LUCKY 13
Regularly dubbed a work of conceptual genius, SGT. PEPPER was actually a product of dead ends and happy accidents, wrought just when THE BEATLES feared that the jig was up. JON SAVAGE revisits the maelstrom from which the original album emerged and hymns its bran tub of bounties, track by track.
The first sound you hear is ambience: pre-performance noises in a theatre, tuning up, calls and chat, movement in a confined auditorium. the first song comes in with pounding drum and bass and heavy guitar in what would soon become known as the rock style. the vocal in the first verse is full throated, pitched high like an MC to whip up enthusiasm, introducing “the act you’ve known for all these years” to intense overdubbed applause. sgt. Pepper’s Lonely hearts Club then sing in harmony, inviting you to “sit back and let the evening go”. as the opening song and title track of the Beatles’ eighth album, sgt. Pepper’s Lonely hearts Club Band is poised between showbiz and rock. it’s the perfect orientation point for fans confused by where the Beatles had been, where they were going and exactly how they had spent their previous nine months. Who were they now? What is Beatles? those questions had already been asked of themselves by the musicians, with no little soul-searching, and the answers leak all over this apparently seamless record. for Sgt. Pepper is defined by absence. on september 1, 1966, the Beatles returned from an extremely stressful american tour with the firm determination never to play live again. there was no announcement, no plans either. they dissolved into thin air. during that autumn, their continued disappearance opened up a profound vacuum. after three months, pop fans were becoming restless; everyone was agreed that, as Pete townshend told disc and Music echo in mid-december, “we need the Beatles to sort things out”. the signs were not hopeful. in the interviews the group gave during their time off, they were in turns dismissive – “everything we’ve done so far has been rubbish,” George harrison told don short – or alienated from their group identity: as John Lennon informed Leonard Gross in spain, “We’re not the Beatles at all. We’re just us.” When they finally regrouped at abbey road in december, they appeared changed: engineer Geoff emerick observed that they “seemed almost robbed of their youth.” Sgt. Pepper began in alienation, distance and doubt and sought to transform these states through artifice. the group’s withdrawal at the height of their fame had disconnected them from their audience; somehow they had to establish a new dialogue with their listeners that would make sense of their extraordinary situation. early on, they decided the new album would be themed, thus creating its own event. their first idea was to make it a collection of songs about memory: the Beatles’ use of Lsd had opened up childhood memories and traumas. they had come so far that they
all felt the need for some grounding. So the forthcoming record would delve into their recent past as Beatles at the same time as examining their upbringings in Liverpool: rooting their own extraordinary experiences in the everyday. The first three songs recorded adhered to this script: Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane focused on adolescence and childhood, while When I’m Sixty-Four harked back to the group’s Cavern days. However, commercial dictates intruded: in January, it was decided to hive off the first two for release as The Beatles’ next single. In what George Martin later admitted was one of his worst professional mistakes, this precluded them from being included on the forthcoming album. Begun on February 1 – by which time promos of the new single were being prepared – a new song revealed an amended concept and gave it the perfect introduction. The Beatles were no longer ‘Beatles’: they were Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – a stalking horse that conflated the recent American vogue for retro/complex names (Jefferson Airplane, The Sopwith Camel etc) and the band’s own roots. The driving force behind this Beatle phase, Paul McCartney had spent much of autumn 1966 writing brass band themes for the film The Family Way – set in Lancashire – and this version of the north-western collective memory (which would resurface in the municipal-style floral display on Sgt. Pepper’s cover) fused with the vogue for retro that had afflicted British pop culture during 1966, via fashionable boutiques like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet and hit tunes like the New Vaudeville Band’s Winchester Cathedral (Number 1 US while When I’m Sixty-Four was recorded). As The Beatles recorded through February and March before the wrap in the first week of April, the strict theme went by the board: even so, the mundane was tackled in She’s Leaving Home, Fixing A Hole and Lennon’s Good Morning Good Morning, while songs like Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite! and Only A Northern Song roughly fitted the Northern/retro theme. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds alltoo-accurately reproduced the reversion to childhood wonder often stimulated by LSD.
Drugs Were inescapable ON Sgt. Pepper, enhancing the album’s undertow of distance. references abound in the songs, not just in Lucy’s florid imagery but in lines like “Found my way upstairs and had a smoke” and “I get
high with a little help from my friends”. Whether The Beatles liked it or not – and at least one of them would fuel the flames – the June release of Sgt. Pepper dropped right into a growing scandal about pop music and escalating drug use amongst American and British youth. It had been building all year, as adults finally worked out what pop stars had been singing about in lyrics that mentioned “dreams” and “minds”. Records by The Smoke (My Friend Jack, about an associate who “eats sugar lumps”) and The Game (Addicted Man, which exhorted the listener to “take it, boy, and hit the ceiling”) fell foul of a growing moral panic – which became a national issue after the February 12 police raid on Redlands’ and subsequent conviction of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger for drug offences. The pre-release of Sgt. Pepper was dominated by this panic. In early May, Disc And Music Echo reported that A Day In The Life was banned by Los Angeles radio stations “because it allegedly refers to drugs”. On May 19, the BBC banned the song on the day that a preview party for the album was held at Brian Epstein’s Chapel Street house. This was the first time that the four Beatles had faced the press as a group since September 1966. Journalists commented on how much The Beatles had changed with their moustaches and flowing clothes. They were still fielding questions about whether or not they would tour again as well as discussing the BBC ban. As Paul McCartney told Ray Coleman rather disingenuously, “If they want to ban A Day In The Life that’s their business. Drugs must have been in their minds – not ours. And the point is, banning it doesn’t help. It just draws attention to a subject.” Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June 1: it immediately went to the top of the LP charts. Just over two weeks later, on June 16, LIFE printed a piece about The Beatles in which McCartney talked about LSD: “After I took it, it opened my eyes. We only use one tenth of our brain. Just think what we all could accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part!” That same day, the Monterey Festival began. The event launched ‘The Summer of Love’ and cemented the emergent drug culture in the eyes of the media. On the 19th, McCartney confirmed that he had taken LSD in a prickly interview broadcast on the ITN news at 9pm. The secret was out. The biggest group in the world were acid-heads, and the formerly most reasonable member was talking about the drug in positive terms on national television. Meanwhile, Sgt. Pepper and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced (released in late May) sat at Number 1 and Number 2 in the UK album charts, confirming the inauguration of the album era. With hindsight, what is extraordinary about Sgt. Pepper is just how successful The Beatles’ reinvention was. It was by no means a done deal in mid-1967: major pop stars did not disappear without risk, and the group knew it. Meanwhile, their re-emergence in alignment with the more controversial aspects of the youth culture was likely to estrange part of their audience. But the album worked because of its near-perfect balance. Sgt. Pepper’s artifices were so brilliantly constructed – the varied material, the bright arrangements, the inspired segues and the shimmering, luxurious production – that its darker undertow was kept hidden, practically until its climax. At a time of generational division, The Beatles took care to be inclusive, with songs ostensibly for children, songs that looked benignly at the square and the elderly, and songs that couched the hallucinatory quality of the mundane in colloquial lyrics and understandable everyday references. The result was a smashing success, as Sgt. Pepper went to Number 1 in the US for over three months and stayed at the top in the UK until November 1967. It brought together and inspired a vast and positive youth culture – the disillusion would come later – that responded in kind to its simultaneous generosity and strangeness.
The Showstopping Opener
The idea that a long-player could be more than two hits and a whole load of filler had been challenged by the Beatles from the off, and in 1966 there had been many albums that worked as a whole over 40 minutes or so (Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde On Blonde). at a stroke, Sgt. pepper’s lonely hearts Club Band the song introduced an ambitious structure. the ‘concept album’ would soon become an obsession among pop’s cutting edge. With its hefty beat, punchy production, and george harrison’s wild acid tones near the end, it’s also one of the album’s few genuinely heavy moments, a canny mixture of old-style variety (“you’re such a lovely audience”) and the hard-edged sound pioneered by Jimi hendrix and Cream: a tribute repaid when hendrix covered the tune in high profile shows that summer. it’s actually somewhat ironic that, although Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is thought to begin the rock album era, it is generally light on what would become cast in iron as the new rock style. Schooled in pop virtues, the Beatles were rarely comfortable with heaviosity, and, indeed, the many roles and styles inhabited on Sgt. Pepper, the album, went directly against the ethic of authenticity that would become a hallmark of post-1968 rock. lennon in particular would proceed to disavow Sgt. Pepper as overproduced and fake, but that was to apply hindsight. it is the very quality of empathy – of understanding the lives of others as well as representing oneself – that appealed to the mass market in 1967. the song ends on a rising build as paul McCartney keeps the artifice going in his introduction of the next vocalist: ‘Billy Shears’. the feel of the song would be developed in the group’s next major project, Magical Mystery Tour – with its simultaneously fond and wry look at the northern culture of the Beatles’ youth. in the meantime, this uncanny fusing of nostalgia and distance allowed this perfectly pitched overture to appeal to adults, uncommitted youth and adepts simultaneously. the group and their audience might feel as though they’re in a play, but they are anyway.
The Intended Message
The Care taken over SGT. Pepper’s sequencing is evidenced by the placement of this as the first full song after the overture. this would carry the mood of the album and having ringo, aka Billy Shears, sing it was a masterstroke. Starr’s honk is the group’s secret weapon: his everyman persona (and indeed the slight strain as he hits the high notes) grounds the others’ airy concepts and alienated musings in a simple statement of unity and togetherness. everyone knows who his friends are: they are the Beatles and they are back together. Beginning with an expression of insecurity, the song adapts the “one for all, all for one” Beatles founding myth to the utopian positivity of the love generation as it spread from southern California in early 1967. it hadn’t yet hit london, but sometime Beatles press officer derek taylor was writing about this “dream future” every week in disc, spreading the word of love to the uninitiated British. like that other great 20th century artefact, the Wizard of oz, With a little help From My Friends is a parable about collective action: namely that the deficiencies of four individuals can be transformed, with kindness and mutual support, into an unstoppable whole. indeed, this was one of the premises behind the mass popularity of four/five-man (and they were mostly men) pop groups from 1963 on, as opposed to the solo artists of the previous generation. Revolver’s yellow Submarine had hinted at the ideal of collectivity but this keynote track made it completely clear. like much of Sgt. Pepper, it was composed in fits and starts – a kind of dreamy displacement activity. accordingly, this apparently upbeat tune has little ellipses where the unconscious pops through: “What do you see when you turn out the light/i can’t tell you, but i know it’s mine…” Beatles albums were filleted for covers as soon as they appeared. With its pole position and timely sentiment, this was top of the list. a quick, almost note-for-note cover by the young idea made the top 10 in July 1967, but it was Joe Cocker & the grease Band’s radical five-minute makeover in the bombastic heavy style that went to number 1 in november 1968 – by which time the whole idea of love and peace was looking rather frayed.
The Child’s Eye View
Pepper’S first overt psychedelic statement, not just in the lyric, but in the sound picture created by george harrison’s droning tambura and paul McCartney’s lowrey organ. after lennon’s
terse lyrics on Revolver, it’s somewhat of a shock to hear him burbling on about “tangerine trees and marmalade skies” but such simple surrealism backs up the claim that the song was inspired by his four-yearold son Julian rather than LSD. Even so, it’s hard to ignore the influence of hallucinogenic drugs in such a lavish production. Lennon’s vocal is compressed and down in the mix: he sounds like the old man of Tomorrow Never Knows as he intones lines like “Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers/that grow so incredibly high”. In the early stages of its use, LSD encouraged a reversion to childhood – a state brilliantly captured by Lennon himself on She Said She Said. Despite a stomping chorus, this evocation of innocence skims by: unlike the rest of the album, there is no counterpoint of unease or psychological insight. Nevertheless, with its dreamy gloss it has its place as the most imitated 1967 pop move. Its influence can be seen in all the childlike songs about tangerines et al that followed – most obviously in Kaleidoscope’s great November 1967 pop-psych album Tangerine Dream. And, it should be noted, Sgt. Pepper’s ‘fake band’ concept has already evaporated.
4: GETTING BETTER The First Sermon: On Personal Development
GETTING BETTER CAN FEEL somewhat buried mid-side but it reveals itself as one of the album’s most substantial pieces. Driven by quick-fire guitar stabs, the song’s driving pace matches a lyric that discusses positivity and selfknowledge as a goal of personal growth. An upbeat Mccartney breezes through evocations of an angry adolescence into the present time: “It’s getting better, a little better all the time…” Underscored by a buzzing tambura, the third verse admits a shocking revelation written by Lennon: “I used to be cruel to my woman/I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.” This was one result of LSD use: a deeper understanding of self. realisations like this eventually moved Lennon towards his partnership with Yoko Ono – one of greater equality rather than 1950s-style pipe-and-slippers chauvinism. fading on counterpointed guitar pings, getting Better emphasises the distance between past and present that is one of the album’s underlying themes – and furthermore, makes it clear that a proper understanding of the past can enhance the present and future. This is a sophisticated message that did not result in a slew of covers nor any obvious influence on the psychedelic tsunami to come: an omission
that makes the song still sound fresh and pertinent, nearly 50 years later.
Concerning Self-Discipline
THIS SONG HAS ITS ORIGIN IN the Beatles’ 1966 lay-off, during which McCartney began fixing the property that he had bought to the south of Campbelltown on the Kintyre peninsula. nothing could have been further from the Beatles’ previous life, as McCartney makes clear in a lyric that speaks of solitude and physical work as a healthy antidote to the pop star madness. as he writes about the fans congregating outside his London house, “see the people standing there who disagree and never win/and wonder why they don’t get in my door.” Beginning with a harpsichord, pepped up by some stinging harrison guitar lines and a sharp, albeit brief solo, Fixing a hole was thought to refer to hard drugs but is not about that at all. if anything, it’s about the hard work needed to naturally get to the enlightened states that might have been suggested by drugs – and indeed it points forward to the group’s latesummer assumption of meditation with the Maharishi. Quietly effective, albeit with sharp bursts of anger, it slipped by unnoticed among the album’s bigger beasts.
An Examination Of The Generation Gap
THE THIRD SONG IN A ROW principally written by McCartney, she’s Leaving home is related with a rare attention to detail and empathy for both parties. Like Yesterday and eleanor rigby, it is carried not by Beatle instrumentation but by a string section – scored not by george Martin but by Mike Leander: the consequent tip towards sentimentality works well against McCartney’s restrained but passionate vocal. this is not rock but a contemporary playlet, along the lines of Cathy Come home, rooted in reality. as McCartney told Barry Miles in 1997, the song had its origins in a newspaper story about a Beatles fan, Melanie Coe. the split between the generations is enacted by the voices of McCartney and Lennon, who in counterpoint state: “we gave her everything money could buy/ Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy.” revealing the hurt that lay behind youth’s desire for freedom and the distress that it caused to parents and the older generation, she’s Leaving home was not rated by the pop cognoscenti but was nevertheless a core element in the album’s wider appeal. Much discussed in the mainstream media at the time, it was quickly covered by Beatle favourite harry nilsson and, during the next five years, by artists as diverse as richie havens and syreeta wright.
A Brief But Transporting Entertainment
IN WHICH LENNON WAKES UP. despite his later repudiation of the song, Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite! is a real tonic: an invitation to the circus enhanced by a sinuous melody, some snappy cymbal work and a committed fairground barker vocal. the lyrics might have been a knock-off – taken from an 1843 poster that Lennon found while filming the penny Lane/strawberry Fields promo films – but the rhythm section is topnotch and for once the singer sounds as though he’s having fun. and yet there is, as ever on this album, an impression of hallucinathe tory distance. verses are
broken up by wild evocations of gravity-defying feats – an auditory suspension of disbelief achieved by George Martin’s inspired translation of a Lennon desire “to smell the sawdust on the floor”: he instructed engineer Geoff Emerick to cut up taped organ and calliope sounds, let the pieces fall and then splice them back together. The result was both airy and disorienting. As Derek Taylor once observed, Lennon had “a good sense of memorabilia”. Using a physical artefact as a springboard, Mr. Kite promotes the album’s theme of nostalgia at the same time as, in the best spirit of pop, it takes the listener there. Back in the mid-19th century, before television, radio and film, the circus was an extraordinary release from everyday life, and this song recaptures that feeling of other-worldly wonder.
GThe Second Sermon: On What Is Real
EorGE HArrison’s sole composition more than justifies its pole, side-opening position with a perfect integration of music, text and feeling. Like she’s Leaving Home, it features no Beatle instrumentation: instead, several indian musicians set up a mid-paced raga while a 12-piece string section of violins and cellos, set to the modal dial, swoop in and out of the oscillating drones. The mood is patient and meditative, fitting a lyric that is both didactic and profound. Harrison begins in an everyday conversation before criticising “the people who hide behind the wall of illusion”. We’re talking Maya here: the Hindu concept that in one definition describes a “magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem”. As a metaphor for the irreality of The Beatles’ life, that’s hard to beat, but Harrison pushes it further into a savage critique of Western materialism: “the people who gain the world and lose their soul”. Poised between With A Little Help From My Friends and A Day in The Life, Within You Without You is the album’s third major statement. With the detachment that is part of the indian religious tradition, Harrison is talking about life as a whole. How do you want to be remembered when you die? Because you will die. And how you live is up to you. The only solution is spiritual discipline: the practised ability to see beyond yourself, beyond the traps of materialism and the ego; then you might find “peace of mind”. Harrison was always the bluntest of the main three Beatles composers and he is not afraid to point the finger: “Are you one of them?” Yet his saturnine demeanour is leavened by his belief that “with our love we could save the world” – a message repeated by The Beatles’ next single, All You need is Love. The mocking laughter that briefly enters right at the end is unnecessary, but makes the point that the serious ideas that he proposes are likely to be met with derision. And this reading of Maya could equally apply to Sgt. Pepper as a whole: the most obviously magical of all Beatles shows, with all its smoke and mirrors, where things are definitely not what they seem.
AAn Invitation And A Question
ProjEcTion inTo THE FUTUrE couched in past styles, When i’m sixty-Four is the album’s other main gesture of cross-generational amnesty: sung by a young man imagining himself 40 years later. The mode is light music hall and Mccartney’s voice is precisely enunciated and sped up high, prefiguring White Album tracks like Honey Pie. The
sentiments are tenderly expressed and the details carefully mundane, with a touch of humour in the unlikely grandkids “Vera Chuck and Dave” and the cod-bureaucratic “Give me your answer, fill in a form…”. As an adult-pleasing move, this breezy number is an important part of Sgt. Pepper’s broad appeal but, apart from Lennon and Harrison’s raga harmonies on lines like “you’ll be older too”, there is nothing musically to place it in 1967. This impression was enhanced by quick cover versions by early 1960s stars like Bernard Cribbins and Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen. Time has lent depth and poignancy to this apparently straightforward ditty.
OA Modest Proposal
CCAsionALLy DismisseD As filler, Lovely Rita provides a welcome moment of looseness in a tightly scripted 40 or so minutes. The scenario is again mundane – Beatle gets a parking ticket – but in the spirit of the time he responds not with anger but with love and generosity. Celebrating that most maligned public servant, mcCartney plays it flirty and jokey but the lyric has some nice switches (“got the bill and Rita paid it”) and the backing vocals include a bit of ska “chik-a-chik” among the horizontal raga lines. Although the instrumentation is straightforward, the production is dense and heavily varispeeded, making Rita one of the most psychedelic-sounding songs on the record. it feels like The Beatles are having fun, an impression enhanced by the final 30 seconds where, after mcCartney’s last line, the group keeps up the piano-led rhythm with a variety of improvised vocal sounds. suddenly, the tension is released, and it’s such a moment of relief.
BA Cynic’s Observation
eGinninG wiTH fouR Lines that contain the word ‘nothing’, Good morning Good morning is anything but – despite its origin in a half-heard advert. it features its author in splenetic mode, forcing the listener to confront the emptiness of everyday life: “everything is closed it’s like a ruin/everyone you see is half asleep.” A furious Lennon is something to behold, and his blasts against naff TV shows, deserted town centres and the horror of the daily workroutine are highly entertaining – albeit redolent of stoner alienation. The track is the dirtiest-sounding on the whole album, with pounding beats, a vicious solo from mcCartney and a compressed and spiky brass section from old Beatle compatriots sounds incorporated. The overall effect verges on resentment at having to write a song when the inspiration is not there (“i’ve got nothing to say/But it’s oK”), but Lennon’s bilious attack works as a sarcastic corrective on an album so rooted in the mundane. it ends, famously, with a sequence of animal sounds that provides the album’s most inspired segue…