The Ultimate Rock Collection - Album # 1
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (June 1, 1967)
I recently returned from Paris, and my mind is still alive with the many places I visited there. The Louvre sucks everyone in, a majestic palace with its many rooms of Flemish paintings, Renaissance masterpieces, Summerian artifacts, and Greek statuary. The Musee D'Orsay, resting inside an abandoned train station, unfurls its impressionistic colors over all with embarrassing extravagance. Montmantre, one of the last remaining older neighborhoods, bustling under the solemnly beautiful watch of the Sacre Cour, charms and dazzles strangers. The Jardin Luxembourg pleads with the weary wanderer to rest in the cool shade of an old tree, the Champs-Elysees threatens to swallow the unaware whole in the bustle of commerce, and the many jazz clubs wind down the sweaty nights for all who brave into their dark, joyous caves.
All these sites, however, can be escaped or avoided. Only the Eiffel Tower can not be eluded. Almost anywhere in the city, it is there, whether in the far distance or around the corner. It is not the greatest site in the city, but one simply cannot shake it.
In the world of Rock Music, The Beatles are the Eiffel Tower. I will not argue they are the best band ever; they are not. I will not try to convince you that they were the most innovative band of all time; they weren't. I won't even try to hoodwink you with claims that they embody the spirit of our new journey into Rock Music better than any before or after; others embody elements of that spirit just as boldly and completely. You can dislike The Beatles, you can sneer at them, and you can tire of them, but you simply cannot shake them.
Fortunately, this is not a bad circumstance. Many of The Beatles' albums are indeed among the great works of Rock Music, and scaling several of these albums does offer a fascinating view of most of the territory of Rock Music. As long as we do not expect too much, we are not likely to be disappointed. In fact, after all these years of endless hype, repackaging, and 'Classic Rock Radio,' it is best if we first approach The Beatles without any expectations at all, or at least only the few we absolutely cannot forget.
By the time of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles themselves were trying to erase most of the expectations already clinging to them. They ceased playing live shows, a move very few bands could literally afford at the time. The loud cries of the fans drowned out their music, and in a way, themselves. The band was no longer a collective of four guys named Paul, John, George and Ringo. They were a hit-producing machine, and they were an easily marketable mechanism to boot. At some point, those cries threatened to make the music irrelevant. In the months leading up to the crucial summer of 1967, The Beatles started to tug at their leash a bit. Sgt. Pepper's attempted to throw the entire harness aside. To do this, they tried to elevate pop music into a fine art.
Thank god they failed. They were, after all, pop songwriters, and they couldn't help, when all was said and done, but to write pop songs. Even in the most psychedelic and pretentious moments of the album, a glorious pop song is still beating beneath the brass and strings. If, however, they didn't quite lift pop into the museums, they certainly did lift it quite a ways indeed.
The early and mid sixties was largely an era of singles. More people bought and listened to individual songs than to an entire album. Most bands would spend the majority of their time creating a three-minute slice of glory. That single, after selling on its own for a few months, would eventually be grouped with a few others and then surrounded by material of a much more frantic creation and a much lower quality. These substandard songs came to be known as 'filler'. Even when a band, like the early Beatles, strove to fill an entire album with great songs, the album usually remained just that - a collection of great songs.
Sgt. Pepper's helps mark the spot when the album became a self-contained work of art. The songs are wonderful, but they work together, both contrasting off and colliding into one another, to create a long experience capable of a greater range than most three minute songs can aspire to. This album was certainly not the first album to try to stand on its own, but it was certainly the most noticed attempt in 1967, and it was the first attempt many ever heard.
And, despite its slightly sagging reputation since the early 90s, it is still a glorious attempt. The Beatles were at an creative frenzy; the album swings between English carnival yards, India, the seventh heaven, an everyday busy street, an orchestra hall, and a nuclear meltdown. Luckily, despite the many stops along the way, the entire trip feels like a single experience. Each song flow perfectly into the next, even if the connections are not immediately apparent to the logic. Notice how the thoughts on aging in When I'm Sixty-Four begin light and funny, but then slowly grow more dark as the song progresses. "Will you still be sending me a Valentine?" sinks into "Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?" A playful imaginative journey has grown dark and serious. The singer might almost be scaring himself.
He is still quite young, however, and will not dwell on such dreary subjects, despite how inevitable they might be. Suddenly, in one of the greatest song transitions in Rock history, the singer burst into an unbridled, joyous declaration of wild, young love and lust. The chiming guitars and ecstatic sighs that open Lovely Rita is a bursting of light into the dark room the previous song was starting to enter, and the results are transcendent bliss.
Why this transition works so well may not be obvious on a first listen, or a second, or a third. This is not important. What is important is that it does indeed work, and works very, very well.
The variety of music on this album is breathtaking. George turns in a quiet Indian experiment with the slowly simmering Within You Without You, Paul steals a bit from Schubert for his mournful backdrop to She's Leaving Home, and John squirts acid over the atmosphere in search of the cloudy sound he floats throughout Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Good Morning Good Morning, one of the most over-looked Beatles songs, churns along at a frenetic pace set by nearly buzzing horns. The image of a carnival occurs quite a bit in this album. This is as it should be, for in many ways, this album is a carnival of sounds and ideas.
In fact, this effortless variety really does not prepare us for the end of the album, where one of the most interesting songs of the band's career awaits us. The Beatles have even just lied to us in the song before, declaring the show over. A Day in the Life is a quite serious attempt to summarize the human condition; if the lyrics at first baffle, try simply following along with your eyes closed as the singer dispassionately describes a few tragic scenes, drags you through a numb morning preparing for work, and then suddenly falls into an ethereal dream of peace and release. Back down to earth, exhausted at the ridiculous banality of bureaucracy counting holes, the singer returns to dreary life only to wish for the same glorious flight of fantasy ("I'd love to turn you on..."). Finally, it is all too much, as everything rises, rises, rises ever higher and higher, and finally explodes, both a bang and a whimper. Again, it is not the logic that matters here; it is the feeling of the words and the music that matters.
This album is not a dusty artifact, so try not to approach it as one. It is not the greatest album of the world, so don't expect it to change your life or to make you healthier, wealthier, or wiser. It is simply a great album, one of many we'll listen to in our lives. Try to fool yourself and to believe that it is yet another new album released this Tuesday. Pick it up, pay for it (or don't), bring it home, and listen to it without any expectations. Listen to it several times. Give it a chance to worm through your ears into your brain, and you never know what might happen.
