Beatles

It's June 1st, 1967, and from this moment on pop music changes shape and substance for good: "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is released, the eighth album by the Beatles in five years. You can only grasp just how revolutionary this record was by listening to the music of the time; just put on some 1950s American rock'n'roll or the early-60s British beat sound that was its direct offspring. With "Sgt. Pepper's", the four lads from Liverpool turn contemporary music inside out. To borrow a political metaphor, you could say they staged a coup, installing a regime diametrically opposed to the previous one without anyone noticing what was happening, with no soldiers or tanks in the streets. It's the first successful concept album in rock history: there's a connecting thread running through it that makes the record feel unified and coherent.

We're in a theatre... the murmur of the audience... the orchestra tuning up in the background (sublime!), the show is about to begin, and the opening number strikes up, sharing its title with the album itself. It's not the Beatles playing but the Sgt. Pepper's Club Band, introducing themselves to the crowd with a fun, rocking number before handing things over to Billy Shears (Ringo Starr) for the next track, "With A Little Help From My Friends"; note that there's no pause between the two tracks, just a continuum, and worth highlighting too, besides Lennon's two enigmatic lines - "What do you see when you turn out the light/I can't tell you, but I know it's mine" - is the near-dialogue form the song takes, almost like an interview.

Next comes a landmark Lennon track: "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds", which became famous because some listeners read the initials LSD between the lines - a theory backed up by the fantastical lyrics, woven from a narrative fabric of images typical of the acid-fuelled visions of someone who's used hallucinogens. A song that would go on to become, in the collective memory, a kind of fresco of the psychedelic era, superbly underscored by its animated appearance in the "Yellow Submarine" film.

McCartney is behind the following two tracks, "Getting Better" and "Fixing A Hole", both inspired by everyday events; the latter was also subjected to a drug-related reading, thanks to the word "fix", slang for shooting up. "She's Leaving Home" is likewise McCartney's work: the idea came from a Daily Mirror story about a girl running away from home; McCartney turned it into a song about loneliness (with plenty of echoes of "Eleanor Rigby") and generational misunderstanding, a theme very much in the air at the time; the lyrics carry real emotional weight and are enriched by a bitterly sarcastic streak, thanks to the chorus's counterpoint and the heartfelt parental commentary, courtesy of Lennon.

Lennon's genius surfaces once again with "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!", its lyrics lifted straight from a Victorian-era circus poster; the music is gripping and hypnotic, unfolding like a spiral that leaves you dazed and disoriented, as if you'd been dropped right into the middle of the ring, surrounded by jugglers, clowns and circus performers.

George Harrison's only contribution to the album is "Within You Without You", a track clearly set apart from the rest of the record, not just stylistically but also because it was performed mainly by outside musicians, especially Indian sitar players; the influence of his experience with transcendental meditation is plain to hear, and indeed Harrison remained a devoted practitioner of Eastern culture until his death.

The atmosphere of "When I'm Sixty-Four" is distinctly odd, done in a vaguely 1950s cabaret style, with a very dry bass and a tuba underscoring the lyrics in the background. The song was dedicated to McCartney's father, who had just turned 64. Also written by McCartney is "Lovely Rita", again inspired by real life, this time by a traffic warden who had given him a parking ticket a few months earlier: out of that fine grew a whole love story. "Good Morning, Good Morning", on the other hand, is pure Lennon, inspired by a Kellogg's Corn Flakes advert; the song was built up by piling on elements according to the idea of reconstructing the story of a single day, not without a few cryptic references along the way.

The penultimate track is one of the album's defining features: the so-called reprise, a device that countless other bands would go on to borrow, and one that gives the record a real sense of continuity. It's a return to the opening track with different lyrics, save for the refrain. It comes like a bolt from the blue, a cleverly staged coup de théâtre without which the whole concept of the album would have lost its coherence.

The Sgt. Pepper's Club Band comes back on stage to bid farewell to its audience and thank them for showing up; the track fades out amid applause, which flows straight into the album's masterpiece, "A Day in the Life", born of the Lennon/McCartney partnership. An acoustic guitar opens over lyrics that unfold in an unusual structure, a sequence of narrative fragments built around a circular idea; this is Lennon's section, inspired by a real-life event, the death of a member of the House of Lords in a car accident. Naturally, it's all filtered through Lennon's trademark nonsense, with added references to his anti-war film "How I Won The War". At the end of the verse, the original rhythm section drops away, replaced by a magnificent orchestral crescendo that resolves into a piano hammering out a faster tempo than before; McCartney's voice then enters, breaking up the previous theme into a hazier, more smoke-filled atmosphere that suits its lyrics perfectly. The swinging, slightly off-beat rhythm marks a real sense of momentum and a break from what came before, yet it magically finds its way back, without any awkwardness, into the original rhythm for the final verse, once again sung by Lennon. Then comes, once more, the orchestral crescendo, which builds to a fever pitch before ending in a violently struck piano chord that fades away. It's a fade lasting many seconds, one that took days of work to achieve, since none of the electronic wizardry existed back then that today lets anyone, even with a child's keyboard, do the same thing in seconds; at the time it demanded hours of labour, ingenuity and intuition. Even so, the result isn't entirely flawless. Listening closely, toward the end of the fade, as the sound dies away, you can hear the rustle of papers and the creak of a chair, noises the engineers were never able to remove in the final mix.

The album doesn't end there: after that fade you can hear a more pronounced hiss, an ultrasonic frequency audible only to animals, followed by a loop of meaningless sounds and voices; this loop had been pressed into the run-out groove of the vinyl record. The trick meant that anyone with an old-style turntable would hear the sound repeat endlessly until someone lifted the needle off the record, while owners of more modern turntables would hear a burst of sound abruptly cut off as the needle automatically returned to its rest at the end of the record. On CD, you can only hear a few seconds of this loop before it fades out.

"Sgt. Pepper's" fully captures the spirit of change and anti-conformism of those years; the Beatles overturned every rule, and with this album they also revolutionised studio recording work, which became long and gruelling, yet more original and creative than ever before.

The lyrics move away from typical adolescent themes and the evergreen "heart-and-love" pairing to tackle more introspective subjects, relationships with fans, "metaphysical" experiences and events either directly lived by the band or drawn from the news of the day.

It's a widely shared and empirically verifiable view that nothing sounded the same after this: this kind of electronics applied to music simply didn't exist before, and finding new sounds, "making a guitar sound like a piano and a piano sound like a guitar" (John Lennon), was no easy feat. For instance, to get a different vocal sound, microphones were submerged in bottles full of water, or singers performed in awkward positions to compress the ribcage and produce a wholly distinctive voice. Then there's the grand entrance of the orchestra into a pop-rock context, following a path already explored (albeit with far less thrilling results) by the Moody Blues: the crescendo in "A Day In The Life", in fact, was performed by no fewer than 160 musicians.

The cover art is also significant: a fully colour sleeve distributed in the same version worldwide (a rarity at the time); the very term "album" was coined for, and by, "Sgt. Pepper's" — the record indeed opens up like a photo album, complete with photos, lyrics and even gadgets inside. The front cover photo is packed with more or less cryptic references: the Beatles wanted behind them the figures who had shaped their lives, but there was no shortage of unsettling inclusions too, such as Timothy Leary (the LSD theorist), Adolf Hitler, Aleister Crowley (the father of modern satanism), and the plants framing the word Beatles at their feet were, in fact, marijuana plants.

An unprecedented production, then, both aesthetically and in terms of content. A level of care and attention to detail never before seen in a piece of "popular" entertainment meant for mass consumption. With "Sgt. Pepper's", pop music was finally freed from the marginal, accessory, merely lightweight role it had been confined to until then, and took its rightful place among the forms of art.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

01/06/2007