CHAPTER 7
RETREAT
Phase Two: Into the Mind and Into the Studio
WE HAVE ARRIVED at a natural line of division in the Beatles’ career. Phase one was a period of professionalization, mastery of craft, and rise to spectacular success. It put in place the egalitarian rock-and-roll band, and it included the decision by Lennon and McCartney to cosign all compositions. Working-class toughness, youthful energy, stage charisma, tight rock and roll, fresh and original compositions, and a vigorously modern (in a very specific, localized British sense) image of authenticity lifted the Beatles to megacelebrity. “This isn’t show business,” said Lennon in late 1963, “it’s something else. This is different from anything that anybody imagines. You don’t go on from this. You do this and then you finish.” Had they not continued, the Beatles would have been noteworthy collaborators, but they would not have been grouped together with someone like Duke Ellington.
Phase two, from 1966 through 1969, was shorter, as if the energy was so intense that it simply could not be sustained. Cynthia Lennon described 1966 and 1967 as something “like a Walt Disney nature film where the process of blossoming and growing was shown at high camera speeds.” These years are sometimes portrayed in terms of fragmentation and individualization, yet many of the greatest successes were thoroughly shaped by collaboration. Phase two involved a double retreat—into the mind and into the recording studio. Frustrated on multiple levels with public performance, they simply decided to stop. The album Revolver was worked out in the Abbey Road studios with high attention to detail and no intention of live performance. The studio became their compositional laboratory. Few other rock bands could demand resources like this. The main precedents were avant-garde, state-funded composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose work was of great importance for the Beatles.
At the same time that they retreated into the studio their songs became more introspective. Inspired by his experiments with LSD, Lennon set about to express his inner explorations musically, his mates following like foot soldiers behind a charismatic field commander. With the songwriting skills of the Rodgers and Hammerstein of rock and roll and with the web of interactive creativity as starting points, the innovations of 1966–1969 lifted the Beatles higher and higher in prestige. The Beatles “are the wisest, holiest, most effective avatars the human race has ever produced,” gushed Timothy Leary in 1967, and to more than a few admirers that sounded like it might actually be true.
The last four years of the group’s existence divide fairly neatly according to the calendar. Early 1966 began with Revolver and closed with the single Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane. The first half of 1967 was dedicated to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the second to Magical Mystery Tour. There was a lot going on during the period from Tomorrow Never Knows, the first song recorded for Revolver, through I Am the Walrus, the first song recorded for Mystery Tour, but the outstanding feature was the development of a psychedelic worldview. This phenomenon overlaps with the growing influence of Indian music and religion, addressed in the final chapter.
Revolver
“The people gave their money and they gave their screams,” noted Harrison, “but the Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give.” Of the four, Lennon paid the steepest price.
In the spring of 1965, Lennon, his wife Cynthia, Harrison, and Harrison’s girlfriend Pattie attended a dinner party hosted by their dentist, who secretly spiked their coffee with LSD. Lennon eventually found a reliable source for the drug and took what seemed to him like a thousand trips. “I used to eat it all the time,” he remembered. He was heavily influenced by the book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964), by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. Psychologist Leary and his Harvard colleagues dove head first into the stunning possibilities of LSD, using the legal drug themselves and monitoring streams of volunteers. The Psychedelic Experience is one of the most audacious artifacts from a decade bursting with outrageousness.
Leary and his coauthors presented LSD as a shortcut to Buddhist enlightenment. They dedicated the book to Aldous Huxley, who had studied the religious use of peyote by Native Americans in the Southwest and Mexico. Leary turned to High Asia instead. It seemed like a matter of cosmic poetry that the Tibetan diaspora, caused by the horrific Chinese takeover of a peaceful country, roughly coincided with public access to chemically synthesized hallucinogens. Leary seized on an ancient book that had been translated in the 1920s and given, by Walter Evans-Wentz, the name The Tibetan Book of the Dead. When the actor Peter Fonda told Lennon, in the summer of 1965 in Los Angeles, during Lennon’s second trip, that he knew what it was like to be dead (a phrase that turns up in Revolver’s She Said She Said), we may suspect an unacknowledged reference to Leary and Evans-Wentz. This trip and this comment seem to have helped Lennon click into the momentum and write songs about it.
When qualified Tibetans started to translate and teach in Western languages, they published several superb editions, with commentary, of the text Evans-Wentz had struggled to interpret. It is easy to see how bold and, to be blunt, how stupid Leary was, as he extracted what he thought were pithy instructions from a richly textured religion that recommends long, patient, and multidimensional cultivation of wisdom and compassion. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that LSD was something of a game changer for Western society, with Leary and the Beatles among the prime movers.
The Psychedelic Experience gathered legitimacy by association with Evans-Wentz, Huxley, Carl Jung (who wrote the preface to the 1960 edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead), and Tibetan Buddhism, and it framed LSD as a matter of spiritual quest rather than party-down hedonism. “I suppose now what I’m interested in is a Nirvana, the Buddhist heaven,” said Lennon in late 1967. “LSD was the self-knowledge which pointed the way in the first place.” Tibetans regard the author of the original book, the great teacher Padmasambhava, as the second Buddha because he successfully planted the vajrayana tradition at Samye monastery in the ninth century. From him it was a clean line back through centuries of Buddhist lineages, all the way to Shakyamuni Buddha himself, ca. 500 BC. Like Lennon, many readers of Leary’s manual had at least a dim awareness of this radiant aura of authority.
The Psychedelic Experience advised its users to read the book out loud to each other while tripping. If you were by yourself, you could prepare a tape recorder ahead of time and play it back while you took the drug; this was Lennon’s solution. Lennon loved to share drugs (first alcohol, then amphetamines, then marijuana) with his buddies, but for now he was a solitary seeker, tucked away in his suburban mansion and destroying his ego as instructed by the Harvard psychologists.
His song Tomorrow Never Knows was the first number recorded for the album Revolver. He began the song by cribbing one of the best lines from Leary’s introduction: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.” He had learned from Dylan how to make a love song more personal and how to inject elements of mystery, then figured out how to match catchy hooks to a concise critique of bourgeois conventional values. In the spring of 1966 he was prepared to go further. Beatles fans could buy the latest album and let Lennon be their guide.
McCartney remembered his partner singing his new song while “rather earnestly strumming in C major” on his acoustic guitar. He wondered to himself what Martin was going to think. The Beatles held a lot of power in the recording studio, but even they had to deal with commercial realities. This new song had no bridge, no refrain, a very dull melody, and only one chord. It made no concession whatsoever to pop prettiness. With its austere, preachy message it resembled a song like Dylan’s Masters of War. In the future Lennon would figure out how to soften this rhetorical mode, his lyrics becoming less like a sermon and more evocative while the title and refrain sum up the exhortation succinctly (All You Need Is Love, Come Together, Give Peace a Chance).
McCartney was good at taking songs from Lennon and making them musically better, but this challenge had no precedent. Good composers are often stimulated by limitations, and that turned out to be the case here. Tomorrow Never Knows is the first great example of a breakthrough song conceived by Lennon that was then hugely transformed through collaboration. The simplicity of the music and the audacity of the lyrics were an invitation to his partner to think boldly.
One could connect the single chord of Tomorrow Never Knows to folk music or to blues, but the more explicit reference for the Beatles was northern India, the region of the Buddha’s birth. The Byrds had just demonstrated (March 1966) “raga rock” in Eight Miles High (backed by Why), with drone, static harmony, and sitar-like guitar solos, and Harrison had been immersing himself in the real thing for several months, hanging out with Ravi Shankar while putting his guitar aside. Around the same time (April 1966) that the Beatles started to work on Tomorrow Never Knows, Harrison brought some musicians from London’s Indian Music Association into the EMI studio to play sitar, tamboura, and tabla on his song Love You To. For Tomorrow Never Knows tamboura and sitar in the background were enough to authentically connect to India.
McCartney had an idea for a drum pattern. In his very first rehearsal with the Quarrymen, back in 1957, he had intervened with the drummer, and that continued with the Beatles. Engineer Norman Smith, who worked with them from 1962 through Rubber Soul, said that “Paul had a great hand in practically all the songs we did, and Ringo would generally ask him what he should do.” For Tomorrow Never Knows he recommended a syncopated pattern (which he had already taught Starr for Ticket to Ride) to replace the simpler pattern Starr had chosen (which can be heard on Anthology). Lennon once praised McCartney and Starr as first-class rock musicians who could go head-to-head with anyone. Some of their best work drives Lennon’s lyrically rich but musically modest songs: Tomorrow Never Knows is one example, Rain another, Come Together the last. It made a difference that the sound quality for bass and drums was improving in 1966, thanks to EMI experiments with microphone placement, direct bass feed into the console, and stuffing sweaters into the bass drum.
Lennon told Martin that he wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a remote mountain in the Himalayas. Perhaps they could suspend him in a harness, he wondered, dangling from the ceiling, with microphones in a large circle around him, rigged in such a way that he could rotate around the room, his voice drifting in and out. This being impractical, the engineers ran his microphone through Leslie speakers, a rapidly rotating configuration designed for the organ, yielding an unprecedented transformation of the human voice.
But the most important musical touch came with a set of tape loops conceived by McCartney. Lennon was dismissive of the avant-garde, which for him meant “French for bullshit”; he later explained this position as “intellectual-reverse-snobbery.” “I don’t go in for much of those culture things,” he said in 1964. “Just drop a name and Paul will go. I’d rather stay at home when I’m not working.” LSD intensified Lennon’s inward-looking leanings, while megacelebrity gave McCartney unlimited access to new art, movies, music, and ideas, whatever caught his fancy. Many are still surprised to learn that it was McCartney rather than Lennon, the abrasive radical, who brought in the innovative techniques used so effectively in Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields Forever, and A Day in the Life. It was McCartney who selected a photograph of Karlheinz Stockhausen for the cover of Sgt. Pepper.
McCartney’s turn toward European modernists resembles Strayhorn’s interest in the harmonies of Ravel and Bartók twenty years before. Jane Asher’s family had been putting a nice variety of high-end stimulation in front of him, and in 1965 and 1966 this included abstract modernism. Her brother Peter joined with friends John Dunbar and Barry Miles to form the Indica Gallery and Bookstore, where McCartney liked to hang out (and where Lennon stumbled upon The Psychedelic Experience and, later, Yoko Ono). McCartney met, at some point during these years, Luciano Berio, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Michelangelo Antonioni, and many other thinkers and artists. “I am trying to cram everything in, all the things I’ve missed,” he said in the spring of 1966. “People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great, and I must know what people are doing.”
The London Days of Contemporary Music Festival dedicated two sold-out evenings to Stockhausen’s music in December 1965. The composer himself spoke and answered questions. He brought along tapes of his electronic compositions, prepared at his famous Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne. A tape of Mikrophonie II included excerpts from his 1956 electronic composition Gesang der Jünglinge, which was created with unmatched hi-fi equipment. McCartney may have heard about the December events; we know for certain that he attended concerts and lectures given by Cornelius Cardew, a close disciple of Stockhausen, in January 1966. He told Cardew that he appreciated the importance of challenging the status quo, but that the music “went on too long.”
Gesang der Jünglinge, available on LP, became his favorite Stockhausen, as it is for many others. The piece uses musique concrète, tape recordings of everyday sounds placed in an unfamiliar context and distorted in inventive, disorienting ways, for example, by playing them backward. The real-life sounds of Gesang der Jünglinge were sung by a boy soprano. The innocence and purity of the voice, along with the lyrics—a biblical story of miraculous salvation from fire—contribute to the drama and supernatural atmosphere. In the fantastically imaginative context of the composer’s electronic sound world, the boy is thrust into a fiery cosmos, breathing air from a different planet, singing for his life.
With oscillographs and filters, Stockhausen analyzed the physical characteristics of the singing and figured out how to create similar sounds electronically. Then he merged the two, back and forth. Sometimes the voice is multiplied, sometimes fragmented, and often enough it is coherent and comprehensible. Percussive consonants blend with electronic clicks, vowel timbres blend with adjusted sine waves, and the pitches of the song blend with a microscopically controlled spectrum of electronic pitch. Different levels of musical reality blur together. As Stockhausen once explained in a different context, “what is like becomes only approximately like; correspondences only correspond approximately.”
7.2 Karlheinz Stockhausen, ca. 1960
The Beatles took musique concrète and ran with it. They used it for humor and charm in a good number of McCartney’s songs (Yellow Submarine, Penny Lane, Back in the USSR, Maxwell’s Silver Hammer), then for modernist dislocation in songs written primarily by Lennon (Tomorrow Never Knows, Benefit of Mr. Kite, Strawberry Fields Forever, I Am the Walrus). Gesang der Jünglinge (and probably other pieces, too) showed them how to introduce electronic sound with a dramatic flair.
McCartney constructed a rudimentary recording studio at his home. In 1965, Stockhausen had experimented with tape loops in pieces like Solo, which was designed to be performed by a single instrumentalist supported by four technical assistants. The assistants create, on the spot, tape loops of what is being played, they manipulate the sound according to various methods, and then they play back the loops as part of the unfolding performance. In April 1966, McCartney planned something similar for the emerging Tomorrow Never Knows.
The rock quartet had already recorded the foundation on track one of the studio master, and now the loops, guided by McCartney, were worked by a collection of white-coated studio technicians and engineers, some manning the tape recorders and some mixing at the sound board. Just like Stockhausen, McCartney and his colleagues painstakingly cut, pasted, threaded, and finagled the tapes, which were variously saturated, sped up, played backward, and sprinkled across the master tape. It was all put together in real time in the studio, not very different from a performance of Solo. One of the loops, a B-flat major chord played by a symphony orchestra, helped compensate for the lack of harmonic variety in Lennon’s tune. This lowered-seventh degree (relative to C) is a sonic spot where African American music meets music from India—it may be heard as a reference to soul pieces like Stevie Wonder’s Uptight (Everything’s Alright) and/or as a reference to ragas. Another loop sounded vaguely like an Indian instrument. The famous seagull cackles are similar to sounds from Stockhausen’s Solo. There is a backward guitar solo: the listener recognizes an electric guitar and can sense a shape to the line, but the attack, decay, and melodic details are off-kilter, difficult to conceptualize—correspondences that correspond only approximately.
“The idols now, the people that I can appreciate now are all much more hidden away in little back corners,” said McCartney in early 1967 as he explained how Stockhausen and John Cage had replaced Elvis as his primary heroes. A little bit of avant-garde went a long way for the Beatles in 1966. Stockhausen shunned surface patterning and especially repetitive rhythms, while the rock-band foundation of Tomorrow Never Knows is that and little else, a single chord, unvarying riff, a simple melody, over and over. The added tape loops are treated as erratic riffs that randomly enter, fade away, and return.
Early titles for this song were “The Void” (a reference to Buddhist teachings on emptiness) and “Mark I.” Tomorrow Never Knows, a throwaway quip from Starr, was intended to “take the edge off the heavy, philosophical lyrics,” as Lennon explained in retrospect. Harrison later insisted that Lennon didn’t fully understand the lyrics and their implications. No doubt that was true, but musicians do not necessarily have to master the philosophies that shape their times. They simply have to have enough connection that they are able to bring that energy to life through music. Even with partial and intuitive understanding they can still come up with powerful results.
One often reads that the Beatles were starting to dissolve with Revolver, spinning out in centripetal directions and losing the collectivity of their early years. This is completely misleading. In fact, the two most important songs on Revolver were thoroughly collaborative. McCartney’s Eleanor Rigby is no less a creative breakthrough than Lennon’s Tomorrow Never Knows, though more subtly. Songwriter Jerry Leiber described it as “evocative and complete. Everything is intact, lyrically and musically, and the arrangement, production and vocals are all integrated. I don’t think there has ever been a better song written than Eleanor Rigby.” Everything was integrated in spite of the fact that at least six people helped create the words, music, and arrangement. McCartney crafted a strong musical structure and verse one of the lyrics. Others then contributed more lyrics, the idea for the chorus, and the string arrangement to fill out his original conception.
McCartney and Lennon first met at St. Peter’s Church in Liverpool, and they occasionally hung out in the church cemetery (also the location where Lennon lost his virginity), which includes the grave of one Eleanor Rigby, though McCartney claims not to have been aware of this when he named the main character. He sang verse one in the spring of 1966 to a gathering of friends from Liverpool. Ideas flew back and forth. Starr came up with the poignant images of the preacher writing a sermon not to be heard by anyone and darning his socks in isolation. Pete Shotton, Lennon’s friend since childhood, solved the problem of how to end the song: have the two lonely principals come together through Eleanor Rigby’s death and burial by Father McKenzie. Harrison contributed the hook, the cry for the lonely people. It is sung by the backup singers, who universalize the narrative like a Greek chorus, pithily condensed. There were several Beatles’ precedents for using a refrain as a throat-gripping opening, but this song’s seriousness gives the device special force. Martin had the idea of combining the refrain and the chorus at the end.
Eleanor Rigby is a ruthless indictment of the Western church and society, which is not capable of saving anyone. It is a stark postwar representation of despair. As Harrison explained in the spring of 1966, “All of this love thy neighbor and none of them are doing it. If Christianity’s as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion.” Exposing the church’s failure cleared the way for the atheist Beatles’ spiritual turn to the East. The rhetorical strategy is narrative rather than exhortative (in contrast to Lennon’s Tomorrow Never Knows), a more effective approach for a pop song. Still, this song was a shock. The predominating E-minor chord is relieved with blunt, temporary dips to C-major that only make the minor all the more dreary.
At the same time that he was developing a taste for the high-modern avant-garde, McCartney was getting to know classical music from the Baroque period. He asked Martin to write something in the style of Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi for the background to Eleanor Rigby. Martin had recently seen the movie Fahrenheit 451 and had the music for that film in mind when he scored the string octet. It is one of Martin’s most effective arrangements, enhancing and not claiming too much attention, just like a good film score. McCartney wanted to place the microphones close to the strings to get a raw sound, and he asked for reduced vibrato, like Yesterday. Again we see him locating an emotional sweet spot, with proper British restraint. The crispness of his melody balances the harmonic dreariness. Against all odds, this powerful synthesis of music and words drove the song all the way to the top of the pop charts.
McCartney’s interest in Baroque music generated two more excellent results in 1966. I sense an undocumented case in the instrumental introduction to And Your Bird Can Sing. This driving line is full of vigor and originality, and it recalls a Bach ritornello—for example, the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto (BWV 1050, movement 1), or the Concerto for Violin (BWV 1042, movement 3). Like these Bach examples, the “ritornello” for And Your Bird Can Sing just keeps going in even rhythmic values, winding unpredictably without any syncopation and with plenty of memorability. The line is very fresh and hardly the kind of thing Lennon could have come up with. Bach and McCartney are very different composers, but these passages offer a way to put them in comparison, with McCartney emerging in fine standing.
The other Bach connection for McCartney in 1966 was Penny Lane, one of the most sparkling songs in the Beatles canon. The composer tuned in one evening to a BBC television broadcast of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. The next day he asked Martin to hire the piccolo trumpet player, David Mason, who would add a track to Penny Lane, his melody dictated to Martin by McCartney. The song is built on a pleasant, allegro bass line, a jaunty stroll through suburban Liverpool. Building on a technique used for Good Day Sunshine, Penny Lane cleverly modulates (movement from one key area to another) at each chorus, a musical skip into the bright blue sky that perfectly expresses the cheerful optimism of the lyrics. As each verse reverts to the jaunty stroll, the music settles back to the home key; the words “meanwhile back” become a pun analogous to “suddenly” in Yesterday. The master stroke arrives when the final chorus surprisingly modulates a step higher still. Everything is dynamic, uplifted, and fresh.
When Brian Wilson heard Rubber Soul it seemed to him all of a piece; he set out to match and beat it with the unified Pet Sounds. Revolver went in a different direction and became the first Beatles step toward the LP as collage. Collage (from the French coller, to glue) was another innovation from Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, every bit as important as cubism for their climb to the high peak of early-century modernism. The artists glued playing cards, musical scores, nails, wallpaper, newspapers, and advertisements into painted scenes. Since the found objects carry implied meaning and since they do not usually belong together, the technique automatically brings humor and irony. From Braque and Picasso the practice spread and became a foundational principle of high modernism (and postmodernism). In the Beatles’ LPs, the varied objects that form collages are types of songs carrying different styles, different types of lyrics, and different sound worlds, the latter intensified by studio innovations. The LP as a collage, full of discontinuity, humor, and irony, is quite different from the LP as a suite: one stresses continuity, the other rupture. The LP suite came naturally to Ellington and Strayhorn as they cultivated associations with classical composers, while the Beatles stumbled into the LP collage in the heady mix of hip London, in 1966.
We have already seen a huge range of expression marked by Tomorrow Never Knows and Eleanor Rigby. Revolver’s collage also includes Harrison’s Love You To, which, though marred by poor lyrics, makes good use of musicians from India playing uncompromisingly Indian music on sitar, tabla, and tamboura. From there Revolver just keeps going. In the early stages there was talk of making the entire album in the United States, at Stax Records or Motown. Though the plan was abandoned, the thought gave birth to McCartney’s Got to Get You Into My Life, with its R and B horn section and equal-stress four-beat groove. Satire in the riff-based and effective Taxman—Harrison’s best song to date, with help on the lyric from Lennon and solo guitar from McCartney—adds yet another dimension.
The range of geographic influence on the Beatles included a swath of cutting-edge Los Angeles. Peter Fonda’s remark about knowing what it is like to be dead was the starting point for Lennon’s She Said She Said, which Harrison helped “weld” together by combining three previously independent starts. Joining up little bits, as Lennon described his process of composition, in this case produced jolts of expressive discontinuity similar to the beautiful non sequiturs of Ellington. Clever shifts of meter and phrasing conjure the unpredictable swings of a mysterious conversation and a sudden lift into childhood reverie, all of it carried with superb musicianship from the band. The splendid single Rain was made around the same time. With heavy use of varispeed tape manipulation and backward guitar and voice, Rain does the Byrds, with their draggy tempos and sitar-style guitars, one better. Also coming from Los Angeles were the latest ballades by Brian Wilson, directly inspiring two from McCartney. A huge spread of charmingly capricious chords, anchored by a delightfully expansive melody, portrays the singer’s ubiquitous love in Here, There and Everywhere, while For No One, the negative counterpart, achieves a lyrical but chilling melancholy.
Capping off this unprecedented breadth was the sing-along Yellow Submarine, perfectly crafted for Starr. Here is another song by McCartney that got filled out with lyric help from others (including singer-composer Donovan Leitch). The downward-dwelling submarine shares a dropout sensibility with Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, but emotionally those two songs occupy opposite worlds. Everything in Yellow Submarine is simple and happy. As a singer, Starr’s common-man persona had been crisply defined with Act Naturally in 1965. The clever leap of Yellow Submarine was to put him at the center of a song that is all about camaraderie. With each fancy breakthrough the Beatles were drifting away from the Everyman ethos, but songs like this, which from now on could only be sung by the unassuming drummer, continued to reassert the image of a communal core.
The step toward the album as a collage was the accidental by-product of independent explorations, but this approach dominated all subsequent Beatles albums. It proclaimed their obvious superiority for the simple reason that no one else could come close to such a huge panorama of music, accomplished at such high-level skill. Revolver’s impressive range emerged from McCartney’s musical flexibility and ability to transform various models, from Lennon’s commitment to bringing his experience of LSD into his songs, and from Harrison’s growing connections to India. One can identify the centripetal energy that tracks forward all the way to the band’s disintegration, but the beauty of Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, and Abbey Road is the balance between this outward thrust and the strong sense of Beatles identity, internalized so thoroughly that it shines through everywhere.
While the Beatles were deep into Revolver the Beach Boys released Pet Sounds, which made a huge impression on McCartney. “Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn’t have happened,” insisted Martin. Pet Sounds changed the way McCartney thought about his creative role, or at least confirmed a direction he was already inclined to take.
Wilson’s ballads God Only Knows and You Still Believe in Me bowled him over, and McCartney also made a close study of Wilson’s bass lines. He had already blossomed as a composer who could coordinate melody, chords, bass line, and form, but any pop composer could find inspiration in Wilson’s craftsmanship. The broader impact from Wilson came through a sense of how to micromanage studio production and arrangements. Wilson was getting into the kitchen of the producer and the engineer and flaunting their luxurious eight-track tape recorders, double the size available at EMI. Wilson had in front of him models like producers Phil Spector and Jerry Leiber, who combined composition, arranging, editing, engineering, and producing. Wilson, the composer-performer, was ready to claim an even bigger range. “He alone in the industry—at the pinnacle of the pop pyramid—is full creator of a record from the first tentative constructions of a theme to the final master disc,” wrote Liverpudlian Derek Taylor, who was generating publicity for both the Beatles and the Beach Boys in 1966. Taylor’s high praise must have hit McCartney like a taunt.
In Pet Sounds you can hear Wilson romping through the studio with evident joy. Unexpected combinations of instruments (the “sweet surprise,” as Mitch Miller used to call it) pop out all over the place—accordion on a soft bed of strings, flutes backed by ukulele, English horns mixing with Hammond organ, a dramatic tympani stroke with heavy reverb coming out of nowhere like a bolt of lightning, altered piano, bass clarinet followed by bicycle horn or sleigh bells, smart drumming, funky bass, liberal doses of synthesizer, and the Beach Boys’ interweaving voices on top of everything. The loving attention to detail matches and extends the beautifully crafted songs. Composer, performer, arranger, and producer are united in the mind of one extremely musical person.
Wilson was good at what we might call the “dynamic arrangement.” Instead of having the same accompaniment for each statement of verse or bridge or refrain, the arrangement keeps changing over the three-minute recording. This kind of thing was standard practice in the Swing Era, but rock musicians had to discover it for themselves. Sloop John B, Wilson’s stunning transformation of a simple folk song, is a terrific example. The song opens with some kind of percussion, hard to identify but sounding like a ticking clock and accompanied by a swirling motive on synthesizer. In verse one the bass enters gradually, then becomes more active, while glockenspiel and percussion add light touches in the background. Verse two brings more active percussion and light vocal harmony, the swirling synthesizer staying steady. Genuine rock accompaniment arrives in verse three, along with extended vocal harmonies. Verse four is suddenly much more active, with a sudden disappearance of the instruments dramatically highlighting the brilliant and complex vocals. A drop in activity marks verse five, out of which pops much more aggressive percussion. The last chorus begins with a marchlike cadence that carries the song into fade-out as the ship sails away, leaving the listener wanting more.
In southern California, Wilson was also experimenting with LSD and reading The Psychedelic Experience, a step or two ahead of Lennon. He tried to articulate a turned-on point of view in Hang on to Your Ego, but his bandmates convinced him to recompose the lyrics and rename it I Know There’s an Answer. They could not follow him. (Al Jardine: “To be honest, I don’t think I even knew what an ego was”; Mike Love: “I wasn’t interested in taking acid or getting my ego shattered.”) In fact most of what Wilson was doing for Pet Sounds was too far out for his bandmates. He was on his own, exploring new territory without the support Lennon enjoyed from the four-headed monster.
Wilson’s move was not a collaborative one but just the opposite: he took control of activities that were usually done by others in sequence. McCartney observed the example and did something different with it. Just as Ellington merged composition, performing, and arranging, and enhanced his position at the center of a creative process that remained highly collaborative, so did McCartney. The others could join him or not, anywhere along the process. As long as the Beatles were able to move flexibly through various combinations of creative procedures—and they did this through Abbey Road—they stayed strong.
Perhaps the most marvelous Beatles demonstration of a dynamic arrangement is Strawberry Fields Forever. The 45 single that distributed this song with Penny Lane is the greatest Lennon-McCartney pairing, not only because of the excellence but also because the compositions reflect the group dynamics so well. These songs were intended to be the first step toward an album about Liverpool and the magic of childhood. As McCartney explained in January 1967, “I’d like a lot more things to happen like they did when you were kids, when you didn’t know how the conjuror did it, and were happy to just sit there and say, ‘Well it’s magic.’” Strawberry Fields Forever is about a place experienced in isolation, Penny Lane is about a community hub. One turns to introverted reverie with mysterious depth, the other to extroverted motion and surface brilliance. Yet the musical riches of Strawberry Fields Forever were the product of creative collaboration, while those from Penny Lane came largely from a superb musical design created by one person.
From Pet Sounds, Strawberry Fields Forever takes the “fade-in” at the end, fondness for musique concrète, and the vast array of instruments, including synthesizer, to which it adds swarmandal from India and backward cymbals while subtracting Beach Boys vocals. “I played [Pet Sounds] so much to John that it would be difficult for him to escape the influence,” remembered McCartney. In the meantime, Wilson had upped the ante of studio hyper-focus with Good Vibrations, which, in late 1966, was soaring through the charts to become the greatest Beach Boys hit ever. But the Beach Boys did not have George Harrison, looking to India; they did not have John Lennon, studying Dylan and boldly thinking about how to reconceive song lyrics; and they did not have Paul McCartney, checking out the high-modern avant-garde. There were no barriers to McCartney’s study of Wilson’s dynamic arrangements, just a huge opening to pour the gains into the Beatles’ studio retreat.
Dylan showed Lennon how to make rock-and-roll lyrics deeper and broader, and Wilson showed McCartney how to turn a recording studio into a compositional laboratory. As Dylan was to Lennon, so Wilson was to McCartney, midcareer models for new directions.
All of this helps explain a central fact about collaboration in phase two: musically, McCartney’s direct impact on Lennon’s songs tends to be far greater than Lennon’s on McCartney’s. Partly this has to do with the nature of each creative mind. Lennon’s fresh, outside-the-box lyrics tend to emerge with relatively simple music, while McCartney’s refined musical structures leave little room for his partner to contribute. In a limited way, the situation is analogous to Ellington and Strayhorn: Ellington liked to combine themes, chords, instruments, and moods in a freewheeling process of mixing, adding, subtracting, and rearranging (Lennon: “doing little bits which you then join up”), while Strayhorn designed intricate musical structures that he regarded as complete and perfect. Ellington sometimes chopped up Strayhorn’s musical structures, upsetting his assistant, but no one messed with McCartney’s. The difference has to do with the different hierarchical textures. Ellington’s leadership was never in doubt. By 1966, McCartney was assuming a position as chief Beatle in charge of musical production without actually taking the title.
With his ego-destroying project advancing grimly, Lennon acceded to his partner’s new role. On one level he could relax, knowing that his songs were in good hands. He was pushing the group beyond “safe” music, and McCartney helped him do it successfully. McCartney appreciated Lennon’s “battering ram” mentality, which he himself lacked. On another level, Lennon was inclined to withdraw. “I was really going through a ‘What’s it all about?’ phase,” he remembered. “This song writing is nothing, it’s pointless and I’m no good, not talented and I’m a shit and I couldn’t do anything but be a Beatle . . . And it lasted nearly two years! I was still in it in Pepper! I know Paul wasn’t at that time: he was feeling full of confidence but I wasn’t.” Lennon’s crisis put McCartney in the central position.
In the early 1970s, when he looked back with some bitterness and a lot of faulty memory, Lennon complained about what McCartney and Martin had done to some of his greatest songs. “I should have tried to get near my original idea, the monks singing,” he insisted for Tomorrow Never Knows—“I realize now that was what it wanted.” He wished Strawberry Fields Forever had been simpler, without the fancy studio treatment. We are lucky it wasn’t. We should not see this as a dysfunctional period for the collective. According to Shotton, who remained involved through 1968:
There never was, and probably never will be, a group more self-contained or tightly knit than the Beatles were in those days; the way their talents and personalities harmonized was little short of miraculous. Until about 1968, I never witnessed, or even heard about, a single serious disagreement between any of them . . . Paul was the only Beatle who posed any challenge to John’s authority and preeminence with the group. Much as John might have found it easier to handle those who—like George and Ringo—seemed to take it for granted that he was the king of the castle, Paul was the only one he considered more or less his equal. John particularly admired and respected—yet at the same time slightly resented—Paul’s independence, his self-discipline, and his all-around musical facility; all qualities in which John felt relatively lacking.
It is not that everything was always rosy. The point is that they found a new equilibrium in 1966 and 1967, one suited to the group’s evolution.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Lennon had intended Strawberry Fields Forever to be the first song for the next album, but it quickly got redirected to a single with Penny Lane. It must have become clear that the theme of childhood memories of Liverpool was too limiting, that the album could reach further without that particular anchor. Ideas were bounced around and a new theme gradually emerged. Personal assistant Mal Evans suggested that they introduce a pretend band, the Beatles’ alter ego. They had heard a funny story about Elvis sending his Cadillac on tour as a substitute for himself. The pretend band, existing only on the phonograph record, could represent the Beatles since they were no longer going to perform in public. McCartney noted the eccentric band names of West Coast psychedelia, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was born. A pretend audience appeared on the cover and roared its approval several times over the course of the record, presented in such a way that it was obviously fake.
But the power of Pepper goes well beyond pretending. Lennon later complained that the songs are not topically unified, but that apparent lack is actually part of the magic. The concept is loose enough to allow an array of music so diverse that it mimics the glorious chaos of life itself. The implicit theme is the psychedelic worldview, which could be summed up most simply as nothing is real. “It’s a fantastically abstract way of living that people have got into without realizing it,” said McCartney in an interview with Barry Miles from January 1967. “None of it’s real.” The most important thing to say to people is “It isn’t necessarily so, what you believe. You must see that whatever you believe in isn’t necessarily the truth . . . because the fact that it could be right or wrong is also infinite, that’s the point of it. The whole being fluid and changing all the time and evolving.” Conventional views of reality fall apart when you see things from a higher point of view, which opens up a world of brilliance, playfulness, wonder, and love.
The most serious songs on the album—A Day in the Life, Within You Without You, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds—articulate this view clearly enough, while the others fill out the album with brilliance, playfulness, wonder, and love. All of it is done with compelling and unprecedented music, tuneful and accessible. The diversity and studio imagination of Revolver are ratcheted up, and those qualities become part of how the album defines itself. This is the recipe for the greatest album in rock history.
When you bought the album you saw the spectacular photo on the cover before you heard the music. It is no coincidence that the most famous rock album has the most famous rock album cover. The cover helps define the theme, and in this way it represents the greatest collaboration between rock musicians and a visual artist. The Beatles enjoyed access to the very best—the best piccolo trumpeter, the best Indian musicians living in London, the best photographers, and so forth. McCartney’s friend Robert Fraser, who happened to be the London dealer for Andy Warhol, knew that Warhol was designing an LP for the Velvet Underground (released March 1967). He thought that the Beatles should follow suit and suggested Peter Blake, who produced his most famous work of art for the benefit of something beyond the status of his own portfolio.
The cover first of all defines the pretend band as a psychedelic one, with dayglo uniforms and the suggestion of a fissure between past and future. The imaginary audience gathers for what might be a funeral, with a solemn statue kneeling at a flower-strewn grave inscribed “Beatles.” The psychedelic incarnation has taken over. The power of the cover depends on the technique of visual collage. The pretend band, the only thing “real” in the photo, stands in front of an imaginary audience of Warholian celebrities in irregularly clunky, vaguely life-size, cardboard cutouts.
The touch of Warhol, picking up on the faux reality of celebrity representation and turning that into a softened and extended theme, reminds us how the most famous visual artist of this decade so closely parallels the Beatles. The Beatles were formed by the view that their primary purpose was popular success, with more artistic goals coming later and always tempered by commercial instincts, deeply ingrained. They shared this pattern with Warhol, who developed his talents in graphic design and window displays before he became an artist. Furthermore, Warhol’s work was highly collaborative, following the norms of commercial art.
As with Warhol, Pepper emphasizes artifice. Some of the celebrities are colorized, many are black and white, and there is no attempt to bring them into a uniform scale. The variety of visual representation continues with the wax Beatles, the ceramic dolls, the cloth doll, the Hindu goddess, artificial palm trees, a collage of untamed semiotics. This is conceptually compatible with the musical collage inside, so each strengthens the other. Visually and musically, brilliant detail, pointing in many different directions and working on different levels of “reality,” overwhelms logic. This was the trick that made it possible for the Beatles to work on a bigger canvas.
The double retreat led them directly to this point. The imaginary world of the album cover has no existence apart from the photograph of it, just as the musical world inside cannot exist apart from the phonograph record. (Three phase-two album titles point toward the phonograph: Revolver is the revolving LP, Pepper is the band that exists only on the LP and nowhere else, and Abbey Road is the address of the recording studio. Pet Sounds was the likely antecedent for this way of thinking.) The disadvantages of phonograph recordings are clear: the sound quality is artificial, there are no performers to relate to, and the record is often heard in social isolation. An advantage is how the phonograph encourages imaginative engagement from the listener, allowing the range of musical meaning to spread beyond what it might in live performance. No record has ever embraced these possibilities better than Pepper.
With Strawberry Fields Forever moved to a single, Lennon turned his attention to a new start for the album. This song became A Day in the Life. He understood how an innovative number could set the tone and shape direction, as Tomorrow Never Knows did for Revolver. The sequence of these three songs defies anyone who wishes to paint the Beatles as more concerned with mass success than artistic innovation, for each is utterly noncommercial. Each builds on the previous effort and beats it. Each began as a simple song by Lennon and through collaboration reached an endpoint that he never could have imagined by himself. A Day in the Life was a collaborative tour de force.
7.3 Lennon, May 1967
We have seen Dylan precedents for a number of Lennon’s songs. A Day in the Life leans toward Ballad of a Thin Man. The singing persona of the initial verses laughs gently at the institutional trappings of conventional Britain (the House of Lords, the English Army, and the Royal Albert Hall). It is usually the case with most artists that an original point of inspiration does not help very much with interpreting the final result. In this case Lennon was responding to a newspaper report of an actual death by car accident, but the song is not a statement of mourning and not even tragic. The situation has something to do with blowing one’s mind, we are told, a phrase that meant something positive in 1967, and the storyteller is laughing. This sets the tone for the entire song, which is about the futility of a shallow and pretentious mind-set and an invitation to join a more expansive view.
Lennon brought verse one to his songwriting partner, not the finished script of Tomorrow Never Knows or Strawberry Fields but a rushed work in progress. “The way we wrote a lot of the time, you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was . . . ,” recalled Lennon, “then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa.” McCartney contributed the slight but powerful refrain, the invitation to turn the listener on, which was taken by the BBC as a drug reference and caused a radio ban.
That Lennon did not carry to his partner a finished script opened up a simple procedure from the old days, now dramatically extended: one songwriter creates a verse and the other complements it with a bridge. In this case, the bridge (“Woke up . . .”) is close to being a complete song in itself, composed and sung by McCartney. It defines a persona that is clearly distinguished from the one in the verses, sung by Lennon. It is the finished musical articulation of this structure that makes the song so spectacularly successful. The results were so unprecedented and powerful that A Day in the Life was immediately compared (by Newsweek) with T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.
The great conductor-composer-critic Leonard Bernstein described how “three bars of A Day in the Life still sustain me, rejuvenate me, inflame my senses and sensibilities.” Lennon sings as if from a distance, with understated delivery. He is recorded with an exceptionally long delay, and his lines are punctuated by piano chording never heard before, a huge sound coming from afar and portending storms ahead. The texture is vast yet empty. McCartney asked a reluctant Starr to invent drum fills instead of simply keeping time. The results—likewise muffled and big at the same time—are superb.
The famous orchestral cacophony first appears as a transition into the bridge, a ferocious swirl of energy that gradually overtakes the initial haze. McCartney had been hanging out at the electronic studio of Peter Zinovieff, an independently wealthy PhD from Oxford who loved to experiment with sequencing, randomness, and musique concrète. Martin remembered that McCartney wanted a “spiraling ascent of sound, suggesting we start the passage with all instruments on their lowest note and climbing to the highest in their own time.” McCartney’s concern was to balance audacity with accessibility. “The worst thing about doing something like this is people get a bit suspicious,” he can be heard saying on a rolling tape picking up studio chatter. “Like, ‘come on, what are you up to?’” In a January interview he spoke about the risk of moving too far ahead too fast. He saw himself as a link to avant-garde electronics. His caution was born from full acceptance of his role as a musician whose primary task is to connect with the audience.
After the chaotic transition swells and bursts, the song lands on a thumping piano quite different from the ominous piano of the verses. McCartney, now the singer, is recorded full, close, and dry, very different from Lennon’s surreal detachment. From this aural trickery we understand the purpose of the transitional chaos: it transports the song from one persona to another, not a typical strategy in popular songs. It takes us from the knowing outsider to the hopeless insider. The new persona is straight, hurried, conventional. It could be Mr. Jones himself rushing through his quotidian hassles, getting his tea, catching the bus, though he is more sympathetic than Dylan would have him, a bit like you and me.
The scoring at the end of the bridge, during the dream, is skillfully done. After the song crisply returns to the verses and their initial atmosphere, the absurdity of the conventional world is pushed to the limit with the counting riddle of four thousand holes at Albert Hall. The farcical tone and quickened pace prepare for the bigger chaos to come. With the final release into oblivion, the supernaturally long piano chord resolves all dramatic tension and punctuates the kaleidoscopic brilliance of the entire album. (An earlier idea was to chant “om” here, a sacred syllable that represents the universal essence and advises caution against nihilistic interpretations of this moment.) Still, the Beatles, in 1967, were not inclined to leave seriousness dangling, so British record buyers were treated to one last joke, the goofy, inner-groove tape loop that popped out surprisingly just before the phonograph arm was about to lift and return to its place, analogous to the laughter at the end of Within You Without You.
In song lyrics, Bob Dylan could spin circles around anyone. Brian Wilson could match anyone in musical craft. Neither could combine the two at the deep level of symbiosis achieved by Lennon and McCartney. And nobody else could, either.
If Lennon was good at launching a breakthrough song that provided intellectual gravity, McCartney was the one who got the album started with the title track and the second track, With a Little Help from My Friends. It was smart to open with high-energy rock—and rock that was very up to date, it should be noted. McCartney’s chords for the theme song do not connect to Chuck Berry but to Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze, just released in March. (Hendrix returned the compliment by covering the Pepper theme at the Saville Theatre three days after the album was released. Then McCartney bowed in Hendrix’s direction once again by repeating these chords in the theme song for Magical Mystery Tour.)
It was even smarter to move directly into With a Little Help from My Friends, a jaunty tune with Penny Lane’s tempo and ambience. The song was conceived for Starr, acting naturally as the fictional Billy Shears, the lyrics filled out with extensive back and forth between McCartney and Lennon. With a Little Help from My Friends has the humble drummer close to the mic and close to the audience. “Of course you can take part, anyone can,” Lennon said to his teenage friend Pete Shotton when he tried to get him to join his skiffle band, even though Shotton was completely devoid of talent. In 1967 the sophisticated Beatles were in danger of losing their connection to the unassuming side of rock and roll, but Starr’s unpretentious voice and persona helped keep it going. The accommodating drummer held things together musically and socially, and he freshly defined their communal image in Yellow Submarine and With a Little Help from My Friends.
The two opening tracks, both based on pretend names, already mark a range of playful expression. Beatles humor, with origins in Scouse sarcasm and The Goon Show mimicry, two traditions of undermining the hegemony of British aristocracy, was a major part of Pepper’s nothing-is-real, psychedelic vision. Humor is often about shifting meaning, a sudden glimpse of an unfixed point of view. The Pepper band is not just funny in its military uniforms, it is surreal. Humor is infused into so many of the Pepper songs that it becomes thematic, a way of puncturing all limiting concepts and opening into a bigger view of life that is “fluid and changing all the time and evolving,” as McCartney put it.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds follows to form a deftly effective psychological sequence for the first three tracks: the pretend, theatrical fun of the opening track is public and extroverted; then comes the inner-circle warmth and tight camaraderie of track two; track three retreats further into a private, visionary world. When Lennon later complained that the concept of the album “doesn’t go anywhere,” he was ignoring this subtle progression.
Lucy in the Sky complements A Day in the Life in that the latter critiques the conventional world while the former celebrates the higher view. Like so much of Pepper it features hard-to-identify sounds crafted in the studio, correspondences corresponding approximately. Backward tape loops, now old hat, give way to more subtle engineering to define unique qualities for each song, the result of some four hundred hours of studio time spread over four and one-half months. Lucy has been criticized for the bald separation between its drifty verses and vigorous chorus. More sympathetically we could hear the chorus as a burst into ecstasy and an experience of childlike wonderment. Lennon was adamant about the origin of the title in a watercolor painting made by his four-year-old son, Julian, rather than the initials “LSD.” The importance of this detail to him indicates his devotion to Through the Looking Glass, which he read passionately as a child, and the sense that the vivid and imaginative qualities described in both song and book are accessible to everyone, even without the drug.
The concept for an album of songs about Liverpool may have been inspired by In My Life and Eleanor Rigby, two songs full of empathy. In the meantime, Lennon’s experiments with LSD turned him in the direction of edgy and boundary-breaking originality. “We’re fed up with making soft music for soft people,” he told Martin in November 1966. That left it to McCartney to pick up the warmer side and achieve emotional balance, an assignment for which he was fully primed.
Getting Better embodies the balance all by itself. McCartney brought the emerging song to his partner, and in a single line—the call and response that it isn’t possible for things to get worse—Lennon complicated his partner’s optimistic tilt; more darkly, he added the bridge about beating his woman. The two composers routinely added to each other’s lyrics like this all the way through the Ballad of John and Yoko. With Getting Better, Lennon’s adjustments took a straightforward song and put it in motion, lifting it into the album’s play of humor and shifting meaning. Musically, the song crackles with forward-moving energy, sensitive design, and warm tunefulness. Beatles biographer Hunter Davies watched the production of it and filed a report. “Paul instructed the technician on which levers to press, telling him what he wanted, how it should be done, which bits he liked best,” said Davies. “George Martin looked on, giving advice where necessary. John stared into space.” With fiancée Jane Asher on a three-month theatrical tour of the United States, January through March, McCartney was ratcheting up his micromanagement of the studio.
McCartney’s Fixing a Hole builds on the point of view of Strawberry Fields Forever. William Mann, the classical music critic for the Times, heard this song as “cool, anti-romantic, harmonically a little like the earlier Yesterday and Michelle.” It is easy to miss the excellence of an unpretentious song like this. As composer Ned Rorem put it, with McCartney as his example, “genius doesn’t lie in not being derivative, but in making right choices instead of wrong ones.” One difference between Pepper and an innovative album like Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is that a second tier (for Pepper) track like Fixing a Hole is musically stronger, by far, than anything on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
At the very warm end of McCartney’s Pepper spectrum stands When I’m 64, perhaps the most maligned song on the album, even though it works well as a unique part of the collage of social and entertainment registers. The song dates from when McCartney’s father, Jim, was still a primary musical influence on his teenage son. Beatles scholar Walter Everett has suggested that the spur for its revival was the chart-making success of Winchester Cathedral by the New Vaudeville Band in October 1966. While 64 evokes the music hall with its bouncy rhythms and conventional melody—it remains a work of juvenilia at this level—it is not simply a dip into nostalgia. McCartney’s insight was to see how, with the right arrangement and dose of winky humor (Lennon contributing the chuckling names of the grandchildren), the “schmaltz,” as he put it, could be lightened up and occupy a satisfying slot in Pepper’s heady mix.
The clarinets of 64 are effective, and so are the harp and strings of She’s Leaving Home, though for different reasons. The clarinets rescue 64 from camp, while the harp and strings of She’s Leaving Home bring into relief the delusionary world of the hopeless parents; along with the falsetto singing they help define this domestic perfection as a transparent illusion. The implicit theme of the album—“It isn’t necessarily so, what you believe”—strengthens this song and vice versa. Musical tenderness solicits empathy for the clueless parents, and the departing daughter quietly emerges as an unnamed heroine who has turned on, dropped out, and freed herself from bourgeois conformity.
Lovely Rita offers another dose of McCartney’s captivating blend of warmth, humor, and tunefulness. It was funny to imagine the world’s most eligible bachelor losing his hair and mending a fuse, and funny to think of him bedding the meter maid, as he does at the song’s end with comic reenactment of the panting sex from Ray Charles’s What’d I Say. Once again musical warmth lifts the song above simple comedy: it tells us that the meter maid is rather fetching.
What is so artistically persuasive about Pepper is how the kaleidoscopic dance of imagery, the tapestry of emotions, the play of humor, is all so beautifully energized by the music. Edgy songs from Lennon are an important part of the texture. Good Morning Good Morning, with its shifting patterns of beats and sneering transitions, is a mate to A Day in the Life; the protagonist has a harder time scuffling through the world in the former than he does in McCartney’s bridge for the latter. Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite is childlike, colorful, and wondrous, a psychedelic calliope, brilliantly realized, the musical equivalent to the dayglo uniforms on the cover. Other musicians in 1967 were exploring psychedelic styles, but none could match either the Beatles’ range or their musical magnetism. That is why Pepper was one of a kind: the safest thing was to go in another direction.
One song remains, and it is the most challenging on the whole album—Harrison’s Within You Without You. Like Tomorrow Never Knows, it is something of a sermon, a starting point for laying out a philosophy that would yield to less preachy efforts in the future. Except for the pun in the title and brief refrain it is completely serious, so serious that Harrison felt he had to lighten the atmosphere by throwing in canned, nervous laughter from the imaginary audience at the end of the track. The point of view is based on religious teachings from India dating back thousands of years. The music also takes inspiration from North India, introductory alap in free, unmeasured rhythm, followed by a tala rhythmic cycle and melodic material that is close to modes of raga. Martin worked with the violinists and cellists to get raga-style bending of pitch and rhythm, amplifying the seriousness of the song with Western classical instruments and suggesting rapprochement between East and West (following the lead of the Ravi Shankar-Yehudi Menuhin collaboration West Meets East, released January 1967).
Pepper would have been terrific without Within You Without You, but its presence clarifies and deepens everything else. A Day in the Life is a potent critique of materialistic values, and Lucy in the Sky offers psychedelic rapture; Within You Without You firmly grounds the psychedelic view in Vedic spirituality. If one is sympathetic, it can subtly define the entire album. The pretend band and fake audience, surreal circus tricks and empty suburban rush hour, failing families and superficial happiness, the fetching meter maid and handsome Paul losing his hair—the entire fantasy may be understood as the “wall of illusion” (maya in Sanskrit). The album’s sprawl suggests a universal reach. Within You Without You states plainly that each of us can dissolve the wall of illusion and experience limitless love and ultimate truth.
Harrison needed five full minutes to ground Pepper’s dazzling psychedelic fantasy in the nurturing embrace of Mother India. There was talk of trimming but he stood firm. It was risky to take the psychedelic inquiry in this direction. The song pointedly asks where you, the listener, stand. Nowhere Man observed how each of us can be a little blind, just seeing what we like to see. Now the full antidote is placed at the beginning of side two of the Beatles’ greatest album. Lennon gave Tomorrow Never Knows a throwaway title to deflect the song’s seriousness, but the title Within You Without You leaves no possibility of escape. Stephen Stills had Harrison’s lyric engraved on a stone monument in his backyard, and Lennon eventually praised it as Harrison’s best composition.
Within You Without You and A Day in the Life bookend Pepper’s second side, two five-minute-plus, mind-blowing songs, each aiming to define not just the album but an entire epoch. A Day in the Life was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, though Within You Without You did not fare that well, partly because of the Indian music, partly because of the didacticism. Not everyone has understood it in the way I have described, as gathering Pepper’s psychedelic world under a Vedic tent. “Harrison now seems to take seriously . . . the kind of homilies that used to make the Beatles giggle . . . ‘self-discovery’ and ‘universal love,’” snorted Robert Christgau in Esquire, with condescension that has been rampant in literature on the Beatles. Nevertheless, that was certainly where the Beatles were headed in 1967—that is, they were headed to India.
The recording studio turned out to offer the best way to musically articulate a psychedelic vision, and the combination landed the Beatles in the realm of art like no other rock group. Reviewing Pepper in the New Yorker, Lillian Ross felt that there was only one possible comparison: “The Beatles, like Duke Ellington, are unclassifiable musicians.” As with Ellington, diversity of expression arose from the plurality of voices, setting them apart from all competition. Their closest rivals at the top of art rock, Dylan and Wilson, sounded monochromatic in comparison. The composer of The Times They Are a-Changin’ was open enough to appreciate I Want to Hold Your Hand, but he is said not to have liked Pepper. Wilson was struck by the folk-rock homogeneity of Rubber Soul and he aimed to better it; compared with Pepper, Pet Sounds does indeed sound homogeneous. There was no way that Dylan or Wilson or anyone else could compete with Pepper’s brilliant display. Nobody else had the four-headed monster’s magical mix of talent, collaboration, and mastery of craft.
Like other musical monuments that define their times, Pepper’s status was less one of trendsetter and more a matter of unapproachable awe. It set a standard that was a burden even for the Beatles.
Love, Death, and Mystery
While the foursome increasingly oriented to India, the second half of 1967 brought several surprises and a crippling tragedy. On June 25 they sort of performed (part prerecorded and part live) Lennon’s All You Need Is Love for a television broadcast that reached around the globe. The show included segments from many countries, a gesture of international harmony. The Beatles were selected for the grand finale. The love in this song is the same love that will save the world in Within You Without You. The opening with La Marseillaise seems to say that the Beatles are offering an international anthem for the revolutionary Summer of Love.
When Harrison actually visited Haight-Ashbury he was shocked by the squalor and sloppiness of come-one-come-all hippiedom. The Beatles had just released their fanciest artistic statement of all. They were at one with high-end technology. How could they align themselves with the casual strumming and free jam sessions of Golden Gate Park? A sing-along was the clever solution. It didn’t matter that the rest of the lyrics for All You Need Is Love were vague and mediocre. Beatles wit and tunefulness (and skillful use of irregular phrasing) carried the day.
Then Brian Epstein died from a drug overdose, leaving the group with a tremendous loss, professionally and personally. There had been growing dissatisfaction with Epstein’s contractual arrangements, still in place from the early days, and it has even been suggested that Baby You’re a Rich Man (another combinative song, part from Lennon and part from McCartney) was a dig at his sustained harvest of Beatles profits. Nevertheless, they still depended on him. “Just as Paul had assumed some of the production duties from George Martin,” observed Emerick, “he now filled Brian’s shoes as well.” McCartney’s first initiative was to move forward on the Magical Mystery Tour movie, which combined the British institution of the mystery bus tour, where you buy a ticket without knowing where the bus is destined, with Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus adventure. The movie flopped, though it is not as bad as its reputation. With a little tinkering and reworking it could have been excellent. A halfhearted album with the same title was patched together.
We could define the psychedelic phase of the Beatles’ career as beginning with Tomorrow Never Knows (April 1966), reaching its apex with Sgt. Pepper, and ending with I Am the Walrus (September 1967). I Am the Walrus takes that aesthetic seriously. Like Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields Forever, A Day in the Life, Come Together, and I Want You, I Am the Walrus was a conceptual breakthrough that received royal treatment from the collaborative team. Lennon once said that it took him a while to figure out how to follow Dylan’s example, and the Rimbaudian Dylan of A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, Mr. Tambourine Man, and Chimes of Freedom was the most difficult challenge of all. I Am the Walrus is his great, crowning victory.
Behind the direct influence of Dylan and the indirect influence of Rimbaud lay, once again, Lewis Carroll, who wrote a poem called “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and created the character Humpty Dumpty (the eggman) for Through the Looking Glass. The messianic opening phrase of I Am the Walrus was derived from the very first page of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita: “I am That, thou are That, and thou are That and all this is That.” But the rest of the song chases Rimbaud as channeled through Dylan, the poet as visionary who disorders the rational world of the senses. Non sequiturs spill out in all directions in a chain of micronarratives about dead dogs, English gardens, and flying policemen. In both Strawberry Fields and A Day in the Life the singer looks on with amused detachment (in his own tree, reading the newspaper, watching a film) at the folly and shallowness of conventional Britain. In Walrus he has grown ten feet tall. He is an eggman and a walrus, and he cries while the rational world darts around in sharp, brittle fragments.
The lyrical imagery is vivid, but what makes I Am the Walrus so powerful—and what distinguishes it from anything Dylan ever wrote—is the musical-lyrical synthesis, the combination once again yielding a song with no precedent. I Am the Walrus is the ultimate (for the 1960s) realization of Rimbaudian aesthetics. They began recording barely a few days after Epstein’s death. A distracted Starr was having trouble concentrating, so McCartney picked up a tambourine, stood in front of him, and kept time, “like a human click track,” as Emerick put it. The studio engineer found yet another fresh way to defamiliarize Lennon’s voice with a cheap mic and an overloaded preamp. The siren-like, oscillating melody is effectively embedded in high-profile and inventive harmonies that swirl around in a way nicely described by critic Ian MacDonald as a “perpetually ascending/descending M. C. Escher staircase.” Martin’s superb arrangement turns ordinary cellos into savage instruments of revenge against those who would kick around an outsider genius like Edgar Allan Poe.
McCartney and Lennon had been experimenting at home with random combinations of sound and video by turning the sound off from the television and joining the visual with records and radio. Lennon brought the twirling radio dial into Walrus. The Mike Sammes Singers were hired to deliver the joker’s laugh. The great novelist Milan Kundera wrote in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting about the laughter of the devil, which denies the world’s rational coherence, and the laughter of the angels, affirming harmony and beauty. If Richard Lester’s movie A Hard Day’s Night was all about the fun-loving laughter of harmonious angels, I Am the Walrus conveys the logic-slaying laughter of the devil. The song was paired with Hello Goodbye, another terrific piece of music that shows McCartney’s knack for making things complicated where they need to be complicated, with independent melody, bass, chords, guitar riff, and vocal call and response, then simple where they need to be simple. Hello Goodbye overshadowed Walrus in the marketplace, to Lennon’s great irritation.