7
SAVING ENGLAND
The Beatles and the World of Sgt. Pepper
IT STARTS with the voices and the harmony. They are there from the beginning. The two greatest voices in rock and roll, though who could know it at the time? Still, there was something from the beginning in the two voices together. Something bracing, not like familiar close harmony, but seeming at moments near to splitting apart, the two voices shooting off on separate tangents. Ian MacDonald talks about the strange “Northernness” of it, when it first came over the radio in Britain.1 Listen to the Waterson family, who, like the Beatles, started as a skiffle group in the early sixties, who, like the Beatles, came from the north (Yorkshire), who, unlike the Beatles, dug into the a cappella harmony traditions of their native soil, and came up with a sound strangely similar. Unlike most harmonies in pop music, pleasant thirds, sixths, and fifths, the Waterson’s harmonies flirt with dissonance, they are almost non-Western. Indeed, the sharpness of the Waterson’s harmonies are similar to traditional vocal styles from eastern Europe to east Asia.
Though the voices are intricately interwoven they feel independent of each other, each singer approaching the same phrase but from such distinct angles that the whole effect is bristling and declamatory. There is a pleasurable unease to it. MacDonald thinks Lennon and McCartney might have picked bits of this up from the English folk strain in skiffle. The Watersons’ harmonies say we’re here for a different kind of ramble. Wake up. The Beatles, too, sensed it was time for England to wake up.
Bob Dylan, driving over the Rockies, heard the Beatles on the radio as he was contemplating adding electricity and rock and roll to his folk repertoire. “They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. . . .”2 As a folk musician, he was saying that the harmonies made the Beatles pop “valid” because they had something of what folk music had—the folk music authenticity factor, the harshness and freshness that cut through hit-parade schmaltz, that folkies of the time were getting out of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. That was what Dylan heard. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds said of the Beatles that, “All their chords were folkie chords.”
There isn’t any greater sound in rock and roll than John Lennon and Paul McCartney singing together. The harmony contains contradictions—one flat, nasal, astringent shouter, like the drone chanter in a bagpipe, contending with a sassy, dulcet R & B choirboy. The result was something deliciously sweet and sour, a sound at once caustic yet full of heart and love. Love for what? A girl? Their audience? Each other? The love that comes off these early sides seems too big, too full of evangelical enthusiasm, to be the teenage transaction that the lyrics say it is. The Beatles took the abrasive harmonic edge from the dour folk tradition, and redeployed it to create a challenging and urgent exuberance. Those harmonies and that exuberance, riding the energy of Ringo’s indiscriminate, cymbal-happy four-four bashing, seemed to say that the good thing long intimated in pop, and promised in gospel, was finally happening, at this moment.
To talk about the happiness of the early Beatles music is to risk trivialization and cliché. But happiness is a misunderstood condition. It is always contingent, a balancing act. Happiness, where it exists and as long as it lasts, is a moment-by-moment response to a crisis. It’s the antibodies of the universe rushing to meet a disease. The happiness of the early Beatles music is a tonic, almost a desperate remedy for bone-deep fatigue, for the exhaustion of possibility, for boredom. It’s like a patient being given pure oxygen. It has to be seen against postwar Liverpool, a place of “almost Biblical bleakness” as American musician Delbert McClinton said about a visit there to play on an early Beatles gig.
Popular culture was enervated and trite, the class system an ossified caricature. The Beatles’ early music meant something different in that place and time than it did in the United States. Happiness is what you get when, for some unapparent reason, the cancer has gone into remission. Happiness is never permanent. Happiness exists in tension with unhappiness, the way the voices of the Beatles existed in tension with each other. Ian MacDonald talks about Paul’s “vertical” song structures, leaping gladly up and down the scales, while John’s “horizontal” writing pushes insistently ahead, caring much less for melodic agility. From these contrary impulses, the early Beatles made a whole. They found a way to hold disparate things in perilous tension together—they were feeling their way to a system of happiness.
In an article called “The Semantic Shifts of the Beatles’ Chords,” a Dutch critic named Ger Tillekens writes, “Intensity . . . cannot fully explain the sense of freshness of the Beatles’ songs. With their harmonic experiments the Beatles created a space for changing the meaning of words and accentuating the grain of voice. Adding to the intensity was also some kind of harshness.”3 Harsh measures for harsh times. Poor fucked England, remarks an American geopolitician in Dr. Cobb’s Game, R. V. Cassill’s occult reimagining of the Profumo scandal (whose sexual carnival kicked off the “Swinging ’60s” in England). Gray cobbled streets and dour sooty brick row houses that the Beatles run past in A Hard Day’s Night look as distant now as images from the nineteenth century. This gray England, documented by photographer Evelyn Hofer in 1962’s London Perceived, this sodden deteriorating England left behind by German bombs and the financial ruin of the war, seemed to have become permanent. There were lots of bomb craters in London and Liverpool when the Beatles were growing up; they would be replaced by terrible Stalinist concrete housing estates and tower blocks crushing the English flair that the world had looked to for style and imagination for centuries. Something in England had not survived the Blitz. Hermann Goering, now in his grave in Germany, had had his effect. But just as in Cassill’s book, England was not quite as fucked as it seemed. Something was afoot in Britain, some new and stylish expression of the island’s old mysteries.
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears . . .
As a boy, between the ages of nine and fourteen, John Lennon spent long summer holidays on the extreme northwest coast of Scotland, with his cousin’s family. Like the Romantic poets, John felt a presence in the austere sublimity of the landscape. Walking the hills, he became aware of something big. “This kind of feeling came over me. . . . I thought, ‘this is the one they’re always talking about, the one that makes you paint or write because it’s so overwhelming that you have to tell somebody’. . . so you put it into poetry.” The one they’re always talking about: John had picked up on the seed of subversion that culture carries. And it was a particularly British type of experience, a kind of nature mysticism that is often lurking near the British heart. The living reality of what the poets, who John probably had drummed into his head at school, wrote about. It was just a seed of intuition about the relationship between art and consciousness, but it would become something large later on.
One looks for the origins of the Beatles sound on their first single, “Love Me Do.” One looks in vain—almost. Just what exactly are we listening to? Lonesome cowpokes? Jack Tars singing a chantey on the docks of Liverpool? Some German art song? It doesn’t rock, that’s for sure, but it is odd. There’s nothing but this harmonica and the unvarnished voices in a minor key droning a lyric that could hardly be a more banal variant of “I love you.” The voices aren’t functioning together yet, but you can begin to hear the bracing quality. The chorus, such as it is—“Someone to love, somebody new / Someone to love, someone like you,” give a hint of things to come. There’s a chocolaty bitterness in the mingling of the voices, in the drone and downward slide of the melody. There’s a buried shout inside the restraint. But there’s not a lot more. It’s all still implicit, not there on the record. Only in retrospect can the new world be glimpsed from here. John’s Aunt Mimi said of it that if her nephew thought he was going to be a millionaire with this kind of stuff he had another think coming. As yet, they couldn’t put on vinyl the rather startling lessons they had recently learned in Germany.
Much has been made of the sleazy scene along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg’s red-light district, where, it is said, the Beatles paid their dues, learned their chops, and honed their sound. Prostitutes, pimps, transvestites, petty criminals, and sociopathic drifters from the merchant ships at the nearby docks certainly colored the audience in the clubs the Beatles played. But it’s telling that, emerging from one of the more sordid scenes in the Western world, the Beatles’ music is as clean as it is. They clearly didn’t absorb the Reeperbahn, as Mick Jagger or Lou Reed might have done. Instead what happened to them in Hamburg is that they found that their noise—if they pushed back against the Reeperbahn hard enough—could tear through the funk and miasma. They could make the Reeperbahn dance, bring it into their own game. It took some courage, because they might have gotten beat up. It was the first world that the Beatles would transcend with their sound. Before then, they weren’t aware they could do that. That was the kind of power that big stars had. That, more than dues paid, is what they brought back from Germany.
The Beatles weren’t bluesmen. The music they were drawn to didn’t have to do with finding ways to endure life. Their music was about finding a source of power, power that could contend with, even overcome, the dead-end world of the Reeperbahn. This is what they found when they discovered that by playing hard enough, by mercilessly over-driving the top boost tone of their Vox AC30 amps, they could batter their way through the anomie of the Indra Club, conquer and enlist the hardened, indifferent crowd, with noise and beat and their shout. They didn’t even have to play well. They just had to play with all their power. In Hamburg they started to become the greatest singers in rock and roll, and their vocal style, especially John’s, was born of the sheer, obsessive desperation to push it as far as they could. It’s why no one—no garage band or punks or thrashers—can get inside the sheer on-the-edge dementia of John Lennon’s rock and roll. You can hear it in “Twist and Shout”—the sound of a singer who has reached the outermost edge of his ability to get across, and then in sheer desperation, goes beyond it, tearing his larynx to get a response, past caring how he sounds, not willing to let go until hysteria, or ecstasy, has been reached. It was this that finally got the attention of the denizens of the Indra and the Kaiserkeller, this that opened a new world for rock and roll. It was here that the Beatles must have had their gospel moment, the experience that in the unity of performer, audience, and beat revealed their “technique of ecstasy.”
Once they found that they could do this, that rock and roll really worked, the implications were large. In transcending the Reeperbahn with rock and roll, there was the germ of an idea—much more difficult, but much more exciting—that perhaps they had found, if they had the wit to apply it, a working alternative to real life, in which none of them had ever been very interested. In struggling with the Reeperbahn they had almost inadvertently been forced to find a new place from which to stand and regard the world. It was either that or give up, and that was an option none of them seem to have conceived of (except for the dead Stu Sutcliffe).*2 Converting a cellar full of freaks in Germany was one thing. Was rock and roll’s apparent offer of freedom something they could trust? Could they continue to call on its power so they could stand boldly and poised in that new place and resist the thousand and one compromises and devil’s bargains that would try to pull them off of it?
It was as ambassadors from this new place that the Beatles met the world. The new angle of approach was what made the early Beatle personae, when they emerged into the public eye, so strange and compelling. They didn’t take the givens of life seriously. They seemed to have another way of looking at things. Life for them seemed to be not a joke exactly, in a despairing existentialist sense, but a laugh, a jest, a game. Hostile American commentators, sensing a new life-form but not able to describe it, compared them to the Beatniks. The Beatles did become friends with some German bohos during their time in Hamburg, and they did absorb some interesting things from them, not least their haircuts. But the commentators couldn’t have been more wrong in one sense. The Beatles weren’t beat. The Beatles, like the Beats, saw ordinary life as a game. But where many of the Beats saw it as a hostile, rigged game, the Beatles saw this revelation as opening the possibility of a new kind of fun. After all, they had triumphed over what, to a nineteen-year-old, might understandably be seen as the worst the world could throw at them. And they had done it by the force of their own will and by rock and roll (and by a good deal of amphetamine).
They had begun to dimly see something even the great fifties rockers didn’t know—that rock and roll wasn’t just a kick, or a sensation, but potentially a way of life. A way of life like the blues or jazz, but one that had its foundation in victory rather than defeat, a mode of life that suggested that happiness could live in the world. The bluesy English bands like the Stones sought to subvert ordinary life from below, the old bohemian strategy of épater le bourgeois. In contrast, the Beatles felt that, in one terrific leap, they had bypassed a good part of ordinary life, gone around and over it. On the one hand it took all their energy to do it. On the other hand, as they were the first to admit, there was nothing to it. This began to be audibly expressed in the songs that they started to write, not intellectually in the lyrics, but in the sound and the attack.
The Beatles were at first not interested in lyrics. They were captivated by neither the wit and charm of high-popular song, or the subterranean poetry of the blues. What they were passionately interested in was sound. The epoch-making moments in rock and roll often announce themselves with a new sound. Sound in this sense is only partly musical; rather, it’s where music and mood and time and place meet. It’s the story told by the overall ambiance of the music. Its relationship to musicianship is not direct. A lot of rock and roll with stunning sonic presence has been created by musical primitives. It has to be said that the Beatles, even by the end of their career, were not individually great musicians (though arguably Paul became a great bass player). They were not even a great band, as we might commonly understand the term. They went from being a rather clodhopping aggregation of wannabe rockabillies who never mastered the backbeat of American rhythm and blues (the way the Stones, for instance, did) into becoming a great rock-and-roll band without passing through a middle stage, without honing their chops. They couldn’t challenge Little Richard or Chuck Berry on their own ground, so they had to bypass them completely by creating a sound that made the question of musicianship largely moot. The chords and harmonies on their first album felt new and wonderfully strange because (1) the Beatles didn’t know any better, and more importantly, (2) because the chords were more in the service of a sound than a song. Those weird chord changes were there for excitement and effect. Like boys with firecrackers, the Beatles stuck these novelties in a song, lit the fuse, and stepped back to watch the song explode skyward or fizzle out on the ground.
For a period of twenty-three months, from December 1960 when they returned from Hamburg, to November 26, 1962, the Beatle’s conducted an ongoing experiment in how to create music that would trigger teen pandemonium. Their primary laboratory was Liverpool’s Cavern Club, where they began a legendary stint as the house band, playing to increasingly hysterical crowds. These gigs led to two crucial encounters, without which the Beatles story might have been wholly different, if it happened at all. The first was their meeting with their future manager, Brian Epstein, “possibly,” as one source has it, “the only honest manager in Britain in those days and almost certainly the only one who voted Labour.” This meeting led to the second, an audition with George Martin, a staff producer at EMI, perhaps the only person in his position in England who could hear this music with open ears, and who, miraculously, understood them when they talked about the sound they wanted and could come up with ways to help them get it.
After nights at the Cavern, the Beatles would gather just like years before in their families’ living rooms, working, wrestling with a sound that could capture the lightning they knew was in their grasp. A sound that would contain the new freedom they had found, and that could offer it to their audience. The band might have been a blunt instrument in Germany, but now they needed a sound that felt like, and would make other people feel, the exhilaration. Brute force had done the job in Hamburg, but now they wanted it to fly.
They found the sound on the third song they recorded with George Martin for their first album. It was called “Please Please Me.” It was recorded on November 26, 1962, under pressure from EMI to produce a single for the album. George Martin was threatening them with the release of “How Do You Do It” a piece of fluff from a professional songwriter that they had been cajoled into recording at their first session. The Beatles knew that this could be the death of them, so their need for the new song was intense.
“Please Please Me” started life as a Roy Orbison–style operatic lament. Under pressure for a hit, the Beatles retooled it. It now became like something from their Cavern set—a sound they had yet to commit to acetate—and it would be the template for Beatlemania. The song flew. Starting out of the gate like something that had been pent for a long time, it was a cascade of voices—those strange northern voices singing in (carelessly, gratuitously, as a bit of throwaway inspiration) a churchy descant. And in the chorus, finally distilled, was the promise of rock and roll for the Beatles, the Holy Ghost–Africa–gospel connection, the age-old and always new call-and-response: “C’mon (Come on) C’mon (Come on) C’mon (Come on) C’mon (Come on),” each “C’mon” urging a little higher and more urgently than the last, the group inviting, compelling its listeners to C’mon, promising a little more each time they sang it, until the tension finally breaks, not resolving back into the starting point, as Roy Orbison or any other pop musician would have done it, but into something even higher and more joyous, the leap into falsetto that would give the Beatles sound yet more of the strangeness that would prick up so many ears. And through it all were the harmonies, the weird harmonies, the joyful and abrasive shout. Here was the new thing, the sound the world was waiting to hear, the sound the Beatles knew they could make—the power they had discovered in Hamburg made light and brash and fresh to reflect the new freer way of looking at the world that they had learned. “Congratulations, gentlemen,” George Martin said at the end of the session. “You’ve just made your first number one.” It was the sound of the “charismatic powerhouse” as Pete Best, their original drummer described the Cavern-era impact of the group. They had discovered their instrument for happiness. Aunt Mimi thought it showed a lot more promise.
The Beatles’ music sounded like good news. Out of a rather calculating effort to manipulate teen sensations, they created music that gave the first hints that rock and roll might change your life. The Beatles had transmuted the down-and-dirty energy of fifties rock and roll into something unforeseeably fresh and exhilarating. It was whipped together from the sweetest froth of black American girl-group pop, Continental bohemianism, Brian Epstein’s homoerotic vision of beautiful boys, northern Britishness, rockabilly twang, the sound of the Sanctified Church, and dim echoes from the Yorkshire Dales. It was this odd combination of things that gave the Beatles their new-thing otherliness when they first emerged into the common consciousness. The Beatles were the next teenage novelty, but that was merely one way of saying that they were also the next new creatures, ambassadors of a new way to be that was at first most compelling to fourteen-year-old girls, but that came to be compelling to almost everyone.
The Beatles’ music sounded effortlessly fresh because it was. They didn’t agonize over Muddy Waters’ licks the way kids like Keith Richards and Eric Clapton did or the rest of the worshipful young Brits in the gathering London blues scene. The legendary bluesmen of America were icons for many of the British bands that would soon coalesce in the wake of the Beatles. The Beatles drew as much on American black music as the Stones, the Animals, or Them—the Stones’ music is no more “black” than the Beatles—but there was more than one kind of black music in the United States, and the strain that drew the Beatles wasn’t the blues. Indeed, it came out of the church. The black church is all but invisible in the music of the great bluesmen. But among black rock and rollers, soul singers, R & B shouters, girl groups, and black pop stylists like Sam Cooke, it was hard to find anyone that hadn’t at some point passed under the stern gaze of a church music director. This was the stuff the Beatles liked. The blues, among other things, was about life without power, what that looks and feels like. No power but what you can put in your music. Church music, on the other hand, was all about power, the experience of Pentecostal power right now, or the assurance that power would come one day soon. Sorrow, pain, and death were in its lexicon, but defeat was not. It assumed and it provided an alternate source of power to the financial and political power that white people held. At its center it was built on an assurance, and an experience, of triumph. It was about triumph, or it was nothing. This was the energy that the Beatles were drawn to, and that, through a long strange chain of transmission, gave power to them and their listeners.
Suddenly all this was on the radio—the harmonies, the exhilaration, the strangeness—and it found an audience bigger and crazier than anyone could have imagined (except maybe the members of the band and their evangelical manager). The rest of the Beatles’ music is an attempt to work out the implications of that sound, to see if the elements that they had brought together could be kept together in some meaningful way at the places where they threatened to split apart. Over time it became clear that what was true of their harmonies and their chords was true of all their music—the ideas behind it as well as the music itself. The threat of dissonance, contained in exhilarating tension within the structure of the song, was merely one instance of a sensibility that shaped most of what they did. This sensibility is what gives the best of their subsequent music its excitement and depth—the eagerness to find out if happiness, their sense of a new world, could be sustained by keeping its contradictions in balance.
Implicit in the love that the Beatles sang from in their early music was that their love was the equal of the world. The sound gave that extra meaning to the conventional sentiments of the lyrics. This was a bold assertion. From the Gospels to Romeo and Juliet to the Shangri-Las, the pattern had always been that when love met the world, love was doomed. The Beatles’ love didn’t sound doomed. The whole unexpectedness of the Beatles made it feel as if this time we might start over and get it right. That was how it felt, but it could scarcely be credited in the context of a pop song.
It could be said that that feeling came from a reinvigoration of something old. The Beatles were attempting to write popular songs, and so they wrote about the oldest and most popular theme of all—romantic love. But the clean wash of energy they brought to it was something new. In “Hold Me Tight” the lyrics are conventional (“You don’t know / what it means to hold you tight / being here alone tonight with you / It feels so right”), but the music of “Hold Me Tight” simultaneously barrels and flies, like a freight train somehow riding three feet above the tracks. Rock and roll had barreled before, but it was those three feet, that levitation, that made a song like “Hold Me Tight” different from fifties rock and roll. The sound lofted the sentiment to a level of excitement that seemed to hint at an exhilaration beyond sentiment, or into implications of sentiment that had never occurred to pop-music listeners before. A little later, around the time of A Hard Day’s Night, George’s new twelve-string Rickenbacker added a chime that made the effect even stronger.
As the Beatles matured, and their subject matter broadened, those intimations that Beatle love could comprehend the world grew more and more explicit. The love would get darker and more inflected, but then the world is a darker and more inflected place than teen romance will allow for. There was Eleanor Rigby dying alone, to the accompaniment of strings as cold and drab as rain on a northern English factory town. But “Eleanor Rigby” was written in the context of “We Can Work It Out,” a real attempt to work out the tension between happiness and unhappiness within one song. “We can work it out . . .” Paul sings, “at the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone.” “Life is very short” John keeps whispering in his ear. The music could contain contradictions, it could contain despair, like Eleanor Rigby’s, and yet as long as the harmony held, the balance, the new place to stand, would live.
To the Beatles’ credit, their laughter at the world extended to themselves. They didn’t become dark brooding heroes like early Elvis and James Dean, or swaggering shamans like Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison. This is one of their real spiritual contributions to their times. The idea of the showbiz “star” was part of the very world that the Beatles found so funny. In the Beatles you could hear what G. K. Chesterton called the most supernatural sound in the world—the sound of a man laughing at himself. “Every time I start to get a swelled head,” Lennon said, “I look at Ringo and I realize we’re not supermen.” The Beatles, in their honesty about themselves, predicted the anti-star stance of the San Francisco bands, and later, the punk and alternative movements in rock and roll. The feeling that you could trust the Beatles, that they were fundamentally honest, was why they seemed to fans later in their career to be models and guides through the confusion of the times. Phoniness was part of the world they had left behind in the Reeperbahn.
In October of 1965 Paul McCartney gave an interview to the New Musical Express in which he said that the Beatles were going to start writing “comedy songs.” This is an interesting insight into what was going on with the band at that point. With bands all around them in Britain like the Stones and the Who and the Animals turning on and listening to Bob Dylan and starting to push the edge of the conventional in pop song, the Beatles began to realize that the dreaminess they had imbibed from American girl groups, even elegantly rendered as in “What You’re Doing,” was going to leave them behind the very curve that they had drawn. Probably what John and Paul meant initially by comedy was satire. The significant thing about this is that their gaze was turning toward something other than the beloved, turning toward the life swirling around them. You can hear this in songs like “Norwegian Wood,” “Dr. Robert,” “Drive My Car”—all comic vignettes, jabs at the swinging England they had helped to create. Everyone knew that the Beatles had wit. It was one of the things in their group persona that had set them apart from more conventional entertainers in the first place. The wit could be heard in their music and in their bantering with the press and in a scripted form in their movies, but not, so far, lyrically. An essentially comic vision of life that had been implicit in their personae, style, and sound now became explicit. The comic vision is the balance between love and the world. In Shakespeare’s comedies, like a Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, the new world of young love encounters the deadly enmity of the old world of family hierarchy and political authority; and in the end the young lovers bring the old with them into an unanticipated harmony, taking up the old world into a new and more divine pattern. The Beatles, with their new “comedy songs” began to grope instinctively toward a similar resolution.
One of the significant developments of popular music in the sixties was the way in which romance began to be used as a metaphor. The core myth of most popular music is the myth of romantic love. It had been wryly and elegantly expressed by show-tune writers and crooners, smoothly and efficiently produced by Tin Pan Alley pros, viscerally expressed by the early rock and rollers. But it didn’t question itself. It didn’t seek to express anything beyond itself, leaving pop music in a romantic ghetto—a pleasant sort of ghetto, to be sure, lit by misty moonlight on lazy rivers and illuminated by kisses sweeter than wine. But it was a proscribed dreamland with no hint of the transcendent. The sixties rockers, the Beatles above all, inherited the romantic ghetto. “Like a Rolling Stone” began to change that. But even Bob Dylan, when he ventured into pop forms, expressed himself in the argot of romantic love. “Like a Rolling Stone” is a love song—a pissed-off love song to be sure, a love song energized by hate, and also a bile-filled bit of class warfare. But it was a boy-girl song all the same. For Dylan romantic love became a tool, a lens, a set of tropes and conventions that he could subvert, a system of metaphor open enough to let him express almost anything, including spiritual experience as in a song like “Visions of Johanna.” With this freedom you could get Van Morrison singing the most tender song in the world about a dying transvestite.
A path opened—a partial path—out of the romantic ghetto, and the Beatles caught on quickly. Not so fast or so thoroughly that they could disavow romantic love, not at first; but by now they were seeing that love could be many new things. Like Dante, the sixties singers discovered that, in the language of romantic love, you could tell a story about the soul.
And then there was acid. Acid was a new factor in the Beatles calculus of happiness, a new weight to set on the delicately balanced scale, a new factor to be added to the elements that the Beatles had been holding in tension. But at first, it appeared as if it might obviate any further need to hold things together any longer. Here, apparently, was the real new place to stand, that the Beatles had been working out so arduously with rock-and-roll music, in a pill. No wonder, then, that the more acid they took, the less they rocked.
In the wave of music by bands influenced by the experience (at first—or secondhand) of LSD, love was, as in Dante or the Sufi poets, a code for the divine, now encapsulated and placed in so many hands by modern chemistry. This expanded vision of romance in late-sixties pop returned romantic love to its origins in ecstatic vision.
Thus we have evidence of an unbroken, though variously modified, aristocratic tradition of mystically toned erotic lore, extending from India not only eastward as far as to Lady Murasaki’s sentimental Fujiwara court in Kyoto, but also westward into Europe.4
“I was alone I took a ride I didn’t know what I would find there / Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there . . .” Paul sings at the beginning of “Got to Get You into My Life” on Revolver. The song itself is a sort of punchy amphetaminized version of Bobby Darin–style swing. But there’s the lyric—he’s not just looking for a girl, he’s looking for another kind of mind. This is the mystically toned erotic lore. He’s singing, in a way, a conventional love song, but he’s also looking for another kind of mind. This has been interpreted as a song about Paul’s introduction to acid. He may or may not have intended it that way, but he certainly left open the possibility of hearing it that way.
“When I was a boy, everything was right,” John sang in the Beatles’ greatest song, “She Said, She Said” (also on Revolver), remembering his childhood visions. Some woman is whispering in his tripping ear that she knows what it’s like to be dead. John answers her with Scotland, with the big thing he felt in the mountains.
The Beatles had been offering up romantic love to their audience for what must have seemed like ages when they first took acid in 1965. Even in such late, presumably almost played-out versions of the conventional love narrative as “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” or “Tell Me What You See,” they still make the old sentiments sound magnificent. The Beatles had become consummate pop-song professionals, still singing the old tropes with a warmth and conviction that promised something bigger than itself. But now that bigger thing finally had to be faced. The Beatles began to search for a way to make explicit a love whose power and potential had haunted their music from the earliest songs. The gazes, which even on Revolver had remained subjective and romantic, were now to be projected outward, something, as we saw, they had begun to practice in their “comedy songs.” To whom were these voices, trained in love’s school, going to sing now? This is why the Beatles had to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
It should right away be noted that the revisionists are right about Sgt. Pepper’s. Song for song, Revolver is self-evidently a superior collection. Pepper’s is a psychedelic artifact—a place where in some respects the Beatles were following rather than forging the zeitgeist, full of “Pepper corn” as one writer has put it. One can find all sorts of places on Sgt. Pepper’s where the Beatles sound dated. But it was something else too. It was the climax of the Beatles’ movement from Eros to caritas, from romantic love to love for all their fellow creatures. And as such its heart was larger than anything else the Beatles had done. It should be said again—this was not really the great leap it is so often said to be. It was a development of what had been suggested by their sound from the start. In part because of the acid vision, but also because it was inevitable, for the Beatles the whole world took on the beauty and fascination (and sorrow) of the beloved of their earlier songs.
Inspired by the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson’s lush ode to the unexpectedly poetic depth and heights of Southern California adolescence, the Beatles had started toying with the idea of writing a song suite about their childhoods in Liverpool. The concept was a mix of John’s and Paul’s sensibilities. For John it offered a theater for the vision of childhood printed indelibly in his psyche; for Paul it offered the freedom to range over the whole of twentieth-century England’s musical styles.
England, the world, called. “A people without history cannot be redeemed from time,” T. S. Eliot said—“history is now and England.” The Beatles were ready to redeem their piece of time. They had hinted at it before in songs like “In My Life”: “There are places I remember, all my life though some have changed.” But that song retreated from its poignant nostalgia back into romance: “But of all these friends and lovers, there is no one compares with you.” Now the Beatles were going to dwell in those places they remembered, in the world, and forgo the final twist into subjectivity, if they could.
“Penny Lane,” recorded in January 1967, was the first full fruit of this extension of vision, and was the third track recorded for what was to become Sgt. Pepper’s. However, under pressure from EMI for a single, the Beatles made the disastrous decision to release “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields” as the twin A-sides of a new single. And so Sgt. Pepper’s lost its leitmotif and the possibility of being a real masterpiece. In terms of artistic unity and completeness, “Penny Lane” is the key to Sgt. Pepper’s and would have been its strongest track. The rest of the album builds on it, branches off from it, comments on it, or reacts to it.
Penny Lane, in Liverpool, was named after James Penny, an eighteenth-century slave trader. It was the name given to a busy central shopping area with a bus terminal, and John and Paul both lived for a time in its environs. They would meet at Penny Lane junction to catch a bus (do not forget that bus) into the center of the city.
The germ of transcendence in the Beatles’ sound, the three feet that the train was above the track in “Hold Me Tight,” is now realized, and it illuminates the absolutely ordinary world of Penny Lane as the Beatles create a scene compounded of memory and vision.
As a young journalist, Charles Dickens frequented a coffee shop in a London hotel that had the words “Coffee Room” stenciled on its glass door. He remembered seeing the door from the inside so that, instead of Coffee Room, the words read Moor Eeffoc. The new phrase with its exotic sound opened up a sense of strangeness in the prosaic setting. This little epiphany exemplified the way Dickens saw London, and was, in microcosm, the technique by which he established London in the imagination of the world. Penny Lane is about the Moor Eeffoc effect. Penny Lane is about the ordinary seen so clearly that it becomes strange, about the grace of seeing the commonplace as novel and marvelous that Thomas Traherne and G. K. Chesterton wrote about. It is about the England where, in English children’s literature, the homely and the fantastic are always implied in each other. Penny Lane is one corner of that new world that the Beatles’ early music implied, that their music made possible, now explored with open eyes, and regarded more closely.
Fig. 7.1. Penny Lane
The staccato piano chords that open Penny Lane are a wake-up call from the street through our bedroom window, inviting us on a stroll like we’ve never taken before. They sound like the most gracious, welcoming piano chords in the world, doing all that bright chords should do, and yet they’re weird too, not quite like an earthly piano—an effect achieved, characteristic of the technique of the whole song, by inserting the strange into the familiar, massively overdubbing multiple pianos so that the sound evokes all pianos—it’s an archetypal piano.
Everything will be exactly as it was when the Beatles were growing up (“The bank was there and that was where the tram sheds were and people waiting, and the inspector stood there, and the fire engines down there . . .” mused Lennon later). But why does the fireman hold an hourglass? Why does the barber keep pictures of all the heads he’s trimmed? Why does the banker never wear a raincoat in the pouring rain? Where is the fireman going as he rushes into the barbershop? And notice, as Ian MacDonald did, that it’s several seasons at once—high summer, and also November (the pretty nurse is selling poppies for Remembrance Day on November 11).
The answer is that the Beatles want to defamiliarize the familiar scene. Viktor Shklovsky, founder of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, said: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar.’ We find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author’s purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception.”5 The deautomatization of perception is what “Penny Lane,” and Sgt. Pepper’s is about.
Or, to stay with England, here is Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar . . . this is the character and privilege of genius.”6 This is the genius of psychedelia: to combine the child’s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances, which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar. . . . Again the Beatles found themselves holding antithetical things together. Penny Lane is a child’s-eye view of the street, painted by an adult. David Mason’s piccolo trumpet solo in the middle of the song is like a boy whistling at the blue sky. The little children laugh at the banker behind his back. The banker, the barber, the fireman, the nurse—all have the iconic significance that a child sees in adults. But the child’s eye is rediscovered, re-bestowed by psychedelic grace on an adult.
McCartney’s bass rolling headily beneath the surface suggests an unsettled strangeness behind the bright scene, hinting at something about to break through Penny Lane at any moment. And, indeed, at the end something from beyond Penny Lane subsumes it. The defamiliarized, disorienting playfulness becomes Play itself. The projector bulb burns through the brightly colored film we’ve been enjoying as the last note of the horn is pulled into a high unearthly tone and all the colors of Penny Lane go white, the unfiltered white light that plays behind the characters of Penny Lane and gives them their life.
“Penny Lane” suggests that what the Beatles initially wanted in Sgt. Pepper’s was a comic/cosmic vision of life as it was lived in England from their childhoods in the immediate postwar years—where an older England was just clinging to life—to the mid-sixties. From the St. Peter’s parish fete where John met Paul, to the Ad Lib Club in Swinging London. The music critic Geoffrey Stokes said that, “listening to the Sgt. Pepper’s album one thinks not simply of the history of popular music but the history of this century.”7 History is now and England.
In Sgt. Pepper’s the Beatles came as close as they could to working out a way that the disparate things they had been trying to hold together in their music could be made into a world, a tenable, inhabitable world, the whole of the world that was implied in that first place to stand that rock and roll gave them. A world where satire and love could live together, the turned-on and the mundane, old and young, the inner eye and the outer, Paul’s vertical and John’s horizontal, classical string arrangements and rock-and-roll guitars. The visionary and defamiliarized seen simultaneously with the most familiar. Where it could be all held together the way that the harmony had held the voices together. This is a very tricky balancing point, and the Beatles did not stay there long.
The record was perhaps not even intended that way, and, indeed, if one assumes that ambition, it has serious flaws. It’s just a collection of songs after all. But there is a unity to Sgt. Pepper’s that the Beatles might not even have been fully aware of, a unity that the acid they were taking might have brought forth willy-nilly from their dream life, the life of their memories.
What was their England? What did it sound like? On Sgt. Pepper’s the old England is evoked first, as the Beatles introduce themselves in their new character as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Influenced by the psychedelic trend toward Edwardian and old music-hall motifs, the concept of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a gesture to an older England, but presented musically in a louder, heavier style than the band had used so far, as if to demonstrate that they could hold their own with the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Who. As such it set up a tension between the gentle, remembered silly old England and the cutting edge of rock.
After the band introduces itself, Billy Shears, the old British showbiz figure of the compere, the master of ceremonies, is brought on. Here at the beginning of their voyage into the psychedelic vision of England is not one of the band’s resident geniuses and masterminds, not John or Paul, but Ringo, the band’s everyman, l’ homme moyen sensuel. In making Ringo the master of ceremonies the Beatles efface themselves, step back, and offer one of the unwittingly cosmic residents of Penny Lane as a guide to what follows.
The first thing Billy Shears of Penny Lane does is sing a song of reassurance—“With a Little Help from My Friends,” a song about the solidarity of human hearts, like “Help,” an admission of dependence. But even here, in the middle of this humble anthem, are hints of another world held in tension with, or hidden within, the general run of things. “I get by with a little help from my friends . . . I’m going to try with a little help from my friends.” Yes, surely. But “I get high with a little help from my friends” completing the triad of human needs?
Then there’s:
Chorus: What do you see when you turn out the lights?
Billy: I can’t tell you but I know it’s mine.
At the end of the day, Billy Shears enters another world, a world he doesn’t have the words for. It’s the world of sleep and dreams, everyman’s doorway into the visionary realm. And so the next track follows Billy Shears into his dream.
Now, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is, on one hand, pure acid kitsch, from John’s sighing “stoned” vocals to the hackneyed child-scape view of rocking horse people and marshmallow pies. As an evocation of the psychedelic experience it comes nowhere near a song like “She Said, She Said.” Compared with the mythic levels of the unconscious that the Grateful Dead were exploring, John (here at least) doesn’t seem to grasp more than the surface of acid experience. A classic of psychedelia it’s not. (There are a couple of redeeming moments—Ringo’s thump-thump-thump bridge to the chorus, which sounds like he’s whacking a packing case with a cricket bat; and the chorus itself, suddenly moving into triumphant 4/4 time with the Beatles like Dadaist magi caroling to a child’s crayon figure in the sky.) That being said, there may be a bit more going on here. Part of the reason the “Lucy” images don’t resonate is because we’ve seen the like before, the dreamscape is overfamiliar. One of John’s favorite authors was Lewis Carroll, and the whole lyric is a Lewis Carroll pastiche. Carroll’s through-the-looking-glass universe had long since been absorbed into the Anglo-American imagination, a site of subversive irrationality that millions of ordinary people nonetheless carried around in their heads. The vision in “Lucy” is childish and English and even cliché. But that would only be disappointing if we were expecting John Lennon’s dream. But it’s not his dream. It’s Billy Shears’s.
“Getting Better” begins with the same staccato wake-up call as “Penny Lane”; only this time it’s not in lyric piano chords but a ringing guitar attack. With Ringo’s inspired cymbal work sending the song shooting through a shimmering mod slalom, the groove of “Getting Better” is the kind of thing at which the Beatles were preeminent in the pop world of 1967—establishing genuine rocking propulsion within a sleek and sophisticated skin. It was this unbreakable tie to beat music that ultimately kept the Beatles from floating off into Paul’s whimsy or John’s acid dreams. It is the Beatles’ rock and roll that, as it always had, holds everything together. This was the reality behind the Beatles much-ballyhooed musical “progression”: they weren’t transcending rock and roll after all, as all the feature writers said; they were going deeper into it, unfolding its implications, layer by layer. As we’ve seen, the Beatles’ most powerful intuition, mistaken or not, was that rock and roll could contain the world. Rock and roll didn’t need to be transcended; it was still their crucial tool for interpreting the world. It needed to be opened up; its riches and amplitude needed to be brought forth and put to work. England and then the world needed it.
The narrator of “Getting Better” lives in one of the grittier alleyways off Penny Lane. He is one of the people the Beatles could have become if they hadn’t followed rock and roll out of Liverpool. “I used to get mad at my school/ The teachers that taught me weren’t cool / Holding me down, turning me round / Filling me up with their rules.” There were a lot of young men feeling that way in England in the late fifties. A brief flare-up of adolescent rebellion, a glimmer of potential. But for most of them it would turn into an abbreviated school career, a scrape or two with the law, maybe some time logged as a teddy boy, maybe the dole for a while, unplanned pregnancies, unwanted kids, finally a life spent between the docks and the pub. “I used to be cruel to my woman / I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved,” John and Paul sing the shocking line.
Does “getting better” mean the English man on the street’s homely English optimism, that he’ll muddle through somehow, that there will be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover? “No I can’t complain” he says in the words of all those who have settled for too little. Or is it that the new possibility that’s afoot will give even him a chance? That the new grace in the land will touch, has touched him? It’s both. It’s England, comic and cosmic at the same time. The two worlds at once. “It’s getting better all the time” Billy Shears as Scouse yob says hopefully. “It can’t get no worse,” taunts John. The grimy reality and the possibility of transformation both at once.
Which prompts the question, was there a new possibility? Could the common people of England change their heads, open their eyes, turn on, save their souls? Sgt. Pepper’s is all about that possibility after all, and so was the whole 1960s. Or did it just seem that way if you were tripping a lot? Was there in fact a new grace loose in the world, or did the Beatles just mean that everybody should take acid? Was the new grace available without the chemistry? Sgt. Pepper’s, at its most serious, confronts that question by trying to integrate the new transforming psychedelic grace with the history that is “now and England.” But what about all those characters in Sgt. Pepper’s that were never going to take acid? Well, Billy Shears isn’t going to take acid, but he sees things in the night that he can’t describe.
There is a tradition of visionary politics in England, and the Beatles had wandered into its stream. William Blake had written in fiery support of the revolutions in France and America, not because he was concerned with the greater enfranchisement of the bourgeoisie but because he thought that these struggles were about throwing open the doors of perception, an apocalypse of consciousness that would make every man and woman an ecstatic. There is something in the English imagination that is opposed to the idea of the lonely mystic in his or her eremitic cell like Julian of Norwich or buried deep in the countryside in a rustic parsonage like George Herbert. The English vision proposes a democratization of vision. The idea saturates the golden age of English children’s literature, the promise that magic is just down the street, in your garden, in the people you meet every day. The generosity, the fellowship, the commonness is part of the vision. In the end everyone will be turned on, in whatever way they know how. They will all know that their neighbors are angels.
“Fixing a Hole” picks up a thread from “With a Little Help from My Friends.” In the latter song we hear with surprise that Billy Shears has nighttime visions that he doesn’t have the language to describe. In “Fixing a Hole” we begin with a suburban homeowner doing household repairs, patching a crack in his ceiling where the rain gets in. But why? Not, it turns out, because the water will ruin the carpet. It’s because it stops his “mind from wandering.” But while the lyrics talk of work, the song’s moody jazziness suggests languor, reminding us what he really wants—to let his mind wander. Where? We don’t know. But it’s an opening, a humble opening—like Billy Shears’s dreams—to Something Else, a little chink, a keyhole in the door of perception.
Other hippies, especially Americans, might laugh at the little man making his little home a right little, tight little castle. But that’s not the vision of Sgt. Pepper’s. Why maintain the house? Because it’s a home of vision. Every little lighted homestead along the red-brick terraces of Liverpool contains its mysteries. Maintaining the house is a yoga. Christian mysticism has always acknowledged that there is the vocation of the contemplative and then there are the mysteries of the householder. The hearth is a doorway between worlds, as in Mary Poppins. Neither path is superior. Cathedrals are only built, as they say, to keep the rain off people who are praying. The house with a hole in its roof is one more place where ordinary England meets turned-on England and finds that the distinction between the two is not obvious, but subtle and shifting.
“She’s Leaving Home” could be about the kid sister of the dead-ender in “Getting Better.” Orchestrated like a florid-genteel Edwardian parlor piece, it’s the story of a runaway daughter, like the lost kids who were drifting into the Haight in America in 1967. On the surface it resembles other Sgt. Pepper’s vignettes of ordinary people in contemporary England. A middle-class couple wakes up to find their daughter gone. There they stand in their economy-of-scarcity mindset, of Blitz and rationing remembered and self-sacrifice—“We never thought of ourselves . . . / We struggled hard all our lives to get by.” But just where the Beatles have led us to expect the unexpected glint of transformation in the characters, the opening to something else, here they’re content with a simple caricature. There is no identification. And if the parents are stock figures, the girl isn’t drawn at all. She’s just up and left it, a new recruit into Swinging London. Only it’s a particularly grubby circle of Swinging London—an assignation with a car salesman. On either side of this generational schism, all you find is cynicism dressed up by George Martin’s strings. Compared to the depth of vision that the Beatles have up to now been showing, it feels cheap. The empathy has fallen out. The Beatles are uncertain of where they stand, they’ve momentarily lost sight of the vision, and so the song lacks emotional impact and imaginative surprise. It seems as if the Beatles were aiming for some sort of definitive generation-gap story, but it’s untransformed by vision or sympathy, the Beatles’ great tools for locating the turned-on in ordinary England. All that develops musically is that the parents are mocked by the sighing voices in the overripe pastoral setting. By the end the Beatles are unctuously reminding the parents that “Fun is the one thing that money can’t buy.” Offered as the song’s ultimate insight, it’s a pretty lame takeaway.
Still, in its context—and context is everything on Sgt. Pepper’s— there’s some sense to the song’s narrow spectrum of sympathy. The vision of “Penny Lane” is that, seen through turned-on eyes, the ordinary reveals itself to be extraordinary, especially true in the depiction of ordinary people. But that experience posed a problem that the Beatles as artists could see, and, as honest psychedelic evangelists, realized they had to face. Maybe the turned-on vanguard could see the people of England in this way, but was it a reasonable hope that the people of England would see each other that way? Once again on Sgt. Pepper’s the question is raised: What about all the people who couldn’t see the spark of eternity glimmering in their neighbor? To their credit, the Beatles didn’t ignore the question by retreating into private ecstasies. In fact, the Beatles were the only sixties pop band to spend any energy at all wrestling with this dilemma. There are a couple of songs on Sgt. Pepper’s that come from the unturned-on vision, that descend from the comic/cosmic to mere irony. “She’s Leaving Home” is one of them. But this problem haunts the whole album, and finally, at the end, forces the Beatles into a shattering confrontation.
“She’s Leaving Home” is followed by “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” which, on the surface, seems another misstep, another twee bit of psychedelic nostalgia from John, heavily dependent on more studio atmospherics from George Martin. Perhaps indirectly suggested by the dark carnival of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, the description of Mr. Kite’s circus is set to a rather sinister Mephisto waltz. In its conception it’s not as penetrating or sophisticated as the best of Sgt. Pepper’s, but it does extend the record’s themes. Because here’s the interesting thing: All the apparently psychedelic life-as-madcarnival tropes in “Mr. Kite” were not phoned in by a groggy Lennon, but were transcribed almost verbatim from an old circus poster he found in a London antique shop. Every image in this fantasia comes from the pen of an anonymous Edwardian pitchman, hauling in the marks in Bishopsgate. In shabby old England, a door to the fantastic opens. Again, the Beatles aren’t juxtaposing the turned-on world with England; they’re finding it inside England.
So ends side one.
At first one is tempted to explain the apparently jarring contrast of “Within You Without You” with the rest of Sgt. Pepper’s as due to intra-band diplomacy, that is, the necessity of giving a track to George. The song is an exercise in George’s fascination with Hindu music and spirituality, performed by Harrison with musicians from London’s Asian Music Centre. Its lyric is a syncretic Western take on Hindu spiritual teaching, delivered with George’s censorious northern dourness. But what is it doing at the center of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?
In 1967 the answer seemed to be that this was the explicit statement of what the record had only implied up to that point. Here was the real spiritual message that had been haunting the first side of Sgt. Pepper’s. Here was the Eastern Light, what all the unenlightened, two-dimensional characters of Penny Lane are secretly starving for, whether they know it or not. As the years went by, however, the track came to seem extraneous and disruptive. Sgt. Pepper’s is about England, about the twist of vision that finds the pearl hidden in the ordinary. And then here comes this cavalcade from the mysterious East, laying it all out with great literalness. And then there’s the elitist and antidemocratic tone—George’s little circle of friends nodding ruefully over the masses who “hide themselves behind a wall of illusion.” “Are you one of them?” George asks you. Billy Shears has no place in this song. It seems a real artistic mistake, more fuel for the argument that there is no unifying perception to Sgt. Pepper’s.
That, I think, is all true, but not completely relevant to the question, which is, what is it doing here? Placed where it is, at the center of the record? It reveals its function, again, like so much on this record, by its context.
For generations of English men and women India was the Other World: curry shops, Annie Besant and the Theosophical Society, Christopher Isherwood’s Vedanta, Rudyard Kipling’s ghost stories and his wise lamas. Paisley-patterned textiles, which came home with soldiers from the East India Company, became a staple of middle-class décor, a luminous, swirling doorway to elsewhere in a million bourgeois drawing rooms. Indian spirituality, or at least a certain English version of it, had been seeping into England since the mid-nineteenth century. The jewel in the crown of empire, India was where Englishmen went out to mind the colonies and instead got their minds colonized,8 as Timothy Leary said. Following the English Orientalist artists and scholars, the popular imagination was seized with the dream of India. What did a lot of English men and women see when they turned out the lights? They saw yogis with secret knowledge, and nautch dancers, fakirs performing marvels, and monkey-chattering temples to many-armed goddesses in the middle of the jungle. How could a survey of dreaming England not include it?
In the context of Sgt. Pepper’s, “Within You Without You” is not the straightforward laying out of Truth that it first seems. However sincerely Harrison meant it, the song is framed, it is put in quotes. It contains truth but it is deliberately presented as an artifact. It is being watched by an audience that we hear at the end, laughing at it. Lennon and McCartney, by putting the song in front of that audience, made it an artifact. It’s a companion piece to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—two recurring English dreams shot through with nostalgia for eternity—one, the vision of childhood, the other, the vision of the East.
“Within You Without You” is framed even more emphatically by the song that follows it. No track on Sgt. Pepper’s could have contrasted more sharply with “Within You Without You” than “When I’m Sixty-Four,” and it could not have been an unconscious decision to sequence the songs this way. “When I’m Sixty-Four” brings us home from the Orient with a vengeance. Standing on its own it’s another McCartney formal exercise like “She’s Leaving Home”—a pastiche of English vaudeville that could not have stood upright for a second on Revolver. Like so much here, it works as a conceptual building block, not as a stand-alone piece of music. Its cheery, gently mocking evocation of English working-class sentimentality can’t be heard without reference to the song that precedes it—the sitars of “Within You Without You” have hardly stopped sizzling before the homely little clarinet begins. Instantly we’re yanked from the scented East into the very quiddity of ordinary Englishness. McCartney even tells us the names of his couple’s hoped-for grandchildren. The couple in “When I’m Sixty-Four” live somewhere near Penny Lane, and they’ve probably gone to see Billy Shears, but they don’t partake of the defamiliarized clarity of the other residents. Like “She’s Leaving Home,” this is another (though kinder) view of the English with unturned-on eyes. What do they see when they turn out the light? Do they dream of the East? Do they dream of childhood, when everything was right? Rather the opposite—they dream of the pleasures of old age. Yet the echo of the sitar haunts this song. The couple may be dreaming of vacations on the Isle of Wight, but they’re standing on a paisley carpet whose pattern undulates in the corners of their eyes. “When I’m Sixty-Four” functions as both a contrast and a sequel to what precedes it. It also sets us up for the sequence that will end the album. Once it has rooted itself in the utterly familiar, Sgt. Pepper’s begins its movement toward the deep.
Lovely Rita the meter maid is a pure creature of Penny Lane, and McCartney starts her song with a wordless cry of high pleasure at being back in that world, a salute to the scene about to be engaged. There are plenty of girls in Penny Lane, of course, but in keeping with the comic vision Paul falls for the meter maid, whose cross-shoulder bag makes her look a little like a military man. As Ringo’s drums, sounding like some one-man-band contraption on springs, bounce the tune down the high street, Paul describes his courtship of the girl he first sees writing him a parking ticket. The dowdy authority figure steals his heart. And why shouldn’t she? Any girl might be a muse in Penny Lane. George Martin’s barrelhouse piano break is pure skylarking, a spirit of play that fills the spaces in this seemingly mundane vignette. Ringo’s chugging uphill rhythm suggests the puffing efforts of Rita’s suitor (when it gets dark he “tows”—not suavely “takes” or “steals” but “tows”—her heart away), echoed in the panting coda supplied by John, hurrying his partner on his way as Paul takes a last over-the-shoulder look at Penny Lane. They’ll visit it just once more, terribly transformed.
To set up the final movement, we picture Paul and George Martin slapping John awake for “Good Morning Good Morning.” This makes John cranky, and that’s just what the Beatles want here. After contributing two soft-focus psychedelic daydreams to the record, the group needs John on his sharp-eyed, misanthropic game if they’re going to pull off what they hope to as they end this record. The dark is starting to fall on Sgt. Pepper’s England, and it takes John’s jaundiced eye to describe it. Shaking off the fog, John comes to himself again.
Instead of Wonderland, John imagines himself inside a life of quiet desperation, a character out of the Angry Young Man kitchen-sink school of British drama that just preceded the Beatles’ arrival on the English cultural scene. Superficially it’s the only other rocker on Sgt. Pepper’s besides “Getting Better,” to which it is kind of a dark bookend. But whereas “Getting Better” had mined rock and roll for the sense of a new energy entering England, sleek in its call to the body, “Good Morning Good Morning” is undanceable. You can hear in the Beatles Anthology how it started life as a much more conventional kind of boogie, but it ended up with no backbeat, all thumping unaccented rhythms like a man stumping angrily through the motions of a day with which he barely has the patience to put up. The protagonist of “Good Morning Good Morning” is the narrator of “Getting Better” but he has seen the ambivalent promise of the psychedelic grace, extended to him in the earlier song, fail him. Now he’s caught in a stale marriage—“Nothing to do to save his life call his wife in / Nothing to say but what a day, how’s your boy been?” He goes off to a job he hates. At the end of the day his wife is glad to see him home because “somebody needs to know the time.” He walks past his old school—a place and a time when there were still possibilities. His only option for a momentary escape is the tawdry adventure of an affair, which seems to exist more as a voyeuristic daydream than an actual assignation. Throughout he insists that “I’ve got nothing to say but it’s O.K.”—a bitter parody of “I’ve got to admit it’s getting better.” Once again we have the sense that this is a Beatles alter ego—it could so easily have been John.
“Good Morning Good Morning” takes us to the margins of despair. The dream of a visionary glint inside the heart of ordinary England that could be fanned into flame, the marriage of the mundane and the mystical, has somehow slipped away. The promise has turned to ashes in the people’s mouths.
Just at this point who should turn up again but Sgt. Pepper’s band, and this time it’s deeply ironic. “We hope you have enjoyed the show” they say, not realizing that the promised evening’s diversion has taken a turn and slipped out of their control. The stage lights in Sgt. Pepper’s magic theater, now that it’s nighttime, throw strange and harsh shadows. No more bucolic tuba interludes, Sgt. Pepper’s band are all hard rockers now. Silly old England is far behind them. “It’s getting very near the end,” they say of their show, but it sounds like they’re warning us of something much more ominous. In a blizzard of screeching guitar and half-coherent shouting, they vacate the stage, and all responsibility for what follows.
For in “A Day in the Life,” the Beatles decided to take a serious risk. The cosmic-comic vision of Sgt. Pepper’s came from looking with open eyes at ordinary men and women and seeing intimations of eternity. But if you spend enough time spelunking in people’s psyches, you’re going to also find despair. The contemporary image of the Beatles’ art as one big Day-Glo fantasia is a canard. No popular artists of their time turned their faces more resolutely toward the dark than the Beatles did in “A Day in the Life.” The song is the Beatle’s acceptance that they had to confront the despair along with the cosmic-comic. Indeed, they realized they had to if there was to be any chance for Penny Lane to continue to exist. If the psychedelic grace could not penetrate despair, then it was a cheat, truly a drug-fueled delusion, as its enemies said, and the vision of Penny Lane was a fraud: the new possibility not a possibility at all, in the end not saving anyone, like it didn’t save the man who thought it was getting better and ended up the half-conscious creature of “Good Morning Good Morning.”
In “A Day in the Life” they decided to put it to the test—not just Sgt. Pepper’s world, but in a way their whole career, the assertion that rock and roll could give you a new place to stand, a new and truer way to come at life. If their music and their vision had no answer to despair, then they had finally found the place where they could no longer hold their new world together.
You can almost feel their reluctance. The whole band won’t, can’t, attack this song. The instruments enter “A Day in the Life” only as they have to. The first stark descending chords are strummed almost before the echo of Sgt. Pepper’s raucous farewell ends, an implicit rebuke. A piano sounds like it wells up almost involuntarily out of darkness, wrenched by a sense of obligation to not let the guitar chords stand alone. And yet the piano chords rise to something stately, building an icy amphitheater for the beginning of the lyric. Someone once called Levon Helm of the Band the only drummer who could make you cry. Ringo, old brick-laying Ringo, here makes you shudder, stumbling with the singer through the darkness. “I read the news today oh boy,” sighs John, not sighing like the fake stoned voice he used in “Lucy in the Sky,” but like someone who is beyond weary of the world, someone who has become an affectless chronicler of meaningless events. The world he describes is a nightmare negative of Penny Lane. Aldous Huxley talked about how easily the psychedelic vision of heaven turns into hell. In “A Day in the Life” Penny Lane becomes the City of Dreadful Night. There is a crowd gaping at a grisly car crash, wondering if the dead man was from the House of Lords. Another crowd turns away from a movie celebrating the English army’s World War II victories—Churchill’s myth of “the finest hour,” the only compensation most Britons had salvaged from the wreckage of the war—now failing to lend any meaning to lives in this numbed city.
And now that voice sings something strange: “I’d love to turn you on.” He’d what? There’s something this affectless observer would love to do? He wants to reach into this flattened hopeless mob and turn them on? This sixties proposition never sounded so misplaced. How can the psychedelic grace enter here? Where are those little openings we’ve seen before, the daydreams, the childhood memories?
We get an answer, but it’s not a graceful one. As in their beginning, harsh psychic conditions demand harsh measures. Producer George Martin, at McCartney and Lennon’s request, brought half of a symphony orchestra into Abbey Road studios. The Beatles had explained to him that they wanted a tremendous, shattering effect. Martin got it by asking the entire orchestra to move, all of them simultaneously, in one prolonged glissandi from the lowest note to the highest note on their scale. Here at the peak of the Beatles’ career, of their popularity and influence, they are back on the Reeperbahn, looking again for a sound that can overcome the world. Believing, hope against hope, that they can find it again, that by pushing hard enough they can open up another new world like the one they opened up by pushing themselves beyond their limits in the Kaiserkeller. Only now they know the world so much better; the stakes are so much higher; they’re not pushing back against a cellar full of roughnecks and hookers; they’re pushing against all-dead, unturned-on, hopeless England. To save the vision of Penny Lane, in the end they resort to sheer mind-blowing force. The orchestral “trip” isn’t euphoric, graceful, or otherwordly, anything we might have taken “psychedelic” to mean. It’s overpowering and frightening, almost unbearable. It’s the whole strategy of the Beatles’ career focused into one point, ventured on one roll of the dice, one concentrated effort to blow open the doors of perception. The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by violence. This time they don’t use rock and roll to smash through, as they had in the beginning. They draw on the Western classical tradition that they had begun their career by rejecting. Perhaps if it had been 1973 and they had been Led Zeppelin, they would have tried to force the issue with guitars and drums, a dark “Stairway to Heaven.” But the Beatles were, as Ian MacDonald reminds us, the archetypal British four-piece pop combo, and such rock triumphalism was not even conceivable for them.
This rising orgy of noise is triggered by the singer’s wish to turn the lost crowd on. It is his last chance, his last technique. Lewis Carroll’s not going to do it, not this job. But then, from the triumphant peak of the crescendo, we’re not shot out into the shining Void that John promised on Revolver. Not at all. Instantly we plummet straight down into the ordinary England where we’ve spent so much time on this record, England surprised by rumors of eternity. And now it’s Paul, of course, Paul’s part, Paul of “Lovely Rita” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.” It’s just a piece of a song, a hurried little shuffle, a vignette featuring the last resident of Penny Lane we shall meet here, an anonymous office drone narrating his morning as he rushes off late to work. Sung in a flat, clipped voice, hurried by Ringo’s shuffling drum, the man wakes up to his alarm, gets himself out of the house, just makes the bus, hauls himself up. We’re back at the Penny Lane roundabout, getting on the bus into the city. The man heads up on top for a smoke. “And somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” he says in his flat voice. A dream—one of the little everyday cracks in consciousness that the Beatles consistently use to signal a potential for vision. This time the dream opens up—the sky opens, and Paul’s Scouse visionary on top of the bus finds himself facing the Angel of England.
It’s John again in a different role, with the most heartbreaking and exalted singing of the sixties, singing from some well of love and grief a wordless lament. There’s great beauty in it and great sorrow—the eros of pop music has become completely sublimated into agape for every soul in the dark city. The beauty of the singing is tragic, but the beauty hints at something beyond even tragedy, the idea that tragedy accepted opens the door to a greater story, that the inhabitants of Sgt. Pepper’s England are being pulled up into a story that subsumes the conflict between turned on and not turned on, between mundane and illuminated. It is the most morally serious moment of sixties rock and roll. A terrible beauty, as Yeats said of another apparently failed revolution, is born.
And then in an instant we’re back where we started, the affectless man reading the meaningless newspaper stories from blind meaningless England, only now we’re being moved along quickly toward the end by Ringo’s still-shuffling drums, still in gear from Paul’s section. The city council of Blackburn, Lancashire, has counted four thousand potholes needing to be filled. The newspaper reader immediately, instinctively responds with the bleakest, most nihilistic line in pop music: “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” Holes, not people. Holes where people should be. The bright characters of Penny Lane have become black holes. Despair comes to its nadir.
But then he says it again, for the last time: “I’d love to turn you on,” as if there is hope for the holes, a remnant of desire and love. And this triggers the second of the crescendi.
The two mighty orchestral agons of “A Day in the Life” are the sound of titanic effort being made. Effort is not psychedelic. The struggle of the crescendi stands in contradiction to the psychedelic article of faith that said that you could relax into Paradise. By making such an effort, the Beatles risk breaking with the whole vision they have built up on the rest of Sgt. Pepper’s, breaking, in a sense, with the whole apparent message of their career.
This second crescendo seems to push even harder and higher than the first, a last monstrous effort. When it seems as if it can push no further, the ascent climaxes in one vaulting note played on all the instruments together at a pitch of triumphant hysteria; and then suddenly the struggle is ended with an exhausted, summative chord struck on four pianos together, an echo of the layered pianos that invited us to Penny Lane. The ring-out takes almost a minute to resolve into silence.
With this the Beatles ended psychedelia. What is left after the endless ring-out of that final chord? It’s peace of a sort, but a sort of peace that has little to do with the picaresque carnival of the bulk of Sgt. Pepper’s. It’s the peace that comes at the end of a great struggle. Is it resolution? Tragedy accepted? Death? Is it the end of the psychedelic grace, or its final establishment? In creating Sgt. Pepper’s, for the first time since the early days of their career, the Beatles had found themselves in a position where they had to test their vision against the world. Once before they had won. Who wins here? The only certain answer that the music offers is that the silence wins. Take that however you will. Defeat or transcendence, hope or despair, it was what the Beatles had left at the end. They had done all they could and then they disappeared into the unspoken moment, the only such moment in the Beatles entire oeuvre.*3
The Beatles’ career was an arc that started at the St. Peter’s parish fete and ended with the last chord of “A Day in the Life.” The rest is silence. Except it wasn’t. They would struggle on for a few more years. They would create some more beautiful music. But they were through working on the project of human happiness. On the White Album they give up on their great project. The voices are separate. The shaky equilibrium of happiness now swings to one side or the other, from the silliness of Paul’s “Rocky Racoon” to John’s bitter “Yer Blues.” The comic-cosmic vision is gone. Now the Beatles were just another sixties band, an especially beloved and talented band, but one upon whom no great stakes were riding. The new possibility, the new place to stand, can no longer be sustained or successfully enacted in the world, which was the promise of the voices from the start. “A Day in the Life” ended that.
Two years later, in the last moments of music they ever recorded, Paul tried to end it differently, at the end of the “long medley” on side two of Abbey Road. And it is so beautiful you almost believe him. A sixteenth-century lullaby, “Golden Slumbers,” sung by Paul with an ocean full of love and reassurance shifts wrenchingly but so righteously into an envoi straight from the Cavern Club, a rave-up from the “charismatic powerhouse” days, with concise snarling solos taken in turn by all four Beatles, working to a point of frenzy when suddenly everything falls away save a racing piano figure over which Paul says good-bye—“And in the end, the love you take, / is equal to the love you make.” It’s poignant, loving, and supremely gracious. But the silence at the end of “A Day in the Life” raises a question that music by itself can’t answer, no matter how beautiful.
The Beatles never matched the Rolling Stones as musicians. The Stones’ rhythm section could have held its own at Stax or Muscle Shoals. Try to imagine that of the Beatles. But the Beatles were the greatest rock-and-roll band because they made the great powers implied by rock and roll a part of the common life of the world. If, on Sgt. Pepper’s, they ultimately fell short of the great project, the totality of their work did in fact create at least part of a new place to stand for anyone who wanted to claim it. The post-Beatles world is a better place, more open and full of possibility, humor, and honesty, than the pre-Beatles world. Of no other individual rock-and-roll band or performer can this be said. The final chord of “A Day in the Life” never ends but trails off into real life as we have all lived it since then.