Sgt. Pepper's One and Only

Forlorn but dignified, the Plaza Hotel faced the mob. All morning long the radio had been urging every potential truant in New York to show up at 59th Street and Fifth. ("The Beatles are now over Newfoundland; touchdown minus 71 minutes on our Beatles Countdown.") By two o'clock there were 3,000 girl teenagers, 1,000 boy teenagers, and 13 press agents.

The press agents were busy turning sporadic yells into the firm, rythmic roar you hear in propaganda films. Wherever there was a television camera, the press agents urged the girls to "scream now" and paid the lucky ones 25 dollars to faint on cue. When the Beatles finally arrived at the Plaza, the crowd charged and nearly killed the chauffeur and two doormen. The PR men sighed with relief. Through a mixture of circus press-agentry and true love, the Beatles were already, on their first day in America, becoming more popular than Jesus.

One day early last June, another Beatles demonstration took place. Thousands of people went to record shops and bought the Beatles' 13th album, Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Few of these people were Beatlemaniacs; many of them were Beatleologists. Whereas the Beatlemaniac drowned out the Beatles with cathartic squeals, the Beatleologist listens so carefully that he can hear Ringo singing submarine in the third verse on the mono record, but clubmarine on the stereo. Beatleologists, in varying degrees of erudition, are the new breed of Beatles fan, and they may make the Beatles more contemplated than Buddha.

Not Since Dickens

The last Englishman to meet with such boundless dual success--popular and critical--was Charles Dickens. A New York mob once trampled eight of its own rushing to get the last installment of The Old Curiosity Shop off the boat from England. The critics took years, however, to catch up with the mobs in enthusiasm and to discover what lay beneath Dickens' charismatic storytelling. The remarkable thing about Sgt. Pepper is that it received both popular and critical acclaim instantly. So great today is the pressure to appreciate that critics rushed to hail the album as "entertainment verging on art" or as "art," period.

For about a year, record critics and Beatleologists have been listening between the grooves for every little innuendo the Beatles offer up and some that they don't. For example, the Beatleologists struck gold this spring when they found out that "Strawberry Fields Forever" was about a women's penitentiary in Liverpool named Strawberry Fields. Suddenly the title took on a suggestion of eternal imprisonment, and such lines as "nothing to get hung about" revealed a definite gallows humor.

Fake Diamonds

At about the same time, though, the Beatleologists hit a dry vein when they decided that the songtitle "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was an anagram for LSD. The song's author, John Lennon, has explained to the world that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was the title of a drawing his daughter brought home from school, around which he built a song about a little girl's fantasies. The song is simply an updated "Big Rock Candy Mountain" with a very neat accelerate-slowdown effect that gives the impression that you're traveling.

Sgt. Pepper, however, is a legitimate hunting ground for Beatleologists, and if Tolstoy was right in saying that the key to art is the "wee bit," never was there a more artistic pop album. It is loaded with every significant little touch that the Beatles could fit into three months of recording. Under the same pressure of inspiration that throws other pop groups into violent convulsions, the Beatles remain gentle, ironic, subtle, innocent and, above all, wry.

The clincher in the argument for Sgt. Pepper's artistic standing is the fact that the album is not just a collection of singles, but a whole. It is structured much like a musical comedy, and it is a study of all the lonely people and where they have all come from.

There is a rumor that the Beatles wanted to rename themselves "Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and that the album cover depicts a wake at the grave of that old and outdated group called the Beatles. The new name stirs up nostalgic images of a group of old Edwardians seated on a bandstand in military uniforms playing brass marches in a simpler age of long summer afternoons. The Beatles may also know that the Edwardian age was one of violent idealistic movements, once described as "Britain's national nervous breakdown," and much closer our own age than most people realize.

The New Beatles

At any rate the title song represents the new Beatles, the Beatles who have utter control over their audience, who can make them cheer, laugh at an unseen sight gag, and, best of all, shut up. "You're such a lovely audience, we'd like to take you home with us," sing the Beatles in one of the most obvious ironies of the album. Clearly they're thinking just the opposite, and have been for years. The song is a renunciation of their whole crowd-pleasing past, just as it is the realization of the artist's dream of total power over an audience.

Also, the song introduces the album's theme. "Sgt. Pepper's lonely, Sgt. Pepper's lonely," it repeats, and so is nearly everyone else in the Beatle cosmos.

Very much like a Beethoven concerto, the song winds up to introduce the solo instrument, which in this case happens to be Ringo's slightly flat voice. Again, the Beatles are putting us on with engaging irony: After a million people have anxiously awaited the new album, spent the price of a steak dinner on it, and have left work early in hot anticipation of hearing it, Ringo sings "What would you do if I sang out of tune/ Would you get up and walk out on me?" However, Ringo's main appeal is for a "little help from my friends." This is followed by a fantasy, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," which is followed by a shaky hope that after a lousy childhood things are "Getting Better, since you've been mine"; followed by a song about "fixing a hole" to keep out the gloomy rain from a wandering, searching mind; followed by a song about a girl eloping from her home, due to parental lack of understanding; followed by a first act finale, where the record goes back to its public mood and promises the audience "a splendid time is guaranteed for all."

The whole first side is saturated with sophisticated wee bits--not preciosities, but highly significant sound gags and word plays. In the writing, there are devices such as the Joycean double entendre, achieved by leaving out punctuation, in the line "And it really doesn't matter if/ I'm wrong I'm right/ Where I belong." Musically, the record has more irony than any score since Arthur Sullivan taught the British public to apprciate real musical fun. Everywhere, some electronic instrument is always plunking against a simple melody, slyly undermining it. Everywhere, a chorus of Beatles is sympathizing with the troubled solo voice, coming in with a soupy "oooo" that sounds a little mocking. At its best the irony is both cutting and touching, as in "She's Leaving Home," where the Beatles mock the uncomprehending parents by singing their parts in falsetto and by underscoring their grief with a treacly, melodramatic cello lament. Yet, like most of these songs, this one mixes deep pathos with edgy comedy. A good deal of the musical tension and emotional excitement of the record comes from the way the Beatles assault their own simple, vulnerable tunes with an ironical barrage of electronic instruments, deliberately overdone rock conventions, and tossed off ad libs.

The Beatles have another delicate device with which they involve their audience--use of the personna. It never failed Robert Browning who made it famous in such poems as "My Last Duchess." Most of the songs are built around a certain personality whom we know pretty well after a couple of listenings, and it is by writing about different kinds of persons, not just different kinds of loneliness, that the Beatles cut their huge main theme down to life size.

Deeper Water

The record's second act gets the Beatles into deeper, more cross-currented waters. The first number, "Within You Without You" puts forward the Beatle manifesto to the tidal, wave-breaking sounds of an Indian raga. George Harrison chants his message, which is the Quintessence of Hippieism: "About the space between us all... and the love we all could share when we find it." At the end of the song comes a small gale of very self-satisfied laughter, which may be the "straight" people laughing at the idealistic, hippie message, or may just be a transition into the next two light-hearted songs, which are about the opposite of loneliness.

"When I'm Sixty-Four" laughs off the ravages of old age with a saxand--traps parody of last generation's pop. The Beatles parody ragtime with a total affection that betrays their longing for good old Sgt. Pepper's simpler, tea-dance age. (Through no coincidence, they have written three lovely fox trots in as many albums). The singer ("yours sincerely, wasting away") is looking forward to every possible kind of social security, not just the financial variety.

There follows the funny song about the singer's dalliance with "Lovely Rita Meter Maid." Nothing, as the verse says, can come between them.

And so into "Good Morning, Good Morning," interpreted by most Beatleologists as an affirmation of everything happy in life. But this is an ambiguous song, in which can also be seen a denunciation of the urban rat race. It uses country metaphors to comment on city life, starting out with a hearty cockcrow, but ending up with a pack of hounds yelping after their prey. Maybe life has the singer at bay, and he doesn't know it.

But it's back to the cheering audience and a thumping, hard-sell reprise of the Sgt. Pepper song--yells, bravos, laughter, and exit the Beatles, their musical over. Except for their most triumphant and theatrical bit of all--an epilogue which wipes the grin off the face of a wildly contented audience and sends them home with the willies. A "Day in the Life" is no joke; all the buoyant comic comment finally gives way to a flood of tristitia mundi. Paul McCartney's sweet, detached, phantasmic voice begins, "I read the news today, oh boy,"--a strange, sad phrase which grows heavier as the song grows more hallucinatory. At first the news is about the Guiness heir, son of a Beer peer, dying in his Lotus elan, sad waste of youth, but comic in its utter meaningless. The singer turns on and the song turns more dreamlike, ushering forth a complex metaphor to rank with Dylan's best. "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire/ And though the holes were rather small/ They had to count them all..."--this refers to Scotland Yard's search for bodies buried in a moor. The method they used was to sink poles in the earth and sniff the ends for the odor of decomposing flesh. "Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall," the song continues. I.E., now they know that an audience, like the audience on the record, is so many dead, empty, hollow, units of loneliness. "I'd love to turn you on," concludes the song. What else could you do under the circumstances.

As few works have since the days of Brecht and Weil, "A Day in the Life" provides a strange, new, jolting way of looking at the familiarities of modern life, so habit-forming that they are no longer disillusioning.

Who are the performers who dress up in Edwardian band costumes to comment on modern times? First of all, when you talk about the Beatles, you mostly mean John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who write nearly all the words and tunes, and producer George Martin, who writes the rest of what you hear on the record. Martin knows all the musical technique anyone will ever need: as a musicologist, he has at is command every classical trick in the book, as a record producer, he knows how to make piano strings sound like the winds of Hell. He can conjure up anything the Beatles call for, and he is responsible for many of the "wee bits" in Sgt. Pepper.

Acid Test

The fourth Beatle (poor Ringo, the mascot, just doesn't create) is George Harrison, who is perhaps the main channel to the hippie movement, and thus to such sentiments as "All you need is love," which is now the main Beatle theme. If the Beatles ever became drug bards ("Day Tripper" and so on), it may be his fault. Or not so much his fault as his dentist's, who one evening slipped some acid into the Beatle's after-dinner coffee, sending them on their first trip. At any rate, drugs are not likely to become a Beatle obsession because, as Harrison told the Los Angeles Free Press last week, "Acid is not the answer, definitely not the answer. It's enabled people to see a little bit more, but when you really get hip, you don't need it."

The Beatles, certainly, are among the most attractive buds of Flower Power, articulating its noblest sentiments as no one else yet has. They are, for a start, apolitical. They have never written a protest song. Except, perhaps for "Taxman." Written when the government was skimming off 90 per cent of their earnings, it is a song in which they wagged a scrupulously bipartisan, yet threatening, finger: "Oh-hoh Mr. Wilson, oh-hoh Mr. Heath."

Political aloofness, however, is not the most basic hippie trait. That is exploration of affection, of loneliness, of communication in general--a trait which the Beatles pluck from the depths of morbid introspection and express in their own constantly changing musical idiom.

For the Beatles are artists of the eclectic-improver variety (most famous example: Shakespeare), and like Shakespeare they are constantly picking up new styles and moods. In their musical celebrity world they are exposed to new contacts: their new-found acquaintances range from Ravi Shanker, who is teaching Harrison the entirely non-Western discipline of the sitar, to the Amadeus String Quartet (unsurpassed even by the Budapest), which recorded the background for "Eleanor Rigby" and which has leant the Beatles some of the Western tradition. Lennon and McCartney read voraciously, and they might borrow inspiration as easily from Eugene O'Neill as from Dylan or Ginsberg. The important thing is that being open-minded borrowers, the Beatles will be producing new, but slightly derivative, kinds of music long after the strictly original geniuses of their generation have choked on their own preoccupations.

The Beatles are the ultimate symbols of the posh, respectable vie boheme. They live in the suburbs that the Rolling Stones Knock in their songs. They have never dropped out from society. They have never had to slum it to gain a sly, detached, enlightening line of sight on the status quo. They are idols to the hippies, prophets to the establishment, and fetishes to the teeny-boppers.

Last week when Joe Orton, a brilliant British playwright of 34, was killed, "A Day in the Life" was played at his funeral. "I read the news today, o boy/about a lucky guy who made the grade." It was the perfect comment on a fellow comic artist, and nothing could better have proven the Beatles' uncanny relevance to just about any occasion.