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Everything You Know About Sgt. Pepper's Is WrongRevisionist Beatles history.

By Jody Rosen
Posted Friday, June 8, 2007, at 7:21 PM ET

Thousands of apocryphal tales about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band have been told and retold in the 40 years since the record's release, but the loveliest is a true one. Immediately following the completion of Sgt. Pepper's in the wee hours of April 21, 1967, the Beatles decamped from Abbey Road Studios to Mama Cass' apartment in Chelsea, where they flung open the windows and blasted an acetate of the album into the London morning at top volume. In the surrounding buildings, windows slowly rose in reply, and neighbors leaned out to listen to the Beatles' newest songs. It's a delightful image, a metaphor for the flood of joy and wonderment that the four Liverpudlians loosed on the world, and on England in particular—the windows, the minds, that were nudged open by the Beatles' sonically questing, love-affirming, sad, funny, irrepressibly tuneful music.

Today, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is so familiar, so encrusted with myth, that we can barely hear it. The album's 40th anniversary has been greeted by scores of articles touting its historical significance, debates about whether it is "the greatest album of all time" (as if such a thing exists), and the usual talk about its status as pop music's first "concept album." The last notion is demonstrably false. Frank Sinatra was making concept albums back when John and Paul were still knocking around in knee socks, and compared to Sinatra's LPs such as In the Wee Small Hours, the Sgt. Pepper's "concept" is, to say the least, loose—the claim is based mainly on the framing device of the title track, which opens the album and is reprised before the stupendous finale, "A Day in the Life." What cannot be denied is Sgt. Pepper's influence on subsequent rock and soul concept albums. It's unfair to blame a record so based in the rigors of pop songcraft, and so full of jokes and mischief and fun, for the ponderous music that was unleashed on listeners in the decades following. But the fact remains that there would have been no Dark Side of the Moon, and no dragons-and-warlocks-themed prog-rock epics, had the Beatles not decided to don epaulets for their lark of an album cover and impersonate a vaudeville band.

To be sure, Sgt. Pepper's has its share of naysayers, and they have been heard from this anniversary season. In a New York Times op-ed article that should be included on the syllabus of Harold Bloom's next anxiety-of-influence seminar, singer-songwriter Aimee Mann wrote, "As a musician, I'm burnt out on it—its influence has been so vast and profound," adding that the album lacks "emotional depth," and that she prefers the lyrics of Fiona Apple and Elliott Smith to Lennon and McCartney's. (No accounting for taste.) Many critics have become similarly disillusioned. The Chicago Sun-Times' Jim DeRogatis has written (in a phrase that typifies his gentle wit) that the album "sucks dogs royally," and indeed the reputation of Sgt. Pepper's has plummeted among rock critics in recent years, with consensus forming around Revolver (1966) as the better Beatles album.

The backlash is based on the wide disdain for Paul McCartney among critics. The truism goes that Sgt. Pepper's is a McCartney album, a pop confection, full of cute noises and neo-music-hall pop, recorded while the drug-addled Lennon was lost in a half-conscious haze. But again, the myth disintegrates on inspection. Yes, McCartney took hold of the reins at Abbey Road, but it was ever thus with Paul, the Beatles' resident musical cosmopolitan and most dedicated studio rat. You'd be hard-pressed to find more canonical Lennon songs than "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and "A Day in the Life," to say nothing of "Strawberry Fields Forever," recorded during the Sgt. Pepper's sessions but released as a double A-side single with "Penny Lane." Meanwhile, those who embrace the cliché that Paul was a spunky and shallow tunesmith—that McCartney composed nostalgia-trip music while Lennon wrote visionary drug anthems—should listen again to Sgt. Pepper's. Sure, "Lucy in the Sky" has the trippy spiraling keyboard figure and acid-washed words, but McCartney's eerie little domestic miniature "Fixing a Hole" is more convincingly psychedelic, with the syntactic ambiguities of its lyric mirroring the fractured flitting of an altered consciousness: "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in/ And stops my mind from wandering/ Where it will go." (Is the hole in the roof? Or in his mind?)

Dig deeper into Sgt. Pepper's, and you find both Beatles frontmen playing against type. The astonishing orchestral "freak-out" in "A Day in the Life"? McCartney's creation. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," that jaunty music-hall throwback with lyrics cribbed from an old vaudeville poster? A Lennon song. Of course, as with all Beatles records, some of the best moments on Sgt. Pepper's arise from collaboration that bleeds into competition, the friction between Lennon and McCartney, with their divergent musical styles and clashing dispositions. Who can resist the "Getting Better" chorus, where Paul the Optimist and Skeptical John square off in a cheeky call-and-response? "I've got to admit it's getting better/ A little better all the time," sings McCartney. "Can't get no worse," chimes Lennon.

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Jody Rosen is Slate's music critic. He lives in New York City. He can be reached at .
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Remarks from the Fray:

Thanks for a pleasant and insightful reprise of one of the kindest, least saccharin and most durable record albums ever made. Despite the tension that racked this collaboration from the beginning to the end of their existence, The Beatles knew how to make music for all the ages.

I'm not talking about Bach or Beethoven monumentality. Where The Beatles might stand in the pantheon of musicians is for others to determine long after I'm gone. I speak of real ages: grandmothers and toddlers, angst ridden boys, beer-bellied bricklayers having their pint of afters, and, of course, the young girls. Easy or at its most exotic, the music these four made managed to resonate; however, unexpectedly with almost everyone who listened to it.

This was the music of my teens. I count myself lucky. And, even with forty years of educating my ear, I know it will also be the music of my "late middle age," interleaving and framing the thousands of selections available to me. One of the treasures of our present age is the approximately 400 years of musical genius we have available at the tap of a key. On top of that we have almost 100 years original performances, nuance and phrasing that let us literally step back into time to feel what our ancestors felt.

For me, The Beatles easily hold their own place in this unprecedented river of sound. Unlike all too many modern musicians, The Beatles understood that music is the pure language of emotion. They demonstrated that this language had a vocabulary greater than four chords and a whine. They explored it every bit as successfully as the musical luminaries of other ages.

Getting to 64 won't be so bad. I know I'll hear friendly voices when I arrive.

--bubbah

(To reply, click here.)

The Beatles were innovators in various ways over the years, but if you're talking about the most significant stylistic "currents" that were flowing in early 1967 and ended up contributing to the evolution of "psychedelic" and "progressive" rock, the Sgt. Pepper album was more of a rider of existing currents than an album that redirected the flow.

As one example, the 2nd half of 1966 was a golden age of psychedelic "dance concerts" in San Francisco featuring LSD, trippy light shows and music by the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Love and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

Because the Beatles were the high priests of pop music (and more popular than Jesus, as I understand it), their 1967 offering was heard by a wider audience than most others. But honestly, if the Beatles had broken up after Revolver, the further evolution of "psychedelic rock" (including the Dark Side of the Moon) and "progressive rock" (with and without dragons) would have been pretty much the same.

--st33ve

(To reply, click here.)

It's hard to describe what hearing Sgt Pepper in 1967 was like. I was 15, was brought up by a music-loving father who worshiped Sinatra, the big bands, Nat King Cole, and a smattering of jazz and blues. The first time I heard it I knew it was, well, seminal...though I didn't know that word.

I knew several guys who bought two copies (unheard of at the time) because we wore out one from repeated listenings and from dropping needles on one song over and over again.

No amount of post-40-year analysis can really explain the influence of that album, because with each passing year, its role became increasingly part of the foundation. If Aimee Mann is worn out by it, that's because she should be. I don't think anyone created words like "the" or "and," but, regardless of how essential they are, who wants to talk about them? Instead, let's talk about "dysentery" and "psychosis."

To compare the Beatles to the creation of words is hyperbolic, yes, but I guess you had to be there. How many times in a person's life can you point to a particular moment and honestly declare that, at the time, even at a tender age, you knew that nothing in music was ever going to be the same again.

--hathead52

(To reply, click here.)

It's a sharp observation that in music polls, as well as in many conversations that I have been privy to, Revolver tends to get more credit. I think this has much to do with the musical tastes of a Post-punk generation of listeners as well as a cynical generation of rock critics who focus almost exclusively on more lo-fi, underground sounds.

Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE Revolver. But, it is slightly more insular and biting in its sonic approach. Moreover, due to the technical limitations of the day, it was recorded with less instruments and at lower fidelity.

Today, this type of album wins automatic points among hipster rock fans and critics. Pavement, Elliot Smith, Wolf Parade, The White Stripes and The Strokes come to mind. They may not get on the front page of Rolling Stone, but Indie rock bloggers and South-by-Southwest attendees drool at the sound of unpolished guitars and slightly-out-of-key harmonies. Virtuosity and perfectionism are not great values among these underground tastemakers.

But whatever. Silly people run around, they worry me and never ask me why they don't get past my door.

--jwschmidt

(To reply, click here.)

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