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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

(Continued from page 1)

On both sides of the Sgt. Pepper's divide—hyperbolically pro and knee-jerk con—there is a tendency to treat the album as an icon stripped of historical peculiarity, floating outside of time and place. Yet Sgt. Pepper's is the definitive Beatles record not necessarily because it contains their best music, but because it captures them at their zeitgeist-commandeering peak: It is the Beatles album of, and about, history's Beatles Moment. It's worth reflecting further on the Beatles' particularity. Today, the band belongs to the world. But they were an English group, and no album was more local and particular, more steeped in the life and lore of Old Blighty, than Sgt. Pepper's.

After Revolver, Lennon and McCartney got the idea to write some songs about their childhood in Liverpool. The result was "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane." With Sgt. Pepper's, they abandoned autobiography for impish realist—and often surrealist—storytelling. Listen to "Good Morning," a trip down a middle-class High Street where chatterboxes greet the day with banalities: "Nothing to do to save his life/ Call his wife in/ Nothing to say but/ What a day, how's your boy been?" Listen to "When I'm 64," where McCartney's beautifully observed lines, sung over the song's most touching minor key lurch—"Every summer we can rent a cottage in the Isle of Wight, if it's not too dear/ We shall scrimp and save"—resolve with an equally beautifully observed, deadpan-funny rhyme: "Grandchildren on your knee/ Vera, Chuck, and Dave." Listen to the last verse of "A Day in the Life" (my favorite in the entire Beatles catalog), where Lennon tweaks a found newspaper item into a very British brand of surreal poetry about holes filling the Albert Hall. Even in the kaleidoscope swirl of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" you can discern an English cityscape, with those "newspaper taxis" plying the quayside and commuters moving through train-station turnstiles. And, of course, the Sgt. Pepper's brass-band iconography and snatches of music-hall pop are an affectionately mocking tip of the hat to the Olde English past—the Beatles gazing back amusedly at Victoriana.

That British past was a central part of the Beatles story. Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties (easily the best Beatles book) reminds us of the band's impact in Britain: how four talented autodidacts, fresh from the hardscrabble streets of the urban North, seemingly pulled England out of its postwar malaise by themselves, exploding the lingering rigidities of Victorianism and the class system through the sheer force of their vivaciousness. (Think of the famous lines from Philip Larkin's "Annus Mirabilis": "Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen sixty-three/ (which was rather late for me)-/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles' first LP.")

If Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band doesn't have a concept, it does have a theme. It's a record about England in the midst of whirling change, a humorous, sympathetic chronicle of an old culture convulsed by the shock of the new—by new music and new mores, by rising hemlines and lengthening hair and crumbling caste systems. In short, it's a record about the transformations that the Beatles themselves, more than anyone else, were galvanizing. Playing Sgt. Pepper's for the umpteenth time, you marvel at what generous-spirited revolutionaries the Beatles were. Compare the "Don't trust anyone over 30" rhetoric of the Beatles' 1960s fellow travelers to "When I'm 64," the sweetest song about old age ever created by a rock group. Then there's "She's Leaving Home," which hitches one of McCartney's prettiest melodies to a lyric that sympathizes on both sides of the generation gap—with the runaway girl who is "meeting a man from the motor trade," and with her grief-stricken parents: "We gave her most of our lives/ Sacrificed most of our lives/ We gave her everything money could buy." It's a remarkable feat of the artistic imagination, but it may as well have been reportage: Many British parents were saying such things back in the spring before the Summer of Love. Forty years later, if you listen closely, you can hear what Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sounded like that morning at Mama Cass' flat in England in 1967. It sounds like England, in 1967.

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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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