The Beatles (2 page)

Almost forty years after the band stopped playing together, their songs still mean a lot to us. For those of us who grew up with them they are like old friends that we never tire of meeting. Because they brightened up our lives and perhaps even helped in awakening our intellectual and spiritual curiosity our feelings towards them are forever warm. Finding out where they came from helps us find out where we came from.

SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

The fruitful period which produced the singles ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as well as the
Sgt Pepper
album was the first in which the Beatles could be totally devoted to the studio because they were free of touring commitments. They took an unprecedented 105 hours to record both sides of the single and then a further five months to complete the album.

Paul conceived the album as a show staged by a fictional Edwardian brass band transported through time into the psychedelic age and played, of course, by the electronically equipped Beatles. Released in June 1967,
Sgt Pepper
was the album of what became known as ‘The Summer Of Love’ – a brief season when the hippie ethic developed in San Francisco seemed to pervade the whole of the Western world. For anyone who was young at the time, the music automatically evokes the sight of beads and kaftans, the sound of tinkling bells and the aroma of marijuana masked by joss sticks. Despite this, there were only four songs on
Sgt Pepper
– ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’, ‘Within You Without You’ and ‘A Day In The Life’ – that even alluded to the social upheaval caused by the changing youth culture.

The rest of the songs were very British pop songs, tackling a range of domestic subjects from neighbourliness (‘A Little Help From My Friends’) and self-improvement (‘Getting Better’), through suburban living (‘Good Morning, Good Morning’) and home decoration (‘Fixing A Hole’), to Victorian entertainment (‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite’). The language of the songs was often deliberately antiquated – ‘guaranteed to raise a smile’, ‘may I inquire discreetly’, ‘meeting a man from the motor trade’, ‘a splendid time is guaranteed for all’, ‘indicate
precisely what you mean to say’ – as if this really was an Edwardian production staged by the good Sergeant Pepper and his men from the local Lonely Hearts club.

Yet, the spirit of 1967 suffused the album in significant ways. It was a fruit of the belief that limits to the imagination were culturally imposed and should therefore be challenged. Anything that seemed technically possible was worth an attempt from a climaxing orchestral frenzy on ‘A Day In The Life’ to a note of such a high frequency that only a dog could hear it on the play-out groove.

Sgt Pepper
was one of the first records to have a gatefold sleeve, printed lyrics, decorated inner bag, free gift and a cover designed by a celebrated artist. Its reputation as the first ‘concept album’ though is undeserved. Merle Travis’s
Folk Songs From the Hills
(1947) was a concept album as was Frank Sinatra’s
In The Wee Small Hours
(1955) and, more recently, Johnny Cash’s
Blood Sweat and Tears
(1963) and
Bitter Tears
(1965). Indeed, it’s arguable whether
Sgt Pepper
was a concept album at all. The only unifying theme was the Pepper song and its reprise and the photographs on the sleeve. There was no theme holding the individual songs together. “Basically
Sgt Pepper
was McCartney’s album, not Lennon’s,” says Barry Miles, who was the group’s main contact on the London underground scene at the time. “People make the mistake of thinking it must have been Lennon’s because he was so hip. Actually, he was taking so many drugs and trying to get rid of his ego that it was much more McCartney’s idea.”

PENNY LANE

Penny Lane is a Liverpool street but also the name given to the area that surrounds its junction with Smithdown Road. None of the places mentioned in ‘Penny Lane’ exists in the lane itself. Anyone not raised in this area of Liverpool might find it , as musician and art critic George Melly once put it, a “dull suburban shopping centre”. But to Paul and John, who had spent their early years in the area, it represented a time in their lives when everyone appeared to be friendly and the sun shone for ever in a clear blue sky. Living in the bubble of fame their memories of childhood were more gilded. As John had observed in ‘She Said, She Said’, ‘When I was a boy, everything was right.’

John had incorporated Penny Lane into an early draft of ‘In My Life’, but it was Paul who made it work. He created a Liverpool street scene that could have been taken from a children’s picture book with a pretty nurse, a jolly barber, an eccentric banker, a patriotic fireman and some friendly passers by. “It’s part fact,” he admitted. “It’s part nostalgia.” At first it sounds as though a summer scene is being described (‘blue suburban skies’) but then rain is mentioned as well as someone selling poppies (November 11). The point is that the song is a series of snapshots, not all of them necessarily taken on the same day.

There was a barber’s shop in Penny Lane, run by a Mr Bioletti who claimed to have cut hair for John, Paul and George as children; there were two banks (Barclays and Lloyds), a fire station in Allerton Road and, in the middle of the roundabout, a shelter. The banker without a mac and fireman with a portrait of the Queen in his pocket were Paul’s embellishments. “I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he’d had the pleasure of knowing,” said
Paul. “Actually he just had photos of different hairstyles. But all the people who come and go do stop and say hello.”

Finger pie was a Liverpudlian sexual reference included in the song to amuse the locals. “It was just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut,” said Paul. “For months afterwards, girls serving in local chip shops had to put up with requests for ‘fish and finger pie’.”

Liverpool poet Roger McGough, who was in the music and satire group Scaffold with Paul’s brother Mike, believes that ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ were significant because, for the first time, British rather than American landmarks were being celebrated in rock’n’roll.

“The Beatles were starting to write songs about home,” McGough says. “They began to draw on things like the rhymes we used to sing in the streets and old songs our parents remembered from the days of the music halls. Liverpool didn’t have a mythology until they created one.”

Today, because of the song, Penny Lane is a Liverpool tourist attraction and this itself has altered the area. The original street signs were stolen years ago and their replacements have had to be screwed to walls and placed beyond easy reach. The barber’s shop has become a unisex salon with a picture of the Beatles displayed in the window. The shelter on the roundabout has been renovated and re-opened as Sgt Pepper’s Bistro. The Penny Lane Wine Bar has the song’s lyrics painted above its windows.

STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER

In the autumn of 1966, John went to Spain to film the role of Private Gripweed in Dick Lester’s
How I Won The War.
While relaxing between shots on the beach at Almeira he began composing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, a song he conceived as a slow talking-blues. Further work on the song took place in a large house he was renting in nearby Santa Isabel.

The song began with what would become the second verse in the recorded version. It was a meditation on the conviction he’d had since he was a child that he was somehow different from everyone else; that he saw and felt things that other people didn’t. In the earliest preserved version of his Spanish tapes he starts, “No one is on my wavelength”, later changing the line to “No one I think is in my tree”, presumably to disguise what could be seen as arrogance. He was saying that he believed that no one could tune in to his way of thinking, and that therefore he must either be a genius (‘high’) or insane (‘low’). “I seem to see things in a different way from most people,” he once said. It was only on take four of the songwriting tape that he introduced Strawberry Fields (but without the ‘forever’) and on take five he added the line ‘nothing to get mad about’ that was later altered to ‘nothing to get hung about’. He was already using the deliberately hesitant mode – “er”, “that is”, “I mean”, “I think” – to underline the truth that this was an attempt to articulate concepts that can’t actually be put into words.

On his return to England he worked on the song at Kenwood where the final verse was added. It wasn’t until he went into the studio that he finished the song by adding the opening verse, a fact that helps to explain why the sentiment of the introduction seems out of joint with the rest of the song.

In the completed version a place is made to represent a state of mind. Strawberry Fields (John added the ‘s’) was a Salvation Army orphanage in Beaconsfield Road, Woolton, a five-minute walk from his home in Menlove Avenue. A huge Victorian building set in wooded grounds, it was a place where John would go with his Aunt Mimi for summer fêtes but also somewhere that he would sneak into during evenings and at weekends with friends such as Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan. It became their private adventure playground.

These illicit visits were, to John, like Alice’s escapades down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass. He felt that he was entering another world, a world that more closely corresponded with his inner world, and as an adult he would associate these moments of bliss with his lost childhood and also with a feeling of drug-free psychedelia.

In his
Playboy
interview of 1980 he told David Sheff that he would ‘trance out into alpha’ as a child, seeing ‘hallucinatory images’ of his face when looking into a mirror. He said it was only when he later discovered the work of artists like the surrealists that he realised that he wasn’t mad but a part of ‘an exclusive club that sees the world in those terms’.

SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

Success meant that the public expected the Beatles not only to deliver another artistic masterpiece but a prophetic vision. To relieve this pressure, Paul developed the personae of Sgt Pepper and his musicians, an identity that would give the band more creative freedom. They had become self-conscious as the Beatles but as the Lonely Hearts Club Band they would have nothing to live up to.

Paul conceived the idea on a flight back to London from Nairobi on November 19th 1966. During an earlier part of this holiday when he was in France he had used a facial disguise in order to travel incognito. This had led him to consider how free the Beatles would be if they could adopt a group disguise.

The conceit, however, wasn’t sustained beyond the opening track and the reprise although it succeeded in giving the impression to many people that
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
was a ‘concept album’. “The songs, if you listen to them, have no connection at all,” George Martin admits. “Paul said, ‘Why don’t we make the band ‘Pepper’ and Ringo ‘Billy Shears’ because it gives a nice beginning to the thing? It wasn’t really a concept album at all. It was just a question of me trying to make something coherent by doing segues as much as possible.” Later on, Martin came up with the idea for the reprise, which helped to wrap it all up.

Sgt Pepper and his band achieved the feat of being very West Coast 1967 (you could picture their name on a psychedelic poster for the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco) at the same time as remaining quintessentially English (you could imagine them playing on an Edwardian summer lawn). Paul had intended to play it both ways, writing old-fashioned lyrics delivered with a satirical psychedelic
intensity, and using a title that appealed to the late Sixties vogue for long and surreal band names – Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Incredible String Band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. “They’re a bit of a brass band in a way,” Paul said at the time, “but they’re also a rock band because they’ve got that San Francisco thing.”

The origin of the name Sgt Pepper is disputed. The Beatles’ former road manager Mal Evans is sometimes cited as having created it as a jokey substitute for ‘salt ‘n’ pepper’. Others suggest that the name was derived from the popular American soft drink ‘Dr Pepper’.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

Journalist Hunter Davies was granted a unique insight into the Beatles’ writing methods while working on their eponymous 1968 authorised biography. On the afternoon of March 29, 1967, Davies went to Paul’s house in Cavendish Avenue and watched as Paul and John worked on ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’. It was one of the first times a journalist had witnessed Lennon and McCartney composing. “They wanted to do a Ringo-type song,” remembers Davies. “They knew it would have to be for the kids, a sing-along type of song. That was what they thought was missing on the album so far. I recorded them trying to get all the rhymes right and somewhere I’ve got a list of all the ones they didn’t use.”

At the beginning of the afternoon, all the writers had was a chorus line and a bit of a melody. For the first two hours, they thrashed away on guitars, neither of them getting very far. It was John who eventually suggested starting each verse with a question. The
line, ‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ didn’t have the right number of syllables and so it became ‘a love at first sight’. John answer to this was ‘Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time’. This was then followed by ‘Are you afraid when you turn out the light?’ but rephrased to ‘What do you see when…’.