The Beatles Are Here! (27 page)

Sgt. Pepper
seemed to be nothing less than an
Alice in Wonderland
for the brave new psychedelic world. Everything in Pepperland was reversed, just as in Lewis Carroll’s mirror-crazy Wonderland. The Lonely Hearts Club Band was “in style” one moment, “out of style” the next. In “Getting Better,” things got better because they could get no worse. In “Fixing a Hole,” it really didn’t matter “if I’m wrong—I’m right.” Life in Pepperland flowed two ways at once: “within you and without you.”

Curiouser and curiouser: the most forward-looking recording in the history of rock music began by looking back to a day twenty years in the past. Recorded tracks, when reversed and played back, had new and sometimes sexual meanings. (“Fuck me like a Superman,” was one popular interpretation of the two-second track that plays after
A Day in the Life
; to me, it sounded more like “Never any other way.”) The cover image was full of reversals: Old heroes were young again. Popular, beloved celebrities were “lonely hearts.” The most globally renowned rock ’n’ roll group had become the most parochial of municipal brass bands. Look in the flower-bed in the tableau’s foreground, where the hottest name in 1960s show business—BEATLES—was spelled out in the most provincial form of display: municipal flower-bed lettering.

My true experience of
Sgt. Pepper
was as a reader. The word play, which I remember my mother’s intellectual friends delighting in, was no more complicated than that which I had adored in Edward Lear’s nonsense verse or in O. Henry’s grifter stories, which had appeared in sixth-grade English. M. C. Escher, whose magic realism I encountered in math class, thanks to a brilliant and iconoclastic teacher, also showed that things were not as they seemed. The Beatles were asking the same question:
What’s wrong with this picture?

Over and over, I read the front and back of the album, from beginning to middle to end, trying to decode the tableau on the front and the strange, spangled words on the back.

The Beatles had written songs that set out to be
not
understandable.
Sgt. Pepper
was a world in which, instead of making clear-cut statements, you projected your own dream onto a cloud. It was like Zen: the song
was
the question. You had to go through a process of self-emptying before you could absorb the answer. But the album’s organizing principle, its thought-outedness, took you . . . where? Back to itself. The Beatles coded their imagery, as all Romantic poets had, so that the younger generation, once it thought it had answered the riddle, could feel safe in its knowingness.
Sgt Pepper
belonged to a genre evergreen to adolescents: If you get it right, you will understand it, but the deeper truth is always one more magnification beyond where your nondreaming mind can see.

The Beatles gave you to understand, as James Joyce did, that you could spend the rest of your life making sense of what they were saying. If studying Beatles lyrics looked like a career in 1967, within a decade, an Ann Beattie story demonstrated how limited the duration of study had turned out to be. In Beattie’s “A Vintage Thunderbird,” the boorishness of a rival is characterized by the way he “complains tediously” that Paul McCartney had stolen words from the seventeenth-century English dramatist Thomas Dekker for “Golden Slumbers” on
Abbey Road
. If we can take Beattie’s stories as true striations of literary archeology, then by 1977 the parsing of the Beatles songbook had become passé.

As a boy, I thought that the Beatles, like my parents, would last forever as the suave, avant-garde leaders of the culture. Whatever they wore in the early 1960s—go-go boots, mop haircuts, collarless jackets—everyone wore. By 1967, the Beatles, trapped by worldwide fame, weren’t so much leaders of the culture as they were hostages to its molten center.
Sgt. Pepper
shows the Liverpool lads to be the voice of the age, the spokesmen for a cultural period that now seems as quaint and faraway as Dickens’s London. The Beatles didn’t invent the New, as I thought they did, so much as they invented an attitude through which to picture the New and the Old at the same time. The costumes they chose for their
Sgt. Pepper
alter-egos were takeoffs not just on the British imperial past but on the swinging London of 1967, when kids flocked to Carnaby Street and the King’s Road to buy recycled police capes and brass-buttoned military coats at boutiques with names like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, which was also the title of a 1967 pop song by the New Vaudeville Band (“Winchester Cathedral” was their big single), whose chorus went:

Oh Lord Kitchener, what a to-do,

Everyone is wearing clothes that once belonged to you.

If you were alive today I’m sure you would explode,

If you took a stroll down the Portobello Road.

Rereading
Sgt. Pepper
more than thirty years later, I sat down in my office in Washington, D.C., with the scuffed album from Sam Goody’s—it’s been marooned for years with the rest of my records in a summer house where there’s still a record player. In my office, the only way to listen to music is on a compact disc inserted into the Microsoft Windows Media Player. I had not thought about it until now, but although I’ve updated most of the music of my youth with CDs,
Sgt. Pepper
is one of the albums that looks so ridiculous in the miniature form (
Woodstock
is another: more than six square feet of visual material shrunk to 4¾ by 5½ inches of plastic casing sealed by the most infuriating packaging ever invented), I haven’t had the stomach to replace the original.

I scanned the back of the record sleeve where five newspaper-column-size lines of unbelievably tiny black type still pulled me right in with the opener: “It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.” I wanted to fall back right back into the audience—to “sit back and let the evening go.” But the lines were hard to read, and not just because the record inside the sleeve had rubbed a white circle onto the printed surface, erasing entire words. The words are in memory anyway. I didn’t need to read them in printed lines because they alighted automatically, almost too quickly, on my inner ear. It was as if I had written them myself, and therefore could no longer lay claim to what happens only once during the initial excitement of creation: an awakening to life itself. Coming from within, predigested and reconstituted, instead of fresh and new from without, the words had calcified.

What rereading without music did allow me to see, however, was how concrete a place Pepperland actually is, and how much the Beatles needed for their counterculture effects the solid institutions, the traditions, and even the architecture of the receding Empire—“all that Trafalgar Square stuff,” as John Osborne, England’s brash young playwright of the 1950s, referred to the country’s crippling nostalgia. Hallowed British scenes and settings in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—“a boat on a river,” “a bridge by a fountain,” “a train in a station,” a railway station “turnstile”—are blown apart and repatterned by “tangerine trees,” “rocking horse people,” “plasticene porters,” a “girl with kaleidoscope eyes.” Every bit of color-saturated 1967 psychedelia comes alive because of the contrast with images of drab, gray, post-war England.

At John Lennon’s direction, the record’s brilliant producer, George Martin, created the swirly, Victorian, and very English effects in the sawdust circus world of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” Martin found recordings of old-fashioned steam organs, then scissored the tape into fifteen-inch segments, instructing Geoff Emerick, the recording engineer, to toss the lengths of tape into the air, pick them up, and re-splice the bits into a new whole. That kind of Dadaist approach, while emblematic of the experiments that made
Sgt. Pepper
a mirror image of its time, could only work musically within the formal structure that Lennon and McCartney and Martin actually felt most comfortable working in. The lyrics of “Mr. Kite” may have sounded far-out to the ear in 1967, but “a splendid time is guaranteed for all” and the rest were sentences transposed verbatim from an 1843 circus poster that John Lennon bought in an antique shop in Sevenoaks, Kent.

Throughout
Sgt. Pepper
, English place names (Bishopsgate; the Isle of Wight; Blackburn, Lancashire), British institutions (the old school; tea time; the House of Lords; the English army; the Royal Albert Hall) and English types (the grandchildren, Vera, Chuck, and Dave; Mr. Kite; the Hendersons; a man from the motor trade; Rita, a meter maid) are presented alternately as extensions of British greatness or as fading rays in the imperial sunset. The album’s themes are anchored, more than I realized, in a period when England was looking back—part wistfully, part skeptically—to a world in which, more often than not, the “English army
had
just won the war,” although the 1967 narrator of “A Day in the Life” can remember the Empire’s glory only from seeing it in a movie. The “twenty years ago today” that seems to invite the audience of a brass band concert to look backward to an earlier, better time is actually pinpointing 1947 as the date from which the rest of the “show” follows—a year when Britain, lately in command of one fifth of the globe, was coming to terms with its weakened island. Awash in historical nostalgia for what had been, the English people could easily recognize the symbols in John Osborne’s bitter play,
The Entertainer
, in which a collapsed music hall player says, “Don’t clap too loud, it’s a very old building,” a reference less to anything architectural than to the decay of England itself.

The Beatles, grandchildren of Victorians, understood in their twenties that they were witnessing not just the end of English folk arts—such as the music hall variety show and the brass bands that had played leafy parks in every corner of the British Empire—but of something significant about the English character. Their lives had begun during the last crucial test of the British people. The births of Richard Starkey in July 1940 and John Lennon in October 1940 and Paul McCartney in June 1942 and George Harrison in February 1943 coincided with England’s darkest but finest hours. Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, the Nazi seizure of Paris, the fall of France, the collapse of the Chamberlain government, the rise of Winston Churchill, the Luftwaffe’s bombing of England, and the Battle of Britain all took place in the five months before John Winston Lennon’s mother and aunt gave him a middle name inspired by Churchillian greatness. Twenty-five years later, Sir Winston’s death and state funeral in January 1965 marked the final organizing moment of Britain’s decline and the full flowering of Victorian nostalgia.

By 1967, the Beatles, driving force of the New and the Now, stood on the infamous cover of
Sgt. Pepper
like the gatekeepers of history. They had learned from their brief lives as world celebrities that things were not always as they appeared to be. In
The Beatles Anthology
, the millennial recounting of Beatles’ history by the lads themselves, Paul McCartney notes that “what we were saying about history . . . [was that] all history is a lie, because every fact that gets reported gets distorted.” Every kind of falsehood and misinterpretation had by then been reported about the Beatles and their music; untruth had freed them to create their own narrative, choose their own heroes, reinvent history.

Behind them on the album cover, in a collage meant to illustrate their sense of the precise present moment of 1967, stood their handpicked representatives of the collective cultural past. Into this pantheon, the Beatles elevated a host of American movie stars and comedians, along with gurus and yogis, writers and painters (though not many musicians), Liverpool soccer heroes, and some seemingly conventional British figures whose lives contained surprise twists, such as the writer Aldous Huxley, whose experiments with LSD and mescaline in the early 1950s had led him to coin the word
psychedelic
. Although the fictitious military band leader Sergeant Pepper appeared only as a handout that came with the album—on a square of cardboard that also included bonus moustaches, badges, sergeant stripes, and other paraphernalia—I was interested to learn that there had been a real-life figure named Pepper: one of the many retired army officers of the British Raj in India who used their military ranks when playing for the local cricket team. Sergeant Pepper played for Uttar Pradesh.

Peering into the cover tableau now, I see, of course, that the famous marijuana plants were nothing but greenery—a spiky houseplant whose Latin name,
Peperomia
, was another inside joke. I look at John, Ringo, Paul, and George, and see them consciously distancing themselves from the viewer. The band is photographed through a filter, with a deep-focus lens, and there’s an extreme, almost deathlike stillness on every surface. After the fantastic energy of their first five years, the Beatles are stepping back into the depths of time. They are reaching into depths previously unexplored, pursuing mysteries, defining the present in terms of a magic past. The sense of mourning that fanatical fans sensed in the
Sgt. Pepper
cover tableau, which they believed signified a concealed set of clues pointing to the unannounced death of Paul McCartney, is, in a more real sense, a eulogy to lost childhood. The four young men on that record have no idea how, or even if, they are going to grow up, and if they do, how they will ever stay together as a band.

Standing among the totems of their Liverpudlian Eden, pantomiming the gestures of a dying Empire, the Beatles were taking a first step out of their dizzyingly successful unadult lives and looking back through the whirlpool of LSD to the solid England of Lennon and McCartney’s boyhood dreaming to invent the first, maybe the only, pure psychedelic rock masterwork. For only through the quirk of having to market in February 1967 a double-A-side single did Beatles producer George Martin omit from the album itself “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Lennon’s memory of a Salvation Army band playing an annual concert at Strawberry Field, the children’s home near his own backyard, and “Penny Lane,” McCartney’s clean, sunlit paean to the English suburbs—a decision that Martin later regretted.