Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (79 page)

B
ACKGROUND

Fans may debate whether
Sgt. Peppers
is the best album the Beatles made, but no group, the Beatles included, ever made a more revolutionary one.

As great an achievement as
Sgt. Peppers
was, it wasn’t produced in a vacuum. In the years leading up to its release, forces much broader than the Beatles themselves had been setting the stage for an industry-changing album to happen.

In fact, the artistic creativity released by the era’s cultural and political turbulence was reaching boundary-busting proportions in 1966, the year that work on
Sgt. Peppers
began. Nowhere was that better reflected than in popular music. Bob Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde
, the Who’s
A Quick One
, the Beach Boys’
Smile
, the Mothers of Invention’s
Freak Out
, and the Rolling Stone’s
Aftermath
all broke important new ground in pop music that year.

WHATEVER YOU CAN DO, I CAN DO BETTER

These landmark releases—and others of similar quality—pushed the Beatles to even greater creative heights than they’d already achieved. No musician or band in that period could stay on top by mimicking earlier successes. With each new record, pop groups in both England and America sought to up the creative ante. It wasn’t just a game—it was commercial survival.

In this competitive environment, the Beatles and the Beach Boys viewed each other as the primary challengers and tried to outdo the other with each new album. The Beach Boys released
Pet Sounds
in May 1966 as their answer to the Beatles’ 1965 masterpiece
Rubber Soul
(itself spurred by the music of Bob Dylan).
Pet Sounds
’ clever songwriting and complex arrangements stunned the Beatles. Paul McCartney called it “the album of all time.” But a new contender for that title was already in the can: the Beatles’
Revolver
. The new Beatles album had been completed a few weeks before
Pet Sounds’
release. It hit the record stores in August. And it was just the Beatles’ opening shot across the Beach Boys’ bow.

Bird brains: Male cardinals take 3 times as long as females to learn a new song.

BEATLE EVOLUTION

Although cultural forces laid the groundwork for
Sgt. Peppers
, tensions and changes within the band also played a major role. As they entered the studio in November 1966 to begin recording their new album, the four group members were conflicted: exhausted and bitter on the one hand, restless to reinvent themselves on the other.

Their exhaustion came from a brutal touring schedule arranged by their manager, Brian Epstein. They were also enraged at Epstein for not protecting them from rough treatment by police in the cities they were playing. And they were frustrated artistically—the new directions they’d taken on
Revolver
couldn’t be reproduced live, which forced them to fulfill their touring contracts by playing in an earlier style that, in their minds, they’d moved beyond. But that didn’t matter to their live audiences, especially their female fans, who screamed too loud to hear the music anyway.

Epstein was able (barely) to hold the Beatles together by promising to end the touring. The wild enthusiasm with which fans and critics greeted
Revolver
helped prepare them for the next phase of their careers. As producer George Martin said, the Beatles “all but owned the music business at that time.” The size of their audience, their almost universal critical acclaim, and their unprecedented commercial success gave them the power to do whatever they wanted in the studio. They were ready to do something great.

RECORDING THE ALBUM

Despite its legend as one of pop music’s greatest “concept” albums, the making of
Sgt. Peppers
was hardly a carefully thought-out affair. Instead, the album came together in a serendipitous, almost haphazard fashion. Two of the best songs written for the new album never even appeared on it: “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane.”

The album had been intended to have an autobiographical theme that would reflect the band’s early lives in Liverpool. Those plans had to be trashed when manager Epstein informed the group that they were overdue for a single. So they reluctantly decided, with producer Martin’s pushing, to release “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane” as a single with two “A” sides. It disqualified the songs from the new album, because in England songs appearing on the singles chart couldn’t also appear on an album released in the same year. The change left only one finished track, Paul’s “When I’m Sixty-Four,” for the album project. Martin later called the decision to yank the songs “the biggest mistake of my professional life,” but it cleared the way for the record that
Sgt. Peppers
would eventually become.

Art History quiz: Q. What’s the actual title of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? A.
La Gioconda
.

THE SONGS

Side 1

• “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
Not only was this theme not the original concept, but the title song wasn’t even written until the album was half completed. Paul, who wrote the song, came up with the idea of basing the album on the notion that the Pepper band was real. He then suggested to Martin that he use studio effects to weave all the material together around that theme. (John didn’t object to Paul taking control of the project. LSD had blurred the edges of his personality, leaving him content—and maybe grateful—to let someone else take charge.)

The Sgt. Pepper persona did something else for the band: it let them step outside themselves. “One of the problems of success was that people had begun to expect so much from them,” writes Steve Turner in
A Hard Day’s Write
. “As Beatles they had become self-conscious, but as the Lonely Hearts Club Band they had no expectations to live up to.”

• “With a Little Help from My Friends.”
Paul and John “wanted to do a Ringo type of song,” remembers journalist Hunter Davies, who witnessed them writing it. “That was what they thought was missing on the album so far.” Keeping with the theme of the alternate band, Ringo sang under the guise of “Billy Shears.” As with some of the other songs, “Little Help” has been accused of promoting drug use. But Paul maintains that the line “I get high with a little help from my friends” means “high” in the spiritual sense.

• “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
Despite rumors to the contrary that persist to this day, it has nothing to do with LSD. The title, George Martin writes, refers to a drawing that John’s then-young son Julian had brought home from school. It depicted a little girl hovering in a black sky, surrounded by stars. Julian explained, “It’s Lucy, in the sky, with diamonds.” (Lucy O’Donnel was his best friend in school at the time.) The song’s imagery—tangerine trees, marmalade skies, and cellophane flowers—was mostly inspired by Lewis Carrol’s
Through the Looking Glass
. “Surrealism to me is reality,” said John. “Psychedelic vision is reality to me and always was.”

Top ticket price to the first Super Bowl in 1967: $12. Top price in 2003: $500.

• “Getting Better.”
On a 1964 tour, Ringo got sick and session drummer Jimmy Nichol subbed for five nights. After each concert, Paul and John would ask Nichol what he thought of his performance. Each time Nichol would reply, “It’s getting better.” They loved the phrase and laughed every time they thought of it. A real Lennon-McCartney song—Paul put down the optimistic foundation of the song: “It’s getting better all the time.” And John added his cynicism: “Can’t get much worse.”

• “Fixing a Hole.”
Yet another song believed to have been about drugs. (The “hole” was a heroin fix.) But Paul had just bought an old farmhouse, fixed it up, and penned a song about it. “If you’re a junky sitting in a room and fixing a hole then that’s what it will mean to you,” he said. “But when I wrote it I meant if there’s a crack, or the room is uncolourful, then I’ll paint it.”

• “She’s Leaving Home.”
Paul read a news article about a 17-year-old girl named Melanie Coe who ran away from home and was inspired to write a song about her plight. McCartney was anxious to record the song soon after he finished it and called up George Martin to request an immediate orchestral score. Martin wasn’t available that day because he was doing a session with another artist, Cilla Black. Impatient, McCartney went out and hired Mike Leander to do the job. He then brought in the score to record the next day. It was the only score that Martin didn’t write for the Beatles in all his time working with them.

• “
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”
The song is based on an 1843 circus poster that John owned. “I had all the words staring me straight in the face one day when I was looking for a song,” he said. The swirling organ sounds that helped create the circus atmosphere weren’t created by a professional organists but rather Martin and Lennon, who masked their inadequacies on the instrument with studio tricks, including doubling the tape speed of certain parts and slowing down others. For some bits, Martin cut the master tape up, threw the pieces on the floor, and put them randomly back together.

How long was the Barenaked Ladies’ song “One Week” #1 on the U.S. charts? One week.

Side 2
:

• “Within You Without You.”
George’s song about his newfound fascination with Indian mysticism, as well as one of his first songs performed on the sitar. None of the other Beatles were present when “WYWY” was recorded.

• “When I’m Sixty-Four.”
The tune is based on a pre-WWII-style pop melody written by Paul. In their first phase as an English club band, the Beatles used to play the melody as a timekiller when a club’s PA system crashed during their set.

• “Lovely Rita.”
A real meter maid named Meta claimed she was the inspiration because she once booked one “P. McCartney” for 10 shillings. When Paul saw the ticket, he told her he liked her name and asked if he could write a song about it. True? Paul says he can’t remember (but he admits it makes a nice story).

• “Good Morning, Good Morning.”
John wrote this as a poke at McCartney’s irony-deficient song “Good Day Sunshine” on
Revolver
. The sly humor that fills the song turns darker on the fadeout sequence—in the series of farmyard sounds, each animal that appears is a predator of the one heard before it.

• “A Day in the Life.”
Although the album’s finale is generally thought of as a John Lennon song, it was a true Lennon-McCartney collaboration, unlike many of the songs credited to both men. John had found inspiration reading the morning paper: “One story was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled.” John wrote a dreamy melody around the stories, but he needed a middle section for the song and asked Paul if he had anything he could use. McCartney wrote the “Woke up, got out of bed…” portion, a song-within-a-song, that created an appropriately abrupt transition from the dreamy opening section. The two worked together over a period of a month with George Martin to record it.

After the two parts were recorded, they decided to fill the gap between them with a “dark, tumultuous orchestra crescendo.” George Martin tells the story:

Superman had a pet monkey named Beppo.

At the beginning of the twenty-four bars, [I wrote] the lowest possible note for each of the 41 instruments in the orchestra. At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note. Then I put a squiggly line right through all twenty-four bars.

Other than that, how the orchestra got from low to high was up to them…provided they finished on the final E chord in unison.

THE ALBUM COVER

Midway through the recording sessions, the Beatles knew they were making a landmark record, and they wanted a cover to match. But the most famous album jacket in the history of rock almost never happened.

Besides the Fab Four, the cover featured life-size portraits of cultural icons the Beatles admired, as well as—for a lark—many they didn’t. The images ran the gamut from Bob Dylan to Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich to Marilyn Monroe, W. C. Fields to Sonny Liston. John wanted to add Jesus and Hitler to the mix, but Jesus was scrapped because of the controversy John had created the year before when he compared the Beatles’ popularity to Christianity. And Hitler was vetoed by the rest of the group.

The record company protested that the collage was a costly logistical nightmare, because permissions would have to be obtained from everyone pictured, and in the case of those who were dead, from their estates. But the band insisted—the Beatles knew they had created an unprecedented record and wanted a cover to match. A frustrated EMI handled the details, which involved sending hundreds of letters all over the world.

IMMEDIATE IMPACT

Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
made its informal public debut from a window ledge outside the London flat of singer “Mama” Cass Elliot. The Beatles and assistant Neil Aspinall drove to Elliot’s place at daybreak, dragged the speakers of her high-powered sound system out onto the ledge, put a tape of the album on, and cranked the volume all the way up. According to Aspinall, not one of the neighbors complained. In fact, several poked their heads out of their windows and smiled their approval. Everyone recognized whose music it was and were thrilled to be awakened by it.

Why don’t they speak English? In England a cat is sometimes called a moggy (and noses are conks).