It Was 40 Years Ago Today…
Posted by peteramescarlin at June 1st, 2007
When ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ spun, so did heads
The Oregonian
Forty years later, the first lines of the first song are still among the most recognizable in rock history.
It was 20 years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play . . .
And though it’s gone in and out of style, as the song itself predicted, its impact has been prodigious — from London to Portland, from ’60s pop idols Paul Revere and the Raiders to 21st century alt-rock heroes Sleater-Kinney. From the mouths of KISN-AM’s reigning Sixties disc jockeys to the pens of today’s most influential cultural critics.
The record transformed the way popular music was written, recorded and analyzed. Echoes of its many innovations can still be heard in today’s CDs. And for people alive and listening in the ’60s it served as a cultural beacon: the first icon of the hippie movement that would sweep the baby boom generation toward adulthood.
So let me re-introduce to you the act you’ve known for all these years: The Beatles’ watershed 1967 album: “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”
They came to the United States in early 1964 as moptopped pop stars with sweet smiles, clever quips and a few catchy tunes. If the Beatles’ music was actually quite a bit more complex than that, the high-pitched shrieks of Beatlemania made it difficult to hear the subtleties.
By 1967 the pop idol days were over. These Beatles had sprouted moustaches, a love for the avant-garde and an overwhelming desire to transcend their own image.
Even the “Sgt. Pepper” album cover was extraordinary: A formal portrait of the Beatles, clad in neon band uniforms, surrounded by a surrealist aggregation of faces ranging from the boxer Sonny Liston to Edgar Allan Poe to Sigmund Freud to Mae West to life-sized waxworks of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, clad in the prim suits they wore during the height of Beatlemania.
“They’re in costumes, so they’re not the Beatles anymore,” says the critic and writer Tim Riley. “They’re Sgt. Pepper’s band. A fictional band in a fictional world. It’s a brilliant way to change the subject.”
“With a Little Help From My Friends”
The baby boomers, the oldest of whom were just entering their 20s, had also developed an appetite for cultural change. Bitter opposition to the Vietnam War, along with long-simmering frustration on issues ranging from student rights to civil rights to feminism inspired thousands of youngsters to follow Timothy Leary’s advice to tune in, turn on, drop out. Some became hippies. Others thrust their fists into the air and marched off to demand political change.
In Portland, mid-summer frustration would on July 30 boil over into a full-blown race riot and the first of many demonstrations and marches that would challenge the city’s social fabric.
“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”
On “Sgt. Pepper” it was the music that exploded. Working with producer George Martin, the Beatles created soundscapes built from exotic instruments, outlandish arrangements and recording techniques they often invented on the spot.
“We played it over and over again, trying to analyze it,” recalls Mark Lindsay. The leader of Portland-launched Paul Revere and the Raiders was living in Los Angeles at the time, producing his group’s records (”Kicks,” “The Great Airplane Strike”) with his housemate, Terry Melcher. What they heard knocked them for a loop.
“We just looked at each other and said, ‘What . . . do we do now?”
“Getting Better”
On Portland’s KISN-AM, then the leading Top 40 station in town, the answer was obvious: Play every song on the album as often as possible. That AM radio playlists had until that moment consisted entirely of hit singles ceased to matter. “The stores were barraged,” recalls morning disc jockey Michael O’Brien. “It was immediate. We played everything, and we played it constantly. It was a historic event.”
“Fixing a Hole”
The Beatles’ peers agreed. Just three days after the June 1 release of “Sgt. Pepper’s” in England, up-and-coming Seattle guitarist Jimi Hendrix stunned a London audience — which included at least two Beatles — by opening a concert with his own arrangement of the album’s title song. “It’s one of the single (gutsiest) moves in rock history,” Seattle author and Hendrix biographer Charles R. Cross says. “If he’d done a really lame version . . . he would have been a laughingstock.”
Instead, McCartney, seated in the royal box, nodded his approval. And a day or two later, he recommended Hendrix to the organizers of the Monterey Pop Festival, who booked the guitarist for a performance that would make him an international sensation.
“She’s Leaving Home”
Still, the Summer of Love wasn’t all peace, love, flowers and bells. When Harrison paid a visit to San Francisco’s hippie-fied Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that season, he was shocked by how grim it was. “I expected them all to be nice and clean and friendly and happy,” he told a reporter. Instead he found “hideous, spotty little teenagers.”
“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”
Quickly elevated to a key cultural document, “Sgt. Pepper” inspired analyses, myths and legends. Obviously, there was a reason why the title to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” included the initials “LSD.” Similarly, “Fixing a Hole” was about a junkie getting a “fix” and “I’d love to turn you on,” well, that was just too obvious. Now just look at the album cover. See that hand raised over Paul’s head . . .?
(Side Two) “Within You, Without You”
As the baby boomers grew into middle age, the rhetoric of their radical-hippie past took on an unintended irony. By the time “Sgt. Pepper” was released on CD in 1987, the album’s concept-heavy sound inspired revisionism. What once had been called the Beatles’ crowning achievement was often dismissed as pretentious and overblown. As anachronistic as Harrison’s belief, sung through the patchouli-scented, sitar-laced haze of “Within You,” that “With our love we can change the world.”
“When I’m 64″
Nevertheless, when Corin Tucker heard the “Sgt. Pepper” songs on the radio in Eugene, the future Sleater-Kinney guitarist fell in love. “In the ’80s all the music on the radio was hot girls and fast cars. But the Beatles told great stories. Anything could be a song. And the music is so layered and interesting; it’s like an odyssey, with all these things happening. It’s like the bedrock of how to make an album.”
“Lovely Rita”
Or how to think, act and dress. Take it from Mike Hockinson, Portland-based author of “The Ultimate Beatles Quiz Book.” “Yeah, it’s true. I got married in a Sgt. Pepper suit in the late ’80s. I was a real Beatles geek back then. It just felt like more fun than settling for a tuxedo. And I still have it, though I got divorced a long time ago.”
“Good Morning, Good Morning”
Music writer Tim Riley, currently working on a biography of Lennon, says “Sgt. Pepper” is far from a soundtrack to bubble-headed hippieness. “Ultimately, it’s about changing your consciousness,” Riley says. ” ‘I’d love to turn you on’ is really a very poetic way to say, ‘you’ve gotta wake up; your ordinary lives are stultifying and dead.’ ” There’s nothing hippie-dippie about that.”
“Sgt. Pepper Reprise”
We hope that you’ve enjoyed the show!
Or at the very least been moved by the belief that youth culture can matter, that rock ‘n’ roll, or any pop culture, can also be art. And that it might be worth hearing, and still able to raise a smile, 40 years on.
“A Day in the Life”
Or maybe we fall into darkness. The band falls apart. Wars are fought. One Beatle killed by a fan gone berserk. Another nearly dying the same way, surviving only to be done in by disease.
The rest of us go on living but to what end? Even a crowd of people can seem pretty dead when they’re walking around unconscious. Now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
Has anything changed in 40 years? Too much, perhaps. Or maybe not enough. But “Sgt. Pepper” remains.
It would love to turn you on.
Peter Ames Carlin: 503-221-8562; petercarlin@news.oregonian.com
