onkster
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« Reply #27 on: May 29, 2017, 05:29:25 PM » |
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I posted this on the Hoffman Board (and I suppose I'll regret it) but hey:
Why more about Sgt. Pepper, with so much already written?
Because of what hasn't been: about the music itself—how it made you feel. Not about the mix. Not the levels. Not the compression, the pressings, the matrix numbers.
After the tumult of '66, the Beatles could have done a lot of things: broken up. Retired. Written and recorded a whole new album of material from a point of cynicism and burnout, which could have sold merely on their name (though they couldn't have done that more than once, surely). They could have sung about fame, reviews, success, sales, money—by this point, it was what they knew best, what they had been living for a few long years.
But they didn't.
As summer dawned in 1967, something hit the record racks that was entirely unexpected: a new Beatles album that looked unlike any Beatles album previously. They didn't look like themselves. There were strange lyrics printed on the back. They appeared to hide behind an outlandish name, and stood beside corpselike wax replicas of themselves, amid what looked like a manicured town square, backed up by a myriad of faces from the past and present. No block letters screaming “BEATLES!”, no list of hits separated by bullet points. It did not look like an advertisement for itself, but more like an instant souvenir photo to grow old in a frame on the wall.
And the music reflected all that, a sonic wedding of old, new, borrowed, blue. It hit you immediately, but it took time to sink in—its treasures were not made obvious, as commercial teen pop songs had long done. You had to listen, not once or twice, but repeatedly—not with the frustration of banging your head against the wall, but with the layered revelation of nuance, feeling, meaning. These were strange new songs brought to you via familiar voices and names, yet this new strangeness was not a cheat, not a cop-out, but a clutch of lovingly-crafted letters from a group of friends we had not seen in a while—if we ever really saw them in the first place. They had been places, they had seen things, they had changed as a result. And here they were, back at last, and they were ready to share it all with us.
Not all of us bought the LP right away—for some of us, our first exposure to Pepper was on AM radio. Back then, most AM stations were loud and fast, with pop songs, ads, and banter nearly indistinguishable from each other. A loud rapidly-aging DJ announced a record like making a pitch, then maybe the Dippity-Do jingle or a Pepsi commercial might scream on, and then the bright jangly rock and roll. Suddenly, something was different: the Dippity-Do pace stopped in its tracks, and a jewel-like arpeggio came out of the transistor speaker: this is how I first heard this thing called “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”. I was four years old, on a lake beach in Okoboji, Iowa, and it was coming out of radios across the sand. I could walk down the shore with my plastic bucket and hear the whole mysterious thing. Was this The Beatles? I recognized the voices, but had no idea what it was all about. Then it was over, the loud DJ confirming that yes, this was The Beatles, from their new album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the long, odd title always recited completely. Maybe 20 minutes later, after a BrylCreem ad, the station's onslaught would come to a halt and there would be this other thing about things “getting better all the time”. Again: The Beatles, from their new album. No 45s, just the album. And again, more songs from it, on every radio around, radiating into the summer sky.
A side point here: this was all in mono, coming across AM radio, through tiny speakers, outdoors, in the car, in your house on a cabinet record-player. Talk of mixes and brickwalls and processing never came up.
I was four. I could say, as many people do, that to hear Pepper now is to take them back to the moment they first heard it—in my case, on a beach, in swim trunks, eating Bugles and building sand castles. But that is merely what they call nostalgia, and does no justice to what was really starting to happen. Sgt. Pepper was strange and new and different, but it didn't scare me away. It got under my skin. It made me see things in my dreams, daydream colorful pictures against my white ceiling, look at familiar things differently: I could see how the irises of a girl's eyes could look like kaleidoscopes. I could see a regular old meter maid as something fanciful, even coquettish. There was a tune about being old yet still in love, at a time when youth was the constant focus on TV, radio, magazines. A buzzing orchestra graced another song that felt like a thoughtful walk in the garden during the show's intermission, that asked us to consider how small we really are, yet absolutely a part of something so big as everything. And to consider how it feels to walk out after a show into bright overcast daylight, to face the daily news and wars and fatal car crashes, and feel a horrible pressure build up into a moment of sudden decision: do we take some of the show with us, or give in entirely to grim reality?
It was one of the first things that welcomed me into seeing things differently, feeling what was under the most obvious surfaces we were sold every day. And like most great music and art, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band made me want to do things. Write things. Make things. Sing things. It touched the ethereal beyond the physical. Years later, George still backed this, saying, “This is available to everyone.”
The Beatles may have sold us a new record we paid cash for, but the free gift inside was so much more than a sheet of cutouts—it was a friendly invitation to make more out of what we already have. Some may have tried (and failed) to dance to it, others may have shut down in the face of its sudden strangeness, but for the many more of us open to it, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a window to a new way of living life. Identical haircuts, suits, and mandatory grins were no longer good enough for them, so why not for us, too?
A piece of plastic came out, housed in colored cardboard. Millions bought. Millions listened. Millions considered the possibilities, and millions acted differently than before. Changes and differences were made; many were triumphs, many mistakes. The world wasn't made perfect, and neither were we. Waking up to a beautiful sunrise can make us feel inspired to do anything—then we have the work of doing it, and though it can never be perfect, it's usually better than doing nothing. And a new sunrise comes for us another day.
This summer, there is a new Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band out there—a new mix, a new package, a new hubbub lending us a chance to hear it all afresh. Some complain loud and long that it isn't exactly the same as what they already had for 50 years—it's been changed, it's different. How strange to hear these things said against the spirit of a work that was about nothing less than change and difference, about moving into the new while keeping something of the old in its back pocket.
While some will continue to cling to the seemingly immutable—chart positions, waveforms, catalog designations, and factual numbers of other sorts—some will still be listening to Pepper and really hearing it, something even AM radio never had the power to stop back in '67. We will still feel it. We will still find ourselves in it, and find itself inside of us. And hopefully, we will let its wisdom and whimsy give us yet another fresh look at the world we live in right now, changing ourselves, changing it.
Good morning, good morning.
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