The Beatles Are Here!

by Penelope Rowlands

  THE BEATLES WERE still very present and very modern when I began at WMMR in Philadelphia in 1969. For me, becoming a disc jockey, they had a direct influence on my work.

  In early progressive rock radio, you would blend records, putting them together in clever ways. The Beatles were doing this already on their albums. Starting with Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, they had a theatricality that other groups didn’t. It came with that period of time.

  These albums had that, as well as high production values. They inspired me in how to put sounds together. They made me want to figure out how to do it with other records.

  In the early days of underground or progressive rock radio, you’d put together long strings of music. The idea was that the music would all relate to each other in one form or another. There would be some kind of connection, often a lyrical or a musical one.

  A lot of it was done very extemporaneously. You’d just get in there and you’d do it. Sometimes you’d put a record on and you didn’t know where you were going next.

  When I played a song and was trying to think of what to follow it with, I could always find a Beatles song that would fit. There was always one that would work and that everybody would know. And there were a lot of them.

  MY DAUGHTER IS now a junior in high school. She always surprises me. You can’t play a Beatles song now—how many years later is this, forty, fifty?—that she doesn’t know. I think, considering the changes that I’ve lived through in music, and what’s popular now, to have that kind of cultural staying power is truly amazing.

  I’ve interviewed Paul a couple of times. One of the things I asked him was how he manages to function as one of the most famous people on Earth. I asked if he could go out on the street and he said, yes, but the secret is to keep moving. “If I don’t move, it’s all over, these people are all around me, but if I keep moving it works out okay.” I thought that was great.

  I still use the Beatles a lot on World Café [his syndicated radio show]. I play them a lot and I love them.

  The Back of the Album

  by David Michaelis

  IN JUNE 1967, when I was nine, my brother and I were farmed out to summer camp in Vermont. In those days you went off with a fully packed trunk and spent more or less the whole summer far away from home. You were not allowed to bring anything that connected you with civilization, not even a transistor radio to follow the baseball season. But late one morning that July, I heard by chance the opening bars of a record that had somehow arrived in camp from the very epicenter of civilization. I had been on my contented way from archery, in the upper field, to woodworking, in the barn—a camp day that could just as easily have been taking place in 1947, because none of the traditional forms or craft lore of a boy’s camp life had yet changed, as everything about the way we thought and dressed and did things was to change after 1967—when from the barn’s shuttered hayloft the electric sound of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band bolted through the clean, sunny air.

  The counselors’ lounge was seedy and inaccessible, an outpost of adult mysteries. The physical presence of the new Beatles album up there behind closed doors created a charged atmosphere I will never forget. I was almost sick with the sheer nerve of it. I remember feeling pierced by the words—“It was twenty years ago today”—and in that first instant of listening in, the shock of the new Beatles record combined with the prestige of the counselor’s lounge to produce an alternate reality.

  Archery? Woodworking? I couldn’t have cared less. Of course, I couldn’t give them up either. I loved archery, I wanted to impress my parents with a Bowman’s Medal, and as that summer went on—the Summer of Love, it turned out—I felt the clear, straight lines of my boyhood becoming blurred in a way I did not fully understand.

  I knew a little about the Beatles already. I owned two Beatles records (A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles ’65), and when I was six and my brother seven, we had had Beatles wigs. They were oddly shaped, scruffy thatches of synthetic black hair. They fit over our heads like ladies’ bathing caps and didn’t look anything like the real thing. We didn’t mind—these were Beatles wigs, and there was something insubordinate about wearing them, a kind of rampant disobedience that felt new and powerful. Years later, when I studied a passage of Milton that described Adam and Eve’s childlike rebellion in Eden, I had a pang of joy and giddiness that reminded me of the sheer liberation I had felt each time I pushed my scalp through the hairy opening of my Beatles wig.

  This new album was different, more complicated. This was no longer just a release of youthful energy; it was playful, as before, but there was now an elegiac tone in the words and music—and that was what made me feel I was entitled to the record’s hidden truths. The previous summer, my parents had sat my brother and me down for an important talk. I knew before the word separation knifed into our living room that it really meant divorce. Everything is going to be the same, they said. Nothing will change. We both love you very much. It was my mother who for years afterward would say, We’re still a family.

  The message of Sgt. Pepper was that things were not as they seemed, which made me, I felt intuitively, the perfect student of its puzzles. Campers were not allowed to listen to records, much less the new Beatles album. But every day, it seemed, additional information about Sgt. Pepper came into circulation: a 20,000-Hz tone, audible only to dogs, had been recorded backward into the inner groove at the end of the British version of the album. It was said that dogs all over England were going bananas when tone arms on hi-fi sets failed to pick up automatically and instead drifted into the subversive inner groove of Sgt. Pepper. Every night, it seemed, the two counselors in my cabin discussed the album, quietly debating shades of meaning over our heads; I recall one of them telling the other that the reverberating piano chord (E major, held for forty-two seconds) gave him cold chills at the end of the record because it was supposed to make you think of a nuclear explosion.

  It almost didn’t matter that we couldn’t hear the music, or the chiller chord that ended A Day in the Life, or the 20,000-Hz dog alarm. The mystification that surrounded the album had as much to do with the art on the record sleeve as it did with the record itself. Marijuana plants, for example, could be clearly seen in the photographic tableau on the Sgt. Pepper cover—real pot plants, daringly placed in plain sight at the Beatles’ feet, or so the counselors said.

  One night they brought the cover around for inspection. We each had a turn with it. The infamous tableau was as densely woven as a tapestry; it was hard to know where to look. Under the big blue Northern England sky, tiers of cutout faces, cloth figures, waxworks, ferns, potted palms, garden ornaments, and sculptural busts were arrayed around the flesh and blood Beatles, who, tiger bright in military-band regalia and holding brass and wind instruments instead of electric guitars, stood poker-faced behind a circusy Lonely Hearts Club Band drum skin. We tried to name faces in the crowd behind the band. Somebody pointed out Sonny Liston. There, too, was Marlon Brando from The Wild One, a popular poster image on the bedroom walls of older brothers in my neighborhood. I recognized the early Beatles as Madame Tussaud’s wax figures, and I knew Bob Dylan—he was a folk singer. All else was unknown to me. I recall turning over the sleeve. There, vibrating in black print on a Chinese-red background, were the words.

  It’s hard to remember now what this meant then. To paraphrase Kenneth Tynan’s remark about how Citizen Kane changed filmmaking, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band revolutionized pop music as the airplane revolutionized warfare. Until Sgt. Pepper, the pop single had dominated the recording industry, each 45-rpm record comprising two songs, the hit tune on side A, a lesser song on side B. Pop singles were marketed in a plain sleeve with minimal design elements and no sign that the lyrics were to be treated as anything more than bubble gum, chewed once and tossed away.

  From Introducing the Beatles in 1963 to Revolver in 1966, the Beatles had supplemented the traditional release of new hit singles with the annual appearances of two-sided L
Ps, the covers of which, though increasingly brash and inventive, gave no warning of what Sgt. Pepper would unleash. Inside and out, everything about the record was narrative. It was bursting to tell a story. On Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles made their regular instruments, from bass guitar to drums, sound like voices that had something new to say, while making more conventional European instruments like the harpsichord and the fiddle, as well as ancient instruments from Hindustani north Indian classical music, seem integral to the most far-out aspirations of rock ’n’ roll. It was the first rock album to insert orchestral scoring for narrative effects—one of many ways in which Sgt. Pepper was created more in the manner of filmmaking than by the conventions of the recording industry. And if the recording processes devised in the Abbey Road studios gave Sgt. Pepper the aura of a mod film, the sumptuous packaging that the Beatles insisted upon clothed the album in its most characteristic quality: readability. Here was the first record ever to publish its lyrics on the back of its sleeve. The songs told a story that was connected by a theme and the story could be read cover to cover.

  After that first eager glimpse of the album sleeve in camp, I bought the record, with my mother, at Sam Goody’s, on a visit to Manhattan. Back in our living room, at the exact middle of the sofa, where my mother’s gay designer friend sat each of us in turn to demonstrate the brand new effects of stereo (a scientific moment that my father would previously have husbanded us through), I settled into a habit of sitting cross-legged and alone, ostentatiously studying the words on the back of Sgt. Pepper without playing the stereo at all. It was a deliberate act to read the Beatles without the music. Using eye instead of ear to ransack the lyrics for their hidden adult meanings turned even a ten-year-old into a seeker of ambiguity, an investigator of the imagination, a devotee of poetry. I had no musical ability then or now, and being given the words on a Chinese-red platter was like being rewarded in school with a period of free play. The literariness of Lennon and McCartney was just my speed. Looking-glass ties? Cellophane flowers that suddenly tower over your head and grow “so incredibly high”? A hole that needs fixing . . . Where had I heard this before? Of course: Alice on the riverbank, Alice down the Rabbit-Hole, Alice in the Garden of Live Flowers.

  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 li
nes 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.