The Beatles Are Here!

by Penelope Rowlands

  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.

  I had a similar feeling in a bookstore the other day, when I noticed that Paul McCartney had printed some of the Sgt. Pepper lyrics (among others from the Beatles songbook) in a spotlessly dust-jacketed volume of poetry—as if, in other words, they weren’t songs and really had been poetry all long. I picked up the tidy white book and tried to read the familiar words in the state of aural blankness it demanded. But some right-brain part of me kept letting in the music. Great big windblown gusts of piccolo trumpets, percussion effects, and even a piano played through a Vox guitar amplifier with added reverb blew into Sir Paul’s spotless white Parnassian tent, ruining his sherry party. It was an odd reaction: When I was a boy I read these lyrics on the back of the album as grail, whereas now, dressed up in white-tie, they seemed to have lost their poetry. Published formally, the words of Sgt. Pepper no longer looked excitingly Now; they looked very Then.

  During earliest moody youth, most records entered my system for a while; I had a favorite song for various humors—an up song, a down song, a daydreaming song, a rebel song—and I memorized them all. After a season or two, those songs would pass out of me, and the record itself would remain external, a fixed piece of a fixed time in the past, part of my increasingly obsolete vinyl collection, an artifact of a lost age. Sgt. Pepper—the name as an abstraction; the image I carry in memory of its cover; even the original object itself, with the outline of the record within visible as a rubbed white circle on the cardboard without—remains in and with me, like a plate connecting halves of a broken bone. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had healing power, and in the summer of 1967, I needed something I couldn’t have found in the tourniquet instructions in The Boy Scout Handbook. The Bowman’s Medal I brought home from camp, which I thought would somehow change everything, seemed as theatrical and obsolete as the medals on the Beatles’ military tunics.

  AFTER MY FATHER and mother called it quits, she awoke always at five in the morning and lay in bed, thinking that my father would come to his senses, walk out on the woman for whom he had walked out on her, and return home, to his side of the bed, where he belonged. So far as I know, my father had no intention of ditching my stepmother or her children, with whom, with every good intention, he had formed a second family; and when it turned out that my mother wasn’t going to choose a permanent replacement for Dad’s side of t
he bed, I began to spend as much time as I could away from my own bed, too. I used to daydream myself into other families, and some of them actually took me in and let me live, without pauses, in the kind of extended living and eating plan that the early 1970s seemed to specialize in.

  If the melody of “She’s Leaving Home” now sounds melodramatic almost to the point of parody, I can still read in the words the strangely disembodied feeling my nine-year-old self tried on when I first encountered the song: Was this how it felt to break free from home? To abandon or to be abandoned? The story of my house and the household in the song did not match, but since my mother’s day always began at five o’clock, the hour of the new day’s start in the song, and the hour at which I, too, would soon take my own exits from Eden, the lament of the refrained farewell—“Bye-bye”—still squeezes my heart.

  Will Lee, musician

  I’VE BEEN MAJORLY informed by the Beatles records throughout my entire life—in my career, in my choice of notes and what to play as a studio musician. No matter what the style of music, it was always a bit of “What would the Beatles have done here?” And that guided me into making good musical choices.

  I was probably eleven when the Beatles came to the U.S. I remember how it felt when I first heard their stuff. It was so fresh and so interesting at a time when pop music was just not as adventurous. When they first hit the airwaves with “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” you knew something was going on, something different and exciting. Before you even got to see them live there was already this really fresh sound.

  The Beatles actually allowed me to have this gig on what’s now called The Late Show with David Letterman. I’ve had it since 1982—and that, in my profession, is what you call a steady gig. Plus it takes place [at the former Ed Sullivan Theater] right where the Beatles were first seen in the U.S.!

  The first time I was approached to do it, [Letterman’s music director] Paul Shaffer said, “You know there’s this pilot coming up, it’s a TV talk show / music / show comedy / whatever, and it’s thirteen weeks.” I thought to myself, “Thirteen weeks of solid work?” I’d not had anything like that before. And it just kept getting extended and extended and extended. I feel so lucky.

  It was almost too obvious, because of how infatuated I was with the Beatles, for me to even think about having a Beatles band. Traditionally, these have been ones where the musicians pretended to be the Beatles, and even tried to look like them, and that’s just not for me—it’s hard enough just being yourself, much less being somebody else.

  I’ve enjoyed the great luxury of not being easily pigeonholed by the entire music community in my career. People couldn’t put a label on me. I’ve always loved the fact that jazz guys thought I was a rock guy and rock musicians thought I was a jazz guy. So the idea of me being “Oh, he’s the Beatles guy” was always scary to me and I never wanted to go there, but once I’d kind of established myself, I was comfortable enough to come up with this idea after I met our drummer, Rich Pagano.

  Rich and I met on a gig together, a small European tour with Hiram Bullock, the late jazz guitarist, who hired us each separately for this tour. By the time we got on stage and started hearing each other it was “Whoa, I wonder what this guy knows about Beatles music.”

  I heard something in Rich’s playing and his singing—he had a very Ringo style of drumming and a very John Lennon style of singing. I started asking him questions and next thing I know our conversations were just Beatles, Beatles, Beatles. We drove poor Hiram crazy. He was like, “Are you guys talking about the Beatles again?”

  After the little tour was over I went back to the U.S. and resumed my life. I was in the China Club here in New York City one night listening to someone play. I was standing next to the guy who booked the music at that club and I leaned over and asked, “If I put together a Beatles band, would you hire us to play here?” He said “Yes!” I went home and called Rich Pagano. That was in early 1998.

  I REALIZED THAT the magic of the Beatles records, all that great music, couldn’t be duplicated with a four-piece band. I knew from the beginning that it had to be at least five pieces; four weren’t going to be enough to bring the magic from the records to the stage. Many of the recordings have great percussion parts, great keyboard parts, and massive double vocals.

  As a studio singer, I knew that with five people you’d be able to get double vocals, and it would be just beautiful. That kind of gang vocal sound the Beatles had on those records is magical to me—there are a lot of guys singing parts.

  I immediately arrived at Jimmy Vivino as the next choice for the band—he’s such a musical archivist and so knowledgeable about sounds and music, what the right notes are, things like that. And he also sang. Jack Petruzzelli and Frank Agnello were the final choices—just the greatest couple of guys.

  Fab Faux is made up of the same five people as it was back in 1998. In New York City, that’s incredible. It may be some kind of record, not counting the Ramones (I don’t know how long they lasted). It’s amazing. We just do Beatles. And that’s all we’re here to do. We all have our solo careers but when we five get together it’s for one purpose and that’s what’s so beautiful. When we get on stage there are no arguments. We all agree on exactly what we’re doing.

  We don’t really go for fake British accents. We don’t do that kind of thing at all. We just do the music note for note. It’s a little bit as if you saw a classical orchestra performing the works of a classical composer.

  We take some risks in that obviously some of the Beatles records were two minutes and four seconds long, or something, and you don’t really want it to end that fast. Instead of fading out we’ll stretch that fade. We ask ourselves what would have happened if this record had kept going? We’ve done that with “Strawberry Fields,” “Day Tripper,” “Come Together,” “Tax Man,” “Paperback Writer,” and “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” and others. These things turn into full-on jams. It’s fun because the guys in the band play well enough to actually say something interesting in that extra time. We have something to say beyond copying just those two minutes, so it ends up being satisfying.

  Our core audience is now made up of people who already know us. Some people come because they know our names as the semicelebrities that some of us are. The audience members I’ve enjoyed meeting are the ones who’ve said things to the effect of “I never really liked the Beatles but I love what you guys are doing.” That to me is really interesting.

  I’m so guarding of the Beatles that the people I relate to the most are those who, after this many years, have finally come to see their first Fab Faux show and tell me they didn’t come before because they didn’t want to hear anybody “botch up the Beatles’ music.” That’s just how I would have been. I wouldn’t have gone to a Fab Faux show because I don’t want anybody messing up their songs.

  The generational thing has crossed over from one to another to another to where the parents who were originally Beatles fans bring their kids or even their kids’ kids. And those kids become our audience. It’s really incredible how it’s transcended the generations. The Beatles’ appeal goes beyond music. Obviously, they changed fashion, as well; I mean the kind of haircut I wear today would have gotten me beat up in the days before the Beatles came!

  When Paul McCartney put on his post 9/11 concert—it was called the Concert for New York City—eleven or twelve years ago, I was asked to play bass with him and his band on the songs on which he played piano or guitar. I was very nervous at the first rehearsal because I was playing with Paul. I came up to him and said “I have a confession to make.” I know he has a dislike for Beatles bands—I think he associates them with the ones that are pretending to be the Beatles, that kind of thing. I was trying to let him down gently and tell him that we have this Fab Faux band that honors the later music, the sort of heretofore-thought-of-as-being-impossible-to-perform-live Beatles stuff.

  He specifically asked me, “Do you do ‘Tomorrow Never K
nows?’ ” and I said, “Oh, absolutely.” It turned out that our conversation was filmed; it was featured in a documentary about ten years later called The Love We Make. There’s me telling Paul about the band exactly as I remembered it.

  The great thing is that back when I first heard the Beatles I could have been just a foolish kid who didn’t know what he was hearing. But I was right about this band and that’s a really good feeling. Especially when you’re a little kid making decisions. I’m really glad my investment in them paid off so well, that I still feel the same way. I feel right about my decision, about how much I liked their stuff.

  I CAME FROM a musical family—my parents were both pretty good jazz musicians. The Letterman show is just a really great thing that happened to me as a result of having them as parents and then having the Beatles influencing me throughout my career. I got really established as a studio musician, I got thought of as a guy who could just sort of do anything, and that was pretty great.

  I’m playing all the time with different people. There’s always some stuff going on because New York City is a really great place to be a musician and a for-hire guy. All kinds of things happen here.

  Why Couldn’t They Leave Us Alone?

  by Sigrid Nunez

  I REMEMBER WISHING that they were called something else. Even the story about how they came up with their name, originally inspired by Buddy Holly’s Crickets (for a while they were the Silver Beetles) made me cringe. It wasn’t just the awful pun. The Beatles (like the Crickets) was the kind of name a group of boys would write on the door of their clubhouse. The kind of boys girls my age had lost patience with and were dying to leave behind.