brighter version The MessengersFriday, Sep. 22, 1967 TIME
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,837319,00.html
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The cover on a new LP album called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a photomontage of a crowd gathered round a grave. And a curious crowd it is: Marilyn Monroe is there, so are Karl Marx, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Einstein, Lawrence of Arabia, Mae West, Sonny Listen, and eight Beatles.
Eight? Well, four of them, standing around looking like wax dummies, are indeed wax models of the Beatles as most people remember them: nicely brushed long hair, dark suits, faces like sassy choirboys.
The other four Beatles are very much alive: thin, hippie-looking, mustachioed, bedecked in bright, bizarre uniforms. Though their expressions seem subdued, their eyes glint with a new awareness tinged with a little of the old mischief. As for the grave in the foreground: it has THE BEATLES spelled out in flowers trimmed with marijuana plants.
With characteristic self-mockery, the Beatles are proclaiming that they have snuffed out their old selves to make room for the new Beatles incarnate. And there is some truth to it. Without having lost any of the genial anarchism with which they helped revolutionize the life style of young people in Britain, Europe and the U.S., they have moved on to a higher artistic plateau.
Cunning Collages. Rich and secure enough to go on repeating themselves —or to do nothing at all—they have exercised a compulsion for growth, change and experimentation.
Messengers from beyond rock 'n' roll, they are creating the most original, expressive and musically interesting sounds being heard in pop music. They are leading an evolution in which the best of current post-rock sounds are becoming something that pop music has never been before: an art form. "Serious musicians" are listening to them and marking their work as a historic departure in the progress of music—any music.
Ned Rorem, composer of some of the best of today's art songs, says: "They are colleagues of mine, speaking the same language with different accents."
In fact, he adds, the Beatles' haunting composition, She's Leaving Home—one of twelve songs in the Sgt. Pepper album—"is equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote." Conductor Leon ard Bernstein's appreciation is just as high; he cites Schumann. As Musicologist Henry Pleasants says: "The Beatles are where music is right now."
Like all good popular artists, the Beatles have a talent for distilling the moods of their time. Gilbert and Sullivan's frolics limned the pomposities of the Victorian British Empah; Cole Porter's urbanities were wonderful tonics for the hung-over '30s; Rodgers and Hammerstein's ballads reflected the sentient and seriousness of the World War II era. Today the Beatles' cunning collages piece together scraps of tension between the generations, the loneliness of the dislocated '60s, and the bitter sweets of young love in any age. At the same time, their sensitivity to the absurd is sharper than ever.
Cheerful Skewering. By contrast, their early music had exuberance and an occasional oasis of unexpected harmony, but otherwise blended monotonously into the parched badlands of rock. I Want to Hold Your Hand, the Beatles' biggest hit single—it has sold 5,000,000 copies since 1963—was a cliché boy-girl lyric and a simple tune hammered onto the regulation aaba pop-song structure. But the boys found their conventional sound and juvenile verses stultifying. Says Paul McCartney: "We didn't like the idea of people going onstage and being very unreal and doing sickly songs. We felt that people would like it more, and we would like it more, if there was some—reality."
Thus it was that the group's chief lyricist, John Lennon, began tuning in on U.S. Folk Singer Bob Dylan (The Times They Are A-Changin'); it wasn't Dylan's sullen anger about life that Lennon found appealing so much as the striving to "tell it like it is." Gradually, the Beatles' work began to tell it too. Their 1965 song, Nowhere Man ("Doesn't have a point of view, knows not where he's going to") asked: "Isn't he a bit like you and me?" Last year's Paperback Writer cheerfully skewered the craven commercialism of the hack.
An even sharper departure from Big Beat banalities came as Tunesmith
McCartney began exhibiting an unsuspected lyrical gift. In 1965, he crooned the loveliest of his ballads, Yesterday, to the accompaniment of a string octet—a novel and effective backing that gave birth to an entire new genre, baroque-rock. Still another form, raga-rock, had its origins after George Harrison flipped over Indian music, studied with Indian sitar Virtuoso Ravi Shankar, and introduced a brief sitar motif on the 1965 recording Norwegian Wood. Now everybody's making with the sitar.
Copping Out, Plugging In. Meanwhile, the growing sophistication of the Beatles' outlook found expression in a series of sharply observed vignettes of English life. The most poignant was last year's Eleanor Rigby, who
Lives in a dream, waits at the window.
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door . . .
Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear . . .
Darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there . . .
All the lonely people,
where do they all belong?
Fantasy took flight in their songs, from Yellow Submarine's childlike picture of a carefree existence beneath the waves to the vastly more complex and ominous vision in Strawberry Fields Forever of a retreat from uncertainty into a psychedelic copout:
It's getting hard to be someone . . .
It doesn't matter much to me.
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about . . .
Moreover, Strawberry Fields, with its four separate meters, freewheeling modulations and titillating tonal trappings, showed that the Beatles had flowered as musicians. They learned to bend and stretch the pop-song mold, enriched their harmonic palette with modal colors, mixed in cross-rhythms, and pinched the classical devices of composers from Bach to Stockhausen. They supplemented their guitar sound with strings, baroque trumpets, even a calliope. With the help of their engineer, arranger and record producer, George Martin, they plugged into a galaxy of space-age electronic effects, achieved partly through a mixture of tapes run backward and at various speeds.
Psychic Shivers. All the successes of the past two years were a foreshadowing of Sgt. Pepper, which more than anything else dramatizes, note for note, word for word, the brilliance of the new Beatles. In three months, it has sold a staggering 2,500,000 copies—each a guaranteed package of psychic shivers. Loosely strung together on a scheme that plays the younger and older generations off against each other, it sizzles with musical montage, tricky electronics and sleight-of-hand lyrics that range between 1920s ricky-tick and 1960s raga. A Day in the Life, for example, is by all odds the most disturbingly beautiful song the group has ever produced. The narrator's mechanical progress through the day ("Dragged a comb across my head, found my way downstairs") is tensely counterpointed with lapses into reverie and with chilling tableaux of frustration and despair:
I read the news today, oh boy,
About a lucky man who made the grade . . .
He blew his mind out in a car.
He didn't notice that the lights had changed.
A crowd of people stood and stared,
They'd seen his face before;
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords . . . At the end, the refrain, "I'd love to turn you on," leads to a hair-raising chromatic crescendo by a full orchestra and a final blurred chord that is sustained for 40 seconds, like a trance of escape, or perhaps resignation.
It's a long way from "I want to hold your hand" to "I'd love to turn you on." In between, the Beatles kept their cool, even when they were decorated by the Queen. They managed to retain the antic charm that had helped make them the rage of Britain and that sparkled on millions of TV screens in February 1964, when America got its first glimpse of them live on the Ed Sullivan Show. Only once did they show a serious lapse in taste: the cover of their 1966 album Yesterday and Today was a photograph of the four wearing butchers' smocks and laden with chunks of raw meat and the bodies of decapitated dolls. Reaction in the U.S. was so violent that Capitol Records pulled it off the market, explaining that it was a misguided attempt at "pop-art satire."
Pilgrimage to Liverpool. Now that the Beatles' music is growing more complex and challenging, they are losing some younger fans. Teenyboppers, most of whom would rather shriek up than freak out, are turning off at A Day in the Life, doubling back through Strawberry Fields and returning to predictably cute 1964-model Beatles—in the form of such blatantly aping groups as the Monkees.
On the other hand, the youngsters who were the original Beatlemaniacs are themselves older now, and dig the Beatles on a less hysterical level. Two years ago, Kathy Dreyfuss of Los Angeles went on a pilgrimage to the Beatles' home town of Liverpool with her mother. "I was such a screaming fan I couldn't eat or sleep," says Kathy, looking back from the very earnest vantage point of 16. "I realize now I was submerging all my problems in the Beatles. I still like them, but it isn't such a madness. Now their songs are about the things I think about—the world, love, drugs, the way things are."
In exchange for the teenyboppers, the new Beatles have captivated a different and much more responsive audience. "Suddenly," says George Harrison, "we find that all the people who thought they were beyond the Beatles are fans."