First Monday with Characters: Tribute to Sgt. Pepper

Released 48 years ago today…

[Editor’s Note: In a departure from our usual “First Monday” column, today some of our characters express their personal tribute to the Beatles album that Time magazine declared “a historic departure in the progress of music’.” –Wikipedia]

On the scene in Chicago

By Bob Boldt

Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on June First, 1967, at the advent of the counterculture’s Summer of Love. I was working as a cameraman/reporter for WFLD-TV in Chicago and was in a unique position to document many of the official and unofficial cultural happenings of that year. It is hard for contemporaries to appreciate a time when a video recorder was not at the ready, as close as any portable telephone or other hand-held device. I literally had a 16mm sound camera with all the film I needed at the ready 24/7.

    Earlier I had documented the historic First Chicago Be-In at Lincoln Park on Mother’s Day [watch the video (8:32)]. The sense of real and drug-induced euphoria in both the counterculture and the general population was palpable. Some hostility was expressed by the larger culture, but mostly those who embraced the new paradigm were met with confused amusement. The War in Vietnam was still raging but Hippie had not yet been radicalized into YIPPIE (Youth International Party). The hub of activity for those eager to experience the new lifestyle was the Old Town area of Chicago. It was a cluster of boutiques, head shops, clubs, restaurants, and crash pads radiating out from the intersection of North Avenue and Wells Street on the Near North Side. The home of the famous Second City Cabaret was at 1616 N. Wells.

    I remember the June night when I first heard the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album was selling out all week and by the weekend everyone in town (Old Town) had their own copy. In those days the voluntary frugality embraced by the most devout hippie did not extend to drugs or a kick-ass sound system. The prevailing motto was “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.” [–Freewheelin’ Franklin]
    I remember the first Saturday night after the album was released, walking around the streets and back alleys of Old Town being entertained by the continuous sounds coming from the open windows of pads up and down the length and breadth of the area. It was a veritable cacophony serenade of Sergeant Pepper tracks. Every ear was tuned and every mind was being blown by the most amazing musical experience anyone had ever had since…since…the Beatles’ last album, Revolver.
    I was experiencing the impact of what we would now call a giant meme being mainlined directly into the bloodstream of the culture. The music didn’t just have a profound impact on its intended demographic. It was immediately absorbed by the larger culture as well. The success of the album with straight music lovers and critics alike was due in no small part to the amazing innovations that arose from the Beatles’ collaboration with their producer, George Martin, whose innovative engineering included a host of state-of-the-art sound rendering and processing techniques, along with a 40-piece orchestra. Martin might well be considered the fifth Beatle because of his creative input on the album.

    The piece also signaled the advent of the themed album, in which a running narrative or theme lasted the complete length of the LP record. Albums like this and extended tracks on other LPs encouraged the emerging Head Radio shows that devoted long stretches of air time to commercial-free extended cuts from rock albums.

    Shortly after leaving my job with WFLD-TV, I took a position as film producer for Aaron Russo’s startup psychedelic night club, The Electric Theater. I designed 16mm, 360-degree cycloramic projections timed to rock music. I did a set based on the Sgt. Pepper album culminating with the last track, “A Day in the Life,” to which I set my original film compositions. It was one of the really important artistic achievements of my life. I wish I had a video of it, although it had to be experienced “in the round” to be fully appreciated. Later I edited the footage I shot at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention to excerpts from the album:

    Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is inextricably linked to so many amazing events, experiences, and relationships in my life that I feel as if I truly own it. Or does it own me?

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Attention!

By Jim Rix

Until the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band I had not paid much attention to the music of the Beatles. While “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Beatles first big hit to come to America (1964), was a catchy tune, the “love” song theme of it and early Beatles tunes caused me to view this group as nothing more than a flash in the pan. Then in 1967, after reading Time Magazine’s cover story on Sgt. Pepper, I purchased the album. To say I was blown away after listening to it would be an understatement. The maturity of their music was staggering. The only tune on the album close to being a love song is “Lovely Rita,” and who wouldn’t want to meet this meter maid after listening to it?

    Two of the songs were about their experiences with drugs: “With a Little Help from My Friends” (Doobies) and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (LSD). But anyone who has done LSD might think “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” was the result of an acid trip while at a circus. But Wikipedia tells us that “the inspiration to write the song was a 19th-century circus poster for Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal, Rochdale, that John Lennon purchased in an antique shop on 31 January 1967.” Up until this album I was under the impression that rock ’n roll consisted of guitars and drums, but this album put an end to that misperception.
    In George Harrison’s contribution, “Within You Without You,” he brilliantly plays the sitar. And then there’s “She’s Leaving Home,” in which there is not a hint of a guitar or a drum. This song has been acclaimed as one of the best songs ever written and I would go further to say I would not disagree with anyone who claims that it is in fact the best song ever written.
    The best way to listen to this album is with quality headphones. That way you will fully appreciate the Beatles’ creativity. I particularly like the use of stereo separation. In “A Day in the Life” (a composite of two songs independently written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney), listen to John drift from right to left as he sings his tune. Also listen for the alarm clock that separates Lennon’s song from McCartney’s. My hearing must be failing because I don’t hear the alarm clock these days but I know it’s there.
    After listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I went out and purchased the dozen or so previously released Beatles albums in one fell swoop and also enjoyed all of them immensely. Not only did I become a lifelong fan of the Beatles in particular, but also of rock ’n roll in general.

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The Beatles’ Bible^*

By Kyle Garza

My favorite Beatles song doesn’t come from the Sgt. Pepper album, but from the double-disc album known as The White Album. The song is “Rocky Raccoon,” and here’s a haiku from it:

O Rocky Raccoon,
Can Gideon really help
Mend a broken heart?

_______________
* [Editor’s Note: There is actually a website named The Beatles Bible.]

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Hip

By Vic Midyett

I have no idea if I heard Sgt. Pepper the very month it came out. I was in a boarding school in Nasik, India (not far from Bombay - now call Mumbai), 600 miles from my parents. There was an Indian army training base nearby, although I never saw it. It must have been at least a couple of miles away, but they had very large speakers and every Friday night they played nothing but Beatles. In hindsight, this was quite a “hip” army base, as I had never heard of the Beatles before that. Imagine. Indian society being the first to introduce me to the Beatles! It was sure a fun period!

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Peace, brother

By Ed Rogers

I guess we could each provide a short contribution to the Sgt. Pepper celebration. Or we could turn up the volume, smoke a big fat joint, and think about what we would write if we could only remember why we wanted to write anything in the first place. Peace my brother! Up the Revolution!
    Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys locked himself in his room after hearing Sgt. Pepper. He said there was nothing left to write. That may not be the quote but you should be able to google it, however. [According to Pimplomat:

Sgt. Pepper broke Brian Wilson’s heart. He had a nervous breakdown after hearing the seminal album in 1967. Because of this, he didn’t complete the Beach Boys’ album Smile until 2004.
    The specific song that affected Wilson so much was “A Day in the Life,” the last song on Sgt. Pepper. Perhaps it was that song’s final E-major chord that suffocated his creativity. That chord is a heavy door shutting on one of the Beatles’ most lyrically depressing albums.
    Below the uplifting music, lyrics address loneliness, leaving, emptiness, and holes (fixing and filling them). And it’s this music/lyric dichotomy that is Sgt. Pepper’s greatest strength. The album has character. It has emotions. It has good and bad days.]

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1996 US jukebox single of “When I’m Sixty-Four,”
as the B-side to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”

Well, I’m 64⁺

By Morris Dean

I was 24 when the Sgt. Pepper album came out, and the 40 years until I was 64 seemed a very long time. But the song “When I’m Sixty-Four” was one of my favorites right off. The song asked whether [my wife] would “still need me...still feed me / When I’m sixty-four.” It said we could still, on Sunday mornings, be “doing the garden, digging the weeds,” and asked, “Who could ask for more?” Indeed, and that’s just the way it was yesterday, and on many other days. It doesn’t have to be Sunday.

    Maybe it was because of George Martin, whom Bob Boldt cites, but a distinctive feature of Beatles music is that you can actually hear the words. So many rock ’n roll lyrics are illegible when it comes to the lyrics, drowned out by guitars and drums and often not well articulated in the first place. But Lennon and McCartney could articulate superbly, and George Martin or somebody made sure the words came through on the track. (Not that all – or even most – of the Beatles’ music is “rock ’n roll.”)
    Around 1972, after Yoko Ono’s arrival and the Beatles split, I purchased the complete set of Beatles albums on open-reel tape, which I still have today.

Lovely Rita seems lonely sitting there between “Sixty-Four” and “Good Morning.”

Lovely Rita, meter maid, in my heart I’ve gotcha,
after I bought the tapes, I never lived withoutcha.
    I’ve heard and sung your song
    so many times, I’ve long
ago remembered nearly everything aboutcha.

    Was lovely Rita a particular person? Wikipedia tells us:

According to some sources, the song originates from when a female traffic warden named Meta Davies issued a parking ticket to McCartney outside Abbey Road Studios. Instead of becoming angry, he accepted it with good grace and expressed his feelings in song. When asked why he had called her “Rita,” McCartney replied, “Well, she looked like a Rita to me.”

    Was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” really about drugs? Even though I never had any experience with LSD, I can believe it – the song’s images so in accord with popular reports from those who did (“tangerine trees and marmalade skies,” “cellophane flowers of yellow and green,” “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes”). But “Lennon insisted that it was derived from a pastel drawing by his four-year-old son Julian,” according to Wikipedia. Anyway, the anthropologists who discovered the fossil Australopithecus 288-1 in 1974 named her Lucy because the song “was being played loudly and repeatedly on a tape recorder in the camp” at Hadar in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia.
    I had paid attention to the Beatles from the first moment I heard them, and the first thing I heard could have been “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Listening to that song lifted my spirits to face my next class in the otherwise uninspiring fall term of my senior year in college. (The song came out in October 1963.)
    Despite the many references to drugs in the Sgt. Pepper album, for me the euphoria of Beatles music, and of Sgt. Pepper in particular, was musical. If drugs helped the Beatles write the music, then so be it. And it seems they did; the Wikipedia article on the album quotes Paul McCartney:

When [Martin] was doing his TV programme on Pepper...he asked me, “Do you know what caused Pepper?” I said, “In one word, George, drugs. Pot.” And George said, “No, no. But you weren’t on it all the time.” “Yes, we were.” Sgt. Pepper was a drug album.

    Haven’t we all, many times, gotten by with “A Little Help from [our] Friends”? (Maybe even gotten high as well? – Are you reading this, Ed?) A friend – well, a colleague at work anyway – gave me a joint to smoke, but it didn’t make me any higher than I already naturally was. The smoke made my eyes burn, though.
    The older (and I hope wiser) I get, the more I identify with these lines from “Fixing a Hole”:

And it really doesn’t matter if
I’m wrong I’m right
Where I belong I’m right
Where I belong

    The first episode of NBC’s new crime drama Aquarius, with David Duchovny, takes place in 1967 with the drama swirling around the activities of a character named Charles Manson, a wannabe musician whose “vision” is that he will become more popular than the Beatles....

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt, Jim Rix, Morris Dean