Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Article from 1967
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 popsong 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?
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The Beatles Lyrics
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