Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Article from 1967
Fantasy took flight in their songs
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 cop-out:
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 FieIds, 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.
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The Beatles Lyrics
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