Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Article from 1967
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. Teeny-boppers, 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 teeny-boppers, 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." That
includes not only college students but parents, professors, even business
executives.
Hardy Minority. Considering that the Beatles' trademark is offbeat irreverence,
their effect on mature audiences is oddly amusing. If the teeny-boppers made the
Beatles plaster gods, many adults make them pop prophets, and tend to theorize
solemnly, instead of seriously, about their significance. The Rev. B. Davie
Napier, dean of the chapel at Stanford University, says that "no entity hits as
many sensitive people as these guys do." Napier, who has dwelt in past sermons
on Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby, is convinced that Sgt. Pepper "lays bare
the stark loneliness and terror of these lonely times," and he plans to focus on
the album in an address to freshman students. Atlanta Psychiatrist Tom Leland
says that the Beatles "are speaking in an existential way about the
meaninglessness of actuality." There is even a womb's-eye view. Chicago
Psychiatrist Ner Littner believes that the Beatles' "strong beat seems to awaken
echoes of significant early experiences such as the fetal intra-uterine serenity
that repetitively reverberates to the mother's heartbeat."
Other over-interpreters include the listeners who--like literary critics
dissecting a sonnet--ferret out indirect references in Beatle lyrics and persist
in catching a whiff of drugs in such innocuous songs as Yellow Submarine. And
there is still the hardy minority that insists on viewing the Beatles as the
great put-on of the century.
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The Beatles Lyrics
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