Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Article from 1967
Victorian Shadows
The Beatles keep in touch constantly, bounding in and
out of each other's homes like members of a single large family--which, in a
sense, they are. Their friendship is an extraordinarily intimate and empathetic
bond. When all four are together, even close friends like Mick Jagger of the
Rolling Stones sense invisible barriers thrown up between themselves and
outsiders. "We're still our own best friends," each says.
With good reason. Not only are they welded together by the sheer fact of being
the Beatles, but they also share a common lower-middle-class background in the
sooty, Victorian shadows of Liverpool. Paul, the son of a cotton salesman, and
John, who was raised by an aunt after his father deserted the family, were
playing together as early as 1955. George, whose father was a bus driver, joined
them in 1958. Two years later they met Ringo (born Richard Starkey), a docker's
son. Their families were dubious about musical careers. "If Paul had listened to
me," says Jim McCartney wryly, "he would have been a teacher." But the boys
persisted. Besides the musical satisfaction, playing in a band was a way to be
somebody especially with the local girls-to make some money and exert their
nonconformity. And after they linked up with Brian Epstein, the elegant would-be
actor and son of a wealthy Liverpool furniture retailer, it was a way to get out
of Liverpool. Epstein shrewdly piloted their career until his death last month
at 32 TIME, Sept. 8).
So tightly knit is the quartet that a leading idea for their next movie is to
present them as separate manifestations of a single person. They constitute a
four-way plug-in personality, each sparking the circuit in his own way. Paul
outgoing and talkative, spreads a sheen of charm; he is the smoother-over, the
explainer, as pleasingly facile at life as he is at composing melodies. George,
once the least visible of the group, now focuses his energies on Indian music
and philosophy; an occasional contributor to the Beatle songbook, he is the most
accomplished instrumentalist of the lot (he has always played lead guitar).
Ringo, a thoroughly unpretentious fellow, is also the most innately comic
temperament; he is the catalyst, and also the deflator, of the crew. Most
mysterious of all--and possibly most important--is John, the creative
mainspring, who has lately grown strangely brooding and withdrawn; he is more
thoughtful and tough-minded than the others, reads voraciously. His telephone is
usually answered by a tape-recorded voice, asking the caller to leave a message.
But Lennon rarely returns calls, instead, so the story goes, plays the tapes
over and over with maniacal glee.
Recipe for Orchestra. Since the Beatles gave up touring a year ago, each has had
more freedom to tackle individual pursuits. John has a major acting assignment
in the forthcoming Richard Lester film called How I Won the War; Paul tried his
hand at a movie sound track and wrote a fine score for the current release, The
Family Way. But their most rewarding activity is still as a group--making
records.
They have transformed themselves from a "live" performing team to an
experimental laboratory group, and they have staked out the recording studio as
their own electronic rumpus room. To achieve the weird effects on Sgt. Pepper,
they spent as much as 20 hours on a song, often working through the night. The
startling crescendo in A Day in the Life illustrates their bold, erratic, but
strikingly successful method. Says Paul: "Once we'd written the main bit of the
music, we thought, now look, there's a little gap there; and we said oh, how
about an orchestra? Yes, that'll be nice. And if we do have an orchestra, are we
going to write them a pseudoclassical thing, which has been done better by
people who know how to make it sound like that--or are we going to do it like we
write songs? Take a guess and use instinct. So we said, right, what we'll do to
save all the arranging, we'll take the whole orchestra as one instrument. And we
just wrote it down like a cooking recipe: 24 bars; on the ninth bar, the
orchestra will take off, and it will go from its lowest note to its highest
note."
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The Beatles Lyrics
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