Shout! (57 page)

The Beatles had originally meant their answer to
Pet Sounds
and
Freak-Out
to be an album in the most literal sense, each track a snapshot of Liverpool as they remembered it from childhood. But, having completed “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever,” they found their enthusiasm for the idea beginning to wane, and simply turned over those two unmatched pearls to Martin for release as their next single. Afterward they continued recording songs with no theme save the things they were currently doing, the newspapers they chanced to be reading, the London whose language and fashion they continued both to dictate and reflect. The newest London craze was for Victorian militaria, sold in shops with ponderously quaint names like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. So one night, the Beatles met to rehearse a new song, in that same vein of mustachioed whimsy, entitled “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

“It was Paul’s number,” Martin says. “Just an ordinary song, not particularly brilliant as songs go. When we’d finished it, Paul said: ‘Why don’t we make the whole album as though the Pepper band really existed,
as though Sergeant Pepper was doing the record. We can dub in effects and things.’ From that moment, it was as if Pepper had a life of its own.”

That life stemmed at first from simple enjoyment. They relished the idea that the four most famous pop musicians in the world should create mock bandsmen as their alter ego, and present their music in the faux-naif setting of a children’s circus and pantomime. Then, as the sessions progressed, there was born in both musicians and their producer that special life, that sensation comparable only with walking on water, that comes from the certain knowledge that one is making a masterpiece.

Its strength lay in the fact that to all four Beatles the vision was the same. All four were now converted to the LSD drug. Even Paul McCartney, the cautious, the proper, had finally given in. LSD is said to have beneficial effects only if used among close friends. In
Sgt. Pepper
it not only moved the Beatles to brilliant music, it also restored them to a closeness they had nearly lost in the numbness of being adored by the whole world. It would be remembered as their best record, and also their very best performance.

Martin had no idea about the LSD at the time. The Beatles, in deference to their schoolmasterly producer, kept even innocent joints out of his sight, puffing them furtively in the gent’s toilets. Martin was, in any case, fully occupied with trying to reconcile an infinity of new ideas with his by now antiquated and inhibiting four-track recording machine. As the kaleidoscope blossomed and expanded Martin and his engineer, Geoff Emerick, cadged extra sound channels by dubbing one four-track machine over another.

Martin had taught the Beatles much: He learned a little, too, in reckless spontaneity. The song that set the circus atmosphere was “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” a John Lennon composition suggested by the words of an old theater bill he had bought in an antique shop. Martin’s instructions as arranger were to provide “a sort of hurdy gurdy effect.” He did so by means of assorted steam organ sound-effect tapes cut into irregular lengths, thrown on the studio floor, then reedited at random. The result was a dreamlike cacophony, swirling about the Lennonesque big top where “summersets,” rather than somersaults, are executed, and “tonight Henry the Horse dances the waltz.”

Martin, indeed, found his last reserves melting in admiration of a
song like John’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” whose images—of “tangerine trees,” “marmalade skies,” “newspaper taxis,” and “looking-glass ties”—were dazzling enough to a man with his middle-aged senses intact. It did occur to him sometimes that John looked rather strange, if not actually unwell. One night, in the aftermath of an acid trip, he looked so ill that Martin had to take him up onto the studio roof for air. Later, Paul took charge of him, driving him home to Weybridge and keeping him company in the hoped-for restorative of turning on yet again.

For Paul,
Sgt. Pepper
was a chance to experiment still further with the vein of narrative realism he had found in “Eleanor Rigby” and “Penny Lane.” Among the treasures he brought to the table was “Lovely Rita,” a cod love song to a meter maid, America’s more seductive term for a female traffic warden, its tweeness diluted by the background of yearningly ironic “ooohs” and “aaahs” from John. “When I’m Sixty-Four” found Paul looking forward to barely conceivable old age, a Darby-and-Joan vision of “doing the garden,” “renting a cottage in the Isle of Wight,” and grandchildren named “Vera, Chuck, and Dave.”

His most ambitious offering was “She’s Leaving Home,” the story of a young woman nerving herself to leave her dependent parents and elope with “a man in the motor trade.” Introduced by a rippling harp, the song unfolded like one of the new, gritty working-class plays to be seen on black-and-white TV—the young woman stealing away from home at daybreak, “leaving the note that she hoped would say more,” then her mother discovering her loss with a cry of “Daddy! Our baby’s gone!” It was a small—perhaps not so small—masterpiece from a humane and understanding heart, only slightly marred by its composer’s imperiousness when the moment came to cut it. As usual, Paul had produced a “head arrangement” that needed George Martin to turn it into a formal orchestral score. When Martin could not do the job on twenty-four hours’ notice, as Paul wanted, he found himself summarily dropped in favor of an outside arranger.

Paul, at least, had no doubt that every song the Beatles were recording formed a link in the overall concept. “This is our
Freak-Out
,” he kept saying. But Ringo was to have a different recollection. “After we’d done the original Sergeant Pepper song, we dropped the whole military idea. We just went on doing tracks.”

If they were not quite following the original plan, they were working
together with a harmony, unity, and enjoyment they had seldom known before, and never were to again. George, as usual, was given his moment of control when Indian musicians came in to help record his latest sitar epic, “Within You Without You.” Ringo was called from the sidelines (“I learned to play chess during
Sgt. Pepper
,” he would later say) to do a vocal for “With a Little Help from My Friends,” the song destined to be given the crucial place after the overture. The roadies Neil and Mal took an active part, helping to operate the numerous sound effects and even playing backup harmonicas. Martin watched beamingly from the control room, still convinced that all these dazzling pyrotechnics were fueled by no stimulant stronger than tea.

Indeed, the album’s stand-out masterpiece, “A Day in the Life,” represented a John-Paul collaboration like none since early Beatlemania. The idea had been suggested to John by the death in a car crash of Tara Browne, youthful heir to the Guinness fortune and a friend of both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. When he first played Martin an acoustic guitar sketch of the song, with its references to “a lucky man who made the grade and blew his mind out in a car,” Martin already felt the hairs prickle at the back of his neck. Unable to finish the lyric, John turned to Paul for something to fill its middle-eight. Paul provided a scrap of an unfinished song about getting up late and running for a bus, as cheery and everyday as the rest was bleak and apocalyptic. The bridge between the two parts was a long drawn-out cry of “I’d love to turn you on!” that they knew was asking for trouble. But there could be no pulling back now.

The song’s finale, John told Martin, had to be, “a sound building up from nothing to the end of the world.” That was the night Martin faced the forty-one-piece symphony orchestra and announced that what they were to perform had no written score. All he would tell them were the highest and lowest notes to play. In between, it was every man for himself.

The song, in its final form, was taped at Abbey Road amid a gala of pop aristocrats such as Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. The orchestra wore full evening dress and also carnival disguises distributed by the Beatles. One noted violinist played behind a clown’s red nose; another held his bow in a joke gorilla’s paw. Studio Two thronged with peacock clothes, Eastern robes, abundant refreshments, and exotically tinted smoke. The four Beatles sat behind music stands playing trumpets, with
Brian leaning on a chair back among them. Their mustaches had aged them: It was Brian, in this last photograph with them, who suddenly looked like a boy.

As with every masterpiece, the hardest part was letting go. They had tailed as well as topped the album with
Sgt. Pepper
’s theme song, adding a reprise of the “Lovely Rita” backing vocal that left John’s grin floating in the air like a bespectacled Cheshire cat’s. Recognizing that “A Day in the Life” was something quite apart from even the most recherché of the other tracks, they had turned it into a devastating afterthought, followed by a multiple crash of piano chords—like the totaling of Tara Browne’s car—that would slam the collection shut like a sarcophagus. They had worked from 7:00
A.M.
to 3:00
P.M.
simply to produce a brief snatch of gibberish to be heard from the record’s normally mute play-out groove. As they stood around the microphone, a drug-dazzled Ringo suddenly remarked, “I think I’m going to fall over,” and toppled forward, to be caught like a doll in Mal Evans’s arms. The final touch was a note at 20,000 hertz frequency, audible only to the fine-tuned hearing of dogs.

The album sleeve, as much as its music, perfectly evoked the hour of its coming. The pop artist Peter Blake was commissioned to design a frontispiece as up-to-the-minute as its four subjects were, and as heedless of convention or expense. The Beatles, holding bandsmen’s instruments and dressed in satin uniforms, pink, blue, yellow, and scarlet, stood mock solemn behind their own name spelled in flowers, set about by a collage of figures representing their numerous heroes. The group included Bob Dylan, Karl Marx, Laurel and Hardy, Aleister Crowley, Marlon Brando, Diana Dors, W. C. Fields—every fashionable face from the pantheon of Pop Art pseudo-worship. There were also private jokes, such as the Beatles’ own ludicrous wax effigies from Madame Tussaud’s, a stray Buddha, and a doll with a sign reading
WELCOME ROLLING STONES.
In one corner, next to Aubrey Beardsley, above Sonny Liston’s head, the face of Stu Sutcliffe, the Beatle who was lost, peered out from a snapshot fragment of some long-forgotten Hamburg night.

EMI initially rejected the design, fearing that those among the assembly who were still alive would object to their likenesses being used in this way. The Beatles appealed directly to the company’s chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, who informally consulted two of the country’s most eminent lawyers, Lord Goodman and Lord Shawcross. “Both Shawcross
and Goodman said the same,” Sir Joseph recalled. “‘Don’t touch it,’ they said.
‘Everyone
will sue.’”

“Paul McCartney talked me into allowing it. ‘Ah, everyone’ll love it,’ he said. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but take Gandhi out. We need the Indian market. If we show Gandhi standing around with Sonny Liston and Diana Dors, they’ll never forgive us in India.’ So the Beatles agreed to take Gandhi out.”

EMI further stipulated that the Beatles should indemnify them to the tune of some twenty million pounds against possible legal trouble. In addition, Brian had to undertake to get clearances from as many of the sixty-two celebrities as possible. Wendy Hanson, his former assistant, was brought back specially to undertake this marathon of the transatlantic telephone. As she later remembered, most of them were only too flattered and delighted to be asked.

Sgt. Pepper
had taken four months and cost twenty-five thousand pounds—an unheard-of sum in those days, more than twenty times the cost of the Beatles’ debut album. Its packaging also was something altogether new, reflecting that age of conspicuous consumption. Instead of the usual single envelope, it came in a double segment that opened like a book. On the back, replacing the traditional leaden sleeve notes, the lyrics of every song were printed in full. Inside with the record was a sheet of cutout novelties, figments of the Beatles’ own comic-book childhood transformed to the last, or next, word in Pop Art—a jovial Victorian army sergeant picture card, a paper mustache, two badges, and a set of NCO’s stripes.

One other feature of the cover passed unnoticed by EMI’s lawyers, nor was it picked up by the keen eye of Lord Shawcross or Lord Goodman. In the foreground of the garden where Sergeant Pepper’s band and their companions stood grew a flourishing row of what looked like marijuana plants.

The landmark events in each era, those strokes of history so monumental that people recall for ever afterward exactly where they were and what they were doing at the time, are generally tragedies. The outbreaks of world wars, the passings of sovereigns or statesmen, the from-nowhere annihilations of John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, and Diana, Princess of Wales, the wanton mass slaughter of 9/11: Such have been the moments that, for billions across the globe for their remaining life
span, recall exactly the circumstances they were in, the clothes they wore, the faces that looked disbelievingly into theirs on first hearing the news.

Only the blessed sixties generation have such a moment to remember not marked by open-mouthed horror and incredulity but open-mouthed delight and exaltation: the moment in June 1967 when they first listened to the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. The memory in this case is uniform to all: how they rushed to their record store to buy it; how Peter Blake’s cover dazzled and delighted them as no album design ever had before; how they first opened its booklike flap and drew out the disk with its shiny virgin grooves and green Parlophone label; how at the first play they simply couldn’t believe it, and had to play it again and again and again.

Musically its conquest was total. It equally entranced the most avant-garde and most cautious, both fan and foe alike. The wildest acid freak, listening in his mental garret to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” could not doubt that his mind had been blown to undreamed realms of psychedelic fancy. Nervous old ladies, listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” in their front parlors, would never be frightened of pop music again. Sergeant Pepper’s cabaret show, with its twanging mystery and workaday humor, its uppercut drive and insinuating charm, invited the elderly as well as the young, the innocent no less than the pretentiously wise. On drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the most rigorous cultural commentator of his age, and on Mark Lewisohn, an eight-year-old in Kenton, Middlesex, the effect was the same. Tynan called
Sgt. Pepper
a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization. Mark Lewisohn stood in the garden as it played, shaking his head wildly while trying not to dislodge the cardboard mustache clenched under his nose.