Why Sgt. Pepper emanates art

John Timpane

is the associate editor of The Inquirer Editorial Board

Forty years ago June 1, the Beatles' eighth album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released in England. The next day, it came out here. Ever since, it has been dissected, glorified (Rolling Stone's No. 1 album of all time) and blamed, called a con job, a turning point, a pot-fest, a triumph.

I'll list some things it did and suggest why it may approach art. The album:

Was and remains 13 entertaining tracks spanning a wide diapason of emotions: devotion, grief, fright, irony.

Was a huge technical, musical and conceptual experiment by the world's most prominent band.

Served notice that untrained people could team with technogeeks to break new ground.

Thus, the Beatles helped destroy world elite culture - something they and everybody from Louis Armstrong to Edith Piaf to Pablo Picasso had been doing for most of their century.

Its greatest impact, however, was the imaginative resources it evoked. In doing things untried in pop music, Sgt. Pepper's spurred many musicians, artists, and just-plain-folks to think differently, leading millions to unexpected destinations (even if it's still not clear where exactly).

How did it do all that? Three ways: bricolage, self-subversion and indeterminacy. A mouthful, but you'll see what I mean.

Bricolage. Sergeant and band threw together images, scraps, sounds, historical periods, trying out new combinations without questioning them or their meaning too closely. It sure scared the heck out of me when I (14) first encountered it. That album cover - Robert Fraser's mélange of pop images, Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Weissmuller, Stephen Crane, a hidden Hitler - was funny, puzzling, scary. I never believed Paul was dead - but these ghostly faces, color, black-and-white, past, present. . . .

It was aural bricolage, too - it threw all sorts of soundscapes at you - much less guitar, replaced by an array of large and small orchestral groups. The renowned full-orchestra volcano of "A Day in the Life"; the swirling steam-organ mania of "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"; the clarinet trio of "When I'm Sixty-Four"; the Indian chamber group and Western orchestra in "Within You Without You"; the harp-and-chamber-nonet of "She's Leaving Home"; those in-your-face horns and rock band of "Good Morning Good Morning"; the reverb-drenched whomp of "Lovely Rita"; the baffling musical structure of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," shifting among at least three keys and two time signatures and still managing (I think) to be a song.

Pulling the rug out. This album, so famous for its "social commentary," offers almost no direct commentary anywhere - by indirection, suggestion, sure. But few songs come out and say much about society or life. Art often doesn't. The one directly profound track is George Harrison's "Within You Without You." How different that track sounded (in a collection of very various tracks): the moral clarity of its lyrics, the sinuous melody, and that superb 5/8 waltz in the middle. The words tell us we're hiding behind a "wall of illusion" and urge us - directly, "no one else can make you change" - to accept the oneness of existence, and our oneness with one another.

And then . . . the undermining party laughter!

Such self-subversion is the true M.O. of this album. The band subverts nothing more often than itself. We're told, "It's getting better all the time," yet Lennon's vicious counter-chorus tells us, "It can't get much worse," plus that shocker of a line ("I used to be cruel to my woman / I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved"), sung smilingly. The grief of the abandoned parents in "She's Leaving Home" in an ineffable countermelody in the chorus, Lennon's idea: "What did we do that was wrong? / We didn't know it was wrong."

In "A Little Help From My Friends," an insecure speaker professes satisfaction, but although he refers to a belief in love at first sight, the bridge ("Do you need anybody?") reveals he may still be unfulfilled. So is the love there or not? You might think, from "Lucy," that we're in for an extended acid trip, but "Getting Better" undermines it, sharp-edged, concrete, smacking you.

Even in the sequencing of the tracks, there's subversion, in a series of neck-wrenching transitions: from the sad, pretty "She's Leaving Home" to the what-the-heck-is-this of "Kite" to the meditative "Within You," then (after deflating laughter) to the Edwardian music hall for "Sixty-Four." Voices sing, "Good morning, good morning" with jackhammer relentlessness. Sunny? No, sneering. Again and again, tones undermine tones; rugs get pulled with laughter light and dark.

Indeterminacy. At 14, I was attracted to the sound effects, the opening tune-up by the pit band, the audience noise, the overpumped rock intro, then . . . horns . . . with unexplained audience laughter underneath. Names floated in and out of half-told stories . . . Billy Shears; Lucy and her diamonds; the Hendersons and Henry the Horse; the "man from the motor trade"; Vera, Chuck and Dave; the man for whom there's "nothing to do to save his life / Call his wife in" . . . the man who "blew his mind out in a car." Most elusive was the leader of the band himself, Sgt. Pepper. Because, of course, there was no leader, no band.

I realize now that the names and stories appear to refer to something - a story, a moment, an insight - but let the referent float. Like the faces on the cover, they suggest a unity, but refuse to name it. Yours to complete - if you can. That indeterminacy helps the album approach art.

Did they know they were doing it? Sure. That unexplained laughter in the intro? McCartney's idea. In the June 4 New Yorker, he recalls his little-boy thrill at hearing radio audiences laugh: "You didn't know what made them laugh. Did someone's pants fall down? What was it? That's what we were trying to re-create. Putting in those things that got the imagination going" [italics added]. Harrison, likewise, requested the guffaws puncturing "Within You," and Lennon asked for the barnyard stampede in "Good Morning."

Things that get the imagination going: That's what they were after. They were, moreover, smart enough not to question their own motives too closely.

Sgt. Pepper's thus suggested to musicians and listeners everywhere that (a) they could think, imagine and create for themselves and not wait for some on-high elite culture to do it for them, and (b) there were new things to think; the clearing could widen if you had the playfulness, the patience and the insight.

That's a lot. Some of Sgt. Pepper's sounds like 40 years ago, but much still startles . . . the sinister growl of the tambura in the last verse of "Better" . . . the jarring piano that breaks off the swirling calliope loop of "Kite" . . . the kickin' reprise of the title tune; the crazy piano vamp at the end of "Rita"; McCartney's excellent bass work in "Lucy"; and Ringo Starr's excellent drumming in "Morning" - and his very disturbing racket in the final verse of "Day."

What a track, "Day in the Life." Lennon's tired, slap-backed intro ("I heard the news today, oh boy"), with guitar and jabbing piano . . . then the orchestra's upwelling, out of nowhere, one of the weirdest effects in pop history . . . then that middle bit, pumping piano and McCartney voice right in your nose . . . then far-away Lennon in a cosmic dream . . . back to the verse (uncannily jaunty, double-time) and the closing orchestra climax and piano bang (45 seconds).

I still don't know what the track "means." I don't think I'm supposed to. In seeming meaningful, but holding off closure, it stands for Sgt. Pepper's as a whole. Like the album, "A Day in the Life" did, and still does, leave my imagination ready to open and be opened. Within and without.