Richard Poirier
lEARNING FROM THE BEATlES
Has anyone been able completely to ignore
Sgt.
Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band?
Probably not. But the very fact of its
immense popularity with people of every age and persuasion is almost
a guarantee of its not receiving the demanding critical attention
that it calls for.
It
isn't enough to say that it is the latest and most
remarkable of the thirteen albums composed and performed by the
Beatles since 1964; some such claim could have been made for each
album when it appeared.
Sgt.
Pepper
isn't in the line of continuous
development; rather, it is an eruption. It is an astounding ac–
complishment for which no one could have been wholly prepared, and
it therefore substantially enlarges and modifies all the work that pre–
ceded it. It sends us back to the earlier Beatles not for confirmation
of the fact that they have always been the best group of their kind.
Rather, we listen for those gestations of genius that have now come
to fruition. And the evidence is there: in each album which, while
being unmistakably theirs, is nonetheless full of exploratory peculiari–
ties not heard on the others; in the way the release even of a single
can set off a new surge of energy in their many imitators; in a self–
delighting inventiveness that has gradually exceeded the sheer physical
capacities even of four such brilliant musicians. The consequent neces–
sity for expanded orchestral and electronic support reached the point
where the Sgt. Pepper album had to be wholly conceived in studio
with as many as forty-eight instruments. Meanwhile, still in their mid–
twenties they have made two movies,
A Hard Day's Night
and
Help!,
which are in spots as good as the Marx brothers, and their most
talented member, John Lennon, has written two books of Joycean
verbal play that suggest why no one is ever in danger of reading too
