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RICHARD PO'IRIER
some two thousand years ago, while others are a bad dream of Brooks
and Warren: the "lyrical technique" of "She's Leaving Home"
is
"uninspired narrative, with a dearth of poetic irony." The song is
in fact one of
Sgt.
Pepper's
satirically funniest cuts, though someone
Goldstein's age mightn't as easily see this as someone older. Recogni–
tion of
its
special blend of period sentimentality and elegance of
wit is conferred upon the listener not by his being chronologically
young but by his having once lived with that especially English blend
of tones from Beatrice Lillie or Noel Coward, and their wistful play
about the genteel.
Nearly all the songs on the Sgt. Pepper album and the two singles
released here since then - "All You Need Is Love" and "Baby
You're a Rich Man" - are in fact quite broadly allusive: to the
blues, to jazz hits of the thirties and forties, to classical music, early
rock and roll, previous cuts by the Beatles themselves. Much of the
comedy in these songs and much of their historical resonance, as in
the stately Wagnerian episode in "A Day In the Life," is managed
in this way. Mixing of styles and tones remind the listener that one
kind of feeling about a subject isn't enough and that any single in–
duced feeling must often exist within the context of seemingly contra–
dictory alternatives. Most good groups offer something of this kind,
like the Who, with the brilliant drummer Keith Moon. In songs like
"Don't Look Away" and "So Sad About Us," Moon, working with
the composer-guitarist Pete Townsend, calls forth a complicated re–
sponse in a manner nicely described in
Crawdaddy
by Jon Landau,
one of the best of the reviewers I've read: "Townsend scratches his
chorus, muffles his strings, or lets the chord stand out full depending
on what Moon is doing - the result being a perfectly unified guitar–
drum sound that can't help but make you feel happy even while the
lyrics tell you to feel sad." The Beatles have often in the past worked
for similar mixtures, but they now offer an additional nuance: espe–
cially in later songs, one of the interwoven strands is likely to be an
echo of some familiar, probably cliched musical, verbal or dramatic
formula. These echoes, like the soap-opera background music of "She's
Leaving Home" or the jaunty music-hall tones of "When I'm Sixty–
four," have the enriching effect that allusiveness can have in poetry:
of expanding a situation toward the simultaneous condition of pathos,
because the situation is seen as recurrent and therefore possibly in-
