THE BEATlES
541.
eyes." Of course the images could come as easily from Edward Lear
as from the experience of drugs, and Lennon has claimed that the
title of the song is not an anagram for LSD but was taken from a
drawing his son did at school. Lennon, the author of two books of
Joycean punning, knows to the point of hilarity that one meaning
denies the presence of another, which it has hidden inside, only to
all strangers and the police. Still his reticence is obviously a form of
the truth. The Beatles won't be reduced to drugs when they mean,
intend and enact so much more. "Acid," Harrison told the Los
Angeles
Free Press
in August, "is not the answer, definitely not the
answer. It's enabled people to see a little bit more, but when you
really get hip, you don't need it." Later, to Hunter Davies of the
London
Sunday Times,
McCartney announced that they'd given up
drugs. "It was an experience we went through and now it's over we
don't need it any more. We think we're finding other ways of getting
there." In this effort they're apparently being helped by Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, the Indian founder of the International Meditation
Society, though even on the way to their initiation in Bangor, North
Wales, Lennon wondered
if
the experience wasn't simply going to be
another version of what they already knew: "You know, like some
are EMI and some Decca, but it's really still records."
The notion that we "picture" ourselves much of the time any–
way without even willing it, that we see ourselves and the world in
exotic images usually invented by someone else, is suggested through–
out the Sgt. Pepper album, even on the cover, with its clustered
photographs of world-shaping "stars" of all kinds. In "A Day in the
Life," the last song and a work of great power and historical grasp,
the hapless man whose role is sung by McCartney wants to "turn on"
himself and his lover - maybe us too - as a relief from the multiple
controls exerted over life and the imagination by various and com–
peting media. The sad little "oh boy" interjected by McCartney's
sweet, vulnerable voice into orchestral movements of intimidating,
sometimes portentous momentum, expresses wonderfully how the vic–
tim is further confounded by the fact that these controls often impose
themselves under the guise of entertainment:
I read the news today oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
