544
RICHARD POIRIER
The Sgt. Pepper album and the singles released here just before
and after it - "Penny Lane," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "All You
Need Is Love" and "Baby You're a Rich Man" - constitute the
Beatles' most audacious musical effort so far, works of such achieved
ambitiousness as to give an entirely new retrospective shape to their
whole career. Nothing less is being claimed by these songs than that
the Beatles now exist not merely as a phenomenon of entertainment
but as a force of historical consequence. They have placed themselves
within a musical, social and historical environment more monumental
in its surroundings and more significantly populated than was the
environment of any of their early songs. Listening to the Sgt. Pepper
album one thinks not simply of the history of popular music but
of the history of this century. It doesn't matter that some of the songs
were composed before it occurred to the Beatles to use the motif of
Sgt. Pepper, with its historical overtones; the songs emanated from
some inwardly felt coherence that awaited a merely explicit design,
and they would ask to be heard together even without the design.
. Under the aegis of an old-time concert given by the type of
music-hall band with which Lennon's father, Alfred, claims to have
been associated, the songs, directly or by chance images, offer some–
thing like a review of contemporary English life, saved from folksong
generality by having each song resemble a dramatic monologue. The
review begins with the Sgt. Pepper theme song, followed immediately
by "A Little Help From My Friends": Ringo, helped by the other
Beatles, will, as I've already mentioned, try not to sing out of "key,"
try, that is, to fit into a style still heard in England but very much out
of date. Between this and the reprise of Sgt. Pepper, which would be
the natural end of the album, are ten songs, and while some are
period pieces, about hangovers from the past, as is the band itself,
no effort is made at any sort of historical chronology. Their arrange–
ment is apparently haphazard, suggesting how the hippie and the
historically pretentious, the genteel and the mod, the impoverished
and the exotic, the Indian influence and the influence of technology
are inextricably entangled into what is England. As I probably
shouldn't say again, the Beatles never for long wholly submerge them–
selves in any form or style, so that at the end of the Indian, medita–
tive sonorities of "Within You, Without You" the burst of laughter
can be taken to mean - look, we have come through, an assurance
