THE BEATlES
from the Beatles (if it
is
their laughter and not the response of tech–
nicians left in as an example of how "straights" might react) that
they are still Beatles, Liverpool boys still there on the far side of a
demanding foreign experience. This characteristic release of them–
selves from history and back to their own proper time and place
occurs with respect to the design of the whole album in a most
poignant way. Right after the reprise of the Sgt. Pepper song, with
no interval and picking up the beat of the Sgt. Pepper theme, an
"extra" song, perhaps the most brilliant ever written by Lennon and
McCartney, breaks out of the theatrical frame and enters "a day in
the life," into the way we live now. It projects a degree of loneliness
not to be managed within the conventions of Sgt. Peppers' Lonely
Hearts Club Band. Released from the controls of Sgt. Pepper, the
song exposes the horrors of more contemporary and less benign con–
trols, and it is from these that the song proposes the necessity of still
further release. It does so in musical sounds meant to convey a "trip"
out, sounds of ascending-airplane velocity and crescendo that occur
right after the first "I'd love to turn you on," at midpoint in the
song, and after the final, plaintive repetition of the line at the end,
when the airplane sounds give way to a sustained orchestral chord
that drifts softly and slowly toward infinity and silence. It is, as I've
suggested, a song of wasteland, and the concluding "I'd love to turn
you on" has as much propriety to the fragmented life that precedes
it in the song and in the whole work as does the "Shantih, Shantih,
Shantih" to the fragments of Eliot's poem. Eliot can be remembered
here for still other reasons: not only because he pays conspicuous
respect to the music hall but because his poems, like the Beatles' songs,
work for a kaleidoscopic effect, for fragmented patterns of sound that
can bring historic masses into juxtaposition only to let them be frac–
tured by other emerging and equally evocative fragments.
Eliot is not among the sixty-two faces and figures, all unnamed
and in some cases probably quite obscure, gathered round the Beatles
on the cover, a pictorial extension of the collage effect which is so
significant to the music. In making the selection, the Beatles were
understandably drawn to figures who promote the idea of other
pos–
sible worlds or who offer literary and cinematic
trips
to exotic places:
Poe, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, along with Marx, Jung, Lawrence of
Arabia and Johnny Weismuller. They are also partial to the kind
