Beatles, Op. 15

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

No album in recent years has been issued in the midst of so much 'fuss and foofaraw as "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."…

The title tune, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is the latter: redundant without making a point by the redundancy. Its lyric is vague and cluttered. The rock intellectuals will claim it is full of meaning, of course. If it becomes desperately important for you to find meaning in it, a little grass will help: pot makes everything seem significant.

The second song of the album, A Little Help from My Friends, features more of the meandering, unstructured, free-association do-it-yourself-Rorschachism that Lennon and McCartney too often pass off as lyric writing, "I get by with a little help from my friends, I get high with a little help from my friends …" What are the friends? Roaches? Who knows whether they mean drugs, or actual real-live friends. This lyric isn't profound; it's just indefinite.

But suddenly, in the third track, the album comes to life. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, almost certainly a deliberate evocation of the visual effect of an LSD high, opens in three-four. A melotron—an electronic keyboard instrument that here sounds like a reverberated harpsichord—provides an eerily beautiful accompaniment. The song begins, "Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, a girl with kaleidoscope eyes." In the refrain line, "Lucy in the sky with diamonds," the song switches to four-four time and a flavor of mild hysteria. The song's effect is of genuine beauty and startling shimmering interflowing images.

Yet the next song, Getting Better, slides off the rail again: it tosses in a little protest against the rigidities of conventional education—something no one in his right mind has tried to defend for the last thirty years….

Good Morning, Good Morning is [a] case of the Beatles spraying contempt at the audience. Sound effects are dubbed fore and aft: chickens, dogs, a hunting horn, a chirping bird. This will be seen as profound by the convinced. Actually, it is Lennon and McCartney saying, "We can throw in any kind of garbage, and the kids will buy it."… [The album's best song is] the startling A Day in the Life. By indirection and imagery, this melancholy, disturbing little piece suggests the spiritual deadness of today's world, the dreary and corrupt quality of the life—and it tends to suggest too why the kids (the intelligent ones, anyway) don't trust our political and academic and business leaders. Using a large orchestra, the song sets a dark mood. Then there is tape acceleration—the orchestra speeds up, and its rising pitch evokes the mounting horror of contemporary life.

At first hearing, A Day in the Life is just another of the wearisome dope songs. ("He blew his mind out in a car …" and "I'd love to turn you on.") But, perhaps in spite of itself, it is much more.

There are, then, three, maybe four important songs in this album, a few that are so-so, and a couple that can be considered authentically insignificant. But the Beatles are growing, growing quickly. The level of literacy in their writing has been raised to a startling degree: gone are the frothy pitches to teen-aged libidos. They are trying hard to say important things. At times they are succeeding.

Gene Lees, "Beatles, Op. 15," in High Fidelity (copyright © by ABC Leisure Magazines, Inc.), August, 1967, p. 94.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

I Blew My Cool through 'The New York Times'

Next

Don Heckman