taylor-mayed's Full Review: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatl...
This is the big one. Everyone but everyone knows of Sergeant Pepper. At the very least they know he/it is something to do with The Beatles – an album, a single, a film or something like that. Ask anybody what the first thing that comes into their heads when you mention The Beatles is, and it’s more than likely that “Sergeant Pepper” will be the answer.
For me, this album is not just one of the very best ever recorded and certainly the pinnacle of The Beatles career, it is a piece of cultural iconography that will probably be one of the major things the 1960s are remembered for in decades to come. There are only four or five recording artists in history to have made such an impact as this, and only The Beatles have ever done so when they had already been established major stars for the best part of five years.
But enough of the glorification – what about the nitty gritty, the songs of the album? It begins with the scene setting eponymous “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hears Club Band”, which establishes the central idea of the album, that this is not The Beatles but another – fictional – band, played by The Beatles. It’s a nice, pacey McCartney song that gives the album a strong start and has a catchy beat.
The end of the song introduces “the one and only Billy Shears”, who is in fact of course the one and only Ringo Starr, whose plodding lead vocal is perhaps the most distinctive of all The Beatles’ voices. This always helps to make the tracks he sings stand out from the rest, and “With a Little Help From My Friends” is no exception. A genuine Lennon/McCartney collaboration, “With a Little Help From My Friends” is an upbeat, uplifting song that carries the listener along with it and has passed into popular culture as one of the legendary pantheon of Beatles tracks.
After the straight-forward sing-a-long antics of “With a Little Help…” comes Lennon’s legendary “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, showing the great strength in depth that this album has when one such iconic track is followed immediately by another of equal status in musical history. To be brutally honest, I have never been a huge fan of Lennon’s more psychedelic moments, of which “Lucy…” is obviously one. However, despite the nonsense lyric, the individuality of the track makes it stand out in the memories of millions.
“Lucy…” is of course often criticised for being about LSD, although whether this is true or not is open to question. Cynthia Lennon has always claimed that John was inspired to write the song when he saw a picture his son Julian had drawn of his friend Lucy, in the sky with some diamonds. Possibly this inspired Lennon to write a song about LSD using those words, or perhaps he simply wrote a song about the picture that has been misconstrued.
The fourth track is another Paul McCartney composition, “Getting Better”, which at first listen appears to be another optimistic song about the main character’s life improving. However, when the lyric goes on to describe wife beating, which does rather jolt against the tone of what could otherwise be a happy song. It also contains the line “the teachers who taught me weren’t cool” when the character is describing his school days, which more than any other line in the whole album, possibly the whole of The Beatles’ career, sounds both odd and rather dated.
“Fixing a Hole” is another very different song, given a unique sound by the use of a harpsichord in the introduction especially. Like nearly all of the songs on this album is has a pleasing, catchy tune and is a very nice song to listen to, and is almost, but not quite, a throwback to The Beatles earlier days as a simple pop group. It also contains a lot of guitar work that could almost fool you into thinking that George Harrison was a proper lead guitarist in the style of other bands.
Following in the tradition of “Yesterday” and “Eleanor Rigby”, “She’s Leaving Home” sees Paul McCartney singing a moving ballad backed by strings. This time, the tale of woe concerns a daughter leaving home secretly, to the confusion and devastation of her parents who cannot understand what they have done wrong.
After the relative sensibility of three McCartney tracks, the album produced another piece of John Lennon weirdness with “Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite!” The whole tone and style of this song sounds somewhat otherworldly, and from this album you could get the idea that John Lennon had a somewhat warped view of the world at the time. Which, given the amount of drugs that he was taking, is very probably true.
George Harrison is probably one of the most frustrating of all The Beatles. He wrote some of their all-time classic songs, such as “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”, he had by far the best solo career of the three survivors during the 1980s and on the whole should have been at least the equal of Lennon and McCartney in terms of reputation. The reason he isn’t is because he would come out with rubbish like “Within You Without You”, a frankly poor song that blots the copybook of the entire album.
Of course, if you like Eastern-influenced music then you may very well find this track interesting and enjoyable. However, if like me you are more entrenched with Western pop music, you will probably just find it jarring and frankly irritating. This album could hardly be said to be filled with tracks that all sounds the same, indeed it goes off in all kinds of different musical directions, but somehow “Within You Without You” still manages to sound grossly out of place.
Luckily, Paul McCartney comes to the rescue with yet another song that has sunk deeply into popular culture, the plodding but pleasant “When I’m Sixty-Four”. This is another song that you can imagine Ringo Starr singing well, however McCartney elects to sing it himself and a good job he does of it too, creating a classic modern folk song. Or should that be old folks’ song?
“Lovely Rita”, Paul McCartney’s ode to a female traffic warden, would seem to be an odd choice of subject for a song but, as with just about everything else they ever attempted, The Beatles don’t just pull it off, they pull it off with style and flair. “Good Morning Good Morning” is a John Lennon song that actually makes some kind of sense in a bizarre way.
The first track is reprised in a slightly different way, faster and more upbeat with a surprisingly modern feel to it, ending the concert by Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band and making way for The Beatles as themselves to add an epilogue to the album – and what an epilogue.
“A Day in the Life” is The Beatles’ own equivalent of “Bohemian Rhapsody” and, while it never quite scales the same heights as that other monolith of musical history, just hearing the opening few seconds sends shivers of anticipation down the spine knowing that you are about to hear something truly epic. The song starts off quite simply and then gradually gets bigger and bigger and bigger, building up to those thunderous orchestral crescendos that provide the breaks between the separate sections of the song.
This is a true Lennon/McCartney collaboration, although rather than sitting down and penning the song together they each took a song they were writing and merged the two together to form this titanic whole. As with “Bohemian Rhapsody”, the fact that the lyric isn’t straightforward to understand strengthens rather than undermines the song (as it sometimes does with Lennon’s other confusing compositions). It was wise that they placed “A Day in the Life” at the very end of the album, as there is no way that any tracks following it could have hoped to live up to it. As it is, the song is followed by a babble of nonsense formed by recording the bands’ voices speaking and cutting up and randomly re-assembling the tape, a slightly odd idea but when they’ve just made such a legendary record I suppose they can do what the hell they like.
So then, how do you sum up an album such as “Sergeant Pepper…”? In my opinion it is certainly the best thing that The Beatles ever recorded in terms of a complete album – beating “Revolver” by a country mile any day of the week. It doesn’t have some of their finest songs, but it does have a consistency of excellence – let down only by “Within You Without You” – that makes it deserve its legendary status.
It shows the one drawback of the “One” compilation album, that none of the tracks from this album are included on it, although “Penny Lane” did emerge from the “Sergeant Pepper…” sessions, it was a non-album single along with “Strawberry Fields Forever”, also from these sessions. However, the fact is that “Sergeant Pepper…” almost sounds like a greatest hits album on its own, and that is its real strength.
One of the most famous and influential albums ever recorded, Sgt. Pepper s Lonely Hearts Club Bandhad a huge impact on the music world, signaling the ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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