It Was 40 Years Ago Today

This week is the fortieth anniversary of the release of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, one of the epochal albums in the history of popular music. Perhaps no other record album has been written about, discussed, or pored over more than this one. A few years ago Rolling Stone magazine named it the greatest album of all time.

After forty years, there is bound be to some reassessment. Over the past few days I've read a few essays, one by Aimee Mann in the New York Times, another in Salon, questioning the accolades this album has received. Mann's article is a personal one, describing her love of the album as a young girl, but her inability to listen to it now, comparing it to a first love. David Marchese's article in Salon expresses a puzzlement over its continued reputation as somehow representative of the 1960s, and considers it overhyped. Then there's Jim DeRogatis, a Chicago rock critic, who a few years ago wrote an essay that dismisses the album entirely, summed up by these words: "It sucks dogs royally."

So, is Sgt. Pepper overrated? The Beatles are my favorite musical group of all time, regardless of genre, and in the face of such reflection I'm forced to step back and do some reassessing of my own. I've never consider Sgt. Pepper their best album, I suppose Abbey Road would be my choice if I had to make one, but I've never harbored hostile feelings about the 1967 release that turned the rock music world on its ear. To be honest, the album is a bit more than the sum of its parts. If you take it track by track, as DeRogatis does, it is wanting. Getting Better, Fixing a Hole, and Good Morning Good Morning are probably in the lower third of all Beatles' songs. George Harrison, fully into his Indian music phase, takes up five minutes of wasted space with Within You, Without You, which frankly isn't all that interesting.

With a Little Help From My Friends and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds are, to my mind, underproduced, as evident by the superior cover versions by Joe Cocker and Elton John, respectively. The title song and its reprise, Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, and When I'm Sixty-Four are pleasant diversions, but not earth-shattering.

That leaves two genuine classics: She's Leaving Home and A Day in the Life. She's Leaving Home is dismissed by DeRogatis as syrupy nonsense, and in the cold light of forty years later, the lyrics do seem a bit facile. But The Beatles were creatures of their time and class. Men born in the 40s, they knew life in England as it once was. Many of their songs are influenced by music hall and other remnants of the war era. Today, a line like "Fun is the one thing money can't buy" seems so simplistic as to be moronic, but I've always thought of the song as the flip side of the hippie rebellion, told from the point of view of two drab, middle-class English people who wake up to find their daughter has split, maybe to go wear flowers in her hair. But beyond the lyrics, I love the orchestration of this song. Following Eleanor Rigby, it's another example of how they used the string quartet so brilliantly.

Every critic who knocks this record can't say anything bad about A Day in the Life, one of the Beatles' greatest creations, so I find no need to defend it here.

Was Sgt. Pepper a concept album? I don't think so. If it had included Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, as it was supposed to, it would have been clearer that this was a record about nostalgia. Was this record representative of its time period? Not really. There's no songs about Vietnam, or overt drug use (though most assume Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds is about LSD), and the musical style seems doggedly retro. Is it the greatest rock album of all time? No, but I'd say it's in the top twenty.

Aimee Mann makes a good point when she says she can't listen to it anymore. I can, but do I hear it anymore when I listen to it? How many times can you listen to an album before it starts to lose meaning? I bought the record in about 1975, when it was already old news, and I've probably heard it over a hundred times. Familiarity may have lessened its impact for me, but I'm not of the opinion that it has lessened its impact upon the history of music.