“Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: The Beatles’ Waste Land” (criticism, 2009)
Despite selling over a million albums within two weeks of its release, 1 Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band was not immediately or universally recognized as what The Guardian in 1997 and
Rolling Stone magazine in 2003 would proclaim it: rock’s number one album ever. Richard Goldstein
in the New York Times dismissed it as “an album of special effects, dazzling but ultimately fraudulent,”
and Frank Zappa in a Rolling Stone article accused the Beatles of selling out. My sister Ann has yet to
cut the plastic wrapper on her album: having heard mine playing at full volume for about a week and a
half, she decided that the album’s “acid excesses” (Coleman 1985: 390) were not for her. As I recall
that summer of ‘67, even after Rubber Soul and Revolver I needed a month or so to figure out what was
really going on below the dazzling surface of this album. Kind of like electric Bob Dylan, country Bob
Dylan, the Reverend Bob Dylan. . . . “What Is This Shit?”
It did not take long, however, to realize that Sgt. Pepper was a milestone in sixties music:
perhaps not the exact moment when rock-’n’-roll became art and poetry, but a major consolidation of
advances in that direction made by Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles themselves. The album
reflects many developments in pop music history and recording technology, but Sgt. Pepper would not
have “worked” had not the Beatles—and their audience—achieved the experience, sophistication and
life wisdom necessary to move beyond the naive “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” the witty “All My
Loving,” and the leering “Little Child.” In A Generation in Motion: Popular Music and Society in the
Sixties I traced the development of both the generation and of sixties music. Here I want to recapitulate
focus on Sgt. Pepper as a coherent album, the rock equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Waste
Land.
In the middle sixties, the stuff of art and poetry was happening on both sides of the Atlantic. By all
reports—I was not there personally—developments in British popular music paralleled those in America
during the late fifties-early sixties in forming an arc from rebellion to co-option, from folk art to schlock rock.
“Britain in the early 1960s,” writes Gould (2007: 100), “was an elephants’ graveyard”; Moore (1997: 10)
describes the period as “a rejuvenated recourse to ‘repetitive trivia.’ (Adam Faith, Billy Fury, Tommy Steele
and Cliff Richard).” In America—I was there—the early sixties were a rock-n-roll vacuum: singers Buddy
Holly gone to the graveyard, Elvis Presley lost to Las Vegas, Little Richard tangled up in religion, both Jerry
Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry in trouble for under-aged sex, DJ Alan Freed busted for payola. Enter Dick Clark
and his mindless American Bandstand rock-n-roll. “Trash, dance crazes, and slop ballads” (Cohn 1992: 54),
with a sprinkling of sanitized folk songs. In both countries, the vacuum produced Beatlemania and what
came in the States to be called the British Invasion.2 By the middle sixties, there was enough trans-Atlantic
dialogue—thanks in no small part to Radio Luxembourg and Radio Caroline— that we can talk of a unified
generation on both sides of the Atlantic. The sixties generation was global, and it was growing rapidly older
and wiser and experienced. That growth was reflected in a rich, eclectic music that moved beyond country,
blues,3 or traditional folk, and in songs that spoke to social, economic, religious, and cultural conditions . . .
and to the alienation they produced.
Allan Kozinn (1995: 9) describes the typical late-fifties, early-sixties rock-n-roll song this way: “its
chord progression a slightly embellished blues pattern, its beat is steady and danceable, and its lyrics are
basic: my girlfriend ran off with someone else, and now I’m sad and lonely.” Ian Inglis (2000, “Men”: 9)
has calculated that of 76 Beatles “self-compositions” recorded between 1962 and 1965, 97% were love
songs. However, of the 120 Beatle compositions recorded between 1966 and 1970, only 32% were love
songs; the balance explored subjects like alienation and estrangement, rebirth, escape and solitude,
political involvement, nostalgia and regret, drugs and their effects, interpretations of childhood, corporate
greed, the boredom of excess, etc. “Taxman,” which leads off Revolver, is a timeless topical song (if there be
such a thing) on the government’s big bite. “Nowhere Man” is social protest, as is “I’m Only Sleeping.” “Dr.
Robert” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” are drug songs. “Norwegian Wood” begins a journey into the surreal,
and “Yellow Submarine” begins a concurrent and not unrelated flight into the world of children’s fantasy,
both of which prefigure Sgt. Pepper. A number of lyrics treat communication problems, not merely
between generations (an old theme of rock-n-roll), but between those who see and understand (the beautiful
people) and those who do not (the diverted, perverted, unalerted): “She Said She Said,” “I Want to
Tell You,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” a put-down song worthy of Dylan. “In My Life” (which Lennon
regarded as his first serious song) takes that first long look over the shoulder which marks the moment of human
maturity. Even the love songs of Rubber Soul and Revolver are a different breed of love song. We have
been used to either sex-on-the-sly or eternal love-and-marriage. These albums give us “I’m Looking
Through You,” and the way “Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight.” “Think For Yourself” uses
lost love to deal with miscommunication between two radically different people. “We Can Work It Out” is
much more than boy-girl relationships (or John-Paul relationships): “Life is very short and there’s no time for
fussing and fighting, my friend.” Heavy philosophy in a rock love song!
In the transitional albums Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver the Beatles move far beyond
traditional rock-’n’-roll musically, incorporating a wide variety of musical and literary influences,
experimenting and innovating in all aspects of form and sound. Cello, sitar, baroque trumpets, heavy
strings, a pseudo-harpsichord, and countless other music instruments not found in rock-’n’-roll are
examined for the tonal shadings they lend music. The lyrics fill with images of color and taste richer than
the unimaginative and comparatively abstract “bright are the stars that shine, dark is the sky.” Traditional
pop forms are bent nearly out of recognizable shape; new interrelationships between lyrics and music are
explored; the range of range of metaphor (or anti-metaphor) expands; realism yields to symbolism and
surrealism. And rock-’n’-roll music becomes rock music, pop becomes art, poetry becomes the rule rather
than the exception.4 Much of Sgt. Pepper is foreshadowed in these albums.
The new directions indicated by these songs—as well as the tendency to think in terms of a
concept album 5—carried the Beatles to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (and on to the white
album and Abbey Road . . . but those are other stories). Sgt. Pepper has been called everything from a sonata
to an opera to a symphony to a collage to “a novel” (this is Paul himself—Trynka 2004: 242) to the Beatles’
Waste Land. That analogy (drawn first, I think, in the Newsweek review) is appropriate on several levels.6
The first, of course, is thematic: Sgt. Pepper represents the Beatles’ collective take on the Waste Land of
contemporary life, to which the up-tempo old-time music provides an ironic contrast, and the new-age
cosmic music suggests a dreamy alternative. There is thus a structural parallel in the fragmented nature of
both album and poem. The Beatles’ critique of contemporary culture, like Eliot’s, is multi-vocalic. Eliot’s
original subtitle for The Waste Land was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” and one of the more
intriguing—and modern—aspects of that poem is the way Eliot jumps from one voice to another. The third
similarity is borrowings and allusions. Today Sgt. Pepper needs (and has received) nearly as much
footnoting as The Waste Land, having borrowed from sources nearly as exotic, both musical and linguistic.
The Pepper’s jacket is perhaps the most multi-vocalic, allusive jacket in all rock. Fourth, as those familiar
with the history of the text of The Waste Land know, Eliot’s poem, like the Beatles’ album, is the result of
multiple revisions and reshapings, by at least three radically different personalities (Vivian Eliot, Ezra
Pound, and T. S. Eliot himself), each of whom contributed lines and ideas and editorial suggestions to the
final product. Finally, we can extend the analogy to the technologies of books and records respectively.
Eliot wrote the famous footnotes to his poem at the request of his publisher: since a book needs at least four
16-page signatures to make a book, and The Waste Land came up a bit short, could the poet perhaps write a
little something to fill another signature? Of course the genesis of those notes no more explains what’s in
them or what the poem is about than the recording studio technology at Abbey Road explains what Sgt.
Pepper is all about, but it’s interesting trivia, and the Waste Land analogy is apt.
While I would argue, as a good structuralist, that telling us how a work of art came into being and who
brought that work into being does not necessarily explain what that work of art is (or what it means to its
audience), the story of Sgt. Pepper’s origins is fascinating and validates some of the themes I find in the album.
The album began with two ideas: first, that the group would do a collection of musical memories of childhood
Liverpool,7 and second, that the Beatles would assume a pseudonym and an alter-ego, maybe something more
mature than the Mop Tops from Liverpool, something more mid-sixties than The Beatles, something like the
West Coast bands that were emerging in the States: Big Brother and the Holding Company or Country Joe and
the Fish. Disguises were nothing new to the Beatles: they had worn disguises in real life while on vacation,
and in the movies Help! (on their flight to the Bahamas, and while playing at the medal ceremony) and even
back as far as A Hard Day’s Night. But the fact that the four Beatles—famous and fatigued—could sit on a
trans-Atlantic flight in August 1966 and decide, “I’ve fucking had it up to here” (Miles 1997: 295) suggests the
disguises reflected a certain alienation—or awareness of alienation—that comes only with experience, that
creeps in at a moment when “those days are gone, I’m not so self-assured.” As early as the film A Hard Day’s
Night the band is collectively on the run from a variety of outside forces; near the end of that film Ringo
deserts the rest of the Beatles and makes a suggestive comment about “toying with the idea of a ball and
chain.” This is called fucking having it up to here, and the New Beatles thinking of the Old Beatles as
belonging to the company of the damned, the unhip group to whom they did not wish, please, to belong
(“Please . . . don’t belong, don’t belong”). The idea of the Beatles being something other than the Mop Tops
became the idea of the Beatles being Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; the alienation which gave rise to
that idea colors most of the songs on the album.
The first idea, although it appears to have gone nowhere on Sgt. Pepper, is to me more interesting to
me at the moment. It seems to me that awareness of displacement comes to people only in their twenties
(“When I was a boy, everything was right. . . ”). It happens to people who go from rags to riches and find
themselves suddenly famous, to people who are receiving death threats because one of them said the Beatles
were bigger than Jesus, to people who move quickly from Liverpool to Hamburg to London and New York . . .
to people who go tear-assing all over the globe to give concerts in Los Angeles and study the sitar with Ravi
Shankar. In retrospect, we can see displacement—and the thematic roots of Sgt. Pepper—in A Hard Day’s
Night. But these things also happen to anyone who lives in this global cultural economy and has a brain and a
double-digit IQ. We all find ourselves fragmented, displaced, aging, and desperate. To switch singers but stay
in-generation, we get a sense of “Time, time, time” and feel hints of “a hazy shade of winter.” Angst and
alienation are the human condition these days. But while we may read Thoreau and Eliot (and sing along with
“I don’t care too much for money; money can’t buy me love”), it takes experience to make us understand the
words, to realize that these things happen “In My Life.” What do we do then? Either we go further, or we
start looking for the long and winding road that leads us back. The two great themes in literature, I have
written elsewhere, are departure and return. We go out and battle some Other, either successfully or
unsuccessfully; and then we discover that we have gone somewhere we do not quite belong and become
someone we really are not. Then begins the (almost always unsuccessful) attempt to reclaim place and self.
So the sense of alienation felt by John and Paul (and Ringo and George) produced, beyond a decision
to travel incognito, develop alter-egos, and avoid public performances, an interest in returning home. “In my
end is my beginning,” observed Eliot in a poem written twelve years after The Waste Land was published.
MacDonald (2007: 169) reports that as early as the planning stage of Rubber Soul “Lennon and McCartney
had broached the idea of writing something about Liverpool,” and Lennon had begun “a haphazard lyric about
a bus-ride from his childhood home in Menlove Avenue into Liverpool’s town centre, listing every landmark
and neighbourhood en route (including Penny Lane).” Tony Barrow (2005: 215), the Beatles’ press officer,
remembers The Fab Four hunkered down in a locker room of Dodger Stadium on the group’s penultimate tour
gig on August 28, 1966, waiting in terrified silence for cops to clear “the hysterically boisterous crowd” which
made escape impossible. The silence, he says, was broken finally by Ringo asking in a small voice (echoing
scenes in A Hard Day’s Night), “Can I please go home to my mummy now, can I please?” “Silently to
ourselves we repeated Ringo’s heartfelt plea,” writes Barrow; “We wanted to go home now.” Mellers (1973:
33) believes that “the basic Beatles song is Edenic,” that songs like “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields
Forever” relate to “a new Eden discovered within the mind” (1973 :82), that the songs of Sgt. Pepper in one
sense “evoke a childhood world quintessentially Beatle-like” (1973: 89). While returning home was to have
been the governing concept of Sgt. Pepper, that initial concept produced only three songs: George’s “Only a
Northern Song,” Paul’s “Penny Lane,” and John’s “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The last two were, according
to Paul according to Barry Miles (1997: 308), “childhood memories: recently faded memories from either or
ten years before, so it was a recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us.” These were released as
singles in February of 1967.
Barrow (2005: 222) says Lennon and McCartney “lost interest in a hometown retro theme for their
album and switched to plan B.”8 Interestingly, the failed idea of returning home to discover one’s place and
self (too early in the artists’ career? Home wasn’t there anymore?) yielded to extreme adventures in the selfas-other (other times, other places, other musical styles) . . . and to an album whose governing concept is
alienation. I would say that in 1967 the Beatles—and their generation—felt dislocated enough to sense the
loss of roots, and to sense that they would carry the weight of lost roots a long time, but a generation in its
twenties was still in Mod escape mode—in part, escape into the high art/psychedelic Other of the avant-garde
. . . which Lennon, somewhat famously, later noted was the French word for “bullshit.” The trip into a life
that was a hit before your mother was born wasn’t going to work in 1967: it got tried on Magical Mystery Tour
(with the crowd on the bus singing “Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” “Toot Toot Tootsie,” “Happy Wanderer,”
“When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and in the ballroom spectacular “Your Mother Should Know”). The film was
blasted by the British press after airing on December 26. Wrong idea for 1967. Had the Beatles given us some
version of Village Green Preservation Society in 1967, Sgt. Pepper would not be the greatest rock-’n’-roll
album ever.
Meanwhile, the “concept” of the Beatles giving a band concert did not, even the Beatles themselves
admit, carry very far. The “concept” of the album as a critique of mid-sixties society and the various types of
and responses to alienation, remained.
The story of this album’s emergence over five months and 700 hours (Gould—387—says that figure
is inflated by 100%) in Studio One at Abbey Road, and of designing and redesigning of the album jacket is
best told by Barry Miles in his biography of Paul McCartney, or by George Martin himself in Summer of
Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper. But I am interested here in the theme(s) and structure of this album as it
exists, not as it came into being. Sgt. Pepper demonstrates something of a circular linear motion which
manages direction in spite of musical variety, reflecting a sonnet cycle or a suite of poems.9 My original
(and pretty much my present) interpretation of the album was influenced by a book I’d written on Chaucer’s
The Canterbury Tales in which I read that work as a dialectic: Chaucer, behind the personae of various
pilgrim and through individual stories, examines and discards a sequence of ideas about order in the cosmos,
and the role of the artist, one position/tale being answered by a succeeding position/tale until artist, pilgrims,
and readers arrive finally at “The Parson’s Tale” and an end of dialectic, art, and pilgrimage. In Sgt. Pepper
the Beatles engage in a debate of many voices, “doing the culture in different voices” as it were, spinning one
song/position off another to end with “A Day in the Life,” not quite where they began, but at a definite end of
dialectic, art, and performance. S
“Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” sets both the tone and the central metaphor of
the album. Whatever the origin of this pseudonym, 10 the Beatles have opted to become Sergeant Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band, and we’re being invited to join a lonely hearts organization. The band’s loneliness
is insisted upon by the repetition of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely.” The pun in “Pepper’s Lonely” is made
explicit on the lyrics printed on the album jacket. Not to put too fine a point on punctuation on an album that
loses the apostrophe in Sgt. Pepper’s on the band’s drum (the cover of Introducing . . . The Beatles [Vee-Jay
SR 106] had lost the apostrophe in “Englands No. 1 Vocal Group”), but in the “Reprise,” there’s a period after
lonely, which is spelled with a lower case L: “Sergeant Pepper’s lonely.” Four times this statement is
made “Sergeant Pepper is lonely.” (You can play clever games like this with printed poetry!)
Kenneth Womack (2007: 169) notes, “On the one hand, the lyrics exemplify the mindless
rhetoric of rock concert banter; yet on the other, they mock the very notion of a pop album’s capacity for
engendering authentic interconnection between artist and audience in the first place.” The disconnect
between band and audience is apparent in Billy Shears’ song: “What would you do if I sang out of tune, /
Would you stand up and walk out on me?” he asks plaintively. But, to switch Beatles’ songs, he’s a
nowhere man; to switch Eliot poems, Billy Shears is a hollow man. And Billy Shears—Ringo—is, as
Albert Goldman points out (1988: 257), “a modern Everyman.”
Two questions present themselves: what is to be done, and do other people have these problems?
Succeeding songs answer these questions. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is a trip song. Despite John’s
protestations, there can be no doubt—its music if nothing else should make that fact clear. The song lyrics
are a sequence of trips: boat on a river, newspaper taxis, train in a station. The action is surreal: ties turn into
looking glasses, eyes become kaleidoscopes, actions proceed without logical cause-effect relationships.
Normal patterns of time and proportion are distorted. The imagery becomes brilliantly visual (something
right out of an animated cartoon), and senses of taste and sight become synesthesized. Some of this is
borrowed from the world of dreams, some from children’s literature (like “Yellow Submarine”), some from a
British television popular in the mid-sixties called The Goon Show (see Turner 1994: 123), some from Through
the Looking Glass (the Beatles themselves admit this much) in which Alice finds herself at one point drifting
lazily down stream picking the flowers that grow just off the shore.
But as Mellers (1973: 102) notes, “the drug theme [in Pepper and elsewhere] exists because of the
search for identity.” Lucy considers her vehicles in response to her alienation. And it does not appear a
particularly unpleasant response, even if it is demonstrably transitory; only within the context of later lyrics
do the drawbacks of escape become apparent.
The responses to loneliness outlined in “Getting Better” and “Fixing a Hole” are similarly suspect.
The first of these is the brighter of the two, postulating a vague “you”—possibly the drugs of “Lucy In the
Sky,” possibly the somebody to love of “With a Little Help”—which has straightened out uncool teachers,
buffered restrictive rules, mellowed an angry young man, cured a confirmed wife-beater. You can take this
all at face value, but it sounds to me as if the speaker is just attempting with partial success to convince
himself. The tip-off is in the sharp, satiric staccato of “get-ting-so-much-bet-ter” and in the Tarzan talk: “me
used to be angry young man; me hiding me head in the sand.”11 “A conventional rationalization,” writes
Peyser (1969: 131), but a dangerous rationalization. Delusions like this prevent us from confronting the
problem directly, insuring that things will not get any better—just look at my administration at Southwest
State University.
“Fixing a Hole” suggests simply avoiding problems and the people who cause them. Many
people thought the song was about heroin; others “explain” the song as a reference to Paul patching
the roof on his farmhouse near Campbeltown, Scotland. The song itself is about a man who has
turned inward upon himself to the exclusion of everybody around him, to the extent that he becomes sole
arbiter of right and wrong (it’s right if I think it’s right) and exhibits self-defensive, derisive disdain for all the
rest of humanity. Again a solution which appears initially attractive loses, after sober thought and in the
context of the rest of the album, some of its initial appeal.
“She’s Leaving Home” poses the obvious solution: pack it up and leave. Things will be better
elsewhere, we tell ourselves. But who, one wonders, will be worse off: the girl, who must inevitably realize
the illusion of fun and freedom, or her parents, self-centered to the last (“How could she do this to me!”),
who will complete their lives never understanding what happened to them, continuing to buy, buy their
own emptiness, trying always to be-long, be-long, never even sensing their own loneliness? The
melodramatic strings13 push this soap opera over the top, making it less “a heartrending cry for all the overaffluent
children” (Fast 1968: 188) than a slap in the face of both overprotective parents and self-absorbed kids.
“Side I is about illusion,” wrote Joan Peyser succinctly (1969: 130). “[A]s full of illusions as the
Tunnel of Love,” wrote Albert Goldman (1988: 250). And this is not an unusual theme for the middle
sixties: see the Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday”: “your dreams before they slip away.” See Mr. Dylan:
“Ain’t it hard when you discover that / He really wasn’t where it’s at.”
In closing side one of Sgt. Pepper, “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” returns us full circle to the
band and performance as an antidote to boredom. “In this way Mr. K. will challenge the world.” Go off to
the show—better still, become the show, join the circus. Steve Turner’s A Hard Day’s Write (1994: 127)
reproduces the poster from which John borrowed names and phrases, but the important thing is not the
source of these words and images, it’s the use to which the “found poem” has been put. “Being For the
Benefit of Mr. Kite” is in effect a miniature Sgt. Pepper or Magical Mystery Tour in its brilliant and
surrealistic imagery, splendiferous music, enchanting performance, and promise of distraction. Performance
is an act of existential defiance against boredom and loneliness, but one cannot help feeling, as Northcutt
puts it (2006: 143), that “Lennon’s circus is a maelstrom of distance between the crowd and the performer”—a
little bit of the old having “fucking had it up to here.” The swirl of show biz that marked “Sergeant Pepper’s” is there (Mr. Kite is “celebrated” as Billy Shears was “the one and only”), but so is the loneliness, the
isolation of “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Make it a drug song if you wish (kiff and hashish, horse
and the rest), but the lyric’s major concern is the sublimation of personal estrangement and neuroses in
the unreal world of circus.
And that concludes side one: a depressing series of vignettes depicting various responses to
loneliness, made the more depressing by the almost irresistible high spirits of the music of “Being For
the Benefit” or “Lucy In the Sky” or “Sergeant Pepper’s.” 14
Side two opens with a recapitulation: “We were talking about the space between us all / And the
people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion / Never glimpse the truth. Then it’s far too late when
they pass away.” There in a nutshell is the first side of Sgt. Pepper. “It’s far too late when you pass away”
the band tells those parents of “She’s Leaving Home”; “it’s all within yourself, no one else can make you
change” it tells the speaker of “Getting Better All The Time”; “when you’ve seen beyond yourself, then you
may find peace of mind” it warns the self-absorbed recluse of “Fixing a Hole.” Womack (2007: 176)
calls the song “the album’s ethical soul,” its thematic core. And while “Within You and Without You” is
itself not a depressing idea, it becomes depressing given the audience’s inability of the audience, directly
confronted in a line like “Are you one of them?” to grasp its simple message. As the song ends, the fictive
listeners giggle.
The next three lyrics describe three “romances” reminiscent of the “Game of Chess” and “Fire
Sermon” sections of Eliot’s The Waste Land, three characters all leading “the sterile, ritualized roles
people play” (Peyser 1969: 132). One proposes a marriage of unsurpassed stultification to a kind of mailorder bride: mending fuses, knitting sweaters, Sunday morning rides, summers in a cottage on a Isle of Wight
(if he can scrape up the dough). “Who could ask for more?” he asks inanely. A satire, as Richard Porier
realized (1969: 176), of “the love-nest sentimentality of old popular songs,” this song may belong to the
discarded return-to-Liverpool concept. The “rooty-tooty variety style” clarinets are perfect—a reflection of
the “music-hall stuff, corny popular songs, the kind of thing that Paul normally wouldn’t tolerate” (Martin
1994: 34) but much loved by McCartney’s father, for whom the song was purportedly written and who
coincidentally turned 64 in 1967. George Martin (1994: 36) calls this song “Paul’s personal vision of hell .
. . banality, tedium, nothingness, poverty, routine.” Growing old in this manner was probably the personal
hell of anybody in the sixties.
Another fellow is busy putting the make on Rita the Meter Maid. Despite her obvious acquiescence
(“Got the bill and Rita paid it”), he manages not quite the quick score he had imagined, but something
between a parody and a nightmare: “Nearly made it / Sitting on the sofa with a sister or two.” The whole
scene, with its hot panting and hustling tempo, is an interesting contrast to the Victorian couple of “When
I’m Sixty-Four,” and a set-up for the next song.
The third character dashes around with the pointless nowhere-to-go-but-in-a-big-hurry-to-get-there of
an old Mod. Bored and supercilious, he talks in the platitudes and conventions of work place and TV
commercial. “Good morning, good morning, good morning . . . How’s your boy been? What a day! It’s
okay.” “John was feeling trapped in suburbia,” McCartney tells us of this song (Miles 1997: 320), bored out of
his skull, reduced to watching soap operas like Meet the Wife. George Martin (1994: 73) called the song “an
ironic, not to say sarcastic look at that suburban life-style. Its lyrics make sharp little digs at the whole
suburban deal.” According to Lewisohn, the animal sound effects are arranged in a way that each
successive animal was capable of frightening or devouring its predecessor (2000: 250). “I had not
thought death had undone so many,” wrote Eliot in The Waste Land.
Into this morass of mundane stupidity breaks the band, its old high spirited theme now more
ironic than ever: “We hope you have enjoyed the show, / We’re sorry but it’s time to go. / Sergeant
Pepper’s lonely.” By this time we’re more than a bit lonely ourselves: the spaces don’t seem to diminish, the
walls of illusion seem impossible to destroy. And while the Beatles have demonstrated, as Poirier (1969:
164) points out, “the enriching effect that allusiveness can have in poetry: of expanding a situation toward the
simultaneous condition of bathos, because the situation is seen as recurrent and therefore possibly insoluble,
and comic, because the recurrence has finally passed into cliché,” the bathos seems now to predominate. In
this reprise, the song clearly “has lost its show-biz glamour, or recognizes it as illusory” (Mellers 1973: 97).
“A Day in the Life” stands outside the context of a band performance, presenting an encore or
a coda. It is as bleak as or bleaker than anything we’ve seen before, because it presents life without
pretense of illusion, only detachment and boredom. “It is the nightmare resolution of the Be atles’
show within a show,” writes Gould (2007: 417). The old tedium is still there, along with all the old
spaces . . . four thousand of them to be exact, sitting in Albert Hall, listening to this concert. Someone
died—so—was he famous? The British Army has won the War—“Britain’s Finest Hour is just another
media cliché” (Gould 2007: 413). People do not recognize people. One man’s predicament is another
man’s joke. The important thing is to get to work on time and sneak a quick escape every now and then.
The song demonstrates technically the same concise vision we saw before in “Eleanor Rigby,” but now
the camera is pointed at us, not them. It is we ourselves who measure our lives in smoked cigarettes and
cups of coffee (“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” wrote Eliot in “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock”). The detachment of audience and listeners is more awful than of the illusions of which
the band has sung, heightened by the distancing of getting these stories from a film or news story.
The ambiguities of “turn you on” are many. The band’s line earlier was, “We’d love to take you
home with us”; now the band would like to show us ourselves, make us aware of what man has done to
man, introduce us to a new and higher reality, get our vital juices flowing once again. The fact that after
the band’s performance we still need turning on, the desperation of this song, and that long last dying chord
all suggest the apparent impossibility of this mission. I hear zero evidence to support Ian MacDonald’s
conclusion (2007: 230) “The message is that life is a dream and we have the power, as dreamers, to make it
beautiful” or Porier’s argument (1969: 178) that “I’d love to turn you on” works the way Eliot’s “Shantih,
Shantih, Shantih” works at the end of The Waste Land. Affirmation from the Beatles is on the way—“All You
Need Is Love,” “Baby You’re a Rich Man”—but these songs are not on this album. Where Revolver ended in
the affirmation of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” at the end of Sgt. Pepper, everyone is asleep or dead . . .
including the Old Beatles, whose funeral is portrayed on the album cover.15 A crowd of people stand and stare.
Sgt. Pepper, then, its music aside, is a troubling album, although it certainly offers a penetrating
glimpse into life in the modern age. The Waste Land comparison is accurate, both thematically and
structurally; and given Eliot’s apparently deliberate obscurantism and the Beatles’ more complicated
medium, I don’t think they come off second best in the comparison. You can push the comparison further:
from The Waste Land Eliot moved on to spiritual regeneration in “Ash Wednesday”; from their own Waste
Land the Beatles moved on to an attempt at spiritual regeneration in Magical Mystery Tour and the white
album. But that is another paper. For the moment, let me conclude by reminding readers that it is now
2008—and we have survived, even if we have not prevailed.
Footnotes
1
Any new Beatles album would have sold a million records in 1967; Meet the Beatles sold two
million within five weeks of its US release, and Rubber Soul sold over a million in one week.
2
In an essay titled “The Beatles Are Coming,” Ian Inglis catalogs—with copious references and
quotations—eight different “explanations” for the Beatles’ popularity in America: reaction to the Kennedy
assassination (they put a smile back on the face of a grieving America), musical-internal (they successfully
synthesized black and white pop traditions), musical-external (they reclaimed rock-and-roll from the
pabulum represented by the three number one songs before “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” namely Bobby
Vinton’s “There! I’ve Said It Again,” the Singing Nuns’ “Dominique,” and Dale and Grace’s “I’m Leaving
It Up to You”), demographic (the younger generation was asserting itself in buying what it recognized as
its own image), structural (groups were replacing soloists as preferred music-makers), sexual (the Beatles
provided masturbation fantasies for teenaged girls), personal (the boys had charisma), and promotional
(thank you, Brian Epstein). In my own experience, the second explanation is correct.
3
Wilfrid Mellers (1973:31) writes, “I heard Country and Western music in Liverpool before I
heard rock and roll.” In the second chapter of Summer of Love (1994) George Martin attributes the
influence of rhythm-and-blues on the Beatles to the WWII presence of 18,000 American troops—with
their music—at RAF Burtonwood (“Little America”) north-east of Liverpool. Moore (1997: 9) concurs:
“Liverpool’s contribution owed more to its role as a major port of disembarkation from the USA.
Sailors would bring home Fender guitars and the latest rock ’n’ roll records which were unavailable in
the UK” (9). Walter Everett (2002: 28) provides a two-page list of R&B artists and their songs known to have
been covered by the Beatles.
4
“It was the first time anyone had done this with lyrics,” writes Barry Miles of lyrics printed as
poetry on the Sgt. Pepper album (341), although Simon and Garfunkel had printed parts of lyrics on the
jacket of Sounds of Silence (1965), and Bob Dylan had printed his own poems that were not lyrics on
albums like The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). Anthologies
of rock-poems like Stephanie Spinner’s Rock Is Beautiful, A. X. Nicholas’ The Poetry of Soul, and my own
textbook-anthology Beowulf to Beatles were still years in the future, but the notion of sung songs as a
legitimate form of poetry was gaining (or, in light of mediaeval and Renaissance traditions, we might say
regaining) currency in both in England and America. In a 1970 interview with Jann Wenner published in
December 1970 Rolling Stone and republished in 1971 as the book Lennon Remembers, John Lennon
explains “newspaper taxis” as “Then I was consciously writing poetry, and that’s self-conscious poetry”
(30), “Mr. Kite” as “a pure poetic job” (40), “I Am The Walrus” as “just poetry” (108), and “Across the
Universe” as “good poetry” (116). Bob Dylan is “another poet” (188).
5
Kozinn (1995: 113) quotes Martin as saying that with Rubber Soul “we were beginning to think of
albums as a bit of art on their own, as entities of their own Several essays in Every Sound There Is examine
Revolver as a concept album, and discussions of other sixties “concept albums” abound. Either way—
“concept album” loosely defined as an album of songs focused on a specific theme or situation or place, or
“concept album” more tightly defined to mean a sequence of songs which tells a narrative story—“concept
album” was not a new ideas with the Beatles.
6
I have seen no direct evidence that any of the Beatles, or George Martin, had read The Waste Land,
the way we have Dylan’s word in Chronicles that he read and reread any number of poets who have long
been suspected of influencing him. We do not even internal evidence along the lines of Dylan’s Ezra
Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower, with images borrowed from an Eliot poem. But Paul
specialized in English literature under a teacher who had studied with F. R. Leavis (Gould 2007: 72), and if
Eliot’s poem was half as popular in England as it was in the U.S.—and with Paul’s teacher as with my
teachers—the familiarity, if not the influence, would have been inescapable.
7
Ray Coleman (1985: 539) writes, “The original idea behind the album was that it should be a
concept L.P.: a memory of a day in the life of Liverpool children (which was to have included both ‘Penny
Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’). A double album, evoking lost innocence, adolescence, and maturity. But
Sgt. Pepper grew and grew, and the original plan disappeared (although vestiges were retained with ‘A
Day In The Life’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’). In its place came an album that broke new ground with the
segueing of tracks, the lyrical obtuseness, the rich production, and lavish instrumentation.” However,
Barry Miles (1997: 306) writes in his biography of Paul McCartney, “Only later in the recording did Neil
Aspinall have the idea of repeating the ‘Sgt. Pepper’ song as a reprise, and the Beatles and George Martin
begin to use linking tracks and segues to pull it all together, making it into more of a concept album.” It is
worth noting that the songs of Sgt. Pepper were not recorded in the order they appear on the album (in fact,
“A Day in the Life” was one of the first songs recorded, ahead of “Sgt. Pepper”), and that an alternate
running order (later discarded) for the finished album exists (Lewishon 2000: 252).
8
However, one group of critics (Middleton, Hatch and Millward, Jewell, Kroll), mentioned on Moore
(1997: 63), find in the Beatles’ materials on Sgt. Pepper a promotion of “northern provinciality over the best
London can offer” and thus a “going home” of sorts.
9
On this subject there has been much critical debate and a range of opinions. At one extreme would be
Barry Miles (1997: 306), who writes, “There was never the intention to make a themed album,” and Steve
Turner (1994: 121), who quotes George Martin (the man who takes credit for sequencing the songs) as saying,
“The songs, if you listen to them, have no connection at all.” Allan Moore (1997: 58, 71) dismisses the idea of
unity in Sgt. Pepper as a myth . . . but then changes his mind: “Sgt. Pepper, disagreements notwithstanding, is
best understood as a concept.” But Moore also writes (22), “in each of these songs [“Being for the Benefit of
Mr. Kite,” “Lovely Rite,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”] we can see that the concern while writing is
neither to know what the song is about, nor to recount a narrative or relate a message, but merely to work. A
casual phrase or encounter will set off an idea which is then worked on, according to its own logic, but without
the slightest care for any prospective audience,” and (26) “it is no longer widely accepted that the ‘meaning’ of
a text is immanent in that text,” and finally (56) “Resistance to exegesis is the only valid option,” so this
witness may step down. William Mann (1987: 93), in his Times review of Pepper’s, confined the “unity” to
the title song, the reprise and “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.” These, he wrote, “give a certain shape
and integrity to the two sides, and if the unity is slightly specious, the idea is, I think, new to pop song LPs,
which are usually unconnected anthologies, and it is worth pursuing. Sooner or later some group will take
the next logical step and produce an LKP which is a popsong-cycle, a Tin Pan Alley Dichterliebe.
Whether or not the remains of Schumann and Heine turn in their graves at this description depends on the
artistry of the compiler.” Gould (2007: 390) also assumes that the “concept” of the concept album is
Pepper’s variety-show-like performance, and thus the notion of Pepper’s as a concept album is somewhat
erroneous, although he—like all serious commentators—discovers any number of echoes and connections
(musical and verbal), one song to another. Russell Reising (202: 239) argues, “the continuity of Sgt Pepper’s
Lonely Hearts Club Band doesn’t really reach beyond the fluidity of some of its musical segues.” Kenneth
Womack (2007: 184), who notes that while the initial “concept” of Sgt. Pepper’s 19th-century rooty-tooty,
peppy-preppy band peters out after a couple of songs, “the album’s real concept involves a rallying call to
consciousness, as opposed to a cohesive storyline about the trials and tribulations of Sgt. Pepper and his band
of lonely hearts.” Joan Peyser (1969: 131-33) compares the album to “roman a clef,” and reads it as a
focused examination of “identity, illusion, loneliness, and death.” Interestingly, Ed Whitley (2000: 105) is
able to assemble a considerable list of critics who, looking back at Pepper’s from the perspective of the
White Album, lament the latter’s incoherence in contrast to “the cohesion and unity” of the former. I
discuss the unity of Sgt. Pepper at length in The Poetry of Rock (1981: 45-51).
10
“The origin of the name Sgt Pepper is disputed,” writes Turner (1994: 121); “The Beatles’ former
road manager Mal Evans is sometimes cited as having created it as a jokey substitute for ‘salt ‘n’ pepper’.
Others suggest that the name was derived from the popular American soft drink ‘Dr. Pepper’.”
11
Bromell and Womack, it seems to me, miss the ironic tone of this song, and several others, when
Brommel writes (2000: 111), “They sang that things were getting better all the time. That the leaks were being
fixed, the cracks being mended, and the world being made whole again. . . . . It doesn’t really matter if we’re
wrong or right, where we belong is right—in this fleeting moment of history that we share together. Since it’s
all a show, no need to be so vehement. Sit back and let the evening go. Come to the circus we’ve created for
you. . . Come home with us. We’d love to take you . . . for yes, there is a home for you in the world,” and
Womack (2007: 173) writes, “In ‘Fixing a Hole,’ Paul adopts a more pacific worldview.” Gould (2007: 400)
reads the song as “Paul’s optimism against John’s sarcasm.”
13
This was not George Martin’s work, but—according to Gould—the work of arranger Mike Leander,
“best known for his overwrought work with Marianne Faithfull” (402)—thus the “clichéd sentimentality of the
song.
14
Ned Rorem long ago observed that Beatles lyrics often work against the music (154).
15
Younger readers may not know about the “Paul is Dead” theory-hoax-marketing gambit which
circulated in late 1969, foreshadowed (according to Tony Barrow, 2005: 216) by a spate of phone calls he
received in September 1966, before Pepper’s was recorded. The theory, based partly on a close analysis
of the Pepper’s cover, was that Paul had died some three years previous and—to keep the group alive and
recording and making lots of money—had been replaced by the winner of a “Paul McCartney Look-Alike
Contest. For more on this story than you would ever want to read (and a fourteen-page bibliography, in
case you want more), see Andru J. Reeve’s Turn Me On, Dead Man.
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