Letters to the Editor
-
Not Overhyped!
Yeah, I'm not sure that it's going to have the effect now that it had then. That doesn't mean it's overhyped, fellas. Just means that it's been so influential you're not hearing anything new. Boy, though, back then, it was new. It was so sophisticated and crazy. I remember When I'm 64 and With a Little Help from My Friends, and they were so wild, because they were old beerhall songs but rock-- You say there's no emotion, Gina, but it's there-- Paul's love for his dad, who sang in a music hall band, and the music of that lost-in-the-war era. And John's sense of alienation and loss. Sure, we're anthropomorphizing songs, but those guys were real to us in a way no other singers ever were.
I suspect it doesn't come through just in the music. But would we think of Keats the same way if we didn't know he died at 26 and those poems were all he left? We can look back now and shrug, big deal, odes about nature that are really about life and death, and hell, he didn't do anything Verlaine didn't do, and you're just romanticizing because he was cute and he died young-- but Keats IS important. So are the Beatles. You don't have to "hear" the music to know. You just have to imagine 1823 (or 1967). We should be so lucky to have music that challenges as that did.
I think Sgt. Pepper is seminal, ground-breaking, inventive, insane, because of the context not just of the times, but of the people involved, this crazy group that had stopped touring because all they could hear was screams and never themselves-- only in the studio could they find themselves. And as always, they led. Yes, looking back, the Kinks were doing really contemporary (I mean 21st C) stuff, and the Velvet U was starting up, and over there on the other land the psychedelics were getting started... but the Beatles still led.
It's funny you fall back on that old comparison with the Stones. I love the Stones, esp of that era, but they were always behind the Beatles (check out the cover of Let It Bleed, a total Sgt P ripoff). The real non-Beatle music was happening in San Francisco. The Stones, good as they were on so many levels, were derivative. They loved the blues and they loved Chuck Berry and they loved the Beatles too... and they took on the coloration of whatever they loved that year. They sounded original because Mick's voice was unique. But they were good mimics too. The Beatles really broke free of everyone else, and we all went with them.
Not to say Sgt. P is even the best Beatle album (I admit, I am most fond of the early stuff, and I too love Abbey Rd). But it is the most important (after the first). You can't see how it changed everything-- you only see the changes. That in itself is evidence of how important it was. After that, for a while, musicians made their own music. They could point to the success of Sgt. Pepper and bamboozle the record companies. Wish we could get back to that.