As with every masterpiece, the hardest part was letting go. They had tailed as well as topped the album with Sgt. Pepper’s theme song, adding a reprise of the “Lovely Rita” backing vocal that left John’s grin floating in the air like a bespectacled Cheshire cat’s. Recognizing that “A Day in the Life” was something quite apart from even the most recherché of the other tracks, they had turned it into a devastating afterthought, followed by a multiple crash of piano chords—like the totaling of Tara Browne’s car—that would slam the collection shut like a sarcophagus. They had worked from 7:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. simply to produce a brief snatch of gibberish to be heard from the record’s normally mute play-out groove. As they stood around the microphone, a drug-dazzled Ringo suddenly remarked, “I think I’m going to fall over,” and toppled forward, to be caught like a doll in Mal Evans’s arms. The final touch was a note at 20,000 hertz frequency, audible only to the fine-tuned hearing of dogs.
The album sleeve, as much as its music, perfectly evoked the hour of its coming. The pop artist Peter Blake was commissioned to design a frontispiece as up-to-the-minute as its four subjects were, and as heedless of convention or expense. The Beatles, holding bandsmen’s instruments and dressed in satin uniforms, pink, blue, yellow, and scarlet, stood mock solemn behind their own name spelled in flowers, set about by a collage of figures representing their numerous heroes. The group included Bob Dylan, Karl Marx, Laurel and Hardy, Aleister Crowley, Marlon Brando, Diana Dors, W. C. Fields—every fashionable face from the pantheon of Pop Art pseudo-worship. There were also private jokes, such as the Beatles’ own ludicrous wax effigies from Madame Tussaud’s, a stray Buddha, and a doll with a sign reading WELCOME ROLLING STONES. In one corner, next to Aubrey Beardsley, above Sonny Liston’s head, the face of Stu Sutcliffe, the Beatle who was lost, peered out from a snapshot fragment of some long-forgotten Hamburg night.
EMI initially rejected the design, fearing that those among the assembly who were still alive would object to their likenesses being used in this way. The Beatles appealed directly to the company’s chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, who informally consulted two of the country’s most eminent lawyers, Lord Goodman and Lord Shawcross. “Both Shawcross and Goodman said the same,” Sir Joseph recalled. “‘Don’t touch it,’ they said. ‘Everyone will sue.’”
“Paul McCartney talked me into allowing it. ‘Ah, everyone’ll love it,’ he said. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but take Gandhi out. We need the Indian market. If we show Gandhi standing around with Sonny Liston and Diana Dors, they’ll never forgive us in India.’ So the Beatles agreed to take Gandhi out.”
EMI further stipulated that the Beatles should indemnify them to the tune of some twenty million pounds against possible legal trouble. In addition, Brian had to undertake to get clearances from as many of the sixty-two celebrities as possible. Wendy Hanson, his former assistant, was brought back specially to undertake this marathon of the transatlantic telephone. As she later remembered, most of them were only too flattered and delighted to be asked.
Sgt. Pepper had taken four months and cost twenty-five thousand pounds—an unheard-of sum in those days, more than twenty times the cost of the Beatles’ debut album. Its packaging also was something altogether new, reflecting that age of conspicuous consumption. Instead of the usual single envelope, it came in a double segment that opened like a book. On the back, replacing the traditional leaden sleeve notes, the lyrics of every song were printed in full. Inside with the record was a sheet of cutout novelties, figments of the Beatles’ own comic-book childhood transformed to the last, or next, word in Pop Art—a jovial Victorian army sergeant picture card, a paper mustache, two badges, and a set of NCO’s stripes.
One other feature of the cover passed unnoticed by EMI’s lawyers, nor was it picked up by the keen eye of Lord Shawcross or Lord Goodman. In the foreground of the garden where Sergeant Pepper’s band and their companions stood grew a flourishing row of what looked like marijuana plants.
The landmark events in each era, those strokes of history so monumental that people recall for ever afterward exactly where they were and what they were doing at the time, are generally tragedies. The outbreaks of world wars, the passings of sovereigns or statesmen, the from-nowhere annihilations of John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, and Diana, Princess of Wales, the wanton mass slaughter of 9/11: Such have been the moments that, for billions across the globe for their remaining life span, recall exactly the circumstances they were in, the clothes they wore, the faces that looked disbelievingly into theirs on first hearing the news.
Only the blessed sixties generation have such a moment to remember not marked by open-mouthed horror and incredulity but open-mouthed delight and exaltation: the moment in June 1967 when they first listened to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The memory in this case is uniform to all: how they rushed to their record store to buy it; how Peter Blake’s cover dazzled and delighted them as no album design ever had before; how they first opened its booklike flap and drew out the disk with its shiny virgin grooves and green Parlophone label; how at the first play they simply couldn’t believe it, and had to play it again and again and again.
Musically its conquest was total. It equally entranced the most avant-garde and most cautious, both fan and foe alike. The wildest acid freak, listening in his mental garret to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” could not doubt that his mind had been blown to undreamed realms of psychedelic fancy. Nervous old ladies, listening to “When I’m Sixty-Four” in their front parlors, would never be frightened of pop music again. Sergeant Pepper’s cabaret show, with its twanging mystery and workaday humor, its uppercut drive and insinuating charm, invited the elderly as well as the young, the innocent no less than the pretentiously wise. On drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the most rigorous cultural commentator of his age, and on Mark Lewisohn, an eight-year-old in Kenton, Middlesex, the effect was the same. Tynan called Sgt. Pepper a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization. Mark Lewisohn stood in the garden as it played, shaking his head wildly while trying not to dislodge the cardboard mustache clenched under his nose.
In America, where the album appeared one day after its U.K. release, critical hyperbole climbed to Gothic heights. The New York Times announced that Sgt. Pepper heralded “a new and golden Renaissance of Song.” Newsweek’s reviewer, Jack Kroll, compared the lyrics with T. S. Eliot: “A Day in the Life,” he said, was “the Beatles’ Waste Land.” Some of the more woolly-headed American commentators classed the album as an almost religious experience and the Beatles as deities—this time with none of the fundamentalist backlash John had caused with his “bigger than Jesus” remark. “I declare,” said Dr. Timothy Leary, high priest of hippiedom, “that the Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God with a mysterious power to create a new species—a young race of laughing freemen…. They are the wisest, holiest, most effective avatars [God incarnations] the human race has ever produced.”
Others saw things rather differently. By the time Sgt. Pepper was released the adult world had moved on somewhat from its initial amused tolerance of the swinging one. Concern was growing about the use of drugs among young people and the degree to which pop music encouraged, even exhorted it. A growing body of opinion now called on pop stars to recognize their position as vastly influential role models and to set a good rather than exultantly bad example to their millions of impressionable fans.
Before Sgt. Pepper there had been occasional controversies over pop lyrics deemed explicit or suggestive, like the Rolling Stones’“Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Now for the first time—thanks to the helpful provision of its lyrics in cold print—an album attracted as much notoriety as a subversive eighteenth-century pamphlet. The BBC took the lead by banning “A Day in the Life” for a list of overt references to drug taking, some readily sustainable but others merely the products of overheated bureaucratic imagination. Obvious fair game were the “man who blew his mind out in a car,” the referen
ces to “smoke” and “dream” in Paul’s middle section, and, of course, the mischievous cry of “I’d love to turn you on.” But the “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,” now interpreted to mean mass heroin needle marks, had simply been John using a news item that caught his fancy. Even the final “sound like the end of the world,” created by classical violinists in clown noses and gorilla paws, was accused of symbolizing an addict’s first chaotic joy after a fix.
More dubious subtexts were eagerly sought and quickly found on the album’s other tracks. Paul’s “Fixing a Hole”—a song plainly about little more than home maintenance—was condemned as another heroin allegory. The Ringo track “With a Little Help from My Friends” caused such a furor in America with its reference to getting high that Senator—soon to be vice president—Spiro T. Agnew led a public campaign to ban it. In “She’s Leaving Home,” the “man from the motor trade,” in reality Brian Epstein’s car-sales partner Terry Doran, was thought to be a euphemism for an abortionist. Even the tracks with no alleged narcotic subtext were credited with a role in turning nice, normal teenagers into mumbling, shiftless freaks. The ultra–right wing John Birch Society went so far as to announce that the Beatles were part of a communist conspiracy and warned that Sgt. Pepper showed “an understanding of the principles of brainwashing.”
But by far the greatest furor arose from the realization that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was a mnemonic for LSD. Since the song clearly could have only one author, it was John who received the bulk of the condemnation for advertising the substance that now dominated every media drug scare story and representing its effect in attractive terms of “tangerine trees and marmalade skies.” John protested that the song had nothing to do with LSD, but had been inspired by a painting his son Julian had done at school. “What’s that?” John had asked, and Julian had replied, “It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds.” Had the story come from anyone without John’s love of verbal jokery, it might have been more believable.
For the millions of hippies now dropping out across America, and their ever-increasing British brethren, Sgt. Pepper very quickly became more than a phonograph record. In their quasi-religion of love and peace, it became an almost sacred text, its random tracks elevated into a gospel more cohesive than even Paul McCartney had ever dreamed, its casual in-jokes and spur-of-moment sound effects interpreted as coded symbols, messages, and philosophical observations on the deepest matters of life and death. Even the fragment of electronic gibberish in the play-out groove was subjected to intensive analysis and eventually pronounced to be saying “Fuck me like a superman,” whatever cosmic profundity that might imply.
If the Beatles had hated the mindlessly screaming fans of four years back, they hated the mystery-and message-seekers more. John, especially, denied with increasing bitterness that his songs had any hidden or mystical meaning. “I just shove a lot of sounds together, then shove some words on,” he said. “We know we’re conning people, because people want to be conned. They give us the freedom to con them.”
A month earlier in the Beatles’ fan magazine a correspondent had expressed the view of the huge other audience they still had. “I know that if Paul took drugs, I’d be worried sick,” the letter-writer said. “But I know he’s too sensible.”
It was, however, the most cautious and image-conscious Beatle who, a fortnight after Sgt. Pepper’s release and on the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday, admitted to Life magazine that he had taken LSD. The admission was possible since acid had only recently become illegal. Paul, while stressing the pluperfect tense, spoke nonetheless as an enthusiast. “It opened my eyes,” he said. “We only use one-tenth of our brains. Just think what we’d accomplish if we could tap that hidden part.”
The outcry was even more ferocious than over Sergeant Pepper’s alleged illegal pharmacopoeia. The Beatle who had hitherto been looked on as pop music’s best ambassador was denounced, in the Daily Mail, as “an irresponsible idiot.” Intercessionary prayers were offered by Dr. Billy Graham to prevent the world’s innocent youth from rushing to emulate him. Paul, protesting he bore no such responsibility, did his best to disarm his attackers with good old Liverpool humor. Taking drugs, he said, was “like taking aspirin without a headache.” On television he was asked if he didn’t feel it irresponsible to broadcast that endorsement to such a huge audience. Paul very reasonably answered that the television company was doing no less by interviewing him in prime time. “It’s you who’ve got responsibility not to spread this. If you’ll shut up about it, I will.”
Soon afterward came news of an even more unlikely acid-head. Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ apparently well-bred and respectable manager, came forward with John and George in a supportive phalanx to admit having taken LSD about half a dozen times before it became illegal. Among those who read the news (oh, boy) was the Beatles’ supreme idol Elvis Presley, soon to forsake Hollywood schlock and return to live performance. Once the standard bearer for rebellious youth, Elvis now looked with horror on the drug counterculture (in which he did not include his own massive narcotics intake, those all being supplied on doctors’ prescriptions). Indeed, the King now sported the honorary badge of a federal narcotics agent and, later, would personally urge America’s new president, Richard M. Nixon, not to let the Beatles into the country again.
Within a few days the whole controversy had been eclipsed by an event that established the Beatles as a literally astral presence as well as demonstrating the schizophrenic nature of the BBC. To demonstrate the ever-developing marvels of satellite broadcasting, the corporation initiated a program called Our World, made jointly by itself and TV networks in thirteen other countries and broadcast live as a symbol of international amity in tune with hippie love and peace. The same BBC that so recently had damned “A Day in the Life” as a drug addict’s guidebook now saw nothing contradictory in presenting the Beatles as stars of Our World’s British segment, representing the corporation, the country, and the theme artistic excellence. And, however terminally pissed-off with the corportion they might feel, the Beatles could hardly resist such a showcase for a new song.
The broadcast took the form of a party—now more correctly called a happening or a love-in—in Abbey Road’s Studio One. The Beatles in flower-power gear performed their specially written number perched on stools and wearing headphones as if caught in the act of recording. Among the privileged crowd who sat around them were Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Moon of The Who, Eric Clapton of Cream, Patti Harrison, Jane Asher, and Paul McCartney’s brother, Michael.
The new song was called “All You Need Is Love,” a foot-stomping chant seemingly designed to contain no shades of meaning or hidden symbols or messages whatever. In a Scouse accent, of course, the crucial word came out as “loov,” suggesting something rather more edgy and ironic than the usual bland flower-child articulation. “All you need is loov,” sang John, between chews on a wad of gum, “Loov, loov. Loov is allyerneed…” A thirteen-piece orchestra was on hand to provide sound effects that included the opening trumpet fanfare of “La Marseillaise” and a sarcastic Lennon reprise of “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.” At the end, balloons and party streamers were showered onto the set, and members of the pop royalty present walked rather self-consciously up and down with placards saying “Love” in various languages while others danced a conga around the studio floor.
The performance went out to thirty-one countries and was watched by approximately five hundred million, a global audience destined not to be surpassed until the Live-Aid concert of 1985 and the death of a still unknown Princess.
That hopeful message to the world was unfortunately lost on the British police who, in response to mounting pressure from Fleet Street, parliament, and the Church, had chosen 1967 for an all-out assault on the drug-guzzling counterculture. Their intended victims presented invitingly soft targets, not least the group who had most outraged public feeling with their hairiness, surliness, sexiness, and refusal to mount the r
evolving platform on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. In February, an eighteen-strong police task force had raided the Sussex home of the Rolling Stones’ lead guitarist Keith Richard while Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and a number of other upmarket underground figures were spending the weekend there. A thorough search of the premises and everyone present had revealed four illegal amphetamine tablets in the pocket of a coat belonging to Jagger. George and Patti Harrison had also been among the party, but had left just before the police arrived. It would later be alleged that the raiders had waited for them to get clear, because to bust a Beatle was still considered tantamount to defiling a national treasure.
The subsequent trial of Jagger and Richard, each for about the most minor drug offense in the book, gave a dark and ugly descant to that summer of flowers and bells and joss sticks and multicolored Sgt. Pepper satins, when “all you need is loov” seemed woven into the very sunshine. Tried and convicted at Chichester Quarter Sessions the following June, Richard was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and Jagger to three months, while Marianne Faithfull achieved notoriety as “the girl in the fur rug” who had allegedly been the centrepiece of a group-sex orgy. A rumor swept Britain that when the police burst in Jagger had been licking a Mars bar lodged in Marianne’s vagina. Although there quickly proved to be no basis for the rumor, for a time it was the Profumo scandal all over again, just moved down an age group and a class.
The affair took on some of the qualities of an LSD hallucination when Britain’s most pro-Establishment newspaper, the Times, rallied to Jagger’s and Richard’s defense, criticizing their vengeful public humiliation and plainly excessive sentences in an editorial headed by a quotation from William Blake, “Who Breaks a Butterfly On a Wheel?” Both Stones were freed on appeal, Jagger being then helicoptered to take part in a televised discussion with assorted Establishment grandees, including the editor of the Times, about “what today’s young people really want.” His next act was to join Richard and the other Stones in the studio to produce their own sarcastically Beatles-themed message to their late persecutors, a song called “We Love You” with anonymous backup vocals by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Beatles and Brian lent them further support on July 24 as signatories in a full-page Times advertisement calling for the legalization of marijuana.
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