by Simon Warner
There is some remarkable and memorable musical content on Sgt. Pepper – the exquisite chamber setting of ‘She’s Leaving Home’, the head-spinning fairground re-creations of ‘Mr. Kite’, the sheer scale and scope of ‘A Day in the Life’ with its two quite distinct sections and extraordinary orchestral climax – but it is hard to equate the songs and sounds here with the styles that were causing excitement in San Francisco at the time. There are many more hints, perhaps, of an idiosyncratic English style – whether the orchestral settings, the music hall elements or the circus evocations – than blatant nods to contemporary American forms. Yet even these Anglicisms are rarely, maybe barely, of the ground-breaking character of those novel soundscapes that were being developed by British bands such as Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, highly inventive material that had been leaving such a strong live impression in the months prior to Sgt. Pepper’s minting.
Commenting on the music on the record, George Martin is a useful, if hardly disinterested, touchstone. In The Summer of Love he states: ‘Sgt. Pepper was a musical fragmentation grenade, exploding with a force that is still being felt. It grabbed the world of pop music by the scruff of the neck, shook it hard, and left it to wander off, dizzy but wagging its tail. As well as changing the way pop music was viewed, it changed the entire nature of the recording game – for keeps. Nothing even remotely like Pepper had ever been heard before’.44 Perhaps though, he speaks for the production values, the technological innovations, more than for the songs themselves.
The idea of ‘consolidation’ provides some interesting points for consideration: the communalism of the hippies, the idea of strength en masse and the mutual support of the community’s members is clearly regarded as significant within the hippy ethos of San Francisco. The Beatles by 1967 were, on the one hand, leaders of a cultural movement but, at the same time, rather distant figureheads. Retiring from touring in 1966, their studio-bound lives and membership of an elite metropolitan circle of artists, musicians and writers inevitably separated them – physically and psychologically – from the people at large. Yet Sgt. Pepper is an album that tries to resurrect some of the pleasure of their stage careers and also incorporates some of the sounds that connote not only a ‘liveness’ but also a desire to connect with an audience again, best symbolised by the title track and its reprise but also in other details of wildtrack – the orchestra tuning up at the start, audience applause at various stages, the suggestion that ‘A Little Help From My Friends’ is an on-stage segue from a live opening number, and the relieving laughter at the end of the serious, solemnity of ‘Within You, Without You’. All of these factors, however planned or contrived, hint that the group are wanting to make some link with a wider world, make a gesture of the ordinary, include the quotidian in the midst of their glamorous, star-crossed, yet rather isolated, existences. The Beatles may reach out only theatrically but at least they try to connect.
As for ‘joyous sexuality’ – and the release of the libido from its social and cultural handcuffs appears crucial to the hippy credo and a keystone to the Summer of Love – how much is that to be encountered in the grooves of Sgt. Pepper? In many ways, this is a perversely sex-less recording. There may be hints of platonic affection – ‘When I’m 64’ – or chummy attraction – ‘Lovely Rita’ – or even optimism for relationships that may have soured – ‘Getting Better’ – but the general tone of this album has little in common with the libertarian and intense physical feelings being vigorously played out in the Haight of the time. On the contrary, the album seems, all too often, to be fraught with an air of repression and frustration: the young woman escaping the provinces for the metropolis in ‘She’s Leaving Home’ is not portrayed as a pioneer on the brink of adventure and salvation but a somewhat desperate escapee carrying a burden of sadness. Ultimately, the classic British restraint in sexual areas, the unease at expressing unfettered passion, characterises this collection much more than we might have expected: the liberated mood of the period in matters amorous is little evident in this Beatles collection.
What of Hamilton’s own overview? ‘Hippies believed in spreading love, freedom, peace, sincerity, and creativity, and they considered acid essential in doing this’.45 To what degree can we perceive Sgt. Pepper to be aligned with such notions? ‘Love’, ‘freedom’ and ‘peace’ are touched upon only in the most passing or abstract of senses and barely in a celebratory fashion: the album provides no explicit and ringing endorsement of these values. Sincerity is more difficult still to identify. By the time of this record, the Beatles had adopted an alter ego of sorts – the fictional band of the title – which gave this LP its constructed and staged, even artificial, flavour.46 Authentic feelings are not entirely absent – Lennon’s ‘A Day in the Life’ and ‘Good Morning’, McCartney’s ‘Getting Better’ and Harrison’s ‘Within You Without You’ may possess elements of the autobiographical – but numerous of the pieces are closer to the model of McCartney’s ‘novelist’ songs47 (‘Sgt. Pepper’, ‘Lucy’, ‘Rita’, ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and ‘When I’m 64’) than symbols of genuine, personal revelation.
As for ‘creativity’, we can hardly question the album’s richness in this respect, building still further on the advancements of Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966). This magnum opus was the product of months of artistic imagination and technological experiment: the result of hundreds of hours of team-work between the Beatles themselves, George Martin and his principal engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. Yet, for all that, this was hardly a creative exercise of the sort that the hippies might have either realised or recognised. The group and their collaborators were working within congenial, if hardly state-of-the-art,48 studio conditions sponsored by one of the most powerful entertainment businesses in existence, a high-end venture orchestrated by a major industrial conglomerate. The fact that label EMI – ‘the greatest recording organisation in the world’49 – owned the Abbey Road studios where the work was done produced an irresistible symbiosis. The Beatles, the leading name in global music-making at the time and a copper-bottomed certainty to produce a profitable outcome from their extended endeavours, had as much time as they needed to perfect their aesthetic vision, a luxury afforded to few acts, before or indeed since. While Lennon, McCartney and co. may have tipped their hats to traditional notions of the visiting muse or the spontaneous combustions of an individual, creative force, there is no question that Sgt. Pepper owed as much to the ‘white heat of technology’, to appropriate one of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s slogans of the time,50 as to the autonomous expression of the artist or the kind of organic romanticism and pastoral naturalism that many of the hippies had, by now, espoused.
The cover of Sgt. Pepper is a subject we cannot ignore in this consideration, as the sleeve – and the accompanying artefacts that were included within the package51 – arguably goes further than the musical contents within as a vivid, visual realisation of the moment. The dazzling colour scheme – brilliant reds, yellows and the fluorescent shades of the band outfits – arguably speaks more eloquently of the optimisms of that summer than the songs themselves. The principal image, devised by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth from an original concept by McCartney then photographed by Michael Cooper,52 is a potent distillation of the eclectic energy of that hippy summer. The Beatles adopt the guise of turn-of-the-century bandsmen, albeit psychedelically re-tinted, a clear nod to the tendency of the hippy community to blend emblems of the natural and organic – characteristics included long-hair, bare-feet and jettisoning of the bra – with a set of carnivalesque references to the past: the Victorian and Edwardian, Art Nouveau and Symbolism. Add, too, that the collaged crowd who gather include Bob Dylan and Beat guru William Burroughs, a number of Indian mystics chosen by Harrison, pot plants and a reference to the Rolling Stones, the striking wax figure of Sonny Liston, a black sporting hero at the height of the Civil Rights push, and (an absent) Gandhi (who was meant to appear but was excised after legal advice) and we have a powerful concoction o
f the individuals and ideas informing the artistic, cultural, political and spiritual world of 1967. Yet, we shouldn’t forget that in the midst of this fantastical convention lurks Adolph Hitler, conveniently hidden by the living, day-glo Beatles, suggesting that there was more than an air of a cheeky prank behind the making of the image and not merely a notion of phantasmagoric good vibes.
But to return to our key questions – was this creative product, in any real sense, a musical mantra to the Summer of Love and its expressions, to hippiedom and its subcultural value system, to the counterculture and its political concerns of that period? The Summer of Love would disintegrate almost as quickly as it had taken shape: the swallows of the gentle revolution would speedily fly off to other climes and times, with the more threatening invocations of the spring of 1968 to come. The idealism that may have lain at the root of the 1967 project was de-railed, in part, by its success. The media had played a part in distorting the ethos of the hippy cause – Farrell reports that Time magazine asked that their San Francisco reporters should compile a backgrounder on this ‘controversial, cloud-cuckooland miniculture’,53 setting the tone for the mixture of ridicule and misinformation that shaped mainstream press accounts of the place and the venture – but the call to fellow travellers to come to the Bay Area also back-fired on the organising group as so many responded to the appeal. ‘By the fall of 1967, the Haight had become so popular that it could not maintain its communitarian voluntarism’, he points out.54 Farber and Bailey comment that the new arrivals were not as able to adapt as those who had been there for some time, building this alternative community. ‘Many if not most of the newcomers were poorly equipped for the task at hand. Hip businesses flourished but rape, disease, exploitation, violence and bad drug experiences skyrocketed’.55 By the end of the summer the Diggers, that group most committed to creating a countercultural space in the Haight, had declared ‘the death of Hippie’.56 Hamilton puts it most directly: ‘The Summer of Love crashed, many hippies fled the Haight, and as an alternative society, the district never recovered’.57
If we are to make direct connections between the Summer of Love, the Haight and the wider Californian scene and the Beatles, they do exist. As we have mentioned, McCartney was a mover behind the Monterey Festival and Harrison would, that year, actually visit the San Francisco quarter himself to see what was happening there.58 But the so-called ‘quiet Beatle’,59 joined by his then wife Pattie Boyd, endured an unhappy experience while among the residents of the hippy heartland. When Harrison, guitar in hand, proved less than accepting of an unsolicited drug offer, the crowd turned on him and the musician departed unimpressed and deeply unconvinced by the district’s peace and love promises. Recalls Boyd:
It was a slightly unfortunate situation because George and I […] had taken a tab of acid and gone down to see what Haight-Ashbury was like, thinking it would be rather like the King’s Road in London. And we walked down Haight-Ashbury and these people started walking towards us and they all looked quite beautiful. They all had flowers in their hair and long flowing robes, carrying babies. Then I realised they had a slightly mad look, pretty stoned and out of it. I know we were, too, but there was something quite odd about everybody being stoned. I heard a voice saying, do you want some drug. And George said, ‘No, no, I’m fine’. And this man turned around to everybody and said: ‘George Harrison turned me down’. At that point the crowd became nasty and angry.60
Ultimately though, despite these first-hand links – positive and negative – which the Beatles forged with the West Coast scene, Sgt. Pepper seems, in retrospect, a less than ideal representation of that broader period for the reasons we have described. Perhaps the best-remembered musical evocation of the time remains Scott McKenzie’s ‘San Francisco’, with a lyric penned by Mamas and Papas member John Phillips, which not only carried the parenthetical legend ‘Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair’ in its subtitle, summing up quite brilliantly within that image the airy, sunny and fruitful possibilities that the Summer of Love appeared to promise, but also, along the way, enjoying significant commercial success on the singles charts – a number one song in the UK and a Top 5 spot in the US – something that Sgt. Pepper itself was quite unable to generate, its intended golden musical nuggets, ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’, issued in advance of the LP and destined never to even assume album track status.
Yet there is no little irony that, if the Beatles’ highest profile long player was not genuinely able to embody the energy and excitements of the time, the group would, within slightly over four weeks of Sgt. Pepper’s unwrapping, write and perform a new piece for a global, satellite television broadcast that would express, in its three minutes or so, the core of the message the hippies had fought to impart over the previous months. Thus it was, a little after the main fanfare, we were able to experience conceivably the perfect song for the Summer of Love. ‘All You Need is Love’, the anthemic work unveiled in late June to an audience running into the hundreds of millions61 and released as a single in July, represented, in many respects, the core theme of the original Haight-Ashbury campaign expressed in universal terms to a worldwide community. By then, although the Beatles’ and Scott McKenzie’s post-Sgt. Pepper releases would provide a mellifluous radio soundtrack for listeners across the UK and the US, the Summer of Love, at least that celebration forged in its founding city of San Francisco, had descended into over-populated chaos and the hopes that the Haight could form a regenerative model in the struggle against strife, domestic and international, had essentially crumbled.
Yet the remarks of Caroline Coon, British cultural and political activist, founder of the drug support agency Release, rock journalist with Melody Maker and later manager of the Clash, speaking on British radio on the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, provide a useful coda. If the original momentum of that campaign appeared to peter out all too quickly, she sees things with a different perspective and in a broader context. ‘We won,’ she states. ‘Everything the hippy generation was fighting for in terms of green politics, gender politics, race politics, sex politics, is actually now the norm. There are still struggles, but the kind of authoritarian right wing, as we all know today, has had to come into the centre ground. And so the Summer of Love has an absolutely lasting and abiding influence.’62 Sgt. Pepper, too, achieved an enduring reputation yet, as this account proposes the links between one subcultural demonstration and the other musical artefact are not as obvious, not as prevalent, as we may have expected. Further, we may see the Beatles’ album as the beginning of the end for the grandiose rock statement. If it was also regarded as the first concept album and also a clear sign that the currency of the single had been superseded by the pre-eminence of the long player, it was also a moment when some musicians began the trail towards a simpler, less complex approach to music-making, a gradual turn to a more primitive, back-to-basics strategy. The album that many in the following decade would cite as the most affecting on the punk and new wave movements would also emerge at the beginning of the Summer of Love, pre-dating Sgt. Pepper by a matter of weeks but unveiled to a far more muted fanfare. Released in April, The Velvet Underground & Nico was spare, minimal and dissonant in sound, a darker manifesto set against the peace and love credo of the hippies. While it would not strike commercial gold then, its impact on the generations of bands that would follow from the early 1970s would be arguably greater still than the Beatles’ masterpiece, a remarkable technical triumph, yes, but less a snapshot of its immediate cultural times than has often been assumed.
Notes
1George Martin with William Pearson, The Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (London: Pan, 1995).
2Farrell, 1997, p. 218.
3Terry H. Anderson, The Movement, 1995, p. 170, quotes a Time report of July 1966 referring to the hippies as ‘a wholly new subculture, a bizarre permutation of the middle-class American ethos’ that had been emerging since the last months of 1965.
4In Clinton Heylin’s The
Act You’ve Known for All These Years (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007), p. 5, the author quotes Lennon’s remark in a 1980 edition of Playboy, which connects with this analogy: ‘Whatever was blowing at the time moved The Beatles, too. I’m not saying we weren’t flags on top of the tip. But the whole boat was moving’.
5For example, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson awarded each of the group MBEs (Members of the British Empire) in 1965 (see Trynka, The Beatles, 2004, p. 170) and a visit to the Phillipines in 1966 caused local uproar when the President Ferdinand Marcos and wife Imelda were allegedly snubbed by the Beatles (ibid., p. 208).
6On 15 April 1966, the US magazine Time published a celebrated account trailed on the cover as ‘London: The Swinging City’. See Green, 1999, p. 71.