Michael Gerber
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Reading Starostin’s part one analysis of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I realized that I’ve never wondered for a second about “the concept” behind that LP; it’s so clear to me I’m a little puzzled when people — John Lennon among them — profess that there is no concept whatever. But I’m finding it difficult to write. I’ve spent the last two days writing paragraphs and discarding them, and this post is a final attempt to blast through, share my idea, and continue hashing it out in the comments.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an album designed around a kind of historical longing very specific to psychedelia in general, and British psychedelia in specific. In the most blunt terms, Pepperland — the place you are taken to by the album — is more or less La Belle Epoque, with drugs. Le Belle Epoque refers to a 43-year period of European history characterized by peace, optimism, prosperity, and artistic and technological progress, which was suddenly and brutally ended by World War I.

If you want to date the place in Pepper specifically, maybe you think of a person who is turning 64 in 1967 —but the concept is not as flat-footed as that.

One of the hallmarks of psychedelic art, whether it’s the posters being produced in San Francisco or the clothes sold on Carnaby Street (at I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet) or Pepper, is the use of historical styles, transformed (or at least heavily inflected) by the specific visual/mental/spiritual experiences caused by psychedelics. Psychedelic art is not simply a set of rules, of random aesthetics — it is an attempt to evoke a distinct experience. So you see a Mucha illustration surrounded by melting letterforms. Or a Victorian-era photo of Sitting Bull, in hot pink metallic ink. Or the 1930s-style drawings of R. Crumb, doing things only hippies do. Or, you see John Paul George and Ringo in band uniforms in peacock colors, two of them tripping, with mustaches and flower epaulets. Or you have heavily processed songs with lyrics literally from a poster from 1843. While it entices us into a Utopian future, psychedelia is obsessed with the past. (That’s one of the reasons I love it so.)

Pepper is the desire for a do-over, expressed by a generation of young people who looks at modernity and sees a death cult. It is a vision of an alternate past, but it’s not simply marmalade-sniffing like The Kinks — the journey back is full of love and magic. Pepper doesn’t say to the listener, “Those were the good ol’ days,” but “The British Empire is dead, let’s build a better one, a whole new kind of one.” This is why George’s Indian detour doesn’t feel out of place — the Raj, too, will be transformed. And then we will laugh.

One of the signature experiences of LSD seems to be “oneness with the Universe” — the perception that everything is natural, everything is alive, and all is One. This is key to the concept of Pepper; this return and remaking is based on oneness, not the atomized, alienated, endlessly analyzed world of modernism.

If you look at the cover, the switched-on Beatles — holding not electric guitars (they didn’t use that take) but Victorian/Edwardian instruments — are quite literally in front of all the heroes of modernism. In front of Freud and Jung (and Hitler, too, if John’s had had his way.) Even their old selves are there, but as waxworks — dead, inhuman, inert. The leading four stand not on a stage, but in a garden, underneath impossibly blue skies. (That last summer of peace was remembered as particularly beautiful and sunny.)

• • •

The legend goes that when Brian Wilson first heard Sgt. Pepper, he pulled over and started sobbing. “They’ve done it,” he said. “They got there first.”

Got where?

For about a year, Wilson and Van Dyke Parks had been laboring over SMiLE. As a framing device Wilson and Parks had collected all sorts of Americana, which they hoped to arrange in some sort of coherent statement about the nature of this country and what it meant, at that time, to be American. But SMiLE is as capacious and chaotic in its way as Pepper is; vast chunks of SMiLE actually seem like a different concept album, one closer to Wilson’s Pet Sounds. It’s all great music—but not about America, Manifest Destiny, or the bittersweet experience of being American.

I believe what Wilson was really trying to do — and eventually did — was use the studio to transport the listener to a past America of his mind, from which his young listeners could make a better future, for America and the world. And when Wilson heard Pepper, he intuitively knew that McCartney and his mates had done something similar, but in an English idiom, not an American one.

A vision this capacious was simply too big for any one musician to envision, even one as talented as Brian Wilson. McCartney needed the help of the other Beatles, and George Martin, and Haworth and Blake. And Lennon definitely did pull his weight putting across Pepper—not just with “Kite,” but also “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a story of love and longing in a switched-on world.

But Lennon’s greatest contribution to Pepper was the song that Wilson heard, his album ender, “A Day in the Life.” It’s poleaxing, but why? Because of that final chord. That final chord is the end of the summer, the end of the dream, the “lights going out all over Europe,” or the Bomb everyone expected to drop at any moment in 1967. It was the final curtain, Goodbye to All That, to quote Robert Graves’ memoir of World War I.

But those are not the last sounds on Pepper. The last sounds are weird laughter, the words “Never could be any other way,” sped up and reversed. All that had come before—all that we assumed never could be any other way—could be reversed, and sped up, and there would be laughter.

Am I just playing games here, like pointing out Paul’s OPD patch on the gatefold? No—Pepper’s concept doesn’t work like that, and if it did it wouldn’t be nearly as impactful. But if you’re historically sensitive, and well read in the British culture of the time—if you know about things like the musical “Oh What a Lovely War!”— the concept behind Pepper is so obvious that once you see it, you can’t un-see it. But it’s not obvious; you gotta know the context—it is a concept of that time and place, not ours. The concept hit like a sledgehammer in June 1967, but became almost indecipherable after, because it’s not located in a musician’s personal traumas (like Tommy), or some Sixth Form yawping about conformity or the quiet desperation of the career civil servant or some shit.

SPLHCB started out as precisely this typical, tiring concept LP—an album about The Beatles’ childhoods in Liverpool that petered out after “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane.” What we got instead was much, much more interesting. The Beatles intended to write about their own childhoods, and almost by accident, ended up writing about the childhood of the West.

• • •

I’ll end this piece how I’ve ended a couple of posts about Pepper, but this chunk of text is particularly appropriate for this topic. The people who listened to Pepper in 1967 definitely experienced it as a concept album, and that extra oomph was felt at least until 1990 or so, after which it began falling out of the #1 spot. The timing here should tell you something—that was the end of the Cold War, when the USSR collapsed and it seemed that human civilization would make it. The Utopian “do-over” suggested by Pepper wasn’t needed anymore.

But back in 1967, Pepper wasn’t a collection of songs not quite as good as Revolver. It wasn’t the first appearance of Paul’s flaws, his reprises and bubblegum and granny music. Pepper certainly wasn’t hype. For the people who heard it then, it was profound. This is Landon Winner from 1968, writing about Pepper: “The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food—Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend—the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard. For a brief while the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.” (If you want more, this guy gets it.)

That was the concept: the West, unified in electric love, going back to where things went wrong, and trying again. Never could be any other way? For a time at least, it worked. Put the speakers in the window and let’s see what happens next.

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