Ulysses

I responded to this elsewhere, at a time when I wasn't aware that Monsieur Cellar Tapes was posting his reviews here. Purely in the spirit of 'a new boy trying to contribute to the board' I thought I'd throw this in the ring as I disagreed with a lot of what he had to say and whilst he's right that Sgt Pepper does draw criticism these days, I think a lot of the criticism has merit.

I agree with the idea that Sgt Pepper, to any fan of either 60s music generally or specifically psychedelia, is pretty much the paisley pachyderm in the room. You can only talk around it for so long before you’ve got to admit it’s there and meet it head on. However, it just so happens I’ve got a pith helmet and an elephant gun with me…

My biggest problem is the idea of Sgt Pepper being genuinely 'ground-breaking'. I honestly believe that the reality is that it’s actually a lull between far more significant points. It's a fantastic lull certainly, and a lull that towers over the high points of many bands of that era but, in Beatles terms, a lull never-the-less.

Much is made of the theme or the ‘concept’ of the album as being innovative but even that doesn’t really stand-up to close scrutiny. It's widely known that Paul McCartney described Sgt Pepper as being The Beatles’ 'Freak Out!’. ‘Freak Out!’, of course, being Frank Zappa's 1966 album of the same name. It’s hard to say exactly what aspect of ‘Freak Out!’ McCartney was referring to as there are several overlapping areas. As well as being a double album, as was orginally intended with Sgt Pepper, and as well as both albums being having a wide stylistic spectrum, it’s worth noting that ‘Freak Out!’ also uses a fictional figure in similar ways to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper persona(s). ‘Freak Out!’ makes use of the ‘uptight’ and ‘white bread’ Suzy Creamcheese within the actual album, as well as the now-famous reference on the actual record sleeve.

However, what’s even more interesting is the reasoning behind utilising these personas. McCartney, it is claimed, wanted liberation from being a boxed-in mop top. The claim is fairly nonsensical though – and not in a good way! - as the Beatles had long hung-up their tour passes and, following Revolver, it was self-evident that the Beatles could pretty much get away with being as avant-garde as they wanted: so what exactly was so constricting about being a post-1966 Beatle? As far as the rest of the universe was concerned he, along with Nasty, Dirk and Barry, had the world on a plate.

McCartney’s fiction-figures and opportunity to speak (in a way he apparently felt he couldn’t as ‘Paul McCartney of the Beatles) are squandered on often cosy nostalgic references to Victoriana and Edwardiana, whilst Zappa’s is a much more vital stinging satire on American politics and the idiocies of pop culture. As Jane Asher’s boyfriend was appearing to avoid the world about him in favour of an expensive dressing-up box and getting lost in a sepia-tinted past-that-never-was, Frank Vincent was keenly dissecting what was happening around him and was alternately laughing and despairing at what he saw.

Much has been made over years of the innovativeness of Sgt Pepper's Victoriana, as if this was something McCartney personally unleashed from the moustachioed Research & Development lobe of his brain. What’s lost on a lot of people now, particularly now “it was 42 years ago today…” is that this particular nostalgic vein had already spurted scarlet and claret across the streets of ‘Swinging London’ for several years. Lord Kitchener’s Valet and its Great-Coated ilk had been selling military-surplus-made-kitsch clothing for quite a while by that point, whilst Vaudevillian nostalgia generally had been the shoe-spatted bread and butter for bands like the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and the Temperance Seven for a long time.

Even David Bowie’s own cultural antenna had also been picking up 'turn of the century' messages as they bounced back from space: his debut album being released the same day as Sgt Pepper. It's genuinely worth comparing what Bowie manages to do with the lyrics of the transvestite tragi-tale ‘She’s Got Medals’ against the reminiscence-fest of the Sgt Pepper title track and various other McCartney songs of this period. Which is really the more 'ground-breaking' here?

It could also be argued that McCartney and Co. had already played the 'retro quasi-military' card as early as ‘Yellow Submarine’ with the sing-song nautical Captain of his childhood. Even the name of the album, ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, was said to be a tip of the brigadier's hat to what was happening in America with the some of the more wordier San Francisco and L.A. band-names.

It can’t be reiterated enough that much of the amazing things that happen on the album, as with a lot of Beatles music, are down to the staff at Abbey Road. Whilst McCartney famously bemoaned Spector’s supposedly smothering over-production on ‘the Long and Winding Road’ (from ‘Let it Be’), it’s hard to think of a band that has generally benefited more from the sonic sorcery that’s come from a studio control desk. However, for all the hype that surrounds Sgt Pepper, the alleged innovations aren’t actually that innovative. The fairground madness of ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ is regularly spotlighted for it’s ‘new’ and clever use of production techniques, however, like a lot of things that appear on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it’s really only a continuation of what they’d already done before. George Martin’s magical musical cut-ups are only a more musically cohesive version of what they’d already done with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ the year before.

The use of Artificial Double Tracking, a technique that’s always mentioned in relation to Sgt Pepper and the Beatles’ work in the studio generally – as well as generally being a boon for the often Lazy Lennon – began, like a lot of things, on their previous album, ‘Revolver’. Similarly, much is made on the use of microphone placement on the album – particularly on the way this shaped the way drums were recorded for decades to come – however this was once more a continuation of something else that started with ‘Revolver’, that time being the way the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ string section was recorded.

As for the nature of the actual songs, it’s worth remembering the chronology of the recording and writing of the songs as well as the order of their release. Anything that is shown as evidence of Pepper’s much vaunted ‘experimentation’ – whether this is the synched grand piano chords, the unstructured orchestration parts or the mixing magic – it is, time and time again, undermined by what the Beatles had done themselves the previous year. As surreally pretty as ‘Lucy…’ is, it’s neither as breath-taking nor mind-melting as ‘Strawberry Fields for Ever’ on any level, whether as a song or a recording exercise, and perhaps the same can be said for any Sgt Pepper track.

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The Fields of Mars