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 July 15, 2007 A Splendid Time
In truth, rock’n’roll had already been taking itself seriously for a couple of years, and so had its fans. Henke wasn’t only describing a cultural phenomenon brought about by the release of Sgt. Pepper’s -- he was writing about the years 1965 to 1969, when rock’n’roll triumphed and the cultural landscape was beginning to be shaped by the kids born after World War II. Pop singers of the previous generation, such as Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, didn’t fade away, but had to step aside for a new crop of songwriters and performers who were not going to leave the scene anytime soon. Rock’n’roll had already been around for ten years, but in the past the older generation of entertainers had been able to dismiss it with stale jokes about teenagers and their short attention spans. By 1967, the Beatles and their contemporaries on both sides of the ocean had not only remained on the charts for the previous three or more years, they had proved themselves capable of change and growth. Many rock’n’roll singers from the 1950s never had the chance to prove their staying power. Buddy Holly died young, Elvis was hustled off to the Army and spent the ’60s making a series of bad movies, Little Richard excused himself for a few years while he struggled with his religious convictions, and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis found themselves mired in scandal. But all of them had already inspired a lot of kids just a few years younger than they were to play their music. In addition, many of their fans remained true to them and to other real rockers of the ’50s, such as Fats Domino, and those fans decided rock’n’roll wasn’t something they wanted to grow out of when they went to college. When the new music came along, they were ready for it. As Charles Perry wrote in one of his essays for I Want to Take You Higher, "Our music was the rock & roll of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, much to the horror of the jazz loving Beats and the puritanical left-wing folk musicians." The new generation of rock’n’roll gave Bob Dylan a chance to break loose from those self-regarding folkies, and he grabbed it. Allen Berra wrote about Dylan’s escape a few years ago, in Slate: "Bob Dylan didn’t save rock’n’roll; it was rock’n’roll that saved Dylan, saved him from a lifetime of godawful, humorless ‘protest’ music." Two years before Sgt. Pepper’s, Dylan had released "Like a Rolling Stone," and the opening snare-drum rim shot was like a shot across the bow of pop music. Dylan’s lyrics were complex, allusive, and personal, but rock fans knew what he meant when he sang, "How does it feel / to be on your own / with no direction home." At nearly six minutes, "Like a Rolling Stone" was more than twice the length of the average pop single, and it told the older generation that pop music wouldn’t be hemmed in by constraints of time or of subject matter. Technically, Dylan was already on the charts when "Like a Rolling Stone" hit the airwaves -- the Byrds were in the Top 10 with a cover of his "Mr. Tambourine Man." They combined Dylan’s poetry and folk-music roots, shared by Byrds Roger McGuinn and David Crosby, with a hint of the Beatles to create a new sound in American rock. The Beatles would also show Dylan’s influence, converting it to serve their own ends on Help!, released two months after "Like a Rolling Stone." Musical influences traveled with dazzling speed in the 1960s as musicians absorbed them and made them their own. If they couldn’t adapt, they faded away. Rock’n’roll fans expected ambition and change, and the result was an exceptionally rich period of pop songwriting and recording.
When you consider Sgt. Pepper’s in the context of the many groundbreaking LPs released in 1967, it doesn’t seem especially radical. Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced was more virtuosic, on a strictly instrumental level, and its experiments in pure sound often had more in common with jazz albums of the time, such as John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space or Sun Ra’s Atlantis, both released that year. The Stones began 1967 with Between the Buttons, the Doors released their first album in April, Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn came along in August, the Kinks continued their streak of inspired LPs with Something Else in September, and The Who Sell Out rounded out the year. The year’s most radical, even shocking LP appeared in March. The Velvet Underground and Nico didn’t make people think of love beads or of wearing flowers in their hair. In short, whatever one might think of a particular title on my list (and I didn’t even include such soul masterpieces as the Four Tops’ Reach Out or Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You), 1967 was a banner year for rock’n’roll. I’m not trying to disparage Sgt. Pepper’s or downplay its importance, but it was a great album in a year of great albums. The Beatles were able to achieve what they did in that record because rock’n’roll fans allowed it, even demanded it, and because other songwriters and bands challenged their preeminence. Some records have been so talked about or overplayed that it becomes hard to listen to them without assuming we know them and have pulled from them everything we can. When I think about Sgt. Pepper’s, I often feel it’s the one Beatles album that seems dated. Then I play it and wonder why I ever thought that. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" does capture the spirit of the summer of 1967, but in a way that is not dated but charming. "She’s Leaving Home" is a little pretentious and overblown, but I never lift the needle or skip the track. Every song on the record, even "When I’m Sixty-Four," carries with it the drive and joy of musicians who have pushed themselves beyond what they thought they could do. It’s the sound of pure inspiration and the thrill of creating. In those years, a lot of records had that kind of magic, and in rock’n’roll, anything seemed possible. Sometimes it still does. …Joseph Taylor
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Forty years ago -- on June 2, 1967 --
the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band in the US,
the day after it hit British record shops. For many people, Sgt. Pepper’s remains
the signal event of the 1960s, embodying the progressivism, cultural as well as musical,
of the times. People began taking rock music seriously. Critic Jack Kroll wrote, in Newsweek,
that "A Day in the Life," the album’s epic closing track, was
comparable to T.S. Eliot’s "The Wasteland." Kenneth Tynan reviewed the LP
for the London Times and hailed it as "a decisive moment in the history of
Western civilization." As James Henke noted 30 years later in I Want to Take You
Higher, the book that accompanied the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame’s
exhibition on the psychedelic era, "the music that only a few years earlier had been
dismissed as a teenage fad was shaping our culture."
By the time the Beatles completed Sgt.
Pepper’s, they had already set a high standard for themselves, especially
with the two LPs that preceded it, Rubber Soul and Revolver. Other musicians
also kept them on their toes. Dylan had released both Bringing It All Back Home and
Highway 61 Revisited in 1965, and Blonde on Blonde in 1966. Other important
albums from 1965-66 show just how bold and experimental pop music was becoming: The
Rolling Stones made two straight masterpieces, Out of Our Heads and Aftermath;
the Kinks gave us The Kink Kontroversy and Face to Face; the Who
issued The Who Sing My Generation and A Quick One; Cream, the Mothers
of Invention, and Simon and Garfunkel all made debut recordings in those exciting two
years. Most important, at least to Paul McCartney, was the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds,
which McCartney has repeatedly cited as a source of inspiration for Sgt. Pepper’s.