Web Letters: A Day in the Life: Sgt. Pepper Turns 40

I have a different take on the album. I think the unification of the album is an afterthought, just a shell, a thin one, for the vast creativity the Beatles were experiencing at the time. It has way too many ideas, musical, personal, and philosophical, and the result is understandably cacophonous. Still it pushed pop music into a deeper more thoughtful realm.

By the way, when John says "I'd Love to Turn you On", let's face it, he's talking about sex.

Rod Bickles

Las Vegas, NV

"So much possibility, so much impossibility." Is this the same defeatism that made the Democrats cave into Bush on the war funding?

Sgt. Pepper was a statement of defiance, cheerfully flouting the rules, enjoying itself. Lennon was far more fascinating when he sung about "Henry the Horse" than about Yoko or his dead mother. The true concept behind this album (self-evident as it was) was freedom, imagination, diversity, pluralism. Each song has its own identity. Nowhere is there the cultural fascism of the far right, or the cultural Stalinism of the far left. There is only the freedom to explore. Sgt. Pepper may be seen as a time capsule, if you like, but only because the subsequent cultural shift demanded that everyone unilaterally forgo the "possibilities" of art. In our contemporary blighted frozen cultural landscape, rock is indeed dead, but there is no reason a phoenix can't rise from the ashes. Sgt. Pepper will provide a template

John Sullivan

Havre de Grace, MD

"Some of the cuts are pretty bad, particularly John Lennon's "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," with elaborate circus sound effects and not much else. Lennon's song about the world of LSD, "where rockinghorse people eat marshmallow pies," is cloying."

As a ubiquitous caveman says on TV, "Whaaat?"

Although most the songs on Sgt. Pepper have Beatle antecedents, it is hard to describe the dislocation of the senses caused by the first exposure to this album even for sophisticated listeners of the time. The "concept" of this, the first true rock concept album, was never about the literal "Sgt. Pepper." Nor were the songs meant to be taken literally as those of a concept band. The purpose was to make clear that the Beatles' rock and roll had becaome an art form of their own definition--that an album was no longer the singles and whatever else had been recorded, but was a whole, meant to be listened to in sequence and all at once.

Remember, 45 rpm singles were the best-selling media of the time. Sgt. Pepper changed that forever.

So, the comment, "Listening to the CD forty years later, the concept behind this concept album now seems a bit lame: The lads take on the identity of old-time music hall entertainers for a kaleidoscopic tour of popular styles of the century--marching bands, circus music, folk songs, jazz hits," is sadly beside the point.

The album was meant as a statement by the band to the world that they would no longer play by the rules of the game that they and Brian Epstein invented.

The result was that Sgt. Pepper became and remains the most important rock album ever recorded. It was the work that redefined how twentieth-century culture related to popular serious music. So, saying that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is "cloying" is also irrelevant. Besides, as usual the song has been misinterpreted by the essayist. John's young son gave his father a picture he had drawn. John asked him what it meant. He said it was "Lucy in the sky with diamonds." Lennon wrote the song for him, but it made the Sgt. Pepper album most certainly because it is one of the finest examples of John's ability to match modern poetry to music.

Interestingly, the individual songs on Sgt. Pepper have gone in and out of style over the last 40 years, but the astounding accomplishment of it as a work that pushed an entire culture into a new era cannot be overstated.

(Dave Hearn was a member of the 1980s band Hawks, whose albums owe virtually everything on them to the path laid out by the Beatles) Google Perfect World Radio....

Dave Hearn
Silhouette Multimedia

Fort Dodge, IA