Magical Retreat: Sgt. Pepper After 45 Years

The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was released in June 1967, is a lovely confection, a beautifully self-conscious neon sign that celebrated with ample imagination the romantic ideal, where the possibility of true love could transcend all of our problems. (If only.) And in that summer, which came to be termed 'The Summer of Love,' Sgt. Pepper's seamless and mellifluous tone made it appear as if that possibility was indeed well within our grasp. However, the idea for the record, following up on their concept single “Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever” (two radically different renderings of childhood and originally destined for the album) came out of the opposite sentiment, a 'Summer of Hate' that took place the previous year.

That particular summer, American cities (as they had almost every summer in the mid-Sixties) were burning in reaction to the continued racial unrest. The escalation of the war in Vietnam had also all but diminished President Johnson's War on Poverty. In short, the tenor of violence was becoming exactly as black activist H. Rap Brown had described it then – as American as apple pie. Amidst this chaos, with the mounting frustration over the dashed ideals of the New Frontier of the early Sixties, The Beatles became easy targets for the angry and the disillusioned. You could say they were even, to a large degree, at the apex of those very ideals being dashed. So their 1966 tour, filled with torpor and turmoil, reached its bottom end with record burnings in the Deep South after John Lennon had remarked that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus. In that summer, The Beatles found themselves no longer in control of their meteoric success. When they first chose to engage their audience in 1962, with their first single “Love Me Do,” the goal wasn't simply to become entertainers, but to put new demands on the pop audience. They set out to take popular music and their fans to another place. And in the coming years they did just that – and more.

In the Shadow of Sgt. Pepper: We're Only in it for the Money

Last summer, I wrote in Critics at Large about how The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, a lovely, masterful avant-garde pop confection, also represented a magical retreat from a counter-culture that was on the verge of turning dark and violent. Before that darkness fully overshadowed the utopian spirit of that record, though, many of The Beatles' contemporaries made valiant attempts to duplicate the wizardry of Sgt. Pepper, as if they were trying to decode a secret language. In 1968, for instance, The Zombies ("Time of the Season") matched some of Pepper's technical innovations while adding some rich textures of their own on the exquisite Odyssey and Oracle (which was also recorded, like Pepper, at Abbey Road Studios). The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed (1967) developed precisely in the spirit of Sgt. Pepper. The album, which yielded two hit songs, "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights in White Satin," was conceived as a song cycle that spanned an entire day – from sunrise to evening – where every song provided a unique perspective from each member of the group. Days of Future Passed was an evocation of a pastoral mystical innocence worthy of poet William Wordsworth in the age of psychedelia.

The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones, a mere six months after Pepper, would concoct their own psychedelic conceit, Their Satanic Majesties Request, where they abandoned their R&B roots for exotic Indian rhythms, sound collages, and music hall pastiches. But because of their bad boy image, the record felt fake (despite its devious title) with its half-hearted flower power sentiments. There were many other lesser, now forgotten groups, who attempted to capture Sgt. Pepper's lightning in a bottle. One American artist who did respond to the seismic impact of Pepper, but didn't buy into the hippie ethos that blossomed out of The Beatles' landmark recording was Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. This Los Angeles band, who coined themselves "the ugly reminder," may have had long hair but they didn't even come close to resembling the pretty groups sprouting up like flowers in a magical garden.

To paraphrase critic Nik Cohen, The Mothers suggested a band of motorcycle outlaws out to pillage your home and kidnap your daughter – though they were more likely to play her Igor Stravinsky (or maybe "Louie Louie") rather than sexually ravage her. Dan Sullivan in The New York Times once pointed up the significant discrepancy between The Mothers and The Beatles. "The most striking difference between [The Beatles and The Mothers of Invention] is not in their work but in their approach to their work – The Beatles' desire to please an audience versus The Mothers' basic distrust of one." Sgt. Pepper had celebrated the romantic ideal, offering the possibility that love could transcend all of our problems. But Zappa, who had already been railing against the 19th Century Romantic tradition of music, perceived something sinister lurking beneath the flowers, beads, and incense burning. Zappa saw the very concept of flower power evolving into nothing less than a successful fad. So on his 1968 album, We're Only in it for the Money, he decided to go after the fad rather than The Beatles' music. "Sgt. Pepper was okay," Zappa remarked to critic Kurt Loder in 1988. "But the whole aroma of what The Beatles were was something that never caught my fancy. I got the impression from what was going on at the time that they were only in it for the money – and that was a pretty unpopular view to hold."

He may have had a point. Contrary to the more generous ideals attached to the group, The Beatles' career was more often than not preoccupied by the power of money. By 1968, film critic Pauline Kael even shared some of Zappa's distrust when she reviewed the animated film Yellow Submarine. She felt that the problem of commerce undermined The Beatles' image, which by that time, began to change in the wake of all the promotional marketing tie-ins associated with the movie. "Wasn't all this supposed to be what The Beatles were against?" Kael asked. "There's something depressing about seeing yesterday's outlaw idols of the teenagers become a quartet of Pollyannas for the wholesome family trade." Yet, even as early as 1965, when interviewed by Playboy, John Lennon sarcastically remarked that they were moneymakers first and entertainers second. It was this particular aura that Zappa countered on his record.

To Have and to Hold: The Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band 50th Anniversary Edition

Dreaming Pepper: The Beatles in costume.

                                                                          I.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in North America exactly 50 years ago today. Among the many things that were possible then and are impossible now is the unanimity that welcomed The Beatles’ eighth album as a culminating event in cultural history – if not History. “The closest that Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815,” critic Langdon Winner famously wrote at the time, “was the week that the Sgt. Pepper album was released.” An assertion so sweeping wouldn’t survive an hour in the social-media wind tunnel of today: experts both bona fide and instant would descend on it with annotated lists of other, far more unifying events. (Thus missing, as experts often do, the rhetorical value of overstatement: there’s a reason those words are still being quoted today.) But one unity Sgt. Pepper undoubtedly did effect was a new fusion of High and Low, of marketplace and ivory tower. It was embraced not only by pop fans, who kept it at #1 throughout the Summer of Love, but also highbrows previously dismissive of popular taste. Composer Ned Rorem believed the album announced “a new and glorious renaissance of song,” while literary scholar Richard Poirier called it “an eruption … for which no one could have been wholly prepared.” Wagner and Eliot, Monteverdi and Joyce were invoked for comparison.

Death and Rebirth: The Beatles, LSD, Brian Epstein and Transcendental Meditation

The Beatles with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1967.

On March 21, 1967, the same day The Beatles were recording the chorus of "Getting Better" on Sgt. Pepper, John Lennon left the vocal session while tripping on acid. Paul McCartney decided he had better get his writing partner home safely. Since it was too far to drive to John's home in Weybridge, Paul took Lennon to his place. After arriving, McCartney was curious to see if taking LSD would bring him closer to his currently distressed friend. Most of The Beatles had taken acid by the time they finished Sgt Pepper, but McCartney had earlier held out. Late in 1966, he finally dropped it with Tara Browne, but with mixed feelings. McCartney didn't enjoy losing control, or putting himself in a position where he couldn't find his way back home. A year later, McCartney actually caused some controversy when he admitted to the press that LSD had opened his eyes to new religious experiences. On that night he tried it with Lennon, he only wished to re-establish a bond they once had as songwriters, as brothers. "[Lennon's] rough edges and fuck-all personality only underscored Paul's pretensions, sparking a contrast that would haunt Paul for the rest of his life," wrote Bob Spitz in his biography, The Beatles. From evening until dawn, the two men hallucinated together, staring into each other's eyes, looking for the firm connection they had when they wrote "I Want to Hold Your Hand." McCartney would later refer to the experience with Lennon as communing with the unknown. He saw John as the Emperor of Eternity, a deity, while they both laughed and shared stories of past glories. For five hours, they communed deeply, barely moving, except for a short excursion taken into the garden. Throughout the evening, these two fractured geniuses briefly blended together as one. But what The Beatles and their fans didn't discover, until shortly after 1967, was that LSD had more troubling ramifications. It first gave credence to religious and political ideologues. When extremists like the Manson Family and the Weather Underground used it to further their apocalyptic agendas, The Beatles became unwitting champions of this new revolution. "The sad fact was that LSD could turn its users into anything from florally-bedecked peaceniks to gun-brandishing urban guerillas," critic Ian MacDonald explained in Revolution in the Head.

Mark Morris's Pepperland: Getting High

Mark Morris Dance Group in Pepperland. (Photo: Gareth Jones)

Pepperland, American choreographer Mark Morris’s latest work, is a new Beatles-inspired dance and, to paraphrase the Fabs, it takes you on a boat on a river to travel back to a not-so-distant time when patchouli scented the air and love was all you needed to change the world. Inspired by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but taking its title from the George Martin instrumental in the animated film Yellow Submarine, the Beatles project which soon followed the 1967 record that Rolling Stone calls the greatest rock album of all time, the nearly hour-long work reimagines the Swinging Sixties as a Technicolor dream. That's how Paul McCartney once described the decade he and his bandmates not only dominated but redefined. Accordingly, the mood is nostalgic in a sunny, giddy, carefree sort of way. The dancing, dexterously and whimsically performed by 14-members of the Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group, skips and leaps and somersaults. The direction is up.

America Thinks and Goes Home: The 50th Anniversary of Frank Zappa's Absolutely Free

While much of the pop music world today is celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, a few months before that landmark album made its way onto our turntables, Frank Zappa's second album, the rock oratorio Absolutely Free, was already sending up the culture wars with the irreverent verve and zeal of Spike Jones. Of course, it didn't draw anywhere near the attention of Pepper and no one is celebrating its 50th anniversary despite its daring and ribaldry. If Freak Out! (1966) announced the arrival of The Mothers of Invention and their subversive intentions (as well as influencing Sgt. Pepper), Absolutely Free was the fulfillment of those ambitions. On the inside cover of Freak Out!, Frank Zappa listed all those who had an impact on his work. But it’s on Absolutely Free that you can actually hear the presence of Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Lenny Bruce, and Edgard Varèse. Freak Out! was a beautifully designed map for The Mothers’ music, while Absolutely Free actually takes you places. Critic Greil Marcus wrote, in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, that “on this early effort the wit was liberating, the noise of the band not merely Absurdist but actually absurd. . . .”

Absolutely Free was indeed an oratorio of ridiculous extremes – performed at breakneck speed – with a tangy political satire woven into a musical embroidery. The history of 20th century music, from Stravinsky to The Supremes, happily plays bumper cars and lives up to the title of the record. No genre gets excluded – or not satirized. “We play the new free music – music as absolutely free, unencumbered by American cultural suppression,” Zappa announced. “We are systematically trying to do away with the creative roadblocks that our helpful American educational system has installed to make sure nothing creative leaks through to mass audiences. . . . The same patriotic feeling expressed in songs like ‘The Green Beret’ and ‘Day of Decision’ are embodied in our every performance, only on a more abstract level. . . .We represent the only true patriotism left.” This abstract example of true patriotism barely leaves you time to catch your breath, and the musical quotes just go whizzing past. And the album’s title turns out to be more than apt. All of Zappa’s musical ideas happily and freely collide in the rush hour traffic.

Seven Doors on One Side, Seven on the Other: The Revolver Box

The Beatles in Abbey Road Studios during filming of the "Paperback Writer" and "Rain" promo films. (Photo: Apple Corps)

A pitfall of trying to understand history is the narrative fallacy. It means deciding, often on scanty evidence and against opposite indications, that things happened a certain way for certain reasons, and then revising every conclusion to fit that faulty or incomplete picture. An example is the still-common characterization of The Beatles’ 1968 White Album as a study in dissolution because a) we know the group were having difficulties at the time, and b) John Lennon decided to describe it that way: “It’s like if you took each track off it and made it all mine and all George’s . . . It was just me and a backing group, Paul and a backing group.” There’s no reason not to hear the 1966 Revolver likewise, as a collection of solipsistic fragments. But we never have, because the dissolution narrative doesn’t commence until later—after Brian Epstein dies, Magical Mystery Tour bombs, and Yoko arrives. In fact, Revolver has long been held up as the summa of the group’s creative unity, despite being as diverse and divergent as the White Album. 

Criss-crossing Abbey Road: Dreaming The Beatles by Rob Sheffield

When John Lennon released his solo album Plastic Ono Band in 1970, he concluded the record with a tune called “God.” The song laments everything he no longer believed in, including “Beatles,” which he stutters out at the end of a long list of disenchantments. “The dream is over,” sings Lennon, and while that may have been true for him at the time, months after the break-up of his band, it wasn’t the case for the millions of fans who adored The Beatles and believed in them. The current crop of believers can be easily found on YouTube as they compile so-called Beatles albums from the Lennon, McCartney-Harrison-Starr solo years in the early seventies. The notion isn’t without merit, as many of the songs on the early solo records were being written in the final months of the band’s career. One such compiler, in a nod to the red and blue Beatles compilations issued by Apple in 1975, has created his own “orange” and “green” albums. Another fan by the name of Marc Bridson has created The Beatles fantasy albums featuring the Fab Four’s solo tracks, collected in an effort to preserve the band in ways they never expected. Strangely, it works . . . but only for dreamers.

Fifty years after the release of Sgt. Pepper and another forty-plus years after the break-up of the world’s most popular rock band, Rob Sheffield’s timing couldn’t be better. In his recently released memoir, Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World (Dey St.), Sheffield turns the story of the Beatles on its cultural head. Rather than write another chronological history of the band, leaving that task to scholars such as Mark Lewisohn, Sheffield tells the story of the group from his unique perspective. He literally begins at the end when Paul McCartney says, “Thanks, Mo” at the conclusion of “Get Back” on Let It Be. For Sheffield it’s a great place to start because it captures a “quintessential Beatle moment” when the band calls it a day and the fans get to enjoy the meaning of their musical and cultural impact. Looking back as a fan, Sheffield says, “The Beatles’ second career has lasted several times longer than the first one . . . The world keeps dreaming the Beatles, long after the Beatles themselves figured the dream was over.” Clearly, timing is everything.

A Cut Above: In Conversation with Beatles' Hairdresser Leslie Cavendish

Leslie Cavendish cutting George Harrison’s hair. Leslie Cavendish has never forgotten the day, just over 50 years ago, when as an employee of Vidal Sassoon’s revolutionary London hair salon, he styled Jane Asher’s strawberry-blonde mane and became entangled with The Beatles. The British actress had been a regular at Sassoon’s Bond Street location, a celebrity magnet attracting all the fashionable women of the day. But on that particular Saturday, September 3, 1966, to be exact, Asher’s regular stylist, Roger Thompson, later Sassoon’s first-ever international creative director in New York, had fussed too much with an earlier client’s hair and had fallen behind. He asked young Cavendish to do the wash and blow-dry, and absolutely lived to regret it when that little twist of destiny ended up catapulting his trainee – and not him -- into the orbit of The Beatles’ fame. After taking extra care, and ensuring that she liked what she saw looking back at her in the mirror, he listened in astonishment as Asher asked him would he mind doing a house call to cut her boyfriend’s hair. Her boyfriend happened to be Paul McCartney. Asher scribbled his address on a piece of paper pulled from a notepad in her handbag. He recalls the moment vividly in The Cutting Edge, his scissors-sharp 2017 memoir whose North American edition comes out today at The Fest for Beatles Fans in New York. “When she passed it over and I saw the address, 7 Cavendish Avenue, I said: ‘What a coincidence. My surname is Cavendish.’ ‘It must be fate, then, Leslie,’ she said with a smile. ‘Don’t you think? I’ll tell him you’ll be over at about six.’ It certainly was fate. My life would never be the same again.”

Artificial Paradise: How the End of the Beginning Sounded

The lads, from The Beatles’ last photo session, in August 1969. (Photo: Ethan Russell)

“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

– Lennon/McCartney, “The End” (1969)

“Making love with his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his mind
Like a leper messiah. When the kids had killed the man
I had to break up the band.”

– David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust (1972)

When The Beatles released the last great pop masterpiece of the 1960’s, they were bringing to a close a remarkable collective waking dream. If only they had allowed their Abbey Road album, possibly one of their three best recordings, to be the band’s final release instead of returning to an earlier fraught effort and letting it out of the studio vault. The self-produced and then Phil Spector-mutilated Let It Be was a mess mostly due to the absence of George Martin, their brilliant guiding light for eight astonishing years together, while Abbey Road had glistened due to his return to the fold as their producer. It also signaled the arrival of a new kind of recording technology, with EMI’s advanced solid-state transistor mixing desk, which would usher in a kind of immediacy the following musical decade would eventually take for granted.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXIII

In the last couple of months, like many viewers, I've been watching David Lynch's return and resurrection of Twin Peaks. Without going into great detail for those who haven't yet dipped in, I can safely say there isn't anything on television anywhere that comes close to what's going on here. Of course, that said, the show has also been a source of frustration, as much as a font of devious delight and pure shock. But partly that is due to the fact that Lynch has broken the wall of serial television. That wall (in both good and bad shows) always provides the predictable dramatic arcs, climaxes and cliffhangers which in the age of streaming give us full comfort and safety, plus the freedom to binge-watch. But who could binge-watch this? Time itself becomes something close to elastic on Twin Peaks, where even stasis sometimes has to be considered a twist in the story.

Stealing Voices & Naming Names: Tim Riley's Biography of John Lennon

Just about the only scene I enjoyed in Walter Hill's action comedy 48 Hrs (1982) was when Nick Nolte's bleery-eyed cracker cop reluctantly visits prison to spring the slick hustler Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy) to help him capture Hammond's former partners in crime. As Nolte approaches the cell, Murphy is listening to his Walkman, oblivious to Nolte – hell, oblivious to the world – while lost in the falsetto notes of Sting's affected soul strutting in The Police's hit song "Roxanne." Murphy is singing along, note for note, not only matching Sting, but surpassing him. What comes across initially as parody quickly takes hold as the only true version of the song. The notes Murphy hits are exactly the same as Sting's, but you actually believe Murphy's tale of a streetwalker. He may be thinking of someone he loves, or perhaps, a broken girl that he left on the outside before he started doing time. (Sting never convinces you that he even knows a streetwalker. He merely convinces you that he walks on the street.)

While it's hardly an example of divine retribution, of stealing back what Pat Boone once stole from Little Richard, but whenever I now hear The Police singing "Roxanne," I crack up. I can't hear Sting anymore. It's Eddie Murphy's voice that replaces him in my mind. No need to Bring Me the Head of Gordon Sumner, as Howard Hampton put it once in one of his delightfully cranky essays, Sting's no longer worthy of being a trophy. In 48 Hrs, a film that shrewdly exploited racial tensions for cheap laughs, and provided what critic Pauline Kael rightly called "an eighties minstrel show," Eddie Murphy came to own "Roxanne," turning it from a minstrel number into a real soul song. (Nick Nolte, who could care less, rips the headphones from Murphy's head before he can even finish the song.) Yet that's the sheer beauty of getting to test the worth of an artist's voice, to see if you can steal what they've claimed as their own. It's partly what drives cover bands, too, who try to both emulate their idols and – potentially – steal the thunder of the idols they adore. But you can't steal someone's thunder if it's not put there to steal.

All Those Years Ago - Mark Lewisohn's Tune In The Beatles: All These Years (Vol. 1)

Reading Philip Norman’s Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation in 1982, I was slightly disoriented, yet nonetheless taken, by its references to a British youth and Beatles fan named Mark Lewisohn—disoriented because I, like most Americans, hadn’t heard of him. First glimpsed as an eight-year-old in the summer of 1967, dancing in the back yard to Sgt. Pepper “while trying not to dislodge the cardboard mustache clenched under his nose,” he was last seen as “a serious young man of twenty-two who holds the title ‘Beatle Brain of Britain,’ so labyrinthine is his knowledge of their music and history.”

But within a decade of Norman’s book, the “serious young man” had achieved broad renown as the acknowledged world authority on All Things Beatle. Today, the mustache beneath Mark Lewisohn’s nose is all his own. Among his works of Fab Four scholarship—all venerated for their precision, depth, and integrity—are The Beatles Live! (1986); The Beatles Recording Sessions (1988); The Complete Beatles Chronicle (1992); and, with Piet Schreuders and Adam Smith, The Beatles’ London (1994). He’s written liner notes for numerous Beatles reissues, and was intimately involved in the 1994-95 Anthology project. His work on the Recording Sessions book alone—for which he listened to every piece of Beatles tape in their record company’s vault—gives him a depth of archival insight undreamt of by other fans or historians.

And his magnum opus is finally upon us. Close to a decade in preparation, its publication twice delayed, Tune In (Crown Archetype; 932 pp.) is the first installment of a three-volume Beatles biography with the corporate title All These Years. The book both looks and weighs important, and the hefty mass-market version is dwarfed by the “Extended Special Edition”—two equally thick volumes in a box, with nearly twice the page count and many more photographs, incorporating quantities of ancillary research that must have been removed from the mass version with a shovel. Lewisohn tells us the project has not been authorized or in any way controlled by the surviving Beatles, the deceased Beatles’ estates, or the group’s joint company, Apple Corps. Unauthorized Tune In may be, but clearly Lewisohn earned the trust of at least three of his subjects (he never met John Lennon) over his decades of research into the Beatles’ daily lives and guarded archives; and it’s largely because Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr deign not to obstruct his work that we have this book, and the three-part whole it heralds.

Music Memory: Steven Hyden's Twilight of the Gods

Author and classic rock aficionado Steven Hyden. (Photo: Uproxx)

Steven Hyden’s Twilight of The Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock (Dey St./Harper Collins) is one of the best books about a life in music from a non-musician that I’ve ever read. His short volume is a blend of memoir, music history and criticism that is so full of wit that it’s hard to resist laughing to oneself on every other page. Here’s the first line: “For as long as I can remember, classic rock has been there for me.” Classic rock? Really? By revealing his love for classic rock albums and its famous performers, Hyden’s book is really a long-winded yet fascinating story about his relationship with music from his early years until the present.

Childhood's End: "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane"

A few months ago, director Ron Howard described his documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years, as an adventure story and a tale of survival, and he tells it as if caught up in the tidal drift of its momentum. Retracing the familiar tale of the meteoric rise of Beatlemania, Howard wastes no time in showing both the endurance and the astonishing skill of a young group of musicians who became the pleasure principle in an age of social and political change. Beginning with footage from November 20th, 1963, at Manchester's ABC Cinema where the group performs "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout" to an ecstatic crowd, Eight Days a Week goes on to chronicle their growing international acclaim as live artists – while also contrasting those shows with the astonishing quality of studio album after studio album despite the band's having to swim daily in a sea of madness.

Howard, whose first documentary was 2013's Made in America, about Jay-Z's music festival of the same name, provides a few choice observations, including The Beatles' stand against racial segregation, while deftly revealing how they always stayed ahead of the cultural curve by making everyone else play catch-up. Although most people who didn't live through that era have today experienced their music in its totality, Eight Days a Week brings you closer to the evolution of their sound so that you hear how remarkably canny they were at resisting being derivative and never repeating themselves. By the end of the film, you can't imagine this feat ever being duplicated again. The footage both familiar and new still carries an explosive charge of adolescent exuberance. Yet Eight Days a Week doesn't shy away from displaying how that adoring adulation would soon turn turtle into the kind of violent fan worship that took the band off the road and later claimed the lives of John Lennon and George Harrison. As Devin McKinney pointed out in his Critics at Large review, however, Eight Days a Week doesn't go far enough into the shadow side of The Beatles' utopian spirit. But it does catch the jet stream of their impact with a full-force gale. Since it only deals with the touring years, though, Eight Days a Week doesn't delve into the radical changes that followed their departure from the road.

Thrillington (1977)

It’s been commonly assumed over the years that it was John Lennon who was the true avant-garde performer in The Beatles and Paul McCartney was - literally - the straight man. That view developed mostly out of Lennon’s bold outspokenness in both his personality and music, while McCartney submerged his personality in the craft of writing songs. Lennon possessed a romantic spirit, but it was one that made his art real and intimate to the listener. McCartney however was perceived as whimsical and impersonal (i.e. a light-weight). Of course, this is a rather simplistic perception because Lennon was equally whimsical in “Bungalow Bill”; just as McCartney could rock hard in “I’m Down.” It was McCartney after all who came up with the tape-loop experiments that Lennon incorporated into “Tomorrow Never Knows.” McCartney was also the first to create a sonic collage called “Carnival of Light” (still unreleased) before Lennon and Ono did their own “Revolution #9” on the White Album. During that period, John Lennon stayed home to live a more isolated domestic existence, while Paul McCartney was going to art shows and listening to Stockhausen.

Paling Well: Interview with Henry Scott-Irvine (Procol Harum: The Ghosts of A Whiter Shade of Pale)

Most groups would kill for a hit song that would define them and last the ages. But what about the hit songs that end up being the death of you? Procol Harum's 1967 milestone "A Whiter Shade of Pale," as seismic for its time as The Beatles Sgt Pepper was in that same year, is one such tune. With its elliptical images of "skipping the light fandango" and "vestal virgins," people have kept this song alive for years. It has been the choice to wed couples and it has graced funerals as well as appearing in dozens of movies. But the irony for Procol Harum remains that despite a long career of great, memorable records (Shine on Brightly, A Salty Dog, Grand Hotel), they can't seem to get beyond the pale.  

For over forty years, Procol Harum possessed a varied history that wedded rock, classical and blues based arrangements. With that classical baroque sound, their succession of albums were filled with cryptic tales of sea journeys, death knells and conquistadors. Being one of the few groups that had an in-house lyricist (Keith Reid), who wrote with keyboardist and singer Gary Brooker,  Procol Harum shaped their music along the piano/hammond organ tandem that Bob Dylan introduced into rock with both his Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Blonde on Blonde (1966) albums. (The Band would also continue that trend beginning with Music From Big Pink in 1968.) But Procol Harum remained more of a cult band throughout the Seventies and early Eighties (including when they reformed in the Nineties). The group has now become the subject of a fascinating book, Procol Harum: The Ghosts of A Whiter Shade of Pale, written by Henry Scott-Irvine, where he examines the strange, troubled history of a band that began life as a short-lived R&B outfit (The Paramounts) during the British Invasion, and would go on to lose some of their members right after "A Whiter Shade of Pale" became a massive hit, and eventually would find themselves in 2008 in court in a lengthy law suit launched by the original organist Matthew Fisher who claimed that he should be considered a co-writer of this famous track.

Writing in the book's forward, film director Martin Scorsese (who used "A Whiter Shade of Pale" and "Conquistador" in his 1989 short film, 'Life Lessons,' from New York Stories) describes Procol Harum's music as a rich mystery. "The point was not so much what the songs were saying, specifically, as what they were suggesting to each of us, individually, where all those sounds and images would lead us, and leave us," he writes. "Procol Harum's music drew from so many deep wells – classical music, 19th Century literature, rhythm and blues, seaman's logs, concretist poetry – that each tune became a cross-cultural whirligig, a road trip through the pop subconscious."

Henry Scott-Irvine, who has written and produced his own weekly radio show on the 24-hour Music & Arts radio station, Resonance FM 104.4 in London, has been a long time fan of the group. In his book, he provides a clear definition of that trip Procol Harum took through the pop subconscious. We spoke recently about the fascinating genesis of this veteran ensemble.

Relentless Beauty: Dion’s Kickin’ Child

Some things take time. For instance, it took time for people to recognize Dion – born Dion DiMucci in the Bronx in 1939 – as one of the most protean figures in rock ‘n’ roll. He has had more distinct artistic phases, and been more impressive in each, than almost anyone. As a teenager fronting his neighborhood group The Belmonts, he was an architect of doo-wop (“I Wonder Why,” “Love Came to Me”); as a soloist, he lit up the early sixties with a string of cool, slick hits (“The Wanderer,” “Ruby Baby,” “Donna the Prima Donna”). He made the Top 40 five times in 1963 alone. Then came The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and Dion, along with his lesser contemporaries, was cast into darkness and doubt. Despite that, and despite a heroin addiction he’d picked up in his teens, he kept recording. He wouldn’t chart again until 1968, with the post-assassination tearjerker “Abraham, Martin and John,” and a supporting album, Dion, that encompassed Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Stevie Wonder in a strange and beautiful hippie-folkie mélange. In succeeding decades, as a born-again Christian, he made music that was often banal, and sometimes perversely fascinating (Born to Be with You, his 1975 collaboration with Phil Spector); most recently, he’s done a series of acclaimed blues-based albums, commencing with 2006’s Bronx Blues.

Notes From the Dangerous Kitchen

This summer is the 10th Anniversary of the publication of my book Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, a work that (looking back) was written in a danger zone not unlike its title. While fending off neighbours who seemed to love making excessive noise until all hours of the early morning, Dangerous Kitchen was written sometimes one sentence at a time. Often I was interrupted because of some melee in my building (usually someone trying to kill someone else) that I had to attend to. Nevetheless, my publisher ECW Press gave me the freedom to write a 600-page book about American composer Frank Zappa that allowed me to go beyond the misleading perceptions of him as this deranged freak who warned us not to eat the yellow snow. I was able to attempt a fascinating study that tied serialist classical music, blues, R&B doo-wop and rock & roll to an artist who fused all of those elements into a satiric artistic rebellion against the excesses of Romanticism. So in this act of shameless self-promotion, here is an excerpt from Dangerous Kitchen (which has continually gone in and out of print in the decade since its publication) that focuses on Frank Zappa's first LP in 1966 with the Mothers of Invention called Freak Out!

When Edgard Varèse died on November 6, 1965, Frank Zappa seemed bound and determined to pick up his fallen torch. Michael Gray writes in Mother! The Frank Zappa Story that Varèse's death "galvanized Frank into a stronger-than-ever determination that he was not going to just make records, but change the face of music." Freak Out!, a two-record set released in July 1966, didn't exactly change the face of music, but it had an incalculable influence on the pop scene. Until then, the only rock double-album was Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde (which had come out only two months earlier). Yet, unlike Blonde on Blonde, Freak Out! was designed conceptually. The songs weren't randomly gathered in the traditional manner of making an album. There was a strategy at work on this debut. Zappa was presenting a whole new gathering of diverse compositions that hadn't been heard all in one place in American pop.

A Pining Spirit: Perth County Conspiracy...Does Not Exist

This piece is an edited and revised version of a script I wrote for the radio documentary "Dream Time: The Story of Perth County Conspiracy...Does Not Exist" for CBC Radio's Inside the Music. 

Back in 1970, the passions of the Sixties counter-culture seemed spent. The Beatles, who had inspired the communal spirit of that age, had bitterly broken up. For one thing, John Lennon had just declared that the dream was over. George Harrison then wistfully told us that all things must pass. But not so in Canada. That same year, singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn gently urged us to go to the country. Joni Mitchell lamented getting back to the garden in her song about the Woodstock Festival. And in Stratford, Ontario, a town known for its Shakespearean Festival, a group of musicians, actors and a café owner converged to create a folk/rock ensemble calling itself Perth County Conspiracy. Every night, in a local haunt called The Black Swan, run by proprietor Harry Finley, musicians Richard Keelan and Cedric Smith began to work their magic at midnight. With a collection of politically irreverent and mystical songs, they created a challenging theatrical experience for those curious Stratford Festival patrons looking for something a little unexpected and out of the ordinary.