This authorized reconsideration of a major canonical work may be how it was always meant to be heard
In 2006, the Beatles coaxed producer George Martin out of retirement to
remix and rearrange several of their iconic songs for Cirque du Soleil's
Las Vegas stage production Love. Martin, though, had a worry: At
age 80 his hearing had turned difficult, and so he brought in a
collaborator: his son Giles. The younger Martin had produced classical
music, as well as recordings by Kula Shaker, Jeff Beck, Elvis Costello
and Kate Bush. "He's my ears," George Martin said. What ears they turned
out to be: Giles recombined parts of many of the Beatles' songs into a
mash-up of the band's audio history, sometimes encapsulating much of it
in a single song. "Get Back" opened with George Harrison's memorable
thrum from "A Hard Day's Night" and Ringo Starr's drum prologue from
"The End," caught sight of an overpassing jet from "Back in the
U.S.S.R.," pulled in part of the audience's expectant murmur from "Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and borrowed a bit of the orchestral
swell from "A Day in the Life," landing on John Lennon's "Glass Onion."
The results proved radical and revelatory and conveyed how resilient
and exciting the band's music remains – and how beautifully and
imaginatively George Martin had produced it all in the first place,
working with four-track recorders and inventing new sounds and
technology. With Love, Giles Martin did what nobody had ever done
successfully before: He reconfigured the Beatles' sounds into an
alternate soundmap, making it plain these decades old songs still had
revelations and delights for contemporary ears. When Love was over, you didn't want it to be – much like many viewed the Beatles themselves.
Now, the surviving band members and their legatees have authorized the reconsideration of a major canonical work: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, originally released 50 years ago on June 1st, 1967, in England, and the following day in the U.S. The new Pepper
comes in various packages: single and double CDs, a deluxe box of four
CDs and two DVDs (containing videos and 5.1 surround mixes of the
original album), as well as a double LP that, like most versions here,
includes several of the album's original developing and alternate
tracks. All editions feature a stereo remix by Giles Martin (George
Martin died in 2016, at 90) and Abbey Road audio engineer Sam Okell. The
ambition might seem a bit of a risk or even redundant. After all, Sgt. Pepper
has been considered by many as not just rock's greatest moment, but
also as a central touchstone for the 1960s – an exemplar for a
generation that was forging new ideals, and granting themselves new
permissions, including the use of psychedelic drugs. The Beatles had
already done a lot to make that change possible, but Sgt. Pepper – coming
along at a time when many thought the Beatles superfluous, in the face
of other new adventurous bands and records – crystallized it all.
Langdon Winner later wrote in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll: "For a brief while, the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young."
Additionally, Sgt. Pepper's
groundbreaking sonics – its mix of pioneering textures, complex
composition and inventive recording techniques –also won the album
standing as a legitimate art form that revised and extended classical
music's archetypes. (This achievement also imbued much of rock itself
with a new prestige and aspiration.) In part, the unprecedented acclaim
resulted from Paul McCartney's insistence on the album as a conceptual
song cycle that existed as a whole entity: The Beatles, posed in ornate
Victorian brass-band military costumery on the cover, were playing a
fictional band, singing from perspectives free of any indebtedness to
their prior musical sensibility and well-established images. (Ringo
Starr later described it as "a bunch of songs and you stick two bits of
'Pepper' on it and it's a concept album. It worked because we said it
worked.")
But that was 50 years ago. A lot changed –
including the Beatles, who ended acrimoniously in 1970. What can we
learn now from Sgt. Pepper's new incarnation? As it turns out,
Giles Martin reveals considerable new wonders – particularly in his
stereo remix of the original album (which appears in all the new
editions, and as a standalone disc and digital download). The remix, in
fact, provides a long overdue epiphany. Martin observes in his liner
notes: "The original Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was
primarily mixed as a mono album. All care and attention were applied to
the mono LP, with the Beatles present for all the mixes. ... Almost as
an afterthought, the stereo album was mixed very quickly without the
Beatles at the sessions. Yet it is the stereo album that most people
listen to today." In other words, popular music's most elaborate and
intricate creation – and one that helped end the mono era – wasn't made
to be heard in stereo.
Perhaps that's been Sgt. Pepper's
unlikeliest secret, though for those who compared the original mixes
over the years the difference was noteworthy: The mono version hit
harder, sounded fuller, whereas the stereo soundstage diffused that
force. You hear it from the start: The mono version of the title track
jolted full-force, particularly in the collusion of Paul McCartney's
bass and Ringo Starr's storming drums. Martin has said that in attending
to the new album's mix he was aiming for a "3-D mono" rendition – and
he has achieved it. The titular opening track finally jumps out of the
speakers in a more centralized stereo: It's sharp, vivid, forward
leaning – the sound of a big band doing very big things and not fucking
around about it one bit. Indeed, everything here is more vibrant and
forceful; it's for the ears of today. Ringo's three-beat drum salvo that
launches the chorus in "Lucy in the Sky" now gives new gravity to the
song's hallucinogenic imagery and chimerical whirl; "Getting Better" has
an aggression that belies the song's title claim, making clearer the
idea that this is a song about a fucked-up man contending to overcome
himself and confessing his flaws and confusion; "Good Morning Good
Morning"'s horns and relentless rhythms propel the distress implicit in
John Lennon's vocal (Lennon later said he was going through a personal
hell as the Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper, and this song reflects
that); and "A Day in the Life" acquires even more frighteningly palpable
depth. The song has always stood outside of Sgt. Pepper's
phantasmagoria. It was a vision of dreams, death, chaos, revelation, and
it held and scared us as it faded into a final oceanic piano chord,
reverberating around a room of keyboards. That moment now holds and
scares even more; its finality sounds boundless.
Extra discs in the various Pepper
packages consist mostly of the album's tracks in development (the
fourth of the six-disc box showcases mono versions). It's particularly
fascinating to hear the simple and spare origins of John Lennon's
"Strawberry Fields Forever" (recorded for the album but released earlier
in February 1967 as a single, along with "Penny Lane") and "A Day in
the Life." Both songs sound abstracted and simple at their outset, then
grow otherworldly; they are mesmerizing transfigurations, and they
transmute right before our ears. Some songs arguably benefit from their
fundamental, pre-effects treatment: "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"
is spookier in its Take 4 version, and much warmer in Take 7, with
McCartney's pumping bass steps and Ringo's razor-sharp cymbal accents.
Similarly, newly released takes of "With a Little Help From My Friends,"
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," "Lovely Rita" and "Fixing a Hole"
demonstrate that before curlicues and overdubs were added there was
still a quartet sensibility at the heart of most of this music (The
Beatles never would have made this music had they kept touring, but
contrary any claims, they could have effectively played almost
everything here live and stripped.) You especially feel the band as a
tight unit in "Getting Better," "Good Morning Good Morning" and the
blazing "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)."
By
contrast, "She's Leaving Home" which featured Paul and John's voices
accompanied by a string nonet but none of the other Beatles. (The song's
writing credit now appears solely as Paul McCartney's. Several other
credits have shifted as well: the title track, along with "Lucy in the
Sky with Diamonds," "When I'm 64," "Good Morning Good Morning," "With a
Little Help from My Friends," "Getting Better" and "Being for the
Benefit of Mr. Kite!" appear as McCartney-Lennon creations, rather than
the more familiar Lennon-McCartney attribution. "A Day in the Life"
shows as Lennon composition, while "Lovely Rita," "Fixing a Hole" and
"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" appear under the
original Lennon-McCartney arrangement.) George Harrison's "Within You
Without You" stands outside the Beatles. Harrison set aside his guitar,
instead playing sitar and conducting Indian classical musicians while
George Martin conducted a conventional classical string section. "Within
You Without You" was derided by some as tedious and preachy, but it has
weathered beautifully. Sgt. Pepper has often been characterized
as a gestalt: a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts. But
Harrison's Hindustani song and Lennon's "A Day in the Life" proved the
exceptions. "Within You Without You"'s message of transcendence and
unity – and of haughty judgement – was, as one critic observed, the
conscience of Sgt. Pepper. "A Day in the Life," the album's
closer, dispelled the whole fantasia that had come before. It was
haunted – the ghost that outlasted the dream.
Sgt. Pepper's moment – its glimpse of a Garden of
Eden, its florid sensibility, its depiction of "Cellophane flowers of
yellow and green/Towering over your head" – could not hold. Bob Dylan
moved back to folk music late that same year with John Wesley Harding – never
once touching psychedelia – and the Rolling Stones reasserted rock
& roll as a gritty, edgy, blues-based vocation with "Jumpin' Jack
Flash," in April 1968. The Beatles were chagrined. The year following Sgt. Pepper's
release, Lennon himself deprecated it as "the biggest load of shit
we've ever done." By 1969 the Beatles had adopted a new motto: "Get back
to where you once belonged," and proceeded accordingly, until they fell
apart. Even so, the album itself never fell from its pedestal. It has
always been seen as an unsurpassed milestone. Not so much for its
psychedelic vision, rather for what it set loose in form, cohesion,
texture, layers, adventurism, technology and utter boldness. Those
possibilities bore fruit across the breadth of popular music, in Born to Run, Around the World in a Day, OK Computer, Yeezus, Lemonade and To Pimp a Butterfly,
among countless others. Also, George Harrison's "Within You Without
You" opened ears not only to Indian sounds but to widening vistas of
world music. We live in soundscapes now that Sgt. Pepper helped lay the groundwork for.
Above
all, though, the album represented accord and imagination as means to
enlightenment – a last bulwark of agreement before the dark set in. We
have lost
a lot since the summer of 1967, including any more chance of being
naïve. But now, thanks to Giles Martin, we can hear the Beatles' apogee
as it was always meant to be heard. That won't save the world, but it
can still
beguile us, and that remains a generous miracle.
source:rollingstone
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