I Will Try Not To Sing Out Of Key

I'm not done with celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band just yet.

Many of the songs on Sgt. Pepper were soon subjected to cover versions, and the LP is known for having yielded many lackluster covers even before the Sgt. Pepper movie's release in 1978.  But the album's second song led to one of the best Beatles covers ever.

John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote "With a Little Help From My Friends" to give Ringo Starr a song for the Sgt. Pepper album, and it was a song in the form of a conversation between a man who needs someone to love and the friends who help him get by . . . and get high, the apparent marijuana reference leading U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970 to propose a ban on the song nationwide.  As originally recorded by the Beatles, "With a Little Help From My Friends" is a rather polite, playful tune, and Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66's cover was similarly mannered.  Then a little-known English blue-eyed soul singer took the song and turned it into a genuine rock number.

Joe Cocker was an up-and-coming singer in the late 1960s.  Influenced by Ray Charles, he indulged his raw talent for singing black American blues and delivered songs in everything from a tender plea to a lecherous barroom growl.  He appended both of these styles to his gutsy cover of "With a Little Help From My Friends," the title track of his 1969 debut album, with some strong, throaty declarations of persistence, improvised sentiments not found in the original lyrics ("I tell ya, I don't get sad no more") and some incredible hollers of transcendence - all backed with a slow-blues arrangement in 6/8 meter and with different chords in middle eight, performed with Procol Harum drummer B.J. Wilson's heavy playing, Tommy Eyre's soulful organ, and - the icing on the cake - guitar lines from Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.  It is the rare example of a Beatles cover being superior to the original Beatles recording.

Play the Cocker version below and hear for yourself. :-)

Through his performance of "With a Little Help From My Friends" at Woodstock and its exposure on FM rock radio, Joe Cocker took his place as one of rock's greats.  Thanks to his friends, the Beatles. ;-)

I'd Love To Turn You On . . .

I turn once again to the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, to look at the incredibly mind-blowing song on that album, "A Day In the Life."  For those who missed it when I posted the promotional clip for the song as my Music Video Of the Week, here are my comments (slightly reworded here), with pictures.

"A Day In the Life" is the last song on Sgt. Pepper, and it was written by John Lennon and  Paul McCartney in early 1967 and recorded that February.  John started the song and based it on a couple of newspaper articles and his own experience in having played Private Gripweed in director Richard Lester's movie How I Won the War, a promotional poster for which is shown above.  (The movie, based on a novel by Patrick Ryan and starring Michael Crawford as Lieutenant Earnest Goodbody - the first-person title character - would premiere in October 1967.)   The first news story was about Guinness brewery heir Tara Browne (below), a friend of John and Paul, having died in a car crash.  Browne didn't "blow his mind out" or go through a red light, as John wrote in the song; he swerved to avoid a car coming out of a side street and, realizing he couldn't avoid hitting a parked van, strategically aimed the car at an angle to keep his companion, fashion model Suki Potier, from sustaining serious injury.  Potier survived; in a sad irony, though, she would die in another car crash in 1981.

The other news story was a mundane report about four thousand potholes in the Lancashire town of Blackburn.  John threw in a nonsense line of how many potholes it would take to "fill the Albert Hall," the verb suggested by Beatles associate Terry Doran.  Some Beatles fans have interpreted the lyric as a put-down of Beatles fans who filled Royal Albert Hall for one of the group's performances.

Paul, meanwhile, had been trying to write a song about someone's day and his ride on the top of a bus during his morning commute, and he and John realized that making it the middle eight of John's song would provide a perfect counterpoint to what John was writing about; Paul's realism was merged with John's surrealism.

When the Beatles brought "A Day In the Life" to the studio, they and George Martin arranged it as a moody piece with two 24-bar instrumental sections that they didn't know what to do with.  Mal Evans, one of the Beatles' roadies, counted the bars in both bridges, with the ring of an alarm clock marking the end of the first bridge and with the second bridge  being at the end of the tape.  (The alarm clock ring was kept in as a sound effect to precede Paul's line about waking up and getting out of bed.)   Eventually the group decided to try something novel to fill each 24-bar section - a forty-piece orchestra starting from the lowest note possible and building up to a high note at E major, improvising their way up the scale without paying attention to what each other were playing.  It was recorded once and reprised at the song's end.  (A conventionally arranged orchestral passage was used to link Paul's middle-eight lyric to John's final verse.)  The orchestral session took place on February 10, 1967.  The musicians, conducted by Martin, balked at improvising because they were classically trained, but everyone was pleased with the result.

Twelve days later, the Beatles found the perfect way to follow the second orchestral section that follows the last verse - a final, crashing piano E major chord to bring the song to an end.  The chord was played by John, Paul, Ringo Starr and Beatles roadie Mal Evans on three pianos, and overdubbed three more times on the four-track tape, with George Martin compounding the sound on a harmonium.  David Crosby of the Byrds was at this piano-chord session. "Man," Crosby later remembered, "I was a dish-rag. I was floored. It took me several minutes to be able to talk after that."

"A Day In the Life" was one of the most complex Beatles songs ever recorded. The sessions for the song took a total of 34 hours and cost £367 and 10/ (£367.50) - more than $7,500 in today's American currency.  (The entire Sgt. Pepper album cost £40,000 to make, or about $100,000 in American money - the equivalent of about $731,000 today.) The February 10 orchestral overdub session was itself an event, Martin and the orchestra wearing evening dress and orchestra members wearing funny novelties.  The Beatles invited guests including Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Donovan, George Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd, and Mike Nesmith of the Monkees to the session.  The orchestral session was filmed for a possible television special on the making of Sgt. Pepper, but it never materialized because the BBC banned "A Day In the Life" for a supposed reference to drugs - "I'd love to turn you on."  (The filming produced the eventual video.)  Paul, who had contributed that lyric, insisted that the lyric referred to turning people on to the truth.

And once people finished hearing Sgt. Pepper for the first time, with that final crashing chord, they would never be turned off from the truth ever again. 

Music Video Of the Week - June 1, 2017

"A Day In the Life" by the Beatles (Go to the link in the upper right hand corner.)

"All summer long we spent dancing in the sand . . . Everybody kept on playing Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . . .."  :-)

'Sgt. Pepper' Fun Facts

Here are some interesting trivial tidbits about the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to amaze your friends with!

On the back cover of Sgt, Pepper, George Harrison appears to be positioning his fingers to make the letter "L," while John Lennon appears to be making a "V" shape with his hands and Ringo appears to form an "E."  The three Beatles are supposedly trying to spell the word "LOVE," but Paul, his back to the camera (taken as a clue by some fans that he is dead), doesn't provide an "O."  In fact, this is a mirror image, as evidenced by the outtake photo below.  Ringo, John, and George are making the same shapes, in reverse, with their hands, but Paul - facing forward - is merely holding his hands together.  No love here.

Official Beatles biographer Hunter Davies sat in with John and Paul while they composed "With a Little Help From My Friends" at John's house in Weybridge outside London.  As Davies describes the songwriting session, John and Paul would exchange ideas back and forth and sometimes jam on the piano or ad-lib a bit when they got stuck.  John's wife Cynthia and Beatles associate Terry Doran were also in the room.  The date was March 29, 1967 - one day before the photo session for the Sgt. Pepper album cover.

"With a Little Help From My Friends" was recorded the same day it was written, during a late-night session.  At the beginning of the session, it was still untitled, so Paul - noticing that John had an injured finger - gave the song the working title of "Bad Finger Boogie."  Two years later, when the Beatles' Apple record label signed a Beatlesque group called the Iveys, Paul had them change their name to Badfinger.

During a Sgt. Pepper session, EMI producer Norman Smith, a former Beatles recording engineer, stopped by and introduced the Fabs to a new London band he was producing - the Pink Floyd.  (The definite article was later dropped from their name.)  The two bands exchanged what was described as "half-hearted hellos."

Former Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, who had not yet joined Floyd in 1967, owns the original "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" painting done by Julian Lennon.

As noted in an earlier post, "Getting Better" was prompted by drummer Jimmy Nicol's response to how he was faring as Ringo Starr's temporary replacement during the Beatles' 1964 world tour: "It's getting better."  Though Paul wrote the bulk of the song, John contributed the line "It can't get no worse," which Paul described as a comment that was "so John."

Paul wrote "Fixing a Hole" about the home improvement project he was undertaking at a house in Scotland he'd just bought.  He'd retreat there after Abbey Road was released, pondering how to go forward in the 1970s.

I mentioned before that the name Rita in "Lovely Rita" was inspired by an assonance rhyme with "meter." There are two different stories of how Paul came up with the idea of writing a song about a parking meter attendant in the first place.  One story goes that it was supposedly prompted by an American friend of Paul's when, while walking down a London street, Paul and his Yankee pal saw a female parking meter attendant - a new phenomenon in Britain then - and the unnamed American said to Paul, "I see you've got meter maids over here these days." Paul says he came up with "Lovely Rita meter maid" as a result while at the piano at his father's home in Liverpool.  Some time later, though, a real-life parking meter attendant named Meta Davies claimed to have inspired the song when she gave Paul a parking ticket.

"Lovely Rita" features comb-and-tissue-paper percussion.

"Good Morning Good Morning" was inspired by a breakfast cereal jingle John heard on television.  The line "It's time for tea and meet the wife" refers not to having tea with one's spouse but instead refers to having tea while watching "Meet The Wife," a British sitcom that had ended its run in December 1966.

What was the inspiration for the title song of Sgt. Pepper?  It depends on who you ask.  One story says that the words "sergeant" and "pepper" came to Paul for no apparent reason, while another story goes that he and Beatles assistant Mal Evans were on a plane together and Evans asked what the "S" and "P" on the bags that came with their in-flight meals stood for.  "Salt and pepper," Paul said, following it with a joke - "Sergeant Pepper." The Lonely Hearts Club Band was inspired by the colorfully named brass bands that populated the north of England at the time.

A dog whistle follows the fade-out of "A Day In the Life."  The frequency is barely noticeable to human ears on the CD version.

The chatter in the inner groove of side two that the Beatles placed there as a joke played for two seconds on record players with automatic pickup, ad infinitum on those without.  Played forwards, it sounds like the Beatles are saying, "Never curse your tanning underwear."  Played backwards, it allegedly sounds like "We'll f**k you like Superman."  Engineer Geoff Emerick insisted there was no intended hidden meaning.   A reproduction of the run-out groove was included on the original compact disc release and re-mastered vinyl and cassette versions of Sgt. Pepper in 1987; it had been deleted from British vinyl editions of the album after its original pressing and had never been included on previous American vinyl pressings.

The inner groove notwithstanding, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the first Beatles album to appear in the U.S. exactly as it did in the U.K.

The Dutch designer group The Fool did a psychedelic painting for the LP cover's gatefold (below).  It was rejected. 

Producer George Martin wanted Geoff Emerick to get a credit for his engineering work, but an unidentified EMI boss nixed the idea in an in-house memo with three question marks next to Martin's request.  The 1987 compact disc issue gave Emerick his well-deserved credit.

The working title of the LP was One Down, Six To Go, a reference to their January 1967 contract with EMI, which apparently required them to deliver seven albums.

Sgt. Pepper is the only Beatles album not released in the U.K. on a Friday, the day of issue for new recordings in Britain in the 1960s.  The Beatles wanted it out on the first of the month to make a symbolic statement, and the first day of June 1967 - its month of release - happened to be on a Thursday.  Ironically, it was released on a Friday in the United States - the next day, June 2, 1967.  Record releases in the U.S. happened to be on Mondays or Wednesdays at the time. 

The launch party for Sgt. Pepper was held on May 19, 1967, at Beatles manager Brian Epstein's house in the Belgravia section of London.  The photo of the Beatles below is from the launch.

That's a lot of fun facts.

And, as a bonus, here is a picture of the Sgt. Pepper cutouts I alluded to in an earlier post.

Never curse your tanning underwear. :-D  

The Cast of 'Sgt. Pepper'

I'm not talking about the movie.

The cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the most innovative sleeve of its day and is still the most influential cover of all time.  Its use of color and detail was striking enough, but its artistry - the use of famous faces joining the Beatles (er, Sgt. Pepper's band) in the photo - brought originality and imagination to pop record album covers, which before then mostly resembled cereal boxes.  You've seen album covers of the early sixties, with their loud copy full of exclamation points and boastful superlatives, the artistes posing stodgily with frozen smiles.  After Sgt. Pepper, the rules had changed for both the contents of rock albums and the sleeves they were encased in.

So how did the Sgt. Pepper album cover come about?  Well, in March 1967, with the LP nearing completion, the Beatles approached fine artist Peter Blake at the suggestion of Blake's art dealer, Robert Fraser, with their idea. Since they were pretending to be another group entirely, giving a concert, they envisioned a cover showing Sgt. Pepper's band having just completed their show in a park.  Blake eventually came up with the idea of a collage of people from the concert's audience - made with cutouts and with wax figures from Madame Tussaud's wax museum in London - and asked the Beatles who they'd like to have in it.  John Lennon and Paul McCartney came up with a whole list of entertainment celebrities and historical figures, while George Harrison came up with a list of Indian gurus.  Ringo Starr didn't bother submitting any names.  Blake and Fraser also added names, and Michael Cooper was commissioned to take the photos.

It took two weeks for Blake to construct the set, and various props were added.  A stone bust of a male figure was added, along with several smaller stone figures and, at John Lennon's suggestion, a portable television set - John correctly predicted that TV would become more influential than it already was.  The boy who delivered the flowers asked to contribute, and he added the guitar made out of yellow hyacinths.  By March 30, 1967, the day of the photo session, everything was ready.  The Beatles donned their fluorescent satin suits and spent three hours posing for not only the front cover but for the back cover and gatefold.  Below is an outtake from the Sgt. Pepper photo session.

There were many faces in the crowd, some famous, others less so, but the diversity of personalities was astonishing - authors and movie stars congregated with philosophers and sculptors.  And gurus.  Among the figures in the background are Lenny Bruce, Marlene Dietrich, Laurel and Hardy, Bob Dylan, Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe (though not together, and not with Jack Lemmon), nineteenth-century British prime minister Sir Robert Peel, Karl Marx (that was sure to offend the John Birch Society in America), Oscar Wilde, Fred Astaire (who was pleased by the honor), Edgar Allan Poe, and former Beatle Stu Sutcliffe, a painter and the group's original bass player, who tragically died young.  There were even even a couple of sports figures - swimmer-turned-actor Johnny Weismuller, soccer player Albert Stubbins, and also former heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston, who, ironically, refused to pose for photos with the Beatles in real life when the Fabs visited Miami in 1964 at the time Liston was preparing to fight Cassius Clay, soon to change his name to Muhammad Ali.  Ali did pose with the Beatles then, of course.

Even more ironically, Liston's wax figure is positioned next to wax figures of the moptop-era Beatles, included by Robert Fraser because he thought it would make sense that the Beatles would want to check out the show of Sgt. Pepper's band.  

The Beatles were asked by their record company to seek permission from the people still who were still alive to have them featured on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, which their manager Brian Epstein painstakingly handled.  Most of them said yes, but Mae West, depicted third from left at the top, initially refused to be included.  "What would I be doing in a lonely hearts club?" she said.  But the Beatles asked her to reconsider in a personal letter, and West, touched by their effort, changed her mind.

Some people, however, were left off the final cover photo.  Out of either cynicism or a desire to make some sort of statement with opposing avatars of pure goodness and pure evil, John Lennon had wanted to include Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler, but good taste prevailed and the idea was rejected.  But at least seven other personalities who were featured in the collage were either barely seen or blocked out of view altogether (or removed) in the cover photo that was chosen.

Here is the same outtake depicted above, with colored circles around the pictures of people who were not visible on the Sgt. Pepper cover.

Leo Gorcey of the Bowery Boys, circled in black, is shown with fellow Bowery Boy Huntz Hall to the right.  But while Hall was kept in, Gorcey had to be painted out.  He requested a fee for being included, but EMI refused to pay a fee to anyone.  And while Mohandas Gandhi, the avatar of non-violent protest, was a no-brainer for inclusion on the cover of the record that would become the soundtrack for the Summer of Love, EMI chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood feared that record buyers in India would be offended by the idea of Gandhi being trivialized by having him standing around with Sonny Liston or actress Diana Dors (the British Marilyn).  So Gandhi, circled above in red, was painted out.

Two more got in by a hair . . . literally.  Albert Einstein was also chosen, and the outtake photo clearly shows his head, circled in white, but in the photo chosen for the cover, he's mostly obscured by John Lennon, and so all you see is his famous hair.   Note the green arrow in the picture below. 

I've seen a couple of guides to who's who on the Sgt. Pepper album cover that incorrectly identify the gent between Albert Stubbins and Lewis Carroll as Einstein; in fact, it is Indian guru Lahiri Mahasaya.

Bette Davis was also chosen, and a cutout of her as Queen Elizabeth I was added to the collage (as indicated by the blue circle in the outtake photo above), but except for a sliver of her hair (or her crown - hard to tell), she was obscured by George Harrison in the chosen picture, as indicated by the black arrow in the picture below.        

But that was still better than not getting in at all, a fate that befell the image of American actor Timothy Carey.  He's the guy circled in green in the outtake photo above.  Carey was known for playing violent characters in movies, and the cutout of him for the Sgt. Pepper collage was from his role as Nikki Arane in  Stanley Kubrick's 1956 movie The Killing (as shown below).  But George's hat completely obscured him in the chosen cover photo. 

Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni were added, but, as seen below, they ended up behind the wax figures of the Beatles and Sonny Liston, as did a duplicate image of Shirley Temple (who's also shown standing next to Dietrich).  And the doll wearing the Rolling Stones shirt is a Shirley Temple doll.

The Sgt. Pepper album also came with cardboard cutout inserts - a stand-up picture of the Beatles, various badges and chevrons, a clip-on mustache (a parody of Beatle wigs, the group  now offering the chance for the fans to copy their facial hair), and a portrait of Sergeant Pepper himself that was based on the stone bust on the front cover.  Deleted from subsequent LP reprints, the inserts returned when the original Sgt. Pepper CD was issued in 1987 when the CD, like other CDs at the time, was issued in an oversized cardboard longbox to prevent record-store shoplifting.  The cutouts were printed on the longbox, but when longboxes were replaced by security tags, the inserts disappeared once again.

There's no understating the effect that the Sgt. Pepper album cover had on rock album artwork.  More so than the offbeat stretched-image photo on Rubber Soul or Klaus Voormann's black-and-white collage/illustration on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper encouraged other rock artistes to come up with bold, colorful covers in response.  Imagine how the covers of Family's Music In a Doll's House, the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, any Yes album or even Rush's Moving Pictures - among many, many more - could have been possible without Sgt. Pepper coming first.  There were also numerous parodies, the earliest example being the interior art work for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention's We're Only In It For the Money (originally intended for the front cover but relegated to the inside of the sleeve by Zappa's label, Verve Records, out of fears of recrimination from EMI).  One thing was for sure; after Sgt. Pepper, no one ever again put out an album cover that resembled a cereal box.  

Peter Blake never got rich from creating this cover, because Robert Fraser signed the copyright away.  "But it has never mattered to me," he said in 1987, "because it was such a wonderful thing to have done."  And rock music would be all the better for it.

Click here for a full list of the personalities on the Sgt. Pepper cover.  No Jack Lemmon, though.

The Fake 'Sgt. Pepper' Movie Soundtrack Album

In discussing the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I inevitably find myself coming back to the execrable 1978 movie based on that album.  You know the story: Pop impresario Robert Stigwood, the manager of the Bee Gees, owned the movie rights to 28 Beatles songs - all but five of them from the Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road albums - tried to weave them into a coherent rock opera, and convinced both the Gibb brothers and Peter Frampton to play Sgt. Pepper's band, resulting in what became the Cleopatra of rock movie musicals.  As bad as the movie was, the soundtrack album - including wrongheaded Beatles covers from Frampton and the Bee Gees but also wrongheaded Beatles covers from George Burns, Alice Cooper and Frankie Howerd (Frankie Howerd?) - was even worse.  Indeed, it's generally regarded as one of the worst albums of all time.  The Beatles themselves were not happy about any of this, and neither were their fans.  When radio stations tried to play some of the selections from the movie soundtrack album, Beatles fans angrily called into these stations, demanding that they revert to playing the original Beatles recordings.  The stations caved to the pressure; just as no one wanted to bother with the movie, no one wanted to bother with the soundtrack record.

Well, what if I told you that someone put out an imitation Sgt. Pepper soundtrack record?

That's right - someone ripped off a ripoff!

Pictured above is an album of anonymous covers of the Beatles songs in the Sgt. Pepper movie, put out by Springboard Records.  Springboard was a Los Angeles-based budget label that, in addition to putting out cut-rate compilations of various recording artists, put out LPs from anonymous studio bands that recorded copycat covers of pop hits and - you guessed it - movie soundtracks.  Before the Sgt. Pepper movie came out, Springboard, guessing that it would be as big as hit as Robert Stigwood's two previous pop musical productions, Saturday Night Fever and Grease, tried to get in on the act by rush-recording and rush-releasing this fake soundtrack record performed by the soundalike group "Abbey Road '78." Abbey Road '78's job was not to copy the original Beatles recordings; their job was to copy the Beatles covers that the cast of the Sgt. Pepper movie recorded to lip-sync to in the film.

That's right, Springboard thought it could swindle record buyers into buying a record that had imitators of Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees (and others) singing Beatles songs.  But then, there was a lot of foolishness in the record business in 1978.  Consider the Kiss solo albums.

When the Sgt. Pepper movie tanked, this fake soundtrack record ended up creating more headaches for Stigwood's RSO record label (which issued the real soundtrack record) than for Springboard.  See, when the legitimate soundtrack album bombed, the unsold copies were sent back to RSO . . . but so were copies of the fake Springboard release.  About a million copies of the Springboard album, by some estimates, were sent to RSO along with copies of the actual RSO album.  The joke went like this - the Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack album was shipped double platinum and returned triple platinum.  And it was all because record store employees, in sending back to RSO all of the records that said "Sgt. Pepper" and "movie" on the sleeve, couldn't tell the difference between the real movie soundtrack album and the ripoff.  Ironically, that was a mistake that Springboard was counting on record buyers to make!  And not all of the Springboard records went to either RSO or back to Springboard itself.  Some of them remained in record stores, left in discount and cut-out bins, with eight-track versions cropping up in discount department stores and selling for fifty cents as late as the mid-1980s.  

On his blog "Classical Gas Emissions," Ben Century sums up the stupidity of this imitation soundtrack album quite succinctly.  "The only thing worse than a bunch of famous artists doing bad Beatles covers," he wrote in 2008, "is . . . a bunch of nobodies doing bad impressions of famous artists doing bad Beatles covers."

Capitol Records, the Beatles' American label, probably made out the best from all of this.  When the Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack came out, the label capitalized (no pun intended) on the fact that it had the original Beatles recordings available and promoted the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album as if it were a new release.  It even issued the title song and "With a Little Help From My Friends," backed by "A Day In the Life," as a new single, and there was even a Sgt. Pepper picture disc!

Cool, huh? :-)

I've confessed to having seen the Sgt. Pepper movie, and I also admit to having owned the RSO Sgt. Pepper movie soundtrack album (I was twelve years old, for Pete's sake), but eventually, I happily graduated to the Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road LPs that, er, inspired the movie.  As we learned from the animated movie Yellow Submarine, the Beatles could pass for Sgt. Pepper's original band, because they were the originals.  So why settle for a mere copy?  

And so, why settle for a copy of a copy?   

The Sgt. Pepper movie failed because Robert Stigwood, who died in 2016, essentially asked the biggest names in late-seventies pop to pretend to be the Beatles in a movie based on an album the Beatles made pretending to be other people.  The big joke about the fake Springboard release was that Abbey Road '78 pretended to be other people pretending to be the Beatles. 

Oh yeah, here's Abbey Road '78 pretending to be Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with their recording of "Getting Better."  And it can't get any worse than this.   

We Were Talking . . .

One more look at a song from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released fifty years ago this year, before the big June 1 anniversary release date and some posts about other aspects of the album . . .

Many Lennon-McCartney songs had been prompted by quips that came out of nowhere, as evidenced by the titles.  The title song of A Hard Day's Night was written around one of Ringo Starr's malapropisms, "Eight Days a Week" from Beatles For Sale was inspired by the frustration over long work hours that a chauffeur for Paul McCartney expressed, and Sgt. Pepper's own "Getting Better" was written based on on temporary replacement drummer Jimmy Nicol's answer to how he was doing substituting for Ringo on the first part of the group's 1964 world tour while Ringo recovered from tonsillitis.  George Harrison, ever the non-conformist, wrote a song around an entire conversation.

"Within You Without You" came out of a conversation George had over dinner with German artist/musician Klaus Voormann at Voormann's London home. Voormann, who knew the Beatles in Hamburg, was now a bass player and playing in Manfred Mann's eponymous band.  The conversation - which was hardly the stuff of bourgeois pleasantries - was deeply philosophical, in which George and Klaus began talking about how a cold, modern world could benefit from sharing love after realizing that change was only possible from within . . . and how the space between us was getting in the way of that.  George found his way to a harmonium (a type of organ) that Klaus had in his house and began playing a tune to his thoughts on the conversation - "We were talking . . ."   He had a song in no time.

George brought "Within You Without You" to EMI Studios at Abbey Road as an untitled song on March 15, 1967, but he eventually decided to name it after the refrain, which was the song's central point - "Life flows on within you and without you."  (The title omitted the conjunction.)  George brought in Indian musicians from London's Asian Music Circle to play the tabla, dilruba, tambura and swarmandal, and he had the studio decorated with Indian tapestries - and burned some incense - to create the proper mood.  He gave the Indian musicians, their names lost to history, the basic melody from which they improvised their music; Indian music is all improvisation.   Below is one of the musicians hearing George play the melody.  Wonder if anyone can at least identify him?      

George and Beatles assistant Neil Aspinall each played tamburas along with the Indian musicians, and Western classical musicians would be brought in a week later to add strings.  The result is an incredible fusion of Eastern and Western musicianship weaving together in a profound pop song.

"Within You Without You" is George Harrison's best Indian-flavored Beatles song musically, and it's also considered one of his best sets of lyrics.   Listening to it, you feel transported to a higher, much more pleasant state of being.  And George's paraphrasing of the Gospel According to Matthew in the lyrics ("For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?") was a nice touch.  John Lennon, for one, had nothing but praise for the whole song.  "One of George's best songs," he said in 1980.  "He's clear on that song.  His mind and his music are clear.  There is his innate talent; he brought that sound together."  Ringo Starr called it "brilliant."  

While the music of "Within You Without You" flows seamlessly, there is one moment where the song - indeed, the entire Sgt. Pepper album - is suspended in time.  It occurs at 3:36 into the song; the music just seems to pause and hang there for a split second before fading and then resuming with the tap of the tabla.  It's as if time itself has stopped completely, if only to remind us that everything is fleeting.  The song ends with some laughter from the audience at Sgt. Pepper's band's show, which George threw in to bring some levity to an otherwise philosophically heavy song, though it almost sounds like crying.   

"Within You Without You" is a very special song.  It is the only George Harrison song on Sgt. Pepper, it is the longest track on that album except for "A Day In the Life" (more about that later), and it was the last song to be completed for the album (it was mixed after every other song on the LP had been finished).

It's also the only song on the Sgt. Pepper album, apart from "Lovely Rita," not to be disemboweled for the 1978 movie of the same name. ;-)  

After Living Alone For So Many Years . . .

Continuing my look back at the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album on its upcoming fiftieth anniversary . . .

The songs Paul McCartney  contributed to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band featured characters that he'd "made up like a novelist," as John Lennon once said, from Sergeant Pepper himself to Rita the meter maid (the name an assonance rhyme with "meter," the assonance inspired by the mildly misogynistic Americanism for a female parking meter attendant).  But "She's Leaving Home," melodramatic as it may sound, was inspired by a real person . . . and it was someone whom Paul, without realizing it,  had met more than three years before he wrote it.

In late February 1967, Paul read an article in the Daily Mail about how a young London girl named Melanie Coe had left her parents, abandoning her car and disappearing.  Her father was flabbergasted by Melanie's decision to run away.   "We gave her everything money could buy," John Coe told the press.  But, Paul thought as he read it, they obviously didn't give her any love or affection, and they failed to grasp what he himself had said back in 1964 - money can't buy you love.  The story inspired the song.     

Melanie Coe was a seventeen-year old girl in 1967, and she did indeed have a lot of possessions that left her unfulfilled.  She left to go off with her boyfriend, a casino worker, and she was found a few weeks later and returned home.  At eighteen, she married to get out of her parents' house, fed up with coldness of her parents.  "They gave me everything - coats, cars," she later said. "But not love."  Melanie found herself in going out to clubs, dancing, and enjoying the music, and she could have cared less about her material possessions.  

Her parents didn't get it.  The Daily Mail didn't get it either, as evidenced by the headline: "A-level girl dumps car and vanishes." The paper was utterly clueless as to how a girl who was in an advanced placement in the British public school system and had her own car could be unhappy.

As the article reported, she had an Austin 1100 like the one above.  Not a Rolls-Royce, but not a shabby car by any means.  But that wasn't important to Melanie Coe.

What Paul McCartney didn't realize is that the Beatles had met Melanie Coe before.  She won a lip-syncing competition on the British pop music show "Ready, Steady, Go!" in October 1963, and it was on the very first installment of that program to feature the Beatles.  Paul himself gave Melanie her award for her win.  Melanie had been a regular backup dancer on the show, much to the chagrin of her parents.

The song is part of Sgt. Pepper's concept of innocence and experience, and the adventure the girl has as she strikes out on her own conveys both.  It was also written with an acknowledgement of a growing trend in late-sixties Britain and America.  More kids in both countries, tired with the stuffy bourgeois trappings of their lives, were going out into the world to find themselves.

The Beatles play none of the instruments featured on "She's Leaving Home," as it was entirely orchestrated.  It sounds a little melodramatic, and if you think it's uncharacteristic of George Martin's style, that's because Martin didn't arrange the score.  Martin, by then a freelance producer and no longer employed with EMI, the Beatles' record company, was away on another session, so an impatient Paul got Mike Leander, who had scored the Rolling Stones' recording of "As Tears Go By," to arrange it.  Martin was unhappy with Paul's move, but, ironically, it mirrored the song.  Though Martin was a father figure to the Beatles, they weren't above rebelling against him when they thought the situation called for it, though they rarely did.  (Legend has it that when John Lennon stood up for the group against Martin when he wanted them to record Mitch Murray's "How Do You Do It" as their first single, despite the fact that it was a song that the Beatles weren't enamored with, Martin asked him, "Are you trying to tell me my business?"  Lennon is said to have replied, "Not at all.  We're trying to tell you our business.")  

Martin, good sport that he was, produced and mixed the final recording of "She's Leaving Home."  The strings are still rather stirring. The introductory harp, by the way, was played by Sheila Bromberg, making her the first female musician to appear on a Beatles recording.

Paul made up a few details in "She's Leaving Home." Ms. Coe left home in the afternoon while her parents were at work, and she briefly hid at the house of a friend - who happened to be married to Ritchie Blackmore, later of Deep Purple - before running off with her boyfriend, a casino worker.  In the song, the girl leaves home at five o'clock in the morning and, two days later, meets up with a car salesman - "a man from the motor trade," presumably to buy her own car and start her own life.  

Ms. Coe turned out to be pregnant, but she didn't know that before she left home; she had an abortion after being found.  There's no evidence that Paul McCartney knew of that when he wrote the song, but when Sgt. Pepper came out, Americans decided that the song was about a girl who is indeed aware of her pregnancy when she leaves home and meets the abortionist on Friday morning at nine o'clock - the "man from the motor trade" being the euphemism for the abortionist.  In fact, the motor trade man was inspired by car salesman Terry Doran, an associate of Beatles manager Brian Epstein.  The irony is monumental; American listeners found in "She's Leaving Home" an unintended meaning that turned out to be true.  The opening lyric, "Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day begins," is not, though, a reference to Paul McCartney dying on November 9, 1966 from injuries sustained in a car crash.

Ms. Coe (above), who is 67 today, settled down and had two children, and she worked first as a jewelry designer and later as a real estate agent.  She never reconciled with her now-deceased  parents, alas, though she wouldn't recommend running away to anyone; she considers herself lucky to have survived the experience.  She does appreciate being the inspiration for a Beatles song - a song covered by Harry Nilsson, Richie Havens and Joel Grey, among others - but she does add that "it would have been nicer for doing something other than running away from home."

Look For the Girl With the Sun In Her Eyes

Continuing with a look at some of the songs on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for that album's fiftieth anniversary, I turn to "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds."

We all know the story.  John Lennon rode over in his chauffeured limousine to his son Julian's nursery school to pick him up, and there was Julian with a painting he did in class, showing a little girl wearing sparkly orbs and surrounded by stars. When John asked Julian what his painting was supposed to be, Julian said, "It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds."  John loved it and wrote a song about it, thus engaging in the art of ekphrasis - bringing a piece of fine art to life in music and/or verse (and one could argue that "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!," though based on a commercial poster, was yet another form of ekphrasis). 

When "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" came out on Sgt. Pepper, fans immediately saw the acrostic spelled out by the first letter of each noun in the song's title - "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" - and immediately thought the song was about an acid trip.  As for John Lennon's explanation of how the title was prompted, well, no one was going to buy that.  

Except that the elder Lennon was telling the truth. And here's a picture of the younger Lennon's art work to prove it.

It may be the most valuable piece of refrigerator art ever conceived. :-)

Not only was the painting real, so was Lucy.  She was one of Julian Lennon's nursery school classmates, and by all indications, Julian liked her a lot.  Why else would he immortalize her in a painting?  And I'm sure he thought she was cute.

In fact, she was.  Below is Lucy O'Donnell, Julian Lennon's first muse.    

It's worth noting that John Lennon's song characters were almost always real people.  Lucy, Mr. Kite, Dr. Robert, Bungalow Bill, Polythene Pam . . . all were based on folks John knew or learned of in his travels.

Lucy herself remembered the painting.  "I remember Julian and I both doing pictures on a double-sided easel, throwing paint at each other, much to the horror of the classroom attendant," she said in 2007.  "Julian had painted a picture and on that particular day his father turned up with the chauffeur to pick him up from school."

But what of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" itself?  The song is musically unique in that the verses are in three-quarter time with the choruses in a 4/4 time signature.  A good deal of the verses are chordless, and the melody abruptly shifts keys, going from A major in the verses to B♭ (B-flat) major for the pre-chorus, and G major for the chorus.  Performed mostly with an organ and a Leslie-speaker-filtered guitar riff played by Paul McCartney and George Harrison, respectively, "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" also features an Indian tamboura that gives it a more exotic flavor, topped with a really spaced-out John Lennon vocal.  No wonder people thought the song was about LSD.

I've always loved this song for having such literary words, and when someone finally got around to asking John Lennon if the lyrics were, umm, pharmaceutically inspired, John replied that the lyrics were inspired by Lewis Carroll's writings, which meant that John inadvertently answered yes.  Carroll was a heavy drug user, explaining why "Alice In Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" were so trippy.  But John couldn't have known that when he read those books as a boy.  And who cares?  A land of tangerine trees under marmalade skies with cellophane flowers of yellow and green growing so incredibly high certainly sounds like a wonderful paradise.    

The song would become a favorite of Beatles fans and make its way into popular culture in unforeseen ways.  A human fossil discovered in 1974 in eastern Africa, projected to be almost four million years old, was named Lucy because one of the paleontologists at the fossil excavation site was playing the song on a cassette tape.  That same year, Elton John covered "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" for a single that, apart from greatest-hits compilations, is not included on an Elton John album (paradoxically, the original Beatles version is an album track that was never commercially released as a single); Elton's cover went to number one in the U.S., and it featured John Lennon himself on guitar and backing vocals.  And a short time after the release of Sgt. Pepper, New Orleans rocker John Fred listened to the song and misheard the title as "Lucy in disguise," the misheard chorus subsequently producing a parody song called "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" . . . but that's another story.

(Less well known is Lindisfarne's parody, "Alan In the River With Flowers," written by Lindisfarne leader Alan Hull.)  

The story of "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds," however, does not have a happy ending.  Lucy O'Donnell - who got married as an adult and became Lucy Vodden (her adult photo is above) - eventually came down with lupus and died of the disease in 2009 at the age of 46.  Julian Lennon, who had reconnected with his old friend, wrote a new song for her, simply called "Lucy," and recorded it with his friend James Scott Cook and American songwriter Todd Meagher, releasing it soon after.  The proceeds of the record's sales go to lupus charities in Britain and America.

"Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" still remains an astonishing song and a worthy part of the Beatles' canon. 

A Splendid Time Was Guaranteed For All

Continuing my look back at select songs from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album in the fiftieth anniversary year of its release, I turn to a song that is one of my favorites from the LP but is widely disregarded by other rock fans.  I refer, as you may have already gathered from this post's title, to "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!"        

John Lennon was prompted to write the song from an old circus poster he bought in an antique shop in Sevenoaks, Kent while there with the other Beatles to film the promotional video for "Strawberry Fields Forever."  Just about every lyric and character in the song came from the poster (shown above).  Pablo Fanque (below), whose real name was William Darby, was a black circus performer and the first black man in Britain to own a circus.  In his employment were all-around performer William Kite and acrobat John Henderson and his wife Agnes.  The horses, the hoops, the wooden cask (the "hogshead") on fire, and the trampolines (the word referred to springboards rather than stretched canvases) were all part of the show; the particular gig this poster advertises took place on St. Valentine's Day, 1843.  But on a Tuesday, not a Saturday, and at Rochdale in northern England, not at Bishopsgate, which is a ward of London; John changed the day of the week and the town in order to fit the meter and the rhyme scheme.  (When I first heard this song, on a cassette, without a lyric sheet, I thought I heard that Mr. Kite would perform his feat "as bishops gaze."  I had this vision of Anglican bishops staring at Mr. Kite in wide-eyed wonder! :-D )

The Beatles recorded "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" at EMI Studios at Abbey Road in nine takes in February 1967 with Paul McCartney's bass, Ringo Starr's drums, backwards guitar from George Harrison, harmonicas, and George Martin on a harmonium, an organ that requires a lot of foot-pumping to play.  It was the perfect instrument for a song like "Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!", as it almost got the sound of circus music perfect.  Almost.  John didn't think the group captured the flavor of the circus, and he said to Martin, "I want to taste the circus . . ..  I want to smell the sawdust on the floor."  Martin knew exactly what he needed - a calliope, a keyboard instrument using steam whistles, which was quite commonly used in Victorian circuses.

Unfortunately, there were no steam organs around, so Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick had to create a circus atmosphere from existing calliope recordings.  Since circuses are known for commotion and noise, Martin and Emerick decided to take recordings of authentic steam organs, chop them up and create a chaotic backwash.  Emerick did just that, cutting up calliope tapes in different ways - straight across, diagonally, whatever - threw them up in the air, and reassembling them . . . only to have the pieces play in the same order as before.  So he turned some of them around, turned some others upside down, and, according to some accounts, crumpled up others, stomped on some of them, dipped a couple of them in a glass of soda (which must have made the tape machine heads really sticky!) - anything and everything to distort the sound and make it random.  The hurdy-gurdy middle eight and the chaotic steam-organ music at the end of the record, with an organ run of the song's melody running along, are the result of that experiment - which pleased John Lennon very much.

"Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" was banned by the BBC on the grounds that "Henry the Horse" was a reference to heroin, but in fact there really was a waltz-dancing horse in Pablo Fanque's show - except that he was called Zanthus.  I love this song.  Not only is it so musically inventive, but it shows what a genius John Lennon really was - I mean, how many other people would have the clever idea of writing a song around a Victorian circus poster?  Of course, not everyone liked it.  In fact, Lou Reed famously called it "absolutely unbearable." Even John Lennon didn't think much of it when the Beatles recorded it, but he'd changed his mind by 1980.  By then he called the song "pure, like a painting, a pure watercolor."

"Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" is the perfect song about the circus, its veneer of innocence contradicted by the cynical sneer of John Lennon's ringmaster character.  Every time I hear it, I'm ready to see Mr. Kite challenge the world.  Just remember, the band begins . . . right about now! :-)  (Note the timestamp below.)

Many Years From Now

As June 1, 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, I thought that, between now and June, I'd take a look at some of the songs on the album and how they were conceived and recorded. 

As noted earlier, two of the first three songs recorded for what became Sgt. Pepper, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane," were released as a double A-side single instead of appearing on the album. The third song, "When I'm Sixty-Four," was thus the first song on the actual LP to be recorded.  

Sgt. Pepper was first heard in June 1967 as a giant leap forward for rock, with its new songs and innovative sounds and arrangements.  Ironically, "When I'm Sixty-Four" was unabashedly retrograde, its clarinets, bass and piano coming out of the early days of music-hall jazz.  Also, "When I'm Sixty-Four" itself was not a new song, having been written by Paul McCartney in 1958 when he was sixteen (64 is 16 quadrupled) and played by the Beatles in clubs during their stays in Hamburg whenever the electricity went out or their amplifiers broke down, so they could keep the show going. 

"When I'm Sixty-Four" wasn't rock and roll, which is why it went unrecorded for so long.  But at the beginning of the Sgt. Pepper sessions in late 1966, with little new material available, the Beatles took a stab at it.  One likely reason for Paul suggesting the song as a Beatles track at that point was the fact that his father, Jim McCartney, had turned 64 earlier that year.  (Hunter Davies, the Beatles' official biographer, mistakenly reported in his book that it was in fact written for Jim McCartney.)  John Lennon was not a fan of the song.  "I would never even dream of writing a song like that," he later admitted. 

The recording of "When I'm Sixty-Four" was begun on December 6, 1966, and recorded in four takes; it was not a hard song to get on tape.  (One piece of studio trickery was used - Paul's recorded vocals were mixed a semitone higher than his natural voice to make him sound like he was sixteen, when he wrote it, as opposed to sounding like he was 24, when he actually recorded it.)  Its lyrics about a teenager imagining himself and his girlfriend growing older together were actually quite revolutionary in a way, as no one in rock and roll - either the stars or the fans - had ever contemplated old age.  (Family, of course, would imagine life from the cradle to the grave in their 1969 masterpiece "The Weaver's Answer," even sharing with "When I'm Sixty-Four" an observation about grandchildren on one's knee.)

"When I'm Sixty-Four" fits well into Sgt. Pepper's song cycle of innocence and experience, and while few people would consider it one of their favorite Beatles songs, it did inspire the intriguing piece of artwork below.

In the late 1960s, illustrator Michael Leonard drew this sketch of what the Beatles might look like some time between 2004 and 2007, the period when they would all reach 64.  It's sort of sad to see John and George depicted in their sixties while knowing that they never made it that far.  But the depictions of them here seem quite inaccurate; John looks like he belongs in a Sherlock Holmes movie, and George looks like a member of a late-period Jethro Tull lineup.  (George may have said that if you're going to be in a band it might as well be the Beatles, but he never said that if you're going to be in a band it might as well be Jethro Tull.)  Leonard got Ringo and Paul completely wrong; Ringo still looks young going toward 77 years of age, completely different from the crochety coot depicted above, while Paul, nearing 75, still looks like the rock star he is; here he looks like the banker who doesn't wear a raincoat.  Though, of course, he's much richer.  But even Paul's and Ringo's youthful looks in old age can't conceal the fact that they are, in fact, old.

Rock and roll, saddled by a thinning gerontocracy these days and in bad need of younger artists to take the torch (the few young rockers who have emerged in recent years don't seem to last long enough to carry it), seems to be on its last legs, but even the Beatles, at the height of their careers, could see that they weren't going to be young forever, and neither was the music.  Maybe that's why, even as Sgt. Pepper, with its psychedelic sounds and electronic effects, is thought to be the most dated Beatles album, "When I'm Sixty-Four" may now be its most relevant song.