Why The Beatles Still Matter

John Lennon
Paul McCartney
George Harrison
Ringo Starr
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`It was forty years ago today....
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`I don't think I've ever had a better example as to how cynical we've become as a culture than when I read some of the pieces in various newspapers and on the Internet which took note of the fortieth anniversary this week of the release of the Beatles' timeless 1967 album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". The opinion of many writers seems to be, "Well, it was never really that good to begin with". Some poor, misguided person by the name of Jon Wiener, in a piece published on AlterNet, actually said "some of the songs are pretty bad". He then proceeded to give an example of one of those "pretty bad" songs: John Lennon's brilliant collage of circus sounds and psychedelic merriment, Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite.
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I don't get it. It may not be their finest album - the passage of time has proven that that's probably true. Revolver and Abbey Road stand out across the decades as works of art that have yet to be surpassed in their brilliance and melodic invention. But to curtly dismiss Pepper as overrated is (to be polite) naive - if not just a tad crazy. It was a milestone album that changed the way we listened to rock 'n' roll. Someone once remarked that June 1, 1967 marked the day that it ceased to be ritualistic dance music and became music to be listened to, to be appreciated.
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Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a masterpiece.
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I can still vividly recall the moment I first laid eyes on that cover! It was in the living room of the house across the street from mine where my cousin Michael Cullen lived. As I remember, it was at twilight. My Uncle Tom and Aunt Elaine had a Columbia console phonograph which was (in its time, I'm sure) state of the art. The lid above the turntable was closed and a copy of the brand new Beatles LP was lying on top of it. To a little kid just two months shy of his ninth birthday, that photograph on the album's cover was eye-opening to say the least! Mike was under the impression that the group had actually changed their name to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and told me as much. What a peculiar name, I thought. "Mike! They're wearing mustaches! What's that all about???" And who the heck were all these strange people surrounding them? In June of 1967, the only people I was able to recognize were Laurel and Hardy. In the ensuing years, the faces would become much more familiar to me: Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Oscar Wilde, W.C. Fields, Huntz Hall, Marilyn Monroe, Karl Marx, Marlon Brando, Mae West, Terry Southern, Marlene Dietrich - and Stuart Sutcliffe - "Stu", as he was known to the lads; the Beatles' first bass player - a brilliant artist and close friend of and mentor to John Lennon - who died suddenly in April of 1962 at the appallingly young age of twenty-one of a brain hemorrhage.
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At the dawn of the summer of 1967, Sgt. Pepper was a revelation! There had never been a record like it before. That year, you couldn't avoid it if you tried - it was being played everywhere and by everybody! And yet, forty years later, many of the very people who loved the album the most during that long ago Summer of Love seem utterly detached from it.
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Maybe listening to that album all these decades later is a painful reminder of all that might have been - of all the dreams that were not to be. The world was in turmoil in June of 1967. The Viet Nam War was raging with no end in sight (It would go on for another eight, long years). And yet with the multitude of problems facing the western world at the time, there was a genuine, tangible hope in the air: "Put a little love in your heart/And the world will be a better place...." It was obvious to everyone (even me, young as I was) that the times were indeed a'changin.
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There's nothing you can do that can't be done

Nothing you can sing that can't be sung

Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game...

It's easy!

All you need is love!

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"All you need is love". We really believed it in 1967. I still believe it. And yet it is hard to listen to Sgt. Pepper in 2007 without feeling a very real sense of sadness and even grief. Two of the Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, are dead - the former by an act of cold blooded murder and maybe even the latter. Harrison was being treated for cancer in 1999 when he was stabbed several times in his home by a crazed intruder on New Year's Eve of that year. His weakened condition as a result of that attack no doubt hastened his death less than two years later.
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There are other things that make us wistful when listening to that album. The hope and optimism that seemed abundant in 1967 is moribund forty years later. The reason Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band today sounds quaint and old fashioned to some ears is because we have become so jaded as a people - mean, callous and indifferent. Our humor has become excessively cruel; our culture obscene. Throughout Sgt. Pepper, are loving, gentle reminders of the joy and wonder of childhood:
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Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain,

Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies

Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers,

That grow so incredibly high....

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That kind of lyrical innocence doesn't even exist in most children's media and literature anymore. Forty years of war, gratuitous violence and political corruption have left us numb. "Tangerine trees and marmalade skies" we now view through a prism of cynicism and scorn.
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Late one night, not very long ago, I had a dream that the Beatles were still among us, making us laugh and sing in the same way they did when they were the undisputed Princes of the Planet Earth all those years ago. That's what was so wonderful about the Fab Four: they not only sang like the scruffy angels they were, but they were so damned funny! All one has to do is view the films "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help" and you're once again reminded that they were a great comedy team - one of the greatest. When I awoke from that dream - thinking it had been real - the blunt realization that the Beatles are gone forever was too depressing to even contemplate.
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In 1995, the night the video "Free As a Bird" premiered on national television (the first "new" Beatles song in over a quarter of a century), I watched it with a young woman who was born in 1970, the year they broke up. Hearing them sing together again - Paul and George sounding strong and clear; John, by that time long dead, his voice transferred from an old and faded cassette tape, sounding as if he were singing from far, far away - was a very moving experience. When she noticed my reaction, she laughed and said, "Oh, Tom! What's the big deal"? I told her that no one who didn't live through that turbulent era, could possibly understand what that band meant to their troubled generation.
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Is Sgt. Pepper dated? Yes it is - horribly so - But that's not the Beatles' fault. It's ours.
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With our love

We could save the world

If they only knew....

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Tom Degan
Goshen, NY.

SUGGESTED READING

The Beatles
by Bob Spitz

ESSENTIAL LISTENING

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

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"The Rant" by Tom Degan

A splendid time is guaranteed for all!