FEATURE:
Paul McCartney at Eighty
IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney in his Sgt. Pepper costume in 1967/PHOTO CREDIT: Parlophone
Eight: Paul McCartney’s Significant Role During The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
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I think I will talk about Wings…
in the next (of forty) feature about Paul McCartney, ahead of his eightieth birthday in June (or at least soon enough!). I cannot do a run of features about McCartney and overlook The Beatles. I will come to his solo work and Wings material, though The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an important album. It turns fifty-five on 26th May. Following the exceptional and faultless Revolver (1966) and a year before The Beatles (The White Album) arrived, this seismic Beatles release came out. Not to credit McCartney with every asset and genius aspect of the album, but he was definitely the driving force. I associate the most astonishing moments of Revolver with John Lennon. In terms of The Beatles, it was quite even between McCartney and Lennon. Even though Lennon became a little less prolific for Let It Be and Abbey Road, he did contribute some truly amazing songs. I will come to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s iconic cover soon. To me, one of the most important albums in music history was a moment that, whether through necessity or inspiration, McCartney assumed the role of the band’s leader. From the black and white cover of Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a bright and psychedelic masterpiece. Lennon was experimenting more with LSD, and George Harrison was still blossoming as a songwriter. There was not a lot of tension and struggle within The Beatles, though it was clear that such an important and revolutionary album needed a leader and focus. Before exploring more, the Beatles Bible looks inside Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I have chosen a few sections that give one an insight into how important and extraordinary the album is:
“The Beatles’ eighth UK album caused a seismic shift in popular music. Recorded in over 400 hours during a 129-day period, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band helped define the 1967 Summer of Love, and was instantly recognised as a major leap forward for modern music.
The mood of the album was in the spirit of the age, because we ourselves were fitting into the mood of the time. The idea wasn’t to do anything to cater for that mood – we happened to be in that mood anyway. And it wasn’t just the general mood of the time that influenced us; I was searching for references that were more on the fringe of things. The actual mood of the time was more likely to be The Move, or Status Quo or whatever – whereas outside all of that there was this avant-garde mode, which I think was coming into Pepper.
There was definitely a movement of people. All I am saying is: we weren’t really trying to cater for that movement – we were just being part of it, as we always had been. I maintain The Beatles weren’t the leaders of the generation, but the spokesmen. We were only doing what the kids in the art schools were all doing. It was a wild time, and it feels to me like a time warp – there we were in a magical wizard-land with velvet patchwork clothes and burning joss sticks, and here we are now soberly dressed.
Paul McCartney
Anthology
Even more so than its predecessor, Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band saw The Beatles pushing boundaries within the studio, creating sounds which had never before been heard. They made extensive use of orchestras and other hired musicians, and combined a variety of musical styles including rock, music hall, psychedelia, traditional Indian and Western classical.
From the fairground swirls of ‘Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite!’ to the animal stampede that closes ‘Good Morning Good Morning’, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band signalled to the world that The Beatles were no longer the loveable moptops of old, unwilling to sing simple love songs and perform for crowds who were more interested in screaming than listening.
The album was always going to have ‘Sgt Pepper’ at the beginning; and if you listen to the first two tracks, you can hear it was going to be a show album. It was Sgt Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band with all these other acts, and it was going to run like a rock opera. It had started out with a feeling that it was going to be something totally different, but we only got as far as ‘Sgt Pepper’ and Billy Shears (singing ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’), and then we thought: ‘Sod it! it’s just two tracks.’ It still kept the title and the feel that it’s all connected, although in the end we didn’t actually connect all the songs up.
Ringo Starr
Anthology
IN THIS PHOTO: Mal Evans, Paul McCartney and Michael Cooper during the Sgt Pepper cover shoot on 30th March 1967
At the core of Sgt Pepper is the sound of The Beatles’ English background, with tales of runaway girls, circus attractions, Isle of Wight holiday cottages, domestic violence, home improvements, Daily Mail news stories, memories of school days, and favourite childhood literature – far from the riches they enjoyed as the most famous foursome on the planet, but remembering times past and wondering what the future would hold.
Prior to the release of Sgt Pepper, however, many commentators believed The Beatles to be over as a group. They had ceased touring and largely retreated from public view, and ‘Penny Lane’/‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ had failed to top the UK singles chart after its February 1967 release.
After the record was finished, I thought it was great. I thought it was a huge advance, and I was very pleased because a month or two earlier the press and the music papers had been saying, ‘What are The Beatles up to? Drying up, I suppose.’ So it was nice, making an album like Pepper and thinking, ‘Yeah, drying up, I suppose. That’s right.’ It was lovely to have them on that when it came out. I loved it. I had a party to celebrate – that whole weekend was a bit of a party, as far as I recall. I remember getting telegrams saying: ‘Long live Sgt Pepper.’ People would come round and say, ‘Great album, man.’
Paul McCartney
Anthology
At the time John Lennon was at the height of his extended dalliance with LSD, although he did play a key role in a number of songs – not least ‘A Day In The Life’, widely held to be one of The Beatles’ finest works.
It was a peak, and Paul and I definitely were working together, especially on ‘A Day In The Life’… I don’t care about the whole concept of Pepper. It might be better, but the music is better for me on the double album, because I’m being meself on it… I felt more at ease with that than the production. I don’t like production so much, but Pepper was a peak, all right.
John Lennon, 1970
Lennon Remembers, Jann S Wenner
For The Beatles themselves, it was harder to escape the album’s legacy. Magical Mystery Tour was made in the same heady spirit, but for their next long-player, the eponymous release commonly known as the White Album, gone were psychedelia, elaborate artwork and much of their enthusiasm for collaboration.
Looking back on Pepper, you can see it was quite an icon. It was the record of that time, and it probably did change the face of recording, but we didn’t do it consciously. I think there was a gradual development by the boys, as they tried to make life a bit more interesting on record. They felt: ‘We don’t have to go up onstage and do this; we can do it just for ourselves, and just for the studio.’ So it became a different kind of art form – like making a film rather than a live performance. That affected their thinking and their writing, and it affected the way I put it together, too.
I think Pepper did represent what the young people were on about, and it seemed to coincide with the revolution in young people’s thinking. It was the epitome of the Swinging Sixties. It linked up with Mary Quant and miniskirts and all those things – the freedom of sex, the freedom of soft drugs like marijuana and so on.
George Martin
Anthology”.
Although one cannot categorically call the 1967 masterpiece a Paul McCartney album, I feel it marked a slight leadership shift between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Even if the best song on the album, the epic finale, A Day in the Life, was led by Lennon, the best of the remaining songs were McCartney’s – from She’s Leaving home to the incredible title track. McCartney came up with the concept of the album. One can argue there isn’t much of a concept, through Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, though it is more about The Beatles assuming the mantle of a fictional band – which they definitely did. He seemed to be the most active and engaged in the studio (alongside George Martin), and many associate Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with McCartney. The cover was spearheaded by Paul McCartney. He took some ideas to his art dealer friend Robert Fraser, who suggested they use Peter Blake, Jann Haworth and Michael Cooper to realise the concept. It remains one of the finest and most acclaimed covers ever! The pride McCartney has when talking about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is clear. As he told National Public Radio's Terry Gross recently, the 1967 had to be something different to what had gone before:
“The Beatles were a very special combination of talents. You had me doing what I do, John doing what he does and then you had George, who by then had come on as a very strong songwriter, and then gluing it all together you had Ringo. That was something very special, as has been proved by its longevity and the stuff we did together still sounds good and still lives today."
The combination was so strong, McCartney knew he could never top it, even when he formed his next band, Wings.
"It was a question of how can you get better than that? And I think I just had to say, well you can't but if you want to keep going maybe you should think about starting something else. So I did, I talked to my wife, Linda, and said, 'Do you want to be in a band? Do we want to start a band?”.
I am going to talk a lot more about Paul McCartney and his significance in The Beatles before his eightieth birthday. One of the most important albums in history is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I feel, were it not for McCartney’s concepts, leadership and drive, then the album would not have sounded like it did. It might not have been as popular…and I reckon the direction and sound of The Beatles might have been different after. What he and The Beatles came up with, created and released in 1967 is nothing short of…
AN undeniable masterpiece.