Forlorn but dignified, the Plaza Hotel faced the mob. All morning long the radio had been urging every potential truant in New York to show up at 59th Street and Fifth. ("The Beatles are now over Newfoundland; touchdown minus 71 minutes on our Beatles Countdown.") By two o'clock there were 3,000 girl teenagers, 1,000 boy teenagers, and 13 press agents.

The press agents were busy turning sporadic yells into the firm, rythmic roar you hear in propaganda films. Wherever there was a television camera, the press agents urged the girls to "scream now" and paid the lucky ones 25 dollars to faint on cue. When the Beatles finally arrived at the Plaza, the crowd charged and nearly killed the chauffeur and two doormen. The PR men sighed with relief. Through a mixture of circus press-agentry and true love, the Beatles were already, on their first day in America, becoming more popular than Jesus.

One day early last June, another Beatles demonstration took place. Thousands of people went to record shops and bought the Beatles' 13th album, Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Few of these people were Beatlemaniacs; many of them were Beatleologists. Whereas the Beatlemaniac drowned out the Beatles with cathartic squeals, the Beatleologist listens so carefully that he can hear Ringo singing submarine in the third verse on the mono record, but clubmarine on the stereo. Beatleologists, in varying degrees of erudition, are the new breed of Beatles fan, and they may make the Beatles more contemplated than Buddha.

Not Since Dickens

The last Englishman to meet with such boundless dual success--popular and critical--was Charles Dickens. A New York mob once trampled eight of its own rushing to get the last installment of The Old Curiosity Shop off the boat from England. The critics took years, however, to catch up with the mobs in enthusiasm and to discover what lay beneath Dickens' charismatic storytelling. The remarkable thing about Sgt. Pepper is that it received both popular and critical acclaim instantly. So great today is the pressure to appreciate that critics rushed to hail the album as "entertainment verging on art" or as "art," period.

For about a year, record critics and Beatleologists have been listening between the grooves for every little innuendo the Beatles offer up and some that they don't. For example, the Beatleologists struck gold this spring when they found out that "Strawberry Fields Forever" was about a women's penitentiary in Liverpool named Strawberry Fields. Suddenly the title took on a suggestion of eternal imprisonment, and such lines as "nothing to get hung about" revealed a definite gallows humor.

Fake Diamonds

At about the same time, though, the Beatleologists hit a dry vein when they decided that the songtitle "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was an anagram for LSD. The song's author, John Lennon, has explained to the world that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was the title of a drawing his daughter brought home from school, around which he built a song about a little girl's fantasies. The song is simply an updated "Big Rock Candy Mountain" with a very neat accelerate-slowdown effect that gives the impression that you're traveling.

Sgt. Pepper, however, is a legitimate hunting ground for Beatleologists, and if Tolstoy was right in saying that the key to art is the "wee bit," never was there a more artistic pop album. It is loaded with every significant little touch that the Beatles could fit into three months of recording. Under the same pressure of inspiration that throws other pop groups into violent convulsions, the Beatles remain gentle, ironic, subtle, innocent and, above all, wry.

The clincher in the argument for Sgt. Pepper's artistic standing is the fact that the album is not just a collection of singles, but a whole. It is structured much like a musical comedy, and it is a study of all the lonely people and where they have all come from.

There is a rumor that the Beatles wanted to rename themselves "Seargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and that the album cover depicts a wake at the grave of that old and outdated group called the Beatles. The new name stirs up nostalgic images of a group of old Edwardians seated on a bandstand in military uniforms playing brass marches in a simpler age of long summer afternoons. The Beatles may also know that the Edwardian age was one of violent idealistic movements, once described as "Britain's national nervous breakdown," and much closer our own age than most people realize.

The New Beatles

At any rate the title song represents the new Beatles, the Beatles who have utter control over their audience, who can make them cheer, laugh at an unseen sight gag, and, best of all, shut up. "You're such a lovely audience, we'd like to take you home with us," sing the Beatles in one of the most obvious ironies of the album. Clearly they're thinking just the opposite, and have been for years. The song is a renunciation of their whole crowd-pleasing past, just as it is the realization of the artist's dream of total power over an audience.

Also, the song introduces the album's theme. "Sgt. Pepper's lonely, Sgt. Pepper's lonely," it repeats, and so is nearly everyone else in the Beatle cosmos.

Very much like a Beethoven concerto, the song winds up to introduce the solo instrument, which in this case happens to be Ringo's slightly flat voice. Again, the Beatles are putting us on with engaging irony: After a million people have anxiously awaited the new album, spent the price of a steak dinner on it, and have left work early in hot anticipation of hearing it, Ringo sings "What would you do if I sang out of tune/ Would you get up and walk out on me?" However, Ringo's main appeal is for a "little help from my friends." This is followed by a fantasy, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," which is followed by a shaky hope that after a lousy childhood things are "Getting Better, since you've been mine"; followed by a song about "fixing a hole" to keep out the gloomy rain from a wandering, searching mind; followed by a song about a girl eloping from her home, due to parental lack of understanding; followed by a first act finale, where the record goes back to its public mood and promises the audience "a splendid time is guaranteed for all."