The whole first side is saturated with sophisticated wee bits--not preciosities, but highly significant sound gags and word plays. In the writing, there are devices such as the Joycean double entendre, achieved by leaving out punctuation, in the line "And it really doesn't matter if/ I'm wrong I'm right/ Where I belong." Musically, the record has more irony than any score since Arthur Sullivan taught the British public to apprciate real musical fun. Everywhere, some electronic instrument is always plunking against a simple melody, slyly undermining it. Everywhere, a chorus of Beatles is sympathizing with the troubled solo voice, coming in with a soupy "oooo" that sounds a little mocking. At its best the irony is both cutting and touching, as in "She's Leaving Home," where the Beatles mock the uncomprehending parents by singing their parts in falsetto and by underscoring their grief with a treacly, melodramatic cello lament. Yet, like most of these songs, this one mixes deep pathos with edgy comedy. A good deal of the musical tension and emotional excitement of the record comes from the way the Beatles assault their own simple, vulnerable tunes with an ironical barrage of electronic instruments, deliberately overdone rock conventions, and tossed off ad libs.
The Beatles have another delicate device with which they involve their audience--use of the personna. It never failed Robert Browning who made it famous in such poems as "My Last Duchess." Most of the songs are built around a certain personality whom we know pretty well after a couple of listenings, and it is by writing about different kinds of persons, not just different kinds of loneliness, that the Beatles cut their huge main theme down to life size.
Deeper Water
The record's second act gets the Beatles into deeper, more cross-currented waters. The first number, "Within You Without You" puts forward the Beatle manifesto to the tidal, wave-breaking sounds of an Indian raga. George Harrison chants his message, which is the Quintessence of Hippieism: "About the space between us all... and the love we all could share when we find it." At the end of the song comes a small gale of very self-satisfied laughter, which may be the "straight" people laughing at the idealistic, hippie message, or may just be a transition into the next two light-hearted songs, which are about the opposite of loneliness.
"When I'm Sixty-Four" laughs off the ravages of old age with a saxand--traps parody of last generation's pop. The Beatles parody ragtime with a total affection that betrays their longing for good old Sgt. Pepper's simpler, tea-dance age. (Through no coincidence, they have written three lovely fox trots in as many albums). The singer ("yours sincerely, wasting away") is looking forward to every possible kind of social security, not just the financial variety.
There follows the funny song about the singer's dalliance with "Lovely Rita Meter Maid." Nothing, as the verse says, can come between them.
And so into "Good Morning, Good Morning," interpreted by most Beatleologists as an affirmation of everything happy in life. But this is an ambiguous song, in which can also be seen a denunciation of the urban rat race. It uses country metaphors to comment on city life, starting out with a hearty cockcrow, but ending up with a pack of hounds yelping after their prey. Maybe life has the singer at bay, and he doesn't know it.
But it's back to the cheering audience and a thumping, hard-sell reprise of the Sgt. Pepper song--yells, bravos, laughter, and exit the Beatles, their musical over. Except for their most triumphant and theatrical bit of all--an epilogue which wipes the grin off the face of a wildly contented audience and sends them home with the willies. A "Day in the Life" is no joke; all the buoyant comic comment finally gives way to a flood of tristitia mundi. Paul McCartney's sweet, detached, phantasmic voice begins, "I read the news today, oh boy,"--a strange, sad phrase which grows heavier as the song grows more hallucinatory. At first the news is about the Guiness heir, son of a Beer peer, dying in his Lotus elan, sad waste of youth, but comic in its utter meaningless. The singer turns on and the song turns more dreamlike, ushering forth a complex metaphor to rank with Dylan's best. "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire/ And though the holes were rather small/ They had to count them all..."--this refers to Scotland Yard's search for bodies buried in a moor. The method they used was to sink poles in the earth and sniff the ends for the odor of decomposing flesh. "Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall," the song continues. I.E., now they know that an audience, like the audience on the record, is so many dead, empty, hollow, units of loneliness. "I'd love to turn you on," concludes the song. What else could you do under the circumstances.
As few works have since the days of Brecht and Weil, "A Day in the Life" provides a strange, new, jolting way of looking at the familiarities of modern life, so habit-forming that they are no longer disillusioning.
Who are the performers who dress up in Edwardian band costumes to comment on modern times? First of all, when you talk about the Beatles, you mostly mean John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who write nearly all the words and tunes, and producer George Martin, who writes the rest of what you hear on the record. Martin knows all the musical technique anyone will ever need: as a musicologist, he has at is command every classical trick in the book, as a record producer, he knows how to make piano strings sound like the winds of Hell. He can conjure up anything the Beatles call for, and he is responsible for many of the "wee bits" in Sgt. Pepper.
Acid Test
The fourth Beatle (poor Ringo, the mascot, just doesn't create) is George Harrison, who is perhaps the main channel to the hippie movement, and thus to such sentiments as "All you need is love," which is now the main Beatle theme. If the Beatles ever became drug bards ("Day Tripper" and so on), it may be his fault. Or not so much his fault as his dentist's, who one evening slipped some acid into the Beatle's after-dinner coffee, sending them on their first trip. At any rate, drugs are not likely to become a Beatle obsession because, as Harrison told the Los Angeles Free Press last week, "Acid is not the answer, definitely not the answer. It's enabled people to see a little bit more, but when you really get hip, you don't need it."
The Beatles, certainly, are among the most attractive buds of Flower Power, articulating its noblest sentiments as no one else yet has. They are, for a start, apolitical. They have never written a protest song. Except, perhaps for "Taxman." Written when the government was skimming off 90 per cent of their earnings, it is a song in which they wagged a scrupulously bipartisan, yet threatening, finger: "Oh-hoh Mr. Wilson, oh-hoh Mr. Heath."
Political aloofness, however, is not the most basic hippie trait. That is exploration of affection, of loneliness, of communication in general--a trait which the Beatles pluck from the depths of morbid introspection and express in their own constantly changing musical idiom.
For the Beatles are artists of the eclectic-improver variety (most famous example: Shakespeare), and like Shakespeare they are constantly picking up new styles and moods. In their musical celebrity world they are exposed to new contacts: their new-found acquaintances range from Ravi Shanker, who is teaching Harrison the entirely non-Western discipline of the sitar, to the Amadeus String Quartet (unsurpassed even by the Budapest), which recorded the background for "Eleanor Rigby" and which has leant the Beatles some of the Western tradition. Lennon and McCartney read voraciously, and they might borrow inspiration as easily from Eugene O'Neill as from Dylan or Ginsberg. The important thing is that being open-minded borrowers, the Beatles will be producing new, but slightly derivative, kinds of music long after the strictly original geniuses of their generation have choked on their own preoccupations.
The Beatles are the ultimate symbols of the posh, respectable vie boheme. They live in the suburbs that the Rolling Stones Knock in their songs. They have never dropped out from society. They have never had to slum it to gain a sly, detached, enlightening line of sight on the status quo. They are idols to the hippies, prophets to the establishment, and fetishes to the teeny-boppers.
Last week when Joe Orton, a brilliant British playwright of 34, was killed, "A Day in the Life" was played at his funeral. "I read the news today, o boy/about a lucky guy who made the grade." It was the perfect comment on a fellow comic artist, and nothing could better have proven the Beatles' uncanny relevance to just about any occasion.