Macca, 1967:

I was thinking of nice words like Sergeant Pepper, and Lonely Hearts Club, and they came together for no reason. But after you have written that down you start to think, "There's this Sergeant Pepper who has taught the band to play, and got them going so that at least they found one number."

The suggestion is tantalizing: the accidental concatenation of "Sergeant Pepper" and "Lonely Hearts Club" is enough to generate the whole narrative: the album's guiding concept resides fully formed in the words. (A step further: the words reside fully formed in the S and P marking the packets Paul and Mal received with their food on the plane back from Nairobi. This kind of trumps Lennon's use of found texts.)

There's a crucial ambiguity in the quotation: is the idea that Sergeant Pepper may have "got them going" without teaching the band any particular song, or is it that he taught them at least one number? (From the latter it is a small leap in imagination to the shocking possibility that he taught them only one number.) In any case, Paul's dark saying poses an important question: What did Sergeant Pepper teach the band?

Many mysteries surround Sergeant Pepper's band. But this much seems well established: they are the sort of band that plays in parks.

Macca: "They're a bit of a brass band in a way, but also a rock band because they've got the San Francisco thing."

The San Francisco thing: The Grateful Dead at the Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, January 14, 1967:



Animal Collective:

Merriweather Post Pavilion is an outdoor music venue in a place called Symphony Woods in Columbia, Maryland. It was designed by Frank Gehry in the 1960's, and they've been having concerts there from 1967 up through today. We used to go to shows there while growing up and have fond memories of times spent on the lawn. For most of the time we've been playing together, both in Animal Collective and the years before, we've tried to make music that would be deserving of an amazing outdoor listening experience. As both a name and a place, Merriweather Post Pavilion represents this for us.

Last August I watched Phish from the lawn at Merriweather Post Pavilion; during Tweezer I found the perfect seat in the roots of a tree. At the same moment, Animal Collective was playing in Prospect Park in Brooklyn:

this idea that Beatles were in a park up north somewhere

The spooky pulsing, strobing color-house: why do we encounter it so often in synaesthetic experiences of music? The sounds on the record seem to refer not to the various instruments that made them, but to a single multiform organism, a dynamic system of functional parts. Songs become machine-castles, steam-powered gear houses, benevolent calliopes with panda-eye windows, ancient computers. (George Martin's harpsichord intro makes it immediately clear that the house in "Fixing a Hole" is this sort of house.)

"Hearing is primarily a way of knowing about the world: from the sounds that reach our ears, we infer relevant properties of the objects that caused them. Presented with a complex of regular, coordinated sounds, we posit an object with regular, coordinated parts. When the sounds of modern recorded music suggest no natural object, we posit self-transforming pinwheel mansions."

Or might these inner cartoons come from some deep part of the brain that imagines, entirely from the inside, what its outer appearance might be like? "Given all these senses, how should I picture the body that receives them? What form could contain these multiple entrances, and how would it look lit from within? Could this possible map of openings be my true face?"

"I must have the perfect space if I am to have the right sort of experience."

I'd like to think that "Fixing a Hole" destroys the fantasy embodied by Paul's meditation chapel: the finished, perfected space in which the mind can freely unfold, uninterrupted by accidents of environment.

The song's narrator is pained by his home's imperfections: "I was fully absorbed in an amazing succession of inner tableaux. But a persistent dripping returned me to my physical setting, and the worlds of meaning I had discovered were lost, probably forever. So I'll fix the leak."

He sings as he works: "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in/and stops my mind from wandering/where it will go/where it will go..." but his words indicate the exact opposite of what is happening to him: the melody here is the precisely the sound of a mind wandering, losing itself in a dream, awakening someplace else. As the narrator becomes engrossed in his repairs, his work tune forgets itself and becomes a free, independent being, and his mind travels unbelievably far (out into the guitar solo), way further than it would have if the sanctity of his passive contemplation had remained undisturbed. (Active engagement with the broken thing as an occasion for psychedelic transport: what a "flight of science" might be.)

Peter Blake, quoted by Derek Taylor:

Paul explained that it was like a band you might see in a park. So the cover shot could be a photograph of them as though they were a town band finishing a concert in a park, playing on a bandstand with a municipal flowerbed next to it, with a crowd of people around them.

Bob Spitz:

John described their identity as "part German marching band, part military band," and the idea was that they had done a concert. "Perhaps we could do something in the park."

Gatefold

"Gatefold" would be a nice name for the world pictured in the Fool's original design for the gatefold of Sgt. Pepper's. (I'm certain I'm not alone in having spent lots of "headphones & notebook" time writing about the land of Gatefold.) Paul's art dealer Robert Fraser talked the Beatles out of using this image; it was "not good art" and would quickly become a dated artifact of the psychedelic era. (They did use The Fool's record sleeve design: the cloudy camouflage layers of red fading to pink.) Fraser's criticisms are correct, but there's a deeper problem with the artwork: it represents psychedelia rather than enacting it (which would make it more appropriate as album art for Magical Mystery Tour). It attempts to illustrate something you can only grasp in imagination, and that only fleetingly, for the fantasy landscapes of Sgt. Pepper can unfold only in time; mental events can't be laid out on a page and made present all at once. Whatever is shockingly real and overflowing in the present moment (wonder, connection) instantly recedes; at the center of psychedelic experience is a gaping hole. This is why people on drugs often think they're dying; they are. We always are, but it's a big deal when you see it happening up close.

A day in the life of two individuals moving separately through London, one in a state of hallucinatory detachment, one buoyant, social, and comfortable with the pleasures of wealth: 13 June, 1923. While Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the War, hallucinates in the park, Clarissa Dalloway, the perfect hostess, is out on errands, buying flowers in advance of her party. She loves being out and about:

In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

There's an explosion as a motor car backfires, and the people outside the flower shop turn to look.

Passers-by who, of course, stopped and stared, had just enough time to see a face of the very greatest importance against the dove-grey upholstery, before a male hand drew the blind [...] But nobody knew whose face had been seen. Was it the Prince of Wales's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's?

Clarissa and Septimus are momentarily linked as they watch the motor car roll down Bond Street towards Piccadilly; otherwise their paths through the city are independent. Septimus's doting wife Lucrezia tugs him away from the spectacle as he begins to mutter suicidally and leads him to Regent's Park to relax.

Following oddly on the mysterious car's progress, an airplane appears, "the sound boring into the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent's Park," and they're shocked to see its puffs "making letters in the sky." This is the first time anyone has seen skywriting, and the on-lookers attempt to spell out its message (Glaxo? Kreemo? Toffee?) a letter at a time. Septimus becomes enraptured and teary watching "one shape after another of unimaginable beauty"—for once the real world is speaking his language. Auditory hallucinations unfold:

"K... R..." said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say "Kay Arr" close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper's, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concussing, broke.

That evening, a friend brings news to Clarissa's party: "A young man [...] killed himself. He had been in the army. [...] He had thrown himself from a window." This fragment of information is enough to set Clarissa's imagination in motion: fascination, empathy, even envy:

Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone. There was an embrace in death.

Devin McKinney: "The crowd of people has been replaced by thousands of holes."

Joan Peyser: "The holes in Albert Hall are people."

Richard Poirier: "The audience in Albert Hall—the same as the 'lovely audience' in the first song that the Beatles would like to 'take home' with them?—are only many holes."

Lennon: "There was a paragraph about 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, being discovered. There was still one word missing in that verse when we came to record. I knew the line had to go 'Now they know how many holes it takes to — something, the Albert Hall.' For some reason I couldn't think of the verb. It was Terry who said 'fill' the Albert Hall. And that was it."

Weird that Lennon's story is about filling a sort of hole. Weird that in the lyric, holes are doing the filling; absence doing the work of presence. An audience of holes: Cage's ideal audience. People as holes: not nihilism but perceptual openness. McCartney fixes holes. Lennon's holes fill. The mind of the artist works the way it does not because it is more full and complete, but because it's gappier, empty in crucial places. You let someone else pick the important word. The holes don't keep your mind from wandering, they give it occasion to wander. Leave your artworks open, let the world in. Each of Lennon's compositions on Sgt. Pepper begins with a text given by the world: Julian's drawing of Lucy O'Donnell, Pablo Fanque's 1843 circus poster, a Kellogg's Corn Flakes commercial, the Daily Mail of 17 January, 1967.

Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday, Sub Pop, 2010

In this case, "bubblegum" refers to gum strings stretching from your sneaker, gum you find on the bottom of a desk, gum in your hair, gum behind your ear, black gum on the subway platform, gum saved in the wrapper to rechew later.† Also Chewels, the 80s gum that squirted gel. Shoplifting gum. Music of gross substances: ketchup and mustard: Kyle makes his voice ooze like a melting cheeseburger. Sauce from the lazy cat's lasagna. (Do we know how the fat John got fat?) I also hear: Rolling Stones tongues, comic book muscles, toothpaste writing, "back in 5 minutes" and "out to lunch" signs, banana peels (on sidewalks, also for smoking), fish bones in garbage cans, jackets with lots of pins, movie marquees, play food, infinite phone cord shoelaces, bottomless spaghetti and meatballs.‡ Music for the the iron-on t-shirt parlor, the video arcade, the drive-in, the drive-thru, for the cassette deck of the compact car of some junior or senior girl in the era of college rock, for John Hughes soundtracks, transistor radios, and MTV. A fantasy of perpetual high school (Kyle Thomas as the Chuck Berry of grunge): drawing checkerboards on your sneakers, opening a football flicked from a crush's desk, running home from school to listen to a song you imagined all day ("ain't no one going to turn me around"), slow-dancing at Homecoming, tripping at school, snorting Adderall and Ritalin, sexting, rollerskating, etc.

†March 16 update: Now that I've bought the CD, I see that album art confirms this suggestion kind of vividly with a drawing of a bubble blown by rotten dentures. This is what missed by reviews that focus on the group's "confectionery" sounds—the grotesque body that's producing them. (I don't mean the band, but the Spirit that animates these songs, the Narrator.)

‡Again, now that I've seen the doodles on the back cover, this seems much less like an insight.

Girls FM: with your ipod on it's easy to imagine everyone is listening to the same thing. (Phish does this to me really bad, though you can be sure no one else is listening to Phish.) American Graffiti: cruising all night through the mind of rock n' roll. Flirty androgyny. Is Kyle famous as a guitar player yet? This song is amazing as soon as that second guitar squawks up the neck; a pinball machine sound. "And the answer won't be hard to find when it's gone now, baby"—this is kind of the philosophical core of the album. Sickening sweetness as the impossible object of desire recedes. "See them play like the infinite band": the infinity is in the aggressive polyrhythms. Wish FM radio was still a thing—sitting on a hill at Y camp, 1984: "Here I am, rock you like a hurricane." Wish albums were still a thing. One evening in early June of 6th grade, I had my dad drive me to Neill's Records and Tapes in downtown Augusta, and I made the existential leap of buying Edie Brickell even though I had gone to get GN'R Lies. I remember the feeling of the night air at Chris Bastey's house when I brought over the tape. No kid who file-shares Happy Birthday will have a memory even remotely like this.

Eyes Music: you know the song where Kyle sings "What went wrong?/I took the drug/I can't remember anything good"? At least he remembered Eyes Music. Amazing winding wide-pupiled melody, like Robyn Hitchcock if he could fully let go. I'm following the shaman on this one. Crocodile bass. Walking in two dimensions. Animal Collective wishes they could do this. Chirrupy keyboard cascades like intelligent beings showing you things (these are Kurt's friends, relatives of the clavioline beings inhabiting Baby You're A Rich Man). Incredible guitar melody that happens only once. "Out of order like ice cubes that grow on palm trees"— Happy Birthday's music feels so visual, but imagery is pretty rare in the lyrics; the (very full) image-world is contained mostly in the attitude of the vocal delivery (which is what rock n' roll is all about). Best middle eight of the millenium. Satanic pleasure. But the coda breaks the trance for me.

Maxine the Teenage Eskimo: the crucial 7th track. Can't believe we get this lucky immediately after Eyes Music. Fagen's Maxine, Moonage Teenage, Dylan's Eskimo. Key lyric: "Maxine the Teenage Eskimo." Maximum synaesthesia: 1:09 to 1:15. Bring in Lacan.

I Want to Stay (I Run Away): genre-destroying violin riff (Ruth)—nothing sounds like this. Police bass and guitar. Wish Happy Birthday would get tapped by Mutt Lange to make the next Hysteria. Chris Weisman would enjoy three years in the studio writing pre-choruses. Sucks for HB that the era of music videos is over.

Pink Strawberry Shake: the most rock and roll swagger, the loosest band sound, the best vocal, and the coolest studio effects. What their phrase "comic book pop gems" refers to.

Zit: a temper tantrum sung by Beavis and Butthead, with immense viral potential; will be the biggest mock angst anthem since "Song 2" (the "woo hoo" song), which has advertised cars and become a standard pump-up song in professional sports arenas. "turning on the lamp"

Badge and "picture card" cut-outs from the insert included with the LP

Beatles scholarship would be advanced immeasurably by the discovery of the original photograph of this man. How much of the image was added by Peter Blake in 1967? Is there a real moustache beneath the cartoon, or is the original Sgt. Pepper moustache itself a fiction? Who is the sad-eyed man who sat for this photo? Assuming that the sergeant stripes are not Blake's addition, is this the uniform of a military sergeant or a police sergeant? An officer of the British Raj? (Could Pepper have earned his stripes in India?)

Lennon's words to "A Day in the Life" were famously inspired by events recounted in the 17 January, 1967 edition of the Daily Mail, which he was reading at the piano as he wrote (newspaper taxis). One story concerned the coroner's report on the death of Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune and friend of the Beatles; he sped through a red light and crashed his sports car into a parked van. One might ask, since the van was parked, wouldn't the accident still have happened if the light had been green? Lennon discourages this line of thinking: "I didn't copy the accident. Tara didn't blow his mind out. But it was in my mind when I was writing that verse" (Davies, 276).

At the time of the song's recording, Paul had taken LSD exactly once, at the home of Tara Browne in 1966. "Tara was taking acid on blotting paper in the toilet. He invited me to have some. I said, 'I'm not sure, you know.' I was more ready for the drink or a little bit of pot or something. I'd not wanted to do it, I'd held off like a lot of people were trying to, but there was massive peer pressure. [...] And that night I thought, well, this is as good a time as any, so I said, 'Go on then, fine.' So we all did it" (Miles, 380).

I'd love to turn you on: hear this as the voice of Tara Browne.

The only thing I really "collect" (meaning that I'll go into a shop and seek them out, irrespective of my immediate desires) are paperbacks from The Arden Shakespeare. The books have nice sewn bindings and are of uniform size (editions from the totally revised third series still have the same dimensions as the second series), the font is readable, the editorial practices are neither conservative nor revisionist, and the copious footnotes (most pages have more notes than dialogue) discuss relevant interpretive controversies. But mostly I collect them for the covers—the pairing of image and text is often abstract, and almost uniformly shocking.

I chanced to read this on the back of Othello:

The illustration on the cover is by Peter Blake, a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of seven artists who have a passionate concern for English artistic skills and craftsmanship, and who see their work as the celebration of a vital tradition in English art, and its ultimate source, the spirit of the countryside.

I was doubly amazed to read (on the computer) that this phase of Blake's career came after his success as a pop artist and his work on Sgt. Pepper's. In 1969, he and his family moved from London to a village outside of Bath, where he worked primarily in watercolors.

This is a common enough 60s narrative—from urbal to rural; from groundless individualism to traditional community; from mass media to folk craft (it dawns on you that the destruction of cultural norms, however advanced it may seem in an artwork, is the same technology-driven capitalist ideology that justifies destroying the earth)—but somehow I've come to expect the story of the artist making the move from the traditional to the experimental, not the reverse.

Blake announced the formation of the Brotherhood of Ruralists on the spring equinox of 1975. He explains the group's philosophy like this:

Simply, our aims are the continuation of a certain kind of English painting; we admire Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, English Landscape, the Pre-Raphaelites, etc… Our aims are to paint about love, beauty, joy, sentiment and magic. We still believe in painting with oil paint on canvas, putting the picture in the frame and hopefully, that someone will like it, buy it and hang it on their wall to enjoy it.

Still inside Pepper: the artwork as a miniature encyclopedia of magical England, to be consumed privately at home.

The Astronomy Domine chord is being strummed in Studio Three

The space between the climax of the second orchestral swell (4:19) and the giant piano chord (4:21) in "A Day in the Life" is not empty. It is very full. Beneath the decay of the orchestra's final note, a second, weirder echo rushes in. It is audible in the stereo mix, though my ear kind of normalizes it—once you're in the stereophonic field, sensitive to all kinds of minute changes in acoustic space, an errant reverb event kind of blends in. But in the mono mix, the sound is musically distinct and quite frightening: something (perhaps the inside of a way-hot piano) is resonating at a quarter tone between Bb and B, not a tritone away from the orchestra's peak, not a fifth away, but a universe away. An overtone of f# separates out just before the massive E major and sustains into the chord (the chord also contains everything (only the keys were a triad