The Beatles
Sergeant Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band

There comes a pivotal moment in everyone's life when convictions collapse, beliefs crumble, and all the foundations upon which habits and lifestyles were built go to hell...

Sometimes, as in the case of political penitents or mafia, these "conversions" can lead to drastic upheavals both in the individual and in the social environment surrounding them; other times the metamorphosis remains confined to the private sphere, and those who have experienced it can continue, with a little attention, to cultivate the usual relationships without anything showing on the outside. I should say that ever since I was a child, I tinkered with the record player and the old 45s of the beat, and as a teenager, the transition to the electric guitar and greater knowledge of Italian rock – and beyond – was an obligatory step.

I owned some 33s of the Beatles, like the Stones, but the passionate love of 50-year-olds and offspring of 68ers of every latitude for Sgt. Pepper always seemed suspicious to me... The catharsis happened one evening when in a brewery with an American friend, the conversation turned to the Beatles... The girl candidly told me that the Beatles, for her and many of her peers across the ocean, were "cheap" because of their ye-ye choruses akin to parochial white voices. A parasite thought nested in my brain then: the strong suspicion that the voices of the Beatles and Lennon, so deliberately childish, reminded me of the voice of Pupo blaring in the carefree evenings of my autarchic and still ignorant adolescence of the Fab4, manifested in all its horror!!! And then what kind of exegesis and trip of criticism on the Beatles was possible anymore in light of these new and striking aesthetic parameters?

With my mind, I went back to the "mythical" times, when we truly enjoyed popular music, appreciating it for what it was, and even though it was very curated and super-arranged, it was often a consumer product: at that time I didn't think about when I would down all the lyrics of Dylan with translations alongside—a true psychomotor nightmare—or the semiotics of Mogol's lyrics with Battisti. Or the bad flash of David Gilmour from Pink Floyd with a face identical to Bill Haley—the one from Rock around the clock—Nature's jokes? Synchronicity? Or are there hidden links between characters seemingly so distant? Or Dylan in the 1976 concerts made up to look like Kiss, or even the dancey Pino D'Angiò dressed as Gene Simmons for the cover of the 45 E' libero scusi? And George Harrison in the late 70s in the video This song... I don't remember the rest, with permed hair and a tight jacket, he looked identical to Alice Cooper... and reciprocally Alice Cooper in his beginnings parodied the Beatles—in fact, he still wears Beatle boots... What a strange game of mirrors...

Mind you, I have nothing against the Beatles—I find Rubber Soul delightful, a true turning point in their career, then the futuristic Revolver, and Magical Mystery Tour I've placed in my virtual ranking of the best psychedelic albums—but sadly I'm critical of Sgt. Pepper.

This album is a very commercial pop-soap-opera, believed by the audience and certain critics to be the first rock opera, but in reality, Paul McCartney and George Martin's baroque elements bring it closer to light opera...

Chronologically, it wouldn't even be the first rock opera, but rather the second after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys in the realm of concept albums. I can already feel the lightning that will strike me for daring to criticize the untouchability of the Beatles, and of this album in particular... it's as if the endless trip of the '60s, with Monroe, miniskirts, the Fiat 500, and Carosello, is consigned to the golden limbo of memories of all of us. Let's face reality and time the avenger: the Pepper 35 years later seems mawkish, as false as the complicit laughter of the Fab4, stuffed with scores borrowed wholesale from every possible musical genre by Maccartney and the fifth Beatle, George Martin, with the group parodying itself in a ghost concert for lonely hearts.

Seen through today's eyes, the Beatles seemed already in the wax museum of Pepper like their mop-top hair, the exact opposite of the "long-haired" and freaks of the period in question and the same for many lyrics of the album, the most petit bourgeois since Dylan's era. The idea of naming bands after animals had its predecessors in Buddy Holly's Crickets—to which good old Lennon's voice perhaps was inspired—brings us back to the early '60s.

Sgt. Pepper still remained a light music record because the Beatles of 1967 were still making respectable little songs but of three minutes, while Pink Floyd, like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and even those rowdies of MC5, played long suites in free form, sometimes even cacophonous, often purely instrumental, on the edge of avant-garde music.

The Sgt. sounds like the commercial record of a group that had sensed the change in the air and adjusted their style to the flower children; from 1963 to 1968 the rise of the Beatles repeated that of the Beach Boys, from the way they were on stage and off, to the vocal blends, but all with at least a year of delay... in fact, the album Pet Sounds was arranged, orchestrated, and produced by Brian Wilson himself, not by an external producer like George Martin.

The album came out in June 1967 after Velvet Underground & Nico (January), The Doors (January), and Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane (February) had changed the history of rock music forever; the Floyd

The Sgt. Pepper recycled those innovations from the American underground to supermarkets around the world. All that makes a show in the album's amusement park: the arrangements range from vaudeville ballads to circus marches or town bands, oriental melodies, old ragtime, swing, chamber music, tap dance, park orchestras, spinettes, and flutes, even to pre-recorded tapes and electronic effects, they reflect the great production work of Martin, a former amateur member of a Sunday marching band of St. James Park. Forerunners of sampling—I swear once in an old, semi-unknown 1940s film I heard a military march of the American-British navy(?), exactly like the opening notes of Yellow Submarine. In the capitalist law of continuous recycling, the Beatles always stayed on the crest of the wave. The exception is John Lennon's oblique genius, which has truly remarkable inventions, but it only confirms the criticisms.

THE COVER

The cover of Pepper is expensive, curated, and very crowded, and is a sort of self-praise of the Beatles as phenomena of the 20th century, with dozens of characters from contemporary art and beyond, as well as figures from politics and society (Cassius Clay, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Washington and the Satanist Crowley coexist in a kaleidoscopic, circus-like cavalcade).

In the midst of the kaleidoscope of characters, faded and bloodless like old statues in a wax museum, are the 4 Baronets, the only living colorful beings among mannequins, adorned with pomp with 1930s marching band costumes, while in a corner of the same cover "rest" four dolls depicting the "old" Beatles and perhaps the first Paul McCartney who died in the mythical accident; the direction is in the hands of the faithful George Martin, who carefully orders the many "alternative" sounds of the album, the repeated verbal and sound "gimmicks". For contemporary musicians of the Beatles, this record was an event that seemed inescapable to confront: the "rivals," the Rolling Stones, soon wrote "Their Satanic Majestic Request", a psychedelic album responding to the aureoled pop baronets and pop saints of British pop.

To this first gallery of covers, we add John Wesley Harding by Bob Dylan, the soundtrack of the eponymous film Sgt Pepper (1978) with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton starring: the former freshly successful from the Saturday night Fever Soundtrack and the latter from Frampton comes alive, while the album also features prestigious guests including Alice Cooper and Earth Wind and Fire, and the arrangements of the revived George Martin: it was a resounding flop. So the cover of Welcome to the circus by Valerio Rivoli, in which Beatles and Carosello are united in the Italian collective imagination of the '60s. There was a notable comparison between the Pepper cover on the website Expecting rain with an excerpt from a newsgroup that maintains the thesis on the relationship always believed to exist (by some at least) between the Beatles and Bob's album "John Wesley Harding" from December 1967.

" Sgt. Pepper has a very showy and colorful cover. It shows the Beatles as the Lonely Hearts Club Band at the center of the cover and doesn't forget the '60s "Flower Power" with the word BEATLES that is barely legible among the red flowers. Sgt. Pepper's is also one of the first times in pop culture that the "Cult of Celebrity" is used and glorified, considering all the famous characters that appear represented on the cover of that album (from the Beatles to Bob Dylan himself). It's obvious that the realization of the cover of this Beatles album cost a lot of time and money. In JWH instead, only a great expenditure of ideas (not time and money) was used to realize the cover. A bearded Dylan in the center of the cover self-portrays as John Wesley Harding: he wears a sort of costume with a cowboy hat and the same suede leather jacket from the Blonde on Blonde cover (but without the scarf).
In contrast to the Sgt. Pepper cover, JWH's is colorless: a black and white photo within a gray border; a harsh contrast (the first of many) with Sgt. Pepper.
Instead of the famous people on the Beatles' cover, the others depicted on Dylan's cover are perfect strangers: the gardener and two religious figures from the third world (guests at the home of Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager, and neighbor in Woodstock where the photo was
taken). This cover fully represents Dylan's anti-Sgt. Pepper idea: simple, religious. Truth in strict black and white, words, actions, thoughts, interiority instead of exteriority, Western, American themes, all contrasted with the Beatles' cover representing overproduction (both regarding the music and the album cover), the quest for truth in drugs, exteriority (celebrity) instead of interiority, Victorian, English themes."

There are some exegetes who claim that you can see pictures of the four Beatles in Dylan's cover where the tree bark is. Deadly games also permeate this cover, which further fueled the alleged death of Paul in a car accident and replacement with a lookalike—you can notice a hand over McCartney's head, and on the back cover, he is also the only one of the 4 turned away. Besides Dylan, Frank Zappa joins the anti-Pepper merry band with We're only in it for the money, released a few months later with a famous irreverent and parodic cover of this celebrated album, and many years later various punk bands in two compilations and a collection of cover bands of the Kiss. I also note an Italian parody of this cover with the LP Italian hearts—a mad, nonsensical mess featuring parts of the Skiantos and the horrendous Syusy Blady

The first part of the album is based on a "triptych of delights" among the most celebrated in rock history: "Sgt. Pepper's" precisely, fades into "With a little help from my friends", followed by "Lucy in the sky with diamonds". The first is a rock-blues imprint piece where, as in a classic script, McCartney emulates Little Richard with a nostalgic, band-inspired text, where he shouts that "it's been twenty years today since the birth of the Orchestra del Sergeante Pep(p)e ...; thanks to a string underline, takes place "With a little help from my friends", said to be written by the Lennon-McCartney duo as a tribute to drugs used in the 'inspirational phase'. More likely, an ironic and irreverent song, played on Ringo Starr's vocal difficulties, whose "monotone" voice plays up the tune: it would later become a showpiece for Joe Cocker at Woodstock.

Followed by the famous "Lucy in the sky with diamonds", played on the double entendre of the initials in the title, LSD, the acronym of the famous drug. But where is the acid guitar of those years, where is Hendrix, and the distortion in a celebratory song of drug-induced visions? John's voice in Lucy sounds like Pupo avant la lettre singing in an exhaust pipe, only if Pupo sings hermetically(?) Chocolate ice cream, I stole it from you, you, chocolate ice cream... the critics dismiss it as peripheral psycho-sexual muzak, while if Lennon imagines or sees marmalade skies... Getting Better is the next piece, an anthem to optimism built on two guitar chords obsessively repeated, according to a modulation that will be repeated in Dear Prudence on the white double album. Following are two songs in which the beautiful of the Fab gives their best worst: Fixing a hole, with an obscure text and vaguely vaudeville melody, then the boring She's leaving home, a real anthem for young women in emotional crisis, even more saturated and mended with baroques. Mr. Kite closes the first side, owner of a whimsical circus fin de siècle, with Lennon in great shape: the song is notable also for the montaging work of the circus interlude made with pre-recorded tapes.

With George Harrison, the Beatles had discovered India, and the inclination toward mysticism, and after a much happier result on Revolver, ours returns to the sitar with the dreamy "Within you, without you", a track that opens the second side of "Sergeant Pepper's," which when listened to today is truly indigestible and tortuous, as well as too long.

Another McCartney song follows, the swingy and vaguely ragtime "When I'm sixty-four", where Paul draws again from his pernicious compositional vein, which dredges up the British music-hall of the late nineteenth century. The bassist, with the poetic depth that will always characterize him in lyrics, which will attract Lennon's ire in the 70s, introspectively asks: "Will you still love me when I've lost my hair... and will be 64 years old?" It is noted that this title was pirated in an old song by the legendary Cugini di Campagna, title "64 anni".

McCartney continues the album of his figurines with Lovely Rita, the parking attendant, garnished with fake avant-garde sound tricks like the sound of comb teeth, then there's Lennon's break with Good Morning, Good Morning, whose refrain was taken from a famous breakfast commercial of the time. The band resumes of Sgt. Pepper follows, with a rock rhythm and finally prominent bass drum, announcing the imminent end of the show, with the almost mystic tones of A day in the life, where Lennon's better psychedelic vein is intruded by McCartney, infesting it with improbable vaudeville comments.

The epic song closes with a recording of an orchestra following an upward scale without precise notation, with in the finale an apocalyptic chord smashed on the piano; at that time there weren't many tracks available for many overdubs, so several players were used in one session.

One last word on the sounds: the superproduction doesn't suffice to cover the fact that in terms of sounds, the Beatles are too much like themselves, and the Pepper has flat sonorities compared to other groups of the same period: their idea of psychedelia is a bit kitsch with those surreal cardboard snare drums, parochial guitars, basses so barely audible they seem elastic-made, while the communion first choruses really are a treat.

It is not possible to consider Sgt. Pepper the greatest rock album of all time—as many crackpots would like. Did the Sex Pistols do well to kick out the first bassist, Glen Matlock, because he listened too much to the Beatles? Enough is enough...