When George Martin first met The Beatles in his capacity as a talent scout and producer for Parlophone Records in London, he was 36. The oldest Beatle was 22. The generation-gap ’60s were dawning, and the 14-year chasm between The Beatles and their would-be collaborator should have ensured a quick end to the relationship.
But the two sides formed an unlikely bond.
At the time, The Beatles were, in Martin’s words, “the joke of the business,” turned down by every record label in England. Martin, on the other hand, was a producer of joke albums, notable primarily for his work with comedians Peter Sellers, Peter Ustinov and the Goon Show troupe.
The Beatles were Goon Show fans. Martin was charmed by The Beatles’ “wacky sense of humor.” From that tenuous common ground, The Beatles and Martin began one of the most successful partnerships of the rock era, recording a series of albums that culminated in 1967 with a pop-culture touchstone, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“I was able to identify potential greatness when I saw it,” Martin said, explaining how in 1962 he came to sign the then-unwanted Beatles. The remark, made a few nights ago at a Park West multimedia show focusing on the making of “Sgt. Pepper,” sounded more than a little pompous. With his upper-crust accent, the man now known as “Sir George,” after he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth, seems more than ever to be a world away from the one The Beatles forged in the ’60s.
For all the brilliance that came out of it, the alliance between The Beatles and their efficient, schoolmasterish producer must have been an uneasy one. This was never more apparent than at the Park West when Martin yet again donned rose-colored glasses in trying to overlook one of the primary subtexts of “Pepper.”
“I knew they smoked marijuana, but they never did it in front of me,” Martin said. “The drug thing was blown out of proportion. . . . The brilliance of `Sgt. Pepper’ was because of The Beatles, and it came in spite of the drugs, not because of it.”
That view contradicts Paul McCartney’s, as expressed in Barry Miles’ recent authorized biography, “Many Years From Now.”
“The main point was that George was the grown-up, not on drugs, and up behind the glass window, and we were the kids on drugs, in the studio,” McCartney is quoted. “He was somebody completely different, an alien force really, performing his wartime role as the Fleet Air Arm observer. . . . He (once) asked me, `Do you know what caused `Pepper’? I said, `In one word, George, drugs. Pot.’ And George said, `No, no. But you weren’t on it all the time.’ `Yes, we were.’
” `Sgt. Pepper’ was a drug album.”
The mainstream certainly regarded it that way. Right-wing groups excoriated the band for numerous drug references in the songs, and British radio banned “A Day in the Life” for the lyric “I’d love to turn you on.” The Beatles steadfastly denied that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about LSD or that “Fixing a Hole” referred to shooting heroin, as some critics (and fans) assumed. At the same time, there was no denying the implications of the elaborately textured music itself, which was the aural equivalent of a swirling hallucinogenic trip.
The Beatles were not the first band to acknowledge the drug culture in their music. Many groups, such as the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Texas acid-rock pioneers led by Roky Erickson, had already touted the mind-expanding possibilities of hallucinogens on their album covers. But The Beatles were the biggest band in the world, four young men cast in the roles of spokesmen for a generation, and their embrace of the counterculture had a resonance that reached beyond the hippie community.
For all of Martin’s lucid testimony about how the album’s music was constructed — with pioneering use of avant-garde string orchestrations, Indian rhythms, backward sound effects and tape-splicing techniques that anticipated digital sampling — one sensed that 32 years after its creation, he still hasn’t quite grasped why it has spoken to so many for so long.
Sure, The Beatles spent more than 700 hours in the studio crafting “Pepper,” a huge extravagance by the standards of the ’60s (by comparison, the group had spent less than 10 hours recording its debut album four years earlier). But contrary to Martin’s continuing assertions, “Pepper” is far from The Beatles’ finest musical achievement. Other albums — “Revolver,” “Rubber Soul,” perhaps even “Abbey Road” — offer a more consistent batch of songs.
But “Pepper” had timing, ambition, scope and, most of all, a sense of inclusiveness, of community that went beyond mere us-against-them, generation-gap posturing. Drugs were part of its landscape, but they were just one means to a deeper end — that of creating a better, more enlightened world. In “Pepper”-land, love the drug.
On its cover, designed by pop artist Peter Blake, stand McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in colorful satin parade outfits, showing off facial hair for the first time. Behind them, bearing witness, are images of the famous — Mae West, Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Shirley Temple and The Beatles themselves, looking far more innocent in the suit-and-tie uniform of their early days. At their feet is a gravesite with the word “Beatles” carved out in red flowers. Here, The Beatles say, we bury our past as the Fab Four in favor of an alternative reality. By creating their own alter-egos in the Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles gave themselves license to blur the lines between the real world and the surreal one they would create with sound and words.
The album’s principle innovations were in the areas of sound, as The Beatles imagined an ever more surreal world that mere drums and guitars could not conjure up. And so they used everything from steel combs and toilet tissue to a 41-piece orchestra to achieve their vision. With a couple of key exceptions, the individual songs were a slight, malnourished bunch. The masterpieces “Strawberry Fields” and “Penny Lane,” which were created during the sessions, were left off the album and released several months before its release as a single. “What a damned idiot I was” to let that happen, Martin now says.
But taken together, the songs on “Pepper” offered a message as inspiring and hopeful as any from that era.
In songs such as “When I’m 64” and “She’s Leaving Home,” The Beatles express unusual empathy for their elders, even if some of it is tongue-in-cheek. On “With a Little Help from Our Friends,” wan vocalist Ringo Starr succinctly describes a universal cure for loneliness and failure. Though Harrison’s raga-flavored “Within You Without You” is essentially a sermon against materialism, it also suggests that all people have it within themselves to travel a higher path.
Only Lennon’s songs, particularly “Good Morning,” and his contribution to “A Day in the Life” have an ineffable air of sadness about them, as he lamented the stultifying suburban grind that had become his reality in the days before Yoko Ono entered his life. Yet even he yearns for deliverance — through drugs, music, spirituality, anything. When he sings “I’d love to turn you on” in the album’s closing number, “A Day in the Life,” he sings not just to his fellow acid heads, but to everybody — a point made clear by the gasping-for-breath worker drone McCartney portrays in the song’s middle section. It is The Beatles calling out not just to the clued-in, but to the clueless — George Martin included.
