The Beatles Forever

But compared to the rest of the album’s packaging, particularly the cover, this portrait of the Beatles is practically quaint. As Bill DeMain writes in Sgt. Pepper at Fifty, the decision to include a relatively straightforward photograph of the Fab Four was an effort to ground the visual aesthetics of the album. The band had initially wanted a psychedelic painting by a London-based design collective called The Fool to grace the cover, until an Eton-educated art dealer (and Paul McCartney friend) named Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser recognized the painting as “not good art” and suggested that two of Fraser’s clients design the cover. When Paul and the boys still wanted the “fiddly little acid-y drawing” (which Pepper at Fifty, a book otherwise full of terrific photos, does not reproduce) in the gatefold, Fraser pushed for photographer Michael Cooper’s portrait instead.

This is a recurring part of the story of Sgt. Pepper: the Beatles having to be pulled back, or brought down to earth, in their pursuit of artistic aims for rock music. Paul’s conception of the album as a live performance by a group of psychedelic alter-egos was a brilliant turn, particularly as fans wondered how the Beatles could continue as a non-touring band. But Paul’s concept pretty much ended after the title song. It took the intervention of Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ road manager, to complete the live-show feel by suggesting a reprise of “Sgt. Pepper” near the end of the album.

Another consistent problem for Sgt. Pepper was its inconsistency. The album’s tracks fail as often as they work. The cacophonous, dissonant orchestral buildups on “A Day In the Life” work brilliantly on the closing track, but the strings on “She’s Leaving Home” (arranged not by longtime producer George Martin but by an outsider, Mike Leander) are saccharine and, as Martin later said, “a shade too lush.” The album zips along during its traditional rock songs, “With a Little Help From My Friends” and the timeless “Getting Better.” But it drags on the second-side afterthoughts “Lovely Rita” and “Good Morning, Good Morning.” The phantasmagoria of the verses to “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” is balanced by the brightness of the song’s chorus. But there’s no such contrast in the circus music of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”

The subtitle for Sgt. Pepper at Fifty, which DeMain coauthored with fellow rock journalist Gillian G. Gaar and artist Mike McInnerney, refers to the record as “the Beatles’ great masterpiece.” As a production, the authors may have it right, given the incredible range of sounds the Beatles and George Martin made with creative tweaks to instruments and analog studio equipment. (On “Lovely Rita,” for example, Martin placed a piece of tape on the tape deck’s rotating capstan to give the recorded piano a “honky tonk” sound, while Paul, John, and George blew through combs wrapped in toilet paper to create the song’s “ersatz brass section.”)

But considered as a piece of art, Sgt. Pepper is hardly a masterpiece. A masterpiece is a cohesive artistic effort where the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Sgt. Pepper‘s parts are greater than the whole. To be sure, the record is better than almost all recorded popular music—it’s the Beatles, after all. But it’s a little too of its own time, a little too disjointed, a little too dominated by Paul. “All my contributions to the album have absolutely nothing to do with this idea of Sgt. Pepper and his band,” John would say later. “It works, because we said it worked, and that’s how the album appeared.”

If you want a masterpiece, go back ten months to Sgt. Pepper‘s spiritual and musical progenitor, Revolver. “Revolver is the Beatles’ artistic high-water mark,” writes Robert Rodriguez in his 2012 book Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock ‘n’ Roll. “For a start, unlike Pepper, it was a true group collaboration.”

This difference can’t be overstated. At every stage of its creation, Revolver reflected the artistic efforts of all four Beatles working together—on songwriting, on instrumentation, on recording, on mixing. This collaboration was all the more remarkable given that the album was made during what might have been a period of dysfunction within the band. Exhausted from touring and Beatlemania, experimenting with drugs, and already moving beyond their singles-driven teeny-bopper style, the Beatles might have fallen apart during that time. Instead, they were driven by competition and ambition to come together (no pun intended) and create an excellent piece of pop-art.

Rodriguez’s book documents this collaboration thoroughly. Consider the first three songs on Revolver: The opening track, “Taxman,” is the first and only George Harrison composition to kick off a Beatles album. (For clarity’s sake, I’m referring to the version of Revolver as released in the United Kingdom, as the band intended, not the original U.S. release that leaves off three songs from the U.K. release.) George sings lead but passes the lead guitar duties to Paul, whose manic solo incorporates some of the Indian music influences George had already brought to the band.

The next song is Paul’s “Eleanor Rigby,” a solo vocal effort accompanied by a string octet. But George, Rodriguez writes, contributed the idea for the chorus about looking at “all the lonely people,” while Ringo Starr offered the line about Father McKenzie “darning his socks in the night.” On John’s “I’m Only Sleeping,” George composed a guitar solo backward, playing the licks as he wrote them and then reversing the tape for the final mix, while Paul provides a strategically placed yawn. And all of this on top of the songwriting collaboration between John and Paul.

On Revolver, all three of the songwriting Beatles turned in their best work to date, John in particular. His “And Your Bird Can Sing” is two minutes of pop-rock perfection, punctuated by a crunchy, infectious guitar hook. The album’s closer, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” is John experimenting with studio tools like tape loops, backward tape, and automatic double tracking to create innovative recorded sounds on top of a steady drone and esoteric lyrics entreating listeners to “turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” With “Here, There, and Everywhere” and “For No One,” Paul has two beautiful meditations on love—the first on being in, the second on falling out. And George has an unprecedented three songs on Revolver, including the raga-rock “Love You To” that presages (and surpasses) his Sgt. Pepper Indian tune “Within You, Without You.”

What really elevates Revolver, however, is its unifying theme. As Rodriguez explains, the album is all about isolation and death. Six of Revolver‘s songs directly reference death or dying. “Tomorrow Never Knows” was inspired by a popular manual about taking LSD adapted from the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead. “I’m Only Sleeping,” “I Want to Tell You,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and “For No One,” are about all the lonely people.

This is heavy stuff for the group that became famous with “Love Me Do.” But it was a logical step for the Beatles, who were maturing both musically and artistically. What Revolver captured was a band that had already moved well beyond singing about holding hands to screaming teeny boppers. But even with an expanded creative palette and ambitions for more, the Beatles still functioned as a band, a musical ensemble relying on each other for ideas and inspiration. This manifests itself across Revolver, as in “I’m Only Sleeping,” which contains both the familiar three-part vocal harmony that’s unmistakably the Beatles—alongside a trippy, backward guitar solo. But by the time Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out, the Beatles were beginning to indulge themselves too much while drifting apart as a group. Their breakup—before Brian Epstein’s death, before Yoko Ono, before the failed Get Back sessions—was already beginning by the time Sgt. Pepper told the band to play.

There’s another photograph of the Beatles that fascinates me. It’s on the reverse side of the iconic black-and-white Revolver cover. Photographer Robert Whitaker captures all four of the lads in a dark studio, wearing sunglasses. John and Ringo are leaning casually against some unseen equipment, while George and Paul sit on top of it. All but Paul are smiling—not artificially, they way they do in the promotional photos during Beatlemania, but in a natural way, like one of them just cracked a joke.

The Beatles were never cooler, before or since.