It’s getting very near the end for Sgt. Pepper’s Enlarged Prostate Glands
Updated: 4 days ago
Whatever happened to the life that we once knew?
— The Beatles, Free as a Bird
Earl Fowler
Half of what I’ll say here is meaningless, but I’ll say it just to reach you. Roll up, roll up, for the mystery tour! Sit back and let the evening go.
Can I take you back where you came from? Can I take you back? Repeat after me: Beatlejuice! Beatlejuice! Beatlejuice!
I read in an online article in the Jewish News this month that at age 83, Bob Dylan is one of just five people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for whom it’s not dark yet. (Dark as in shorting the light fantastic from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol. Dark as in Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No one was saved.)
Even for the final five, it’s getting there. Dark spots will show up on a CT scan or an MRI sometime in the next decade (two at the outside) and they’ll all wind up staring into the abyss.
As will I. As will you. The two-minute warning has been given by the touch of the velvet hand like a lizard on a windowpane. And it’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.
Through the thinning hair off the top of your head, can you name the other four yet to join the Choir Invisible? Paul McCartney, 82, and Ringo Starr, 83, are not-dead giveaways, you’ll pardon the expression.
But the remaining two? Cue the plangent cosmic keynote of “Tomorrow Never Knows” that marked one of the first returns of the drone to Western music since the 12th century.
Sound the instantly recognizable opening chord from “A Hard Day’s Night” (G eleventh suspended fourth, but who’s counting?). Pound the extended three-piano final chord from “A Day in the Life” (your basic E major). The ultimate detumescent downbeat.
Fade to half-in-the-bag Banshee screams from Yoko … and time’s up.
Sitting on a Cornflake, waiting for the van to come, I studied the faces on my original, well-weathered 1967 Capitol Records pressing of the epochal Beatles classic — which, whatever you think about the music therein, has had an undeniably vast, cross-generational impact on everything from meter maid fashions to the fixing of holes where the rain gets in.
Caught up in the trippy optimism of the time, influential theatre critic and risqué Oh! Calcutta! co-ordinator Kenneth Tynan gushed in The Times that Sgt. Pepper marked “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.”
Let’s save that kind of overheated hyperbole for, I dunno, how about world wars or the resounding knell that sounded on Nov. 5 for the 235-year-old American republic.
Living as we do, though, in an Era’s Tour of interchangeable, eminently forgettable pop stars, even old hippies with an abiding interest in the acid grandiosity of the time have largely forgotten what a grandiloquent aural happening the album’s release — from the toppermost of the poppermost — added up to in June of 1967.
Once there was a way.
The late journalist/songwriter Ian MacDonald described the stir — oh, let’s just call a freak-out a freak-out — in Revolution in the Head, his meticulous analysis of every Beatle song ever released (not counting last year’s machine-learning-assisted John Lennon home demo “Now and Then”):
Young and old alike were entranced. Attending a party with a group of rich older women, EMI (Records) boss Sir Joseph Lockwood found them so “thrilled” by the album that they sat on the floor after dinner singing extracts from it. In America normal radio-play was virtually suspended for several days, only tracks from Sgt Pepper being played.
An almost religious awe surrounded the LP. Paul Kantner of the San Francisco acid rock band Jefferson Airplane remembers how The Byrds’ David Cosby brought a tape of Sgt. Pepper to their Seattle hotel and played it all night in the lobby with a hundred young fans listening quietly on the stairs, as if rapt by a spiritual experience. “Something,” says Kantner, “enveloped the whole world at that time and it just exploded into a renaissance.”
Something in the things they showed all of us plasticine porters with looking glass ties and girls with kaleidoscope eyes.
A splendid time was guaranteed for all.
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile. The most promising candidate I could come up with, based on a careful scrutiny of the cover, for a continuing existence above room temperature: Dion DiMucci, sixth from the left in the second row of the cover’s pellmell panoply of Hindu yogis (elementary penguins, singing Hare Krishna), Hollywood movie stars, wax dummies and English comedians.
With every mistake, I must surely be learning. For my hunch was right.
Flanked by sunglasses-sporting American writer Terry Southern and Oscar-nominated serial marrier Tony Curtis, 85-year-old DiMucci is still enjoying the royalties from such hits as “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer.” His surname likely won’t mean anything to you because when he was fronting the Belmonts and the Bel-Satins in the late Fifties and early Sixties, the singer/songwriter was mononymously known simply by his given name: Dion.
Now comes the 221B Baker Street portion of our program, an identity I would never have been able to uncover without sleuthing around through the Wikipedia entry for every plausible candidate on the record sleeve.
Unless you count the wax dummies (by my count, seven: one an anonymous hairdresser’s model, one of former heavyweight boxing champ Sonny Liston, one of Shirley Temple as a child, and one of each of the Beatles themselves), the final remaining survivor is American artist Larry Bell.
Best known for glass boxes and large-scale “illusionistic” sculptures — in other words, hardly recognized at all outside of antediluvian artsy circles — Bell is also still on the right side of the ground at age 85. What does he see when he turns out the light? I can’t tell you but I know it’s glass boxes and illusionistic sculptures all the way down. Possibly with a banana duct-taped to a wall at the halfway mark, where he stops and he goes for a ride, till he gets to the bottom and he sees us again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
When Sgt. Pepper’s was released, 25 of the 71 faces (I should be sleeping like a log after a painstaking, laborious count) were still freely mugging about in the land of the living, even when kept in a jar by the door.
It would be tedious to list them all, given that they’ve been going in and out of style. But this star-studded roll call includes: Mae West (who died in on Nov. 22, 1980, 16 days before John Lennon), Fred Astaire (1987), Terry Southern (1995), Tony Curtis (2010), William S. Burroughs (1997), Johnny Weissmuller (1984), Marlon Brando (2004), Bette Davis (1989; only the top of her head is visible so, strictly speaking, we have Bette Davis hair), Marlene Dietrich (1992), and of course the Fab Four themselves, as they were in 1967 in full Pepper regalia and again as clean-shaved Madame Tussauds dummies of their Ed Sullivan-era selves in slick suits and ties fastidiously vetted by manager Brian Epstein.
(Pointless digression No. 1: Kinda weird that of the two men named Epstein burned into the annals of contemporary Western culture, the first got off on being abused by young men and the second got his jollies from abusing young women.)
And speaking of exploiting girls, you can just make out an image of Shirley Temple (who died in 2014) behind the wax models of the Beatles, one of three appearances she makes on the cover. I’m going to make a wild surmise that somebody enjoyed multiple viewings of On The Good Ship Lollipop just a little more vigorously than would be considered wholesome today. (At ease, sailor. Oh, my goodness!)
My friends and I took for granted the identity of the glamorous wax dummy a few figures to the right of George Harrison (the 23rd anniversary of whose 2001 death will arrive on Nov. 29, to be followed in less than two weeks by the 44th anniversary of Lennon’s death on Dec. 8). Obviously Marilyn Monroe. But in fact, it’s a stand-in for actress Diana Dors, a British blonde bombshell modelled on Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren.
(Pointless digression No. 2 from the Sunrise Doesn’t Last All Morning Department: John Lennon has now been dead one, two, three, four! years longer than he was alive. George Harrison has been in the arms of Krishna longer than he had been walking the Earth and idolizing Carl Perkins by the time the Beatles made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.)
Diana Dors, whose real name was Diana Mary Fluck, titillated the breathless British tabs by playing hostess to scandalous “adult parties.” After making a fool of everyone and laying it down for all to see, “Swinging Dors” succumbed to ovarian cancer in 1984 at age 48.
There has to be a tasteless joke in there about being down on one’s Fluck; thank goodness you won’t hear any double entendres in this chaste space about a woman who once referred to herself as “the only sex symbol Britain has produced since Lady Godiva.”
(As is well known, the Benny Hill-digging Beatles eschewed double entendres. Baby, you can drive my car.)
Liston, the “Big Bear” baited and beaten by a brash youngster named Cassius Clay for the heavyweight championship two weeks after the Beatles’ first Sullivan appearance in February 1964, was only 40 when counted out for good in 1970 under circumstances even more suspicious than the famous “phantom punch” of his second match with the man then dazzling the world as Muhammad Ali.
(Why don’t we do this third pointless digression in the road? How about a live Netflix spectacle of white YouTuber Jake Paul jumping up and down on Ali’s grave for eight rounds? That way Paul could receive another $40 million for hard-fought decisions over two of the greatest Black fighters of the last century. Elmore James got nothin’ on this baby. Don’t forget to reserve a ringside seat for the Imperial Wizard-elect.)
But let’s get back, Loretta, to where this essay once belonged. For our purposes here, if you want to count the wax dummies of Dors and Liston, that would increase the count of the living at the time of the album’s release by two to 27.
Another three of the images on the cover (here come old stacked tops, groovin’ up slowly) are faces of pin-up girls by two celebrated artists who were both alive at the time but today draw only mourners: a “Vargas girl” by Alberto Vargas (he died in 1982) and two “Petty girls” by George Petty (1975).
Even a cursory glance at the album’s back row reveals a gap between the Vargas girl and American actor Huntz Hall, who died in 1999. (If you’re keeping score at home, that’s designer and builder Simon Rodia of Watts Towers fame between Hall and Dylan in the back row.)
The lacuna is there because the face of American actor Leo Gorcey was deleted after a fee of $400 for the use of his image was requested — “now give me money; that’s what I want” — and summarily denied. Gorcey, best remembered as the leader of The Bowery Boys, was 51 when his liver cancer proved fatal two years after Sgt. Pepper hit the record stores.
The Bowery buffoons were never renowned for savvy business decisions, of course, but you have to figure that forgoing a chance to appear on one of the Sixties’ most cherished, Zeitgeist-catching icons over a few hundred bucks was a malapropism too far. One thing I can tell you is you got to be free.
(Why malapropism? In case it’s been a while since you caught a Bowery Boys movie — and I sincerely hope it has been — “I depreciate it” was Gorcey’s signature yuk-yuk line whenever called upon to express gratitude. In this case, he certainly did.)
The Sgt. Pepper cover includes images of a virtual beggars banquet of luminaries who, by the Summer of Love, already knew what it was like to be dead, including: Lenny Bruce (whose fatal morphine overdose had shocked the world the previous summer), Albert Einstein, Stephen Crane, W.C. Fields, Carl Jung, Aubrey Beardsley, Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Karl Marx, Dr. Livingstone (I presume), H.G. Wells, James Joyce, onetime Beatle Stu Sutcliffe, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll (whose influence on Lennon’s best lyrics is obvious), Aleister Crowley (dead for 20 years by then; or was he?), T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), and man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.
Mohandas Gandhi was bounced because of record company EMI’s apparently well-founded concern that an offended Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wouldn’t allow the record to be printed there if the Mahatma appeared. The way EMI saw it, life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, so bend.
Another bit of last-minute effacement was deemed necessary after a bad little kid moved into the neighbourhood. Fed up with being a fab moptop and dying to confront the uptight, short-sighted, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, brylcreemed and bad-teethed No Sex Please, We’re British “hypocritics” with outré cultural subversions — a mischievous yearning that irresistibly attracted him to what MacDonald describes as Yoko Ono’s “fatuous fugue of legs, bottoms and bags” — Lennon suggested that Adolf Hitler be modelled for the album. And so he was, but thanks to its discreet placement behind the group as they posed in their uniforms, der Führer’s face was ultimately hidden behind them.
So was an image of Jesus. An outlandish pairing to be sure, though white Christian nationalists have clearly warmed to the concept as we approach the End Days. At Trumpian cult rallies they heil, heil, right in der Führer’s face, only with beaming, hate-filled eyes and loaded AR-15s at the ready on gun racks in the parking lot instead of derisive raspberry sound effects. Jai guru deva, boom!
And in the end, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the album designers hadn’t got a good reason for taking the easy way out. Doesn’t seem to apply any more, at least in America, but in 1967 it was still true that the love you waste is equal to your excruciating lapses of taste.
A year later, slipping the surly bonds of Beatlemania to touch the burbling gonads of messianic self-parody, John and Yoko would let their pants down on the cover of their unlistenable Two Virgins album. Fans? Music charts? Hit parades? See how they run.
You become naked …
The displacement of Hitler from the Sgt. Pepper frame is how Tarzan-era Weissmuller wound up poking his head and bare shoulder over Ringo’s cap instead. We’d seen his chest before. Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lord of the Apes.
(Somewhere in the jungle, Carol Burnett’s ear-shattering, catastrophically constipated Tarzan yodel echoes through the liana canopy. The movement she needs is not on her shoulder. Do I have to spell it out? CHEESE AND ONIONS.)
The Sgt. Pepper cover also features a smattering of old school British entertainment figures (for example, comedian Max “The Cheeky Chappie” Miller and actor/singer/comic Issy Bonn), who helped shape The Goon Show-esque sensibilities of the Liverpool lads back when they really were lads. The sound effects, steam organs and calliopes edited into the whimsical, kaleidoscopic wash of the song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” — through a Hogshead of REAL FIRE! — are a throwback to Edwardian and even Victorian burlesque.
Indeed, the concept behind the whole album was to fuse straight, mid-century variety orchestration — when the button-down British observed a class-based order of deference to “elders and betters” — with the let-it-all-hang-out, sock-it-to-you, LSD-propelled, lotus-eating rock’n’roll of a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod world increasingly given to wild, Dionysian, oh that magic feeling, abandon.
We’d been prepped for this by “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver: Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. I think my favourite all-time George Harrison line is from the under-appreciated song “It’s All Too Much,” which the Beatles recorded a month after completing Sgt. Pepper: “Show me that I’m everywhere, and get me home for tea.”
Sgt. Pepper exudes a fairground atmosphere with bows to music hall and Northern England playhouse traditions. But the record is also a joyful goodbye to all that philistinism. As Samuel Beer, repurposing Percy Shelley’s famous claim about poets in the previous century, observed in his perceptive 1980 book Britain Against Itself, the Beatles were the “unacknowledged legislators of populist revolt.”
In the U.S., you could say the same thing about the aforementioned MAGA movement today. Only now girls in “Jesus Has Chosen Him” T-shirts scream and grown men in red baseball caps squeal, joined in their shared loathing for the progressivism of contemporary culture ushered in by the Sixties. Now it’s Lee Greenwood’s ubiquitous “God Bless the USA” swallowed up by crowd noise instead of “She Loves You” or “We Can Work It Out.” It’s a funny old world.
So may I introduce to you the act you’ve known for all these years …
Of a piece with Sgt. Pepper’s Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band-style musical pastiche, possibly based on pataphysical science or a novel by a man named Lear, is the eccentric assemblage of props and whatsits arrayed along the lower third of the Sgt. Pepper cover.
Let’s see: There’s a hookah in the style of a semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower. A Fukusuke doll (a Japanese figure associated with good luck and mayhap, in this case, a bit of fish-and-finger-style rascality with the F-word). A stone figure of Snow White, a drumhead, an idol of Lakshmi (the Hindu goddess of wealth, beauty, fertility, royal power and abundance). A trophy commemorating who knows what. It doesn’t matter much to me.
There’s a stone bust of a Victorian gentleman (a sculpture owned by Lennon that also served as the basis for the album’s cutout portrait of Sgt. Pepper). A nine-inch Sony TV set owned by either Lennon or McCartney. A stone figure of a girl, a ceramic Tree of Life from Mexico, a cloth grandmother figure, a cloth doll of Shirley Temple wearing a sweater bearing the embroidered salute: WELCOME THE ROLLING STONES GOOD GUYS. She’s so cold.
A three-stringed guitar made of blossoms, another stone figure of no fixed significance, a garden gnome (possibly the progenitor of all those elfin “little people” on the cover of Harrison’s 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass), a cloth snake, a florist’s shop worth of flower power. All rounded out by 4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.
OK, as any expert-textpert, choking smoker Beatleologist would know, I made that last one up. It’s only me, it’s not my mind, that is confusing things. Golden slumbers fill your eyes. Still, now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
Finally, if you’ve never heard the story, I’d love to turn you on to how the sleeve came about in the first place. One more time for Ringo.
Pretty clearly, the overall image was made by having the Beatles — all decked out in their corny, campy Pepper outfits with sundry insignia, patches, military medals and fringed officer epaulettes — pose before life-size, black-and-white, hand-tinted photographs of the supporting cast pasted onto hardboard.
The Fab Four all cradle musical instruments none of them could play — John a French horn, Ringo a trumpet, Paul a cor anglais and George a piccolo. (To be fair, George never learned to play the sitar particularly well either but that didn’t stop him from deploying one on Sgt. Pepper’s meditative yawn “Within You Without You,” which leaves listeners noodling about in a kind of stunned Tussauds bardo. Talk about a wall of illusion.)
Despite being paid a measly £200 for their work, then married graphic pop artists Jann Haworth (now 82) and Peter Blake (still with us at 92) were awarded the Grammy Award for Best 1967 Album Cover, Graphic Arts, for their design. In an interview with the magazine American Songwriter, Blake revealed that the original concept was simply to depict the band surrounded by fans after a performance:
I suggested that they had just played a concert in the park. They were posing for a photograph and the crowd behind them was a crowd of fans who had been at the concert. Having decided on this, then, by making cutouts, the fans could be anybody, dead or alive, real or fictitious. If we wanted Hansel and Gretel, I could paint them and they could be photographed and blown up.
I asked the four Beatles for a list and I did one myself. Robert Fraser (a London art dealer known as Groovy Bob) did a list and I can’t remember whether Brian Epstein (who died of what was deemed an accidental overdose three months after the album’s release) did one or not. The way that worked out was fascinating. John gave me a list and so did Paul. George suggested only Indian gurus, about six of them, and Ringo said, “Whatever the others say is fine by me” and didn’t suggest anyone. It’s an insight into their characters.
All kinds of people were suggested. Hitler was there; he is actually in the set-up, but he is covered by the Beatles themselves as we felt he was too controversial. The same applied to Jesus. There were only two of their contemporaries on the cover. Bob Dylan was suggested by John and I put on Dion because he is a great favourite of mine.
So that’s how the locus classicus of English psychedelia — still adored by millions and savagely sent up by Frank Zappa in the cover for The Mother of Invention’s third album, We’re Only In It For the Money — all went down. In the words of Dion DiMucci (I might be slightly paraphrasing), we got our dream cover so we don’t have to dream alone.
Which brings us back to the ticking clock of late 2024. One sweet dream … pick up the bags and get in the limousine. Soon we’ll be away from here, step on the gas and wipe that tear away.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. All good children go to heaven.
Still. I know we’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before. A feeling we can’t hide.
And with a love like that, you know we should be glad.
Comments