2. Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) – “A Day in the Life”

[2011 review of “A Day in the Life” here]

My unconventional conventional choice here has become something of a lightning rod for conventionalists and contrarians. Since approximately 1978, Sgt. Pepper’s has been named in multiple places via multiple surveys as the greatest rock album of all time, though support for it has flagged a little in this century. Certainly many also consider it the greatest psychedelic rock album of all time, which is where a contrarian like myself starts to clear his throat. The only songs besides “A Day in the Life” that might qualify as psychedelic—“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (John Lennon being cute about LSD, i.e., Lucy Sky Diamonds, plus the lyrics are trippy), “Within You Without You” (George Harrison droning ineffectively on a sitar for five minutes), and maybe “Fixing a Hole” (by Paul McCartney shortly before composing “Rocky Raccoon”). It is otherwise the omnibus anthology style that arguably started with Revolver and continued through the White Album and Abbey Road, with songs of all genres and semi-genres chockablock side by side. (In that sense, Rubber Soul may be the last cohesive Beatles album.) “She’s Leaving Home” on Sgt. Pepper’s, for example, is a tender, sentimental ballad likely to make the weak cry. Compare Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days” (produced by McCartney) or Glen Campbell’s “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife.” Let me stipulate I have nothing against crying. I do it all the time. “When I’m Sixty-Four,” written by McCartney when he was 14 and now a tradition to call out for any baby boomer turning that precise age, is more like a nagging earworm, featuring clarinets. There should be polaroids with a birthday cake and grandkids. You’re not dropping acid for that, if you are dropping acid, which I am not necessarily endorsing.

To be clear, I have nothing against most of the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s. I thought I might, and have thought so for many years of not listening to it, but, when I started playing it again in recent days, the first thing I realized was how well I know it, from the sequencing to all the words in all the songs. I can even sing with “Within You Without You.” It’s among the first albums I ever bought and it’s thoroughly imprinted on me, so taking the contrarian stance is tricky. I do believe Sgt. Pepper’s has been vastly overrated. But it’s still the Beatles and thus has undeniable appeals for fans like me who came up on them. It’s not the greatest rock album of all time (that’s Highway 61 Revisited or possibly Sandinista) and it’s not the greatest psychedelic album of all time either (that’s—well, why spoil the surprise, right? you've probably figured it out by now anyway). All that said, Sgt. Pepper’s does have arguably the greatest psychedelic song of all time. “A Day in the Life” is so perfect, in fact, I’m convinced the song and its placement as the last heard on the album are what have convinced people that the album is a psychedelic masterpiece when it is really just a workaday Beatles album—if I were going to stack-rank them all I’m pretty sure it would fall in the bottom third.

But it does have “A Day in the Life” and that’s not nothing. So majestic in its ambitions and scope that you would have to classify it as a novelty, comparable perhaps to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” (more operatic than psychedelic) or exercises by Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and the Who, all of which came after Sgt. Pepper’s. “A Day in the Life” is also (with “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”) a source of the controversy around whether the album is pro-drug and thus a target for censorship. Obviously, in 1967, it was pro-hallucinogens. It’s also in favor of transcendental meditation. While a lot of songs on the album are just goofs (a Beatles tradition of its own, again arguably since Revolver), “A Day in the Life” comes in deadly serious and stays that way, even as the lyrics are deceptively quotidian. McCartney pounds the piano with great authority. Lennon’s words are disorienting. “I heard the news today, oh boy....” They don’t seem to make sense but feel like they should. “He blew his mind out in a car....” Ringo’s fills are subtly perfect. Three verses of this and then, at 1:40, with a wobbly drawn-out “I’d love to turn you on,” it spirals into the first of its two blunt force avant-garde classical orchestra interludes, which frankly were too much for me to handle as a 12-year-old hearing it for the first time on the radio. It felt like my head was exploding and I was going insane for the 35 seconds or so that it lasts. The Paul McCartney section in the middle is a perfect counterbalance to the Lennon and the orchestra. But with “Found my way upstairs and had a smoke / And somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” we are off again to the wilds of the raggedy edges of the brain, in a place the Moody Blues studied well for “Tuesday Afternoon.” Powerful orchestral notes usher us back to Lennon and “I read the news today, oh boy.” One more verse and one more orchestral fever break and then McCartney hits a grand chord on a grand piano and they let is resonate for 45 seconds. Spectacular. What hit you? Another masterpiece.