MUSIC

The Messengers

The cover on a new LP album called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a photomontage of a crowd gathered round a grave. And a curious crowd it is: Marilyn Monroe is there, so are Karl Marx, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Einstein, Lawrence of Arabia, Mae West, Sonny Listen and eight Beatles.

Eight? Well, four of them, standing around looking like wax dummies, are indeed wax models of the Beatles as most people remember them: nicely brushed long hair, dark suits, faces like sassy choirboys. The other four Beatles are very much alive: thin, hippie-looking, mustachioed, bedecked in bright, bizarre uniforms. Though their expressions seem subdued, their eyes glint with a new awareness tinged with a little of the old mischief. As for the grave in the foreground: it has THE BEATLES spelled out in flowers trimmed with marijuana plants.

With characteristic self-mockery, the Beatles are proclaiming that they have snuffed out their old selves to make room for the new Beatles incarnate. And there is some truth to it. Without having lost any of the genial anarchism with which they helped revolutionize the life style of young people in Britain, Europe and the U.S., they have moved on to a higher artistic plateau.

Rich and secure enough to go on repeating themselves--or to do nothing at all--they have exercised a compulsion for growth, change and experimentation. Messengers from beyond rock 'n' roll, they are creating the most original, expressive and musically interesting sounds being heard in pop music. They are leading an evolution in which the best of current post-rock sounds are becoming something that pop music has never been before: an art form. "Serious musicians" are listening to them and marking their work as a historic departure in the progress of music--any music.

Ned Rorem, composer of some of the best of today's art songs, says: "They are colleagues of mine, speaking the same language with different accents." In fact, he adds, the Beatles' haunting composition, She's Leaving Home--one of twelve songs in the Sgt. Pepper album--"is equal to any song that Schubert ever wrote." Conductor Leonard Bernstein's appreciation is just as high; he cites Schumann. As Musicologist Henry Pleasants says: "The Beatles are where music is right now."

Like all good popular artists, the Beatles have a talent for distilling the moods of their time. Gilbert and Sullivan's frolics limned the pomposities of the Victorian British Empah; Cole Porter's urbanities were wonderful tonics for the hung-over '30s; Rodgers and Hammerstein's ballads reflected the sentiment and seriousness of the World War II era. Today the Beatles' cunning collages piece together scraps of tension between the generations, the loneliness of the dislocated '60s, and the bitter sweets of young love in any age. At the same time, their sensitivity to the absurd is sharper than ever.

By contrast, their early music had exuberance and an occasional oasis of unexpected harmony, but otherwise blended monotonously into the parched badlands of rock. I Want to Hold Your Hand, the Beatles' biggest hit single--it has sold 5,000,000 copies since 1963--was a cliche boy-girl lyric and a simple tune hammered onto the regulation aaba pop-song structure. But the boys found their conventional sound and juvenile verses stultifying. Says Paul McCartney: "We didn't like the idea of people going onstage and being very un real and doing sickly songs. We felt that people would like it more, and we would like it more, if there was some--reality."

Thus it was that the group's chief lyricist, John Lennon, began tuning in on U.S. Folk Singer Bob Dylan (The Times They Are A-Changin'); it wasn't Dylan's sullen anger about life that Lennon found appealing so much as the striving to "tell it like it is." Gradually, the Beatles' work began to tell it too. Their 1965 song, Nowhere Man ("Doesn't have a point of view, knows not where he's going to") asked: "Isn't he a bit like you and me?"

Fantasy took flight in their songs, from Yellow Submarine's childlike picture of a carefree existence beneath the waves to the vastly more complex and ominous vision in Strawberry Fields Forever of a retreat from uncertainty into a psychedelic copout. Its four separate meters, freewheeling modulations and titillating tonal trappings, showed that the Beatles had flowered as musicians. They learned to bend and stretch the pop-song mold, enriched their harmonic palette with modal colors, mixed in cross-rhythms, and pinched the classical devices of composers from Bach to Stockhausen. They supplemented their guitar sound with strings, baroque trumpets, even a calliope. With the help of their engineer, arranger and record producer, George Martin, they plugged into a galaxy of space-age electronic effects, achieved partly through a mixture of tapes run backward and at various speeds.

All the successes of the past two years were a foreshadowing of Sgt. Pepper, which more than anything else dramatizes, note for note, word for word, the brilliance of the new Beatles. In three months, it has sold a staggering 2,500,000 copies--each a guaranteed package of psychic shivers. Loosely strung together on a scheme that plays the younger and older generations off against each other, it sizzles with musical montage, tricky electronics and sleight-of-hand lyrics that range between 1920s ricky-tick and 1960s raga. A Day in the Life is by all odds the most disturbingly beautiful song the group has ever produced. At the end, the refrain, "I'd love to turn you on," leads to a hair-raising chromatic crescendo by a full orchestra and a final blurred chord that is sustained for 40 seconds, like a trance of escape, or perhaps resignation. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.