Guaranteed to raise a smile @50

At the maturity phase in their career, The Beatles — particularly Paul McCartney — considered the Beach Boys a threat to their popularity and stature.

As its chief songwriter, who was also the group’s bassist like McCartney with the Beatles, Brian Wilson served as a formidable competitor for McCartney. Brian became evidently jealous of the Beatles’ accomplishment with Revolver. Imitating the Beatles’ marijuana habit, which brought him to a higher level of consciousness, Wilson reclaimed lost glory by coming up with the seminal album Pet Sounds, a richly textured work blending the group’s choir-voice sound and Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” a lavish combination of sound elements.
For McCartney, the Pet Sounds influence came in the form of the idea that he could make bass a major sound. He told editor Tom Mulhern: “The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, a big influential album for me. If you’re in C, and you put it on something that’s not the root note — it creates a little tension. It’s great. It just holds the track, and so by the time you go to C, it’s like ‘Oh, thank God, he went to C!’ And you can create tension with it. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing; it just sounded nice. And that started to get me much more interested in bass. It was no longer a matter of just being this low note in the back of it.”
Every track of Pet Sounds is a masterwork for the Beach Boys, the whole album rich and diverse. Wilson sings solo in “Don’t Talk” and “Caroline No,” but the harmonies of “You Still Believe In Me,” “Sloop John B,” and “God Only Knows” are brilliant as group work. There are amazingly imaginative touches everywhere, from highly complex orchestral arrangements to astoundingly simple a capella harmony. If Pet Sounds were to be assigned an importance in rock history, it would be as the first “concept album” with its introspective lyrics, unified tone, and high-quality recording.
In fact, even McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison considered Pet Sounds as having elevated rock’s standards. It became a reference point for the Beatles, most especially McCartney, in creating their next album.
By taking Chuck Berry’s partiality for contemporary youth culture and adding a distinctive, West Coast twist, blending in vocal harmonies from ‘50s pop, rock, and rhythm ‘n’ blues groups and singing songs about sun and surfing, Wilson almost single-handedly created an image of Southern California as a modern utopia. As the Beach Boys evolved, Wilson began to play the role of Spector while the band toured. He stayed home, wrote new songs and recorded backing tracks in the studio.
Spector influenced the Beatles by powering up the Beach Boys. He conceived the 45-rpm record as an art form and executed it in a Wagnerian scale, combining classical and popular music traditions with a flair for drama. He operated on the belief that the producer is the most important person in record production and central to this authority is strict technical and artistic control. His innovative methods created an encompassing revolution in the entire record industry, which certainly boosted the careers of the Beatles and the Beach Boys.
By this period, the Beatles were heavily into experimentation. As echo is a major component of Spector’s recording technique, the Beatles adopted it as a prime component of sound distortion. The Beatles relied on the echo to give a fuller sound to a song element. This is an undesirable sound element but the Beatles, through Spector’s initiation, explored it as an integral sound characteristic.
From beginning to end, the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band album the release date of which, June 1, 1967, its 50th year we are revisiting tomorrow, June 1, 2017, is a complete departure, both in concept and content, from rock.
From the way record producer George Martin arranged the track list, the album suggested a theme with the inter-connection of song topic and treatment. It starts with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and ends with a reprise in abbreviated form of the same song. In between, the gamut of the working class condition is tackled in varying moods and methods. As for the predicament that humans find themselves in, the meaninglessness of life, the album suggests a solution through “A Day in the Life,” the finale song’s souring climax: getting turned on.
Critic Kenneth Tynan noted the album’s historical perspective by writing that its release is a decisive moment in the history of western civilization.” Professor Langton Winner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concurred with Tynan. He wrote: “The closest Western Civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, was the week the Sergeant Pepper’s album was released. For a brief while, the irreparably fragmented consciousness of the West was unified at least in the minds of the young.”
Newsweek wrote: “Sgt. Pepper’s is such an organic work...a rollicking, probing language-and-sound vaudeville which grafts skin from all of the three brows — high, middle and low — into a pulsating collage about mid-century manners and madness.”
Richard Poirier and Geoffrey Stokes raved this album that by “listening to the Sgt. Pepper’s album one thinks not of simply of the history of popular music but the history of this century.”
NME’s David Quantick wrote: “It’s not the greatest album ever made, as some people would have you believe. It’s not even the best Beatle album. But it is the first example of recording technology being used as an instrument and it does contain enough traces of the old McCartney lyricism that it appeared to bringing us up against the future even as it tied us nostalgically to the past.”
But the most prophetic assessment of the Sgt. Pepper’s album came from Richard Goldstein in The New York Times. He wrote that the album is “dazzling but ultimately fraudulent” and has the “power to destroy rock ‘n’ roll.”
With the Sgt. Pepper’s album, the group achieved a musical synthesis that far exceeded the subject matter and musical content of pop. By incorporating relevant or interesting ideas, they accomplished in several years what classical music took centuries and jazz music several decades to achieve. Stereo Review critic Eric Zalman called them “the first poets of the technological age,” crediting their influences in art and life as “irreversible.”
Regardless of the mixed and contradictory assessment about this album, the Grammy Awards gave it the Album of the Year, the first rock album to win it, and Best Contemporary Album in the 1968 awarding ceremonies.
But even in this maturity period, the Beatles remained White Negroes. They might not be nicking obscure rock ‘n’ roll songs but classical music and the developed styles of their peers by them were still imitation. They just became more sophisticated plagiarists or plagiarists extraordinaire as McCartney put it.
The clear winner of the Beatles vs. Beach Boys music battle: the White Negro Beatles.

Note: Culled from the columnist’s book, The Beatles: Extraordinary Plagiarists, as released by Amazon.com in New York.