You don't need me now, why would anything be different when you're 64?

Not something I normally do, I decided to listen to music tonight.  I had "Nowhere Man" in my head for some reason, then followed it up with a couple other songs and it was obvious I was in a 'Beatles' mood.  Who woulda thunk it?  I had to look up which album "Nowhere Man" was on and could not remember the title "For No One" even though I still had all the lyrics still in my head.  How does that work?

Anyway, asking what to listen to, I decided to straight to the top, Sgt. Pepper.  It deserves the recognition as their best album even if the songs aren't the best.  For one thing, music production had become a whole new thing just in the few years of their recording career and they were in front of this as in many other ways.  Just the way all the different sounds were things that couldn't have been dreamed of before.  Obviously they started moving away from this pretty quickly, only a few more tracks on Magical Mystery Tour and then going their own ways with the White Album before trying to get back to the old style with Let It Be and finally putting it all together for Abbey Road.

It's definitely Paul's album.  John was tired of the Beatles-life and was surrounded by subordinates enough that he didn't see any need to keep going.  George had never been someone who wanted to be in charge and the sudden change from not having to spend day after day touring around the world was a brand new lifestyle for them all.  Paul was still young, energetic and aspiring to get further so he had the best of all possible worlds.  I've said it to this day that I'm still impressed by this guy who keeps writing, recording and releasing new songs because that's been what worked for his whole life and there's no reason to stop.  He's pushing 80 at this point, but that's the price of being Paul McCartney.

Anyway, most of the songs are his.  John enjoyed taking a rest and wasn't really in the mood to work on anything and most of his contributions show it.  Even "A Day in the Life" which is possibly the greatest Beatles song before or after doesn't come off that well, he was just reading a newspaper and writing a song on it.  It was the sudden change to Paul's bridge and the orchestral overload with the overall production that really demonstrated how music had changed since they'd cranked out a bunch a songs in one day for their first album.  Then it adds the ending, overlapping a bunch of sounds that was intended to repeated itself on the record until you got up to turn it off, obviously a design as an album.  This was the first album that was truly designed as an album which even predecessors like Frank Zappa couldn't cite as an example.  It works because the album was conceived as a complete creation even if there isn't any deliberate intellectual connection between the songs.

George couldn't contribute anywhere near as many songs to an album as Lennon and McCartney and most of the songs were Paul's.  He makes his typical melodic ballads and adds orchestral arrangements since there's no chance of playing them live any time soon.  They're all very catchy and very nice without a trace of hard rock in them.  I found myself singing along with "When I'm 64" which doesn't usually happen.

It's possible that this is what makes the album work as a whole, occasionally breaking up by George's "Within You, Without You" or John's "Benefit For Mr. Kite" (based on a circus advertisement from 1843 that he'd recently purchased) just to do something different.  The weakest songs are towards the end but that's pretty typical for making albums.  The Beatles are just one of the rare bands where even their worst songs have always had a lot of fans and John/Paul were very good at writing pop-rock even as they had started moving in new directions.

And that's why it works so well.  The White Album just goes everywhere and there's no way to keep it all together without a lot of drugs and by that point the group was starting to split up.  Abbey Road was very straightforward even as it included everything that had got them to this point, put George up as a songwriter and its second side pointed the way for art rock in the next decade, but it couldn't have been done without all the previous albums.  It's my favorite Beatles album so I'm not knocking it by saying this.  Rubber Soul and Revolver were where they started going everywhere with modern production abilities and stood out for their new directions for the second half of the 1960s.  And their earlier albums were just collections of songs, regardless of the merits.  You could put their first six albums together and play every song alphabetically and only a major Beatles fan would have any clue which song came from which album, much less explain why.

Sgt. Pepper was the first album to get past that and not be broken up for other releases and changes were made even there after the record company took "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" away for a single, which almost by definition meant they couldn't be included on the album.[Which makes no sense, who would refuse to buy a dozen new Beatles tracks if they'd already bought two of them with the single, but that's literally how record companies thought back then.]  Whatever their record as originators, this is where the Beatles did not push themselves.  The Rolling Stones were already flying to the best studios in the world while the Fab Four just went down the street to a cheap studio that was originally a townhouse before being set up to record movie soundtracks.  Abbey Road, their last recording, was the first time they were even able to use an eight-track recorder.  Just imagine what Chinese Democracy would sound like if Axl Rose had gotten to use an eight-track for six months like the Beatles did for that one.

Anyway, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is still music and it's still wonderful.  Haven't heard many things like that come out in the past few decades even though the Beatles made it possible.

Before I post, I've decided to throw "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields" into the mix since I haven't heard them in a while either.  The former is just another great ballad like Paul always makes.  It's always said that these two songs were where John and Paul truly showed how different they were.  Paul's doing a bright piano number singing about people he sees and a trumpet plays in back, John's is much flatter and dingy, singing self-absorbed lyrics and his vocal track had to be replayed at a different speed to be in tempo and key with the orchestra.  But at least he buried Paul, it would have been a shame to leave the corpse out on the street like that.