Welcome to Track Chatter, where we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we reconsider songs by The Beatles. Can anything new be said about this band or its music? Have a look below and let us know what you think.
Aaron: Well, what can one say about the record that’s had everything said about it? Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in the early summer of 1967 (the “Summer of Love”), has been praised nearly continuously in the almost forty-five years since its release. It spent hundreds of weeks on both the UK and US album charts and was the first rock album to win the Best Album Grammy. Jimi Hendrix famously played cover versions of the title track in London clubs just days after its release (and with some of The Beatles in the audience). It’s been credited with fully entrenching the concept of the “album” – as a unity rather than a collection of singles – as well as with inventing (or perfecting) the concept album. It drove Brian Wilson mad. And while its position as the number one, no doubt, best album of all time has naturally waxed and waned with the ever-changing trends of rock music criticism and fandom, it has never fallen out of favor or ceased to be considered as anything other than a stellar rock and roll album. It may come as no surprise that Rolling Stone continues to proclaim it the greatest album of all time, but even the more discerning hipster types at Pitchfork awarded it a rare 10 out 10 in a recent reconsideration.So, what indeed can one say? Well, it’s not quite true that Sgt. Pepper’s was the first “proper” album – an entity conceived as a whole piece rather than a collection of parts. Like nearly all artistic developments, the coming of the unified album happened over time – a very brief time in this case, to be sure. It’s well accepted that at least since Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours (1955), artists had been releasing albums based around unifying ideas and musical themes with a considered and purposeful sequencing of tracks. The Beatles themselves had been moving in this direction since Rubber Soul (and arguably since Help!), and the influence of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) on Sgt. Pepper’s is well known. However, as was often the case with The Beatles, the album harnessed the fullness of their songwriting prowess, their experimental drive, their adeptness in the studio (still using four-track recording as EMI was unwilling to equip Abby Road studios with eight-track mixing decks until later in 1967), and lots of happy accidents to make something more than the sum of its parts. The result is thus, perhaps, the first album that really feels like an album in the modern sense. Songs bleed into one another. Varispeeding allowed them to modify pitches so that the beginnings and endings of songs could be more seamlessly blended. Automatic double tracking and George Martin’s (and his engineers’) incredibly facility with “bouncing” tracks meant that they could achieve an amazing depth of sound wherein multiple tracks from a variety of sources – band and non-band alike – could be clearly discerned by even the unpracticed ear. And for reasons that are often difficult to pinpoint, the album’s lyrics and themes resonated with the zeitgeist in ways that have rarely been achieved – before or since – by one forty minute rock album.
Whether Sgt. Pepper’s is the “best album of all time” is, however, a pretty subjective claim. There are so many matrices by which to measure such a distinction (sales? awards? influence? – and just how does one measure something as intangible as “influence”?), and so many different types of albums, that one’s preference for such a title will invariably come down to questions of taste. And there are certainly those who find Sgt. Pepper’s boring, uninspired, overplayed, hackneyed, or even simple. However, within the medium of rock music, the claim simply cannot be made that Sgt. Pepper’s is “bad.” From the opening sound effect of a mulling audience and the tuning of a first violin that breaks into one of the band’s most rocking numbers to the closing chord of their most celebrated song, the album sparkles with energy, creativity, and clear ideas executed with stellar musicianship and technological acuity. In short, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a fucking awesome album.
We struggled with the question of which track to choose and long considered tackling “A Day in the Life.” The album closer is generally considered the pinnacle of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting tandem as well as the crowning achievement of The Beatles/George Martin recording relationship. And as we had already broken our “lesser-known-tracks” rule with “Yesterday,” we thought, why not do so again. However, in the end we decided that, much like Sgt. Pepper’s itself, “A Day in the Life” has simply been discussed too much. Which track, if any, however, can be considered lesser known from this album? All the songs regularly feature on classic rock radio; they show up in movie soundtracks, on mix tapes (mix tapes?), and as cover versions by other bands. In the end, we decided to go with “Fixing a Hole,” in part because it’s one of the less assuming songs on an album full of mind blowers. Or is it? What do you think, Lew? Does “Fixing a Hole” hold its own with the other heavy hitters on Sgt. Pepper’s?
Lew: I feel like I'm always answering “yes” to the question you pose me in your intros, but I'm going to say it again. I do think that “Fixing A Hole” holds it own on Sgt. Pepper's. I don't think that it’s the crowning musical achievement that “A Day In The Life” is, but I would also say that a good deal of its strength as a composition lies exactly in its unassuming nature. Without digressing about “A Day In The Life” too much, I’ll just say that although it’s obviously a really fantastic song, regardless of arrangement, the production is a huge part of its impact. The acoustic guitar that bridges into the piano to introduce the first verse, the orchestral parts, the reverb on Lennon’s voice coming out of the bridge, and the overdubbed grand pianos on the last chord of the song (among other things) all serve to elevate the composition to something much more than a standard rock song. There’s a lot to listen to, pretty much all the time. By contrast, “Fixing A Hole” is not pointing toward the same goal – it's not as evidently uncomfortable with the restraints of what could be said in a three-plus minute song or more standard production, but the craftsmanship is superb (we’ll talk more about the music as the discussion progresses, I’m sure) and the lyrics do a great job of blending the particular and the universal, so to speak. I think it’s a quiet mind-blower, to borrow your term. It’s almost sneaky. What do you think of it?
Aaron: Before I answer that question, I’d also like to say a word or two about other tracks on the album. By mind-blower, I am, of course, referring to the album’s well-known highlights: “A Day in the Life” to be sure, but also the title track (and its reprise), “A Little Help from my Friends,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” In addition to those hits, I’d probably throw in “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and “Good Morning,” mainly because (in addition to being fascinating songs), their production quality really makes them album showcases. And I’d also add Harrison’s “Within You Without You.” It’s a song that I didn’t like much as a child (it frightened me a bit, to be honest), but it’s the song where we see George starting to shed his long-held cynicism and really embrace the Eastern values and concepts that he’d been exploring for the previous few years. It’s also, maybe, the most sincere song on the entire album (Ian MacDonald calls it “central to the outlook of Sgt. Pepper”). “When I’m Sixty-Four” may be the album’s biggest throwaway number, yet it remains one of its best-known tracks. It’s not a mind-blower by any stretch of the term, but it is one of the most successful songs on the album. Finally, it’s worth mentioning “She’s Leaving Home,” which, as far as I can tell, was long considered the album’s second key track (after “A Day in the Life”). This mainly seems to have been because of its showcase as a Lennon/McCartney number, its production values, and its oddly ambiguous take on traditional values versus the new, freer thinking ideals of the baby boomers. It’s a beautiful song, but may be the one song, perhaps, that I find doesn’t really hold up well. I do like the song, but in today’s respect, it seems a bit maudlin in the way it so obviously comments on its era’s generation gap in a way that seems so innocent as almost to be hokey today.
“Fixing a Hole,” is a different kettle of fish from most of those songs. It features very little in the way of blatant studio trickery (aside from its brilliant multi-tracking), and its lyrics hint not towards the Lennonist absurdity of “Mr. Kite” or “Lucy,” nor towards the generational touchstones of “With a Little Help from my Friends,” “She’s Leaving Home,” or “Within You Without You.” In fact, it seems to be a song, on first listen, celebrating the mundane. And its form and musicality seems to support that (again, at first), with its odd harpsichord intro and then its fairly standard verse chorus verse format (and it hardly rocks out like the title track, “Good Morning,” or even “Lovely Rita” do). But I love that you describe it as “sneaky,” which I think is such an apt term for it. And I’d argue that sneakiness is anchored in what you call the song’s “blending of the particular and the universal.” Do you think you could say a bit more about what you mean by that?
Lew: When I mentioned “the blending of the particular and the universal” (with apologies to Hegel) in “Fixing A Hole,” what I was trying to get at was a kind of juxtaposition that the song has always suggested to me. On one hand, the narrator is describing, to borrow your wording, a mundane activity of home repair (“fixing a hole where the rain gets in”). At the same time, on the other side of that activity is whatever the leak in the narrator's roof has interrupted (“and stops my mind from wandering”); his wandering mind and all that is suggested by that phrase, which is arguably quite a lot. My sense, which could be limited to my own impressions, has always been that he’s alluding to some type of meditation and that there’s a cosmic element to it that supersedes what the narrator sees as the pettiness of other people (who don’t get in his door). To my mind, the entire song is about trying to create an insular, controllable environment and also a letting go of the pressures and obligations of society. It suggests all sorts of things, from Buddhism to an alienation from the community of other people and, ultimately, existentialism. So, for me, it’s very sneaky, because it appears unassuming, but in another way, can be seen as tackling some very difficult philosophical questions.
Aaron: Well said. I’ve always wondered just exactly “where” his mind was wandering. As a child I thought of it just as daydreaming and there have been times later in my life when I thought meditation or just getting high. I think it might be any of those. McCartney and the rest of the band were in the midst of their experimentation with LSD at the time and still smoking marijuana heavily, and they were also exploring mediation and other aspects of Eastern religions. And daydreaming plays a vital role in songwriting. So I’m not so sure McCartney would have seen the three situations (and others are possible) as being significantly different.
What’s interesting, and why I like your use of “sneaky,” is the way the song wants to create the space for all those activities – the space where he’ll go when his mind is wandering – which is also a space that, as you say, keeps the “silly people” from getting past his door. If we put the song within its cultural and historical context (Summer of Love, burgeoning hippie movement, drug culture, exploration of Eastern religion and other non-Western modes of thinking), then, on the one hand, it seems to be celebrating the moment. Give in to your inner thoughts, let your mind wander, the “turn on, tune in” bits of Leary’s mantra. On the other hand, the desire to keep out the rabble, or to keep out the silly people, or to keep out people in general seems pretty anti-social. It certainly doesn’t celebrate anything like a communal vibe. Now, the “silly people” might be interpreted as being representatives of “the man” or of consumer society, straight society. But from what I’ve read, McCartney got the idea for the lyric from the fans who used to loiter outside his house and Abby Road studio hoping for a glimpse of the band. So in that sense, the “silly people” are also, on one level, McCartney’s peers – at least generationally speaking. In that sense, the song celebrates a very literal interpretation of the “drop out” bit of Leary.
I don’t think the song is either pro- or anti- the spirit of ’67. I think it’s both at the same time (which is best expressed in the ambiguity of the “it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong I’m right . . .” lyric) – and in that sense, I think it shares a lot with other songs on the album that look for something like “universal consciousness” in acts of the mundane or even non-special, with songs about meter maids, reading newspapers, growing up, and getting old. Aside from Harrison’s “Within You Without You,” and maybe “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” there’s not a song, really, that on its surface says “prepare to have your mind blown by how deep this thing is.” Even “A Day in the Life,” in all its grandeur, is about reading newspaper stories and spending the day at work. And yet, through their celebration of daily ritual, of the ordinary, these songs do tap into something more universal and (yeesh) cosmic. And “Fixing a Hole,” at least on the level of its lyrics, might do it as well as any of them. Any thoughts about the music – does it mirror or contribute to the sense of sneakiness in anyway? (And any thoughts about that opening keyboard bit?)
Lew: That is a great analysis of where “Fixing A Hole” is situated in relation to the cultural movement of the late 1960’s. For the most part, I’ll leave what you said to speak for itself; however, I will add that I think that you’re absolutely right to identify a large of the Sgt. Pepper’s project as an act of finding the universal within the mundane. I don’t know that The Beatles were the first to do that in pop music, but they certainly did it on a broader scale than it had been done up to that point. That is one of the things that makes Sgt. Pepper’s so important for me, and it’s the reason why I still think of it as possibly the most cohesive Beatles album. The finding of beauty or tragedy within mundane circumstances is something that I think largely appears for the first time in 20th-century art, and Sgt. Pepper’s is as much a participant in that transformation as any of the literature or visual art of its time. Also, needless to say, Sgt. Pepper’s set the stage for a number of English chamber pop albums that celebrated and dissected traditional English values and social conventions – I’m thinking of The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, but I don’t doubt that there are other strong examples.
Musically speaking, there are a few things about “Fixing a Hole” that I find quite sneaky – it’s probably the most harmonically complex song that we’ve discussed in this series. The harpsichord intro is an interesting touch - it strikes me as a sort of fanfare, which also establishes the tonal center of the song. I love the transition from the harpsichord to the verse, with Ringo clicking off the count before the vocal starts. What I really like about the song, which was fairly shocking to me at the time that I first learned it, is this chord progression under the verse, which starts on an F major chord (F, A, C), moves to C aug (C, E, Ab - the V or dominant chord in a slightly altered form) and uses that turnaround as a pivot to land on an F minor 7 (F, Ab, C, Eb), which moves to an F minor 6 (F, Ab, C, D), Bb major (Bb, D, F), F minor 7, and then back to Bb major to conclude the phrase. What’s most interesting about that, to me, is the way the chords are inverted during the verse to create a descending line – by placing the notes F, E, Eb, and D in the bass of the first four chords, it creates a chromatic movement from one chord to the next, which enables the listener to hear the key change from F major at the top of the phrase, to F minor shortly thereafter, as being completely natural and as something that your ear is pulled toward. And, of course, Paul’s great melody on top of that which treats it all like it’s no big thing, is very helpful for the listener as well. Needless to say, I find the whole thing highly sneaky, and generally brilliant.
Aaron: Wow, I never would have guessed that there was so much complexity at the heart of this song. As much as I’ve always liked it, it can come across almost as having been tossed off (which is part of its charm for me), but that seems to be belied by how much thought McCartney and Martin must have put into its composition and recording. I like the way you describe how it “enables” the listener to hear the song in a particular way. I think the track’s recording works to that end as well. It doesn’t exhibit the production fireworks of some of the other Sgt. Pepper’s tracks, but attention was clearly paid not only to how the song was recorded in a general sense, but (or so it seems to me) how its recording emphasized certain characteristics of its composition. I particularly like the way Ringo’s drums are recorded (such a long way from the early albums) so as to catch his beat, which acts as the song’s steady hand, but which is also oddly lackadaisical (matching, perhaps unintentionally, the song’s content). I like the judicious use of double tracking on Paul’s vocal track, the way the “ooohs” come in for the second pass at the “really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong, I’m right” chorus. And while I don’t think anybody would argue that the solo is an example of Harrison’s best work, I love the sound of the solo, especially the way it bleeds in from McCartney’s shouts of “hey, hey, hey.”The song’s position on the album is also a great example of how well-sequenced Sgt. Pepper’s is – to my eary, musically, the harpsichord sort of prefigures the harp of “She’s Leaving Home” (when I was younger, I often mistook the two songs based on that harpsichord intro), and how the bass line is echoed in (to my non-technical ears) the bass of “Mr. Kite” – at least stylistically, if not harmonically.
So I guess what’s becoming increasingly fascinating to me about “Fixing a Hole” is how a song that I always sort of thought of as one of the album’s “lesser” tracks – a song that I might even have described as being a bit out of place – is really a subtle touchstone for the entire album in the way it sets up, comments on, prefigures and echoes various lyrical and musical themes (this would include the theme of transition, which is alluded to in the final line – “I’ve taken the time for a number of things that weren’t important yesterday” – transition being one of the album’s major concerns). But perhaps that’s reading too much into it.
Lew: I like the solo quite a lot. Admittedly, it's not quite at the level of his work for “Something” or “Let It Be” in terms of musical content, but I love what it adds sonically. It’s a concise little interlude that adds a slight feeling of chaos to the song, maybe in some way underpinning the tension between mundanity and escapism that the narrator is describing.
I think your term “touchstone” is a good one. It's not far-fetched to say that “Fixing A Hole,” along with “A Day In The Life” presents one of the clearest distillations of what they seem to be trying get at on Sgt. Pepper’s. I've always been a little torn about the idea of it as a concept album, because it doesn’t present (or attempt to present, as the case may be) a linear narrative in the same way as The Wall or Tommy, but in the light of the discussion we’ve been having, it actually strikes me as more of a genuine concept - an attempt to communicate a particular point of view via music, rather than a haphazard rock opera. In that respect, I think you’re right on when you note that the line “I've taken the time for a number of things that weren't important yesterday,” hits on something fundamental about the concept that’s at stake throughout the album, and, to my mind, it really is getting at a tension between the traditional aspects of daily life and the aspiration to find something more genuine, which is also very much at play in “It’s Getting Better,” “She's Leaving Home,” “Within You Without You” and so on.
Aaron: Exactly – so it’s not a “concept” album in the sense that it tells a story (shouldn’t that really be a “story album?”) or in the way it pushes a particular line of thought or philosophy (I guess those are generally called “loose concept albums”). However, the concept we’ve outlined here does seem to be one of the thicker, more noticeably strands tying the album together (again, I’d say, noticeable in part due to the excellent sequencing. So it seems like we’ve essentially decided that Sgt. Pepper’s – long mistakenly labeled the “first concept” album, then indisputably regarded as NOT a concept album – maybe just is a concept album after all. And all based on a conversation about what is arguably the least celebrated track on the album. Excellent work. I’d say that’s a good day’s work and so a good place to leave off. Of course we’d love to hear our readers’ thoughts on this or any other question we’ve raised about Sgt. Pepper’s, and any others that we haven’t raised as well.
Coming Next: With George Martin’s help, John constructs an enduring psychedelic rock classic.
