by ERIC S. CARUNCHO
as published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer (18 June
2017)
Even with the huge amount of media hype for the
50th anniversary re-release of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band” album, it’s hard to imagine, in the age of Ed Sheeran, just how
groundbreaking it was when it first came out. Even if you were there.
I was 11 when “Sgt. Pepper” was released in 1967,
but the Beatles had already embarked on their Magical Mystery Tour by the time
I finally managed to scrape together the 13 pesos (if memory serves) for my
very own copy the following year.
 |
| It was 50 years ago today: the Beatles helped
usher in the counterculture with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” |
It was the first record I ever bought with my own
money and I remember rushing home from the record store to play it on the
family’s hi-fi system.
Like most of my generation, I had grown up on the
Beatles.
My first clear memory of really hearing music and
being affected by it was listening to “I Should Have Known Better” blasting
from the jukebox by the banana cue stand across the street from our house. (To
this day, I can’t hear that song without the phantom smell of frying bananas).
In Grade 4, the “smart” kids were all wearing
pointy-toed Beatle boots with their short pants. (Not me—I still wore school
shoes from Gregg’s, though I did have the Beatles pencil box).
I had a Radiowealth transistor radio and every
evening I tuned in to “The Beatle Beat Show,” a solid hour of nonstop Beatles,
on some long-forgotten AM station. (Sundays they played nonstop Beatles from
sign on to sign off).
I also had a “groovy” (and as it later turned out,
secretly gay) ninong who was involved in “The Beatlemaniacs,” a TV variety show
that featured local combos and go-go dancing—all the tropes of 1960s teen life
in Manila. He sported a Beatle haircut (which I later found out was a wig) and
was the first man I knew to wear bell-bottoms and smoke weed.
Mind-blowing clarity
None of it prepared me for that first hearing of
“Sgt. Pepper.”
My father had a pretty good stereo setup at the
time: a solid-state amplifier, three-way speakers and a German turntable with a
Shure cartridge.
And so it was with total, mind-blowing clarity that
we all listened to “Sgt. Pepper” in its entirety—from the opening electric
blast of the title track to the last decaying piano notes on Lennon’s mini
epic, “A Day In The Life.”
My mother, who liked Broadway musicals, Mario Lanza
and Diomedes Maturan, was unimpressed.
Like the rest of the world, she had been charmed by
the Beatles in their lovable moptop incarnation singing “Yesterday.” “Sgt.
Pepper” left her cold. What happened to all the pretty ballads? Who were these
long-haired men on the album cover—in their garish outfits and their walrus
mustaches?
Something else
My father was the real music aficionado in the
family, though he was more of a Frank Sinatra fan. His favorite band, however,
was “Los Indios Tabajaras,” an easy-listening guitar instrumental duo that
performed Latin numbers dressed like Indians from the Amazon rain forest.
Upon listening to George Martin’s orchestral
arrangements on “She’s Leaving Home,” he grudgingly accepted that the Beatles
were pretty good—for a “pop” group.
“Sgt. Pepper” was totally unlike anything that had
come before. Even my unformed, preteen mind could instinctively grasp that this
was something else.
This was not just pop, it was art.
Not pop, but art
Subsequently, I played “Sgt. Pepper” constantly,
and not only because it was the only record I owned for the longest time.
I usually listened on my father’s headphones and
studied the gatefold album cover for hours, trying to divine secret clues and
hidden meanings from the artwork.
The Beatles had embarked on a program of
consciousness-expansion ever since Bob Dylan turned them on to marijuana in
1964.
By the following year, they had started
experimenting with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), injecting tongue-in-cheek
references in songs like “Day Tripper.”
Alternative culture
More significantly, their music as a whole began to
reflect their altered state of consciousness and growing alienation from the
conformist mindset of the mainstream, in songs such as “Nowhere Man.”
It all came to a head in “Sgt. Pepper.” It wasn’t
just the drug references in songs such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
(which listeners instantly picked up on as code for LSD, although Lennon, for
years afterward, said it was based on a child’s drawing by his son Julian), or
the line “I’d love to turn you on” in “A Day in the Life,” or Ringo singing, “I
get high with a little help from my friends.”
The whole album was a blueprint for an alternative
culture, with the Beatles—in their psychedelic marching-band costumes—as pied
pipers.
Marcos thugs
“Sgt. Pepper” had dropped on unsuspecting Filipinos
less than two years after their Rizal Memorial Stadium debacle, when they had
to unceremoniously flee the country with a baying mob of Marcos thugs at their
heels, inflamed by their supposed snub of the first family’s invitation to
Malacañang.
Marcos was still at the height of his popularity,
and the whole country, it seemed, was enraged at the Fab Four’s display of bad
manners. There was even some muttering about banning the Beatles’ records. (For
the full account, read Oliver X.A. Reyes’ hugely entertaining and informative
“Beat the Beatles.”)
Things had hardly settled down when Lennon made his
notorious pronouncement that the Beatles were now “more famous than Jesus
Christ.”
Moral decline
None of this was lost on my parents. The
abovementioned events only cemented their perception of the Beatles as
harbingers of moral decline.
We had subscriptions to Life and Time magazines, so
they were fully up to speed on the alarming emergence of hippies, the worldwide
protest movement and the drug culture.
“Sgt. Pepper” notwithstanding, my world still
revolved around karate (no thanks to Tony Ferrer and Roberto Gonzales), Marvel
comics and monster movies.
I was a total square throughout first year high
school, sporting the same crew cut I had in grade school and still listened to
the Beatles.
Meanwhile, some of my more au courant classmates
had started to grow their hair long. They listened to groups like the Doors,
whose first album had come out just ahead of “Sgt. Pepper,” but whose music was
more aggressive and transgressive than the Beatles’ gentle pop excursions.
But change was just around the corner, and although
I didn’t know it then, thanks largely to “Sgt. Pepper’s” subliminal influence,
I would be ready to embrace it wholeheartedly.
In 1969, half a million kids gathered for three
days of love, music and bad acid freakouts at Woodstock and “Led Zeppelin II”
knocked the Beatles’ final studio album, “Abbey Road,” off the charts.
It was the end of an era and the beginning of
another.
Pinoy youth culture exploded the following year as,
in quick succession, came the First Quarter Storm, then nine months later, the
Antipolo Rock Festival. Choose your rebellion: Lenin or Lennon. Become a
placard-waving student activist or grow your hair and become a “head” (which
was what drug users were called in those days).
Greatest album
For the longest time, “Sgt. Pepper” was considered
the greatest album ever made, according to Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the
“500 greatest albums of all time,” in which it has stayed at No. 1.
Critical opinion has largely shifted, however, and
these days the Beatles’ previous album “Revolver,” or the subsequent “The
Beatles” (aka The White Album) are held in greater esteem by music aficionados.
Even when it was first released, “Sgt. Pepper” was
less significant as an album of music than as a cultural weather vane: it
embodied changing attitudes, ideas and consciousness at a historic crossroads.
It was also a breath of optimism in increasingly
dark times.
We who live in the age of global jihad,
“alternative facts” and autocratic leaders could use a little of that.
ERIC CARUNCHO is one of the finest writers JINGLE Music Magazine has ever had in its stable. His core is rock and he writes with fire in his soul. Through his brilliantly-written thought threads then and now, Eric has paved recognition, among others, for the deserving but oft-snubbed Pinoy indie musicians struggling to find their place in the sun. His book Punks, Poets, Poseurs: Reportage on Pinoy Rock and Roll was published in 1986.
He wrote record reviews for JINGLE in the mid-1980s. In a personal historical account, among the first stories he wrote though (when he began his career with newspapers in 1986) were features on the underground
hardcore punk rock scene. At the time, according to Caruncho, "the punks were the tabloids’
latest boogeymen, portrayed as devil-worshipping drug addicts and
possibly sexual deviants." But he viewed them as "harbingers of a genuine cultural movement, which
would come to fruition several years later with the emergence of the
so-called “alternative” rock scene, as epitomized by the Eraserheads..."
The rest is history -- both for him as a writer and for the bands he wrote about.
