It was twenty years ago today...

It was twenty years ago today...

Actually, it’s been forty years, and a month, and a few days, if you go by the release dates of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1, 1967 (Great Britain) and June 2, 1967 (United States) - thereby accounting for most of the English speaking cash registers in the swinging sixties. There was also a world-wide release in June 1967 that issued the vinyl wherever EMI had a presence, India included.

It all came back to me, not when I saw smatterings of the press on the 40th anniversary, not when I read the news (Oh Boy), of the BBC’s sponsoring of today’s relatively obscure pop/rock idols performing the thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper. That is, after all, pretty standard tributeism. It was when I saw the parody/tribute to that striking record sleeve closer to home.It was staid old India Today’s recent cover for the issue on 60 years of independent India.

For India Today it was a curiously selective photo essay in the tradition of the now extinct Life Magazine with potted blurb covering the decades. But then, here is a magazine already grown old and boring in thirty years, stuck in the arthritic groove of its journalistic formula and its ageing proponents, leached of spontaneity, proud of its ability to squash surprise and eliminate spark in favour of gloss and vacuous luxe. Of course, one can say what one will, but it’s paid off in yards of consumer product advertisements and demonstrated good business sense.

Nevertheless, perhaps in a burst of sentiment wafting forth from a peace-and-love-generation staffer, there they were, on the cover of India Today, those same Sgt. Pepper colours, that same collage of faces and bodies adapted, a little ridiculously, to suit the India story, complete with that same graveside flower arrangement in front, evocative, as we all know (or should), of an epitaph, rather than what the corporate sector refers to as a “forward statement”.

But let’s suppose for a minute that in using the Sgt. Pepper style cover, we India Today types are sticking with the original Beatles metaphor of influences, namely: (the faces and life-size cut-out collage), death,(name spelt out in flowers at the feet of all those faces), and rebirth (radically different content in the music). Let us pretend that we India Today types also know what we are burying and what we’re looking forward to as a nation. A photo essay compendium may not do the trick but one wonders what will? Why does all talk of progress and change in India seem so unconvincing? Is there a basic attitude problem here?

As far as I can see, we Indians suffer from a form of anal retentiveness. We are not willing to let go of anything, good, bad or ugly. Our way is to layer in the change on top of all that has gone before and if the burden is onerous enough to smother, snuff and extinguish any or all of the past- then so be it. In the event, we don’t have to hold ourselves responsible because we didn’t do it, it just happened and so, whatever it is, or becomes, it is not our fault. You may say it is a luxurious approach to social and economic change, ambivalence institutionalised even, but we in India won’t have it any other way.

This is why we cleave and cling to our socialism and love of poverty and the fertile fields of corruption and goondagiri, wearing both white and blue collars simultaneously. We preserve every bureaucratic hurdle intact to the best of our ability in the face of an information technology onslaught and try, try our best, to render null and void every move towards progress and extraction from the third world mire we have grown so very fond of.This, even as some of us realise that this is, at last, a losing battle. We tell ourselves that even if this is so, let us gird up and fight our last stand fight, our rearguard, reactionary, last gasp action, our bhelpuri version of Thermopylae if you will. The idea is to give nothing away right up to the moment we are swept away in the rising tide of global manna for our corporate prowess. After all, it won’t take us a split second to turn around from the other end of the sheet as if to the manner born.

We are not just reactionary but also horribly primitive, consisting of a veritable horde of “me-first” Socialists in transition. Paradoxical Socialists really, people who are uncaring about the suffering of the poor, perfectly content to be exploitative, venal and callous. We are Socialists capable of the greatest hypocrisy and brazenly determined to show little sign of a change of heart even when it comes right down to it. Still, God knows, this is a surprising nation, adept at confounding doomsayers and steeped in an undeniable religiosity that must be performing its own set of independent miracles. We may not, after all, need the pointy-head analysis if the majority of our people would rather take it as read. Awareness may suffice. See how we’ve managed to populate ourselves a billion plus strong, copious by any reckoning, at the rate of several million every year, with a combination of fecund awareness and prudery. And fast forwarding a bit, the prosperity that is coming to this benighted, misguided populace, will, in time, and not very much time at that, become a great metaphor for wisdom and sagacity. We might, all us India Today types, overtake ourselves in the darkness, by default, or by virtue of apathy if nothing else, and be content to take on from where we find ourselves. We won’t, most likely, remember to thank the few on the market capitalism bus who’ve been motoring on through the night while we slept - but then, “we are like this only”.

The prosperity coming our way is indeed a happy thought brought on by a happy juxtaposition. Because, surely, the proper and right use of metaphor, in celebration of our 60th, calls for it to be seen through to its implied end, hand-on-elbow and right up the stairs to the paradigm shift. That is, clearly, what The Beatles did with Sgt. Pepper – they buried the Brian Epstein induced Beatlemania that had lasted four phenomenally successful years, even with Epstein voicing his misgivings, and got on with being themselves. And in doing so, the world discovered that their larger selves were, if not grander, certainly more profound than when they were simply the biggest pop group that ever walked the face of the earth.There was great symbolism to the moment that gave birth to Sgt. Pepper and the album sleeve designer Peter Blake managed to capture it. It was symbolism so powerful that people around the world are still using the metaphor to depict change and renewal these forty years on.

Many others have parodied/paid tribute to the Pepper album cover, irresistible for its social commentary. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention was among the first, and later, much later, The Simpsons, more than once and Mad Magazine (2002) and Rolling Stone Magazine – for its 1,000th issue last year (2006). What sort of closures this might imply for these various entities is however not the subject of this piece. Besides, there’s always the fun and games of putting in all the faces, life-size cutouts and wax dummies one likes without worrying about the “grave” symbolism. It’s like throwing a party with everyone one has ever admired in attendance and then taking a group shot while everyone can still stand up.

But Sgt. Pepper, in 1967, represented the straight forward burial of certain endings. The Beatles had stopped touring in 1966 and were no longer constrained to write music they could readily perform live. In fact, unlike The Rolling Stones, they never performed live in concert as a group ever again. Sgt.Pepper, album number 8 in their repertoire, was the first of their influential and path-breaking studio albums. It used the then new-fangled eight track in multiple track series for the first time. Thanks to George Harrison’s fascination with India and Hinduism, they used Indian session musicians and instruments such as the sitar, tanpura and tabla and also a 41 piece western orchestra inspired by Lennon-McCartney. George Martin, their legendary Producer, sometimes referred to as the “Fifth Beatle”, mixed in authentic fair ground music and multiple sound effects using loop techniques that were brand new in 1966 and 1967. There was further technological wizardry in the mixing and other serendipitous discoveries of technique and effect during the 12 to 20 hour recording sessions spread over 129 days at EMI’s the state-of-the-art Abbey Road Studios.

And for the first time, The Beatles, inspired by Paul McCartney, made an interesting attempt to create alternate persona, a set of alter-egos that could liberate one : “You could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar, because it wasn't you,” said Paul, except that, in hindsight, it was very much you, just a different, more liberated, and as far as Sgt. Pepper went, a somewhat music-hall- psychedelic- hippie-generation-eastern-mysticism celebrating you.Nevertheless the McCartney inspired Sgt. Pepper, his Lonely Hearts Club Band and Billy Shears were very well received as a “theatrical conceit: an imaginary concert by a fictional band, played by the Beatles” as a Rolling Stones Magazine retrospective review put it as late as November 1, 2003. Over 11 million copies of the album were sold celebrating its incandescent creativity.

At the same time, Sgt. Pepper conclusively marked the end of the exuberant “I Wanna Hold your Hand” era. From now on, all those fifties rock and roll and delta blues influences showed up in the Beatles repertoire, or indeed in their solo careers thereafter, only as a retro echo, a stylistic highlight or a wry comment.

As postscript, perhaps because no metaphorical death is complete without a flesh and blood victim, the most influential figure in the making of the early Beatles died suddenly just after Sgt. Pepper was released. The soft-spoken but visionary Jewish record-shop owner who had taken the Beatles from their leather-jacketed beginnings to worldwide success via scores of the happiest pop songs the world had ever heard was dead. Epstein died just when his protégés grew wings and began to fly their own trajectories. It was time for him to let go. And so he did. In the India story, the parallel would obviously be the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948.

Many years later, twenty one actually, by which time John Lennon too had been dead seven years; George Harrison, now in the latter part of his solo career, put together another supergroup over a series of dinner parties at his Friar Park home in the United Kingdom and at Bob Dylan’s house and studio in Santa Monica, California. This too, like Sgt. Pepper, was an alter-ego experiment, that went not just good but absolutely brilliant. The Travelling Wilburys existed for just ten days, a twinkling of an eye really, but it was long enough to produce a burst of creativity amongst its starry line-up consisting of Harrison himself, fellow Brit Jeff Lynne and transatlantic cousins Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison. They were backed by a session musician drummer called Jim Keltner, saxophone player Jim Horn, percussionist Ray Cooper and one Ian Wallace on tom toms.

Together, the stellar assembly wrote, rehearsed and recorded a celestial theme album fit for the Gods. The Wilburys persisted rather more seriously in the masking of their real identities and creating a myth but of course it came to nought. You can’t hide the distinctiveness of each of these great musicians as soon as you hear them play or hear their voices. But you can benefit from their collaboration, that alchemy that was part fuelled by their musical vision and pasts and infused also with their mesmerising tribute to their rock and roll and bluesy roots. When The Traveling Wilburys Volume 1 was released, it went platinum pretty soon and eventually sold over five million copies.And once again, there was a blood sacrifice. Roy Orbison, a luminous presence in The Traveling Wilburys Volume 1 died suddenly, barely three months after the release, but not before he'd got to know about and savour its resounding success.

There was a Travelling Wilburys Volume 3 too, produced in 1990, probably in deference to Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever reckoned perhaps as Vol. 2 by George Harrison because it too had Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison performing on it, with only Bob Dylan, from the Wilburys line-up, absent. But in any case, Wilburys Volume 3 was orphaned without Orbison’s trembling tenor, that unique pain-filled-Pretty-Woman-sunniness that he had, capable of lighting up not just a recording studio but the creativity of his supremely gifted collaborators.

The astral Orbison would, nigh on twenty years on from those ten days in mid 1988 at Santa Monica, California, it is possible, be satisfied with The Wilburys as a fit epitaph for himself. And come to think of it, maybe George Harrison would see it that way too, albeit with a doff-my-cap to "My Sweet Lord" and "While my Guitar Gently Weeps" and maybe "Here Comes the Sun".

But all of these were songs, of which Orbison also had a bushelful, many hits, but The Wilburys was, in effect, the last hit album George produced, wrote, performed and sang for. And it really was Orbison's last work.

Why else would Olivia Harrison, George's widow, re-release the complete CD set of The Wilburys along with a DVD on the making of this remarkable album, this June 2007, nearly twenty years on?

That it’s gone straight to No.1 in the UK and Australia and No. 9 in America is fitting tribute to its quality and relevance. And till June 30th 2007 The Wilburys had already sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. Its true. Witness yet another generation coming to terms with those ten days of masked magic!

As alter-ego rock and roll albums go, The Wilburys was only reckoned to be No. 70 on The Rolling Stones Magazine's All-Time-Great Albums Chart wherein Sgt. Pepper's occupies the No. 1 slot. It hardly matters, this order of champion stragglers sloping their way along the Yellow Brick Road. What matters is that these beloved pieces of music and their creators are on it, mask or moustache included.

Zorro, Batman, Superman, Spiderman and every secret-identity-Walter-Mitty out there would know just how it feels. Anyway, goodbye Nelson and goodbye Lefty also. Johnnie's still in the basement mixing up his medicine and Jeff and Tom are hanging out the washing. But you guys on the other side, you take care… and thanks for the music… and here’s hoping you’re having a blast as fully-paid-up card-carrying members of The Immortals.

And don't forget to remember us to John Lennon and Elvis. After all, we who flip over the CDs also stand and serve. So don't forget us neither.

Title: It was twenty years ago today…

By GHATOTKACH

Thursday, 19th July 2007

(2,523 words)

This and all other essays on GHATOTKACHSERIES are copyright 2005-2007 by Gautam Mukherjee. All rights reserved.