Is Sgt Pepper Prog?

Message Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic

 ExittheLemming wrote:

 Dean wrote:

To understand why Sgt Pepper is held in such high regard, and why In the Court of the Crimson King is considered to be the beginning of Progressive Rock, we have to take a step back and define exactly what we mean by "first". We often take it at its literal meaning when its use isn't quite that precise or accurate. English is like that, we seldom use words for their precise literal meaning - I'm not literally dying of thirst nor am I dying in any figurative way, but a cup of tea would be most welcome at this moment in time. When we stake a claim of something being the first of some-such we know that this doesn't have to be chronologically the first or even the only instance in at any given time. We are simply acknowledging that this is perhaps the first example of something that people remember, or it was the first occurrence that garnered a notable measure of attention at the time, or sometime later. Once that thing had been noticed by virtue of the whatever it is that brought it to the public eye it may be possible to use that as a yardstick to measure earlier, lesser known examples of the same thing, but they will never be regarded as "the first".
In the case of ItCotCK there are a number of albums released before it that can lay claim to being Progressive Rock, some in their totality and others just in part but this was the album that made people stop and take notice. That's not to belittle, ignore or overlook those other album because most of them (at least those mentioned thus far) have not been forgotten and their importance has not been disregarded, many of them were well-received and popular from their initial release but none of them were regarded as Prog Rock (or containing elements thereof) until after ItCotCK's release (some many, many years after). What ItCotCK contained was a recognisable paradigm-shift away from the norm in the underground music scene that had spored many great albums in the later half of the 1960s. What it represents is a convergence of ideas that had been brewing away in disparate corners of the scene and the result was something that couldn't be easily categorised at the time. ItCotCK was not the first, but it was the first that people recognised as being different to everything else. Earlier albums may have been just as ground-breaking but they were readily accepted as belonging to a collective trend in music that was evolving out of the post-hippy rock scene. ItCotCK and 21st Century Schizoid Man in particular came as a punch in the face of all that, arriving as it did at just the right moment in time when just such an album was needed to mop-up the "summer of love" aftermath and a return to the realities of real life. Other albums such as Ars Longa Vita Brevis may have preceded ItCotCK chronologically but they didn't have the same impact or effect and without ItCotCK they wouldn't be regarded as Prog Rock at all. (and let's get real here - The Nice made their mark with Five Bridges, not Ars Longa Vita Brevis.)

What we have with Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles is more or less the same. They were not the first band to write all their own material but they were the first to make it the accepted norm among pop groups [breaking away from the Tin Pan Alley approach]; they weren't the first to utilise every aspect of the studio as a creative tool but they were the first that the record buying public really noticed; they weren't the first band to record albums as being more than a vehicle for their chart singles but they were the first to popularise it. The Beatles grew up in a very short space of time from an early sixties "boy band" beat combo to serious (or semi-serious) pop-rock band that kept pace with their adolescence fan's growth into middle and late-teen maturity - that they don't appeal so much to people who where born in the sixties and later should therefore come as no great surprise. What was a first for the Beatles in that time was also a first for their audience, and since the Beatles were bigger than every other band around then so was their audience. Sgt Pepper in this respect is a coming of age album where The Beatles asserted themselves as grown-up versions of their earlier "four young lads from Liverpool" image, but more on that after this short digression...

There is a hell of a lot of tosh written about the Sixties, none of it particularly accurate and most of it exaggeration and hearsay. The adage "if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there" (or paraphrases thereof) being the biggest fib of all - if you were there and can't remember them then your testimony is questionable at best. The vast majority of the record buying youth were not hippies or freaks (those wastrels were hardly likely to be buying records anyway), they were normal folk who either went to school clutching copies of Record Mirror and The New Musical Express or had regular day jobs so they could earn money to spend in record shops and fashionable boutiques, and attend gigs in evenings and weekend. [There was a lot more to the gig scene back then than just the big-name venues and festivals that get remembered now]. Those are the youth who bought Sgt. Pepper, and they are the record-buying public that made those 'underground' albums popular. Can they remember the Sixties? Of course they bloody can. Did they recognise Sgt. Pepper as something special? Of course they bloody did. What we can say about them with a fair degree of accuracy is, like us die-hard prog fans today, they were incredibly knowledgeable of the music scene at the time. They read the weekly music papers and magazines from cover-to-cover because that was all there was, copies of each publication would get passed around common rooms, staff canteens and youth clubs. And they listened to the radio. While a lot of hot air and noise is made about FM stations in the US, most of that is inconsequential because it was too localised - tiny stations broadcasting line-of-sight transmissions to a limited audience. Here in the UK underground music was on national radio (albeit late at night but that's the only time this knowledgeable record-buying youth would listen to it anyway) with programmes such as The Perfumed Garden and Top Gear playing the kind of music that wouldn't get broadcast on daytime programming but was widely reported in all the weekly music papers. While a teenager growing up in the sticks would be unable to see their favourite underground band playing live in The Marquee or The Roundhouse in London, they could hear them on the radio and read about them in the music press and thus buy their albums in Woolworths and Our Price.

So... with Sgt Pepper we don't have (one of) the first Prog Rock albums, or (one of) the first concept album-that-isn't-quite-a-concept-but-it-is albums, we don't see any real ground-breaking developments in music that hadn't been seen before or the incorporation of any wacky out there left-field music genres that hadn't already been used previously in pop music. Yet it is universally accepted as being a ground-breaking album that changed the face of pop and rock music pretty much from the day of its release [as measured by Jimi Hendrix playing his version of the title track live on stage three days later as Harrison and McCartney watched from the wings]. What we have with Sgt Pepper is a culmination of lots of different unrelated elements converging onto a single moment in time (exactly like ItCotCK). All those components existed on other albums but they all converged on Sgt Pepper at the right moment when the audience was at their most receptive for change. 

At this point I should address the 'Tron issue thing: There is no 'tron in Sgt Pepper (although as Alan has noted there is some on Strawberry Fields Forever) and nor should there be because you have to remember what the 'Tron was invented for, which was to replace the costly studio orchestra that many bands couldn't afford to use in their recording sessions. While a couple of the Beat-less bought the new fangled instrument they didn't need to use them in the studio simply because if they wanted flute, trombones or strings playing on their tracks they'd employ someone to play the real acoustic instrument.  Ironically, because they'd then apply studio treatment to those acoustic recordings sometimes the end result sounds more like a 'tron than the real 'tron did. It would take later albums like ItCotCK to elevate the 'umble 'tron beyond its usage as an ersatz orchestra replacement to an bona fide instrument in its own right.

Love it or loathe it, and it has to be said, from my personal view there is a lot on Sgt Pepper not to like and very little that I do like, it is easy to be dismissive of large chunks of the album when each track is taken individually and with little regard to context. Contextually the theme of Sgt Pepper (and the double A-side single that accompanies it) isn't that far removed from the overall concept of it (which is hardly surprising) - it's grown-up album that takes small musical steps forward but thematically it's making longing looks backwards as it is an album of nostalgia for a time that never quite existed. In that respect it's as though the Beatles themselves were wishing for a present that harks back to their past, for even when they are being optimistic there remains a glint of cynical pessimism  ("It's getting better all the time .... it can't get no worse"). That the Lonely Hearts Club Band is a brass band reflects McCartney's childhood and the beginnings of his musical education, similarly the music for Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! recalls the music of fairgrounds and circuses from Lennon's youth although lyrically it's based on an English circus poster from 100 years earlier (sorry José more Fanque and Well's than Barnham and Bailey - although musically in England it would have been Smart and Chipperfield that inspired the Beatless, and of course the fairground in Sefton Park, Liverpool). The reason for all this nostalgia was not just the Beatles trying to escape the claustrophobia of fame, that alone would not have caught with the record-buying public, but that was a reflection of what was happening in London, the UK and Europe at the time. By the mid-sixties the post-war optimism was wearing thin, especially with the teenagers who had suffered the hardships of the post-war period without experiencing the grim reality of the war itself, they too wanted the childhood that had been denied them. In Germany this would give rise to the dourness of Krautrock (following a generous push from London psychedelia, including from Sgt Pepper itself), in Carnaby Street and on The Kings Road this saw a revival and reinvention of Edwardiana and Victoriana, and unlike its American counterpart the English Psychedelic scene revelled in this whimsical arty nostalgia as escapism and fanciful fantasy excursion, but always with an unnerving sinister undercurrent, the aftershock of something unpleasant, either past and impending. 

This was the melting pot from which Progressive Rock was cast. I (infamously perhaps) have argued strongly that Prog Rock would never have arisen in America, and this is why. Sure some American bands did things that are the similar to the point of being practically the same but they never came to anything because the catalysing environment wasn't there to propagate them - unlike in the UK, Germany, Holland, France, Italy and Sweden where the wind-blown seeds of Sgt Pepper, together with Ars Longa Vita Brevis, Shine On Brightly, Piper at the Gates, The Soft Machine and Days of Future Past, and of course In the Court of the Crimson King, would germinate into something else entirely. 

Have to agree with pretty much all of this, especially the futility and delusion of 'firsts by chronology' part. (Very perceptive insight) Not sure what you mean as the source of the 'dourness' of Krautrock though: Do the losers have post war optimism? Reading the journalism of Ulrike Meinhof at around this time made me think that German youth resentment stemmed from the belief that many of the lower ranking officials in the Nazi regime were still in power and not held accountable for their past

Ditto and great post Dean.
Regarding the last bt of your post Iain, I too have read quite a few interviews with folks from the Krautrock "scene" and most of them tell of the same thing. What little money the country had (post WW2 after having been bombed back to the stone age) did not go to new teachers. What up and coming musicians then faced at school were music teachers who believed the schlager to be god's private ear-lotion. 
Now if there is anything worth rebelling against in this strange world of ours it is surely the German take on muzak. Krautrock needed to happen imo - hell it could go a couple more rounds right about now. Schlager is huge in certain parts of Denmark (Jutland, where I'm situated, being one of the hotspots)