Psychedelic Popular Music by William Echard

Author:William Echard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

The Beatles: Part 2

One major theme of this chapter is to see how psychedelic topicality has functioned in contexts larger than a single song. Somewhere in that discussion it would make sense to develop a topical analysis of an entire album, and no candidate makes more sense than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. So a detailed topical analysis of that LP is the main focus of this second Beatles discussion. A secondary purpose is to reflect on what the Beatles represented in the topical field of psychedelia overall. Specifically, I will ask to what extent classicism could be used as a concept for tying together features that made the Beatles distinctive relative to other psychedelic artists in 1967. I mean classicism not just in the narrow sense of drawing from classical music topics but also as a certain kind of psychedelic rock aesthetic: tightly arranged, nonimprovisatory, with a clear and concise approach to form. I also mean for the term to resonate on a sociological level. Classicism in this sense can mean an emphasis on topics that would have been associated with tradition and social order. This would apply not only to classical music but also, for example, to brass bands, music hall, and the way that George Harrison channeled Orientalism and raga rock into a traditional guru-disciple situation through his studies with Ravi Shankar. I am not suggesting classicism as a final conclusion or categorization of the Beatles, but we will keep it in mind as an orienting theme.

Also, please recall that I have decided to include transcriptions in this book for the most part only when adequate transcriptions are not available elsewhere. In the case of the Beatles, sufficiently reliable and complete transcriptions have been collected in The Beatles: The Complete Scores (Fujita et al. 1989). My analysis is going to focus on fairly high-level features, ones that can be summarized in words, so transcriptions are not necessary to follow the argument. But readers wishing to consult some can find them in that collection.

“Strawberry Fields Forever”: Detailed Reading

As a warm-up for the full album analysis, and to demonstrate some typical Beatles topical procedures in a smaller framework, let’s develop a detailed topical analysis of a song originally intended for Sgt. Pepper but ultimately released separately and in advance: “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

For this analysis and the full album analysis that follows, there is unfortunately no way to make the presentation entirely smooth and natural for the reader. This is because the overall analysis needs to be based on a description of many moment-to-moment details, but at the same time the importance and even sometimes the identity of those details don’t become clear without reference to the overall analysis. I’ve decided to proceed by first discussing the small details, and I will divide that discussion up by instrument, since most of the important topics are centered on one particular instrument. After that, I will discuss the overall form and the larger topical features. This order of presentation demands a

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