How many holes?

It's much more pleasant to think about the Beatles than to think about almost anything else that is in the news nowadays. I was just about eleven years old in 1970 when the Beatles broke up, so most of what I know about their music I picked up in arrears, years after the music was first created and after it was already canonical. By the time I started high school in 1972 the Beatles were already classic. It's odd that things should have worked out that way because I vividly remember being four years old, almost five, when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show, and all my friends were admiring them and their absurd hairdos. We played fake guitar on yardsticks and shook our heads back and forth like Paul doing that hybrid sing/yell "Awwoooooo!" Some time after kindergarten I abandoned the Beatles and took up instead with the Mets. It wasn't until eighth grade that I started paying attention to music again. By then, even though the Beatles had already broken up, they were of course unavoidably everywhere.

What this means is that I came to Sergeant Pepper a few years after it was already established as an Important Statement and a Musical Masterpiece. Once a teenager is conditioned that he is supposed to like something, it's very hard for him to formulate a contrary opinion. I was a typical teenager, which means that the first few times I heard Sergeant Pepper my mind refused to consider it on any terms other than "this is great!" Which isn't to say that there is something wrong with liking Sergeant Pepper. Like most Beatles music it has a certain exuberance and basic happy subtext that sweeps out of the speakers and bobs along, splashing against the brain merrily so that you can't help but walk out humming. But is Sergeant Pepper really so much better than the Beatles' other stuff that it should be viewed as their magnum opus?

I know there is a substantial body of thought that considers the answer so obvious as to make the question seem stupid. "Of course Sergeant Pepper is their masterwork, you nitwit," goes this school of thought. "What else would their masterwork be? Hard Day's Night?" But I really think this view is influenced more by history than by music. Sergeant Pepper was the loudest part of the soundtrack for 1967, the most insistent background music for the legendary "Summer of Love." For someone like me who was way too young to have any idea what the Summer of Love was or meant, the historical aspect of Sergeant Pepper's significance fades. Whatever fondness I have for Sergeant Pepper has nothing to do with 1967 and all the baggage that the memory of 1967 carries with it for so many people. For me, the album has to be judged as a musical work.

On that basis I have to say it's a really good album. Not because the tunes are especially complex or that the words are so deep. The lyrics and melodies are, to be sure, of very good quality -- and the songs fit well together, sometimes complementing and sometimes contrasting. That's not the striking thing, though. What strikes me about Sergeant Pepper as I listen to it now is how much diverse musical history was packed into it and how much of what came later it foreshadowed. It refers to its immediate surroundings by picking up all of the bouncy saccharine of 1960s pop, but does it without having a cloying aftertaste. More interesting, though, it layers on top of the bouncy stuff some otherworldly noises and sounds, and mixes them up with lyrics that run the gamut from the banal to the obscure to the bizarre.

There's nothing I could say about "A Day in the Life," for instance, that someone else hasn't already said before. But because I'm writing about Sergeant Pepper now in 2007, with the benefit of forty additional years of musical history behind us, I can see how deeply it has embedded itself into our cultural soundtrack. The Beatles scavenged sounds from all over the musical universe, used the electronic equipment at Abbey Road studios to incorporate new sonic elements into the music and used even dissonance to make their music.

I'm a big Pink Floyd fan. I've been one since 1973. The best of Floyd's music has a certain majesty and intensity that is irresistible. But some of Floyd's best sounds like the Beatles. "A Day in the Life" could have been on the "Wish You Were Here" album. Floyd's "Free Four" (from the "Obscured by Clouds" album) echoes "With a Little Help From My Friends." And "Lovely Rita" has an air of otherworldliness, with the double tracking and that windy tinniness in the vocals, that would have been comfortable nestled on some of Floyd's spacier albums. Floyd, of course, recorded its greatest work at Abbey Road. It must have been in the air.

But just because Sergeant Pepper was really well done doesn't mean it has aged as well as one would hope, or that it has Beethoven-strength timelessness. Coming back to Sergeant Pepper now, it has a pop feel to it that seems almost incongruous. My daughter is something of a musician - she plays piano - and she grew up listening to the music her dad played in the car. That means a steady diet of Pink Floyd, as you might imagine. But recently I played Sergeant Pepper in the car. She was able to tell it was the Beatles, but didn't know which album it was. I told her, and she was flummoxed: "This is supposed to be the greatest album ever made?" I guess she'll need to listen to it all the way through to pick up the ingenuity of the work, and I don't know if she'll ever do it. But that underscores how Sergeant Pepper was far more influential and striking for the first few years after it came out than it likely will be going forward. Technology has made into pabulum much of what made Sergeant Pepper great. Anyone can do anything with the sounds on an album. It's similar to how Citizen Kane strikes one today as a good movie, but nothing earthshattering: its pioneering touches have now become standards.

That doesn't mean it sounds old, though. Good melodies and interesting lyrics always sound good. So here's to John, Paul, George and Ringo: congratulations on this milestone. Too bad John and George aren't around to celebrate.

Question of the day.

"How come you don't write about sex? When are you going to discuss sex?"

Soon, my friends. I promise.

Stuffed Rodent Heads.

No, that's not the latest underground delicacy or transgressive college food fad. Stuffed rodent heads is my personal shorthand reference to a little pub in the English countryside where I was fortunate enough to visit one summer between my second and third years of law school.

One of the nice things about doing well in law school and going to a high-ranked law school - I went to Columbia - is the almost amazing competition among law firms to get students to come work there. The result is that students at first-tier law schools get recruited very avidly, and the summer between the second and third years of law schools turns out to be a lovely boondoggle for law students. They are wined and dined, given (at times) interesting work, taken out for shows and parties and boat rides, and paid the same as a first-year associate, which back then, in the paleolithic year of 1983, wasn't as rich as it is now, but was still pretty good. In fact, my then-girlfriend and I had a fabulous, luxurious, fun-filled summer for almost no cost at all, which was lousy training for our eventual life together as husband and wife. But that's a tale for another day. The point here is that during the summer I made enough money to pay half my law school tuition for the following year (a student loan covered the other half) and still have some left over to cover a trip to England for ten days. It was a good trip.

I met my friend David at Gatwick Airport, and we spent a pretty hectic week and a half gamboling around Old Blighty. Being young and thus heedless, we rented a car and explored the countryside. (One day I'll write a post about the pleasures of driving on the left side of the street.) Our itinerary covered a bunch of scenic and historic towns far from London, stretching from Stratford-on-Avon to Bath to Stoke-on-Trent and on up to Chester, the Lake District and York, and then back down Cambridge, ending up back in London.

Our first night on the road was spent in Stratford-on-Avon. Being young and relatively penurious, we were willing to forego the pleasures of regular hotels to get cheap lodging. So we set about to find a nice bed and breakfast at the outskirts of town. Since we were good New Yorkers, we could not resist one at the edge of the town that was named "Brooklynne." The proprietor of the Brooklynne inn was a nice woman named Mrs. Barnacle. Unfortunately, when we asked Mrs. Barnacle after dinner what there was to do in the area of Stratford-on-Avon, she had no idea. So we ended up wandering around the outskirts of town and found our way into a local pub.

I don't remember the pub's name but I do remember that pub. How could I forget it? It was very dimly lit. Very dimly. We could see some of the clientele. Some of them seemed not to have moved a muscle in decades and probably had cobwebs under their arms. They all seemed so......... well, so dingy. But the pub itself was a wonder to see. It may have been a few hundred years old, with lots of wood beams and a wood plank floor. The tables lined the walls and spilled into the middle of the big room. The bar itself was a large rectangular affair jutting into the front of the room, with glasses hanging upside down from its top and rows upon rows of taps gracing the space behind the bartender. The guidebook we were using said that the drink of choice in that section of England was called "scrumpy," which was just a local name for hard apple cider. It came in varying degrees of hardness; the maximum one, I'm told, was so alcoholic it almost burned the nose to drink it. David and I stuckwith medium strength.

We sat down at one of the tables near a window. The place was almost deserted except for the immobile denizens at the front, so we had our choice of where to sit. One seat seemed as good or as bad as another because, after all, it's not like there was much of a view out the window -- just the unhurried side street where the pub was located. So we sat down and started on our scrumpy.

Only two sips into the mug I looked up just above head level and realized we were being watched. No, not by a passerby and not by a waiter. There was a stuffed chipmunk head on the wall, and the little rodent's eyes were fixed on us. I had never seen a stuffed chipmunk head hanging on a wall before. A stuffed moose head, yes. A stuffed bear head, yes. But a chipmunk? Who would bother to pay a taxidermist to stuff the head of a chipmunk, much less mount it on the wall? Could it really have been someone's hunting trophy?

Actually, it probably wasn't a hunting trophy. I knew that because, as it turns out, every open wall space had a small stuffed rodent head on it. Not only that, but the stuffed rodent heads were all wearing clothes: each one had a small cap and a little wool scarf wrapped around its dead stuffed neck. There were chipmunks, squirrels, what looked like raccoons, some other varmint-like things. They all were attired in caps and scarves, very colorful caps and scarves, in an array of plaids and tweeds. They all looked solemn. And we were apparently the only people to take notice of them. Everyone else in the place was looking down into their glasses of whatever they were drinking. Apparently they were used to having stuffed rodent heads gazing down at them from the pub walls.

We were young back then and didn't have the nerve to actually ask someone why there were stuffed rodent heads all over the walls. It was England, after all, and from what we had heard the place was supposed to be a bit eccentric.

Looking back on it now, though, the stuffed rodent heads are nothing more than the prime example of "different strokes for different folks." No doubt the cobweb-festooned denizens of the place thought it was perfectly natural to have their drinking overseen by a collection of wall-mounted, scarf-bedecked, haberdashery-wearing furry mammals. After all, they had probably been doing it for years. So why not?

That's why, when I see someone doing something that initially strikes me as unusual, what I immediately think of is stuffed rodent heads.