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.