One Last Time On The 50th
Anniversary Of The Beatle's "Sgt. Pepper" Album (2017)-The Class of
1964-Stones or Beatles?
By Phil Larkin
[As of December 1, 2017
under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought
in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site
administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of
some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the
habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books,
political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of
writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate.
After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer”
seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik
Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The
Editorial Board]
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Today I choose not to go
on and on about the recent internal disputes on this site which has led to the
canny and “exile” of the former site administrator, Allan Jackman who used the
moniker Peter Paul Markin when posting, etc., because I have bigger fish to fry
as they used to say in the old days in my Irish Catholic growing up Acre
section of North Adamsville south of Boston. (Allan in a retro piece written well
before all the controversies has given his take on this dispute in a posting
dated December 15, 2014.) Those “fish” meaning in this 50th
anniversary year of the Beatle’s world record bestselling album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the world-historic dispute of that Acre
growing up time about whether the Beatles or the Stones (Rolling Stones) were
the band that fit our moods. “Spoke” to
us although we would have torn each other’s hearts out, or did a huge amount of
“fag” baiting (yeah, we were way behind the curve then on sexual identity issues
even though one of our hang-around guys, the biggest “fag-baiter” ultimately to
our collective shock “came out” a couple of years after the Stonewall Riots of
1969 in New York City and for a while “shunned” him until we wised up a bit mainly
through our own chances in politics and ways of looking at the world) if
anybody had dared to use such an expression in the year of our Lord 1960
something.
I have gone round and
round on this one and by overwhelming general consensus, excepting our leader
Frankie Riley, who tough and smart as he was, couldn’t get us to buy into his
view that the “boys for Liverpool,” meaning po’ boy working class guys like us
were superior to the Stones. And here is the funny part some fifty plus years
later those of us who are still around from that time and still speaking to
each other, including that gay brother (a couple of guys are not for very long
ago reasons but in the baby-boomer male psyche “forgive and forget” was, is, a
tough dollar) having recently gathered together to listen to a ton of Beatles
and Stones material still believe that our youthful opinions hold true. That truth
despite most of us, having survived the “from hunger” neighborhood, wound up having
decent and honorable careers. Even Frankie belatedly to be sure feels that the “angry
young men” Stones still represent best our own anger at our situations in a
world we did not make than the more wistful Beatles. Personal preferences,
time, and whatever youthful angst and alienation obviously mixing up the pot
when comparison time comes around but there you have my take on that still
simmering controversy.
So the Stones “win” that
battle but today I want give a “shout out” especially to those on the Beatles
side about a program on NPR’s Terry Gross- hosted Fresh Air. One day she had, in an encore edition originally aired
on June 1st, the son of George Martin, the guy who produced Sgt. Pepper who for the 50th
anniversary remixed his father’s original album work. For an hour he spoke
about many interesting things that occurred during the original production and
the things that he had done to give the thing a 50th anniversary retooling.
Here’s the link but
listen to Stones stuff before final judgment-okay:
https://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/531040084/50-years-later-producer-remixes-sgt-pepper-to-bring-it-into-the-modern-world
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