and kept my mind from wandering

I’m not sure what to make of this announcement. As a studio album, it would have been the pinnacle of conceited folly, but as a radio special, it’s a matter of fatuous inevitability. What has been revealed of the line up so far doesn’t instill me with a lot of confidence, just the anticipation that the end results will be overly reverent takes garnished with a side of ego tripping. (Travis’ major claim to fame, at least as far as I’ve seen referenced outside the rarified realm of the music press, was their mimeographed copy of “Getting Better” that was used in a Phillips commercial.)

If the producers really wanted to pay homage to the legacy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they should have gone wild when selecting the artists. For example, I’d love to hear Neko Case’s take on “A Day in the Life,” or have Underworld or the Chemical Brothers rework George Harrison’s self-indulgent boat anchor “Within You Without You” into something spectacular and different.

This sentence:

The BBC reports that Geoff Emerick, the engineer in charge of the original sessions, will use the same equipment to record the new versions.

…is a fine example of how gimmickry passes as relevance these days. It’s a level of hucksterism on par with a carnival barker’s patter (“The Great Wheredini will now attempt to escape from the same guillotine used to decapitate Marie Antoinette!”) or the sales pitch of Chaucer’s Pardoner when hawking his phony relics. (Speaking of which, who knew that Joan of Arc was an Egyptian human-feline hybrid? I need to get a revised prayer card for her featuring this image.) It’s a marketing ploy masquerading as significance, substance through association.

It’s not like this sort of nonsense hasn’t been tried before. The Beatles cast such a massive shadow over the realms of pop music and popular culture that it’s a given that those threads would be repeatedly picked up and pursued for reasons both noble and exploitive. Nothing can match the 1978 musical, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in terms of sheer crapulent audacity.

For a while, a friend and I were engaged in an intense game of “can you top this” involving terrible movies. While a cheapo Turkish ripoff of Star Wars took the grand prize for all-around ineptitude, its incoherent mix of Islamic platitudes and shag-carpeted sasquatches is still more watchable than Sgt. Pepper’s is. Even as camp, it’s nigh unbearable, and this is from someone who will sit through Xanadu whenever it pops up on cable TV. It makes Skidoo look like Casablanca.

The film is, at its core, a paradox. It’s a celebration of the power of music against the corruption of the music business, but the film itself is as cynical, bloated, and venal as any of the villainous forces depicted onscreen. Each frame oozes pure, uncut 1970’s unctuousness as it attempts to ingratiate itself with the audience through a litany of overproduced and poorly contextualized renditions of The Beatles’ songs. It’s all presented with a migraine-inducing degree of literalness (It’s Maxwell and his Silver Hammer! It’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds! Hey, have you met Mr. Mustard yet? The Egg Man and the Walrus apparently walked out due to a contract dispute) that completely misses what made the original songs so damn interesting.

It also doesn’t help that the film features no dialogue, only the songs and narration (provided by George Burns). As a result, much of the characters’ emoting is done via broad pantomime. It’s a bold directorial move, and one that gives the viewer the impression that one is watching a grade school play performed by a gaggle of hyperactive (retarded?) schoolchildren. Poor Peter “Billy Shears” Frampton fares especially badly on this score, as he chews the scenery with clueless gusto. The Bee Gees just seem kind of confused and sad in comparison.

I’d love to see a deluxe DVD release of the film with an audio track of the director’s instructions during filming: “Happy, Peter, happy! Now sad! Sad! Now drugged! ‘Drugged’, I said, not ‘having an orgasm!’”

So, yeah, the bar has been set pretty low for not creating the worst Beatles tribute ever, but anything’s possible when the Gallagher brothers are involved.

From the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band OST (1978):

Steve Martin – Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

George Burns – Fixing a Hole