The Beatles’ apocalypse now

Despite appearances, the legendary band saw the 1960s’ heart of darkness and refused to lie about it.

For decades, the Beatles were, without question, the most famous people on earth since Charlie Chaplin. For many, they defined the 1960s themselves, with an early flowering of idealism eventually ending in disillusionment.

The Beatles are normally seen as avatars of the best of the ‘60s: Peace, love, joy, youthful energy, spiritual exploration, the enthusiastic embrace of life. To an extent, this was true. But something else took shape during the period roughly encompassing the albums Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and The Beatles (“The White Album”).

It has been said, including by John Lennon himself, that the Beatles invented very little, but were experts at sensing the anticipatory tremors of popular culture. They could then almost instantly amplify and convey them to a mass audience. From long hair to the drug culture, eastern mysticism, and back-to-basics rock n’ roll, this held true for a decade. 

In only one area, however, were the Beatles genuinely ahead of the curve: The question of how it was all going to end.

The truth is that almost all of the Beatles’ work during the epochal years of 1967 and 1968 is remarkably and in many ways unrelentingly dark. The atmosphere of their albums becomes more and more oppressive, dissonant, and apocalyptic. While moments of the old jolly optimism appear, the overall sense is of a world flying apart. Perhaps because they were at the cultural epicenter of the ‘60s, the Beatles seemed to sense that the upheavals of the moment were not going to end in peace and love. They were going to implode and leave scorched earth behind.

Pepper, Mystery Tour, and The White Album are a nightmarish landscape, laden with surreal and menacing imagery: Billy Shears is waiting to shear you in half. Mr. Kite will stun the world by playing with fire. The Fool on the Hill is going nowhere. The Magical Mystery Tour is coming to take you away, whether you like it or not. I Am the Walrus because I have become pre-verbally insane. The night in which the Blackbird sings is dead. Happiness is a Warm Gun. The overall aesthetic is one of clanking chains and strange rumblings from the basement. The albums sound as if they were all recorded in haunted houses where, in a secret room, lurked an unseen monster. They are, in other words, something like the truth.

II.

There are intimations of this gathering dusk on the album Revolver, such as the droning horror of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which seems to echo out of oblivion itself. But it emerged in full on Pepper. This is by far the Beatles’ most legendary album and perhaps the most legendary album in the history of rock n’ roll. It is, nonetheless, an oddity. Taken separately, none of its songs are notably outstanding, though they all contain remarkable moments. Taken as a whole, however, as it was meant to be taken, the album is of striking quality. 

The sonic brilliance of Pepper’s production cannot be gainsaid. It is a bizarre collage of sounds that, even today, strike one as remarkably free of cliche and—surprisingly for an album that was very much a product of a specific moment in time—undated. To a great extent, the album sounds like its cover. It is filled with innumerable faces and runes of its transient era that remain enthralling despite the passage of many decades.

Pepper is oddest of all, however, in that it is widely seen as the manifestation of a single year: The bizarre interregnum in traditional civilization known as 1967. It was seen then and is seen now as the album of the “Summer of Love,” a monument to the hippie ethos of peace and love. It is hedonistic but kind, altruistic in the most pious manner but without condemnation. It is the “high and beautiful wave” that, several years later, Hunter S. Thompson saw being turned back. 

The irony is that hidden within the flower-power ethos of Pepper is precisely that turning back. Pepper only sounds like the soundtrack of a perpetual summer. Listened to today, with full knowledge of what happened after the wave turned back, it is a dark prophecy; a doom-laden dirge that sounds increasingly sinister as the years go by. Pepper is a stupendously dark album masquerading as a celebration of psychedelic joy. Its legendary producer George Martin said more than he knew when he noted that its coda, which ends in a final catastrophic chord, was “a tremendous build-up, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world.”

The mysterious sense of the uncanny that pervades the album begins immediately, with the band’s introduction. It forces us to ask: What is this band that’s been playing for 20 years, since it is apparently not the Beatles? And who the hell is Billy Shears, that slightly menacing name that evokes a pair of very sharp scissors? From the beginning, Pepper is terribly strange. This cannot but unnerve the listener, who wonders suddenly who and where he is. In what world have the Beatles—the biggest band in history—been replaced with something else?