{"id":2104,"date":"2011-03-20T17:37:32","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T21:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2104"},"modified":"2015-09-25T20:45:37","modified_gmt":"2015-09-26T00:45:37","slug":"sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=2104","title":{"rendered":"My Pepper Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n

My Pepper Moment<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles (1967), encountered 1967<\/span><\/h3>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Buy it here<\/a>[1] | Lyrics here<\/a> | See it here<\/a>[2] | Sheet music here<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Graduation.\u00a0 Commencement.\u00a0 Moving on.\u00a0 All hopeful, terrifying words.\u00a0 You hope and expect that wherever you\u2019re headed improves on the world you\u2019re leaving behind, and you\u2019re terrified that you\u2019ll wish later on that you could go back.\u00a0 You\u2019re being expelled as though from a womb.\u00a0 The next stage, you know, is likely to put you and your parents in different places, in different households.<\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It has to happen.\u00a0 You and your parents have to disentangle.\u00a0 They need to have their lives be more about them, just as you need to have your life be more about you.\u00a0 On both sides, the \u201cus\u201d of your family identity needs dialing back.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not All About Me<\/span><\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Formally, the date of my own graduation\/expulsion was Friday, June 9, 1967.\u00a0 Actually, the process had begun back on Sunday, May 14 when my stepdad had come down with violent abdominal pains.\u00a0 Over the next couple of weeks, much of them spent in the hospital, he was diagnosed with diverticulitis, a disease of the bowel.\u00a0 He would have to undergo a major resection of the bowel three days before my graduation.\u00a0 His life was going to be more about him at this point, however I felt about it.\u00a0 I might be taking finals, going to honors assemblies and proms and such, experiencing the highs and lows of this inflection in my life; he wasn\u2019t going to be there in my cheering section.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I wasn\u2019t going to be available much to support him, either, I was furiously busy, as absorbed in this final spasm of high school life and my other amusements as he doubtless was with his own uncooperative guts.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This proved to be a moment of transition for him as well.\u00a0 Up till that point, one would have described him as in decent health for someone with his generation\u2019s standard bad habits (born in 1922): smoking, drinking, overeating.\u00a0 He\u2019d had a health crisis with scarlet fever a couple of decades back; he\u2019d done pretty well since then.\u00a0 And he would have stretches of reasonable fitness afterwards.\u00a0 But serious bad stuff kept menacing him from this point onward.\u00a0 This diverticulitis attack was the moment when the Reaper started sizing him up \u2013 and never looked away for long after that.\u00a0 My stepdad kept saying that he thought he\u2019d live to an old age, but be sick the whole time.\u00a0 The prediction was based on grim experiences that began here.[3]<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Graduation Day<\/span><\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to recall how bad it actually was, having him and by extension my mom subtracted from my affairs at that moment.\u00a0 The one place I do remember really missing him was at the graduation itself \u2013 and having the feeling that my mom was just going through the motions of being there.\u00a0 Our parish priest had driven her to the graduation direct from the hospital.\u00a0 There was no one to take pictures (never a skill of my mom\u2019s); I only have this one from the newspaper.\u00a0 (I\u2019m the figure on the extreme left of the top row.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That was one of the reasons the ceremony itself felt rather empty to me.\u00a0 Another was knowing that we were leaving almost nothing behind us; it had been announced that there would only be one more graduating class after ours before our school shut down forever.\u00a0 When you\u2019re leaving a school, you want there to be something to return to from time to time, so as to draw sustenance from and measure yourself against some kind of ongoing tradition.\u00a0 Even if you can\u2019t return, you want what you had and were still to\u00a0be going on for someone, in some form, or some way.<\/span>[4]<\/span>\u00a0 At a graduation, you\u2019re<\/em> supposed to be the one doing the abandoning; it isn\u2019t supposed to be about the school saying with relief: They\u2019re gone!\u00a0 We can close up shop.<\/em>\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The final fly in the ointment for me about that graduation was the awfulness of the music.\u00a0 Our school had a great choir, but the orchestra was an embarrassment.\u00a0 That orchestra, which I\u2019d just walked past a few moments before the news photo above was snapped, was playing that familiar march from Die Meistersinger<\/em>,<\/span>[5]<\/span> very badly.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t feel full of pomp and circumstance with that cacophony going on.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So whatever people might like graduations to feel like, mine wasn\u2019t much.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Vernors With Something Huge On The Side<\/span><\/h3>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The after-party, though, was another matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There had been a series of class parties over the extended goodbye we were all saying to each other.\u00a0 The very last one was that afternoon, at our classmate Dave\u2019s house.\u00a0 This was the last time we would all<\/span>[6]<\/span> be together before you\u2019d have to call it a reunion. \u00a0Dave was not a special friend of mine.\u00a0 I was one of the smart kids, he was one of the jocks, about the fastest runner I witnessed in my brief stint as manager of the track team.\u00a0 Dave was not the greatest student, and not very friendly towards those of us who were.\u00a0 But I was glad to be there, if only because it was a great place to have a party.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Dave came from one of the established mercantile families of Ann Arbor.\u00a0 There was a store on Main Street with the family name, and his home was on a circle that bore the family name too.\u00a0 There was a large pool in the back yard, and he\u2019d set up (or maybe the family just had) a real live soda fountain to help us beat the June heat.\u00a0 I still remember that fountain with longing.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To explain this, I first have to explain <\/span>Vernors Ginger Ale<\/span><\/a>,<\/span>[7]<\/span> to the extent anyone can explain it.\u00a0 Though I can now buy a product by that name in Baltimore, the true Vernors was a Detroit thing, an intense, pungent ginger-and-vanilla experience, heightened by the deliberate overcarbonation of the beverage.\u00a0 And if you happened to put that overcarbonated treat in a soda fountain beside a pool on a hot summer afternoon, it made for indescribable wonderfulness.\u00a0 You more inhaled it than drank it, especially if you knew to spritz in only shallow drafts.\u00a0 The foam gave you all the flavor and little else.\u00a0 I believe there were other flavors in the fountain, but I only had eyes for Vernors.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So there I was, drowning my sorrow in Vernors, and then someone turned on the record player.\u00a0 That was my first opportunity to hear Sgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band<\/em>.\u00a0 The U.S. release of the album had been either June 1 or June 2.<\/span>[8]<\/span>\u00a0 So the album had been out a week.\u00a0 I might have heard something of it on the radio, but there were no singles from it in release.\u00a0 The album came out only as an album, the only right way for it to be heard.\u00a0 So I\u2019m pretty certain that up to this point I\u2019d only heard of<\/em> it, not heard the thing itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most critics call this the single greatest album of the rock era.\u00a0 I agree about that, but sheer abstract greatness was not the quality that made the first hearing unique for those of us sitting around that pool.\u00a0 What struck me, and don\u2019t think I was alone, was how strange<\/em> the album sounded.\u00a0 It starts with an orchestra tuning up in a concert hall against a background of crowd noises, not a very typical way for any production in the world of rock to have started.\u00a0 As the vinyl rotated, we heard a whole lot of other stuff we\u2019d seldom or never heard before: merry-go-round pipe organ sounds, sitars, an orchestra doing chromatic upwards slides, foxes and hounds, string chamber ensembles.\u00a0 We heard lyrics about things no one else was lyricizing about: a young woman leaving home, getting old, meter maids, and whatever Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds<\/em> might be about.\u00a0 Picking up the album cover (and I remember I did that) was to encounter things we\u2019d never seen before: a group shot that included the Beatles dressed up in Victorian band-leader uniforms and waxworks of the Fab Four, Marlene Dietrich, a bust of Oscar Wilde, Laurel and Hardy, you name it.\u00a0 The interior opened up to reveal a closeup of our heroes as the band-leaders against a harsh gold-yellow background.\u00a0 The back had them awash in scarlet with all of their lyrics (not a common thing in those days.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Did everyone instantly drop everything and listen?\u00a0 No, it was a pool party.\u00a0 Did anyone ignore it entirely?\u00a0 I can\u2019t speak for everyone there, but I seem to recall a lot of dumbfounded comments.\u00a0 Those who were paying any kind of attention knew that they\u2019d have to pay a lot more attention, later on, that we\u2019d all have to listen to\u00a0it several times to get out of it a reasonable helping of what the album had to offer.\u00a0 But hey, we had the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That was the beauty of the moment for us.\u00a0 We had the time.<\/em>\u00a0 No more teachers, no more books.\u00a0 No more living at home.\u00a0 No more anything familiar.\u00a0 In our first official post-high school moments we were being offered something original, something we had not encountered before.\u00a0 It was bright and shiny and challenging and exciting.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I remember little else about that party.\u00a0 I do remember hearing that record, though, and feeling great.\u00a0 We were leaving home, bye-bye.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 This links you to a CD.\u00a0 So far as I know, the only downloadable version as of this writing (March 2011) is on iTunes.\u00a0 But I have no direct link for that.<\/p>\n

\n

[2]<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 This version actually uses the music of the reprise rather than the opening cut of the album.\u00a0 However the quick montage of Pepper images is remarkable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/span>\u00a0 My stepfather died just shy of his 76th<\/sup> birthday in 1998.\u00a0 Age being such a relative thing, you can make up your own mind whether the first part of his prediction came true or not.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019m called to mind of the ending of the second of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, The House at Pooh Corner<\/em> (1928):\u00a0 \u201cSo they went off together.\u00a0 But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.\u201d\u00a0 In one sense it\u2019s a beautiful lie.\u00a0 Christopher Robin stops being a child, grows up and dies.\u00a0 He plays nowhere now.\u00a0 In another it\u2019s very true; by the magic of his invocation of a lovely moment in a boy\u2019s preadolescence, A.A. Milne has created two books that will enable other children, especially boys, to live for a while in that safe, amusing imaginative realm, probably for as long as there are readers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[5]<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 To hear it performed as intended, download here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[6]<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 When I say \u201call,\u201d I\u2019m guessing with a great degree of confidence that a few of us wouldn\u2019t have been there.\u00a0 Unfortunately, there were one or two kids who had been singled out, by the cruelty of which young people are so capable, for mistreatment by almost everyone to some degree.\u00a0 It may have been aspects of their bodies or their personalities; whatever it was, our treatment of these kids was inexcusable.\u00a0 At our 20th<\/sup> reunion in 1987, a classmate of ours reported that over the intervening years he had run into one of these \u201cgoats,\u201d who had wanted nothing to do with him.\u00a0 The classmate commented that we had collectively been cruel, and if he\u2019d been the former \u201cgoat,\u201d he wouldn\u2019t have wanted anything to do with him, either.\u00a0 We saw one of these kids at one of the reunions (our class \u201creunes\u201d a lot), but basically they have turned their backs, and who can blame them?<\/p>\n

And what was my own part in all this?\u00a0 So far as I can recall, I never participated in anything like persecution, but I didn\u2019t do anything about it either.\u00a0 I never tried to befriend these kids.\u00a0 I dealt with them where it was called for, but that was it.\u00a0 In my defense, the class I joined as a ninth-grader had mostly been together for eight years at that point.\u00a0 The roles of persecutors and victims had long since been set.\u00a0 I do not to this day think I could have achieved anything.\u00a0 Should I still have tried?\u00a0 Yeah, I think so.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[7]<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 You can see an apostrophe in the logo.\u00a0 Somewhere along the line, the apostrophe got dropped from the name.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[8]<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0 My sources differ.\u00a0 Ian MacDonald\u2019s ferociously knowledgeable book<\/a>, cited before, says, at Page 232, that the date was June 2.\u00a0 Allmusic says<\/a>, on undisclosed authority, that the date was June 1.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except commercial images<\/p>\n

Theme Songs Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Theme Song<\/a>\u00a0| Next Theme Song<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those who were paying any kind of attention to Sgt. Pepper on that hot afternoon knew that they\u2019d have to pay a lot more attention, later on, that we\u2019d all have to listen to it several times to get out of it a reasonable helping of what the album had to offer. But hey, we had the time. That was the beauty of the moment for us. We had the time. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,968],"tags":[2411,2455,2446,2350,2443,2449,2445,2452,2442,2448,2053,2454,2444,2451,1548,2453,2054,2447,2305,2441,2457,2450,2456],"class_list":["post-2104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-closeup","category-theme-songs","tag-2411","tag-a-a-milne","tag-bad-habits","tag-beatles","tag-commencement","tag-die-meistersinger","tag-diverticulitis","tag-fab-four","tag-graduation","tag-grim-reaper","tag-ian-macdonald","tag-laurel-and-hardy","tag-leaving-home","tag-lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds","tag-marlene-dietrich","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-revolution-in-the-head","tag-scarlet-fever","tag-sgt-pepper","tag-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band","tag-the-house-at-poor-corner","tag-vernors-ginger-ale","tag-winnie-the-pooh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2104"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5485,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2104\/revisions\/5485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}