With A Little Help From My Friends

Can it really have been 40 years since the original release of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album? Memory plays tricks. Things that happened a couple of years ago seem far away and lost in time, but the Beatles are always fresh in my mind.

In 1967 I was in the U.S. Army, serving as a clerk in an artillery battery stationed just outside of Nuremberg, Germany. It was my first real time away from home, my first for-sure time outside of the country. My life was made just a little bit easier by some new friends I'd made, some white, some black. That didn't seem strange to me, even then, because I've never been a bigot, but then I came from a lily-white community where I didn't have an opportunity to be a bigot.

That year was a tough one in the United States (what we GI's called "The World"). There were race riots, and civil rights marches, and political and anti-war demonstrations. We were far away, but yet close enough by our ties as fellow Americans. Armed Forces Radio was heavily censored so we couldn't get much news from them. We could pick up the BBC, and we could hear the then-pirate radio station off the coast of England, Radio Caroline. That was where I first heard songs from Sgt Pepper.

I went to the post PX and picked up the British pressing of the album--I remember paying $2.50--and took it back to the barracks. I'd just bought a small Phillips portable record player which sounded awful, but it was the only thing I had to listen to records, so many of us in the barracks had them. At night you could hear all kinds of tinny-sounding music up and down the hallways of the barracks, soul, white pop, country and western. I didn't announce to anyone I had the album, just went back to the room in the barracks I shared with a couple of other guys, sat on my bunk and started playing the record. Within a short period of time there were several other men in the room, both white and black, listening to Sgt Pepper. None of us said anything, we just listened, right through to the sustained piano note in "A Day In The Life."

I wish I could say I was prescient and thought this was the absolute best thing I'd ever heard, or that I felt transcended in some way, but actually there were cuts that disappointed me. I thought George's "Within You Without You" with its prominent sitar was a waste of vinyl, and didn't care much for Paul's "She's Leaving Home," which I thought at the time was sappy. It took a few more listens before I got into the total groove of the album, but it happened. After that first hearing, when the record was over the other guys left the room. One guy stayed behind to talk about it. My black friends had listened in silence as we all had, but nowadays I wonder if it was a racial thing: that they were listening in on what white boys liked so they'd know what cultural forces were at work in the white community. As an African-American friend once explained to me, "Black people know more about white people than you know about blacks, because we are always paying attention." Or maybe they liked the Beatles, too. They never said.

That was 40 years ago. A whole lifetime. Later there were the albums The Beatles, commonly called The White Album, from which Charlie Manson heard things none of the rest of us did, and has some of the Beatles' finest songs. Then what I considered the Beatles greatest album ever, Abbey Road. I believe both of those albums owed their greatness to the groundwork laid by Sgt Pepper. But they came later, when my Army stint was over. What I most remember about hearing Sgt Pepper for the first time that June of 1967 was that in my barracks room there were 12 ears listening silently and intently to every word and every note that came out of that cheap Phillips record player.

Ciao for now.