![]() Pepper cover was itself a nightmare version of The Beatles' gathering. While We're Only in it for the Money wasn't designed as a savage attack on the band, his parody of the Sgt. It was this particular aura that Zappa countered on his record. "There's something depressing about seeing yesterday's outlaw idols of the teenagers become a quartet of Pollyannas for the wholesome family trade." Yet, even as early as 1965, when interviewed by Playboy, John Lennon sarcastically remarked that they were moneymakers first and entertainers second. "Wasn't all this supposed to be what The Beatles were against?" Kael asked. She felt that the problem of commerce undermined The Beatles' image, which by that time, began to change in the wake of all the promotional marketing tie-ins associated with the movie. By 1968, film critic Pauline Kael even shared some of Zappa's distrust when she reviewed the animated film Yellow Submarine. Contrary to the more generous ideals attached to the group, The Beatles' career was more often than not preoccupied by the power of money. I got the impression from what was going on at the time that they were only in it for the money – and that was a pretty unpopular view to hold." "But the whole aroma of what The Beatles were was something that never caught my fancy. Pepper was okay," Zappa remarked to critic Kurt Loder in 1988. So on his 1968 album, We're Only in it for the Money, he decided to go after the fad rather than The Beatles' music. Zappa saw the very concept of flower power evolving into nothing less than a successful fad. But Zappa, who had already been railing against the 19th Century Romantic tradition of music, perceived something sinister lurking beneath the flowers, beads, and incense burning. Pepper had celebrated the romantic ideal, offering the possibility that love could transcend all of our problems. "The most striking difference between is not in their work but in their approach to their work – The Beatles' desire to please an audience versus The Mothers' basic distrust of one." Sgt. Dan Sullivan in The New York Times once pointed up the significant discrepancy between The Mothers and The Beatles. To paraphrase critic Nik Cohen, The Mothers suggested a band of motorcycle outlaws out to pillage your home and kidnap your daughter – though they were more likely to play her Igor Stravinsky (or maybe "Louie Louie") rather than sexually ravage her. This Los Angeles band, who coined themselves "the ugly reminder," may have had long hair but they didn't even come close to resembling the pretty groups sprouting up like flowers in a magical garden. One American artist who did respond to the seismic impact of Pepper, but didn't buy into the hippie ethos that blossomed out of The Beatles' landmark recording was Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. There were many other lesser, now forgotten groups, who attempted to capture Sgt. But because of their bad boy image, the record felt fake (despite its devious title) with its half-hearted flower power sentiments. The Rolling Stones, a mere six months after Pepper, would concoct their own psychedelic conceit, Their Satanic Majesties Request, where they abandoned their R&B roots for exotic Indian rhythms, sound collages, and music hall pastiches. ![]() The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request Days of Future Passed was an evocation of a pastoral mystical innocence worthy of poet William Wordsworth in the age of psychedelia. ![]() The album, which yielded two hit songs, "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights in White Satin," was conceived as a song cycle that spanned an entire day – from sunrise to evening – where every song provided a unique perspective from each member of the group. The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed (1967) developed precisely in the spirit of Sgt. In 1968, for instance, The Zombies ("Time of the Season") matched some of Pepper's technical innovations while adding some rich textures of their own on the exquisite Odyssey and Oracle (which was also recorded, like Pepper, at Abbey Road Studios). Pepper, as if they were trying to decode a secret language. Before that darkness fully overshadowed the utopian spirit of that record, though, many of The Beatles' contemporaries made valiant attempts to duplicate the wizardry of Sgt. Pepper album, a lovely, masterful avant-garde pop confection, also represented a magical retreat from a counter-culture that was on the verge of turning dark and violent. Last summer, I wrote in Critics at Large about how The Beatles' Sgt.
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