Review of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) by Eric H — 22 Jun 2009

This is a thoroughly bizzare experience that feels like a significant work simply because it is so evocotive and representative of its time. Almost like it's a historical document. Even the concept of what the movie is feels bizarre. I don't even know what to call it. It seems odd to call it a musical, because that suggests musical theater, and the "theater" part of this equation is clearly not something that anybody cared about.

My best attempt to describe the film is that it is a collection of musicians and filmmakers and performers that happen to be Beatles fans who come together and make essentially a tribute movie. This is somewhat in the vein of Julie Taymor's lovely Beatles tribute movie Across the Universe, except that in that movie, there really was some value put on character and story over the music and production.

The story and characters here are pretty intentionally flimsy. To make a telling comparison, the story here goes through roughly the same beats as the story that Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock tried to tell over the course of its gameplay. In essence in the broad outlines, there's a little band that gets noticed, moves to Hollywood and sells their soul. For Guitar Hero fans, the idea of attaching a storyline to this kind of gameplay was not particularly intriguing and the Guitar Hero franchise eventually abandonded any more sophisticated storytelling attempts in later incarnations of that game. People wanted to play the music, not deal with a story. Any kind of storyline just seemed kinda immaterial.

And here in Sgt. Pepper the story feels about as immaterial. What's striking here is the vast variety of participants here that represent all manner of different popular musical styles of the late 70s. There's Earth, Wind And Fire, there's The Bee Gees, there's Peter Frampton, there's Alice Cooper, and I believe that this movie was the reason why Aerosmith recorded their famous cover of "Come Together.".

And it all highlights a particularly interesting trait about the Beatles. Their songwriting abilities. I've had this discussion with a music fan before. Zeppelin might have been made up of four virtuouso performers that were the best at their instruments, but the Beatles were made up of four of the greatest SONGWRITERS that ever lived. And evidence of the power of their songwriting is that when people cover Zeppelin, only the best performers can make it sound even decent to listen to. When people cover the Beatles, it sounds good even at karaoke level.

And in Sgt. Peppers, we can see further proof of this in that all of the music done over in myriad styles from soul to disco to musical theater to marching band, every song feels totally at home in its new genre, almost as though they were originally written for marching band or musical theater or disco or soul.

Having said all that, the experience of watching the movie is a trying one. Everything feels very dated and out of style and it's clearly a product of 70s culture. And the lack of a storyline makes it difficult to go from scene to scene and pull everything together. But I personally watched it as a distraction from my daily authoring duties at work. I had it on more or less in the background while I was working, and in that context where I was able to ignore some of the more laboriously paced parts, I enjoyed it. I'd say it might be good to put up in the background at a house party or something like that. It certainly is a novelty and it is pretty fun to listen to.