CHEAP TRICK: SGT. PEPPER LIVE (2009)
1) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band; 2) With A Little Help From My Friends; 3) Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds;
4) Getting Better; 5) Fixing A Hole; 6) She's Leaving Home; 7) Being For The
Benefit Of Mr. Kite!; 8) Within You Without You; 9) When I'm Sixty-Four; 10) Lovely
Rita; 11) Good Morning Good Morning; 12) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
(reprise); 13) A Day In The Life; 14) Medley: Golden Slumbers / Carry That
Weight / The End.
Okay, so this is the weirdest one yet. As if
the innumerable quotations, periphrases, hints, and other types of Beatles
influence (along with the occasional direct cover like ʽDay Tripperʼ) did not
suffice; as if they needed something very direct, very blunt to confirm the
title of «American Beatles»; as if work on The
Latest stimulated their nostalgia glands to the point where itching gets
dangerously close to bursting — Cheap Trick went ahead and did it, climbing up
on stage and pulling a one-time Phish on us by covering Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in its entirety, in
commemoration of the 42nd anniversary of its release, because who the heck
cares about round dates? The urge is all that matters.
Actually, we learn from the liner notes that
they were doing this as early as 2007 (when there was a round date after all),
first with the LA Philharmonic Orchestra, then with other orchestras in
different venues — the liner notes do not specify when and where this
particular recording was made, but the orchestra is the New York Philharmonic —
including a two-week run at the Las Vegas Hilton in September 2009: a royal
venue for a royal album! Curiously, they did not follow it up with a medley of Elvis hits, as much as some of
the regular patrons would love to hear that, I'm pretty sure.
The choice of Sgt. Pepper was probably quite deliberate — apart from continuing
to exist as the quintessential Beatles / quintessential art-pop record in the
communal mind, it was also the one album that most glaringly symbolized rock
music's transition from stage-based to studio-based: all the innumerable studio
tricks that gave Pepper its otherworldly,
psychedelic sheen could not be replicated on stage, even if somebody had solved
the screaming girl issue. At the same time, Sgt. Pepper was the first Beatles album that was put together as a
continuous, quasi-conceptual suite of songs, with an intro and an outro, and
thus, deserved to be performed as a single piece. And so here we are — who but
Cheap Trick, these reputable «American Beatles» who'd worked so much out of the
direct shadow of their UK predecessors, to try and realize that dream? Particularly
now that they have already realized theirs,
and are left with nothing much to do?
And yet, there's a problem. If they are doing
an «authentic» Beatles-like vision of Sgt.
Pepper, then this record has to be considered a failure, because, honestly,
it does not sound that much like the
Beatles (see below on the major discrepancies). But if they are doing a «Cheap
Trick interpretation of the Beatles' Sgt.
Pepper» — then, in my opinion, they are not offering enough Cheap Trickery
to make it significantly different. In other words, the performance may have
been fun to attend in person, but as an album release, it kind of slips through
the cracks, and does not intrigue me all that much to warrant subsequent
listens.
The songs are, indeed, played as close to the
original as they can be — but within the context of a standard four-piece rock
band, expanded with an additional keyboardist, a couple extra backing
vocalists, and an orchestra. (I don't know who plays the Indian instruments,
but maybe a few members of the orchestra were switching between Western and
Eastern ones); there is no specific goal of perfectly recapturing the Sgt. Pepper ambience, so you don't get much by way of weird effects on the
guitars, and there are no backing tapes whatsoever, either, so you don't get
the kaleidoscopic dazzling patterns on the instrumental parts of ʽMr. Kiteʼ. In
other words, the classic colorfulness of Sgt.
Pepper is here, if not exactly turned to monochrome, then at least greatly
reduced, which only goes to confirm the legend of the album's
irreproducibility (is that a word?) in a live setting (unless you do use
backing tapes, but that's cheating).
Another problem, from that angle, is Zander's
performance. He has to take on the roles of both
John and Paul, and while he's largely doing alright as John (and even as George
on ʽWithin You Without Youʼ), his impersonation of Paul fails quite miserably —
he consistently oversings and adopts a more «rocking» tone than necessary, even
for such songs as ʽWhen I'm Sixty-Fourʼ, and as a crooner, he is not
particularly fit for ʽShe's Leaving Homeʼ, either. I'm not saying that Paul himself always does a great job on these
songs when he is performing them live, but come on now, you just can't have the
exact same person be John and Paul at the same time. They should have really
found a different vocalist for those songs.
Now if you look at it from a different angle —
imagine that this is Cheap Trick's reinterpretation of Sgt. Pepper as would be more fit for, say, a late Seventies
audience (the same one who was instead cruelly tortured by the Sgt. Pepper movie back in the day) —
then the whole thing makes a little more sense, but only a little. Here the
chief point of interest would be Nielsen and his guitar work, as he transforms
the majority of Pepper's guitar (and
not only guitar) styles into variants of his own screechy rock'n'roll idiom.
You get that screechy rock'n'roll style in the coda to ʽLucy In The Sky With
Diamondsʼ, you get it in the jumpy, echoey finale of ʽLovely Ritaʼ, you even
get it on soft numbers like ʽWith A Little Help From My Friendsʼ, with plenty
of distorted block chords, 100% Cheap Trick rather than Lennon/McCartney. Does
it work? Well... maybe, but it's not as if we're adding to the depth of the
original here — rather, we're subtracting from it by reducing too many
different things to the same common invariant. As much as I like the basic
power pop format, it is only when you begin honestly applying it to music like Sgt. Pepper that you truly begin to
dis-appreciate its sonic limitations.
Still, I think we should be generous and rank
the results as at least a tiny notch above
the level of «ridiculous one-time curiosity». At the very least, Cheap Trick's
long history of Beatle-influenced work guarantees that this is not just a posh
cash-in, but a truly heartfelt tribute to their idols. To be fair, I think they
could have done a much better job with an album like Revolver, which was much more oriented at heavy guitar rock than Sgt. Pepper and which, on the whole,
was far more influential on Cheap Trick's entire career (beginning with ʽTaxman
Mr. Thiefʼ) than Sgt. Pepper, but I
guess «Revolver Live» would have
sounded less appealing to people who only remember the Beatles by their #1
album as per the average mainstream rankings. (They do, however, offer us the
final part of the Abbey Road medley
as an encore — so why not throw in ʽTaxmanʼ and ʽShe Said She Saidʼ?). Anyway,
they do have a very close affinity with the material, although, dear friends, there
is no need to rub it in our noses so bluntly — for instance, by boasting that,
this time around, they were privileged to work with Sgt. Pepper's recording engineer himself, Geoff Emerick, to ensure
further «authenticity» of the experience. Really, guys. The only thing missing
was to pull out those Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band uniforms out of
the moth closet — for some reason, they didn't even bother to have their own
copies made.
"they do have a very close affinity with the material"
ReplyDeleteThat's not nearly enough, as any classical musician will confirm. The performer has to find a way to make the material his/her own. It's the only way. That's why Dream Theater's version of Made in Japan doesn't work, while Therapy? backing Bruce Dickinson (yeah, the Iron Maiden guy) in Black Night totally works.
Granted, in the case of Sergeant Pepper that's probably a lot harder than with Black Night.
"a late Seventies audience (the same one who was instead cruelly tortured by the Sgt. Pepper movie back in the day)"
ReplyDeleteMy wife, b. 1969, disowns all rock music pre-1980. The Beatles only exist as pop culture relics in her mind, as does Elvis and any other "oldies/classic rock" act. Case in point: One day I was randomly singing (as I do) "Fixing a Hole" and she blurted out, "Why are singing a song from that MOVIE???" She's never connected with the record. Her only link to the music is Frampton. She'd probably love Zander singing it too, because both were golden-tressed, slenderized demigods in their prime. Alas, that was forty years ago today...