By the time I purchased Sgt. Pepper's, I was old enough to have acquired a long list of albums that I wanted to hear because I felt I was "supposed to." Kind of like that list of books "everyone ought to read" that so many of us probably feel haunting us. (Moby Dick, anyone? Finnegan's Wake?)

I listened to the album til my ears turned blue. I played it before sleeping and when I first woke up each day. Much of the artistry on the album probably went underappreciated by me because I'd already heard so many of the studio albums (by other artists) that had followed it. I am an unabashed fan, for example, of The Electric Light Orchestra and The Alan Parsons Project, each of which groups seems or seemed to have grown a taproot straight into the original Beatles energy source.

The lyrics caught my ear at many turns, with grit, with double-entendre, and with beautifully executed images. They still do.

And the songs are fun to sing! I'm not quite old enough yet to side with the parents on "She's Leaving Home," opting still to mentally high-five the girl who goes out with Lennon's "bye-bye" at the end of the song. I still enjoy "Fixing a Hole," and thinking about what it means to fix that hole where the rain comes in "and stops my mind from wandering."

I remember friends walking with me late at night in a Mexican border town singing three-part harmony (we sang killer harmony in those days) to the title song, getting cheers and beers thrown our way, as the party was the order of the day. People kept asking us to sing it again, and again and again we did.

Now, like so many of the classic albums that I was listening to during those days, I don't feel the need to play the thing. I doubt it will find its way to the used CD bin, but I've heard it so much that listening again is like putting on a second shirt.

It seems to me that the most brilliant move the Beatles made in their career was to split up and stay true (more or less) to their word that they would never rejoin unless all four could be in. Of course the music industry would have liked "Sgt. Peppers Part Two" or something, but isn't it the most deliciously tantalizing feeling to think what could have happened if they'd kept putting out more music as a band? Had they done so, perhaps the real result would have been a decline in the later music's vitality, making it more likely that the real strides they made as artists would eventually be overwhelmed by a catalog grown fat and flaccid.

Of course we'll never know, and that, in my opinion, is the pinch of magic that keeps later generations returning to their music. It is a little like the eternally popular story of the artist or actor who died young, trailing mystique and questions of what might have been. Such a story has a way of generating cult-like followings (Cobain, Elliot Smith, James Dean, Monroe, even Kevin Gilbert). What the Beatles managed to do was to tap into that mystique, probably without even intending to.

I've heard people say things like, "if the music they would have done would have sounded like "Free as a Bird" or "Real Love," then it's a good thing they stayed broken up. My own take is to say that while I love the "naked" recording of Lennon banging out "Real Love" on the piano in his New York flat, I find Jeff Lynne's reworking of the song into a tighter "pop" structure, adding in the rest of the boys' parts, to be absolutely irresistable. I truly love that version of that song, and I don't care what blue-eared Beatles purist comes after me as the self-styled taste police.

So the anniversary of Sgt. Peppers found me revisiting "Real Love" as I lugged dirt down to the garden. "No need to beee alone . . . "

Love them Beatles.

Herring405