Listening to the Future. Bill Martin

had a model of sorts in the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, the album on which Brian Wilson, the group’s principal composer, distanced the band from its surf music image. Its lyrics, for the most part, had the emotional depth that the Beatles had been working toward, and its quirkily-structured songs boasted colourful instrumentation and sound effects, to say nothing of the Beach Boys’ magnificent vocal harmonies, which rivalled the Beatles’ own. When McCartney heard the album at the time of its release in 1966, his reaction was, “how are we going to top this?”

      As it turned out, Wilson later said that he was inspired to make Pet Sounds after hearing the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. But Sgt. Pepper brought this creative give-and-take to an end. Wilson’s plan was to respond with Smile, a collection of material lyrically and musically more complex than Pet Sounds, and meant to be as daring as Sgt. Pepper. But Wilson’s excessive drug use (among other personal problems) caught up with him during the sessions, which ground to a halt when he had a nervous breakdown.¹⁸ Nevertheless, for as long as it lasted, the competitive interaction between the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Bob Dylan, and a handful of other rock musicians unquestionably helped transform the best pop music of this time from teenage ephemera into durable art. (p. 154)

      A little while—two years, but two very long years—after the hullabaloo around Sergeant Pepper’s had faded away, the Beatles released what was in fact the last album they made together as a group, Abbey Road (1969). (Let It Be was made earlier but not released until 1970.) This is a record of great maturity, and it is difficult not to look back on it and feel a certain wistfulness—for all kinds of reasons. By this time, the innocence of the summer of love had long ended—quite definitively, in the summer of 1968 in the streets of Chicago—but Abbey Road seemed really to signal a certain kind of end.

      I would like to quote some lyrics here but, frankly, and keeping in mind John Lennon’s legal difficulties over “Come Together,” I would prefer not to give any money to Michael Jackson. My motives are not entirely selfish—indeed, they are a bit paternalistic, because, let’s face it, What good has more money ever done for the King of Pop? This point is actually not as extraneous as it might at first sound, because the opening to the possibility of progressive rock, as well as the closing of this time, has everything to do with questions of money, forms of property, and structures of legality.

      For this brief moment, however, let us contemplate the Beatles’ final great achievement, where something came to an end, and yet where it was still the case that something was supposed to happen next. And in the same moment, let us also remember that 1969 was the year marked by the emergence of the Crimson King.