Tag: music

The Bee Gees vs. … Fascism???

On Sunday morning I woke up out of a funny dream that involved the soundtrack album of the 1978 film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. My first thought after waking was, “wait a minute, was this a film that was actually made, or is this some sort of Mandela-effect thing in my mind?”

I duly verified that, yes, the Sgt. Pepper movie actually exists. I am party to my fair share of conversations about schlocky cinema, but I never hear anyone talk about this one. I distinctly recall that my family owned the double-LP soundtrack album to this movie when I was a little kid, but that was literally my sole reference point for it. It seemed to have been excised from the cultural conversation, for better or for worse.

After this dream, I realized I had to watch Sgt. Pepper. Thanks to the magic of Internet streaming services, on Sunday evening my wife Candi and I sat down and watched it. She was a grown adult when the film was released but she did not even remember it happening. (The effort to memory hole this movie seems to have succeeded!)

Online reviews of Sgt. Pepper are savage, so I was prepared for a bad film. I was not completely prepared for what I saw. It was…a mess, for sure. But it was also a fascinating artifact of late-1970’s entertainment, and it had a surprising political subtext as well.

Let me begin by saying that I am about as friendly an audience for this movie as it could get. I love movie musicals. I never stopped loving the Bee Gees or disco. I like the Beatles and the Sgt. Pepper album well enough (Sgt. Pepper is actually the only one I ever bought), but I am far from a Beatlemaniac. Peter Frampton I can take or leave, but I don’t hate him. I am not scared of high-concept ridiculousness in films. (Case in point: no one else I know is as enthusiastic as I am about Wim Wenders’ five-hour director’s cut of Until the End of the World.) If I can’t warm up to a jukebox musical that recasts discofied Beatles songs as the soundtrack for a morality play about the music industry, who can, really?

In my opinion, the chief problems with Sgt. Pepper come from the flawed structure of its story, not from the acting or production values. I will summarize the story as tightly as I can here, spoilers included. (Content warning: reference below to attempted suicide.)

Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees as Billy Shears and the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (redux).

Billy Shears (Peter Frampton) and his backup band (the Bee Gees) are a revival of the original Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from Heartland, U.S.A. Back in 1918 Sgt. Pepper’s band somehow brought about the end of World War I with the uplifting power of their music. Years later, after the death of Sgt. Pepper himself, Billy and his band take up the Sgt. Pepper mantle, ostensibly representing the forces of peace, love, and harmony in contemporary times.

As the film begins, Billy and company leave the innocence of Heartland, U.S.A. to go to Los Angeles along with their manager, Dougie Shears (Paul Nicholas), at the summons of B.D. Brockhurst (Donald Pleasance, of all people!). In doing so, Billy leaves behind his lady love, Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), to whom he is devoted, but apparently not as much as he is to his music career. The story quickly begins to assume a familiar form: Billy and the band, the disciples of peace, love, and harmony, quickly find themselves seduced by the glamour and fast life of the music industry. They sign a record contract with B.D.’s label BD Records at a drug-fueled dinner straight out of Fellini’s Satyricon. Under B.D.’s influence, our heroes fall in with an all-woman disco/funk band on BD Records called Lucy and the Diamonds (Stargard), who are portrayed as siren-like temptresses (at one point Lucy herself even gets described as “wicked”). Our heroes are quickly on their way to becoming vapid showbusiness phonies when Strawberry Fields shows up to try to call them back to themselves.

So far so good, perhaps. A bit hackneyed, about as silly as an episode of The Monkees, and definitely unfair to Lucy and the Diamonds, but you can see where it’s going.

But then the story leaves the rails almost completely.

After Billy and the boys leave for LA, a certain Mean Mr. Mustard rolls into Heartland on a ramshackle bus. (Frankie Howerd, the British comedian, plays Mustard in his only US film credit.) Mustard, an awkward middle-aged man whose bus includes two robot assistants (!) and a large video screen from which he receives orders, proceeds to corrupt wholesome, upright Heartland via real estate transactions (he opens burger joints! 24-hour mortgage lenders! video arcades!!!!) and develops a genuinely creepy romantic fixation on young, sweet Strawberry Fields.

The height of Mustard’s perfidy, though, is that he, along with his henchman, Brute (Carel Struycken, the giant waiter from Twin Peaks), steal the instruments of the original Sgt. Pepper band (you know, the ones they played to end World War I) from the Sgt. Pepper museum in Heartland. Why? Well, it’s not entirely clear. They seem to have some sort of talismanic significance for the F.V.B. (“Future Villain Band”), from whom Mustard takes his marching orders. The F.V.B. and its fellow travelers have an oft-repeated motto: “We Hate Love, We Hate Joy, We Love Money.” Mustard steals the instruments and distributes them among the main players in F.V.B.’s cabal. When Billy and the boys receive news of the theft, they, with Strawberry Fields in tow, set out to recover the stolen instruments.

The introduction of the F.V.B. and the “recover the talismanic instruments” storyline destroys whatever narrative coherence the movie had, but it also generates, oddly enough, the most compelling sequences in the film. Billy and the band first confront Dr. Maxwell Edison (Steve Martin, at the height of his manic “wild and crazy guy” period), holder of the stolen silver cornet, who runs a clinic of sorts that turns “ugly old corrupt people into handsome young corrupt people.” Steve Martin, as Dr. Maxwell, does an over-the-top version of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” to a chaotic, frankly frightening sequence in which his energized silver hammer converts, at a tap on the forehead, old people in surgical gowns into young, perky clones wearing khaki shirts and shorts and orange neckerchiefs. (The uniforms’ resemblance to those of the Hitler Youth is too great to be coincidental.) The whole scene plays like yet another outtake from Fellini’s Satyricon, which I mean here as a sincere compliment.

Steve Martin’s Dr. Maxwell Edison singing and dancing in front of newly minted Hitler Youth.

Billy and the boys then recover the stolen tuba from Father Sun (Alice Cooper), who is running a sort of brainwashing academy for the newly minted Hitler Youth. They pause to play a benefit concert back in Heartland headlined by Earth, Wind & Fire, but during the concert Mustard and Brute kidnap Strawberry Fields. After a genuinely creepy scene in which Mustard sings “When I’m Sixty-Four” to a bound and gagged Strawberry, he takes her to F.V.B. headquarters. Billy and company rush off (in a hot air balloon, a byword for speedy travel if there ever was one) to confront the F.V.B. itself—played by Aerosmith. During the showdown, Aerosmith does its now-famous cover of “Come Together,” which is one of the two really compelling performances in the film (the other being Earth, Wind & Fire’s cover of “Got to Get You Into My Life”). During the showdown, Billy overcomes the lead singer of the F.V.B. (Steven Tyler), but Strawberry Fields unfortunately dies in the melee as well. The boys, as well as a chastened BD Records cohort, go back to Heartland for Strawberry’s funeral. The band then begins to put its life back together, but Billy, still distraught over Strawberry’s death, climbs onto the roof of a building on Heartland’s town square and—he actually jumps off.

But then. (It’s a huge “but then.” We need to pause over it for a second.) But then the Sgt. Pepper weathervane on top of the Sgt. Pepper Museum on the Heartland town square comes to life! The magical Sgt. Pepper is none other than Billy Preston, who sings “Get Back” as he drifts down from the roof of the museum (on clearly visible wires), zapping Billy with his magic electrified finger, lifting him back onto the roof he just jumped from mid-fall, and to boot curing his inconsolable dejection. As he sings and dances, Preston zaps away the remaining traces of Mustard’s corruption of Heartland and—if that weren’t enough—zaps into existence (I kid you not) a resurrected Strawberry Fields, seemingly none the worse for being dead and reanimated. (For this feat I dubbed Billy Preston’s finger the Magic Finger of Resurrection.) By the end, all is right with the world, and the show ends with a chorus of about 100 celebrities appear to sing the finale/reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Billy Preston as Sgt. Pepper, complete with his Magic Finger of Resurrection.

Suffice it to say that the story is a lot. A lot a lot. It raises so many questions that it doesn’t even try to answer.[1] The movie also has problems of dramatic pacing as well as mediocre acting by people such as Peter Frampton who aren’t career actors. The fundamental structural problem with this movie, though, that makes the other flaws more obvious is that a third of the way through it exchanges, without explanation, one major dramatic conflict—the “seductions of the music biz vs. love and authenticity” one—for another, and neither conflict resolves convincingly or is even seriously tied to the other one. Billy and the gang start the movie on a clear, if a bit overdone, success/fall/redemption entertainment-biz story arc, only to get derailed into a magical (but politically coded) quest against existential evil in which the vile tempters of the first arc are transformed into passively supportive allies. And all of it with minimal exposition, no dialogue, and a Beatles soundtrack!

No movie could have fulfilled such a brief coherently. It’s so incoherent, such a jumble, that I am left wondering how this entire production even happened. No one has undertaken a thorough exploration of that question that I know of, but the answer undoubtedly lies with the producer, the impresario and media mogul Robert Stigwood. Stigwood in effect owned the Bee Gees as well as the rights to use several Beatles songs and wanted to use both to make a buck. (Or, as we would say today, to maximize ROI on his IP holdings.) Anonymous rumors on the Internet claim that the project was difficult to get off the ground: many actors and bands passed on appearing in it, the Beatles themselves had nothing to do with it, and the Bee Gees, smelling a flop, wanted to back out two weeks into shooting. But Stigwood not only had extensive production experience but also a great deal of power and connections from producing Grease and Saturday Night Fever, and so the film made it into theaters. It’s at least mildly amusing, if not baffling, to observe that the character of B.D. Brockhurst, the unsavory record producer atop BD Records, is a not-very-flattering parody of media moguls like Stigwood himself. The logo of BD Records in the movie even transparently recalls that of RSO Records, Stigwood’s music label.

Sgt. Pepper is really two different movies, two different stories, both underdeveloped and sandwiched together uncomfortably. The music-industry morality play storyline is hackneyed no matter how you cut it, but the F.V.B.-cabal storyline is strange and unexpected and generates the best (if most disturbing) moments in the film. Shorn of the music-industry plot and liberated from the mandate to shoehorn the story into Beatles lyrics, that story could have made for a good movie, maybe even a great one. From the perspective of the USA’s descent into 2025’s fascist-inspired madness, the political subtext of the F.V.B. cabal subplot feels urgent. The narrator characterizes the F.V.B.’s goals as: “poison young minds, pollute the environment, and subvert the democratic process.” Dr. Maxwell’s remolding of “ugly, old corrupt people” into an army of Hitler Youth as part of their program incisively portrays the repackaging of old reactionary hatreds and desire for repression into an eye-pleasing package for newer generations. (It felt a bit like the mission of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, honestly.) That a major studio film would portray this dynamic just two years before the advent of Ronald Reagan and his recasting of the conservative revolution, whose shadow lingers large over us still, feels almost prophetic.

Sgt. Pepper is not a good film. But as a cultural artifact, it contains so many bits and pieces that are food for thought. If what you want is compelling entertainment, look elsewhere, but if you want to explore a forgotten episode in cinematic history, you can find it on Blu-Ray or rent or buy it digitally on Amazon Prime.

[1] Just some of the unanswered questions here: Why were the original Sgt. Pepper’s instruments so important that they were worth stealing? Was it the instruments themselves that gave Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the ability to end World War I and make peace? Since we are being this ahistorical, did World War II even happen? Or did the peace and good vibes of the Sgt. Pepper band keep the Treaty of Versailles and the troubles of the Weimar Republic from giving National Socialism a foothold? If Sgt. Pepper’s instruments were so important, why weren’t they better secured—or, even better, why didn’t our heroes take them instruments with them to ensure their success? If the weathervane on top of the Sgt. Pepper museum is really a godlike Billy Preston with the power to undo death itself, why doesn’t he intervene at literally any point in the preceding chaos to set things straight?

September 16, 2025
My Ten “Desert-Island” Albums

The very premise of this post dates me, I get it. Listeners who use Spotify and other music streaming services are awash in about as much music as they can handle at their fingertips all the time. What would it mean to be restricted to… just ten albums? Also, while the “album” isn’t completely dead, I would argue that with the advent of widely-available digital music “listening to an album” is not how most listeners, most of the time, listen to or conceptualize music.

What can I say, though? My music-listening habits were forged in the late 1980’s with the advent of CD’s. Most of my music listening still involves listening to one album from start to finish, even if I am listening to them digitally from my phone. (I only created playlists for the first time a month ago.)

I come from a time, in other words, where the question “if you were stuck on a desert island and could only take ten albums with you, what would you take?” made more sense. Realistically, we stood no better chance of being stranded on a desert island with ten albums and working stereo equipment than we did getting caught in quicksand. At least, though, the first clarifying question we would have asked would not have been, “Hey, do I get to have my phone with me?”

Anyway. In no particular order, my ten “desert-island” albums are:

The Velvet Underground, Loaded (1970)

The last Velvet Underground studio album, and the only one without John Cale, is a lighter, poppier effort than their earlier classics. Arguably it is not their best work. Those are arguments I would be willing to entertain. And yet Loaded is my sentimental favorite, the one I return to over and over again. From the earnestness of “Sweet Jane” and “Rock and Roll” to the ridiculousness of “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” to the urban desolation of “Oh! Sweet Nuthin,” Loaded reaches me in a place that the drug-addled Nelson Algren/William Burroughs vibe of The Velvet Underground & Nico and White Light/White Heat just doesn’t. (Not that I don’t love those albums, much less William Burroughs! It’s just that I have never danced alone in my room to them, whereas—confession time—I have to Loaded.)

Alfred Schnittke, Concerto Grosso No. 1, Quasi una Sonata, Moz-Art à la Haydn. Gidon Kremer, Tatiana Grindenko, Yuri Smirnov, The Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Heinrich Schiff (Deutsche Grammophon, 1988)

Schnittke is the only composer I know of whose music often makes me laugh. To be clear, I am laughing with it, not at it. Schnittke is able to write music with an actual sense of humor! The music on this album is probably his most famous, and it’s Schnittke at his playful best: his “polystylism” gives him resources for packing in virtually every timbre and sonic texture imaginable. To have the audacity to write a “Concerto Grosso” in 1977, and then load it full of John Cage-esque prepared piano, tango, baroque trills and harpsichord flourishes, and much else? The result is playful, histrionic, bleak, daft, and fun in a way that so much classical music isn’t.

Beck, Sea Change (DGC, 2002)

Sea Change makes the list not only because it’s Beck, but because it inhabits a crucial place in the annals of break-up music. The songs reputedly date from the end of a long-term relationship, and to call the overall tone of this album bleak is an overstatement. It’s especially restrained and elegiac in light of the overall gonzo tone of the rest of Beck’s catalog. Is it Beck’s best music? Probably not. But I still come back to the overall emotional space Beck creates on Sea Change as a way of exploring my own emotions about relationships’ endings. I love Adele, but I feel like Beck captures a vulnerability here that Adele’s most famous love-gone-wrong songs don’t.

Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 6 in A Minor, “Tragic”. Vienna Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez (Deutsche Grammophon, 1995)

Man is it hard for me to include only one Mahler recording on here! Half this list could have been Mahler. But if I have to pick one (since that is the rule I set for myself), I have to pick Boulez and the Vienna Philharmonic doing Mahler’s 6^th. First off, the music itself. I am apparently one of the few Mahlerians who prefers the relative classical restraint of his middle symphonies (the 4^th through the 7^th) to the elephantiasis and bathos of, say, the 2^nd and 3^rd. Mahler reaches the pinnacle of this middle period in the 6^th, a relentless, driving colossus of a symphony that well earns the apocryphal title of “Tragic.” And then there is this recording of it, which won numerous awards and accolades after its release. I have heard several recordings of the 6^th by this point, but none of the others have the spaciousness and sonic edge of this one. As a friend in graduate school said, “I listen to it and ask myself: How did they do that?” The rest of Boulez’s mid-90s Mahler cycle on DG is hit or miss (one reviewer, I remember, asked rhetorically, “I wonder if Boulez actually likes this music”; ouch), but the 6^th is a definite keeper.

Vikingur Olafsson, Debussy-Rameau (Deutsche Grammophon, 2020)

I can’t say that I was a big fan of Debussy before hearing this album, not to mention that I had heard virtually no Jean-Philippe Rameau. Olafsson, though, fully inhabits this music, showing that these two French composers, separated by centuries, complement one another. I don’t know if it’s Olafsson’s piano performances or the recording, but this may be the most intimate-sounding piano recording I have ever heard, almost painfully so. It exposes the inner life of the music like the exposed nerve-and-blood-vessel pulp of a tooth.

Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (Blast First, 1988)

I bought Daydream Nation in 1989 on the strength of the song “Candle,” which was either the first or second single to be released from it. I listened to the whole CD and, with the exception of “Candle” and “Teen Age Riot,” the two big college-radio singles from it, it left me cold. I could not comprehend what so many critics loved about this album. I didn’t listen to the whole thing again until my mid-thirties, probably the same age as those critics who loved it back in ’88 and ’89, and I finally got it. The camp drama and overproduction of ‘70s rock meets alt-jazz on Daydream, and the mixture still feels fresh and vital to me. No one ever asks me to explain the United States in the 1980s, but if someone did I would tell them to listen to Daydream Nation and Guns ‘n Roses’ Appetite for Destruction. The entire corrupt undercarriage of 1980s America, its diseased subsoil, its addiction to power and to self-delusion: it’s all in there.

Edward Elgar, Cello Concerto, Sea Pictures, Jacqueline du Pré, Dame Janet Baker, London Symphony Orchestra, Sir John Barbirolli (EMI/Gramophone, 1967)

This is one of those classical albums that always makes the best-of lists, and for good reason: du Pré’s performance on this recording singlehandedly made Elgar’s Cello Concerto a household name (as it were). Only twenty years old when she recorded it, du Pré performed with such confident virtuosity that even almost sixty years and numerous recordings later, many still consider this the definitive recording of the Concerto. Of course, there is no performance without Elgar’s composition, which is probably my favorite Elgar: dramatic and complex. Dame Janet Baker’s performance of the Sea Pictures is certainly fine, but make no mistake, this is du Pré’s show.

Richard Strauss, Tod und Verklarung, Metamorphosen, Four Last Songs. Gundula Janowitz, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan (Deutsche Grammophon, 1974)

Richard Strauss was an egotistical, Nazi-collaborating, antisemitic train wreck of a human being. This needs to be said. And yet, I can’t help but love his music. The real star of this album is Gundula Janowitz’s performance of the Four Last Songs, which will haunt me for the rest of my life. No other performance I have ever heard of the Songs comes close to Janowitz. Metamorphosen is a masterpiece of musical elegy, especially if you can forget for a moment that Strauss likely wrote it to memorialize his feelings on the Allied bombing of the Munich Opera House in 1944. (I mean, there is a lot to lament or criticize about the Allied bombing campaigns in Germany at the end of the war—hello, Dresden? Anyone read Slaughterhouse-Five?—but the fact that Strauss summoned his feelings and considerable artistic temperament to mourn a building feels emblematic of a lifetime of really skewed priorities to me.)

Keith Jarrett Trio, Still Live (ECM, 1986)

I am one of those people who isn’t much into jazz, but I know what I like. Since I bought this double album in 1987 (or was it 1988?), I have loved it. Jarrett and his trio (Jack DeJohnette on drums, Gary Peacock on bass), in a live concert in Germany in 1986, take jazz standards (“My Funny Valentine,” “The Song is You,” “Someday My Prince Will Come”), together with some original Jarrett compositions, then transmogrify them through all kinds of unexplored musical territory. The sonic texture of this recording is astounding—it was a fairly early instance of full-digital recording—and it is engineered to an energetic sheen. Still Live also gives the listener one of Jarrett’s controversial performance tendencies—his near-constant vocalization while he plays. It’s not subtle or otherworldly, like just catching Glenn Gould’s breathing on his classic recording of the Goldberg Variations. No, he grunts, howls, squeals; it’s like someone is forcibly wringing the music out of him. A lot of people find this aspect of Jarrett distracting, but I honestly don’t. I can’t imagine this live album without it—it adds to its irresistible energy. Plus, if John Cage taught us anything he taught us that the ostensibly “non-musical” aspects of musical performance, its accidents and extraneous noises, are an irreducible part of the actual music that gets made. Jarrett’s audibly squeezing the music out of himself is an example of Cage’s insight.

Joe Hisaishi, A Symphonic Celebration: Music from the Studio Ghibli Films of Hayao Miyazaki. Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon, 2023)

OK, there is a lot of sad, dark, and/or heavy music on this list, so let’s end on a (mostly) cheerful note. I love Miyazaki movies, but I have to confess that at least half of my love of them is love of Joe Hisaishi’s music. Hisaishi has been collaborating with Miyazaki on film scores since Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (1980), and I cannot imagine the films without his music. Nothing else quite sounds like Hisaishi to me. In 2023, DG gave Hisaishi an orchestra and the opportunity to rearrange selections from over forty years of film scores, and the results are fantastic. On my imaginary desert island, there is a lot of Hisaishi music missing from this album that I would miss, but this would give me the essentials.

A Concluding Word

I hope it’s clear by now that this exercise isn’t the same as “pick the ten best albums ever recorded.” Not really, anyway. I hope it comes through that I think these ten albums are pretty great, and I would love it if you listened to them because of what I say about them, but that’s not the same as an attempted critical judgment of absolute quality (whatever that is). Rather, it’s another way of answering the question “What albums do I, Brian Cubbage, like the most? Which ones have stayed with me over the course of constant listening and re-listening? Which ones best express what my emotional life is like?” The answer to those questions is a mixture of critical judgment, the limitations engendered of when and where I was born, and the sheer happenstance of when I heard (or really understood) a particular album for the first time.

Many people have a tendency to overidentify with the music they like. There is a truth, though, in this tendency: music can serve as a social handle that we hope others can grab in the right way. Music expresses the texture of one’s emotional life in ways that little else can. Maurice Merleau-Ponty belittled music by saying it was too on the other side of the world to disclose to us the world and perception, which was of course his real cherished interest; it refers to little else but itself.[1] I’m not sure Merleau-Ponty’s take is entirely right. It overlooks the capacity music has to connect us with the inner lives of other people, which is a pretty tremendous achievement if you ask me.

This list, then, is offered in the spirit of anyone who is curious what it is like to be inside my head, what handle you might hold onto to grasp the weirdo who writes all the other stuff posted here.

[1] Perhaps this oversimplifies what Merleau-Ponty says about music a little bit. In a radio lecture from 1948, he accords to music the privilege of disclosing, as Proust said, the world of the musician, and beyond that the “great world of possible music, the region of Debussy, the kingdom of Bach.” But music does little more than that for Merleau-Ponty.

April 19, 2024