It’s Getting Better All the Time: 50 Years of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

I was probably around 12 years old when I got my first copy of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, perhaps just a little earlier.

That’s the age -- 12 -- of the protagonist in my new novel Obsessica. Have had some more readers and a couple of very nice reviews over on Amazon since the last time I brought it up over here. I’m actually in the middle of getting the ebook version together, and also have some other plans to promote it a little more going forward -- more on that soon.

I was chatting with someone about the book and stumbled into an observation about 12-year-olds. It’s an idea that might well have come from the narrator of Obsessica, who is writing as an adult about something he experienced when he was that age.

“We’re all 12, really, or thereabouts,” I said. “That is, there’s a point in there somewhere before we’ve grown up when we become who we end up being, and no matter how much we change after that we can’t really leave behind that first-finished-draft of ourselves.”

If that’s true, it matters that I was around 12 when I first listened to and loved Sgt. Pepper.

Later I would learn more about the Beatles, reading books and like many engaging in a kind of protracted study of every little detail of their history, including all things Sgt. Pepper. But well before that more intellectual engagement took place came the deep impression caused by many, many listenings back when I was a kid -- back when the record, like other things I experienced, inevitably became part of who I am.

I love the songs. All of them. And the idea. During their first few years of recording and performing, the Beatles provided a kind of template for the whole concept of a “band” (at least in the realm of popular music). Then with Sgt. Pepper they invented a fictional version of themselves to enable even greater experimentation.

They were already larger than life by then. But Sgt. Pepper was an even greater revelation -- about what the Beatles could do, and about what could be done by others, too.

In the title song, Sgt. Pepper is a character described as having “taught the band to play.” Like a mentor or muse or something. Which, of course, is what the album has served as for countless bands and musicians and people who yearn to be creative in other ways.

People talk about it being a “concept album” which it is. To me the analogue is a short story collection like Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio, Nine Stories, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Different episodes, different characters, different moods, all connected by common thematic threads relating a particular ethos and vision emanating from the artist.

Sgt. Pepper features a variety of characters and voices and perspectives, complemented by the many different styles -- rock, blues, music hall, psychedelic, vaudeville, classical, traditional Indian, avant-garde -- all made to fit inside so-called “pop” formats.

The variety was more than enough to stimulate my still forming brain, with the record almost feeling like one “novelty” song after another. It’s rocking and relaxing, moving and melodramatic, catchy and complex, funny and frightening.

I suppose it’s true that an impressionable 12-year-old probably experiences these things more deeply than a cynical adult. But there I was, listening to Sgt. Pepper over and again on the stereo console, ensuring that decades later I’d still be thinking these thoughts and feeling these feelings when listening again.

I’ve written here about the Beatles many times before, including telling the story of my father playing the Red and Blue albums on eight-track player that came with an old Plymouth Valiant, and going with Vera to see the Cirque du Soleil show Love, and going to see Cheap Trick perform the whole of Sgt. Pepper, also in Las Vegas.

And (I must not omit) describing the card game I invented last year called “Sgt. Pepper,” a Badugi variant. Here are the complete rules:

Pulling out my Sgt. Pepper LP today, I’m finding tucked inside a copy of the fan mag The Beatles Monthly, dated June 1987. Yes, I’m old enough to remember when it was twenty years ago today the Beatles released their album that begins with the lyric “it was twenty years ago today.”

And now it’s fifty years ago today, the LP being released in the U.K. on June 1, 1967 and in the U.S. the next day. And everyone is listening to and talking about Sgt. Pepper and acting like kids again.

And I’m setting the needle down to listen -- again -- knowing even before the orchestra starts warming up that it’s guaranteed to raise a smile.

The Biggest (Friendly) Game in Town

I’m trying to remember just how many Cirque du Soleil shows Vera Valmore and I have seen.

Having spent a number of summers in Las Vegas with the WSOP -- with Vera coming out to visit each time -- I know we saw a few. I believe O was the first, then Mystère. And of course Love, the Beatles one. There might have been one or two others in there, but I forget.

Was thinking about those shows again today while reading the story of Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté announcing this new “Big One for One Drop”-branded festival of cash games and tournaments scheduled to happen in October, called the Monte Carlo One Drop Extravaganza.

The marquee event will be a third “Big One,” albeit this time the tournament will sport a €1 million buy-in (even more the the $1 million buy-ins for the first two). Again a big chunk of each buy-in (€111,111) will go to the One Drop charity, and once again the entries will be capped (at 48 players).

A key difference, though, is that professionals won’t be allowed to enter the event, with the plan being instead to reserve all spots for “recreational” players -- i.e., the businesspersons and philanthropists who have made up a percentage of the previous “Big One” fields.

“Right now there is no poker tournament in the world of this magnitude that is strictly for recreational players,” Laliberté told PokerNews, using a decent-sized magnitude of understatement. The pros will be welcome to play the side events and cash games, but the main event will be strictly for amateurs.

It’s curious to think whether such an event will be as interesting to follow with no “name” pros in the field (although there will be some familiar folks in there, for sure).

Again, I think back to those Cirque du Soleil shows. All were highly entertaining, although to be honest I don’t recall coming close to being “moved” at all at any of them. Each had somewhat abstract themes and/or messages (with “Love” being the most obvious example), but each was also more or less overwhelmed by spectacle -- thrillingly so, mind you, but in an ephemeral way, at least for me.

This rec-only million-euro tournament seems like it’ll be a similar spectacle, without too much deeper meaning in terms of its place in poker’s story and developing culture. About that I could be wrong, though. And of course, the charity component ensures it will have meaning beyond poker, for certain.

Will be curious when it comes around. Laliberté usually does put on a good show.

(EDIT (7/13/16): Looks like the schedule for the sucker is out now -- you can see it here.)

Image: Laliberté during a press conference at the Johnson Space Center, public domain.

2009 WSOP, Day 29: Mystère

I signed off yesterday saying something about relaxing “poolside” with Vera Valmore (here visiting for the week). Was cloudy most of the day, and during the afternoon came a torrential downpour, meaning nobody was doing much of anything poolside yesterday. Much nicer today, though, so I think we’ll really, genuinely make it out there for some fun in the sun.

Last night, while Jeff Lisandro was winning his third WSOP bracelet of the summer (in Event No. 44, the $2,500 Razz), Vera and I trucked over to Treasure Island for dinner and to see another Cirque du Soleil show, this time Mystère. We’d seen both O and Love before, and this one followed the formula fairly closely, offering once again that surreal mix of dance, ballet, gymnastics, acrobatics, trapeze, and occasional slapstick. Fun stuff, to be sure. (This here two-minute trailer gives a good ideer what we’re talking about, if yr curious.)

Another part of the formula for these shows that was given a little more attention in Mystère than in the others we’ve seen has to do with audience involvement, whereby some of the characters of the production pull spectators out of the crowd and interact with them, with a couple even being brought onto the stage to become “characters” in their own right, playing roles in the nonsensical narrative.

I’ll admit that while watching the show last night I was thinking there was something incongruous about the more serious-minded dance/gymnastics numbers and these little comic interludes. Neither really immediately seem to “mean” much at all, and whatever they meant, I wasn’t really picking up on what they had to do with each other. I’m not saying that sensing such incongruity made the performance less entertaining -- just harder to respond to intellectually.

Vera made some good points to me afterwards, though, that kind of explained how all the parts indeed served a greater whole. She noted how those interactive elements forced the audience to engage a little differently, which kind of fits with Cirque du Soleil’s thematic emphasis on creativity and imagination. Indeed, on their website one reads that “Cirque du Soleil’s mission is to invoke the imagination, provoke the senses and evoke the emotions of people around the world.”

Those bits with audience -- in which one could literally be unexpectedly taken out of one’s seat at any moment -- made it impossible, really, to sit there passively and not respond to what was happening. “No one dared to take out their iPhones or Blackberries to check their messages or friends’ status updates,” explained Vera. She added that she appreciated the effort made to engage the audience in this way, because really, they could’ve gotten by without doing so -- the dancing and jaw-dropping-how-the-hell-did-they-do-that performances were plenty engaging on their own.

Vera’s explanation made me think a little about the WSOP and how it attempts to engage its audience -- both online and live at the Rio. There’s a lot of energy being directed toward that effort, too, I think, that shows Harrah’s understands you can’t just put on a poker tournament and expect throngs of fans and other interested folks to come follow along.

Of course, sitting in the bleachers watching a WSOP final table is probably never going to “provoke the senses” quite like a Cirque du Soleil show can. Although it can certainly “invoke the imagination” and even “evoke the emotions,” I think. And for anyone hopeful of finding and keeping an audience, it is important always to think about how best to keep ’em engaged.

I’ll be back over at the Rio tomorrow, trying to keep people engaged with Event No. 50, the $1,500 Limit Hold’em Shootout, which I’ll be covering Friday through Sunday. Looks like they’ve capped that one at 1,000 entrants, meaning the person who wins that bracelet will need to win just three one-table sit-n-go’s.

Meanwhile, my plan is to spend most of today relaxing au soleil with Vera by the pool. Very passively.

2008 WSOP, Day 29: Love

Well, the Love show didn’t disappoint. Definitely one of the more entertaining spectacles of the many from which to choose here in Las Vegas.

Have written here before in praise of the Beatles. Grew up listening to them. Learned to play guitar from a Beatles songbook. Long ago committed all two hundred-plus of those tunes to memory. (Like a lot of folks, I imagine.) Also had someone pass me the Love soundtrack a couple of years ago when it first came out, so I was additionally aware of how for the show the songs had been recombined, sometimes quite ingeniously, so I wasn’t necessarily surprised by any of that at the performance.

The show’s form resembled that of the previous Cirque du Soleil show Vera and I had seen, O. Lots of high-flying gymnastics-slash-modern dance supplemented throughout by various, clever machinations to redistribute the set design. There were a few dozen “characters,” none of whom perfectly corresponded to the ones inhabiting the Beatles songbook (to me, anyway). Although one could argue they were all suggested in an indirect way -- e.g., the lovelorn, flower-carrying shy guy, Teddy boys, the mustachioed British bobbies, Liverpudlian kiddies, etc.

The production definitely emphasized the more surreal-leaning, latter era of the Beatles repetoire, both in the song selections and the René Magritte-meets-Barnum & Bailey aesthetic. Lots of fun moments, perhaps the most fun being when a bed appeared in the center of the stage and its linens rapidly extended outward, enveloping the stage and then, to everyone’s delight, the entire audience as well. Vera said it reminded her of games with parachutes in elementary school.

As was the case with O, the show never moved too far away from the land of spectacle and into something more meaningful. That is to say, lots of moving around, but nothing too terribly moving. Still, that message of love that so indelibly informs the Beatles’ music was consistently delivered. One never hears in Love the Fab Four’s most profound lyric “the love you take is equal to the love you make,” though the idea is successfully implied throughout. Everybody, including Vera and me, had smiles on as we filed out of the theater.

As we walked out we passed the poker room at the Mirage, and hearing somebody telling his buddy about finally hitting quads quickly recalled to me the purpose of my being here. Back to poker today, as I return to the Rio to help cover Event No. 46, the $5,000 No-Limit Hold’em Six-Handed event. Looks like 805 signed up for that one yesterday, and they played all of the way down to 96 today. Might take a good while for those 96 to turn into just six for tomorrow’s final table, I imagine.

Meanwhile the $50K H.O.R.S.E. (Event No. 45) moves into its third of five days, with over half the field gone. Just 67 of the original 148 remain. Many the big names are over there, with Greenstein, Lindgren, Negreanu, and Doyle Brunson near the top of the chip counts at present.

Oh, by the way, I couldn’t let it go unnoticed here that Dan LaCourse, the winner of Event No. 42, the $1,000 Seniors No-Limit Hold’em World Championship, is a retired police detective. According to LaCourse, his training as a detective came in handy at the poker table, as “people reveal themselves through subtle gestures and mannerisms within three seconds of being of being confronted with a question or decision.”

Interesting stuff. Of course, you probably knew that already -- that in the end, the info you take is equal to the profit you make.