(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[sgt. pepper] I remember it as if it were yesterday, the first time my friend and I looked at the weird photo on the cover: John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, dressed in the strangest uniforms, lined up in front of an army of faces – faces we were not able to identify at the time, but who we would later get to know as Bob Dylan, Karl Marx, Marlon Brando, Oscar Wilde, Marylin Monroe, Dylan Thomas… And what was hidden behind this smiling doll with the words «Welcome the Rolling Stones »on the sweater…? For a long time we sat with the cover in front of us. This was Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Large drum. Tuba. Trumpet. In short: the Beatles in 1967.
Kiss and Gene Simmons' long tongue was like what we were supposed to dig in the early 1980s. Not that we listened to Kiss very much, it was the posters and the trading cards that mattered. Elvis was still a topic of conversation, he was the Man with a capital M, and compared to Simmons a far better role model, there were many adults who thought. When you came to school with a Kiss button on your jacket, you were greeted with an appreciative nod from the tough guys in sixth grade. One of the most powerful teachers looked at it differently, and one day he gave a long lecture on the use of symbols. If we knew what the two ss in the Kiss logo stood for? He had experienced the war, the teacher, so he was convinced that Kiss was preaching the message of Nazism.
But the Beatles? Sgt. Pepper? Here we had come across something that the men of power obviously had no idea about. Finally something that was neither exemplary nor dangerous. Finally something we could only wonder about, in peace and quiet. My friend had received the album as a gift from an older cousin – apparently the cousin had grown tired of the Beatles, how old he was, the cousin, and at the same time so young. The cousin knew all about music. (He could even tell that Gene Simmons was born in Israel, and that Kiss was an ironic band, whatever that means.) The cousin – whom I never met, but who my friend always talked about – became my invisible guide through the magical music world of popular culture.
Sgt. Pepper, 1967. We thought it was a long time ago. 1967! We watched the strange uniforms, and we played the record, over and over again. «It was twenty years ago today / Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play ». 20 years! Shall we see… it will be 1947! Has'em stayed on the side just after the war? No, no (had the cousin explained), this is fiction, this is something they have come up with. Well, so this is a lie, isn't it? Do not lie exactly, more like art (had the cousin said).
Alas, time flies, and now it's really starting to get long ago. In the summer of 1967, Sgt. Pepper the big pop news. A sensation, something unexpected had happened. The Beatles were suddenly no longer The Beatles; John Lennon & co had shown what it means to break expectations, the Beatles were now an unpredictable band, after Sgt. Pepper and the absence of the grammatical marker "the" anything could happen.
And was that exactly what happened? "Anything"? Already at the beginning of the 1980s, we got a strong sense that History hides more than it reveals.
