Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers that grow so incredibly high.

Oh, wow. Psychedelic:



I don't know if I like having kaleidoscope eyes. Maybe blank it all out with whiteness:



But don't look too long. Don't look too hard. Look out!



It's a vortex!

Picture yourself with a psychedelic record...

"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" turns 40 this weekend. How strange this makes me feel! "It was 20 years ago today...," the opening line of the album, referred to desperately old-fashioned times, and now the album is twice that old, and yet... it seems to be all about youth and promise and newness.

At the time, I thought my parents were so hopelessly mired in the past to still be listening to the music they loved from the 1940s. I enjoyed mocking my father's ridiculous belief that the big bands would come back. The old man needed to face the fact that rock and roll had conquered everything. But they were in love with music that was only 20 years old. That would be like someone today loving U2's "With or Without You" and Prince's "Sign O' the Times" -- which seems utterly normal and not at all pathetic.

Funny how things within your own lifetime remain so alive. But step across the boundary into that infinity of time when you were not yet born, and it's so far away. When I was growing up, WWII seemed disconnected from anything that related to me -- though in truth, I owed my existence and everything about my way of life to it -- but it was no longer ago that the Clinton Era is now.

Enough about me. Back to "Sgt. Pepper." Let's see what Steven Van Zandt has to say:

After being obviously the "greatest album ever made" for years, it ran into a bit of revisionist history these past, oh, 30 years or so.

It probably began with one of the Beatles putting it down or shrugging it off or making the mistake of suggesting that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be....

So, with the only disclaimer that the appallingly awful stereo mastering is, tragically, the only available version right now, let me revise revisionist history and suggest that "Sgt. Pepper" was, and is, an incredible piece of work and absolutely the best representation of the Summer of Love and the very psychedelic 1967. (Blog: What are your "Pepper" memories?)

Are you asking me, Stevie? Right when I was going to stop talking about myself and listen to you. Okay.

Well, the day the album came out, I bought it. My friend was having her "Sweet 16" party that evening, which was bad timing, because all I wanted to do was to listen to that album over and over and get it thoroughly imprinted on my brain so I could listen to it on a deeper level, over and over. So I brought the album to the party, thinking everyone would freeze, stunned by the brilliance, and want to do nothing but listen and talk about how the entire world had changed today.

But it played too much in the background for us to hear it properly. Someone's mother said to me, in a disgusted tone, "What is this music?" I can't remember how much of my contempt I conveyed as I said this was the new Beatles album. I silently counted her as one more example that my parents' generation was the lamest. The entire environment of a suburban "Sweet Sixteen" party was giving me that she's leaving home after living alone for so many years feeling. How right George was about the space between us all. But this is not the way we're going to live from now on. Bring on the tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

It was universally mind-blowing at the time....

Interestingly, in direct contrast to the album's ultramodern sound, its lyrics and sensibility were wistful, nostalgic -- very much looking back when the world was looking forward (and made more obvious if you include "Strawberry Fields" and "Penny Lane," both meant to be on the album). It's full of depressed, dysfunctional, cynical, confused and, yes, lonely characters going through the motions of life, implicitly asking, "Is this all there is?" when the band's audience was never more full of hope, discovering love and becoming philosophically enlightened.

The world was unified in its praise of and inspiration from the album as it has never been for anything before or since.

Stevie says to get the album in mono -- I've had it right by me for 40 years -- and listen straight through:

I promise you will be transported to a place you've never been....

Oh, but I was.

ADDED: Excellent "Sgt. Pepper" website.

Warm fuzzies.

Aw, he's lonely!



That's better.

Am I the only one who has never seen Fred Thompson act?

I mean, set aside the acting one does as a politician. (I tend to refer to politicians as "political actors," but not because I think they are playing a role, just because they are taking action.) I have never seen Fred Thompson in any TV show or movie. Does this give me some useful perspective on the impending FT candidacy? Perhaps not. I may be the least reliable observer, because I don't understand how other people feel. I won't be seeing what they are seeing. You guys are prepped to receive what he will dish out, and he -- quite rightly -- will speak to the people who already have deep feelings about him that have nothing to with his capacity to be President -- except to the extent that your subliminal receptivity will help him do the job. I feel quite estranged from these new political doings. And all because I didn't watch enough TV.

Anyway, I see that Jeremy Sisto is going to join "Law and Order" -- not replacing Thompson though:

Jeremy Sisto, best known for his role on "Six Feet Under," will replace Milena Govich as a detective on NBC's "Law & Order" next season....

Sisto is currently in theaters with Adrienne Shelly's indie romantic comedy "Waitress." Shelly was murdered by a construction worker last year, an incident that inspired an episode of "Law & Order."

Yeah, don't let the expression "romantic comedy" fool you. Sisto plays a brutish husband who makes Stanley Kowalski seem like a comic character. It's terribly sad that the extremely talented Shelly was murdered, but her death seems to have caused reviewers to write uncritically about the movie. The men in "Waitress" are naturally evil. This is a movie where a man's only hope is to reshape his existence to cater to a woman's needs -- let's cuddle and talk! -- and where women whose men won't comply joyfully traipse off into the sunset without them. Poor Sisto puts his dramatic all into a role where the character is a monster for no reason other than that he's a man. But I adored him in "Six Feet Under," and I'm glad to see he's got this new role.

"I think that Rudy, as far as terrorism goes, is just entering his peak killing years. And that's why I'm for him."

In case you missed Dennis Miller on O'Reilly last night, here's the transcript.

Speaking of blog controversies...

I was happy to see that traffic on this blog hit a new high in May. The previous high was last September, when traffic was inflated by a huge influx of visitors who were extremely hostile to me! Mostly, I'm glad to get a lot of traffic, and it's fine that a lot of people are here looking for a fight, but it's not fun when it's all out of proportion, especially when there are all sorts of distorted comments which I don't like answering and also don't like leaving unanswered.

Anyway, May had its crazy little controversy -- noted in the previous post -- so there actually was a little of that sort of thing pushing traffic. Not that I planned it. You never know what little offhand wisecrack or thought experiment is going to set people off. I mean, sometimes you know you're taunting a particular person or type of person. I never do that as a means to the end of getting more traffic. Really, I want readers, not traffic.

My approach to blogging is to say whatever I want about whatever interests me, and nothing more. Sometimes a little less -- to protect my privacy and to respect people I interact with in off-blog life -- but never any more. I hope you can tell, and I hope you realize how much I appreciate the readers who come here because they like approach.

Radio alert.

I'll be on "Lake Effect," on WUWM, the Milwaukee public radio, some time between 10 and 11 Central Time today. Streamable here. The archive will be up here later. I've already recorded the interview, which is a fast moving ramble about blogging that mostly concentrates on my recent, controversial suggestion that it might be a good idea to use nonfiction books when teaching young children how to read.

UPDATE: You can listen to it here now. It's only about 5 minutes long.