Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

When Sgt. Pepper’s got its first CD release in 1987, we heard again and again that it was “more than an album.” For one thing, the country sank into a spell of nostalgia for the Summer of Love (”omg, it was twenty years ago today!”): luckily this time around, on the 40th anniversary, nobody’s reminiscing about the build-up to Woodstock or that guy from the Monkees trying to levitate the Pentagon with his mind.

But more than that, in porting the album to the CD, Capitol went to pains to tell us about the “extra” stuff that came with the first vinyl release. The cardboard cut-outs from the vinyl were reproduced on the CD long box for you to cut out all over again. (Back then, CDs came in 12″ tall “long boxes” to help them fit in old LP racks. It was a total waste of cardboard, but it gave you something to hang on your dorm wall.) The original album, after the sustained piano chords at the end of “A Day in the Life,” had included first a high-pitched signal that would annoy dogs (John hated dogs); then it hopped into a lockgroove of the Beatles’ sped-up voices making weird noises. On a record player without autoreturn, the thing would play forever, but on the CD, they gave you about 15 seconds of it. Better than nothing, I guess.

The Beatles were more than four guys who made music, and their career included plenty of weird stories and incidents. Remember the “Paul is Dead” mystery, where fans dug through the records for clues to whether McCartney was, well, dead? That’s not unlike the Year Zero alternate-reality game that Nine Inch Nails commissioned for their latest record – except, of course, that nobody had to pay to get it started. When Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was rereleased last year by Nonesuch, it came with an elaborate multimedia website and remixing area. When I interviewed him about it, Byrne said that he’d like to see more albums come with a multimedia component – an interactive substitute for that 12″ album cover. In the ’60s, they had huge, crazy art to stare at; in the ’80s, my generation got those crappy tiny CD booklets; but hey, when my kid buys his own copy of Sgt. Pepper’s in the ’10s, it’ll have a web 3.0 website, and someone will add a little script to bring that lockgroove back. It’ll come with all the baggage – er, all the history that I had to hear about in the ’80s, but unlike me, my kid will have more new ways to experience it.

One of the things that draws me to transmedia storytelling is that a transmedia story is a story you tell yourself. You don’t just pick up a book, start at the beginning, and end at the end; a work like Star Wars has many official and unofficial extensions to explore. You pay attention to the official stories, but you can choose to ignore some of them. You can play through them your own way with the toys or the games, or make up your own stories on top of the license. This has been true for decades, but as they say, the Internet changed everything. When I was eight, I made up new universes with my Star Wars toys; my kid will be able to do the same thing, but with his friends around the world. I got thinking about this yesterday because Sgt. Pepper’s, with all its mysterious secrets and elaborate cover art, encourages the same thing – making up stories, drawing new experiences, sharing theories with your friends. But in the ’80s, one big narrative crushed all the others. That narrative starred a big, smelly, naked crowd of hippies. And even if you wanted to be one of them, too bad – it’s over!

The next generation will get more out of the album than mine did. Sgt. Pepper’s was musically never my favorite Beatles album, but I had to wade through that boomer nostalgia when I listened to it. It was hard to take away my own meanings when I was deluged with so many of the “right” ones. But with my kid, that history will be more distant. And he’ll listen to it any way he wants.