Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band turns fifty this week, the Beatles’ innovative and historic album — it was the first rock LP to win Album of the Year at the Grammys — released on June 1, 1967. Some musicologists argue that Sgt. Pepper is rock’s first great “concept album,” and many biographers agree that its most essential concept, given the Beatles’ love-ballad, tour-driven, fame-enslaved lives, was escape. The whimsy of having the Fab Four masquerade as an Edwardian show band came to Paul McCartney as he was returning from his own masquerade, a holiday in Africa during which he had traveled incognito. The group leaped at the chance to get off the road and into the studio, where they hoped to deepen the technical and cultural complexity of their music beyond the usual pop song constraints.

For Paul and John Lennon, says Steve Turner in Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year, the creative work on Sgt. Pepper was also an opportunity to get back to where they once belonged:

What gave the Beatles different ambitions? It had a lot to do with their arts education — Paul studying English literature and art at school and John enrolling in art college. It enlarged their frame of reference sufficiently enough that when they came to compose music, they were able to see themselves simultaneously in the tradition of entertainers and in the tradition of painters, sculptors, film-makers, poets, novelists, and dramatists. It was surely significant that when they made up their list of influential figures for the cover of Sgt. Pepper, the actors (14), writers (11), artists (8), and comedians (6) far outnumbered the musicians (4).

Turner establishes 1966 as revolutionary based on a handful of band-shaping events — not just the release of Revolver and the beginning of work on Sgt. Pepper, but George meeting Ravi Shankar, and John meeting Yoko Ono (and making the “more popular than Jesus” comment that helped to make that year’s tour their last). Jon Savage argues in 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded that the year was a cultural cluster bomb, each of the detonations set off or amplified by a wide range of music. Each of Savage’s twelve chapters is tied to a song; for example, the chapter on the Vietnam War is tied to Barry Sadler’s “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” which was released as a 45 rpm single in 1966, that being “the last year when the 45 was the principal pop music form, before the full advent of the album as a creative and a commercial force was heralded by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in summer 1967.”

The Beatles’ “Yesterday” is the top song on BMI’s list of the 50 most performed songs, 1940−90. Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” is #3, and his “Up Up and Away” is #27. For the title of his recent memoir, Webb turned to neither of these, nor to his equally popular “Wichita Lineman,” but to his 1968 hit “MacArthur Park” and perhaps the most mocked metaphor of the decade:

Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

In The Cake and the Rain, Webb describes cruising the ’60s and ’70s in the fast lane — at one point, Glen Campbell was paying him in Corvettes — alongside some of the era’s most famous musicians, producers, and personalities. For many of them, Webb included, it was a bumpy, dependency-driven ride, the cake often commingling with rain in preposterous ways. Like the time Webb and record producer-engineer Gary Kellgren turned the Magnifico, a WWII hospital ship, into a floating recording studio and invited Harry Nilsson, Micky Dolentz (from the Monkees), a handful of legendary West Coast sidemen, and an armful of hangers-on for an overnight cruise up the California coast. After an afternoon of music and margaritas, the group ferried themselves to a seaside restaurant, leaving the sixty-two-ton ship, its lights ablaze to warn away intruders, anchored at sea — or so they thought. As everyone got lost in the wine, the cocaine, and Kellgren’s stories about his recording sessions with Lennon, Jagger, Clapton, and others, someone finally looked up to see “the lights of the Magnifico just disappearing over the horizon.”

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It is no secret that the field of science is dominated by men. But famed geobiologist Hope Jahren, who has won such prestigious awards as the James B. Macelwane Medal, takes what can often be an oppressive system in stride. “It’s not about whether they approve of my work at Harvard or at whatever journal. This is not about whether my boss is nice to me. This is about me knowing more than I did yesterday.”

In her nationally bestselling book, Lab Girl, which is now out in paperback, Jahren digs into everything from her Minnesota childhood, when she spent hours playing and conducting experiments in her father’s laboratory, to her love of author Jean Genet. But the meat of the book focuses on her incredible determination and drive to study plants, despite the often shocking hurdles that male scientists put in her way. We are also introduced to Bill, her brilliant, eccentric lab partner, who provides inspiration and support when she needs it most. Most striking is how successfully Jahren extends the mantle of scientist to each one of her readers, using terminology that is not only accessible but emotionally arresting. One finds it impossible to read this book and not develop a deeper and more protective connection to the natural world.

I caught up with Hope Jahren this spring, not long after Lab Girl was honored as a finalist for the Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Award. She spoke to my via phone from her  lab in Norway, to discuss the multiple meanings of language, sexism in science, and why finishing a book is like losing a loved one.– Bill Tipper

The Barnes & Noble Review: What is geobiology?

Hope Jahren: It’s the combination of geology and biology. You can look around you and see all kinds of things that aren’t alive — water, atmosphere, rocks, etcetera, and look at all the things that are alive — plants, little worms, yourself, etcetera, and geobiology is interested in the processes that turn the one into the other.

BNR: Was examining that intersection where you wanted to go when you first undertook your scientific career?

HJ: Well, I was always interested in geology and in physics and chemistry, and those, of course, are the manipulation of things that aren’t alive. It’s much, much easier. We have really good ideas about how gases behave and how liquids behave, and what chemicals do when you mix them. A lot of that stuff was worked out in the 1700s, in the earliest phases of the Enlightenment. But then, when you try to apply those same things and you throw a living organism into the mix, that’s when it all gets amazingly complicated.

It’s like Alice in Wonderland, where it starts out with things you understand and it’s very familiar. Then, all of a sudden, weird stuff starts to happen, and these characters are introduced, and everything becomes very unpredictable. I think when you introduce living organisms into scientific experiments, it’s a very similar thing.

BNR: In the book, you so brilliantly draw connections between the natural world and our thinking about everything from love to work to economics.

HJ: I grew up with biblical literature. I was always taught to interpret its symbols, and that meaning is a tiered thing that exists on many levels, in everything we do, some of it conscious, some of it subconscious, and all of these different levels of meaning contribute to understanding, which is a much more holistic thing. That probably also goes back to some of the earliest reading that my mother and I did on Susan Sontag, who talks a lot about metaphor and things like that. That’s how I was taught to read in general. You read difficult things and you might not know what they mean right away. But through the course of your life, you will be presented with different scenarios and different information, and if you’re patient and you just live life, things will make sense along the way.

With communication, you’ve got something you want to say, and it’s this disembodied message that doesn’t really fit into words. The challenge is to approximate whatever that is as best you can. It’s almost like shooting an arrow toward a target. Sometimes you miss the target altogether, and sometimes you can really stick it in the bull’s-eye. It’s with practice, shooting that same arrow, that you realize what the bull’s-eyes are.

My whole, passionate focus was: How do I distill this plant stuff? I’ve spent decades of my life studying them, but not everybody is going to. The world needs to turn on a lot of other wheels. So if I had a chance to say one thing, to distill it down to its purest, most elegant, spherical form, what would I say? The funny thing is, I think, if you do that work, and you really polish it and it’s just a clear bell ringing on one concept, you just look at the words and you’ll find it means more than one thing.

BNR: That seems to me an extraordinary insight, and a very useful way of thinking about it for writers. That in that effort to distill and capture the idea, the language itself is going to give you all of this extra meaning.

HJ: One standard that I held myself to was that I was going to write a book, and it was going to say everything important that I wanted somebody to know about plants, whether they were taking my class, or in college, or on the street, or whatever, and I was going to not use one word that they had to look up. I was going to come to them and use their words. I held myself to that standard. So when I ran up against a scientific word, I forced myself to choose the best commonly invoked term, and then shape it as precisely I could with accessible adjectives and things like that, and then let go.

BNR: It’s astonishing how well you succeeded at that. In talking about how trees make energy you write: “The plant pigment chlorophyll is a large molecule, and within the bowl of its spoon-shaped structure sits one single precious magnesium atom. The amount of magnesium needed for enough chlorophyll to fuel 35 pounds of leaves is equivalent to the amount of magnesium found in 14 one-a-day vitamins, and it must ultimately dissolve out of bedrock, which is a geologically slow process.” Was it natural for you to talk about the bowl of chlorophyll’s spoon-shaped structure, or was that a kind of image you had to work to craft?

HJ: I use a lot of allusions to feminine objects, to objects associated with female labor: “spoon” of course, and then the one that people often touch on is “a leaf is a platter of pigment strung with vascular lace,” which is dishes and lace.

BNR: Did you want to work against the kind of gender prejudices that are in a lot of scientific writing?

HJ: It was not a conscious thing. The first work that I did with my hands was in my father’s lab, but it was also with my mother in the garden and in the kitchen, so those were the objects of my early toolkit. I naturally gravitate toward them. I’ve also always let myself do that, use the objects of my life. But it does create this nice juxtaposition of these very female images with these scientific concepts, which I really like and I think makes me a special voice in the end.

BNR: My favorite adjective in that sentence [with the phrase] “the one single precious magnesium atom” is “precious.” That’s a word that lights up that whole sentence for me.

HJ: The magnesium is associated with feeding — that’s what the plant is doing, trying to feed itself. So there’s this nourishing, maternal thing at work. When I’m saying something like that, I’m trying to poke your subconscious into coming along for the ride. I’ve invoked these symbols that you associate with nourishment, and then I’m going to talk about how the tree nourishes itself. That’s a type of learning that’s really effective. You’ve got to try to engage people both on a conscious level and a subconscious level, otherwise they’ll wander. I also talk a lot about the five senses, how things taste, how they smell, what plants sound like, etcetera.

BNR: There’s a wonderful sort of bookshelf peeking out in different places in this book. In your first encounter with your long-term research partner, Bill, you’re reading a book about Jean Genet.

HJ: Yes. Those are all true stories. I didn’t invoke them for any literary purpose. It’s just what I happened to be doing at the time.

BNR: Were there particular books that were strong influences on you as this book came to be?

HJ: I was greatly influenced by Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, because he’s got this fantastic heroine, Becky Sharp. I wrote an essay on her; it’s on my blog somewhere. I just love her.

I had read so much Victorian literature, and it was sort of constricting. There’s Dickens, who has these amazing characters, but the women are either too good or too bad, and they’re either young ingénues or these old-maid types, and there’s no real place in between. But when I got to Vanity Fair my mind just opened up. Things don’t end particularly well for Becky Sharp, but she doesn’t care. She just asks the question: “How do I get what I want within this very constrained power structure that is supposed to keep me from getting what I want?” She had this freewheeling approach. I thought: If I can be the Becky Sharp of scientific research, then we’ll see how far that goes.

BNR: With a year behind you since the book’s release, and having talked about it in these kinds of conversations with many other people, do you see it differently? Is it more of an artifact for you?

HJ: I think the main feeling I’ve had since the release of the book is really grief, because it was so joyful to sit, and write, and play with the words, and play with the sentences, and read them out loud, and use my mind that way. These were some of the happiest months of my life, and then it was just over. It gives me joy to hear that the book is doing what I hoped it would do: teach people about plants, but it’s been more of a grieving process. This book was my best friend for a long time. I got up early in the morning with it, and it was there when I went to bed. I feel really melancholy about it.

BNR: This really seems to be a story of dealing with the contingency of life and the idea that this work, which requires persistence and long-term effort, can somehow continue in the face of the absolute unpredictability of things.

HJ: Well, that’s one of the main things of the work, this contrast between work and grace. To what extent do things come to you because you work for them, and to what extent do things fall into your life out of grace? I think my personal answer for that is that you work to keep yourself busy while you’re waiting for grace.

BNR: Why did you decide to write a book versus continuing your own scientific writing?

HJ: Scientific writing is great. It’s actually a lot like writing poetry, because you have to condense. You have to put many years of work by many people into a few pages. Then it’s done in this weird, passive, very omniscient third person. Because the point is not how you feel about it. It’s all about advancing the idea.

So by doing that writing, there were huge parts of me I was never going to get to use. I was never going to get to write dialogue. I was never going to get to be funny. You can only report results in the scientific setting, and there are so many things we did that didn’t yield results, but we still learned from them. Scientific writing is a wonderful tradition, but it’s confining.

I remember thinking, “I’m just going to let myself do this. I’m going to drop the ball on all this other stuff people want me to do for six months, and I’m going to stop denying myself this book. And then, whatever happens, happens.” It just got to a point where it was more painful not to write. It took more energy to suppress it than to write it.

BNR: There is a thread that runs through this book about the sexism that exists within the scientific community, and it reflects the power inequities writ large in our culture. I’m curious to know if you feel that things are moving in one direction or another with women in science in particular.

HJ: Is there sexism in science? Yes. Is it getting better? No. There’s this fundamental and culturally learned power imbalance between men and women in our society, and it finds expression within every human endeavor. I tried to talk about the particular ways in which it finds expression within science. It’s flavors of the usual things. It has to do with safety. It has to do with discomfort around female reproduction. It has to do with the policing of female sexuality. All that kind of stuff. And I give examples of when each of those things comes into play.

For me, I think it’s a kind of Becky Sharp strategy. When the rules aren’t fair, you can’t hold yourself to the rules. Now, that doesn’t always work, and there’s a price to be paid, and all that kind of thing, but what I try to drill in is that the real rewards of the job are not ones that could be taken away from me.

I’m also an example of somebody that would have put up with just an endless amount of shit to be able to do that job, just because I loved it so much. But I still resent what I did have to put up with. We need to attack these fundamental power imbalances that exist. Sexual violence, reproductive rights, and compensation for equal labor.

BNR: What you’re suggesting is that these things aren’t any more specific to science than they are to any other particular corner of our world. Simply, as long as we have male supremacy as a feature of our society, it’s going to have all of these dysfunctional effects.

HJ: Exactly. I also didn’t quit science because there’s nowhere to run. Where are you going to go? Where is this Disneyland where I’m going to get equal pay for equal work and all this kind of stuff?

But the other thing is that I never idolized these guys that were giving me crap. The people that I respected did not fit the mold of who was powerful within the structure. That’s what I often tell people, that you have to keep in close touch with the part of it that makes you happy. If it’s being in the lab, if it’s working with your hands, let yourself stop and feel the joy that comes from getting to do that for two hours. If you just focus on that, you’ll always be doing the job for the right reason. The rest of it is just shit you gotta do! [Laughs]

 

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One only has to look at an electoral map from the 2016 presidential contest to get the feeling that America’s cities are at odds with the rest of the country. Kim Phillips-Fein’s excellent new book, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, vividly depicts a period when New York was seen — not always positively — as an archetypal example of urban liberalism. Much of the emergency that defined New York’s mid-1970s character revolved around debt, accounting practices, and municipal bonds, but in Phillips-Fein’s hands it is not only exciting but extremely relevant, too.

In 1975, the city teetered on the brink of financial collapse, with no one eager to come to its rescue. (The New York Daily News‘s legendary headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” succinctly captured the position of the executive branch.) Fear City begins by laying out how Gotham had reached this perilous point. New York, more than any other American city, Phillips-Fein writes, had “an unusually expansive and generous local welfare state”; in addition to a sprawling network of public schools, public libraries, and playgrounds, its activist public sector had helped create two dozen municipal hospitals, ample public housing, day care centers for low-income families, drug-treatment centers, an inexpensive subway system, free entry to world-class museums, a network of tuition-free colleges, and more.

Many saw the city’s “generosity” as the cause of its financial distress, but Phillips-Fein points to a wider range of political and social factors. Federal subsidies for homeownership and federal investment in highways facilitated the white middle class’s postwar exodus to the suburbs, which greatly reduced the city’s tax base. By the early ’70s, the local loss of manufacturing jobs plus a nationwide recession led to an increase in spending on welfare for the poor, who, in New York, were increasingly African American and Latino. Faced with the choice of cutting popular services, raising taxes, laying off city employees, or borrowing money, three successive mayors — Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, and Abe Beame — felt there was no choice but to keep borrowing, in the author’s words, “[displacing] the conflicts the city confronted in the present onto the future.”

That future arrived in 1975. Phillips-Fein, a professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the author of 2009’s Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, describes the city’s nosedive in a fast-paced, gripping account. The first brush with bankruptcy came in April, but Governor Hugh Carey’s creation of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), which gave New York emergency state aid to repay creditors in exchange for control of the city’s financial management, pulled New York from the brink.

The city was so deep in the red, however, that it was only a temporary fix, and by October New York was again unable to meet its debt obligations. Only the federal government, it seemed, could bail the city out this time, but President Ford, who blamed New York for its problems, was unmoved. Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan Greenspan, and Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, together urged him to let the city default, believing that bankruptcy would not only teach New York a lesson but would send a strong warning to other cities about the perils of government spending. Politicians and bankers who favored helping the city worried that default would send a different kind of message — that the symbolism of a bankrupt New York City would set off a nationwide financial panic.

Phillips-Fein, putting archival sources like meeting minutes to dramatic use, reveals all the last-minute machinations to forestall disaster. At a White House meeting, an emotional Mayor Beame, pleading with the president for help, argued that European tourists, after all, weren’t coming to America to visit Detroit or Columbus; an indignant Ford reminded Beame that he himself was from Michigan, while even the vice president, New Yorker Nelson Rockefeller, quietly warned the mayor not to “get carried away.” Beame’s point, though clumsily made, resonates in Phillips-Fein’s account, as the author also suggests that the country owed something to its preeminent city. She notes, for instance, that New York had historically “offered a vast program of social benefits to African Americans, who had come north because they were fleeing the violence and exclusion of Jim Crow; in other words, the city had picked up the bill for the sins of the American South.”

New York’s black residents would be among those to suffer the most when the city was ultimately saved from bankruptcy for the second time. This time, Governor Carey pushed through a law allowing the city to pay only interest, not principal, to creditors for one year. The city’s finances were put under the control of a corporate-leaning Emergency Financial Control Board. When the state legislature also approved large tax hikes, Ford at last committed to a financial aid package for the city, claiming to be satisfied that the city and state had committed to a future of fiscal austerity.

Indeed it had. “Underneath all the technicalities of the refinancing agreements,” Phillips-Fein notes, “was a promise to fundamentally restructure how New York City worked — to drastically cut the budget and shift spending away from social services.” Garbage piled up in the streets after sanitation layoffs; public schools squeezed forty-five or fifty kids into classrooms at overcrowded, understaffed schools; the FDNY laid off hundreds even as fire deaths were on the rise. The book gets its title from “Welcome to Fear City,” a pamphlet created by police officers embittered by layoffs, warning visitors to New York to stay off the subway and avoid being on the streets after 6 p.m. Crime worsened and poverty deepened. (Meanwhile, art and music scenes thrived amid the squalor, and one wishes Phillips-Fein had paid more than glancing attention to that milieu.)

Underlying these immediate effects was a deeper transformation. The fiscal crisis “seemed to delegitimize an entire way of thinking about cities and what they might do for the people who live in them,” the author writes. New York committed, above all else, to making itself attractive to business and investors. In an allusion to the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Felix Rohatyn, the financier who’d chaired the MAC board, crowed, “This time around, New York City should look to Europe and say, ‘Give me your rich!’ ” Here are the roots of the city we have today, where extreme wealth and extreme poverty exist side by side. In one shift that now feels particularly portentous, in 1976 a government agency that had roots in low-income housing turned instead to commercial real estate, giving a sweetheart deal for a flashy midtown hotel to a brash young developer. Who was it? Here’s a hint: four decades later, during his campaign for president, he repeatedly said that minorities in cities were “living in hell.”

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