Today’s classic song of the day is my favorite Beatles track and maybe their best track, which is saying a lot given how many great songs this group produced. The song is “A Day in the Life;” never released as a single, it was the concluding track on side two of 1967’s landmark Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
“A Day in the Life” was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. John had the basic idea for the song and wrote all the verses. Paul filled in the bridge in the middle (“Woke up, got out of bed…”) and contributed the pivotal line, “I’d love to turn you on.”
The song is about… well, what is it about? The verses are the type of free-form wordplay typical of Lennon at the time, apparently inspired by the December 1966 death of a friend of theirs, Tara Browne, in a traffic accident. (“He blew his mind out in a car…”) Brown was the 21 year-old heir to the Guinness fortune and had introduced the boys to LSD. As John later recalled:
“Tara didn’t blow his mind out, but it was in my mind when I was writing that verse. The details of the accident in the song—not noticing traffic lights and a crowd forming at the scene—were similarly part of the fiction.”
Paul remembers the story this way:
“The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together. It has been attributed to Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, which I don’t believe is the case, certainly as we were writing it, I was not attributing it to Tara in my head. In John’s head it might have been. In my head I was imagining a politician bombed out on drugs who’d stopped at some traffic lights and didn’t notice that the lights had changed. The ‘blew his mind’ was purely a drugs reference, nothing to do with a car crash.”
The bit about holes in Lancashire and filling the Albert Hall came from a story John read in the Daily Mail that went as follows:
“There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per person, according to a council survey. If Blackburn is typical, there are two million holes in Britain’s roads and 300,000 in London.”
A friend suggested that all those holes could fill the Albert Hall, and John had his final verse.
The band recorded the basic tracks for “A Day in the Life,” then titled “In the Life Of…” on January 19-20, 1967, at EMI Studio Two. They left a 24-bar section empty for something to be determined in the future, recording only Ringo shaking his maracas and assistant Mal Evans counting out the measures. That section would lead into the totally different feel (announced by a ringing alarm clock) in McCartney’s bridge.
Those 24 bars were later filled by a 40-piece orchestra, which arrived on February 10 for a very unusual recording session. John had requested of producer George Martin, who did all of the group’s orchestral arranging, to create “a tremendous build-up, from nothing up to something absolutely like the end of the world.” Martin described how he translated those rather vague instructions:
“What I did there was to write… the lowest possible note for each of the instruments in the orchestra. At the end of the twenty-four bars, I wrote the highest note… near a chord of E major. Then I put a squiggly line right through the twenty-four bars, with reference points to tell them roughly what note they should have reached during each bar… Of course, they all looked at me as though I were completely mad.”
Martin recorded the orchestra doing this four different times and mixed each take together into a single track. The result was a massive atonal crescendo with no fixed pitch, save for the beginning and end. The section was repeated at the end of the song.
Also unique to “A Day in the Life” was the ending chord, which rang on and on for close to 40 seconds. The sound was achieved by John, Paul, Ringo, and Mal Evans on three pianos and George Martin on harmonium, all playing an E major chord. The extended sound was created by increasing the gain on the recording console as the natural vibration faded out. Instead of decreasing in volume, the volume stayed more or less the same for the full 40 seconds.
At the time there was nothing like “A Day in the Life.” As experimental and innovative as the rest of the Sgt. Pepper’s album was, “A Day in the Life” stood out as even more so. It is, to my ears, the height of the Beatles’ musical creativity. It may not be their best song (one could argue for “Yesterday,” “Let It Be,” Something,” “In My Life,” or a dozen others), but it is, without a doubt, their most impressive track. It is, truly, a masterpiece, one of the most unique and influential recordings of all time.
And here’s your daily bonus video of the day, a short film documenting the orchestral recording session for “A Day in the Life.” Enjoy.
