A DAY IN THE LIFE
“A Day in the Life” is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as the final track of their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Credited to Lennon–McCartney, the verses were written mainly by John Lennon, with Paul McCartney primarily contributing the song’s middle section. Lennon’s lyrics were inspired by contemporary newspaper articles, including a report on the death of Guinness heir Tara Browne. The recording includes two passages of orchestral glissandos that were partly improvised in the avant-garde style. As with the sustained piano chord that closes the song, the orchestral passages were added after the Beatles had recorded the main rhythm track. Since 2008, McCartney has included the song in his live performances. It was ranked the 28th greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone. In another list, the magazine ranked it as the greatest Beatles song. (More from Wikipedia)
Perhaps because of the possible LSD reference in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, rumors of drug references in other lyrics by the Beatles also became manifest. Wikipedia reports: “Concerns that some of the lyrics in Sgt. Pepper refer to recreational drug use led to the BBC banning several songs from British radio, such as ‘A Day in the Life’ because of the phrase ‘I’d love to turn you on’, with the BBC claiming that it could ‘encourage a permissive attitude towards drug-taking.’ . . . They also banned ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ because of the lyric which mentions ‘Henry the Horse’, a phrase that contains two common slang terms for heroin. Fans speculated that Henry the Horse was a drug dealer, and ‘Fixing a Hole’ was a reference to heroin use. Others noted lyrics such as ‘I get high’ from ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, ‘take some tea’ – slang for cannabis use – from ‘Lovely Rita’, and ‘digging the weeds’ from ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’.” I had heard about “Horse” but not “Henry”; maybe any word starting with “H” could refer to heroin.
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Most famously, John Lennon wrote the bulk of “A Day in the Life” based on several items that were in the January 17, 1967 edition of the Daily Mail. Wikipedia quotes one of them: “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.” John evidently added the part about how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.
Paul McCartney’s contributions to “A Day in the Life” include the key lyric, “I’d love to turn you on”. Also, as given in Wikipedia: “McCartney provided the middle section of the song, a short piano piece he had been working on independently, with lyrics about a commuter whose uneventful morning routine leads him to drift off into a dream. McCartney had written the piece as a wistful recollection of his younger years, which included riding the bus to school, smoking, and going to class. This theme matched with the original concept of the album which was going to be about their youth.”
The impetus for “A Day in the Life” though was the death of a childhood friend of both John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Tara Browne; Browne, an heir to the Guinness fortune, had died in an auto accident in 1966 when he was 21 years old. An article in the Daily Mail the same day as the “hole” article talked about a custody matter regarding his two children. Wikipedia quoted Lennon about this part of the song: “I didn’t copy the accident. 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.”
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Lennon/McCartney appears by most of the Beatles’ songs, but starting at least with Revolver, I began to notice that George Harrison was writing many of my favorite Beatles songs. His contribution to Sgt. Pepper was “Within You Without You”; that song and “A Day in the Life” quickly became my favorite songs on that mammoth album.
(June 2015)
