A Day in the Life
‘The Beatles finest single achievement’ Ian Macdonald
Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on “A Day in the Life”. The way we wrote a lot of the time was you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like “I read the news today” or whatever it was.
Whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you would just drop it until we next met each other. Then I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. John Lennon Remembers, Rolling Stone (1971)
A DAY IN THE LIFE was The Beatles most ambitious production to that point, taking thirty-four hours to record. Four years earlier, an entire album had been completed in under ten.
Partly a response to The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, it was the first new song recorded for Sergeant Pepper — Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane came from the same sessions but there was a protocol that previously released singles should not appear on albums.
So although A DAY IN THE LIFE would become the closing track it was not written with that in mind. It was essentially an experiment and an attempt to break free from the confines of the traditional three minute pop song.
Structure
In the released version, it opens over the closing strain of the reprised Sergeant Pepper. This disguises what is perhaps the most muted start of a Beatles track, with thirteen seconds of gentle acoustic guitar strums, joined by bass and piano, before the vocal comes in
Lennon and McCartney each provide separate sections, though both have confirmed there was collaboration throughout. The sections are distinct and contrasting — with McCartney’s ‘Woke up, got out of bed’ switching to double time, for example.
This was musically challenging, especially as the writers worked intuitively rather than through scores. To create the two bridges they simply left a twenty-four bar gaps, which they returned to fill.
Somehow George Martin and his team of sound engineers managed to shape the disparate elements into a seamless whole. To do so, they extended the known limits of four track recording technology. This was then state-of-the-art but was primitive by today’s standards.
Verse One
‘I read the news today…’
Lennon and McCartney have recalled the writing process differently. According to John, the first and last verses are based around a report in The Daily Mail for 17th January 1967. This concerned the coroner’s report on the death of Tara Browne, the young Guinness heir, whom The Beatles knew socially — full story.
In 1997 Paul McCartney suggested a different version of how the lyric evolved. This was that he and John wrote this section together and that Paul at least, did not have Tara Browne — a personal friend — in mind — see here.
In both interpretation the narrator assumes that Browne/the politician had been tripping on LSD, as the narrator appears to be doing. The interior monologue then drifts to a story about the war in Vietnam. Lennon links this to his personal experience of filming How I Won the War (‘The English army had just…’).
Verses 2 & 3
Following the first orchestral bridge (see below), we move to the section McCartney sings. This second story is also told in the first person, but characteristically Paul’s narrative voice is less overtly autobiographical.
The piano pulse introduces a new, harsher, more metallic edge, echoed in the vocal. ‘Woke up, got out of bed’ was originally a fragment intended for a song about McCartney’s schooldays. Here it is adapted to fit the mood of ennui and disillusionment.
The ‘smoke’ initially referred to a Woodbine cigarette. During the recording process Lennon and McCartney, perhaps emboldened by the copious amounts of marijuana they were smoking, introduced what was obviously a drug reference (‘went into a dream’). This would cause problems when it was brought to the attention of broadcasters like the BBC.
The narrators switch. Lennon sings about another story from the same edition of the Daily Mail. This one is about the high number of potholes ‘in Blackburn, Lancashire’. Supposedly unglamorous Blackburn (where they shot the first ever filmed western) had long the butt of music-hall jokes.
The Bridge(s)
One thing that astonished contemporary music critics was the structural complexity of A DAY IN THE LIFE. None of The Beatles could read or write music. Nor did they have any formal training in composition or orchestration. So how did they manage such a sophisticated transition between the sections?
For the technical elements, the role of George Martin was crucial. He was helped, however, by something spotted early by Leonard Bernstein. This was that although The Beatles lacked formal theoretical knowledge they often showed intuitive understanding of advanced musical concepts.
Building those 24 bar ‘gaps’ into the architecture of the song demonstrates this — and the ad hoc nature of the process. The practicalities were managed by road manager, Mal Evans dispatched with a stopwatch and an alarm clock. This can be heard at the end of the first bridge — a trick that Pink Floyd would repeat on Dark Side of the Moon.
‘Freak outs’ and ‘aural happenings’
In this period Paul McCartney was intrigued by avant-garde classical music, particularly the work of Luciano Berio and John Cage. Under their influence, he proposed to fill the bridges with a ‘freak outs’ or ‘aural happenings’ (Macdonald p.183).
These ‘freak outs’ would involve orchestral glissando. Each player would play in unison the same pattern: from lowest to highest note. McCartney asked for this to be improvised, an instruction that baffled the classically trained session musicians. As so often, George Martin found a solution.
To avoid a ‘chaotic tone cluster’ {Martin} scored each glissando individually to ensure the right ‘random’ effect. He also asked each player to player to ‘finish on whichever note in the E Major triad was nearest the highest on their instrument’.
The Final Chord
Many of the best Beatles songs start and/or finish with a bang. A DAY IN THE LIFE delivers its knockout blow is in its final chord. Originally recorded as a hummed E major, this evolved into what Jonathan Gould describes as:
“A forty-second meditation on finality that leaves each member of the audience listening with a new kind of attention and awareness to the sound of nothing at all”.[66]
This was achieved using absurdly primitive technology in today’s term. Lennon, McCartney, Evans and Martin played the chord on three pianos. Each was then multi-tracked four times.
Lennon had asked George Martin to make the final chord ‘a sound like the end of the world’. He did not disappoint.
