Here are some interpretations of what is possibly the greatest Beatle song ever created. Comments anyone? Allan Moore Tim Riley Ian Macdonald Mark Hertsgaard

Allan F. Moore, 1997

The last chord has not died, however, before the entry of a solitary acoustic guitar on offbeat quavers, and the innocent listener is led into one of the most harrowing songs ever written. Its structure is well known: Lennon's original material moves through three verses, to the first orchestral crescendo, McCartney's serendipitous insertion, Lennon's floating vocalize, a fourth verse and the final crescendo and landing.
The richness (and extreme rightward placing) of Lennon's voice in the opening verse (with added echo) highlights the thinness of the accompaniment: bass and leftward simple strummed guitar, minimal piano and maracas. The entry of the kit after the after the first line of verse 2 promises much, and ultimately leads to the orchestral chaos. The orchestra is introduced so subtly, low down on the right beneath a fading Lennon, that we are hardly aware that it has not been present all along. McCartney's interpolation continues the texture, but the increase of speed suggests a thickening, which is fulfilled by the brass entry during the dream sequence. The final verse has left and right channels switched, as if the interpolation has really counted, has really changed something (and, if my interpretation of the melody carries any weight, it has). The very last minute is an astonishing experience. The final chord is sounded at 4'21". At 4'50" it is possible to hear the creaking of a piano stool, at 5'02" the faders are pulled down and then, at 5'11" we enter 22" of Lennon's beloved meaningless (on the original album, this was the playout groove, and so would continue for ever until the turntable arm was removed [Webmaster comment: why didn't they do this for the CD??!!].
That much was comparatively easy to write dispassionately. But the immensity of the horror that this song's lyrics seem to portray demands attention, and two paths are fruitful. Even writers unmoved by the remainder of the album will speak eloquently of what this song means to them. Richard Goldstein, for instance, whose early criticism I have already mentioned, wrote of its "seminal influence" and its profundity, readily received by its entire audience. A great deal is made of the line "I'd love to turn you on", and its superficially apparent call to drug use. While acknowledging Lennon's use of LSD while writing, the song itself is far fromt the call to intoxication it was taken to be: it is already warning against this option, although much less obvious than that of "Within you without you". Middleton argues that the song investigates hallucination, but rejects drug use. In the stylistic context of rock, those massive, indeed horrifying, orchestral crescendi must be interpreted as discouragement, perhaps illustrating the results of such use.
A meaning can be disinterred for the song itself. MacDonald is full of ideas: "A song not of disillusionment with life itself but of disenchantment with the limits of mundane perception, 'A Day in the Life' depicts the 'real' world as an unenlightened construct that reduces, depresses, and ultimately destroys', and yet it still offers a transcendent optimism in our own power to develop a beautiful construct. Riley is equally eloquent, even questioning whether Lennon's verses are dreaming McCartney's everyman, or vice versa. Middleton, too, finds the song an apt conclusion to the album, noting that its complexity and equivocation offer an impressively intelligent exploration of our cultural problem: "we can no more run away from our civilization than we can be content with it as it stands". This near-denial of ultimate hope was brilliantly captured in Goldstein's early review where, focusing on verses 2 and 3, he observes the narrator subdued by total despair, while the crowd (everyman again?) looks, but simply turns away untouched (with particular reference to Eliot's The Waste Land). The song's subject is, thus, an intensely counter-cultural one, one couched specifically in terms of a flight from banality, but as ever the Beatles are equivocal about the outcome. Mellers insists, in this vein, on the sublime understatement of "rather sad" in verse 1.
We can, then, say what this song is probably about. We can declare that, however partially, it is reducible to mere words. To do so, however, seems to me a cardinal mistake. Mellers offers an alternative approach when he claims that the song is not about what it refers to. Indeed, these references confuse rather than clarify, and we might argue that, in attempting to clarify them, critics are ultimately misrepresenting the song and, hence, the entire album. For Mellers, the song is about the contrast between its simple tune and the horrific events depicted by the words. That contrast can be felt to operate on a number of levels: terrifying/grotesque, illusion/reality, inner/outer. This seems to me to be a fruitful approach, for we might say that if the Beatles had been able to "clarify" what the song was about, then they would have done so. What is important is that the meaning could only be presented in the unclarified manner that it was, a manner that is ultimately beyond straightforward presentation.
There is another (perhaps less hackneyed) way to make the same point. In the context of the setting (unequivocally false but presented none the less: "we're listening to a pretend audience that is pretending to listen to the pretend Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band") --- a setting which presents itself to us as unreal but which is closed as an experiential whole by the astounding reprise of the title track --- "A Day in the Life", being external, can only be unreal to that unreality, ie utter and devastating reality (a reality founded musically on units of "5" rather than "4"). No matter how strange and disturbing the elements of the song seem to be (the curious references, the odd grouping, the crescendi, the piano fade and playout groove, the dislocation of the interpolation), that is our reality is what the song is really about. Resistance to exegesis is the only valid option.

Tell Me Why / The Beatles: Album by Album, Song by Song, The Sixties and After

Tim Riley, 1988

Before the final chord has even begun to fade away, the acoustic guitar of "A Day in the Life" enters the left channel, and the parallel universe of everyday life intrudes. The curtain falls on Pepperland just as another is raised on the sobering stage of the real world. (The unadorned guitar chords shatter the Pepper illusion in much the same way that backwards sounds subvert the direction of "Rain.")
Like "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Twist and Shout," "A Day in the Life" redefines everything that came before. After the reprise regroups the mythical band and sends the audience home with a rousing encore, the real Beatles take us back into the world that greets us after the turntable platter stops spinning. As a postlude to the to the Pepper fantasy, it casts a shadow that sets all the other songs (and the Beatles' own career) in perspective. "A Day in the Life" comments on how listening to a pop record relates to what's happening when the show is over.
The slow guitar chords at the outset have a drag to them, and the piano that soon joins in is wearied as well. The sound is ominous, broad but not dense. Lennon's entrance on "I read the news today, oh boy" is pregnant with disillusionment; the gentle fall on the word "oh" alone is the sound of poignance. The simple surface gestures in the music and the voice gain deep feeling with repeated listenings. "And though the news was rather sad," he sings, "well I just had to laugh." The laughter isn't funny but a nervous response to an overwhelming despair.
Guitar, bass, piano, and gentle maracas carry the first verse. Lennon's delivery from the far left channel sounds distant, adrift in the burdensome events he's reading aloud, unable to make sense of the news that greets his day. The second half makes the anxiety clear: "He blew his mind out in a car." Even the way Lennon phrases that horror---borrowing an image from the drug culture to soften the violence---tells us that he has a great deal of trouble accepting the reality itself. Ringo's drum entrance swells this image further, filling up the space with large hollow tom-toms. The crash occurred because "he didn't notice that the lights had changed," a pitifully small oversight.
During the last lines of the first verse, Lennon's voice moves slowly from the far right toward the center as the song becomes more aware of itself and the music gains intensity. The end of the first verse reaches the melodic height with Lennon's falsetto left hanging in the air, unresolved: "NobodywasreallysureifhewasfromtheHouseofLords." Half the horror is in the victims unrecognizable familiarity---he could have been anybody.
Ringo's drums comment on each line in the second verse, conveying the emptiness the singer fears in himself. "A crowd of people turned away" fromt the brutal scenes of the war movie, but the singer cannot turn away---"having read the book," he is impelled to watch, repulsed by the illusions on the screen but unable to turn his eyes from the awful truth it imposes. (The despair hints at atomic devastation.) By the end of the verse Lennon's voice has traveled all the way over to the far left channel, and the journey of awestruck disbelief is complete. As he sings "I'd love to turn you on," his voice fades into the debris of sound that will soon rise up and overwhelm its meekness. (The BBC banned this song from its airwaves because this line was thought to be a drug reference, when in fact it is probably one of the least drug-oriented on the record.) The cloud of confusion that has grown inside the singer's head since the song began now opens up, slowly at first, then rises toward a torrential downpour of sound. The storm reaches drastic proportions in a matter of seconds.
The conglomeration of noise made by over forty orchestral musicians playing without music evokes the image of a train speeding toward a head-on collision---it picks up speed from its own momentum. At the peak of the summit, the moment of reckoning, a breakthrough occurs---an alarm clock goes off, and a befuddled sleeper wakes up and begins his day, oblivious to his own nightmare. The simple snare-to-cymbal rousing that Ringo whips off on Paul's waking words completes the transition.
The new beat is chipper, industrious, and comments on its own corporate precision only briefly at the end of lines, where the marshalled bass is set loose for a contrasting harmony (on the words "comb across my head" and "in seconds flat"---the snare marches purposefully onward. The compulsion of the rhythm conveys his obsession with time; after looking up and noticing that he's late, he actually gasps for breath before moving on.
Paul's complementary section is the day in the life of a modern everyman who sets forth each morning unaware of the tragedy around him---a kind or rock-'n'-roll Babbitt. Lennon's agonized empathy surrounds Paul's blissful ignorance: as it did the protagonist of "Good Morning," life is passing this figure by; he is not of this world but out of it, preoccupied with his schedule and bland attire. Hopping on the bus "in seconds flat," he climbs to the top level of the double-decker bus (where smoking is allowed) and has his routine ciggy to start his day. The nightmare returns.
The blurring of the dream life and the real world adds to all the confusion. We're never sure whether Lennon's section is the "real" world or if it's merely the dream that Paul slips back into atop the bus. The alarm clock blurs these boundaries: is Paul waking from Lennon's nightmare, or is Lennon imaging Paul's generic day in the life? The song inside a song works like the play within a play: the interdependence of reality and illusion is telescoped into one setting. As Paul drifts further off into his "dream," his "ah" travels from right to left and back to the right again, very slowly, doubling the distance that Lennon took over the course of the first two verses [Webmaster's note: Riley is in error here, it's actually Lennon who sings the long "ah"]. The rhythm softens to a comfortable backbeat by slicing the rigid military snare in half, allowing a smooth transition back to Lennon's final verse. In fact, the pulse is constant until the end, and the basic rhythm track was recorded live after days of rehearsals, even though bass, drum and vocal tracks would be overdubbed several days later. A loud brass line announces the return, and Lennon appears way over to the left, where he had arrived at the end of the first verse.
This last verse goes by more swiftly than the first two; the forces that are set in motion for the first orchestral ascent are starting up again here, only much sooner. This time the train is a runaway from the very begining of the verse, and the loss of control is apparent with each passing line.
The final image of the song is trivial: "four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire" are potholes that the local authorities had to count. Lennon comments on bureaucratic absurdity wryly: "Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall." What all the holes refer to doesn't matter as much as where Lennon takes the image---by devoting attention to such a meaningless counting task, he emphasizes the disparity between this verse (and the warped values it implies) and the other two.
The second orchestral tidal wave is larger and more disturbing than the first. Instead of arriving at an alternative world, the roaring tumult crashes headlong into the defeat that was its fate from the very beginning. The tangle of instruments was never scored; each player was told to follow George Martin's gestures and reach a certain pitch as he conducted the ensemble. It is the sound of utter turmoil, an ocean of vexation, churning from beneath everyman's subconscious and ready to explode at any second.
When the climax is reached and the final declamatory chord hammers the song closed, it is bombastically hollow. The sheer force of energy released is enormous, but the tension remains unresolved; it leaves the listener more disturbed than mollified. This final chord, struck mightily by the four Beatles at three pianos on a simultaneous cue, hangs in the air forever, echoing until the final strains disintegrate before our very ears. The aural image couldn't be more stark; it has a sense of tragic inevitability that haunts long after the record is played.
In the context of the album, the track begins as an encore and winds up a eulogy; it dismantles the illusory world the Beatles entered as Sgt. Pepper's Band. Because "A Day in the Life" sits next to an unabashedly fun set of songs, it sounds all the more stark. But the Sgt. Pepper journey isn't futile; its despair is ultimately hopeful. "I'd love to turn you on" is a motto of enlightment, of Lennon's desire to wake the world up to its own potential for rejuvenation, not self-annihilation. If "A Day in the Life" were a single, it would be unbearably pessimistic; as the final track to the Pepper road show, it cools the freak-out optimism and challenges its listeners to scheme beyond the numbing ordinariness that daily life confronts them with. "A Day in the Life" affirms the imaginative landscape of the rest of the album by acknowledging our need for it. Because of the larger context, it's not "a song of wasteland," as Richard Poirier suggests. The final blow doesn't summon the fate of modern man; it decries the tragedy of the fullness available and denied in our culture.

Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records & The Sixties

Ian MacDonald, 1994

With Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane in the can, The Beatles were confident that their reply to The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds was well under way. Capitol, though, needed a new single and the tracks were accordingly requisitioned for a double A-side in February 1967. Since UK chart protocal in the Sixties was that anything issued as a single could not be included on an LP released in the same year, the group submitted to this with ill-grace. Apart from putting them back to square one with the new album, the decision killed their key concept of an integral set about their Liverpool childhoods. Fortunately, they were at the peak of their powers, and, only two days after finishing Penny Lane, they were back in Abbey Road working on their finest single achievement: A Day in the Life.
A song not of disillusionment with life itself but of disenchantment with the limits of mundane perception, A Day in the Life depicts the "real" world as an unelightened construct that reduces, depresses, and ulimately destroys. In the first verse --- based, like the last, on a report in the Daily Mail for 17th January 1967 --- Lennon refers to the death of Tara Browne, a young millionaire friend of The Beatles and other leading English groups. On 18th December 1966, Browne, an enthusiast of the London counterculture and, like all its members, a user of mind-expanding drugs, drove his sports car at high speed through red lights in South Kensingtion, smashing into a van and killing himself. Whether of not he was tripping at the time is unknown, though Lennon clearly thought so. Reading the report of the corner's verdict, he recorded it in the opening verses of A Day in the Life, taking the detached view of the onlookers whose only interest was in the dead man's celebrity. Thus travestied as a spectacle, Browne's tragedy became meaningless --- and the weary sadness of the music which Lennon found for his lyric displays a distance that veers from the dispassionate to the unfeeling.
On the next page in the same newspaper, he found an item whose absurdity perfectly complemented the Tara Browne story: "There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire, or one twenty-sixthof a hole per person, according to a council survey." This --- intensified by a surreal reference to the circular Victorian concert venue the Albert Hall (also in South Kensington) --- became the last verse. In between, Lennon inserted a verse in which his jaded spectator looks on as the English army wins the war. Prompted by his part in the film How I Won the War three months earlier, this may have been a veiled allusion to Vietnam, which, though a real issue to Lennon, would have overheated the song if stated directly.
At one level, A Day in the Life concerns the alienating effect of "the media". On another, it looks beyond what the Situationists called "the society of the spectacle" to the poetic consciousness invoked by the anarchic wall-slogans of May 1968 in Paris (eg "Beneath the pavement, the beach"). Hence the sighing tragedy of the verses is redeemed by the line "I'd love to turn you on", which becomes the focus of the song. The message is that life is a dream and we have the power, as dreamers, to make it beautiful. In this perspective, the two rising orchestral glissandi may be seen as symbolising simultaneously the moment of awakening from sleep and a spiritual ascent from fragmentation to wholeness, achieved in the final E major chord. How the group themselves pictured these passages is unclear, though Lennon seems to have had something cosmic in mind, requesting from Martin "a sound like the end of the world" and later described as "a bit of a 2001". All that is certain is that the final chord was not, as many have since claimed, meant as an ironic gesture of banality or defeat. In early 1967, deflation was the last thing on The Beatles' minds --- or anyone else's, with the exception of Frank Zappa and Lou Reed. Though clouded with sorrow and sarcasm, A Day in the Life is as much an expression of mystic-psychedelic optimism as the rest of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The fact that it achieves its transcendent goal via a potentially disillusioning confrontation with the "real" world is precisely what makes it so moving.
Made in a total of around thirty-four hours, A Day in the Life represents the peak of The Beatles' achievement. With one of their most controlled and convincing lyrics, its musical expression is breathtaking, its structure at once utterly original and completely natural. The performance is likewise outstanding. Lennon's floating, tape-echoed vocal contrasts ideally with McCartney's "dry" briskness; Starr's drums hold the track together, beginning in idiosyncratic dialogue with Lennon on the slack-tuned tom-toms; McCartney's contributions on piano and (particularly) bass brim with invention, colouring the music and occasionally providing the main focus. A brilliant production by Martin's team, working under restrictions which would floor most of today's studios, completes a piece which remains among the most penetrating and innovative artistic reflections of its era.

A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles

Mark Hertsgaard, 1995

John Lennon recalled Sgt Pepper as "a peak" in the Beatles' career, a time when "Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on 'A Day in the Life.' " Indeed, "A Day in the Life" may be the ultimate Lennon-McCartney collaboration, a classic example of how the songwriting style of each man perfectly complemented that of the other. Although John would later confess that he and Paul wrote many songs "eyeball to eyeball," especially in the early days, their usual practice by this time, January 1967, was for one of them to provide the missing middle or accents to a song that the other had already almost completed. In the case of "A Day in the Life," it was Paul who made John's composition whole. Lennon had the melody and story line---the verses about a man who "blew his mind out in a car," the English Army that "had won the war," the "four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire"---but the song needed something more. Lennon didn't like laboring over songs, preferring instead the Zen purity of inspiration, so when he got stuck after completing the main verses he set the song aside. "I needed a middle-eight for it, but that would have been forcing it," he later explained. "All the rest had come out smooth, flowing, no trouble, and to write a middle eight would have been to write a middle eight, but instead Paul already had one."
Paul did indeed have the fragment "Woke up, fell out of bed..." lying around. The two partners agreed that its peppy portrait of the alienating hustle of modern urban life---based on Paul's memories of rushing to school in the morning---made the ideal counterpoint to John's gently ominous, dreamlike commentary on the hollow absurdity of status, order, and worldly attachments. The initial idea of the song had come, as it so often did with Lennon, from an item in the mass media. "I was reading the paper one day and noticed two stories," he recalled. "One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car crash. On the next page was a story about four thousand potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire, that needed to be filled. Paul's contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song, 'I'd love to turn you on,' that he'd had floating around in his head and couldn't use. I thought it was a damn good piece of work."
The Guinness heir, whom the Beatles had happened to know, was born to a life of fantastic privilege. By conventional standards he was "a lucky man who made the grade." He had everything money could buy, but found himself no more immune to death's arbitrary, dispassionate arrival than the lowliest proletarian. A momentary, all too human lapse---"he didn't notice that the lights had changed"---and he was gone. In the moment of death, all delusion is shattered, everyone is equal. Lennon clinches the point with the wistful, mocking epitaph "Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords." The gathered crowd knows they've "seen his face before" but they can't place it; in the broad scheme of things, he is barely a bit player. The wealth and position that seemed so important, to the heir and the larger society, is revealed as trivial and fleeting. Equally blinded by a different kind of triviality are the bureaucrats of the final verse, tabulating the precise number of holes in the roads of Blackburn, Lancashire, even "though the holes were rather small." No wonder the singer would "love to turn you on." To see his fellow human beings sleepwalking so numbly through the glorious richness that life offers is heartbreaking.
Musicologist Wilfred Mellers has observed that "A Day in the Life" derives much of its power from the contrast between its relatively simple tune and the horrors described in its lyrics. But it is Lennon's voice as much as anything that puts the message across. In his 1992 behind-the-scenes documentary The Making of Sgt Pepper, George Martin played an early version of "A Day in the Life." Referring to John, Martin said, "Even in this early take, he has a voice which sends shivers down the spine." Martin had just heard Lennon's entranced delivery of the opening lines, and the deep gaze on his face and the slight glistening in his eyes suggested how moved he still was by the memory of his departed friend.
The alarm clock that heralds the transition to McCartney's portion of the song was actually set as a joke, according to George Martin, who added, "We left it in because we couldn't get it off" the tape. But it is a sublime bit of serendipity; there couldn't be a more appropriate introduction to Paul's "Woke up, fell out of bed" lyric. Lennon was the more philosophical of the two, but McCartney showed more empathy for the daily life of the average person, and here that perspective provides a reassuring anchor to Lennon's cosmic musings. McCartney's everyman seems oblivious to all but his own small concerns---a cup of tea, a quick cigarette on the way to work---yet he is not an unsympathetic character; he simply has enough trouble keeping his own life together without also tyring to confront the moral issues raised in Lennon's part of the song. He also represents each of us who retreats from full engagement of life; like us, he is the "you" in "I'd love to turn you on."
It was the "love to turn you on" line that caused "A Day in the Life" to meet a fate shared by numerous other Beatles songs: banning by the authorities. The BBC contended that the song promoted drug-taking. It is true that by the time the Beatles made Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, their use of mind-expanding drugs such as marijuana and LSD was copious and frequent, opening doors they had not even known existed, with obvious and beneficial effect on their creativity. McCartney later admitted that "A Day in the Life" was written "as a deliberate provocation to people. But what we really wanted was to turn you on to the truth rather than just bloody pot!" Critical of the Vietnam War and the narrow-minded conformity of modern consumer society, the Beatles sought to express countercultural values in their songs in an effort, George Harrison said, "to wake up as many people as we could."
Obliterating boundaries between classical and rock and roll and avant-garde and the mainstream, the Beatles decided to punctuate "A Day in the Life" with a dark, tumultuous orchestra crescendo. It is this stroke of audacity that catapults "A Day in the Life" beyond the level of splendid achievement to that of enduring masterpiece. Because Lennon and McCartney were musically illiterate---neither man ever learned to read or notate music---it was Martin who had to explain what the Beatles wanted to the forty outside musicians summoned to Abbey Road Studios on the evening of February 10, 1967. "What I did there was to write, at the beginning of the twenty-four bars, 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 each instrument could reach that was near a chord of E major."
John had said he wanted the song to rise up to "a sound like the end of the world." Finally, the Beatles hit upon the idea of simultaneously striking an E-major chord on three grand pianos, the sound to be drawn out as long as possible with electronic enhancement. It took John, Paul, Ringo, and Mal Evans nine tries before they all hit the keys at precisely the same time. When that evening's overdub was attached to the end of the orchestral crescendo, John got his wish. The effect of the crashing E-major chord, followed by some fifty-three seconds of gradually dwindling reverberation, brings to mind nothing so much as the eerily spreading hush of the mushroom cloud.
To conclude a pop song with a sound evoking thermonuclear devastation, the late-twentieth-century human nightmare, would be pretenious in the hands of lesser artists. With the Beatles, it sounds as natural as a roaring waterfall, and as awe-inspiring. The rolling shock waves of the sustained E chord, at once terrible and magisterial, seem to go on forever, giving the listener ample time to absorb and ponder the many dimensions of meaning in the song.
"A Day in the Life" posits nothing so crude as a direct condemnation of militarism or the nuclear arms race, though its sensibility certainly encompasses a warning against such stupidities. The appeal of the song's poetry lies rather in its implicit articulation of the American Transcendentalist's credo: "All is connectedness." Glorification of wealth, identification with hierarchy, fixation on the illusory trifles of existence---these values cannot be separated from the social structures that make nuclear war and other forms of organized violence possible. Yet for all its foreboding, the song offers redemption. The despair in "A Day in the Life," critic Tim Riley has pointed out, "is ultimately hopeful. 'I'd love to turn you on' is a motto of enlightenment, of Lennon's [sic] desire to wake the world up to its own potential for rejuvenation, not self-annhilation." "A Day in the Life" thus fulfills one of the holy missions of great art---awakening in its audience not only a reverence for the miracle of life but a renewed enthusiam to go out and live it.

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