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An inauspicious beginning…
 Many of the legendary tracks that Lennon composed for the Beatles have been subject to great speculation about hidden meanings, but were actually inspired by the most mundane of daily coincidences. “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” long associated with the acronym for a controlled substance, was actually inspired by a watercolor painted by 4-year old Julian that pictured a dark sky with rough stars and a stick figure of his classmate Lucy O’Donnell. Julian described the picture for his father as, “That’s Lucy in the sky, you know, with diamonds,” and the wonderful turn of phrase took hold in Lennon’s fertile imagination.
The origins of “A Day In The Life” are equally prosaic and rooted in the trivial events of the day. John Lennon was inspired to jot some lines over breakfast after reading the January 17th edition of the Daily Mail. One story related to a mundane project to fill 400 potholes in Blackburn, Lancashire, and postulated on the likely number of potholes throughout the United Kingdom. This fanciful extrapolation clearly ignited Lennon’s creative sensibility, and he likely composed his first poetic formulation of the song around this event (though no reductio ad absurdum about the size of Albert Hall was contemplated in the newspaper column). Lennon would later recall another story as inspiration, concerning the accidental death of Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune and acquaintance of the Beatles, after driving into the back of a truck in Redcliffe Square-although this event occurred almost a month earlier in December 1966. The intermediate stanza is believed to reflect John’s small role in the film How I Won the War which had wrapped filming in the Fall of 1966.
“I was reading the paper one day and noticed two stories. One was about the Guinness heir who killed himself in a car. That was the main headline story. He died in London 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” (Sheff, Playboy Interviews, 155).
He apparently composed the main three verses without much difficulty. According to John’s own recollection, “I needed a middle-eight, but that would have been forcing it. The rest had come through smooth, flowing, no trouble, and to write a middle eight would have been to write a middle eight, but instead Paul already had one there.”
Indeed, later that day Lennon took his initial draft of the basic three stanzas of the song to Paul McCartney’s house. After several annotated adjustments were made, a cleaner draft was composed in capital letters on the verso of the same A4 sheet of paper. At this point John or Paul inserted the melodic key which would fasten the various lyrical portions together, in Lennon’s recollection, “the beautiful little lick ‘I’d love to turn you on’” at the end of the third stanza in blue marker. Interestingly, at this juncture the phrase lacks the subjunctive, and reads “I love to turn you on” in manuscript.
It was only after finalizing the basic structure of Lennon’s contribution that Paul and John found that the former’s short lyric, “Woke up, got out of bed…,” which he had bandied about for some time, fit perfectly within the middle eight at the melodic center of the song. They finally had the outline of the first song of their next album, and were eager to make a stab at recording it.
On the basis of this initial draft of the lyrics, the band entered the studio two days later and recorded the basic structure of the song. In Bob Spitz’s recent summary: “They began on January 19 with a simple, two-track rendition, laying down the basic rhythm – Paul on piano, Ringo on bongos, and George on maracas – accompanied by John’s despairing, spectral voice saturated in echo ‘because he wanted to sound like Elvis Presley on “Heartbreak Hotel”.’ The gorgeous melody, as stark as it is soulful, stands out as one of the Beatles’ finest accomplishments” (660).
In the middle and end of the track they left two 24-bar interregnums, counted down by band manager Mal Evans and concluding with an alarm clock bell, initially as a joke. However, serendipitously the alarm worked perfectly with Paul’s short lyric “Woke up, got out of bed…” when the separate lyrical elements were combined.
As for the two 24-bar gaps, someone in the band struck upon the idea of having a full symphony ascend from the lowest possible note to the highest in an E major scale over a 24-bar period. On February 10, George Martin managed to summon 40 musicians from the Royal Symphony to Abbey Road Studios in full evening dress, for a musical ‘happening’ with friends including Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Donovan and Brian Jones. In a circus-like atmosphere they recorded several takes that were combined in the studio into a startling and unprecedented symphonic crescendo. The final chord was itself a symbol of unity, with John, Paul, Ringo, Mal Evans and George Martin each hammering down an E chord simultaneously on grand pianos. As a final trick John Lennon had George Martin dub in a 15-kilohertz high-frequency tone inaudible to the human ear (“especially intended to annoy your dog”), followed by an endless loop of studio background noises made by the runout groove looping back on itself. The surviving manuscript apparently records John Lennon’s first two full drafts of his lyrical contribution to the song. Lennon’s hesitations in the phrasing of the first complete draft are reflected in several lines that are crossed out (he wavered between “stood and stared” or “turned away” to describe the crowd in the first stanza, and whether the holes were “very” or “rather” small in the last). Even more remarkable for a first draft composition, this single sheet of paper has a second version transcribed in full capital letters verso, with each stanza numbered and a final addition (in Paul’s hand?) of the catchphrase “I love to turn you on.” This cleaner, legible version may well have been composed as the studio lyric sheet for the first session at Abbey Road Studios two days later.
This priceless artifact of rock ‘n’ roll history survived as part of the estate of Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager, and was eventually sold as part of his effects at Sotheby’s London, August 27, 1992. Next...
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