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A shot heard around the world...
 Among the many outstanding accomplishments of the Beatles’ songbook, it is generally agreed among critics that “A Day In the Life” is the first among equals, serving as the final coda to undoubtedly the most influential rock album of all time, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of the many classic songs composed by Lennon and McCartney, most critics agree that “A Day In The Life” comes closest to epitomizing their musical genius, and emerges at the summit of their long and fertile creative collaboration.
On June 1st, 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band struck the world audience like a thunderbolt. Anticipation was at a fever pitch, as it had been almost a year since the release of Revolver and the band had finally sworn off touring in 1966 after Lennon’s “Jesus” controversy and a disastrous tour of the Philippines. The album was the longest and most expensive recording in rock n’ roll history to date, and the tremendous anticipation for the musical launch has been likened by Langdon Winner to the marshalling of Europe in the aftermath of Waterloo at the dawn of the 19th century:
“The closest Western civilization has come to unity since the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was the week the Sgt. Pepper album was released. In every city in Europe and America the stereo systems and the radio played... and everyone listened. At the time I happened to be driving across country on Interstate 80. In each city where I stopped for gas or food – Laramie, Ogallala, Moline, South Bend – the melodies wafted in from some far-off transistor radio or portable hi-fi. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. For a brief while the irreparable fragmented consciousness of the West was unified, at least in the minds of the young.” (Langdon Winner, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock ‘n’ Roll, 183)
Since its first airing in June 1967, the stunning final coda of “A Day In The Life” has been hailed as a revolutionary achievement that elevated the rock genre to a new plane. “’A Day In The Life’ redefines everything that came before…. As a postlude to the Pepper fantasy, it casts a shadow that sets all other songs (and the Beatles’ own career) in perspective” (Tim Riley, Tell Me Why, 225). Contemporary critics immediately grasped at superlatives to capture the final composition’s towering achievement. Jack Kroll, writing in Newsweek shortly after the album was released, likened “A Day in the Life” to T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” generally considered the greatest English language poem of the 20th century. Mark Hertsgaard in his eponymous book (A Day In The Life) devotes the first chapter to the song and concludes, “like [Picasso’s] ‘Guernica’ and ‘The Wasteland,’ ‘A Day In The Life’ is a work of sufficient beauty, power and social relevance to rank among the outstanding statements of twentieth-century art” (10).
More recent critics have echoed these sentiments. The brilliant syncopation of Lennon’s soulful lyrics, combined with the radical introduction of a symphonic crescendo and thundering piano chord as the coda to the album mark this work as the Beatles’ most “outstanding studio performance,” according to Bob Spitz in his new biography of the band. Indeed, “A Day In the Life” was recently voted the “Best British Song” of all time in a poll of leading music critics by Britain’s Q magazine (October 2005).
Superlatives aside, this chorus of approval is grounded in some basic features unique to this composition which elevate the song above the many great works of the Lennon-McCartney songbook, the most successful and innovative musical collaboration of the 20th century. Next...
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