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Firsts and lasts…
 “’A Day In The Life’ may be the ultimate Lennon-McCartney collaboration, a classic example of how the songwriting style of each man complemented that of the other.” (Mark Hertsgaard, A Day In The Life, 4).
One reason that the Beatles stand out in the history of rock music is their staggering capacity for innovation, consistently pioneering new approaches and vistas in the musical landscape which influenced all rock music to come. “A Day In The Life” is a watershed moment in that long fertile collaboration for many reasons.
It is the last truly substantial collaboration between them as songwriting partners, as from this point forward they disengaged and independently produced the basic lyrical and melodic structure of songs before coming together in the studio. It is the first song they completed for the first “theme” album ever produced, although it is of course the last track which ties together the album’s disparate thematic threads.
Technically, it is a watershed as the first song (and album) to employ Dolby noise reduction technology, an innovation that produced unheard-of fidelity and predates the emergence of 16-track recording, which first became available in late 1967. “A Day In The Life” is also apparently the first track to employ extra melodic layers like the inaudible high-pitch frequency and the eternal looping gibberish at the end of the song/album, dismantling the notion of its “end.”
It is also the first rock song to employ a full symphonic orchestration as a central element in its melodic structure. The Beatles and George Martin were already innovators in exploiting classical instrumentation in songs like “Norwegian Wood,” but “A Day In The Life” is the first and arguably most successful experiment of bridging that traditional divide between rock band and orchestra. Indeed, whoever struck upon the idea of the 24-bar sound experiment – mathematically and technically constrained by the instructions to proceed from the lowest to the highest possible note of each instrument in an E major scale, yet unconstrained in how fast to ascend – unwittingly introduced a new element of “sound art” and the avant-garde experiments of pioneers John Cage and Karlheinz Stockheisen into popular music for the first time. Nearly 40 years on, it is still a shocking and thrilling sonic interruption that shatters the conventions of the “pop” song, much like the celluloid tear in Bergman’s Persona exploded the conventions of film narrative a year earlier.
More notoriously, “A Day In The Life” is apparently the first song to be censored by a national radio network in the United Kingdom, when the BBC banned its airplay two days before the global release date because of the supposed references to drugs in the song. The censors were particularly affronted at the phrase “I’d love to turn you on”, which supposedly was an incitement to drug use. Certainly other groups, including the Beatles in 1966 after John’s “Jesus” controversy, had been the subject of regional bans in the U.S. and isolated pockets of censorship, but “A Day In The Life” has the distinction of the first blanket government-wide ban in the UK, joining the ranks of other luminous works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Lolita and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch which failed at first to assuage the British censors. Next...
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