Tara's Beatles Pages

Roger Lord - Oboe

John Marston - Harp

Eric Gruenberg, Granville Jones, Bill Monro, Jurgen Hess, Hans Geiger, D. Bradley, Lionel Bentley, David McCallum, Donald Weekes, Henry Datyner, Sidney Sax,Ernest Scott - Violins

John Underwood, Gwynne Edwardsm Bernard Davis, John Meek - Violas

Francisco Gabarro, Dennis Vigay, Alan Delziel, Alex Nifosi - Cello

Cyril Mac Arther, Gordon Pearce - Double Bass

Basil Tschaikov, Jack Brymer - Clarinets

N.Fawcett, Alfred Waters - Bassoon

Clifford Seville, David Sandeman - Flute

Alvin Civil, Neil Sanders - French horns

David Mason, Monty Montgomery, Harold Jaskson - Trumpets

Raymond Brown, Raymond Premru, T. Moore - Trombones

Micheal Barnes - TubaTristan Fry - Timpani, percussion

With "strawberry fields forever" and "Penny Lane" in the can, The Beatles were confident that their reply to the beach boys "pet sound" 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 charts protocol in the sixties was that anything issued as a single could not be included on a LP within the same year, the group submitted to this will ill grace. Apart from putting them back to square one with the new album, the decision killed their concept of an integral set about their liverpool childhood. Fortunately, they were at the peak of their powers and, only two days after finishing Penny Lane we're back at Abbey Road working on their finest single achievement :A Day In The Life

More nonsense has been written about this then anything else the Beatles produced. It has been described as a sober return to the real world after the drunken fantasy of 'Pepperland' ; as a conceptual statement about the structure of the pop album (or the artifice of the studio, or the falsity of the record performance); as an evocation of a bad trip; as a 'pop Waste Land'; even as a morbid celebration of death. Most of this misinterpretation stems from ignorance of the fact that - apart from the relatively trivial 'When I'm 64' - 'A day in the life' was the first track begun for sergeant pepper. At this stage, The Beatles had a little idea what the new LP was going to be about (if anything). Conceived on its own terms, A Day In The Life fell into place at the end of the finished work four months later with a naturalness that could hardly have been apparent at the time in was recorded. Still less likely is that The Beatles would have set about constructing an unlike anything they'd ever done before (not least it being two minutes longer then the longest track in their Discography to date). Far from a purpose-built grand finale to a master plan, it was merely a further speculative episode in the parallel developments of its authors.

If anything predetermined A Day in the Life, it was a LSD. A song about perception - a subject central both to late-period Beatles and the counterculture at large - A Day In The Life concerned 'reality' only to the extant that this had been revealed by LSD to be largely in the eye of the beholder. A scepticism about the appearance had figured in some of the songs of rubber soul, later coming to the fore in Rain, and your bird can sign, and Tomorrow never knows. Strawberry fields forever and penny land are further links in the chain of songs about perception and reality of which A day in the life is an explicit culmination.

A song not a 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. 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 of 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 speeds through red lights in south kensington, smashing into a van and killing himself. Whether or not he was tripping at the time is unknown, thoughLennon Clearly thought so. Reading the report of the coroner'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 as item whose absurdity perfectly complemented the Tara Browne story : 'There are 4,000 holes in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire or one twenty-sixth of 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 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 invoking by the anarchic wall-slogans of May 1968 in Paris (e.g. 'Beneath the pavement, the beach'). Hence the sighing tragedy of the verse 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 symbolizing simultaneously the moment of awakening from a sleep and a spiritual ascent from fragmentation to the wholeness, achieved in the final E chord. How the group themselves pictures the 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 describing it as 'a bit of 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. (It was originally conceived and recorded as a humming vocal chord.) 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 achieved its transcendent goal via a potentially disillusioning confrontation with the 'real' world is precisely what makes it so moving.

The Beatles began recording A day in the life two days after Lennon was inspired to write its verses. In the intervening period, McCartney added the double-time middle section, a fragment of a number about his schooldays which, in its new context, became a vignette of a vacantly busy life of routine. ( The 'smoke' was originally a woodbine but, as McCartney and LEnnon agreed, 'Bugger this, we're going to write a real turn-on song!') At this stage, the composition was so new that they hadn't had time to work out how to join Lennon's section to McCartney's section and so had to record the basic track leaving two gaps of 24 bars ( counter by road manager Mal Evans, who's voice remains on the finished recording). The recording was subsequently built up over the next three weeks - Lennon and McCartney redoing their vocals, McCartney and Starr replacing their bass and drum parts - until the desired effect was obtained.

For the final overdubs, a party was thrown in Studio 1 on friday 10th of february, much as had been done on 1st of june 1966 for Yellow Submarine, except that this time an orchestra was involved. McCartney had decided that the 24 bar bridge would be filled by a full symphony orchestra going from its lowest to it's highest note in a unsynchronised slide - a 'freak out' or aural 'happening'. Charged with realizing this, George Martin Halved the number of players and scored the glissando individually to ensure the right random effect. Rather than a chaotic tone-cluster, each player was asked to finish on which ever note in the e major triad was nearest the highest on the instrument. A second four-track tape machine was slaved to the one running the Beatles' own stereo track ( the first time this had ever been tried in a British studio) and each orchestral glissando was recorded in mono four time before being mixed back to the master as a single monstrous note (presumably remixed with ADT to take up the spare track). At the end of this festive evening, those in the studio spontaneously applauded the result. The final chord, played by Lennon, McCartney, Starr, Evans, and Martin on three pianos (multi-tracked four time), was recorded separately twelve days later.

Made in a total of around thirty-four hours, A day in the life represents the peak of The Beatles achievements. With one of their most controlled and convincing lyrics, its musical expression is breath taking, its structure at once utterly original and completely natural. The performance is likewise outstanding. Lennon;s floating tape-echoed vocal contrasts ideally McCartney's 'dry' briskness; Starr's drum hold the track together, beginning in idiosyncratic dialogue with Lennon on 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 restriction which would floor most of today's studios, completes a piece which remains among the most penetrating and innovative artistic reflections of its era.