Notes and Quotes: "A Day in the Life"

Peter Vince (Abbey Road engineer in Lewisohn 1988:96): Only the Beatles could have assembled a studio full of musicians, many from the Royal Philharmonic or the London Symphony orchestras, all wearing funny hats, red noses, balloons on their bows and putting up with headphones clipped around their Stradivari violins acting as microphones.

Tony Clark (Abbey road engineer in Lewisohn 1988: 96): I was speechless, the tempo changes — everything in that song — was just so dramatic and complete. I felt so privileged to be there . . . I walked out of the Abbey road that night thinking "What am I going to do now?" It really did affect me.

Martin (1979:208): John asked Paul if he had anything to go into the middle part of the song, and Paul came up with "woke up, got out of bed...," which is really a completely different song. But it merged into the other one, because it provided a sort of dream sequence. We divided the two sections with what was in effect a very long musical pause. When we recorded the original track it was just Paul banging away on the same piano note, bar after bar, for twenty-four bars. We agreed that it was a question of "This space to be filled later." In order to keep time, we got Mal Evans to count each bar, and on the record you can still hear his voice as he stood by the piano counting: "One — two — three — four...," for a joke, Mal set an alarm clock to go off at the end of twenty-four bars, and you can hear that too. We left it in because we couldn't get it off!

Lennon (from a 1980 Playboy interview quoted in Dowlding 179): 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.

Faithfull (2000: 89): In December, Tara Browne was killed in a car accident. This was very shortly after we'd all taken the acid trip together. He was on acid that night and drove his Lotus Elan through a red light. This is the incident so eerily described in John Lennon's song, "A Day in the Life." It wasn't just the drugs that killed him, though. After all, everyone we knew at that time was driving around London on acid.

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21 March, 2012