It starts off so simply: as the final triumphant notes of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’ fade away, a delicately strummed acoustic guitar bubbles up from the ether. Although most first-time listeners probably assumed that the reprise of ‘Sgt. Pepper’ would end The Beatles‘ iconic 1967 album of the same name, there was one more song that would show off the Fab Four at their most ambitious and creative.
‘A Day in the Life’ was one of the final true-blue collaborations between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lennon first wrote the song in early 1967, with McCartney quickly filling in the song’s middle section. Inspired by newspaper stories and the emerging influence of psychedelics, ‘A Day in the Life’ soon went from a simple guitar-and-piano work in progress to something far more kaleidoscopic.
“Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on ‘A Day in the Life’,” Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. “The way we wrote a lot of the time: you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. He was a bit shy about it because I think he thought it’s already a good song … So we were doing it in his room with the piano. He said, ‘Should we do this?’ ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’”
As the pair began to add new sections and segments to the song, ‘A Day and the Life’ started to sprawl into a wild new composition. For the song’s first verse, Lennon tapped into the tragic death of Tara Browne, the heir to the Guinness brewing fortune who had befriended The Beatles before dying in a car crash at the age of 21 in December of 1966. McCartney later confirmed that Browne was the inspiration behind the verse but initially considered it to be a coincidence.
“The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together. It has been attributed to Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, which I don’t believe is the case, certainly as we were writing it, I was not attributing it to Tara in my head,” McCartney told Barry Miles in the book Many Years From Now. “In John’s head it might have been. In my head, I was imagining a politician bombed out on drugs who’d stopped at some traffic lights and didn’t notice that the lights had changed. The ‘blew his mind’ was purely a drugs reference, nothing to do with a car crash.”
The initial arrangement of ‘A Day in the Life’ featured conventional instruments. The first take of the song had Lennon on acoustic guitar, McCartney on piano, Geroge Harrison playing maracas, and Ringo Starr playing congas. For the transitional 24-bar bridge, McCartney repeated a piano chord as the band’s road manager, Mal Evans, counted out measures and rang an alarm clock at the end. The section was left open, with no one quite sure what to do with the open space.
Eventually, McCartney added bass guitar, and Starr played a new drum track. A transitional section between McCartney’s middle section and Lennon’s final verse was added, although it remains a bit of a mystery as to who sang the wordless vocals. ‘A Day in the Life’ was almost complete, but there was still the question of what would occupy the two 24-bar transitional sections.
Lennon eventually convinced producer George Martin to gather an orchestra together to create a crescendo. McCartney wanted the musicians to improvise the run-up, going from each instrument’s lowest note to its highest. Martin knew that the practicality of such an endeavour would be difficult, especially for the more traditional players who would show up at the session. To try and bridge the gap between the buttoned-up sensibilities of the orchestra and the experimental whims of The Beatles, Martin outlined a rough score for the musicians to follow.
“At the very beginning, I put into the musical score the lowest note each instrument could play, ending with an E major chord. And at the beginning of each of the 24 bars I put a note showing roughly where they should be at that point,” Martin explained in Mark Lewisohn’s The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.
Adding: “Then I had to instruct them. ‘We’re going to start very very quietly and end up very very loud. We’re to start very low in pitch and end up very high. You’ve got to make your own way up there, as slidey as possible so that the clarinets slurp, trombones gliss, violins slide without fingering any notes. And whatever you do, don’t listen to the fellow next to you because I don’t want you to be doing the same thing.’ Of course they all looked at me as though I was mad…”
After a few different takes of the orchestral swell were combined together, ‘A Day in the Life’ was nearly complete. The session for the orchestra overdub was staged as a massive party, and after the orchestra was finished, The Beatles assembled their guests into a makeshift choir to perform the song’s final E Major chord a capella. The band wasn’t happy with the result, so instead, Lennon, McCartney, and Starr all played the chord on different pianos, with Evans stepping in as well as Martin, who played his own E chord on a harmonium.
On British copies of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, ‘A Day in the Life’ ends with a high-pitched tone and some spliced studio chatter. All told, the instruments that made up the song include 24 moving parts with everything from vocals to an alarm clock. See the full list below.
Instruments used in The Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’:
*Vocals
*Acoustic guitar
*Piano
*Harmonium
*Maracas
*Congas
*Tambourine
*Drums
*Bass guitar
*Violins
*Violas
*Cellos
*Double basses
*Harp
*Oboes
*Clarinets
*Bassoons
*Flutes
*French Horns
*Trumpets
*Trombones
*Tuba
*Timpani
*Alarm clock
Check out ‘A Day in the Life’ down below.
