There’s no universal decree mandating camaraderie among members of every rock band. While some bands operate with a Three-Musketeers-style camaraderie in all aspects of their work, an equal number prefer to keep their distance from bandmates once off the stage. While sharing time with any member of The Beatles usually results in fantastic memories for most musicians, a select few were less than thrilled about the prospect of performing alongside the Fab Four.
As The Beatles made their way into the late 1960s, they had become a very different band in comparison to their early days. For all of the great teenybopper music they could crank out in the first half of the decade, both John Lennon and Paul McCartney had started turning in landmark pieces of work that expanded what rock could be on albums like Rubber Soul and Revolver.
When the band departed from the road, though, there were questions about what they would do next. Since no other group had released records without touring behind them, The Beatles started using the studio as a songwriting workshop, working meticulously at Abbey Road Studios until they came up with the recording they were proud of.
Lennon would be the first to showcase new material for the band’s experimental phase, playing the basis of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ on one of their first meetings back from the road. While McCartney would match his writing partner’s flair for experimentation with ‘Penny Lane’, it wasn’t until they hit ‘A Day in the Life’ that they moved outside conventional song structures.
While the band had flirted with other genres before, Lennon and McCartney had created a song meant to bring rock and roll to the same level as high art, concluding with a cinematic crescendo from an orchestra. Even though the group had used classical instruments in their songs before, the musicians called in for the session were less than thrilled with what they were being asked to do.
Instructed to go from the lowest note on their instrument to the highest independent from one another, most musicians were bewildered at how untraditional the song was. Although many of the salaried workers went along with it, engineer Geoff Emerick recalled how tense the studio environment was at the time.
In his memoir Here There and Everywhere, Emerick recalled a few classical musicians taking exception to The Beatles’ ideas, saying, “The general response wasn’t so much outrage as it was dismay. The musicians knew they were there to do a job; they just didn’t like what they were being asked to do…It wasn’t exactly dignified, and they resented it”.
Despite their years of honing their craft for sightreading, the musicians delivered masterful improvisations throughout the song, allowing the track to gradually build twice before ending Sgt Pepper with a glorious piano chord. The session musicians may have liked the traditional way of making records, but everything about ‘A Day in the Life’ was focused on expanding beyond tradition.
