History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (12 page)

A year and a half later, in the midst of a year in which the Beatles’ first and second albums,
Please Please Me
and
With the Beatles,
would occupy the number 1 position in the British charts for fifty-two consecutive weeks—and no one would have believed, even at the end of that year, that this was only a harbinger of things to come—a new confidence, bravado, arrogance, assurance should have gone into the song. But while at a show in London the Shirelles’ “Baby It’s You” brought out everything the group had to give, two weeks later in the same hall “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” brought out nothing. With dull strummed backing and tuning straight from the Shadows, the instrumental group that had dominated the British charts for years, it was boilerplate Merseybeat. Without a musical dimension, there was nothing to hear but words, and with the roar of novelty at the heart of Beatlemania, a new world sighted if not yet reached, the song sounded old.

Four years later, it could seem as if the Beatles had done more than change the world. It could seem as if they owned it, or as if they were it, as if every voice on earth went into theirs and was sent back to whoever it came from with more vitality,
more intelligence, more heart, and more love, leaving not only the world, but individual girls and boys, men and women, changed. And still there was no end to the sense of surprise that was the truest source of the change the Beatles had made.

No one had ever heard anything like it; no one has heard anything like it since. That is the first thing to remember about “A Day in the Life,” the last track on the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
an album that, at least in its moment, made almost every other performer in rock ’n’ roll feel incomplete, inarticulate, fraudulent, and small: left behind.

As 1966 broke into 1967, it was a time in rock ’n’ roll—in life lived according to its pace—when no one knew what to expect. Album by album, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, even the Beach Boys, even someone who might not have been heard of the year or the month before, were in a constant battle to top each other. On 29 August 1966, in San Francisco, the Beatles had played what would turn out to be their last show, an event that, in its absence, would transform the group. George was spending time in a London ashram, days that would transform his life. On a night that would transform his, John Lennon had met the conceptual artist Yoko Ono. Still, no one, perhaps not even the Beatles themselves, were ready for the daring of “A Day in the Life”—for its bet that the future had already arrived.

It was the second song to be recorded for
Sgt. Pepper,
made in January and February of 1967, but in a way it wasn’t part of the album at all.
Sgt. Pepper
was constructed as a music-hall review, harking back to the 1920s or even before. It began and ended with the title celebration and its reprise, with rousing shouts from the stage and deliriously happy applause from the crowd. Then, creeping out of the last burst of affirmation as it faded back into the past—“A ‘regular’ movie,” Pauline Kael once wrote, “says yes to the whole world or it says not much of anything,” and that’s what “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” said—the present, in the form of its wars, greed, vanity, and triviality, returned.

That determined, bright strum from John’s acoustic guitar, placing the listener right on the steps to the door that was about to open; the loose, floating notes from Paul’s piano, disconnected, abstract, distracting you from the feeling that something was about to happen, making you forget why you were waiting for the door to open—it was like a play, complete and finished in a few seconds.

John had written three verses about reading the news: a car crash and a movie opening in London, a count of potholes in “Blackburn, Lancashire” somehow matching the number of seats in the Albert Hall. DJs quickly told their listeners that the person who “blew his mind out in a car” in the first verse was Tara Brown, a Beatle hanger-on and heir to the Guinness fortune who was killed in an auto accident, and that the film the singer saw in the second verse was
How
I Won the War,
starring John himself, who died at the end, but none of that mattered. It wasn’t only the notes in the song that floated; it was the play itself. The story unfolded like a dream, dissolving each time you tried to make its details into facts.

But it was too much of a dream. The story was pierced by a piece of song that Paul McCartney had been holding onto, an account of a commuter rushing for the bus, and this was the prosaic anchor the song needed. The commuter makes the bus, goes upstairs for a smoke, and drifts off—returning, as Devin McKinney wrote in 2003, to “the dream from which he believed he had been awakened.” And there is “a sound building up from nothing to the end of the world,” as John put it when he demanded an orchestra to take the song into a maelstrom. “We’ll tell the orchestra to start on whatever the lowest note on their instrument is,” Paul remembered saying to John, “and to arrive at the highest note on their instrument, but to do it in their own time.” In their own time—that was the source of the danger in the heart-stopping climb that took the everyday to the face of eternity. There were random cymbal slashes from Ringo Starr broken up in the noise; a stentorian, counting voice disappearing into the whirlwind, and then a single, giant chord, three pianos struck at once, then a slipping, droning forty-three seconds from a thunderclap to a buzz that never quite reached silence.

Page upon page has been written on the song as a poem of alienation, an echoing damn on all the works of modern life. In 1984, Jon Wiener noted that while the
Sgt. Pepper
song-cycle ends with the band thanking its “lovely audience,” “A Day in the Life” ends with the audience described as empty holes, and perhaps this explains anything that needs to be said about what the song means. Very little has been said about the way the song’s meaning is conveyed. The song created an altogether new field of expression, one that was never occupied again; the question of how that field was made remains open.

As the song begins, both John’s singing and the melody he is tracing are intentionally following in the tracks of Elvis Presley’s 1956 “Heartbreak Hotel.” Then the song leaps forward, past itself, past 1967, and past the Beatles, to the last moments in John’s 1970 “God,” the last song on his first solo album, where, in the absurdly pompous line, “I was the dreamweaver,” he found the most sublime singing of his life and of his time; it was the way he put his whole being into “was.” “A crowd of people turned away,” he sings of the movie he goes to see in “A Day in the Life,” his tone echoing that moment three years later in advance, in the quiet sweep as he lets the words drift, so that you can picture the crowd as a wave, a single body and no mind. “But I just had to look—”

“You never use the word ‘just,’” John once said. “It’s meaningless.
It’s a fill-in word.” In the handwritten lyrics for Lennon’s part of “A Day in the Life,” you can see where he omitted the word in the line that follows “I just had to look”: “
Just
having read the book.” There it is, the fill-in word. But in the previous line—“I just had to look”—
just
can mean nothing, or it can be an absolute.
I had to look, I had no choice
—here “just” pulls down against the other words, making its own music, allowing the “had” to rise up like a spirit, making you feel you would give anything to follow it.

“A Day in the Life” remains a play in which the most casual events of the day, the stories in the paper, anyone’s morning routine, turn into inexplicable threats. Daily life becomes a circus, at just that point where someone cuts the ropes holding up the tent. As cheers ride the band off the stage, as the boards pile high with bouquets thrown from all over the theater, even the balconies, a figure dressed in white tie and tails stands in the wings. He looks out into the crowd, where even strangers are embracing, and as the last round of applause drops away he steps forward. He is there to bring the news that, outside the theater, nothing has changed. The hall falls silent. As the members of the audience leave the building, they become the crowds that will course through “A Day in the Life,” averting their eyes from the smashed car in the street outside, walking briskly past the headlines on the hoardings, trying to get the sound of the man’s voice out of their heads.

That was the high point of the Beatles’ career. Three months after the release of
Sgt. Pepper
Brian Epstein died in London of a drug overdose, likely a suicide. After that the Beatles stumbled, for a moment finding their footing in 1968 with the collection of disparate sessions that produced what came to be known as “the White Album”—where, Jann Wenner wrote at the time, “It’s possible that they are no longer the Beatles.” At the beginning of the next year they went into the studio, with Yoko Ono sitting at John’s side as the last in a long line of Fifth Beatles, for a recording marathon they were calling “Get Back”—a return to roots for a band whose history so matched that of rock ’n’ roll itself that they were their roots. There was backbiting and insult, dismissal and the deadly expressions that didn’t need words. George and Ringo quit the band and then returned and quit again. Paul tried to keep one day following another. John was there but already gone.

They had all the money in the world, and time was running out. They went into the studio day after day and came out with nothing. They tried the first songs John and Paul had ever written together, the first songs they’d played. They even went back to “That’ll Be the Day,” and got no farther with it than they had eleven long years before, in another world. Then one day, at the end of January, for a few minutes another country, that country of songs, came into view.

There’s a flurry of rhythm, some random tuning up, then
a harsh stop. Then a guitar note that fills in the silence, then drums, then George slashing chords out of the shimmering tones of a guitar run through a Leslie box, lining out “Not Fade Away,” John shouting words from far back in the sound, then adding organ. At first the borrowed Bo Diddley beat is all they have: John sings a line from Dee Clark’s Diddley knockoff “Hey Little Girl,” then a line from Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley.” Everyone but George seems to lose interest—the abstraction at the heart of the song is leaving them mute and handless—but they press on, as if they can’t think of anything better to do. Then on a cue from John there’s a tip into “Maybe Baby,” and a hint of the band driving its own car, the song merely the gas, and the tune almost takes on a body. It’s full, strong—and it begins to come apart in an instrumental break. John comes back, earnest, still reaching for the song, and then without a pause, by some trick of the light, “Maybe Baby” is replaced by “Peggy Sue Got Married.” It’s hot, sharp, the words scrambled back into “A Day in the Life”—“Peggy read the news the other day”—George searching for a spine in the song, letting the melody carry him, then realizing the melody is the spine. Singing “Winkin’ and blinkin’ and nod,” bits and pieces of God knows what, “You say you care, you’re everywhere,” John begins to do what people have always done with fifties songs, mock them, turn them into jokes to mock one’s own helpless affection for them, but it doesn’t work; the mockery
doesn’t work, and then neither does the song. They hit a wall—the wall dividing their love for the music they can no longer play from whatever music they might still have ahead of them. And then there’s a high, metallic half-phrase from a rhythm guitar, everyone knowing what it is, where it’s from, what it’s for.

“Crying, Waiting, Hoping”: they dance around the sound that’s still hanging in the air, knowing this is where it will happen or fail. “We used to do it,” someone says sadly, defeat all over his voice. “It ended with, ah—” George says. John plays a fragment of a chorus on his guitar. The words begin to come to him like birds. The singing is ragged, but they’re all part of it, with John’s fragmented lead only a step ahead of anyone else.
Hopin’ you’ll come back
—and then a flood of emotion into a single syllable that expands to fill the whole room and sharpens like a drill to drive down into the ground beneath it: “
Mine.
” All you hear is heart and melody—the heart the melody was crafted to bring out.

The song gives them freedom: they’re lost in it, they’re home. Structure doesn’t matter, the right words have no meaning, the progression of going where you’re supposed to go dissolves into the paradise of finding that you’ve arrived without will or even wish in the place you want to be. There’s something in the dynamics of the song, in the switchbacks of the melody, that demand that anyone who has truly found the song rewrite it on the spot—live it out.
“Smokin’,” says Paul. “Jokin’,” John answers. Time and again John returns to “Hopin’—you’ll come back”—and as you hear the group coming apart across these sessions, the bell rings all too clearly. They love this song, and they love each other, or they remember that they did. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s nothing to what’s coming.

At the right moment, George moves into the mandated solo, that grave-robber’s overdub he learned ten years before. “You’ll come back,” Paul sings, high, keening, over George’s first notes, as if the line got away from him, the words unbidden. George plays the same formal passage he played in 1962 and 1963, but everything is different. John and Paul are talking, singing, in the background; there is no separation, every sound is part of every other. Everyone shares in the laughter, the embarrassment at how much the song is asking of them and how much, now, at the end, they have to give it.

George’s notes are liquid, unstable, shifting into each other, a swirl of clothes, jackets and ties and shirts and scarves floating by like pages blown off a calendar by the wind of an old movie. More emotion flies out with each measure. The Leslie effect allows every note to melt, matching the singing. It’s a crude, broken mess of such beauty it makes no sense. The notes begin to turn over; the song is doing cartwheels. As George picks his way through the memory of the song—the memories the song sparks of when they used to do it, when they tried to nail what attracted them to it in the
first place, but also what the song itself remembers, the years it has traveled, the bodies it has inhabited, the voices that have tried and will try to speak its language—the whole history of the Beatles is present, as loss. And suddenly, that’s all you hear. Everything they ever had shines more brightly as, here, they feel its absence, feel what has slipped away, what can never be recaptured. Once they sent an idea of friendship out all over the world: the idea of a group that could bring out the uniqueness of the individual more completely than he or she could ever do alone. Now they are putting that into the world one last time, but secretly, in a broken performance they have no reason to think anyone will ever hear.