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selenak'"A Day in the Life" - that was something. I dug it. It was a good piece of work between Paul and me. I had the "I read the news today" bit, and it turned Paul on. Now and then we really turn each other on with a bit of song, and he just said "yeah" - bang, bang, like that. It just sort of happened beautifully ..."
Thus John Lennon regarding the song that when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heartsclub Band was released was hailed as the musical equivalent of T.S. Eliot The Waste Land by the critics and even now is bound to turn up in people's "best songs of all time" lists. I actually have a bit of a distant relationship towards it - it's the Robert Altman movie of Pepper to me, i.e. I admire it intellectually yet there are other songs that do far more for me emotionally both on that particular album and in the Beatles song catalogue - but then alienation is one of the emotions the song goes for. Also it just happens to be one of the songs where we have the minutae from inspiration to production, and a great illustration of the psychedelic, experimental phase of the 60s. A Day in the Life also showcases just how many people contributed to a song, and why studio production at this point took a leap forward.
Sidenote: did the Daily Mail have some sort of product placement deal with the Beatles? Because it gets mentioned pretty regularly, both in interviews and in song lyrics (Paperback Writer), for example. Anyway, John, reminscing in 1980:
I was writing 'A Day In The Life' with the Daily Mail propped in front of me on the piano. I had it open at their News in Brief, or Far and near, whatever they call it. I noticed two stories. One was about the Guinnes 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 4,000 potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire.
The first time I read that statement, I had no idea "the Guinness heir" actually was a personal acquaintance/friend, and you wouldn't think so from John's matter-of-fact tone and the way he phrases it. But in fact the man in question, Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune of brewery fame, shows up in a couple of Beatles and Rolling Stones stories before his demise. He was friends with Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg (who described taking one of her first LSD trips with him), had been with Paul McCartney on a trip to visit the family in Liverpool when Paul had the moped accident that split his lip and broke one of his teeth (you can see the resulted in the Rain and Paperback Writer promos before he had the tooth caped). He was also the person Paul took his first LSD trip with, after holding out for more than a year after the rest of the band was already into acid. (Something John was not happy about, to put it mildly.) Tara Browne died on December 18th 1966 while on his way to visit a friend, at the age of 21. The coronor's report on his death was issued in January 1967, and the second story John refers to, about the potholes in Lancashire, appeared on January 7th in the Daily Mail, so you can date the time of inspiration exactly, which is rare.
After having written the first verse, John met up with Paul:
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 was already a good song. Sometimes we wouldn't let each other interfere with a song either, because you tend to be a bit lax with someone else's stuff; you experiment a bit. Paul's first contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song: 'I'd love to turn you on,' that he'd had floating around in his head and couldn't use. I thought it was a damn good piece of work.
Paul: I liked the way he said 'Lan-ca-sheer', which is the way you pronounce it up north. Then I had this sequence that fitted, 'Woke up, fell out of bed ...' and we had to link them. This was the time of Tim Leary's 'Turn on, tune in, drop out' and we wrote, 'I'd love to turn you on.' John and I gave each other a knowing look: 'Uh-huh, it's a drug song. You know that, don't you?'
'Yes, but at the same time, our stuff is always very ambiguous and "turn you on" can be sexual so ... c'mon!'
As John and I looked at each other, a little flash went between our eyes, like ‘I’d love to turn you on', a recognition of what we were doing, so I thought, Okay, we've got to have something amazing that will illustrate that.
At which point they went to the studio to present the fragmentary song to George Martin & Co. to work on it further. Engineer Geoff Emerick:
They had a new song - one of Lennon's - and they were anxious to play it for George Martin and me. They had gotten in the habit of meeting at Paul's house in nearby St. John's Wood before sessions, where they'd have a cup of tea, perhaps a puff of a joint, and JOhn and Paul would finish up any songs that were still in progress. (...) The song unveiled for us this evening was tentatively called "In the Life Of" - soon to be retitled "A Day in the Life" . It was in a similar vein to "Strawberry Fields Forever" - light and dreamy - but it was somehwow even more compelling. I was in awe; I distinctly remember thinking, Christ, John's topped himself! As Lennon sang softly, strumming his acoustic guitar, Paul accompanied him on piano. A lot of thought must have gone into the piano part, because it was providing the perfect counterpoint to John's vocal and guitar playing. (...) The song, as played during that first run-through, consisted simply of a short introduction, three verses, and two perfunctory choruses. The only lyric in the chorus was a rather daring 'I'd love to turn you on' - six provokative words that would result in the song getting banned by the BBC. Obvoiusly more was needed to flesh it out, but this was all Lennon had written. There was a great deal of discussion about what to do. Paul thought he might ahve something that would fit, but for the moment everyone was keen to start recording, so it was decided simply to leave twenty-four empty bars in the middle as a kind of placeholder. (...)
Though no one yet knew what the overdubs were going to consist of, it was obvious that there were going to be lots of them, so made the decision to record all the instruments for that first pass on a single track, though I put Lennon's guide vocal, heavily effected with what he called his 'Elvis echo,' on a separate track. John loved having tape echo in his headphones ('Make it so I don't sound like me,' he'd say) and I'd usually record it right along with his vocie becuase he'd sing to the echo, which would in turn cause him to approach the song differently.
Sidenote: it's really one of the strangest phenomenons and in a way sad, that John, who had undeniably one of the best voices in rock'n'roll history, didn't like his own voice. Every producer he ever worked with, from his first, George Martin, to his last, Jack Douglass, reports those "make me sound not like me" demands, and was driven crazy by them in varying degrees.
More Geoff Emerick: Mal Evans was dispatched to stand by the piano and count off the twenty-four bars in the middle so that each Beatle could focus on his playing and not have to think about it. Though Mal's voice was fed into the headphones, it was not meant to be recorded, but he got more and more excited as the count progressed, raising his voice louder and louder. As a result, it began bleeding through on to the other mics, so some of it even survived onto the final mix. There also happened to be a windup alarm clock on top of the piano - Lennon had brought it as a gag one day, saying that it woudl come in handy for waking up Ringo when he was needed for an overdub. In a fit of sillness, Mal decided to set it off at the start of the 24th bar; that, too, made it onto the finished recording, for no reason other than that I couldn't get rid ot of it. (...) Once (John) started singing, we were all stunned into silence; the raw emotion in his voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Once the sparese backing track was deemed satisfactory, Lennon did take after take of the lead vocal, each heavily laden with tape echo, each more amazing than the one before. His vocal performance that night was an absolute tour the force, and it was all George Martin, Phil, and I coud talk about long after the session ended.
That first track done - i.e. lead vocal and very basic instrumentation - they checked, and Paul's fragment of a song that he thought might fit the missing middle section opened with the lines "woke up, fell out of bed", which worked with the alarm clock beautifully. However, the main section still needed rhythmic accompaniment.
Paul: 'We persuaded Ringo to play tom-toms. It's sensational. He normally didn't like to play lead drums, as it were, but we coached him through it. We said, "Come on, you're fantastic, this will be really beautiful," and indeed it was.'
Geoff Emerick: Paul suggested that Ringo not just do his normal turn but really cut loose on the track, and I could see that the drummer was quite reticent. 'Come on, Paul, you know how much I hate flashy drumming,' he complained, but with John and Paul coaching and egging him on, he did an overdub that was nothing short of spectacular, featuring a whole series of quirky tom-tom fills. Because John and Paul felt so strongly that the drums be featured in this song, I decided to experiment sonically as well. We were looking for a thicker, more tonal quality, so I suggested that Ringo tune his toms really low, making the skins really slasck, and I also added a lot of low end at the mixing console.
After this, there was a week-long interlude, during which they recorded the title track of the album and filmed the promos for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. Then it was time to record the Paul segment of A Day in the Life.
Geoff Emerick: He explained that he wanted his voice to sound all muzzy, as if he had just woken up from a deep sleep and hadn't yet gotten his barings, because that was what the lyric was trying to convey. My way of achieving that was to deliberately remove a lot of the treble from his voice and heavily compress it to make him sound muffled. When the song goes into the next section, the dreamy section that John sings, the full fidelity is restored. Although the overdubs to the middle section were being done separately from the main body of the song, it had already been edited into the four-track master, which made Richard's job of dropping in and out a bit tricky. Paul's vocal, for example, was being dropped into the same track that contained John's lead vocal, and there was a very tight drop-out point between the two - between Paul's singing "...and I went into a dream" and John's, "ahhh" that starts the next section. Richard was quite paranoid about it - with good reason. John's vocal, after all, had such great emotion, and it also had tape echo on it. The thought of having to do it again and re-create the atmosphere was daunting, not to mention what John's reaction would have been! Someone's head would have been bitten off, and it most likely would have been mine. But Paul, ever professional, did heed the warning, and he made certain to end the last word distinctly in order to give Richard sufficient time to drop out before John's vocal came back in. Listening carefully, you can actually hear Paul slightly rush the vocal; he even adds a little "ah" to the end of the word "dream", giving it a very clipped ending.
Once this was done, inspiration struck as to how to fill those 24 bars between the main song and Paul's middle section. At that point, no one was thinking small anymore, but what Paul suggested shocked George Martin anyway; he was asking for a full symphony orchestra. (For, remember, 24 bars.)
Quoth George Martin: 'Nonsense,' I replied. 'You cannot, cannot have a symphony orchestra just for a few chords, Paul. Waste of money. I mean you're talking about ninety musicians!' ... Thus spake the well-trained corporate lackey still lurking somewhere inside me. Yet my imagination was fired: a symphony orchestra! I could see at once that we could make a lovely sound.
Geoff Emerick: It was Ringo, of all people, who came up with the solution. 'Well, then,' he joked, 'let's just hire half an orchestra and have them play it twice.' Everyone did a double take, stunned by the simplicity of the suggestion. "You know, Ring, that's not a bad idea," Paul said.
So what did he want the orchestra for exactly? What were they to do?
Paul: After 'Somebody spoke and I went into a dream ..." big pure chords come in. But for the other orchestral parts I had a different idea. I sat John down and suggested it to him and he liked it a lot. I said, 'Look, all these composers are doing really weird avant-garde things and what I'd like to do here is give the orchestra some really strange instructions. We could tell them to sit there and be quiet, but that's been done, or we could have our own ideas based on this school of thought. This is what's going on now, this is what the movement's about.' So this is what we did.
I said, 'Right, to save all the arranging, we'll take the whole orchestra as one instrument.' And I wrote it down like a cooking recipe: I told the orchestra, 'There are twenty-four empty bars; on the ninth bar, the orchestra will take off, and it will go from its lowest note to its highest note. You start with the lowest note in the range of your instrument, and eventually go through all the notes of your instrument to the highest note. But the speed at which you do it is your own choice. You've got to get from your lowest to your highest. You don't have to actually use all your notes but you've got to do those two, that's the only restriction.'
This, initially, caused the classically trained George Martin to blanch.
Reports Geoff Emerick: George Martin still looked dubious. 'The problem', he explained, is that you can't ask classical musicians of that caliber to improvise and not follow a score - they'll simply have no idea what to do.'
John seemed lost in thought for a moment and then brightened up. 'Well, if we put them in silly party hats and rubber noses, maybe then they'll understand what it is we want. That will losen up those tight-asses!' I thought it was a brilliant idea. The idea was to get them into the spirit of things, to create a party atomosphere, a sense of camaraderie. John was no tseeking to necesarily embarass them or make them look silly - he was trying to tear down the barrier that had existed between classical and pop musicians for years. As the snowball started rolling, it began to gather momentum. 'How about if we use the orchestra twice in the song - not just before the middle section, but after the final chorus, also, to end the song,' Paul suggested. John nodded his okay, so I set about making a copy of Mal's countdown and editing it into the multitrack tape. A little later that evening, Paul had another brainstorm. 'Let's make the session more than a session: let's make it a happening.'
What this meant was that in addition to half of the London symphonic orchestra (in evening dress), various friends of the band - i.e. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Brian Jones, Graham Nash, Donovan - as well as George's wife Pattie would also show up, in a studio that was transformed:
Mal Evans had decked out the studio with ballooons, so it all looked quite festive - unfortunately, if you listen very carefully during the orchestral climb, you can actualyl hear the sounds of some of them bursting in the background! As everyone began turning up, Mal started circulating among the musicians, handing out party favours. 'Here you go, mate, have one of these,' he would say amiably in his working-class Liverpool accent, rubber nose or fake boob in hand. Most of the musicians seemed taken aback; one of them even rudely slapped Mal's hand aside. But for all their grumbling, most of them ended up donning hats, gorilla paws, and the like, htough I suspect they probably would have been a little more resistant if it wasn't for the fact Mal was six foot four and weighed well over two hundred pounds. David Mason and Alan Civil, both of whom had been on Beatles sessions before, were two of the better-spirited participants that night; they'd gotten to know Paul. Dave had played on 'Penny Lane' just a few weeks previously, and he did what he could to smooth things over, telling the other brass players, 'It's all right, it's just a bit of fun, just go along with it.'
Have a heart for the Orchestral players here, asked not only to improvise but also to wear a rubber nose while a bunch of hippies flitted around and everything started to smell of pot. They played the chord five times all in all, and got progressively looser. As George Martin put down his baton and said, 'Thank you, gentlemen, that's a wrap! everyone in the entire studio - orchestra members, Beatles, and Beatles friends alike - broke into spontanous applause. It was a hell of a moment, and the perfect ending to remarkable session.
Was that finally it for A Day In the Life? No. It still wasn't.
By that point, it had become apparant that the monumental song wuld be used to close the album, so a very special ending was needed. The inspiration for what was finally used once again came from Paul, with eager assent from John: a huge piano chord that would last 'forever' ... or at least as long as I could figure out how to get the sound to sustain. Attaining the massive sound was fairly easiy: we would simply commandeer every availalbe piano and keyboard in the Abbey Road copmlex and have lots of people playing the same chord simultanously, then overdub them three more times, filling up a four-track tape with an abundance of audio. But the sustain was a bigger problem: even if you hit a piano chord at full volume and hold down the sustain pedal, the sound only lasts for a minute or so before fading into nothingness. It seemed clear to me that the solution lay in keeping the sound at maximum volume for as long as possible, and I had two weapons that could accomplish this: a compressor, cranked up full, and the very faders themselves on the mixing console. Logically, if I set the gain of each input to maximum but started with the fader at lits lowest point, I could then slowly raise the faders as the sound died away, thus compensating for the loss in volume.
Thus they got to work; all pianos available were brought to one studio - Studio Two - where George Martin, John, Paul and Ringo waited. George was absent for unexplained reasons, so roadie Mal Evans was recruited in his place.
To get as strong an attack as possible, everyone decided to play standing up instead of sitting down. John, Mal, and George Martin each stood behind a different piano, while Ringo and Paul shared the out of tune Steinway uprgiht; I presume they did double duty because Paul had to coach his drummer on which notes to play. Because there were four hands slamming out the chord instead of two, that ended up being the dominant instrument on the recording. John was really out of it that night, so Paul repeatedly counted everyone in. It took quite a few takes to get a keeper, because it was problematical getting everyone to hit the start of the chord at exactly the same time. Up in the control room, I would slowly raise the faders as the sound died away. By about a minute or so in, I reached full volume, and the gain was so high that you could literally hear the quiet swoosh of the studio's air conditioners.
And thus, ladies and gentlemen, A Day in the Life was completed. The original promo which was filmed on the day of the orchestral overdub session/happening (aka you can play a game of "spot the Rolling Stone") :
All in all, the EMI logs show they worked 34 hours on this single song. Please Please Me, their first album, had taken only ten hours to record - the entire record, that is. What is it about, in the end? While you can count the various allusions - Tara Browne's death, the film which is probably Richard Lester's How I Won The War (in which John had taken a part, and which had flopped), and the absurd calculations about the holes in Blackburn, Lancashire - they're interesting only in a background way, and I think as with every song, the content is in the ear of the listener. And thus different for all of us. To me, it's about life passing by, being unable to really feel anything that you observe happening. Going into a dream. In fact, it's more dream-like to me than Inception, because of that surreal disconnectness. Rolling Stone last year deemed it the Beatles' greatest song; I don't think so, and not just because I couldn't name any single "greatest Beatles song". But one of the greatest? Definitely.
Thus John Lennon regarding the song that when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heartsclub Band was released was hailed as the musical equivalent of T.S. Eliot The Waste Land by the critics and even now is bound to turn up in people's "best songs of all time" lists. I actually have a bit of a distant relationship towards it - it's the Robert Altman movie of Pepper to me, i.e. I admire it intellectually yet there are other songs that do far more for me emotionally both on that particular album and in the Beatles song catalogue - but then alienation is one of the emotions the song goes for. Also it just happens to be one of the songs where we have the minutae from inspiration to production, and a great illustration of the psychedelic, experimental phase of the 60s. A Day in the Life also showcases just how many people contributed to a song, and why studio production at this point took a leap forward.
Sidenote: did the Daily Mail have some sort of product placement deal with the Beatles? Because it gets mentioned pretty regularly, both in interviews and in song lyrics (Paperback Writer), for example. Anyway, John, reminscing in 1980:
I was writing 'A Day In The Life' with the Daily Mail propped in front of me on the piano. I had it open at their News in Brief, or Far and near, whatever they call it. I noticed two stories. One was about the Guinnes 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 4,000 potholes in the streets of Blackburn, Lancashire.
The first time I read that statement, I had no idea "the Guinness heir" actually was a personal acquaintance/friend, and you wouldn't think so from John's matter-of-fact tone and the way he phrases it. But in fact the man in question, Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune of brewery fame, shows up in a couple of Beatles and Rolling Stones stories before his demise. He was friends with Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg (who described taking one of her first LSD trips with him), had been with Paul McCartney on a trip to visit the family in Liverpool when Paul had the moped accident that split his lip and broke one of his teeth (you can see the resulted in the Rain and Paperback Writer promos before he had the tooth caped). He was also the person Paul took his first LSD trip with, after holding out for more than a year after the rest of the band was already into acid. (Something John was not happy about, to put it mildly.) Tara Browne died on December 18th 1966 while on his way to visit a friend, at the age of 21. The coronor's report on his death was issued in January 1967, and the second story John refers to, about the potholes in Lancashire, appeared on January 7th in the Daily Mail, so you can date the time of inspiration exactly, which is rare.
After having written the first verse, John met up with Paul:
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 was already a good song. Sometimes we wouldn't let each other interfere with a song either, because you tend to be a bit lax with someone else's stuff; you experiment a bit. Paul's first contribution was the beautiful little lick in the song: 'I'd love to turn you on,' that he'd had floating around in his head and couldn't use. I thought it was a damn good piece of work.
Paul: I liked the way he said 'Lan-ca-sheer', which is the way you pronounce it up north. Then I had this sequence that fitted, 'Woke up, fell out of bed ...' and we had to link them. This was the time of Tim Leary's 'Turn on, tune in, drop out' and we wrote, 'I'd love to turn you on.' John and I gave each other a knowing look: 'Uh-huh, it's a drug song. You know that, don't you?'
'Yes, but at the same time, our stuff is always very ambiguous and "turn you on" can be sexual so ... c'mon!'
As John and I looked at each other, a little flash went between our eyes, like ‘I’d love to turn you on', a recognition of what we were doing, so I thought, Okay, we've got to have something amazing that will illustrate that.
At which point they went to the studio to present the fragmentary song to George Martin & Co. to work on it further. Engineer Geoff Emerick:
They had a new song - one of Lennon's - and they were anxious to play it for George Martin and me. They had gotten in the habit of meeting at Paul's house in nearby St. John's Wood before sessions, where they'd have a cup of tea, perhaps a puff of a joint, and JOhn and Paul would finish up any songs that were still in progress. (...) The song unveiled for us this evening was tentatively called "In the Life Of" - soon to be retitled "A Day in the Life" . It was in a similar vein to "Strawberry Fields Forever" - light and dreamy - but it was somehwow even more compelling. I was in awe; I distinctly remember thinking, Christ, John's topped himself! As Lennon sang softly, strumming his acoustic guitar, Paul accompanied him on piano. A lot of thought must have gone into the piano part, because it was providing the perfect counterpoint to John's vocal and guitar playing. (...) The song, as played during that first run-through, consisted simply of a short introduction, three verses, and two perfunctory choruses. The only lyric in the chorus was a rather daring 'I'd love to turn you on' - six provokative words that would result in the song getting banned by the BBC. Obvoiusly more was needed to flesh it out, but this was all Lennon had written. There was a great deal of discussion about what to do. Paul thought he might ahve something that would fit, but for the moment everyone was keen to start recording, so it was decided simply to leave twenty-four empty bars in the middle as a kind of placeholder. (...)
Though no one yet knew what the overdubs were going to consist of, it was obvious that there were going to be lots of them, so made the decision to record all the instruments for that first pass on a single track, though I put Lennon's guide vocal, heavily effected with what he called his 'Elvis echo,' on a separate track. John loved having tape echo in his headphones ('Make it so I don't sound like me,' he'd say) and I'd usually record it right along with his vocie becuase he'd sing to the echo, which would in turn cause him to approach the song differently.
Sidenote: it's really one of the strangest phenomenons and in a way sad, that John, who had undeniably one of the best voices in rock'n'roll history, didn't like his own voice. Every producer he ever worked with, from his first, George Martin, to his last, Jack Douglass, reports those "make me sound not like me" demands, and was driven crazy by them in varying degrees.
More Geoff Emerick: Mal Evans was dispatched to stand by the piano and count off the twenty-four bars in the middle so that each Beatle could focus on his playing and not have to think about it. Though Mal's voice was fed into the headphones, it was not meant to be recorded, but he got more and more excited as the count progressed, raising his voice louder and louder. As a result, it began bleeding through on to the other mics, so some of it even survived onto the final mix. There also happened to be a windup alarm clock on top of the piano - Lennon had brought it as a gag one day, saying that it woudl come in handy for waking up Ringo when he was needed for an overdub. In a fit of sillness, Mal decided to set it off at the start of the 24th bar; that, too, made it onto the finished recording, for no reason other than that I couldn't get rid ot of it. (...) Once (John) started singing, we were all stunned into silence; the raw emotion in his voice made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Once the sparese backing track was deemed satisfactory, Lennon did take after take of the lead vocal, each heavily laden with tape echo, each more amazing than the one before. His vocal performance that night was an absolute tour the force, and it was all George Martin, Phil, and I coud talk about long after the session ended.
That first track done - i.e. lead vocal and very basic instrumentation - they checked, and Paul's fragment of a song that he thought might fit the missing middle section opened with the lines "woke up, fell out of bed", which worked with the alarm clock beautifully. However, the main section still needed rhythmic accompaniment.
Paul: 'We persuaded Ringo to play tom-toms. It's sensational. He normally didn't like to play lead drums, as it were, but we coached him through it. We said, "Come on, you're fantastic, this will be really beautiful," and indeed it was.'
Geoff Emerick: Paul suggested that Ringo not just do his normal turn but really cut loose on the track, and I could see that the drummer was quite reticent. 'Come on, Paul, you know how much I hate flashy drumming,' he complained, but with John and Paul coaching and egging him on, he did an overdub that was nothing short of spectacular, featuring a whole series of quirky tom-tom fills. Because John and Paul felt so strongly that the drums be featured in this song, I decided to experiment sonically as well. We were looking for a thicker, more tonal quality, so I suggested that Ringo tune his toms really low, making the skins really slasck, and I also added a lot of low end at the mixing console.
After this, there was a week-long interlude, during which they recorded the title track of the album and filmed the promos for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields. Then it was time to record the Paul segment of A Day in the Life.
Geoff Emerick: He explained that he wanted his voice to sound all muzzy, as if he had just woken up from a deep sleep and hadn't yet gotten his barings, because that was what the lyric was trying to convey. My way of achieving that was to deliberately remove a lot of the treble from his voice and heavily compress it to make him sound muffled. When the song goes into the next section, the dreamy section that John sings, the full fidelity is restored. Although the overdubs to the middle section were being done separately from the main body of the song, it had already been edited into the four-track master, which made Richard's job of dropping in and out a bit tricky. Paul's vocal, for example, was being dropped into the same track that contained John's lead vocal, and there was a very tight drop-out point between the two - between Paul's singing "...and I went into a dream" and John's, "ahhh" that starts the next section. Richard was quite paranoid about it - with good reason. John's vocal, after all, had such great emotion, and it also had tape echo on it. The thought of having to do it again and re-create the atmosphere was daunting, not to mention what John's reaction would have been! Someone's head would have been bitten off, and it most likely would have been mine. But Paul, ever professional, did heed the warning, and he made certain to end the last word distinctly in order to give Richard sufficient time to drop out before John's vocal came back in. Listening carefully, you can actually hear Paul slightly rush the vocal; he even adds a little "ah" to the end of the word "dream", giving it a very clipped ending.
Once this was done, inspiration struck as to how to fill those 24 bars between the main song and Paul's middle section. At that point, no one was thinking small anymore, but what Paul suggested shocked George Martin anyway; he was asking for a full symphony orchestra. (For, remember, 24 bars.)
Quoth George Martin: 'Nonsense,' I replied. 'You cannot, cannot have a symphony orchestra just for a few chords, Paul. Waste of money. I mean you're talking about ninety musicians!' ... Thus spake the well-trained corporate lackey still lurking somewhere inside me. Yet my imagination was fired: a symphony orchestra! I could see at once that we could make a lovely sound.
Geoff Emerick: It was Ringo, of all people, who came up with the solution. 'Well, then,' he joked, 'let's just hire half an orchestra and have them play it twice.' Everyone did a double take, stunned by the simplicity of the suggestion. "You know, Ring, that's not a bad idea," Paul said.
So what did he want the orchestra for exactly? What were they to do?
Paul: After 'Somebody spoke and I went into a dream ..." big pure chords come in. But for the other orchestral parts I had a different idea. I sat John down and suggested it to him and he liked it a lot. I said, 'Look, all these composers are doing really weird avant-garde things and what I'd like to do here is give the orchestra some really strange instructions. We could tell them to sit there and be quiet, but that's been done, or we could have our own ideas based on this school of thought. This is what's going on now, this is what the movement's about.' So this is what we did.
I said, 'Right, to save all the arranging, we'll take the whole orchestra as one instrument.' And I wrote it down like a cooking recipe: I told the orchestra, 'There are twenty-four empty bars; on the ninth bar, the orchestra will take off, and it will go from its lowest note to its highest note. You start with the lowest note in the range of your instrument, and eventually go through all the notes of your instrument to the highest note. But the speed at which you do it is your own choice. You've got to get from your lowest to your highest. You don't have to actually use all your notes but you've got to do those two, that's the only restriction.'
This, initially, caused the classically trained George Martin to blanch.
Reports Geoff Emerick: George Martin still looked dubious. 'The problem', he explained, is that you can't ask classical musicians of that caliber to improvise and not follow a score - they'll simply have no idea what to do.'
John seemed lost in thought for a moment and then brightened up. 'Well, if we put them in silly party hats and rubber noses, maybe then they'll understand what it is we want. That will losen up those tight-asses!' I thought it was a brilliant idea. The idea was to get them into the spirit of things, to create a party atomosphere, a sense of camaraderie. John was no tseeking to necesarily embarass them or make them look silly - he was trying to tear down the barrier that had existed between classical and pop musicians for years. As the snowball started rolling, it began to gather momentum. 'How about if we use the orchestra twice in the song - not just before the middle section, but after the final chorus, also, to end the song,' Paul suggested. John nodded his okay, so I set about making a copy of Mal's countdown and editing it into the multitrack tape. A little later that evening, Paul had another brainstorm. 'Let's make the session more than a session: let's make it a happening.'
What this meant was that in addition to half of the London symphonic orchestra (in evening dress), various friends of the band - i.e. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Brian Jones, Graham Nash, Donovan - as well as George's wife Pattie would also show up, in a studio that was transformed:
Mal Evans had decked out the studio with ballooons, so it all looked quite festive - unfortunately, if you listen very carefully during the orchestral climb, you can actualyl hear the sounds of some of them bursting in the background! As everyone began turning up, Mal started circulating among the musicians, handing out party favours. 'Here you go, mate, have one of these,' he would say amiably in his working-class Liverpool accent, rubber nose or fake boob in hand. Most of the musicians seemed taken aback; one of them even rudely slapped Mal's hand aside. But for all their grumbling, most of them ended up donning hats, gorilla paws, and the like, htough I suspect they probably would have been a little more resistant if it wasn't for the fact Mal was six foot four and weighed well over two hundred pounds. David Mason and Alan Civil, both of whom had been on Beatles sessions before, were two of the better-spirited participants that night; they'd gotten to know Paul. Dave had played on 'Penny Lane' just a few weeks previously, and he did what he could to smooth things over, telling the other brass players, 'It's all right, it's just a bit of fun, just go along with it.'
Have a heart for the Orchestral players here, asked not only to improvise but also to wear a rubber nose while a bunch of hippies flitted around and everything started to smell of pot. They played the chord five times all in all, and got progressively looser. As George Martin put down his baton and said, 'Thank you, gentlemen, that's a wrap! everyone in the entire studio - orchestra members, Beatles, and Beatles friends alike - broke into spontanous applause. It was a hell of a moment, and the perfect ending to remarkable session.
Was that finally it for A Day In the Life? No. It still wasn't.
By that point, it had become apparant that the monumental song wuld be used to close the album, so a very special ending was needed. The inspiration for what was finally used once again came from Paul, with eager assent from John: a huge piano chord that would last 'forever' ... or at least as long as I could figure out how to get the sound to sustain. Attaining the massive sound was fairly easiy: we would simply commandeer every availalbe piano and keyboard in the Abbey Road copmlex and have lots of people playing the same chord simultanously, then overdub them three more times, filling up a four-track tape with an abundance of audio. But the sustain was a bigger problem: even if you hit a piano chord at full volume and hold down the sustain pedal, the sound only lasts for a minute or so before fading into nothingness. It seemed clear to me that the solution lay in keeping the sound at maximum volume for as long as possible, and I had two weapons that could accomplish this: a compressor, cranked up full, and the very faders themselves on the mixing console. Logically, if I set the gain of each input to maximum but started with the fader at lits lowest point, I could then slowly raise the faders as the sound died away, thus compensating for the loss in volume.
Thus they got to work; all pianos available were brought to one studio - Studio Two - where George Martin, John, Paul and Ringo waited. George was absent for unexplained reasons, so roadie Mal Evans was recruited in his place.
To get as strong an attack as possible, everyone decided to play standing up instead of sitting down. John, Mal, and George Martin each stood behind a different piano, while Ringo and Paul shared the out of tune Steinway uprgiht; I presume they did double duty because Paul had to coach his drummer on which notes to play. Because there were four hands slamming out the chord instead of two, that ended up being the dominant instrument on the recording. John was really out of it that night, so Paul repeatedly counted everyone in. It took quite a few takes to get a keeper, because it was problematical getting everyone to hit the start of the chord at exactly the same time. Up in the control room, I would slowly raise the faders as the sound died away. By about a minute or so in, I reached full volume, and the gain was so high that you could literally hear the quiet swoosh of the studio's air conditioners.
And thus, ladies and gentlemen, A Day in the Life was completed. The original promo which was filmed on the day of the orchestral overdub session/happening (aka you can play a game of "spot the Rolling Stone") :
All in all, the EMI logs show they worked 34 hours on this single song. Please Please Me, their first album, had taken only ten hours to record - the entire record, that is. What is it about, in the end? While you can count the various allusions - Tara Browne's death, the film which is probably Richard Lester's How I Won The War (in which John had taken a part, and which had flopped), and the absurd calculations about the holes in Blackburn, Lancashire - they're interesting only in a background way, and I think as with every song, the content is in the ear of the listener. And thus different for all of us. To me, it's about life passing by, being unable to really feel anything that you observe happening. Going into a dream. In fact, it's more dream-like to me than Inception, because of that surreal disconnectness. Rolling Stone last year deemed it the Beatles' greatest song; I don't think so, and not just because I couldn't name any single "greatest Beatles song". But one of the greatest? Definitely.
