How John Lennon Wrote the Beatles' Best Song, "A Day in the Life"

If you’re under 60, you prob­a­bly heard the line “I read the news today, oh boy” before encoun­ter­ing the song it opens. Even after you dis­cov­ered the work of the Bea­t­les, it may have tak­en you some time to under­stand what, exact­ly, it was that John Lennon read in the news. The “lucky man who made the grade” and “blew his mind out in a car” turn out to have been inspired by the young Guin­ness heir Tara Browne, who’d fatal­ly wiped out in his Lotus Elan. The fig­ure of 4,000 holes in the roads of Black­burn came from anoth­er page of the same edi­tion of the Dai­ly Mail. These are just two of the mem­o­rable images in “A Day in the Life,” which son­i­cal­ly recon­structs the fab­ric of the nine­teen-six­ties as the Bea­t­les knew it.

In his new video below, Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, calls “A Day in the Life” “arguably the Bea­t­les’ best song.” Crit­ic Ian Mac­Don­ald is rather less ambigu­ous in his book Rev­o­lu­tion in the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Records and the Six­ties, pro­claim­ing it “their finest sin­gle achieve­ment.”

And if any sin­gle fac­tor shaped its devel­op­ment, that fac­tor was LSD. “A song about per­cep­tion — a sub­ject cen­tral both to late-peri­od Bea­t­les and the coun­ter­cul­ture at large — ‘A Day in the Life’ con­cerned ‘real­i­ty’ only to the extent that this had been revealed by LSD to be large­ly in the eye of the behold­er,” he writes. Lennon may have proven to be the group’s most ded­i­cat­ed enthu­si­ast of that short­cut to enlight­en­ment. It’s worth not­ing, as Puschak does, that it was Browne who first “turned on” Paul McCart­ney.

Source: openculture.com/Colin Marshall

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