A book has come out that explains the song was inspired by the death of a rich British socialite. The photograph of the wrecked car is in the article. I have no idea why the hell John Lennon thought it was funny.
I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph
The rest of the song makes no sense to me. The English Army had just won the war But I just had to look having read the book
4000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire And though the holes are rather small, Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert hall. are they referencing graves here?
For a song about a dead friend it sure takes some weird ass turns.
I know a lot of the Beatles songs can’t be taken too seriously. Some songs have meaning, but many were just words that sounded good together in a song.
Hey - at the time, this was groundbreaking stuff, in terms of a pop band freakin’ out with lyrics and song structure. And it still holds up as a piece of music today. Worthy of respect, even if Lennon was word-salading and he and McCartney pieced stuff together. In fact, that improv nature makes the song even more cool - they pulled off a hellaciosly ambitious song.
I have to disagree. There a lot of songs that can evoke strong emotions or even place you in the characters life.
By the Time I get to Phoenix she’ll be rising.
She’ll find the note I left hangin’ on her door
And she’ll laugh when she reads the part that says I’m leaving
Anyone that’s been through a breakup can’t help but step into that song. We know exactly what each person is feeling. The pain, the heartache. The regret of losing someone special in their life. A very powerful song.
Amarillo by morning, Amarillo’s on my mind, Amarillo by morning, up from San Antone, Amarillo’s where I’ll be
We instantly know exactly how much that character loves that city. How anxious he is to return.
The first two verses of of a Day in the Life were a thoughtful tribute to a friend that had died unexpectedly. For some reason Lennon choose not to continue in that direction. The song goes off on a tangent. It’s still a great pop song. Beloved by Beatles fans. But, I can’t help but wonder what it could have been if Lennon explored the grief and loss of his friend. The senselessness of driving too fast and recklessly. Lennon could have contemplated his own mortality. It’s something we’ll never know.
But the composite of the two unfinished works does in a way become a “day in the life” – a day in life doesn’t have a coherent thematic thread, it’s things sort of happening that don’t necessarily flow from one another or lead anywhere. So we just get a set of vignettes of life happening and thoughts being held, among the sort of controlled chaos of everyday life represented by the instrumental part.
But sure, if I were getting paid by a reviewing magazine in 1967 to take the composite work and sell to the public its thematic sense, I could try: “You get some hard shocking news about an untimely death, but notice that the public just want to gawk at the celebrity (they’d seen his face before); you realize that you may be yourself involved with conflating something serious with entertainment (the film and book about the war, that people turned away from). You wish you could turn others on to what you’re trying to say. But, people have to take care of the immediate and everyday and someone with a more mundane life, like you were in the past, will not have time to think of those things (he’s got his bus to catch). You get lost in the reverie of contemplating that for a bit and when you shake it off you look at the news again and they’re now reporting on something utterly mundane, like potholes. You still wish you could turn others on to what’s up. But the world around you just goes on being dissonant and kind of chaotic.”
I was saying that your broader statement is true of all songs, not just the last clause. Some songs have direct meaning, others are just words that sound good together. The Beatles wrote some great examples of both.
No, they weren’t. They are sort of a rendering of Lennon’s reaction to reading a newspaper article about the death of a friend. It’s not a tribute at all. It’s devoid of emotion and sentiment. In a way that could be said to reflect his shock, and I think that’s where you’re getting the idea that this was a tribute. But I don’t think that was Lennon’s intent. There’s really nothing about who the dead man was- just what happened to him, and the curious but detached reaction of the crowd. The song has that same detached, dreamlike quality, and Lennon then digresses into the “How I Won the War” puns and other things without any change in emotion. The bit about the holes in Blackburn is also from a newspaper article. I expect the article caught his attention because it was about the death of someone he knew and that played a role in the composition of song, but it’s not a tribute. The only thing you know about Tara Browne from that song is that he died in a car crash because he didn’t see the lights had changed.
