A playlist I made had a perfect slot for that song, but it was driving me crazy that the track included the weird, scrambled/psychedelic voices at the end. Seemed pretty obvious to me they should have just labelled that as a separate track when they mastered the CD and then for iTunes. So you’d hear it if you played the album, but not when playing just “A Day in the Life”.
I mean, it would be kind of annoying tacked on to almost any Beatles song, but it’s especially inappropriate after that famous sustained piano note. So I was practically ready to try to lobby iTunes to change how they tracked the album, when it occurred to me to see if they had a “single version” of the track or something like that. And there it was: the version from the “Blue Album” (1967-1970) was 28 seconds shorter, and did indeed turn out not to contain the offending musical postscript.
I still don’t really think they tracked the Sgt. Pepper album correctly, but at least I’ve got my substitute.
That’s known as “Sgt. Pepper Inner Groove,” and was designed to take advantage of how some (most?) turntables would get stuck on the smallest (last) ring of the spiral-shaped groove which constitutes the entire side of any LP.
The 1980 LP Rarities agrees with you that it should be considered a separate track from “A Day in the Life.”
That bit wasn’t on the cassette version of Sgt. Pepper’s, which was the version I had for years. I did finally get the album on CD, but somehow I never noticed that that was tacked onto the end.
The nice thing with MiniDisc was that you could split, splice, and rearrange everything on the disk. Somehow, we’ve lost technology as technology has progressed.
Whoaaa…mind blown. And you can adjust volume (useful for certain older tracks that have not been remastered) and change the date (useful for stuff that *has *been remastered and now has a bogus date). Awesome, thanks!
Interesting–I wonder why they didn’t put it on the cassette? Kind of amazing that you never noticed it on CD, as it’s pretty jarring after several seconds of quiet.
Audacity is great for editing out these kind of annoyances, as well as fading live tracks in and out. The OP didn’t mention that the Sgt Pepper version of ADITL also crossfades in from the Sgt Pepper Reprise, while the Blue Album version has a clean start. I only have the old Blue Album CD, so I just edited the clean start onto the remastered version, and just for the hell of it moved the Inner Groove to play faintly under the long final note, which I also shortened. I was also able to put a clean start on Dear Prudence by pasting the guitar part from the end of the song to the beginning.
Works for things like this, also for editing songs back together that really should be one track, such as side 2 of Abbey Road. “My” version of the track consists of Good morning/Sgt pepper Reprise/A Day in the life (without the end crap noise (and the dog whistle))all as one song, though that might be a bit extreme for most people!
Plus, you can also use it to play Revolution #9 backwards*, or to hear the “hidden” messages in Fire on High and The Wall.
Whoa, then that surprises me in the opposite direction: that they added it in a U.S. release at all, and especially as part of another track. There must have been millions of Boomers who excitedly unwrapped that CD, stuck it in their brand-new player, and then were horrified to find that Yoko was apparently still plaguing the Beatles (along the lines of Just Asking Questions’s funny asterisked post) with her avant-garde sonic experimentation, beyond her husband’s grave.
