What kind of revolution?
The word revolution in the title needs care. “A Day in the Life” is not a political song in the way that protest songs of the period were. Its revolution is mostly musical: two unfinished pieces by different writers joined with an orchestral passage that no rock record had quite done this way. It is also a quietly unsettling picture of ordinary life, glimpsed through newspaper stories, a dream and a commute. It closes Sgt. Pepper, and many listeners still regard it as the best thing on the album.
Lennon’s sections
John Lennon’s verses were based on items in the press. He later said he was working from the Daily Mail. One verse refers to a man who “blew his mind out in a car”, which is generally understood to allude to Tara Browne, a young Guinness heir and friend of the band who died in a car crash in December 1966. Lennon said, at least later, that the lyric was not a literal account of the accident. Another verse refers to “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire”, taken from a newspaper report about road holes, and another to an English army that had “just won the war”, a nod to the film How I Won the War, in which Lennon had a small role in late 1966.
The tone is flat and observant. Lennon sings in a detached, echoing voice over piano, and the images are the sort of things a reader notices in a paper without reacting strongly. The unease comes from that detachment.
McCartney’s section
The middle part is McCartney’s, a brisk, light passage in which a man wakes, gets dressed, runs for the bus and has a smoke and a dream. It is generally described as drawn from his own memories of earlier years, and it contrasts sharply with the slow verses around it. Where Lennon’s sections drift, McCartney’s move at a walking pace, with a bass line and drums pressing forward. The two halves had probably been written separately, and joining them was a decision made in the studio in January 1967, when recording began. A bridge was left in the middle, and Beatles roadie Mal Evans counted the bars aloud, with an alarm clock ringing at the end of the gap.
The orchestral crescendo
The two gaps in the song were eventually filled with an orchestral rise. On 10 February 1967, a group of around forty classical musicians were brought to Abbey Road. Producer George Martin wrote out a start note and an end note and asked each player to rise from the bottom of his or her instrument’s range to the top over the span of the passage, in his or her own time and without coordinating with the others. The band reportedly asked the players to wear evening dress and some novelty items to lighten the mood, and the session was filmed. The effect is a swelling, roaring wave, ending at a point of tension.
The track resolves with a huge piano chord. According to accounts of the session, several musicians played an E major chord together on multiple pianos, and the sound was allowed to fade, with the recording levels raised so that the decay lasted for more than forty seconds. That fading sound ends the album.
Mixing the personal and the cultural
Reading the song as revolutionary can still make some sense if the word is taken loosely. By 1967 Beatles fans were listening to the group as commentators, and the song takes the form of modest everyday events seen with some distance. The sleepy narrator in the verses, who “saw a film today”, reflects a world saturated by media. That fits the mood of the time, which also produced works by Bob Dylan and others that treated popular culture itself as a subject. It also sits comfortably alongside the wider psychedelic experimentation of the period, in which altered perception, sometimes real and sometimes only suggested, shaped the sound of records.
The BBC ban
Shortly before the album was released, in May 1967, the BBC announced that it would not play “A Day in the Life”. The reason given was that the line “I’d love to turn you on” and some other lines might encourage drug use, a reading also applied to the “4000 holes” verse. The Beatles’ own comments over the years varied. Lennon was cited as saying that the “turn you on” line had a drug association but that the song as a whole was not about drugs. In later years McCartney also acknowledged a drug reference in the line. Accounts differ on details, and it is best to treat any single quotation from this period cautiously.
The ban was notable because the BBC then had a very limited number of pop outlets, and pirate radio stations were a growing alternative. It did not hurt the album’s sales. Sgt. Pepper was released in the UK in late May and in the US in early June 1967, and the track became one of the most discussed songs of the Summer of Love. The ban was later lifted.
Why it lasts
The song has been covered and sampled many times, and the closing chord and orchestral rise are often cited as an inspiration for later ambitious recordings. It was made in the same building and period as the early work of other bands, including Pink Floyd, whose Piper at the Gates of Dawn was being recorded in a nearby studio at Abbey Road, and it stands as a good example of why 1967 is considered an unusually inventive year in the music of 1967.