Setting the stage: Following the end of their world tour in the summer of 1966, the four Beatles for the first time took several months off and pursued different interests separate from one another (John appeared in a film, How I Won the War; George went to India to study the sitar, and so forth). Then, since the last week in November, the Beatles reconvened and had been in the recording studio, working on their next album (which as of yet was untitled). Despite a slower than usual start, they had by this point done extensive work on such songs as "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Penny Lane", and "When I'm 64", and were on this January date going to work on a new song by John (with lyrical assistance from Paul)
Everywhere people stare each and every day
The weekday bustle of London was muffled on the 19th of January as a sudden winter storm arrived, blanketing the city in more than 14cm of snow, with the evening temperature plunging to -11°C. But the activity within Abbey Road was as busy as ever.
John enjoyed reading London’s Daily Mail, although he often found himself at odds with the newspaper’s conservative editorial stance. Like the rest of its readership, he had been following the news accounts stemming from Guinness brewing heir Tara Browne’s tragic death in an automobile accident a month before, with the Daily Mail posting accounts in the weeks since of the details of the accident, news of his memorial service in Knightsbridge, and the results of the coroner’s inquest. Now, a new story came on January the 17th, detailing how the High Court was awarding guardianship of Browne’s two young children to his mother, Lady Oranmore, rather than to the children’s mother, Noreen MacSherry, whom the young socialite was separated and estranged from at the time of his death. Tara, the son of Baron Mereworth, a member of the House of Lords, was a much-liked fixture of the friendly social circle shared by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He was particularly close to both Lennon and McCartney, and in 1966 it was in the company of Browne that Paul undertook his first use of LSD.
The article stirred up John’s lingering melancholy over Browne’s death and got him thinking about writing a song. He was interested in trying a sort of cinéma vérité style of songwriting, more like a lyrical documentary than the standard pop tune. He opened with the line, “I read the news today, oh boy.”
He began playing with other words, shaping a tale of a man of importance (“A lucky man who made the grade” . . . as in a peerage; “They’d seen his face before”). The accident is referenced (“He blew his mind out in a car”), although Lennon changed the circumstances; Browne was not killed driving through a red light (“He didn’t notice that the lights had changed”), but rather he was forced to swerve when another car drifted head-on into his traffic lane, and he struck a stationary vehicle to avoid the other auto.
Satisfied with how the lyrics were shaping up, John decided to move on to another topic, as one would when reading a newspaper. For the next part, he drew upon his own recent filmmaking experience (“The English Army had just won the war / A crowd of people turned away / But I just had to look / Having read the book”).
Now came time for the bridge (which John and Paul called the “middle-eight”), but Lennon was content with letting McCartney take a crack at that later, as was their collaborative habit.
Leafing through that day’s edition of the Daily Mail, John spotted another item in the ‘Far & Near’ column, a bit of absurdity played utterly straight, as the Blackburn, Lancashire Council announced that after a thorough survey, there were some 4000 holes in the city, or one twenty-sixth of a hole per resident. That was worth commemorating, he decided.
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“They had to count them all,” he wrote, following with, “Now they know how many holes it takes to … what? … the Albert Hall”. Nothing satisfying came to mind, so he decided to worry about it later.
Gathered in the studio, he played what he had for the others. He was calling it “In the Life Of…”, at least for the time being. The response was enthusiastic, and John and Paul went to work tidying up the lyrics. McCartney suggested a line to be sung just before the bridge, and then repeated at the end: “I’d love to turn you on.” Years later, Paul recalled, “I remembered thinking, ‘Well, that’s about as risqué as we dare get at this point.’ Well, the BBC banned it.”
However, John was still stuck on exactly what the holes were doing to the Albert Hall. It was then that Terry Doran, a friend of the Beatles who was visiting them at Abbey Road, made his contribution to the culture of Western Civilization by saying, “Fill the Albert Hall, John.”
As for the middle-eight, instead of creating something there on the spot, Paul suggested using a song he had begun writing, but hadn’t yet gotten beyond the opening stanzas. In the spirit of “Penny Lane”, it was a remembrance of his boyhood, of waking up in the morning and rushing to catch the bus to school and sneaking a Woodbine cigarette on the open upper deck. John loved the fact that it not only so closely recalled his own schooldays experience, but that it was so very much unlike the rest of the song in tone, but nevertheless matched the ‘slice of life’ quality of John’s lyrics.
The four Beatles then went to work on the basic track, John on piano, Paul on organ, Ringo on conga drums and George on acoustic guitar. For the next layering track, they shifted their duties a bit; now Lennon was on acoustic guitar as McCartney took his seat at the piano, Harrison played the maracas, and Starr supplied more congas.
For the lead-in to the middle-eight, they played a simple 24-bar piano segment, and had their personal assistant, Mal Evans, count out the bars with his voice drenched in ever-increasing amounts of reverb. They had set an alarm clock to go off to coincide with the end of the count; quickly enough, they realized this was the perfect introduction for Paul’s segment, which opened with the words, “Woke up, fell out of bed.”
It was nearing 3:00 in the morning as the Beatles departed from Abbey Road and stepped out into the near-silent, snow-covered city, weary but immensely satisfied at what they had accomplished on this day.
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