It was January 17th, 1967, a Tuesday.
John Lennon was sitting at the piano in his home working on new music for the Beatles.
The band was two months into recording their new album, which would be their first since deciding to stop touring permanently.
What would be their final tour ended just three months before that, in August 66, and it was a punishing experience for the boys.
Too many dates and media controversies.
Too much traveling crowds so loud that no one could actually hear the music.
And the Beatles were moving in new creative directions too, writing songs with innovative studio techniques that couldn't really be replicated on stage.
Not back then, anyway.
I mean they were touring during the release of Revolver, but they didn't play any of those songs on that tour.
Exhausted, the Beatles took a three-month break, during which they all went their separate ways and did their own things.
John went to Almeria, Spain to film a part in Richard Lester's black comedy film, How I Won the War.
He said, green, green, green.
So I did.
By November the band was back in the studio recording what would become Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
By mid-January they'd recorded Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane and When I'm 64, the first two of which would be released as singles.
Then, on January 17th, Lennon opened the newspaper.
He saw a story about Tara Brown, the 21-year-old Irish socialite who was the great, great great grandson of Arthur Guinness, the guy who founded the famous Guinness Brewery in 1759.
Tara was an heir to that fortune, a trust fund kid who was living it up in the swinging London of the 60s.
Tara actually knew John, but he was better friends with Paul.
In fact, he facilitated Paul's first LSD trip.
Well, you know, if I was to say where I got it from, you know, it's illegal and everything.
It's silly to say that.
On December 17th, Brown was driving through London with his girlfriend when he crashed his Lotus Elan into a parked truck.
He died the following day of his injuries.
A month later they were still writing stories about his tragic death in the papers, and the story that John saw that Tuesday in the Daily Mail was the inspiration for A Day in the Life, what would become the final song on Sgt.
Pepper and arguably the Beatles' best song.
In John's version it's not a swinging socialite in the car, but a politician who shoots himself in the head.
Maybe a politician.
The crowd of people gathering to stare recognize his face, but...
The House of Lords being, of course, an institution of privileged elites who are not elected to their positions.
They are, in most cases, lucky men who made the grade, though that's a bit of John's signature sarcasm.
It's not hard to make the grade when you're born near the top.
The paradox is that this man with every advantage was still seemingly deeply unhappy.
To that, John laughs.
A strange response.
Is it a nervous laugh?
A chuckle at the absurdity of the world?
Is it a sign of numbness and detachment?
Or is it a laugh of recognition?
John wasn't born with privilege, but by January 1967, he had plenty of it.
Fame, money, power.
These things should bring you joy, right?
Well, what if they don't?
One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were.
Complete craziness is surrounding you and you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand.
In the second verse, John goes to see a movie about the Second World War, presumably.
A crowd of people turn away at the moment the British are victorious.
The verse is likely referencing the movie that John just finished filming in Spain, but once again he creates in just a few lines a dreamlike atmosphere in which he's seeing an event of great violence filtered through a media lens.
First it was a newspaper, now it's a film.
First a suicide, now a war.
First a tragedy, now a triumph.
These are extremes of experience, but John sounds disengaged, hauntingly so.
The great gift of John Lennon's voice was his singular ability to convey nuanced emotion.
I mean, how do you make existential boredom sound so poignant?
It's not about technical skill, it's something undefinable.
I love the other parts of this song.
That reference to LSD advocate Timothy Leary's phrase turn on, tune in, drop out.
I love the music, the volcanic orchestral breaks, Paul's bridge, which is just so Paul.
Fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head.
But for me, the transcendent parts of A Day in the Life are John's verses.
The final one was inspired by another article from that same January 17th Daily Mail.
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.
The local council reported that there were 4000 potholes in the town of Blackburn Lancashire, or 26th of a hole per person.
It's just so absurd, this image of some government official counting thousands of holes in the roads of an English town.
John was always sensitive to this kind of absurdity.
Sometimes it's comic, as in this verse, sometimes it's tragic, as in the first verse.
Mostly it's a combination of both.
The truth is that there's something fundamentally absurd about reality itself.
That fact is often hidden by the language we use to describe it.
But language can also be used to bring that absurdity back to the surface.
For example, the great Lewis Carroll, who deeply influenced John, accomplished that with the use of wordplay and parody, by inventing new words and disrupting language's normal patterns.
John followed in Carroll's footsteps with his own books of literary nonsense and in songs like I Am the Walrus, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Come Together.
You can hear it here too, in lines like Now they know how many holes it takes to fill it out, But there's something unique about A Day in the Life.
It's not as playful as those other songs I mentioned, not John's verses anyway.
There's something wistful about the lyrics and the voice that sings them a sense of paralysis and loss.
The song is not ultimately about these poetic tragic, absurd scenes, but about the person, the 26-year-old, who can only ever experience them from behind the glass of media, of drugs, of an unprecedented, inescapable level of fame.
You know, John always said that his favorite Beatles songs were the personal ones.
Songs like In My Life, Help, Strawberry Fields Forever.
At first glance, A Day in the Life might not seem like it's about John Lennon.
Maybe even John didn't believe it was.
But even if the lyrics point outward, the voice tells a different story.
Hey, everybody.
Thank you so much for watching.
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