The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
The Beatles · produced by George Martin · Parlophone · 40 minutes
Mode
The rock album made one work; music hall, brass band, Indian classical forms and an orchestra admitted to a pop group’s record
Mythos
The masque and the waking: a band in costume, the old self buried in flowers, a day breaking through the show
Phase
Thirteen tracks on two sides, run together; a frame that opens, lapses after the second track, returns in the reprise and gives way to the closer
Presentation
Album; no single taken from it, the lyrics printed on the sleeve, about forty minutes heard in sequence
Register
Bright and strange; fanfare, dream, sermon, music hall and an orchestral roar on one bill
Scale
One English day, from the kitchen to the newspaper, inside a show
Governing Proposition
A band that has stopped touring presents its record as a show by a fictional band, lets the show play and bid farewell, and then lets a day break through the mask: a newspaper, a death, a war on film, and an orchestra climbing out of control. The album made itself the work, and the waking at its end is what the show was for.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins as a show. Its title track introduces a band that is not the band, a bandstand troupe taught to play “twenty years ago today”, and the second track is sung from inside the show. The frame is set in two tracks and then dropped; it returns only in the reprise near the end of the second side, where the show bids farewell. Between them the songs run together with short gaps or none, and nothing on the record was issued as a single in Britain or the United States. The album is offered as one made thing, to be heard in order.
The band had stopped touring, and the record was made for the studio alone. It was recorded at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, between late November 1966 and April 1967, produced by George Martin and engineered by Geoff Emerick, on four-track machines whose tracks were bounced down to make room for more. Two songs begun in the same sessions, Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane, were issued as a single in February 1967 and left off. Parlophone released the album in Britain at the end of May 1967, and Capitol in the United States in early June: thirteen tracks on two sides, about forty minutes, the sides within seconds of each other.
The sleeve completes the conceit. Peter Blake and Jann Haworth built a tableau, photographed by Michael Cooper, in which the band stand in costume beside wax figures of their former selves, above flowers laid out like a grave, before a crowd of the famous dead and living. The lyrics are printed on the back, and on the British pressing a run-out groove follows the last chord. The sleeve is not the record, and it counts here only where it bears on the frame: the old self is buried and the mask is put on. What the mask is for becomes plain only at the end.
Movement II
Inside the frame, the first side moves between dream and the ordinary. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds drifts in its verse and lifts into its chorus, a nursery dream the record will later wake from. Getting Better and Fixing a Hole stay level, bright songs of a life put in order, and they are the first of the record’s soft spots: the first a lesser version of the waking to routine that the closer makes fully, the second a song the record could lose. Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! ends the side in a swirl of cut-up fairground organ, a small and uneasy height.
She’s Leaving Home is the record’s one drama of a family, and it is built without the band: Mike Leander’s strings and harp carry it alone. A daughter leaves for a life of her own, and her parents are given the counter-voice, answering the story of her going with their own bewilderment, unable to see what they denied her. The rupture of a generation is held from both sides at once, which no single narrator could do, and the warmth of the setting keeps the parents’ blindness from becoming a caricature.
That song and the closer carry the record’s disclosure, and the disclosure can be stated. A society that receives death, war and its own emptiness as news has learned to read them as routine, and a daughter’s leaving arrives as news to the people who raised her. Elsewhere the record renders a mood, the ordinary made bright and strange, more than a meaning, and the mood is what its year heard first. The meaning is narrower and holds longer: two conditions, set in two songs, against a surface that celebrates.
Movement III
The second side opens with the farthest step the record takes from its frame. Within You Without You, at five minutes the longest song but one, is a sermon on illusion and the self set in Indian form, over a drone, with bowed Indian strings. It is the only track to state a law of life against the show’s bustle, and it states it rather than uncovering it: doctrine, not disclosure. As sound it is transport, and it stands where a side opens.
Then When I’m Sixty-Four, a music-hall proposal of a long marriage, set for George Martin’s clarinets. The two tracks are the most distant elements on the record, and they sit side by side. Both concern a life passing, one as illusion to be seen through, the other as a future to be shared, and the frame of the variety show admits both. The record’s law is ordinary English life, the street, the kitchen and the newspaper, seen through a lens that makes it bright and strange, and its range runs from devotion to the fairground.
A variety bill is also a law of convenience, and the record shows where it is only that. Lovely Rita, a traffic warden courted in a bright arrangement, and Good Morning Good Morning, a day of routine with coarse brass and its animals, obey the bright surface and nothing deeper. The first could go without loss; the second is a lesser version of the morning the closer will give in full. They are the record’s weakest arrangements as well as its slightest songs, and with Getting Better and Fixing a Hole they are the four containers in a form that elsewhere knows a great deal.
Movement IV
What the record turns from is mostly its makers’ own. Revolver, the year before, had already brought tape loops, studio processes and an Indian song into a pop record; Pet Sounds stood beside it; the music hall, the brass band and Indian classical forms were there to be borrowed. The turn here is to the album as the work: a sequence framed as one show, no single taken from it, the lyrics printed on the sleeve, the songs run together, an aleatory orchestral passage on a pop record, a sermon in Indian form opening a side.
The stake was real. The band had stopped touring, and this was a record that could not be played on stage. It was placed by the best-resourced band in the world, with studio time open-ended, on a path its previous record had opened, and many of its means are that record’s carried further. The making is what turned the means into a form. George Martin and Geoff Emerick built dense arrangements on four tracks by bouncing them down, and the result stays legible: brass, strings, harp, harmonium, an Indian ensemble and a rock band each have a space.
Martin’s setting of A Day in the Life frees the orchestra inside fixed bars, and that is true orchestration, as are his clarinets for When I’m Sixty-Four and Mike Leander’s strings and harp for She’s Leaving Home. McCartney’s bass is melodic throughout, and Starr’s drumming on the closer is a lead voice. The faults lie in the weaker songs: generic arrangements on Lovely Rita and Good Morning Good Morning, and a balance in which the band’s playing is often secondary to the effects. The invention belongs to the record’s turn and its reach; the craft is the legibility, and it holds across all but those two tracks.
Movement V
The reprise is short, little more than a minute, and the show bids farewell. It crossfades into A Day in the Life, and the mask drops. Placed first, the song would be a great song; placed after the farewell, it is a waking. A man reads of a death in a car; a crowd turns away; an army wins a war on film; holes are counted in “Blackburn, Lancashire”. The reply is the wish to “turn you on”, and the orchestra climbs. Between the dreaming verses a hurried morning breaks in, and the form of the song is the gap between routine and vision.
The two orchestral ascents are the record’s summit. The players climb from their lowest notes to their highest, each at their own pace, and the song ends on a chord struck on pianos and left to decay for about forty seconds; on the British pressing the run-out groove follows. The BBC declined to broadcast the song. The rest of the record made the ordinary bright and strange; this song lets the news through and then tears the bright surface open, and the record’s law is kept by being broken. It is what the show was for.
The album won the Grammy for Album of the Year, the first rock record to do so, and the records of its year answered it, Their Satanic Majesties Request among them. It displaced the single as rock’s unit, and the gatefold, the printed lyric, the concept album and the art rock of the next decade grew from it. What it lacks is not reach, nor the making, nor the frame. It is the join: its orders are many and are held four at a time only in the closer, its frame lapses after two tracks, and four songs could sit on any record of their year. Within those limits it is one work, and it ends by waking from itself.
Act III · The Twelve
Thirteen tracks in about forty minutes, run together as one show, and the core is compelled. The frame must open and must return, A Day in the Life must follow the farewell, and She’s Leaving Home, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Within You Without You each carry a part of what the record knows: the family, the dream the closer wakes from, and the one law of life set against the show’s bustle. The test bites at Lovely Rita and Fixing a Hole, about an eighth of the running time, and softens at two more. Two songs from the same sessions were issued as a single and left off: the order was a selection, not a necessity.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A society that receives death, war and its own emptiness as news has learned to read them as routine. A Day in the Life sets that condition: a man reads of a death in a car, a crowd turns away, an army wins a war on film, holes are counted in “Blackburn, Lancashire”, and the reply is the wish to “turn you on”, then an orchestra climbing out of control. She’s Leaving Home states a second condition from both sides: a daughter leaves for a life of her own, and her parents, given the counter-voice, cannot see what they denied her. Held from the top: elsewhere the record renders a mood more than a meaning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Height is reached once at the summit of the form and several times below it. A Day in the Life is the ceiling: two orchestral ascents in which the players climb from their lowest notes to their highest, each at their own pace, then a chord struck on pianos and left to decay for about forty seconds. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds lifts from its drifting verse into its chorus; She’s Leaving Home is warm beauty on harp and strings; Within You Without You is transport in its drone and bowed Indian strings. The title track’s fanfare is exhilaration rather than elevation, and five songs stay level, in charm and bustle. Five rises in thirteen tracks hold it below the top.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth is built in the frame, and the frame bears load. The record presents itself as a show by a fictional band, taught to play “twenty years ago today”, and the sleeve completes the conceit: the band in costume beside wax figures of their former selves, above flowers laid out like a grave, before a crowd of the famous dead and living. The old self is buried and the mask put on. The masque plays, bids farewell, and A Day in the Life steps out of it into a day and a death: a pattern of the sequence, not an allusion. Held below the bar: the frame drops after the second track, much else is only evoked, and Rita, the runaway and Billy Shears stay types.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own Revolver (1966), where tape loops, studio processes and an Indian song had already entered, with Pet Sounds (1966) beside it, and the music hall, the brass band and the Indian classical forms the record borrows. The turn is to the album as the work: one show, no single taken from it, the lyrics printed, the songs run together, an aleatory orchestral passage on a pop record, a sermon in Indian form opening a side. The stake was real: the band had stopped touring, and the record could not be played on stage. Held from the top: the wager was placed by the best-resourced band in the world, and many of its means are Revolver’s carried further.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and most of what the record knows goes, because its knowledge is in the frame and the way out of it. A show announces itself, plays, bids farewell, and gives way through a crossfade to A Day in the Life, where the mask drops. Placed first, that song would be a great song; placed after the reprise it is a waking. Within it, dreaming verses and a hurried morning are joined by orchestral ascents, so that the form is the gap between routine and vision. She’s Leaving Home gives the parents the counter-voice, holding both sides at once. Sequence is counted here, once. Held from the top: the frame lapses after the second track, and four songs are containers.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence first, and fifty-nine years supply it. The study is a literature of its own: Mark Lewisohn’s session chronicles, Ian MacDonald’s track-by-track Revolution in the Head, Allan Moore’s Cambridge handbook on this album, Walter Everett’s analyses of the band’s harmony and form. Giles Martin’s remix of 2017 went back to the session tapes, and the sleeve has been parsed for decades. The record repays the attention: A Day in the Life never settles into one hearing, its orchestral passage different each time, and the relation of the frame to the songs is still argued. Held from the top: much of the return is to the making, the event and the sleeve, and the lighter tracks yield at first hearing what they will ever yield.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The field is popular music in 1967. The record reorganised what a rock album was, from a set of singles to one made thing, framed, sequenced and printed, with the studio as instrument and any idiom open to a pop group. Much of that was already in Revolver and Pet Sounds, and the record assembles possibilities more than it invents one; the assembly is itself the reorganisation. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the records of its year answered it, Their Satanic Majesties Request among them; the album displaced the single as rock’s unit; the concept album and the art rock of the next decade grew from it; and it was the first rock record to win the Grammy for Album of the Year.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years. The form is whole: thirteen tracks, the sleeve, the run-out. Presence is as wide as any record’s: continuously in print, on compact disc from 1987, remixed in 2017, its songs in daily broadcast and in other musicians’ hands. The fabric is sound. The charge is the surface fixed to its moment, which the axis names: the record is the emblem of 1967, its uniforms, its Indian borrowing, its psychedelic colour, and its standing among critics has fallen as that year receded. On that surface it stands a tenth below Revolver and Highway 61 Revisited at 9.0, level with The Velvet Underground & Nico at 8.9, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of the recorded medium is high and often load-bearing. George Martin and Geoff Emerick built dense arrangements on four-track machines by bouncing tracks down, and the result stays legible: brass, strings, harp, harmonium, an Indian ensemble and a rock band each have a space. Martin’s clarinets for When I’m Sixty-Four and his setting of A Day in the Life, which frees the orchestra inside fixed bars, are true orchestration; Mike Leander’s strings and harp carry She’s Leaving Home with no band at all. McCartney’s bass is melodic throughout, and Starr’s drumming on the closer is a lead voice. The faults: generic arrangements on Lovely Rita and Good Morning Good Morning, and a balance in which the playing is often secondary to the effects.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the record: ordinary English life, the street, the kitchen, the newspaper, seen through a lens that makes it bright and strange. The two most distant elements sit side by side and obey it. Within You Without You, a sermon on illusion in Indian form, and When I’m Sixty-Four, a music-hall proposal of a long marriage, both concern a life passing, and the frame of the variety show admits both. A Day in the Life obeys the law by tearing the surface it governs. The range is very wide, from devotion to fairground and from a nursery dream to an orchestral roar. Held from the top: a variety bill is also a law of convenience, and Getting Better and Lovely Rita obey the bright surface and nothing deeper.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. The orders are many: consciousness, as dream and altered perception; the family, in She’s Leaving Home and the long marriage of When I’m Sixty-Four; work and the city, in a traffic warden and the commute of the closer; the media and history, in a newspaper and a film of a war; death, in the car; the sacred, in Within You Without You; entertainment and age. A Day in the Life binds four of them in one song, and She’s Leaving Home binds the family to the generation. What holds the figure is the join: elsewhere the orders are listed, one track to an order, and nature and the state are nearly absent.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.4, The Bottomless Well at 9.1, then The Living Form and The Made at 9.0. A record that turned the rock album from a set of singles into one made thing, fifty-nine years of study that A Day in the Life still repays, a form whose frame makes the closer a waking, and dense arrangements kept legible on four tracks. Below them, The Swerve and The Imperishable at 8.9: the album as the work, wagered by a band that had stopped touring, and a presence as wide as any record’s.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0: many orders, from the family to the newspaper to the sacred, bound four at a time in A Day in the Life and elsewhere listed one track to an order, with nature and the state nearly absent. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.3: two short songs could go without loss, two more are lesser versions of the closer’s waking, and two songs from the same sessions were left off.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.4, The Swerve at 8.9, The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short: the frame builds one myth and drops after the second track. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. The summit is withheld twice: by the Epochal Gate at The Archetypal Deep, and by the aggregate, which stands below 9.0.
Basis · the album as first released in Britain by Parlophone in 1967, thirteen tracks in running order on two sides, about forty minutes, with the 1967 mono mix taken as the work heard and the issued sleeve counted only where it bears on the frame; judged from knowledge of the recording, its lyrics, its documented making and its reception. Running times are approximate. The stereo mix issued at the same time, the 2017 remix and the single of Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane from the same sessions are evidence, not the object. No lyric is quoted beyond a fragment of four words. Individual session dates, exact timings in each mix and most session personnel are not given, being unverified here.