In Their Lives by Andrew Blauner

Author:Andrew Blauner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-02T15:19:40+00:00

STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER / PENNY LANE

ADAM GOPNIK

I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT IT a shame that “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields,” the two finest songs from the Beatles sessions that produced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, could not, according to the brutal commercial rules of the period, be placed on the album after having first appeared as a 45. (Remember those? Remember albums?) Yet spending a morning finding a place for them amid the familiar tracks proves much harder than one might have imagined. The rule of Beatles album composition was that the “closer” on an album side should be, so to speak, unanswerable, conclusive. “Strawberry Fields” could certainly sit on the end of side one, in place of “Mr. Kite,” and achieve that, rather like “I Want You” on Abbey Road. But then again it might have been too sepulchral, too conclusive, too far out of the fairground fantasy world of the record, broken properly only once by “A Day in the Life” on the end of side two. And if “Penny Lane” is to open side two, well, it seems too complete a work to open anything. It needs to be the end of something, too. (One feels a similar uneasiness trying to fit “Hey Jude” onto the White Album; it’s too big to be contained by other songs. And so, in its more miniature scale, is “Penny Lane”.)

No, the double-A-sided single belongs as a small masterpiece alongside the bigger one—and, perhaps, in a way, an even bigger masterpiece than the larger record; a perfect expression of the Beatles’ art at the high point of their artistry, at the pivotal moment when they turned from pop entertainment to invent a new form of their own—genuinely artful in its indifference to conventional expectations, genuinely pop in its ability to communicate immediate emotion immediately. In this case, the emotion communicated was a simple one, the classic Wordsworthian emotion, a longing for childhood places and peace in the midst of the confusions of adulthood. With my chin only slightly out and leading, I’d even argue, or anyway assert, that this simple single was the most significant work of art produced in the 1960s, the one that articulated the era’s hopes for a crossover of pop art and high intricacy, and that summed up, in poignant poetic form, the decade’s surprising desire, which was not for revolution, but instead for renewed innocence. For a little while anyway, such music suggested that anything was possible, and made what was possible seem what was most humane.

The story of how the two songs came to be recorded is familiar—or familiar to Beatles fans, anyway, but, fifty-plus years on, still might be briefly retold. Both were recorded at the very beginning of what became the Sgt. Pepper sessions, in December of 1966, and then in the first month of 1967. John had written “Strawberry Fields” while shooting the Richard Lester movie How I Won the War the previous summer in Spain. “Penny Lane” had emerged under Paul’s

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