There’s something about the November nip in the air that tugs at our heartstrings, isn’t it? It’s time to go down memory lane. Or Penny Lane, if you will.
Every Beatlemaniac has a favourite song, and perhaps everyone has compared Penny Lane with Strawberry Fields Forever. Both were recorded as a part of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but the record company released these two songs as a double A side single in February 1967. Similar in theme, different in treatment, both became iconic, marking the transition of The Beatles from their early rock ‘n’ roll to more complex, unique compositions.
You can’t really play favourites with these two, you’re just happy they are around. Penny Lane is Paul McCartney’s song, though it’s credited with John Lennon. (It’s the reverse for Strawberry Fields Forever.) Penny Lane’s an actual place in Liverpool which has over the years become something of a pilgrimage, thanks to the song. Paul, John and George Harrison knew it well as boys growing up in the 1950s — Ringo Starr, of course, drummed up with the trio some years later.
In Penny Lane, there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know
And all the people that come and go
Stop and say hello
On the corner is a banker with a motorcar
And little children laugh at him behind his back
And the banker never wears a mac in the pouring rain
Very strange
Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
Wet beneath the blue suburban skies....
A nostalgic song without being sappy about it, the lyrics bare their cleverness after the first listen. The sly, mercurial nature of memories comes to the fore. The banker, the barber and all the other characters become just a little mythical, a little unreal. The season — “wet beneath the blue suburban skies” — goes teeter-totter between summer and rain, but the sudden reference of a nurse selling “poppies from a tray” could point to Remembrance Day, November 11. It could be a veiled reference to drugs, too. Either way, it’s a jumbled-up kaleidoscope, the way memories are. “Very strange”, as the song says, repeatedly, as if surprised by its own stream of consciousness.
While the lyrics capture the slippery, oddball ways our minds remember people and things, the vocals and the music arrangement play along brilliantly. You’d be expecting the piano and the guitar and the drums, but there’s a gigantic surprise in store.
Enter David Mason and his piccolo trumpet solo. Paul had heard David perform Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 on TV, and decided that Penny Lane needed the high-pitched sound of the piccolo trumpet for maximum impact. Paul’s instincts worked, the trumpet lifted Penny Lane from good to extraordinary.
It’s the nature of life that we leave lanes and people and towns behind. Not everything or everyone can be revisited. That’s called adulting. But then, there’s the rabbit hole of bittersweet memories. And a song called Penny Lane to ease the way.