luxken27 | 100 Songs That Have Moved Me | Song #010: "Penny Lane" (1967)

Title: "Penny Lane"
Artist: The Beatles
Composers: Paul McCartney, John Lennon
Producer: George Martin
Release Date: February 13, 1967
Peak Chart Position: #1 (Hot 100)
Album: Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

Rolling Stone metadata:

Rank: #456

Blurb: After Lennon composed "Strawberry Fields Forever," McCartney wrote his own snappy memoir. Penny Lane was a Liverpool bus stop where Lennon and McCartney often met. "John came over and helped me with the third verse, as was often the case," McCartney said. "We were writing recently faded memories from eight or 10 years before." (Source)

Words from the artist:

"A lot of our formative years were spent walking around those places. Penny Lane was the depot I had to change buses at to get from my house to John's and to a lot of my friends. It was a big bus terminal which we all knew very well. I sang in the choir at St Barnabas Church opposite." - Paul McCartney, 1967

"When I came to write it, John came over and helped me with the third verse, as often was the case. We were writing childhood memories: recently faded memories from eight or ten years before, so it was a recent nostalgia, pleasant memories for both of us. All the places were still there, and because we remembered it so clearly we could have gone on." - Paul McCartney

John Lennon is said to have contributed the line "Four of fish and finger pie", which derived from a crude Liverpudlian sexual term:

"It's part fact, part nostalgia for a great place - blue suburban skies, as we remember it, and it's still there. And we put in a joke or two: 'Four of fish and finger pie.' The women would never dare say that. except to themselves. Most people wouldn't hear it, but 'finger pie' is just a nice little joke for the Liverpool lads who like a bit of smut." - Paul McCartney, 1967

"We were often answering each other's songs so it might have been my version of a memory song but I don't recall. It was childhood reminiscences: there is a bus stop called Penny Lane. There was a barber shop called Bioletti's with head shots of the haircuts you can have in the window and I just took it all and arted it up a little bit to make it sound like he was having a picture exhibition in his window. It was all based on real things; there was a bank on the corner so I imagined the banker, it was not a real person, and his slightly dubious habits and the little children laughing at him, and the pouring rain. The fire station was a bit of poetic licence; there's a fire station about half a mile down the road, not actually in Penny Lane, but we needed a third verse so we took that and I was very pleased with the line 'It's a clean machine'. I still like that phrase, you occasionally hit a lucky little phrase and it becomes more than a phrase. So the banker and the barber shop and the fire station were all real locations." - Paul McCartney

Penny Lane was a street in Liverpool, which also lent its name to the surrounding area. Lennon and McCartney both lived nearby, and often met at the Penny Lane junction to catch a bus into the city centre:

"The bank was there, and that was where the tram sheds were and people waiting and the inspector stood there, the fire engines were down there. It was just reliving childhood." - John Lennon, 1968

"I remember saying to George Martin, 'I want a very clean recording.' I was into clean sounds - maybe a Beach Boy influence at that point." - Paul McCartney

"The only reason that Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane didn't go onto the new album was a feeling that if we issued a single, it shouldn't go onto an album. That was a crazy idea, and I'm afraid I was partly responsible. It's nonsense these days, but in those days it was an aspect that we'd try to give the public value for money.

"The idea of a double a-side came from me and Brian, really. Brian was desperate to recover popularity, and so we wanted to make sure that we had a marvellous seller. He came to me and said, 'I must have a really great single. What have you got?' I said, 'Well, I've got three tracks - and two of them are the best tracks they've ever made. We could put the two together and make a smashing single.' We did, and it was a smashing single - but it was also a dreadful mistake. We would have sold far more and got higher up the charts if we had issued one of those with, say, When I'm Sixty-Four on the back." - George Martin

(Source) <-- Not for nothing is it called the Beatles Bible *bows in wonder*

How this song moves me:

This song is pretty much straight out of my childhood. I grew up listening to my parents' music instead of what was popular at the time (hence, no doubt, my love for cheesy 80s pop thirty years after the fact), and the Beatles were at the forefront of my father's collection. I was also the -perfect- age when the Anthology triple-albums were released (the first in 1995) to be all indignant that they were enjoying a resurgence of popularity. They were "my" band, after all, and all these new people liked them for all the wrong reasons!

One of my favorite recordings from Anthology 2 was "Penny Lane" - it was fascinating to hear the earliest versions of the song, with its unique piccolo trumpet accompaniment, and the single-track vocals. You don't realize what you take for granted in terms of musical production until you hear the not-so-finished tracks, aheh =) This song is absolutely beautiful, in all incarnations. I think Paul McCartney proved his genius with this opus, and it truly was the perfect complement to Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" ♥

Like a lot of Beatles songs, I know this one by heart =) The lyrics are slightly silly, but very warm and inviting - no surprise, considering they are nostalgic memories from Paul's childhood ♥ I didn't notice the contrast of the lyrics to the melody at first blush, but now its quite striking. I think its obvious this came from the Beatles' fruitful-genius period in 66/67, when they were breaking down all the barriers of weirdness and psychedelia. It's been said that this song is LSD-tinged, and I can buy that - "a nurse is selling poppies from a tray / she feels as if she's in a play / she is anyway!" Paranoia much? =)

This song feels like coming home, to me - its a little bit of my Happy Place, where I can just go to be me, weirdness and all. Listening to this song makes me wish I had come of age in the late 60s, just to experience what it must've been like when the Beatles ruled the world. There was rarely a miss, and though I resented it in '95, I'm quite happy now that there is such immense love for the Beatles, their catalog, and their enduring influence on music.