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Although John had been writing more
obviously autobiographical songs for over a year now, it was
with 'In My Life' that he felt he'd made the breakthrough
that Kenneth Allsop had encouraged him to make in March
1964, when he suggested focusing on his own interior
life.
Recorded in October 1965, the song
was a long time in gestation. It started, John said, as a
long poem in which he reflected on favourite childhood
haunts by tracing a journey from his home on Menlove Avenue
down to the 'Docker's Umbrella', the overhead railway which
ran along Liverpool's dockside until 1958 and beneath which
dockers would shelter form the rain.
Elliot Mintz, who was hired by Yoko
Ono to carry out an inventory of all John's personal
possessions after his death, remembers seeing the first
handwritten draft of the song. "It was part of a large book
in which he kept all his original Beatles' compositions,"
says Mintz. "He had already told me about how the song was
written and that he considered it a significant turning
point in his writing and, just as he had described to me,
the song went on at great length and included lots of place
names including Penny Lane."
In a later single-page draft of
this rambling lyric, John listed Penny Lane, Church Road,
the clock tower, the Abbey Cinema, the tram sheds, the Dutch
cafe, St. Columbus Church, the Docker's Umbrella and
Calderstones Park. Although this fulfilled the requirement
of being autobiographical, John realized that it was no more
than a series of snapshots held loosely together by his
feeling that once familiar landmarks were fast disappearing.
The tram sheds were now 'without trams' and the Docker's
Umbrella had been 'pulled down'. "It was the most boring
sort of 'what I did on my holidays' bus trip song and it
wasn't working at all..." he said. "Then I lay back and
these lyrics started coming to me about the places I
remember."
John jettisoned all the specific
place names, and worked up the sense of mourning for a
disappeared childhood and youth, turning what would
otherwise have been a song about the changing face of
Liverpool into a universal song about confronting the facts
of death and decay. Here was a tough guy, who had been known
to laugh at cripples and who poured scorn on the
middle-class nature of his upbringing, but who was also a
sentimentalist. Throughout his life, he kept a box of
childhood mementoes in his apartment and once wrote to his
Aunt Mimi asking her to send him his Quarry Bank school
tie.
He later told Pete Shotton that
when he wrote the line about friends in 'In My Life', some
of whom were dead and some of whom were living, he was
thinking specifically of both Shotton and former Beatles
Stuart Sutcliffe, who had died of a brain tumour in April
1962.
The source of the melody in
dispute, John has said that Paul helped out with a section
on which he was stuck. Paul still believes he wrote it all.
"I remember that he had the words written out like a long
poem and went off and worked something out on the
Mellotron," he said. "The tune, if I remember rightly, was
inspired by the Miracles."
On the track itself, the
instrumental break was played by George Martin who recorded
himself on piano and then played it back at double speed to
create a baroque effect. John's opinion on the finished
result was that it was his "first real major piece of
work".
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