THE READING ROOM: Jonathan Cott Explores Two Beatles A-Sides in ‘Let Me Take You Down’

There’s seemingly no end to the number of Beatles books out there. Readers can expect to travel endlessly down a long and winding road full of Beatles ephemera for more than eight days a week with recollections of their hangers-on, philosophical musings on the priest in “Eleanor Rigby,” phenomenological analyses of the world of the “Yellow Submarine” and “Octopus’s Garden,” detailed glimpses into the lives and words of the Fab Four, and more. Once starting down that road, it’s hard to get back, and readers find themselves either captivated by the endless stories of B-chords, Hamburg nightclubs, Eastern philosophy, and musical genius, or drowning in a rushing torrent of tepid writing that tells the same stories over and over again.

Novelist and biographer Jonathan Cott, like many writers on The Beatles, has his own story of the way their music changed his life, or in this case, of the way two songs mesmerized him so much that he had to share his thoughts with other fans. In his new book Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever, Cott recalls, like most Beatles fans, where he was when he first heard “Penny Lane” on February 13, 1967: He was walking down Benvenue Avenue in Berkeley, California, to drop off a just-completed paper on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to his professor’s office when he heard “a series of staccato piano chords and a dazzling, soaring solo melody played by a high-pitched trumpet.”

After depositing his paper, he rushed to the nearby record store and bought a copy of “Penny Lane.” The song on the flip side of the 45 was “Strawberry Fields Forever.” This song wasn’t, he discovered, in fact “the single’s B-side. Both Capitol Records in the United States and Parlophone Records in Great Britain had released ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as a double A-side recording, which meant they couldn’t promote one song over the other, nor could one of the songs even be considered first among equals. The Beatles were the first rock group in Great Britain to release double A-side records, but one doesn’t know whether they specifically intended to convey that or highlight the contrasting meanings of the songs that they had chosen to mate with each other.”

Cott listened to “Penny Lane” as soon as he got home that afternoon and felt the song, with its descriptions of the world of Penny Lane, evoked “the everyday sublime.” Because he was meeting some friends for dinner, he didn’t listen to the other A-side, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” until later that evening. “As soon as I heard the first few seconds of a hovering, spectral flute-like melody, I realized I wasn’t in Penny Lane anymore. I could already tell that if ‘Penny Lane’ was like a morning Indian raga, this song was going to be a midnight raga, so I decided to listen to it with the lights out.”

Since that day in 1967, Cott has continued to be amazed that these two songs shared the same record, and he’s wondered what they share in common. While reading the Jungian psychologist James Hillman’s book The Dream and the Underworld, Cott had an epiphany. In the book, Hillman observes that Zeus (the Greek god of the sky) and Hades (the Greek god of the underworld) are brothers and their brotherhood “’indicates that the upper and lower worlds are the same, but only the perspectives differ, one brother viewing things from above and through the light, the other from below and into the darkness.’ And it dawned on me that Penny Lane is the world of Zeus, and Strawberry Fields is the world of Hades. The first is Paul’s world, the second is John’s — Paul takes you ‘back’ and John takes you ‘down,’ but the songs turn out the be two sides of the same coin, the same record.”

Cott divides his book into two A-sides. On the first side, “A Hard Day’s Nights: June-December 1966,” he recounts the making of the two songs. The material will be familiar to Beatles fans since it’s been told before in numerous books — Cott even mentions that there have been more than 2,000 books written on The Beatles — so this section is akin to the song itself. It’s a pleasant diversion that introduces readers to (or reminds them of) the denizens of The Beatles world during those six months of 1966 when the band was falling apart. He describes the making of the songs: “It took more than 70 hours of studio work to create seven minutes of music — ‘Penny Lane’ is just over three minutes, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ just over four minutes. Their brevity, however, belies and inexhaustible richness and depth of meaning.”

On the other A-side, Cott interviews five individuals — guitarist Bill Frisell, artist Laurie Anderson, actor Richard Gere, Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck, musician Jonathan F.P. Rose — about the ways these two songs have affected or influenced them. On this side, like “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Cott takes readers down into the intricacies of the two songs. For example, Frisell comments on the structures of each song. “’Penny Lane’ is so beautifully rich texturally but it mostly stays in the same world for the entire song, whereas ‘Strawberry Fields’ is like, whoa, where are we going, we’re suddenly thrown into these different worlds…Unlike ‘Strawberry Fields,’ ‘Penny Lane’ stays within a common symmetrical structure. And unlike John, there’s more reference in Paul’s work to the melodies and harmonies of earlier Tin Pan Alley songs, he had that language in his blood. But there are some weird harmonies in ‘Penny Lane’ as well.”

For Rose, “‘Penny Lane’ painted a picture of a wide range of very normal English people but did so with respect and humor…‘Penny Lane’ is the antithesis of ‘othering.’ It has compassion for its subjects. It heals the divides.” On the other hand, “Strawberry Fields” was a darker song. “It invites the listener to join John Lennon on a journey and to share his uncertainties. He’s searching and trying to figure out something he’s unclear about…In ‘Strawberry Fields,’ Lennon expressed his personal vulnerability…The stories of ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ remind me of the title of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.”

Anderson points out that “Maybe ‘Strawberry Fields’ is a song about confusion. There’s the difference between somebody who’s caught in depression and someone who’s making a big painting of an entire landscape, like Bosch or Brueghel. John Lennon is a painter, ‘Strawberry Fields’ is a painting, and although he’s someone who’s talking about being lost and who’s embodying that feeling and is really feeling it…And for me, that’s one of the things ‘Strawberry Fields’ is about — feeling but not being sad. It’s John Lennon having this back-and-forth conversation. He’s an artist who’s making a portrait of confusion and argument and is presenting a lucid and clear description of that.” “Penny Lane,” on the other hand, is for Anderson, “daily life observed through a transparent lens…everybody’s playing the role that’s expected of them.”

For Beatles fans who can’t read enough about their favorite band — even though they’ve heard some of the stories before — Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever will add another glimpse of how other fans view the group. Readers should start with the A-side that features the conversations with Frisell, Rose, Gere, Klenck, and Anderson, though, for that’s where the most resonant music plays; the rest is ephemera and “nothing to get hung about.”

Jonathan Cott’s Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever was published by the University of Minnesota Press on April 30.