Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written primarily by John Lennon with assistance from Paul McCartney, and credited to the Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership.[2] Lennon's son Julian inspired the song with a nursery school drawing that he called "Lucy – in the sky with diamonds". Shortly before the album's release, speculation arose that the first letter of each of the nouns in the title intentionally spelled "LSD", the initialism commonly used for the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide.[3] Lennon repeatedly denied that he had intended it as a drug song,[3][4] and attributed the song's fantastical imagery to his reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books.[3]
The Beatles recorded "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" in March 1967. Adding to the song's ethereal qualities, the musical arrangement includes a Lowrey organ part heavily treated with studio effects, and a drone provided by an Indian tambura. The song has been recognised as a key work in the psychedelic genre. Among its many cover versions, a 1974 recording by Elton John – with a guest appearance by Lennon – was a number 1 hit in the US and Canada.
Composition[edit]
Most of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is in simple triple metre (3
4 time), but the chorus is in 4
4 time. In the song, the structure modulates between musical keys, using the key of A major for verses, B-flat major for the pre-chorus, and G major for the chorus.[14] It is sung by Lennon over an increasingly complicated underlying arrangement which features a tambura, played by George Harrison; lead electric guitar put through a Leslie speaker, played by Harrison; and a counter melody on Lowrey organ played by McCartney and taped with a special organ stop sounding "not unlike a celeste".[15][16] Session tapes from the initial 1 March 1967 recording of this song reveal Lennon originally sang the line "Cellophane flowers of yellow and green" as a broken phrase, but McCartney suggested that he sing it more fluidly to improve the song.[17]
Recording[edit]
The recording of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" began with rehearsals in Studio 2 at Abbey Road on 28 February 1967.[18] The instrumental backing was finished the following evening. On the first take, track one of the four-track tape contained acoustic guitar and piano, track two McCartney's Lowrey organ, track three Ringo Starr's drums, and track four a guide vocal by Lennon during the verses. Take eight replaced the guide vocal with Harrison's tambura. The four tracks of this take were then mixed together and recorded on the first track of a second four-track tape.[18] On 2 March, Lennon's double-tracked vocals, accompanied by McCartney on the choruses, were recorded to tracks two and three. McCartney's bass and Harrison's lead guitar occupied track four.[19] The lead guitar part varies between sections of the song: over the bridges, Harrison duplicates Lennon's melody and intonation in the style of a sarangi accompanying an Indian khyal vocalist;[20] over the choruses, he plays an ascending riff on his Fender Stratocaster (mirrored by McCartney's bass), with heavy Leslie treatment given to the part.[21] Eleven mono mixes of the song were made at the 2 March session, but they were rejected in favour of the final mono mix created on 3 March. A stereo mix was made on 7 April.[19]
Outtakes from the recording sessions have been officially released. The Beatles' Anthology 2, released in 1996, contained a composite remix, with ingredients from takes six, seven and eight, while the first take of the song was featured on the two-disc and six-disc versions of the 50th-anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper in 2017.[22] The six-disc collection also included take five and the last of the eleven mono mixes made on 2 March 1967.[23]
Reception[edit]
Upon the release of the Sgt. Pepper album, Disc and Music Echo magazine wrote that "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was "easily remembered", that the song spotlighted John Lennon's "peculiarly insinuating" vocals, and that it "jumps along on a crashing clavicord-type sound."[37] Richard Goldstein wrote in a review for The New York Times that the song was "an engaging curio, nothing more."[38] Ernie Santosuosso wrote in a review for The Boston Globe that the song's imagery was "wild".[39]
Discussing the impact of the Sgt. Pepper album, author Nicholas Schaffner cited the song as an example of how the Beatles successfully captured the way "young people were trying to transcend, transform, or escape from straight society" in 1967. He said that just as Harrison's "Within You Without You" represented the exoticism of Herman Hesse's Siddartha, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was a "miniature pop version" of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in terms of conveying the sense of wonder the book evoked.[40] According to musicologist Walter Everett, the song's lyrics inspired "derivative texts" throughout the late 1960s, namely John Fred & His Playboy Band's "Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)", the Lemon Pipers' "Jelly Jungle (of Orange Marmalade)", Pink Floyd's "Let There Be More Light", and the Scaffold's "Jelly Covered Cloud".[41]
Rolling Stone magazine described "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" as "Lennon's lavish daydream." In their respective reviews for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine identifies it as "one of the touchstones of British psychedelia,"[42] while Richie Unterberger views it as "one of the best songs on the Beatles' famous Sgt. Pepper album, and one of the classic songs of psychedelia as a whole." Unterberger adds: "There are few other songs that so successfully evoke a dream world, in both the sonic textures and words."[43] In his book on the history of ambient music, Mark Prendergast highlights the track as one of the album's "three outstanding cuts", along with "A Day in the Life" and "Within You Without You". He describes it as "incredible" and "a gossamer-like evocation of childlike psychedelia."[44] For BBC Culture, Greg Kot called the song an "acid-rock fantasia" and a high point of the album.[45]
In a review for the BBC Music website, Chris Jones described the track as "nursery rhyme surrealism" that contributed to Sgt. Pepper's "revolutionary ... sonic carpet that enveloped the ears and sent the listener spinning into other realms."[46] Writing for Paste in 2015, Hilary Saunders called the song "a perfectly indulgent introduction to psych-rock."[47] In 2013, Dave Swanson of Ultimate Classic Rock ranked "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" fourth on his list of the "Top 10 Beatles Psychedelic Songs" saying that, despite Lennon's insistence about the inspiration for its title, the track is "Three-and-a-half minutes of pure lysergic bliss, full of picturesque and surreal lyrics set to one of the Beatles' most trippy songs."[48]
Harrison later identified "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" as one of the few songs he liked from Sgt. Pepper[49] and expressed satisfaction with his Indian music-inspired contributions.[50] For his part, Lennon expressed disappointment with the Beatles' arrangement of the recording, complaining that inadequate time was taken to fully develop his initial idea for the song. He also said he had not sung it very well. "I was so nervous I couldn't sing," he told journalist Ray Connolly, "but I like the lyrics."[51] According to author Ian MacDonald, in a scenario similar to Lennon's disappointment with "Strawberry Fields Forever", Lennon most likely rued the loss of "sentimental gentleness" he had envisaged for the piece, and, overly passive to his songwriting partner's suggestions, allowed the arrangement to become dominated by McCartney's "glittering countermelody".[52] MacDonald views the bridge portions as the "most effective" sections, through their subtle use of harmonised drone and "featherweight bass", and bemoans the reversion to "clodhopping ... three-chord 4/4 rock" over the choruses. He concludes by saying that the track "succeed[s] more as a glamorous production (voice and guitar through the Leslie cabinet; echo and varispeed on everything) than as an integrated song."[52]
According to authors Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew,[16] and John Winn:[53]
The Beatles
Additional musician
Legacy[edit]
Lennon mentioned "Lucy in the Sky" in the Beatles' song "I Am the Walrus".
A 3.2-million-year-old, 40% complete fossil skeleton of an Australopithecus afarensis specimen, discovered in 1974 by Donald Johanson, Yves Coppens, Maurice Taieb and Tom Gray, was named "Lucy" because the Beatles song was being played loudly and repeatedly on a tape recorder in the camp. The phrase "Lucy in the sky" became "Lucy in disguise" to the anthropologists, because they initially did not understand the impact of their discovery.[57] The NASA mission Lucy has, in turn, been named after the fossil. It is due to arrive at its first target, asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, in April 2025.[58]
In 2009 Julian with James Scott Cook and Todd Meagher released "Lucy", a song that is a quasi-follow-up to the Beatles song. The cover of the EP showed four-year-old Julian's original drawing, that now is owned by David Gilmour from Pink Floyd.[59]
Lennon's original handwritten lyrics sold at auction in 2011 for $230,000.[60]
"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"
"One Day (At a Time)"
15 November 1974 (UK), 18 November 1974 (US)
Summer 1974
5:58