Tara Browne's mangled car; 'Daily Mail'

Some of the best narratives are mined from newspaper and magazine headlines, whether fictionalized or not. From the twisted seriousness of Nirvana’s “Polly” about the rape of a 14-year-old in Tacoma, Washington, Cobain threading a metaphor around a caged bird, to the pop-culture meta silliness of Shel Silverstein’s homage to the gold standard 70s ‘made-it’ musician status, “The Cover of ‘Rolling Stone’,” the examples go on for days.

The Beatles were no stranger to this relationship. Of the many headline inspirations the famous Lennon-McCartney credit chewed into – “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “She’s Leaving Home” – the story of the death of a Guinness fortune heir, Tara Browne, in a car crash on this December day in 1966 would definitely spawn the fab four’s most iconic of the bunch, Lennon eventually titling the track, “A Day in the Life.”

The closing St. Pepper… track’s musical merits as arguably the band’s finest song ever recorded, complete with a mind-melting 40-piece “orchestral orgasm,” as George Martin put it, would far outshine its journalism roots, and it will forever be odd that Lennon apparently reads his newspapers a year after they go to press – he didn’t sit down to write the song until January 1967 – but Tara Browne’s tragic end will also forever be a metaphor for our own fragility. So goes the genius immortality of art. RIP Mr. Browne:

I read the news today oh boy

About a lucky man who made the grade

And though the news was rather sad

Well I just had to laugh

I saw the photograph.

He blew his mind out in a car

He didn’t notice that the lights had changed

A crowd of people stood and stared

They’d seen his face before

Nobody was really sure

If he was from the House of Lords