The Beatles Enter the Scene
“And while Lenin read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died”
Photo of BEATLES; John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison – posed, group shot – outside Brian Epstein’s Belgravia house for Sgt. Pepper launch (Photo by Jan Olofsson/Redferns)
In the final four lines of the third verse, the Beatles arrive on the scene of music (“the quartet practiced in the park). Lenin here it is often believed to be a play on Lennon, but it is not clear what the correlation to Marx means. It has been speculated that it is a reference to Lennon via his song revolution because Marx is generally associated with the communist revolution. The dirges mentioned at the end are a possible reference to the tragic death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy but may also be a funeral mourning for the good old days.
Lenin reading a book on Marx can also be interpreted as the rise of communism in Eastern Europe and across the globe, as a background in the music setting of the period. If that is the case, Lenin is not a play on Lennon, but the Russian political figure himself, who based most of his thinking on the writings of Marx.
The idea of a cultural revolution in the works is poignant at this point, and as the Beatles grew more and more experimental, they would soon change the shape of rock ‘n’ roll just as Bob Dylan had managed to do before them. The park reference is mostly related to the famous 1966 farewell concert at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park when the Beatles retired from the public eye and began to create more straightforward music.