‘Let Me Take You Down: Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever’ by Jonathan Cott

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Let Me Take You Down by Jonathan Cott

In his enlightening new book, Jonathan Cott thinks about a pair of songs that represent The Beatles at their creative pinnacle, “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields.” If your response is: “What? Another Beatles book?” remember that Cott interviewed John Lennon several times and is one of the great conversationists among cultural writers. Half of Let Me Take You Down is the author’s analysis, the other half consists of his conversations on the two songs with guitarist Bill Frissell, polymath Jonathan F.P. Rose, actor Richard Gere, performance artist Laurie Anderson and Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck.

Jungian psychology echoes throughout Cott’s presentation. Since “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” were originally released as a two-sided single, Cott draws on archetypes of Zeus and Hades, the sky god and the lord of the underworld. “It dawned on me that Penny Lane is the world of Zeus, and Strawberry Fields the world of Hades,” he writes. Paul McCartney’s “Penny Lane” is bright while Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields” is dark, “but the songs turn out to be two sides of the same coin.” Not unlike the ancient Greek archetypes, “Paul and John were musical brothers-in-arms, but they were also sibling rivals,” Cott continues. “Penny Lane” was McCartney’s response to “Strawberry Fields,” links in a long chain of creative competition. 

Cott explores the many resonances of those songs, lyrical and musical, with the people he interviewed for Let Me Take You Down. With a remarkable ability to quote poets and philosophers in the course of his discussions, Cott goes deep and ranges widely in those discussions. “These two songs are crystalized and distilled,” Frissell said. “They’re not long but they’re epic, and there’s so much there,” adding that “Penny Lane” mostly “stays in the same world for the entire song” where “Strawberry Fields” shifts, breaks pattern with a freedom he compares to Delta blues or Bill Evans. “It’s as if the melody is asking the question, and then there’s an answer to it,” Frissell continued. On “Penny Lane,” Rose finds “compassion for its subjects. It heals the divides.” A song for our time?