Devin McKinney: "The crowd of people has been replaced by thousands of holes."

Joan Peyser: "The holes in Albert Hall are people."

Richard Poirier: "The audience in Albert Hall—the same as the 'lovely audience' in the first song that the Beatles would like to 'take home' with them?—are only many holes."

Lennon: "There was a paragraph about 4000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, being discovered. There was still one word missing in that verse when we came to record. I knew the line had to go 'Now they know how many holes it takes to — something, the Albert Hall.' For some reason I couldn't think of the verb. It was Terry who said 'fill' the Albert Hall. And that was it."

Weird that Lennon's story is about filling a sort of hole. Weird that in the lyric, holes are doing the filling; absence doing the work of presence. An audience of holes: Cage's ideal audience. People as holes: not nihilism but perceptual openness. McCartney fixes holes. Lennon's holes fill. The mind of the artist works the way it does not because it is more full and complete, but because it's gappier, empty in crucial places. You let someone else pick the important word. The holes don't keep your mind from wandering, they give it occasion to wander. Leave your artworks open, let the world in. Each of Lennon's compositions on Sgt. Pepper begins with a text given by the world: Julian's drawing of Lucy O'Donnell, Pablo Fanque's 1843 circus poster, a Kellogg's Corn Flakes commercial, the Daily Mail of 17 January, 1967.