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The 1988 film Imagine: John Lennon includes a scene in which a scruffy-looking young man is caught lurking on the grounds of John and Yoko's Tittenhurst Park estate in Ascot, England, and is brought to the masters of the house for questioning. As John and Yoko stand in the doorway of their home inquiring about the lad's presence on their property, the interloper launches into a discussion about the meaning of lyrics to various Beatles songs, particularly Dig a Pony (which was featured in the Let It Be movie and album). John patiently explains to the youth that (like many of his songs) Dig a Pony had no particular meaning — it was merely a collection of words and phrases that sounded good together, which listeners could imbue with whatever meaning(s) they chose to read into it. John then sympathetically asks the young man if he's hungry and invites him in for a meal before sending him on his way: That episode demonstrates a not uncommon phenomenon associated with popular music: Fans who are insistent they know exactly what a songwriter is referring to in a particular song, even when the title or lyric has no specific referent at all. A case in point is the enigmatically titled Page 43, a David Crosby meditation on the theme of dive into life before it passes you by which appeared on the 1972 Graham Nash/David Crosby album: The lyrics seem straightforward enough, but ... what is the page 43 from which they're supposedly drawn? A page from a book? Which one? In fact, as David Crosby acknowledged to interviewer Paul Zollo in 1993, page 43 didn't refer to anything definite at all — yet that didn't stop some listeners from declaring that they absolutely knew the answer: We note for completeness' sake that different editions of the same book can be paginated differently, so even if one knew specifically which book Page 43 referred to, that information wouldn't necessarily be sufficient to identify the material of interest. Particularly in the case of a book such as the New Testament, which is available in many, many different versions and translations, a mere page number (rather than a chapter and verse citation) would be virtually useless as an identifier.
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