![]() By the end of January, though, EMI was demanding a new Beatles single – there hadn’t been one since “Yellow Submarine” the previous August, an impossibly long gap in those days. Pepper: John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” and McCartney’s “Penny Lane,” both reminiscences of the Liverpool of their childhood. From November 24th, 1966, to mid-January 1967, the Beatles worked extensively on a pair of new songs, intended for what would become Sgt. The songs that would end up on Magical Mystery Tour began taking shape in late 1966, well before McCartney was struck by his cinematic vision. The Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, on the other hand, did what the movie was supposed to do – despite being a grab bag of the group’s 1967 singles and songs recorded specifically for the film, it holds together surprisingly well as an addendum to Pepper, giving us an image of the psychedelic Beatles refining their enhanced perceptions into individual pop songs so potent that they changed the whole landscape of music. ![]() “You gotta do everything with a point or an aim, but we tried this one without anything – with no point and no aim,” McCartney admitted the day after it premiered. But like a lot of Sixties attempts to turn utopian theory into practice, the movie fell on its nose: The Beatles simply weren’t filmmakers. Paul McCartney’s concept was that the Beatles would drive around the British countryside with their friends, film the result and shape that into a movie over which they would have total creative control. Pepper was a blueprint for the Beatles’ new utopianism – a culture of vivid sensory experience, for which they could be the entertainers and court jesters – the Magical Mystery Tour project was an attempt to literally take that idea into the world. With touring no longer a question, they had the luxury of fine-tuning their songs at length in the studio the same band that had recorded its first album in a single day was now tinkering with individual recordings for weeks on end. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. Asked why he thought people didn’t like it, McCartney said he wasn’t sure-he liked it fine.The year leading up to the release of the Magical Mystery Tour album in November 1967 was turbulent but fantastically fertile for the Beatles – they were working on its songs more or less simultaneously with the ones that ended up on Sgt. “All You Need Is Love,” debuted to an estimated 400 million people in the world’s first live international satellite TV production (Our World), did receive wide acclaim, and while cynicism and embarrassment about 1967’s Summer of Love would set in as soon as a few years later, it probably deserves more.Īs for the movie that gave the album its name, press coverage of it was so uniformly hostile (not to mention viewer feedback to the BBC switchboard so sustained) that McCartney went on the BBC the day after it first aired to defuse the tension. “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” probably doesn’t get the credit it deserves. And if “I Am the Walrus” was Lennon’s dark foray into contradiction and surreality, McCartney’s “Hello, Goodbye” was its bright counterpart. The yin-yang of McCartney’s “Penny Lane” and Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” (originally released on the same 7-inch record) arguably says more about what ground the band covered in seven minutes than any other two songs in their catalogue-the former baroque, charming, and upbeat the latter dense and melancholy-variations on a theme of seemingly simple pasts refracted, dreamlike, through the present. Designed primarily as a consumer service, the second half of Magical Mystery Tour collected what they’d offered in 1967. While the band had helped rechristen the album format as an artistic statement unto itself, they were still releasing singles-as in tracks that weren’t associated with any album. There was a rare instrumental (“Flying”), a foggy Harrison drone (“Blue Jay Way”), and an invocation of the past by McCartney that blurred lines between sweet and eerie (“Your Mother Should Know”). What had started out as a string of acid playground rhymes turned into Lennon’s angriest song this side of 1970 (“I Am the Walrus”), while McCartney’s simple sentimentality had taken on a quality that felt stoic, almost abstract (“The Fool on the Hill”). Still, this was The Beatles in 1967-momentum was strong. The album was released as a companion to a meandering, band-directed movie, and its first half is probably one of the lowest-stakes sides in the band’s catalogue-a relief, in a way, from how high-stakes their music had become. ![]() ![]() Pepper’s and 1968’s White Album, Magical Mystery Tour nevertheless played a part in The Beatles' story, and put a cap on a year in which the band made yet more music nobody was totally prepared for them to make. Though wedged between the comparatively giant Sgt. ![]()
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