FEATURE:
The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour
Will It Ever Get a Remaster and Re-Release?
__________
WHETHER you consider it to be…
IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney pose for group shot on bus during filming of Magical Mystery Tour/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
an album or E.P., The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour is fifty-five on 27th November. It was released on 27th November, 1967 in the U.S. as an album. It was released on 8th December, 1967 in the U.K. as a double E.P. The double E.P. features six tracks, whilst the L.P. has eleven. Many fans consider this to be among the band’s least essential works. It includes the soundtrack to the Magical Mystery Tour film. Maybe not one of the band’s best films, I think that it stands up and is worth a watch anyway! I love Magical Mystery Tour as an album. It followed the mighty Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This was a period where The Beatles were truly immersed in psychedelia and the spirit of 1967. The following year, The Beatles’ eponymous album came out. It was a strange time for the group. A moment of transition. In 1967, in late-August, while The Beatles were attending a Transcendental Meditation seminar held by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Wales, their manager Brian Epstein died of a prescription drug overdose. Paul McCartney initiated the Magical Mystery Tour idea. After they completed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in April 1967, he wanted to create a film that captured a psychedelic theme similar to that represented by author and LSD proponent Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters on the U.S. West Coast. A mix of U.S. West Coast and the bus and coach tours McCartney enjoyed a as a child, recording began in late-April, yet the film idea then lay dormant for a time. Biographers have said how the sessions were aimless and unfocused; The Beatles overly indulging in sound experimentation and exerting greater control over production. Some wonderful songs came out of this period. McCartney wrote three of the soundtrack songs, including The Fool on the Hill. John Lennon and George Harrison contributed I Am the Walrus and Blue Jay Way, respectively. The sessions also produced Hello, Goodbye and Flying.
If some don’t consider Magical Mystery Tour a studio album or a necessary addition to your Beatles collection, it is a fascinating work regardless! Whereas other film-related and adjoined albums like A Hard Day’s Night were successful and lauded, many overlooked 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour. Not included on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever were on Magical Mystery Tour. So too is All You Need Is Love (the album version includes all of these). It is such a strong collection of songs! I do wonder whether Magical Mystery Tour will get a remaster. There have been Special Edition version of their albums since Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band’s fiftieth anniversary in 2017. Giles Martin (son of the late Beatles producer George) has covered their studio albums beyond that point. He has now gone back and has done Revolver. I suspect that he will continue to go back, so that Rubber Soul (1965) is his next project. I wonder whether Magical Mystery Tour will languish. There would have been outtakes and demos from the sessions. I’d love to know whether there are earlier versions of I Am the Walrus. Maybe seeing how The Fool on the Hill started life. Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever are classics. Perhaps there are outtakes of those songs? As you have the film too, maybe that can be tied in. As Magical Mystery Tour is fifty next month (in the U.S.), it has been on my mind. Like Yellow Submarine (1969), it is one of those albums that people know about but do not necessarily love.
I want to end up with a couple of features/reviews, and a 2009 review from Pitchfork. A forgotten classic and hugely rewarding album, Magical Mystery Tour deserves new love and a reissue! The Spectrum investigated and told the story of Magical Mystery Tour in their feature from 2017:
“Paul McCartney based both the film and its title track on memories of surprise trips he took as a child, though there are plenty of references to a different sort of trip in this trumpet-inflected tune. After all, he was in a rock ‘n’ roll band in the 1960s. Paul finds one of the most alluring hooks in the band’s history as his voice takes on a bit of an edge and he sings, “The Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away.”
The bassist’s obsession with stage musicals is evident once again in “The Fool On The Hill,” which took inspiration from his regular tarot readings with a group of Dutch artists and designers called The Fool. But it also symbolizes Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who taught transcendental meditation to The Beatles.
Not only was “Flying” an infrequent instrumental number for The Beatles but it’s also an extremely rare tune where all four band members share the writing credits — even Ringo Starr, whose voice is most prominent among the band’s wordless vocals on the track. While there is singing, there are no lyrics and the primary melody is often carried instead by John Lennon on a Mellotron that sounds like a trombone.
George Harrison wrote “Blue Jay Way” on a street of the same name in Los Angeles. It was composed on an organ in a rented house while waiting on the arrival of some friends who were lost in a dense fog. A variety of studio effects were used to enhance the mystical nature of the tune, including vocals processed through a Leslie cabinet to express a feeling of the fog.
Paul revisits the retro style of “When I’m Sixty-Four” on the bouncy “Your Mother Should Know.” There is no guitar on the song. Instead Paul plays piano and bass, John plays the organ and George plays tambura. Recording began at Chappel Recording Studios and it was there that Epstein visited The Beatles in the studio for the last time before his death four days later.
The soundtrack portion of “Magical Mystery Tour” ends with John’s brilliant “I Am The Walrus,” which was inspired by both literature and drugs. But the strange imagery had a purpose: “John wanted to make fun of pseudointellectuals who interpreted his songs in phony ways,” write Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin in “All The Songs: The Story Behind Every Beatles Release.” Yet he also said it “has enough little bitties going to keep you interested even a hundred year later,” according to The Beatles Anthology.
When it comes to the additional tracks, the only non-stunner is “Baby You’re A Rich Man.” It’s still a strong track and a rare full collaboration between John and Paul, the result of combining two separate pieces — one by each — to create the song. John sang lead and some suspect that Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones may have even joined Paul and George on backing vocals near the end.
The remaining four singles are among the strongest pieces ever recorded by The Beatles, even though John wasn’t a fan of “Hello, Goodbye,” Paul’s exploration of duality, according to Guesdon and Margotin. It may not have been as artistically sound as “I Am The Walrus” but it’s difficult to ignore that addictive melody, including another fantastic Paul hook. And that short but eminently exquisite little snippet of whining electric guitar makes it a Beatles masterpiece.
Nearly 400 million viewers saw the debut of “All You Need Is Love” on June 25, 1967, as part of the first international satellite broadcast, “Our World.” John described his simple lyrics as carrying a universal message while George called the tune “a subtle bit of PR for God,” according to The Beatles Anthology. It became a massive hit and the unofficial anthem for the “Summer of Love.” Today its title has become synonymous with The Beatles and what they represented.
“Strawberry Fields Forever,” according to Guesdon and Margotin, “summed up the essence of The Beatles’ art in four minutes.” The authors say it is “probably the key song in their entire repertoire.” John wrote it while filming scenes for the film “How I Won the War” in Spain and said it’s about how he sees the world in a different way. Like some of John’s other compositions around this time (“Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” “A Day In The Life”), “Strawberry Fields” was so forward-looking that it still holds up extremely well 50 years later.
While John had a jewel with “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Paul answered with his own in the form of “Penny Lane.” John’s song celebrated The Beatles’ creatively psychedelic side while Paul’s focused on the band’s knack for pop perfection. Both tunes reflect on elements of their childhood, with “Penny Lane” telling the story of the neighborhood where Paul was raised. The impeccable melody finds Paul again aiming for The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” from “Pet Sounds.” It has, perhaps, the greatest melody of the band’s entire catalogue”.
Rolling Stone went very deep with their love and inspection of Magical Mystery Tour. A remarkable work from a band who, in 1967, were at their peak, you need to re-listen to Magical Mystery Tour. A very different album to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I love discovering the background and details of Magical Mystery Tour:
“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. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. 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.
If Sgt. 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. 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. 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.
“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. 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.
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. From November 24th, 1966, to mid-January 1967, the Beatles worked extensively on a pair of new songs, intended for what would become Sgt. Pepper: John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” and McCartney’s “Penny Lane,” both reminiscences of the Liverpool of their childhood. 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. George Martin wasn’t happy about pulling “Penny Lane” and “”Strawberry Fields Forever” off the album-in-progress, but there wasn’t much else in the can. Released on February 17th, the single was a worldwide hit, and a statement of purpose for the rest of the Beatles’ recordings that year: reflective, druggy, a little nostalgic, and more inventively orchestrated and arranged than anything else around.
That spring, with Sgt. Pepper all but complete, McCartney visited California, hanging out with members of the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas. Along the way, he got the idea for an hour-long movie that would document a free-form bus trip, a sort of British equivalent of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ adventures in their bus, Further. McCartney drew a diagram of how the Magical Mystery Tour film would be structured, and wrote a theme song for it, which the Beatles recorded over a series of sessions in late April and early May.
The next song they tackled was Lennon’s “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” a scathing portrait of a social arriviste that may or may not have been intended as a jab at manager Brian Epstein. Relations between the Beatles and Epstein had become slightly strained. When he turned up in the studio to announce that he’d booked them to debut a new song on the first-ever live global-satellite-transmitted TV special, Our World, they were nonplussed – he hadn’t asked them first if they were interested. Lennon agreed to come up with a song for the show, then promptly forgot about it; when he was reminded that the show was a couple of weeks away, as engineer Geoff Emerick recalled later, Lennon groaned, “Oh, God, is it that close? Well, then, I suppose I’d better write something.”
Our World aired on June 25th, 1967, three weeks and change after Sgt. Pepper had been released. The song Lennon had grudgingly slapped together to fulfill his obligation was another triumph: “All You Need Is Love,” the signature anthem of the Summer of Love. The Beatles performed it live on the air (with the help of a prerecorded backing track), accompanied by an enormous crowd of their cohorts, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, on whose “We Love You” Lennon and McCartney had sung a month earlier. When “All You Need Is Love” was rush-released as a single, the flip side was “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.”
That’s about all they managed to do together over the month and a half following the Our World broadcast. Their relative lack of productivity wasn’t a sign of the internal unrest that would soon surface; they were still very much a unit, and did everything by consensus. “If three of us wanted to make a film, for instance, and the fourth didn’t think it was a good idea, we’d forget about it,” McCartney said at the time. In late July, Lennon, George Harrison and McCartney traveled to Greece with the idea of buying an island and building a commune and a recording studio there.
The reason for the artistic slowdown was simple: It was a beautiful summer – there were parties to go to and drugs to take, and Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen, was very pregnant. Among those parties was a big bash at Epstein’s house; he’d asked the band to arrive early so they could discuss something important. But, as Harrison later recalled, “Everybody was just wacko. We were in our psychedelic motorcars with our permed hair, and we were permanently stoned … so we never had the meeting.”
The bandmates did do a little work, convening in late August to run through McCartney’s old-timey number “Your Mother Should Know.” They also had an audience with the Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who would become a hugely mportant figure in their lives over the next year.
On August 27th, Brian Epstein was found dead of an accidental prescription-drug overdose. The Beatles had been drifting away from him for a while – his management contract with them was close to expiring, and it wasn’t clear whether they were going to renew it – but he’d directed the band’s business for close to six years, and had helped to transform the Beatles from a scruffy beat combo to an all-conquering cultural force.
“We loved him, and he was one of us,” Lennon said at the time. Epstein really had been a crucial part of their organization – the person whose business acumen gave them the freedom to concentrate on their music. The Beatles’ creative chemistry thrived on their differences as artists, but it was their business problems that would ultimately tear them apart a few years later. As Harrison later put it, “We didn’t know anything about our personal business and finances; he had taken care of everything, and it was chaos after that.”
It eventually took 11 weeks. The problem was partly that everyone had their own ideas about what should and shouldn’t be in the movie, and partly that they’d neglected to get some important material on film and had to go back to shoot it. Still, the band made it down to Abbey Road for a handful of sessions between September 25th and October 25th, completing the spacey trio of songs it had started in early September, and recording McCartney’s “The Fool on the Hill” and “Hello Goodbye” (the latter released on November 24th backed with “I Am the Walrus”).
The Magical Mystery Tour movie was finally broadcast on BBC television on December 26th, 1967, and became the first Beatles project to be an outright flop. (It didn’t help that the BBC aired it in black-and-white rather than color.) The reviews were savage. “They thought we were stepping out of our roles, you know,” Lennon groused a few months later. “They like to keep us in the cardboard suits they designed for us. Whatever image they have for themselves, they’re disappointed if we don’t fulfill that. And we never do, so there’s always a lot of disappointment.”
As an LP, Magical Mystery Tour was an unqualified triumph, sitting atop the American charts for eight weeks and eventually going sextuple-platinum. It extended and refined the Beatles’ version of psychedelia: a vision of the world that was essentially colorful, reflective and loving, but encompassed bad trips as well as good ones”.
I will finish off with Pitchfork’s review. The only U.S. release to become part of The Beatles’ cannon, the combination of singles and a soundtrack E.P. is masterful! Almost fifty-five years later, Magical Mystery Tour is a delight that everyone needs to behold:
“Of the three singles, the undisputed highlight is "Strawberry Fields Forever"/ "Penny Lane", John Lennon and Paul McCartney's tributes to their hometown, Liverpool. Slyly surreal, assisted by studio experimentation but not in debt to it, full of brass, harmonium, and strings, unmistakably English-- when critics call eccentric or baroque UK pop bands "Beatlesesque," this is the closest there is to a root for that adjective. There is no definitive Beatles sound, of course, but with a band that now functions as much as a common, multi-generational language as a group of musicians, it's no surprise that songs rooted in childhood-- the one experience most likely to seem shared and have common touchpoints-- are among their most universally beloved.
The rest of the singles collected here are no less familiar: Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" was initially completed up for an international TV special on BBC1-- its basic message was meant to translate to any language. Harrison's guitar solo, producer George Martin's strings, and the parade of intertextual musical references that start and close the piece elevate it above hippie hymn. Its flipside, "Baby You're a Rich Man", is less successful, a second-rate take on John Lennon's money-isn't-everything theme from the considerably stronger "And Your Bird Can Sing". It's the one lesser moment on an otherwise massively rewarding compilation.
Much better from Lennon is "I Am the Walrus", crafted for the Magical Mystery Tour film and EP but also released as a double-sided single with McCartney's "Hello Goodbye". One of Lennon's signature songs, "Walrus" channels the singer's longtime fascinations with Lewis Carroll, puns and turns of phrase, and non sequiturs. "Hello Goodbye" echoes the same contradictory logic found in the verses of "All You Need Is Love", a vague sense of disorientation that still does little to balance its relentlessly upbeat tone. McCartney excelled at selling simplistic lyrics that risk seeming cloying, though, and he again does here-- plus, the kaleidoscopic, carnival-ride melody and interplay between lead and backing vocals ensure it's a much better record than it is a song.
In almost every instance on those singles, the Beatles are either whimsical or borderline simplistic, releasing songs that don't seem sophisticated or heavy or monumental (even though most of them are). In that sense, they're all like "All You Need Is Love" or childhood memories or Lewis Carroll-- easy to love, fit for all ages, rich in multi-textual details, deceptively trippy (see Paul's "Penny Lane" in particular, with images of it raining despite blue skies, or the songs here that revel in contradictions-- "Hello Goodbye"'s title, the verses in "All You Need Is Love"). More than any other place in the band's catalogue, this is where the group seems to crack open a unique world, and for many young kids then and since this was their introduction to music as imagination, or adventure. The rest of the Magical Mystery Tour LP is the opposite of the middle four tracks on the EP-- songs so universal that, like "Yellow Submarine", they are practically implanted in your brain from birth. Seemingly innocent, completely soaked through with humor and fantasy, Magical Mystery Tour slots in my mind almost closer to the original Willy Wonka or The Wizard of Oz as it does other Beatles records or even other music-- timeless entertainment crafted with a childlike curiosity and appeal but filled with wit and wonder.
On the whole, Magical Mystery Tour is quietly one of the most rewarding listens in the Beatles' career. True, it doesn't represent some sort of forward momentum or clear new idea-- largely in part because it wasn't conceived as an album. The accompanying pieces on the EP are anomalies in the Beatles oeuvre but they aren't statements per se, or indications that the group is in any sort of transition. But if there was ever a moment in the Beatles' lifetime that listeners would have been happy to have the group just settle in and release songs as soon as possible, it was just before and after the then-interminable 10-month gap between the Revolver and *Sgt. Pepper'*s. Without that context, the results could seem slight-- a sort-of canonized version of Past Masters perhaps-- but whether it's an album, a collection of separate pieces, or whatnot matters little when the music itself is so incredible”.
I do hope Giles Martin approaches Magical Mystery Tour at some point. If not a true studio album, it is deserving of a new release in the same way as Yellow Submarine is. After he goes back and does the studio albums (I assume 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night might be the last in the run?), going back and doing Magical Mystery Tour would be wise. At the very least, there needs to be something done! Fifty-five on 27th November, I hope there is some love and fond remembrance of this wonderful Beatles release. From the first line of the title track, you definitely want to go…
ON their magical mystery tour!