![]() “When we were kids, you’d get on a bus, and you didn’t know where you were going, but nearly always it was Blackpool. “It used to just be called a mystery tour, up north,” Paul explains. Ideas fell quickly into place and it became a magical mystery tour: a typical Beatles combination of northern working-class culture and taking the fans on an acid trip.” Pepper” album, “Paul decided to pay a surprise visit to Jane (Asher) on her twenty-first birthday on 5 April,” explains Barry Miles in his book “Many Years From Now.” “Paul had his movie camera with him and it was two days later, while filming in a Denver park, that he came up with using a mystery tour as the basis for a television special. Just after the completion of the recording for the “ Sgt. And, in this process, they recorded a song that created the visionary atmosphere to whet the appetite for the excitement that would follow…whatever it would be. With this skeleton of an idea, he brought together the boys to construct the theme song, aptly named “Magical Mystery Tour,” to get the ball rolling, with the thought that they’d figure out the rest along the way. Pepper” fantasy needed a theme song, it appeared that he needed one for this venture as well. In harmony with the “summer of love” mentality of the times, Paul sought to take us all on a “Magical Mystery Tour” where anything can happen.Īlthough the concept had yet to fully materialize, he had enough of an idea to get the project rolling. What could possibly happen next? Should The Beatles be expected to take their audience on yet another journey next time around? Well before the first journey was unleashed upon the public, Paul McCartney had already envisioned the next experience the group was to unveil. They didn’t fail to win over the hearts of loyal fans, gaining many more in the process. Their fans were taken on an incredible journey with the promise that “ a splendid time is guaranteed for all!” Critics and audiences the world over were overwhelmingly impressed. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” With the sound of an audience spurring them on, they took to an imaginary stage and became as many varied acts as suited their fancy, creating the most vividly colorful variety show imaginable. Asked why he thought people didn’t like it, McCartney said he wasn’t sure-he liked it fine.The Beatles were on a roll! The group had expanded the pop album format from just a collection of songs to the realm of a fantasy program, taking on the alter egos of “ 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 catalog-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 catalog-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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |