![]() ![]() "Your Mother Should Know" was yet another of Paul's "grandma songs" as Lennon once called the "good timer" old fashioned ditties Paul often wrote. It's a song I didn't fully appreciate until I moved there more than a decade later. ![]() Then came "Blue Jay Way", one of George Harrison's most atmospheric songs, so well-produced by George Martin, and so evocative of the desolation and isolation that can be Los Angeles. "The Fool On the Hill" was deeper and gave greater promise, but that was followed by a lackluster instrumental that punctured whatever hope was raised by "The Fool on the Hill." The opening title track was cheery but sounded like a campy commercial. Remember the last "first play" had been Sgt. buyers thinking this was The Beatles' "next" album. It was Capitol that elevated a minor double EP into a full length album that left U.S. Little did we know that it was Capitol that created this album, not The Beatles. The only mystery here was how could The Beatles do this? Do this to them and to us? Remember: the movie was not shown in America. What we knew back then before playing the record was that everything about this cheesy package reeked of exploitation. People now can argue about the effect of Epstein's death on this project or what might have happened had he lived, from his nixing it, to his making it better. How many fans back then thought in terms of who was at the helm of this enterprise? How many were thinking of Brian Epstein's role in the Beatles' rise or that his death had left them essentially rudderless? The double page photo on 12/13 looked staged, static and utterly insincere. The real heartbreaker was the page 10 photo of the four in corny psychedelic haberdashery mugging incredibly insincerely to the camera. ![]() It felt as if The Beatles had just given up-as if the pressure of a Sgt. The cover art was tacky as were the masks on our heroes, with whom we'd grown up.īefore playing it and just thumbing through the full sized booklet made clear that this was an ill-advised project. Imagine Beatle fan disappointment in America upon buying this record, which was the follow-up to Sgt. There, the five tunes on side one comprised a double 7" EP issue containing the songs from the "Color Television Film called 'Magical Mystery Tour'". Asked why he thought people didn’t like it, McCartney said he wasn’t sure-he liked it fine.Authenticity required this album to have a "Capitol" label since it was not originally issued in the U.K. “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. ![]()
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