Behind the Scenes of "Magical Mystery Tour" - Rolling Stone

The Magical Mystery Tour movie was a flop, but the album was loaded with cult singles

November 27, 1967: release of the album Magical Mystery Tour.

The year before 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 at the same time as those that ended up on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. Since there was no longer any question of going on tour, they had the luxury of refining their songs in the studio for a long time; the same band that had recorded their first album in a single day were now tinkering with each recording for weeks.

If Sgt Pepper was the ideal the Beatles were aiming for – a sensory experience, of which they could be the performers and conductor – the Magical Mystery Tour was a first attempt to put this idea into the world as literally as possible. Paul McCartney's idea was for the Beatles to travel the British countryside with their friends, film the result and turn it into a film over which they would have full creative control. But like many utopian projects born in the 1960s, the film fell flat: The Beatles simply weren't filmmakers.

“You always have to have a goal, but we tried this movie with nothing — without a goal,” McCartney admitted the day after the premiere. The Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, on the other hand, pulled it off. Although it is a compilation of singles recorded in 1967 and songs recorded especially for the film, it holds up surprisingly well, as an addendum to Pepper.

The songs that would lead to the Magical Mystery Tour began to take shape at the end of 1966, long before McCartney discovered any cinematic ambitions. From November 24, 1966 to mid-January 1967, the Beatles worked intensively on two new songs, intended for what would become Sgt Pepper: John Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" and McCartney's "Penny Lane", both of which recall the Liverpool of their childhood. At the end of January, however, EMI was clamoring for a new single – there hadn't been one since “Yellow Submarine” the previous summer, which was a very long time at that time. George Martin wasn't happy to have taken "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" from the current album, but there wasn't much else recorded. Released on February 17, it was a global hit and a statement of intent for the rest of the Beatles' recordings that year: a bit nostalgic, and more inventively orchestrated and arranged than anything had come before.

That spring, with Sgt Pepper nearing completion, McCartney traveled to California, where he hung out with members of the Beach Boys and Mamas and Papas. Along the way, he came up with the idea for an hour-long film that would document a bus journey, a sort of British equivalent to the adventures of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Further. McCartney drew a diagram of the structure of the Magical Mystery Tour film and wrote a theme song for it, which the Beatles recorded during a series of sessions in late April and early May.

The next song is Lennon's "Baby, You're a Rich Man," a scathing portrayal of a social upstart who may or may not have been inspired by Brian Epstein. Relations between the Beatles and Epstein had become slightly strained. When he arrived in the studio to announce that they would be performing a song for the first-ever live satellite special, Our World, they were puzzled – he hadn't asked them beforehand if they were interested. Lennon agreed to come up with a song for the show, then quickly forgot about it. When reminded that the show was due in a few weeks, as engineer Geoff Emerick later recalled, Lennon groaned, “Oh, my God, already? Well, then, I guess I better write something."

Our World aired on June 25, 1967, three and a half weeks after Sgt Pepper's release. The song Lennon had reluctantly written was a new hit: “All You Need Is Love,” the Summer of Love anthem. The Beatles performed it live (with the help of a pre-recorded backing track), accompanied by a huge crowd of friends, including Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, for whom Lennon and McCartney had sung "We Love You” a month earlier. When "All You Need Is Love" was released as a single, the B-side was "Baby, You're a Rich Man."

That's about all they managed to do together in the month and a half after Our World. Their relative lack of productivity was not a sign of the internal turmoil that was soon to surface; they were still very united and did everything by consensus. "If three of us wanted to do a movie, for example, and the fourth didn't think it was a good idea, we moved on," McCartney said at the time. At the end of 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 this artistic downturn was simple: It was a great summer — there were parties to be had and drugs to be taken, and Ringo Starr's wife, Maureen, was heavily pregnant. Among these parties, there was a big one at Epstein; he had asked the group to arrive early so they could discuss something important. But, as Harrison later recalled, “Everybody was just crazy. We were in our psychedelic cars with our hair permed, and we were permanently high...so we never made that meeting. »

The band members worked a bit, reuniting in late August to record McCartney's "Your Mother Should Know." They also had an audience with transcendental meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was to become a very important figure in their lives the following year.

On August 27, Brian Epstein was found dead after an accidental overdose of prescription drugs. The Beatles had been away from him for a while – his management contract with them was about to expire and they weren't sure if they were going to renew it – but he had run the band's affairs for almost six years. years and had helped make the Beatles a cultural monument.

"We loved him and he was one of us," Lennon said at the time. Epstein had truly been a crucial part of their band – the person whose business acumen gave them the freedom to focus on their music. The Beatles' creative chemistry blossomed through their differences as artists, but it was their business issues that ultimately tore them apart a few years later. As Harrison later said, “We knew nothing of our personal affairs and finances; he had taken care of everything, and it was chaos after that. »

Days after Epstein's death, the Beatles had come together again to continue the Magical Mystery Tour, not to seek a new manager. Between September 5 and 8, they recorded three particularly outlandish songs: Harrison's “Blue Jay Way” (inspired by his trip to Los Angeles in early August); the instrumental jam “Flying,” which was co-credited to all four Beatles; and Lennon's famous "I Am the Walrus." “The first line was written during an acid trip one weekend, the second line during another acid trip the following weekend, and it was completed after I met Yoko,” he later said.

Those three leads were for the movie, which began filming the following week, with no script or anything but some wacky concept art. From September 11-15, the psychedelic bus toured the West Country, stopping occasionally to spin what seemed like a good idea at the time. On the evening of the 16th, the Beatles slipped into EMI studios to re-record "Your Mother Should Know", which they had started working on just days before Epstein died. The following week, they shot other elements for the Magical Mystery Tour, including the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band at a strip club, where they recorded a song called "Death Cab for Cutie" (later to be birth to the rock band of the same name). As new directors, the Beatles figured it would probably take them a week or so to edit their ten hours of footage to make it usable.

It ultimately took them 11 weeks. Part of the problem was that everyone had their own ideas about what should and shouldn't be in the movie, and partly that they neglected to film some important elements and had to flip the turn. Still, the band headed to Abbey Road for a handful of sessions between September 25 and October 25, completing the trio of songs they had started in early September, and recording 'The Fool on the Hill' and ' Hello Goodbye” by McCartney (the latter was released on November 24 alongside “I Am the Walrus”).