magical mystery tour vs sgt pepper

The Beatles’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ at 50: A Monument to Paul McCartney’s Genius

Released fifty years ago—on November 27, 1967—the Beatles’ last slice of psychedelia is an underrated masterpiece, and more fun than ‘Sgt. Pepper.’

Stereo Williams

In 1967, the Beatles were experiencing staggering highs and lows. They were riding a wave of commercial and critical acclaim following the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , and their hit single “All You Need Is Love” had become an anthem for that summer of flower power. But that August, they’d lost their longtime manager Brian Epstein, a severe blow to the group’s sense of unity —despite the fact that Epstein had become a somewhat more marginalized figure after the group decided to stop touring in the fall of 1966.

And John Lennon , who had been a catalyst for much of the band’s artistic growth since its inception, was suddenly less engaged. Lennon’s recreational drug use, spiraling marriage and newfound obsession with Japanese artist Yoko Ono made the Beatles less of a focus. His growing ambivalence and the death of Epstein meant that Paul McCartney was now more of a driving force in the Beatles, and that summer, McCartney had an idea for what the band should do to follow up Sgt. Pepper .

“Paul had a great piece of paper—just a blank piece of paper with a circle on it,” Ringo would later recall. “We filled it in as we went along.”

“It was basically a charabanc trip,” George Harrison said during the Beatles Anthology in 1995. “Which people used to go on from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights,” a popular electric light display presented in the autumn months. “They’d get loads of crates of beer and an accordion player and all get pissed, basically—pissed in the English sense, meaning drunk. And it was kind of like that. It was a very flimsy kind of thing.”

Magical Mystery Tour would be a psychedelic film written, directed by and starring the Beatles. The shoot was a disaster from the beginning: none of the scenes made sense, props would fall apart mid-scene and no one seemed to have a clear idea of the film’s direction.

The nonsensical story focused on a group of strange individuals taking a “mystery tour” in England, with Richard Starkey (aka Ringo Starr) and his widowed auntie as the focal point. Mostly improvising, the film includes segments where John Lennon shovels spaghetti, McCartney skipping around France alone, George Harrison as a wizard, and appearances by the bands Traffic and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. McCartney had wanted Jimi Hendrix to appear in the film , but he was booked to play the Monterey Pop Festival in the U.S. (Incidentally, it was Paul who’d suggested the promoters book Jimi). The film was released to television on December 26, 1967, and it would become one of the most reviled projects the Beatles were ever associated with.

“BEATLES PRODUCE FIRST FLOP WITH YULE FILM” read Daily Variety ’s headline. “It looked awful and it was a disaster,” bemoaned longtime Beatles’ producer George Martin. “We don’t say it was a good film,” said McCartney, shortly after the premiere. “It was our first attempt. If we goofed, then we goofed. It was a challenge and it didn’t come off. We’ll know better next time.”

Despite the failure of Magical Mystery Tour as a film, the EP/album proved to be a creative and commercial success; the wide-ranging songs were an outlet for even weirder musical experiments than Pepper , and the inclusion of previously-released hit singles like “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” on the American version made it a bit more listenable than its more lauded predecessor.

The carnival-barker title track is an obvious “sequel” to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” but it’s not as musically rich. Both songs attempt to announce the project as a whole, but “…Tour” feels like a production exercise surrounding a flimsier song. “The Fool on the Hill” is driven by flutes and a recorder, and would become one of the more popular songs from Magical Mystery Tour . Also written by McCartney, “Fool” is another song that is hamstrung by kitschy production and tossed-off lyrics, but McCartney’s melodic skills are impossible to ignore. Even when applied in a song that sounds as maudlin as this.

The only Beatles (mostly) instrumental, “Flying,” sounds like Booker T. & the MGs if they were locked in a room with copious amounts of LSD. It has a slinky groove courtesy of McCartney and Ringo’s chugging bottom, and an odd, wordless chorus of “La-la-las,” the only vocals on the track. In the film, it was the soundtrack to aerial shots of Greenland that were filmed after the main production was completed.

Harrison’s only songwriting contribution to Magical Mystery Tour is the droning “Blue Jay Way.” Harrison’s disengagement from the Beatles was most evident throughout 1967; he was a guitarist growing more bored with guitar-driven music, and like Sgt. Pepper (where his lone writing credit is the Indian-driven “Within You, Without You”) his only writing on Tour is this psychedelic, mantra-like ode to…waiting. It’s a song that evokes the kind of dark psychedelia of Syd Barrett more than the whimsy of Summer of Love-era Beatles, and it provides one of the more genuinely interesting outside-the-box musical moments on …Tour.

Based on a line from A Taste of Honey , “Your Mother Should Know” is a lot more interesting—one of McCartney’s odes to music hall. But where other such songs would plant themselves firmly in the nostalgia of the 1930s, Paul gives this enough of a psychedelic twist to make it as druggy and weird as the rest of the sounds here. The sequence in the movie famously features the Beatles in white tuxedos descending a staircase in an old-timey ballroom number that recalls Fred Astaire films.

But the most famous of the original songs on Magical Mystery Tour is Lennon’s only song. “I Am the Walrus,” with its pastiche of sounds in the production and lyrics referencing Lewis Carroll, became a classic slice of British psychedelic pop, with Lennon’s abstract lyrics becoming subject to endless interpretation and dissection. The usage in the film famously features the Beatles decked out in strange animal outfits—with Lennon wearing a walrus mask. The song would prove to be a musical foundation for everything from The Flaming Lips to Tears For Fears’ hit “Sowing the Seeds of Love,” and it’s arguably John’s last slice of LSD-driven phantasmagoria before Lennon abandoned the style in 1968.

In America, Magical Mystery Tour was released as a full album, with hit singles “Hello Goodbye,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane” and “All You Need Is Love” added to the track listing. Also included was “Baby, You’re A Rich Man,” the B-side from the “All You Need Is Love” single. “Strawberry Fields…” and “Penny Lane” were famously released prior to Sgt. Pepper and subsequently left off of the album (as was the band’s practice at the time). McCartney’s “Hello Goodbye” was chosen as the standalone single for Magical Mystery Tour , frustrating Lennon, who’d hoped for “Walrus” to get the distinction.

“Hello Goodbye” may not have been the most ambitious Beatles song, but with their sound getting more and more audacious, they needed something that could appeal to the pop fans that had loved them since their beginning. And McCartney’s infectious little ditty about nothing was perfect for radio. The song would shoot to No. 1 both in the UK and the US in November 1967.

Of course, the band that year had already been defined by the success of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , and had rather paradoxically thrust themselves to the forefront of the counterculture, even as mainstream superstars. With Magical Mystery Tour , they showed fans that they weren’t infallible, but it firmly cemented them in the zeitgeist of the times. For better and worse, psychedelic-era Beatles music is an indelible part of the fabric of 1967. As such, it could arguably be their most dated work.

Within a few months of Magical Mystery Tour ’s release, the band would embark to India for a retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. By the time they returned to the studio in the spring of 1968, the whimsy of their more LSD-fueled period would mostly be left behind. The White Album would be less musically gaudy; it would also be much more musically fragmented, as the band came to resent McCartney’s controlling hand within the band.

The Beatles had started on their psychedelic journey back in 1966, with the “Paperback Writer/Rain” single and their acclaimed Revolver album . That album’s drugginess was driven by Lennon and Harrison’s experiments with acid—McCartney wouldn’t take LSD until the recording of Sgt. Pepper in early 67. It was Lennon’s fascination with LSD that led the Beatles into druggy territory, but it was McCartney who was the chief architect of their most famous psychedelic albums. His driving of Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour meant that the music reflected McCartney’s sensibilities—his drug-fueled music tending to be more whimsical and light than Lennon’s more brooding songs. As it stands, Magical Mystery Tour is the end of the Beatles at their druggiest and most consistently experimental, a period that began about 18 months prior with “Rain.”

But for all its merits (and flaws), Magical Mystery Tour will always live in the shadow of the mythical Sgt. Pepper . That album is about as overrated as any released in the history of music; and it’s legend dwarfs the superior record that came before and the strong release that came after. Magical Mystery Tour sounds like a sequel, but not an inferior one. Without the faux-conceptualism of …Pepper , its songs are more freewheeling and somewhat less pretentious. The diminished presence of Lennon and Harrison make this is a Macca-centric affair, and that can be a plus or minus, depending on your taste. But it’s a fascinating snapshot of the Beatles at their weirdest. The drugs may have been wearing off but the songs were still there.

And it’s still fun to sing along to.  

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‘Magical Mystery Tour’: Inside Beatles’ Psychedelic Album Odyssey

By Douglas Wolk

Douglas Wolk

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.

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The first day of June 1967 saw the release of an album that would provide the soundtrack for the approaching summer. For weeks to come, nearly everywhere you went, you would hear it: on the radio, in restaurants and clubs, from passing automobiles and through the open windows of homes, where it spun repeatedly on turntables.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the album, and it was the Beatles’ latest and greatest achievement. The record defined not only that summer—dubbed the Summer of Love—but also the year and, eventually, the moment at which pop music became art. Until then, pop music had been written and produced for teenagers, and teenage music was not supposed to be like this: sophisticated, challenging, as carefully wrought as an objet d’art.

With Sgt. Pepper’s , the Beatles redefined the genre even further than they had the previous year with Revolver , creating grand productions punctuated by calliopes, classical Indian instruments, orchestras, animal noises, sound effects and layered crashes of piano chords. Pressed onto a 12-inch slab of vinyl and packed into a baroque, parti-colored sleeve, the music on Sgt. Pepper’s constituted not just an album but an event—a pivotal moment in the development of Western music.

So what do you do for an encore? Seizing the moment, the Beatles might have carried onward with a music project even grander, or defied expectations and taken a completely different artistic direction. In fact, they would do both in 1968 with their sprawling, stripped-down double-disc White Album.

But in the meantime, in late April 1967, with the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions barely finished and the album still unreleased, they launched haphazardly into a new project based on, of all things, an art-film concept dreamed up by their bassist, Paul McCartney. Titled Magical Mystery Tour , it was designed from the beginning as a TV film that would include the Beatles both as actors and as musical performers. The idea had come to McCartney on April 11 during a return flight from the U.S. to Britain.

The Beatles had quit touring the previous August, and a film, he reasoned, would be a good way to keep them in the public eye. In fact, it would be little more than a container for six new Beatles songs: the title track, “Your Mother Should Know,” “The Fool on the Hill,” “Blue Jay Way,” “I Am the Walrus” and “Flying.” Accordingly, the film’s plot was slight and functional: a bus carrying the band and a group of tourists through provincial England comes under the power of a cadre of magicians (also played by the Beatles), after which strange things start to happen. As a story device, the bus tour was certain to appeal to British viewers.

“It was basically a sharabang trip,” George Harrison said, “which people used to go on from Liverpool to see the Blackpool Lights,” a popular electric light display presented in the autumn months. “They’d get loads of crates of beer and an accordion player and all get pissed, basically—pissed in the English sense, meaning drunk. And it was kind of like that. It was a very flimsy kind of thing.”

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As John Lennon saw it, “It’s about a group of common, or ‘garden,’ people on a coach tour around everywhere, really, and things happen to them.”

No one in the group took the concept very seriously. The Beatles didn’t hire big-name screenwriters or a visionary director, or pour loads of money into the production. They simply signed up some character actors—including Jessie Robins as Ringo Starr’s bellicose, fat aunt, and eccentric Scottish poet and musician Ivor Cutler as the skeletal Buster Bloodvessel—hired out a coach, and hit the English countryside, filming a series of bizarre and droll sketches designed to support the title’s dual notions of magic and mystery.

“We rented a bus and off we went,” Starr says. “There was some planning. John would always want a midget or two around, and we had to get an aircraft hangar to put the set in. We’d do the music, of course. They were the finest videos, and it was a lot of fun.”

“We knew we weren’t doing a regular film,” McCartney says. “We were doing a crazy, roly-poly Sixties film.”

Indeed, the entire last half of 1967 was a strange time for the Beatles. Concurrent with the start of Magical Mystery Tour, they’d agreed to provide music for Yellow Submarine, an animated film based on their 1966 song of the same name from Revolver . Film productions had been a secondary aspect of the Beatles’ career ever since their 1964 feature film debut, A Hard Day’s Night . Now, however, they were involved in two films simultaneously. In addition, at nearly the same time that they’d agreed to Yellow Submarine , their manager, Brian Epstein, had signed them up to appear on Our World , a live global television event scheduled for June 25, for which the Beatles would compose and perform a new composition, “All You Need Is Love.”

Clearly, there was no shortage of projects for the group to work on. The problem was that, after an intense five months of recording Sgt. Pepper’s , they found it difficult to focus again on a new project, let alone three.

“I would say they had no focus, absolutely,” says Ken Scott, the Abbey Road engineer who ran the mixing console for several of Magical Mystery Tour ’s songs. (His recollections of working with the Beatles as well as recording classic albums by David Bowie, Elton John, Supertramp and others are chronicled in his new memoir, Abbey Road to Ziggy Stardust.) “It was kind of weird, ’cause I’d worked with them from A Hard Day’s Night through Rubber Soul as a second engineer, and I’d seen sort of how they would get down to work and all of that kind of thing. But on Magical Mystery Tour , the focus didn’t seem there. It was kind of thrown together.”

A survey of the group’s recording sessions from this period bears out his point. Between the completion of Sgt. Pepper’s on April 21 and the conclusion of sessions for Magical Mystery Tour the following November, the group recorded about an album’s worth of songs, several of which remained unmixed or unfinished for another year, some for even longer. In addition to the six Magical Mystery Tour tracks, the Beatles recorded McCartney’s “All Together Now,” and Harrison’s “Only a Northern Song” and “It’s All Too Much,” all of which ended up on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack, released in January 1969. Also started during this time was the recording of Lennon’s novelty tune “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number),” which remained unfinished until late 1969 and unreleased until 1970.

Which is not to imply that the Beatles lacked motivation. Geoff Emerick, who engineered Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s and much of Magical Mystery Tour , believes their almost nonstop working schedule from 1962 through 1967 had everything to do with their lack of direction in the wake of Sgt. Pepper’s . In his 2006 memoir, Here, There and Everywhere , he recalls, “People don’t realize how hard the Beatles worked in the studio, and on the road. Not just physically, but psychologically and mentally it had to have been incredibly wearying. Now”—with the completion of Sgt. Pepper’s —“it was time to let off some steam. All throughout the spring and summer of 1967, the prevalent feeling in the group seemed to be: after all those years of hard work, now it’s time to play.

“Personally, I saw it as just a bit of harmless light relief after all the intensity that had gone in to Pepper. The question was, how long could it last before they got bored?”

For now, there was no chance of that happening. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour wouldn’t take place until mid September, but in the meantime, there were songs to be written and recorded for the film, not to mention work to be done for Yellow Submarine and Our World. McCartney had written Magical Mystery Tour ’s title track around the same time that he’d come up with its concept, so it was the first of the project’s tunes to be recorded. The bulk of the recording was done over five dates from late April to early May, in a set of sessions that featured the same sort of inventiveness that the Beatles had brought to Sgt. Pepper’s . Richard Lush, the second engineer on those dates, recalls, “All that ‘Roll up, roll up for the Mystery Tour’ bit was taped very slow so that it played back very fast. They really wanted those voices to sound different.”

By the end of the fourth session, the group had spent nearly 27 hours on the track. It was a tremendous amount of time to devote to a single recording, demonstrating how completely the Beatles had taken over Abbey Road as an incubator for their musical ideas. Ken Scott says those long hours were the reason many of Abbey Road’s senior engineers didn’t want to work with the Beatles.

“The old-timers were all in their forties,” Scott says. “They had families, and they had got totally used to working 10 to 1, 2:30 to 5:30, 7 to 10, whereas the Beatles didn’t work on those schedules. So they didn’t like it because of that, primarily.” Indeed, on May 9, with “Magical Mystery Tour” completed, the Beatles spent more than seven hours—from 11 p.m. to 6:15 the next morning—jamming unproductively in the studio. Even the durable George Martin, their producer, sneaked out early on that session.

For the time being, Magical Mystery Tour ground to a halt as the Beatles focused on recording songs for Yellow Submarine and preparations for the Our World television program on June 25. The TV show was especially important, as it was the first live, global satellite TV production. Fourteen countries participated in the two-and-a-half-hour production with segments of arts and sports performances, cultural events and even broadcasts of babies being born. It’s estimated that more than 400 million people the world over viewed the program.

Undoubtedly, the highlight for most young viewers was Britain’s contribution, featuring the Beatles performing “All You Need Is Love.” Written for the event by Lennon, the song was a well-timed missive from the counterculture to the established order. With the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War still fresh in the news and the United States’ Vietnam escalation dragging on, Our World provided a platform for the Beatles to spread a message of peace. “Because of the mood of the time, it seemed to be a great idea to do that song,” Harrison said. “We thought, Well, we’ll just sing ‘all you need is love,’ because it’s a kind of subtle bit of PR for God, basically.”

Though Lennon, McCartney and Harrison performed their parts live on air, much of the song’s backing track was prerecorded during a one-day session at Olympic Studios on June 14 (see sidebar, page 50) and in subsequent sessions at Abbey Road, in order to make the performance go as smoothly as possible. Which it did—just barely.

“We had prepared a track, a basic track, of the recording for the television show,” George Martin says. “But we were gonna do a lot live. And there was an orchestra that was live… And just about 30 seconds to go on the air, there was a phone call. And it was the producer of the show, saying, ‘I’m afraid I’ve lost all contact with the studio. You’re gonna have to relay instructions to them—’cause we’re going on air any moment now!’ And I thought, My god, if you’re gonna make a fool of yourself, you may as well do it properly in front of 200 million people!”

“The man upstairs pointed his finger,” George Harrison recalled, “and that’s it. We did it, one take.” After a few post-show overdubs, the song was complete and ready for its release as a single on July 7.

And with that, the Beatles abruptly went on hiatus. For the next two months, Magical Mystery Tour was put on hold. Not another note would be recorded for it until late August.

With nothing to do, the Beatles wandered in ways only the very rich can. They rented a boat and sailed up the coast of Athens, shopping for an island on which they could plant themselves and their growing commercial empire. “We’re all going to live there,” Lennon said. “It’ll be fantastic, all on our own on this island.” The idea came to nothing. Adrift in the Summer of Love, they dropped acid, and lots of it, particularly Lennon and Harrison.

Late in the first week of August, Harrison and his wife, Patti Boyd, traveled to San Francisco, drawn by the news of the burgeoning hippie scene in the Haight-Ashbury district. The experience was disheartening. Harrison thought he’d find a community of doe-eyed enlightened beings. Instead, he encountered young dropouts who were constantly on drugs. “That was the turning point for me,” he said. “That’s when I went right off the whole drug cult and stopped taking the dreaded lysergic acid.”

• Indian culture and mysticism held a growing fascination for Harrison. Seeking a release from drugs, he turned to meditation. Through a friend, he learned that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement, would be speaking at the Hilton Hotel in London on August 24. He decided to go and picked up tickets for his bandmates, in case they wanted to come along. In the end, all but Ringo Starr attended.
• “We went along, and I thought he made a lot of sense,” McCartney says. “I think we all did, because he basically said that, with a simple system of meditation—20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in the evening, no big sort of crazy thing—you can improve the quality of life and find some sort of meaning in doing so.”

Immediately after the presentation, Harrison, Lennon and McCartney had a private audience with the Maharishi. At his request, they agreed to travel with him on the following day to Bangor, Wales, for a seminar and retreat. Photos from the Bangor event show all four Beatles, clad in psychedelic finery, sitting on a dais with the Maharishi, who was clearly reveling in the attention that the group was bringing to his movement.

“I was really impressed with the Maharishi, and I was impressed because he was laughing all the time,” Starr recalls. “And so we listened to his lectures, and we started meditating. We were given our mantras. It was another point of view. It was the first time we were getting into Eastern philosophies.”

But while the Beatles were achieving a higher level of consciousness in Wales, their world was falling apart back in London. On August 27, as they meditated with the Maharishi, their manager Brian Epstein died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills.

“That was kind of stunning,” McCartney says. “’Cause we were off sort of finding the meaning of life, and there he was—dead.”

Both friend and business manager to the Beatles, Epstein had worked tirelessly to secure a recording contract for them back in 1962. His efforts had landed them an audition with George Martin, who subsequently signed them to EMI’s Parlophone Records. Since then, Epstein had overseen their growing empire, leaving the Beatles’ free to focus on their music. Harrison said of his passing, “It was a huge void. We didn’t know anything about, you know, our personal business and finances. He’d taken care of everything… It was chaos after that.”

On September 1, within days of Epstein’s death, the Beatles gathered at McCartney’s house in London’s St. John’s Wood and put their minds back to the task of making music. A plan to study Transcendental Meditation at the Maharishi’s retreat in India was put on hold. Magical Mystery Tour was now a top priority. Perhaps they needed something to take their minds off their grief. Or maybe, as Lennon suggested, Epstein’s death put the fear of god into them that their own days were numbered. “I knew that we were in trouble then,” Lennon recalled. “I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared, you know. I thought, We’ve fucking had it now.”

As the creative force behind the film, McCartney had been busy working on the film’s loose script. “He and John sat down, I think in Paul’s place in St. John’s Wood,” recalled Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ longtime friend and road manager. “And they just drew a circle and then marked it off like the spokes on a wheel. And it was really, ‘We can have a song here, and we can have this here, we can have this dream sequence there, we can have that there,’ and they sort of mapped it out. But it was pretty rough.”

The Beatles had made little headway on Magical Mystery Tour since May. On August 22 and 23, just days before Epstein’s death, they’d attempted to record “Your Mother Should Know” at Chappell Recording Studios, an independent facility in central London (Abbey Road had been booked and unavailable.) But now it was time to knuckle down. On September 5, the Beatles regrouped in the familiar confines of Abbey Road’s large Studio One to do just that, starting with a new Lennon composition, “I Am the Walrus.”

There was a new face on the session: Ken Scott. Like Geoff Emerick, Scott was one of the many young men who’d climbed up through EMI’s rigorous training program. He had worked as second engineer—a tape machine operator—on previous Beatles sessions, but to date he had never engineered a recording. On this day’s session, he was working as second engineer to Emerick, who had engineered nearly every Beatles session from Revolver forward. Emerick’s ingenuity with recording equipment, his ideas about microphone placement and his talent for interpreting and fulfilling the Beatles’ growing desire for audio effects had quickly made him an invaluable part of the group’s production team.

So Scott was understandably shocked when, less than two weeks later, on September 16, he arrived at Abbey Road and was told to take over as the Beatles’ engineer; Emerick had abruptly left for an extended vacation. “I was completely thrown in at the deep end, put behind a board having never touched it before,” Scott recalls. “That first session I had no idea what the hell I was doing.”

Scott did his best and carried on with the session, a remake of “Your Mother Should Know,” using the same mic setups and recording gear that Emerick had been using. Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Scott can’t recall what guitars, basses and amps were used on Magical Mystery Tour, but photos, videos and the film offer suggestions. With respect to guitars, the Beatles most likely used the same gear that they used on Sgt. Pepper’s, though it may not appear that way to the untrained eye. As the psychedelic craze caught on in the summer of 1967, Harrison, Lennon and McCartney each gave their guitars wild paint jobs. Harrison treated his 1961 Sonic Blue Stratocaster, acquired in 1965, to a Day-Glo rainbow finish that he applied himself, and redubbed the guitar “Rocky.” He can be seen playing the guitar in the “All You Need Is Love” broadcast, during which he performed his guitar solo live, and in the “I Am the Walrus” segment of Magical Mystery Tour. Likewise, McCartney embellished his Rickenbacker 4001S bass with a dripping pattern using white, silver and red paint; the bass can be seen in the “All You Need Is Love” broadcast, the “I Am the Walrus” segment and the video for the single “Hello, Goodbye,” recorded around the same time as Magical Mystery Tour . Lennon continued to use his Epiphone Casino, which he had spray-painted either white or grey, as well as his Gibson J-160E acoustic-electric, to which he eventually had a psychedelic finish applied.

As for amps, McCartney used a Vox 730 guitar amp—a valve/solid-state hybrid—with a 2x12 730 cabinet for his bass. Lennon and Harrison can both be seen using Vox Conqueror heads with 730 cabinets in the “Hello, Goodbye” video. Other amps in their possession at this time included a Fender Showman, a Fender Bassman head with a 2x12 cabinet, and a Selmer Thunderbird Twin 50 MkII.

Though Scott originally relied on Emerick’s miking and engineering techniques, he found his comfort zone as the weeks stretched on. Eventually, he began to experiment with sounds, much as Emerick had before him. The Beatles’ sessions proved perfect for this. “As a young engineer learning, working with the Beatles was absolutely incredible, for two reasons,” Scott says. “One, there weren’t time limits. With EMI’s traditional three-hour sessions, you didn’t have time to experiment because you had to get a couple of tracks recorded in three hours. With the Beatles, time was unlimited. Two, there was the freedom to experiment. The Beatles always wanted things to sound different, and that gave you the opportunity to try things. I could use completely the wrong mic in completely the wrong place, and completely screw up the EQ so it sounds atrocious. But I would learn from that. And the Beatles could just as easily hear it and say, ‘Oh, that’s awful—but we’ll use it.’” He laughs. “Because they wanted everything to be different. So just in terms of experimentation, they were the most amazing band to be able to work with.”

There was no greater example of experimentation on Magical Mystery Tour than the mono mixdown session for “I Am the Walrus,” on the night of September 29. The song itself was a marvel of wordplay and orchestration—as Lennon said, “one of those that has enough little bitties going to keep you interested even a hundred years later.” No song in the Beatles’ catalog features as many literary and social references in its lyrics as “I Am the Walrus” does. In writing it, Lennon drew on references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (the walrus), playground nursery rhymes, the Hare Krishna movement, Edgar Allen Poe and even the Beatles’ own “Lucy in the Sky.” Complementing the bizarre lyrics was an equally vivid and evocative orchestral score for strings, horns, clarinet and 16-piece choir, which was recorded on September 27 in Studio One.

But the crowning touch was applied at the September 29 mixdown. Although the song was essentially finished, Lennon wasn’t ready to sign off on the track. “John felt that the song was missing something,” Scott says. Lennon’s idea was to add to the last half of the recording the sound of a radio dial being turned through its frequency range, catching snippets of live programs as well as the static in between stations. But unlike other overdubs, this one would be added live at the mixing stage, thereby embedding the radio broadcast permanently into the final recording. It was an unusual way to work, but with no free tracks available on the four-track tape, it was the only way to proceed.

The job of dial turning fell to Ringo Starr. During one of the two takes performed that night, he let the dial come to rest on a BBC broadcast of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear. “I can’t remember if he just stopped doing it or if John told him to stop at that point whilst we were mixing,” Scott says. “But it finished up being that section from King Lear. The fact that it finishes up just being one station almost goes against what [Lennon] was after. He very much wanted it [the radio station] just sort of changing the entire time.” As it happened, the extract from King Lear—depicting the violent death of the steward Oswald—fit perfectly. Its disturbing dialogue and the cadences of the actors’ speech meshed as if on cue with the song’s complex arrangement. “It was pure luck,” Scott says, “because it was [mixed] live. We never could have recreated it.”

The surreal sounds of “I Am the Walrus” are nearly equalled by “Blue Jay Way,” Harrison’s contribution to Magical Mystery Tour . The song is among the best of his compositions from this period, a haunting piece from which the group fashioned a sonically fascinating recording. Harrison wrote the song in August while staying at a rented house on Blue Jay Way in the L.A. neighborhood of Hollywood Hills. He was waiting for Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ press officer, to arrive, but Taylor had trouble finding the house. As the hour grew later, fog descended, further delaying his arrival. Feeling sleepy, but not wanting to doze off, Harrison sat down at a Hammond organ in the house and began composing a new song fresh from the experience of waiting for Taylor’s arrival, punctuated by a mournful chorus on which he pleads, “Please don’t be long, for I may be asleep.”

The recording of “Blue Jay Way” took place in Studio Two, commencing on September 6 and continuing through the 7th. As evidence that the Beatles were plowing ahead on Magical Mystery Tour following months of inactivity, the song was begun while the group was still at work on “I Am the Walrus.” “Blue Jay Way” features a kitchen-sink application of audio effects, including vocals through a Leslie speaker (first used on Revolver’s “Tomorrow Never Knows”), flanging on the drums and, on the stereo mix of the song, an overdubbing of backward background vocals.

The result is a recording that, while not as dense as Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus,” is every bit as satisfying. After standing in the shadows of Lennon and McCartney, Harrison was clearly coming into his own. “As each one was taking more control of their own songs, he didn’t have to rely on the others quite so much,” Scott says. “So I think that gave him more freedom, more flexibility to complete his songs, and that they were turning out better and better all along.”

On September 8, with the basic tracks for “Blue Jay Way” completed, the Beatles turned their attention to “Flying,” a slow blues in C that was unusual in two respects: not only was it an instrumental (it’s la-la-ing vocals notwithstanding) but all four Beatles shared a co-writing credit on it. At this stage, the song was called “Aerial Tour Instrumental” and included a saxophone solo (later erased) from a Mellotron, the tape-based sample player that had provided the flutes on “Strawberry Fields Forever” (and which also provides the windwood lead instrument and background string sounds on “Flying”). More overdubs were added on September 28, including ethereal sounds from tape loops created by Lennon and Starr, thereby stretching the recording’s length to 9:36. The song was edited down to 2:14 and fades out with the tape loops, though the unused portion of the song didn’t go to waste: it was saved and reused as incidental music in the movie.

McCartney’s track “The Fool on the Hill” was the last song to be undertaken for Magical Mystery Tour , beginning on September 25 in Abbey Road’s Studio Two. According to the bassist, he had written it while at the piano in his father’s house, in Liverpool, following the Beatles’ August trip to the Maharishi’s seminar in Wales. The “Fool” referred to in the song is actually the Maharishi, whom McCartney saw as a misunderstood mystic. “His detractors called him a fool,” he explained. “Because of his giggle he wasn’t taken too seriously.”

Despite its rather simple arrangement, “The Fool on the Hill” contained numerous overdubs, including recorder, penny whistle and harmonicas, which quickly filled up the four-track tape. On October 20, McCartney decided to add a flute solo to the song, but with no tracks available, the tape would have to be bounced down—for the second time since it was begun—to another reel of tape, onto which the flute overdubs could be added.

Rather than subject the song to yet another transfer, a procedure that can add hiss and degrade sound quality, George Martin decided to implement a technique that had been used for “A Day in the Life,” on Sgt. Pepper’s . For that song, Abbey Road engineer Ken Townsend had devised a way to link two four-tracks to play in sync, using a pilot tone on one track to control the speed of the second machine. “It was extremely trustworthy, except for one little thing,” Scott says, “and that was the starting time of them. Once you got them running together, yes, they were perfectly in sync. The problem was just starting them up together, because each machine starts at a different speed every time.”

Apparently, by the time they recorded “The Fool on the Hill,” everyone had forgotten how much trouble the system could be. “The problem was that on the second four-track, [the flutes] didn’t come in till about a quarter of the way into the song,” Scott says. “So we wouldn’t know until they came in whether or not the two machines were running in sync. Eventually we got it so that they ran in sync for probably just two mixes: the mono and stereo. Yeah. It wasn’t fun.”

By the middle of November, all six Magical Mystery Tour tracks were completed, mixed and mastered. On December 8, the finished work was released in England as a gatefold package containing two extended-play 45-rpm records. In the U.S., where EPs had failed to catch on, Capitol Records, the Beatles’ American label, issued it as a full-length album containing the six songs on one side and five other Beatles tracks released as singles in 1967: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Penny Lane,” “All You Need Is Love,” “Baby You’re a Rich Man” and “Hello, Goodbye.” In either of its musical formats, Magical Mystery Tour was a hit with both the public and critics.

The film was not. Shown on the BBC on Boxing Day—the day after Christmas, and a holiday in Britain— Magical Mystery Tour was universally panned as a confusing and self-indulgent mess. Having little in the way of plot, it derived its entertainment value from the Beatles’ musical performances as well as cinematography that was rich with the psychedelic colors that typified the times.

“And of course they showed it in black and white!” Ringo Starr says. “And so it was hated. They all had their chance then to say, ‘They’ve gone too far. Who do they think they are?’”

McCartney, as the film’s instigator, takes the long view. “I defend it on the lines that nowhere else do you see a performance of ‘I Am the Walrus,’” he says. “That’s the only performance ever.”

No such defenses are necessary when it comes to the music. It’s as fine as anything on Sgt. Pepper’s , and it shows at times an even greater command of arrangement and studio production. Clearly, the Beatles were getting a firmer hand on the intricacies of their music.

But there is a weariness to the music as well, a tangible sense of Sgt. Pepper’s expectant summer giving way to Magical Mystery Tour ’s melancholy autumn. The six songs destined for Magical Mystery Tour were written before Epstein’s death late that August, but there is a dry, funereal whiff to most of those that were recorded after it, as if the Beatles were mourning his loss through the by now ritual sessions at Abbey Road. “I Am the Walrus” is wonderfully macabre and grotesque with its maniacal background vocals and Lennon’s seething croup of a voice, his baleful shouts growing until, by the coda, he sounds like a huffing blast furnace. Harrison’s haunting “Blue Jay Way” emerges sinisterly out of silence, its dreamy Lydian melody, sustained organ chords, unsettling cello lines and ghoulish background vocals evoking the song’s theme of unanswered longing and physical dislocation. McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill” is plaintive and abandoned, its wistful flutes and plodding chorus of bass harmonicas inducing cloud-engulfed vistas of lonely supernal peaks.

And then there is the dirgelike 12-bar-blues burlesque of “Flying,” a perversely psychedelic defiling of the genre that gave birth to the rock and roll from which the Beatles emerged and, in 1967, briefly took flight. Within weeks of the dawn of 1968, they would land once again on the solid ground of rock and roll and folk, recording McCartney’s barrelhouse R&B tribute “Lady Madonna” and, one day later, Lennon’s gentle acoustic ode “Across the Universe.” A dream was over. A new one was just beginning.

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Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of  Guitar Player  magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of  Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World , a founding editor of  Guitar Aficionado  magazine, and a former editor with  Guitar World ,  Guitar for the Practicing Musician  and  Maximum Guitar . Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.

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‘Magical Mystery Tour’: The Non-Album That Accidentally Became One of The Beatles’ Best

I n the realm of rock and roll debates, the argument over which Beatles album is the best is one of the mostly hotly-contested. Perhaps because the records that are most mentioned ( Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Revolver, The White Album, Abbey Road, Rubber Soul ) are also in the running for greatest rock and roll albums of all time. 

But we’re here to make a case for an album that technically wasn’t an album, at least not to start. Magical Mystery Tour is a bit of an odd duck in the catalog of the Fab Four. And yet, you can make the case that the 11 songs that it contains are as strong as any set The Beatles ever released. Let’s explore how this collection of tracks evolved into what it is today, beginning with a look at the record company shenanigans behind its strange status.

EMI vs. Capitol

The Beatles’ music was released in America courtesy of Capitol Records, which was the North American arm of parent company EMI. EMI pretty much gave Capitol free rein in the early days of the group in terms of how the music would be packaged for American audiences. Which is why there was a divergence between the UK and American versions of the albums.

For example, albums like Meet the Beatles! and Something New only existed in America. In some cases, an album would have the same title on both sides of the Atlantic and still contain a different collection of songs. Those who bought Rubber Soul in America, for instance, were greeted with “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” which had been released in Britain on Help! , as the first track. The general idea was to divvy up the material into as many releases as possible in the U.S.

By the time Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released in 1967, The Beatles stepped in and insisted that their original vision of the album be honored in America. From that point forward, there was no separation between the EMI and Capitol albums. With the exception, that is, of the soundtrack for a bizarre Beatles film named Magical Mystery Tour .

[RELATED: 4 Beatles Songs That Capture Life on the Road]

A Fantastic Flop

Following the death of manager Brian Epstein in August 1967, The Beatles pushed forward with a Paul McCartney idea for a new film that they’d put together pretty much by themselves and which would feature new, original songs. Magical Mystery Tour , which debuted on television in Great Britain on Boxing Day in ’67, was a glorified home movie detailing a ramshackle bus trip that was occasionally interrupted by surreally absurd (or maybe they were absurdly surreal) set pieces.

The movie dumbfounded audiences and stirred up critics to deliver some of the first negative reviews the band had ever received for anything they had released. But it was hard to deny the brilliance of the music contained in the movie. John Lennon’s “I Am the Walrus” was majestic madness, Paul McCartney’s “The Fool on the Hill” served up lovely melancholia, and the wild experimentation of George Harrison’s “It’s All Too Much” was the best kind of overkill. Throw in the shiny title track, the charming instrumental “Flying,” and a fun McCartney singalong in “Your Mother Should Know,” and it was clear the boys were still operating at the psychedelic peak they reached during Sgt. Pepper’s , which had come out earlier in the year.

Leave It to the Yanks

In Great Britain, those songs were released as a double EP (extended play) disc. But Capitol knew that the EP format didn’t do that well in America. Thus, they came up with the idea to round up the singles and B-sides the group had released throughout 1967 and turn those songs into the second side of an LP.

And what a batch of songs that was. There was the 1-2 punch of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” which had introduced the world to the studio-bound Beatles (they gave up touring in ’66) and set the table for Pepper’s . “All You Need Is Love,” the ultimate Summer of Love anthem that the group had done as a one-off for a worldwide television special, was included, as was its quirky yet engaging B-side “Baby, You’re a Rich Man.” Topping it all off was the endlessly catchy “Hello, Goodbye,” which the group had released as a single in the interim between Pepper’s and the film.

At the time, The Beatles had complained about this Frankenstein monster of an album being released in America. But it’s telling that, when the Fab Four put their catalog on CD for the first time in the late ‘80s, they included the American version of Magical Mystery Tour in the package.

And why wouldn’t they? The songs all came from roughly the same time period and captured the band at a dizzyingly high creative point. Magical Mystery Tour can go toe-to-toe with any of the heavyweights in The Beatles’ collection of albums. Not bad at all, especially when you consider it took some record company interference to create the definitive version of it.

Photo by Jim Gray/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The post ‘Magical Mystery Tour’: The Non-Album That Accidentally Became One of The Beatles’ Best appeared first on American Songwriter .

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Chad Comello

Sgt. pepper’s magical mystery tour.

This article comparing The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , both released in 1967, got me thinking about what one hypothetical album that combined the best of both albums would look like. So as part of my Better The Beatles project, I’ve determined a track listing for  Sgt. Pepper’s Magical Mystery Tour . Thirteen tracks from both albums, shuffled into an ideal song order for your listening pleasure.

• Magical Mystery Tour
• Hello, Goodbye
• With a Little Help from My Friends
• Lovely Rita
• She’s Leaving Home
• Getting Better
• Strawberry Fields Forever
• When I’m Sixty-Four
• Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
• Baby You’re a Rich Man
• All You Need Is Love
• A Day in the Life

The cuts from  Magical were pretty easy: “Flying,” “Blue Jay Way,” “I Am the Walrus,” and “The Fool on the Hill” are either too weird or too instrumental. “Your Mother Should Know” was the toughest goodbye.

Sgt. Pepper’s was a bit more difficult. I won’t miss “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and “Good Morning Good Morning”, but ditching “Within You Without You” eliminated the remaining George Harrison song, and “Fixing a Hole” is interesting but not interesting enough.

I pondered what to do about the two title tracks that bookend the album. Theoretically they provide the framework for both albums, but I figured “Magical Mystery Tour” performs the same upbeat and psychedelic invitation that the first “Sgt. Pepper’s” track does, so that allowed me to ditch both songs and let the album name do the storytelling.

You’re welcome.

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Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour Live

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Beatles, 1967.

T his past Friday in Chicago I saw Tributosaurus play all of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Magical Mystery Tour” live, and it was astonishingly great. Hearing the whole thing performed with ALL the instruments originally used—a string section, woodwinds, brass, and a host of Indian instruments—underlined just how rich and rewarding these albums are. The greatest double album the Beatles ever made, in my opinion.

Recordings aren’t going to do this justice, but here’s a clip of “A Day in the Life” that’s been posted:

Here are a few of my favorite moments from the show:

• The drummer, Dan Leali, singing “With A Little Help From My Friends” while drumming
• The string section and “Indian band” on stage during “Within You Without You”—a powerful visual  representation of Harrison’s bringing Eastern and Western musical stylings together
• The harp in “She’s Living Home”
• The clarinet trio on “When I’m Sixty-Four”
• The bass saxophone on “Good Morning, Good Morning” (Biggest sax I’d ever seen; looks like something Dr. Suess dreamed up)
• The brass on “Lovely Rita”
• The piccolo trumpet on “Penny Lane”
• Steve Frisbie’s uncannily channeling McCartney’s vocal style, especially on “Magical Mystery Tour”
• The band’s humor throughout; they take the music, but not themselves, seriously

Related posts:

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One comment.

That looks like it must have been an incredible performance.

I’m curious if the surviving Beatles have seen shows like this live, and if so, what they had to say about it. I’m not speaking about the “beatlemania” type tribute bands, but artists like this, as well as the Fab Faux.

– Hologram Sam

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• The Beatles’ albums in order – complete list!

Magical Mystery Tour

Released as a six-song double EP in the United Kingdom and an 11-song album in the US and elsewhere, Magical Mystery Tour was the soundtrack to the television film of the same name, which was first broadcast by the BBC on 26 December 1967 .

In the wake of the death of Brian Epstein on 27 August 1967 , The Beatles found themselves suddenly without direction. Whereas since 1962 they had been carefully guided by their manager, at the peak of their career they were unused to making their own business decisions or having absolute autonomy over their future.

On 1 September 1967 , five days after Epstein’s body was discovered in his London home, The Beatles met at Paul McCartney ’s house at 7 Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood, London. The previous day an announcement had been issued stating that the band would continue to be managed by NEMS Enterprises – now under the guidance of Epstein’s brother Clive – until further notice.

During the 1 September meeting The Beatles agreed to continue with Magical Mystery Tour , a project begun in April shortly after the completion of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . Crucially, this was a time when McCartney began steering many of the group’s decisions, encouraging them to continue during a period in which they might easily have collapsed amid a lack of direction.

I was still under a false impression. I still felt every now and then that Brian would come in and say, ‘It’s time to record,’ or, ‘Time to do this.’ And Paul started doing that: ‘Now we’re going to make a movie. Now we’re going to make a record.’ And he assumed that if he didn’t call us, nobody would ever make a record. Paul would say, well, now he felt like it – and suddenly I’d have to whip out twenty songs. He’d come in with about twenty good songs and say, ‘We’re recording.’ And I suddenly had to write a fucking stack of songs.

McCartney’s concept for Magical Mystery Tour was to produce a television special about a group of ordinary people taking a mystery trip on a coach. The film would take in various locations in England and France, and would be mostly improvised and take advantage of the encounters they had on the road.

Magical Mystery Tour was Paul’s idea. It was a good way to work. Paul had a great piece of paper – just a blank piece of white paper with a circle on it. The plan was: ‘We start here – and we’ve got to do something here…’ We filled it in as we went along. We rented a bus and off we went. There was some planning: John would always want a midget or two around, and we had to get an aircraft hangar to put the set in. We’d do the music, of course. They were the finest videos, and it was a lot of fun. To get the actors we looked through the actors’ directory, Spotlight: ‘Oh, we need someone like this, and someone like that.’ We needed a large lady to play my auntie. So we found a large lady.

Latest Comments

Absolutely underrated in so many ways.

Problem is… it’s not really an album. Just a collection of songs already recorded

But isn’t that what the definition of an album is? A collection of songs already recorded?

Kind of hard to make an album if none of the songs have been recorded already.

The idea is that if you for example compare it to Sgt. Peppers, there is no feeling of a “string” guiding you through the album. MMT seems very convoluted to me. Side 1 & 2 seem to me like they are from different albums and mindsets. In almost every album theres a definite feel of “This is their idea of music at this point”. This doesn’t happen for me in Magical Mystery Tour.

best beatle album a collection of hits Such a master piece, along with revolver, rubber soul, sgt pepper, and white album

and help. and a hard days night and well all beatle music.

The only Capitol release that improved upon a British release. (Or even equalled it, for that matter, since the UK “Pepper” was ever-so slightly better than the US version, which excluded the inner-groove gibberish and for-dogs-only tone.)

Yep, I agree that Capitol finally did the Beatles right by adding all those wonderful 1967 singles. For once they didn’t butcher the EP, (like all the previous LP’s) they just added to it. But I also really love the EP for what it is. Never saw it growing up in Canada until I finally got my own UK EP import.

How can you not love MMT? It gives me a warm, magical, mysterious feeling just thinking about it. The only downer is Blue Jay Way which is tough to get all the way through. They should have put “It’s All Too Much” on this instead of Yellow Submarine. Then it would be spotless!

Yellow Submarine isn’t on Magical Mystery Tour. Did you mean Blue Jay Way?

I think he means they shoud have put the song It’s All Too Much on the album MMT istead of the album Yellow Submarine.

I agree with you about MMT being a supreme beatles album , but i dont agree about blue jay way … when you consider how hari wrote it , he was took out to a friends house in (america i think) by whoever and the friend was not at home so george waited at the house entrance while (whoever) went to look for the friend or a phone …. it was getting towards dusk a little dark and george being on his own in the unfamiliar surroundings of a foreign country got a little scared and the lane/road was called Blue Jay Way and the song was born…. you might say written with the help of fear !!!

Blue Jay Way was not meant to be a Top 40 hit. It was first & foremost a vehicle to tell us the story of Paul’s death, and its video was likewise a vehicle to show you quick flashes of his corpse, his damaged face after the accident, and even his displaced jawbone flying around. These grisly images are presented against a busy background of people dancing & darting across the scene, so you must freeze frames to see them. But they are all there to tell the story as The Beatles intended.

Pure bullocks. George told the story many times as to what this song is about. You simply haven’t a clue I’m afraid.

Just another fool on the hill.

Is it the EP you’re referring to? Blue Jay Way although lengthy is a significant Harrison piece, instrumentation-wise, which I find quite soothing when listened to. You don’t have a complete MMT experience without this song.

Blue Jay Way may be the only song on all of The Beatles albums that I skip every single time.

I love all the Beatle albums, but between this one and Beatles for sale, they are my least favorite.I find it suprising that John Lennon said it was his favorite.I heard that in the Anthology DVD and I assumed it was from an interview at the time of MMT’s release but on here it says from a Rolling Stone 1974 interview.I am the Walrus is definetly one of Lennons best works, but the album as a whole just doesnt stand up there for me.It’s still a great record, just not one of their better ones in my opinion.

In the states, MMT was a Christmas release, 6 months after Sgt. P. It was seen as the next Beatles album, when in fact it was an extension of Sgt. P. That the White Album was in fact the next Beatles album has been lost on the American public’s consciousness.

One has to wonder what might have happened if they didn’t feel the need or succumb to the pressure to churn out album after album in the wake of Brian’s death. The massive White Album, then 5 months later convening for Get BAck/Let It Be… then Abbey Road right after. Bands today could never maintain the pace of recording/movies/business pressures as did the Beatles. Perhaps, if… they might have… oh well. There are a lot of “perhaps’ ” in the history of the Beatles.

Yeah, it’s UNCANNY (and terribly stupid on their part) that less than ONE MONTH AND A HALF after releasing the White Album, these crazy workaholics should convene again for the drudgery of more recording AND filming. Even without the alleged “tensions” attending the recording of The Beatles, any four human beings should have been exhausted after such strenuous work. Why not wait at least until spring/early summer to resume work, have a good rest of writing/rehearsing/recording (and putting up with each other!), and then “get back” with renewed energy? I’m sure The Beatles wouldn’t have split up if they had respected themselves a little bit more. They seemed to have gotten caught up into a masochistic groove: what sense does it make to play LIVE in the middle of the winter on a windswept rooftop in London!!!? That, despite all the odds, that performance should have been SO good is yet another proof of how great The Beatles were, but they simply seem to have stretched human nature too far…. What a waste!

The band had a very work a day attitude to what they did. Essentially they saw being recording artists the same way as being a Teacher,Nurse,Engineer, Postman or any other job. You went to work everyday and had some days off for weekends or holidays. Paul particularly had this attitude. Although their hours of work were unusual they were more like shift workers working a backshift.

It continued after they split up as well. After recording TWO Albums in 1969, they immediately dived into solo singles and albums.

Ringo releasing 2 albums in 1970, Paul 1 in 1970 and 2 in 1971, George a triple album in 1970, John releasing albums in 1970 and 1971.

The Beatles got it right. They split up while they were a YOUNG band & will always be remembered as such……Unlike the rolling stones.

It is very simple why they did so much work in November 1966 to August 1969 in the studio. They were not touring and could spend the time recording as much material as they could release.

I live in the US and close to 40 years ago read that the White Album was meant as a follow-up to Sgt. Pepper’s, with the stark cover and relative simplicity of the songs countering the extravagance and complexity of Pepper.

well, bear in mind that side 2 was mostly songs that had gotten lots of radio play during the year before, so even in the U.S. it was clear to me, as an 11 year old, that it included a lot of re-packaged material. Compared to my experience of the White Album which was like getting this amazing toy chest, every single song was unfamiliar, the whole thing had a vibe, and what a treat to discover them all from scratch. And there was an obvious difference between the fun but ultimately kind of commercial comic book in MMT and the much more interesting packaging of the White Album and Sgt Pepper. Kind of the same thing with Let It Be…when I got THAT for Christmas it was exciting to have a new bit of Beatles product and i gleaned pleasure from various tracks. But every single thing about it signaled that it wasn’t a major work in the canon. Starting with the banal packaging.

I concur wholeheartedly. The albums’ and singles’ releasing frequency was imo also a bad business decision altogether on part of the parts involved. It sort of unnecessarily saturated the Fab4 market, with the exception of the hardcore fans worldwide.

Not at all. Their creativity had multiplied and they wanted to keep the box open as they weren’t planning any tours; MMT was to be broadcast in MondoVison, exploring a new format it turned out to be more than an interlude, quite magically. Meanwhile the affiliated record companies had been releasing as much as possible already, clearly Apple was created to keep them letting it get so out of control, as well as an outlet for whatever the Beatles would fancy.

This album has its similarities to the white album not pepper think about it The Fool On The Hill and Mother Natures Son or Flying and Wild Honey Pie, Strawberry Fields Forever and Glass Onion, Baby Your A Rich Man and Happiness Is A Warm Gun!!

strawberry fields forever was originally wrote for pepper penny lane also but the big wigs moneymen who all but owned the Beatles were impatient pepper took so long to make that they demanded a release so EMI released SFF/PL so it does have similarities to pepper. the information can be found in the “complete abbey road recordings” which was put out by EMI/HAMLIN.

I saw ‘MMT’, the color version, in a small ‘art’ theatre in my city in early 1968…I was quite intrigued as it had a dreamlike and slightly ‘down’ air about it, quite different from ‘HDN’ & ‘Help’.

I can only imagine what the UK Boxing Day audience who saw the black & white version thought.

Very ‘surrealistic’ and way ahead of later MTV rubbish.

MMT was not distributed in North America until late 1968-early 1969 in small theatres with Eric Anderson doing a short concert as well as introducing the movie.

The MMT movie best moment is definettly Jonh serving sppaghetti to the big lady! That’s so genius!. I like the album very very much! Except for “Hello Goodbye”(I hate it, but fits the purposes of the movie/album I guess), all the songs are great and fit within The Beatles best work!

Outstanding album; really better than other higher-profile albums like SPLHCB.

This has to be said: MMT is NOT a Beatles album. It is an American COMPILATION of Beatles music. Nothing to do with them apart from that. Since its entry to the “official canon” the attitude seems to have grown that it should be considered as if one of the UK albums that they put so much thought and effort into. Comparing it to those albums is just wrong. I love the album. It is one the great COMPILATION albums – but to see how the group wanted the music on it presented at the time, look to the UK double-ep (which is a fantastic package) and the relevant singles. However much I love it as an album, one of my big disappointments is that it made the original CD reissue series in the ’80s. That gave the impression there were 13 albums instead of 12. What would Mark have done? I would have had “Past Masters” live up to its job description – to collect ALL recordings not featured on the 12 albums they recorded and released as they envisioned them. You could then have a “Past Masters” that made sense, instead of having a big 1967-shaped hole at its centre. And if anyone’s wondering, it would easily fit. “Past Masters” is about 94 minutes, MMT 36, giving a “Past Masters” that would be around 130 minutes. Volume/Disc 1: 1962-66, Volume/Disc 2: 1967-70 (think I’ve heard that split somewhere before). A later release of MMT could have been done later, as has happened with other Capitol albums. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t dislike the album or anything, I just dislike it’s elevated status alongside the 12 albums they did record. I dread the day when I come across a comment telling me that The Beatles never recorded a better album than “1”!

It’s a nice idea. However, having MMT incorporated into Past Masters may have meant we didn’t get the MMT artwork – the booklet is really worth having. Personally I’m glad they kept it as a standalone release, but it’s all personal preference. I do think there’s quite a big hole in PM because MMT hoovered up all the amazing 1967 singles.

True it’s technically not a Beatles album although I believe Parlophone did decide to start pressing copies of it in the U.K. at some point like it was a Beatles album. It’s a great companion album to Sgt. Pepper since those two albums basically give you 99% of their 67 output.

I totally agree, it was an EP and should have gone down in history as an EP. When they released the new 2014 mono LP set, they should included the EP and put the remaining singles Past Masters.

No I think they got it right releasing it as an album when it came time to standardise the albums throughout the world as there was packaging especially for it, and for once Capitol got it right in putting all the 1967 singles on the second side, It would have left Past/Mono Masters as lop sided from 1965 onwards with the 11 songs that are on the album.

However i do agree that they could release Magical Mystery Tour as a stand alone Double EP in both stereo and mono, and maybe release it as a twelve inch singles as well in stereo and mono. So you could have four options in which to buy it.

It’s an album. It exists today as an album because that’s what it is. So, in other words: The Beatles were wrong and Capitol was right. They knew it was an album, and it is!

Another detail to clarify who wore which animal suit…look for the wristwatch.

I got this album in June 1980. It is great that the songs on the British EP and the1967 singles and Bsides could be included on one album. It compliments Sgt Pepper in that regard. I Am The Walrus is one of my favorite songs of all time and a great example of John Lennons offbeat genius. And for that matter The Fool On The Hill is one of McCartneys finest. And then you have other masterpieces like All You Need Is Love, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever on side two. Thats not to forget Baby Youre A Rich Man.

Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane belong on Sgt Pepper, but as usual EMI couldn’t wait and needed a single before Pepper was finished. and the Beatles didn’t put their singles on albums to that point.The iconic album would have been truly awesome with.their best two songs of 1967

Agreed, what I have done is make my own albums, So Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane are on my version of Pepper, likewise I added Rain to Revolver and removed Yellow Submarine.

I’ve done the same. Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine get spliced together as the great psychedelic afterbirth that follows Sergeant P. My version runs: Magical Mystery Tour, Baby You’re a Rich Man, Only a Northern Song, Hello Goodbye, All You Need Is Love, Flying, Your Mother Should Know, The Inner Light, Hey Bulldog, Blue Jay Way, All Together Now, I Am the Walrus, The Fool on the Hill and It’s All Too Much. I was inspired by the great article “Playing God” by Todd Burns and have similarly chopped and changed all the albums to include singles from each period. I’ve only just noticed that You Know My Name (LUTN) is missing. That might go last. I’m interested in hearing about other versions or improvements!

Havent seen the mmt movie, but excluding hello goodbye, & blue jay way its great back to back

I have the original 1967 MMT EMI in mint condition, can some one tell me the value of this record? Thanks!

Check around a little bit but I have seen a quote of up to $750 on moneymusic.com

If we allow that MMT is indeed a Beatles album, then it clearly is in their very top-most in the canon. It has at least 5 of what would be considered universally accepted of the top 25 Beatles songs of all time. SFF, AYNIL, IATW, PL, and FOTH

The first Beatle album I ever owned at the age of 13 and for that it will also have a nostalgic place in my heart.

It is fabulous. Just brilliant. Frankly, it should be seen for what it is, very serious music. Because “Strawberry Fields Forever” is so good, I really think that this is the best album of all, well, I suppose, along with “Sgt. Pepper”. “I Am the Walrus” and “Fool on the Hill’ are so good that I find myself playing this more than any other of their albums. Yes, I prefer the old vinyl one though I also have the CD and I believe the EP somewhere as well. If it is serious music you want, and not necessarily pop entertainment, then this one really stands out. Forget about the costumes, the movie, the inside information, and just focus on the 11 songs. I have no problem with any of the songs that people who have commented on dislike. It’s all great. The album version stated here to not be released was everywhere in the U. K., yes, everywhere as soon as 1968 and all through the 70’s. Import? That’s silly, since it’s their album. The cover maybe, perhaps, but certainly not the music. It’s a bit like saying an American printing of a Shakespeare play is American when the play isn’t. As for the reason I find this to be their best, well it certainly has nothing to do with the film. I’ve never seen it and that’s all right. It’s all about the brilliant music herein. Cheers!

Yeah but my question is, where are the costumes and masks today? Were they donated or does the current Beatle members have it?

A lot of you guys doesn’t have a clue about MMT. The US album was fully supported by The Beatles. Before 1967 they couldn’t do anything about Capitol’s releases, but by renewing their contract with EMI, one of their demands was that they could control releases overseas. If the Beatles had put their foot down before Capitol, the US album would not have happend. They did not.

The whole movie was a rent party. The bus, the sets, actors, costumes; all rented.Only the music was bought and paid for…by the fans. And we (Americans) didn’t even get to see the movie.

Nigel – the movie did play here in the states but probably in sporadic and random theaters. I saw it somewhere in Connecticut in the 70’s.

I was totally nuts about “I Am The Walrus” when it came out and it’s still a favorite. But beyond that I feel that the other songs from the movie (Side “A” of the US album) are collectively about the weakest material the Beatles ever put out. It feels to me as though they wanted to keep the innovation and magic of Sergeant Pepper going but were just trying too hard. Also I wonder if Brian Epstein’s death and resulting lack of “grown up” direction didn’t contribute to the muddle.

Instead of “Magical Mystery Tour” I refer to this album as “Whoa! Way Too Much Acid!”.

Did anyone know that in magical mystery tour Paul is wherein a flashers coat during the song fool on the hill and you can actually see for a fleeting moment his junk.

This was thought to be as one could not tell due to the quality of the VHS tapes .Now its on Blu ray and DVDone can tell that this information is wrong.

Really like the sound of this album. Sounds a bit like Pepper in style, without all the psychedelic organs that makes Pepper sound a bit dated. Only song I’m not a huge fan of is “Blue Jay Way” which to me, drones on a bit too long.

this, in my opinion, is the only US release that was better than the UK version! Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane and I am the Walrus all on the same album!

For most of us Americans under 60, this is an album. It starts with MMT and ends with All You Need is Love. I discovered this album as an 11 year old and didnt learn until my mid 20’s that I had the compiled American release. I decided to keep my original thoughts to it. Its the MMT album! They all evoke a 1967 feel to it; psychadelia (dark & positive), wit, nostalgia, & love. It feels like a concept album (all 11 songs). Lets not put this in the same category as the Hey Jude compilation Album that includes songs from years past. Whenever i have been asked if Pepper was the best Beatles album, i often jokingly respond that its not even the best album of ’67. I love MMT.

But the point i want to remind people of are the small magical pieces between songs. They are enjoyable little treats. You could make the point that this pattern continues on side 2 with the short snippets after Hello Goodbye & Strawberry Fields Forever. That is another reason why the two sides hold nicely together.

I’m in my 70s now and I guess that’s why it’s not an album to me, just mainly a collection of songs. The fact is that by the fall of 1967 we had heard the non-film songs lots on the radio and they were completely familiar when MMT was released. The film songs (except “I Am The Walrus”) did not seem in the same league musically with the singles and therefore the whole effort seemed like a weird mashing together of unrelated elements, very much the opposite of the Beatles’ normal way of doing things. Of course I bought the album though! But when I had first heard that the Beatles would follow up Sgt. Pepper with something called “Magical Mystery Tour,” just the name conjured images of an even deeper dive into psychedelia and therefore MMT was rather a flat disappointment in that regard.

The reason John said, “The Walrus was Paul” was not because Paul was in the Walrus costume. It was because he had a mo-ped accident and grew a moustache to hide the scar. The others said he looked like a walrus, but also grew moustaches in solidarity.

No one has mentioned that US Capitol, in making MMT a full album, copied UK Parlophone’s method for their earlier soundtrack LP’s, with all the movie songs on Side 1 and all the non-movie songs from the same time-frame on Side 2.

That is interesting, but seeing as side one was the same as the British release, this could be a coincidence? But there’s equal chance it was deliberate.

In my opinion, “Magical Mystery Tour” was The Beatles at the zenith of their psychedelic phase and some of the sessions happened to coincide with the Summer of Love. John and George went into their keyboardist mode during the sessions for MMT and both of them began to write keyboard-led songs during this period, so it clearly gave them a fantastic opportunity to develop their own keyboard techniques – George went into the organ and John clearly developed a fondness for pianos, mellotrons and organs – but neither fully abandoned playing their guitars altogether. Conversely, Paul’s bass never took a back seat to guitars or keyboards, since he was easily able to overdub it whenever he needed to or if he wished to rerecord them for the final mixes. Here’s a bit of trivia: in the video for “All You Need is Love”, the mystery drummer using brushes on Ringo’s hi-hats is Keith Moon. During the psychedelic period, John, Paul and George repainted their Gibson J-160E, Rickenbacker bass and Fender Stratocaster (nicknamed Rocky) respectively in psychedelic finish and Ringo used a red front head on the bass drum of his Ludwig drum kit. So yes, it is very interesting to know what instruments were used during these creative recording sessions.

What’s not to love about this LP. The only Capitol LP that outperforms the EP.

Great write up Joe. Always enjoy your site. Truly the best Beatles Forum out there!

That’s true for a number of reasons: a) Capitol compromised by merely expanding the EP into album format by including all six tracks from the EP on side one and filling out side 2 with their singles from 1967 (“Hello Goodbye”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Penny Lane”, “Baby You’re a Rich Man” and “All You Need is Love”) on side two, so this was clearly some compensation over the omission of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” from “Sgt. Pepper”. b) The album was a popular import into the UK and it eventually got a British release in 1976. c) It was the officially adopted CD version in 1987 and 2009 plus it got remastered for vinyl in 2012.

I have always considered the “Magical Mystery Tour” LP a special case and the exception to the rule among the pre-Sgt. Pepper Capitol releases that The Beatles clearly disliked.

Perhaps the running order for the album version of “Magical Mystery Tour” had some influence on Simon and Garfunkel finalizing the running order for their 1968 album “Bookends”, as side one on that album was a song cycle (not a concept album, per se) and side 2 had the duo’s 1966-1967 singles and songs written by Paul Simon for the film “The Graduate”, most notably “Mrs. Robinson”.

Hairsplitting aside as to it’s official album status -this is my favorite Beatles album. There’s at least 5 masterpieces on it. It has the band at their psychedelic peak . Blue Jay Way is the only weak track but that’s made up for by the increasing fondness I have for Baby You’re a Rich Man. 5/5

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Sgt. Pepper’s Magical Mystery Tour

29 Songs, 1 hour, 36 minutes

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