Beatles

What a mess. For all of his brilliance on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul McCartney must take much of the blame for the ill-conceived for television movie “Magical Mystery Tour”. McCartney had thought of it while in America in April of 1967. The others agreed to it so they all share it to some degree. He wrote the title tune and recording began April 25th.

On May 11th the group recorded and mixed “Baby You’re a Rich Man” at Olympic Studios with Keith Grant engineering. The session began at 9PM and by 3AM they had it mixed and “in the can”. It was originally slated to be used in the animated film “Yellow Submarine” announced on June 7th (a week after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s…).

So now The Beatles had two projects going simultaneously: “Magical Mystery Tour” and “Yellow Submarine”. They returned to Olympic on May 12th and recorded, again in one evening, “All Together Now” and on the 17th began work on the deliciously warped “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)”.

The next week they returned to De Lea Music Recording Studio to begin recording “It’s All Too Much”, and then following the release of Sgt. Pepper’s… on June 1st, they went back to work on “It’s All Too Much” and a few days later “You Know My Name….”.

The single “All You Need is Love”/”Baby You’re a Rich Man” was released July 7th five weeks after Sgt. Pepper’s…. so neither would be released on a UK album. The Beatles returned to the studio (Chappell Recording Studios, not Abbey Road) August 22nd to record “Your Mother Should Know” and on the 23rd to record overdubs. It was the final session attended by Brian Epstein, who passed away on the 27th from an accidental drug overdose. He was 32.

Those who claim had Epstein lived he could have persuaded the group to abandon “MMT” were probably wrong. By then The Beatles did as they pleased. Four days after Epstein’s passing, on September 1st, they met at McCartney’s home and decided to continue with the movie project. They commenced recording on the 5th, started filming on the 11th and had the double Magical Mystery Tour EP in the stores well before Christmas.

About the MMT project George Martin is quoted in Lewisohn’s book as saying “MMT was terribly badly organized and it’s amazing that anything ever came out of it”.

“I Am The Walrus” came out of it and Martin was proud of it as well he should have been. Also outstanding was Paul’s “The Fool on the Hill”. Harrison’s “Blue Jay Way” was another studio effects tour de force and richly evocative of foggy Los Angeles, which is where it was written and what it’s about.

On September 8th the group recorded what would become its first released instrumental and the first composed by all four group members. On the 16th they re-did “Your Mother Should Know” with Ken Scott engineering for the first time having been promoted after Geoff Emerick had burned out after (according to Scott) Sgt. Pepper’s… and become sick of MMT.

Throughout the Fall the group continued recording and mixing songs for MMT and for “Yellow Submarine”. The comings and going are fascinating but “all too much” to cover here.

”Hello Goodbye”/”I Am The Walrus” made it to #1 in the UK shortly after its November 24th release. The Magical Mystery Tour double EP was issued in the UK on Friday December 8th in both mono and stereo versions but not in America. Instead Capitol released it as a full album with the EP songs on side one and five songs from the Sgt. Pepper’s….. era on side two.

There was a mono album issue (Capitol MAL 2835) but it was fairly rare as most listeners by then were well into stereo. Unfortunately stereo mixes did not exist of “Penny Lane”, “Baby You’re a Rich Man” and “All You Need is Love” so Capitol produced “electronically reprocessed for stereo” versions for the stereo album, which Lewisohn describes as “duophonic” but that’s not accurate. Duophonic was Capitol’s far more noxious process for producing “stereo”, which involved gobs of reverb and tape delay to produce an echoey, puke-inducing mess. Fortunately they restrained themselves on their stereo release. Capitol’s version was imported to Britain and was popular with LP fans.

More popular with stereo fans was the German “Hör Zu” record club version of Magical Mystery Tour (SHZE 327), which has the final three songs in genuine stereo obviously released after October 22nd 1971, which was when George Martin finally got around to mixing in stereo “Baby You’re a Rich Man”. “All You Need Is Love” was mixed to stereo in 1968 and “Penny Lane” September 30th 1971. While the original ‘80s era Mobile Fidelity Magical Mystery Tour LP featured Capitol’s “reprocessed for stereo” tracks, the Mo-Fi cassette has the true stereo mixes, which just adds to the “fucked-upness” of this entire MMT enterprise—not that the songs aren’t. Most groups would kill to produce a collection of Beatles “cast offs” like this. It figures that the only typo I could find on this entire box set (so far) is on the MMT jacket where “Los Angeles” is “Los Angels”. Of course, translated from Spanish it’s “The Angels”, but “Los Angels” is a mutt.

You can read the stereo box MMT review here

When this album was first released most American kids had not idea what it was other than a follow up to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember buying it at a small Ithaca book and record store and thinking “WTF is this?” (though not with that acronym since it had not yet been devised). The cover sucked and when I opened it and looked at the booklet it was double WTF. Here were my untouchable heroes looking beyond goofy. What was this?

Other than the still magnificent “I Am The Walrus”, said to have been cobbled together by Lennon from parts of three songs and filled with not very well hidden references to a notorious rock star busting drug squad cop, religious criticism and other issues on Lennon's mind at the time (the ending is not "everybody smoke pot", which everyone did anyway) most of the rest of the side was pretty weak. The title track was just okay, “The Fool on the Hill” notable, “Flying” filler, “Blue Jay Way” evocative and interesting and “Your Mother Should Know” equals “When I’m Sixty Five”. Side two was of course outstanding but five songs? And three in fake stereo? And what was this all about? It was a major let-down of course.

Today, with the backdrop known, it’s still a let-down as an album but any album with “I Am the Walrus” and some of the others can’t be all that bad and this one isn’t.

Again, the mono mixes are for the most part, more coherent than the stereo ones (“I Am the Walrus” stereo reverts to mono once the “King Lear” stuff starts because that was taken from a live radio feed as it was performed and it hadn’t been recorded by anyone), for the reasons repeated in the other record reviews. The original mono mix of “Blue Jay Way” is very different from the stereo in that the latter mix had the entire song running backwards on a tape machine injected into the mix at various points while the original mono did not.

In retrospect side two “stereo lust” was as much because it was at first unobtainable and than somewhat hard to find only on the German pressing. Plus the American original mono sounds distant, bright and thoroughly mediocre. The original’s deep bass had been completely lopped off. This reissue absolutely kills the original mono American release in every way: transparency, dynamics, frequency extension, you name it. Wait. I just did!