Magical Mystery Tour is a record by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a double EP in the United Kingdom and an LP in the United States. It includes the soundtrack to the 1967 television film of the same title. The EP was issued in the UK on 8 December 1967 on the Parlophone label, while the Capitol Records LP release in the US and Canada occurred on 27 November and features an additional five songs that were originally released as singles that year. In 1976, Parlophone released the eleven-track LP in the UK.
When recording their new songs, the Beatles continued the studio experimentation that had typified Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and the psychedelic sound they had pursued since Revolver (1966). The project was initiated by Paul McCartney in April 1967, but after the band recorded the song "Magical Mystery Tour", it lay dormant until the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, in late August. Recording then took place alongside filming and editing, and as the Beatles furthered their public association with Transcendental Meditation under teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
The sessions have been characterised by some biographers as aimless and unfocused, with the band members overly indulging in sound experimentation and exerting greater control over production. McCartney contributed three of the soundtrack songs, including the widely covered "The Fool on the Hill", while John Lennon and George Harrison contributed "I Am the Walrus" and "Blue Jay Way", respectively. The sessions also produced "Hello, Goodbye", issued as a single accompanying the soundtrack record, and items of incidental music for the film, including "Flying". Further to the Beatles' desire to experiment with record formats and packaging, the EP and LP included a 24-page booklet containing song lyrics, colour photos from film production, and colour story illustrations by cartoonist Bob Gibson.
Despite the mixed reception of the Magical Mystery Tour film, the soundtrack was a critical and commercial success. In the UK, it topped the EPs chart compiled by Record Retailer and peaked at number 2 on the magazine's singles chart (later the UK Singles Chart) behind "Hello, Goodbye". The album topped Billboards Top LPs listings for eight weeks and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1969. With the international standardisation of the Beatles' catalogue in 1987, Magical Mystery Tour became the only Capitol-generated LP to supersede the band's intended format as the ninth studio album in their core catalogue.
Background
After the Beatles completed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in April 1967, Paul McCartney wanted to create a film that captured a psychedelic theme similar to that represented by author and LSD proponent Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters on the US West Coast. Titled Magical Mystery Tour, it would combine Kesey's idea of a psychedelic bus ride with McCartney's memories of Liverpudlians holidaying on coach tours. The film was to be unscripted: various "ordinary" people were to travel on a coach and have unspecified "magical" adventures. The Beatles began recording music for the soundtrack in late April, but the film idea then lay dormant. Instead, the band continued recording songs for the United Artists animated film Yellow Submarine and, in the case of "All You Need Is Love", for their appearance on the Our World satellite broadcast on 25 June, before travelling over the summer months and focusing on launching their company Apple.
In late August, while the Beatles were attending a Transcendental Meditation seminar held by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Wales, their manager Brian Epstein died of a prescription drug overdose. During a band meeting on 1 September, McCartney suggested they proceed with Magical Mystery Tour, which Epstein had given his approval to earlier in the year. McCartney was keen to ensure the group had a point of focus after the loss of their manager. His view was at odds with his bandmates' wishes, with George Harrison especially eager to pursue their introduction to meditation. According to publicist Tony Barrow, McCartney envisaged Magical Mystery Tour as "open[ing] doors for him" personally and as a new career phase for the band in which he would be the "executive producer" of their films. John Lennon later complained that the project was typical of McCartney's "tendency" to want to work as soon as he had songs ready to record, yet he himself was unprepared and had to set about writing new material.
Recording and production Recording history The Beatles first recorded the film's title song, with sessions taking place at EMI Studios in London between 25 April and 3 May. An instrumental jam was recorded on 9 May for possible inclusion in the film, although it was never completed. According to Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn, the Magical Mystery Tour sessions "began in earnest" on 5 September; filming started on 11 September, and the two activities became increasingly "intertwined" during October. Most of the 16 September session was dedicated to taping a basic track for McCartney's "Your Mother Should Know", only for McCartney to then decide to return to the version he had previously discarded, from 22 to 23 August. The latter sessions marked the Beatles' first in close to two months and took place at a facility new to the band – Chappell Recording Studios in central London – since they were unable to book EMI at short notice.
Many Beatles biographers characterise the group's post-Sgt. Pepper recording sessions of 1967 as aimless and undisciplined. The Beatles' use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD was at its height during that summer and, in author Ian MacDonald's view, this resulted in a lack of judgment in their recordings as the band embraced randomness and sonic experimentation. George Martin, the group's producer, chose to distance himself from their work at this time, saying that much of the Magical Mystery Tour recording was "disorganised chaos". Ken Scott, who became their senior recording engineer during the sessions, recalled, "the Beatles had taken over things so much that I was more their right-hand man than George Martin's".
Early, pre-overdub mixes of some of the film songs were prepared on 16 September, before the Beatles performed the music sequences during a six-day shoot at RAF West Malling, a Royal Air Force base in Kent. The recording sessions continued alongside editing of the film footage, which took place in an editing suite in Soho and was mostly overseen by McCartney. The process led to a struggle between him and Lennon over the film's content. The Beatles also recorded "Hello, Goodbye" for release as a single accompanying the soundtrack record. That his film song "I Am the Walrus" was relegated to the B-side of the single, in favour of McCartney's pop-oriented "Hello, Goodbye", was another source of rancour for Lennon. He later recalled, "I began to submerge."
During this time, the band's commitment to the Maharishi's teachings remained strong. Barrow later wrote that Lennon, Harrison and Ringo Starr were "itching" to travel to India and study with their teacher, but they agreed to postpone the trip and complete the film's soundtrack and editing. Harrison and Lennon promoted Transcendental Meditation with two appearances on David Frost's TV show The Frost Programme, and Harrison and Starr visited the Maharishi in Copenhagen. All four band members attended the 17 October memorial service for Epstein, held at the New London Synagogue on Abbey Road, close to EMI Studios, and the 18 October world premiere of How I Won the War, a film in which Lennon had a starring role. Recording for Magical Mystery Tour was completed on 7 November. That day, the title song was given a new barker-style introduction by McCartney (replacing Lennon's effort, which was nevertheless retained in the version used in the film) and an overdub of traffic sounds.
Three pieces of incidental music were recorded but omitted from the soundtrack record. In the case of "Shirley's Wild Accordion", the scene was cut from the film. Featuring an accordion score by arranger Mike Leander, it was performed by Shirley Evans with percussion contributions from Starr and McCartney, and recorded at De Lane Lea Studios in October. "Jessie's Dream" was taped privately by the Beatles and copyrighted to McCartney–Starkey–Harrison–Lennon, while the third item was a brief Mellotron piece used to orchestrate the line "The magic is beginning to work" in the film.
Production techniques and sounds
In their new songs, the Beatles continued the studio experimentation that had typified Sgt. Pepper and the psychedelic sound they had introduced in 1966 with Revolver. Author Mark Hertsgaard highlights "I Am the Walrus" as the fulfilment of the band's "guiding principle" during the sessions – namely to experiment and be "different". To satisfy Lennon's request that his voice should sound like "it came from the moon", the engineers gave him a low-quality microphone to sing into and saturated the signal from the preamp microphone. In addition to the song's string and horn arrangement, Martin wrote a score for the sixteen backing vocalists (the Mike Sammes Singers), in which their laughter, exaggerated vocalising and other noises evoked the LSD-inspired mood that Lennon sought for the piece. The orchestral arrangement and the vocal score were recorded on a separate four-track tape, which Martin and Scott then manually synchronised with the tape containing the band's performance. The track was completed with Lennon overdubbing live radio signals found at random, finally settling on a BBC Third Programme broadcast of Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear.
According to musicologist Thomas MacFarlane, Magical Mystery Tour shows the Beatles once more "focusing on colour and texture as important compositional elements" and exploring the "aesthetic possibilities" of studio technology. "Blue Jay Way" features extensive use of three studio techniques employed by the Beatles over 1966–67: flanging, an audio delay effect; sound-signal rotation via a Leslie speaker; and (in the stereo mix only) reversed tapes. In the case of the latter technique, a recording of the completed track was played backwards and faded in at key points during the performance, creating an effect whereby the backing vocals appear to answer each line of Harrison's lead vocal in the verses. Due to the limits of multitracking, the process of feeding in reversed sounds was carried out live during the final mixing session. A tape loop of decelerated guitar sounds was used on "The Fool on the Hill" to create a swooshing bird-like effect towards the end of that song. Lennon and Starr prepared seven minutes' worth of tape loops as a coda to "Flying", but this was discarded, leaving the track to end with a 30-second burst of Mellotron sounds.
Although he recognises Sgt. Pepper as the highpoint of the Beatles' application of sound "colorisation", musicologist Walter Everett says that the band introduced some effective "new touches" during this period. He highlights the slow guitar tremolo on "Flying", the combination of female and male vocal chorus, cello glissandi and found sounds on "I Am the Walrus", and the interplay between the lead vocal and violas on "Hello, Goodbye". In MacFarlane's description, the songs reflect the Beatles' growing interest in stereo mixes, as "remarkable sonic qualities" are revealed in the placement of sounds across the stereo image, making for a more active listening experience.
Songs Soundtrack