1967 at 50: THE BEATLES - MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

The return of my brother at the end of 1975 changed my life. Not the person as much as the suitcase of records he brought with him (along with an adoring entourage). The year I made the sacrifice of adopting teen culture and adding rock music to the things that were mine was mostly fed with Countdown and local radio. That changed immediately. That afternoon I broke the stillness in the wake of Michael's gang heading off to some neighbourhood hedonism by immersing myself in Led Zeppelin III. I've already described that in the article about that album. But the other golden vein he brought was Beatles and one of the first things I did was find this album.

It must have been the cover with its bright yellows and reds, harlequin stars and the band in animal costumes. Taking it out of the sleeve protector it fell open to reveal the storybook in the gatefold. As I pored over the photographs of the Beatles on the bus, in uniform, as facepainted wizards, I put the disc on and listened as I read the odd text illustrated with odder cartoons. And the trip burst forth.

Roll up roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour! Step right this way!

A big brassy opening gives way to the brassy harmonies singing roll up rollup for the Mystery Tour. Everything drives forward, the big piano chords, the cantering drumming and variations in the shouting exclamations. Less than three minutes of sheer joy. But then it ends on a strange melancholy piano fading through a kind of jazz groove.

The mood continues for the next song, Paul's Fool on the Hill with its tale of an outsider who's happy to be strange regardless of the mockery of the straight world. Paul's vocal can sound strained at times but the sincerity of the song is commanding. Odd textures and colours, branting baritone harmonicas, electronic swishes and a rude off pitch recorder add a schoolyard touch to it. I didn't need the illustrations to show me the scene of this one, lowered myself into it and watched, feeling like the weirdo in the title, home.

Flying is the most underrated Beatles song. It's an instrumental and short but it starts with big electric guitars with amp tremolo that take you up and lift you to the sky. A gentle acoustic playing thirds gleams over this and then we're under way. Organs, oboes and eventually the band's voices play the lovely upwardly moving theme. The motion is smooth and shimmering, a perfect summer day's flight. It ends in what I would soon learn was a mellotron playing odd phrases which like the end of the title track seem to just emerge from underneath the track.

Blue Jay Way. A bright organ chord. A swirling eastern melody meanders over. George's mournful vocal immersed in a flanger continues the tune as a giant bass thumps underneath. There's a gap between verse and chorus which stays in  the east as George moans "please don't be long". Phased drums and backing vocals and grief stricken cellos drive this one through a kind of lysergic sludge. I had never heard atmosphere like this in any music. It's both sinister and sad, alone in the kind of night we had in Townsville when the single sheet of cloud was lighted to a purple mud by the suburban lights and the air thickened with the humidity.

A bouncing singalong by Paul is next with Your Mother Should Know. Clear and beautiful vocal harmonies and a minor key with a break on the piano and organ that had the sound of something from a mystery movie. It doesn't stick around but it's solid and strangely moody, ending on a vocal chord with a groaning tambura trailing out.

Next came the one that scared me: I am the Walrus. A few bars of broken chords on an electric piano are swamped by a thick string section playing another eastern sounding motif. Some rattats on the snare and everyone's in with the same kind of thumping machine as on Blue Jay Way. But John's vocal is acidic, distorted like a fuzz guitar as he spits out strange lines: "I am he as you are he and you are me and we are all together. See how they run like pigs from a gun. See how they fly. I'm crying ..." The momentum grinds on as though the nonsense of the words have the most earnest meaning. The second "I'm crying" is repeated in a lightly broken falsetto which sounds like he really is crying. Second chorus shuts down as a variant of the opening string figure plays druggedly over a small cacophony of laughter and goonish talking. The middle eight is about rain and sunshine and is drawn back into the chorus. The final verse takes the images further into disgust and violence and when the final chorus is trudged through the fade out driven by the violins scraping upwards, a semitone at a time until it seems they can no longer hold the rhythm and grind down into long single notes until they reach the top of their gamut. Meanwhile a group of monsters start chanting something like hop frog hop frog everybody's hop frog over and over and then other voices, spoken start bleeding in talking about burial and murder. Until you know that that last detail was a BBC performance of King Lear and the chant was "got one got one everybody's got one" the fade out sounds like the ghastly fulfilment of all the words before it which to my suggestive mind might well have been a black magic spell. I actually worried about that and wondered if that's what got me listening to it again and again.

This brings us to the end of the sequence as originally released in the UK as a double single with the booklet in a gatefold in a miniature version of the one that came out in the US and I was playing here. The US release for once actually went one better than the UK one. Side two was made up of the non album singles of that year and is rich from first to last.

Bashing straight into Hello Goodbye, Paul's big bright tenor rides on shining piano chords and swishing percussion. The band comes in with a solid electric guitar arrangement, massive kick drum sound, phased backing vocals, a strange druggy sounding string section and blasts of delay on the vocals. Not much to the lyric. I say this and you say the opposite. The song ends then bursts into a coda with a nonsense chant that sounds Hawaiian. Pure joy.

If I am the Walrus scared me Strawberry Fields continued to terrify me with its dreamlike slow motion and dark sounding vocal. It was at once tangy sweet and unsettling. The words seemed similar to the Fool on the Hill where the narrator was happy to hide away in a treehouse in a place where there was nothing to get hung about. I took hung to mean hanged. And then there was the fade out with the wobbly dissonant flutes and black thunderous drums and the murmuring words at the end. My sister Marina whoalso returned to the fold for those holidays told me that Strawberry Fields was a brand of LSD which soon after intrigued me but then just worried me. And the murmuring at the end under the weird flutes was John telling us he'd buried Paul. Then out came the Paul is Dead clues which fascinated and creeped me out. The bulk of the song was irresistable musically but I always lifted the needle before the horror of the fade out could start.

Penny Lane like Hello Goodbye starts with the vocal straight away. This was one I knew from before and loved to hear with its big glittering brass section and Bach trumpet. The loping bassline, bright vocal and gleaming harmonies catch me to this day. The textures that could vary from the trail of a bell or vibrating wine glasses fused into a whole that seemed discovered under marble rather than built. I strongly appreciated the classical connections.

Baby You're a Rich Man start with a chugalug rhythm and a strange oboe twiddling wriggly melody. The harmonies of the vocal are in falsetto and trade with Lennon's fuller lead vocal and the football shout of the chorus. The song seemed to be about what life was like as a famous person who could get or do anything they wanted. Didn't really leave an impression but I never skipped it.

All You Need is Love, on the other hand, I would put on to hear it by itself. Beginning with a rousing brass section playing La Marsellaise the band sing Love love love over a harpsichord and lower strings. John's vocal is half spoken and speaks of inevitability and the order of things before shouting All you need is love. A tiny guitar solo plays the verse melody and the chorus again. The last verse and chorus are eventually swamped by a mounting series of interpolations that add a crowd to the fadeout chant ot Love is all you need, from Paul yelling "everybody" singing the chorus of She Loves You, the saxes playing Glenn Miller riffs and a sense of barely contained but happy chaos.

I had to listen many times before I started appreciating just how much thinking and work had gone into these tracks. In those months where I heard a lot of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in one go, without any sense of timeline forced me to approach all of it as music, rather than music made by famous people the way it came across on Countdown. All of this consolidated in my head and joined what I knew of J.S. Bach, Mozart or Elgar. This is what, I assumed, the Beatles had began with, these orchestrations and intricate textures and colours. I also assumed (Hey, I was thirteen and listening to rock music closely for the first time) that they played all the instruments or used synthesisers. I had the same absurd confidence in the cure-all power of electronic instruments as some people have in plastic surgery, believing they could solve any problem in their field. Later when I heard the early Beatles I was able to marvel all over again how they'd developed so rapidly.

Until then I had the odd naive booklet with its strange druggy cartoons and the full colour pages of a movie that I expected was like any movie I saw at the cinema with plotting and acting and, in this case, singing and playing. Over the years I read enough to learn that it was poorly regarded and it wasn't until decades later that I saw it on VHS with a near constant wince of embarrassment as the band demonstrated repeatedly as though it had been planned as torture, how they had no idea of how to make a film. Yes, I suckered up and bought the blu-ray with its high def image and sound and I'm softer on the film than I was and am happy to leave it on while I draw until the songs happen.

But it was this album rather than Sargent Pepper that convinced me of The Beatles' musical power and suggested a creative bar placed high. A few months after that I was won over by Queen's A Night at the Opera which, it struck me, was made to the same standards of musicianship and composition and cohesion that Magical Mystery Tour had (despite itself, as I was to learn) and continued the timeline of making records to that industrial standard. And then two years later I was jammed into the big angry noise of punk. but even then, while I was soon to donate my Zeppelin and similar albums to my brother on leaving Townsville I kept all the Beatles ones and when those appeared in new technological packages (CD and then the remasters) I always bought this one first.

1967 at 50: DISRAELI GEARS CREAM

If you learned how to play guitar enough to play along to records in the '70s you knew about blues. Well, you knew about three chords in twelve bars that just kept circling around until the song ended. What you didn't know about were names like Robert Johnson or Howlin' Woolf because no one around you had any records by them because no one else knew about them either. What you played along to was pasty dialled boys from the south of England who did the three chord thang as though they'd come up with it. If you looked at the names in the brackets by the titles you saw a lot of difference and noticed that the few brackets that held names you knew belonged to some of the people on the record sleeve. You also knew that those songs sounded the same as the ones by the strangers. Later, when everything widened out, you might hear the real thing and if you weren't as disappointed with it as you were that wine didn't taste like strong cordial you are lying or you are rare. If you heard that stuff first it would have been different: Led Zeppelin's heavier take, The Stones' more opiod one or Hendrix's interstellar one would have sounded like exploration and Willie Dixon like a pioneer. But it didn't happen that way.

I first knew Cream as a band name only and it took years to finally hear the music. Eric Clapton in the mid-'70s was already a household god and you were meant to speak his name reverently even though at that time he just sounded old and flavourless to you. So when I borrowed Disraeli Gears from my brother Greg to see where the reputation came from I was gobsmacked.

A quick unceremonious titter on the drums and the razor sharp riffs of Clapton's overdriven Gibson with another lead overdubbed from the wailing corner of the fretboard. And it's Clapton's own falsetto that changes everything. I had heard at that stage too many hearty throated shouters sounding like note perfect eisteddfod acts and assumed all white blues was like that. In fact, I thought they all sounded like Jack Bruce from the few Cream songs I had heard on the radio. But Clapton keeps it in the eerie register of his lead licks, howling about a girl possessed by a wicked Strange Brew of forces. For once the coldness of white boy blues finds its purpose as a kind of whimper of fear like a dark ages monk seeing the demon in every village girl. Not siding with the monk but I can hear what he sees.

Sunshine of Your Love thrusts into gear as a distorted riff, scaffolded on the drums and given a banshee wail on the lead guitar. Jack Bruce's clear masculine vocal singing rises about his own dawn approach to the vessel of his lust. Clapton comes in, almost identical except that it becomes easy to tell Bruce's higher skill from his, and the two trade lines, seemingly about the same girl. A little poetry here but really it only has to sound and feel like sex itself. Here enters Ginger Baker's drumming which goes well against the norm by putting great expression on the toms and letting the odd breath through as the "waiting so long" lines tighten their grip. Clapton's howling solo appears from the shadows, not a million notes but a few well chosen and made of indestructible tone.

World of Pain kicks straight in without a riff but with a barely breaking guitar tone playing chords that seem to slowly shimmer. In fact it's a mix of very slight chord picking on the rhythm and restrained twanky wah on the lead, feeling both heavy and buoyant at once. Clapton's vocal in mournful through the lyric about trees in a stifling city and moves through a dirge of isolation in a pitiless world. Jack Bruce comes in for the chorus with a falsetto that has a strange church like sonority. Again the solo, slight and elegant emerges rather than storming in is almost indistinguishable from the vocals. The fade is similarly busy but stately, a procession of subdued wails and a kind of restless march on the tom toms.

Dance the Night Away kind of sounds like a latin seduction song but the words and instrumentation take a more psychedelic turn. For starters Clapton starts with the band on an electric twelve string (in fact a Fender XII) with a gorgeous minor key arpeggio. Jack Bruce joins in with Clapton in a falsetto harmony vocal for the rest of the song. But instead of seduction it's a kind of self-annihilation piece. After love oblivion which rings in with a strange tremolo solo from Clapton that ricochet's off the Byrds more recent outings and seems to soar through the grey heavens the narrator is imagining, like a mandolin possessed by Syd Barrett. Baker's drums again provide a tidal rise and fall without resort to stock fills or too much simple time playing. We lift with the song and if we listen we wonder why we should. But we do.

Next up is, we have to admit it, is the Ringo song. Blue Condition is a hardworking electric blues track that even I would happily hear  rather than just leave on but there's something in the way. Ginger Baker's vocal drags the entire exercise down through the floorboards. It's not his Lunnon accen'. You want to hear that working listen to the Kinks or the Small Faces. It's that he sounds as though he could'n care less about what always sounds like a well considered lyric. And he was the writer. He can't even sing his own blues. One of the extended releases of this album includes Clapton's vocal but while it is much more engaging it still falls. Maybe Ginger sang it at a practice, suggested it to Eric who didn't want to overdo it so perpetuated the absent mood of the vocal for evermore. Perhaps it's also how anyone who ever covers it also performs it. I suppose there are valid arguments for why it should be such an affectless drone but all I hear is a powerful electric blues betrayed by what sounds like indifference.

The old side two begins with restless wah wah chords  an ominous bass figure and a snakepit swirl of ride cymbals. Jack Bruce's dramatic room temperature vocal starts us off with images of legend and epic. Trhen the band kicks the door down with a weaponised wah wah descent from Clapton in unison with the bass. Over this ground Bruce's huge manly vocal lifts an octave as the band drives hard below. Repeat. That might seem dismissive given the classic status of this track but really with a band at such a peak repeating really means doing it more intensely on the next go. That's what happens here, artist Martin Sharp's Homeric lyric about Odysseus and the sirens, and travel and the epic of a life led boldly. Sharp designed the cover for the album, a psychedelic collage of mugshots, wings and fantastic creatures whose looks border between legendary and sinister. Sharp had the lyric which he showed to Clapton at the pub. Clapton folded it up, took it home and this song came forth. Still one of my favourites from the era with its urgent wah wah, big vocal and Bakers unconventional drumming.

SWLABR crashes to life with a riff made of bass in unison with an extremely distorted guitar. The tight riffing and rhythm and Bruce's wailing vocal charge to the stop/starts where he brings the psychedelic sexuality of the verses to a head with the dadaist image of a painting with a moustache or a rainbow with a beard. Is it sex? Is it tripping on acid? Is it sex while tripping on acid? With all the edibly crunchy guitar sounds and tongue-out vocal, do you care? Just turn it up.

We're Going Wrong begins with a slightly distorted electric 12 string playing a four chord sequence of immediate solemnity as Baker plays something between a funeral march and a medieval basse dance on the toms. Bruce comes in shifting from head voice to falsetto with a lament so plainly stated it feels like raw experience. Near the halfway mark Clapton enters with a banshee wail solo with his famous woman tone, a distorted guitar sound played high on the fretboard in emulation of a woman singing, in this case a woman singing a funeral dirge. It continues when Bruce's vocal returns, even more plaintive and hurt in full falsetto, answering his cries with its own pain until it seems too intense to continue and the song is brought to an end with a oddly out of place blues riff played in unison by bass and guitar as Baker puts the track to bed with some whispering cymbals.

Outside Woman Blues is a Clapton-penned blues in emulation of his influences. The lordy woman lyric is elevated by some judgement of the possessive and adulterous man at the centre. Otherwise, it's really a showcase for Clapton's layered guitars, heavily distorted but playing unison thirds and fifths in soloing and the strong riff of the piece. The song ends with a deftly rendered groan that could have come off any of the records he was so inspired by. Is it Clapton himself? Jack Bruce? It's Eric's vocal for the rest of the song but the styling is so studied and precise it's hard to say.

Take it Back is standard runkachunkasplunka boogie with harmonica and Clapton's wailing tone (and more electric 12 playing rhythm). An audience makes itself heard but sounds like it's in the studio. The rollicking gait of the piece obscures its anti conscription  message. Musically unloved by me but I'll leave it on.

Mother's Lament rounds off one of the most innovative electric blues records of its era with a throwaway joke song with wincabley forced Cockney accents, barber shop harmonies, carefully sloppy and pub piano playing. When I was a kid I loved this bit and would often play it again. These days I'll only leave it playing if I'm doing the washing up or something that would make it difficult to switch it off.

This was a peak for the power trio and the result of a timeline of decision and indesicion, and trial and error, that managed to find them concentrating on providing a record of their strengths as a musical unit aside from their spectacular live shows. Instead of following the culture by insisting on writing everything themselves they collaborated with anyone who brought good things to the table and fashioned songs that could exist without their playing and arrangements. Jimi Hendrix's debut album suffered from shortcomings in composition that, while absent from subsequent releases, makes Are You Experienced a lesser beast today than Electric Ladyland. But Cream found their own path in a kind of open architecture and an appreciation of the difference between what makes a good show and a good album. This record still sounds very, very fresh.