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.
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