The Beatles, The #1 Artist of the Rock Era, Part Eight

 

(Continued from Part Seven)

Riding the crest of the momentum of Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles planned for two projects, a one-hour television movie to be called Magical Mystery Tour and a full-length animated movie called Yellow Submarine.  The band began recording for Magical Mystery Tour in April of 1967 but stopped to focus on recording songs for Yellow Submarine.

 

On June 25, the Beatles performed "All You Need Is Love" to an estimated global televised audience of 350 million viewers and released the single a week later.  It jumped to #1 in nearly every country in the world and sold over one million copies.

In addition to expanding their use of psychedelic drugs during the summer, the group met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in London and the next day, traveled to a Transcendental Meditation retreat.  

On August 27, the Beatles learned that Epstein, the man behind all of their success to this point, had died.  "We collapsed," Lennon said later to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine.  I knew that we were in trouble then.  I didn't really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music."

Patti Boyd, Harrison's wife at the time, said in her 2008 biography, Wonderful Tonight:  George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Me:   "Paul and George were in complete shock.  I don't think it could have been worse if they had heard that their own fathers had dropped dead."  

The group soldiered on and released the "Magical Mystery Tour" Soundtrack in December.  In the first three weeks after its release, the album set a record for the highest initial sales of any LP in the history of Capitol Records. 

"Hello, Goodbye" went to either #1 or #2 in every major country in the world and sold over one million copies.  It was the group's 15th career #1 song.  It is The #76 Song of the Rock Era*.

The premise of the film, which Paul imagined on a flight home from America with Mal Evans, was to have unscripted action; various "normal" people were to travel on a coach and experience unspecified "magical" adventures.  Paul extended the idea from actual trips he took in his youth to northern England:

            It used to just be called a mystery tour, up

            north.  When we were kids, you'd get on a

            bus, and you didn't know where you were

            going, but nearly always it was Blackpool.

            Everyone would spend time guessing 

            where they were going, and this was part

            of the thrill.  

           One of our great inspirations was always 

           the Barker.  "Roll up!  Roll up!"  

           promise of something:  the newspaper ad

           that says "guaranteed not to crack", the

           "high class" butcher, "satisfaction 

           guaranteed" from 'Sgt. Pepper'.  "Come

           inside", "Step Inside, Love"; you'll find

           that pervades a lot of my songs.

All the group had on April 25, 1967 when they walked into the EMI Studios was a title and a few bars of music.  Through what is truly magical, that transformed into "Magical Mystery Tour".

 

Paul wrote "Fool On The Hill" for the movie and it was filmed on a hilltop near Nice in France.  "I think I was writing about someone like Maharishi," Paul said to Barry Miles for the biography Many Years from Now.  His detractors called him a fool.  Because of his giggle he wasn't taken too seriously.  It was this idea of a fool on the hill, a guru in a cave, I was attracted to."

Paul first recorded a solo demo with no other Beatles, then the group began recording it on September 25.  Dissatisfied, they returned on the 26th for takes six and seven, and it is a mix of those that yielded the final product.  On October 20, three flautists - Jack Ellory and brothers Christopher and Richard Taylor - completed the finishing touches, scored by George Martin at the suggestion of McCartney.

 

The "Magical Mystery Tour" Soundtrack topped the Album chart for eight weeks.  This wonderfully unusual song resulted from lyrics John designed to mess with the heads of scholars trying to dissect songs by the group.  

John got the idea of the Walrus from the poem The Walrus and The Carpenter, from the Lewis Carroll sequel to Alice in Wonderland called Through the Looking-Glass.  The voices at the end of "I Am The Walrus" are from a BBC broadcast of the Shakespeare play King Lear.  This section of the play is from Act Four, Scene 6:

Oswald:  "Slave, thou has slain me.  Villain, take my purse."

Edgar:  "I know thee well:  a serviceable villain, as duteous to the vices of thy mistress as badness would desire."

Gloucester:  "What, is he dead?"

Edgar:  "Sit you down, father.  Rest you."

 

Paul wrote this at his London home.  The title is from the screenplay of A Taste Of Honey:

              I wrote it in Cavendish Avenue on the

              harmonium I have in the dining room 

              there.  My Aunty Jin and Uncle Harry and

              a couple of relatives were staying and

              they were in the living room just across

              the hall, so I just went to the dining room

             and spent a few hours with the door 

             open with them listening.  And I suppose

             because of the family atmosphere "Your

             Mother Should Know" came in.  It's a

             very music-hall kind of thing, probably 

             influenced by the fact that my Aunty Jin

             was in the house.

         

(Abbey Road Studios, the place where all the magic happened.)

The group began recording of the song at Chappell Recording Studios on Maddox Street in London as Abbey Road was booked.  The Beatles recorded eight takes of the rhythm track on August 22 and recorded overdubs for the song the next day, which was also Brian Epstein's last-ever presence at a Beatles recording session. The band recorded 11 more takes on September 16 at Abbey Road but then decided the Chappell recordings were the best. 

 "Baby You're A Rich Man" is from an unfinished John Lennon song called "One Of The Beautiful People", to which McCartney added the chorus.  It is one of the best known songs to utilize the clavioline, a keyboard instrument that was a forerunner to the synthesizer.  John selected the oboe setting for the clavioline.  The Beatles recorded and mixed it at Olympic Sound Studios in London, one of the few times a Beatles song was created entirely away from EMI Studios.

As solid as the music was, the film for Magical Mystery Tour was lambasted by the media, although millions of people watched the broadcast.  Yellow Submarine was largely praised, and the soundtrack album featured four new songs, as well as the title track (already included on Revolver), "All You Need Is Love" (featured on the Magical Mystery Tour album in the U.S.) and seven instrumentals composed by George Martin.

 

This song evolved from an early demo in 1968 called "She Can Talk To Me".  The Beatles recorded it on February 11, 1968 at Abbey Road Studios while they were being filmed for a promotional video for the single "Lady Madonna".  The recording and mixing took 10 hours, with George running his guitar through a fuzz box.  "Hey Bulldog" was deleted from prints of the movie to cut the time down, but the song was restored in 1999 when the film was re-released.    

 

The Beatles departed for India in February, 1968 for a three-month meditation "Guide Course" with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  The group was inspired to write numerous songs during this period, many of which appeared on their next album.  But Starr couldn't take the food and left after just 10 days, and McCartney too left a month later.  

After an electronics technician known as Magic Alex suggested to Lennon and Harrison that the Maharishi was trying to manipulate them and alleged that the Maharishi had made sexual advances to women attendees, Lennon left before the end of the course, bringing Harrison with him.  John wrote a blistering song called "Maharishi", which was renamed "Sexy Sadie" to avoid potential legal issues.  McCartney commented to Bill Harry for the 2000 book The Beatles Encyclopedia:  Revised and Updated, "We made a mistake.  We thought there was more to him than there was."  

The Beatles created a business structure known as Apple Corps, initially designed for tax purposes but expanded to include their own record company as well as a vehicle to promote peace and education.  Lennon and McCartney officially unveiled the project in May in New York City.  There were several subsidiaries of Apple such as Apple Electronics (with the goal of nurturing technological innovations) and Apple Retailing, which briefly opened the Apple Boutique in London.  But poor hiring decisions and other factors led to unsuccessful projects that drained the group of millions of dollars.

Apple Records was more successful, with the label signing artists such as James Taylor, Badfinger, and others.

Another of the Beatles' career best is next.  "'Lady Madonna' was me, sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing," Paul said in a 1994 interview.  "It reminded me of Fats Domino, so I started singing a Fats Domino impression.  It took my other voice to a very odd place."

The group recorded it on Saturday, February 3 and returned to Abbey Road three days later for vocal overdubs and a few additional piano parts, when they decided that some added brass would give the song a nice touch.  A few phone calls landed four saxophonists, including Ronnie Scott and Harry Klein.

"Lady Madonna" was a #1 smash in most countries, including the U.K., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria, but settled for #4 in the U.S. despite selling over two million singles there.

We've arrived at a classic for which one can truly say it doesn't get much better than this.  It's a ballad that Paul wrote to John's son Julian during the divorce of his parents.  

In June of 1968, McCartney drove to Weybridge to visit Cynthia Lennon and her son.  On the way, Paul thought about their changing lives and all the time he had spent with John at that house:

       I thought, as a friend of the family, I would

          motor out to Weybridge and tell them that

          everything was all right; to try and cheer    

          them up, basically, and see how they were. 

          I had about an hour's drive.  I would always

          turn the radio off and try and make up 

         songs, just in case...I started singing:  "Hey

         Jules - don't make it bad, take a sad song,

         and make it better..."  It was optimistic, a

         hopeful message for Julian:  "Come on 

         man, your parents got divorced.  I know

         you're not happy, but you'll be OK."

McCartney recorded a piano demo when he returned to his home in Cavendish and played it for Lennon for the first time:

         I finished it all up in Cavendish and I was

         in the music room upstairs when John and

         Yoko came to visit and they were right

         behind me over my right shoulder, 

         standing up, listening to it as I played it

         to them, and when I got to the line, "The

         movement you need is on your shoulder,"

         I looked over my shoulder and I said, "I'll

         change that, it's a bit crummy," and John

         said, "You won't you know.  That's the

         best line in it!"  

         That's collaboration.  When someone's

         that firm about a line that you're going to

         junk, and he said, "No, keep it in."  I love

         those words now.

    

 

In addition to the instrumentation of the Beatles, 10 violins, 3 violas, 3 cellos, 2 double basses, 2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 1 bass clarinet, 1 bassoon, 1 contrabassoon, 4 trumpets, 2 horns, 4 trombones and 1 percussionist was brought in to record the song.

"Hey Jude" was a universal #1, a colossal hit that has sold over eight million units to date.  In the United States, it spent nine weeks at #1, among the most ever at that spot and during one of the most competitive times in music history.  It should come as no surprise, then, that it is The #2 Song of the Rock Era*.

Another legendary album is next.  Don't miss that in Part Nine!