Magical Mystery Tour

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Lore & Background

The project was initiated by Paul McCartney in April 1967, combining Ken Kesey's idea of a psychedelic bus ride with McCartney's memories of Liverpudlians holidaying on coach tours. 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. 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".

In Their Own Story

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. 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." 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. 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.

Reader's Guide

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. 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.

Did You Know?

• The EP was issued in the UK on 8 December 1967 on the Parlophone label, while the Capitol Records LP release in the US occurred on 27 November and in Canada on 1 December.
• The album topped Billboard's 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 and form part of their core catalogue.
• The Beatles recorded 'Hello, Goodbye' as a standalone single in November 1967, with 'I Am the Walrus' as its B-side, while 'I Am the Walrus' served as the A-side of the Magical Mystery Tour EP in the UK.
• Three pieces of incidental music were recorded but omitted from the soundtrack record, including 'Shirley's Wild Accordion' which was cut from the film.