Day 294: The Beatles – Magical Mystery Tour

Today, I was venturing out to enjoy Summer Solstice and I wanted a fitting album to play in the car. I chose the Magical Mystery Tour, one of my less listened to albums by Beatles. I also have some Beatles themed outings coming up, but maybe more on that later.

I’m just going to skip writing a general introduction to the band – if you’re reading a pretty obscure music blog, you know about the Beatles.

The Magical Mystery Tour was released in 1967 as the group’s ninth studio album. It was originally recorded as the soundtrack to an experimental film that Paul McCartney was recording, but it took a turn when the group’s manager Brian Epstein died. They had been with him for their whole career, so the band felt directionless, and McCartney took control of recording the album and creating the film. It was broadcast on the BBC on Boxing Day in 1967.

The music was released as an LP in the US and a double EP in the UK. The first half of it was songs from the film, while the second one consisted of their recent singles. It also included a 24-page booklet with song lyrics and comics.

As an album, it’s a continuation for the psychedelic sound they’d been experimenting with since thei 1966 release, Revolver. It’s possibly them at their weirdest, especially on songs like “I am the Walrus”, which was inspired by two acid trips and the Lewis Carrol poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”.

The experimenting with LSD had started when John Lennon and George Harrison unwittingly took it when they went to a party at their dentist’s place, but they quickly got the rest of the band in on it, as told by George Harrison:

John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid because we couldn’t relate to them anymore. Not just on the one level – we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much.

This album presents a fun moral conundrum of is being a dealer morally OK if the drugs are of the fun and semi-harmless psychedelic variety and the person you sell them to composes a masterpiece, because psychedelic Beatles is the band at their best. Oviously the dealers who sold them hard drugs were terrible, but whatever guy they had for psychedelics is probably at least a bit OK in the grand scheme of things – without them, we probably wouldn’t have “Strawberry Fields Forever”.

Technically we could probably regard that as them taking drugs for the greater good of the world, because I wouldn’t want to live in a world without songs like “All You Need Is Love”. It was originally written by Lennon-McCartney as the UK’s contribution to Our World, the first global live TV programme, where they performed it live to 400 million people. There’s something very sweet about that, like it’s their answer to the question of if you could speak to every single person in the world, what would you say. It’s a pretty good answer, too.

It’s a classic album for a reason. The Magical Mystery Tour is a 9.5/10.