The shape of the year
For the Beatles, 1967 was the first full year without live concerts, and almost everything they did was tied to the studio, television or the business ventures they hoped to run themselves. The dates below are given as precisely as is safe. Where sources differ on a day, only the month is stated.
January and February
The recording sessions that began in November 1966 continued through the new year. Two promotional films were made in late January and early February, one for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and the Penny Lane film, both shot in southern England. The two songs were released together as a double A-side single in February 1967, in the United States slightly ahead of Britain. In the UK it reached number two, held off the top spot by a ballad by Engelbert Humperdinck. Also in February, the orchestral section of “A Day in the Life” was recorded with a large group of classical players at Abbey Road.
March and April
Work on the album carried on through the spring. In March the group recorded “Within You Without You” with Indian musicians, and at the end of the month they posed for the sleeve photograph that gathered a crowd of cardboard and waxwork figures around the band. The last recording sessions finished in April.
May and June
The Sgt. Pepper album, titled Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was released in Britain at the end of May and the beginning of June, with 1 June commonly cited as its date and the American release following within days. It was received with great enthusiasm by most critics and sold very strongly, and its release came as the Summer of Love took shape in San Francisco and London. A press party for the album was held in London in May.
On 25 June, the group appeared in the Our World broadcast, a live link between several countries by satellite. They performed “All You Need Is Love” with friends and fellow musicians sitting around them in the studio. The song was released as a single in July.
July and August
On 24 July the four members signed a full-page advertisement in The Times that called for reform of the cannabis laws, and the Times marijuana advertisement drew a good deal of press comment. Later in the summer, in late August, they went to a lecture by the Indian teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and then travelled to Bangor in Wales for a meditation event.
On 27 August the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, was found dead at his London home at the age of 32. The coroner’s verdict was accidental death by an overdose of sleeping medication. The group ended their trip to Wales at once. Epstein had steered their career from Liverpool clubs to world fame, and his death left the group without a manager just as they were moving into more independent projects.
September to November
The Epstein death aftermath shaped what came next. In September the Beatles began filming Magical Mystery Tour, a television project with a coach, a cast of friends and actors and no finished script. McCartney drove much of the early planning. Filming ran for several weeks, and the footage was edited over the following months. The song “I Am the Walrus”, written by John Lennon, was recorded in September.
In November, “Hello, Goodbye” was released as a single, backed by “I Am the Walrus”. Around the same time the American label Capitol issued a Magical Mystery Tour album that combined the film songs with the year’s singles.
December
Early in December the group opened the Apple Boutique at 94 Baker Street in London, a shop that was part of their wider Apple business plans. It featured a psychedelic mural painted on its outside wall and a stock of clothes and objects by a design collective. It lasted less than a year and was closed in mid-1968, when the remaining stock was reportedly given away.
The British release took the form of a double EP, which arrived in early December. The film itself was shown on BBC1 in a Boxing Day broadcast on 26 December, in black and white, and critics were largely unkind, with the Daily Mail among the harshest. It was the first significant setback of their public career, though the music from the project remained popular.
Reading the year as a whole
Taken together, the calendar shows an unusual pattern. The first half of the year was dominated by one very controlled project, the album and its single, while the second half was marked by shorter bursts of activity, public statements, television and a business venture, all affected by the loss of Epstein. The members also began to move in different directions: Harrison’s interest in Indian music and religion, Lennon’s more personal songwriting and McCartney’s organising energy. That process was only beginning in 1967, and its consequences belong to the following years.