Recording while filming
The songs for Magical Mystery Tour were made in a scattered way. Some had been recorded earlier in 1967, including the title song, which was begun in the spring. Others were completed in the autumn, in the same weeks as the film shoot, with the Beatles moving between studio and location. The key place was EMI Studios in Abbey Road, London, where the group worked with producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick. The best documented of the autumn recordings is I Am the Walrus.
I Am the Walrus
John Lennon’s song was begun in early September 1967. Lennon is generally said to have drawn on several sources: the Lewis Carroll poem The Walrus and the Carpenter, and a letter from a schoolboy at his old school who had mentioned that teachers were analysing Beatles lyrics. Lennon reportedly found the idea amusing and set out to write words that could not be analysed, and the result is a stream of images that only partly make sense.
The backing track was recorded first, with a repetitive, slightly mechanical rhythm and an unusual electric piano part. Later sessions added strings, cellos and a brass section arranged by George Martin, who worked from Lennon’s ideas and shaped them into a written score. A choir of professional singers was also brought in to chant and sing nonsense phrases, giving the ending its crowd-like effect. The arrangement helps to lift a fairly simple melody into the strange, dense piece that it became.
King Lear on the radio
One of the most talked-about details is the use of a radio broadcast. During the final mixing in late September, Lennon is said to have had a radio tuned to the BBC and decided to feed whatever was playing into the mix. What came out was a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and fragments of dialogue from the play can be heard in the fade-out, between the choir and the strings.
The effect was spontaneous, and it was possible only because the mix was being performed live, with several people working the controls at once. It is a small example of the freedom that the studio offered the Beatles in 1967, when they were no longer touring and could treat recording as a creative playground. It also fits with the wider trend of psychedelic recording techniques that the band had helped to popularise.
Blue Jay Way
George Harrison wrote Blue Jay Way in Los Angeles in August 1967, on a trip that also took him to Haight-Ashbury, and recorded it at EMI soon after. The song has a slow, drifting feel, built on a repeating organ part, cellos and a heavy use of studio effects. Backward sounds and echoed vocals add to the impression of fog. The arrangement shows the continuing influence of Indian music on Harrison, although the song is a Western pop piece, not an Indian one: the influence is in the drone-like quality and the sense of suspended time.
Flying and the Mellotron
Flying was a group instrumental, credited to all four Beatles, and it shows a different side of the band’s studio work. The Mellotron, a keyboard that plays pre-recorded tape sounds, had been heard on Strawberry Fields Forever earlier in 1967 and was part of the group’s palette at this time, and its eerie, wavering tone suits the floating mood of Flying. The tune itself is simple, a basic twelve-bar structure with bright instrumental colour, and the effect comes mainly from the sounds.
The songs from earlier in the year
The title song was begun in April 1967 and finished later, with a trumpet part by session player David Mason. Your Mother Should Know was recorded in August 1967 and has the old-fashioned dance-hall feel of the best of McCartney’s lighter tunes. The Fool on the Hill, written by McCartney, was recorded in September, with a flute and recorders that give it its pastoral sound. None of these was as experimental as Walrus, but together they show the variety in the group’s output.
What the sessions show
Taken together, the sessions show a band working in two modes. One was the playful, quick and relaxed approach of a group making music for a film. The other was the detailed, layered style that had defined Sgt. Pepper and the Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane singles. The Mystery Tour songs, especially I Am the Walrus, belong more to the second mode, and their reputation has outlasted that of the film they were written for.