Spend $99.00 get Free Shipping on anything gets free shipping option USA only
Shopping cart
You have no items in your shopping cart.

How the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour was almost, but not quite, saved

28 November, 2015 - 0 Comments

Pity the poor Brits, who only received the first side of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour as an EP. After all, Side 2 of the 1967 American version included the greatest double-sided single in Beatles history — “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” — when Capitol paired the original film’s music with a trio of recent double-sided hits.

It made for a surprisingly effective soundtrack, when you consider its association with such a badly conceived, awfully executed movie misfire. But even the American version of Magical Mystery Tour — released in the U.S. on November 27, 1967, it’s now part of the canon — struggles to overcome comparisons with the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, issued earlier the same year. There’s no over-reaching theme on Magical Mystery Tour, no fizzy medleys, no eye-popping maze of cultural icons to pore over on the cover — and that tends to expose the weaker songs in a way that it didn’t for Sgt. Pepper.

So, we have Paul McCartney offering the limpid, but ultimately undercooked “The Fool on the Hill” and, with “Your Mother Should Know,” another in what has become an unbroken series across the decades of pre-rock throwback piffles. George Harrison, who had begun an often-interesting exploration into Indian music, took an experiment with drones on “Blue Jay Way” to the point of monotony. That’s to say nothing of the tossed-off instrumental filler of “Flying.” Sometimes the added-on songs on the project’s second half are no better: John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love,” for all of its pop culture cache as the first globally broadcast song, remains more pastiche than visionary. The dopey “Hello Goodbye” would have been, without question, the worst No. 1 song the Beatles ever had — if not for the morbid, crashingly boring “The Long and Winding Road.”

Comments (0)
Close