While there is more than a little debate about the validity of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (released 11/27/67) as a bonafide long-player, the practical fact of the matter is that the ‘album’ was originally a release cobbled together by the group’s American label, Capitol Records, as a means of maximizing holiday record sales back in late 1967.
As originally issued in the Beatles’ native country on Parlophone Records, Magical Mystery Tour consisted of six cuts split between two extended play records. In the United States, those half-dozen tracks were combined with singles released subsequent to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, plus the magnificent double-A side from the previous February “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”.
The US organization had gone to similar lengths in the past in its formulation of Beatles ‘65 and Something New, likewise composites of tracks released as singles, EPs, and LPs issued in Great Britain. As integrated with the content on the English package–which also included a 24-page booklet containing song lyrics, color photos from film production, and color story illustrations by cartoonist Bob Gibson–this handful of titles contributes to what became the only Capitol-generated LP to supersede the band’s intended format and form part of their core discography.
Semantics though it may be to argue, the debate regarding the validity of that designation centers on the work of the Fab Four as they originally conceived it. With over half-century hindsight, that perspective may seem purist to a fault, but to otherwise consider MMT a legitimate Beatles album requires ranking it the weakest of all their long-players (with the exception of those domestic titles tied to the movies A Hard Days Night and Help! both of which featured orchestral pieces taking up roughly half the playing time of each).
Even a re-sequencing of the eleven tracks is a dead end. The highly infectious “Hello Goodbye” might make an effective, if over-obvious, opening cut while its flip side as a single, “I Am the Walrus,” would certainly constitute an even more dramatic album finale than it is as a side closer. In its continuation of Lennon’s Joyean wordplay with sound effects and production, it’s a fine match with “Baby You’re A Rich Man:” where strains of Indian music become ever more prominent through the exotic keyboard sounds of the Clavioline. As such, it’s a likely candidate for the mid-point of an LP, but its own flip side as a 45-rpm record, “All You Need Is Love,” is as slight a tune as the Lennon/McCartney composing team ever wrote (to be fair, it was a commissioned piece, not a naturally inspired one, designed for an international TV broadcast).
Meanwhile, “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” stand alone as a pair of the foursome’s most inventive studio concoctions. The former is a composite of two separate recordings, ingeniously configured by producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick (at author Lennon’s request), its massed blocks of strings and brass underpinned by comparably orchestrated percussion.
A far cry from the subdued early demos, its dark foreboding is also a stark contrast to its sunny opposite wherein McCartney, in direct response to his writing partner’s nostalgic reverie, continued to stretch the boundaries of pop song structure. A decidedly more positive dream-like air permeates this jolly number, that atmosphere epitomized by the charming piccolo trumpet interlude (that reappeared in the truncated form at the end of some mixes).
The half-dozen tracks from the film are lightweight at best and would gain little or no gravitas from juxtaposition from the superior numbers that comprise the second half of the ‘LP.’ “The Fool On The Hill” is a fair McCartney ballad, but “Your Mother Should Know” is an exercise in style pure and simple: to call it a knockoff of “When I’m 64” is being kind. Meanwhile, the title song is as flimsy a conceit as the title song to the iconic (authentic?) 1967 Beatles album, “Flying” is a limp instrumental that could only work to discernible effect if used in snippets as segues between the other numbers. And on “Blue Jay Way,” the sonic effects of phasing and echo are more interesting than the song itself; this is not the kind of heartfelt substantial material that would prompt George Harrison to contemplate a solo album over the next two years.
All that said, Magical Mystery Tour is not the most expedient example of the craven mercenary approach Capitol Records took to the bastardizing of the Beatles albums. The label borrowed liberally from both Rubber Soul and Revolver to create Yesterday And Today and, in doing so, seriously distorts those 1965 and 1966 works in their fourteen-track forms. Standing as the arguable pinnacles of the quartet’s studio collaborations with producer George Martin, with fifty-five years of hindsight, those better-integrated collections cast an ever wider and longer shadow over Magical Mystery Tour.
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John Lennon is on record somewhere saying that MMT was his favorite Beatles LP because it was so odd…