Magical Mystery Tour (song)
| "Magical Mystery Tour" | ||||||||
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The 1996 US jukebox single release of the song, backed with "The Fool on the Hill"
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| Song by The Beatles from the album Magical Mystery Tour | ||||||||
| Released | 27 November 1967 (US) (LP) 8 December 1967 (UK) (EP) 19 November 1976 (UK) (LP) |
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| Recorded | 25–27 April and 3 May 1967 | |||||||
| Genre | Psychedelic rock | |||||||
| Length | 2:51 | |||||||
| Label | Parlophone, Capitol, EMI | |||||||
| Writer(s) | Lennon–McCartney | |||||||
| Producer(s) | George Martin | |||||||
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"Magical Mystery Tour" is a song by the Beatles, the opening track and theme song for the album, double EP and TV film of the same name. Unlike the theme songs for their other film projects, it was not released as a single.
"Magical Mystery Tour" is credited to Lennon–McCartney, though written primarily by Paul McCartney. McCartney said it was co-written.John Lennon said, "Paul's song. Maybe I did part of it, but it was his concept." In 1972, Lennon said, "Paul wrote it. I helped with some of the lyric." The remaining lyrics explain in a general way the premise of the film: a mystery tour of the type that was popular in Britain when the Beatles were young. Lennon and McCartney expanded the tour to make it magical, which allowed it to be "a little more surreal than the real ones."
There are also other interpretations of the song as an explicit reference to drugs, since the Beatles were experimenting with acid in those years. Paul McCartney himself said about the song:
"Because those were psychedelic times it had to become a magical mystery tour, a little bit more surreal than the real ones to give us a license to do it. But it employs all the circus and fairground barkers, 'Roll up! Roll up!', which was also a reference to rolling up a joint. We were always sticking those little things in that we knew our friends would get; veiled references to drugs and to trips. 'Magical Mystery Tour is waiting to take you away,' so that's a kind of drug, 'it's dying to take you away' so that's a Tibetan Book of the Dead reference. [...] Magical Mystery Tour was the equivalent of a drug trip and we made the film based on that."
Recording began on 25 April 1967, less than a week after the final sessions for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The song was not complete when the session began and much of the evening was spent in rehearsals, but by the end of the evening the basic rhythm track was complete. Bass guitar and vocal overdubs were added by the Beatles on 26 and 27 April. On 3 May, the brass fanfare and other parts were added in a disorganised session where the trumpet players began the evening without a score. According to Philip Jones, a friend of one of the players who was present, one of those players, Elgar Howarth, eventually took matters into his own hands and wrote a score out for them.
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