Strawberry Fields Forever

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“Strawberry Fields Forever”
Single by The Beatles from the album Magical Mystery Tour
A-side	"Penny Lane"
Released	13 February 1967 (UK) 17 February 1967 (US)
Format	7"
Recorded	Abbey Road: November–December 1966
Genre	Psychedelic rock/Experimental rock
Length	4:10
Label	Parlophone (UK) Capitol (U.S.)
Writer(s)	Lennon/McCartney
Producer	George Martin
The Beatles singles chronology
"Eleanor Rigby" / "Yellow Submarine" (1966) "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane" (1967) "All You Need Is Love" (1967)
Music sample
"Strawberry Fields Forever" Problems? See media help.
Magical Mystery Tour track listing
"Hello, Goodbye" (7) "Strawberry Fields Forever" (8) "Penny Lane" (9)

"Strawberry Fields Forever" is a song recorded at the end of 1966 by The Beatles, and released at the beginning of 1967. Written by John Lennon, multiple critics have described it as one of the group's best recordings.^[1][2] It is one of the defining works of the psychedelic rock genre and has been covered numerous times.

The song gave its name to the Strawberry Fields memorial in New York City's Central Park, near the site of Lennon's murder at The Dakota apartment building.^[3][4]

[edit] Composition

Lennon began writing the song in late 1966, while in Almería, Spain filming Richard Lester's How I Won the War.^[5] Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" and McCartney's "Penny Lane" shared the theme of nostalgia for their childhood in Liverpool. While both referred to actual locations there, they also had strong surrealistic and psychedelic overtones.

Strawberry Field now attracts large numbers of tourists

Strawberry Field was the name of a Salvation Army Children's Home just around the corner from Lennon's boyhood home in the Woolton suburb of Liverpool. Lennon and his childhood friends Pete Shotton and Ivan Vaughan used to play in the trees behind the home.^[6] One of Lennon's childhood treats was the garden party held each summer on the grounds of Strawberry Field. Lennon's Aunt Mimi recalled: "As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, 'Mimi, come on. We're going to be late.'"^[7]

The period of its composition was one of momentous change and dislocation for Lennon. The Beatles had just retired from touring after one of the most difficult periods of their career, including the infamous "more popular than Jesus" controversy and their disastrous tour of the Philippines. Lennon's marriage was failing, and the psychological wounds of his childhood were causing him renewed pain. He was also using increasing quantities of drugs, especially the powerful hallucinogen LSD. Although there are no obvious references to drugs, the song's style, tone, and oblique stream of consciousness lyrics are often thought to have been influenced by his LSD experiences.

Lennon said about the song in 1980:

"I was different all my life. The second verse goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius-- 'I mean it must be high or low,'"^[8]

There exists a rich documentary record of demos and studio takes which reveal the evolution of the song. The earliest demo version of the song has a single verse with no refrain:

No one is on my wavelength, I mean, it's either too high or too low; That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right, I mean it's not too bad.

In later demo versions Lennon altered this verse to make it more obscure, and added a second verse; these became the second and third verses respectively on the released version. The first verse on the released version was written close to the time of the song's recording.

According to Simon Freeman of Times Online, "The words 'nothing to get hung about' were inspired by Aunt Mimi's strictures not to play in the grounds. It has gone down in Beatles mythology that the young Lennon would reply: 'They can't hang you for it'."^[9]

[edit] Recording

The song's groundbreaking production and complex arrangement gave clear evidence of the band's near-total mastery of the recording studio and their increasingly avant-garde approach to their music. It featured extensive overdubbing, prominent use of reverse tape effects and tape loops, and extensive audio compression and equalization. In addition to the standard guitar-bass-drums backing, the arrangement also included piano, Mellotron (played by McCartney)^[10], trumpets, cellos and some unusual instruments including the swarmandel,^[11] an Indian stringed instrument which provided the sitar-like sound at the end of each chorus.

The released version of the song is an edit of two different performances. The band recorded multiple takes of two quite distinct versions of the song. The first version featured relatively basic instrumentation of Mellotron, guitars, bass and drums. For the second version, recorded some weeks later, Lennon opted for a much more complex arrangement (scored by George Martin) that included trumpets and cellos, along with the prominent sound of backwards cymbals during the verses.

Lennon decided that he liked the first part of Take 7 (the first version) and the ending of Take 26 (the "orchestral" version). He wanted the finished master to combine these sections from the two versions, and he gave the task of joining them together to producer Martin and recording engineer Geoff Emerick.^[12]

Martin's and Emerick's problem was that the two versions were played in different keys and tempos (Take 7 in A major and Take 26 in C major).^[13] Fortunately for Martin and Emerick, the faster version was also in the higher key. That the two pieces of the song, when joined, have the same tempo and the same key is the result of slowing down the faster and higher-keyed version and speeding up the slower and lower-keyed version to a speed at which both tempo and key matched. (Decreasing the playback speed of a recording has the effect of lowering its key, while increasing a recording's playback speed raises its key.) That the two takes were able to match when tempered in this way and fit together so seamlessly was, according to George Martin, a happy coincidence; when Lennon had first asked Martin to make this edit, the latter observed the two different takes and insisted it would be impossible. There are two edits in the released version: one just after the first verse, before "Let me take you down" (where a superfluous verse was removed); and the second a few seconds later, a more prominent edit between the words "'cause I'm" and "going to" at exactly one minute into the song (where Take 7 blends into Take 26). The pitch-shifting in joining the versions also gave Lennon's lead vocal a slightly other-worldly "swimming" quality.^[14]

The instrument that produced the flute-like sound in the song's introduction was a Mellotron. The previous year, Mike Pinder of The Moody Blues, who had worked for Streetly Electronics under quality control and a test driver for 18 months, introduced the Mellotron to the Beatles, and all four of them purchased one within a week.^[15] One was brought in to the Abbey Road studio especially for the song, and McCartney performed the Mellotron during the recording. This innovative British-made electronic keyboard used eight-second tape segments (or samples) of real instruments such as brass, strings (used on take 1 of the song), and flutes (on takes 2 through 7). Following The Moody Blues, The Beatles were one of the first rock bands to acquire a Mellotron, and "Strawberry Fields Forever" is one of the first uses of the instrument on a pop recording (Graham Bond used it in 1965). As a result of the Beatles' patronage, the instrument was rapidly taken up by other groups and used on other famous recordings of the psychedelic era by Traffic and The Rolling Stones.

Contrary to belief of the Paul Is Dead urban legend supporters, Lennon says "cranberry sauce" at the end of the song rather than "I buried Paul". In 1974 McCartney said:

"That wasn't 'I buried Paul' at all-- that was John saying 'Cranberry sauce.' It was the end of Strawberry Fields. That's John's humor. John would say something totally out of sync, like cranberry sauce. If you don't realize that John's apt to say cranberry sauce when he feels like it, then you start to hear a funny little word there, and you think, 'Aha!'"^[8]

Lennon himself confirmed this in a 1980 Playboy interview. He said that it was a kind of icing on the cake of the weirdness of the song, where anything he might have imagined saying would have been appropriate. On the sessions released in The Beatles Anthology, the words "cranberry sauce" are more clearly heard, especially during the edit piece joined onto the end of take 7.

[edit] Personnel

• John Lennon: double tracked lead vocals, lead guitar and piano.
• Paul McCartney: mellotron, bass and timpani.
• George Harrison: slide guitar, swarmandel and bongos.
• Ringo Starr: drums and cymbals.
• Mal Evans: tambourine.
• George Martin: cellos and trumpets arranger, producer and mixer.
• Geoff Emerick: recording and mixing engineer.

• Three cellos and four trumpets, played by session musicians (as indicated on the album article page).
• Backward tapes(cymbals and melotron tracks played backwards and superimposed).

[edit] Release

The single was released on 13 February 1967, in Britain, and subsequently on 17 February 1967, in the United States, as one side of a double A-side single, paired with the McCartney composition "Penny Lane". When manager Brian Epstein pressed producer George Martin for a new Beatles single, Martin told Epstein that the group had recorded what were, in his opinion, their two finest songs to date ("Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane"). Epstein suggested that Martin issue the songs as a double A-sided single, as they had done with their previous single, "Yellow Submarine/Eleanor Rigby". Following UK protocol in the 1960s not to include songs released as a single within a new album, both songs were ultimately left off Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. George Martin later figured that this was a "dreadful mistake."^[16]

The single reached #2 in the UK charts, behind Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me". "Penny Lane" reached #1 in the United States, while "Strawberry Fields Forever" peaked at #8. The fact that the single only reached number 2 in the UK charts has always been seen as a failure.

In the U.S., both songs were included on the LP Magical Mystery Tour, which was released as a six-track double-EP in the UK.^[17] When Magical Mystery Tour was re-released on CD, Parlophone chose the U.S. LP track listing rather than the UK double-EP.^[17]

The song appears on the John Lennon Imagine soundtrack.

In 2006, a newly mixed version of the song was included in the album Love. This version builds from an acoustic demo and incorporates elements of "Hello, Goodbye", "Baby You're a Rich Man", "In My Life", "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", "Penny Lane", and "Piggies"^[18]

[edit] Promotion and reception

The song reached number two on the British charts. The number one single at the time was Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me". (An interesting note is that until February 1969, there was no single definitive singles chart in the UK. The retroactive determination of "British chart history" flows smoothly from NME's 1950s chart through Record Retailer's expanded chart, which began in 1960, into the one compiled by the British Market Research Bureau that is used today. "Strawberry Fields"/"Penny Lane" was ranked as a number one entry on Melody Maker's weekly singles chart.)^[19]

The promotional film for the song is now recognized as one of the first and most successful conceptual music videos, featuring reverse film effects, stop motion animation, disconcerting jump cuts from daytime to night-time and (among other things) the Beatles playing and subsequently pouring paint over and smashing an upright piano. It also featured the use of jarring juxtaposition of setting with props - such as a table in the middle of an open field - often seen in more recent 'eccentric' music videos. It was filmed on 30 and 31 January 1967 in Knole Park in Sevenoaks, and directed by Peter Goldmann. Goldmann was a friend of Klaus Voormann who recommended the Swedish TV director to the group.^[20] The location of the filming is easy to find, as it is on one of the main roads through the park with a recognisable tree. Both videos were selected by New York's MoMA as two of the most influential music videos in the late 1960s; both were originally broadcast in the United States in early 1967 on the variety show Hollywood Palace, with Liberace as host.

Brian Wilson claimed that "Strawberry Fields Forever" was partially responsible for the collapse of the Beach Boys' legendary unfinished album SMiLE. Wilson first heard the song on his car radio while driving, and was so affected by it that he had to pull over until the song finished. He then remarked to his companion (either wryly or in despair, according to the version of the story) that the Beatles had "got there first" (i.e., to the sound he was trying to achieve with the new album). SMiLE was shelved shortly afterwards.^{[citation needed]}

Before playing the song on his radio show in January 2006, BBC Radio 2 DJ Mark Radcliffe said it could be described "without fear of contradiction as the greatest double-A side ever".

Richie Unterberger of All Music Guide hailed it as "one of the Beatles' peak achievements and one of the finest Lennon- McCartney songs."^[1] In 2004, this song was ranked number 76 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.^[2] It was ranked the second best Beatles song by Mojo magazine, after A Day in the Life.^[21] According to AcclaimedMusic.net (a site which combines hundreds of musicians' and critics' best-of lists from around the world), "Strawberry Fields Forever" is the Beatles' most critically acclaimed song of all time, ranking at #16 on the All Time Top 3000 Songs.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• The Beatles (2000). The Beatles Anthology. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ISBN 0-8118-2684-8. 
• The Beatles (2003). The Beatles Anthology (DVD). Apple records. ASIN: B00008GKEG (Bar Code: 24349 29699). 
• Davies, Hunter (2002). The Beatles: The Authorised Biography. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-32886-4. 
• Emerick, Geoff; Massey, Howard (2006). Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 1-592-40179-1. 
• Lewisohn, Mark (1988). The Beatles Recording Sessions. New York: Harmony Books. ISBN 0-517-57066-1. 
• Lewisohn, Mark (1992). The Complete Beatles Chronicle. Harmony Books. 
• MacDonald, Ian (2005). Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties, Second Revised Edition, London: Pimlico (Rand). ISBN 1-844-13828-3. 
• Sheff, David (2000). All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-25464-4. 

[edit] External links

• Alan Pollack's notes on Strawberry Fields Forever