Paul – lead
vocals, piano, recorder, bass
John – harmonica
George – acoustic guitar, harmonica
Ringo – drums, maracas, finger cymbals
George Martin – possibly celeste
Session musicians – three flutes
Without meaning to damn with faint praise, the highlight of the five new tracks in the Magical Mystery Tour package is undoubtedly the first to have been written, Paul’s haunting ‘The Fool On The Hill’. With a throwback to the earlier ‘Nowhere Man’, and predicting the meditative Indian-inspired songs on the forthcoming White Album, this shows Paul at his lyrical best. The song is a finely judged mixture of drama and fantasy, an insight into madness, an out-of-body experience of the eyes in his head seeing the world spinning round. In spite of the flutes and recorder, the overall tone is menacing – this nowhere man is a master of disguise, sitting and waiting…
Hunter Davies’s 1968 biography of the group gives an insight into how germs of songs were shared between Paul and John around this time. John had come to Paul’s house in mid-March to finish off ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’.
“Paul then went back to his guitar and started to sing and play a very slow, beautiful song about a foolish man sitting on the hill. John listened to it quietly, staring blankly out of the window, almost as if he wasn’t listening. Paul sang it many times, la la-ing words he hadn’t thought of yet. When at last he finished, John said he’d better write the words down or he’d forget them. Paul said it was OK. He wouldn’t forget them. It was the first time Paul had played it for John. There was no discussion.”
Paul recorded a two-track demo for the song on 6 September, a week after Brian Epstein’s death, sat alone at a piano. This can be heard, complete with cod ending, on the Anthology 2 compilation. Recording of the track itself began nearly three weeks later on 25 September, including contributions on harmonicas and recorder. The following day, more overdubs were added, changing the song into what Mark Lewisohn calls “almost a ‘re-make’”. It was also lengthened from 3’45” to 4’25”, although when it was finally mixed, it was edited down to three minutes. On the third day of recording, Paul recorded a new vocal and a tape loop was included, which can be heard briefly flitting across the stereo spectrum after the last verse, and the Beatles’ contributions were complete. The flutes were added on 20 October, during the session that also saw the viola overdubs for ‘Your Mother Should Know’. As usual, no music was prepared for the overdub session, George Martin writing down Paul thoughts as he tried out various ideas on the piano. The flutes were mixed using Ken Townsend’s 50 Hz sync system that had failed to work for the orchestral overdub of ‘A Day In The Life’. Here, with just one tape machine to drive, the system worked flawlessly, although, as the flutes don’t appear until well into the song, the trial-and-error process of making sure the two machines start at the same time was that much more laborious.
The development of ‘The Fool On The Hill’ can be judged by comparing the version of the song completed on the first day of recording – the take 4 that appears on Anthology 2, which has also been slowed down by a whole tone – with the released song. Lines such as “the man with empty mind” were obviously deemed a little harsh.
Listening to the arrangement of ‘The Fool On The Hill’, it is apparent why Paul was so horrified with Phil Spector’s treatment of ‘The Long And Winding Road’. In contrast to the Spector production, this earlier song boasts a variety of instruments, used skilfully and with restraint. Bear in mind ‘The Fool On The Hill’ is structured very formally, with four verse–refrain couplings topped and tailed with an intro and an outro, although the length of verse and chorus is hard to pin down as they have a tendency to glide into one another. It starts with flutes and Paul’s piano with a gentle, understated vocal (his third attempt at recording it). The chorus is accompanied by an assortment of finger- and other percussion that is barely audible, and George’s acoustic guitar joins in verse two for a couple of very minimal D-related chords. The hook of the song comes with the bridge and the combination of Paul’s recorder and the harmonicas played by John and George.
The song is also a prime example of using parallel major and minor chords to provide an atmospheric wash that reinforces the lyric. The move from the major verse to the minor refrain, as we go from the certainty of what we know to the truth of what he knows, sends a chill down the spine, a shiver as we notice the sun has set on our conviction. The emphasis on the Bb drives the point home.
The doo-wop Em7–A7–D6–Bm7 of the verse (ii7–V7–I6–vi7) is a nice variant on the basis of ‘All My Loving’ or the bridge of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, the repeat cutting off as we slip into the chorus.
The song shows the group’s burgeoning interest in Transcendental Meditation. Paul, John and George and their partners had attended Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s lecture at the Hilton Hotel, London on 24 August, and all four Beatles had travelled to Bangor, Wales the following day for a weekend seminar in meditation. Paul later admitted that the song was probably about “someone like” Maharishi. “His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle he wasn’t taken too seriously. It was this idea of a fool on the hill, a guru in a cave, I was attracted to.” Although he sets up our preconceptions by calling him a “fool”, we can see where Paul’s sympathies lie. “Saviours and gurus are generally spat upon, so I thought for my generation I’d suggest that they weren’t as stupid as they looked.” The lyricism of the song is powerful – the suggestion of the visionary with more than just “eyes in his head”, who can see very well who the fools are, but chooses to keep the information to himself in spite of the derision he attracts. The bald “they don’t like him” is very loaded.
For the filming of the ‘The Fool On The Hill’ sequence that occurs early on in the film, Paul, Mal and a cameraman, Aubrey Dewar, took off to Nice for a couple of days. Paul famously forgot to bring his passport, but got through customs by virtue of the perfectly reasonable argument that they knew who he was so why should they need to see his photograph in a passport. The three of them, together with a local taxi driver, filmed in the mountains north of the city from dawn to dusk, taking in beautiful landscape shots together with sequences of Paul looking moodily at the sunrise, mugging to the camera, dancing on the rocks and miming to a cassette of the song. Unfortunately, as they had no clapperboards to synch the sound to the visuals, the mimed footage could not be used. The brief snatch of Paul singing in the final film is clearly out of synch with the soundtrack.