September 11, 1967, Baker Street, London
With Epstein dead, workaholic Paul had to ensure that the group stayed together. He knew they could not afford to sink into depression over Brian’s loss, for that way led to oblivion. They needed to work. From now on, all of the band’s main ideas would emanate from McCartney. For Lennon the gang was no longer his only concern. He had started questioning the band’s usefulness, and in doing so planted the seed that would cause him to kill that which he had once loved above all else.
The gap opened up by not touring now allowed other elements to catch Lennon’s obsessive attention, namely meditation and Japanese avant-garde artist Yoko Ono. Music still drove him forward, but it wasn’t to the exclusion of other influences. Soon, he would be using one force in particular to break the gang up for good.
When the recording of Sgt. Pepper wound down, Paul flew to America as a 21st-birthday surprise for his girlfriend Jane Asher, who was touring in a production of Romeo And Juliet. Paul took Mal Evans and his movie camera along for the ride. He began shooting in various American locations and from this came the idea for a film in which a group of people would board a bus and travel around the country, the camera capturing their adventures and dialogue.
“I used to do a lot of amateur filming,” McCartney recalled, “So, the idea tumbled together that we’d hire a bus, take a bunch of people out and start trying to make up something about a magical mystery tour.”
Part of the drive behind the film was a pressing need for the band to sustain their relationship with the fans through mediums other than the live concert. We must remember that in the Britain of The Beatles the media for pop music was extremely limited. For fans who could not see the band in the flesh now, television would be their only chance to see them. Tony Barrow, the band’s press officer at the time, recalled, “Paul made it clear to me that his aim was to make a feature-length film for full-scale theatrical release and he felt that a successful screen ‘tour’ would go a long way toward plugging the gaping hole left by the axing of the Fab Four’s concert trips.”
McCartney’s idea brought together two very disparate elements—he mixed the band’s northern working-class culture with LSD. That they were able in part to make this work is testament to the band’s genius. The Beatles were always working from a huge palette of influences and brilliantly weaving them into fresh, unique works of art. McCartney once recalled them adopting a studious pose as another band walked into the dressing room, his friends pretending to listen to some poems McCartney was reading out of a book. The point he was making was that they were able to pull off the stunt because he had a book of poems on him. The other band didn’t.
Magical Mystery Tour echoed writer Ken Kesey’s famous 1964 trip around America with his band of friends and associates he named The Merry Pranksters but it also had roots in the Liverpool of The Beatles’ collective childhood when bus companies ran mystery tours. Customers would pay to get on and not be told what their destination was until arrival. Blackpool was the usual endpoint.
“John and I remembered mystery tours,” McCartney later recalled, “and we always thought this was a fascinating idea: getting on a bus and not knowing where you are going … So we took that idea and used it as a basis for a song and a film.” Using their experiences on LSD and the general psychedelic zeitgeist, the idea developed to become a magical mystery tour, with the film being the cinematic equivalent of an acid trip.
The film’s songs contain many drug references. The title song opens with the shout of, “Roll up, roll up,” an evocation of the circus master’s cry and a knowing wink to marijuana smokers. The film’s narration meanwhile continually makes references to “the magic starting to work,” just as a trip would unfold itself.
Brian Epstein was involved in the film’s early stages. Coming back from America, McCartney had sketched out the film in the form of a pie chart, which he showed to his manager. One of the first ideas was that each member of the band be given a 20-minute slot to film a segment of their own devising. Brian liked the idea and made some calls on Paul’s behalf, sounding out various people who could contribute to the project. His death in late August meant the band would now have to make some serious decisions.
On September 1 a band meeting was held at McCartney’s house where it was a decided they would manage themselves, push on with the film, and then head to India for a two-month meditation break. Four days later, work on the film’s music started and the band recorded several new songs including the title track, “Your Mother Should Know,” “I Am The Walrus,” “Flying” (their first ever instrumental) and “The Fool On The Hill.”
It is interesting how Lennon and McCartney had again worked the same magic as earlier in the year, Lennon producing a fantastic psychedelic song in “I Am The Walrus,” Paul again replying with a song brimming with a melody and style that was unique to his talents with “The Fool On The Hill.”
“I Am The Walrus” was recorded nine days after Epstein’s death. The lyrics are part religious inspired, suggesting that God is within us all and therefore we are all brothers and sisters, and part derived from LSD trips with some truly surreal imagery. The song’s remarkable musical changes allied with Lennon’s powerful vocal, provides an unsettling reflection of the man’s mind.
Lennon would later admit that he was writing obscurely at the time, à la Dylan, as he put it. He wanted his words to give the impression of profundity when in fact there was none. Or very little. “Dylan got away with murder,” he revealed, “I thought, I can write this crap too. You just stick a few images together, thread them together and you call it poetry.” Yet “I Am The Walrus” remains an incredibly powerful record.
Paul’s “The Fool On The Hill” is by contrast sublime pop music, inspired in part by the Maharishi and the idea of a man who sees the world in a completely different way from others. The song’s clever musical changes, moving from wistful to joyous in a second, is the work of a man at the top of his game.
As recording proceeded the band began working on the film’s casting. “We got Neil and Mal our trusty roadies to hire a driver and coach and paint our logo on the side: Magical Mystery Tour. We hired a bus full of passengers, some of which were actors. I got a copy of Spotlight and selected all the actors from there,” Paul recalled. Noted names who joined the cast included Ivor Cutler, Victor Spinetti and Nat Jackley, a music-hall star who specialized in funny dancing and who the band adored.
Called in for advice was Denis O’Dell who had worked on A Hard Day’s Night. He was now employed full-time by the band and was worried about the ramshackle approach they were taking. “Getting involved in producing and directing their own film was a brave step for a pop group,” he recalled. “It was unprecedented at the time, unfortunately their attitude was to learn as they went along rather than find out about the job before taking it on.”
On September 11, 1967, the Magical Mystery Tour bus pulled up at Allsop Place off Baker Street and the weird and wonderful got on board. To their surprise, there were no scripts. McCartney explained that everyone would have to improvise. The point of a mystery tour, after all, was that you didn’t know where you were going—making the film would be the same kind of journey.
Filming took place in London, Devon, Cornwall and Kent. On one occasion the band got stuck on a bridge and had to call the AA and police in to help them over. One morning, Lennon told McCartney about his dream the night before in which he was dressed as a waiter and piling spaghetti on to the plate of a fat woman. McCartney said great, and the entire sequence was filmed that very morning.
As no one had thought to book a proper studio to film the band performing their songs, Denis O’Dell booked West Malling Royal Air Force station near Maidstone, Kent and the band performed “I Am The Walrus.” The footage is remarkable, the band dressed in full-on psychedelic clothing are gathered around John’s white piano in the late-summer sunshine and their performance is interspersed with all kinds of surreal imagery, such as dancing policemen and shots of the band wearing animal-head costumes. As Paul would later say this footage alone is worth entering the Magical Mystery Tour.
Due to take two weeks, the editing process stretched to nearly three months. There was ten hours of material to carve into an hour-long film. Worse, someone had forgotten to use clapperboards at the start of each scene, which made editing a real nightmare.
In December McCartney took the finished film to the BBC. They had already banned “I Am The Walrus” for the crime of using the word “knickers.” However, the band had a secret and radical agenda. They wanted to use their popularity to get the film shown over Christmas. Christmas TV was traditionally based around comedy and light entertainment. The Beatles wanted to gatecrash the nation’s party and push counterculture right into their homes. They wanted to mess with people’s minds and if possible turn them on.
“We wanted to take over the Bruce Forsyth slot,” Paul later recalled. “He was always on, ‘Hello everyone, Happy Christmas, had enough Christmas dinner?’ We thought we’d had enough of all that. We wanted to make a change, so we wanted the big audience slot. Which we got.” The film was shown by the BBC on Boxing Day at 8:35 p.m. It was screened in black and white as most people did not possess color TVs and in doing so stripped the film of its charm and great inventiveness. The nation sat and watched in bemusement as the band they knew as The Fab Four starred in a drab-looking formless film with no storyline, plenty of surreal images and improvised dialogue.
The Beatles dressed up for their surreal film, Magical Mystery Tour. With Epstein dead and Lennon losing interest, McCartney played an even greater role in the band. It was he who directed and edited the film.
The papers were indignant. “Blatant rubbish,” cried the Daily Express summing up the general press reaction. The Beatles were now in a very peculiar position. They were still deemed front-page news but in reality they did not merit such mainstream acceptance. If The Beatles had formed in 1966, only the music and counterculture magazines, such as International Times, would have been interested in them. They certainly would not have featured in the gossip columns.
What is striking about this film now is how close it feels to The Prisoner TV show that would air in September 1967 and captivate the nation. There was something in the air. Both show and film take a collection of disparate people and put them in a particular environment. The Beatles chose a coach; the TV show’s star Patrick McGoohan had the unique Welsh village of Portmeirion. Both works of art set out to challenge the viewer and make them think about the world they live in.
Not surprisingly The Beatles became fans of The Prisoner and hooked up with McGoohan one night. The Prisoner’s final episode used the band’s “All You Need Is Love” to amazing effect.
Beatles fans by contrast were left rubbing their eyes. They had seen the band on television three times in 1967 and in all three sections—the “Strawberry Fields Forever”/“Penny Lane” promotional films, the Our World “All You Need Is Love” event and this new film—the band was either dressed in psychedelic clothing and singing about love or making “wink, wink” references about drugs to the nation.
As Her Majesty The Queen herself remarked about the band at an EMI board meeting, “Yes, they have gone a little weird, haven’t they?” The Beatles didn’t care. They had gone to India and started chanting “Hare Krishna” at one another.
