I will describe the background of this album the way my high school music teacher described it to me: one day in the late '60s, Paul McCartney got really high & said, "hey, let's get a bunch of strange people & circus performers & put them all in a bus & drive around the countryside & see what happens!" Well, nothing interesting happened, so the Beatles did what they did best: they wrote some new songs, shot musical sequences for them, cut those together with the bus tour footage, & called it a movie--which aired on the BBC at Christmastime in 1967 & which pretty much everybody hated.
The music, on the other hand, pretty much everybody loved. When I acquired this CD as a middle schooler (I think I stole it from my parents?) I didn't know any of the background, or that the Beatles had only written 6 new songs for the movie. The other 5 tracks on the CD are unrelated non-album singles that were packaged with the soundtrack as an LP for the US market--a move the band disliked but were powerless over. I've always found the history of the Beatles record packaging to be baffling--were the labels convinced that tastes were so radically different between the UK & the US that every single release for the first 5 years of their recording career had to be shuffled around, reassembled, & sometimes retitled?
As a kid, I thought this CD worked just fine as a single album, but I did always think there was something strange about it. The fact that it flows so well despite its cobbled-together nature speaks to the consistent core elements of this period of the Beatles: studio experimentation, ambitious instrumental arrangements, the obvious influence of psychedelic drugs. From the brass on the opening title track to the flutes & recorders on "The Fool on the Hill" to the trippy vocal effects of "Blue Jay Way" to the extreme studio tinkering & found sound samples of "I Am the Walrus," the soundtrack half is a superbly crafted ride. The instrumental "Flying" is one of the funkiest things the Beatles ever recorded, & "I Am the Walrus" & "Blue Jay Way" still sound cutting-edge 55 years later, which is kind of astonishing given how thoroughly imitated they've been.
Despite some of the dumbest lyrics in all Beatledom, "Hello Goodbye" is still a nostalgic song for me. What hit me this time about "Strawberry Fields Forever" was the huge layered drum overdubs, as if there are 12 different Ringos banging away jazzily, plus the way Paul's Mellotron dominates the mix in the beginning. Speak of Paul dominating, I wouldn't be surprised if "Baby You're A Rich Man" was written expressly to be a bass showcase. The orchestration craze continues with "Penny Lane"'s extravagantly arranged horns & piccolo trumpet solo by David Mason. These are all amazing singles but their inclusion here makes the CD feel weirdly backloaded.
The soundtrack portion of this CD is great but lightweight, & the singles tacked onto the end are better heard in other configurations, all of which makes this the least essential Beatles release of this period, minus Yellow Submarine. But as I always say, mediocre Beatles is better than a lot of bands' best work, & if I were stuck on a desert island with this CD I could do a hell of a lot worse.
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