The song Lennon had grudgingly slapped together to fulfill his obligation was another triumph: “All You Need Is Love,” the signature anthem of the Summer of Love. Our World aired on June 25th, 1967, three weeks and change after Sgt. Lennon agreed to come up with a song for the show, then promptly forgot about it when he was reminded that the show was a couple of weeks away, as engineer Geoff Emerick recalled later, Lennon groaned, “Oh, God, is it that close? Well, then, I suppose I’d better write something.”
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When he turned up in the studio to announce that he’d booked them to debut a new song on the first-ever live global-satellite-transmitted TV special, Our World, they were nonplussed – he hadn’t asked them first if they were interested. Relations between the Beatles and Epstein had become slightly strained. The next song they tackled was Lennon’s “Baby, You’re a Rich Man,” a scathing portrait of a social arriviste that may or may not have been intended as a jab at manager Brian Epstein. Released on February 17th, the single was a worldwide hit, and a statement of purpose for the rest of the Beatles’ recordings that year: reflective, druggy, a little nostalgic, and more inventively orchestrated and arranged than anything else around. George Martin wasn’t happy about pulling “Penny Lane” and “”Strawberry Fields Forever” off the album-in-progress, but there wasn’t much else in the can. By the end of January, though, EMI was demanding a new Beatles single – there hadn’t been one since “Yellow Submarine” the previous August, an impossibly long gap in those days. Pepper: John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” and McCartney’s “Penny Lane,” both reminiscences of the Liverpool of their childhood. From November 24th, 1966, to mid-January 1967, the Beatles worked extensively on a pair of new songs, intended for what would become Sgt. The songs that would end up on Magical Mystery Tour began taking shape in late 1966, well before McCartney was struck by his cinematic vision.
The Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, on the other hand, did what the movie was supposed to do – despite being a grab bag of the group’s 1967 singles and songs recorded specifically for the film, it holds together surprisingly well as an addendum to Pepper, giving us an image of the psychedelic Beatles refining their enhanced perceptions into individual pop songs so potent that they changed the whole landscape of music. “You gotta do everything with a point or an aim, but we tried this one without anything – with no point and no aim,” McCartney admitted the day after it premiered. But like a lot of Sixties attempts to turn utopian theory into practice, the movie fell on its nose: The Beatles simply weren’t filmmakers. Paul McCartney’s concept was that the Beatles would drive around the British countryside with their friends, film the result and shape that into a movie over which they would have total creative control. Pepper was a blueprint for the Beatles’ new utopianism – a culture of vivid sensory experience, for which they could be the entertainers and court jesters – the Magical Mystery Tour project was an attempt to literally take that idea into the world. With touring no longer a question, they had the luxury of fine-tuning their songs at length in the studio the same band that had recorded its first album in a single day was now tinkering with individual recordings for weeks on end. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Yellow Submarine soundtrack. The year leading up to the release of the Magical Mystery Tour album in November 1967 was turbulent but fantastically fertile for the Beatles – they were working on its songs more or less simultaneously with the ones that ended up on Sgt.
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