"Nothing To Get Hung About" At 59
Sgt. Pepper's poached dream recasts the pop song as anxious idyll
Just a few months after weathering the "bigger than Christ" fallout and the "Butcher Cover" photograph, the Beatles had to give up two tracks for a single that had been recorded with the Sgt. Pepper project in mind. This "Strawberry Fields Forever" essay appeared in my Lennon biography in 2011, and marks an even greater break with Lennon's writing style, as if the fade-to-black of "Tomorrow Never Knows" lurched back with follow-up questions. (The halting “fake” ending of “Fields” defies any sense of closure.) Grounded by McCartney's answer song, "Penny Lane," the double-A side confounded listeners even as it climbed the charts (blocked at the top by Engelbert Humperdinck's "Please Release Me"). It gave February of 1967 a sense of tectonic plates shifting.
WHEN THE FOUR Beatles regrouped for the first time since Candlestick Park for an EMI Records session in Studio 2 on November 24, 1966, the familiar room became lit with uncertainty. Lennon didn't look like himself. For the first time anyone could remember, he wore spectacles, which he had never done in public. He'd grown accustomed to his character Private Gripweed's "granny" glasses and enjoyed seeing more clearly without the first-generation hard contact lenses he had struggled with. Cigarettes were lit, tea served, and expectancy hung in the air as John Lennon picked up his guitar and announced his new number: "Strawberry Fields Forever." There is no tape of Lennon's first performance, but it's grown into legend because of George Martin's quote (and the working demos that have leaked since): "When John sang 'Strawberry Fields' for the first time, just with an acoustic guitar accompaniment, it was magic," George Martin remembers. "It was absolutely lovely. I love John's voice anyway, and it was a great privilege listening to it." Sung alone in front of the others, this mélange of surreal fragility must have had a quixotic effect coming from a tough hide like Lennon's. Suddenly, their most reliable cutup had enchanted them with a reverie of youth, which somehow made him sound older—and made the others feel older as well.
Lennon's narrative ("Let me take you down 'cause I’m going to . . .") retreats to a childhood idyll, the grounds of Woolton's Strawberry Field Salvation Army home. Both musically and lyrically, the song surpasses anything Lennon had written before, trumping even "Tomorrow Never Knows" from earlier that year. The lyrics were experimental, figurative, and nonlinear; the music had new color and fluidity, the slow-motion quality of listening to something underwater, and yet simultaneously a clear, visionary presence, as if the most hallucinatory images were tumbling from a subdued narrator waking up inside a dream. For the Beatles, the images evoked the backyard at Mendips, where Lennon had a treehouse, and his infatuation with the child's frame of mind. It must have felt like eavesdropping on a close friend's dream therapy:
No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
Although hesitant and uncertain, the music finds a curious inner calm: In real life, the Strawberry Field grounds were one step from an orphanage, and as an abandoned child, Lennon must have felt a strange identification with the children there. At age four, he watched his mother, Julia, give away a daughter he would never know; it would have been completely natural to fear himself just a step away from the same fate.
"Strawberry Fields Forever" sounds like a dream reassembled in a bottle, but it required elaborate postproduction work to capture its emotional fragility. The recording process itself resembled the jumbled lyric, with intense sessions followed by days of Lennon's second thoughts. The song was delicate, but it also had grit, and Ringo's lopsided tom-toms loosened it up (another track where Ringo's left-handedness made his fills sound oddly spry).
"I've seen Strawberry Fields described as a dull, grimy place next door to him that John imagined to be a beautiful place, but in the summer it wasn't dull and grimy at all: it was a secret garden," McCartney writes in his memoirs. Raised in a "proper" home by his aunt Mimi, he looked forward every summer to the marching bands that played the fêtes in its yard.
"John's memory of it wasn't to do with the fact that it was a Salvation Army home; that was up at the house," McCartney says. "There was a wall you could bunk over and it was a rather wild garden, it wasn't manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in. The bit he went into was a secret garden like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and he thought of it like that, it was a little hide-away for him where he could maybe have a smoke, live in his dreams a little, so it was a get-away. It was an escape for John."
McCartney's sympathetic support followed on this understanding of his partner's personal associations. That first evening they recorded a spare version with electric guitar, two Mellotron tracks (one of which often gets mistaken for a slide guitar), and backing vocals behind Lennon's lead. Four days later they abandoned this version for a second, more band-oriented arrangement, featuring McCartney's now-distinctive Mellotron introduction.
"Strawberry Fields Forever" sounds like a dream reassembled in a bottle, but it required elaborate postproduction work to capture its emotional fragility. The recording process itself resembled the jumbled lyric, with intense sessions followed by days of Lennon's second thoughts. The song was delicate, but it also had grit, and Ringo's lopsided tom-toms loosened it up (another track where Ringo's left-handedness made his fills sound oddly spry). On the other hand, the band aimed for an ineffable tone it couldn't quite hit, and the tempo kept accelerating with each take. Perhaps some outside instruments could shake up the sound and bring the words more color…
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Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music, by Tim Riley (Grand Central, 2011)
more Riley books
see also: Devin McKinney’s Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
“Expanding the Giant Now,” the Beatles story, remastered, Ringo Goes Country, and “Solo Beatles Deluxe Karma Ballast”
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That single was when the Beatles entered full on into dream territory.
What a beautiful essay. Thank you.