Songs I've Liked #2&3: Strawberry Fields & Penny Lane

I can still remember being down in the basement listening to a transistor radio when the DJ announced that they were playing, for the VERY FIRST TIME, the Beatles' new double-sided single. Then the world of musical possibilities exploded again as the first sounds of the fluty mellotron introduced Strawberry Fields Forever.

The mellotron has been a fascination of mine since I first heard it, and when first hearing actually occurred is debatable. It could be in February '67 when the Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane double-whammy-single dropped. Another big early proponent of the mellotron, after they dropped an actual orchestral accompaniment for the likes of "Tuesday Afternoon", was the Moody Blues. Later on, King Crimson brought a majestic and ominous use to the instrument. And then many more bands adopted the distinctive sound.

The mellotron simulates orchestral sounds (and choruses, too) by playing recorded tapes of strings, or flutes, or people, back and forth, one tape for each key on a keyboard. This very mechanical process lends itself to trouble and break-downs, and the temperamental instrument actually found itself in some legal trouble, too, when musicians claimed that it was putting them out of work. Although it has found its way back, most modern bands shelve the thing in favor of a digital sample on a modern keyboard.

Paul McCartney's mellotron work was but one source of fascination for me on hte new Beatles single. The disc showed pretty clearly the yin and yang between Lennon, who wrote the autobigraphical "psychoanalysis set to music", the "hazy impressionistic dreamworld" of Strawberry Fields Forever, and McCartney, with the easy melody and high brass of Penny Lane.
Both songs were nostalgic recollections of the songwriters' past, recalling places from the Beatles' Liverpool youth. And now the songs are drenched in nostalgia for me. In their time, they burst through the bonds of the basic pop tune, so much so that they purportedly led Beach Boy Brian Wilson to throw up his hands and set aside his "Smile" project, which only saw the light of day as a complete work in the last decade. Both songs were recorded along with those that made it onto "Sgt. Pepper", and some people (including George Martin) feel it was a mistake that the songs did not make it onto that landmark LP. Instead, here in the U.S., they were tacked onto the "Hits Side" of our domesticversion of "Magical Mystery Tour".
"Strawberry Fields Forever" took considerable work to record, and the production was about as high tech as things got back in the day. The Beatles recorded two fairly dissimilar takes, in different keys (like a C and a B-flat). John pronounced both versions worthy, and asked George Martin to fuse them together. And he did, by speeding one up a bit, slowing the other down a smidge. The artificial resulting tape speed added to the ethereal sound of the song.
For me, and really for about everybody I know, the era of the Big Release of a Single is long gone. This Beatles blockbuster was folliowed, pretty much the next week, by the Turtles rolling out "Happy Together", an eminently memorable ditty that was also, interestingly for me, on the first pop or rock album I ever heard in stereo. For me, really, another "big release".

Another interesting factoid about the Beatles' one-two punch: In England, they recorded sales for each of the songs separately, somehow, and while Penny Lane made it to number one, Strawberry Fields peaked in second place, nudged out by Engelbert Humperdinck's "Please Release Me". Some noted that the Beatles twofer, in total, sold nearly twice as many copies as Mr. Humperdinck's single.