WSJ: Some History on "Strawberry Fields"

[Michael_B]

From today's WSJ:

In September 1966, John Lennon went to Almería, Spain, mainly to film his only acting role outside the Beatles, in Richard Lester’s “How I Won the War,” but also as a needed respite from Beatlemania, which had turned nightmarish on the world tour that had ended the previous month. There, Lennon examined his life with a detachment that found its way into the gentle ballad “It’s Not Too Bad.” The song proved far more important than the film. By year’s end, the Beatles and their ingenious producer, George Martin—who died at age 90 on March 8—had transformed this folk-like tune into “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a recording (released in 1967) that many critics regard as one of rock’s most enduring masterpieces, a rich-textured, dark-hued four-minute essay in musical and lyrical psychedelia that both captures and transcends its time.

Lennon’s earliest recordings of the song, from Almería, begin not with the laconic refrain that opens the finished recording—“Let me take you down / ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields / Nothing is real / And nothing to get hung about”—but with a verse that starts, “No one I think is in my tree.” Lennon never explained this puzzling first line, but it may refer to his feeling of isolation during the backlash surrounding a comment he made earlier that year about the Beatles being “more popular than Jesus.”

The eventual song-opening refrain, completed before Lennon left Spain on Nov. 6, was a brilliant touch. For listeners not obsessed with the Beatles’ biographies, “strawberry fields” is simply colorful, evocative imagery. But for Lennon, it was a nostalgic reference to Strawberry Field, an orphanage near his childhood home that evoked an innocent time before the madness of Beatlemania.

Still, it was a while before he saw the refrain’s potential. In a series of ambitiously overdubbed demos Lennon recorded at his home studio in London, the Almería opening remained in place, as it did when he first played the song for the other Beatles and Mr. Martin at EMI’s Abbey Road studios on the evening of Nov. 24.

That night, the band spent seven hours recording an easygoing version of the song, with acoustic guitars, light drumming, a slinky bass line, reedy Mellotron textures and, on the final verse, sweetly harmonized vocals. Lennon reconsidered the opening and moved another verse—beginning, “Living is easy with eyes closed / Misunderstanding all you see”—to the top. And the group played an outro, based on the chords of the verses.

It was a lovely recording, but not what Lennon had in mind, so the group devoted its next two sessions, on Nov. 28 and 29, to a restructured version. Here, the outro became an introduction, played by Paul McCartney in transparent, fluty timbres on the Mellotron. The band’s textures were tougher and more aggressive. And at long last, Lennon moved the refrain to the song’s opening.

But this version didn’t fully suit him either. Perhaps, he told Mr. Martin, an orchestral score would provide the kaleidoscopic textures he wanted. Mr. Martin obliged with a vivid score for cellos and brass. He moved the song to a higher key, to take advantage of the cello’s lowest note, an open C. And he quickened the tempo. All this would be added to a thundering percussion track that the Beatles prepared in advance. On Dec. 15, Mr. Martin recorded this brisk new orchestral version, with Lennon adding vocals and George Harrison adding guitar and swarmandal, an Indian zither.

Lennon was still not satisfied, but there were things he liked in each version. Why not, he suggested, combine the band’s Nov. 28-29 recording with the orchestral version? Mr. Martin noted that the recordings were at different tempos and keys. But when he looked more closely, he realized that since the orchestral version was both higher and faster, he could reconcile the two by slowing that version down and speeding up the band’s recording.

His edit, at the one-minute mark, is like the moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when black-and-white yields to color. As a final touch, he created a coda—by fading the song out, then back in again—that featured remnants of the group’s percussion recording (played both forward and backward), and a slowed-down Lennon saying, inexplicably, “cranberry sauce” during the second fade.

Lennon often cited the recording as one of his favorite Beatles tracks, but in the intensely self-critical moments to which he was prone, he felt his vision for the song had remained beyond his grasp. Shortly before he was murdered, in 1980, he told Mr. Martin that he wished he could remake all his Beatles recordings.

“Even ‘Strawberry Fields’?” Mr. Martin asked.

“Especially ‘Strawberry Fields,’” Lennon said.

[Hbom]

Great read Michael, thanks.