Strawberry Fields Forever

• 1. Introduction

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  "Strawberry Fields Forever" arrived on the 13th of February 1967, and almost nobody knew what to make of it. Derek Johnson of the NME confessed in print that he was both fascinated and confused, writing: "Quite honestly, I don't really know what to make of it." The Daily Mail's entertainment reporter asked, "What's happening to the Beatles?" and described them as "four mystics with moustaches." Brian Wilson heard it on his car radio while under the influence of barbiturates, shook his head, and said to the person beside him: "They did it already - what I wanted to do with Smile." Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders sat with his producer Terry Melcher as it finished playing, looked at him, and asked: "What the fuck are we gonna do?" A song that John Lennon would come to regard as his finest work with the Beatles had landed not with triumph but with bewilderment. What was it, exactly? Where had it come from? And how did a track that failed to reach number 1 in the United Kingdom end up ranked number 7 on Rolling Stone's 2021 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time?

• 2. A Liverpool Garden

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  Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army children's home in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool, close to where John Lennon grew up. Lennon and his friends Pete Shotton, Nigel Walley and Ivan Vaughan used to slip into the wooded garden behind the home. Every summer a Salvation Army brass band played at a garden party held in nearby Calderstones Park, and Lennon's Aunt Mimi recalled him pulling her along, saying: "Hurry up, Mimi - we're going to be late." There was nothing grand about the place, but it lodged in him. Mimi said there was "something about the place that always fascinated John." He could see it from his bedroom window. The garden, the band, the sound drifting over - these were among his happiest childhood associations. Lennon began writing the song in Almería, Spain, in September and October 1966, while he was on the set of Richard Lester's film How I Won the War. He was alone, without his bandmates, and feeling it. According to his wife Cynthia, he was also distraught after learning in late October that Alma Cogan, an English singer he had cared deeply about, had died in London at the age of 34. Author Steve Turner notes that at this early stage Lennon was likely drawing inspiration from Nikos Kazantzakis's autobiographical novel Report to Greco, a book about "a writer searching for spiritual meaning" that Lennon was reading on location. The earliest demo had no refrain and only one verse, beginning: "There's no one on my wavelength / I mean, it's either too high or too low." The reference to Strawberry Field itself only entered the song after Lennon returned to England in early November. The words "nothing to get hung about" in the chorus were drawn directly from a childhood memory: Aunt Mimi had strictly forbidden him from playing in the Strawberry Field grounds, and Lennon had replied to her: "They can't hang you for it."

• 3. Three Versions, One Song

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  Recording began on the 24th of November 1966, and what followed was unlike anything the Beatles had attempted before. Over five weeks, the band spent 45 hours in Studio 2 at EMI Studios in London, working on a four-track machine. They produced three distinct versions of the song, each different in structure, key and tempo, and the one that ended up on the record was spliced together from two of them. The first version opened with a verse rather than the chorus and was relatively spare. Harrison overdubbed slide guitar parts using the Mellotron's guitar setting and its pitch control to achieve the sliding effect. Lennon soon abandoned it as too lightweight. For the second version, on the 28th of November, the group used McCartney's Mellotron introduction followed immediately by the chorus, and Harrison played arpeggio chord patterns after Lennon struggled to master the picking technique himself. Lennon's lead vocal was recorded with the tape running fast, so that on playback the slowed tonality gave his voice a slurred, otherworldly quality. But even this version left Lennon unsatisfied. He told producer George Martin he wanted a new line-up, this time with strings. Martin recalled him saying: "He'd wanted it as a gentle dreaming song, but he said it had come out too raucous." The third version, recorded on the 8th and the 9th of December, drove in the opposite direction: a faster tempo, heavy percussion, backwards-recorded hi-hat and cymbals, timpani and bongos played by McCartney and Harrison. Among those playing additional percussion were Beatles associates Mal Evans, Neil Aspinall and Terry Doran. Martin's orchestral overdub session on the 15th of December featured four trumpets and three cellos. The cellist Joy Hall became the first woman to appear on a Beatles recording. Her contribution, along with the parts of those three sessions, were then reduced to just two tape tracks. After reviewing acetates of both the second and third versions, Lennon told Martin he wanted to combine them. Martin pointed out that the orchestral version was at a faster tempo and in a higher key than the earlier recording. Lennon replied: "You can fix it, George." On the 22nd of December, engineer Geoff Emerick used nothing more than scissors, two tape machines and a vari-speed control to speed up the first version and slow down the second, then spliced them together in the middle of the second chorus. The shift in pitch gave Lennon's voice what Emerick called a "swimming" quality. Martin later said the premature fade-out before the coda's reappearance was his own idea, intended to hide errors in the busy percussion track.

• 4. Inside the Music

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  The song opens with a flute-like melody on Mellotron, an instrument that Lennon had purchased in August 1965. Unusually, the vocals enter with the chorus rather than a verse. Musicologist Dominic Pedler describes the song's harmony as featuring "non-diatonic chords and secondary dominants" combining with "chromatic melodic tension intensified through outrageous harmonisation". The phrase "to Strawberry" begins with a slightly dissonant G melody note and winds through semitone clashes before resolving on "Fields." The second and third verses are introduced by a descending, raga-like melody played on a swarmandal, an Indian board-mounted zither. Brass enters in the middle of the second chorus. After three verses and four choruses, the song fades out, then unexpectedly fades back in for what musicologist Walter Everett calls a "free-form coda." This closing section features the Mellotron in a haunting tone achieved by recording the instrument's "Swinging Flutes" setting in reverse, scattered drumming and discordant brass. Among the faintly audible comments Lennon made over the coda, the phrase "Cranberry sauce" was heard by some as "I buried Paul," fuelling the so-called Paul is Dead hoax. Although the song was originally written in C major on acoustic guitar, the manipulation of tape speeds meant that the released recording sits roughly in B major. Walter Everett describes the key as "midway between" A and B over the opening minute, and then "closer to B." Lennon's admission that the song reflected how he had felt "different all my life" was not incidental to its sound: he called it "psychoanalysis set to music." McCartney heard in the lyrics an admiration for the nineteenth-century English writer Lewis Carroll, particularly the poem "Jabberwocky."

• 5. The Promotional Film

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  By January 1967, the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein was under pressure from the record company for a new single, and Martin told him they had "two all-time great songs" ready. The decision to pair them as a double A-side followed the format the group had used for "Eleanor Rigby" and "Yellow Submarine" in August 1966. The film for "Strawberry Fields Forever" was shot on the 30th and the 31st of January 1967 at Knole Park in Sevenoaks, Kent. It was directed by Peter Goldmann, a Swedish television director recommended to the Beatles by their mutual friend Klaus Voormann. One of the band's assistants, Tony Bramwell, produced the shoot. Bramwell spent two days dressing a large tree in the park to resemble, in his own words, "a piano and harp combined, with strings," inspired by Voormann's remark that "the whole thing sounded like it was played on a strange instrument." The clip showed the Beatles in their new form: all four now wore moustaches, following Harrison's lead when he left for India in September 1966. Lennon appeared in the round "granny" glasses he had worn as Private Gripweed in Lester's film, and he had kept the shorter haircut he had taken for that role. Rather than performing the song, the film relies on abstract imagery: reverse effects, long dissolves, jump-cuts from day to night, superimposition and extreme close-ups. In one moment, McCartney appears to leap onto a branch of the tree. The clip closes with the band pouring pots of coloured paint over the upright piano. Music critic Chris Ingham described the final scene as "oddly shocking, but brilliantly memorable as a statement of iconoclastic artistic intent." The films were first broadcast in America on The Ed Sullivan Show and in Britain on Top of the Pops. On The Hollywood Palace on the 25th of February, host Van Johnson introduced "Strawberry Fields Forever" as "a musical romp through an open field with psychedelic overtones and a feeling of expanded consciousness," before adding, "If you know what that means, let me know." The clip's 1985 selection by New York's Museum of Modern Art for an exhibition of the most influential music videos placed it among the oldest works included. In 2003, MoMA's "Golden Oldies of Music Video" exhibition presented both the Beatles' clips, with avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson as host.

• 6. Missing Number One

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  "Strawberry Fields Forever" / "Penny Lane" reached number 2 on the UK Record Retailer chart, stopped by Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me," the year's biggest-selling single. It was the first Beatles UK single since "Please Please Me" in 1963 to miss the top spot, breaking a four-year run of number 1 records. The British press treated the outcome as evidence that the group was declining. McCartney said publicly he was not upset because Humperdinck's song was "a completely different type of thing." Harrison acknowledged that the new music would alienate some listeners but would also win new ones. On the national chart compiled by Melody Maker, however, the combination topped the singles list for three weeks. In the United States, where the two sides were counted separately on the Billboard Hot 100 regardless of the double A-side designation, "Penny Lane" reached number 1 while "Strawberry Fields Forever" peaked at number 8. The single reached number 1 in Canada and Norway. The first 250,000 copies of the UK release came in a picture sleeve, the first time any Beatles single in Britain had been sold that way. The back cover showed individual photographs of the four Beatles as infants, a gesture that music critic Greil Marcus noticed when he wrote, looking back on the single and what it promised for Sgt. Pepper: "If this extraordinary music was merely a taste of what The Beatles were up to, what would the album be like?" Both songs were ultimately left off Sgt. Pepper. Martin later called that omission a "dreadful mistake." Capitol Records subsequently included both tracks on the US Magical Mystery Tour LP, a decision that displeased the Beatles.

• 7. Ripples Outward

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  The song's influence on psychedelic rock was immediate and lasting. Music historian Ian MacDonald identifies it as having "extended the range of studio techniques developed on Revolver, opening up possibilities for pop which, given sufficient invention, could result in unprecedented sound images." He credits it with launching both the "English pop-pastoral mood" associated with Pink Floyd, Family, Traffic and Fairport Convention, and English psychedelia's preoccupation with childhood memory and LSD-altered perception. Simon Philo describes much of Pink Floyd's 1967 debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as being in the style of the "patented British psychedelia" introduced by the Beatles' song. David Howard calls the production a "direct touchstone" for Pink Floyd, the Move, the Smoke and other bands on London's psychedelic scene. The Mellotron's flute sound on the record remains, despite an earlier appearance on Manfred Mann's "Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James" in late 1966, its most celebrated use in pop or rock. Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues, who had supplied the instrument to the Beatles, said he was "in bliss" when he heard it. The cello arrangement proved similarly influential on 1970s bands including Electric Light Orchestra and Wizzard. Walter Everett identifies the song's fade-out and fade-in coda as a technique the Beatles pioneered further after using it on the 1966 B-side "Rain," and notes that the Rolling Stones responded to it directly on both sides of their August 1967 single "We Love You" and "Dandelion." In Michael Snow's 1967 Canadian structural film Wavelength, the song plays on a radio in a room that is gradually zoomed in on; Snow began editing the film in early 1967 and was significantly drawn to the track after its release, choosing to overdub it over a song that had been playing in the original footage. Richie Havens performed the song to open the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. Todd Rundgren covered it in 1976. Peter Gabriel recorded a version for the musical documentary All This and World War II, pairing it with newsreel footage of Neville Chamberlain's "Peace for our time" declaration after his 1938 meeting with Adolf Hitler. The Madchester duo Candy Flip released an electronic version in 1990 that peaked at number 3 on the UK Singles Chart. Alvin Lucier used the vocal melody as the piano score of his 1990 experimental classical composition "Nothing Is Real." In October 1985, Yoko Ono officially dedicated a 3.5 acre section of Central Park in New York, named Strawberry Fields, in Lennon's memory. The song's opening line, "Living is easy with eyes closed," became the title of a 2013 Spanish film depicting a fictional account based on a real teacher who visited Lennon in Almería while he was writing the song.