Magical Mystery Tour (Mono)

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From Wikipedia:

Magical Mystery Tour is an album by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a double EP in the United Kingdom and an LP in the United States. Produced by George Martin, both versions include the six-song soundtrack to the 1967 film of the same name. The EP was issued in the UK on 8 December 1967 on the Parlophone label, while the Capitol Records LP release in the US occurred on 27 November and featured eleven tracks through the addition of songs from the band’s 1967 singles. The EP was also released in Germany, France, Spain, Yugoslavia, Brazil, Australia and Japan. The first official release as an eleven-track LP in the UK did not occur until 1976.

Despite widespread media criticism of the Magical Mystery Tour film, the soundtrack was a critical and commercial success and a number one Grammy-nominated album in the US. When EMI issued the Beatles’ catalogue on compact disc in 1987, the track listing of the 1967 US LP was adopted rather than the six-song UK release.

Background

After the Beatles recorded Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul McCartney wanted to create a film based upon the group and their music. The film was to be unscripted: various “ordinary” people were to travel on a coach and have unspecified “magical” adventures. The resulting Magical Mystery Tour film was made and included six new Beatles songs. The film originally screened on BBC-TV over the 1967 Christmas holidays but was savaged by critics.

The number of songs used in the film posed a challenge for the Beatles and their UK record company, EMI, as there were too few for an LP album but too many for an EP. One idea considered was to issue an EP which played at 33⅓ rpm but this would have caused a loss of audio fidelity that was deemed unacceptable. The solution chosen was to issue an innovative format of two EPs packaged in a gatefold sleeve with a 28-page booklet containing the lyrics, colour photos from film production, and colour story illustrations by Beatles Book cartoonist Bob Gibson. Of the package, Bob Neaverson wrote: “While it certainly solved the song quota problem, one suspects that it was also partly born of the Beatles’ pioneering desire to experiment with conventional formats and packaging“. The package was released in the UK on 8 December, in time for the Christmas market, at the sub-£1 price of 19s 6d (equivalent to £16 today).

Because EPs were not popular in the US at the time, Capitol Records released the soundtrack as an LP by adding tracks from that year’s non-album singles. The first side of the LP contained the film soundtrack songs (like earlier British Beatles soundtrack albums), and the second side had the remaining A-side and B-sides released in 1967, with the last three of these five songs – “Penny Lane“, “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” and “All You Need Is Love” – presented in duophonic, fake “processed” stereo sound on Capitol’s stereo version of the LP. In its LP, Capitol used the EP set’s 28-page booklet, consisting of 24 pages of colour photos and illustrations and four pages for the song lyrics on its centre leaves, and enlarged the photos and illustrations to LP size to be included as a 24-page booklet inside a gatefold album sleeve. The lyrics to the film songs were also printed inside the gatefold itself. Several years later Capitol quit including the 24-page booklet and removed mention of it from the album cover.

Sales performance

Magical Mystery Tour was number 1 on Billboard‘s Top LPs listings for eight weeks at the start of 1968 and remained in the top 200 until 8 February 1969. It was nominated for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1968. In Britain, the EP peaked at number 2 on the national singles chart, behind “Hello, Goodbye“, and became the Beatles’ ninth release to top the national EP chart compiled by Record Retailer. In the UK singles listings compiled by Melody Maker magazine, it replaced “Hello, Goodbye” at number 1 for a week.

Decades later, the 2012 remastered Magical Mystery Tour DVD entered the Billboard Top Music Video chart at number 1, while the CD album climbed to number 1 on the Billboard Catalog Album Chart, number 2 on the Billboard Soundtrack albums chart, and re-entered at number 57 on the Billboard 200 albums chart for the week ending 27 October 2012.

Critical reception

Reviewing the EP a month before the film’s screening, Nick Logan of the NME enthused that the Beatles were “at it again, stretching pop music to its limits“. He continued: “The four musician-magicians take us by the hand and lead us happily tripping through the clouds, past Lucy in the sky with diamonds and the fool on the hill, into the sun-speckled glades along Blue Jay Way and into the world of Alice in Wonderland …. This is The Beatles out there in front and the rest of us in their wake.” In Record Mirror, Norman Jopling wrote that, whereas on Sgt. Pepper “the effects were chiefly sound and only the album cover was visual“, on Magical Mystery Tour “the visual side … has dominated the music“, such that “[e]verything from fantasy, children’s comics, acid (psychedelic) humour is included on the record and in the [EP] booklet.” Bob Dawbarn of Melody Maker described the EP as “six tracks which no other pop group in the world could begin to approach for originality combined with the popular touch“.

The album review in Rolling Stone consisted of a single-sentence quote from John Lennon from 1966 in reference to other artists covering their songs: “There are only about 100 people in the world who understand our music.” Writing in Saturday Review, Mike Jahn hailed Magical Mystery Tour as the Beatles’ best album yet, superior to Sgt. Pepper in emotion and depth, and “distinguished by its description of the Beatles’ acquired Hindu philosophy and its subsequent application to everyday life“.

Robert Christgau of Esquire considered three of the five new songs to be “disappointing“, including “The Fool on the Hill“, which, he wrote, “may be the worst song the Beatles have ever recorded“. Christgau still found the album “worth buying“, however, “for all the singles, which are good music, after all; for the tender camp of ‘Your Mother Should Know’; and especially for Harrison’s hypnotic ‘Blue Jay Way,’ an adaptation of Oriental modes in which everything works, lyrics included“. Hit Parader said that “the beautiful Beatles do it again, widening the gap between them and 80 scillion other groups.” Remarking on how the Beatles and their producer “present a supreme example of team work“, the reviewer compared the album with the Rolling Stones’ concurrent release, Their Satanic Majesties Request, and opined that “I Am the Walrus” and “Blue Jay Way” alone “accomplish what the Stones attempted“.

Release history

In 1969 and 1971, the previously unavailable true-stereo mixes were created, which allowed the first true-stereo version of the Magical Mystery Tour LP to be issued in Germany in 1971. As an American import, the Capitol LP peaked on the British album charts at number 31 in January 1968. In the face of continued public demand, EMI officially released the Capitol LP version of Magical Mystery Tour in the UK in November 1976, although, notwithstanding the availability of the true-stereo mixes, it used the Capitol masters with fake stereo.

When standardising the Beatles’ releases for the worldwide compact disc release in 1987, EMI used the US LP version of Magical Mystery Tour (in true stereo) in what was otherwise a British album line-up.

The inclusion of the 1967 singles on CD with this album meant both that the Magical Mystery Tour CD would be of comparable length to the band’s CDs of its original albums and that those three singles would not need to be included on Past Masters, a two-volume compilation designed to accompany the initial CD album releases and provide all non-album tracks (mostly singles) on CD format.

In 1992 the EP version of Magical Mystery Tour was reissued in both mono and stereo as part of a box set containing CD versions of the Beatles original UK EPs. The album (along with the Beatles’ entire UK studio album catalogue) was remastered and reissued on CD in 2009. Acknowledging the album’s conception and first release, the CD incorporates the original Capitol LP label design. The remastered stereo CD features a mini-documentary about the album. Initial copies of the album accidentally list the mini-documentary to be one made for Let It Be. The mono album was reissued as part of The Beatles in Mono CD and LP box sets. […]

Last updated on February 28, 2023