To date, there were just two songs earmarked for the film - the title tune and Your Mother Should Know, both by McCartney. Now, John Lennon brought in his sole contribution for the TV movie, apart from the group instrumental Flying and some incidental music. This otherworldly composition began simply enough as a droning wordgame to confound those who were constantly digging for deeper meaning in the lyrics of the band's songs. Of course, the Beatles themselves had unwittingly encouraged those who did so by printing the words of all the Sgt. Pepper songs on the back of that album earlier in the year.
In his book Here, There and Everywhere, engineer Geoff Emerick reports that producer George Martin found the song bewildering when Lennon first played it for all to hear, uttering, "What the hell do you expect me to do with that?" The mood did not improve once they began working on the basic track. Sixteen takes were necessary (and only five of them were complete) before they yielded a decent master. After just a few takes, Paul abandoned his bass and grabbed a tambourine to help the usually-reliable Ringo maintain a steady beat throughout. Emerick relates that Martin wondered aloud in the control room why John was playing the electric keyboard instead of Paul, as Lennon made numerous mistakes.
Things went better on the following night, September 6th, as Paul added his bass part and John recorded his amazing lead vocal. Anthology 2 presents take sixteen from September 5th with only John's vocal overdub from this date. This allows us to hear George Harrison's minimal electric guitar in the clear, which turned out to be his only work on the track. At this point, George Martin took away a copy of the recording to try and figure out what kind of arrangement he could possibly come up with to augment the song. As usual, his input turned out to be exceptional.
In the meantime, however, most of the filming of Magical Mystery Tour took place, including the sequence for I Am the Walrus. Though Paul directed much of the film, this was definitely John's baby, and it remains one of the best sections of the finished product, serving today as a perfect example of the promotional films of the psychedelic period.
On September 27th, a sixteen piece orchestra spent the afternoon session recording George Martin's ingenious score, which once again incorporated the sliding strings that he had first used in support of George Harrison's Within You Without You months earlier. The evening session was even more inventive, as sixteen members (eight boys and eight girls, according to the standard notation of the time) of the commercial group the Mike Sammes Singers sang many strange backing vocal parts arranged for them by Martin and Lennon.
At the all-important mono mixing session on September 29th, Lennon finally got to add the live radio feed he wanted to the second half of the recording. He unknowingly settled on a BBC broadcast of Shakespeare's King Lear. As this was mixed live into the song, it created difficulties when the stereo mix was done on November 6th. The equipment of 1967 made it impossible to separate the radio signal and so, from the moment that that signal was introduced, the sound is in mono, though it moves from speaker to speaker thus causing a unique effect.
Though the song was part of the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack, it was also chosen to be the B-side of the single Hello Goodbye. In addition to Anthology 2, the song can also be found on the Blue Album, the American version of Rarities and Reel Music.
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