Today’s classic songs of the day are both sides of a two-sided single released by the Beatles in February of 1967. The songs are “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” and they offer a kind of mirror image view into the songwriters’ youth.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” was written by John Lennon (but attributed to Lennon-McCartney, as were all their Beatles-era tunes) and is inarguably the most experimental and influential of the two tunes. In “Strawberry Fields” John revisited his childhood in Liverpool, where he played in the garden of a Salvation Army children’s home named Strawberry Field. Lennon’s Aunt Mimi had these memories of those times:
“There was something about the place that always fascinated John. He could see it from his window… He used to hear the Salvation Army band [playing at the garden party], and he would pull me along, saying, ‘Hurry up, Mimi—we’re going to be late.'”
Lennon turned his memories into a surrealistic soundscape. The song starts with a mellotron (a kind of primitive sampling instrument) playing a flute line that leads into Lennon’s impressionistic lyrics:
Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It’s getting hard to be someone, but it all works out
It doesn’t matter much to me
Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to strawberry fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever
Paul McCartney played the mellotron, George Harrison added slide guitar and an Indian instrument called a swarmandal, and Ringo Starr contributed pounding drums and additional percussion. John played guitar and some more mellotron at the end. There was also a brass section in there in the back half of the song.
The Beatles spent 45 hours in the studio, spread over five weeks, working on “Strawberry Field,” a long time for a single song back in those days. They ultimately produced two distinctly different versions of the song, of which Lennon preferred the lighter vibe of one take and the heavier, more intense approach of another. He tasked producer George Martin to somehow splice together the beginning of the lighter version and the end of the heavier one, which was easier said than done as the two recordings were in two different keys and two different tempos. (“You can fix it, George,” Lennon supposedly said to the man many considered the fifth Beatle, before walking away for the day.)
Remember, these were the days before digital recording, so Martin had to figure out a way to slightly speed up the first version and slightly slow down the second. In Martin’s own words:
“I listened to the two versions again, and suddenly realized that with a bit of luck I might get away with it, because, with the way that the keys were arranged, the slower version was a semitone flat compared with the faster one. I thought: If I can speed up the one, and slow down the other, I can get the pitches the same. And with any luck, the tempos will be sufficiently close not to be noticeable. I did just that, on a variable-control tape machine, selecting precisely the right spot to make the cut, to join them as nearly perfectly as possible.”
Martin lucked out. The final version of “Strawberry Fields” was a little faster and higher pitched than the first and slightly slower and lower pitched than the second. If you listen closely, you can hear the switch right in the middle of the second chorus, on the word “going.” (“Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to…”)
In a way, “Strawberry Fields” was more of an art song than a pop song. It sounded psychedelic and maybe a little drug-influenced, and it really stretched the boundaries of what a pop song could be—and how it could be constructed.
When record buyers flipped the single over, they got the song “Penny Lane,” which was written by Paul McCartney. (And, as usual, credited to Lennon-McCartney.) Like “Strawberry Fields,” “Penny Lane” was a reflection on Paul’s youth in Liverpool. It was more of a straight forward pop song than Lennon’s piece, with a typically brilliant Paul McCartney melody and lyrics that painted a word picture of his life as a boy in the south Liverpool suburb of Mossley Hill and a real street named Penny Lane.
As Paul later recalled:
“‘Penny Lane’ was kind of nostalgic, but it was really [about] a place that John and I knew… I’d get a bus to his house and I’d have to change at Penny Lane, or the same with him to me, so we often hung out at that terminus, like a roundabout. It was a place that we both knew, and so we both knew the things that turned up in the story.”
Paul wrote “Penny Lane” in direct response to John’s “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Paul’s lyrics, however, while still somewhat impressionistic, were more conventional than what his bandmate wrote:
In Penny Lane, there is a barber showing photographs
Of every head he’s had the pleasure to know
And all the people that come and go
Stop and say hello
On the corner is a banker with a motorcar
And little children laugh at him behind his back
And the banker never wears a mac in the pouring rain
Very strange
Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
Wet beneath the blue suburban skies
I sit and meanwhile…
“Penny Lane” was also more conventional in its arrangement and instrumentation, although there were some unique aspects to the recording, primarily the brass and woodwind parts and the piccolo trumpet solo. That solo, played by trumpeter David Mason (who received 27 pounds and ten for his work—less than $40 in American money), was the defining feature of the recording, really setting it apart from other songs on the radio and cementing it as unique in the Beatles’ canon.
How successful was the two-sided single? “Strawberry Fields” was a number-one hit in numerous countries (Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—and #2 in the UK), but only hit #8 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and #10 on the Cash Box Top 100. “Penny Lane” charted separately from “Strawberry Fields” and peaked higher on the charts. It was a top five hit around the world, hitting #1 in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and West Germany. It stalled at #2 on the UK charts but hit #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100 in the U.S.
All that said, “Strawberry Fields Forever”/”Penny Lane” may be the best and certainly most memorable two-sided single in music history. Both songs were instant classics that influenced untold numbers of songs and songwriters in the years after.
And now, for your viewing pleasures, today’s daily bonus videos (plural) of the day are the Beatles’ official promotional films for both “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.” The “Strawberry Fields” film, in particular, was groundbreaking and very influential. They both hold up very, very well today
