Strawberry Fields Forever

Great.

So when he's 13, the first record he buys is Strawberry Fields.

This is 1966 or 1967.

He says they'd only just got a record player that week.

For the rest of the White House.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So when he's 13, he says about Strawberry Fields, it just took you in and it dragged you under and took you to places you'd never been before.

Or a 13-year-old boy had never been before.

Well, what an A.

Speaking of the Beatles, that's Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields.

That's Hey Jude Revolution great, because You're My Best Friend might be the best pop song on this record.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a masterpiece, and there's so many great songs on this thing.

yeah and I when I started the series I knew I wanted to do self-portraits I didn't know what and then my dad died and for so long I just didn't I didn't recognize myself for so long and then the day after my birthday I had the day off and I just thought I'll do my self-portrait and um My dad and I really liked the Beatles, especially Sgt. Pepper's and Magical Mystery Tour.

And I had been listening to Strawberry Fields Forever kind of as a comfort.

I've got a playlist of songs that my dad liked that I listened to when I need to.

And I thought, Strawberry Fields, nothing is real.

He's really famous for using the Mellotron, which is a really cool old-sounding instrument where they You basically it's it's all these different notes on reels of tape and you press a key and it plays that note.

It's very if you listen to the beginning of like Strawberry Fields Forever by the Beatles.

If you listen to King Crimson, it's the Crimson Court.

It's that big strings, that old strings sound.

I had technique.

I could play songs.

But I just really struggled with... playing melodically, especially in major keys.

And so the cage system was just a really important thing for me.

These things will start wrapping together.

It's just going to take time.

Okay? But when you think of songs like...

Any of that kind of stuff.

We know more about the songwriting of With A Little Help From My Friends than most other Beatles songs.

Unlike, say, Strawberry Fields Forever or Get Back, we don't have audio recordings of the songwriting process, but we do have a very interesting first-hand account by a journalist for at least part of the process.

That journalist was Hunter Davies, the author of the only authorised biography of the band.

Davies was allowed to hang around with the band, observing whatever they happened to be doing, and he was in the room on March 29, 1967, for the second day of John and Paul working on the writing of With a Little Help From My Friends.

And it was originally supposed to be an album about their hometown and growing up.

And the first tracks they cut for Sgt. Pepper's was Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields.

And...

They were under a great deal of pressure, the Beatles were, to... put out some new product because it had been a while since Revolver had come out and people were starting to say, oh, their creativity's drying up.

So George Martin was under a great deal of pressure to get something new out there.

So they put out the single with Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields on it, which is brilliant.

But George Martin, to his dying day, said his biggest regret was producing the Beatles, was not having those two albums on Sgt. Pepper.

Can you imagine how great Sgt. Pepper would have been with those two songs on there?

1966.

And then Strawberry Fields, the first session was November the something.

Yeah, it was like November 28th.

Okay, so it's like late November.

We'll argue that another day.

We'll argue that another episode.

But him writing Strawberry Fields and being on his own, really, for the first time away from...

the beatles and cynthia and and all that was kind of a big deal but yeah the the changes when they did come back and there's that video i know you've seen it there's some very british person catching them right by the abbey roads oh outside yeah that was just before

George Harrison is singing While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

Paul is singing about Penny Lane and John is singing about Strawberry Fields Forever.

Those four equations, those would be those different configurations of the Beatles with one of them front and everybody else backing the front man.

would be the equations, but the Beatles would be the Lagrangian.