"Roll Up!"; 50th Anniversary of Magical Mystery Tour - The Beatles

Great memories with this album..
Happy 50Th

 

Happy Big 5 0 .. to all the People out there!

 

Off:

Mono

Prefer Paraphone 2 45 RPM release.
"Compact Disc EP. (sic) Collection" version too!!

Would like to see:
Two Blu-rays (or SA-CD), in faux original parkaging; one mono & one stereo disc.
24/96 LPCM w/all art work & marketing material on HD vid as well!!

Capital mono/stereo in any Hi-Rez format would be fine tho...

 

My first Beatles record. The older brother of a friend was playing it.... I loved it and had my mother buy it for me. The year was 1972 or 1973.

 

Don't know if it's a total shame. After all.. the album has been remastered .. the film has been dvd'ed and blurayed.. the special has been done. But wow.. talk about a low key 50th anniversary..if APPLE had really wanted to soak the fans they could have easily spent this year on Pepper and MMT and probably done another one of those USB or Streaming APPLE thingies and would have made a nice killing on all of it!!!

P.S. my dad in his late 30s with a passel of kids, wondered just why this Beatles thing kept going on ... so he went out and bought a copy of the latest Beatles album ... the Capitol Mono and this was the first thing I spent hours listening to by the time I celebrated my first birthday. That copy worn out... it was replaced in 1971 by the APPLE label reissue of MMT and the 2nd Album and I remember just spacing out to this precious communication for hours on end. Every sound was pored over and reviewed and every song thoroughly enjoyed. I was weird enough that Blue Jay Way was a favorite.. and I didn't hate any track. Hello Goodbye was my highlight and it wasn't long before that 24 page booklet got torn to shreds and lost. Oh well.. those were the days.. but Christmastime is here again!

 

That's "Strawberry Hills FOREVER"

 

Ah, I can hear my wife now, calling the '67 era stuff the "weird sh-t" She's not a big fan...

Anyway:
So, where did you first hear this album? In '87, going through my first rush of delayed Beatlemania (better late than never, I s'pose)- bought the cassette.
What did you think? I liked it, of course- coolest part for me was how gaps between the tracks were kept to a minimum so all the songs sorta segued together
Has this opinion changed? Yes. I don't dislike the psychedelic Beatles as much as my wife does, but I really have to be in a mood to listen to that stuff now. A lot of it really hasn't aged well for me.
How many copies do you own? '67 Capitol mono, '09 Stereo CD.
Do you like the mono mix or the stereo? I actually prefer the stereo for this one, even though the mono LP sounds damned good. Tough call, really.

 

Depends where you lived...

 

Id say Meet the Beatles is the album the largest total number of people worldwide were aware of before The Beatles broke up. Probably double the number thst were aware of MMT.

 

I'd never heard of 'Meet The Beatles' until sometime in the 70's when I became aware of the US catalog - outside of the US, it didn't 'exist'.
Still doesn't to the average fan in the street who isn't American.


MMT at least gets the guernsey for being the one US album to have become 'canon'.

 

I somehow feel that the original EP was a more coherent statement. But having the singles like Strawberry FF on the other side of an LP gives us easy access to those great tracks. And SFF really does complement Walrus – both songs being defining moments in The Beatles' work for me.

 

Not sure this holds true 50 years later.

 

The point about it being canon is solid and fact-based. But 'most famous' is a dicey contention - a poor choice of words perhaps.

There are a ton of posts on this forum about the Beatles' Capitol albums.

Based on what I've read 'Yesterday and Today' might be the most talked-about Capitol album. A lot of people love it, a lot of people denigrate it as a hodgepodge. And of course there was all the controversy with the original cover art.

 

Good points that I will concede.

When I said "most famous", I meant how this album eventually got released (okay, some Capitol albums were pressed by EMI for military bases and this album was imported in sufficient quantities to crack the British charts) in Britain (first on cassette then on vinyl) and then because the only Capitol album (until 2004) to be released on CD.

Heck, it's because of this album (and the Germans) that "Penny Lane" and "Baby, You're a Rich Man" have true stereo mixes*. ("All You Need is Love" had already been mixed in stereo for Yellow Submarine)

* Of course, it's also because of the Germans "Strawberry Fields Forever" has two stereo mixes but I digress.

 

I agree, it has been marginalized by the band for the last 30 years. During their career it was their most famous album.

 

My favourite Beatle album or double EP.

 

I love this album. Growing up
I had an 8 track of it on the Cameo label if memory serves me well. I’d just listen to Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, and Hello Goodbye at the time. When I was 11 or 12 my cousin got a Walkman and the cassette for Christmas and I remember listening to the title track over and over (still one of my favorite Beatles songs).
I later got the mono and stereo albums....then the CDs.
I prefer the Stereo CD I suppose although side 2 of the mono reminds me of the Capitol Stereo because of the fake stereo tracks.

 

Even though genesim later admitted his example of "Hello Goodbye" following "I Am The Walrus" was a bad one, I think it needs to be said that anyone who has misgivings about the two songs being on the same LP needs to remember "I Am The Walrus" was the B-side of the original "Hello Goodbye" single in both the US and UK! So those two tracks are linked forever in all ways.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again, Capitol deserves kudos for showing great restraint in the putting together, getting The Beatles' approval, and release of this album. Right from the get-go, Capitol:

1. Used all the original artwork as in the EP, just blown up to 12"x12" size. Even if the front cover isn't exactly like the EP's, the EP's front cover forms the centerpiece for the LP's front cover so all of the UK artwork was used. The only things changed were label copy, catalog numbers, publishers etc.

2. Kept all the EP's songs on one side. For those who can't abide the "bonus" cuts of Side 2, well...you don't have to play it. Just play Side 1 of the LP (or program only the first six songs of the CD) and you have the full, undiluted intent of the band. Can you imagine if Capitol mixed all the songs up over both sides?

3. Kept the songs on Side 2 current and thematically consistent. Considering all the non-LP tracks Capitol had in the vaults and could have put on Side 2, logic (never a corporate strong suit) prevailed.

Oh yes...theoretically Capitol could have designed, complied, sequenced and otherwise totally fubar'd the whole thing up in the earliest stages of planning the release even if they needed the band's approval for the final design.

Totally different graphics, shuffeld track list, "Paperback Writer" and "Misery" on Side 2....all could have been planned before Beatles' approval, but thankfully that never happened.

 

I've always loved Magical Mystery Tour as an album and it was so good that it hurt my appreciation for the film when I saw that later. It's one of the first albums I ever bought and I already knew some songs from 1967-1970, so I was really only hearing a few new songs but "Baby You're a Rich Man" was one in particular I fell in love with hard. I know it's not the greatest they ever did and it's maybe even in the lesser half of their recorded works in terms of quality but as one of the new songs for me (only 'Flying', 'Blue Jay Way', 'Your Mother Should Know' and 'Baby You're a Rich Man' weren't on 1967-1970), it became a top 10 Beatle song for me to this day.

As a whole experience, it's their most colorful album sonically with tons of instruments and sounds and I like it way more than MMT as just an EP which to me, seems incomplete without the major biggies on the 2nd side plus I was disappointed there was only one true Lennon song of 6 on the EP. As a kid, I wondered why he didn't have more material on the EP and I guess I still do. Just a couple of years earlier, Lennon could have written another 4 or 5 songs to complete a full album like he did with A Hard Day's Night and Help! considering he was so prolific but I guess it wasn't where his head was at in 1967.

 

Imagine the double album they could have put out for Christmas 67 if they decided to go crazy with the leftovers.

 

Well, of course - the book is always better than the movie!

 

I had just posted a 2-LP of The Who Sell Out that I worked on for a long time and I did one for the Beatles 1967 material as well that I'll post here and on the other MMT-era songs thread. I used an idea that I don't think I've ever seen anyone try yet and includes a lot of tracks that people might not think of when putting together a compilation of this period. I don't have time yet to post though and I want to go through the material one more time first but if you have the all the tracks, it'll be worth hearing at least once.

 

My recollection of this album was that it was one of the good ones... however played it last week for the first time in maybe 10 years following reading something about it on this forum...and was genuinely a bit underwhelmed....

Loved the title track, The Fool On The Hill and Hello Goodbye....but.....

Maybe just an off day....or else it might sit there again for another 10 years....

 

Not true. It was an American release, so in the rest of the world people were not aware of that album. Going by the number of people, it has to be one of the late period, when their releases were standadized. I would say Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road.

 

I am aware it was a US only release. Their US fan base was so much bigger, particularly in the 1964 peak, that it was still their most famous album. By the time all releases started being the same in 1967, they were no longer at the peak fame moment. They were getting outsold by The Monkees by that time. And MMT did not get worldwide release until the 80s right? They were nostalgia artists for boomers and their progeny by then.