Roots and Beginnings: Magical Mystery Tour by the Beatles

Prose fiction does not hold a monopoly on worldbuilding. Imagined realities that appear to sprawl in all directions beyond the keyhole into which you’re glancing at any given moment can be constructed through much more than just the accretion of made-up facts about invented people and places. Sound can do it too, because sound implies a point of origin for the transmission, and with sufficient creativity you can make it so that point of origin appears to be located on another planet entirely.

I’ve often thought that my tweenage love for the Beatles, and slightly later Led Zeppelin, and still later the Wu-Tang Clan (and, on a parallel comedic track, Monty Python), stemmed from these groups’ ability to sound deep, wide, and dense respectively – to build worlds just as surely as did J.R.R. Tolkien or George Lucas, but with a different set of tools entirely. Wu-Tang famously created their own nine-man mythology from soul samples, Five Percent Nation doctrine, Marvel Comics, mob movies, kung-fu flicks, hip hop, anecdotes from their own lives, and inside jokes from their neighborhoods and circles of friends. Led Zeppelin pilfered American blues, English folk, proto-“world music” drawn from equatorial traditions worldwide, and USA/UK rock and roll, filtered it through Jimmy Page’s monumental production skills, sprinkled it with Middle-earth, and came up with massive-sounding music designed to fill both arenas and imaginations. And by the time of Magical Mystery Tour, the cobbled-together America-only LP recorded on either side of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, the Beatles were studio obsessives whose brand of psychedelia wasn’t the formless paisley lava-lamp haze with which that word has since come to be associated, but a meticulously ordered excess of information, a pile of constituent elements that seemed to sprawl off to the horizon, endlessly explorable with your parent’s turntable, a decent set of headphones, and patience.

Magical Mystery Tour was the jam for me because of two towering singles, “I Am the Walrus” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The former was mostly playful, the latter poignant, in terms of which side of John Lennon they brought out. “Walrus” was poetic, cynical stream-of-consciousness image-making – I remember thinking he was really slamming pollution by saying the English rain could give you a tan, and having no idea what was going on with “yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye” other than that it was gross and awesome. “Strawberry Fields” was, as I dimly understood the word, trippy – nothing is real, he argued, but therefore there was nothing to get hung about, so it worked out in the end. Both songs, however, were made in my mind by their prolonged and ominous outros, increasingly discordant swirls of dialogue snippets, strings, clangs, driving drums, distorted vocals…hell, both of them allegedly contained clues as to the death of Paul McCartney, a rumor/meme/conspiracy theory/ARG decades ahead of its time. There was no making literal sense out of this morass of sonic information the way you could understand a “normal” rock song. This was music to get lost in just as surely as you could get lost in the Fellowship’s journey from Rivendell to Moria. It was music designed to transport.