Magical Mystery Tour

Pushkin.

Mystery tours was just sort of the quick hit.

You get on the bus somewhere in Liverpool.

Yeah, and you weren't supposed to know where you were going. You get on the bus and you'd trust the operators to take you somewhere.

Nice.

No, it was nice to get away and you couldn't really afford much more.

Playground spectacular, playground, extraordinary.

There were advertisers a mystery tour, but often wasn't so much a mystery.

You were going to Blackpool, Blackpool and millions of Britons and millions from overseas.

So I just liked the idea that you didn't know where you were going, and it's like, come with me, we'll go somewhere.

Where are we going? It's a mystery?

Okay, great, let go.

When a man buys a ticket for a magical mystery theater, he knows what to expect.

We guarantee him the drip of a lifetime, and that's just what he gets, the incredible or magically mister tool.

Woll up, woll up.

I'm Paul will do And I've been fortunate to spend time with one of the greatest songwriters of our era, And.

Will you look at me, I'm going up to I'm actually a performer.

That is, Sir Paul McCartney. We worked together on a book looking at the lyrics of more than one hundred and fifty of the songs, and we recorded many hours of our conversations.

Well actually a song, my god, Well that crypta hoy.

This is McCartney, A life in lyrics, a masterclass, a memoir, and an improvised journey with one of the most iconic figures in popular music in this episode magical Mystery Tour. When McCartney was growing up, the notion of a mystery tour involved paying to get on a bus and be transported to an unknown location for the day. The fact is there was very little mystery about it at all. The destination was usually Blackpool, a resort on the northwest English coast.

Coaches carry three million passengers each year, and each season eight million arrived to experience the delights of.

This the lamp.

There, you'd be able to sit by the ocean, ride roller coasters and see the impressive festival of lights before heading home.

I think it's a cheap holiday, you know, if you don't have any time or money, you just run out for the day and it often involved a sharra bank a coach and you'd all just get on that.

And you go for a day trip.

Blackpool would be the sort of star day trip and sometimes to see the lights.

It was just sort of the quick hit take the kids out.

Normally it's like a seaside place where you would get some o'zo down the kid's throats.

In addition to a little fresh air. A Blackpool day trip provided a great deal of entertainment by way of its fair ground attractions.

That was great.

Blackpool was really pretty cool because they had a fun for and the famous thing there was the the laughing It was a guy in a little sort of a model that just laughed.

You'd stand in front of it and you couldn't resist laughing. That wasn't a real person.

No, no, it's a recording, I see.

But it was a little model and they kind of moved. It was jolly bild.

Guy McCartney's childhood enthusiasm for the Carnivalesque sets the tone for Magical Mystery Tour, a song written as an opener for the w P of the same name. The Blackpool Laughing Man wasn't the only carnivalesque laughter on McCartney's mind while writing Magical Mystery Tour. Shortly before he wrote those lyrics, Jerry Samuels, billed as Napoleon the Fourteenth, released a hit novelty.

Song, Remember when you ran away and I got on my knees and begged you not to leave, because I go ber sir, well you left me anyhow, and then the days got worse and worse, and now you see I've gone completely out of my mind.

First of all, let's talk about this phrase that coming to take you, to take you away? Right?

No?

Yes, So it was a song and it came to me this morning as I was thinking of this. You know, one of those songs that one should probably have forgotten about completely, the novelty song.

Yes They're coming to take me away, haha, They're coming to take me away.

Hoe to the funny farm where.

Life is beautiful all the time, and be happy to.

See they're going to take you away. Hah, They're coming to take you away, Which was quite an amazing song because it was wor was it about mental health?

It was?

It certainly sounded like and we were laughing at it, which you know, I think those post war time years, people laughed at stuff, even dark stuff. In fact, there was dark humor, quite a lot of sick jokes that were called, and you were encouraged to laugh at it as a way of defeating it, sure, as a way of not letting it get you down, so you know, we're coming to take you away. And it was I'm sure that was an echo of that.

As fair Ground Barkers and Mystery to her guides. The Beatles repeat this nod to Napoleon the Fourteenth Song, their appeals to the listener escalating with each verse.

And the other thing about this is it's waiting to take you away the first time, and the next time it's hoping to take you away, and the last time next to the last time is it's coming to take you away, and then it's dying to take you away.

In Magical Mystery Tour, the idea of being taken away is more whimsical, But in Napoleon the Fourteenth Song, it's clear that the maniacal speaker would be taken away to a mental institution. Billing for Christ's sakes, you must be committed right. This setting loomed large in the public imagination after the release of ken Casey's nineteen sixty two novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, later adapted into a film starring Jack Nicholson.

Jesus, I mean, you guys do nothing but complain about how you can't stand it in this place here, and then you haven't got the guts just to walk out.

What do you think you are? For Christie crazy or something?

Well, you're not, You're not.

Ken Casey would embark on his own version of a magical mystery tour in nineteen sixty four. He and his comrades drove across the United States in a school bus covered with psychedelic designs. This group called themselves the Merry Pranksters, and they firmly embraced a countercultural mindset. Here's Casey giving voice to that mindset outside of San Francisco Courthouse in

I feel a man has the right to be as big as he feels it in him to be.

While McCartney wasn't physically on ken Casey's hallucinogenic buss, it may have been this quintessential nineteen sixties image which prompted Magical Mystery to her. The Psychedelic Bus is particularly recognizable in the Beatles Surreal made for TV movie that accompanied the album, in which the band and an eccentric group of tourists pile into a coach and encounter various magical incidents.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Boys and girls, welcome to magical Mystery. To all, I am your career, Jolly Jimmy Duncan, and you are all my friends.

The film was largely improvised. Ringo Starr once recalled that the closest they got to a script was a circle that Paul McCartney drew on a blank piece of paper, with the idea that they would start with the bus and fill in the plot as they went along.

Anyway, I'll tell you something.

You ain't coming away with me anymore?

Who bought the tickets to the trip?

I did?

Yeah, I'm not. I'm taking you.

You're not taking me anyway the film.

The idea of the film thought had been inspired by Ken Casey's Mary Pranksters, whom you came across when accompanying Jane Asher on a West Coast Theater tour in April nineteen sixty seven. That's that's what I'm that's what we're hearing.

Yeah, well I don't know about these things, right, Yeah, you know some of these things. I'd say, well, I'm not even sure I met Ken Casey, but then someone shows me a photograph as you with him. Okay, so I'm not sure that connection. But it was connected inasmuch as we were all connected in this generation, this crowd of us, who'd you know, who liked the same kind of things, And you know, it was getting around.

Throughout my conversations with Paul McCartney, it became clear to me that what he himself remembers is in many ways bond to the story that a generation told about itself.

We always used to say, people say, oh, you were the absolute leaders of the generation, and we said.

Well, not really.

I mean, there were plenty of other people who we were influenced by. So you know, if you had Alan Ginsburg, Alan would be thinking very similarly to this.

We had a lot in almost with people like that.

I mean the fact that I mean there is a there's got to be a connection between the Beats and the Beatles.

We were very aware of all of that and that have preceded us, So we were really interested in that.

It was kind of quite a thrill, you know.

To know that there was this whole new thing breaking out across the world.

The Beats weren't the only literary tradition. The Beatles were plugging into it. Before the Beats, there had been the Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who embraced personal liberty, whimsy, and even drug inspired visions. Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, read here by Sir John Neville, was almost certainly written under the influence of opium.

In Xanadu did Kubla can a stately pleasured ome decree where Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground with walls and towers were girdled round. There were gardens bright with sinuous rills, where blossomed many an incense bearing tree. And here were forests ancient as the hills, enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

In school, as I took those kind of classes, I'd been told, you know that he was a bit of a drug addict, so you knew there was a history of people writing about that and weirdness and exotic stuff and this and that. Again, roll up is another illusion round because we were rolling up cigarettes.

Right, That had not occurred to me, of course, you.

Know that's what it is, roll up, and so you know, all our friends and oxy temporaries would spot that, Hey, that's great, let's roll up a joint. So we could have carried on with that with that, but then we start to try and get it into a little bit of.

You know, the magical mystery tour.

Rather than just an ordinary It could have been the weekend Mystery Tour, but you know, because it was magical, so we were we're putting trying to put this this song into that.

Sort of hazy world.

In their desire to break from tradition, these poets, artists and musicians established a new tradition of their own. He also find inspiration in unusual phrases which could be given new context.

So something like Satisfaction Guaranteed is like roll up. There are phrases that you'd heard a million times, but now we were putting a spin on them. Instead of coming to my fir ground. We're saying more than that now to the ego listener satisfaction guarantee. That's the kind of thing you'd see on an advert for vacuum cleaner.

So you know, you're drawing on these phrases that have currency at the moment, right in their moment.

I mean, I would just venture.

That the term magical mystery tour has in an now entered the language.

Yeah, I noticed that with the popularity of the Beatles, a lot of our phrases.

Have crept into language.

Journalists will quote, well, it's been a long and mining road to get here, and they're just throwing it in because it works.

As a phrase.

And yet there's that little allusion to the Beatles song.

In this way, the Beatles were much more than a band of four performers. They both derived from and were leaders of an entire cultural shift turning away from the known rules and customs of the past toward a mysterious, potentially magical future. This spirit was accessible to anyone who dared to sort of speak, get on the bus, that do is knee.

It was a generational movement, no doubt about it. Yeah, we were very aware of that. It was a great thing to see that this whole thing was happening, which was a break from our parents and parents generally, because you know, the normal thing would be that people would just expect you to go to school, go to college, get a job, and get married, and that was sort of it.

You know, that was like the expectation for most.

People and work for the rest of your life, in that particular in one's job.

Yeah, you know.

The artistic thing that we were part of was suggesting that you didn't have to do that, that there were options, and it was exciting to look at those options. I think, oh, wow, well, wow, we don't have to eat meat and too veg We could be vegetarian. Wow, that's crazy thought.

You know, we can write songs about drugs. Wow.

There's another crazy thought, you know, was the opportunities expanded and for us and for everyone.

For Paul McCartney, songwriting itself is an excuse to venture into the unknown, a magical mystery tour.

You know.

Once I'm writing a song, I'm off on a trail and.

I really don't know what the goal is or or even where I'm heading, but I do like to go there and find out things on the way.

M Magical Mystery Tour the title song from the Beatles nineteen sixty seven album in the next episode. Paul McCartney has been a nature lover and birdwatcher since childhood, his song catalog teeming with feathered friends.

Like so many girls, Jenny Wren could sing Birken Took Away.

McCartney. A Life in Lyrics is a co production between iHeartMedia, NPL and Pushkin Industries.