Furbank 1967: A Year In Psychedelic Rock

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-78952-485-7
Verlag: Sonicbond Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

It was the year the Sixties really started swinging - the Summer of Love, when the Rolling Stones said 'We Love You' and The Beatles pointed out that 'All You Need Is Love'. At the centre of the year's tumultuous social and cultural change was the mind-expanding music called psychedelic rock, a multi-coloured mixture of amazing sounds, when imagination and experimentation ran riot and the old musical boundaries were torn down in a haze of hallucinogenic abandon.
Kevan Furbank looks at the roots of psychedelic rock and examines the contributions made by some of the biggest bands of the year, including The Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Love, Pink Floyd and The Beach Boys.
He examines the hits and misses, the successes and failures, the bands that were born to be psychedelic and those that had psychedelia thrust upon them - sometimes with disastrous results. And he shows how the genre planted the seeds for other forms of popular music to take root and flourish. If you love music and want to know why 1967 was such a watershed year, then you will want this book. It is eye-popping, mind-opening and horizon-expanding - and a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Kevan Furbank is Managing Editor of the Irish Daily Mirror and has been a journalist on local and national newspapers for nearly 40 years. He has published books on local history and written stories, articles and columns on practically every subject under the sun. This is his third book for Sonicbond, his first two being Fairport Convention and Gong in the On Track series. His music tastes encompass prog, rock, folk and jazz and in his spare time, he likes to pretend he can play guitar, bass and mandolin. He lives in Holywood, Northern Ireland, and is married with two grown-up daughters, both of whom are better musicians than he is.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Furbank, Kevan

Leseproben

Chapter 2

The Beatles

Key personnel:

George Harrison: vocals, guitars, percussion, sitar, tambura, swarmandal

John Lennon: vocals, guitars, keyboards, percussion

Paul McCartney: vocals, bass, guitars, keyboards, percussion

Ringo Starr: drums, percussion

History

Formed in Liverpool, England, in 1960, their name was inspired by Buddy Holly’s backing group The Crickets, with a letter changed to emphasise ‘beat’. Turned down by several record companies, they were eventually signed to EMI’s novelty-record label Parlophone, run by producer George Martin. Original drummer Pete Best was replaced by Richard Starkey – alias Ringo Starr – during recording of their first single, ‘Love Me Do’, which reached a respectable number 17 in the UK. The follow-up, ‘Please Please Me’, hit number 2, while the third release ‘From Me to You’ started a string of eleven number 1s and the spread of Beatlemania across the world. Regarded as the most influential pop/rock band of all time, they are also the best selling music act ever, with estimated worldwide record sales of 600,000,000. They broke up in 1970.

Key releases in 1967

‘Penny Lane’ / ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (Single)

Both songs by Lennon/McCartney

Double A-side single

Label: Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)

Release date: 13 February 1967

Charts: UK: 2; US: 8; Australia: 1; Netherlands: 1; Norway: 1; Sweden: 1

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Album)

All songs by Lennon/McCartney except as noted.

Label: Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)

Release date: 1 June 1967 (UK), 2 June 1967 (US)

Charts: UK: 1; US: 1 (and many, many other countries)

Side 1: 1.‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ 2.‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ 3. ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ 4. ‘Getting Better’ 5. ‘Fixing a Hole’ 6. ‘She’s Leaving Home’ 7. ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’.

Side 2: 1. ‘Within You Without You (George Harrison)’ 2. ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ 3. ‘Lovely Rita’ 4. ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ 5. ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)’ 6. ‘A Day in the Life’.

‘All You Need Is Love’ / ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’ (Single)

Both songs by Lennon/McCartney.

Label: Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)

Release date: 7 July 1967

Charts: UK: 1; US: 1 (and many, many other countries)

‘Hello Goodbye’ / ‘I Am the Walrus’ (Single)

Both songs by Lennon/McCartney.

Label: Parlophone (UK), Capitol (US)

Release date: 24 November 1967

Charts: UK: 1; US: 1 (and many, many other countries)

Magical Mystery Tour (Album)

All songs by Lennon/McCartney except as noted. Label: Capitol (US)

Release date: 27 November 1967 (Originally in US only)

Charts: US: 1

Side 1: 1. ’Magical Mystery Tour’ 2. ‘The Fool on the Hill’ 3. ‘Flying’ (Lennon/ McCartney/Harrison/Starr) 4. ‘Blue Jay Way’ (Harrison) 5. ‘Your Mother Should Know’ 6. ‘I Am the Walrus’

Side 2: 1. ‘Hello Goodbye’ 2. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ 3. ‘Penny Lane’ 4. Baby, You’re a Rich Man’ 5. ‘All You Need Is Love’

Magical Mystery Tour (Double EP)

All songs by Lennon/McCartney except as noted.

Label: Parlophone (UK)

Release date: 8 December 1967 (UK)

Charts: UK: 2 (Held off the number 1 spot by ‘Hello Goodbye’); Netherlands: 2; Australia: 2; New Zealand: 2; Sweden: 2

Record 1 – Side 1: 1. ’Magical Mystery Tour’ 2. ‘Your Mother Should Know’

Record 1 – Side 2: 1. ‘I Am the Walrus’

Record 2 – Side 1: 1. ‘The Fool on the Hill’ 2. ‘Flying’ (Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/ Starr).

Record 2 – Side 2: 1. ‘Blue Jay Way’ (Harrison).

The Beatles had gone very quiet after Revolver was released in August 1966. Apart from the usual Christmas flexi disc to fan club members and a Greatest Hits in December, there was no peep from Messrs. Harrison, Lennon, McCartney and Starr, and no inkling of what they were up to behind the doors of EMI Studios in Abbey Road, London. In a Melody Maker interview from January 1967, The Who’s guitarist and main songwriter Pete Townshend complained: ‘I’m a bit disappointed they’re not making records. If they are, then I wish they’d hurry up. They are basically my main source of inspiration – and everybody else’s for that matter’.

They were not to disappoint. Six months after their last collection of wholly new material – and about the same length of time since they had given up touring – The Beatles released a double-A-side single that showed they were using their studio time to the full, and also making music that couldn’t possibly be reproduced on stage by four lads with two guitars, bass and drums.

‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ are prime slices of British psychedelia, marrying cutting-edge music technology and studio effects with rose-tinted nostalgia and genre-busting instrumentation. Both songs are about geographical places in the band’s home city of Liverpool – but there the resemblance ends. They reflect the personalities of the people who wrote them: Paul McCartney’s ‘Penny Lane’ is clever, sophisticated, witty and carefully constructed; John Lennon’s ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is a jumbled stream of consciousness that says more about the writer’s mental state than the Salvation Army children’s home it was named after. It had to be pieced together from two separate recordings, because characteristically, Lennon wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted.

‘Strawberry Fields…’ came first, written by Lennon while he was filming How I Won the War in Spain in 1966. Feeling lonely and vulnerable and perhaps searching for some meaning in his life after the end of The Beatles as a touring entity, he began recording some ideas and lyrics, initially without any reference to the Strawberry Fields home in the title. ‘Living is easy with eyes closed / Misunderstanding all you see’ seems pretty obvious and straightforward. So are ‘It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out / It doesn’t matter much to me.’ Then things get a bit obscure.

In an interview with Playboy in 1980, Lennon explained:

The second verse goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree’. Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me, is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius – ‘I mean it must be high or low’, the next line. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see. I thought I was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people didn’t see. As a child, I would say, ‘But this is going on!’, and everybody would look at me as if I was crazy. I always was so psychic or intuitive or poetic or whatever you want to call it, that I was always seeing things in a hallucinatory way. It was scary as a child, because there was nobody to relate to.

The song had no identifiable chorus until early November when Lennon was inspired by memories of playing in the grounds of the Strawberry Field home near where he lived in Liverpool. The line ‘nothing to get hung about’ came from his Aunt Mimi’s orders not to play there, and his response ‘They can’t hang you for it’. Later, he said he chose the name because it was groovy-sounding: ‘...because Strawberry Fields is anywhere you want to go.’

Recorded across November and December 1966, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is famously constructed out of two different versions: one relatively gentle and dreamlike, the other more manic, with Ringo’s drumming to the fore (the edit is dead-on the one-minute mark). The final version is ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ with knobs on – the longest recording The Beatles had done so far and the first to feature a false ending.

It opens tentatively and mysteriously, with McCartney playing a Mellotron on the flute setting, and includes cello, flute, harpsichord and brass, along with a vast array of percussion devices, particularly in what has been described as the ‘free-form coda’ at the end (which apparently used to drive DJs nuts). Lennon’s voice adds to the dream-like quality by slurring the lyrics together and slowing down the second section to match the tempo and take the recording from C major to B flat, gives the vocal a swirly, smoky quality.

Add George Harrison’s swarmandal (a sort of Indian zither) and touches of slide guitar, plus George Martin’s brass and string arrangement, and you have a mini-symphony that seems to encapsulate the entire psychedelic era in four mind-blowing minutes.

And, finally, ‘Strawberry Fields...