For the Beatles, Across the Universe was rather an odissey than a song. More than two years passed from the very first recording to the release of the most famous remix. In the meantime, there were six takes, a lot of rehearsals and at least three mixings. All of it with without making its author satisfied.
Most people agree that the fourth Beatles album, called for a joke “Beatles for sale”, is not one of their best ones at all.
Explications talk about the hurry and the stressed mood the Beatles were involved in during recording sessions. When the four came in studio on August the 11th 1964, they came from mounths over mounths of hard work with no break at all. On June they had finished “A Hard Day’s Night”, new album and soundtrack of their first movie. Then they had travelled around the world for a couple of mounths, playing from June to July in Denmark, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zeland, Sweden and doing a lot of performances for radio and tv shows. In the meantime, on July the 6th there had been the premiere of the movie in London. All this effort led to another great ammount of success: at the beginning of August “A Hard Day’s Night” was on the top of the UK and US charts. And there was a tour in the United States to be done between August and September.
Beatles’ story it’s not just the one of a rock band: for more than a reason it’s the story of contemporary music itself and of its technical progress.
The years of activity of the band saw an autentic revolution of studio recording technics, passing soon from primitive overdubbing methods to modern multitrack machines.
When the double-album “The Beatles” was released (or the White Album as soon was called from its cover), the press and the fans took it as a new masterpiece. Writing on The Observer, Tony Palmer suggested the Beatles to be the greatest songwriters ever since Schubert. That article soon became well-known for this phrase, but actually it was moved by a great appreciement for the musical variety of the record: “do you want some rock n’ roll? The Beatles have done it and better… do you want some blues? The Beatles have done it and better…”
The press and the fans didn’t know, anyway, that the record was what came out of several mounths of discussions between the Beatles themselves and between them and their technicians, of drug intake and nights over nights spent doing nothing but losing time. What seemed to be just the new masterpiece was actually the first step on the way to the break-out.
The legend of Strawberry Fields starts in Spain. John Lennon wrote it in 1966, while he was abroad playing in Richard Lester’s movie “How I Won the War”.
It’s not coincidental that such an important chapter of Beatles’ story was written in those days. The year 1966 is a main one in their career. In few mounths two important things happened: first, they decided to stop playing live, after one of their unluckiest tournée ever; second, they released “Revolver”, an album that showed the Beatles definitely on the way to avant-gard.
Although the success of the latter, it was all but sure that the Beatles would have a future together, the press often suggesting they were about to split.
