Strawberry Fields ForeverLet Me Take You Down . . . , to the Subdominant |
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| It's Getting Hard to be
Someone During a period of personal and professional crisis for Lennon, this escapist pastiche references a childhood haunt: "Strawberry Field," the garden of a Salvation Army orphanage near one of his aunt's homes. In the context of psychological and social turmult, Lennon seems to be attempting a return to a less complicated age. |
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| The year is 1966. Shedding the cute image developed under the aegis of Brian Epstein, Lennon and the other Beatles are experimenting with LSD, an experience that no doubt influenced their aesthetic sense. Their sense of humor, however, failed to catch on with American record distributors who took offense at the original "Butcher" sleeve of the American compilation, "Yesterday" . . . and Today. With their next album, Revolver, they continued experimentation with sound begun the previous year. For example, they expanded their application of musique concrete in the tape manipulations of "Tomorrow Never Knows." And George Harrison's "Love You To" exhibits evidence of his counter-cultural life and his first attempts at assuming an Indian musical style in his music. | ||
| Their relationship with their fans was also undergoing reconfiguration. They undertook a disastrous Asian tour, encountering defiant Japanese right-wing militarists who sent death threats and spitting Filipino police officers who insulted and jostled them (Miles 1998:218). Moreover, some American audiences reacted angrily and violently to John's comments about the Beatles being bigger the Jesus. Little wonder that after the last Beatles concert (in San Francisco on August 29th), George commented, "Well, that's it. I'm not a Beatle anymore" (Lewissohn 1992:214). Each of the Beatles took time off and went their separate ways. John went with Richard Lester to work on the film, How I Won the War. When he returned, he brought a song that was to consume much of his creative energy over the next two months. | ||
| Many Beatles fans know that the final release of "Strawberry Fields Forever" is a montage of different recordings edited together by producer, George Martin and his engineer, Geoff Emerick. Most notably, they spliced the first minute of one recording onto the remainder of a separate production originally intended to replace it. The replacement version, with trumpets and cellos, various drums and cymbals, and tape loops layered onto it, also resolves a musical "problem." In the first and second studio versions of the song, the ending modulates to a different key. This seems not to have bothered Lennon, but it probably annoyed the classically trained Martin. Indeed, as one examines this recording, a kind of musical and social tension surfaces. At each stage of the recording process, someone adds or replaces ideas in a communal effort to forge a whole musical idea. | ||
| Strawberry Fields Forever The chronology of "Strawberry Fields Forever" includes various official and unofficial recordings. For some of the earliest recordings, verifying the precise identity, date, and origin is nearly impossible. Those who own the originals (principally EMI, the surviving Beatles, and Yoko Ono) realize both the commercial and artistic value of the tapes. Nevertheless, the creators of these recordings never intended them for public release and probably never fully considered them as historical documents. The owners have made exceptions including some of the outtakes on the Beatles' Anthology 2 and the tapes Ono made available for a Westwood One radio series on Lennon. Entrepreneurs have made bootlegs of other versions available since at least the early 1980s. Some of these originate in copies that the Beatles and others in the production process made both for themselves and for selected friends. Some probably, originate in official attempts to preserve the contents of the original tapes. For anyone interested in the creation process, these recordings are as important as Beethoven's sketches, even if the Mylar originals are more delicate and the contents much more widely distributed. |
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Recording History |
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| Lennon may have made the earliest tapes on a cassette recorder while filming scenes for How I Won the War, in Almeria, on the southern coast of Spain, probably in October of 1966. After returning to England, he re-recorded examples of the song at his Weybridge home outside London in mid-November. A little over a week later, on November 24th, the Beatles spent the day trying out the song. The others are likely to have heard Lennon's Weybridge tape and came to the studio with their own ideas. They started again on November 28th and finished a second version, Take 7, on the 29th. | ||
| However, Lennon was unhappy with what they had at that point, feeling it was too heavy. On December 8th and 9th, they began recording a new version, this one notably including a different ending. On December 15th, George Martin recorded trumpets and cellos to accompany part of the song and to serve as a segue to the new ending. On December 21st, they added more vocals and piano, finishing the second version, Take 26. (See Lewissohn 1992:235.) | ||
| Nevertheless, the next day, December 22nd (apparently after listening to a tape of Take 26), John was still unhappy. At this point he asked Martin to splice the beginning of Take 7 onto the beginning of the end of Take 26. The problem for Martin was that the first version was slower and at a lower pitch than the new version. So, Martin and Emerick slowed Take 26 down and sped Take 7 up until they matched pitch and spliced the two versions together. Martin expresses surprise that the tempos matched, but the Beatles may have had the original tempo (and key) of the earlier takes in mind when they began on the 8th. All that remained that month was the post-production work of mixing, copying, and preparing the master. (See Lewisohn 1988:87-91 and 1992: 232-235.) | ||
| While we may not know the precise dates of the unofficial recordings (that is, those recordings made in Almeria and Weybridge), we have a general idea of their sequence. More importantly, we have a relatively good description of the Abbey Road sessions published by Lewisohn (1988 and 1992). By comparing versions of the "song," we can see a developmental process in which Lennon and his colleagues wed the atypical to the typical and make a simple structure increasingly complex. | ||
| The verse section of the song consists of two symmetrical eight-measure phrases. The first half (mm 1-8) shows Lennon playing with rising tertial relationships in his chord choices while in the second half (mm 9-16) he opts for a more traditional rhythm and blues pattern of descending tertial relationships. That is, in the first half, chord relationships are usually in ascending thirds, and in the second half, the opposite tends to be true. While we cannot know what he was thinking here, we can see a pattern. The first half of the verse is at once original sounding, and a transposed (but imperfect) mirror version of the second half's sequence. That is, the ascending thirds of the first half roughly mirror the descending thirds of the second half. Another curious aspect of the verse is that it begins on the dominant (as does the chorus, albeit with a twist). This in itself would have little effect on the tonal center of the music, but in combination with other harmonic choices, the arrival at the tonic is tentative. Indeed, the song seems to have two tonal centers. [See Everett (1986: 368ff) for a Shenkerian-oriented harmonic analysis of the song. See Pollack for a more conventional, but limited harmonic analysis.] | ||
| "Form Stack" | ||
| Comparing form in the various versions reveals a similar developmental process at the architectonic level. Lennon casts at least one Almeria version in the classic pop form, sometimes known as "song form": verse/verse/chorus/verse (AABA) with a short introduction. In a Weybridge version of mid November, Lennon toys with the chorus, attempting to develop a suitable ending (a problem that will follow him throughout the process). In the studio, a fuller version emerges with a modified closing chorus bridging to a coda composed from verse material. (This new coda also reintroduces the picking style heard in at least one Weybridge version.) However, the remarkable aspect of the bridge and coda is that they take the song through a transposition to the key of the subdominant, which is where this version of the song ends. | ||
| Ending with a different tonic is unusual even for pop music, and would have been an anathema to 19th-century European composers (and their 20th-century tonal followers). Lennon's harmonic framework for this song helps to set the subdominant up as a secondary tonic. The tonal ambiguity of his tertially related chords in the verse and his treatment of the dominant divide the listener's attention between harmonic areas. | ||
| Four days later (November 28th), the recording is down a whole step (Bb) and they have now created an instrumental introduction fashioned out of the verse material. The chorus now opens the singing. They may have begun with a faster version and slowed the tape speed to transform the sound of the instruments and perhaps make it easier for Lennon to sing. But the new key results in a difficult play for the guitar in the closing coda section, which is now at Eb. The next day (November 29th), they slowed the tape speed down yet another half step, probably so that the guitar could now play the closing sequence in a much more guitar-friendly D major. Unfortunately, precisely knowing the key of any of these versions is difficult, owing to the manipulation of tape speeds. | ||
| When Lennon, the other Beatles, Martin and Emerick began working on yet another version, one of the first things they undertook (after recording a new backing track in only four complete takes) was the ending. This coda of tape loops, percussion, a recording of cymbals played backwards, electric guitar, and an Indian surmandal will eventually include material that George Martin composed to return the music harmonically to the tonic. Martin had no small task. The track over which he scores, repeatedly references the Eb of the subdominant (to which Martin repeatedly responds with Bb's on the piano). | ||
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| John Covach (1997) observes that both traditional music theorists and popular culture theorists stigmatize the musical analysis of popular music. Because the musical syntax of popular music diverges from that of the European classical tradition (and notably as deified by Schenker), Covach contends that many music theorists trivialize and misunderstand its structures. Similarly, because writers within the tradition of popular culture seldom have the training to analyze music and/or have reacted negatively to the training they have received, they reject it as a valid method of investigation. Nevertheless, combining these approaches can help us understand music and musical behavior. The tools of musical analysis can reveal the cultural process and the methods of culture analysis can illuminate the musical process. | ||
| Perhaps we can also diminish some of the paternalistic thinking about the musical theories and practice of popular musicians. Moreover, a number of cultures (not just our own) mythologize a romantic notion of instinctive folk talent as pure in its origin and untainted by the intellectual apparatuses of cosmopolitan ideation. Musicians spend years internalizing ways of thinking about music, usually physiologically based but ideationally manipulated. | ||
| Studying the musical structure of "Strawberry Fields Forever," we can see how the song grew and how differences in harmonic aesthetics led to different approaches to its construction. The tools of the establishment reveal how Martin shaped the final version of the song. Perhaps more interestingly, we can use them to see that Lennon has an entirely different notion of harmonic relationships and the art of composition. And, given the wealth of materials that could be available, we might indeed be studying "Strawberry Fields" forever. | ||
| References Cited | ||
| Beatles, The. 1996.
Anthology 2. Apple Corps Ltd./EMI Records Ltd. [7243 8 34448 2
3] Davies, Hunter. 1985. The Beatles. Hanson, Liane. Interview with George Martin. Sunday Edition, National Public Radio. (29 November 1998). Covach, John. 1997. We Won't Get Fooled Again: Rock Music and Musical Analysis. In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, eds. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrency Siegel, 75-89. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Everett, Walter. 1986. Fantastic Remembrance in John Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Julia." In The Musical Quarterly 72: 3: 360-393. Lewisohn, Mark. 1988. The Beatles Recording Sessions. New York: Harmony Books. ——. 1992. The Complete Beatles Chronicle. New York: Harmony Books. Martin, George with Jeremy Hornsby. 1979. All You Need Are Ears. New York: St. Martin's Press. Miles, Barry. 1998. The Beatles: A Diary, ed. Chris Charlesworth. London: Omnibus Press. Noyer, Paul Du. 1997. Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane: The Beatles. In Mojo 45:85. |
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| 10-Apr-2008 |