"Strawberry Fields Forever" #8 4/1/1967

The record that upped the ante more than any other on what could be done in rock music, even more so than "Good Vibrations." Reportedly Brian Wilson heard an advance copy during the "Smile" LP sessions and scrapped that entire project, believing the Beach Boys couldn't top this. Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders said, "Now WTF are we supposed to do?" It was John's LSD-aided, deliberately hazy recollection of times he spent around the Strawberry Field orphanage run by the Salvation Army near his childhood home. From a technical standpoint, the recording is simply amazing. Lennon liked the first part of one take and the remainder of another. When George Martin pointed out they were in different tempos and keys and couldn't be edited together, John just said, "You can fix it." So Sir George did what hadn't been done to that point - he sped up one tape and slowed down the other. The almost imperceptible splice is at the 1:00 mark, right after "cause I'm..." There is a very minor difference in pitch from there to the end, but it's still a marvel of editing for the time. My apologies, because this clip is only the first 1:23 of the song. It's impossible to find the full video on YouTube or anywhere else online. You'd have to buy an official Beatles video collection for that. The unabridged version has the famous supposed "I buried Paul" line during the backwards passage at the end, where John claimed to have said "cranberry sauce."