IVIV: Magical Mystery Tour

[Robin Landseadel]

The Summer of Love was a big party that everybody wanted in on and  
nobody really wanted to stop. This note, from the 2009 remaster of the  
Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour" CD gives a clue as to how long that  
party/hangover lasted:

	A perfect companion to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
	the Magical Mystery Tour album rounds out all the other songs
	released in 1967. The double A-sided single 'Strawberry Fields
	Forever'/'Penny Lane' was released in February - the first new
	Beatles material for six months. 'All You Need Is Love' followed
	it in July - issued five weeks after Sgt. Pepper. An anthem for
	'the summer of love', it was first heard on 25th June, 1967 by a
	massive global audience watching the historic TV programme
	Our World - the first satellite link - up between countries from all
	five continents. Their sixteenth single 'Hello, Goodbye' had
	arrived in the shops at the end of November, 1967.

	By Christmas, The Beatles were at number one with 'Hello,
	Goodbye' and at number two with Magical Mystery Tour. 'I Am
	The Walrus' was on the flip-side and also part of the EP
	package and so, for three weeks, the same song occupied the
	top two positions of the British chart. In the United States, the
	Magical Mystery Tour album reached number one in the first
	chart of January, 1968 and stayed there for eight weeks. Its
	initial run in the Top LPs chart lasted for 59 weeks and it re -
	entered the list several times until the summer of 1970.

	Ken Howelett & Mike Heatley

Note that Magical Mystery Tour, the Hippie-ist of all the Beatles  
enterprises, fell off the charts in the summer of 1970.

I'm making several connections here—Arpanet, TRW and Howard Hughes are  
all mentioned within a few pages, enterprises linked to the Beta- 
Testing of global satellite communications. This ties to "All You Need  
Is Love" and that first global broadcast of "Our World."

In IV's opening scene, Doc and Shasta go on at length over love's that  
been bought underscored by Doc's ironic whistling of "Can't Buy Me  
Love." Over and over again in IV we are given scenes and situations  
where talk of "love" pretty much is code for talk of getting it on.  
Love may or may not have been all you need, but most settled for less  
anyway.