IVIV: Magical Mystery Tour

[John Carvill]

> 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...

Hey! Robin! I thought you only liked the mono remasters? :-)


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

What about Apple? All that 'trying to undermine capitalism' stuff?


> 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.
>

I suspect that picking that particular Beatles song was indeed
significant. And yeah, you can draw a line from there to All You Need
Is Love. Then there's Doc's explicit rumination on what 'love' might
turn out to mean. Love, whether free or brotherly, was at the heart of
The Beatles, and The Sixties. You could almost argue that IV in some
ways resembles All You Need Is Love, since that song included sly
references to other musical styles and modes (La Marseillaise, for
instance), is deceptively simple, and of course also includes a blast
of 'She Loves You', harking back to the early days of The Beatles, and
reminding us of COL49.