In 1966, The Beatles had tired of touring. The crazed fans, various death threats, and breakneck schedule had taken their toll, and the band was on the verge of breakup. So they officially retired from the road and turned their focus exclusively to making records.
The studio follow up to their mid-1966 album Revolver originally was planned as a concept album: a collection of original songs about childhood memories of growing up in Liverpool. As we all know, the band famously took the album concept in a different direction, pretending to be an Edwardian-era marching band in day-glo uniforms, playing a concert for a crowd of onlookers. Nevertheless, two songs were recorded for the nostalgia project before it was abandoned: Paul McCartney's "Penny Lane" and John Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever," both released as a double A-side single in February 1967.
Strawberry Field (minus the "s") was the name of a Salvation Army home for children, located a short walk from Lennon's childhood home. He and his boyhood friends would often play in Strawberry Field's garden, despite his aunt's stern orders not to trespass on the property. (My guess is that's exactly why they played there and why it held such fond memories for him.)
I first heard "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the car radio on the way home from my elementary school's annual Halloween Carnival, which was sort of a throwback to rural harvest festivals, complete with bobbing for apples, cakewalks, and the like. The ghosts-n'-goblins feel of the evening kind of fit with the psychedelic vibe of the song's eerie Mellotron flutes, strange backwards percussion, and heavily compressed strings. So for many years, the song just evoked fond memories of being 6 years old and playing carnival games in a homemade lion costume.
But when I bought Magical Mystery Tour on CD as a teenager and listened to it while driving to/from school, "Strawberry Fields Forever" resonated with me for a different reason. Lennon's poetic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics painted the picture of a bittersweet childhood: the innocence and escape of Strawberry Field pitted against feelings of being a misunderstood oddball.
I'd also felt like the odd man out growing up. I was an only child, and there were no kids my age in my neighborhood to play with, so I learned early on to keep myself occupied—drawing, building Lego cities, going on fantasy time travel adventures on my bike, or pretending to be a rock star and putting on concerts for my stuffed animals and action figures. I also spent a lot of time around the adult members of my family. Consequently, my interests and topics of conversation tended to be a little more World News Tonight than Fraggle Rock. So I often felt like I was speaking a different language from some kids at school, never really connecting with them on an intellectual level. That's why Lennon's whole lyrical motif of knowing you have a passionate, singular point of view but having difficulty expressing it to others really struck me.
I came to embrace the song's refrain Strawberry Fields, forever as a kind of rallying cry for individuality—a declaration that, just because you're misunderstood by some doesn't mean you should change how you look at the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment