50 Years Of Beatles: ‘The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall’
On September 11, 1967, the Beatles undertook a fateful course—one that would humble them profoundly in the coming months: with the recent triumph of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the international simulcast performance of “All You Need Is Love” under their belts, they tried their hand, bizarre as it may seem in retrospect, at becoming film directors.
John Lennon, for one, recognized the dangerous waters that the Beatles had been trolling in since manager Brian Epstein’s untimely death only a few weeks earlier. As Lennon later remarked, “I knew that we were in trouble then. I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. And I was scared.”
To Lennon’s credit, he understood intuitively that while their work as composers and their musicianship may have been unparalleled, such skills didn’t necessarily prepare them for making movies. But with Paul McCartney eager to see the Beatles make their mark in those post-Pepper, post-Epstein days, they amiably trudged on.
McCartney fashioned the idea for the group’s latest film project on traditional English day trips to the countryside. As McCartney later observed, “In England, they have these things called mystery tours. And you go on them and you pay so much and you don’t know where you’re going.” Clearly, the Beatles adopted this concept literally as their movie’s central aesthetic, essentially making things up as they went along. And with that, the Magical Mystery Tour was born.
By: Ken Womack
Source: Huffington Post
