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On this day: The Beatles release the revolutionary Strawberry Fields Forever
“Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to Strawberry Fields …“Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about … Strawberry Fields forever.”
It was 53 years ago that John Lennon urged us to go with him into Strawberry Fields and the Beatles released what is still considered to be one of the greatest pop songs of all time.
On February 17 in 1967, the iconic song was released as a double-side single along with the hit Penny Lane.
It peaked at No.8 on the US Billboard charts.
In their home country, the single was kept from the top spot by Engelbert Humperdinck’s Release Me.
Perhaps an indication of the mixed reaction from the group’s fans, it was the first time since 1962 that the band had failed to top the charts.
The upbeat psychedelic pop sound was coupled with Lennon’s lyrics about his tough childhood and nostalgia for their early years in Liverpool.
When he was a boy Lennon lived near the gothic Strawberry Field Salvation Army children’s home with his Uncle George and Aunt Mimi.
Despite his aunt’s disapproval, he would often climb over the wall to play hide-and-seek in its garden.
It’s reported that Lennon had an affinity with the orphans who lived at Strawberry Field, as he felt abandoned by his parents.
In 1980, when talking about his childhood, he said: “There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see”.
Mimi later recalled: “As soon as we could hear the Salvation Army band starting, John would jump up and down shouting, ‘Mimi, come on. We’re going to be late’.”
The old building has since been turned into a visitor centre.
At the opening last year, Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird, 72, recalled how the place had been a sanctuary.
“The first time I visited John in New York I was struck just how closely his gothic Dakota apartment building resembled the old Strawberry Field mansion. Perhaps he was searching for another sanctuary,” she told reporters.
Lennon would come to view Strawberry Fields Forever – which he wrote through the prism of the drug LSD – as his greatest work with the group.
“It’s real, you know,” he remarked in 1970.
“It’s about me, and I don’t know anything else really. The only true songs I ever wrote were Help! and Strawberry Fields Forever.”
The track is widely regarded as one of the Beatles’ best and its video was heralded as a key moment in the development of promo films.
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9 Replies
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Let us take you down …
… ’cause we’re going to take you on a trip down memory lane. Through Strawberry Fields, of all places!Let’s quickly go back to the beginning of this story. Most of you probably know our versions of In My Life and Blackbird. You might have seen the videos for them on YouTube. We recorded the music in 2009, right before we went on our first ever trip to Liverpool, the city that would much later become our home ♥
Being the crazy young Beatles fans that we were, we soaked in everything we could about the city and also shot some music videos there. When we returned back home to Austria we released the finished videos for In My Life and Blackbird.
Now, what you don’t know is that we recorded a couple more songs for that same project that never made it on the internet or any albums. Life happened, things got in the way and other projects came up. We never got around to do a video for this song. But we still have the audio!
So as a MLT Club exclusive … here is a rough mix of a super old recording of “Strawberry Fields Forever”!
A fun blast from the past, that we ourselves have not heard in years, not until we dug it up last week.
LISTEN: Strawberry Fields Forever (Beatles Cover) – Recorded in 2009
CLUB MUSIC > DUO SESSIONS
We were only 15 years old at the time and you can definitely hear that in our voices. MLT Babies ?
We hope you enjoy!
And that you all have a groovy today!
And nothing to get hung about …
Mona & Lisa
19/07/2019
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Yuppers… Classic both in original and MLT version…. But… I prefer Blueberries moreso so it’s “Blueberry Fields Forever” for me ???
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I thought purple berries would be more your thing jacki. Purpleberry Fields Forever perhaps!
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I remember it being released……..it reminds me of sled riding with other kids during that winter. The song was the first sign of a major shift in their music.
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Lol… Howard, I’m not familiar with the berries you posted a photo of…. But Blueberries do turn purple when you squirt/squish them,… Lol… So they do have a purple -Ness of them, so that counts…. But you have piqued my curiosity now regarding those berries you shared photo of….. ???
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Another interpretation from the Web.
“I believe that the meaning you find in a work of art, if we would consider a song a work of art, is yours and like an opinion, you are entitled to it.
I once asked a painter for the meaning of his painting and he answered, “Whatever meaning you can find in it is its meaning.” I am comfortable with that answer for it gives me the freedom to interpret.
In fact, we can find meaning in the most trivial things and who can say we’re wrong about that?
Anyways, a lot of the previous answers had focused on childhood nostalgia and on describing the place itself, Salvation Army orphanage.
Well, John Lennon explained the song to Playboy in 1980:
“Strawberry Fields was a place, Salvation Army home near the house where I lived with my auntie. But I just took the name as an image – it (the song) had nothing to do with the place.
“You know, it’s like a “A Little Night Music” was from that Magritte painting of a black tree with half a silver moon on it. It’s irrelevant to the musical, except to know that the guy saw this picture and got this idea or whatever.
“Strawberry Fields Forever is about ME…about the constant search for why you go down one road and why you go down another…Which influence is more? The Beatles were important, but in my life, the Beatles influence…was it more than my birth, my education? The fact that my parents split and I lived with my auntie? I cannot give that more important emphasis than any other part of my life. So the awareness of that is what apparently is trying to be expressed in “Strawberry Fields”…
“My influences are tremendous, from Lewis Carrol to Oscar Wilde. The Beatles were only ten years. I’ve lived with Yoko longer than I was a Beatle. I’ve been with Yoko longer that I’ve been with Paul and they still ask about Paul. Obviously the most important influence in my life the last thirteen years had been Yoko Ono. Now, I’ve got maybe another forty or fifty years to live, and who knows, so what the hell. “Strawberry Fields” is my attempt at expressing that.
“The line goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree”. Well, what I was trying to say in that line is ‘Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius.
“’I mean it must be high or low’. What I’m trying to say in my insecure way is, ‘Nobody seems to understand where I’m coming from.I seem to see things in a different way from most people.
“I always was so psychic or intuitive and poetic. I was always seeing things in hallucinatory way that saw beyond the mask. And it’s scary when you’re a child because there is nobody to relate to.
“But, ‘Somehow it all works out’. After all the downs and scary mysticism, I am still optimistic. The other expression I had which became a Beatles expression was, ‘It will turn up all right in the end’.
“I used to say that to my friend Pete who would worry about exam at grammar school. He was in the Quarrymen. The original group was named after my school, which was Quarry Bank, and had a Latin motto which meant ‘out of this rock’ – that’s symbolic, isn’t it? – ‘you will find the truth'”
Yes, out of that rock, The Beatles was born. Thank you.
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Hi all;
I teach at local colleges and once in a while I get reminders of the “maturity level” I currently find myself. There was an example in the text about a company called Fields Forever which delivered truckloads of strawberries. We discussed the example which tried to discover the minimum cost the company could accomplish the task. Then afterwards I asked if they knew the “play on words” this example was doing. Only one student knew. Then another student wanted to know if I went to Woodstock!!!!! Obviously this student is going to fail the course regardless of what his grades are!!!!
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I can relate, Michael. One of my students recently asked me, in a similar context, whether I went to Woodstock. I said, “Well, I was three years old at the time, so if I went I don’t remember it. But then again, that’s true of most of the people that went.”
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