While I have played many of The Beatles best songs (‘best’ being a subjective term), there are many more I haven’t played, and tonight’s is one of them.  You know how sometimes I can barely find any trivia about a song?  Well, this one is the complete antithesis of that, with more trivia than this single little music post can handle, so if you’re interested and want more, I suggest you visit both SongFacts and Wikipedia!

According to SongFacts …

Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army home in Liverpool where John Lennon used to go. He had fond memories of the place that inspired this.

John’s aunt Mimi did not like John going to Strawberry Fields, as it was basically an orphanage and she thought they would lead John astray. John liked going there because having lost his father and later his mother he felt a kinship to the lads. When John and his aunt would argue about his going he would often reply, “What are they going to do, hang me?” Thus the line “Nothing to get hung about.” In America, to be “hung up” is to worry about something, so many US listeners thought the line meant that it was nothing to get “hung up about.”

Lennon (from his 1980 interview with Playboy magazine): “Strawberry Fields is a real place. After I stopped living at Penny Lane, I moved in with my auntie who lived in the suburbs in a nice semidetached place with a small garden and doctors and lawyers and that ilk living around… not the poor slummy kind of image that was projected in all the Beatles stories. In the class system, it was about half a class higher than Paul, George and Ringo, who lived in government-subsidized housing. We owned our house and had a garden. They didn’t have anything like that. Near that home was Strawberry Fields, a house near a boys’ reformatory where I used to go to garden parties as a kid with my friends Nigel and Pete we would go there and hang out and sell lemonade bottles for a penny. We always had fun at Strawberry Fields. So that’s where I got the name. But I used it as an image. Strawberry Fields forever.”

This was released as the flip side of “Penny Lane.” The Beatles often released singles that contained a song written by Lennon on one side, and a song written by McCartney on the other. Which single was considered the A-side was sometimes a point of contention.

This was the first Beatles single to break their long-running streak of #1 hits in the UK. If they had not released it with “Penny Lane,” they would have beaten the existing #1 by a large margin, but stores recorded sales for one side of the single or the other, which hurt the chart position for this song.

This was the first pop song that faded to silence and then came back. The fake ending drove DJs nuts because it created the dreaded “dead air.”

On January 30, 1967, The Beatles shot a promotional film for this song, which was one of the first and most successful music videos, featuring stop motion animation and other special effects. It was filmed in and around Knole Park, an estate owned by the National Trust, near Sevenoaks in Kent. The tree that features prominently in the video is behind the park’s birdhouse.

The director of these videos was Peter Goldmann, a Swedish friend of Klaus Voormann, who was associated with the Beatles in their early days in Hamburg and later designed the Revolver album cover. The following day the Beatles filmed a promo film for “Penny Lane” also at Knole Park. These films hold up very well because, like movies, they were shot on high quality film.

It turns out Strawberry Fields is not forever. In 2005, Britain’s Salvation Army closed the Strawberry Field children’s home in Liverpool, stating that it’s preferable for children to be raised in a foster or small group home instead of a large orphanage. The home opened in 1936, and Lennon left money to Strawberry Field in his will. His widow, Yoko Ono, donated the equivalent of $70,000 in 1984 to keep the home open. Only 3 children remained in the home in January 2005, when the Salvation Army announced it would close.

The song charted at #2 in the UK and #8 in the U.S.  As far as I can tell, it did not chart at all in Canada.

Strawberry Fields Forever

The Beatles

One, two, three, four

No one I think is in my tree
I mean, it must be high or low
That is, you can’t, you know, tune in but it’s all right
That is, I think it’s not too bad

Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to strawberry fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn’t matter much to me

Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to strawberry fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever

Always, no sometimes, think it’s me
But you know I know when it’s a dream
I think I know, I mean a… yes
But it’s all wrong
That is, I think I disagree

Let me take you down
‘Cause I’m going to strawberry fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever

Strawberry fields forever
Strawberry fields forever

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: פורר טל / Lennon,john Winston / Mccartney,paul James

Strawberry Fields Forever lyrics © Sony/atv Tunes Llc, Harrisongs Ltd