"John and I remembered Mystery Tours, and we always thought this was a fascinating idea: getting on a bus and not knowing where you were going. Rather romantic and slightly surreal! All these old dears with the blue rinses going off to mysterious places. Generally there's a crate of ale in the boot of the coach and you sing lots of songs. It's a charabanc trip. So we took that idea and used it as a basis for a song and the film."
--Paul McCartney, source undetermined; possibly Many Years From Now by Barry Miles (I found it tucked into a video explaining MMT, with no reference, and in fact needed to pause the video to even READ, never mind capture, the quote.)
And but so the thing is, that is a VERY England-oriented quotation, one that needs unpacking if you're an American born a year before the creation of the cinema monsterpiece in question. Mystery tour. Tour bus. This is a thing tourists do in New York City, or in London. This is not a thing suburban American families do for a casual holiday, nor a day trip, neither.
I expect most US citizens born before 1973 understand 'dears with blue rinses,' and sure, the elder set congregate at senior centers go places on tour buses, but these people are getting on a bus for some pre-designated show or shopping trip, with pre-determined food stops, and have likely ordered their lunch down to two Splendas with their iced tea months in advance and the only deviation or surprise will be if one of them is dead or hospitalized and unable to make the trip. So much NOT going off adventuring to "mysterious places."
Now, 'a crate of ale in the boot of the coach' is 100% what I'm talking about when I say this is a very English quotation. A 'crate of ale' might be what I'd call a case or a flat of beer, and the 'boot of the coach' would be the trunk of the bus. I believe. I haven't been to England, and as for going in the '60s, that's a window I was always going to miss. As for 'a charabanc trip,' the term, from the French char a bancs, "wagon with benches," evolved to mean a hired transport for several to many people at once. Folk of a certain age, in a particularly geography, have fine memories of such trips, but they are not of the US variety. We'd call it a bus trip, and the notion of a group bar-crawl transport is, to us, a more modern notion and called 'party bus' which may include pub crawl, but also substances of many sorts on the bus, and an expectation of rowdy collegiate behavior, not at all the thing we'd associate with 'blue rinse dears' or blue-collar 'beanfeasters' at all.
Of course, by the 1970s, even in England the day-trip coach holiday was becoming an artifact, what with folk having their own cars and whole week-ends or even weeks for leisure outings.
Gibbard took the band name from the song "Death Cab for Cutie", which was written by Neil Innes and Vivian Stanshall and recorded by their group the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. The song is a track on the Bonzo's 1967 debut album, Gorilla, and was performed by them in the Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour. The title was originally that of a story in an old pulp fiction crime magazine that Innes came across in a street market. In a 2011 interview, Gibbard stated, "The name was never supposed to be something that someone was going to reference 15 years on. So yeah, I would absolutely go back and give it a more obvious name." --Wikipedia
Which reminds me of the Dave Grohl story. After the demise of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Dave Grohl in 1995 released an album under the name of Foo Fighters, called Foo Fighters. The album gained enough traction that he had to actually acquire a band in order to tour. The band (now an actual band) released a song this autumn that my sister (a big FooFan) didn't believe could possibly be on my radar before it was on hers, but yes, by random chance of there not being any baseball on my radio, I did. The song, "Under You," made me question whether I'd been missing out not listening to Foo Fighters for all these... some amount of time. So I listened to a Foo playlist, and determined that the only other song by the Foo that I was familiar with was "Everlong," which I mistakenly had believed to be a Green Day hit.
Well, if you're a FooFan, you know, of course, that it's not. But while I listened to this Foo playlist, I kept wishing I was listening instead to Green Day. So I think Foo Fighters is fine, and Dave Grohl is (mostly) fine, but I evidently prefer the sound of Green Day.
And that's all right, to acknowledge one's preferences without confusing them with actual quality, because so much of life is about personal bias. "Is it good?" one might ask. If that one is asking ME, I can say without bias that the Honda CRV in fact IS a good vehicle because I've researched it, driven it, driven other vehicles and done comparisons. The Toyota Rav-4 is also objectively a good vehicle, by and large as a used vehicle significantly harder to find and somewhat pricier than a comparable CRV. I can objectively say that my family doesn't like the sightlines of the CRV, but the sightlines don't seem to bother me, possibly because I'm the shortest member of my family. Is a Reuben better than a BLT is not a question I would answer directly. Which is to say that I'm not judging Green Day to be BETTER than Foo Fighters, only more to my personal liking. Neither band is the creator of what I consider a musically ideal (I'd say perfect, but ....) song, "Ice", by Crack the Sky, which runs 4 1/2 minutes on vinyl but in live performance can go as long as 12 minutes.
The Beatles, despite having a skimpy seven-year run of music-making, have it all over all of those bands, musically, in my opinion. Aside from the songwriting, the idea of a concept album, new mixing techniques, the foundation of MTV music videos, even the popularization of classical and 'exotic' instruments in rock music can largely be credited to them. They will, however, never ever make anything new.
Does that matter, though? They made Magical Mystery Tour - shot in about two weeks- AND Yellow Submarine (okay, their participation in Yellow Submarine was under duress at first, but then they loved it and threw the entirety of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band at it) and while Submarine was very psychedelic and thus obviously popular, Mystery Tour was very Fellini-esque, and not everyone likes even the real Fellini. MMT is immediately hailed as a 'flop,' and even among more contemporary critics, it is regarded as not a good choice. It seems to me, though, that the Beatles did exactly what they planned to do when making it. I think they hit the mark of "rather romantic and slightly surreal" when you see it in color. In black and white, on a 16-inch screen, I imagine it's basically baffling.
