| 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." (thanks, Ken - Hartland, MI) |
| Lennon: "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." (thanks, Conrad - Los Angeles, CA) |
| Lennon wrote this while he was in Spain
working on a movie called How I Won The War. |
| A distorted voice at the end sounds like "I
buried Paul," which fueled rumors that Paul McCartney was dead. The
voice is actually Lennon saying, "Cranberry sauce." |
| There is a memorial to Lennon in Central Park
called "Strawberry Fields." It is located across from The Dakota,
the building in New York City where Lennon lived. |
| John donated money to Strawberry Fields before
his death. One of its buildings is named "Lennon Hall." |
| 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. (thanks,
Confusing - Sydney, Australia) |
| Two versions were recorded with different
instruments and spliced together to make one song. The edit is 59
seconds in. |
| This was one of the first songs to use a
Mellotron, which was an early synthesizer. Lennon played it. |
| This was the first pop song that faded to
silence and then came back. The fake ending drove DJs nuts. |
| The working title was "It's Not Too Bad." (thanks,
Mike - Mountlake Terrace, Washington) |
| Just after Lennon sings, "Let me take you down
'cause I'm going to," there is a series of beeps which, in Morse
Code, form the letters "J" and "L." (thanks, Buddy - South Bend, IN) |
| Peter Gabriel covered this in 1975 on the
compilation All This And World War II. |
| "Strawberry Fields Forever" is the name of a
US fan club that publishes a popular Beatles magazine. |
| Cyndi Lauper performed this at the Strawberry
Fields memorial in Central Park as part of the 2001 special Come
Together: A Night For John Lennon's Words And Music. Proceeds from
the show went to victims of the September 11 attacks on America. |
| 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. 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, when the Salvation Army announced
it would close. (thanks, Tom - Seneca, SC) |
| Vanilla Fudge does a series of fractured
covers of this song on the second side of their debut album. It is
split up into four parts, titled "STRA" "WBER" "RYFI" and "ELDS." At
the end of their cover of Eleanor Rigby, they sing "Nothing is real"
and "Nothing to get hung about." (thanks, Jim - Oxnard, CA) |
