Strawberry Freud Forever
Hear the TAP team perform a Beatles classic
Illustration by Austin Hughes
The lyrics of “Strawberry Fields Forever” feature perhaps the pithiest literary encapsulation of defense mechanisms since Thomas Gray’s line “ignorance is bliss”: “Living is easy with eyes closed / Misunderstanding all you see.”
To celebrate our music-themed issue (58.2), the TAP team—under the name Austin, Austin, and the Drives—has released a cover of this classic track. Play it above!
Austin, Austin, and the Drives:
Art Director Austin Hughes: guitar, banjo, drum loops, vocals, sound engineering
Contributing Editor Austin Ratner: lead vocals
Design Director Melissa Overton: bass
Julian Overton: cello
Editor in Chief Lucas McGranahan: guitar, bass
Writer David Cameron: guitar, tanpura, vocals
Writer/Illustrator Tati Nguyen: vocals
Illustration by Austin Ratner
As for John Lennon, he never knew his father, and his mother struggled to care for him and gave him away to her sister Mimi when he was five. It left Lennon with a heavy lifetime burden of longing and rage. Biographer Bob Spitz writes,
“Strawberry Fields Forever” allowed John to wrestle with a confessional song as confused and dramatic as his emotions. “[It] was psychoanalysis set to music,” he reasoned later, after having spent years on the therapist’s couch. For years he had been sugarcoating his imagery, reluctant, except in a few notable cases, to reveal himself personally in a song. It was easy, with Paul as his sidekick, to keep the lyrics unspecific and upbeat. But with Rubber Soul and Revolver, John had turned a corner on his craft. He finally sensed the true scope of his potential—a gift he’d suspected all along—and realized that to make the leap to great songwriting, he would have to open up his heart.
“Strawberry Fields Forever” lifted everything onto the next level. For inspiration, John took himself back to Woolton, the scene of his favorite childhood escapades, where he spent blissful summer mornings in the company of Nigel Walley, Ivan Vaughan, and Pete Shotton playing in Calderstones Park. Strawberry Field wasn’t a patch of land but, as John pointed out, the name of “an old Victorian house converted for Salvation Army orphans,” near the entrance to the park. “It [provided] an escape for John,” Paul remembered, musing on his own memories of the place. “There was a wall you could bunk over and it had a rather wild garden, it wasn’t manicured at all, so it was easy to hide in.” Aunt Mimi told Albert Goldman: “there was something about the place that always fascinated john. He could see it from his window, and he loved going to the garden party they had each year. He used to hear the Salvation Army band, and he would pull me along, saying, ‘Hurry up, Mimi—we’re going to be late.’”
All these memories came flooding back as John amused himself in Spain, sifting through the scrapbook of his less-than-idyllic childhood. “I took the name”—Strawberry Fields—“as an image,” John explained, and he used it as inspiration to express his seriously conflicted feelings about growing up and self-awareness. Instead of rhymes and word play, John poured strings of surreal images into the verses to bring his emotional world alive.
Published in issue 58.2.