100 DAYS OF THE BEATLES – TOP 100 SONGS – 100

NO. 100: HELLO, GOODBYE (McCartney – November 27, 1967) 

Magical Mystery Tour – Track 1, Side 2 (3:24)

YouTube Video

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (sans footnotes/references) –

Under the working title "Hello, Hello", the Beatles recorded the backing track on 2 October 1967, and added vocals and a guitar overdub on the 19th. After further overdubs of bass guitar and viola, recording was completed on the 2nd November, and mixing on the 6th. "Hello Goodbye" is in the key of C Major and in 4/4 time

The song features a coda which came spontaneously in the studio. Of this, McCartney said "I remember the end bit where there's the pause and it goes 'Heba, heba hello'. We had those words and we had this whole thing recorded but it didn't sound quite right, and I remember asking Geoff Emerick if we could really whack up the echo on the tom-toms. And we put this echo full up on the tom-toms and it just came alive."

"Hello, Goodbye" was released as a single on 24 November 1967. In the US, the song was also included on the Magical Mystery Tour album released three days later, but the song was not made available in the UK on an album (or in stereo) until the release of the 1973 compilation album 1967-1970.

With the release of the song, McCartney gave an explanation of its meaning in an interview with Disc: "The answer to everything is simple. It's a song about everything and nothing. If you have black you have to have white. That's the amazing thing about life."

Three promotional films were made for the song; directed by McCartney, they were filmed on the 10th November at the Saville Theatre in London. The films were not aired by the BBC due to the Musicians Union's strict rules on miming; with no such restriction in the US, one of the films was screened on The Ed Sullivan Show on the November 26th . 

In the US, Capitol Records omitted the comma in the song’s title in the packaging of the single (as did some of EMI’s partners in other countries), and also the Magical Mystery Tour LP (which was subsequently adopted for the CD release of this album).