John Lennon is rumored to sing “Baby you’re a rich fag Jew” towards the end. I don’t hear it or believe it, myself.
And, that he was thinking of Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager who passed away around the time “Baby…” was being written.
I couldn’t decide between “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” so I voted for “I Am the Walrus.” 
“The Fool on the Hill” is also worthy of consideration. But “All You Need Is Love” is IMHO vastly overrated. If I wanted a banal, childish sing-along, I’d listen to “Yellow Submarine.”
Never heard that before. Thanks. I don’t believe it at all.
“Penny Lane.”
Easy choice.
I voted for “Hello/Goodbye”, one of the weaker singles in their entire catalog, for the simple reason that it’s the first Beatles song my daughter and I would sing together and play Rock Band: The Beatles to.
So while there are four or five songs that are easily “better”, this one shot straight up the chart of my heart when Sophia became a Beatles fan because of H/G.
I said in the Sgt. Pepper thread that Strawberry Fields Forever is by far my favorite Beatles song from that period. Whatever my conception of Beatles chronology is, I didn’t think of I Am the Walrus being from the same period. They started recording Strawberry Fields in November 1966 and released it the next February, while they started working on Walrus in August 1967, after Sgt. Pepper was already out, and then released the song in November. I’m not saying they’re from distinct periods, but I’d never thought of them that way. Strawberry Fields is psychedelic and strange, but to me, Walrus is even further out there. Strawberry Fields is rooted in John’s childhood, but Walrus is almost totally untethered to the real world. It starts with The Walrus and the Carpenter and just goes. In fact these are probably my two favorite Beatles songs. I’ve seen a lot of Dopers say “I can’t vote” in that situation, but I saw Walrus on the track list and clicked the button without reading any of the other songs because I forgot Strawberry Fields was also on the album. 
I heard it quite clearly the first time I heard the song on my Mobile Fidelity LP. Very clearly. The latest remastering does not have it, and those I listened to a few minutes ago.
A strange album. It sounds like a collection of Yellow Submarine outtakes, whimsy and experiment but short on genuine compositional creativity. I also agree with a previous post that described most of these as over-produced and over-processed. The McCartney vibe is strong with this one, and much of this album was reincarnated better as Wings. I may be unnecessarily harsh, but only because there are so many superior Beatles works out there. The whimsy and studio experiments of the White Album, for example, sound like virtuoso musicians in their element. On Mag Myst Tour, it sounds fumbling and amateurish.
Penny Lane is the only stand-out to me as a complete song that still feels timeless and fresh today.
Pretty much spot-on with my thinking all around. Well put.
Interesting, thank you!
It was really tough to decide between “I Am The Walrus” and “Strawberry Fields” but I wound up leaning just a little more towards “Walrus”.
I’m not sure what you mean by “fortuitous”. Is there a story behind it? I thought it was just some random stuff thrown in there for weirdness’ sake.
Lennon’s habit of using repeated notes in melodies is always pointed out in musicological studies of the Beatles’ songwriting, but surely Macca deserves a Johnny-One-Note prize for “Silly Love Songs,” which begins with a G repeated 13 times in a row.
Paperback Writer?
I vote for “Death Cab for Cutie”!
I actually saw the film. It wasn’t very good, but the high point for me was the Bonzo Dog Band performing “Death Cab for Cutie.”
In any case, “I am the Walrus” is the standout on a very good collection of songs.
It happened to be on the radio right when they were recording that track. An irreproducible, perfect moment.
(As a child, I always heard the words “Edgar Allan Poe” being spoken, echoing the line from the song. Turns out it’s “Earl of Gloucester” that’s being spoken there.)
Same. Even trying to hear it, nope.
I didn’t know that. I figured it was something already on tape that they just mixed in. And yeah I’ve always heard “Edgar Allan” something in there too.
It is perhaps worth pointing out that “fag” is not a British slang term for a homosexual. We have our own ways of denigrating homosexuals, thank you very much. In fact, “fag” in British slang, means a cigarette. A sentence like “I could just murder a fag,” carries no homophobic connotations in Britain at all.
I doubt whether the American slang sense of “fag” was even particularly well known in Britain in 1967, as it probably would have been censored from most movie and TV scripts, which is where most Bits get most of their knowledge of American English from. As The Beatles had spent a fair bit of time in America by this time, it is quite likely that they would have been familiar with the American meaning of “fag”, but it does not seem likely that it would have come naturally to Lennon to actually use the word that way.