I heard this old one on the radio, and it stirred some memories…one, that I never knew what the hell the words meant.
Also, was this something to do with a drug trip?
What was the business about “you can’t tune in” all about?
Wikipedia is your friend…
The Beatles went through a period of time where very little they wrote made sense, thanks to the wonders of hallucinogenic drugs. This song was written during that time period.
On reading that wiki article, you can see that John Lennon deliberately made one part more obscure, while his explanations show that some of it isn’t as obscure as it seems.
And that sort of sums up a lot of John Lennon’s writing. His two books owe a lot to the Goons and Lewis Carroll, while songs like Norwegian Wood seem obscure until you know the back story. (He had to hide what the song was really about so his wife Cynthia wouldn’t know about his one night stand.)
The standard answer to any question about music in the second half of the 1960s:
“It’s about drugs.”
While much of they lyric is acid-assisted poetry, the title phrase (Strawberry Fields) is in fact a location from Lennon’s childhood neighborhood in Liverpool. Paul McCartney simultaneously wrote a song about a different Liverpool childhood neighborhood location – “Penny Lane”. The two songwriters often cranked out very different songs based on a similar musical or thematic template – a srt of friendly competition, conscious or subconscious – and would (especially in the earlier Beatles priod) then help the other perfect their song.
Nitpick: Starberry FIELD is the name of the place where Lennon played as a child.
Starberry FIELDS is the name of the song and the Central Park memorial to Lennon.
Nitpick deux: Strawberry Field.
Huh. All this time I thought Penny Lane was in Zaire.
For those who don’t want to bother reading through the Wikipedia article, the song is more or less Lennon looking back at himself as a young child. Strawberry Field, as mentioned by other posters, was a place that he used to go to which probably came to represent some iconic Utopian place for him. The key verse is the second one. Basically, it refers to the fact that, as far back as he could remember, Lennon always was aware that he seemed different from everyone else (“No one I think is in my tree”), and he always wondered whether he was a genius or an idiot (“I mean it must be high or low”).
One of my half-baked interpretations is that the phrase “nothing is real” refers to the fact that it was a playground that contained no playground equipment. So the children had to use their imaginations a lot more when they played.