Strawberry Fields Forever - Remastered

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. In 1984, Lennon's widow Yoko Ono donated $375,000 to the home.

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." In America, to be "hung up" is to worry about something, so many US listeners thought the line meant that it was nothing to get "hung up about."

Lennon (from his 1980 interview with Playboy magazine): "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." Some of the lyrics reflect being misunderstood. Lennon added: "The second line goes, 'No one I think is in my tree.' Well, what I was trying to say in that line is, 'Nobody seems to be as hip as me, therefore I must be crazy or a genius.'"