Beatles – "Strawberry Fields Forever" (1967)

I think I know 

I mean, oh yes

But it's all wrong

We learned in the previous 2 or 3 lines that the late Steve Jobs had seven Beatles albums on his iPod when his biographer, Walter Isaacson, asked to see his playlist in 2005. 

Jobs had three of the Fab Four’s first five LPs on his playlist, plus Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, Abbey Road, and Let It Be.  But his iPod did not include Rubber Soul, Revolver, or The Beatles (a/k/a “The White Album”).

Nothing from “Revolver” on Steve Jobs’s iPod?

Jobs was pretty nuts about the Beatles, but he was even more nuts about Bob Dylan – he had no fewer than 21 Dylan albums on his iPod.

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Jobs had a bootleg CD containing all the different takes of “Strawberry Fields Forever” the Beatles recorded.  The group spent 55 hours in the studio working on that song before they were happy with it.

The recording that was released was actually a combination of two different takes.  Producer George Martin had to slightly speed up one take and slow down the other one in order to be able to accomplish that.

Jobs was a perfectionist even when it came to the smallest details of Apple products, and he told Isaacson that the Beatles’ insistence on getting “Strawberry Fields Forever” just right – John Lennon seems to have been the guy who kept pushing to do it one more time – “made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties.”

Ironically, you couldn’t buy “Strawberry Fields Forever” or any other Beatles song from the iTunes Store until 2010, when EMI (the Beatles’ record company) finally agreed to allow Apple to sell digital copies of the Beatles’ music.

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To say that Steve Jobs didn’t suffer fools gladly is an understatement.

According to Isaacson, Jobs’s most salient personality trait was his intensity:

This intensity encouraged a binary view of the world that colleagues referred to the hero/sh*thead dichotomy.  You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same day.  The same was true of products, ideas, even food: something was either “the best thing ever,” or it was sh*tty, brain-dead, inedible.

Tina Redse was the first woman Jobs asked to marry him.  (She turned him down – not because she didn’t love him, but because she couldn’t bear how uncaring and self-centered he could be.)

Tina Redse

Redse eventually concluded that Jobs’s lack of empathy and his propensity to demean, bully, and belittle others were clear indicators that he suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

It fits so well and explained so much of what we struggled with, that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see.

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“Strawberry Fields Forever” was originally intended to be included on the Sgt. Pepper album.  But the Beatles’ record company insisted on releasing the song as a single, and the group didn’t like to include previously released singles on their albums.  (It’s too bad that they didn’t do the world a big favor and put it on the album instead of “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” or “She’s Leaving Home.”)

Here’s “Strawberry Fields Forever”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon.