page_title: Baby, You're a Rich Man
section_title: Release
hierarchical_section_title: Baby, You're a Rich Man / Release
caption_attribution_description: English: Hippie Hill. This sloppy peace sign marks the threshold for Hippie Hill, San Francisco.
context_page_description: "Baby, You're a Rich Man" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as the B-side of their "All You Need Is Love" single in July 1967. It originated from an unfinished song by John Lennon, titled "One of the Beautiful People", to which Paul McCartney added a chorus. It is one of the best-known pop songs to make use of a clavioline, a monophonic keyboard instrument that was a forerunner to the synthesizer. Lennon played the clavioline on its oboe setting, creating a sound that suggests an Indian shehnai. The song was recorded and mixed at Olympic Sound Studios in London, making it the first of the Beatles' EMI recordings to be entirely created outside EMI Studios.
  Lennon wrote his portion of the song after attending the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, an all-night festival held at London's Alexandra Palace that served as a key event in the emergence of the counterculture in the UK. His lyrics address the "beautiful people" of the 1960s hippie movement and combine with the chorus to present a statement on the universality of non-material wealth.
context_section_description: "Baby, You're a Rich Man" was initially submitted for inclusion in Yellow Submarine. While parts of the song were used in the film, its initial release was as the B-side of "All You Need Is Love", which the Beatles performed on the Our World satellite broadcast on 25 June 1967 and then rush-released as a single. The release took place on 7 July in the United Kingdom and on 17 July in the United States. "All You Need Is Love" topped singles charts in many countries around the world. In the United States, the B-side also charted in its own right, peaking at number 34 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 60 on the Cash Box Top 100. In Australia, it was listed with "All You Need Is Love", as a double A-side, when the single topped the Go-Set national chart.
  The single followed soon after Sgt. Pepper, which historian David Simonelli describes as "the most important cultural moment of 1967" through its resonance "across every boundary of class, age, gender, race and geography". Both records provided a soundtrack to that year's Summer of Love, a phenomenon that marked the full emergence of the 1960s counterculture. The Beatles were viewed as leaders of the counterculture and, during July and August, pursued interests related to the same utopian-based ideology. In a 1970 interview, when asked about Haight-Ashbury, the district of San Francisco that represented "the city of the beautiful people" in 1967, Lennon recalled that he was "all for going and living" there, but "George went over in the end." During this visit, on 7 August, Harrison was handed an acoustic guitar in Golden Gate Park and briefly performed "Baby, You're a Rich Man", leading a crowd around in a manner that press reports likened to the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
  Although the visit was viewed as the Beatles' endorsement of a youth movement that they helped inspire, Harrison was disappointed at how Haight-Ashbury represented a haven for dropouts and drug addicts, rather than a community looking to explore the possibility of enlightenment that LSD presented. On his return to London, he shared this disillusionment with Lennon. The pair subsequently became avid supporters of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation technique, after the Beatles had attended a seminar by the Maharishi in Bangor, Wales, where they publicly disavowed LSD on 26 August. In light of this development, author Nicholas Schaffner wrote that "Baby, You're a Rich Man", like "Strawberry Fields Forever", revealed the "redundant" aspect of repeated LSD "trips" after the initial sense of spiritual euphoria awakened by the drug, in that the songs "tend[ed] to provide more riddles than solutions".
  Against the Beatles' wishes, Capitol Records, EMI's North American affiliate, included "Baby You're a Rich Man" and other tracks from the band's 1967 singles on the US album Magical Mystery Tour, released in November that year. In the company's rush to prepare the album, a duophonic (or "mock stereo") mix of the song was used for the stereo version of the LP. While parts of the song were used in the 1968 film Yellow Submarine, it was not included on the accompanying soundtrack album. The sequence for "Baby, You're a Rich Man" appears towards the end of the film, when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band have been released from the paralysis initiated by the Blue Meanies' hatred of music. Later editions of the US single include a voice saying the end of the word "Seven" or "Eleven" before the track starts.
caption: Peace symbol drawn on a walkway at Hippie Hill in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Harrison busked the song at the hill during his visit to Haight-Ashbury in August 1967.
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