"I Am the Walrus"
Brian Epstein, who had managed the Beatles almost from the beginning and been the architect of most of the critical forward steps in their career, died on August 27, 1967. It was a loss from which the band never recovered; Brian had always called the shots, business-wise, and when they tried to manage themselves – via Apple Corp – they sounded the band’s death knell.
Paul responded as he always would when confronted with death, by diving into the work. Only five days after Brian’s death, he gathered the others to his home to announce his grand plan for a TV special – a “magical mystery tour” - for which they would need some new songs.
"That put tremendous pressure on John to contribute,” wrote Bob Spitz, “a task he wrestled with over that pulpy, hot weekend. However, when the Beatles entered Studio Two on Tuesday evening, ready to roll, it was evident that John had come up with a killer.”
The Writing
“I Am the Walrus” was a child of many parents. First in John’s inspiration was the oscillating sound of a police siren, from which he derived a melody wavering across a semitone; then there was a pastoral melody about his Weybridge garden that he’d been kicking around; and finally a nonsense song about cornflakes (remarkably the second time that breakfast cereal had been his muse).
“I don’t know how it will all end up,” he said to Beatles biographer Hunter Davies at the time. “Perhaps they’ll turn out to be different parts of the same song.”
That they did, and it didn’t end there. Pete Shotton spoke with John about a fan letter from a student at their alma mater, the Quarry Bank School, where the literature class was studying Beatles lyrics to excavate meaning and truth. This amused John no end.
He prompted Pete to drudge up an old rhyme from their own school days:
Yellow matter custard, green slop pie,
all mixed together with a dead dog’s eye
It became John’s mission to lard this new song up with as much inscrutable nonsense as possible. As Shotton tells it, after Lennon wrote down the line about “semolina pilchard” unaccountably scaling the Eiffel Tower, he smiled and said, “Let the fuckers work that one out, Pete!”
“I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, never saying what you mean, but giving the impression of something,” John told Playboy in 1980. “Where more or less can be read into it. It’s a good game, I thought, they get away with this artsy-fartsy crap... but it was the intellectuals who read all this into Dylan or the Beatles. Dylan got away with murder. I thought, well, I can write this crap, too. You know, you just stick a few images together, thread them together, and you call it poetry.” 23
A pair of acid trips had gotten him rolling on the first two verses - “I am he as you are he as you are m e and we are all together...” - a symptom of LSD ingestion being, apparently, uncontrollable monosyllaby. From there the nonsense just piled up layer by layer.
“...even nonsense words have to come from somewhere, there must have been a thought process that threw them up,” wrote Hunter Davies later. Here are some of the sources:
The Walrus: “[The Walrus] came from ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’. Alice in Wonderland24,” John told Playboy. “To me, it was a beautiful poem. [Later I] realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story, and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, ‘Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the Carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it?”
“Goo goo g’joob”: Alternately “Goo goo goo joob” or “Goo goo ga joob”. It is often speculated that this is a corruption of “koo koo ka choo” from Simon and Garfunkel’s paean to adultery, “Mrs. Robinson”, but this is unlikely; though the songs were both recorded around the same time, no one heard “Mrs. Robinson” in the film The Graduate until December 1967, and it wasn’t released as a single until the following April. It’s more likely that Paul Simon was quoting John, rather than vice versa.
An alternate source for “goo goo g’joob”, per Ben Zimmer in The Atlantic, is the term “googoo goosth” from Finnegan’s Wake.
“Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna”: a reference to American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who had a tendency to chant the mantra in public.
“semolina pilchard”: semolina is a bland pudding, and pilchard is a kind of sardine – grotesqueries in keeping with canine eye drippings. But Marianne Faithfull reported that ‘semolina pilchard’ was actually a subtle reference to Det. Sgt. Norman Pilcher, a British cop who drug-busted celebrities. His pinches for possession included John, George, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Donovan.
Then there's “the Eggman.” This was a nickname of Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals, who had a habit of breaking eggs open on young women while having sex with them.
“As impenetrable as the images of ‘I Am the Walrus’ are, the song can be heard as a continuation of Lennon’s exploration of his own identity, which he had begun in earnest with ‘She Said She Said’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’,” wrote Walter Everett. “The opening line, ‘I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,’ recalls Alice’s identity crisis in Chapter 2 of her adventures... ‘I’m sure I’m not Ada.... and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel... Besides, she’s she and I’m I... Who am I, then?”
“John ultimately trumps his antecedent’s penchant for verbal esoterica with a series of disjunctive, acid-soaked images,” wrote Kenneth Womack, “word pictures that, by virtue of their lightly packed visual imagery, defy easy interpretation. ‘I Am the Walrus’ features a profundity of textual absurdities, ranging from ‘stupid bloody Tuesday,’ ‘crabalocker fishwife’, and ‘pornographic priestess’ through ‘expert textpert choking smokers’ and ‘elementary penguin’ As with Carroll’s nonsensical poem ‘Jabberwocky,’ phrases like ‘crabalocker’ and ‘fishwife’ find Lennon utilizing portmanteaux, in which single words are laden with a multiplicity of possible meanings.”
The Music
“I Am the Walrus” is one of the most structurally complex songs John ever wrote. While it superficially follows a conventional AABA structure, his modifications are substantial, and viewed as a whole converge to form a veritable Escher painting of compositional formatting.
The verse (A1) is six bars – two sets of changes, three bars each. In the first half, the melody bounces a half-step back and forth, the “siren” in John’s inspiration; the changes walk down from A to D/F#, stepping back up F-G-A. Then a bar of C, a bar of D, and back to A.
Then there’s a variation (A2), which starts out like A1, but in the second half, an F chord appears for a bar, followed by two bars of B, and the tempo of the melody doubles, widening to a full step. The verse then repeats – again, six bars – followed by the refrain – a bar of C, a bar of D, and a bar of E. That pattern takes the song from “I am he...” through the first “goo goo g’joob.”
John then varies the pattern. On the second pass (“Mr. City policeman sitting...”), there’s only one instance of A1 – no A2 - followed by an extended refrain (“I’m crying”), five bars rather than three.
The second, shorter version of the pattern then repeats (“Yellow matter custard...”), but this time John swaps A2 for A1, and again heads into the refrain, restoring “I am the Eggman/goo goo g’joob.”
Then comes an orchestral break in B, lasting a mere four bars, followed by the only major vocal diversion. A bridge appears (“Sitting in an English garden...”), using the changes from bars 2-4 of the orchestral break, morphing them into the second half of A2 – F, B, B – followed by the four-bar “Eggman/goo goo g’joob” refrain.
The last verse (“Expert texpert choking smokers...”) comes full-circle to the first verse – A1, A2, followed by the original refrain, extended by one bar to allow for two extra “goo goo g’joob”s. Then comes the coda, which adds another 1:07 to the song.
It is, by far, John’s most avant garde song structure. (We’re not going to count “Revolution #9”.)
The Recording
The song’s studio history is like no other Beatles song.
Assembling at Abbey Road on September 5, four days after the Magical Mystery Tour meeting at Paul’s home, they laid down the basic track – John on electric piano, Paul on his Rickenbacker, George on Stratocaster and Ringo behind the drums. Mellotron overdubs were done, and some tambourine was added.
The shadow of Brian’s death hovered over the session. “I distinctly remember the look of emptiness on all their faces while they were playing ‘I Am the Walrus’,” remembered Geoff Emerick, who engineered the session. “It’s one of the saddest memories I have of my time with the Beatles.”
The band then jumped on the bus and shot their quirky home movie, Magical Mystery Tour, for two weeks. “I Am the Walrus”, thus far an unremarkable track, awaited their return. During this break, George Martin dutifully composed a score and booked a 16-piece orchestra.
On September 27, everyone reassembled at Abbey Road. More Mellotron was dubbed onto the song, along with Martin’s musicians – eight violins, four celli, three horns, and a contrabass clarinet. Martin considered the song “chaos,” but could do little about it.
“Some of the sounds weren’t very good,” he later said. “Some were brilliant, but some were bloody awful.”
Then there were the Mike Sammes Singers, eight men and eight women who found steady work doing TV theme songs and commercial jingles. Martin brought them in to do the “ho-ho-ho hee-hee-hee ha-ha-ha” bits, the “oompah, oompah, stick it in your jumper” and “got one, got one, everybody’s got on.”
The song was mixed down on September 29. During that session, John impulsively dialed the radio to a BBC rendition of Shakespeare - King Lear, Act IV, Scene 6 – and prompted Emerick to feed it onto the tail end of the master tape:
Slave, thou has slain me. Villain, take thy purse.
If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body...
...and so on. The song could not end more perfectly.
Progressive Elements
Use of imagery
It’s hard to imagine a more stunning deployment of imagery than “Walrus”, even for John. His first excursion into Lewis Carroll, “Lucy”, just glowed – but its images were benign, dreamy, where the “Walrus” montage is disorienting, shocking, even disturbing at times. Intentionally opaque or no, John’s word-pics mesmerize, even if they don’t elucidate.
This is two steps shy of what the aforementioned Jon Anderson of Yes would later do – using words to convey images for their own sake, not necessarily in service of any meaning or narrative. John is going one better, in a sense, actually inventing words - ‘crabalocker,’ ‘texpert’ - which manage to generate mental images even though they don’t mean anything.
We can say that the imagery of “Walrus” is as progressive as Carroll himself, in that it leverages nonsense as emotional energy that is as stirring to the audience as any serious work.
Experimental timbres
It is no exaggeration to say that “I Am the Walrus” is an overt exercise in experimental timbre, the generation of an aural landscape where no instrument or voice (other than John’s) sounds like itself – an effort to be as outlandish with sound as with words. In this regard, the song is an unqualified success.
This was very much by design; from the first bendy string notes of Martin’s intro to the monkey-chatter of the chorus, “Walrus” announces its sonic ambition: to surprise and shock. The Mellotron overdubs serve to ensure that this auricular irreverence is all-pervasive, perhaps the purest exercise in contrived texture the band ever achieved.
Postscripts
“Magical Mystery Tour is one of my favorite albums, because it was so weird. ‘I Am the Walrus’ is also one of my favorite tracks—because I did it, of course, but also because it’s one of those that has enough little bitties going to keep you interested even a hundred years later.” ~John Lennon to Dennis Elsas on WNEW-FM, Sept. 28, 1974
“As the last burst of the Beatles’ self-conscious psychedelia, ‘I Am the Walrus’ functions – on both a lyrical and musical level – as a brilliant tirade against the ills of enforced institutionalism and runaway consumerism. Teeming with stunning wordplay and linguistic imagery - ‘obscurity for obscurity’s sake,’ in the words of Michael Roos - ‘I Am the Walrus’ pits Lennon’s bitter vocals against a surrealistic musical tableau comprised of McCartney’s hypnotic bass, Harrison and Starr’s playful percussion, and Martin’s exhilarating string arrangements. ‘I Am the Walrus’ opens with Lennon’s Mellotron-induced phrasings designed to replicate the monotonous cry of a police siren. As the song’s spectacular lyrics unfold’ - ‘I am he as you are he and you are me and we are altogether” - Starr’s wayward snare interrupts the proceedings and sets Lennon’s intentionally absurd, Whitmanesque catalogue of images into motion. While an assortment of cryptic voices and diabolical laughter weave in and out of the mix, Lennon’s pungent lyrics encounter an array of ridiculous characters, including that madman of literary effrontery himself, Edgar Allen Poe. “When ‘I Am the Walrus’ finally recedes amongst tits ubiquitous mantra of “goo goo g’joob,” the song dissolves into the scene from King Lear, and the whole production suddenly dies by its own hand in a symbolic meta-suicide denoting the spiritual death of the individual in a Western world beset by corporate monoliths and identify politics.” ~ Kenneth Womack
“Fine then. Maybe the song is just a put-on, or a kind of a dare. No wonder I felt like it was resisting me. It is endlessly analyzable, and yet somehow analysis-proof. Any interpretive effort runs aground on the limits of interpretation. Lennon sneers at the overanalyzing expert-texperts like that Quarry Bank literature teacher who would kick Edgar Allan Poe if given half a chance.” ~Ben Zimmer in The Atlantic
“...a piece of terror lurking in foggy midnight moors.” ~Hit Parader
“I Am the Walrus” was the B-side of the “Hello Goodbye” single, released Nov. 27, 1967. John was unhappy it wasn’t the A side.
The American progressive band ELO initially set out “to continue where ‘I Am the Walrus’ left off, artistically.”
“‘I Am the Walrus’ features Lennon’s most inspired verbal and aural textures, as well as the Beatles’ supreme moment of narrative paradox: in one sense, ‘I Am the Walrus’ seems utterly devoid of meaning, yet at the same time its songwriter’s rants about prevailing social strictures absolute beg for interpretation, its layers of meaning fecundating and expanding with every listening. In ‘I Am the Walrus’, Lennon looms large, he contains multitudes.” ~Kenneth Womack
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