I Am The Walrus

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I Am The Walrus is a song off The Beatles' 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour and as the B-Side to Hello, Goodbye. It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney.

Contents

Writing

John had written I Am The Walrus in August 1967, shortly after the June release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He had written the first few lines under the influence of LSD. Lennon told Playboy in 1980, "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko." I Am The Walrus was a composite of three different Lennon songs he was working on. A two-tone police siren was heard by Lennon in his Weybridge home, and this inspired the tune to "Mr. city policeman sitting pretty little policemen in a row." In his 1968 official biography on The Beatles, Hunter Davies recalled the writing of the song. "[John had] written down down another few words that day, just daft words, to put to another bit of rhythm. 'Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the man to come.' I thought he said 'van to come', which he hadn't, but he liked it better and said he'd use it instead." Davies recalled the "sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun" part had come when John had repeated the phrase to himself until the proper tune came to him. John was quoted in The Beatles as saying, "I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song - sitting in an English garden, waiting for the van to come. I don't know." Music critic Ian McDonald described the chord sequence as "the most unorthodox and tonally ambiguous sequence he ever devised." He referred to the looped sequence as "an obsessive musical structure built round a perpetually ascending/descending MC Escher staircase of all the natural major chords." Though many had tried to find meanings to the obscure lyrics, John insisted that they didn't mean anything. "'Walrus' is just saying a dream - the words don't mean a lot. People draw so many conclusions and it's ridiculous... What does it really mean, 'I am the eggman'? It could have been the pudding basin for all I care. It's not that serious." John had gotten the idea for the song's title from the Lewis Carroll poem "The Walrus And The Carpenter." John had later realised that the walrus was in fact the antagonist of the story. John told Playboy in 1980, "It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realised 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?" The Eggman, though possibly a reference to Humpty Dumpty, could also be a reference to Eric Burdon of The Animals, whose friends called him 'Eggs,' because liked to break eggs onto naked girls during sex. Burdon wrote in his autobiography that Lennon had watched his peculiar habits during an orgy in Mayfair. Burdon had broken two amyl nitrate capsules under two girls' noses and broken eggs on their stomachs. Supposedly, while this had happened with Lennon watching, he had said, "Go on, go get it, Eggman. Go for it. I've been there already, it's nice," The song contained several of Lennon's neologisms, including crabalocker, texpert, and goo goo g'joob. He had previously done so in his books In His Own Write and A Spaniard In The Works. John's friend and former Quarryman Pete Shotton had also said that an inspiration to the obscure lyrics was a project at John's former school, Quarry Bank. A former classmate named Stephen Bayley had told Lennon that a teacher was giving a project where students analyzed Beatles lyrics. Because of this, John tried to make the lyrics as obscure as possible. Lennon asked Shotton to remind him of an old childhood rhyme they had known. It went, "Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, all mixed together with a dead dog's eye. Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick. Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick." This became "Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye." After it was written, Lennon reportedly said to Shotton, "Let the fuckers work that one out!" The "Semolina Pilchard" in the lyrics, according to Marianne Fathfull was a reference to Sgt. Norman Pilcher, a detective who had become known for busting pop stars for using drugs. Also in the lyrics, it insulted those who obsessed about Hare Krishna. John told Playboy in 1980, "Part of it was putting down Hare Krishna. All these people were going on about Hare Krishna, Allen Ginsberg in particular. The reference to 'Elementary penguin' is the elementary, naive attitude of going around chanting, 'Hare Krishna', or putting all your faith in any one idol. I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days." The BBC had banned the song because of the lines "pornographic priestess" and "let your knickers down." Despite this, George Harrison had cited these as his favorite lines. Hunter Davies quoted Harrison as saying, "Why can't you have people fucking as well? It's going on everywhere in the world, all the time. So why can't you mention it? It's just a word, made up by people... It doesn't mean a thing, so why can't we use it in a song? We will eventually. We haven't started yet."

Recording

The song was recorded on September 5, 1967, when sixteen takes of the basic track were recorded. These included bass, lead guitar, electric piano and drums. They then overdubbed Mellotron. Take 16 without the orchestra overdubs was featured on Anthology 2. On September 6, they overdubbed more drums and bass, as well as Lennon's vocals. The song was returned to on September 27, when the sixteen-piece orchestra, conducted by George Martin was recorded. Later that day, the Mike Sammes singers overdubbed backing vocals onto the song. Paul McCartney said in his authorized biography, Many Years From Now, "John worked with George Martin on the orchestration and did some very exciting things with the Mike Sammes Singers... Most of the time they got asked to do Sing Something Simple and all the old songs, but John got them doing all sorts of swoops and phonetic noises. It was a fascinating session. That was John's baby, great one, a really good one." George Martin recalled, "The idea of using voices was a good one. We got in the Mike Sammes Singers, very commercial people and so alien to John that it wasn't true. But in the score I simply orchestrated the laughs and noises, the whooooooah kind of thing. John was delighted with it." The last overdub was recorded on September 29, when seveteen mono mixes were made, the final one being an edit of Mix 10 (from beginning to second chorus) and Mix 22 (from the second chorus to the end). The two mixes included a recording of a live radio program being broadcast on BBC Third Programme, which would become BBC Radio 3 the next day. It was a broadcast of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear. Right as it was being recorded, it was on Act IV, Scene VI, which featured Gloucester (Played by Mark Dignam), Edgar (Philip Guard), and Oswald (John Bryning). John later said, "We did about half a dozen mixes and I just used whatever was coming through at that time. I never knew it was King Lear until, years later, somebody told me - because I could hardly make out what he was saying. It was interesting to mix the whole thing with a live radio coming through it., So that's the secret of that one." Also included in the mix is the noise of a detuned radio.

Recording Sessions


Release

Originally, John wanted this to be the single released after All You Need Is Love. However, it was forced to the B-Side of Hello, Goodbye, because both Paul and George Martin felt Hello, Goodbye would be the more commercial song. John would later say, "I got sick and tired of being Paul's backup band."

In The Film Magical Mystery Tour

A sequence for this song was filmed in West Malling in Kent. Fittingly, John wore an 18th century madman's cap.

LOVE Mix

A remix of this song is included on the 2006 album LOVE. It does not differ greatly from the original version, though it is completely remixed and includes a count-in from an early take of Strawberry Fields Forever.

Personnel

The Beatles

Guest Musicians

Production

Available Versions

Available On

Cover Versions

  • Arcwelder
  • Mark Bonilla
  • Bono
  • Boris featuring Merzbow
  • Jim Carrey
  • Colin's Hermits
  • Die Toten Hosen
  • Ekoostic Hookah
  • The Fab Faux
  • Les Fradkin
  • Grey Matter
  • Hash
  • The Hippie Love Gods
  • Jackyl
  • Kummeli
  • Klaus Lage
  • Jeff Martin
  • Men Without Hats
  • Russell Morris
  • Oasis
  • Oingo Boingo
  • The Punkles
  • Leo Sayer
  • Spooky Tooth
  • Styx
  • XTC
  • Frank Zappa
  • The Zeff

Source

Retrieved from "http://www.beatleswiki.org/wiki/I_Am_The_Walrus"
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