Rock history is filled with stories of highly misunderstood songs, and it seems like a fair amount of them were by the Beatles. This makes sense, of course. The Fab Four’s lyrics weren’t always that straightforward; plus, everybody assumed everything was a drug reference during the ’60s and ’70s. Sometimes that wasn’t true: John Lennon insisted “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was about a picture drawn by his son, not LSD. However, Lennon also revealed that another Beatles classic really was inspired by psychedelic experiences…in addition to one of the most surreal novels of all time.
Released on the 1967 Magical Mystery Tour album, “I Am the Walrus” has been puzzling listeners for decades:
Yellow matter custard
Dripping from a dead dog’s eye
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess
Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down
I am the egg man (oh)
They are the egg men (oh)
I am the walrus, goo-goo, g’joob
Who is the walrus? For that matter, who is the egg man? As it turns out, the song was confusing because Lennon wanted it to be; he wrote the seemingly nonsensical words out of frustration when he found out that people (even students) were analyzing Beatles’ lyrics. However, as Lennon told David Sheff of Playboy in 1980 (later quoted in Sheff’s book, All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono), his imagination got a little hallucinogenic boost.
“The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend,” Lennon recalled. “The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko…I’d seen Allen Ginsberg and some other people who liked [Bob] Dylan and Jesus going on about Hare Krishna. It was Ginsberg, in particular, I was referring to. The words ‘Element’ry penguin’ meant that it’s naïve to just go around chanting Hare Krishna or putting all your faith in one idol. In those days I was writing obscurely, à la Dylan.”
As Lennon went on to explain, Lewis Carroll‘s 1871 poem, “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (which appeared in his dark children’s fantasy novelThrough the Looking Glass) also influenced the lyrics for “I Am the Walrus,” though he later realized he got the meaning of the poem wrong.
“It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist system,” Lennon said. “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 realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, s—t, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it? [Sings, laughing] ‘I am the carpenter…'”
You might think that Lennon’s explanations would have put all the speculation about “I Am the Walrus” to rest, but that’s not at all what happened…especially because Lennon stoked the fire himself with the lyrics to another Beatles song, “Glass Onion” (on the 1968 double album The Beatles, better known as the White Album):
I told you about the walrus and me, man
You know that we’re as close as can be, man
Well here’s another clue for you all
The walrus was Paul
“I threw the line in — ‘the Walrus was Paul’ — just to confuse everybody a bit more,” Lennon was quoted as saying in The Beatles Anthology.
“It could have been ‘the fox terrier is Paul,'” he continued. “I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. I was having a laugh because there’d been so much gobbledygook about Pepper — play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that.”
All these years later, the fact that fans remain unconvinced there’s not a deeper meaning behind both “I Am the Walrus” and “Glass Onion” proves they’re poetry indeed.
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