Song of the Day: The Beatles – I Am the Walrus

As threatened a while back in my post on the Tragically Hip’s Ahead by a Century, here’s my take on this classic slice of mid-Sixties psychedelia.

Many years ago now, it must have been back around 1978, I had a strange experience in high school English class. We were listening to a recording of Shakespeare’s King Lear, when an eerie, bewildering realization crept over me. It was during Act IV Scene VI, Oswald had just been slain, and as the actors delivered their lines, I realized that I knew the words by heart. Beginning at a certain point, I could speak right along with them, matching pronunciation, cadence, and intonation, and I had no idea how that could be. I’d never read or seen the play. We were just beginning a new set of lessons. Yet somehow in the recent past, over countless listenings, I’d already heard – not read, but heard spoken – these very words:

Oswald: Slave, thou hast slain me. Villain, take my purse.
If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body
And give the letters which you find’st about me
To Edmund, Earl of Gloucester. Seek him out
Upon the English party. O, untimely death!
Death!

Edgar: I know thee well: a serviceable villain,
As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
As badness would desire.

Gloucester: What, is he dead?

Edgar: Sit you down, father. Rest you.

What the…? How??

Well, what was then about eight years’ worth of listening to this, that’s how:

It was Lennon’s idea to enhance the general spookiness of the extended fade-out at the end of I Am the Walrus – already rendered surreal by a mixture of ascending strings, electronic noise, and Ringo’s rather expert, almost chaotic drumming, overlaid by two chanting choruses, one repeating the phrase oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper, the other intoning everybody’s got one – by mixing in random radio chatter. Somebody in the studio flipped on the BBC, King Lear was being performed, and John figured perfect, put it in the mix. Like so many elements of the song, it doesn’t really mean anything in context, but it seems to. It works.

I am the Walrus is an undeniably strange composition, and not everybody’s cup of tea, yet it’s widely considered a masterpiece of its kind, a view shared most emphatically here at Needlefish H.Q., even though it provides those on the wrong side of the great chords vs. melody debate with powerful proof that a tune can function brilliantly on the strength of its chord shifts alone, despite having, in essence, no melody at all. True, obviously, since there it sits, though I’d respond that nobody ever pulled it off quite like Lennon did in this instance, not even John, who never hit this sort of peak again. It’s pretty much a one-off. Advance Howard Goodall’s wonderful Beatles documentary to the 13 minute mark to see what I mean (and by the by, if you’ve never seen it, the whole documentary is revelatory, and more than worth a full viewing):

Or, if you’re keen on a more detailed musicological analysis:

Walrus was both a high water mark and an inflection point for John. It was the last in the chain of LSD-influenced psychedelic songs that began with Rain in 1966, and carried on through to the end of 1967 with tracks like She Said She Said, Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields Forever, and Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds (though some would argue that Cry Baby Cry, off 1968’s White Album, was actually the final spin through LennonLand). It was the zenith of his explorations into the zany wordplay and nonsense verse he’d adored as a young man, devouring the works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, as emulated in his own popular books In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. It may also, sadly, have served as a turning point for the whole Beatles project. Proud of his creation, John lobbied hard for it to be the A-Side of the next Beatles single, but the record company executives much preferred Paul’s Hello Goodbye, a tune that Lennon despised, in part because it was light, airy pop, and in part, I suspect, because he knew it was a guaranteed No. 1, and Walrus, as the folks at EMI had concluded, probably wasn’t. Many think that the perceived slight is what sealed the deal for John (though clearly there were lots of other factors then contributing to the group’s impending dissolution).

It couldn’t have done much to impress the bean counters at EMI that the music wasn’t exactly upbeat and enjoyable, in the usual radio-friendly way, while John’s oddball lyrics seemed genuinely, and perhaps even deliberately, meaningless. What was all this business about pilchards, corn flakes, egg men and walruses? Goo Goo Ga Joob? Seriously? Honestly, it was utter nonsense. Were AM deejays supposed to slap such a thing onto their platters for heavy rotation? What were the teenyboppers then supposed to make of it? For the love of God, man, whatever happened to holding hands, falling in love, and having your poor adolescent heart broken? Had the Beatles gone mad?

No, not exactly, though there was a fair bit of lysergic acid diethylamide involved, on top of which Lennon was feeling a little more mischievously bloody-minded than usual. As the story’s usually told, John wasn’t just in the mood to indulge in the sort of wordplay in which he’d delighted since childhood, he wanted to poke fun at the often obtusely symbolic lyrics of Bob Dylan, who, John believed, “had been getting away with murder”, as well as mess with the minds of a growing subculture of “Beatleologists” who’d begun looking for hidden meanings in the band’s lyrics (a cultish pursuit that was already starting to spiral into the insane conspiracy theory that Paul had died in a car accident in 1966, and been replaced by a look-alike). They were even teaching Beatle songs in school, an idea that struck Lennon as both absurd and hilarious. This is from John Lennon In My Life, the memoir published in 1983 by John’s lifelong friend and confidant Pete Shotton:

One afternoon, while taking “lucky dips” into the day’s sack of fan mail, John, much to both our amusement, chanced to pull out a letter from a student at Quarry Bank. Following the usual expressions of adoration, this lad revealed that his literature master was playing Beatles songs in class; after the boys all took their turns analyzing the lyrics, the teacher would weigh in with his own interpretation of what the Beatles were really talking about. (This, of course, was the same institution of learning whose headmaster had summed up young Lennon’s prospects with the words: “This boy is bound to fail.”)

“John and I howled in laughter over the absurdity of it all. “Pete,” he said, “what’s that ‘Dead Dog’s Eye’ song we used to sing when we were at Quarry Bank?” I thought for a moment and it all came back to me:

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.

“That’s it!” said John. “Fantastic!” He found a pen and commenced scribbling: “Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye….” Such was the genesis of “I Am the Walrus” (The Walrus itself was to materialize after, almost literally stepping out of a page in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass’)

Inspired by the picture of that Quarry Bank literature master pontificating about the symbolism of Lennon-McCartney, John threw in the most ludicrous images his imagination could conjure. He thought of “semolina” (an insipid pudding we’d been forced to eat as kids) and “pilchard” (a sardine we often fed to our cats). Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower….,” John intoned, writing it down with considerable relish. 

He turned to me, smiling. “let the f*ckers work THAT one out, Pete.”

Warming to the task, John threw all sorts of verbal spaghetti at the wall, the better to confound the serious-minded listener. The opening line, sometimes interpreted as an allusion to Eastern mysticism, was actually cribbed from the first verse of the old Boer War song Marching to Pretoria (I’m with you and you’re with me and we are all together). The bit about being an eggman among eggmen seems an obvious reference to Humpty Dumpty (perhaps John was suggesting we’d all had a great fall of late?). There were phrases that seem to have been inserted simply to confuse while seeming deeply yet inscrutably meaningful (crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess), and surreal imagery straight out of a bad acid trip (sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come, semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower). Clearly, none of it meant anything at all.

In the conventional wisdom, Walrus was thus little more than the musical version of an upraised middle finger captioned analyze this, ya f%+#in’ propeller-heads.

Well, hold up for a second. Not so fast. There’s more going on here, and it’s plainly audible in Lennon’s voice. If he’s only pulling our legs, then why’s he so frickin’ angry? If this is all an elaborate joke, then why isn’t he smiling? As he dredged his consciousness for portentous-sounding drivel, was he digging up something else along with it? That’s sure how it sounds to me. John was nothing if not somebody with a whole heap of axes to grind, and to these ears, in between the poetic pranks and absurdly confounding wordplay, he’s grinding all kinds of them here.

The title is itself a bit of a political statement, lifted from The Walrus and the Carpenter, a poem recited by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which John rightly interpreted as a critique of capitalism, power, entitlement, and greed (John was a little chagrined later, upon realizing that the walrus was actually the villain of the poem, but reckoned that the song’s title still worked better because “nobody would have listened to something called I Am The Carpenter”. Actually, the carpenter is a bit of a louse too; it’s the poor little oysters, who end up getting eaten, who’re meant to be sympathetic, though I suppose I Am the Oyster doesn’t have much of a ring to it either). The words, meanwhile, are only part gibberish. There’s an even greater measure of perfectly comprehensible grievance, as, verse by verse, John, obviously keen to have a go at just about everything that had ever ticked him off, takes scornful pot-shots at all and sundry. Among the items on his burgeoning shit list: quotidian drear (stupid bloody Tuesday), religious nuttiness (elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna), scolding prudes (boy you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down), forced cheerfulness (man you’ve been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long), phoney-baloney experts (expert texpert choking smokers don’t you think the joker laughs at you?), self-satisfied cops (mister city policeman sitting pretty little policemen in a row), narrow-minded critics (man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe), and oblivious, bone-headed persistence in defiance of all reason (sitting in an English garden waiting for the Sun / if the Sun don’t come you’ll get your tan from standing in the English rain).

Lennon’s version of Wonderland was populated with sneering bullies, idiots, and abusers, the weak all going along to get along, the powerful all insisting on conformity and obedience, or else.

Special kudos to George Martin, whose typically perfect understanding of the assignment led him to score the strings to sound like a royally pissed-off Vaughn Williams. His contribution here was as significant as it was to McCartney’s Eleanor Rigby, and in both instances, arguably, he deserved a co-writing credit, but Martin was never particularly fussed about such things. The lads inspired him. In their company he reached heights as a producer and arranger that were beyond anything he could have imagined, back in the days when he toiled in obscurity at the little Parlophone label, an EMI backwater which, before he decided to audition a not altogether promising pop-rock guitar combo from Liverpool, produced mainly novelty records and the occasional comedy offering of the Goon Show troupe. Then young Harrison opined that for starters, he didn’t much care for the producer’s taste in neckties, and it wasn’t long before the tail was wagging the dog at the world’s biggest record company. Songwriting credit? Don’t be daft. It was more than enough, much more, to be there to nurture the genius that kept growing by leaps and bounds, right there in front of him, the luckiest guy who ever manned a recording console, privileged to be there at the creation.

Something that’s never, it seems to me, given the proper emphasis in the recounting of the fable: somehow, every fateful step along the way, they managed to encounter just the right person to ensure they achieved their potential, whether it was a formidable bouncer on the Reeperbahn, a beautiful Bohemian girl plugged into the Hamburg artistic community, a dapper record store owner in Liverpool, or a little known knob-turner at an unimportant record label who already possessed every skill and instinct required to help them flourish – or, for that matter, each other.

It was all more than a little bit miraculous.