From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "I Am the Walrus"

Single by The Beatles
Released 24 November 1967
Format vinyl record (7")
Recorded September 5-28 1967
Genre Pop
Length 4:34
Label Parlophone / EMI (UK)
Capitol Records (US)
Producer(s) George Martin
Chart positions
#1 (UK)
#1 (US)
The Beatles singles chronology
"All You Need Is Love"/"Baby You're a Rich Man"
(1967) "Hello Goodbye"/"I Am the Walrus"
(1967) "Lady Madonna"/"The Inner Light"
(1968)


"I Am the Walrus" is a 1967 Beatles song, written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon-McCartney. Lennon wrote most of the song on separate acid trips.[1] The song was released on their Magical Mystery Tour album, and is most noted for its unusual, often bizarre lyrics. It was released as the B-side to the #1 hit Hello Goodbye.

Lennon composed the song by combining three separate songs he had been working on. Additionally, when he learned that a college professor was having his students analyze Beatles' lyrics, he added on a verse of specifically nonsensical words designed to confuse listeners.

The Walrus within the song is a reference to the walrus from Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter. Lennon later expressed dismay at learning that the Walrus was the villain within the poem (see below).
Origins

An alternate cover for the Hello Goodbye/I Am the Walrus single

The history of the lyrics begins with three different song ideas that Lennon was working on, the first of which was inspired by hearing a police siren while at his home in Weybridge; Lennon wrote the lines "Mis-ter c-ity police-man" to the rhythm of the siren. The second idea was a short rhyme about Lennon sitting in his Weybridge garden, while the third idea was a nonsense lyric about sitting on a corn flake. Unable to finish the ideas as three different songs, he instead chose to combine them into one.

Sometime later, Lennon received a letter from a pupil of Quarry Bank Grammar School, which he had attended as a child. The writer mentioned that their English master was making his class analyze Beatles' song lyrics. (John wrote an answer to the letter, dated September 1, 1967, which was auctioned by Christie's of London in 1992).

Lennon, amused that a teacher was putting that much effort into understanding Beatles lyrics, decided to write the most confusing, unusual lyric he could. Lennon's childhood friend Peter Shotton was visiting, and he asked Shotton about a silly playground nursery rhyme that they used to sing when they were kids.

Shotton remembered the words:
"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".

Lennon borrowed a couple of words from the rhyme, added the three old unfinished ideas and the result was the lyrics to "I Am the Walrus". Upon finishing the lyrics, Lennon remarked to Shotton, "Let the fuckers work that one out."[2]

An interesting factor to the music is that all the chords used are major chords or seventh chords, and all the 'musical' letters of the alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F, and G) are so used. The song ends with a descending progression of A7, G7, F7, E7, D7, C7, and B7, repeated over and over until the end.

Lennon explained much of the song in an interview he gave to Playboy in 1980:[1]
"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. Part of it was putting down Hare Krishna. All these people were going on about Hare Krishna, Allen Ginsberg in particular. The reference to "Element'ry 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."
"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 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? [Singing] 'I am the carpenter....'"

The song's opening line, "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together", clearly parodies the opening line of the song Marching to Pretoria, by The Weavers: "I'm with you and you're with me and we are all together." This is a remarkably little-noted fact.

The song also contains the unusual exclamation, goo goo goo joob. Various unsatisfactory hypotheses exist regarding the origin and meaning of these syllables, though it has been noted that James Joyce's Finnegans Wake contains the words googoo goosth at the top of page *557, where it appears:
...like milk-juggles as if it was the wrake of the hapspurus or old Kong Gander O'Toole of the Mountains or his googoo goosth she seein, sliving off over the sawdust lobby out ofthe backroom, wan ter, that was everywans in turruns, in his honeymoon trim, holding up his fingerhals...

It is not clear that Joyce is the source, or what it means if he were the source. Lennon was a reader and admirer of Joyce's, and this could be all there is to it.[3] There may also be a connection with the very similar "koo koo ka choo" in Paul Simon's song Mrs. Robinson, written in 1967.

The unusual monologue buried in the mix towards the end of the song is actually a few lines of Shakespeare's King Lear (Act IV, Scene VI), which were added to the song direct from an AM radio receiving the broadcast of the play on the BBC Home Service (or possibly the BBC Third Programme).[2]

The recording of "I Am the Walrus" featured, in addition to the Beatles themselves, violins, cellos, horns, clarinet and a 16-piece choir.

The stereo mix of the record has an interesting twist: At almost exactly two minutes into the song, the mix changes from regular stereo to "fake stereo", with most of the bass on one channel, and most of the treble on the other. The mix appears to 'wander' sonically in the fadeout, from left to right. The reason for the change in mixes was because the radio was inserted during the mono mixdown. The mono single mix also includes an extra bar of music before the words "yellow matter custard".

Who was the Walrus?

The 1968 Beatles song "Glass Onion", written by Lennon, and featured on the White Album, refers to earlier Beatles compositions. Mentioning "I am the Walrus", Lennon sings, "Here's another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul."

In the 1980 Playboy interview, John responded to the confusion:
"I threw the line in — 'the Walrus was Paul' — just to confuse everybody a bit more. And I thought 'Walrus' has now become me, meaning 'I am the one.' Only it didn't mean that in this song."

Lennon also comments in "The Beatles Anthology" that he wrote the song at a point when the band was beginning to fall apart, and hoped by putting this line in combination with "I told you 'bout the walrus and me man, you know that we're as close as can be man", he could begin to patch things up with the band.

The fact that McCartney was dressed as a walrus on the cover of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour LP was also stated by Lennon to have inspired the line.

Paul also responded to the lyric in an interview broadcast on a Beatles documentary on WYNY 1981:
"[John] happened to have a line go 'the walrus was Paul' and we had a great giggle to say 'yeah, let's do that,' because everybody's gonna read into it and go crackers cause they all thought that John was the walrus."

On Lennon's 1970 solo album "Plastic Ono Band", the song "God" contains the lines "I was the Walrus, but now I'm John."