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On 23 August 1967, Brian Epstein had looked in on the second day of recording ‘Your Mother Should Know’. Four days later he was dead. The Beatles hoped to attend his funeral in Liverpool two days later, but his family asked them to stay away, as they wanted to avoid any turmoil.
A week later, on the evening of 5 September, the four of them assembled at Abbey Road, determined to press on with the recording of Magical Mystery Tour. The mood was sombre. ‘There was a pallor across the session that day,’ recalled Geoff Emerick. ‘We were all distracted, thinking about Brian.’
On his acoustic guitar, John went through a new song. ‘I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together,’ he began.
Geoff Emerick wondered what on earth he was on about: ‘Everyone seemed bewildered. The melody consisted largely of just two notes, and the lyrics were pretty much nonsense.’
Some of the lyrics seemed to stray beyond nonsense. When John sang ‘pornographic priestess’ and ‘let your knickers down’, George Martin turned to Emerick and whispered, ‘What did he just say?’
John finally reached the end. There was silence. John looked up at the sound box for George Martin’s reaction. ‘That one was called “I am the Walrus”,’ he said. ‘So, what do you think?’
Martin was lost for words, but hesitation soon gave way to irritation. ‘Well, John, to be honest, I have only one question. What the hell do you expect me to do with that?’
Nervous laughter ensued. It was evident to Emerick that John ‘was clearly not amused’.
The impetus to write the nonsensical words of ‘I am the Walrus’ had sprung from a letter John was sent at the end of August by Stephen Bayley,1 a fifteen-year-old pupil at John’s old school Quarry Bank. Bayley explained that his English teacher was in the habit of playing Beatles songs in class, and getting the boys to analyse the lyrics, before weighing in with his own interpretation.
Pete Shotton, who was with John when he first read the letter, remembers John howling with laughter at the notion that his old school, which had once written him off as a failure, was now elevating his output to a set text. Shotton noticed how he saw it as a challenge. ‘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.’
Trying to think of the daftest rhymes, John remembered a playground jingle. ‘Pete, what’s that “Dead Dog’s Eye” song we used to sing at Quarry Bank?’
Pete thought for a moment, then remembered:
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.
Versions of this ditty were chanted by schoolchildren the length and breadth of the country in the 1950s.2 It is included in The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie, first published in 1959, alongside many regional variants. In Manchester the custard was ‘splish splashy’ and the pie was made of giblets; in the Forest of Dean it was ‘scab and matter’, and came with ‘green snot pies’; in Ipswich the pie was at its least tempting – it was made of bogie, and served with hard-boiled snails and a dead man’s eye.
John was delighted by Pete’s recital. ‘That’s it!’ he said, reaching for a pen. ‘Fantastic!’ He duly wrote down ‘Yellow matter custard’, before adding other bits and pieces retrieved randomly from childhood memories. ‘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 was clearly amused by the idea that teachers would spend their time clawing away at an inner meaning. ‘Let the fuckers work that one out, Pete,’ he said.
The song was further filtered through John’s childhood fascination with the topsy-turvy world of Lewis Carroll, and in particular the poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, which is told to Alice by Tweedledee in Through the Looking-Glass. Beneath its merry rhythm lies a Hannibal Lecterish tale of two exquisite psychopaths. It starts with the Walrus encouraging a crowd of young oysters to join him and the Carpenter as they walk along the shore. But once they get to their destination:
‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said,
‘Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed –
Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed!’
‘But not on us!’ the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
‘After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!’
The Walrus and the Carpenter immediately change the subject, complimenting the oysters and pointing out the lovely view. The Walrus then grows sentimental:
‘I weep for you,’ the Walrus said:
‘I deeply sympathize.’
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter,
‘You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none –
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.
It is, as the psychoanalyst Paul Schilder pointed out some time ago, a poem of ‘astonishing cruelty’. This cruelty, shielded by nonsense, clearly struck a chord with John.
As John predicted, his hotchpotch of words has indeed been subjected to all kinds of analysis – in fact, almost as much as Alice in Wonderland itself. Is it anti-capitalist (‘pigs in a sty’), anti-academia (‘expert texperts’) or anti-bureaucracy (‘corporation T-shirt’)? You can find in it whatever you want. ‘I was writing obscurely, à la Dylan, never saying what you mean, but giving the impression of something, where more or less can be read into it. It’s a good game,’ John confessed years later. He had, he added, written the entire song on LSD.
His dismissal of any serious intent has done nothing to staunch the flow of interpretations. And why should it? Some regard it as an attack on the police (imagining ‘pilchard’ to be John’s near-homonymic pursuer Det. Sgt Pilcher3), while others see it as a defence of drug culture. The I-am-he-as-he passage has been interpreted as both a satirical attack on Eastern religion and an impassioned defence of it. For the Beatles’ biographer Jonathan Gould, the Walrus is ‘a potent symbol of John’s contempt for the Beatles’ idealized image as popular heroes of youth’. Ian MacDonald, who considered it the high point of Lennon’s songwriting oeuvre, believed the song was ‘its author’s ultimate anti-institutional rant – a damn-you-England tirade that blasts education, art, culture, law, order, class, religion, and even sense itself’. John’s actor friend Victor Spinetti thought it an encrypted protest against family life.
Some have been keen to stake their claim to central roles in the story. ‘I was the Egg Man,’ wrote John’s drinking partner Eric Burdon of the Animals in his autobiography. ‘Or, as some pals called me, “Eggs”. The nickname stuck after a wild experience I’d had at the time with a Jamaican girlfriend named Sylvia. I was up early one morning cooking breakfast, naked except for my socks, and she slid up behind me and cracked an amyl nitrate capsule under my nose. As the fumes set my brain alight, and I slid to the kitchen floor, she reached to the counter and grabbed an egg, which she broke into the pit of my belly. The white and yellow of the egg ran down my naked front, and Sylvia slipped my egg-bathed cock into her mouth and began to show me one Jamaican trick after another. I shared the story with John at a party at a Mayfair flat one night with a handful of blondes and a little Asian girl.
‘“Go on, go get it, Egg Man,” Lennon laughed over the little round glasses perched on the end of his hooklike nose as we tried the all-too-willing girls on for size.’
As it happens, Eric Burdon’s claim has been subject to the vagaries of history, or at least historians, with many muddling up his role and making him the egger, not the egged.
John took a particular pride in ‘I am the Walrus’: ‘It’s one of those that has enough little bitties going to keep you interested even a hundred years later.’ This may seem boastful, but fifty years on, it is also halfway to being true. Nevertheless, he came to think that he had made a mistake in casting himself as Carroll’s Walrus. ‘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’ve picked the wrong guy.”’ Hence, when it came to writing his self-referential song ‘Glass Onion’, he came up with the line, ‘Here’s another clue for you all – the Walrus was Paul.’ But he was a slapdash reader. In the original poem there is little to choose between the Walrus and the Carpenter: both use their charm to lure the oysters away, before gobbling them up without a hint of remorse.
‘What the hell do you expect me to do with that?’ The answer to Martin’s question was that John didn’t have a clue, and nor did the others. Epstein’s death had left them bewildered. At the start of the session Ringo had been close to tears, and John himself appeared to be in a state of shock. George looked beyond the here and now. ‘Mr Epstein’s body may be gone,’ he said, ‘but his spirit remains.’ Not for the first time, Paul was the pragmatist: ‘We just have to carry on, I suppose.’
‘I distinctly remember the look of emptiness on all their faces while they were playing “I am the Walrus”,’ remembered Geoff Emerick. ‘It’s one of the saddest memories I have of my time with the Beatles.’
John told Martin and Emerick that he wanted his voice to sound as though it were coming from the moon. This left them none the wiser. Emerick set about distorting the amps to make John’s voice sound both edgier and more ethereal. ‘I had no idea what a man on the moon might sound like – or even what John was really hearing in his head – but, as usual, no amount of discussion with him could shed a lot of light on the matter.’ The next day, John insisted on adding random sounds from the radio. George Martin rolled his eyes.
The completed mish-mash includes a snatch of dialogue from King Lear, and the Mike Sammes Singers4 chanting ‘Everybody’s got one, everybody’s got one’, along with the playground ditty ‘Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper.’ It is both everything and nothing. It may derive, in George Martin’s words, from ‘organised chaos’, but, like Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, it somehow transcends interpretation to touch upon the sublime.
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1 Bayley (1951–) grew up to be an iconoclastic cultural critic, and the author of books about cars, sex, and the Albert Memorial.
2 And well into the sixties: I remember chanting it in the playground of Grove House School in Effingham, Surrey, circa 1964.
4 The Mike Sammes Singers, easy-listening doyens of Sing Something Simple, had one of the most varied and least trumpeted careers in the history of popular music. Their voices can be heard on ‘Let it Be’ and ‘Good Night’, and they also provided backing for, among many others, Tom Jones on ‘Delilah’, Ken Dodd on ‘Tears’ and Olivia Newton-John on ‘Banks of the Ohio’. They also sang the memorable theme song for Gerry Anderson’s Stingray. The day after their ‘I am the Walrus’ session, they recorded a session with Kathy Kirby, and then went straight to the ATV studios to record The Benny Hill Show. In his days as a session musician, Elton John would occasionally work alongside them: ‘Frightening isn’t an adjective you would normally associate with the Mike Sammes Singers, who did backing vocals for everyone – they looked like middle-aged aunties and uncles who’d arrived at the studio direct from a golf-club dinner-dance. But if you had to sing alongside them, they suddenly struck the fear of God into you, because they were so good at what they did.’