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In an age of rapid social change,
the Beatles were often regarded as prophets and every song
was scrutinized for symbols and allusions that might contain
a message. Who was the egg man in ?I Am The Walrus'? Was the
tea that was mentioned in 'Lovely Rita' really marijuana?
Was 'Henry The Horse' street slang for heroin?
The Beatles had perhaps laid
themselves open to wild misinterpretation by mixing up the
languages of poetry and nonsense. John, in particular, had
enjoyed obfuscating his point of view beneath layers of
imagery. However, by 1968, John was trying to write more
directly and most of the work he brought back from India was
simpler and less self-conscious. When a pupil from his old
school wrote and asked him to explain the motives behind his
songwriting, John replied that the work was done for fun and
laughs. "I do it for me first," he said. "Whatever people
make of it afterwards is valid, but it doesn't necessarily
have to correspond to my thoughts about it, OK? This goes
for anyone's 'creations', art, poetry, song etc. The mystery
and shit that is built around all forms of art needs
smashing anyway."
'Glass Onion' was a playful
response to John to those who pored over his work looking
for hidden meanings. He started to piece together the song
using odd lines and images from some of the most enigmatic
Beatles' songs - 'Strawberry Fields Forever', 'There's A
Place', 'Within You Without You', I Am The Walrus', 'Lady
Madonna', 'The Fool On The Hill' and 'Fixing A Hole'. In
'Glass Onion', he jokingly claimed that the walrus was Paul.
(In some primitive cultures the walrus is a symbol of death
and this new information was later used as confirmation by
those who believed that Paul had been killed in a road
accident in 1966, to be replaced by a double.) Finally, he
came up with four new tantalizing images for his 'literary'
fans to pore over - bent back tulips, a glass onion, the
Cast-Iron Shore and a dovetail joint.
The bent back tulips, explains
former Apple press officer Derek Taylor, was a reference to
a particular flower arrangement in Parkes, a fashionable
London restaurant in the Sixties. "You'd be in Parkes
sitting around your table wondering what was going on with
the flowers and then you'd realize that they were actually
tulips with their petals bent all the way back, so that you
could see the obverse side of the petals and also the
stamen. This is what John meant about 'seeing how the other
half lives'. He meant seeing how the other half of the
flower lives but also, because it was an expensive
restaurant, how the other part of the society
lived."
There were simple explanations for
the other perplexing references: the Cast-Iron as the
Cassie); a dovetail joint referred to a wood joint using
wedge shape tennons, and Glass Onion was the name John
wanted to use for The Iveys, the band that signed with Apple
in July 1968.
The Iveys didn't like the name
Glass Onion and, instead, called themselves Badfinger after
'Badfinger Boogie', the original title of 'A Little Help
From My Friends'.
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