The sprawling, disjointed nature of
'I Am The Walrus' owes much to the fact that it is an
amalgamation of at least three song ideas that John was
working on, none of which seemed quite enough in its own
right. The first, inspired by hearing a distant police siren
while at home in Weybridge, started with the words 'Mis-ter
c-ity police-man' and ran to the rhythm of the siren. The
second was a pastoral melody about John in his Weybridge
garden. The third was a nonsense song about sitting on a
corn flake.
John told Hunter Davies, who was
still researching the Beatles' official biography at the
time: "I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll
turn out to be different parts of the same song." According
to Pete Shotton, the final catalyst was a letter received
form a pupil of Quarry Bank School, which mentioned that an
English master was getting his class to analyze Beatles'
songs. The letter from the Quarry Bank pupil was sent to
John by Stephen Bayley who received an answer dated
September 1, 1967 (which was sold at auction by Christie's
of London in 1992). This amused John, who decided to confuse
such people with a song full of the most perplexing and
incoherent clues. He asked Shotton to remind him of a silly
playground rhyme which English schoolchildren at the time
delighted in. John wrote it down: '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'.
John proceeded to invent some
ludricous images ('semolina pilchards, elementary penguins')
and nonsense words ('texpert, crabalocker'), before adding
some opening lines he'd written during an acid trip. He then
strung these together with the three unfinished songs he'd
already shown Hunter Davies. "Let the fuckers work that one
out", he apparently said to Shotton when he'd finished.
Asked by Playboy to explain 'Walrus' some 13 years later, he
remarked that he thought Dylan got away with murder at times
and that he'd decided "I can write this crap
too."
The only serious part of the lyric,
apparently, was the opening line with its vision of the
unity behind all things.
The 'elementary penguin' which
chanted Hare Krishna was John having a dig at Allen Ginsberg
who, at the time, was chanting the Hare Krishna mantra at
public events. The walrus itself came from Lewis Carroll's
poem 'The Walrus and The Carpenter'.
The recording of 'I Am The Walrus'
began on September 5. It lasted on and off throughout the
month because George Martin was trying to find an equivalent
to the flow of images and word play in the lyrics by using
violins, cellos, horns, clarinet and a 16-voice choir, in
addition to the Beatles themselves. On September 29, some
lines form Shakespeare (King Lear Act IV Scene VI) were even
fed to the song from a BBC broadcast.
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