Track #9: “I Am the Walrus” Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

Welcome to Track Chatter, where we choose a different song to discuss in depth. This entry is part of an ongoing series in which we reconsider songs by The Beatles. Can anything new be said about this band or its music? Have a look below and let us know what you think.

Lew: In late 1967, The Beatles followed Sgt. Pepper’s with Magical Mystery Tour. Magical Mystery Tour was a concept, generally thought to have been initiated by Paul McCartney, which produced a promotional film and a group of songs that functioned as material for the score and musical performance interludes contained within the film, as well as the content of the album by the same name. The Beatles began work on the project shortly after the death of their longtime manager, Brian Epstein, during which time Paul became increasingly active as the band’s leader and de facto manager. Needless to say, it was a time of turmoil for the band.

The film itself was a massive critical failure, in terms of its reception by the press and the public. It’s worth noting that a portion of the public’s initial negative response may be attributable to the fact that Magical Mystery Tour was filmed in color, but broadcast on BBC TV in black and white, which robbed some of its intended visual impact. Nevertheless, I think it’s also viable to say that the Magical Mystery Tour project as a whole began to reveal some weaknesses within The Beatles’ organization, greatly exacerbated by the loss of Epstein’s leadership and business savvy, which were affecting their creative output.

However poorly the film was received, the album Magical Mystery Tour contains some definite classics. The title track, “Fool On the Hill,” “I Am The Walrus,” and “Hello Goodbye” among others, are fascinating and relatively unique pieces of songwriting within The Beatles catalogue. For this entry, we’ll be discussing my personal favorite of the bunch, “I Am the Walrus.” “I Am the Walrus” sees John Lennon at his most abstract, tossing images and references about with relative abandon. If “She Said She Said” can be described as expressionist, the term is even more apt here. While “I Am the Walrus” is generally characterized as psychedelia, the lyrics contain a cynicism or aggression that’s relatively unusual in the psychedelic music of the era. Aaron, we’ll be talking about the arrangement and production as we get further on, but I’d like to start by talking about the lyrics. It’s easy to write them off as a post-modern pastiche of images; I’m wondering if you find any continuity within them, or if you even think that there’s a need for that? 

Aaron: Before I answer your question, I’d just like to mention that Magical Mystery Tour also contains two songs – “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” – that were previously released as part of a double-A-side single in February of 1967. They were the first songs recorded during what would become the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions, but were released as singles under record company pressure. Because of long-standing UK tradition, they could not be released on the next album (Sgt. Pepper’s) so were included on its follow-up, Magical Mystery Tour. I only mention this because in working on this project, I’ve come to the conclusion that “Penny Lane” is a nearly perfect Beatles song in almost every way conceivable (do I exaggerate?) and would like to urge everybody reading to revisit the song, especially if you haven’t considered it in a while.

But back to “I Am the Walrus.” Well, I don’t think the lyrics bear a close reading on our part because a lot of that would consist more of reading into rather than analyzing. The song is one of the rare examples in The Beatles’ catalogue of lyrics completely devoid of any clear narrative or point. “She Said She Said” was obscure and expressionist, to be sure, but at least one could say, well, there’s this girl, right, and she’s talkin about death and all, and, well, it gets the singer to thinking about when he was a boy and all that. Whereas, with “I Am the Walrus,” it’s very difficult to point to the song and say that it is about anything. Having said that, for the first time in this series, I think the lyrics bear reprinting in full (if that’s all right with you, Lew). Here they are:

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly.
I'm crying.

Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come.
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday.
Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.

Mister City Policeman sitting
Pretty little policemen in a row.
See how they fly like Lucy in the Sky, see how they run.
I'm crying, I'm crying.
I'm crying, I'm crying.

Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye.
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess,
Boy, you been a naughty girl you let your knickers down.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob.

Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun.
If the sun don't come, you get a tan
From standing in the English rain.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob.

Expert textpert choking smokers,
Don't you thing the joker laughs at you?
See how they smile like pigs in a sty,
See how they snied.
I'm crying.

Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower.
Elementary penguin singing Hari Krishna.
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.
I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.
I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob.
Goo goo g'joob g'goo goo g'joob g'goo... (etc.)

As a coherent statement, they don’t seem to make much sense on the surface, and maybe they don’t (there are plenty of web sites out there speculating on the song’s many possible meanings, for those interested). But I don’t think they’re as random as they might seem at first. As far as I’ve been able to tell, Lennon wrote the majority of the song’s music in one, day-long session. The lyrics, on the other hand, he worked on for weeks. That alone belies the notion that they are some sort of stream of consciousness overflow of spontaneous feeling. It’s worth noting the conflux of events in Lennon’s life that surround the song’s writing. As you mentioned above, Lew, this came soon after Brian Epstein’s death – in fact, it’s generally accepted that “I Am the Walrus” was the first new song completed after his death – and Lennon was arguably closer to Epstein than were any of the other Beatles. Furthermore, Lennon was nearing the end of his two-year LSD binge, and he was also becoming more attuned to the political face that the counterculture was taking in the UK and America. The result is a collection of lyrics that are at once cynical and despondent, but also quite playfully clever with a touch of the wit that early-Beatles Lennon had more regularly exhibited.

I’ll point to specific examples in a moment, but do you think I’ve accurately captured the tone here Lew? Do you have any thoughts about what Lennon is aiming at here?

Lew: I’m glad you pointed out that “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” are on Magical Mystery Tour. I’d agree that they're both great, and fairly important Beatles songs. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I’d have been nearly as happy to discuss either of them as “I Am the Walrus.” Nevertheless, here we are.

In terms of our discussion about the lyrics (incidentally, thanks for including them), I think that your assessment of them as cynical or despondent, but also playful, is quite apt. The idea that the music was written quickly, while the lyrics were drawn out over a period of time is believable to me, because the images and references seem deliberate, if disjointed. If anything, the disjointedness lends itself to the idea that Lennon took the lyrics as far as he could on successive occasions, only to return later with a fresh perspective. On the other hand, I agree that these lyrics are not random at all - however one might like to interpret them, I would argue that they convey a feeling that's more specific than the pastiche of images might suggest.

I don't want to abandon our discussion of the lyrics, but I thought it might be worthwhile to also begin to think about the music and production. “I Am the Walrus” is definitely an example of George Martin at his best. In fact, I might go so far as to say it’s the Beatles song that most successfully blends the sound of the actual band playing with a very smartly written orchestral arrangement. I'm curious about your thoughts on that, but don’t let me derail any thoughts you might still be having about the language.

Aaron: Just to hop back to the lyrics a little bit, I would like to say a few brief things about why I think they work so well. As I mentioned above, Lennon was coming to the end of his big acid bender and was sort of re-engaging with the world, but doing so through the prism of still doing lots of acid as well as having begun a deeper sort of spiritual investigation – something he’d fight and return to for much of the next few years. The result in his lyrics, on the one hand, seems to be a move away from the type of studied introspection that one finds in “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “A Day in the Life,” and even “She Said She Said,” which uses an external experience as an avenue for internal exploration. On the other hand, John had always had a penchant for the absurd and surreal, even, apparently, dating back to his secondary school days. It seems that the type of “ego cleansing” he experienced on acid allowed him to tap into that facet of his personality without worrying about writing the “perfect” song (which was a worry of his earlier days in the Beatles). So, with “I Am the Walrus,” we seem to be getting a very surreal and cynical Lennon pointing his guns at “society” in a very biting but humorous manner.

More specifically, he seems to be taking aim at many British institutions directly (one might argue they’re as “Western” as they are “British”) – the police, corporations, schools and school teachers – as well as what he seems to have considered poseurs and hipsters. The juxtaposition of these things with nonsense lines and nursery rhymes only heightens the sense of absurdity. And this all comes after Lennon’s opening lines that would seem, on first glance, to be hinting towards some kind of harmony or oneness (The Beatles had already begun meeting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, while not yet having mate the trip with him to India). Whether by all those “he” and “we” pronouns he means only a select group (those outside “straight” society) or whether Lennon’s own mystical pretensions are also up for mockery seem both to be possibilities. If Lewis Carroll could make fun of himself, then so can John Lennon.

To zero in on one particular set of lyrics, I’d have to say that the lines that really bring home the song’s layers of possible meaning come during the breakdown in the middle:

Sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun.

If the sun don’t come, you get a tan

From standing in the English rain.

 I love the way the first line starts off with a strong sense of hope. At the same time, it paints such a lovely image. After all the dissonance of the previous lyrics about sitting on cornflakes and dead dogs’ eyes, the calm of the garden seems to be something of an eye in the storm. But it doesn’t last because Lennon follows it up with such a wonderful little dig – it’s as if he’s mocking everything about the notion of the British stiff upper lip. All those people running around pretending that things will be all right when, clearly, they won’t. And the hope of the opening line dissipates in the grey English rain.

I think the music even echoes that sentiment somewhat. The music behind the first line sounds as gentle and sweet as the words themselves, but on the “if” there seems to be a change in key or tempo or both. Is that right, Lew? Perhaps on that we can jump back into talking about (what I agree) is the song’s excellent composition and orchestration.

Lew: You are absolutely right to identify the change that's taking place between “sitting in and English garden” and “if the sun don’t come” – the chord progression that’s happening under the first line of what I think we can call a sort of bridge, although similar to what has been happening, is something of a departure from the progressions that have been established up to that point. Obviously, the dynamics change as well – your observation that it feels like the “eye of the storm” seems particularly apt, as the feel of the music seems to break completely from the very driving rhythmic feel that the song maintains during the verses and choruses. At the line “if the sun don't come,” the rhythm resumes, and the chord progression becomes the turnaround, which transitions into the chorus.

To go back into the lyrics for a second, one thing that I found particularly striking in your most recent response was the discussion of the way pronouns are functioning in the song. Like you, I’m curious about the way the opening lines of the song seem to imply a unity. I’d point out the rhythm of the vocal part – Lennon’s delivery of the first two lines (“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together”) is very rhythmic, with accents falling on all of the beats and being strongest on the “2” and “4” beats of the first two measures after the vocal enters. I started off hearing it as a rap, but eventually started thinking about a basic drum beat with the bass drum playing 8th notes on beats one and three, and the snare hitting quarter notes on two and four. Either way, all of the accents in those two lines are pronouns until the last beat of the second measure where “all” falls on the fourth beat and “together” bleeds into the first beat of the next measure. All of that analysis (which may or may not be useful to think about) aside, the feeling I get from the rhythm and delivery of that section of the verse reminds me of a drinking song that should be sung by a group of people. After that point, the rhythm becomes more syncopated and less pronounced in outlining of the beat specifically, but to my mind, it creates a feeling of conversation in which Lennon is pointing out a variety of images to a group of people, which the further use of pronouns in the song seems to support. Admittedly, that’s a highly subjective read on things, but it’s something that occurred to me.

Aaron: Well, the song is somewhat frustrating in that its imagery and lack of linearity both make any reading impossible while also making nearly any interpretation valid (if, that is, it’s at least somewhat grounded in the text, the cultural and historical context, etc.). That was partly Lennon’s intention, I guess. Supposedly, he got a letter from a pupil at his former school who said he was studying Beatles’ lyrics in class. Lennon’s finding this ludicrous was a major impetus behind the writing of this song – interpret this!

So in a sense, I don’t know that your “subjective” reading is any more or less valid than any other reading (I’m not sure if that’s a completely good thing, mind you, but that is an element of surrealism, after all, isn’t it?). In any case, the pronouns are important and I’m glad you highlighted how they fall rhythmically. I do think the opening lines work as something like an invocation, which is highly important, because throughout the rest of the song I think Lennon is playing with the idea of who the “we” are in “we are all together.” That playfulness, I think, is what saves the song from being from being sort of derivatively surreal and allows it to be more authentic. The song’s playfulness and anger and cynicism collide in a way that opens up the text in more than just its somewhat random lyrical content. That gives it an emotional heft that I, for one, don’t find in a lot of other 60’s-era stabs at pop surrealism.

I fear, however, that I’m descending a bit into Lit Crit 101, so I’ll step back from that and ask if there’s anything else you want to say about the lyrics, music, or the dialogue between them.

Lew: Well, we haven’t really talked much about the music, and there are a few things worth mentioning about it. I guess the thing that’s most striking about it (to me) is the orchestration. Obviously, the Beatles used orchestral arrangements to great effect in a number of places - certainly in “Yesterday” as we’ve previously discussed, but also in “A Day in the Life,” “She's Leaving Home,” and so on. I think that “A Day in the Life” was a turning point, in that it was able to successfully marry the orchestral arrangement to the context of a rock song as a coloration, rather than allowing it to become the primary instrumental force in the song, in the way that I think it does in “Yesterday” and “She's Leaving Home.” Having said that, I think that “I Am the Walrus” develops the concept of orchestra as one part of an ensemble even more successfully. The melodies provided by the orchestra are fantastic, and I certainly wouldn’t say that they’re superfluous, but you can hear the song being played without them by straight “rock instrumentation” (if that’s a phrase that’s in any way meaningful). By contrast, I can’t immediately picture the original version of “Yesterday” being played that way.

Aaron: Great point, Lew. You’ve managed to put your finger on one of the things that make the Beatles such a good band, one of the things that continues to make them vital. They were supremely confident in their ability to integrate new areas of expression into their existing sound. I think that’s just as true of their early music wherein skiffle beats and Little Richard are seamlessly blended, as well as of a song like “I Am the Walrus” wherein psychedelic rock, surrealism, and orchestration are blended so organically. And, to return to at topic of some of our earlier posts, they do this in such a way that, really, we can apply the term “Beatlesque” to a song like “She’s a Woman” just as readily as we do to “I Am the Walrus.”

Coming Next: John really shakes off the cobwebs, with a little help from a Monkey.

Coming Soon: While continuing with our Beatles series, we'll be introducing a new feature here at Track Chatter, one that we hope you'll get a kick out of. Stay tuned!

Congratulations: to Lew and Jenna on the recent birth of a beautiful, healthy baby boy!