It is surely impossible to suggest that The Beatles could be misunderstood in any way, given the incessant attention the band has received over the past 60 years in books, documentaries, biopics and online forums. Yet, we must never underestimate the complex inner workings of John Lennon’s genius; his lyrics could be unpredictable and wantonly deceiving.
When The Beatles broke up, Lennon embraced protest writing with renewed fervour in candid songs like ‘Working Class Hero’, ‘Gimme Some Truth’ and ‘Imagine’. Concurrently, he reflected on his childhood trauma in several prominent tracks, including the achingly frank ‘Mother’. While such songs left little to the imagination – pardon the pun – they postdated the psychedelic wave, during which Lennon had plenty of fun confounding the listeners.
Just as the distorted guitars and busy production suggested, psychedelic rock thrived on opacity. Heeding the heady times of acid, grass and associated befuddlement, The Beatles, especially Lennon, began to toy with their audience with clever wordplay and misleading concepts. With weird and wonderful compositional developments like those heard in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘A Day in the Life’, one could hardly pass off straightforward lyrics of yore, like those heard in ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’.
Famously, Lennon caused a stir among fans in 1967 when The Beatles released ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Given the band’s highly publicised dabblings with LSD, many fans reached the conclusion that Lennon’s titular refrain was code for the psychedelic drug. With a line like “A girl with kaleidoscope eyes” elsewhere in the lyrics, one can understand the derivation. Still, despite the mounting evidence, Lennon asserted that the song was an innocent description of a drawing his first son, Julian, made for him. “They didn’t spell anything out,” Lennon told Dick Cavett of the refrain in 1971. “It wasn’t about that at all. But nobody believes me.”
Maybe there was really no intention of drug reference on ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’, despite the emphasis on the words “so incredibly high”. With Lennon, all bets are off. The master of misdirection had a proclivity for wit in interviews, and this bled beautifully into his artistic output. If ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ misled unintentionally, Lennon responded with a more incisive work of deception later in 1967 with the ‘Hello, Goodbye’ B-side, ‘I Am the Walrus’.
Lennon wrote ‘I Am The Walrus’ to intentionally confuse his listeners. This time round, the Beatle admitted to the influence of LSD. “The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend, the second line on another acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko,” Lennon recalled in All We Are Saying, regarding the opening, “I am he as you are he as you are me / And we are all together”.
The song is a truly bizarre patchwork of colourful imagery and unhinged vignettes. By the end, most listeners are asking questions like, “What’s an egg man?” and “What does he mean by ‘Walrus’?” Clearly concerned with the general madcap influence on the younger generation, they targeted the song for its racy line, “Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down”.
Due to Lennon’s evocative lyrics on other songs, which leant on Beat Generation influences to make oblique references to the sociopolitical climate of the 1960s, fans tried to seek the hidden messages in ‘I Am the Walrus’. However, Lennon asserted that there were none. “‘Walrus’ is just saying a dream – the words don’t mean a lot,” he stated in Anthology. “People draw so many conclusions, and it’s ridiculous… What does it really mean, ‘I am the egg man’? It could have been the pudding basin, for all I care. It’s not that serious.”
Lennon’s comments unearth the age-old question of frivolity in art. Should there always be a message in the nonsense? Can nonsense be a message without the requirement of rhetoric or narrative? In this writer’s humble opinion, if one can enjoy art and make personal interpretations, it doesn’t really matter whether the artist had any intended interpretations; art is in the eyes and ears of the beholder.
