In a sense, The Beatles changed the world twice in the 1960s. Firstly, as a polished skiffle group, they ravaged the charts on both sides of the Atlantic with love-inspired hits like ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’. A performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 opened the door to similar UK bands, marking a critical turning point in the British Invasion. Had The Beatles burned out at this stage, they would have been remembered as the band that initiated change. As we all know, they also became an integral part of the change.
While The Beatles enjoyed their early rise to fame, shining a ray of hope on a post-war generation, Bob Dylan maintained America’s musical presence with some more sociopolitically pertinent and immersive lyrics. This early folk period soon bled into the more oblique lyricism of the mid-1960s. Inspired by the non-conformist literature of the Beat Generation, this period of Dylan’s songwriting ignited John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s imagination.
Famously, Dylan’s songwriting style greatly influenced The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul, especially Lennon’s song ‘Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)’. Despite Dylan’s derision, the album was a huge success and a turn in the tide for the Fab Four. Following their noses into the psychedelic era, The Beatles soon found themselves at the vanguard of an artistic revolution inherently bound to the hippie worldview.
With Lennon’s famous protest protests and primal scream projections still yet to come, the psychedelic era brought plenty of bizarre themes to the Beatles catalogue. Alongside straightforward songs like ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ were unprecedented classics like the compositionally progressive ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and the lyrically confounding ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’
Somewhere amid the madness, much of it the produce of Lennon’s wonderfully eccentric mind, arrived ‘I Am The Walrus’. The Beatles released the song in 1967 as part of the soundtrack to their television film Magical Mystery Tour. The song also served as the B-side to McCartney’s ‘Hello, Goodbye’, much to Lennon’s despair as the song’s primary writer.
Lennon allegedly wrote ‘I Am The Walrus’ to confuse his listeners. It doesn’t take a Timothy Leary to suppose that LSD may have had an impact on the song, too. “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 inspiring song is a patchwork of vivid imagery and wild ideas, begging questions like, “What’s an egg man?” and “What does he mean by ‘Walrus’?” However, there were no questions in the BBC’s decision to ban the song from the airwaves. Obviously concerned by the general madcap influence on the younger generation, they targetted the song for its racy line, “Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down”.
Besides all the oddities in the lyrics, the song became a hit with the public due to its accessible yet inventive composition. Lennon’s lead vocal is double-tracked, allowing a strange echo effect, while string orchestration, mellotron and horns elevate an unconventional chord progression that resulted from Lennon joining three separate song ideas.
In the outro, Lennon leaves the listener with a final creative flourish. In September 1967, Lennon heard a broadcast of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, ironically enough, on the BBC Third Programme on the radio. He decided to tape some lines from Act IV, Scene Six, in which the Earl of Gloucester says, “Now, good sir, wh—” at which point Lennon stopped the tape and later cut in a fragment from Edgar: “…poor man, made tame by fortune…good pity…”
As the song plays out, Lennon cuts into a more extensive part of the dialogue, which also features Oswald, whom Edgar kills. Slave, thou hast slain me. Villain, take my purse. If ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body, And give the letters which thou find’st about me,” Oswald, who was voiced by John Bryning, proclaims. The part of Earl of Gloucester was voiced by Mark Dignam, while Philip Guard portrayed Edgar.
