The Beatles – I Am The Walrus

Lennon built a lyric meant to lose the interpreters

On 5 September 1967 The Beatles were back at EMI Studios, Abbey Road, with a new John Lennon song that refused to behave like a pop lyric. He had started “I Am the Walrus” after a pupil at his old school, Quarry Bank in Liverpool, wrote to say a teacher was making the class pull Beatles songs apart for hidden meaning. Lennon decided to give that teacher nothing solid to stand on.

The opening, “I am he as you are he as you are me”, came first. Around it he piled images from Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, from a rude story Eric Burdon of The Animals had told him about an egg, and from whatever else was in the room. He said later that the words were a dream, not a code. In a 1980 interview he also admitted a regret: in Carroll’s poem the walrus is the villain, and he would rather have been the carpenter.

George Martin produced. The band recorded the rhythm in early September: Lennon on electric piano and vocal, McCartney on bass, Harrison on guitar, Starr on drums. Martin then wrote an orchestra, recorded on 6 September, with violins, cellos, horns and clarinet. On 27 September the Mike Sammes Singers, a London vocal group of sixteen, came in to chant “ho ho ho, he he he”, “oompah, oompah”, and a few ruder lines Lennon fed them.

Engineer Geoff Emerick had a radio on in the control room during the final vocal session, tuned to a live BBC broadcast. A Third Programme performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act IV, leaked into the microphones. Martin and Emerick left those voices in the recording, under the last minute of the song. You can hear a few lines of the play if you turn it up.