This helped create one of rock music’s first distorted lead vocals. Violating EMI’s strict rules, Emerick had Lennon record his vocals using a low-fidelity talkback microphone (typically used by an engineer in the control room to “talk back” to musicians in the recording studio). As always, Emerick turned Lennon’s strange request into the perfect effect. For “I Am The Walrus,” he asked engineer Geoff Emerick to make his voice sound like it was coming from the moon. Lennon, one of rock’s best vocalists, was always frustrated by the sound of his voice. “I’m crying” could also be an allusion to one of The Beatles’ favorite singers Smokey Robinson who had sung the same phrase in the 1965 song “Oooh, Baby Baby”. In fact, “I Am The Walrus” was the first song The Beatles recorded after Epstein’s death four days earlier. Burdon was known as “Eggs” to his friends, due to his strange fetish of breaking eggs over naked women.Īt the end of each verse, Lennon sings “I’m crying.” The Beatles had been doing a lot of crying around this time since their manager Brian Epstein had recently died.
Surprisingly, Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals, stepped forward to claim that he was the egg man referenced by Lennon. It wasn’t until later that John realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the poem! There is no “egg man” in the poem, although Humpty Dumpty does make an appearance in Through the Looking Glass. The title of the song was based on the poem “The Walrus and The Carpenter” by one of Lennon’s favorite authors, Lewis Carroll. So, he turned an old playground nursery rhyme that he sang as a child (“yellow matter custard/green slop pie/all mixed together with a dead dog’s eye”) into the line “yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.” Lennon decided to give the students (along with music critics) something a little more difficult to analyze. Just ten years later, a student at Quarry Bank wrote Lennon to tell him that they were analyzing Beatles lyrics in class. “He has too many of the wrong ambitions and his energy is too often misplaced.” That was a description of John Lennon written by the headmaster of Quarry Bank High School in 1956.
The sound morphed into the opening notes of “I Am The Walrus.” They are even mimicked in the two-note motif in the verse (“Mis-ter ci-ty p’lice-man…”). During one trip, he heard the two-note pattern of a police siren passing by. Lennon wrote the bulk of the song during several LSD trips. The song owes a huge debt to Lennon’s favorite hallucinogenic… Here are ten things you may not know about “I Am The Walrus.”ġ. All of this adds up to create The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece.
This November marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus.” Written primarily by John Lennon for the TV movie Magical Mystery Tour, “I Am The Walrus” features a cryptic Lennon lyric with a bizarre chorus, an innovative arrangement from producer George Martin that includes sprechgesang (don’t worry, I’ll define it in a moment), studio trickery from engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, and an excerpt from Shakespeare’s King Lear.