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Erowid Character Vaults

Claudio Naranjo

Nov 24, 1932 - Jul 12, 2019

Summary

Claudio Naranjo was a Chilean psychiatrist and author who wrote nearly two dozen books, many of which were published in numerous languages. In his youth he was trained in classical music. He obtained his medical degree in Santiago de Chile, going on to study medicine, psychology, and spirituality at Harvard, U.C. Berkeley, and the Esalen Institute. At Esalen he apprenticed under the father of Gestalt therapy, Fritz Perls. Protoanalysis, Naranjo's method of describing personality types, eventually developed into the well-known Enneagram system.

In 1962, after becoming inspired by a Harvard economic botany exhibit that displayed various psychoactive plants, Naranjo was assisted by the museum's curator, Richard Evans Schultes, with his desire to research yagé use in the territory of Putumayo in Colombia. Once he was in the Amazon, hoping that it would help open doors for him with the native medicine men, Naranjo revealed that he also studied medicine. He handed out LSD-impregnated pieces of paper, explaining that he was looking for plants that produced similar effects. Within the psychedelic community, Naranjo had befriended Michael Harner, Carlos Castaneda, Leo Zeff, Stan Grof, Willis Harman, and others. After returning to Chile for a few years, he began therapeutic work with harmaline (and various related harmala alkaloids), ibogaine, MDA, and MMDA. Some of this work was reported in 1967 at the San Francisco Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs conference and the U.C. Berkeley LSD conference, and some of it was later touched on in Naranjo's 1973 book The Healing Journey: New Approaches to Consciousness.

Over the course of his life, Naranjo has studied numerous esoteric traditions and religions including meditation, Sufism, tantra, Taoism, and Tibetan Buddhism. In 2006 he founded the Naranjo Institute, which sponsors workshops and retreats worldwide that focus on exploring psychological, spiritual, and expressive approaches toward healing and human growth.


(https://erowid.org)

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"Hello, Goodbye" is a song by the English rock band The Beatles. The song was released as a single in November 1967, and topped the charts in the United States, UK and Norway. The song also was a number two hit in both Austria and Switzerland.

Writing

Though the songwriting credit is Lennon/McCartney, it was written solely by Paul McCartney.

Alistair Taylor, who worked for the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, had asked McCartney how he wrote his songs, and McCartney took him into his dining room to give him a demonstration on his harmonium. He asked Taylor to shout the opposite of whatever he sang as he played the instrument—black and white, yes and no, stop and go, hello and goodbye. Taylor later said, "I wonder whether Paul really made up that song as he went along or whether it was running through his head already."

Recording

Under the working title "Hello Hello", the Beatles recorded the backing track on 2 October 1967, and added vocals and a guitar overdub on the 19th. After further overdubs of bass guitar and viola, recording was completed on the 2nd November, and mixing on the 6th. "Hello Goodbye" is in the key of C Major and in 4/4 time.

The song features a coda which came spontaneously in the studio. Of this, McCartney said "I remember the end bit where there's the pause and it goes 'Heba, heba hello'. We had those words and we had this whole thing recorded but it didn't sound quite right, and I remember asking Geoff Emerick if we could really whack up the echo on the tom-toms. And we put this echo full up on the tom-toms and it just came alive."

Release

"Hello, Goodbye" was released as a single on 24 November 1967. In the US, the song was also included on the Magical Mystery Tour album released three days later, but the song was not made available in the UK on an album (or in stereo) until the release of the 1973 compilation album 1967–1970.

With the release of the song, McCartney gave an explanation of its meaning in an interview with Disc: "The answer to everything is simple. It's a song about everything and nothing. If you have black you have to have white. That's the amazing thing about life."

Three promotional films were made for the song; directed by McCartney, they were filmed on the 10th November at the Saville Theatre in London. The films were not aired by the BBC due to the Musicians Union's strict rules on miming; with no such restriction in the US, one of the films was screened on The Ed Sullivan Show on the 26th November.

In the US, Capitol Records omitted the comma in the song’s title in the packaging of the single (as did some of EMI’s partners in other countries), and also the Magical Mystery Tour LP (which was subsequently adopted for the CD release of this album).

Reception

"Hello, Goodbye" topped the charts in both the United States and Britain where it spent seven weeks at number one, and was the Christmas number one for 1967.

Uses

The song’s coda plays over the end titles of the Beatles’ 1967 Magical Mystery Tour film.

B-side "I Am the Walrus"
Released 24 November 1967
Format 7"
Recorded 2 October – 2 November 1967
Abbey Road
Genre Pop rock
Length 3:27
Label Parlophone
Writer(s) Lennon/McCartney
Producer George Martin
Certification Gold (RIAA)


(https://en.wikipedia.org)




"I Am the Walrus" is a 1967 song by The Beatles, written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney.[1] Lennon claimed he wrote the first two lines on separate acid trips. The song was in the Beatles' 1967 television film and album Magical Mystery Tour, and was the B-side to the #1 hit "Hello, Goodbye".

Lennon composed the avant-garde song by combining three songs he had been working on. When he learned that a teacher at his old primary school was having his students analyse Beatles' lyrics, he added a verse of nonsense words.

The walrus is a reference to the walrus in Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (from the book Through the Looking-Glass). Lennon expressed dismay upon belatedly realising that the walrus was a villain in the poem.

Origins

The genesis of the lyrics is found in three song ideas that Lennon was working on, the first of which was inspired by hearing a police siren at his home in Weybridge; Lennon wrote the lines "Mis-ter cit-y police-man" to the rhythm of the siren. The second idea was a short rhyme about Lennon sitting in his garden, while the third was a nonsense lyric about sitting on a corn flake. Unable to finish the ideas as three different songs, he combined them into one.

Lennon received a letter from a pupil at Quarry Bank High School, which he had attended. The writer mentioned that the English master was making his class analyse Beatles' lyrics. (Lennon wrote an answer, dated 1 September 1967, which was auctioned by Christie's of London in 1992). Lennon, amused that a teacher was putting so much effort into understanding the Beatles' lyrics, wrote the most confusing lyrics he could. Lennon's friend and former fellow member of The Quarrymen, Peter Shotton, was visiting, and Lennon asked Shotton about a playground nursery rhyme they sang as children.

Shotton remembered:

    "Yellow matter custard, green slop pie,
    All mixed together with a dead dog's eye,
    Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick,
    Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick".

Lennon borrowed a couple of words, added the three unfinished ideas and the result was "I Am the Walrus". The Beatles' official biographer Hunter Davies was present while the song was being written and wrote an account in his 1968 biography of the Beatles. Lennon remarked to Shotton, "Let the fuckers work that one out." Shotton was also responsible for suggesting to Lennon to change the lyric "waiting for the man to come" to "waiting for the van to come".

All the chords are major chords or seventh chords, and all the musical letters of the alphabet (A, B, C, D, E, F and G) are used. The song ends with a chord progression built on ascending and descending lines in the bass and strings, repeated over and over as the song fades. Musicologist Alan W. Pollack analyses: "The chord progression of the outro itself is a harmonic Moebius strip with scales in bassline and top voice that move in contrary motion." The bassline descends stepwise A, G, F, E, D, C, and B, while the strings' part rises A, B, C, D, E, F#, G: this sequence repeats as the song fades, with the strings rising higher on each iteration. Pollack also notes that the repeated cell is seven bars long, which means that a different chord begins each four-bar phrase.

Lennon explained much of the song to Playboy in 1980:

    * "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko... I'd seen Allen Ginsberg and some other people who liked Dylan and Jesus going on about Hare Krishna. It was Ginsburg, in particular, I was referring to. The words "Element'ry penguin" meant that it's naïve to just go around chanting Hare Krishna or putting all your faith in one idol. In those days I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan."
    * "It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it? [Sings, laughing] 'I am the carpenter....'"

Recording

"I Am the Walrus" was the first studio recording made after the death of the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein in August 1967. The basic backing track featuring the Beatles was released in 1996 on Anthology 2. George Martin arranged and added orchestral accompaniment that included violins, cellos, horns, clarinet and a 16-piece choir. Paul McCartney said that Lennon gave instructions to Martin as to how he wished the orchestration to be scored, including singing most of the parts as a guide. A large group of professional studio vocalists named "The Mike Sammes Singers", took part in the recording as well, variously singing "Ho-ho-ho, hee-hee-hee, ha-ha-ha", "oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper!", "everybody's got one" and making a series of shrill whooping noises.The song also features another Beatles song with an unrelated coda in the shape of new parts of strings, new choruses and the sampling of a radio in its fade-out.

The dramatic reading in the mix towards the end of the song is a few lines of Shakespeare's King Lear (Act IV, Scene VI), which were added to the song direct from an AM radio receiving the broadcast of the play on the BBC Home Service (or possibly the BBC Third Programme). Lennon said in a 29 September 1974 radio interview with disc jockey Dennis Elsas that he "didn't even know it was Lear" until someone brought it up to him much later. The bulk of the audible dialogue, heard in the fade, is the death scene of the character Oswald (including the words, "O untimely Death! Death!"); this is a piece of the "Paul is dead" urban legend. Two other lines from the play are at the beginning of the third chorus, 2:25 into the song. They are taken from the two lines:

    "Glou. Now, good sir, what are you?

    Edg. A most poor man, made tame to fortune's blows, Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, Am pregnant to good pity."

These lines are faded in and out in the recording, so that we hear only: "Now, good sir;" "man, made tame to fortune's;" and "good pity."

Different versions

In the original (1967) stereo release, at around two minutes through the song, the mix changes from true stereo to "fake stereo". This came about because the radio broadcast had been added 'live', off-air, into the mono mix-down and so was unavailable for inclusion in the stereo mix; hence, fake stereo from the mono mix was created for this portion of the song.

The mono version opens with a four-beat chord while the stereo mix features six beats on the initial chord. The four-beat-only-intro is also included on a different stereo mix (overseen by George Martin) for the most recent home video version of Magical Mystery Tour. The US mono single mix includes an extra bar of music before the words "yellow matter custard"; an early, overdub-free mix of the song released on The Beatles Anthology 2 reveals John singing the lyrics "Yellow mat -" too early—this was edited out. A hybrid version prepared for the 1980 US Rarities LP combines the six-beat opening with the extra bar of music that precedes the words "yellow matter custard" (from the aforementioned US mono single mix).

In 2003, the first-ever completely true stereo mix of the song (albeit with the introduction covered by narration voice-over), including the formerly "fake stereo" second half, was included on The Beatles Anthology release to DVD (a change from the VHS edition); and in 2006, the first-ever stereo mix of the complete song (albeit in "mash-up" form: i.e. - not a "straight" remix) was issued on the Beatles' album Love. The true stereo mix had been made possible when a separate recording of the same King Lear radio performance used in the original mix was located.

Personnel

    * John Lennon – lead vocals, electric piano, mellotron
    * Paul McCartney – bass, tambourine, backing vocals
    * George Harrison – electric guitar, backing vocals
    * Ringo Starr – drums

    * Orchestrated, directed and produced by George Martin.
    * Session musicians: strings, brass and woodwinds.
    * Mike Sammes singers – background vocals.
    * Engineered by Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott.
    * Mixed by Geoff Emerick and John Lennon.

Reception

Critical reception at the time of the track's release was positive:

    * "John growls the nonsense (and sometimes suggestive) lyric, backed by a complex scoring incorporating violins and cellos. You need to hear it a few times before you can absorb it." - Derek Johnson

    * "Into the world of Alice in Wonderland now and you can almost visualise John crouching on a deserted shore singing "I am the Walrus" to some beautiful strings from far away on the horizon and a whole bagful of Beatle sounds, like a ringing doorbell and someone sawing a plank of wood. A fantastic track which you will need to live with for a while to fully appreciate." - Nick Logan

Interpretation

Although it has been reported that Lennon wrote I am the Walrus to confuse those who tried to interpret his songs, there have been many attempts to analyse the meaning of the lyrics.

Who was the Walrus?

Ostensibly Lennon is the walrus as he appears in the Magical Mystery Tour film singing the song. On the track-list of the accompanying soundtrack EP/LP, underneath "I Am the Walrus" are printed the words ' "No you're not!" said Little Nicola' (in the film, Nicola is a little girl who keeps contradicting everything the other characters say). Lennon returned to the subject in the lyrics of two of his subsequent songs: in the 1968 Beatles song "Glass Onion" he sings "now here's another clue for you all — the walrus was Paul", and in his 1970 solo song "God", "I was the walrus, but now I'm John."

Who was the Eggman?

Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals, is claimed by some to be the 'Eggman'. Burdon was known as 'Eggs' to his friends, the nickname originating from his fondness for breaking eggs over naked women's bodies. Burdon's biography mentions such an affair taking place in the presence of John Lennon, who shouted "Go on, go get it, Eggman..."

A-side "Hello, Goodbye"
Released 24 November 1967
Format 7"
Recorded 5 September 1967,
EMI Studios, London
Genre Psychedelic rock
Length 4:34
Label Parlophone
Writer(s) Lennon/McCartney
Producer George Martin


(https://en.wikipedia.org)

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Quote:

I AM THE WALRUS
(Lennon/McCartney)

PAUL 1967: "Everyone keeps preaching that the best way is to be 'open' when writing for teenagers. Then when we do we get criticized. Surely the word 'knickers' can't offend anyone. Shakespeare wrote words alot more naughtier than knickers!"


JOHN 1967: "We chose the word (knickers) because it is a lovely expressive word. It rolls off the tongue. It could 'mean' anything."


GEORGE 1967: "People don't understand. In John's song, 'I Am The Walrus' he says: 'I am he as you are he as you are me.' People look for all sorts of hidden meanings. It's serious, but it's also not serious. It's true, but it's also a joke."


JOHN 1968: "We write lyrics, and I write lyrics that you don't realize what they mean till after. Especially some of the better songs or some of the more flowing ones, like 'Walrus.' The whole first verse was written without any knowledge. With 'I Am the Walrus,' I had 'I am he as you are he as we are all together.' I had just these two lines on the typewriter, and then about two weeks later I ran through and wrote another two lines and then, when I saw something, after about four lines, I just knocked the rest of it off. Then I had the whole verse or verse and a half and then sang it. I had this idea of doing a song that was a police siren, but it didn't work in the end (sings like a siren) 'I-am-he-as-you-are-he-as...' You couldn't really sing the police siren."


JOHN 1980: "The first line was written on one acid trip one weekend. The second line was written on the next acid trip the next weekend, and it was filled in after I met Yoko. Part of it was putting down Hare Krishna. All these people were going on about Hare Krishna, Allen Ginsberg in particular. The reference to 'Element'ry penguin' is the elementary, naive attitude of going around chanting, 'Hare Krishna,' or putting all your faith in any one idol. I was writing obscurely, a la Dylan, in those days. It's from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter.' 'Alice in Wonderland.' To me, it was a beautiful poem. It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it? (singing) 'I am the carpenter...'"


(http://www.beatlesinterviews.org/)



Finally, on November 29, 1967, John added one more element to the final mix: a BBC radio broadcast of Shakespeare's King Lear, Act Four, Scene 6, lines 219-222 and 249-262, found while Lennon was scanning the airwaves for something interesting to mix in, live. The words from the broadcast, at the time they are heard in the song, are as follows:

Gloucester. (2:25) "Now, good sir, wh--" (Here Lennon changes the channel away from the station.)
Edgar. (2:28) -- "poor man, made tame by fortune --" (2:34) "good pity--"

Later, at the end of the song, John leaves the broadcast where it is, and we hear:

Oswald. (3:52) Slave, thou hast slain me: Villain, take my purse. If ever thou wilt thrive, (4:02) bury my body, and give the (4:05) letters which thou findest about me to (4:08) Edmund Earl of Gloucester. (4:10) Seek him out upon the British party. O, (4:14) Untimely Death!
Edgar. (4:23) I know thee well, a (4:25) serviceable villain. As duteous to the (4:27) vices of thy mistress as badness would desire.
Gloucester. What, is he dead?
Edgar. (4:31) Sit you down father, rest you.

Trivia:

    Although never specifically designated as such, "I Am The Walrus" was clearly considered the b-side to its single counterpart, "Hello Goodbye," by the band, producer George Martin, and just about everyone else. This infuriated John Lennon, who, spurred on by his new relationship with Yoko Ono, grew increasingly more anxious to have the Beatles singles move in a more avant-garde direction. This would be the first battle in a war which would eventually contribute to the band's breakup.
    After the "Paul Is Dead" rumors began in 1969, the question of who actually was the Walrus became significant in the minds of many Beatles fans, since, the rumor went, the Walrus was an Eastern religious symbol of death. This, it turns out, is not true. Yet Paul, not John, wears the walrus costume in the Magical Mystery Tour film. Furthermore, the back of the MMT album features the line "'No you're not!' said little Nicola." Little Nicola is a character in the accompanying MMT film, but she never says this to John. To further confuse matters, the Beatles song "Glass Onion" -- written as a nasty rebuke to the "Paul Is Dead" rumors -- also claims that "The Walrus wa s Paul." Yet in John's solo track "God," he claims " I was the Walrus / but now I'm John," making this, in the end, more of an existential question.
    The original mono mix that appears on the British Parlophone single of "I Am The Walrus" features several anomalies: six beats in the electric piano intro instead of four, two beats and a cymbal crash by Ringo before the first "Goo goo g'joob," and extra beats after the first "I'm crying." The original American single features only the first two of these anomalies, while the original stereo mix on the MMT album -- the version most are familiar with these days -- changes from true stereo to "mock stereo" (in which the mono mix is artificially divided into two sides) at exactly 2:00. The mix available on 1980's Rarities combined the mock stereo with the extra beats intro.
    An urban legend has the singers singing "Everybody smoke pot" at the end instead of the actual "Everybody's got one."
    Author Jeff Kent's biography The Last Poet: The Story of Eric Burdon 1989 claims that Burdon, the Animals' lead singer, was the "eggman" of this song; supposedly, Eric liked to break raw eggs on groupies' bodies, and Lennon, having witnessed this in person, gave him the name "eggman." But then why is John the eggman in the song?


(http://oldies.about.com)

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Quote:

I Am The Walrus

Magical Mystery Tour album artworkMagical Mystery Tour album artworkWritten by: Lennon-McCartney
Recorded: 5, 6, 27, 29 September 1967
Producer: George Martin
Engineers: Geoff Emerick, Ken Scott

Released: 24 November 1967 (UK), 27 November 1967 (US)

John Lennon: vocals, electric piano, Mellotron
Paul McCartney: bass guitar, tambourine
George Harrison: lead guitar
Ringo Starr: drums
Peggie Allen, Wendy Horan, Pat Whitmore, Jill Utting, June Day, Sylvia King, Irene King, G Mallen, Fred Lucas, Mike Redway, John O'Neill, F Dachtler, Allan Grant, D Griffiths, J Smith, J Fraser: backing vocals
Sidney Sax, Jack Rothstein, Ralph Elman, Andrew McGee, Jack Greene, Louis Stevens, John Jezzard, Jack Richards: violins
Lionel Ross, Eldon Fox, Bram Martin, Terry Weil: cellos
Gordon Lewin: clarinet
Neil Sanders, Tony Tunstall, Morris Miller: horns

Available on:
Magical Mystery Tour
Anthology 2
Love

John Lennon's final masterpiece of 1967 found him at his surrealistic, sneering best. I Am The Walrus was included on the soundtrack of the Magical Mystery Tour TV film, and first released as the b-side of Hello Goodbye.


Lennon had wanted I Am the Walrus to be The Beatles' next single after All You Need Is Love, but Paul McCartney and George Martin felt that Hello Goodbye was the more commercial song. The decision led to resentment from Lennon, who complained after the group's split that "I got sick and tired of being Paul's backup band".

The song was written in August 1967, at the peak of the Summer of Love and shortly after the release of Sgt Pepper. Lennon later claimed to have written the opening lines under 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.

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

I Am The Walrus was a composite of three song fragments. The first part was inspired by a two-note police siren Lennon heard while at home in Weybridge. This became "Mr city policeman sitting pretty..."

Hunter Davies recounted the beginnings of the second part in his authorised 1968 biography of The Beatles:

    He'd written down down another few words that day, just daft words, to put to another bit of rhythm. 'Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the man to come.' I thought he said 'van to come', which he hadn't, but he liked it better and said he'd use it instead.

The third part started from the phrase "sitting in an English country garden" which, as Davies noted, Lennon was fond of doing for hours at a time. Lennon repeated the phrase to himself until a melody came.

    I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song - sitting in an English garden, waiting for the van to come. I don't know.

John Lennon
The Beatles, Hunter Davies

The chord sequence was described by critic Ian MacDonald as "the most unorthodox and tonally ambiguous sequence he ever devised." He ingeniously referred to the looped sequence as "an obsessive musical structure built round a perpetually ascending/descending MC Escher staircase of all the natural major chords".

I Am The Walrus was one of the highlights of the Magical Mystery Tour film. For the performance, filmed in West Malling in Kent, Lennon tellingly wore an 18th century madman's cap.

The lyrics

    'Walrus' is just saying a dream - the words don't mean a lot. People draw so many conclusions and it's ridiculous... What does it really mean, 'I am the eggman'? It could have been the pudding basin for all I care. It's not that serious.

John Lennon
Anthology
I Am the Walrus - Magical Mystery TourI Am the Walrus - Magical Mystery Tour


The song's title came from Lewis Carroll's poem The Walrus And The Carpenter, from the book Through The Looking Glass. Lennon later realised with dismay that he'd identified with the villain of the piece.

    It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist system. I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work. Later, I went back and looked at it and realised that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.' But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

The eggman of the chorus, while possibly a reference to Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, was more likely The Animals' lead singer Eric Burdon following a particularly notable incident recounted to Lennon at a London party.

    It may have been one of my more dubious distinctions, but I was the Eggman - or, as some of my pals called me, 'Eggs'.

    The nickname stuck after a wild experience I'd had at the time with a Jamaican girlfriend called Sylvia. I was up early one morning cooking breakfast, naked except for my socks, and she slid up beside me and slipped an amyl nitrate capsule under my nose. As the fumes set my brain alight and I slid to the kitchen floor, she reached to the counter and grabbed an egg, which she cracked into the pit of my belly. The white and yellow of the egg ran down my naked front and Sylvia slipped my egg-bathed cock into her mouth and began to show me one Jamaican trick after another. I shared the story with John at a party at a Mayfair flat one night with a handful of blondes and a little Asian girl.

    'Go on, go get it, Eggman,' Lennon laughed over the little round glasses perched on the end of his hook-like nose as we tried the all-too-willing girls on for size.

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
Eric Burdon with J Marshall Craig

I Am The Walrus contained words ("crabalocker", "texpert", the chorus refrain "goo goo g'joob") coined by Lennon. As such, it owed more to his books In His Own Write and A Spaniard In The Works than anything The Beatles had previously recorded.

    You know, you just stick a few images together, thread them together, and you call it poetry. Well, maybe it is poetry. But I was just using the mind that wrote In His Own Write to write that song. There was even some live BBC radio on one track, y'know. They were reciting Shakespeare or something and I just fed whatever lines were on the radio into the song.

John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

According to Lennon's childhood friend Pete Shotton, he was further inspired to turn the song into a nonsense tour-de-force after receiving a letter from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at his old primary school Quarry Bank. The letter revealed that a teacher was having his class analyse Beatles lyrics.

Lennon asked Shotton to remind him of a playground rhyme they'd known from childhood:

    Yellow matter custard, green slop pie, all mixed together with a dead dog's eye. Slap it on a butty, ten foot thick. Then wash it all down with a cup of cold sick.

This became "Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye", followed by a stream of mostly meaningless nonsense. "Let the fuckers work that one out," was his response to Shotton when he'd finished.

'Semolina pilchard', according to Marianne Faithfull, was a reference to Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, the notoriously anti-drug zealot who made it his mission to bust people from the music world for possession of illegal substances. Elsewhere, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg made an oblique appearance:

    I'd seen Allen Ginsberg and some other people who liked Dylan and Jesus go on about Hare Krishna. It was Ginsberg, in particular, I was referring to. The words 'Elementary penguin' meant that it's naive to just go around chanting Hare Krishna or putting all your faith in one idol.

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

The BBC banned the song for the lines "pornographic priestess" and "let your knickers down". As Hunter Davies recorded, the lines were particularly admired by George Harrison.

    Why can't you have people fucking as well? It's going on everywhere in the world, all the time. So why can't you mention it? It's just a word, made up by people... It doesn't mean a thing, so why can't we use it in a song? We will eventually. We haven't started yet.

George Harrison
The Beatles, Hunter Davies

In the studio

The Beatles began recording I Am The Walrus on 5 September 1967, just nine days after the death of Brian Epstein. Sixteen takes were recorded on that first day, just five of them complete. At this point it was bass, lead guitar, electric piano and drums, with an overdubbed Mellotron.
I Am the Walrus - Magical Mystery TourI Am the Walrus - Magical Mystery Tour


This version, without the various orchestral overdubs that came later, can be heard on the Anthology 2 collection. The sparseness of the recording serves to highlight the magic and mastery of George Martin's orchestration.

The following day more bass and drums were taped, along with John Lennon's vocals, snarled with such ferocity that the studio levels often peaked and distorted.

I Am The Walrus was then left until 27 September, when the orchestral and choral overdubs were recorded. George Martin conducted the 16-piece orchestra in an afternoon session in Abbey Road's Studio One, and in the evening the Mike Sammes Singers were brought in to Studio Two.

    John worked with George Martin on the orchestration and did some very exciting things with the Mike Sammes Singers... Most of the time they got asked to do Sing Something Simple and all the old songs, but John got them doing all sorts of swoops and phonetic noises. It was a fascinating session. That was John's baby, great one, a really good one.

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

The singers, eight female, eight male, were seasoned session performers. George Martin's rather unorthodox score consisted of a series of whoops, "ho ho ho, he he he, ha ha ha", "Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper" and "Got one, got one, everybody's got one".

    The idea of using voices was a good one. We got in the Mike Sammes Singers, very commercial people and so alien to John that it wasn't true. But in the score I simply orchestrated the laughs and noises, the whooooooah kind of thing. John was delighted with it.

George Martin
The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, Mark Lewisohn

Lennon spoke about the choir in his 1980 interview for Playboy magazine.

    I had this whole choir saying 'Everybody's got one, everybody's got one.' But when you get thirty people, male and female, on top of thirty cellos and on top of the Beatles' rock 'n' roll rhythm section, you can't hear what they're saying.

John Lennon
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

On 29 September the final overdub took place, and it was a memorable one. By this point they were at the remix stage, with 17 mono mixes being made during the session. Only two were complete, and the final master copy was an edit of the two.

The first part of the song came from mix 10, and lasted up until the end of the second chorus. From then it was joined to mix 22, which incorporated a live radio feed from the BBC Third Programme, the day before it became Radio 3.

That night a broadcast of Shakespeare's The Tragedy Of King Lear was broadcast, and Lennon's radio happened to settle on Act IV, Scene VI featuring Gloucester, Edgar and Oswald, played by Mark Dignam, Philip Guard and John Bryning respectively.

    We did about half a dozen mixes and I just used whatever was coming through at that time. I never knew it was King Lear until, years later, somebody told me - because I could hardly make out what he was saying. It was interesting to mix the whole thing with a live radio coming through it., So that's the secret of that one.

John Lennon
Anthology

The noise of the detuned radio appears before the line "Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun". A snippet from King Lear can be heard in the chorus immediately before the "Expert texpert choking smokers" line, with an exchange between Gloucester and Edgar:

    Lennon: I am the eggman
    Gloucester: Now, good sir, what are you?
    Lennon: They are the eggmen
    Edgar: A most poor man, made tame to fortune's blows
    Lennon: I am the Walrus

The King Lear performance reappears more prominently towards the song's end, as the strings reach their climax and amid the choir's chant of "Everybody's got one". The radio dial once more flits between channels, and in the song's final minute a longer passage was used.

    Oswald: 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
    To Edmund Earl of Gloucester; seek him out
    Upon the English party: O! untimely death. [Dies.]
    Edgar: I know thee well: a serviceable villain;
    As duteous to the vices of thy mistress
    As badness would desire.
    Gloucester: What! is he dead?
    Edgar: Sit you down, father; rest you.


(http://www.beatlesbible.com)

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