Credited to Lennon and McCartney, the song “I Am The Walrus” was one of the most famous tracks of The Beatles‘ 1967 album “Magical Mystery Tour”. The psychedelic track was quite different from what they were writing on the previous records and showed that the band was experimenting more in the studio. But what inspired the song? The late legendary John Lennon explained in an interview with Rolling Stone back in 1968.
How “I Am The Walrus” was written according to John Lennon
“With ‘I Am A Walrus,’ I had ‘I am here as you are here 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-here-as-you-are-here-as…’ You couldn’t really sing the police siren,” John Lennon said.
Where did the idea of using ‘Walrus’ come from?
Shortly before his tragic assassination, in an interview with Playboy magazine, the Beatle explained that the idea for the word “Walrus” in the song came from “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from “Alice in Wonderland”.
“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,'” John Lennon said.
The song curiously was a number 1 hit in Belgium but in the United States only peaked at number 56 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Lennon said a few times that he wrote the lyrics to confound listeners who had been affording serious scholarly interpretations of the Beatles’ lyrics.