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1 May 2011
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William Shears Campbell said
I know that quote by John talking about giving Paul the title of the walrus in Glass Onion exists somewhere though. I heard it with me own two ears. Or maybe I read it. But I feel like heard it.
From the ‘Anthology’ book
JOHN: [‘Glass Onion ’] That’s me, just doing a throwaway song, à la ‘Walrus’, à la everything I’ve ever written. I threw the line in – ‘the Walrus was Paul’ – just to confuse everybody a bit more. It could have been: ‘The fox terrier is Paul.’ I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. I was having a laugh because there’d been so much gobbledegook about Pepper – play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that. At that time I was still in my love cloud with Yoko. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just say something nice to Paul, that it’s all right and you did a good job over these few years, holding us together.’ He was trying to organise the group and all that, so I wanted to say something to him. I thought, ‘Well, he can have it, I’ve got Yoko. And thank you, you can have the credit.’ The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul. It’s a very perverse way of saying to Paul: ‘Here, have this crumb, this illusion, this stroke – because I’m leaving.’
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20 August 2013
Offline ^That’s gut wrenching, and I’m not even Paul. I bet it crushed him to hear that from John. 
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Offline Ahhh Girl said
^That’s gut wrenching, and I’m not even Paul. I bet it crushed him to hear that from John.
It’s from the ‘Anthology book’ and not one unique quote but compiled from a handful of sources between 1970 and 1980.
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7.11am
7 May 2017
Offline Tony Japanese said
Ahhh Girl said
I am he as you are he as you are me (which means all of them are the walrus as well as being egg men)
Makes sense, the walrus can’t be John and Paul.
Of Course it can.
– John Lennon , 1967 in I Am The Walrus
(John is the Walrus)
“The Walrus was Paul”
– John Lennon , 1968 in Glass Onion
(Paul is the Walrus)
“I told you about The Fool On The Hill “
– John Lennon , 1968 in Glass Onion
(This isn’t true if he was John, Paul told us about The Fool On The Hill in 1967’s The Fool On The Hill )
Conclusion: John = Paul = Walrus
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8.02am
11 September 2018
Offline So what you’re saying, is that I Am The Walrus , Glass Onion and God is simply an admission from John that he spent a year thinking he was Paul McCartney ? The clues are there, I guess. Along with yours:
I am he – Who is he? Well now we know this is John admitting he is Paul.
I Am The Walrus – On the surface, we think John is admitting to being the walrus, but as we know from the first line he has actually become Paul (no doubt following a particularly strong dose of acid).
The walrus was Paul – by this time (Spring 1968) we can assume that John no longer think’s he is Paul.
I told you ’bout The Fool On The Hill – From this line we can conclude John became Paul around March 1967 (which is when this song was written).
I was the walrus, but now I’m John – by 1970, John has recovered from his delusions of McCartneyism. Possibly it was he who (accidentally) instigated the ‘Paul is dead’ rumours. Something that was clearly meant to mean, ‘I, John Lennon ‘ spent around twelve months between March 1967 and May 1968 believing I was Paul McCartney of the Beatles. That Paul is dead.’
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7 May 2017
Offline There’s even more to it.
“It came in a vision – a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them ‘From this day on you are Beatles with an «A»’. ‘Thank you, Mister Man’, they said, thanking him.”
– John Lennon , 1961
“I’m the man on the flaming pie.”
– Paul McCartney , 1997
So we can conclude that John = Paul = Walrus = Man on the flaming pie. This means the two were eating acid laced pies as far back as 1961, and it took them a while to figure out their genius band name so they left the pie in the oven for too long (thus it was flaming), while George was eating biscuits.
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24 June 2019
Offline I think John was just consciously creating what he called gobbledegook, but subconsciously, he may have been referring to real people or events. He had so much emotional baggage that it came out in his lyrics, probably more often than he intended. John also tended to change his history depending, it seems, on his mood at the time. If he were alive today, he may be saying that Yoko was the walrus.
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5.25am
18 October 2013
Offline Maybe you’re right?……… I think if someone came up with a really great theory about one of his songs…..Even though ironically this particular lyric was designed to flummox and poo poo the daft theorists………John would go along with it…
But on that day in 67….after Brian’s death….With Abbey Road studio staff expectant at the unveiling of another Beatles classic……John’s two note siren gobbledegook ……..sang in a monotone to his strumming guitar……left them all scratching their heads and George Martin at least very underwhelmed…….
“Well’ asks john hopefully…….’What do you think George?’
“Well,’ muses George…….’To be honest what am I supposed to do with that?’
(it wasn’t only Harrison you see that had to ride the put-downs).
Here we have the idiosyncratic brilliance of John Winston Lennon………Paul’s almost unparalleled melodic gift was vital to the Beatle’s dominance……..But so was the genius of the the least musically talented musician the world has ever known.
John should have answered Martin with…..
‘Well George we’re gonna make this into a fecking classic for the ages…..that’s what we’re going to do with it!!!!’
And together…..That’s exactly what they did do with it.
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Offline Wigwam said
Maybe you’re right?……… I think if someone came up with a really great theory about one of his songs…..Even though ironically this particular lyric was designed to flummox and poo poo the daft theorists………John would go along with it…But on that day in 67….after Brian’s death….With Abbey Road studio staff expectant at the unveiling of another Beatles classic……John’s two note siren gobbledegook ……..sang in a monotone to his strumming guitar……left them all scratching their heads and George Martin at least very underwhelmed…….
“Well’ asks john hopefully…….’What do you think George?’
“Well,’ muses George…….’To be honest what am I supposed to do with that?’
(it wasn’t only Harrison you see that had to ride the put-downs).
Here we have the idiosyncratic brilliance of John Winston Lennon………Paul’s almost unparalleled melodic gift was vital to the Beatle’s dominance……..But so was the genius of the the least musically talented musician the world has ever known.
John should have answered Martin with…..
‘Well George we’re gonna make this into a fecking classic for the ages…..that’s what we’re going to do with it!!!!’
And together…..That’s exactly what they did do with it.
Not sure if that is serious or not but if it is it’s complete nonsense.
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18 October 2013
Offline meanmistermustard said
Wigwam said
…….But so was the genius of the the least musically talented musician the world has ever known.
Not sure if that is serious or not but if it is it’s complete nonsense.
I sort of feel that as being true, though perhaps I should have said, ‘accomplished’ ………I see it as possibly the well spring of John’s originality. He wasn’t constrained by knowing how it should be done….He only knew how he wanted it done.
You can take any trained professional musician ………add in all the jazz players…….classical musicians, virtuosos ……the list goes on…..and on… of unknown, unheard of people in the world who were born before….. or were alive then….. or are alive now…….well beyond John in terms of technical musical ability……….Musicians that have gained a thorough and extensive understanding of music…… through an intense study of it in the world’s most prestigious universities and put in thousands of hours of practice….That in theory at least have a far greater understanding of music and its possibilities than John had at anytime in his life…….
Set them all against…
…….Our John…Who’s drive to make music and perform it meant that he appeared in public playing 4 string banjo chords on a 6 string guitar that he hardly knew how to tune….singing the lyrics of popular songs that he didn’t even know the words to and had to make words fit as he went along……
There were others like John caught up in that skiffle craze of 1957…….Indeed in 1957 there were thousands of musicians of John’s age who were already light years ahead of him….musically, technically, theoretically.
Yet against all of them, ONLY John…was somehow able to set himself upon a path, that ten years on from the back of that lorry at a fete in Woolton would lead him, together with his friends…to create something with the timeless musical stature of, ‘A Day In The Life …..And so much else.
OK the stars aligned for the Beatles……But first and in my mind foremost was the spark of genius within an otherwise always rudimentary musician.
John wasn’t a musician by their terms.….He was something much much more…..Something they couldn’t come close to.
I’m so glad he came along.
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15 July 2014
Offline According to Wikipedia, John got the idea for the opening notes from a police car going past. Imagine the talent of being able to do that!! A police car siren becomes the opening bars for a kick-ass song.
The lyrics are nonsense in order to deliberately confuse fans and music students who were going through Bealtes lyrics and trying to find meaning in them. Lennon, apparently, written the lyrics and said to Peter Shotton, “Let the f***rs work that one out.”
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Offline No matter how meaningless the lyrics may or may not have been to John, he still had this incredible talent for linking disparate imagery together and making a great and cohesive song out of it. The man really was a genius. I still find Revolution 9 has a flow even though there really is nothing to join all the bits together (except “Number nine, number nine, number nine…”).
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Offline We know that “egg man” came from an Eric Burdon euphemistic reference to describe a certain sex act. The “Goo Goo Ga-joob” phrase, also, became famous countercultural parlance in its own right (when it showed up in Simon & Garfunkel’s Mrs. Robinson only a couple months later).
Some vintage audio of WALRUS from the Capitol MMT
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Offline May I know if this thread is entirely sarcastic? I do have a good modified copypasta in mind but I would not like to divert the thread from it’s intended purpose.
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Offline CakeMaestor said
May I know if this thread is entirely sarcastic? I do have a good modified copypasta in mind but I would not like to divert the thread from it’s intended purpose.
Not sure modified pasta is right in these days and times.
Feel free to post away.
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14 June 2016
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I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch lately and the other day the bridge of this song stuck out to me as kind of an optimistic line.
“Sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun
If the sun don’t come, you get a tan
From standing in the English rain”
I always thought the imagery to be weird and blew it off as goofy back when I was a kid, but looking at it again it looks like it’s a way of saying “if the sun won’t come out, be happy in the rain”
Not sure if John actually thought of that while writing the song. There’s a good chance he didn’t, actually, but that was my interpretation.
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Offline It’s the national running joke about how wet and miserable summer in England so often is, @William Shears Campbell.
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Offline I Am The Walrus makes sense when you put all the lyrics together.
I think the beginning is saying the four Beatles are all one, and sometimes want to do their own thing, running away like pigs from a gun. They are also crying because epstein died. Sitting on a cornflake is used to hide the meaning of the song (as John wanted it to make no sense), and the van is a touring bus. Pretty little policemen blocking out beatlemania fangirls, who fly like lucy in the sky, and so on. The rest would take 14 paragraphs to explain.
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