In the winter of 1967, The Beatles released a bewildering track called ‘I Am the Walrus’. Penned by John Lennon, the song contained some truly indecipherable lyrics, entirely committing to the silly and the surreal. Lennon’s words found him sitting on cornflakes, climbing up the Eiffel Tower, observing yellow matter custard dropping from a dead dog’s eye, and continually declaring himself “the eggman” and “the walrus.”
Lennon penned ‘I Am the Walrus’ somewhere between a swimming pool and several acid trips, allowing the influence of LSD and Lewis Carroll to find its way into his strange sentences. The track has left audiences puzzled for decades now, desperately attempting to pull meaning from Lennon’s literary references and bizarre image choices, but the story behind the track’s recording is slightly less well-known.
Despite the silly nature of the lyrics to the track, the sessions for ‘I Am the Walrus’ were full of sadness for the band. When the Beatles entered the studio to get to work on the track, it marked their first time recording since the passing of their manager, Brian Epstein. The loss of their close friend, one of few figures who earned the title of the fifth Beatle, would be deeply felt during the recording process.
Lennon brought the song to the band and their trusted producer, George Martin, the latter of whom wasn’t impressed with his initial idea. “The melody consisted largely of just two notes, and the lyrics were pretty much just nonsense,” engineer Geoff Emerick remembered in Here There and Everywhere, “for some reason, John appeared to be singing about a walrus and an Eggman. There was a moment of silence when he finished, then Lennon looked up at George Martin expectantly.”
The producer quickly shot Lennon’s initial idea for the song down, but the band decided to continue with ‘I Am the Walrus’ despite his protests. But when it came to recording the track, the grief they were feeling surrounding Epstein’s death began to infringe on their playing. Lennon insisted on playing the piano himself, but Emerick recalled him making a “few fluffs” as he did so.
When Martin asked him why Lennon wouldn’t pass off piano duties to Paul McCartney, Emerick “had no answer,” speculating that he may have been using it to “get his grief out.” If that was the case, he wasn’t the only one. Almost all of the band struggled to get their parts right while recording ‘I Am the Walrus’, each seemingly struggling to deal with Epstein’s death as they played.
Emerick suggested that even on the final recording, you can still tell that the band were “distracted,” mourning rather than focused on their recording. He recalled, “I distinctly remember the look of emptiness on all of their faces while they were playing ‘I Am The Walrus’. It is one of the saddest memories I have of my time with The Beatles.”
Eventually, the band managed to get through their respective parts and complete ‘I Am the Walrus’, which would appear in Magical Mystery Tour, and the track has been subject to constant discussion and dissection, despite Martin’s initial protests. But the band never quite got over the death of Epstein. In the years that followed, his death would continue to weigh heavy on the band and even contributed to their eventual break-up at the end of the decade.
It wasn’t just ‘I Am the Walrus’ that Epstein’s death had an effect on, but the rest of The Beatles’ career, as he had been so essential to the Fab Four’s success and story for so long.
