I Am the Walrus/The Beatles

"I Am the Walrus," from The Beatles' 1967 album Magical Mystery Tour, was actually created out of three songs that John Lennon was working on. Unable to finish them, he combined them into one. The idea for the walrus came from Lewis Carroll's poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter," found in his 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, a sequel of sorts to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In a 1980 Playboy Magazine interview, Lennon said: "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?" And we always thought the walrus was Paul. (Let's not overlook the other literary reference in the song: Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.)

Submitted by William Scheckel