I am the egg manThey are the egg menI am the walrusGoo goo g’joob
They may sound like nonsense, but the lyrics to this LSD-inspired classic were penned by John Lennon after he received a letter from a boy at his old school, Quarry Bank.
At least that’s according to a comprehensive account of how the track came into being in Ian MacDonald’s 1994 book Revolution In The Head.
In the letter, the schoolboy described how his English class was analysing The Beatles’ lyrics.
Amused, Lennon began to reflect on how his English teachers had dismissed him as a talentless disrupter.
“Yellow matter custard, green slop pie/All mixed together with a dead dog’s eye,” was a playground chant he and an old school friend who was with Lennon at the time recalled and modified for the song.
“The hurt teenager’s revenge on his ‘expert textpert’ schoolmasters (‘I’m crying’) broadens into a surreal onslaught on straight policemen in a row, corporation vans, and the guardians of conventional morality beating up a fellow psychedelic rebel (the opium-addicted surrealist Edgar Allan Poe),” MacDonald writes.
According to MacDonald, the initial idea for I am the Walrus’ perpetually ascending/descending staircase of all the natural major chords came from hearing the drone of a police car while at his Weybridge country mansion.
“The words took longer to come, arriving overall several acid-heightened weekends and passing a number of phases,” he wrote.
