Because the 60s progressed, pop music grew to become extra refined. One results of this was that music lyrics started to be considered by some followers as secret messages, clues to some deeper which means for them to decipher and uncover the hidden fact their idols had been imparting completely to these clued-up sufficient to get the message. On “Glass Onion,” The Beatles determined to have some enjoyable with lyrical references to their earlier songs.
In 1967, Stephen Bayley, who at the moment was a scholar at John Lennon’s outdated Quarry Financial institution College, in Liverpool, wrote to Lennon to inform him {that a} trainer was getting the category to research Beatles songs. He requested John to clarify his songwriting, to which Lennon wrote again: “All my writing… has always been for laughs or fun or whatever you call it – I do it for me first – whatever people make of it afterwards is valid, but it doesn’t necessarily have to correspond to my thoughts about it, OK? This goes for anyone’s ‘creations’, art, poetry, song, etc. – the mystery and s__t that is built around all forms of art needs smashing anyway.”
‘Play it backwards and you stand on your head’
Speaking particularly about “Glass Onion” in 1970, John defined: “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.”
“Glass Onion” makes reference to a lot of different Beatles songs in its lyrics. In addition to the walrus line, the music opens with a reference to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” earlier than mentioning “Fixing A Hole” and “The Fool On The Hill,” for the final of which Paul McCartney and producer Chris Thomas added recorders so as to add to the allusion. There’s additionally a reference to “Lady Madonna,” which had itself included a reference to “I Am The Walrus” (“see how they run”), which in flip included a reference to “Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds” (“see how they fly like Lucy in the sky”). The unique handwritten lyrics to “Glass Onion” additionally embrace a crossed-out reference to a different Beatles quantity within the final verse: “Looking through a hole in the ocean for a yellow submarine.”
On the time they recorded the Esher demos for “The White Album”, in late Might 1968, “Glass Onion” consisted of only one verse, which was repeated. Recording of the music didn’t start till September 11, whereas George Martin was on vacation. Chris Thomas took the helm for the “Glass Onion” classes, which started with John on acoustic guitar, George on electrical guitar, Paul enjoying bass, and Ringo on a brand new, experimental drum set-up. He had acquired a brand new Ludwig Hollywood equipment, and pictures taken by Linda Eastman on the classes present him with, as Mal Evans described it in his Beatles E book Month-to-month column, “two drum kits instead of one”. His conventional oyster black pearl equipment and his new Hollywood one had been arrange in a mixed equipment: “I thought I’d try a double bass-drum in the studio, like Ginger [Baker] and Moony [Keith Moon], so we set them all up. When I was to play the fill, the break came, and I just froze, looking at all these drums!”
Quite a few overdubs had been then added, amongst them John’s double-tracked vocal, tambourine, piano, Mellotron, snare, and the 2 recorders; in the course of the music’s combine, an ending was created – and spliced all through the music – utilizing tape loops of a telephone ringing, a glass breaking and BBC TV’s Kenneth Wolstenholme’s commentary of England’s controversial third objective from the 1966 World Cup Ultimate: “It’s a goal!”
However when George Martin returned from his holidays, he had a suggestion: why not add a string part as an alternative? Martin scored for a string octet (principally a string quartet doubled up), taking the music’s sudden ending and winding it right down to an eerie conclusion.
‘It’s only a little bit of poetry’
Recalling the music in his 1994 memoir, Many Years From Now, Paul McCartney stated: “It was a nice song of John’s. We had a fun moment when we were working on the bit, ‘Here’s another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul.’ Because, although we’d never planned it, people read into our songs and little legends grew up about every item of so-called significance, so on this occasion, we decided to plant one. What John meant was that in Magical Mystery Tour, when we came to do the costumes on ‘I Am The Walrus’ it happened to be me in the walrus costume.”
This specific pointer was clearly signposted and would come again to chew them. This line could be seen as a big clue within the “Paul is dead” conspiracy that emerged in 1969, the place followers scoured the band’s songs and art work to seek out clues as to how and when Paul had supposedly died and been changed by a “fake Paul.”
In fact, as Paul himself confirmed, he was very a lot alive. And moreover, the walrus wasn’t really Paul anyway, as John clarified in a 1980 interview: “It was actually me in the walrus suit. I thought I’d confuse people who read great depths into lyrics. It could have been ‘The fox terrier was Paul’, you know. It’s just a bit of poetry. It was just thrown in like that. The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko, and I was leaving Paul.”
The tremendous deluxe version of The Beatles’ “White Album” may be purchased right here.
