Goo Goo Goo Joob

"I am the Walrus" and "Hello Goodbye" by the Beatles on Capitol

The thing about the Beatles is that they've never been part of anything else. Three years ago they stood in the wind next to Stonehenge singing "The Night Before" amused and surrounded by tanks. Then last summer they came out in flowers. Lucy in the Sky in with Diamonds was an anagram for LSD; A Day in the Life smoked pot; and then there was All You Need Is Love. Great new sounds, but it sure looked like they'd joined the hippies. After their new 45, we can turn around and read the summer differently. They may have dressed like hippies and even been fascinated by hippies, but they stuck to their own insights and philosophy.

The significance of these two songs above and beyond their new album, "Magical Mystery Tour", is evident in their pre-release as a single. The first, (I am the Walrus), is their most erudite, least musical, and longest ever; as the Beatles biggest extravaganza, it's even more enigmatic than "Strawberry Fields".

The transcription on the inside of Capitol's jacket cover is far from adequate. Aside from the obscurity of allusion the text has simply omitted some words ("mister" in line nine) and has scrambled others (this is heard more clearly in the album's more audible selections). Following is our annotated version of the song:

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together (1)

See how they run (2) like pigs from a gun see how they fly,

I'm crying. (3)

Sitting on a cornflake (4)--waiting for the van to come.

(5) Corporation teashirt, stupid bloody tuesday man you been a naughty boy

you let your face grow long. (6)

I am the eggman (7), they are the eggmen (8), I am the walrus (9)

GOO GOO GOO JOOB (10)

Mister city policeman sitting pretty little policeman in a row,

see how they fly like Lucy in the sky--see how they run

I'm crying--I'm crying I'm crying.

Yellow matter (10a) custard dripping from a dead dog's eye. (11)

Crabalocker (11a) fishwife pornographic priestess boy you been a naughty girl,

you let your knickers (12) down.

I am the eggman, they are the eggmen--I am the walrus.

GOO GOO GOO JOOB ... What nonsense ... (13)

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 am the eggman, they are the eggman--I am the walrus.

GOO GOO GOO JOOB ... How are you, sir? A good man maintains fortune ...

Expert texpert (13a) choking smokers (14) don't you think the joker laughs at you . . . hohoho heeheehee haha . . .

See how they smile, like pigs in a sty, see how they snied (15).

I'm crying.

Semolina (16) pilchard (17) climbing up the Eiffel Tower. (18) Elementary penguin (19) singing Hare Krishna man you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen POE.

I am the eggman, they are the eggmen--I am the Walrus.

GOO GOO GOO JOOB GOO GOO GOO JOOB GOO GOOGOOOOOOOOOOOJOOBOOOOOB (10)

Everybody's going mad. everybody's going mad. (20)

"If (21) ever thou wilt thrive, bury my body,

And give the letter which thou find'st about me

To Edmund Earl of Gloucester. Seek him out

Upon the British party. O, untimely death! Death!

I know thee well. A serviceable villain,

As duteous to the vices of thy mistress

As badness would desire.

What, is he dead?

Sit you down, father; rest you."

1) together also means good, cool. 2) from "Three Blind Mice." 3) see note nine. 4) Alice (in Wonderland) shrinking and shrunk. 5) from the asylum? 6) walrus's face is long. 7) The eggman is H. C. Earwicker in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. He is the cosmic father of man and is symbolic of the oosphere. The oosphere contained the universe at the beginning before it was broken. His initials stand for "Here Comes Everybody". The eggman is everybody. 8) Everybody is an eggman because we're all progenitors.

9) from Lewis Carroll's story of the Walrus and the Carpenter. The Walrus cries while he eats the oysters he has tricked into following him. 10) the sound of Finnegan falling--the breaking of the oosphere. 10a) "Man of" is a far more likely, and grammatical, interpretation of what the Beatles sing than "matter". 11) from an old English schoolboy's rhyme: "Alligator, crocodile, custard pie/All mixed together with a dead dog's eye/Spread it on a sandwich nice and thick/ And swallow it down with a cup of cold sick" 11a) If this isn't Capitol's inaccurate estimation of "Grab a lock of", then the Beatles have created a nonsense in the spirit of Lewis Carroll, one that (intentionally) sounds like the first phrase. 12) i.e. panties. 13) mumbled in the background. 13a) cross between "textbook" and preceding word. 14) hippies with pot. 15) i.e. they're snide. 16) an awful English pudding. 17) literally a fish dish of the same grade as semolina pudding; more likely is an abomination of "filcher", meaning in this context a hippie so degraded that he has to steal, violating the hippie ethics. 18) to jump? 19) the Penguin textbook editions; here means people who haven't read farther. The word is actually plural in the song, and is an appositive of choking smokers. 20) chanted repeatedly by a host. 21) the death of Oswald from King Lear: act IV, scene vi, lines 246-253.

The Beatles are putting down everyone--the eggman (the primordial progenitor of mankind) and also the eggmen, all the people walking around today producing and propagating. We're all Lewis Carroll's walrus, crying while we destroy the young but destroying them anyway.

In the Walrus the merrieness has gone out of the Beatles' laughter. Sure, we still laugh with the joker at the choking smokers, chuckle at the English garden, and smile knowingly at the pretty (a favorite put-down is to pretend they're fags) policemen.

In these sections it's the same Beatles who mocked the businessman in A Hard Day's Night with "give us a kiss". Here and there, things are still fun; but everywhere else it's a violiny, morbid picture of the degrading lives that England's eggmen--everyone from the hippies to the cops to the worker in the corporation teashirt--are falling into.

Even if your existence isn't mean, it can still be meaningless. Britain's dilletante nobles and the others who still take their tea quietly at four sit in their gardens maintaining their fortunes (luck and/or money). And because their lives are irrelevant to anything or anybody, the Beatles tell us, they are left alone (like Eleanor Rigby) standing in the rain.

The really puzzling point of interpretation is the quote from King Lear, which floats through the end of the song. Why Lear? Well, it's a play about madness, and everybody's going mad. But why the death of Oswald? The recording did come out on the anniversary of the weekend when Lee Harvey Oswald killed a great ruler and then died himself. Maybe the Beatles are ironically saying that degraded, crazy Oswalds can change the course of the world. And maybe the Lear allusion explains that most men no matter what staggeringly infamous deeds they perform, will die insignificant deaths.

I am the Walrus is ambiguous enough to keep you wondering how serious the Beatles really are. Richard Poirier, the reigning Beatles explicateur, said last month in the Partisan Review that "the Beatles' most talented member, John Lennon, has written two books of Joycean verbal play that suggest why no one is ever in danger of reading too much into the lyrics of their songs." So don't sell the allusions short.

At the same time the song doesn't make it as one of the all time great sounds. Rock, like blues, is the art of emotional music--basic music, which, although it is often electric and artificial, is always simple. The sounds in I am the Walrus are designed too often to transmit literal ideas instead of feelings. For instance, there is a screen of static between the singer and the listener, the sound that a weak radio makes late at night. This is apparently to indicate that the Beatles are having a hard time getting through to their audience through all the haze of mass media. The music sets the tone for the lyrics by sounding like a dirge. With all its intriguing esoterica the Walrus forfeits a lot of the basic appeal of rock.

It's the second song that's the hit.

Hello Goodbye is a beautiful song that rolls up and down in simple, glorious repetition. Doing it on the Ed Sullivan Show, they winked, laughed, showed us it was a recording by not playing their instruments, and hoohaed the prime time audience into the ground. Once more the Beatles are making the music mean as much as the text and more.

The words are almost entirely variations on "You say yes-I say no-You say goodbye-I say hello". Serious fans read into this a put-down of the hippies' offhand and mindless acceptance of everything and everybody. They're pretty much right. But it doesn't matter: the song is quite catholic and can readily mean anything you feel like when you say hello.

In addition to being more intellectually egalitarian, Hello Goodbye brings the sound all back home to the sense. The whole great thing about rock, and the Beatles, isn't listening to someone play a guitar: it's hearing the simultaneous and integrated sound pouring out of the amplifiers, virtually giving life.