MUSIC
The song John Lennon thought would hold up in 100 years
There aren’t many songs from The Beatles canon that haven’t received some harsh treatment from John Lennon. From the band’s early years playing traditional pop music to their various experiments in the studio, Lennon was never shy about airing what he considered dirty laundry, calling some of his classics not nearly as good as people made them out to be. Although Lennon had a vicious tongue, he admitted that one of their musical experiments had the power to last a century.
Then again, Lennon’s compositions always worked best when engaging in a back-and-forth with Paul McCartney. Although the group would become more fractured later, Lennon and McCartney’s innate ability to bring the best out of each other made for a musical smorgasbord on every single album, from the folk-leaning Rubber Soul to their final masterpiece Abbey Road.
Towards the end of the group’s run as a live act, though, Lennon wasn’t as thrilled with the idea of turning the album into a grandiose statement. While McCartney would have the idea of creating an album based around a fictional band, Lennon was not on board, thinking that Sgt Pepper got far more credit than it deserved.
As far as his songwriting was concerned, Lennon was already working on the beginnings of outlandish genre experiments. Although it wouldn’t be included on Sgt Pepper, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ would become one of the band’s iconic tracks, taking the primary folk song Lennon had started with and turning it into one of the first major psychedelic hits.
Following the death of their manager Brian Epstein, though, the band started work on their net project, looking to put together an outlandish film inspired by a travelling show. Although Magical Mystery Tour bombed as a film when it was first aired, the music therein featured one of the most outlandish songs Lennon would ever write.
First conceived on an acid trip, ‘I Am The Walrus’ would become one of the band’s most celebrated voyages into psychedelia, making for a sense of controlled madness whenever it came on. Although Lennon claimed that most of the lyrics lacked coherence from one line to the next, he felt the song recording would still resonate with people years later.
Discussing the legacy of the song, Lennon thought that ‘I Am The Walrus’ had the potential to be around a century after its release, saying, “[Magical Mystery Tour] is one of my favourite albums because it was so weird. ‘I Am The Walrus’, one of my favourite tracks because I did it of course, but also because it’s got enough little bits going to keep people interested even 100 years later”.
Although a century hasn’t yet passed since its release, the track is still a modern marvel in rock history over half a century later. Utilising a swirling chord sequence and blending both stereo and mono recording technologies, both the band and producer George Martin should be applauded for taking rock into new and exciting directions across the song’s runtime. While the track would be relegated to the B-side of McCartney’s ‘Hello Goodbye’, ‘I Am the Walrus’ was proof that rock and roll was about to undergo significant changes.
