10 Things You Didn’t Know About “I Am The Walrus”

by Scott Freiman, Culture Sonar: http://www.culturesonar.com/10-things-about-i-am-the-walrus/

This November marks the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus.” Written primarily by John Lennon for the TV movie Magical Mystery Tour, “I Am The Walrus” features a cryptic Lennon lyric with a bizarre chorus, an innovative arrangement from producer George Martin that includes sprechgesang (don’t worry, I’ll define it in a moment), studio trickery from engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, and an excerpt from Shakespeare’s King Lear. All of this adds up to create The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece. Here are ten things you may not know about “I Am The Walrus.”

1. The song owes a huge debt to Lennon’s favorite hallucinogenic…
Lennon wrote the bulk of the song during several LSD trips. During one trip, he heard the two-note pattern of a police siren passing by. The sound morphed into the opening notes of “I Am The Walrus.” They are even mimicked in the two note motif in the verse (“Mis-ter ci-ty p’lice-man…”).

2. … And to Quarry Bank High School
“He has too many of the wrong ambitions and his energy is too often misplaced.” That was a description of John Lennon written by the headmaster of Quarry Bank High School in 1956. Just ten years later, a student at Quarry Bank wrote Lennon to tell him that they were analyzing Beatles lyrics in class. Lennon decided to give the students (along with music critics) something a little more difficult to analyze. So, he turned an old playground nursery rhyme that he sang as a child (“yellow matter custard/green slop pie/all mixed together with a dead dog’s eye”) into the line “yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s eye.”

3. The Mysterious Eggman
The title of the song was based on the poem “The Walrus and The Carpenter” by one of Lennon’s favorite authors, Lewis Carroll. It wasn’t until later that John realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the poem! There is no “egg man” in the poem, although Humpty Dumpty does make an appearance in Through the Looking Glass. Surprisingly, Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals, stepped forward to claim that he was the egg man referenced by Lennon. Burdon was known as “Eggs” to his friends, due to his strange fetish of breaking eggs over naked women.

4. The Beatles Were Crying
At the end of each verse, Lennon sings “I’m crying.” The Beatles had been doing a lot of crying around this time, since their manager Brian Epstein had recently died. In fact, “I Am The Walrus” was the first song The Beatles recorded after Epstein’s death four days earlier. “I’m crying” could also be an allusion to one of The Beatles’ favorite singers Smokey Robinson who had sung the same phrase in the 1965 song “Oooh, Baby Baby”.

5. A Vocal from the Moon
Lennon, one of rock’s best vocalists, was always frustrated by the sound of his voice. For “I Am The Walrus,” he asked engineer Geoff Emerick to make his voice sound like it was coming from the moon. As always, Emerick turned Lennon’s strange request into the perfect effect. Violating EMI’s strict rules, Emerick had Lennon record his vocals using a low-fidelity talkback microphone (typically used by an engineer in the control room to “talk back” to musicians in the recording studio). This helped create one of rock music’s first distorted lead vocals.

6. The Human Click Track
The recording of “I Am The Walrus” was incredibly complex, ultimately taking 25 takes to complete. On one of the earlier takes, Lennon was playing an electronic keyboard called a Hofner Pianet (some sources say it was a Wurlitzer electric piano) and was making a lot of mistakes. Ringo was having trouble keeping a steady tempo — understandable, considering the song was long with a slow tempo. On top of all this, emotions were high due to Epstein’s recent death. George Martin was getting frustrated and his temper was beginning to show. McCartney jumped into action and saved the day by playing tambourine next to Ringo, acting as a human click track to keep Ringo in sync with Lennon’s keyboard.

7. What the Hell Am I Supposed To Do With This?
When Lennon first performed “I Am The Walrus” for George Martin, he asked Martin for the producer’s opinion. “Well, John, to be honest, I have only one question,” Martin said. “What the hell do you expect me to do with that?!?” Luckily, the always inventive Martin came up with an innovative orchestral arrangement that fit the song perfectly. It features eight violins and four cellos, three French horns, and a contrabass clarinet — a rare member of the clarinet family that was a favorite of Frank Zappa. In fact, Zappa loved “I Am The Walrus,” and played it often in his concerts.

8. Stick It Up Your Jumper
Martin’s arrangement didn’t stop with the orchestral instruments. He clearly felt that Lennon’s song needed something more. So, he hired the Mike Sammes singers, known for their work on Disney films and TV themes. Rather than create a standard vocal arrangement, Martin took advantage of the singers’ excellent score reading skills and created a sprechgesang arrangement. Sprechgesang, which means “spoken singing”, is a vocal technique halfway between singing and speaking. In his score to “I Am The Walrus,” Martin had the Mike Sammes singers make whooping sounds, laugh, snort, and shout phrases like “Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper!” Nothing like this had ever been heard on a popular music recording.

9. Thou Hast Slain Me
At the end of the very complicated mixing sessions for “I Am The Walrus”, Lennon had an idea that made Martin roll his eyes — mixing a live radio broadcast into the recording. It took some engineering work from Geoff Emerick (plus some paperwork to get permission from his bosses at EMI) to patch an AM radio into the console. During the mix, Ringo manned the radio while John instructed him when to turn the knobs. Coincidentally, Ringo stumbled on the BBC production of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear. The broadcast was at the point of Act IV, Scene VI, where the steward “Oswald” is killed.

10. Walruses in White Satin?
Many artists have claimed that they were part of a Beatles recording even though no proof exists. A few years ago, Ray Thomas of the Moody Blues claimed that he and Mike Pinder sang backing vocals on “I Am The Walrus.” This claim is not backed up by any other source. (Thomas also claimed that it was his idea to put harmonicas on “The Fool on the Hill” and that an adventure with a groupie inspired McCartney to write “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window.”)

Bonus: Who IS the “Walrus?”
When John wrote and recorded “I Am The Walrus,” it was weeks before he donned the costume for the famous sequence in Magical Mystery Tour. Mysteriously, the soundtrack album included a comment below the song listing: “’No, you’re not!’ said Little Nicola.” John confused things even more when he sang, “The walrus was Paul” in the White Album song “Glass Onion.”

Some conspiracy theorists claimed that the walrus was a symbol of death in Greek and Eskimo mythology. The fact that this was blatantly false didn’t matter. It was one of the clues (along with the King Lear death scene) that helped to create the “Paul Is Dead” myth.

Eventually, Paul had the last laugh when he wore a walrus mask for the video to George Harrison’s 1988 song “When We Was Fab.” Finally, he was the walrus.

–Scott Freiman

PS. He was invaluable in shaping one of their most colorful albums.  Plus, read more about the legends, stories and tall tales behind many Beatle tracks.

Photo: Keystone, courtesy Getty Images

The Deity of British Blues: Alexis Korner

by The Music Court: http://musiccourtblog.com/2013/09/08/the-deity-of-british-blues-alexis-korner/

Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House, Ma Rainey, Big Bill Broonzy - names that are forever linked with their god-like status among the propagation of American Blues - an extensive genre that had an indelible impact on the future molding of rock ‘n’ roll.

On the other side of the pond, British jazz musicians and fans became ensconced with the Blues music of musicians like Ma Rainey and Fats Waller, acquiring much of these tunes from African-American GIs stationed there during the Wars.

After the Skiffle craze died down in the 1950s, many Skiffle-influenced musicians turned their attention to pure Blues music.

Muddy Waters had a shocking electric (literally) visit to England where he shocked Brits with his amplified electric blues.

Some were appalled by his lack of reverence for the classic style, but the youth ate up this edgy playing. Among them was a guitarist by the name of Alexis Korner, who, like the Blues ancestors above, would spark a focus on Blues in Britain and influence a slew of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest musicians.

Thus, he too should be considered a true Blues god, and it should come to no surprise that he is often given the moniker of the “Father of British Blues.”

Korner’s elaborate music history is extensive and impactful. It is not easy to keep the plenitude of anecdotes to a minimum, but for the sake of the reader I shall limit my focus to a few stories.

Like, for example, in 1969 while touring with a new band, Korner was jamming with a little-known singer named Robert Plant. Jimmy Page, who often performed with Korner at the Marquee Club, was intrigued by Plant’s voice and asked him to join The New Yardbirds … who would soon turn into a rock band called Led Zeppelin with Page and Plant at the helm.

But I am getting ahead of myself. That was in the late 60s. Korner’s career (even though he dabbled in Skiffle) really began in 1961 when he founded Blues Incorporated with Blues harmonica extraordinaire Cyril Davies.

Blues Incorporated (like The Yardbirds, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, and Cyril Davies’ All-Stars) was an early example of a “supergroup.” But, in truth, it was just a platform for talented blues musicians to play music.

Blues Incorporated, though, has the special mark as the first electrified Blues band in Britain. The band secured a residency at the Marquee (mentioned above) and even established an R&B Night at Ealing Jazz Club.

Remember what I said about the youth loving electrified Blues music? Well, where do you think they went to hear this music? And who do you think inspired them to pursue this music?

So when I tell you that Korner played with musicians like Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Paul Jones, Eric Burdon, and many, many others, you should not be too surprised. Most of the early Blues musicians in Britain are linked with Alexis Korner in some way.

He is like the Kevin Bacon of British Blues. And when Cyril Davies left Korner to form his All-Stars he played with musicians like Nicky Hopkins and Long John Baldry until he died far too young in 1964.

The All-Stars were led by Baldry who created Hoochie Coochie Man, featuring a singer named Rod Stewart. Page also had a few All-Stars jam sessions, adding individuals like Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Bill Wyman, and Mick Jagger to the mix.

But back to Korner for one more story before I urge you to watch this documentary about him.

Blues Incorporated was asked by BBC radio to broadcast a session in the early 60s, but the producer only had room for six musicians. The seventh member of the group with a singer named Mick Jagger. Jagger was asked to gather some friends and play the normal spot at the Marquee.

The friends he gathered were Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Ian Stewart on piano, Dick Taylor on bass and Tony Chapman on drums. The band went by the name of  Rollin’ Stones after a Muddy Waters tune.
Cyril Davies on vocals and harmonica. Alexis Korner playing a mean acoustic guitar. Released in November, 1962.

Robert Crumb Illustrates Philip K. Dick’s Infamous, Hallucinatory Meeting with God (1974)

Why You Don’t Frack With John Lennon’s Farm

by Lisa Mullenneaux, Yes! magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-cooperatives-are-driving-the-new-economy/why-you-don-t-frack-with-john-lennon-s-farm?utm_source=mar13yn&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mrDontFrackJohnLennonFarm

Lisa Mullenneaux wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Lisa is a journalist based in Manhattan and Woodstock, N.Y. Her books and articles are described at lisamullenneaux.com. 

When fracking hits close to home, Mark Ruffalo, Debra Winger, Yoko Ono, and other big names find common ground with small towns.

 

“Governor Cuomo: Imagine There’s No Fracking,” read a billboard on the Major Deegan Expressway into Manhattan last October. 

 

One of the motorists who saw it may well have been Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been under increasing pressure from New York state residents to ban the shale gas extraction method known as “fracking.” 

 

The billboard was the first action by Yoko Ono and her son Sean Lennon’s advocacy coalition Artists Against Fracking, which boasts nearly 200 famous members ranging from Salman Rushdie to Lady Gaga.
What spurred mother and son to organize artists like themselves was the threat to their Delaware County farm that sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a rock formation geologists estimate holds trillions of cubic feet of natural gas.

“I have always felt lucky,” Lennon wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times, “to live on land [my father] loved dearly.” Sean Lennon’s father was, of course, the legendary musician and former Beatle John Lennon, not the first city resident to want a rural escape.

Sean Lennon’s education about fracking began with gas companies’ pitches at a local high school in spring 2012. “[They] were trying very hard to sell us,” he wrote, “on a plan to tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing.

Most of the residents at the meeting, many of them organic farmers, were openly defiant. The gas companies didn’t seem to care.”

Lennon did his homework, and is now a well-informed opponent of fracking - like actors Mark Ruffalo, Debra Winger, Melissa Leo, and other public personalities who have lent star power to this critical environmental issue for the Empire State.

State writes its own guidelines

Concerns about the environmental and public health effects of high-volume horizontal gas drilling have kept a moratorium on fracking in New York since 2008.

That’s the year the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), under then-Governor David Paterson, began to update permitting guidelines for this new technology through its Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement.

In 2012, physicians, scientists, and medical groups appealed to Cuomo to do a comprehensive health impact assessment of fracking. Instead, the DEC commissioner asked the state health commissioner and a trio of out-of-state experts for advice. As of December 2012, their analysis of DEC guidelines was still under review.

Sandra Steingraber is an environmental biologist and well-known author who has written extensively on the health risks of toxic industrial practices. She’s a New York resident who has become a prominent opponent of fracking.

When the DEC rejected the call for a health impact assessment and released its revised regulations for public comment, Steingraber urged opponents to flood the DEC with comments, demonstrate in Albany during Governor Cuomo’s annual State of the State address in January, and spread the word.

“This is our moment,” she said, “to tell Governor Cuomo to lead the way to a renewable energy future.”

A visit to Dimock

Like most successful actors, Mark Ruffalo could plant his family anywhere, but he fell in love with Sullivan County’s trout-rich streams and hemlock forests; they reminded him of Wisconsin, where he grew up.

At first Ruffalo was enthusiastic about the gas extraction rumors he heard in Callicoon. But that changed in June 2010 when he visited Dimock, Pa., just across the state border.

He made that trip with environmental lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr. at the invitation of Ramsay Adams, founder and executive director of Catskill Mountainkeeper, a regional conservation group.

Adams introduced Kennedy and Ruffalo to Dimock residents who felt conned and sickened. “We inspected contaminated wells and heard residents’ complaints of feeling abandoned by companies leasing their land and by their elected officials,” recalls Ruffalo of his Dimock trip.

“In fact, they were looking to Kennedy and me to save them.” By the end of that visit, Ruffalo’s view of fracking had done a 180-degree turn. “I think what you’re doing is terrific,” Ruffalo told Adams. “Let me know how I can help.”

To many of Mark Ruffalo’s neighbors in Callicoon, an offer of $5,000 an acre from the gas industry and the promise of future royalties is tempting. In fact, hundreds of homeowners in Sullivan and adjacent counties have already signed leases and confidentiality agreements.

But not Adam Diehl and his family, who have committed to keeping their dairy farm going for the next generation. “We depend on good water,” explains Diehl, “for our cows, our crops, and our own health. Once you mess up your groundwater, you can’t fix it.”

Asked about Ruffalo’s anti-fracking advocacy, he says, “Our little voices don’t carry very far. It’s good we have people like him.”

Fracking is exempt from the regulations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the risk of groundwater contamination is one of many reasons singer/ songwriter Natalie Merchant joined the opposition.

“I met families from Dimock who had been victimized by Cabot Oil & Gas,” says the Stone Ridge, N.Y., resident. “It broke my heart to hear about their three-and-a-half-year struggle to get replacement water and compensation.”

“I am terrified what will happen to this state,” adds Merchant, “the state I was born in and have lived in for almost 50 years, if hydraulic fracturing begins here. It’s a Pandora’s box we don’t want to open.”

The need to send Governor Cuomo a powerful message prompted Merchant to rally her musician and actor friends for a protest and concert at the state capital in Albany last May. “I’d never asked favors from anyone, but I spent three weeks on my knees, begging. Those entertainers who couldn’t participate - like David Byrne and Paul Simon - donated the rights to their songs.”

The result was a powerful call to ban fracking from a powerfully talented group - actors Ruffalo and Melissa Leo, scientist Steingraber, musicians John Sebastian, Joan Osborne, Dan Zanes, The Felice Brothers, Medeski Martin & Wood, Citizen Cope, and Toshi Reagon.

Merchant’s collaborator and partner, Jon Bowermaster, directed the events, which were filmed by Alex Gibney. Dear Governor Cuomo documents a remarkable concert that ends with a directive for its audience: Call the governor!

“All those who participated in the concert are New Yorkers, as I am,” says Bowermaster, who is currently screening the film all over the state.

“Natalie and I have people asking us what to
tell their neighbors who are considering leasing their lands, how to present the facts landmen [salesmen for oil and gas companies] won’t tell them. We send them a DVD of our film.” He’s encouraged by how New Yorkers have responded.

“Typically New York’s Department of Conservation receives about 1,000 letters in response to a proposal; during the public comment period that ended January 11, it received over 200,000 letters plus tweets, Facebook comments, and emails.”

Fracking on film

Increasingly, this fracking fight is being played out on the big screen, but it started with a very modest 2010 film called Gasland. Josh Fox’s family in Milanville, Pa., was weighing their options after being offered a gas extraction lease.

Video camera in hand, Fox traveled to western states where the shale gas boom was underway and spoke with homeowners there. Gasland is the result, a home movie that became a media “blowout” (slang for a gas explosion) for the oil and gas industry.

Fox showed early footage of the film to actress Debra Winger, who has lived in Sullivan County for 22 years and raised her three sons there. She signed on as an executive producer and has become as outspoken as Ruffalo about protecting her family home and way of life.

"I know people see the economic benefits [of fracking] as a panacea, and they feel that my opinion is compromised by my success in the world,” said Winger. “But the public health problems that have plagued this practice make it impossible for me to see it as the answer to our county’s or our state’s woes. As soon as we can move on from this death grip that the oil and gas industry has on us ... we will be able to start putting our minds on a healthy, prosperous future without fossil fuel.”

Working to promote the economic benefits of shale gas drilling in a state where farmers and small business owners are struggling to survive, supporters of the energy industry dismiss celebrity activists as meddlers or outsiders.

New York Senate Deputy Majority Leader Tom Libous, for example, was cheered at a rally in Albany on October 16, 2012, when he attacked them. “Stay in Hollywood,” he said. “We don’t want to hear it here.”

The rally was organized and paid for by Landowner Advocates of New York, a front group tied to the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Libous already knows how lucrative a gas industry alliance can be: $190,700 of the contributions to his 2012 re-election came from fracking-related sources, according to Common Cause.

“Big Names Aren’t Helping Our Small Towns” was the banner headline of an ad campaign by the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York last August. At rallies to encourage Cuomo to lift the fracking moratorium, the group passed out postcards of Ruffalo, Winger, and Fox with the message: “Reading from a script doesn’t make you a scientist or geologist.”

Frack Action’s John Armstrong looks at it another way: “These celebrities are our neighbors; they have every right to take a stand on this issue.”

Dr. Kathleen Nolan with Catskill Mountainkeeper argues that recruiting celebrity activists is justified. “The energy industry has had opportunities again and again to roll out its agenda for New York state,” says Nolan.

“We are simply asking for equal time to present the case against fracking, and it’s important for those who have a media presence to lend their support. ... When you’re fighting Goliath, you want David to have as much ammunition as possible.”

Some of that ammunition comes in the form of the $15-million feature film Promised Land, based on a story by Dave Eggers, directed by Gus Van Sant, and starring Matt Damon, John Krasinski, Frances McDormand, and Hal Holbrook.

In Promised Land, Damon plays an energy company salesman who comes to question his role promoting hydraulic fracking to farmers in a small Pennsylvania town.

Producer Chris Moore says one of the movie’s themes is self-government: “We have a right as a community - whatever the community is, whether it’s a group of neighbors, whether it’s a town, whether it’s a county, whether it’s a state, whether it’s a city, whether it’s a country - we have the right to decide what we’re going to do. And that is a right that only has value if we exercise it. If we actually do it.”

So far 41 New York towns have used local zoning ordinances to ban fracking, fearing the scale of industrialization would destroy their communities.

Against all odds, New Yorkers continue to hold off fracking in their state. The media appeal of movie stars is helping, as are the persuasive skills of the filmmakers, musicians, and storytellers.

But what drives celebrities to take part is clearly not fame or money. It’s the same motivation as that of their friends and neighbors - quality of life. The assurance that their water is safe to drink, their air safe to breathe, their soil safe to grow vegetables. That their rural community won’t become a brownfield.

A Feel-Good Movie About Fracking?

Chris Moore, who co-produced “Good Will Hunting,” has a new film starring Matt Damon as a corporate salesman trying to open up a small town to fracking. Here, YES! publisher Fran Korten gets Moore’s take on the ideas behind the film.

On January 11, the final day of the DEC’s public comment period, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon appeared at a rally at the state capital in Albany where 204,000 public comments against fracking were delivered. A decision is expected from the state by the end of February.

Will New York’s governor decide to open southern New York to fracking, continue the moratorium, or make New York the second U.S. state with a ban on horizontal drilling?

“Time is on the side of those of us who oppose fracking, because, as time goes by, it looks more and more like it’s the wrong thing to do,” says Steingraber. Filmmaker Bowermaster describes the contest in more dramatic terms. “It’s like the ultimate thriller,” he says. “No one knows how it will end.”

Confessions of a Quit Addict

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Original Movie Soundtrack) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Barbara Graham, UTNE Reader: http://www.utne.com

 

By the time I heard Timothy Leary chant “Turn on, tune in, drop out” from the stage of New York’s Fillmore East, I had already quit college. 

 

The year was 1967, and Leary’s battle cry was for me more a confirmation of what I already believed than a call to action.

 

I had never been much good at doing things that didn’t arouse my passion. 

 

Even when I was a young girl, it was obvious that I had been born without the stick-to-it, nose-to-the-grindstone gene. 

 

I was stubborn, tenacious in my devotion to the people and things I loved, disdainful of everything else. There was no in-between. 

 

In high school I got straight A’s in English and flunked math. When it came time for college, I enrolled at NYU because it was the only way I could think of to live in Greenwich Village and get my parents to pick up the tab. But I rarely made it to classes and dropped out one month into my sophomore year.

That was the first time I felt the rush of quitting, the instant high of cutting loose, the biochemical buzz of burning my bridges. The charge had to do not with leaving college for something else, but with leaving, period - the pure act of making the break.

Suddenly it seemed possible to reinvent myself, to discard my old life like last year’s outfit and step into a new one - free from the responsibilities and relationships that had dragged me down. I got an unlisted telephone number and warned my parents to stay away. “When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere,” wrote D.H. Lawrence, and for a long time this was my mantra.

It didn’t take long for me to find a collaborator, a master of disappearing acts who made me look like a rookie. Brian was ready to morph one life into the next on the turn of a dime. I became his loyal apprentice and during the summer of 1968, shortly after Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., were gunned down, we sold everything we owned and quit our jobs, our friends, our apartment, the urban jungle, America and the blight of Vietnam, and fled to Europe.

But our new life didn’t quite match our dreams: As winter neared, we found ourselves living in a rusty old van on the outskirts of Rome, hungry and cold and hard up for cash. From there, we boarded a freighter for Puerto Rico - which turned out not to be the nirvana we’d imagined, either - especially after the little episode with customs officials over a speck of hashish.

Still, a pattern had been set: living in one place, dreaming of another, working at odd jobs (mine included secretary, salesgirl, cocktail waitress, draft counselor, nude model, warehouse clerk, candle maker), earning just enough money to get us to the next destination.

We crisscrossed the United States, went north to British Columbia, and lived in every conceivable sort of dwelling from tenements and tents to farmhouses and plywood shacks. Sometimes I’d grow attached to a place and plant a garden, thinking that this time things would work out and we’d stay forever - or at least long enough to see the flowers bloom.

But something always went wrong: It rained too much (British Columbia), the cost of living was too high (Colorado), the air wasn’t pure enough (Southern California), or we couldn’t find work that was meaningful, not to mention lucrative enough (everywhere).

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Mind-Body/Confessions-Quit-Addict-Starting-Over.aspx#ixzz29i39tgLJ