Beatles – "I Am the Walrus" (1967)

I am he 

As you are he 

As you are me

And we are all together

Ever hear of a "Shepard scale"?  I didn't think so.

You've probably never heard of "Penrose stairs" either.

Penrose stairs

Click here to watch a video that features both a Shepard scale and a Penrose staircase.

Note now the ball keeps bouncing up the steps – never down.  And notice how the scale keeps ascending but never actually gets any higher.

The last 70 seconds or so of "I Am the Walrus" feature a Shepard scale, which has been called a "sonic barber's pole."  

Click here to watch a video that tells you everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about a Shepard scale (also known as a "Shepard tone").

There are Youtube recordings of Shepard scales that last for hours -- each note seemingly higher in pitch than the one before.  Click here for a TEN-HOUR-LONG recording of a rising Shepard tone.

(Who are the people who create such recordings and post them to Youtube?  Henry David Thoreau might have been thinking about them when he wrote in Walden of those men "who lead lives of quiet desperation.")

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In 1980, John Lennon told Playboy magazine that the opening lines to today's featured song, "I Am the Walrus," were written during an acid trip.

Click here to read the entire interview.  (John Lennon was definitely so full of sh*t that his eyes were brown.  So was his charming wife, Yoko Ono.)

The very brown-eyed couple

One commentator speculates that the lines quoted above were inspired by these lines from the traditional British song, "Marching to Pretoria":

You sing with me

I'll sing with you

And so we will sing together

It's certainly possible that Lennon heard that song as a child, and that he remembered its lyrics when he sat down to write "I Am the Walrus."  But I would give most of the credit for the song's opening lines to the drugs Lennon apparently consumed in gynormous quantities.

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Don't get me wrong.  I've always loved the lyrics to "I Am the Walrus," which is one of the songs that Mark Vidler of Go Home Productions used in his mashup, "(I Am The) Trampolene (To The Other Side)," which was recently featured on 2 or 3 lines.  (You can click here to read about that mashup if you haven't already.)

Those lyrics make even less sense than most rock lyrics of that era.  They make even less sense than most of John Lennon's other lyrics, which is saying something. 

Lennon wrote a song about a walrus because he was a fan of Lewis Carroll's poem, "The Walrus and the Carpenter," which is famous for these lines:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

      "To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings."

"The Walrus and the Carpenter"

Years later, Lennon had an epiphany: he realized that Carroll's poem was about the evils of capitalism.  (John Lennon was reportedly worth about $150 million at the time, so he knew all about the evils of capitalism.)

To me, ["The Walrus and the Carpenter"] was a beautiful poem.  It never dawned on me that Lewis Carroll was commenting on the capitalist and social system.  I never went into that bit about what he really meant, like people are doing with the Beatles' work.  Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy.  I thought, "Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, 'I am the carpenter.'"  But that wouldn't have been the same, would it?  "I am the carpenter . . . "

When John was right, he was right: "I Am the Carpenter" most definitely wouldn't have been the same.

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Click here to watch the official music video for "I Am the Walrus." 

Click on the link below to buy "I Am a Walrus" from Amazon:

Doors -- "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" (1967)

Arms that chain
Eyes that lie

Break on through to the other side

"Break On Through (To the Other Side)" is one of the four songs that is combined in the Go Home Productions mashup, "(I Am The) Trampolene (To the Other Side)."  As I noted in my post about that mashup, "Break On Through" is the first track on the first Doors album, The Doors.  

Click here to read that post.

Here's the cover of The Doors:

Are you familiar with The Cat Doors album?

It was the Doors' first single as well, although it didn't sell for diddley-squat.  The follow-up single did a little better -- it was called "Light My Fire," and a few of you might remember it.

(By the way, a BYU professor figured out a few years ago that the album version of "Light My Fire" had a slower tempo than it should have.  He noted that the sheet music and all the live recordings of "Break on Through" were in the key of A, while the album version was in A-flat.  So when it was time for the 40th anniversary version of the album, the engineers sped "Light My Fire" up by about 3.5% to get the key up to A.)  

Jim Morrison

About halfway through "Break On Through," Jim Morrison repeats the line "She gets high" four times.  The suits at Elektra Records had the word "high" deleted from the original recording -- they were no doubt shocked to find a drug reference in a Doors song (zut alors!) -- but recent re-releases of the album include "high."

At about 1:20 of the "Break On Through" video embedded below, you'll see that Morrison didn't vocalize "high" when that video was recorded.

This famous photo of Jim Morrison reminds me of the joke about the husband who walks through the room while his wife is glued to the TV, watching her favorite soap opera.  After checking the show out for a couple of minutes, he asks, "Why is the surgeon operating with his shirt off?"

The 2 or 3 lines IT wizards produced this mock-up of what Jim Morrison might look like if he were still alive today:

The previous 2 or 3 lines introduced you to Julian Cope, whose "Trampolene" is also featured prominently in "(I Am The) Trampolene (To The Other Side)."  Mr. Cope -- whose eyes must be a very, very deep shade of brown -- has something to say about just about any topic you can think of.  Not surprisingly, he has a lot to say about Jim Morrison and the Doors:

Jim Morrison is a hero to me and should be a hero to anyone who loves rock'n'roll.  He was a God of the 20th century.  He was the most exceptional rock'n'roller of all time and paved the way for Iggy, Ozzy, Patti and every other shamanic weirdo – hell, he was chosen as a drinking partner by Gene Vincent.  Nuff said.  

No rock‘n’roll writer could ever have foreseen the music of the Doors and NO-ONE could have thought of juxtaposing a shamanic Death God baritone with the Las Vegas Basement sound that Manzarek, Kreiger and Densmore pumped out. It was more garage-y than any garage band, trashed forerunners such as the Seeds and Music Machine, took more risks than any previous rock band had ever dared, and pushed performance to the edge of its limits. 

While the Velvet Underground hid behind light projections, 4/4 noise and appealed to arthouses, the Doors took shamanism into arenas – and Jim bared his soul and his arse to people expecting Top 40 hits.  I tried this in 1981 with the Teardrop Explodes and got mercilessly panned – Jim did it 12 years earlier and got death for his pains.  

People tend to take Jim Morrison and the Doors for granted because they got so big, and that's dangerous – never overlook the Doors. They are worth re-visiting again and again and again.  Their music is shocking far beyond the noise of Krautrock and the Detroit bands, whom I adore without qualification, because the Doors also took silence to its limits, and in front of straight teenagers, too.  For that alone, they advanced the stomping heathen cause several light years in 6 splendid albums.  

No rock‘n’roll writer understands Jim, because they are so jealous that he was loose beyond the bounds of practicality and more beautiful than a man had a right to be.  So they cloud the issue and call him a bad poet, even though he was the first rock‘n’roll poet to dare to be that (Lennon cloaked his muse in Goon Show cop-outs as a defence) and managed to confront the whole of society through a medium such as rock‘n’roll, which most intellectuals still ridiculed as Kiddies’ Music. . . . 

Jim Morrison and the Doors are still my heroes and I think of Jim at least once a day.  And often with tears streaming down my face.

Here's "Break On Through (To the Other Side)" -- with all drug references included, so don't play it in front of the kiddies:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Verve -- "Bitter Sweet Symphony" (1997)

And I'm a million different people 

From one day to the next

The previous 2 or 3 lines featured the Go Home Productions mashup, "(I Am The) Trampolene (To The Other Side)."  Click here to read it.

That mashup begins with a sample from "Bitter Sweet Symphony."  Actually, it begins with a sample from an orchestral version of the Rolling Stones' song, "The Last Time," which was recorded by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra in 1966.

The young Andrew Loog Oldham

Andrew Loog Oldham's father was an American officer who was killed when his B-17 bomber was shot down over the English Channel in June 1943 – a full seven months before Oldham was born to an Australian mother who was working in England as a nurse at the time.

Oldham was a hustler whose first job was for a Carnaby Street "mod" fashion designer.  He became a publicist for a number of musicians, and a friend introduced him to the Rolling Stones in 1963.

Oldham with the Stones

He managed the Stones until 1967, when he and the band had something of a falling out.  Despite his lack of experience, he also produced all their albums during that period.

While he was the Stones' manager and producer, Oldham also recorded several albums of instrumental covers of pop hits, using a collection of session musicians that he called the Andrew Oldham Orchestra.

One of the song's on the Oldham Orchestra's 1966 album, The Rolling Stones Songbook, was a cover of "The Last Time."

Click here to watch the Stones' performing the song – which was the first of their hits to be written to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

Click here to listen to the Andrew Oldham Orchestra cover of the song, which to my ears is barely recognizable as the same song.

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The world little noted, nor long remembered the Oldham Orchestra until 1997, when "Bitter Sweet Symphony" was released on the Verve's Urban Hymns album.

The Verve had a license to use a five-note sample from the orchestral version of "The Last Time."  But ABKCO Records – the company that owned the copyrights to the Stones' pre-1970 songs – argued that the Verve had used a lot more of the song than five notes.  

The dispute was settled when the Verve agreed to give songwriting credits for "Bitter Sweet Symphony" to Jagger and Richards, and assigned the song's copyright to ABKCO.  Given that the instrumental version of "The Last Time" sounds almost nothing like the Stones' version, that seems like a truly bizarre outcome.

Verve lead singer Richard Ashcroft, who wrote the lyrics to "Bitter Sweet Symphony" as well as a melodic violin part that is prominently featured in the song, had this to say about Jagger and Richards being credited with authorship of his song:  "This is the best song Jagger and Richards have written in 20 years."

Richard Ashcroft

The music video for "Bitter Sweet Symphony," which features Ashcroft lip-synching the song while strolling down a busy London street.

Ashcroft walks straight ahead, bumping into pedestrians who are going the other way and fail to make way for him -- he flattens one young woman without appearing to notice what he has done -- and steps up on to the hood of a car that is stopped in his path rather than change direction and walk around the car.

Click here to watch the "Bitter Sweet Symphony" music video.

Click below to buy the song from Amazon . . . not that Messrs. Jagger and Richards need the money:

[NOTE: In 2019, Jagger and Richards signed over the publishing rights for “Bitter Sweet Symphony” to Richard Ashcroft, which Ashcroft said “was a truly kind and magnanimous thing for them to do.”  He acknowledged to a BBC News reporter that the dispute was the fault of the Stones’ manager at the time, the late Allen Klein – not Jagger and Richards.  Click here to read a 2019 BBC News story about the whole kerfuffle.] 

Go Home Productions -- "(I Am The) Trampolene (To The Other Side)" (2012)

Trampolene!

Everybody 

Loves my baby

She gets high

Goo goo g'joob

Each of the two previous Go Home Productions mashups featured on 2 or 3 lines combined two songs.  This one is a little more complicated.

"(I Am The) Trampolene (To The Other Side)" begins with a sample of the very familiar opening measures of the Verve's huge 1997 hit, "Bitter Sweet Symphony."  (We'll have more to say about that song in a future 2 or 3 lines.)  

About ten seconds in, Vidler adds a sample from "Trampolene," which was released on Julian Cope's third solo album, Saint Julian.  (No, I don't know why he spells "trampoline" that way.  If you want to know, get on your computer and do some research.  And if you're reading this, you're already on your computer, aren't you?   So you don't really have an excuse for asking me to do all the work, do you?)

At the 0:22 mark, Vidler works in Jim Morrison's opening lines from "Break on Through," the first track on the Doors' eponymous debut album:  

You know the day destroys the night

Night divides the day 

Vidler teases us a little, looping those lines so they are repeated four times before he lets us hear what comes next:

Tried to run

Tried to hide

BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE!!!

Jim Morrison

(Say what you will about Jim Morrison's excesses, but I can't think of a singer whose very first recorded lines top his on "Break on Through."  That's a pretty insane song to kick off your first album with, and Morrison absolutely nailed it.) 

About a minute later, Vidler brings in Cope's vocals from "Trampolene," and there's a nice little passage where Cope and Morrison go back and forth.  

At 2:08, we hear the inimitable John Lennon singing "Goo goo g'joob" as Vidler adds the fourth and final component of this mashup, which is the Beatles' "I Am the Walrus" -- surely the strangest song they ever recorded.  (You think Finnegan's Wake is hard to figure out?  Riddle me this: what the hell does "I Am the Walrus" mean?)

 

Here's the official video for this mashup, which incorporates videos of all four of the component songs being performed by the original artists.  It is really, really good:

Click here and you can download "(I Am The) Trampolene (To The Other Side)" for free.