The White Album 50 Project: "Glass Onion"

Many people write off the Beatles' White Album song "Glass Onion" as a cosmic joke John Lennon was playing on us by offering up these enigmatic lyrics referring to Beatles songs from the previous year or two and having a laugh on us for always trying to find in the songs meanings that were never intended.  But when you peel back the surfaces of this onion, interpreted below in a painting by Lacey Bryant, you find the clue to what this song is about - and it's not that the walrus was Paul.

"Glass Onion" is mainly a self-referencing song in which John revisits the numerous places his and Paul McCartney's lyrics have taken the Beatles' listeners to.  "Glass Onion" specifically recalls images from "Strawberry Fields Forever," "I Am the Walrus," "Lady Madonna," "The Fool On the Hill," and "Fixing a Hole," suggesting that all of the surrealistic landscapes offer a clue into what this other place behind the glass onion really is.  And here's another clue for you all - John's insistence that "the walrus was Paul" was simply John saying, as he said, "something nice to Paul," possibly complimenting him for being a complex songwriter in his own right, spinning freewheeling imagery as good as John's.  (Let's get things straight - it was not a clue to a story that Paul McCartney was dead.)  John even tries to take credit for one of Paul's songs: "I told you 'bout the fool on the hill; I tell you, man, he living there still."  Paul takes it back with a brief recorder riff.

"I threw the line in - 'the walrus was Paul' - just to confuse everybody a bit more," John later said.  "I mean, it's just a bit of poetry. I was having a laugh because there'd been so much gobbledygook about Pepper - play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that."

Well, here's another clue for you all: To get to this other place you can go to, you have to stand on the Cast Iron Shore.  That lyric refers to the south bank of the Mersey River in Liverpool, having been home to a cast-iron foundry and containing a lot of rust residue from ships that had scraped the foreshore.  The shoreline itself turned red from the ferric oxide that collected in the sand.  To see this other place, you have to stand in reality and look beyond it.

So where's this other place you can be?  Listen to me.  "Glass Onion"'s various references to earlier songs are part of an ongoing joke among the Beatles - they're always looking back on their earlier work with a bit of cheek.  When Ringo Starr sang "Tell me why" in the Rubber Soul tune "What Goes On," John, remembering the earlier Beatles song "Tell Me Why," can be heard calling out, "We already told you why!"  Later on the White Album, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" references "Yes It Is," a 1965 Beatles B-side, by title.  To find this place beyond the bent-back tulips, you can't just go back to 1967.  You have to go back farther.

Well, here's the last clue for you all: In "Glass Onion," John refers to a song that goes farther back than any Beatles song I've mentioned so far.  Most Americans may not have noticed it back in 1968, because the song in question had never appeared on a Capitol album and would not appear on a Capitol LP until long after the Beatles broke up.  When John informs us of another place to go, he's referencing the Please Please Me track "There's a Place" ("There's a place where I can go") and that song tells us what this place is.

It's John's mind.

If you want to understand anything John said, you had to get in his head.  And even then you would have a hard time figuring out what he was saying.  But everything flows in John's mind, and through his mind you see how the other half - the artists and the poets that the Beatles represented - live.

The music of "Glass Onion" is a parody of the group's trippier sound from Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour; the band's biting rock melds with a sly, almost strident string arrangement that takes over at the end and takes the song to its lumbering conclusion.  (The opening drum tap is the first time Ringo's playing appears on the White Album.)  As if the coy lyrics weren't enough to confuse the fans, John originally wanted to add, instead of the strings, some incomprehensible sound effects to make the song even more obscure - a ringing telephone, the sound of glass (a glass onion?) breaking, and British soccer commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme (below) shouting "It's a goal!" - all played over and over and over and over in the fadeout.

John did a mono remix of his idea while George Martin was on vacation; Martin, upon his return, suggested the string arrangement as a more sensible alternative.  The aborted mono remix of "Glass Onion" with John's sound effects appears on Anthology 3.  It's too bad John had to listen to George Martin; his sound effects would have been one more banana peel that could have slipped up Beatles fans back in 1968, especially the ones smoking dovetail joints. :-D