In my early teens I didn't know what the song meant. Still, it appealed to my wicked sense of humor and my growing anger with most of the world around me. "Expert texpert choking smokers, Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?" delivered with a snarl that sounded as briny and nasty as anything Johnny Rotten sang on my Sex Pistols album. "Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess, Boy, you been a naughty girl and you let your Knickers down." Crazy sexual frustration, anger, information overload, everything you need as a teen in the world today.  

In fact the only specific memory I can attach to the song is being 14 years old, mowing my back yard. It was an especially sweltering Florida summer day. I was listening to the track over and over again. My brain boiling in the heat and the lyrical explosion of the song. I turned it up louder and louder, trying to decipher the babble of conversation scattering itself across the song as it reached it's overwhelming crescendo.  

In my late teens I didn't know what the song meant. Still, the absurdity of it rang true to me.  

"Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel tower

Elementary penguin singing hari krishna.

Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe."  

Surely this was how the world worked, like this song. The insane, the foolish, the hypocrites and the righteous all bumping up into each other, becoming one or the other. A seeming randomness that somehow works itself out. Somehow becomes a satisfying structure. Right?  
 

"ho ho ho, he he he, ha ha ha".

In my early twenties I didn't know what the song meant, but it didn’t matter. It was pissed off and it was absurd. It was rapturous but melancholy. It was seemingly random, but brilliantly constructed, each sound rolling into the next.  Lyrically he was taking Bob Dylan's psycho folk imagery and trumping it.  

"I am the Walrus go goo g'joob" felt like a taunt to the audience, take this seriously, I dare you. Or perhaps a paraody of the Beatles as they used to be, singing something as innocuous and meaningless as “I Wanna Hold your Hand”. Except… not really, you get the feeling Lennon could give a damn if his audience got it or not.  

Now I still don't know what the song means. I get the feeling John Lennon didn't know what the song really meant, and as best as I can figure now, that's beside the point anyway. Lennon was using language as his play toy. Tapping into subconscious imagery and universal emotions.  

John Lennon would spend most of the rest of his career after “Magical Mystery Tour” laying himself open to world and trying to be as emotionally raw as possible. While he would give a nod to the kind of self deception such "honesty" creates, I don't think he ever properly addressed it. I don't think anything in his emotionally complex but lyrically straightforward late Beatles and solo catalogue ever came as close to the heart of the world as the twisted imagery in "I am The Walrus". 

"Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come.

Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday.

Man, you been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.

I am the eggman, they are the eggmen.

I am the walrus, goo goo g'joob." 

But music is not poetry and lyrics are not poems. It's the intonation of the voice, the wattage of the delivery and the music all combined with the words which create the true impression of the song.  

the music warps the world as soon as it starts. The wave of strings distorting the sound-scape and leaving the listener off kilter, setting us up for the duration of the song.  Lennon's voice  coming through, uttering syllables that are as unexpected as they are inevitable. Strings, piano, guitars, drums all pushing you forward. The sounds of laughter and half heard voices invade your headspace. There is only one way the song could end, in a cacophonous rush of sound. 

It's the sound of Lennon and the Beatles pushing the envelope on almost every level, but never straining from the instantly accessible.  Assuming you like it, this isn't demanding music to listen to. It doesn't require rapt attention to enjoy. You don’t have to peel it apart like an onion to sing along with it.  

Not matter how many times I hear “Walrus”, it feels fresh. There is always something to noticing. Not always something new, but always a different angle, always something to dissect and look at from a new perspective.  

I've listened to the Beatles, especially the psychedelic era, enough now to play whole albums in my head. While The Beatles were one of the bands that lends itself to repeat listens, "I am the Walrus" is the only one I can listen to anytime, any mood, no matter how many times I've heard it in the same week or even day. I don't sit and dissect it every time I did as a kid and a young teenager, but when I do it's always worthwhile. 

Some quick math using my last.fm page shows that in the past two years I've listened to the song 251 times. That's somewhere around 18 hours worth. That doesn't even include the times the lastfm plug-in wasn't turned on or installed on my ipod. The high rate of play is because it's one of a handful of songs that I have to play again right away after I've heard it.  

I probably won't ever know what the songs means, but I don't ever want to. I'm sure each period of my life is going to lead me to a different perspective on the song and new reasons to keep listening.