(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej / Apple Corps LTD)
Fri 7 November 2025 17:30, UK
John Lennon always needed a point ot prove throughout his life. But like God on his second Monday at work, finding a competitive purpose became increasingly difficult to come by when The Beatles sat on an unprecedented precipice of fame, adoration, and lofty esteem as they mounted the crow’s nest of culture in the early 1960s.
From Elvis Presley to Chuck Berry, the band had dethroned their idols, reaching further than pop music had ever thought to dream. But one man, who they simply bumped into in New York, still dangled the carrot of further progress out in front of them.
As Paul McCartney recalled of their famed first meeting at the Delmonico Hotel in 1964, when Bob Dylan chatted with the band and gave them their first true toke of marijuana, but got them into more than mere green alone: “I could feel myself climbing a spiral walkway as I was talking to Dylan. I felt like I was figuring it all out, the meaning of life…”
You often meet interesting strangers in hotel bars, but usually you discover the true virtue of popping a chair beneath the handle of an already locked door rather than the key to existence. So, they would soon collectively crown him their “idol”, and while Dylan’s style might have been markedly differing, they would pore over his back catalogue and soon enough it would point the Fab Four in the right direction for their own future.
It was a year on from the famed ‘meaning of life’ meeting in the vaulted inn on Park Avenue, and Lennon sat utterly confounded on a couch in Liverpool. Fresh from recording Help!, the band’s best work to date, it seemed further fame, fortune, and frenzied adulation were inevitable… yesterday. Yet today, success isn’t what occupies Lennon’s mind as he sits at home in Weybridge, playing a record on repeat.
John Lennon always admired Bob Dylan. (Credits: Far Out / UMG / Bent Rej)
Picking up the phone, he calls Paul McCartney and says something along the lines of, ‘You’ve got to come over and listen to this new Bob Dylan single immediately’. Macca is greeted by the greatest counterculture anthem of all time: ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. And in the unfurling progress of the 1960s, it’s back to the drawing board for the Fab Four.
With ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, Dylan revolutionised the way that people look at songwriting, the mighty Beatles included. With the glowering track, “He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further,” McCartney told Clinton Heylin. The collision of rock ‘n’ roll with lyrical poetry and societal sagacity was a potent force that bent minds with all the will of Uri Gellar’s therapy practice.
It would soon come to fruition what “a little further” meant for The Beatles as they ladled all of their creative clout and liberating ways into one single, utterly manic anthem of their own. If Dylan had mastered Delphic depth with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, then Lennon decided to give people delirious mania that they couldn’t even begin to understand.
‘I Am The Walrus’ has no right being a giant hit so ubiquitous and beloved that even today, over half a century on from its release, you can say “I am the eggman” to a group of children and one of them will likely respond, “Goo-goo-chachoo”. Unless that’s just my rather esoteric niece? But all the same, the song remains timeless and unyieldingly transcendent, permeating society.
That shouldn’t be the case. It is a nonsense poem inspired by the avant-garde world of Dadaism. It pioneered the coupling of pop with classical string arrangements in a truly full-blown manner. It is written in the dazzling fashion of a harmonic Möbius strip. It throws in modal shifts and defies functional harmony with mediant music techniques. It heralded sampling and stirred up psychedelia’s furthest reaches.
Bob Dylan, John Lennon and The Beatles have a complex relationship. (Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej / Yoko Ono / Trafalga Releasing)
That’s too much for one band to propagate, let alone a single bloody song. But somehow, all of that and more is contained in ‘I Am The Walrus’, and it gloriously defies all expectations that it happened to be presented to the world by its most mainstream band. These days, we usually use ‘mainstream’ as an insult, proclaiming it to be synonymous with mundane, safe culture. But in 1967, it meant working-class lads grabbing the centre of society by the lapels and marching it into the liberated future.
So, Dylan might have been producing magic that completely transformed pop culture, but from a more popular position, The Beatles prided themselves on doing more with the new meanings that he laid out. For Lennon, this unmatchable feat was typified by ‘I Am The Walrus’, his most ambitious and singular work.
“He had that same kind of envy of the way people perceived Bob Dylan. Bob released ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ six months before the Beatles came out with ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand,’ and the respect and wonder that surrounded him was something that challenged John,” his friend Elliot Mintz recalled of the competitive spirit that eventually drove him to great Walrus heights.
“He insisted to me he was a far better writer than Dylan was. It was a love-hate thing,” Mintz told Spin. “We would have these conversations where John would insist that ‘I Am the Walrus’ was superior to anything that Bob had ever penned.”
Above all, it was Lennon’s proudest triumph, perhaps because it was something Dylan couldn’t have penned. After being accused of and freely admitting to imitation with the likes of ‘Norwegian Wood’, here was a full band and orchestral ensemble that could only ever have been prised from the taught and mystic mind of the walrus himself – whatever that meant.
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