John Lennon Left a ‘Crumb’ in ‘Glass Onion’ for Paul McCartney
“Glass Onion” is one of the strangest and most surreal songs that John Lennon wrote for The Beatles. It’s a self-aware song that openly mocks its audience and contains several references that passionate Beatles fans can appreciate. Lennon put plenty of thought into the lyrics for this song, and one line in the song he put in specifically for Paul McCartney.
John Lennon said Paul McCartney was the ‘walrus’ in ‘Glass Onion’
“Glass Onion” from The White Album was John Lennon’s way of addressing fans who looked too deeply into the messaging of the Beatles’ songs. The track references popular Beatles songs, such as “Lady Madonna” and “Strawberry Fields Forever”. Another song it references is the deeply confusing “I Am the Walrus” from the Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack.
“I Am the Walrus” is easily The Beatles’ most nonsensical track, but it created so many theories as fans thoroughly analyzed every lyric. One debate was about who the walrus was. In “Glass Onion”, Lennon appears to confirm that the “walrus is Paul.” However, in his 1980 interview with Playboy, Lennon said it was an irrelevant line in a song he deemed a “throwaway.”
“That’s me, just doing a throwaway song, à la ‘Walrus’, à la everything I’ve ever written,” Lennon said. “I threw the line in – ‘the Walrus was Paul’ – just to confuse everybody a bit more. And I thought Walrus has now become me, meaning ‘I am the one.’ Only it didn’t mean that in this song. It could have been ‘the fox terrier is Paul,’ you know. I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. It was just thrown in like that.”
Lennon also said the “walrus is Paul” was meant to be a “crumb” for McCartney. When Lennon wrote “Glass Onion,” he had already decided to leave The Beatles and felt guilty about it.
Well, that was a joke,” Lennon added. “The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul. I was trying – I don’t know. It’s a very perverse way of saying to Paul, you know, ‘Here, have this crumb, this illusion – this stroke, because I’m leaving.’”
Lennon checked with McCartney before putting the line in the song
In Many Years From Now, Paul McCartney reacted to John Lennon’s line in “Glass Onion”. McCartney said he liked the line because it was a nice reference to Paul wearing the walrus suit in the music video, which added to The Beatles’ lore. He also said Lennon ran the lyric by him before putting it in the song.
“When we came to do the costumes on ‘I Am The Walrus,’ it happened to be me in the walrus costume,” McCartney recalled. “It was not significant at all, but it was a nice little twist to the legend that we threw in.”
Sir Paul later added that he liked the lyric because it gave fans another excuse to dive back down the rabbit hole.
“I said, ‘It’s a great line.’ You know, it’s a spoof on the way everyone was always reading into our songs,” he said in 2001. “I said, ‘There you go, you’ve given them another clue to follow.’”
