The Beatles Bible

‘Glass Onion’ was John Lennon’s answer to those who looked for hidden meanings in The Beatles’ music. It was a song deliberately filled with red herrings, obscure imagery and allusions to past works.

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Wikipedia

"Glass Onion" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their 1968 double album The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). The song was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney.

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Glass Onion is one of John Lennon’s songs from the White Album. It’s superficially in the same psychedelic vein as Strawberry Fields Forever, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and I Am The Walrus. This period and these songs were amongst my favourites when I first got into the Beatles, but I never liked Glass Onion in the same way. On the surface it’s of the same family: instead of “newspaper taxis”, “tangerine trees”, and an “elementary penguin climbing up the Eiffel tower”, we have “bent-back tulips”, “cast-iron shore” and “a glass onion”. But (as explained in the beatlesbible.com article) the lyrics were deliberately constructed to encourage over-interpretation, and are packed with references to previous Beatles songs.

Whereas my favourite songs had been either jabberwocky-type nonsense, perhaps-coded allegory or some kind of subconscious blend of the two, Glass Onion was neither. I liked my nonsense and allegory to be authentic. Glass Onion was inauthentic nonsense. Preposterous!

Even though I think I already knew the story when I formed this view, I think you can tell from the song itself. The sheer density of the cross-references, tells you that this is a very different exercise, and I think it suffers from the contrast.

To pack the cross-references in, there are some compromises with the lyrics – they don’t scan well (e.g., the line “Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet, yeah” (12 syllables) is uncomfortably jammed in the same space as “To see how the other half lives” (8). And the title itself: “Glass Onion” puts the emphasis, unnaturally, on the second syllable of onION.

Another weakness compared with the earlier psychedelic classics is, in my opinion, the strings. George Martin’s arrangements really add to Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am The Walrus, taking them into a new dimension. But the Glass Onion strings with their long glissando chords create, for me, a jarring slow motion effect that opposes the sharp guitar stabs and makes me feel like I am swimming in treacle. The outro is a real downer. All deliberate, but not very enjoyable for me.

It’s notable that several of the songs referenced are McCartney ones: Fixing A Hole, Lady Madonna, Fool On The Hill. “The Walrus was Paul” – whatever that means. Lennon said (much later):

“Well, that was a joke. 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’”.

I think what he means is that he (Lennon) is integrating Paul into the mythology and highlighting his (Paul’s) contributions as a kind of olive branch, since he realised that his partnership with Yoko was putting the Lennon-McCartney relationship into jeopardy. All the Paul references were added later on in the writing process as the Esher demo of the song (recorded shortly after the bands return from India as the first step in the White Album project) only refers to Strawberry Fields.

I will admit that making us think about the difference between authentic and inauthentic nonsense is quite an arty concept in itself. Very Lennonoesque, but maybe not intentional in this case.