Off The Beatle Track

The Beatles couldn’t predict the future any better than the rest of us. But a few of their songs seem to foretell the future in oddly specific ways.

In this post I’ll examine three of those songs, plus a bonus: two songs that some might argue contain premonitions that I’m not so sure about.

I Am the Walrus (1967)

Semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower….

Norman Pilcher was the Metropolitan Police Service officer who arrested Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in 1967, the year that John wrote I Am the Walrus. I mention Pilcher because the great Beatles Bible contains this note: “‘Semolina pilchard’, according to Marianne Faithfull, was a reference to Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, the notoriously anti-drug zealot who made it his mission to bust people from the music world for possession of illegal substances.”

Th arrests of the two Stones would have put Pilcher on John’s radar in ’67, but what makes this reference possibly a premonition is that Pilcher himself then arrested John and Yoko in ’68 for possession of 200 grams of hashish and half a gram of morphine.

John’s Liverpool friend Pete Shotton, in his book John Lennon In My Life, says that he was present when John wrote part of I Am the Walrus: “… John threw in the most ludicrous images his imagination could conjure. He thought of ‘semolina’ (an insipid pudding¹ we’d been forced to eat as kids) and ‘pilchard’ (a sardine we often fed to our cats).”

Faithfull’s and Shotton’s stories could both be true; John could have been thinking of Pilcher when he wrote “pilchard.” In any event, it’s quite possible that John referred (though obliquely) to his arresting officer a year before his drug bust.

Glass Onion (1968)

Here’s another clue for you all: the walrus was Paul.

As with I Am the Walrus, John wrote Glass Onion to confound those who analyzed (or overanalyzed) Beatles’ lyrics. Later, he said, “I threw the line in – ‘the walrus was Paul’ – just to confuse everybody a bit more. . . . 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.”

Sure, except that no one searched Beatles lyrics and album covers in 1969 for clues that the fox terrier had died.

For the record, I don’t buy that Paul died in 1966 and was replaced by William Campbell.² But most Beatle fans go through a “Paul is dead” phase, and this line from Glass Onion is cited as evidence that Paul ceased to exist because, I don’t know, a walrus symbolized death in some cultures.

What is impressive, though, is that John anticipated the “Paul is dead” craze by a year.

Maxwell’s Silver Hammer (1969)

Rose and Valerie, screaming from the gallery, say he must go free (“Maxwell must go free”).

I read Vincent Bugliosi’s book about the Charles Manson murders, Helter Skelter, when I was about 13, and it scared the hell out of me. Bugliosi mentioned that Manson would eventually be eligible for parole, and I was convinced that he would find his way 3,000 miles clear across the U.S. and show up in my neighborhood.

The murders that Bugliosi described, and later convicted Manson of, took place in August 1969, the month before The Beatles released Abbey Road, the worst song on which was Paul’s Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.³ The song describes a murderer with female supporters who appear in the courtroom and cause a disruption on his behalf. Maxwell also murders the presiding judge.

The Manson trial began in July 1970. His female supporters chanted in the courtroom, and Manson himself threatened the judge’s life.

Please be clear that I don’t in any way hold The Beatles responsible for the crimes committed by Manson or his followers. Nor do I believe that The Beatles ever communicated with Manson, either privately or publicly via their music. I just find it particularly strange that Paul McCartney wrote a jolly song about a serial murderer.

Two that don’t quite check out

John didn’t meet Yoko until 1966, but he later said that the 1965 track Girl “was about that girl. That turned out to be Yoko, in the end. The one that a lot of us were looking for.”

Some of the lyrics could describe Yoko (e.g., “She’s the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there, you feel a fool”). But mostly the song sounds like John longing for a deeper, more spiritual relationship than he felt he had in his marriage.

The Beatles met the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in August 1967, and they recorded The Fool on the Hill in September. Evidence seems to suggest that Paul began writing it before they first encountered the Maharishi, but Paul has said that “I think I was writing about someone like Maharishi.” In other words, the song doesn’t probably contain a premonition, but merely elements of a description of an actual person.

Have any examples of Beatle premonitions that you’d like to share? Email me at beatletrack@gmail.com.

1. “Insipid Pudding” would be a good band name. ↩︎
2. He died in 1965 and was replaced by Billy Shears. Kidding! ↩︎
3. By far, and that includes Her Majesty. Imagine replacing Maxwell with one of the songs George had already written, like All Things Must Pass! ↩︎