Heart famously wrote their 1977 hit “Barracuda” about shady, sleazy men in the music industry who sexualize and exploit women. (Something with which Heart vocalist and guitarist Ann and Nancy Wilson were, unfortunately, very familiar.) The Beatles, and more specifically, John Lennon, wrote “I Am the Walrus” after multiple LSD trips. Lyrically and sonically, the two songs are incredibly different. But in a 2016 conversation with Rolling Stone, Ann revealed the lesser-known way these two tracks are connected.
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“People always ask who the porpoise is in the lyrics,” Ann said. The porpoise she was referring to is in the song’s bridge: “‘Sell me, sell you,’ the porpoise said / Dive down deep now to save my head / You, I think that you got the blues, too.”
“Nancy is the porpoise. We used to call each other that,” the vocalist continued. “I think it was an evolution of the walrus because we were big Beatles fans. We used to have all these pet names for each other, and that was the one at the time.”
From “I Am the Walrus” to “Barracuda”
The connection between The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” and Heart’s “Barracuda” is a sentimental coincidence, which cancels out the fact that neither a barracuda nor a walrus is a porpoise. (A barracuda is a ray-finned saltwater fish, and a walrus is a pinniped, if you were wondering.) And anyway, within the context of 1970s psychedelia, Heart’s inclusion of a talking capitalist cetacean fit right in.
Of course, Heart’s 1977 track isn’t about that salesmammal at all. It’s about the titular hunter, a watery representation of sleazy, exploitative men in the music industry. While speaking to Rolling Stone, vocalist Ann Wilson recalled a man approaching her backstage to ask about her “lovah.” “At the time, I was with Mike Fisher, the ‘Magic Man’.”
“I said, ‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s right over there.’ And he went, ‘No, no, no. I mean you and your sistah! You’re lovers, right? It dawned on me then and there that our mother had been right. We were going to be misunderstood as sisters in rock and in the most base kind of way.”
“It p***ed me off, and I went back to the hotel and wrote the words to ‘Barracuda’,” Wilson continued. “Then we came up with the groove. It was a song written out of being insulted. And I guess I realized, ‘Yeah, well, this is kind of a slimy business.’”
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