How Eric Burdon became known as the Eggman will scramble your senses.
How Eric Burdon became known as the "Eggman" will scramble your mind.

Being a record nerd, and a bit of a head, it's inevitable some of my record-nerd conversation threads eventually lead into discussions regarding the Beatles. Of course, it's fine to talk about the Beatles, but it can sometimes feel a bit entry-level to revisit rote conversations about the Fabs; really, how much more needs to be said? Anyway, this weekend I found myself in one of those conversations (and then via Dangerous Minds) where I was reminded that "the Eggman" from the Beatles' song "I Am the Walrus," was a reference to the Animals' frontman, Eric Burdon, and his exploits sexploits.

According to Bob Spitz in The Beatles: The Biography Lennon bestowed the nickname in “a reference to a 1966 orgy he attended with Eric Burdon, who earned the nickname for breaking raw eggs on girls during sex.”

Oh boy. I hate to turn this post into a poor man's Savage Love, but I'm afraid to wade into teh internet "fetish" search waters alone—does anyone know the term for an egg fetish? Um, IS there an egg fetish? Would this have to do with a person's taste for eggs Bene-dicks? Turns out, as told by Burdon in his autobiography, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, he wasn't the CRACK-up, it was his date, and the YOKE was actually on him!

It may have been one of my more dubious distinctions, but I was the Eggman—or, as some of my pals called me, "Eggs". The nickname stuck after a wild experience I’d had at the time with a Jamaican girlfriend called Sylvia. I was up early one morning cooking breakfast, naked except for my socks, and she slid up beside me and slipped an amyl nitrate capsule under my nose. As the fumes set my brain alight and I slid to the kitchen floor, she reached to the counter and grabbed an egg, which she cracked into the pit of my belly. The white and yellow of the egg ran down my naked front and Sylvia slipped my egg-bathed cock into her mouth and began to show me one Jamaican trick after another. I shared the story with John at a party at a Mayfair flat one night with a handful of blondes and a little Asian girl. “Go on, go get it, Eggman,” Lennon laughed over the little round glasses perched on the end of his hook-like nose...

At some point in the '00s, I read Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, tho' my only current recollection is some anecdote about him riding around sand dunes in Israel during the '80s—which is an odd and not very rock and roll memory for me to have kept; a sexy egg story should have been way more memorable. Yeah, so there you have it—Eric is the Eggman—goo goo g'joob!