Among the surreal imagery, Lewis Carroll references, and fanciful wordplay in The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” is the mention of the Eggman. This has long been known to refer to The Animals’ singer Eric Burdon, who was given the nickname by John Lennon. 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.”

However, it turns out that the commonly told tale is actually 180 degrees off. The fabled egger Burdon was actually the eggee. (There is a technical term for the raw egg paraphilia, but I can’t find it and can’t face another list of fetishes.) 

Burdon set the record straight in his 2002 autobiography, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, co-written with Jeff Marshall Craig:

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 as we tried the all-too-willing girls on for size.

John Lennon standing in for Burdon as the Eggman: