Eric Schaal |
If you wanted to pick the most
baffling Beatles song, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” should be a contender. Whether
you go by the shifting musical styles, the obscure lyrics, or the insane final
passage (“Bang, bang! Shoot, shoot!”), John Lennon just about emptied the tank
writing this one.
The Beatles themselves loved the
track. John spoke of what fun they had recording it, and his bandmates spoke
glowingly of it. In fact, as The White Album was headed to record stores, Paul
McCartney said he wanted to talk about it because it was a favorite of his.
But when talking about the song’s
meaning, there was little consensus. Some said the title came from an NRA
magazine; Paul said it came from a gun advertisement. And to confuse things
further, John said “I need a fix” wasn’t a drug reference.
But another quote from Paul, when
he described it as “just good poetry,” might come the closest to getting it
right.
“John said he had written half a song and
wanted us to toss out phrases while Neil [Aspinall] wrote them down,” Taylor
said. One came from a couple Taylor met on holiday. The man told Taylor he wore
moleskin gloves because he liked “the sensation when I’m out with my
girlfriend.”
That suggestion turned into
someone “acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand.” When Taylor brought up
a man arrested for looking up women’s skirts with mirrors attached to his
shoes, John turned it into “a man in the crowd with multicolored mirrors on his
hobnail boots.”
The night’s conversations also
gave John the idea for the soap impression someone “ate and donated to the
National Trust.” (This was a reference to public defecation around Liverpool.)
As for the part when John sang, “Mother Superior jumped the gun,” that was
John’s nickname for Yoko Ono.
As for the unusual song title, John
pulled that verbatim from yet another source. Someone had a copy of American
Rifleman magazine in the recording studio and it was opened to an article under
that headline.
“It said, ‘Happiness is a warm
gun,” John recalled in Beatles Anthology. “I thought it was a fantastic, insane
thing to say.” Despite writing “the junkie” next to his second section of
lyrics, he maintained the references weren’t to heroin.
“They said it was about shooting
up drugs,” John said. “But they were advertising guns and I thought it was so
crazy that I made a song out of it.” So why did he sing the last section with
that over-the-top vocal? Next to the final section of lyrics, John wrote
“satire of ’50s rock ‘n’ roll.”
“It was such a great line that
John sort of took that and used it as a chorus,” Paul said in Many Years From
Now. “It’s just good poetry.” Later, he described where John’s mind was at.
“It’s a piss-take of all the people who really do think happiness is a warm
gun.”