The Beatles had no small shortage of eccentric, obscure songs, thanks in large part to the member of the Fab Four who was arguably the most avant-garde writer, John Lennon. Though he and Paul McCartney released the band’s songs under their songwriting partnership, they individually wrote the vast majority of Beatles tracks. “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is one of Lennon’s, and it contains some of the strangest extended metaphors in the Fab Four catalogue.
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Countless listeners have analyzed “Happiness is a Warm Gun” for its hidden meanings. The ones they found—whether accurate or not—became so inextricably linked to the song’s legacy that these days, it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction. Here are some common myths, misconceptions, and little-known facts about this iconic cut from The Beatles’ eponymous 1968 release, the “White Album”.
Misconception: “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” Wasn’t a Drug Reference
Drug use was rampant in the 1960s, and The Beatles became de facto figureheads of the growing fanbase for marijuana and LSD. H***** was also seeping into the entertainment industry—something that would later take hold of John Lennon and Yoko Ono alike. However, Lennon asserted many times that “Happiness is a Warm Gun” wasn’t a coy reference to intravenous drugs.
“They said it was about shooting up drugs,” Lennon recalled in Anthology. “But they were advertising guns, and I thought it was so crazy that I made a song out of it. It wasn’t about ‘H’ at all. George Martin showed me the cover of a magazine that said: ‘Happiness is a warm gun.’ I thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you’ve just shot something.”
Myth: Mother Superior Isn’t a Religious Figure
John Lennon wasn’t averse to contemplating religion in his music, but “Happiness is a Warm Gun” wasn’t one of those times. Some people assume the Mother Superior who “jumped the gun” was a religious figure. Lennon debunked this theory during one of his final interviews with David Sheff.
“I call Yoko Mother or Madam just in an offhand way,” Lennon explained. “It’s just images of her.” These same images helped inform lines like, “I feel my hand on your trigger.” “That was the beginning of my relationship with Yoko, and I was very sexually oriented then. When we weren’t in the studio, we were in bed.”
Misinterpretation: There Is No Masturbation, but There Is Poop
Some parts of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” came directly from conversations John Lennon had with Apple’s publicist, Derek Taylor, while on LSD. Taylor told Lennon about a man he knew with a moleskin glove fetish, which turned into, “She’s well acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand, like a lizard on a windowpane.” (Taylor said the last half was a snippet about his time living in L.A.)
Given the sensual imagery of that last line, many believed a subsequent lyric, “Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime,” must be about something intimate and handsy, like masturbation. But according to Taylor, it was actually about another man he knew who used a fake third hand to shoplift. No masturbation. However, there was another, er, primal bodily function discussed later in the second verse.
“A soap impression of his wife, which he ate and donated to the National Trust,” was, in fact, about defecating. “The eating of something and then donating it to the National Trust came from a conversation we’d had about the horrors of walking in public spaces on Merseyside, where you were always coming across the evidence of people having crapped behind bushes and in old air raid shelters,” Taylor explained.
“So to donate what you’ve eaten to the National Trust was what would now be known as ‘defecation on common land owned by the National Trust,’” he continued. “When John put it all together, it created a series of layers of images. It was like a whole mess of colour.” Messy indeed.
Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
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