| "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" | ||||
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| Song by The Beatles from the album The Beatles | ||||
| Released | 22 November 1968 | |||
| Recorded | 24–25 September 1968, EMI Studios, London |
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| Genre | Hard rock, blues rock | |||
| Length | 2:43 | |||
| Label | Apple Records | |||
| Writer | Lennon–McCartney | |||
| Producer | George Martin | |||
| The Beatles track listing | ||||
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"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" is a song by The Beatles, featured on the eponymous double-disc album The Beatles, also known as The White Album. It is a John Lennon composition, credited to Lennon–McCartney.
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According to Lennon, the title came from the cover of a gun magazine that producer George Martin showed him: "I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.' It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something."[1] The reference, whether or not intermediately from the magazine, was one of many 1960s riffs on Charles M. Schulz's culturally popular saying, Happiness is a Warm Puppy, which began in the Peanuts comic strip and became a widely sold book.
Lennon said he "put together three sections of different songs...it seemed to run through all the different kinds of rock music."[1] The song is thus by the composer's own admission a pastiche. The song begins with a brief lilting section ("She's not a girl who misses much..."). Drums, bass and distorted guitar enter as this portion of the song proceeds. The surreal imagery from this section is allegedly taken from an acid trip that Lennon and Derek Taylor experienced, with Taylor contributing the opening lines.[2] After this, the song transitions into a song fragment called "I Need a Fix," built around an ominous-sounding guitar riff. This section drifts into the next section, a chorus of "Mother Superior jumped the gun." The final section is a doo-wop send up, with the back-up of vocals of "bang, bang, shoot shoot."
One of the most salient musical features of the song is its frequent shifts in time signature, some tempo changes, and some unusual phrasing. The song begins in standard 4/4 time but quickly deviates from the norm. There is a 5-bar phrase rather than the usual 4, beginning with the line "She's well acquainted...". The last line of that verse ("A soap impression of his wife...") has a 6/4 bar (the second measure of the phrase) before going back to 4/4 for the last two bars of the phrase, and Ringo Starr plays the downbeat on "1" in the fourth bar, giving a more unusual feel. The subsequent guitar lead and bridge can be analysed as a 3-bar pattern of 9/8, 12/8, 12/8 (or 5 bars—one of 9/8, four of 6/8, etc.), with Ringo retaining an implied 6/8 throughout, so that the snare drum downbeats are on "1" as often as not. This gives way to a faster (almost double-time) 4-bar pattern of 3/8, 6/8, 3/8, 7/8 for the "Mother Superior..." section before returning to a slower 4/4 for the doo-wop ending. During the "When I hold you..." section, the rest of the band returns to 6/8, but Ringo stays in 4/4. This is a rare example of polyrhythm in The Beatles' catalogue.
"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" is Paul McCartney's favourite song on the White Album. Although tensions were high among the band during the album's recording sessions, they reportedly collaborated as a close unit to work out the song's challenging rhythmic and meter issues, and consequently considered it one of the few true "Beatles" songs on the album.[3]
Many different interpretations of the song have been offered down the years. It has been said that, in addition to the obvious reference mentioned above, the "Warm Gun" could also be due to Lennon's sexual desire for Yoko Ono[4] and also to his well-documented problems with heroin at the time of the recording of the White Album (in this case, the gun being a loaded syringe, although Lennon claimed to have snorted, rather than injected, heroin during the time that he used the drug). In his 1980 interview Lennon admitted to the double meaning of guns and sexuality ("that was the beginning of my relationship with Yoko and I was very sexually oriented then") but denied the song had anything to do with drugs.[5]
The song was not met warmly by American and British censors. It was banned by the BBC because of its sexual symbolism.[6]
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