Happiness Is a Warm Gun - Remastered 2009

"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" is a song written by John Lennon (credited to Lennon/McCartney) and recorded by The Beatles for their 1968 album The Beatles. All four Beatles have at some point identified it as their favourite song on the album.

Background & Inspiration

Lennon derived the title of the song from an article in the May 1968 issue of American Rifleman, the magazine of the National Rifle Association (NRA). The magazine belonged to George Martin, the Beatles' producer, who had brought it with him to the recording studio. Lennon recalled his reaction to the phrase: "I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something."

Many different interpretations of the song have been offered down the years. It has been said that, in addition to the obvious gun imagery, the "Warm Gun" could also allude to Lennon's sexual desire for Yoko Ono (meaning an erect penis) 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). In his 1980 Playboy interview, Lennon admitted to the double meaning of guns and sexuality but denied that the song had anything to do with drugs. He said: "that was the beginning of my relationship with Yoko and I was very sexually oriented then."

Composition

Lennon once claimed the song was "sort of a history of rock and roll," as it features five different sections but is less than three minutes long. The song begins with surreal imagery inspired by an acid trip that Lennon and Derek Taylor experienced, with Taylor contributing the opening lines. The three sections were described by Lennon as "the Dirty Old Man", "the Junkie" and "the Gunman (Satire of '50s R&R)".

Recording

Recording for "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" began at 7 pm in Studio Two at EMI Studios in London on 23 September 1968. Although tensions were high among the Beatles during the album's recording sessions, the band collaborated as a close unit to work out the song's challenging rhythmic and metre issues.

Having spent over two years studying the sitar, George Harrison had become familiar with the complex time signatures typically found in Indian classical music. Lennon benefited from Harrison's input in the arrangement for "Happiness Is a Warm Gun", further to the pair having joined different sections together for Lennon's 1966 song "She Said She Said" off the Revolver album. Over the "Gunman" section of the song, Paul McCartney and Harrison sang backing vocals in the doo-wop style, including the lines "Bang bang, shoot shoot" in response to Lennon singing the title phrase.