John Lennon had begun writing two separate songs about odd sexual turn-ons in 1968 but couldn't finish either one. Then, while the Beatles were recording what became the White Album, producer George Martin showed Lennon an essay from an American magazine. The provocative title prompted Lennon to start writing a third song about sex; when strung together with the first two, the result was one of the most astonishing - and definitely one of the most subversive - Beatles songs of all time.
The essay, written by a fellow named Warren W. Herlihy, was not about sex but about firearms, and the magazine was the May 1968 edition of American Rifleman, the official magazine of the National Rifle Association. Herlihy's essay was about how he bonded with his son John through the sport of shooting when, one day in 1957, he was going out on a shooting excursion with friends and John, then a boy of seven, asked to tag along. Soon John had his first rifle - a small Remington Model 514. He later moved up to a Winchester Model 37. Herlihy lovingly wrote about how he bonded with his son by teaching him marksmanship through shooting clay targets and discs until John was ready to hunt, his proud pop describing their hunting trips in great detail:
"The years went by. Happy years. Hunting ducks and geese in mud up to the arm pits, rain streaming down our necks. Through those years that kid of mine made kills that would turn a veteran shotgunner blue - not with cold but with envy."
Waxing rhapsodic in 1968 about the happiness and the joy he derived from going out shooting with John, Herlihy pondered the beauty of his son's first rifles, which had been kept as mementos of the warm memories of their adventures. "The bores are clean and the barrels have a good bit of their original bluing," Herlihy wrote. "Sometimes I open the cabinet to admire their polished stocks and well-oiled metal." Herlihy took pride in the young man John had become at the age of eighteen - old enough to be drafted into the service but in 1968 still too young to vote.
Those guns, Herlihy concluded, stand for "the comradeship and the good times a father and son can have when they share a love of guns and shooting."
The essay's title? "Happiness Is a Warm Gun."
This essay has to be read to be disbelieved. I urge you to click on the above image twice to enlarge it so you can read it for yourself. A textbook example of a celebration of conservative American values - family, fatherhood and firearms - it is at once elegantly written and superlatively sick, equating a father-son relationship forged over a love of guns and a desire to shoot animals with taking your kid to his first Yankees game. Violence may not be as American as cherry pie, as H. Rap Brown once opined, but it is certainly as American as baseball.
And while there's no evidence that either George Martin or John Lennon read the essay, they were understandably appalled by the tone-deafness of its title. "I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say," Lennon later remarked. "A warm gun means you just shot something."
The title of Herlihy's essay was a play on "Happiness Is a Warm Puppy," "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schulz's 1962 book, in which Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and the rest of the "Peanuts" gang offer numerous definitions of what happiness is. (The book also inspired the song "Happiness," which was a tune from the 1967 stage musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.) By perverting something as fine and wholesome as "Peanuts" for a title for an essay celebrating firearms, Herlihy was practically begging for a crazed genius like John Lennon to turn his gun romanticism on its ear and bring out the underlying phallic implications of gun worship - by turning the fetish for rifles and shotguns into sexual images of smoldering barrels and smooth triggers.
Oh, this was gonna be good.
The song begins with Lennon musing about a woman who's "not a girl who misses much," and the gritty guitar line accompanying him already makes it clear what he's talking about. Then Paul McCartney's bass and Ringo Starr's drums bubble up and explode as Lennon explores the dirty, ugly, grotesque side of sex, set to guitars that bite and scratch like alley cats. Lennon seethes with morbid fascination about this woman getting a thrill from a velvet-gloved hand up against her side, then he focuses on a man's unsavory hobby of using mirrors on his boots to get excitement from looking up girls' skirts; as the guitars spit, the nauseating pervert relieves himself of what nauseates him by eating a carved soap likeness of his wife and crapping it out on public property - "donated to the National Trust." Imagine being so disgusting yet so disgusted yourself by your wife that you symbolically turn her into two in the loo. These images, inspired by LSD visions Lennon had while tripping with Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, then devolve into a demented waltz articulated by the nastiest guitar solo ever committed to a Beatles recording.
The brooding, mean register Lennon's voice assumes as the music gets raunchier conveys his own seething desire for sex, speaking of it in terms of getting high - "I need a fix 'cause I'm going down." (Lennon always insisted that he was speaking of a sexual and not a narcotic high, but the dirty, sordid nature of both is still powerful - and powerfully pungent - in his stoned delivery.) Yoko Ono, his teacher and his elder, is his dealer: "Mother Superior jump the gun." He wants to jump her bones, and she's going to jump his pistol. "Sex is inextricably bound up with the violent phallus of the gun," Tim Riley wrote in his Beatles song-analysis book "Tell Me Why," "which plays off the junkie's 'shooting up' and the dirty flasher 'shooting his wad' before it lurches into the final episode."
And that's when things really get interesting.
The song goes into its third section - it reaches its climax, in fact - in an unlikely depiction of ecstasy as Lennon exuberantly espouses the happiness he feels from his warm gun in a send-up of silly R&B tunes like Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl" as Paul McCartney and George Harrison back him up with choruses of "bang-bang, shoot-shoot." At once, Lennon is satirizing sexually repressed Americans by, as Bob Duggan of BigThink.com wrote, commenting on the American firearms fetish "that commingles sex and gun violence into one dangerous, creepy brew" while laughing at that other American cultural embarrassment - doo-wop. The insane and the inane.
But, just as importantly, Lennon is inverting kinky sex and gun violence into a celebration of the feeling he gets from sexual activity. In "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," he turned ugliness into beauty, frustration into gratification, perversion into liberation, and, as Newsweek once opined, death into love.
And he did it by making a complete mockery of Warren Herlihy's idea of happiness.
Paul McCartney and George Harrison both considered "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" to be their favorite song on the White Album, no doubt in part because it took down the "guts and guns" mentality of American conservatism. The song goes through many intricate time signatures and complex meter changes that would test the abilities of any musician; it's one of only two Beatles songs that lack anything resembling a definable verse/chorus structure ("You Never Give Me Your Money," from Abbey Road, is the other song). It became a challenging song to record, and all four Beatles were closely involved in working out the arrangement; indeed, it's one of the very few times the Beatles worked together as a group on the White Album, which is the most likely reason why Paul and George loved it so much. "A dogged band effort spread over fifteen hours and nearly one hundred takes," Beatles author Chris Ingham wrote, "the resulting two minutes 40 seconds of acid-folk, progressive rock and doo-wop was described by Lennon as 'a history of rock and roll.' It's not quite that, but certainly one of Lennon's final masterpieces for the Beatles."
For his part, Warren Herlihy wrote that he was never sorry he gave in to his son John's pleas to take him shooting, but I have no doubt that he regretted the choice of the title for his essay after what the Beatles did to it. Who knows what John Herlihy - who would be 68 today - thought of the whole thing.
The song collapses to an end with a final tap of Ringo's drums.
Afterglow. :-)
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