The Beatles, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun"

In a perfect world, this song would be as hilarious now as it was in 1968 (or maybe not "hilarious" so much as "amusing in a boy-John-Lennon-is-running-with-this-metaphor-isn't-he? way"), when it came out on the schizophrenic "White Album," the precursor to the four ex-Beatles' solo careers. In a perfect world, it would simply be remembered as the former slogan for a gun-rights group (I think it was the NRA, but John could simply have stumbled across it during his gorging on newspapers that led to several other song ideas), not as an ironic (cruelly ironic) foreshadowing of Lennon's own murder in December 1980. In a perfect world, that death wouldn't have occurred, because the dipshit who committed it (whose name shall not be aired here, because it would be what he wanted, secondhand fame) would never have thought to try. That stupid asshole would've just ended up shooting one of the guys in Gerry and the Pacemakers in this perfect world (no worries, G&TP fans; he would've been a terrible shot).

Of course we don't live in a perfect world. We live in an imperfect one, where John Lennon is dead, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" a bad joke on the part of the joker, and the song a no-no to be played during any rememberance of Lennon's passing (it's the equivalent of playing the Sex Pistols's "Belsen Was a Gas" on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz). Which is a shame, because the song devoid of such tragic context is a scream, a funny trip through Lennon's paranoid-scatterbrained late-Beatles songwriting, when he and Yoko Ono were having a laugh at the world (and his bandmates) reacting so strongly to their courtship (it just wasnt' proper!). The song itself is a collection of different verses from some other songs, put together and set to a great backdrop of good old fashioned rock grooves. John Lennon went off the farm a little bit during those years, drugs and transcendental meditation doing turns on him throughout 1966 and 1967 (heroin was around the corner, if not already on the scene, when the White Album came out in the fall of 1968). The songs from that era that were primarily his are both groundbreaking ("Strawberry Fields, Forver") and batshit crazy ("The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill"). And if anyone can figure out "Revolution #9," please let me know. It sounds like an acid trip though Hades.

So yes, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" is batshit crazy, but in a good way; heard outside the context of Lennon's murder, it's possible to find the humor in Lennon's wordplay and suggestiveness. But of course the context is everything; ever since 1980, it's been impossible, once you've come across the song, to hear it outside of the tragic consequences. Unless you're Michael Moore, and then you use it as the soundtrack to a montage of gun violence (including the infamous clip of Bud Dwyer shooting himself on live television) in your movie "Bowling For Columbine." I'm willing to bet that was the introduction to the song for a lot of people who hadn't heard it before, couldn't concieve that such a downright eerie thing as a John Lennon song about shooting guns could exist.

The White Album was either the first or second proper Beatles "album" I ever got, as a Christmas gift along with the first of many late, lamented CD players. My mom got it for me the first Christmas that I ever wanted a Beatles album for Christmas. Her favorite Beatles song, she told me, was "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Like I said, the White Album was basically a run-thru for each Beatles' solo careers. John and Paul get the lions' share of songs, of course, but George Harrison had some good ones, and Ringo got a couple of vocal showcases (courtesy of the boys, of course). The album is a mess, a glorious two-disc mess on CD (it was one of the first double albums, a trend towards bloated grandiosity and the clear lack of a producer with backbone enough to edit the album for cohesiveness, but this is one of the few that actually benefits from such variety). When I first heard "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" (hell, when I saw the song title in the listings), I probably couldn't believe it; after all, this was sung by the man who'd be gunned down a little over a decade after the album came out. Of course, I did better than Charles Manson, who thought the proto-stomper "Helter Skelter" was a call to arms in a coming race war (that old Charlie would become a leader of, with all the glory and pussy that affords, of course). Yes, Charles Manson used the Beatles to justify his crime spree.

Taking the Beatles out of context isn't unheard of, naturally; take John's infamous "Bigger than Jesus" quote, from an old interview but given new life in 1966 when religious fanatics took the quote out of context (that he was saying that a lot of young people worshipped the Beatles more than conventional religion, an idea that isn't as bizarre in our celebrity-obsessed world as it would've been in 1966). Beatles records were burnt, concerts were boycotted, and death threats were recorded (no doubt when Lennon imagined himself in the guise of a gun-nut who gets release from shooting his warm gun, he had plenty of invective from those past threats stored away for reference). Not for the first time, a celebrity retreated from the spotlight, though in John's case it was him and the band retiring from live performances because of the uproar and also because frankly Beatles concerts were outlets for teenage girls to scream their heads off (much as a Justin Bieber show fulfils the same function today). When they did re-emerge, with 1967's questionable-concept-album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," it was a stab at something deeper than what they'd be able to do live, an album basically made for the listener at home.

Studio experimentation was both good and bad for the band, as it led them to new creative heights but also down a rabbit hole that would eventually allow the tensions that took a back seat to their schedule on the road to come to the forefront, where it would drive them apart. No, it wasn't Yoko anymore than it was Linda Eastman (later McCartney, in 1969) that drove the band apart, though that probably didn't help. The recording studio gave us wonderful songs that wouldn't be reproducable live (at least not at a typical Beatles concert in that time, hence when they did return to the stage it was on the roof of Apple Records, for the "Get Back/Let It Be" sessions). But it also gave them time to reflect on how they were growing as artists (and growing apart). Think about people that you were forced to be around for a long enough time, no matter how close you were to them eventually you'd probably have your complaints about them as well. John and Paul were the alpha dogs of the band, doomed to butt heads over John's artiness versus Paul's popualism, and poor George was marginalized to the point that he lacked confidence in his songwriting ability. Ringo was a happy soldier during much of the tumult (he was the late man to the party, but it wouldn't have worked without him), but even he started getting upset, being the first to threaten to leave the group during the sessions for the White Album.

"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" isn't a great song, but it's a favorite, much the same way that while I agree with those who find "Hello Goodbye" obnoxious and daft, I like it nonetheless because of how stupid it is (see my entry on R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People"). I was watching the documentary on J.D. Salinger and how "The Catcher In the Rye" inspired three desperate losers to shoot famous people (along with Lennon's killer, there was John Hinckley Jr. and Robert Bardo). That must've been a hell of a thing, to know that three people used something that you wrote as "justification" for murders or attempted murders, and it's no wonder Salinger kept his head down for the most part during the last few decades of his life (though in a quick aside, I think he played the "recluse" angle too well, because people kept talking about him despite his lack of publishing since 1965). If John could've known that he'd have been gunned down in a short time, one wonders if he'd have written the song in the first place (maybe "Happiness Is a Warm Bun," a ode to bakery? Or "Happiness Is a Warm Crossbow," to keep with the weapons theme?). I'd like to think he'd go for it anyway, to confront the fear that was no doubt triggered (pun intended) by the death threats he recieved for a comment that today would be a badge of honor (Kanye West probably tweets that he's bigger than Jesus on an hourly basis). I'd like to think that somehow he knew how inappropriate the song would seem in the wake of his death, and yet he'd go for it anyway. He'd confront the abyss, the relegation to "peace and love John Lennon" that negates the deeper, more substantial man behind the myth that would follow his death, where "Imagine" is over-used to the point of banality (and where Cee Lo Green would both feel the need to change the lyrics and be bombarded for it, because he's uncomfortable with the notion of no higher power). True artists confront uncomfortable truths, and the truth is that John Lennon was gunned down one night by a loser with shit for brains and a fixation on Holden Caulfield. The truth is also that "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" was a song that foretold that end, perhaps, or at the least it was the desperate laugh of a man facing mortality from nutjobs like the one who would eventually kill him, and he was raising something of a middle finger to those nutjobs, especially the one that would take him up on the song's title.

Whatever the facts are, the song deserves better than as some pop-culture fortune-teller of doom for the man who wrote it.