From day one, John Lennon always wanted to make songs that sounded weird. The Beatles may have started life as a simple pop group who wrote material for the screaming teenagers of the world, but once they started experimenting in the studio, Lennon was never going to walk out satisfied until he had something that changed someone’s perception of what a rock song could be. While Lennon readily admits that he didn’t hit the mark all the time, he thought that the journey he went on with ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ was one of his greatest achievements.
Then again, there’s a good chance that The White Album is one of the group’s greatest records strictly because it’s so strange. It’s already a lot to take in at over 90 minutes, but the drastic tones heard across the album almost give it an anti-concept, as if every track is just smushed together with little rhyme or reason other than just getting them out there.
Although each of the members had a lot of time to think about songs when studying transcendental meditation, a lot of Lennon’s material ran the gamut of where his mind was. There were the occasional songs of desperation like ‘I’m So Tired’, but also sheer beauty behind the gentle fingerpicking on ‘Dear Prudence’.
At the same time, that also led to the most experimental choices in Lennon’s career. While he was still making obscure art projects on vinyl with Yoko Ono in his spare time, translating that same energy onto a Beatles album with ‘Revolution 9’ left many people thinking he had lost his way. If that was a trainwreck for fans, ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ is an example of that kind of experimentation done correctly.
In under three minutes, Lennon takes what sounds like four different song ideas and crams them into one epic piece. The soft guitars at the beginning seem to prepare you for something emotional, but hearing that break into the dirtiest blues riff he ever wrote and then immediately going into 1950s-style doo-wop for the last section is enough to make people check the playback to make sure they’re not accidentally switching to different songs.
The tone might be borderline incoherent in spots, and that’s exactly why it worked for Lennon, telling Jann Wenner, “I like that. One of me best, I forget about that. I think it’s a beautiful song. I just like all the different things happening in it. I put together three different songs. But it was meant to be like – I don’t know, it seemed to run through all the different kinds of rock music.”
Despite some of the other members being a bit wary of Lennon’s experiments, both Paul McCartney and George Harrison considered the track one of their favourites on the album. However, one of the key strengths of the song nowadays is the impression it has on every other rock band that dared to dream bigger.
The act of combining three different songs was the same practice that Queen used when making ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and even Thom Yorke of Radiohead looked to this song when working on the different pieces of ‘Paranoid Android’. The Beatles were always pushing against the limits of what rock could do, but more than anything, ‘Happiness is A Warm Gun’ was a reminder that with the right idea, anything is possible once musicians start recording.
