If John Lennon had decided to become a music critic instead of a rock star, chances are he would have been one of the most vicious scribes in the world. When you look back at his interviews surrounding The Beatles, Lennon was absolutely cutthroat regarding his old band’s material, dubbing most of his earlier songs as nothing but garbage and claiming that half of Paul McCartney’s material was nothing but silly love songs. Lennon could take his foot off the gas when he wanted, and ‘Happiness is A Warm Gun’ is one of the few songs he was convinced he got absolutely right.
From day one, Lennon always wanted things to sound different from what he had heard before. He may have needed to write songs like ‘She Loves You’ to help get his foot in the door in the early days, but once he actually started working on expansive topics on Rubber Soul, there was a whole new world of possibilities to work with.
While many attribute the makings of albums like Revolver and Sgt Peppers to the drugs they were taking, no amount of acid could have made these songs better. This was just a case of the band being dialled in and pulling at the sound in whatever way they wanted, even if it meant creating something that couldn’t be performed live.
After making an artistic milestone on Sgt Pepper and the subsequent Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album was an opportunity for the band to show different sides of their personality. For every dishevelled song on the record, there would be one of the greatest songs you’d ever heard on tracks like ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ or ‘Blackbird’.
Although Lennon was proud to sneak an avant-garde experiment like ‘Revolution 9’ onto the record, ‘Happiness is A Warm Gun’ is still one of the greatest Frankensteins he had ever brought to the band. Since there’s no traditional chorus, the song seems to have an episodic structure, going from one section to the other and never bothering to return to the first section.
The song also runs the gamut between different styles without sounding incoherent, going from a delicate fingerpicked intro to a dark bluesy dirge and then into a chord progression that could have been found on a late-period doo-wop song. While most would think that anyone who wrote this song completely lost the plot, Lennon remained defiantly proud of what he had made.
Speaking with Rolling Stone, Lennon considered the song among his greatest Beatles compositions, saying, “That’s one of my best. I like all the different things happening in it. I had put together some three sections of different songs. It was meant to run through all the different kinds of rock music”.
The Beatles were still a pop band for many people, but this could justifiably be called one of the first progressive rock songs. King Crimson and Pink Floyd were just on the horizon, but when listening to each of these rapid-fire sections back to back, you’re not just hearing the precursor to something like the medley from Abbey Road. This is the sound of everything from ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to ‘Paranoid Android’ and any other popular rock song that dared to break the rules of how a song should be structured.
