I did a quick search for insights into the meaning of the song:
"No, it's not about heroin. A gun magazine was sitting there with a smoking gun on the cover and an article that I never read inside called "Happiness Is a Warm Gun." I took it right from there. I took it as the terrible idea of just having shot some animal...it was at the beginning of my relationship with Yoko and I was very sexually oriented then. When we weren't in the studio, we were in bed...I call Yoko Mother or Madam just in an offhand way. The rest doesn't mean anything. It's just images of her." - John Lennon, Playboy, 1980
Written by Lennon, who got the idea from a gun magazine cover that read, "Happiness Is A Warm Gun In Your Hands," also Lennon's original song title. The song dealt with three themes. The first was Lennon's indignation of the American firearms lobby; the second was a sort of rock 'n' roll history; and the last was imagery that conveyed Lennon's sexual passion for Yoko.
http://www.iamthebeatles.com/article1011.html
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i am a cat.08-17-2001, 08:01 PM
I've always thought gun = penis. To me, it was always a song about sexual manipulation, not drugs.
honey6908-17-2001, 09:35 PM
I always thought Happiness is a Warm Gun was about a warm vagina. He's says when I put my finger on your trigger, I know nobody can do me no harm. Then he goes on to say its a warm gun, yes it is. Like it's her trigger but it sure is a warm gun. I'll have to listen to it again but that's what I got from it.
curehp08-17-2001, 11:32 PM
I think it's clearly about gun violence. I see the message as'this world is f$#@ed up and some people get to the point where they believe that the only thing that can make them happy is shooting someone or themselves to put an end to their problem(s). Like the song "I Don't Like Mondays"
Creighton08-18-2001, 01:49 AM
Originally posted by terpsichore77
I have always heard that HIAWG is completely about sex. I don't know where the
heroin connection is coming from.
In a way this is true....it IS about sex. It's also about sexual manipulation. How sex can be used by both partners to manipulate the personality and responses of the other partner. Umm...the actual fuckee becomes the fucker, becomes the fuckee - while the reverse may be happening on a psychological level. Ah, nevermind....listen to the original with this in mind. You'll get to it. Anyway, John needed a gun (bang bang) to protect himself....so he used his to find one. Yoko was a loose cannon...he stuck his dick in it....or, rather, it jumped his gun. Except she wasn't really a cannon, of course. She was a mother superior. Just listen to it.
Creighton08-18-2001, 08:56 PM
Yeah, well, I've seen the Beatles and was a huge Beatles fan (after Rubber Soul), reading everything about the song lyrics that I could get my hands on. John typically preferred to mislead people about his lyrics. He took it as a joke on the public and the interviewers. He was also fully aware of the interpretations which were being discussed at the time and enjoyed insisting that the songs meant either nothing at all or that the interpretations which had been offered concerning the overarching meaning of the entire lyric content of particular songs were misdirected because there simply was no meaning. In other words, he preferred to say that his lyrics were just bits and pieces which he happened to fall upon and throw into a new song without any real thought as to what it meant altogether. To listen to him describe his lyrics is to listen to his humor. He would spew a stream of bullshit a mile long when everybody and his brother, sister, mother, father, aunts and uncles understood what was going on in the song. Sure, he picked up bits and pieces here and there. However, he carefully chose those bits and pieces and put them together in specific ways to convey meaning. His lyrics were NOT abstract splashes of color. If you prefer to believe that, though, you WILL miss the meaning. It was a characteristic of his genius that this is so.
Clunky the monkey08-18-2001, 02:03 PM
This is taken from the book "a hard days write - the stories behind every beatles song". I typed it all out myself - so excuse any typo's. It explains the origins of the song so well.
“The idea for this song came to John Lennon after he discovered a gun magazine belonging to George Martin that had been left lying around the studio. On the cover was the line "Happiness is a warm gun in your hand". It was too good a phrase to let go and he began to toy with it. "I thought, what a fantastic thing to say!" John later remarked. "A warm gun means you've just shot something."
John had recently started living with Yoko Ono the Japanese artist he'd first met at an exhibition of her art in 1966. By his own admission, he felt "very sexually oriented" during this period, so before long the idea for a song about a warm gun had taken on sexual connotations, and gave rise to phrases about itchy trigger fingers and discharged loads.
If it was a song about anybody, it was a song about yoko. she was the girl he held in his arms, the girl who was so smart that she didn't miss a trick and the one he always called mother - in this case, mother superior.
But tagged on to the original lines were random images picked up from a night of
acid tripping with Derek Taylor, Neil Aspinall and Pete Shotton at a house Taylor was renting from Peter Asher in Newdigate near Dorking in Surrey. "John said he had written half a song and wanted us to toss out phrases while Neil write them down," says Taylor. "First of all, he wanted to know how to describe a girl who was really smart and i remembered a phrase of my father's which was 'she's not a girl who misses much'. It sounds like faint praise but on Merseyside, in those days, it was actually the best you could get.
"Then i told a story about a chap my wife Joan and i met in the carrick bay hotel on the isle of man. It was late one night drinking in the bar and this local fellow who liked meeting holiday makers and rapping to them suddenly said to us, 'I like wearing moleskin gloves you know. It gives me a little bit of an unusual sensation when i'm out with my girlfriend.' He then said, 'I don’t want to go into details.' So we didn't. But that provided the line, 'She's well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand'. Then there was 'like a lizard on a window pane'. That, to me, was a symbol of very quick movement. Often, when we were living in LA, you'd look up and see tiny little lizards nipping up the window," continues Taylor.
"'The man in the crowd with mulit-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots' was from
something i'd seen in a newspaper about a Manchester City soccer fan who had
been arrested by the police for having mirrors on the toe caps of his shoes so that he could look up girls skirts. We thought this was an incredibly complicated and tortuous way of getting a cheap thrill and so that became 'multi coloured mirrors' and 'hobnail boots' to fit the rhythm. A bit of poetic license," adds Taylor.
"The bit about 'lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime' came from another thing i'd read where a man wearing a cloak had fake plastic hands, which he would rest on the counter of a shop while underneath the cloak he was busy lifting things and stuffing them in a bag round his waist.
"I don’t know where the 'soap impression of his wife' came from but the eating of something and then donating it 'to the national trust' came from a conversation we'd had about the horrors of walking in public spaces on Merseyside, where you
Were always coming across the evidence of people having crapped behind the bushes and in old air raid shelters. So to donate what you've eaten to the national trust (a British organization with responsibilities for upkeeping countryside of great beauty) was what would now be known as 'defecation on common land owned by the national trust'. When John put it all together, it created a series of layers of images. It was like a whole mess of colour," Taylor concludes.
The Beatles had just started to record this track on the day Linda Eastman arrived in London to begin life living with paul.
