The Beatles' White Album Tracks, Continued

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Although credited to Lennon - McCartney, it was written by John Lennon.

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Lyrics:

She's not a girl who misses much

Do do do do do do, oh, yeah

She's well acquainted

With the touch of the velvet hand

Like a lizard on a window pane

The man in the crowd with the

Multicolored mirrors on his hobnail boots

Lying with his eyes

While his hands are busy working overtime

A soap impression of his wife

Which he ate and donated to the National Trust

I need a fix cause I'm going down

Down to the bits that I left uptown

I need a fix cause I'm going down

Mother Superior jump the gun

Mother Superior jump the gun

Mother Superior jump the gun

Mother Superior jump the gun

Mother Superior jump the gun

Mother Superior jump the gun

Happiness is a warm gun

(Bang bang, shoot shoot)

Happiness is a warm gun mama

(Bang bang, shoot shoot)

When I hold you in my arms

(Oh yeah)

And I feel my finger on your trigger

(Ooo, oh yeah)

I know nobody can do me no harm

(Ooo, oh yeah)

Because happiness is a warm gun mama

(Bang bang, shoot shoot)

Happiness is a warm gun, yes it is

(Bang bang, shoot shoot)

Happiness is a warm, yes it is, gun

(Happiness, bang bang, shoot shoot)

Well, don't you know that happiness is a warm gun mama

(Happiness is a warm gun yeah)

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Video clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTU2Y0VFH0E

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The creator of the Peanuts comic strip, Charles M Schilz, once wrote a book “Happiness is a Warm Puppy”. 

John Lennon once commented on how he came up withy the song concept and title:

"I think he [George Martin] showed me a cover of a magazine that said 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.' It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something."

  - John Lennon

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"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" was McCartney’s and Harrison’s favourite song on the White Album.

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As with many Lennon lyrics, Happiness is a Warm Gun can be interpreted on a number of levels: 

• it is a song about drugs, Lennon was doing heroin at the time and the gun is a symbol of a hypodermic syringe (although he was snorting, not injecting); 

• it is a song about his sexual desire for Yoko Ono, who is the Mother Superior referred to; 

• it is a nonsense thing with phrases selected at random to write the lyrics.

From the Lennon 1980 Playboy interview:

PLAYBOY: "'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.'"

LENNON: "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."

PLAYBOY: "What about the sexual puns: 'When you feel my finger on your trigger'?"

LENNON: "Well, 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."

PLAYBOY: "What was the allusion to 'Mother Superior jumps the gun'?"

LENNON: "I call Yoko Mother or Madam just in an offhand way. The rest doesn't mean anything. It's just images of her."

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The BBC banned the song for sexual suggestiveness.

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According to Susan Kreutzer:

The lyrics were a typical Lennon hodgepodge of images most of which came from an acid laced get together with friends Derek Taylor, Pete Shotton, and longtime Beatles assistant Neil Aspinall.

John said he had half a song and wanted to throw out ideas while Neil wrote them down.  

They were looking for a phrase that described a very smart girl and Taylor remembered a phrase his father used to say, ‘She’s not a girl who misses much’.  

Then Taylor told a story of man he and his wife had met late one night at a bar at the Carrick Hotel, who said he liked to wear moleskin gloves when out with his girlfriend.

The line, ‘which he ate and donated to the national trust’ was the most curious. They remembered walking the public places of Merseyside and finding that people had defecated behind the bushes and at old air raid shelters hence, donating what they ate. 

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http://www.thebeatlessongbysong.com/HappinessWarmGunScript.html