The White Album is full of cobwebby subterranean corners, and this song is one of the cobwebbiest. The title comes from an issue of American Rifleman that John Lennon thought was funny in a bleak way. The joke became quite a bit more bleak after his death.
You can listen to the isolated tracks here. This is probably the most formally complex Beatles song unless you count the Abbey Road medley as a single work of music. “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is a miniature medley unto itself, since John stitched it together from several unfinished fragments. It took a lot of in-studio rehearsal to pull it together, and the band needed more than seventy takes (including false starts) to get the final one. It’s interesting to compare this earlier take, which doesn’t have all the overdubs.
John and Yoko discussed the song in an interview with Howard Smith.
John is clearly proud of the song, and describes it as covering “the whole history of rock and roll.” He says that “the girl who doesn’t miss much” and “Mother Superior” are both Yoko. He also denies that any of it is about heroin, which is hard to believe when the lyrics literally say that he needs a fix cause he’s going down.
Not too many people have attempted to cover this tune, but there are a few respectable versions out there. I like the soul/jazz take by Bobby Bryant.
The Breeders version features gigantic-sounding drums recorded by the late, great Steve Albini.
I love the way Danger Mouse flips samples of it for “Moment of Clarity” on the Grey Album.
Beyond these direct covers and samples, “Happiness is a Warm Gun” has been culturally impactful in a more general way too. Its formal complexity emboldened other rock songwriters to broaden their compositional ambitions. For example, Radiohead cites its through-composed structure as their inspiration for “Paranoid Android“.
Here’s my transcription. The song is complicated, but it’s understandable if you take it in bite-sized pieces. Let’s start with the tempo, which is ambiguous at the beginning of the song. I hear it as a slow 70 beats per minute. In his analysis, Alan Pollack hears it as a medium-up 140 beats per minute. That’s plausible during the first part. However, for me, the clearest indication of tempo in a rock song is that the snare drum should be on the backbeats, beats two and four. Ringo’s backbeat placement clearly says 70 bpm, so I’m treating that as the base tempo throughout.
The A section (“She’s not a girl who misses much”)
This section is just four bars long, and is harmonically and melodically unrelated to anything that follows. You might think of it as an intro, but it feels more like a first verse. (Though by this logic, there is no second verse.) The section is in E minor, but it starts on the iv chord, Am7. The G on top of the chord moves down a half step to F-sharp to make Am6. Then the F-sharp carries over to the Em to make Em9. Hip!
||: Am7 Am6 | Em9 :||
John uses the same Travis-picking pattern here as he does in “Dear Prudence” and “Julia”. He had just learned the technique in India from Donovan, and was clearly excited about it. He uses the same voicings of Am7 and Am6 in “Julia” too.
The B section (“She’s well acquainted with the touch of a velvet hand”)
The section kicks off with a wild and distorted Dm6 chord, which comes completely out of the blue. This chord has no apparent relationship to the key of E minor. John has switched keys to A minor, which isn’t such an unusual modulation, but he’s landing on the iv chord, which is an extra step around the circle of fifths. Minor sixth chords are weird, too; there’s that tritone between the flat third and natural sixth, which makes it sound like a diminished seventh chord, an unstable and bluesy harmony.
From here, the chords just alternate Dm6 and Am, but the meter is odd, with bars of two and three at unpredictable intervals. The lyrics are John’s finest surrealism. I have no idea what he’s talking about with “the soap impression of his wife that he ate and donated to the national trust”, but it sounds fantastic and is fun to sing.
The C section (guitar solo, then “I need a fix”)
The time signature changes from 4/4 to 3/8, so it feels like the tempo is doubling. The key changes from A minor to A blues tonality. Alan Pollack analyzes this section as being in A minor, but while the melody may use C-natural, the chord underneath uses C-sharp, the major third. George plays the drunken-sounding lead part on a fretless guitar. John was originally singing the lyrics over that part, and you can hear a little remainder of the erased vocal at the end of the solo.
The phrasing and hypermeter are very difficult to understand here. The hypermeasures would seem to be three bars long, but then the chord change from A7 to C at 0:54 falls in the middle of a hypermeasure rather than at the beginning of one. The last hypermeasure before the vocals come in gets cut off early, too.
The D section (“Mother Superior jumped the gun”)
Now the meter gets really wild. I hear two bars of 3/16 for “Mother Superior” and then two bars of 3/8 for “jumped the gun.” On the next phrase, there are two bars of 3/16 for “Mother Superior” and then a bar of 3/8 and a bar of 4/8 for “jumped the gun.” You could, I guess, hear this all as a bar of 9/8 and a bar of 10/8. Then that entire nineteen-beat unit repeats two more times. Gnarly! The chords are A7, C, A7, G7, which I hear as all being part of the same A blues tonality as the previous section.
Jacob Gran hears the meter a bit differently than I do: “I’d count it 1+a 2+a 3+a | 1+ 2+ 3+ 4+ | 1+a 2+a 3+a | 1+ 2+ 3+ 4+ 5+ with equal 16ths as the subdivision. So a four measure phrase of 9/16 and 4/8 then 9/16 and 5/8, repeated three times.” A few days later he posted an update: “A student and I just listened to the isolated tracks on YouTube, and I changed my mind. What I said still sort of makes sense for the vocals, but Ringo’s drumming is more like 6/16 (feels like the first two hits of a tresillo pattern), 6/8, then 6/16 and 7/8.” This is the same thing that I came up with, just grouped differently.
The E section (“Happiness is a warm gun”)
We’re back to 4/4 at 70 bpm, like the first part. The chords are a simple doo-wop progression: C, Am, F, G. On “when I hold you in my arms”, the meter changes to 6/8, but Ringo’s beat feels like overlaid 4/4, and he plays it a little uncertainly to my ears. On the break (“Happiness is a warm, yes it is…”), the G resolves to Fm7 rather than C. It seems like the tempo is suspended, but the break is exactly two bars long. John’s falsetto “guuuunnnnn” enters three sixteenth notes before everything else does, it’s really satisfying.
Why does this all hang together so well?
If I saw this song written out without having heard it, I would be expecting nerdy math rock. I certainly wouldn’t expect it to sound so natural and coherent. So why does the song sound so organic? Some of it is the production. This is not a very complicated recording by late Beatles standards. The general instrumental timbre stays consistent the whole time, give or take a layer of guitar. There is some variety in the vocal production: someone (I think John) harmonizes in thirds in the B section, and John doubles himself in octaves in the C and D sections. In the E section, Paul and George sing the harmonies with their voices sped up to give them a Chipmunk-y quality; maybe they wanted to sound like the Ronettes. These bits of studio manipulation aside, the general feeling is of four guys playing live in a room. It’s the rare psychedelic Beatles song that a rock band could convincingly recreate onstage if they were willing to put in the rehearsal time.
What, if anything, do the words mean? Scott Haden Church has some ideas in his article, The Beatles’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun” as Postmodern Protest. The title gives you the main argument. Church thinks that the song is satyrical and mocking, and that the lyrics sound “carnivalesque”, thanks to all the references to sexual deviance and drug abuse, not to mention the casual violence of the title. The fragmented structure “symbolically commits violence to standard musical form and lyrical convention.” Church recognizes that this is not an overt protest song like something Bob Dylan would have written in 1963. Instead, it’s more in keeping with Lennon’s absurdist theatrical protest actions like the Bed-ins for peace.
It’s also worth remembering how jarring it would have been to hear the Beatles doing a surrealist protest song in 1968. Only four years earlier, these guys were singing “I Want To Hold Your Hand” on the Ed Sullivan Show in matching suits and bowl haircuts. John Lennon had written several other extremely weird songs by this point, and he was already notorious for making blunt political statements. Still, “Happiness is a Warm Gun” is much darker than “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, more fragmented than “A Day in the Life”, and more pointed than “I Am The Walrus.” It was weird enough for me to hear all of this music out of order as a kid in the 1980s; I can only imagine how weird it was to experience it in real time.