The idea for this song came to John
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 a warm gun had taken on sexual
connotations, he gave rise to phrases about itchy trigger
fingers and discharged loads.
If it was a song about anybody, it
was a song about Yoko. He 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 wrote 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 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 in the window," continues Taylor.
"'The Man in the crowd with
multi-coloured mirrors on his hobnail boots' was form
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 hand were
working overtime' came form another thing I'd read where a
man wearing a cloak and 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 around
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 conversation he'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 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 with Paul.
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