‘Cold Turkey’: John Lennon’s war against the war on drugs
When John Lennon marked his official emancipation from The Beatles with the anti-war cry ‘Give Peace a Chance’, his declaration could not have been clearer: he would not be silenced.
With the Fab Four, Lennon continually made his beliefs heard, though his voice was often quieted by the mass hysteria that followed in The Beatles’ wake. Going solo meant Lennon having a platform all of his own, one that would exorcise him from his past and allow him to begin anew. ‘Give Peace a Chance’ was an instantaneous anthem with its melodic call-to-action, but its successor, ‘Cold Turkey’, formed from a darker cloud when, as its name suggests, Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, abruptly gave up their destructive heroin addictions.
Lennon had presented an early version of ‘Cold Turkey’ to Paul McCartney, recorded as simple acoustic guitar demos in September 1969. This was during the recording sessions for Abbey Road, ones fraught with tension: Ono’s looming presence had grown increasingly unwelcome, and Lennon’s agitation increased towards the songs produced, resulting in his desire to have his contributions split from McCartney’s on the final product.
When Lennon showed McCartney ‘Cold Turkey’ towards the end of the sessions, it was refused. This was not the first time that Lennon had chronicled his drug use, nor had the rest of The Beatles. Lennon explored his complicated relationship with substances as hidden meanings in songs like ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ (the meaning of which the singer disputed) and ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’, both appearing on the White Album the year prior. Fame’s web tangled Lennon into its grasp and, unable to find an efficient reprieve from the chaos, he looked to drugs – particularly heroin – as an outlet.
Speaking with Jann Wenner in 1970, Lennon described how his and Ono’s drug use came to be. “Heroin. It just was not too much fun. I never injected it or anything. We sniffed a little when we were in real pain,” the musician explained. “People were giving us such a hard time. And I’ve had so much shit thrown at me and especially at Yoko.”
Lennon went on to explain how the disrespect towards him and his wife manifested in retaliation through less-than-ideal means. “We took H because of what The Beatles and their pals were doing to us,” he said. “And we got out of it. They didn’t set down to do it, but things came out of that period. And I don’t forget.”
Without McCartney’s approval of the song, Lennon opted to record it himself under the name of the Plastic Ono Band, and it became the first track for which he took sole songwriting credit. As for the song’s meaning, Lennon simply described it to writer David Sheff as “self-explanatory”. The lyrical content chronicles the aftermath of detoxing from heroin, with visceral descriptions of its effects on the body.
“Temperature’s risin / Fever is high,” Lennon sings. “I wish I was a baby / I wish I was dead.” He promises to “be a good boy” in exchange for reprieve from the unrelenting body aches and sleepless nights. “I promise you anything,” he wagers, “Get me out of this hell.”
The final recorded version of ‘Cold Turkey’ featured some familiar musicians. Recorded in Abbey Road Studio 2, Ringo Starr loyally joined on the drums, while Lennon invited guitarist Eric Clapton to lend a hand, alongside Klaus Voorman on bass. Lennon’s description of heroin’s brutal aftermath was nowhere near in promotion of drug use, as he wanted to make abundantly clear.
“They’re always arresting smugglers or kids with a few joints in their pocket. They never face the reality,” he said to Sheff in 1980, quoted in Sheff’s book All We Are Saying. “They’re not looking at the cause of the drug problem. Why is everybody taking drugs? To escape from what? Is life so terrible? Do we live in such a terrible situation that we can’t do anything about it without reinforcement from alcohol or tobacco or sleeping pills?”
‘Cold Turkey’, then, holds a mirror not just to drugs’ effects when they are finally abandoned, but to the root cause of their sinister appeal in the first place. “I’m not preaching about ‘em,” Lennon declared. “I’m just saying a drug is a drug, you know. Why we take them is important, not who’s selling it to whom on the corner.”
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