The Beatles song about John Lennon’s heroin addiction: “We were disappointed”
Heroin has a long and storied history within the context of popular music. Over the years, everybody from Billie Holiday to the New York Dolls’ Johnny Thunders have been drawn to the needle, and The Beatles were no exception. When John Lennon started using heroin with Yoko Ono, his songwriting shifted focus, leaving his bandmates worried for his health.
As the Fab Four transitioned from fresh-faced pop stars to more considered and mature artists, drugs had a growing influence over the group. For the most part, the band’s habits were limited to less severe substances, namely cannabis and LSD. Psychedelics like LSD became synonymous with the sound of The Beatles as they evolved, with the drug almost inseparable from seminal works like Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver.
It must have come as something of a shock, therefore, when John Lennon abandoned the mind-altering powers of acid for the opium depressant of heroin. Lennon and Ono had first become hooked on the golden brown in 1968, claiming it was a result of wanting to escape from press intrusion into their relationship. Inevitably, his addiction had a profound effect on the rest of the band, with Paul McCartney once sharing, “We were disappointed that he was getting into heroin because we didn’t really see how we could help him. We just hoped it wouldn’t go too far.”
It did not take long for Lennon’s smack habit to bleed over into his musical output. As McCartney explained, “He was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into and so his songs were taking on more references to heroin.”
Continuing, he added: “Until that point we had made rather mild, oblique references to pot or LSD. Now John started talking about fixes and monkeys and it was a harder terminology which the rest of us weren’t into.”
The most obvious example of Lennon’s heroin addiction within a Beatles track comes in ‘Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey’, from The White Album. The title of the track is widely accepted to be a reference to heroin, with ‘A monkey on the back’ being a term used for the drug, originating in the jazz scene of the 1940s. With lyrics like, “The deeper you go the higher you fly”, it seems fairly obvious what the track is all about.
Despite its pretty clear ties to heroin, Lennon himself refuted claims that the song was about drugs. According to the songwriter, the track was, in fact, about his relationship with Yoko Ono. He once revealed in an interview, “That was just a sort of nice line that I made into a song. It was about me and Yoko. Everybody seemed to be paranoid except for us two, who were in the glow of love.”
Although Lennon claimed the track was not in any way influenced by his penchant for heroin, the songwriter also claimed that the track ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ (L.S.D.) had nothing to do with psychedelic substances – so perhaps take his comments with a pinch of salt.
