The Beatles song John Lennon fell out of love with while recording: “An incredibly complicated thing”
Almost everything The Beatles did was predicated on them having the time of their lives in the studio.
They may have seemed like they absolutely fucking hated each other by the time they reached the end of their tenure, but they were simply growing apart and wanting to make different kinds of music than what they had been working on for the past few years. And while that meant having to compromise a little too often in the studio, there were moments where John Lennon felt that some tunes had lost their lustre after a while.
Granted, Lennon was always going to be a little bit unhappy going back to some of the biggest pieces of their career. He famously hated most of the Sgt Pepper period because he felt he had nothing to contribute, and even when there were moments that stood out, he would always be talking about how things could have turned out a lot better than they ultimately became on tracks like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
For all of the vitriol that he threw towards his old band, though, you aren’t going to find too many quotes from him saying anything bad about The White Album. This was everyone’s chance to roam free and do whatever the hell they wanted when they entered the studio, and Lennon relished every opportunity to get weird, even if it pissed off McCartney to no end seeing him deconstruct music on ‘Revolution 9’.
But it would make sense why Lennon would gravitate to an album like this in their catalogue. It’s almost the anti-concept album in many respects, with how many twists and turns it goes down, but that invites a lot more possibilities as well. There are many fine pop tunes Lennon serves up, like ‘Dear Prudence’ and the absolutely beautiful version of ‘Good Night’, but there are also tracks that don’t seem to have any clear direction, like ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’.
The tune was already an excuse for Lennon to cram everything he could find about rock and roll into a single tune, but getting those transitions down was never going to be that easy. There are many options when it comes to getting the right feel for a song, but the entire layout of this tune feels like three tunes smashing into each other for the span of an entire track. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but that didn’t mean it was easy to make, either.
When Giles Martin talked about looking over the outtakes for the record, he remembered hearing Lennon say that he was starting to have less enthusiasm for playing the tune after a while, saying, “A song like ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ is an incredibly complicated thing to play, and actually they’d find it quite funny. They’d get through the end of a take, and John would go, ‘It’s getting better, but it’s not getting more fun.’ But George would go, ‘It’s getting better and it’s getting more fun.’ John would say, ‘Is it? Maybe for you, but it’s hard.’”
Granted, any band that could pull this off would have had their fair share of headaches putting everything together. There were a lot of times where anyone would need to look at where they were in the tune to realise where everything was going, and even if the tune clocks in at under four minutes, the whole thing goes by so fast that it feels like going through multiple different versions of rock and roll in such a short timeframe.
Even if this was a true labour of love for Lennon to get down on paper, the true testament of The Beatles’ skills was the fact that they were able to play off each other this well. Not everyone had to love everything that their writing partners were doing on The White Album, but as long as the count-in came in, they were always going to give it everything they had.
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