White Album turns 40

Wow. It was 40 years ago that The Beatles was released.

A year after Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles' self-titled double-LP, nicknamed The White Album, signaled the Fab Four starting to go their separate ways. Most of it was written while the Beatles were in India, studying Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi.

It's always been one of my favorite Beatles albums. I even wrote a review of it for my high school newspaper.

In that spirit, I'd like to post a review of just one of the many songs from this album. Popmatters.com has a review of each song on the album to celebrate the 40th anniversary. I thought this one really nailed it. Great song, too, needless to say.

Happiness Is a Warm Gun
Primary Songwriter: Lennon
Recorded: September 23-25, 1968 at Abbey Road

The Beatles' first side ends with an intricate masterpiece that represents a united—and unusually wonderful and weird—effort amidst so much individuality. Reportedly McCartney’s favorite “White Album” song, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is also classic Lennon: a lyric mixture of the psychedelic ("She’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand / Like a lizard on a window pane"), the distinctly British ("Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime / A soap impression of his wife which he ate and donated to the National Trust"), the obviously sexual ("When I hold you in my arms / And feel my finger on your trigger"), the personal ("I need a fix”, reflecting Lennon’s drug dependency), and the political ("Happiness is a warm gun” came from a magazine article about the American gun lobby).

But beyond its potent poetry of religion, sexuality, violence, and vision, “Happiness” is one of the Beatles’ most musically sophisticated tunes. It is not built on verses and choruses but rather from four or five distinct sections that build in intensity. Lennon claimed it as a miniature history of rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s fair enough. It opens with a delicate verse of guitar and voice only, shifting upward as bass and drums enter. There is a sudden change to 3/4 time for a brief, guttural blues guitar solo that precedes “I need a fix”. Just as suddenly, the triple meter double-times to 6/8 while Lennon starts to sing “Mother Superior jump the gun”, slowing to 3/4 on the second half of the phrase. Which happens six times. But with a measure of 4/4 on the end of the every other repetition. Got it? Needless to say, the familiar doo-woppy “Happiness is a warm gun / Bang-bang, shoot-shoot!” is back in 4/4 again, but Lennon’s spoken interlude ("When I hold you...") is in 3/4 again.

All this intricacy might sound like symphonic prog-rock run amok, except that it takes a scant 2:43, with each section as concise as a dot of color in a Seurat painting. And the wonder of the song is precisely this almost shocking brevity and incongruity: no section repeats, and each part seems like a new world, a revelation. While it is clear that “Happiness” glues together several different tunes, there is also flat-out artistry in how these disparate pieces echo off each other. The toggling between duple and triple meter gives the tune balance, even as the intensity of each section ramps ever upward. There is also a balancing of romantic imagery (starting with a girl and a man) and violent imagery, allowing Lennon to be alternately provocative ("Mother Superior” mixed together with “gun") and playful (is it the woman’s trigger or the gun’s trigger he has his finger on?). As always, Lennon is aware of how the commodification of the Beatles can be exploited: the title of the song is a bitter joke about the gun lobby, but also a reference to the cuddly catch-phrase from Peanuts of the time, “Happiness Is a Warm Puppy”. The joy of this play is that it is also sonic: the beautiful reverb on the opening guitars doesn’t even last a minute, but the vocal falsetto doubling that starts with “I need a fix” is its own kind of candy, which then develops into the mocking harmony of “Bang-bang, shoot-shoot”.

All of which is to say: Wow. Only five years had passed since “I Want to Hold Your Hand”, yet the Beatles were now writing and recording complex poetic suites rather than verse-chorus pop tunes. Radiohead apparently found “Happiness” of inspiration when working on its own multi-part tune, “Paranoid Android”, for OK Computer. But what had not changed for the Beatles was their keen awareness that rock ‘n’ roll—the sublime art of the three-minute symphony—was worth an investment of great wit and passion. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is catchy like a pop song, provocative like protest art, effortlessly complex and yet off-the-cuff funny. Which is to say: it is the apotheosis of “Beatle-esque”.

—Will Layman