2000 Great Songs #1395: Happiness Is A Warm Gun

Some 650 songs ago, chatting up "Dear Prudence," I talked about what a revelation The White Album was when I first bought it as a kid, realizing that the Beatles had such an incredibly rich catalog of deep cuts far removed from the basic hits I'd heard on the radio up to that point. But more than just heretofore unknown (to me) great songs, the album was riddled with truly weird songs. And, ok, a few oddities had found their way to the hits collections and the FM dial (i.e. "I Am The Walrus," to pick one), but the White Album introduced me to a band that wasn't just making pop songs, but was truly willing to fuck around and see what they came up with--and what they came up with still somehow sounded strangely brilliant.

"Happiness Is A Warm Gun" was one of the tracks that really messed with me. You've got 4-5 disjointed, arguably half-assed musical snippets joined together (something they'd do more with on side two of Abbey Road, but at least those felt like medleys of nearly complete songs). The "she's not a girl who misses much" is just a few seconds long, quickly pivoting into that "velvet hand" bit with the staccato guitar jabs; then a complete tempo shift for the "I need a fix segment"; then another tempo shift for the "Mother Superior jump the gun nonsense"; and then it finally wraps up with the title business, done as a weird-ass 50s doo-wop song.

And all of that in under two minutes, forty five seconds. Fucking nuts if you ask me.

Early take:

Breeders cover:

World Party cover:

Phish (live) cover (at 6:20 into the clip):

U2 cover:

Tori Amos cover:

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