Sean Lennon Q & A in Rolling Stone

[shelter]

I distinctly remember reading in a John Lennon Interview ................"I like rock and roll , I don't like much else"

Yeah, he always said he was mostly into rock & roll... Which is odd if you realize he also wrote songs like Julia, Good Night, Across The Universe, Because and If I Fell...

[Aegir]

I'm convinced "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" was inspired by "She's Goin' Bald"!

I don't see it at all. Please elaborate.

[shelter]

I'm convinced "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" was inspired by "She's Goin' Bald"!

I don't see it at all.

Me neither, to be honest.

[Sir Rob]

I distinctly remember reading in a John Lennon Interview ................"I like rock and roll , I don't like much else"

Wasn't that the Jann Wenner 'Lennon Remembers' interview from 1970?  I think he said a lot of wild and sweeping stuff there that should be taken with a pinch of salt.

[Surfer Joe]

Didn't Lennon tell Playboy in 1980 that he'd been listening to Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were"? Maybe I'm misremembering.  Anyway, he liked (and wrote) a lot of stuff that wasn't harsh. People love to stereotype Lennon...

[Dancing Bear]

Lennon loved to wear an uniform, so you can't blame people for stereotyping him.

[Surfer Joe]

Interesting point. But regardless of whether he encouraged it...he gets oversimplified, and though he was genuinely larger than life, over-mythologized. When people try to reduce the Beatles to just him, it really makes me think they've bought into the hype rather than the actual greatness.

[Roger Ryan]

I'm convinced "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" was inspired by "She's Goin' Bald"!

I don't see it at all.

Me neither, to be honest.

While Lennon's inspiration to create a multi-part song that is made up of distinct genre types could have come from The Who's "A Quick One While He's Away" or novelty records like the kind Spike Jones used to do, "Happiness..." seems like a close approximation of "She's Goin' Bald" to me. The opening section to both songs refer to a female protagonist and have a rolling kind of melody accompanied by stream-of-consciousness wordplay. Both feature a hard blues section ("Mother Superior jumped the gun..."/"It's too late mama, there's nothing upside your head"), and both feature a parody of a doo wop style ("Happiness is a warm gun - bang, bang, shoot, shoot"/ "Na na na na, nana nana na - what a blow"). Each song contains yet another genre parody that differs from the other: "Happiness..." throws in a country-western blues nod ("I'm goin' down...") whereas "..."Bald" goes for a melodramatic radio serial jab ("She tried to salvage what she could and threw it in a sack!").

"She's Goin' Bald"'s release on "Smiley Smile" would have happened only a month or two before Lennon's trip to India when he began writing most of his material for the "White Album", so if Lennon was influenced at all by the Beach Boys' summer '67 release as he and McCartney reportedy were with "Pet Sounds", he might have been intrigued enough by "...Bald" to do his own multi-part oddity.