The Beatles, the famous British rock band formed in 1960, have become one of the most revered and successful musical acts in history. Their classic hits such as “Here Comes The Sun”, “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, and “All You Need Is Love” helped the Fab Four to change the face of popular music forever. As many ardent fans know, some of their most famous songs have interesting backstories. One such song, credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, although it had an entirely different meaning, ended up predicting the band’s shocking breakup, which occurred just a few years after the single’s release.
The Beatles’ “Glass Onion” Foretold the Band’s Epic Breakup
In November 1968, The Beatles released their ninth studio album, The Beatles (also known as The White Album). As with nearly all of their records, it featured several popular hits, such as “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”, “Blackbird”, and “Revolution 1”, to name a few. Another hit track was titled “Glass Onion.” The nearly two-minute and twenty-second psychedelic rock song was originally written as a subtle dig at critics and fans who delved too deeply into the band’s lyrics. The song was also intended by its main composer, Lennon, to poke fun at the band. For example, “Glass Onion” included a plethora of Beatles song references, including: “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Lady Madonna,” “The Fool on the Hill,” and “Fixing a Hole.” “That’s me, just doing a throwaway song, à la ‘Walrus’, à la everything I’ve ever written,” Lennon once revealed about the single. “I threw the line in – ‘the Walrus was Paul’ – just to confuse everybody a bit more. And I thought Walrus has now become me, meaning ‘I am the one.’ Only it didn’t mean that in this song…It could have been ‘the fox terrier is Paul,’ you know. I mean, it’s just a bit of poetry. It was just thrown in like that.”
However, the track also had a deeper meaning, which later became a premonition of things to come: the group’s breakup on April 10, 1970. During one of his last interviews with David Sheff, Lennon revealed that he wrote the Paul lyric to signal to the group that he was over being a part of it, “The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko, and I was leaving Paul. I was trying … I don’t know. It’s a very perverse way of saying to Paul, you know, ‘Here, have this crumb, this illusion, this, this stroke, because I’m leaving.” While many have theorized and debated over the true and main cause of the band’s devastating breakup, according to Lennon, in a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, the reason for his departure was because he felt that, “I had to either be married to them [the band] or Yoko, and I chose Yoko.” However, in a 2012 interview with David Frost, McCartney offered ip a different reason: “Yoko Ono “certainly didn’t break the group up, the group was already breaking up.”
In what has become a legendary moment in pop music history, Beatles member John Lennon gave a sit-down interview with his wife, Yoko Ono, on The Dick Cavett Show in September 1971. During the interview, Lennon discussed various topics, including the meaning behind their famous song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” The three-minute twenty-eight-second track was featured on The Beatles’ eighth studio album, titled Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Some of the song’s famous lyrics go as follows: “Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain /Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies / Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers / That grow so incredibly high / Newspaper taxis appear on the shore / Waiting to take you away / Climb in the back with your head in the clouds
And you’re gone.”
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The True Story Behind The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”
In the Dick Cavett interview, Lennon was asked if “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was a code word for anything (in this case, drugs). Lennon responded, “It never was, and nobody believes me. I even saw some famous star, I even forgot who it was, introduced me at Mel Torme’s show, who said that “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was about LSD,” said Lennon. He added, “This is the truth: My son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. And I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, it’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds. And I thought, that’s beautiful. And I immediately wrote a song about it.“ Lennon added that once the song was released, some people noticed that the lyrics’ monikers spelled out LSD. Lennon professed that at the time he wrote the song, he didn’t realize it spelled out the drug name, so he started going through old songs of theirs to see if they spelled out anything similar, but thankfully, they didn’t.
in a similar interview, Paul McCartney confirmed to author Barry Miles for the 1998 biography Many Years From Now that the song he co-wrote with Lennon was categorically not about LSD. McCartney added, “I swear we didn’t notice that when it came out, in actual fact, if you want to be pedantic you’d have to say it is LITSWD, but of course LSD is a better story.”
Lennon also later added that the song’s lyrics were also slightly inspired by Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking Glass, of which Lennon was a huge fan.Lennon recalled in a 1980 interview: “It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg, and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere, and I was visualizing that.”
