A song from legendary musician John Lennon was written while he was “stoned out of his mind.”
The hitmaker behind Imagine and I Want You (She’s So Heavy) put one of his best songs together when he was high on marijuana. Lennon would share as much in one of his final interviews, confirming a long-standing rumour that a song he had written for the band was influenced by pot. The atmosphere in the studio at the time helped Lennon just as much as a “big hash joint” as he says the mood left him “transfixed” on the song. A backwards vocal technique which features on Rain would come to Lennon while he was high, and once he put it down on the track, it seems to have worked well. It was released on the other side of The Beatles‘ Paperback Writer, which released on May 30, 1966.
Lennon said: “I got home from the studio and I was stoned out of my mind on marijuana and, as I usually do, I listened to what I’d recorded that day. Somehow I got it on backwards and I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint.
“I ran in the next day and said, ‘I know what to do with it, I know … Listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing backwards with the guitars going backwards. [Singing backwards] Sharethsmnowthsmeaness … [Laughter] That one was the gift of God, of Jah, actually, the god of marijuana, right? So Jah gave me that one.”
Lennon’s influences, be it wanting to confuse listeners or taking a toke on a big joint, would cement him as one of the greatest songwriters if his generation. But the Imagine hitmaker would tire of people reading too deeply into his lyrics, and he wrote a song just to mess with those trying to find deeper meaning in his work.
In the same interview, Lennon suggested his Glass Onion track from The White Album, was written solely to confuse people. Lennon would rather bluntly put it as a spoof of “everything I’ve ever written,” and would go on to suggest he wrote it merely to “confuse everybody”. He said: “That’s me, just doing a throwaway song, à la ‘Walrus’, à la everything I’ve ever written.”
Speaking with interviewer David Sheff in 1980, Lennon added: “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.
“Well, that was a joke. 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 stroke, because I’m leaving’.”
