The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [27]
You also have a song on that album, “In My Life.” When did you write that?
I wrote that in Kenwood. I used to write upstairs where I had about ten Brunell tape recorders all linked up. I still have them. I’d mastered them over the period of a year or two—I could never make a rock & roll record, but I could make some far-out stuff on it. I wrote it upstairs; that was one where I wrote the lyrics first and then sang it. That was usually the case with things like “In My Life” and “Universe” and some of the ones that stand out a bit.
Would you just record yourself and a guitar on a tape and then bring it in to the studio?
I would do that just to get an impression of what it sounded like sung and to hear it back for judging it—you never know till you hear the song yourself. I would double track the guitar or the voice or something on the tape. I think on “Norwegian Wood” and “In My Life” Paul helped with the middle eight, to give credit where it’s due.
Let me ask you about one on the double album, “Glass Onion.” You set out to write a little message to the audience.
Yeah, I was having a laugh because there’d been so much gobbledy-gook about Pepper, play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that. Even now, I just saw Mel Tormé on TV the other day saying that “Lucy” was written to promote drugs and so was “A Little Help from My Friends,” and none of them were at all—“A Little Help from My Friends” only says get high in it; it’s really about a little help from my friends, it’s a sincere message. Paul had the line about “little help from my friends,” I’m not sure, he had some kind of structure for it, and—we wrote it pretty well fifty-fifty, but it was based on his original idea.
“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is a nice song.
Oh, I like that, one of my best; I had forgotten about that. Oh, I love it. I think it’s a beautiful song. I like all the different things that are happening in it. Like “God,” I had put together some three sections of different songs; it was meant to be—it seemed to run through all the different kinds of rock music.
It wasn’t about H at all. “Lucy in the Sky” with diamonds which I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea spelled LSD—and “Happiness”—George Martin had a book on guns which he had told me about—I can’t remember—or I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” It was a gun magazine, that’s it: I read it, thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means that you just shot something.
You said to me, “ ‘Sgt. Pepper’ is the one.” That was the album?
Well, it was a peak. Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on “A Day in the Life,” that was a real . . . The way we wrote a lot of the time: You’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, like “I read the news today” or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. He was a bit shy about it because I think he thought it’s already a good song. Sometimes we wouldn’t let each other interfere with a song either, because you tend to be a bit lax with someone else’s stuff, you experiment a bit. So we were doing it in his room with the piano. He said, “Should we do this?” “Yeah, let’s do that.”
I keep saying that I always preferred the double album because my music is better on the double album; I don’t care about the whole concept of Pepper; it might be better, but the music was better for me on the double album because I’m being myself on it. I think it’s as simple as the new album, like “I’m So Tired” is just the guitar. I felt more at ease with that than the production. I don’t like production so much. But Pepper