Police: Driver in crash was in middle of sex act
Mar. 2, 2010 05:25 PM
Associated Press
LEWISTON, Idaho – A couple escaped unharmed after they left their kitchen for the living room, just moments before a pickup truck came crashing through the kitchen wall.
Lewiston police said a drunken driver was apparently participating in sexual activity with a passenger when he lost control, left the road and drove a 2003 Dodge pickup through the house, coming to rest in a nearby yard.
The Lewiston Tribune reported that neither the driver nor his passenger were injured. The driver was arrested on a misdemeanor drunken driving charge.
The residents of the home, Teresa Roesner-Weatherby and her husband, Bill Weatherby, also escaped injury. Damage to the home is estimated at about $50,000.
..."The title came from an article in a gun magazine John Lennon saw. "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" was the slogan of the National Rifle Association. It struck Lennon as "fantastic, insane… a warm gun means you've just shot something."
ReplyDeleteThis complicated song, which involved various different time signatures, (the 6/8 middle section was made more convoluted by Ringo continuing to drum in 4/4), took 15 hours and over 100 takes to nail. The first half of one take was combined with the second half of another to form the complete song.
Like the composer Wagner, Lennon felt that a song must have increasing excitement, climax and redemption. The song is built from pieces of several different little songs, with different melodies and rhythms, and one after another, the excitement is increasing. The climax is the falsetto, and finally the redemption is in the continuing call and answer.
When The White Album was released in 1968, it was not commonly known that Lennon was a composer, as many people thought that he was only a lyric writer. After The Beatles broke up, their individual songwriting contributions were revealed in greater detail. (thanks to Johan Cavalli, who is a music historian in Stockholm)
Lennon said of this song: "It's sort of a history of Rock 'n' Roll." Much of the imagery in the lyrics was about his sexual passion for Yoko.
Lennon considered this one of his favorites. It's also Paul McCartney's favorite song on The White Album.
In the last section of the song, the backing vocals are "Bang, Bang, Shoot, Shoot." (thanks, Dan - Riverside, CT)
A popular theory is that Lennon meant for this to be a drug metaphor for doing heroin:
-"Needing a fix"
-"Jump the gun" meaning to cook it up
-"Bang, Bang, SHOOT, SHOOT"
-"When I hold you in my arm, nobody can do me no harm" - heroin addicts tell how when you're on it, nothing can do you no harm and Lennon's overall nature seem to point to this. (thanks, Matt - Edgewood, KY)
This was banned by the BBC for sexual symbolism. They thought the gun was a phallic symbol.
The original line "When I hold you in my arms and feel my finger on your trigger..." appears in unreleased, bootlegged versions of "I'm So Tired" as "When I hold you in your arms, when you show me each one of your charms, I wonder should I get up, and go to the funny farm." This could mean the line was originally sexual but was put in as a metaphor for a gun later on. (thanks, Conrad - Los Angeles, CA)
The final Doo-Wop chorus of this song has the exact same chord progression as "This Boy," just in a different key. (Thanks to our Beatles expert Pattie Noah - check her out at luvmedeux.com.)
Tori Amos covered this on her 2001 album Strange Little Girls. All the songs on the album were written by men - Amos took on different characters to interpret them from a woman's point of view. Yoko Ono had to approve this, and she did.
The Breeders covered this on their 1990 album Pod. (thanks, Melissa - Madrid, IA)"
Thanks, Wes. Proud of you. Seriously. Sometimes it helps to dig a little bit deeper in order to understand why one actually does (or does not) appreciate a song. In doing so you often end up appreciating things you may never have heard or paid attention to before. There is all this and much more to be said about just this one song. Musicological Ph.D. theses have been produced just on the subject of the Beatles music; I own copies of a few of them. Maybe save that for another occasion. Not now.
ReplyDeleteI was just enjoying my first 5 am cappuccino and read about the important event that took place in Lewiston, ID. Tried to visualize it ... and the perfect soundtrack immediately jumped to my mind. Bang, bang, shoot, shoot. And then my Jeep was parked in the kitchen. Yeah!