Naughty bits: Age warning for minors!! | Page 2 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

What a great thread! Well done @trcanberra.

Drugs, then. According to Barry Miles, practically every Beatles lyric that mentions ‘high’ or ‘grass’ is about cannabis. “Find me in my field of grass…”

You can also add some references to tea. A ‘tea head’ was 60s vernacular for weed smoker, and The Beatles used the term quite often (see the Anthology book). My favourite is Lovely Rita ‘s “May I enquire discreetly: When are you free to take some tea with me?” Once you know, you know…

The first drugs reference was in She’s A Woman (“Turns me on when I get lonely”). I think the second was It’s Only Love (“I get high when I see you go by”). Got To Get You Into My Life was all about cannabis, although it’s quite well hidden. The most blatant example was probably “Arizona grass” in Get Back .

There are plenty of others, almost too many to mention. 1965 seems to have been a peak, from Ticket To Ride (“I don’t know why she’s riding so high”) to the sharp inhalation in Girl, meant to sound like a toke on a spliff. I also have a theory that the ending of Norwegian Wood has Lennon sparking up a joint (“So I lit a fire”), although it’s more often interpreted as him burning down the flat. Personally I think he’d have been more likely to have a smoke, but hey.

Lots of references to the effects of LSD too: Tomorrow Never Knows , Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds , She Said She Said , I Me Mine , Day Tripper etc. Interestingly, these seem to be mostly about other people, in contrast to the first-person cannabis references. I’ll have to give that subject a bit more thought – it never occurred to me before.

Pills barely got a mention, which might seem odd considering how much they had in the early 60s, but they weren’t writing about non-love subjects back then. The song Please Please Me was probably recorded on Preludin (see Tune In), and I’m sure there were others. When Lennon accidentally took LSD in the studio in 1967 (Getting Better session) he thought he was taking an upper, so it was clearly not unusual at that time.

Happiness Is A Warm Gun contains a pretty blatant reference to heroin (“I need a fix”). I’ve also heard that Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey might be about shooting smack (“The deeper you go, the higher you fly”) but it could equally be one of Lennon’s free-association nonsense songs. According to Yoko she and Lennon never used needles.

Last post for now. Here’s a snippet from my article on I Am The Walrus . Warning: sexually explicit descriptions.

The eggman of the chorus, while possibly a reference to Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, was more likely The Animals’ lead singer Eric Burdon following a particularly notable incident recounted to Lennon at a London party.

It may have been one of my more dubious distinctions, but I was the Eggman – or, as some of my pals called me, ‘Eggs’.

The nickname stuck after a wild experience I’d had at the time with a Jamaican girlfriend called Sylvia. I was up early one morning cooking breakfast, naked except for my socks, and she slid up beside me and slipped an amyl nitrate capsule under my nose. As the fumes set my brain alight and I slid to the kitchen floor, she reached to the counter and grabbed an egg, which she cracked into the pit of my belly. The white and yellow of the egg ran down my naked front and Sylvia slipped my egg-bathed cock into her mouth and began to show me one Jamaican trick after another. I shared the story with John at a party at a Mayfair flat one night with a handful of blondes and a little Asian girl.

‘Go on, go get it, Eggman,’ Lennon laughed over the little round glasses perched on the end of his hook-like nose as we tried the all-too-willing girls on for size.

From the same article, this is quite interesting:

The BBC banned the song for the lines “pornographic priestess” and “let your knickers down”. As Hunter Davies recorded, the lines were particularly admired by George Harrison :

Why can’t you have people fucking as well? It’s going on everywhere in the world, all the time. So why can’t you mention it? It’s just a word, made up by people… It doesn’t mean a thing, so why can’t we use it in a song? We will eventually. We haven’t started yet.