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Paul McCartney said John Lennon got into heroine while writing songs for The Beatles’ The White Album. John was suffering at the time. Subsequently, Paul said that suffering led to a good track.
1 song from The Beatles’ ‘The White Album’ uses old jazz slang for heroin
The 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now discusses”Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” from The Beatles’ The White Album. In the 1940s and 1950s, “monkey on the back” or “monkey” were slang from the jazz subculture. They both referred to heroin addiction.
Paul connected the song to John’s life. “He was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into and so his songs were taking on more references to heroin,” he said. “Until that point we had made rather mild, rather oblique references to pot or LSD. Now John started to be talking about fixes and monkeys and it was a harder terminology which the rest of us weren’t into.”
While making ‘The White Album,’ the other Beatles worried about John Lennon’s drug use
Paul said the other members of the Fab Four weren’t happy about John’s drug issues. “We were disappointed that he was getting into heroin because we didn’t really see how we could help him,” he said. “We just hoped it wouldn’t go too far.
“In actual fact, he did end up clean but this was the period when he was on it,” Paul continued. “It was a tough period for John, but often that adversity and that craziness can lead to good art, as I think it did in this case.”
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Notably, John discussed the song a 1980 interview from the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. John said the song was about Yoko. He never mentioned drugs.
1960s songs by The Beatles and others inspired drug rumors
The Beatles were heavily associated with the 1960s drug culture, so of course they wrote songs about illicit substances. For example, in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now, Paul said “Got to Get You Into My Life” was about marijuana.
However, some of their songs were falsely assumed to be about drugs. For instance, The Guardian says fans believed “Yellow Submarine” was about Nembutal, a drug that comes in a yellow capsule. In the aformentioned book, Paul says it was just a simple children’s song.
Classic 1960s songs like Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” (which featured some input from Paul), and The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze” all inspired drug rumors. Yet, a song that Paul felt was about heroin never inspired much drug-related speculation. This just goes to show that fan theories shouldn’t be taken as gospel. Just because drugs were a huge influence on 1960s rock doesn’t mean every 1960s rock song was about drugs.
“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” is one of the great songs from The Beatles’ The White Album even if it came from a difficult time in John’s life.
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