"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" is a song by The Beatles, featured on the eponymous double-disc album The Beatles, also known as The White Album. It is primarily a John Lennon composition, credited to Lennon/McCartney.
According to Lennon, the title came from the cover of a gun magazine that producer George Martin showed him: "I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.' It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something. Like heroin into your arm."
"Happiness Is a Warm Gun" is Paul McCartney's favorite song on the White Album. Although tensions were high among the band during the album's recording sessions, they reportedly collaborated as a close unit to work out the song's challenging rhythmic and meter issues, and consequently considered it one of the few true "Beatles" songs on the album.
Lennon said he "put together three sections of different songs ... it seemed to run through all the different kinds of rock music." The song begins with a brief lilting section ("She's not a girl who misses much..."). Drums, bass and distorted guitar are introduced as this portion of the song proceeds. The surreal imagery from this section is allegedly taken from an acid trip that Lennon and Derek Taylor experienced, with Taylor contributing the opening lines. After this, the song transitions into a Lennon song fragment called "I Need a Fix," built around an ominous-sounding guitar riff. This section drifts into the next section, a chorus of "Mother Superior jumped the gun." The final section is a doo-wop send up, with the back-up of vocals of "bang, bang, shoot shoot."