There are a couple of Beatles songs with questionable lyrics. It’s a wonder The Beatles recorded them at all; some of them are so controversial.
5. ‘Run for Your Life’
“Run for Your Life” is one of the most controversial Beatles songs and one with some extremely questionable, violent, and disturbing lyrics. Thankfully, it’s also one of the most often-forgotten. John Lennon said it was a throw-away that didn’t matter, but for the fans who remember it, “Run for Your Life” is unnerving, to say the least.
John told Rolling Stone (per Beatles Bible), “I never liked ‘Run For Your Life,’ because it was a song I just knocked off. It was inspired from – this is a very vague connection – from ‘Baby, Let’s Play House.’ There was a line on it – I used to like specific lines from songs – ‘I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man’ – so I wrote it around that but I didn’t think it was that important.”
4. ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’
What does ‘happiness is a warm gun’ mean? He saw the phrase on the cover of a magazine and thought it was a “fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you’ve just shot something,” John explained in The Beatles Anthology. However, the lyrics are still questionable.
John explained, “‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’ was another one which was banned on the radio – they said it was about shooting up drugs. But they were advertising guns and I thought it was so crazy that I made a song out of it. It wasn’t about ‘H’ at all.” Guns are controversial enough themselves without being in a song. This tune has been tainted further because of John’s 1980 assassination.
3. ‘Got to Get You Into MyLife’
Paul McCartney made “Got to Get You Into My Life” an ode to pot, not an average love song. In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote that he liked that only he would know he was talking about pot in the song.
“It was very joyous at that time,” Paul wrote. “The scene turned darker a few years later, as the whole drug thing did, but it started off as a rather sunny-day-in-the-garden type of experience.”
In terms of the music, Paul wanted the tune to sound like American R&B. There are sounds on the song that The Beatles had never used.
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2.’Taxman’
George Harrison’s “Taxman” has questionable lyrics too. Surprisingly, George dared to call out the tax man in a song. However, he was so sick of how much money they took from him that he had to release it.
In Anthology, he said, “I had discovered I was paying a huge amount of money to the taxman. You are so happy that you’ve finally started earning money – and then you find out about tax. In those days we paid 19 shillings and sixpence out of every pound, and with supertax and surtax and tax-tax it was ridiculous – a heavy penalty to pay for making money. That was a big turn-off for Britain. Anybody who ever made any money moved to America or somewhere else.”
1. ‘Doctor Robert’
Usually, songs that are about doctors tend to be subliminally about drugs. For instance, Mötley Crüe’s “Dr. Feelgood.” The Beatles’ “Doctor Robert” is no different. There are drug references hidden underneath, and that’s what makes this a questionable Beatles song.
In David Sheff’s All We Are Saying (per Beatles Bible), John said, “Another of mine. Mainly about drugs and pills. It was about myself. I was the one that carried all the pills on tour. Well, in the early days. Later on the roadies did it. We just kept them in our pockets loose. In case of trouble.”
Fans can read whatever they like into any Beatles song, but these tunes have the most questionable lyrics. When the group released them, they began experimenting in the recording studio. Their songwriting was changing and becoming more complex. Suddenly, they weren’t writing love songs anymore.
How to get help: In the U.S., contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration helpline at 1-800-662-4357.
