Taylor turns north on Central Park West. After around twenty yards, Mark sees the man look over his shoulder. Mark stands alone across the street from the Dakota, muttering to himself, when their eyes lock.

Taylor looks away and picks up his pace.

“A creepy, sweaty guy recognized me and got in my face,” Taylor will later recall. “He was talking fast, telling me about himself—that he was working on a project with John Lennon. I had spent nine months in a psychiatric hospital, and it seemed to me that he was mentally ill.”

Chapter 36

Chapter 36

I don’t need to fight to prove I’m right.

—“Baba O’Riley”

In US folklore, nothing has been more romanticized than guns and the larger-than-life men who wielded them,” states Time magazine in its June 21, 1968, cover story titled “The Gun in America.”

During the last week of September, the Beatles continue to record songs for their double album. Like the majority of the thirty songs on the White Album, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” originated when John began writing it at the ashram in Rishikesh. He envisions its multiple distinct phases as “sort of a history of rock and roll.”

When George Martin hands John a visual, the fragments become an ingenious whole. “A gun magazine was sitting around,” John remembers, “and the cover was the picture of a smoking gun. The title of the article, which I never read, was ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun.’

“I thought, what a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you’ve just shot something.”

American gun laws have been static since 1939, but in the wake of the political assassinations of JFK, MLK Jr., and RFK, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushes for reform, sponsoring the Gun Control Act of 1968, which Congress passes into law on October 22.

On November 20, two days before EMI releases the White Album—pressed with Apple labels—Paul is interviewed on Radio Luxembourg, calling the song “a favorite of mine” while dismissing the content that inspired it.

“And it was so sick, you know, the idea of ‘Come and buy your killing weapons,’ and ‘Come and get it.’ But it’s just such a great line, ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun,’ that John sort of took that and used that as a chorus. And the rest of the words…I think they’re great words, you know. It’s a poem. And he finishes off, ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun, yes it is.’”

Critics agree. “‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ is one of the greatest numbers on the album,” the International Times says, praising the Beatles’ ninth studio album and latest chart topper, the reviewer catching John’s musical intention that “the music has three distinct phases ending with a touch of the ’50s…a snatch from ‘Angel Baby’ by Rosie and the Originals at the end.”