Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Part 1

     Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is one of the greatest psychedelic songs of all time and even has the initials; L, S and D in the title. John Lennon denied purposely giving the song a name with LSD in the title and claimed the title came from his five year old son’s school painting of a classmate. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds has a sound that had never really been heard before and lyrics that are nothing if not surreal so John’s innocence in this matter has always been questioned. His infatuation with the writing of Lewis Carroll, author of Alice In Wonderland, was well known at the time and a lot his first book, In His Own Write, was attributed to Lewis’ inspiration so Lucy’s lyrics can easily be seen as being John’s version of a Lewis Carroll story. The song could just as easily been called “Alice In The Sky With Diamonds”.
    I believe John’s story for two reasons; first is that John Lennon, throughout his life, was known as being nothing if not brutally honest. He admitted to committing adultery and even admitted to writing songs about it (Norwegian Wood), about being addicted to heroin and writing songs about it (Cold Turkey), and even admitted to having taken LSD dozens of times. Maybe back in 1967 Brian Epstein and Capitol Records and EMI put pressure on him to lie about Lucy to avoid Sgt. Pepper from getting banned (again), but thirteen years later when he gave his last interview to Playboy Magazine two months before his death, why would he continue to lie? He wouldn’t and didn’t. This leaves the second reason why I want to believe John’s story; it’s much more cosmic to think it just spontaneously came out of him without his conscious knowledge. Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is not one of the Beatles lewd in-jokes such as “fish and finger pie” from Penny Lane or “tit, tit, tit” from Girl but is an example of divine inspiration.


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