Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

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Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is a song off The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written by John Lennon and credited to Lennon/McCartney.

Contents

[edit] Writing

The song's verses are in 6/8 time, when the chorus is in 4/4 time. At the time, and even now, many believed that "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was an acronym for LSD, a drug The Beatles were known to take. John, as well as Paul, Julian Lennon, and George Martin, have claimed the song is about a drawing John's four-year old son Julian drew. John said, "I had no idea it spelt LSD. This is the truth: my son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. I said, 'What is it?' and he said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds,' and I thought, 'That's beautiful.' I immediately wrote a song about it." There is little doubt, though, that the lyrics were influenced by his LSD use, which hit an all-time high in 1967. In 2004, Paul said it was "pretty obvious" the lyrics were written about an acid trip. In 1980, John claimed that the song was also influenced by Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, "It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep, and the next minute they're rowing in a rowing boat somewhere - and I was visualising that. There was also the image of the female who would someday come save me - 'a girl with kaleidoscope eyes' who would come out of the sky. It's not an acid song." George Martin has said this about the song, "The idea that ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ stands for LSD is rubbish. John wasn’t like that and people credit him with too much subtlety. He liked to shock people, and if he’d really wanted to write about drugs he would have done it straight out. You’d never have been in any doubt as to what he was singing about." Paul remembers writing the song with John, "I showed up at John's house and he had a drawing Julian had done at school with the title 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' above it. Then we went up to his music room and wrote the song, swapping psychedelic suggestions as we went. I remember coming up with 'cellophane flowers' and 'newspaper taxis' and John answered with things like 'kaleidoscope eyes' and 'looking glass ties'. We never noticed the LSD initial until it was pointed out later - by which point people didn't believe us." Earlier in the year, before the song was released, Paul had admitted to taking LSD to the media, contributing to the belief that the song was about LSD. The actual girl the painting showed was Lucy O'Donell, a girl born in 1963 whom Julian went to school with at Heath House, a private nursery school in Weybridge. Lucy herself did not know she was referenced to in the song until she was thirteen years old in 1976.

[edit] Recording

The first time the song was brought into the studio was an eight-hour session on February 28, 1967. During this session, no formal takes were recorded, just very many rehearsals. The next day, they recorded seven takes of the basic track, featuring piano, acoustic guitar, organ, drums, and maracas. John sang guide vocal on these takes. A tambura was dubbed onto Take 7. On March 2, John and Paul overdubbed their vocal parts, as well as Harrison overdubbing his guitar and Paul overdubbing his organ. After that, they were finished, making the song the fastest-to-complete recording on the album, completed in just two days. Take 6 with the Take 7 tambura and vocal overdubs was included on Anthology 2 in 1996. George Martin talk about how they recorded the vocals, "The first track was recorded at a frequency of 45 cycles, our normal frequency being 50 cycles. In other words, we slowed the tape down, so that when we played it back the voice sounded ten percent higher: back in the correct key, but thinner-sounding, which suited the song. It gave a slight Mickey Mouse quality to the vocals. In fact, Paul was also singing on two tracks, lending John a spot of harmony." The song was mixed differently in mono, the mono version having more echo on the vocals. John was never proud of how quickly the song was done. He has said the he prefers Elton John's 1974 cover version in 1976. John actually plays guitar on Elton John's version, though he is credited as Dr. Winston O'Boogie and his Reggae Guitars. An acetate of The Beatles' version exists with Jeremy ("The Boob") from the Yellow Submarine movie singing the first verse, although with different lyrics. In that version, he sings, "Picture yourself just of nuclear fission with library cards and metaphor skies, ha ha ha ha/Somebody quotes you, you read from a source book, a concept with microscope eyes, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha." This version was intended to be used in the movie itself, but the regular version was used instead. The acetate is widely available on bootlegs.

[edit] Recrding Sessions


[edit] LOVE Mix

A remix of the song was included on the 2006 album LOVE. It included parts of the clavoline overdubs from Baby You're A Rich Man, as well as some brass parts from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At the end of the track, in the transition to Octopus's Garden, it features some of the orchestral parts from Good Night.

[edit] Personnel

[edit] The Beatles

[edit] Production

[edit] Available Versions

[edit] Available On

[edit] Cover Versions

  • Athelete
  • Bono
  • Guns N' Roses
  • The Hooters (Live Only)
  • Hyde
  • Elton John (Released As A Single)
  • Branimir Krstic
  • Rita Lee
  • William Shatner
  • Diane Steinberg

[edit] Sources

Retrieved from "http://www.beatleswiki.org/wiki/Lucy_in_the_Sky_with_Diamonds"
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