Picture yourself in a boat on a river, using your kaleidoscope eyes to read about the writing and recording of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” the seminal Beatles hit from 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Not just a hit for The Beatles, it topped the charts once more in 1975 when Elton John covered this dreamy classic for his album “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.”
Anyone who’s heard this song at least once has definitely wanted to know what it’s all about. Is it about gettin’ off your noggin on LSD? Is it a secret code about a place full of diamonds? Or is it just a bunch of gobbledygook? We’ll get into that, and how John Lennon came up with the song, how it was interpreted, and how Elton John had secret help from a Beatle (hint: it was John) in making his cover a #1 song.
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The song was written by The Beatles as the centerpiece for one of their most beloved albums. But it wasn’t the call for their listeners to tune in, turn on, and drop out that everyone thought it was… at least not completely. When Lennon’s son Julian brought home a drawing of his classmate Lucy O’Donnell, Lennon noticed that the artwork was titled “Lucy – in the sky with diamonds.” Lennon said, “I thought that beautiful. I immediately wrote a song about it.”
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Even though that’s pretty good evidence that the song was inspired by Julian’s drawing, eagle-eyed fans noticed something about the song’s title – the letters L S and D. The trippy lyrics definitely seem to reference the hallucinogenic effects of taking LSD, but throughout his life John Lennon claimed that the song was nothing but a childlike bit of pop reverie.
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“Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies/Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers that grow so incredibly high…” You’re not completely off base if you think that sounds like something that was written about exploring the inside of your mind with the help of LSD. Not so says Lennon. After the release of the song he said that the lyrics were written in the style of Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland, and that his son’s illustration reminded him of the “Which Dreamed It?” chapter of Through the Looking Glass, in which Alice floats in a “boat beneath a sunny sky.”
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Throughout his life John Lennon constantly stated that the references to LSD in the song were “purely unconscious” and that he never thought about it until someone pointed it out to him. His cowriter, Paul McCartney, says that even if he and Lennon didn’t sit down and write a bunch of lyrics about tripping their gourds off, they were influenced by the drug. In a 2004 interview with Uncut magazine McCartney said that it was “pretty obvious” that drugs were a major influence on the band at the time, specifically “Lucy in the Sky.” However he added, “It’s easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles’ music.”
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Less than 10 years after The Beatles invented the concept album and inadvertently started the rumor that “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was about LSD, Elton John brought the song back to the forefront of the world’s consciousness. While he definitely could have recorded the song well enough on his own, he brought out the big guns while recording at Caribou Ranch.
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In 1974 Elton John called up John Lennon to help out with backing vocals and guitar for the track, but the former Beatle recorded under the pseudonym Dr. Winston O’Boogie, obviously. Lennon chose the outlandish name in part by using his middle name, Winston. Elton John’s version of the song sat on top of the US Billboard pop charts for two weeks in January 1975, and its b-side was just as Beatles-tastic, it was a cover of “One Day (At a Time)” from John Lennon’s album “Mind Games.”
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Supposedly, the original release of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was banned by the BBC in 1967 because of its alleged references to LSD. However, that claim has been disputed by authors Alan Clayson and Spencer Leigh. They state that the BBC never officially banned the song even though they were unsure about the track’s subject matter. The song that was actually banned from Sgt. Pepper’s was the album’s final song, “A Day in the Life” for containing a single line that the BBC believed made a reference to getting someone high.
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The 3.2-million-year-old ape “Lucy” is 40 percent of a complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton that was discovered in 1974 by paleontologist Donald C. Johanson in Hadar, Ethiopia. At the time of the fossil’s discovery, the Beatles were being played nearly constantly in the camp, which led discovering anthropologists to give the old girl her famous name.
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Aside from lending a name to a fossil, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” accurately describes the biggest diamond ever found. Lucy, also known as V886 Centauri and BPM 37093, is a white dwarf star with 90 percent of its mass crystallized. Because much of the star’s inner core is carbon, that means that its insides are made up of a 10 billion trillion trillion carat diamond. How’s that for an uncut gem?
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