Do you believe "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was intentionally about LSD?

Julian has even identified the Lucy from the painting, this would sure be some major conspiracy.

 

Err, what? The title may very well have been influenced by that drawing, but to suggest the song isn't LSD influenced and the title deliberately made to have LSD in it is laughable. Are people now suggesting Julian titled the drawing Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds? lol

 

Of course it was influenced by LSD among other things, some people think the title was a reference to LSD. Julian and Paul who has said he has seen the painting must be lying too.

 

According to both Lennon and Ringo Starr, who witnessed the moment, Julian first uttered the song's title upon returning home from nursery school.[4][6][22] Lennon later recalled of the painting and the phrase, "I thought that [it was] beautiful. I immediately wrote a song about it."[4]


Ringo too...

 

It's not about LSD.

 

Hey, if people want to believe the song isn't about LSD and the title used because it spelt out LSD that's up to them.

 

The problem there is that you have to accept 2 major coincidences at the same time to believe his story.

First, you have to believe that a 4 year old child would, all on his own, come up with that phrase, verbatim. And happily tell his tripping father and giggling 'Uncle' Paul about it.

Secondly, and much harder to accept, is that John decided to use this cute 4 year old's painting title as the title and chorus catch-phrase of his most drugged-out sounding song to date, in the year that by his own admission he was on "a thousand trips", and somehow nobody noticed that the initials spelled out L.S.D. And, you have to accept their mock-horror when being confronted with these observations as genuine. I can't.

Either JL was on acid when Julian showed him the painting and somehow his memory recalled it as happening they way he always said it happened, or he was disgruntled when people caught his little inside joke and refused to admit the ruse out of stubbornness.

And another reason I don't believe the official story is because JL was a word man, an author, a funny-guy who wrote the Daily Howl. If anyone was into hidden/funny references, it was him. This was the guy who didn't want the "Being" left off the engineer's announcement when he called out, "For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite, Take 1....."

 

Everyone seems to be ignoring post 195, which confirms the bleeding obvious.

 

Depends which McCartney you wanna believe.

Alice In Wonderland[edit]
According to both Lennon and McCartney, the lyrics were largely derived from the literary style of Alice In Wonderland.[5][3] Lennon had read and admired the works of Lewis Carroll, and the title of Julian's drawing reminded him of the "Wool and Water" chapter of Through the Looking Glass in which Alice floats in a "boat beneath a sunny sky":[25]

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 are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that.[3]

McCartney remembered of the song's composition, "We did the whole thing like an Alice In Wonderland idea, being in a boat on the river...Every so often it broke off and you saw Lucy in the sky with diamonds all over the sky. This Lucy was God, the Big Figure, the White Rabbit."[5] He later recalled helping Lennon finish the song at Lennon's Kenwood home, specifically claiming he contributed the "newspaper taxis" and "cellophane flowers" lyrics.[6][7]

Lennon's original handwritten lyrics sold at auction in 2011 for $230,000.[26]

 

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.
Paul McCartney
Anthology

 

Yes, it comes down to whether you believe two songwriters who deliberately wrote a trippy psychedelic song didn't notice that the titles initials spelt out LSD.

 

Again, the debate is not about whether the song's imagery was inspired by hallucinogenics. The debate is about whether or not Lennon deliberately put the initials LSD into the song's title, or it was a coincidence.

 

I thought I'd read a 60s interview where he told the story, but I can't find any example now so I may have been wrong. This page has multiple instances of Lennon telling the story, with the earliest clearly-cited one coming from the 1970 Rolling Stone interview. It also cites Pete Shotton, Cynthia Lennon, and Julian backing up the story. So if John is lying, they all are too. At minimum, we know for a fact that Julian did have a classmate named Lucy, and did make a drawing of her.

What I keep coming back to, is why would Lennon go to all the trouble of constructing an elaborate lie, and enlisting Pete, Cynthia, and Julian to back him up on it? If Lennon is lying, did he get Julian to make the drawing deliberately to back up the lie? That seems far-fetched. As has been noted, Lennon was generally honest about both in-jokes ("tit" in Girl, "finger pies" in Penny Lane) and unsavory behavior ("I beat her" in It's Getting Better) in his lyrics. He was also quite open about his drug use. It is a weird coincidence that the initials spell LSD, but it seems far less plausible that a person like Lennon would lie about this one thing so consistently over the years. I can't imagine him first writing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and then thinking "Ah yes. I remember Julian telling me he has a classmate named Lucy. Her name will provide the perfect lie for me to conceal my real intentions in titling this song!"

Yes, but as noted he was telling the story about the Lucy drawing at least as early as 1970, in the very same interview in which he boasted about his past LSD use.

 

Not quite, as Paul's accounts of these things are not completely reliable. For example, consider this from the quote you cite:

Fast forward to this month's Uncut interview with Paul McCartney, who explains that . . . "Day Tripper," he says, "that's one about acid."

"Day Tripper" is about acid? No, it's not. McCartney is---intentionally (to be cool?) or unintentionally (due to carelessness)---taking a secondary element of the lyrics (LSD trips) and saying that it's what the song's all about. What it is about, as Paul and John both said on other occasions years ago, and as a simple reading of the lyrics suggests, is a certain kind of person (i.e., a "weekend hippie") whom John and Paul looked down on.

So, McCartney's explanations of their songs are---news flash!---not entirely reliable. Of course "Lucy" is, at least in part, about the LSD experience, but as Czeskleba says above, that's not the issue here.

 

Hunter Davies' 1968 biography says the title came from Julian's drawing, but Davies doesn't say whether he heard that from John.

 

He must be lying too.

 

You're not gonna question that "Yesterday" came to him in a dream, are you? I couldn't handle that...

 

Yes, and I don't see why some people are unwilling to accept that John and Paul were oblivious to the LSD initials until it got pointed out. I mean, people overlook coincidental things that others point out to them, with a "wow, I never noticed that" moment.

 

Yeah, sure.

 

I was thinking that even if Lennon consciously titled the song to include the letters L.S.D., the song itself isn't "about" LSD, but rather a fanciful set of dream images. Besides, I wonder why it matters either way.

 

Seems to me there are two separate questions here

1. Is the Song Title Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds a code - an acronym - for LSD
2. Does the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds have an imagery that could be acid influenced.

The answer to 1, is no, not necessarily, the song title and part of the inspiration probably came from Julian's painting.
The answer to 2 is yes.

Paul's quote in post 95 is simply talking about question 2. Seeing as Paul has always said some of the imagery i.e newspaper taxis and cellophane flowers were his then he is in a pretty strong position to say these were acid influenced images. That doesn't mean Alice in Wonderland wasn't an influence and it doesn't mean there wasn't a painting by Julian that provided the title and in part inspired the song.

These things are not mutually exclusive. Neither John or Paul needs to have been lying or to have made a mistake. In fact this whole thing is really boring and unimportant unless you over think it.