Does anybody know if John Lennon has ever explained the insertion of those two words, barely more than whispered and which would prove to be prophetic, in an admittedly already bizarre song?
Are you listening to the version on Abbey Road (and The Beatles 1), or the version on Anthology 3? If the former, I’m not hearing it. If the latter, I’ve never heard it.
I did find some lyrics sites with “shoot me”, but other sites don’t have it. Where there is supposed to be “shoot me” I hear “shoop”, and I’m not even sure it’s a human voice I’m hearing.
I’d be interested in learning if the official lyrics have ever been released.
It’s definitely there and the voice is definitely Lennon’s. Even though I haven’t double checked, I’m fairly sure it’s in all of the versions. The “shoop” you’re hearing is the ‘Shoot me’ part. There are 1,030 hits on Google for ‘Come Together’ and ‘lyrics’.
As everyone else, I had heard the sound on the very first play (turn table, circa 1969:D), but only fairly recently did I notice, with a pair of headphones on, that what I had thought all that time was ‘shoo’ or ‘shoop’ was in fact ‘Shoot me’. Given what happened a bit more than 20 years ago, it kinda stuck in my mind.
Should have read:
Because happiness is a warm gun …
Spookily prophetic as it sounds, I’d just take it to be a needle drug reference. Lennon reportedly had a heroin addiction in the late sixties, though he claimed in a Rolling Stone interview that he only snorted the stuff, never shot it, and “It wasn’t too much fun”.
Of course, a more definitive answer would be welcome.
“he shoot coca-cola …”
According to Geoff Emerick, an engineer at the Abbey Road sessions, “On the finished record you can really only hear the word ‘shoot’! The bass guitar note falls where the ‘me’ is.” No explanation as to the significance of the line, though.
Well, I hate to disagree with the principal recording engineer for the Abbey Road sessions, but if you listen closely to the Abbey Road CD with headphones glued to your ears, you can hear the ‘me’ in ‘shoot me’, although not every single time.
The cocaine angle is interesting, especially given the ‘he shoot coca-cola’ line. But I guess we’ll never know for sure.