Why John Lennon Compared Himself to Ronald Reagan

TL;DR:

• John Lennon and Ronald Reagan liked calling their wives “Mommy.”
• John defended himself and Reagan for calling their wives “Mommy.”
• John revealed he once used to call Yoko Ono “Mother Superior.”

John Lennon once compared his relationship with Yoko Ono to Ronald Reagan’s relationship with Nancy Reagan. He noted a similarity. Subsequently, he discussed how that similarity related to The Beatles’ “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.”

John Lennon and Ronald Reagan liked calling their wives ‘Mommy’

During a 1980 interview with Rolling Stone, John had a lot to say about women. He realized how much women do for men during a trip to the Bahamas. “Not just what my Yoko does for me, although I was thinking in those personal terms … but any truth is universal,” he said. “What dawned on me was everything I was taking for granted.” John said these pro-woman sentiments inspired him to write the Beatlesque tune “Woman.”

John then compared himself to Reagan. “I do call Yoko ‘Mother,’ like our president-elect calls his wife ‘Mommy,'” he said. For context, John’s assertion about Reagan was correct.

John Lennon defended himself and Ronald Reagan for calling their wives ‘Mommy’

John defended this choice of words. “And for those childless people who find that peculiar, it’s because, in general, when you have a child around the house, you tend to refer to each other that way,” he said. “Yoko calls me ‘Daddy’ — it could be Freudian, but it could also mean that Sean refers to me as ‘Daddy.’

“Occasionally I call her ‘Mother,’ because I used to call her ‘Mother Superior’ — if you check your Beatles Fab Four f****** records, ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun,'” he added. “She is Mother Superior, she’s Mother Earth, she’s the mother of my child, she’s my mother, she’s my daughter. The relationship goes through many levels, like most relationships. But it doesn’t have any deep-seated strangeness about it.” John said people were always criticizing him no matter what he did.

How The Beatles’ ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ performed on the charts

“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” never charted on the Billboard Hot 100 because it wasn’t a single. The tune appeared on The White Album, which became a huge hit. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for nine weeks. The White Album stayed on the chart for a total of 215 weeks.

According to The Official Charts Company, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” didn’t chart in the United Kingdom either. On the other hand, The White Album topped the U.K. chart for eight weeks and lasted on the chart for 37 weeks.

“Happiness Is a Warm Gun” inspired covers by U2, Tori Amos, and The Breeders. The tune also appeared during Salma Hayek’s cameo in the Fab Four musical Across the Universe. In the film, a character sings the song during a drug-induced hallucination where Hayek appears to him in the form of several nurses.

John and Reagan didn’t have a lot in common but they liked making a certain word choice.