A three-year-old's drawing of his classmate gave the Beatles Lucy in the Sky
Julian Lennon came home from nursery school with a picture of his friend Lucy Vodden and called it Lucy in the sky with diamonds. His father John turned the title into one of the defining psychedelic songs of 1967, and then spent years insisting its initials spelling LSD were pure coincidence.
Julian later said he had no idea why that drawing stood out, beyond an obvious fondness for Lucy, but he always showed his dad what he had made at school. The phrase reminded John Lennon of Lewis Carroll, especially the passage in Through the Looking-Glass where Alice drifts in a boat beneath a sunny sky and a shopkeeper turns into a sheep. Paul McCartney helped finish the song at Lennon's Kenwood home, supplying the newspaper taxis and cellophane flowers.
The recording, begun at Abbey Road on 28 February 1967, was built to shimmer. George Harrison played an Indian tambura drone and sent his lead guitar through a Leslie speaker, while McCartney added a heavily processed Lowrey organ line. The verses sit in three-four time and the chorus switches to four-four, with the key shifting from A major through B-flat to G.
Soon after Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in June 1967, listeners noticed the initials. Lennon said the idea had never occurred to him, and McCartney backed him in 1968, though in 2004 he admitted drugs had shaped some of their songs of the era, this one included. A persistent story says the BBC banned the track; in fact it was A Day in the Life that fell foul of the corporation, and Lucy was played on its radio in May 1967.
The song has become a touchstone of British psychedelia. Elton John's 1974 cover, featuring Lennon as a guest, went to number one in the US and Canada. Lucy Vodden died of lupus complications in 2009, aged 46, after Julian had renewed their friendship.
Source: Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
