What Is The Beatles' Got To Get You Into My Life Really About?

During their first few years as international superstars, the Beatles didn't exactly reinvent the wheel as songwriters. Sure, even those early songs were exquisitely written for the most part, but it was easy to decipher what they were about — boy meets girl, girl leaves boy, boy tells his male friend that his estranged ex-girlfriend actually loves him, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's not even mentioning how their earliest albums were rather heavy on covers of American pop and R&B tunes — not unusual for a British band taking the rest of the world by storm circa 1964, but covers are covers.

By 1966, however, the Beatles had become far more sophisticated songwriters, and that was especially true on their full-length album from that year, "Revolver." The record featured songs about paying exorbitant taxes, seeing feel-good doctors named Robert, and the plight of a lonely woman named Eleanor — certainly, this was no longer "love, love me do, you know I love you" or "well, she was just seventeen, you know what I mean" territory for the Fab Four. But that isn't to say "Revolver" didn't include any songs about good old-fashioned love. Ostensibly, that's what "Got to Get You Into My Life" was about, but as you'll be finding out in a bit, this track was far from an ordinary love song. Very, very far.

At first glance, the lyrics of "Got to Get You Into My Life" hint at a song dedicated to a woman. Perhaps Paul McCartney wrote it for someone he was (allegedly) seeing behind Jane Asher's back? (They ultimately broke up in 1968 — two years after the song came out.) But no, "Got to Get You Into My Life" isn't about Macca's new girl, or any other person, for that matter. Instead, it's about the sweet leaf.

In the 1997 Barry Miles-written biography "Many Years From Now," McCartney explained (via Beatles Bible) that despite how it is ostensibly written for a person, "Got to Get You Into My Life" is actually about marijuana, and how he was first introduced to it. "I'd been a rather straight working-class lad but when we started to get into pot it seemed to me to be quite uplifting ... I didn't have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding," he said, later on adding, "It's saying, I'm going to do this. This is not a bad idea. So it's actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret."

So there you have it — it's not as blatant in its support for weed as Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," but it makes perfect sense if you come to think of it.

While arguably one of the poppier, more accessible tracks on "Revolver," "Got to Get You Into My Life" was not released as one of the album's singles. In fact, it would be 10 years before the song would make it to the pop charts. In 1976, "Got to Get You Into My Life" was included in "Rock 'n' Roll Music," a double-album compilation of the Beatles' harder-rocking tunes, and even if it had been six years since the Fab Four broke up, the song was released as a single. Proving that the Beatles still had staying power despite no longer existing as a band, "Got to Get You Into My Life" peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the week of July 24, 1976.

Two years after the original version charted a decade after the fact, Earth, Wind & Fire released their own soulful, jazzy take on "Got to Get You Into My Life," and it was also a big hit. On the week of September 16, 1978, their version went all the way to No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it turned out to be one of the few good things about the movie adaptation of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," where it was included in the film's soundtrack.