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Mike Hadreas is openly gay, and the video for this song received a lot of homophobic flak when it featured Hadreas openly embracing another man.
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Hadreas believes that time with his lover is limited, ticking away like a bomb until Hadreas explodes and inadvertently ruins the relationship.
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The narrator offers a heartbreaking self-realization: his relationship with his lover wouldn’t last if his lover actually got to know him on a more intricately personal level.
Singer Mike Hadreas used to be a violent drug addict and fears his past and his inner demons will resurface and that this part of him is too ugly to be accepted by his lover.
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
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Boy, you've been a naughty girl
You let your knickers down The Beatles – I Am the Walrus
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Turns out this ever so odd of lines is a dig at the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg:
I saw Allen Ginsberg and some other people who liked Dylan and Jesus, going on about Hare Krishna. It was Ginsberg, in particular, I was referring to. The words ‘Elementary penguin’ meant that it’s naive to just go around chanting Hare Krishna or putting all your faith in one idol.
-John Lennon, All We Are Saying by David Sheff
Lennon is comparing the Hare Krishnas, and particularly Ginsberg, to waddling penguins.
It is a cold, cynical image.
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The walrus is a reference to Lewis Carroll’s poem The Walrus and the Carpenter.
The poem describes how a carpenter and walrus gain the trust of a group of oysters only to betray the oysters and eat them. Upon hearing the poem Alice attempts to make sense of the characters actions.
“I like the Walrus best,” said Alice, “because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters.”
“He ate more than the Carpenter, though,” said Tweedledee. “You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn’t count how many he took: contrariwise.”
“That was mean!” Alice said indignantly. “Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn’t eat so many as the Walrus.”
“But he ate as many as he could get,” said Tweedledum.
Lennon – like Alice – expressed dismay upon belatedly realizing that the walrus was a villain in the poem.
Later, I went back and looked at it and realized that the walrus was the bad guy in the story and the carpenter was the good guy. I thought, Oh, shit, I picked the wrong guy. I should have said, ‘I am the carpenter.’ But that wouldn’t have been the same, would it?
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The term “purple haze” has been used to refer to LSD, due to the form sold by Sandoz, called Delysid, which came in purple capsules.
The phrase itself appears in print as early as 1861, in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, chapter 54:
There was the red sun, on the low level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black…
Although, Hendrix himself stated that the song was partially in reference to a sci-fi story entitled Night of Light by Philip José Farmer. In it, “purple haze” is used to describe the disorienting effect of sunspot activity on the inhabitants of a planet called Dante’s Joy.
I wish I could caress, caress, caress The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Manic Depression
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If anybody knew how to make love to his guitar, it was Jimi Hendrix.
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