10 Legendary Rock Songs That Were Insanely Controversial

Towards the mid '60s, the tone of rock and roll was starting to turn a corner. Although Beatlemania may have started the British Invasion just a few years before, the Fab Four were looking to do something different with their sound, with albums like Rubber Soul and Revolver inching that much closer to something more experimental. Just as the Summer of Love was starting though, Sgt. Peppers was their leap off the diving board into something new, with one of the trippiest songs that John Lennon would ever write.

Being influenced by a drawing that his son Julian brought home from school of his classmate Lucy, John created an entire world with Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, stringing together different images in your mind to create an Alice in Wonderland like scenario, from rocking horse people to marmalade skies. There was a sort of whimsy about a song like this, but most of the BBC had more concerns about what was going on between the words.

While Lennon had always stuck by his story about Julian's drawing, both fans and critics caught on to the fact that every major word in the song title spelled out LSD, which got it banned from the BBC because of its drug references. John could stand by his innocent explanation until the end of time, but it's kind of hard to take him seriously when the lyrics to this song feel like something that would come out of an acid trip.