THERE'S NO QUESTIONING the importance of covering the passing of Ronald Reagan--a man whose impact on America and the world was profound. Plus it's been more than 30 years since the capital has seen a presidential funeral. But such historic moments have a habit of overshadowing news that, under lesser circumstances, would have garnered more attention. How unfortunate, for example, for the intellectual and literary giants C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley, who both happened to die on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Or how fortunate (at least for a few days) for Ted Kennedy that his accident at Chappaquiddick took place on the same weekend as the moon landing in July of 1969.

And so it is that as the world mourns the death of the Great Communicator, little notice will have been paid to otherwise earth-shattering news out of England: In an interview with Uncut magazine, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney has finally admitted that "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" really was about LSD.

Maybe this isn't as important as the G-8 summit (also receiving little coverage), but for Beatles fans everywhere, it is the equivalent of realizing, after all these years, that Alger Hiss really was a spy.

FOR THOSE NOT INDOCTRINATED, it seems fairly obvious: "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" is a mnemonic for LSD. It's nothing new--songs about drugs and alcohol are quite common, from Billy Joel's "Captain Jack" to Phil Collins's "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" (about meeting up with a cocaine dealer) to Eric

But you needn't go any further than the lyrics of "LSD":

Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
and she's gone

Where exactly has she gone to? Did her eyes change from kaleidoscopes into the sun or are these two different girls? Clearly the only way to "dig" the message is by going on an acid trip. And not too long after the song came out in 1967, most people figured this out. Yet, for decades, the Beatles continued to deny the reference to LSD--claiming that, in fact, the title of the song came from a drawing by Julian Lennon, John's son, who was 3 years old at the time. As is revealed in the Beatles Anthology (and collected from other sources like Rolling Stone), Lennon is adamant that it's all happenstance:

I saw Mel Tormé introducing a Lennon-McCartney show, saying how "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" was about LSD. It never was, and nobody believes me. I swear to God, or swear to Mao, or to anybody you like, I had no idea it spelt LSD. This is the truth: My son came home with a drawing and showed me this strange-looking woman flying around. I said, "What is it?" and he said, "It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds," and I thought, "That's beautiful."