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George and Pattie flew from Greece to California, where they attended a recording session by the Mamas and the Papas, dropped in on Ravi Shankar’s music school, and dined out on Sunset Strip. On 7 August 1967 they flew to San Francisco in a private Learjet with Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall to see Pattie’s sister Jenny, who was living there. It is probably no coincidence that the B-side to ‘All You Need is Love’ is ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’.

After lunch with Jenny, George and his gang thought it would be fun to drive to Haight-Ashbury, the hippy district, where the grooviest musicians – Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin – were known to hang out. On their way there, Derek passed around LSD. ‘Since we were going to Haight-Ashbury, it seemed silly not to,’ recalled Jenny. As they got out of the car, ‘the acid kicked in and everything was just whoah, psychedelic and very … I mean, it was just completely fine.’

George hoped to wander around unrecognised in his blue denim jacket, psychedelic jeans, heart-shaped shades and moccasins: after all, most people in Haight-Ashbury were trying to look just like him, so who could tell the difference? Moreover, San Francisco was famous for being mellow: even if the hippies did recognise him, they would surely be too laid-back to give him any hassle.

So it came as a surprise when George and Pattie drifted into a shop, and found it immediately filling with new customers. As they left the shop and walked along the street, a crowd of people trailed behind them. Pattie could even hear them muttering, ‘The Beatles are here, the Beatles are in town …’

It wasn’t what George had expected. ‘We walked down the street, and I was being treated like the Messiah.’ How did it feel to be one of the beautiful people? At that very moment, most uncomfortable. Pattie was shaken: ‘We were expecting Haight-Ashbury to be special, a creative and artistic place, filled with beautiful people, but it was horrible – full of ghastly drop-outs, bums and spotty youths, all out of their brains. Everybody looked stoned – even mothers and babies – and they were so close behind us they were treading on the backs of our heels. It got to the point where we couldn’t stop for fear of being trampled.’

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Hoping to shake off these hangers-on, they set off for Golden Gate Park, to the area that had recently become known as Hippie Hill. But George had become an unwitting Pied Piper. As the five of them sat down on the grass, a stream of hippies followed suit, to be joined by many more.

From the back of the gathering a guitar was produced, and passed from hand to hand to the front, before finally reaching George. It then dawned on Pattie that they wanted more from him than he was either willing or able to give. ‘I had the feeling that they’d listened to the Beatles’ records, analysed them, learnt what they thought they should learn, and taken every drug they’d thought the Beatles were singing about. Now they wanted to know where to go next. And George was there, obviously, to give them the answer.’

George made an attempt to give them a little of what they wanted, demonstrating the guitar’s chords – ‘This is G, this is E, this is D’ – rather than singing a song. A girl started yelling, ‘Hey! That’s George Harrison! That’s George Harrison!’ Hearing the cry, more hippies began to edge towards him; the crowd grew bigger and bigger.

They all started calling for a song, but George, increasingly frightened, politely handed back the guitar, saying, ‘Sorry, man, we’ve got to go now.’

As he and his friends stood up to walk away, a hippy approached him saying, ‘Hey, George, do you want some STP?’ George hesitated. A week or two before, five thousand tabs of STP had been distributed at the Summer Solstice Celebration, and a large number of people had ended up in hospital. ‘No, thanks, I’m cool, man,’ he said, and carried on walking.

The hippy was affronted, saying, ‘Hey, man – you put me down,’ then turning to the crowd of followers and complaining, ‘George Harrison turned me down!’ The easy-going, hippy-dippy mood suddenly altered. ‘The crowd became hostile,’ recalled Pattie. ‘We sensed it because when you’re that high you’re very aware of vibes.’

George and the others began to walk away slowly, before it dawned on them that their car was parked a mile away, so they picked up their pace. But as they walked faster, so did the crowd. George experienced some form of panic attack, accelerated by the LSD: ‘It was like the manifestation of a scene from a Hieronymus Bosch painting getting bigger and bigger, fish with heads, faces like vacuum cleaners.’

Neil Aspinall remembered them growing ever more frantic. The drugs had made them lower their guard, putting them in the same situation they’d always taken such pains to avoid. By now, a thousand people or so were chasing them. ‘In the end, we were running for our lives.’

At last they spotted their limousine, and jumped into it, slamming the doors. The crowd of hippies circled the car. ‘The windows were full of these faces, flattened against the glass, looking at us.’ They began rocking the car. Adulation had turned to menace, and menace to attack. Somehow, George and his friends managed to inch the car forward, and then shot away.

It was the last time George ever took LSD; never again would he place his faith in followers. ‘It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug culture. It wasn’t what I’d thought – spiritual awakening and being artistic – it was like alcoholism, like any addiction. That was the turning point for me – that’s when I went right off the whole drug cult and stopped taking the dreaded lysergic acid.’