April 1965, Strathearn Place, London
They sipped at their coffee and suddenly the room expanded. Cynthia Lennon peered and realized that George Harrison and his girlfriend Pattie Boyd were now specks on the horizon. Incredible. A minute ago they were sitting right in front of her. She took a deep breath and wondered what the hell was going on. Meanwhile, John, who was sitting beside her, seemed absolutely lost, and the dentist’s girlfriend Cindy started shouting “The Bismarck is sinking!” LSD had just entered Beatle Land and everything would be changed forever.
The man responsible was a man of teeth. John Riley was a dentist who operated out of Harley Street and had many high-profile clients, including George Harrison. Riley was in his mid-30s, a charismatic man, hip to the trip with a glamorous girlfriend, Cindy Bury. Riley and George had bonded and become good friends. George invited Riley out to the Bahamas when the band was filming their second film, Help!
In April 1965 a dinner date was arranged and George and John along with partners, Cynthia and Pattie, showed up at his apartment on Strathearn Place. The conversation that night centered on the arrival in London of a superdrug named LSD (acid). For Harrison this was the first time he had heard of the drug. That state of ignorance would not last long. After dinner, Riley slipped LSD into their coffees.
As the drug worked its strange hallucinatory powers, the two Beatles and their wives suddenly felt the urge to get out of the house. Riley tried to stop them. He confessed to putting the drug in their drinks. His actions were misunderstood. The girls became convinced that he wanted an orgy to take place. This heightened their sense of panic and they rushed out to George’s nearby car and drove off to The Pickwick Club where the trio Paddy, Klaus & Gibson was performing. Then they moved on to The Ad Lib Club. To access the club customers had to get into an elevator and ride up four floors. As they ascended a red light came on and all four instantly thought the elevator had caught fire. They stumbled into The Ad Lib screaming.
Somehow they managed to settle themselves at a table. A fellow pop star (unnamed) sat next to Lennon. “Mind if I sit here?,” he asked the Chief Beatle. “Only if you don’t talk to me,” Lennon growled. Then the dentist appeared. He had followed them to the club. He sat down and instantly turned into a pig.
George now started to feel the benefits of the drug. “I felt in love,” he recalled. “Not with anything or anybody in particular, but with everything. Everything was perfect, in a perfect light, and I had an overwhelming desire to go around the club telling everybody how much I loved them—people I had never seen before.” This was some experience for a man believed to be the band’s drollest character. George carried little of John’s charisma, Paul’s optimism or Ringo’s likable persona. But now he wanted to tell the world he loved everything and everyone in it.
The four left the club, got into George’s car and drove at about ten miles per hour back to George’s Surrey residence. Cynthia climbed into bed, still tripping and very fearful she would never regain her sanity. George and Pattie left John downstairs drawing on bits of paper, convinced that George’s house was a submarine and it was his job as captain to guide the party through rough waters (even in this distorted state, John saw himself as the leader). The color of the submarine, incidentally, was yellow.
Four months would pass before John and George took the drug again, during their 1965 American tour at a huge Hollywood house that had been rented for them. Ringo ingested it as well. Paul didn’t. He was far too concerned about the long-term effects of the drug. Marijuana he loved; LSD was something else. He would let the others travel into the unknown. Paul often likened his relationship to John to two men standing on the edge of a cliff. John would always throw himself off and then report back to Paul on his experience. So it was with LSD.
The band The Byrds was there and so was the actor, Peter Fonda. As a child Fonda had experienced serious illness. Twice his heart had given out, only for it to be revived. As everyone tripped, Fonda kept approaching Lennon, telling him, “I know what it is like to be dead.” Lennon, who was reveling in the sun, the scene and the models in front of him, kept moving away, only for Fonda to follow him and repeat, “I know what it is like to be dead.” John would use that line for his composition “She Said She Said” on the band’s Revolver album, a work that, in its use of sounds and images, reflected the band’s consumption of the drug.
Yet this was not the band’s first LSD-inspired song. That honor goes to a Lennon song, called “The Word,” placed on the band’s sixth album, Rubber Soul. Although at the time it was assumed to be a love song, it was no such thing. Many advocates of LSD experienced deep ecstatic emotions. George wanting to say “I love you” to everyone in The Ad Lib Club the first time he took LSD is typical of its effect. LSD cast aside all prejudice, and for the sharp-tongued, domineering Lennon, this was a revelation. LSD put Lennon on a completely new path. “The Word” therefore celebrated the deep feelings of love that he was experiencing.
For three years John took LSD on a regular basis and it helped shape his songwriting. LSD took The Beatles out of Beatlemania and turned them into a completely different band. It changed their music, their outlook, their lives, their clothes. LSD coupled with their uncontrollable impulse to move forward artistically took the band away from the screaming girls and into the heart of London’s underground culture. Soon the band’s mission was to spread the word …
The first song John wrote after his first LSD experience was “Help!.” After LSD, he rarely wrote the kind of love songs that had brought him a huge fortune, opting instead either to examine himself and his past—such as “In My Life” and “Nowhere Man”—or to return to his Beatnik impulses and begin writing in a much more fragmented way where the images did all the work—such as “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am The Walrus.” It was a remarkable transformation.
The Beatles did something no other band had done: they managed to reinvent themselves and maintain their position as the world’s number-one band. And as for McCartney his experiences on acid led The Beatles somewhere rather unexpected.