Until the late fifties it was purely a tool of doctors and psychiatrists, used to treat alcoholics and as a truth serum for criminal psychopaths. Then a Harvard psychology professor named Timothy Leary pronounced it beneficial to all humankind: “medicine for the soul” that need have no adverse effects if taken in the proper way. Leary’s conviction was strengthened by Aldous Huxley, the visionary British novelist (whose works had always been to the fore on Aunt Mimi’s bookshelf). Huxley’s The Doors of Perception described how using a mescaline, a drug with effects like those of LSD produced by the peyote cactus, had allowed him to see “what Adam saw on the first morning of his creation—the miracle, minute by minute, of naked existence.” He believed that, through Leary’s proselytizing, LSD could make mystical experience available to millions and bring about “a revival of religion which will be at the same time a revolution.”
LSD was not yet illegal but classed merely as an experimental drug. It was nicknamed acid; taking it was “dropping acid,” after the custom of absorbing its minuscule doses into bread or sugar, or “turning on,” implying instant access to a more exciting and vibrant mental wavelength. The unpredictable journey under its influence was known as a trip, no more portentous than some little outing by motorboat, though the distinction had to be made between good trips and bad. Its dual effect on mind and vision was termed psychedelic, a word coined in 1956 by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond from the Greek words psyche, “mind,” and deloun, “to reveal or make manifest.”
John’s first, inadvertent trip having turned out a good one (like “CinemaScope in real life”), he could not wait to repeat the experience as soon as a nondental source of supply could be found. To his surprise, he found that the desired substance could be picked up around London with little more difficulty than aspirin. Generous consignments regularly crossed the Atlantic in the baggage of Leary’s American converts, notably his “high priest,” Alan Hollingshead, who arrived with five thousand doses and an almost evangelical mission to turn on Britain. Hollingshead would later found the World Psychedelic Centre, in Pont Street, Chelsea, where LSD-dipped fingers of bread were handed out gratis, much as today’s supermarkets offer free samples of cookies or salad dressing.
Since George Harrison’s first trip had, in its own way, been as good as John’s, the two conducted much of their further exploration together. Unlike other drugs, acid involved a degree of forethought and unselfishness: users were advised to take it only among friends in comfortable, familiar surroundings, and had an obligation to provide mutual support if adverse reactions set in. For George, as he later said, this one-to-one caring and sharing finally broke down the barrier he felt had existed between John and him since he first joined the Quarrymen. “After taking acid [we] had a very interesting relationship. That I was younger or smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John…. [He] and I spent a lot of time together from then on, and I felt closer to him than all the others…just by the look in his eyes, I felt we were connected.”
When the Beatles had reached California on their ’65 American tour, John and George were both carrying foil-wrapped sugar cubes with the intention of turning on Paul and Ringo at the earliest opportunity. In the event, Paul demurred and only Ringo partook, with Neil Aspinall loyally volunteering to keep him company. The occasion was an afternoon party at their rented mansion in Benedict Canyon, attended by, among others, David Crosby and Jim McGuinn of the Byrds, and the London Daily Mirror journalist Don Short. Ensconced by the pool, well supplied with food and alcohol, Short was blissfully unaware of the tripping going on under his nose.
The crowd who dropped by and turned on that afternoon also included a gangly young man named Peter Fonda, son of the Hollywood legend Henry and brother of Jane, who would himself one day make the most memorable film to emerge from Sixties drug culture. At one point, he buttonholed John with the rambling tale of how once, while playing with a gun, he had accidentally shot himself. “I know what it’s like to be dead, man,” he kept mumbling, as if it were a special, exclusive acid dividend. “Don’t tell me,” John protested. “I don’t want to know what it’s like to be dead.”
To begin with, John had no idea of the mystical edifice growing up around LSD—hence its first, purely flippant appearance in Beatles music, the single “Day Tripper,” cowritten by Lennon and McCartney and released in Britain alongside the Rubber Soul album in December 1965. The acidy title was merely to show how with-it they were; “Day Tripper” actually is a song about sexual frustration, similar to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” (even down to its guitar riff) but expressed in terms far more brazen—“half the way there,” “one-night stands,” “big teaser” deliberately sung to sound like “prick teaser.” George Martin had earmarked it as the A-side of the new single until Paul came up with a country-influenced ballad, “We Can Work It Out.” When John refused to have “Day Tripper” relegated to the B-side, a compromise was formulated: a “double A-side” single. As the waltz-time middle eight of “We Can Work It Out”—for which Paul had called on John’s help—so aptly put it, “Life is very short and there’s no ti-i-i-i-ime / For fussing and fighting, my friend….”
“Day Tripper” could equally have expressed John’s view of himself in relation to London since his flight into the manicured Surrey countryside. Despite its easy accessibility by Rolls-Royce, he felt cut off from the pulse of life in the capital; out of step with fashions and obsessions that, as the decade passed its halfway point, seemed to change by the month, the week, the day, even the hour.
Clubs, restaurants, and shops were not the only things he missed, living so far from “the Smoke.” The visual arts were flourishing as never before in his lifetime: painting, sculpture, printmaking, typography, collage, and all kinds of eye-catching new alliances between them. A brilliant young generation of Pop artists had wrested the genre back from the American Andy Warhol and his glorified Campbell’s soup can, and given it a uniquely British slant. Most were of John’s generation, brought up during the dull fifties, in the same Victorian-shadowed suburbia. Now they turned the mundane devices and designs of that era into cherishable icons ranging from matchbox labels and seaside slot machines to comic-book heroes like Korky the Cat and Desperate Dan. More populist by far than Warhol, their works spilled off gallery walls onto posters, magazine covers, and book jackets. Here was the first distillation of what would be the essential Sixties aesthetic—nostalgia for childhood combined with a sense of reinventing the whole world.
The new spirit of America’s hippies—young people who rejected their country’s long-sacred consumer society, “turned on” to acid, and “dropped out” of formal education and conventional lifestyles—was also blowing into London and germinating like so much drug-charged pollen. Fashionable young people—upper-class ones, for some reason, most eagerly of all—were abandoning their Carnaby Street bell-bottoms and miniskirts for hippie caftans, sandals, head-bands, and mystical amulets. The in quarters of Chelsea and Notting Hill were filled with the sound of Indian ragas, the musk of smoldering incense, and the ever-strengthening voice of protest.
Initially, it must be said, Britain’s would-be hippies did not have overmuch to protest about. The country was currently involved in no foreign war nor overt acts of tyranny in its few remaining overseas possessions, and, unlike America, had no military draft. Students left school for university assured of full financial support from their local authorities and without any obligation to repay it. Far from being oppressed, British teens and twenties were positively adulated, the papers brimming with eulogies to the young painters, young actors, young photographers, young writers, young journalists, young couturiers, and young entrepreneurs who now poured through the breach the Beatles had first opened. Never before had putative rebels been so achingly without a cause.
Lacking any suitable outrage on home territory, they were obliged to choose one many thousands of miles away, in a land of which hitherto they had known nothing. America’s military sup
port of South Vietnam against the communist north, begun under President John F. Kennedy, had rapidly grown into independent military action and, by 1965, included the bombing of North Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi. The U.S. military then knew nothing of news management and gave the world’s media unrestricted access to its operations, which inevitably included onslaughts on thatched villages by high-tech helicopters and the immolation of women and children by a jellied petroleum incendiary called napalm.
Overnight, Britain’s former young worshippers, and beneficiaries, of American culture turned into its bitter opponents. Though Harold Wilson’s Labour government sent no British troops to participate in the arduous, vicious—and unwinnable—conflict in South Vietnam’s jungles and paddy-fields, it refused to condemn America’s actions there. The result was an outbreak of antiwar marches and demonstrations in support of those taking place, with somewhat more relevance, on the college campuses of America. A new term, the underground, encompassed all these modish new forms of dissent—for British ears, a dual echo of wartime anti-Nazi movements and London’s subterranean transport network. Protest, rock music, and still-unbanned LSD increasingly came together in events billed as freak-outs or happenings. And all the time, if not touring inside the Beatles’ hermetically sealed bubble, John was stuck away among lawn sprinklers and garden gnomes in Weybridge.
By contrast, Paul McCartney, the only Beatle still based in London, was gallingly close to this ever-developing scene. Lodging as he did with Jane Asher’s family in Wimpole Street, he had the West End and all its myriad amusements just a few minutes’ walk away. Jane’s doctor father and musician mother were cultivated people who fostered their celebrated young boarder’s awareness of classical music, theatre, ballet, and art as well as giving him an entrée into their top-drawer social circle. He also formed a close friendship with Jane’s brother, Peter, who played guitar and sang in close harmony with a Westminister schoolfriend named Gordon Waller. When EMI signed the duo as Peter and Gordon in 1964, Paul gave them an unused Lennon-McCartney song, “World Without Love,” which took them to number one on both sides of the Atlantic.
Through Peter Asher, Paul—and therefore John—acquired other friends at the new frontier of pop music and the underground. The most crucial to this story was John Dunbar, a handsome twenty-two-year-old who had been a teenage acquaintance of the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, studied fine art at Churchill College, Cambridge, then made national headlines by marrying Oldham’s latest recording protégée, Marianne Faithfull. Equally appealing to John’s quieter side was Barry Miles, known simply as Miles, a soft-spoken but sharp-minded young bookseller who, coincidentally, had grown up with the Rolling Stones’ guitarist, Brian Jones, in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
In 1965, with £2,000 starting capital from Peter Asher, Dunbar and Miles set up a combined art gallery and bookshop named the Indica, in Mason’s Yard, St. James’s. Paul was an enthusiastic supporter of the project, even helping to repaint the premises before their official opening. Once the Indica was in business, he thoughtfully asked Miles to keep his suburbanized fellow Beatles informed of anything interesting that came in, either artworks or literature. John became a frequent customer at the bookshop, though, Miles remembers, he always seemed a little defensive and prickly, as if conscious of being an out-of-towner. “One day, the subject of Nietzsche came up, and John pronounced it ‘Nicky.’ When I corrected him, he got quite annoyed.”
On another visit, Miles showed him a book that had appeared in America a few months earlier: The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass). With an abruptness that his Aunt Mimi would have recognized, he took the slim volume, curled up on the couch in the middle of the shop and read it from cover to cover.
The book transformed what he had regarded merely as a new game into an alternative religion, with foundations as ancient as Christianity or Islam. To support their vision of LSD as “a journey into higher consciousness,” the authors had based their manual on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Buddhist text traditionally read aloud to the dying to prepare them for the intermediate stage between extinction and reincarnation. In order to reach acid’s higher consciousness, they said, one must first make the same renunciation of worldly aggression, competitiveness, and, above all, self-importance that Buddhism had been teaching for centuries. In Buddha-esque language, with a touch of the vaudeville hypnotist, there followed step-by-step instructions for attaining “an ego-free state in which all things are like the void and cloudless sky.” “Do not struggle…. Do not cling in fondness and weakness to your old self. Even though you cling to your old mind, you have lost the power to keep it…. Trust your divinity, your brain and your companions…When in doubt, turn off your mind, relax and float downstream….”
Amazing as it may seem, money was never the Beatles’ prime objective. They saw themselves always as artists on a continuous upward curve of experimentation and innovation. After creating an album like Rubber Soul, it was galling to have to run back onstage with their same old matching suits and hair, and blast the same old thirty-minute repertoire into the same vortex of mindless screams. In late 1965, the four had a meeting at which all agreed their in-concert standards had gone to hell, simply because no one was listening. As John said: “…we could send out four waxwork dummies of ourselves and that would satisfy the crowds. Beatles concerts are nothing to do with music any more. They’re just bloody tribal rites.”
Modern rock stars on tour are insulated from the outside world by dozens of aides, fixers, security staff, and PR people. But the Beatles, despite their hugely enlarged performance venues, still traveled with much the same small entourage that used to accompany them around northern dance halls: Brian; the two roadies, Neil and Mal; and press officer Tony Barrow. Whenever they went, they were available—and vulnerable—in ways that no headliners today would tolerate. For John, the whole process had become a repetition of school, except that now there could be no playing truant. “He got to the point where he just hated the audience,” says his old Hamburg friend and confidant Klaus Voormann. “He couldn’t stand that this herd of cows was just screaming. He was angry about those people’s reactions; he found it terrible. It was a complex with him. He’d gone from pretending to be this tough rock-’n’-roller into being a Beatle, which was also all about pretending. With all that he had, he wasn’t happy because he hadn’t come to terms with his own personality. He was a Beatle, and he knew that a Beatle doesn’t really exist.”
Britain had already, unknowingly, seen its last-ever Beatles tour, back in December 1965. Brian’s original plan had been the traditional countrywide trek, ending with a second Royal Variety Show appearance and yet another of their metropolitan Christmas pantos. However, the four had flatly refused to do either the Royal or Christmas show, and raised so many other objections to their itinerary that the whole thing was almost called off. Eventually, they compromised with a nine-date circuit of key cities, including the Liverpool Empire and ending in Cardiff on December 10.
Despite the shortness of the tour, John was in an overtly rebellious mood, emerging from the Beatles’ Rolls into the dank night fogs of Newcastle and Manchester, jacketless, in a white T-shirt—the new kind with a picture or slogan printed on the front—and greeting the stage-door media contingents with jeers and sarcasm (though in one-to-one interviews, even with the most obscure local journalist, he remained as open and honest as ever). Onstage, like the other three, he had virtually given up trying to make himself heard against the screams. Yet sometimes even now he would crash both forearms down on his organ keyboard in sheer fury and frustration.
Whatever his private feelings, the treadmill of his life as a Beatle for the moment seemed unstoppable. In the coming summer, the four were committed to an overseas tour, finishing up in America, whose only threat at this point was the tedium of being worshipped and adored. Meanwhile they had to turn out another album that would simultaneously confound
all their rivals on a creative level and maintain their primacy in the charts. With barely two months to pull this off, they reassembled at Abbey Road Studios with George Martin on April 6.
John later called what emerged “the acid album,” forming a book-end, as it were, with “the pot album,” Rubber Soul. In fact, acid was just one of the elements that would make this, for many people, the Beatles’ finest achievement on record. With the new complexities and ambiguities of rock, it combined the old simplicity and certainties of pop, as well as the eclecticism and self-indulgence of studio despots; it had the energy and self-discipline of a band still on the road and under the cosh. It showed John moving off alone in a wholly new direction and (literally) finding a wholly new voice, yet still content to function inside a group, apply all his concentration to improving someone else’s work, play rhythm guitar, sing backup harmonies, and simply have fun.
In four of the five new songs he brought to Martin, his senses appeared as lucid and his competitive edge as keen as ever. “Doctor Robert” took an objective, satirical view of drug use, lampooning a well-known New York physician who supplied wealthy Manhattan socialites with amphetamine-laced vitamin shots. “And Your Bird Can Sing,” for all its enigmatic air, merely borrowed a titling device from Paul (“And I Love Her”) and ended up as a message little more complex than “keep smiling.” “She Said She Said” used the “I know what it’s like to be dead” line with which Peter Fonda had simultaneously bored and unsettled him in California six months earlier. But Fonda’s dirge was now ringingly upbeat, full of competitive left-field chord changes. Even the dozy mood of “I’m Only Sleeping” suggested a familiar John Lennon, who could be “miles away” and “in the middle of a dream,” yet never ceased vigilantly “keeping an eye on the world going by my window.”