As the hippie era dawned in the mid-1960s, The Beatles were introduced to the wonders of LSD, courtesy of London dentist John Riley. Understandably, there was a period of parental outrage when the news of such dabblings reached the British public, but some rather enticing music was in the post.
Synthesised in 1938 for the first time, LSD was relatively new and had only been tested by daring psychonauts, including British writer Aldous Huxley, by the late ’50s. When it became a common street substance in the 1960s, little was known of the potential risks of this drug that could temporarily turn one’s world upside down.
Thanks to the hippies’ voracious use of LSD, we were informed of the risks and benefits of psychedelic experimentation rather quickly. From the tragic decline of Syd Barrett to the weird wonder of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, it was clear LSD was a drug of immense power.
After being spiked by their apparently wild dentist in March 1965, John Lennon and George Harrison were keen to try LSD again. In August ’65, during a break from their North American tour, The Beatles rented a house owned by Zsa Zsa Gabor at 2850 Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills.
For this second trip, Harrison and Lennon would be joined by drummer and first-time psychonaut Ringo Starr. Meanwhile, Paul McCartney decided to sit this one out, perhaps stirring the early foundations of ‘Dear Prudence’ in Lennon’s consciousness.
“I had a concept of what had happened the first time I took LSD, but the concept is nowhere near as big as the reality when it actually happens,” Harrison reflected in Anthology. “So as it kicked in again, I thought, ‘Jesus, I remember!’ I was trying to play the guitar, and then I got in the swimming pool, and it was a great feeling; the water felt good.”
Although the band was clearly in a state for privacy, their rented residence was flocked by a series of visitors during its break, including Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of The Byrds, journalist Don Short and Help! actor Eleanor Bron.
McGuinn claimed to have introduced Harrison to the music of Ravi Shankar during the trip. “There were girls at the gates, police guards,” McGuinn recalled. “We went in, and David, John Lennon, George Harrison and I took LSD to help get to know each other better. There was a large bathroom in the house, and we were all sitting on the edge of a shower, passing around a guitar, taking turns to play our favourite songs. John and I agreed ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ was our favourite ’50s rock record.”
He added: “I showed George Harrison some Ravi Shankar sounds, which I’d heard because we shared the same record company, on the guitar. I told him about Ravi Shankar, and he said he had never heard Indian music before.”
Among the famous faces to appear at the mansion that day was American actor Peter Fonda. The Easy Rider star allegedly tried to comfort Harrison during a frightening turn in which he felt he was dying.
“I told him there was nothing to be afraid of and that all he needed to do was relax,” Fonda once recalled. “I said that I knew what it was like to be dead because when I was ten years old, I’d accidentally shot myself in the stomach, and my heart stopped beating three times while I was on the operating table because I’d lost so much blood.”
“John was passing at the time and heard me saying, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead,’” Fonda continued. “He looked at me and said, ‘You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born. Who put all that shit in your head?’”
Speaking to Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner in 1970, Lennon reflected on the trip. He noted that their inexperience with LSD was the likely source of Harrison’s negative experience. “We still didn’t know anything about doing it in a nice place and cool it and all that, we just took it,” Lennon said. “And all of a sudden we saw the reporter [Don Short], and we’re thinking, ‘How do we act normal?’ Because we imagined we were acting extraordinary, which we weren’t. “We thought, ‘Surely somebody can see.’
Feeling somewhat vulnerable in front of a journalist, Lennon and his bandmates turned to their road manager. “We were terrified waiting for him to go, and he wondered why he couldn’t come over, and Neil [Aspinall], who had never had it either, had taken it, and he still had to play road manager. We said, ‘Go and get rid of Don Short,’ and he didn’t know what to do, he just sort of sat with it. And Peter Fonda came, that was another thing, and he kept on saying, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’ We said, ‘What?’ And he kept saying it, and we were saying, ‘For chrissake, shut up, we don’t care. We don’t want to know.’ But he kept going on about it. That’s how I wrote ‘She Said She Said’.”
‘She Said She Said’, one of Lennon’s masterful compositions on 1966’s Revolver, contains lyrics almost directly transplanted from The Beatles’ conversation with Fonda.
