The Beatles song with an early drug reference
The Beatles were no strangers to drug references. Despite their contemporary claims to the contrary, the Fab Four purposefully dropped in the occasional reference to whatever substance they were favouring at the moment, including cannabis, LSD and even heroin. Looking hard enough throughout The Beatles catalogue, you can find nods to everything and anything illicit.
You will have to start at a specific time in the band’s career if you’re looking for those references: The Beatles were relatively straight-laced throughout their early mop-top years. The band never really engaged with the seedier side of life throughout their songs, partly due to the influence of manager Brian Epstein and partly due to the innocence of youth. There was another, much simpler explanation for why The Beatles never talked about drugs in their early songs — they rarely did drugs in their early years.
There were exceptions, of course. “In Hamburg the waiters always had Preludin – and various other pills, but I remember Preludin because it was such a big trip – and they were all taking these pills to keep themselves awake, to work these incredible hours in this all-night place,” Paul McCartney explained in the book Many Years From Now.
He added: “And so the waiters, when they’d see the musicians falling over with tiredness or with drink, they’d give you the pill. You’d take the pill, you’d be talking, you’d sober up, you could work almost endlessly – until the pill wore off, then you’d have to have another.”
Between their Hamburg residencies, meeting Bob Dylan, and discovering the magic of weed, The Beatles were relatively straight for a number of years. But after Dylan reintroduced the group to cannabis, The Beatles were all in, often using the drug throughout the filming of Help! and during the recording sessions for Rubber Soul. But the earliest nod to drugs probably came in late 1964 on the single ‘I Feel Fine’.
“I have a recollection of walking round St. John’s Wood with that in my mind, so I might have written it at home and finished it up on the way to the studio, finally polished it in the studio, maybe just taken John aside for a second and checked with him, ‘What d’you think?’ ‘Like it.’ ‘Good. Let’s do it!'” McCartney recalled in Many Years From Now.
“John did a very good thing: instead of playing through it and putting like a watercolour wash over it all with his guitar he just stabbed on the off-beats, McCartney added. “Ringo would play the snare and John did it with the guitar, which was good, it left a lot of space for the rest of the stuff”.
When asked by interviewer David Scheff in 1980, Lennon copped to the reference to pot on ‘She’s A Woman’. “That’s Paul with some contribution from me on lines, probably. We put in the words ‘turns me on’. We were so excited to say ‘turn me on’ – you know, about marijuana and all that, using it as an expression”.
After the release of ‘She’s A Woman’ in 1964, “turn me on” became a favourite subliminal nod to pot for the band, later appearing in ‘A Day in the Life’ (and subsequently getting the song banned by the BBC). The phrase was so prominent that fans believed they could hear the phrase “turn me on, dead man” when ‘Revolution 9’ was played backwards, perpetuating the infamous “Paul is Dead” conspiracy.
Check out ‘She’s A Woman’ down below.
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