Cocaine, weed, heroin and LSD: It was drugs that ultimately split up The Beatles
What happens when you take four lads from Liverpool and give them the world on a plate? Well, they take advantage of everything that the world has to offer.
One of the major moments in The Beatles’ career came in 1964, when they performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. Their songs had already risen to number one in the UK, and for all intents and purposes were doing well in the US, but it was this televised performance which really skyrocketed them to fame. Essentially, Beatlemania officially started with a couple of songs on a Sunday night.
“There was no real future for a British band before The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964,” said Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, reflecting on that fateful night. “That was the turning point, after which there was an avalanche. It totally transformed the possibilities, and as usual, The Beatles were the frontrunners. In music, there is The Beatles, and then there is everybody else.”
The Beatles new found stardom exposed them to a brand new way of living. They were treated like royalty, and suddenly found themselves rubbing shoulders with other big names in entertainment, one of whom had a major impact on the band’s life – Bob Dylan. The Beatles met the folk icon shortly after a gig at the Hotel Delmonico in Manhattan, but he wasn’t alone.
Upon arrival, Bob Dylan offered the band some weed, and this small offering marked the first time any of the four Beatles had been exposed to the drug. Bob Dylan found this surprising, especially given he thought there was a reference to the drug made in the band’s song ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. It turned out he had just misheard the lyric “I can’t hide,” as he thought the band were singing “I get high.” Ringo Starr was the first to accept Dylan’s offer of drugs, and after that, the band were exposed to what would become a huge part of their future development, both creatively and professionally.
Despite the major impact this initial joint would have on the band, none of them was aware of it at the time; quite the contrary. As Ringo Starr put it when discussing that night many years later, “We got high and laughed our asses off.”
The pre-weed Beatles
While Bob Dylan giving the band a joint was a major moment for The Beatles, it wasn’t the first time that any of them had done drugs. They had first dabbled when they were at art school, as the band realised that you could get a hit by tampering with the cardboard in an inhaler. John Lennon admitted, “The first drugs I ever took, I was still at art school, with the group – we all took it together – was Benzedrine from the inside of an inhaler.”
Art school brought about the band’s first hit, but it was in Hamburg when they really threw themselves into recreational drugs. There was a practical element to this new substance, though, as while they were playing elongated shows every night and perfecting that live sound which would eventually win over audiences on The Ed Sullivan Show, they took drugs that would help them stay awake and alert during such shows.
“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,” recalled Lennon. “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.”
A division between the band’s attitude towards drugs was present even in these early days, as while his fellow band members were taking Preludin in a bid to stay awake, Paul McCartney was reluctant. He would frequently pass, despite the fact that those around him, musicians and bar staff alike, were keen to partake.
“I knew that was dodgy,” said McCartney. “I sensed that you could get a little too wired on stuff like that. I went along with it the first couple of times, but eventually we’d be sitting there rapping and rapping, drinking and drinking, and going faster and faster, and I remember John turning round to me and saying, ‘What are you on, man? What are you on?’ I said, ‘Nothin’! ‘S great, though, isn’t it!’ Because I’d just get buoyed up by their conversation.”
Sweet Mary Jane is in my ears and in my eyes
After Bob Dylan first introduced The Beatles to weed, the band started smoking it frequently, to the extent that at times it would get in the way of their work. “The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension. We were smoking marijuana for breakfast,” said Lennon, according to David Scheff. “We were well into marijuana, and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.”
The drug also bled into their music. As the band worked on Rubber Soul, it is now rather fittingly referred to as “the pot album” as it was written during a time when The Beatles were obsessed with the substance. Bob Dylan had unlocked something previously hidden within the Fab Four, as they were suddenly smoking weed regularly and writing songs which were a reflection of the drugs’ impact.
Paul McCartney, in particular, was a big fan. As the band would eventually move on to try harder stuff, McCartney preferred to stick to marijuana, as he felt as though it helped to expand his mind. Additionally, he didn’t feel as though it came with the negative side effects that other drugs did.
“I’d been a rather straight working-class lad, but when we started to get into pot, it seemed to me to be quite uplifting,” he said. “It didn’t seem to have too many side effects like alcohol or some of the other stuff, like pills, which I pretty much kept off. I kind of liked marijuana, and to me, it seemed it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding.”
The dentist’s coffee acid test
The first time the public became aware of The Beatles’ affiliation with drugs was when they released albums like Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, both of which were a lot more experimental than their counterparts. The use of LSD would really split the band, as while some members felt that the drug could expand their minds and help them experience the world differently, others thought that too much of a dependence on it could spell bad news.
The first two members to try the drug were John Lennon and George Harrison while having dinner at their friend’s house. Their coffee was laced with the hallucinogenic drug without Lennon and Harrison knowing. Everyone in attendance had heard of the drug before, but wasn’t fully clued up on what it did when you took it.
“He laid it on George, me and our wives without telling us at a dinner party at his house,” said Lennon. “He was a friend of George’s and our dentist at the time. He just put it in our coffee or something. He didn’t know what it was, it was just, ‘It’s all the thing’, with the middle-class London swingers. They had all heard about it and didn’t know it was different from pot or pills. And they gave it to us, and he was saying, ‘I advise you not to leave’, and we thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house, and we didn’t want to know.”
The whole process was quite scary, as those in attendance started to feel the drugs take effect, while suddenly finding themselves locked in a house with someone they hardly knew. “It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film,” recalled Cynthia Lennon. “The room seemed to get bigger and bigger.”
Doors eventually unlocked, they ended up in a nightclub, and as soon as George Harrison felt well enough to drive home, he jumped behind the wheel and got to stepping. With Lennon, Cynthia and Pattie Boyd in the car, he drove incredibly slowly, as the drug’s impact continued to materialise and dissipate at unpredictable intervals. After a steady 18 mile an hour cruise home, he managed to get everybody back in one piece.
“We got home safe and sound,” said Harrison, “And somewhere down the line, John and Cynthia got home. I went to bed and lay there for, like, three years.”
Despite a questionable first experience with the drug, Lennon and Harrison found themselves drawn to it, and they continued to take it and experience its hallucinogenic prowess. After developing an affinity for acid, they opted to try to get their fellow Beatles to take it, in the hope that it would help them on a personal level but also as a creative unit.
Ringo Starr was pretty open-minded when it came to drugs, and so accepted LSD the first time that it was offered to him. “John and George didn’t give LSD to me. A couple of guys came to visit us in LA, and it was them that said, ‘Man, you’ve got to try this,’” he recalled. “They had it in a bottle with an eye-dropper, and they dropped it on sugar cubes and gave it to us. That was my first trip. It was with John, and George, and Neil, and Mal. Neil had to deal with Don Short while I was swimming in jelly in the pool. It was a fabulous day. The night wasn’t so great, because it felt like it was never going to wear off. Twelve hours later, and it was: ‘Give us a break now, Lord’.”
Paul McCartney also took the drug, but was a lot more hesitant about doing so. “It alters your life, and you never think the same again,” he said, as the use of drugs highlighted the differences among The Beatles. “John was rather excited by that prospect. I was rather frightened by that prospect – never get back home again. I was seen to sort of stall… because there was a lot of peer pressure.”
McCartney was right about the peer pressure. Despite the fact that the band had been friends for years, when Lennon and Harrison started taking acid, they felt as though they were on another level altogether. Their connection to one another had been elevated, as had their connection to their art. They both felt like the band wouldn’t be able to work together on a similar plane ever again unless they all had this psychedelic experience.
“John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid,” said Harrison. “Because we couldn’t relate to them anymore. Not just on the one level – we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much. It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable. It was something that had to be experienced because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think. It was all too important to John and me.”
“It was just a nice feeling”
Finally, the hardest drug that ever played a part in The Beatles’ relationship with one another and their music was heroin. It was just John Lennon who took it, something which he said was a result of the attitude of the rest of the band. “We got such a hard time from everyone,” he said, the “we” in question being him and Yoko Ono.
A lot of people blamed Yoko Ono for Lennon’s new interest in heroin, as she was the one who introduced him to the drug; however, Ono attests that Lennon wouldn’t have taken it unless he absolutely wanted to. She affirmed that the reason he suddenly found himself so enamoured with heroin was that he had wanted to try it.
“It was just a nice feeling. So I told John that,” she said, adding that he “wouldn’t take anything unless he wanted to do it.”
Paul McCartney said that it was a difficult period for the band when Lennon started taking heroin. Even though McCartney himself didn’t take to LSD quite as well as the other band members, they had still been able to connect somewhat, but creative language barriers were erected the moment that Lennon started using.
“We were disappointed that he was getting into heroin because we didn’t really see how we could help him. We just hoped it wouldn’t go too far,” said McCartney, before talking about Lennon’s musical output after the drug. “He was getting into harder drugs than we’d been into and so his songs were taking on more references to heroin… Until that point, we had made rather mild, oblique references to pot or LSD. Now John started talking about fixes and monkeys, and it was a harder terminology which the rest of us weren’t into.”
Drugs split up The Beatles
So, how did all of these drugs lead to the breakup of The Beatles? Well, it all goes back to the thing that runs through each one of the band members’ recollections of taking said drugs – the music they made.
In Hamburg, the drugs they took didn’t affect their creativity, as they were predominantly using them in a bid to stay awake. When Bob Dylan introduced them to marijuana, it resulted in a record like Rubber Soul, which the members called “the pot album”. LSD led to the creation of Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s, which are dripping in more psychedelia than a sugar cube with liquid LSD infused in it. When John Lennon started taking heroin, he wrote songs like ‘Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey’, which seems to make reference to the drug and needing a fix.
Despite all of the arguments and fallouts The Beatles may have had during their time as a band, they were always connected through their music, but given that this was so wildly impacted by whatever drugs they were taking, the moment they were all getting their highs off of something different, the whole band began to crumble. Paul McCartney didn’t tend to stray much further than weed, George Harrison stuck to LSD, John Lennon was on heroin, and Ringo Starr… Well, Ringo himself admitted, “I’d take anything.”
Drugs got in the way of The Beatles’ connection to their music, and once this connection was severed, the band was on borrowed time. There’s no denying it – drugs split up The Beatles.
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