The time John Lennon accidentally took LSD in the studio: “I was not in a state of handling it:
The Beatles started out as a clean-cut group of Liverpudlian lads, donning matching suits and bowl cuts as they took to the stage at the Cavern Club and carved out an early audience for themselves. They sang in blissful harmony, telling tales of love and hand-holding over pop rock and rollers. But by the mid-1960s, they hoped to shed this early image and delve into more experimental territory, both in their sound and substance use.
In the late summer of 1964, two titans of music met for the first time, and the Beatles’ sound was forever changed in the process. Bob Dylan was hanging out with the Fab Four at the Delmonico Hotel in New York, where he introduced the band to marijuana for the first time. This introduction to drugs would change the sound of the Beatles in their later years as they began to experiment with psychedelics.
The Beatles’ use of LSD led to psychedelic offerings like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, albums that would define entire eras and cultures. But even though their acid use was evident in their music, they weren’t necessarily using psychedelics in the studio, or at least, not on purpose. “I never took it in the studio,” John Lennon once recalled in Lennon Remembers by Jann S Wenner, before admitting, “Once I did accidentally.”
During the recording of Sgt. Pepper’s, Lennon unknowingly took the wrong drug while in the studio. “I thought I was taking some uppers,” he explained, “And I was not in a state of handling it. I can’t remember what album it was but I took it and then [whispers] I just noticed all of a sudden I got so scared on the mic.” Initially, Lennon didn’t know what was wrong with him, believing that he just felt a bit ill.
Producer George Martin quickly noticed that there was something wrong with the Beatles guitarist, prompting him to ask Lennon what was wrong. Lennon couldn’t explain why he felt ill, so Martin took him outside onto the roof. “George Martin was looking at me funny,” Lennon remembered, “And then it dawn on me, I must have taken acid.”
The incident seems like a prime example of why Lennon avoided taking the drug during studio sessions. He became overwhelmed by nerves and kept asking his bandmates for reassurance. Martin wasn’t even aware that Lennon had taken acid, admitting in All You Need Is Ears that the fact only dawned on him much later. “But Paul knew,” he explained, “And went home with him and turned on as well, to keep him company. It seems they had a real trip.”
With one of their lead lyricists suddenly too anxious to even get behind the microphone, the band retired from the session, leaving their two songwriters to navigate a trip together for the first time. It certainly doesn’t sound like the most productive of studio sessions, but it does make for a good story, and it also marked some of their earliest use of the drug.
Although Lennon’s accidental acid use had rendered their session ineffective, the band got right back to it the next day and carried on recording Sgt. Pepper’s. When the record was eventually released in the summer of 1967, the band’s growing interest in psychedelics was evident in the sound and style of the record, and it became a cultural phenomenon of a record.
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