John Lennon and Keith Richards’ wild “acid-fuelled road trip” to the British seaside
Torquay: the British Riviera, where the only thing to distract you from the stunning beatitude of being by the breezy seaside is the squawk of zealous seagulls and the odd stupefying moment where you remember, with great awe and surprise, that you’re still in old Blighty. That is, of course, unless you happened to be there one fateful day in the late 1960s—a day where you could add the bumbling sight of two of the most famous men in history, fumbling around the pier, out of their gauds on LSD, to the list of distractions on the southern English coast.
Keith Richards and John Lennon were far from your typical Devon holidaymakers, not least because The Rolling Stones’ riff master and The Beatles’ smartest tool were two of the most prominent men in rock ‘n’ roll at their biblical pomp, but also because – as a few barbed remarks will attest – they weren’t always the best of friends. However, a brief spell in the late ‘60s found them on swell terms, happily bonding over a hefty quart of acid.
Richards’ debauchery is the stuff of legend. He claims to have once stayed up for nine days straight. He also nearly burnt down the Playboy Mansion while experimenting with what he could smoke, swallow or snort to get high. And he’s avoided death by misadventure more times than a feline Evel Knievel—but even he found his match in Lennon. The Liverpudlian was no slouch in the party stakes, often finding himself at the centre of a cacophony of narcotics. In his blistering memoir Life, Richards details a particularly intense and hedonistic “acid-fuelled road trip” to the humble climes of the British seaside.
The memoir, released in 2010, allowed Richards to look back at the raucous behaviour that gained him such an irreversible reputation. But in this case, such was the wondrous intensity of the evening that Richards needed to rely heavily on the memories of Kari Ann Moller, the wife of Mick’s younger brother Chris Jagger, to fill in the blanks.
In the book, Richards refers to it as “an episode of such extremes that I can barely piece together a fragment”. In fact, he can’t even offer up a definitive year, let alone a pinpointed date. Alas, there is no doubt someone from Devon, who has surely been called a liar for years, who recalls seeing the improbable pair up to no good and can finally fill in that blank.
What we do know is that during 1967 and 1968, Richards was regularly using psychedelics. He described his experimental phase as “the idea of a boundary that had to be pushed”. It’s a sentiment that many across the capital’s bubbling music scene identified within an age where old knowledge had led to Hiroshima and an alternative was hunted down with great, new hunger. One particular night, cashing their own slice of this new dawn, Richards, Lennon, and Moller had taken some LSD while circling the famous Hyde Park in London and decided that they simply must go on a road trip.
With “three unfamiliar days off” the group set off on their travels, ready to receive the surprises that every mysterious turn would befall them. The first stop was Lennon’s country manor, where they “said hi to [Lennon’s wife] Cynthia”, perhaps in a bid to get a spousal permission slip for the mischief that lay ahead.
After that important stop was complete, the group were still deeply tripping and entrenched in a swirling world of hallucinogens. Moller decided the next logical place to go was to visit her mother in the seaside town of Lyme-Regis.
“What a nice visit for her mother,” says Richards. “A couple of flying acid heads who’d been up for a couple of nights. We got there about dawn.” Luckily, after being refused service in a café and with Lennon being recognised — he was one of the most famous men in the world at the time — the group decided against visiting Moller’s mother and instead spent some time by the beach, trying to relax and cool off their hot heads.
Well, at least that’s what Richards thinks might have happened. “There follow therefore some missing hours, because we didn’t get back to John’s house until after dark,” he said. “There were palm trees so it looks as if we sat on the Torquay palm-lined esplanade for a great many hours, engrossed in a little world of our own. We got home, and so everyone was happy.”
In what must be a frightening statement for anybody who knows about Richards’ penchant for illegal substances, the guitarist said: “It was one of those cases of John wanting to do more drugs than me. Huge bag of weed, lump of hash and acid.” While Lennon’s drug-taking was kept relatively quiet in comparison to Richards, it is impossible to deny the singer’s hedonistic lifestyle, once described by the man himself as being like “Fellini’s Satyricon”.
Richards has little recollection of the three days he and Lennon spent on the road (who would?).. The Beatle didn’t have any clearer idea himself: “Johnny and I were so out there that some years later, in New York, he would ask, ‘What happened on that trip?'” An answer was never found—this truly was The Lost Weekend.
And it’s a weekend that oddly typifies an era. A cultural revolution was afoot and it looked to finally foist a dose of liberty on the world. A vignette that encapsulates those heady days is to imagine a similar incident happening tomorrow: the two biggest stars in the world, sat comatose on a promenade, encircled by phones filming their sybaritic stupor unfurl. But in 1967 or 1968, the reaction was so nonchalant that nobody can even remember the date.
