5 - Magical mystery tours, and other trips: yellow submarines, newspaper taxis, and the Beatles' psychedelic years

Summary

The day of the LSD experience often becomes a dramatic and easily discernible landmark in the development of individual artists.

stanislav grof

One evening in April of 1965, Beatles George Harrison and John Lennon, Along with George's fiancée Pattie Boyd, and John's wife Cynthia, dined with John Riley, a prominent dentist in London. Their host secretly slipped LSD-laced sugar cubes into the after-dinner coffees, and so began a night filled with bouts of intense sensory excitement. Lennon later exhorted listeners to “take a drink from [the] special cup” of a physician named “Doctor Robert,” a song on which dreamy, seemingly floating vocal harmonies declared: “well, well, well, you're feeling fine,” quite likely commemorating the quaffing of their first and subsequent magic cups. In August of that same year, Harrison and Lennon again took LSD; this time, Ringo Starr joined in, as did actor Peter Fonda. As Harrison sat poolside, struggling somewhat with the effects of the drug, Fonda related a story from his youth in which he nearly died from blood loss. “I know what it's like to be dead,” he stated. Lennon, perhaps in an effort to free the group from the morbid impact of Fonda's story, retorted: “Who put all that shit in your head?” Lennon memorialized this event in “She Said She Said,” a track on which he changed the sex of his interlocutor and related that: “She said I know what it's like to be dead … / I said who put all those things in your head.”