The Beatles & Pot

August 28th 1999 was the 35th anniversary of the first time the Beatles tried pot, at the behest of none other than Bobby Dylan. This is significant, as it was through the Beatles, that so many in our country were indirectly confronted with the decision to use or not use drugs.
 

McCartney tells what happened on that eventful day:
 
The awkward thing about it all is you have to talk about drugs. If you don't you're being wildly dishonest. The good thing was that it was the first period of people taking drugs, and the first bloom is always the best really. So it was at a time when, having been to America, we started to expand our horizons. We'd met people like Dylan and we got into pot, like a lot of people from our generation. And I suppose in our way we thought this was a little more grown-up than perhaps the Scotch and Coke we'd been into before then. What makes people smoke cigarettes when they're fourteen? It's peer pressure. It makes them feel older, it makes them feel a bit groovier and that's quite valuable, at that age, to feel a bit groovier. And I suppose it was the same kind of thing in our case. So once pot was established as part of the curriculum you started to get a bit more surreal material coming from us, a bit more abstract stuff. It was just the first time I'd been exposed to all these new influences and had the time and inclination to bother with them all. I always have to give marijuana credit for that.
 
It was Bob Dylan that turned us all on to pot in America and it opened a different kind of sensibility really; more like jazz musicians. The nearest we'd ever heard of this was like the old joke about the cleaner in the Hammersmith Odeon saying, 'That Ray Charles, he's a tight bastard. You know, he must pay his musicians nothing. There were two of them sharing a cigarette in the toilet last night.' It was somehow plugging into that sensibility. There was a sort of naughtiness about it and yet I knew I'd have to keep my shit very well together because I knew there was a very naughty end to it. Devastation and heroin and the real serious stuff was around the corner. But this was the mild end of it and for quite a number of years there, everyone was at the mild end of it. Instead of Scotch and Coke and ciggies it became pot and wine.
 
In today's climate I hate to talk about drugs because it's just not the same. You have someone jumping on your head the minute you say anything, so I've taken to not trying to give my point of view unless someone really very much asks for it. Because I think the 'Just say no' mentality is so crazed. I saw a thing in a women's magazine the other day. 'He smokes cannabis, what am I to do? He laughs it off when I try to tell him, he says it's not really harmful...' Of course you're half hoping the advice will be, 'Well, you know it's not that harmful; if you love him, if you talk to him about it, tell him maybe he should keep it in the garden shed or something,' you know, a reasonable point of view. But of course it was, 'No, no, all drugs are bad. Librium's good, Valium's good. But cannabis, ooooh!' I hate that unreasoned attitude. I really can't believe it's thirty years since the sixties. I find it staggering. It's like the future to me, it's like it hasn't happened. I feel the sixties are about to arrive. And we're in some sort of time warp and it's still going to happen.
 
Less than an hour after going on stage (8/28/64, at the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, NY), the group arrived back at the Delmonico. The Beatles' suite occupied most of the sixth floor of the 500-room hotel and was protected by police in the corridors and lobby as well as the street. In the hospitality suite, their press officer Derek Taylor doled out the drinks and food to the assembled journalists and pacified the celebrity guests - the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and the DJ Murray the K - who were waiting for the party to get going. Meanwhile the Beatles were trying to unwind after the concert and its surrounding madness. Together with Brian Epstein and their roadies Mal and Neil, they retired to a back room for dinner.
 
Since it was impossible for them to leave the hotel, they asked the New York Post journalist Al Aronowitz if he could arrange for Bob Dylan to visit them. Paul: 'We were great admirers of Dylan. We loved him and had done since his first album which I'd had in Liverpool. John had listed to his stuff and been very influenced; "you've Got to hide Your Love Away" is virtually a Dylan impression.'
 
Dylan was driven down from Woodstock by his roadie in his anonymous blue Ford station wagon, picking up Aronowitz from his home in Berkeley Hills, New Jersey, on the way. Aronowitz, who had been on the fringe of Beat Generation circles since the late fifties, had turned Dylan on to pot the year before. In the hotel lobby, police barred their way until Mal Evans came down and the three were quickly ushered into the main lounge. Brian naturally played the gracious host and asked what they would like to drink.
 
'Cheap wine,' said Dylan. Unfortunately the Beatles had been drinking good French wine with their meal so Mal was dispatched to buy something suitably nasty for Dylan. In the meantime, Dylan was offered some purple hearts, the little blue Drinamyl pills which kept virtually every British rock group going through the sixties when their bodies told them they should be sleeping. Dylan declined and suggested they smoke some grass instead.
 
Brian Epstein explained with some embarrassment that they had never smoked pot before.
 
'But what about your song, the one about getting high?' asked Dylan. '"And when I touch you, I get high, I get high..."'
 
The Liverpool accent had rendered the words of "I want to Hold your Hand" unintelligible to Dylan. 'It goes, "I can't hide, I can't hide..."' explained John.
 
Victor Mamudes, Dylan's tall, skinny roadie, was naturally the one carrying the drugs - in those days this was a roadie's most important job - and he passed the bag to Dylan, who began to roll the first joint rather shakily, spilling quite a lot of the grass into the large bowl of fruit on the room-service table. Al Aronowitz wrote: 'Bob hovered unsteadily while he tried to lift the grass from the bag with the fingertips of one hand so he could crush it into the leaf of rolling paper which he held in his other hand. Besides being a sloppy roller, Bob had started drinking whatever expensive stuff was already there.'
 
With more than a dozen police in the corridor outside and reporters just down the hall, great caution was deemed necessary; Dylan and Ringo retired to the far end of the back room near the front windows, blinds were drawn and rolled towels sealed the locked doors. As snatches of Beatles songs floated up from the fans in the street below, Dylan passed a skinny American joint to Ringo, who smoke the whole thing, not knowing that pot-smoking etiquette requires that the joint be passed around.
 

Paul:
 
The first time I took it I got very high indeed. It was quite a breakthrough, it was something different. George Harrison, John and I were sitting in the main room of the suite, the lounge, drinking. We were sitting there with our Scotch and Cokes, and Dylan had just given Ringo a puff of it. Ringo came back in and we said, 'How is it?' He said, 'The ceiling's coming down on me.' And we went, Wow! Leaped up, 'God! Got to do this!' So we ran into the back room - first John, then me and George, then Brian. We all had a puff and for about five minutes we went, 'This isn't doing anything,' so we kept having more. 'Sssshhhh! This isn't doing anything. Are you feeling... ggggzzzzz!' and we started giggling uncontrollably.
 
And it was very very funny and my, it was. It was! The Beatles were about humour, we had a great humour between us. There was an 'in' side to the track of humour that we would use as a protective thing, so with this on top of it, things were really hilarious. I remember walking round the suite, trying to get away from it all, closing the door behind me without realizing George Harrison had walked step by step with me, so I thought I'd lost him, turned around, and he's in the room with me. 'Ohhh! This is hilarious. I can't handle it!' It was like the funniest bloody dream going.

It was me, George and Brian, this little group. Everyone would go in in twos. We were looking at Brian Epstein, who had a little butt, the tiniest little butt, so he looked like a tramp smoking a dog-end, which we had only ever done when we were poor before...And this, compared to Brian's image...and we were going, 'Awwwww!' Fucking screaming laughing at him. It was hilarious. I remember Brian looking at himself in the mirror and getting the whole joke of all this. We were all in hysterics.
 
Brian was pointing at himself and going, 'Jew!' And it was hilarious! We couldn't believe this was so funny. I mean, that would be the first time Brian would point at himself and say 'Jew.' It may not seem the least bit significant to anyone else, but in our circle, it was very liberating.
 
It developed into a bit of a party. We all went back out into the lounge and drank and whatever but I don't think anyone needed much more pot after that. That was it! I spent the whole evening running around trying to find a pencil and paper because when I went back in the bedroom later, I discovered the Meaning of Life. And I suddenly felt like a reporter, on behalf of my local newspaper in Liverpool. I wanted to tell my people what it was. I was the great discoverer, on this sea of pot, in New York. I was sailing this sea, and I had discovered it.
 
So I remember asking Mal, our road manager, for what seemed like years and years, 'Have you got a pencil?' But of course everyone was so stoned they couldn't produce a pencil, let alone a combination of pencil and paper, so it was I either had the pencil but I didn't have the paper or I had the... I eventually found it and I wrote it down, and gave it to Mal for safekeeping.

I'd been going through this thing of levels, during the evening. And at each level I'd meet all these people again. 'Hahaha! It's you!' And then I'd metamorphose on to another level. Anyway, Mal gave me this little slip of paper in the morning, and written on it was, 'There are seven levels!' Actually it wasn't bad. Not bad for an amateur. And we pissed ourselves laughing. I mean, 'What the fuck's that? What the fuck are the seven levels?' But looking back, it's actually a pretty succinct comment; it ties in with a lot of major religions but I didn't know that then. We know that now because we've looked into a lot of that since, but that was the first thing. We were kind of proud to have been introduced to pot by Dylan, that was rather a coup. It was like being introduced to meditation and given your mantra by Maharishi. There was a certain status to it.
 
"Got to Get You Into My Life" was one I wrote when I had first been introduced to pot. 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. 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. I didn't have a hard time with it and to me it was mind-expanding, literally mind-expanding.
 
So "Got to get You Into My Life" is really a song about that, it's not to a person, it's actually about pot. It's saying, 'I'm going to do this. This is not a bad idea.' So it's actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret. It wouldn't be the first time in history someone's done it, but in my case it was the first flush of pot. I haven't really changed my opinion toom much except, if anyone asks me for real advice, it would be stay straight. That is actually the best way. But in a stressful world I still would say that pot was one of the best of the tranquilizing drugs; I have drunk and smoked pot and of the two I think pot is less harmful. People tend to fall asleep on it rather that go and commit murder, so it's always seemed tome a rather benign one. In my own mind, I've always likened it to the peace pipe of the Indians. Westerners used to call it 'native tobacco.' In the sixties we all thought this was what they were smoking.
 
 
If you talked to him [George Martin] now about whether he knew we were doing drugs, he would say, 'Well, I suspected it, but they kept it out of my face.' Which we generally did. It wasn't like the scenes of debauchery that followed. The least discreet would be that Mal, our road manager, might be over behind the sound screens rolling a joint. It was fairly good-natured, pleasant stuff. I mean, obviously we had to be in such a state as to be able to record. You don't want to do vocals when you're scared to do vocals. So it had to be controlled, and I think it was, but I think the idea that music can be enhanced by marijuana was definitely being researched at the time, so you would smoke a joint and then sit down at the piano and think, Oh, this might be a great idea! I'm not saying that was the only way to work because before that we worked completely straight, completely clean, no alcohol or anything, and had a bunch of very good ideas under those circumstances.
 
It was the discipline of EMI. We had a certain attitude towards EMI, that it was a workplace, that was always there underneath it all, although we would often party. There was George Martin himself, who was fairly practical, and the engineers. You didn't want to mess around. Then there was our own controlling factor. We didn't want to be lying around unable to do anything. We knew why we were doing it: it was to enhance the whole thing. I think if we found something wasn't enhancing it, booze for instance, we gave it up. Once or twice we'd try a little wine when people were around, but generally you'd fuck up solos and you couldn't be bothered to think of a little complex musical thing that would have sounded great. You might have wanted to think of a harmony part to something and now it was a bit of a chore and tuning up is a bit of chore when you're stoned.
 
In the early days we recorded 10:30-1:30, then break for lunch. Nobody paid for your lunch, you just had an hour off to go and buy it for yourself. Very EMI. Then 2:30 till 5:30. And that was generally it, just those two sessions, or then, if you were really going crazy, 7:00 till 10:00, an evening session, which was really working late. by the time you'd done that, you wanted to go home or you wanted to go to the pub or something. Then later we heard rumours that people like Sinatra sometimes worked at three in the morning, so as things got a little wilder and a little more into party frame we did try that, and we had the place and we were able to do it. But I'm not sure how productive it was really. I think most of our best stuff was done under reasonable sane circumstances because it's not easy to think up all that stuff, and you've really just got to get the miracle take if you're stoned. It can be done, just sometimes, but it may be one in a hundred.

McCartney, Paul: 'Many Years from Now' (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1997) Pp 184-193.

 
 

Got To Get You Into My Life

I was alone, I took a ride,
I didn't know what I would find there
Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there
 
Ooh, then I suddenly see you,
Ooh, did I tell you I need you
Every single day of my life
 
You didn't run, you didn't lie
You knew I wanted just to hold you
And had you gone you knew in time we'd meet again
For I had told you
 
Ooh, you were meant to be near me
Ooh, and I want you hear me
Say we'll be together every day
 
Got to get you into my life
 
What can I do, what can I be,
When I'm with you I want to stay there
If I'm true I'll never leave
And if I do I know the way there
 
Ooh, then I suddenly see you,
Ooh, did I tell you I need you
Every single day of my life
 
Got to get you into my life
Got to get you into my life
 
I was alone, I took a ride,
I didn't know what I would find there
Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there
 
Then suddenly I see you,
Did I tell you I need you...
 
 Beatles - Revolver, 1966 & 1987 Capitol
   

 

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