"It's not hard to imagine how grey all our lives would be today if The Beatles had not paved the way for turning music into a kaleidoscope of colour explosions after the bland, sugar-sweet pop of the early sixties".
When they started using psychedelics they stopped being entertainers and became pioneering artists whose influence is still massive today. They also became more politically overt and spiritually aware, both individually and as a band.
Their first forays were with Benzedrine from an asthma inhaler, when John Lennon was still at art school. In Hamburg they were given slimming pills and ‘Prellies’ – the stimulant Preludin – to keep them marching. They played from 6pm to 3am with a few breaks in between sets.
Other drugs were on the scene to
o. Once, when working with Paul, I asked him who the coolest cat he ever met was, expecting him to say Dylan. “Robert Fraser,” he replied, referring to the celebrated art dealer and sixties tastemaker. Fraser turned him onto collecting Magritte in the seventies, but well before that he had turned the band on to cocaine during Sgt. Pepper.
“I used to have a bit of coke and then smoke some grass to balance it out,” Paul told his biographer, Barry Miles. “What I enjoyed was the ritual of meeting someone and them saying, ‘Have you seen the toilets in this place?’ And you’d know what they meant. And you’d wander out to the toilets and you’d snort a bit of stuff. It wasn’t ever too crazy; eventually I just started to think – I think rightly now – that this doesn’t work.”
Peter Fonda inspired John Lennon' song on Revolver
In 2000, Fonda recalled to The Post that he was there in 1965 as Beatle George Harrison tripped on with his band mates. A strung-out Harrison feared he was going to die.
The story of Revolver began in a night of hell and illumination. “We’ve had LSD,” John Lennon told George Harrison.
Lennon overheard Fonda and recalled the instance years later: “[Fonda] kept on saying, in a whisper, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead,’ and we said, ‘What?’ And he kept on saying it. We were saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, shut up! We don’t care, we don’t want to know!’ But he kept going on about it.” Fonda: “[Lennon] looked at me and said, ‘You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born. Who put all that shit in your head?’ ” Roger McGuinn of the Byrds – who described the day as “morbid and bizarre” – recalled Lennon insisting that Fonda leave the gathering.
Fonda’s words stayed in Lennon’s head. They frightened him, but also presented a problem to try to resolve. And it was solved with the sonh 'She said. She Said'
