Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T07:14:42.011Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

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

from Part II - Works

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2011

Kenneth Womack
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Get access

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.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×