Chapter 2: Of Emperors and Princes

“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.”¹ — Paul McCartney, 1997.

In this chapter, we’re going to continue our deep dive into the events of August 28 1964, when — according to the folktale, anyway — Dylan first met The Beatles at the Delmonico Hotel in New York and turned them on to cannabis. And we’re also going to begin our unfolding of the deeper and more complex story that I’ve hinted is waiting to be discovered beneath the Dylan story as it’s generally told.

And given that Paul says he wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about his discovery of cannabis, this song seems like something we ought to look into — especially since Paul has explicitly told us that his songs are where to look for the truth of his life, rather than in all those books about The Beatles in which the Dylan story is told.²

Next week, we’ll talk more about understanding the artist through the art, when we take a close look at the lyrics to “Got To Get You Into My Life.” But first, in this chapter, we’re going to consider the context of the song — and whether it is, in fact, about what Paul says it’s about.

I don’t have any preliminaries for you this time, other than to remind you that while you do not need to be familiar with Part One of Beautiful Possibility to engage with Seven Levels, there will in this chapter be occasional references that you may not get if you’re not familiar with Beautiful Possibility. And I’ve done my best to help with that in either the main text or the footnotes.

So let’s get started.

It seems all-but-certain that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” in early 1966. And right away, that suggests at least one significant inconsistency, because Paul claims he wrote the song about — and more importantly, during — the “first flush of” and “when he’d first been introduced” to cannabis.

As we talked about in the prior chapter, when it comes to cannabis, “being introduced to” and “the first flush of” — which is another way of saying “turned on to” — describe two potentially very different experiences. Paul uses both phrases in his description of the inspiration for “Got To Get You Into My Life.” So is Paul referring to The Beatles’ likely introduction to cannabis — the one John and George describe in their pre-fame bad weed quotes (such as they are)? Or is Paul referring to The Beatles getting turned on to cannabis with Dylan in 1964?

This is — for once — an easy question to answer. Given the context and everything we covered in the prior chapter, it seems all-but-certain that Paul is referring here not to the early Liverpool experience, but to being turned onto cannabis by Dylan in 1964 — whatever the specifics of where and when that happened.

So if “Got To Get You Into My Life” was written in early 1966, that adds up to a gap of almost a year and a half between the inspiration for the song and the writing of the song.

A year and a half is a significant gap for a song about a brand new discovery — and especially a song with the urgency of “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And a year is even more of a gap in the ultra-compressed world of 1960s Beatle time, where — given the speed of their creative evolution — a year is more like five years.

So maybe despite its obvious urgency, “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t a song about a new discovery at all. Maybe it’s a nostalgia song — Paul writing in 1966 about his first time getting turned on to cannabis in 1964. There’d be nothing unusual about that, in and of itself. Artists frequently draw creative inspiration from their past memories, and Paul is no exception. It’s what he did with, among other songs, “Penny Lane.”

But “Got To Get You Into My Life” as a nostalgia song doesn’t seem to quite line up.

Paul has explicitly told us he wrote the song about what was happening for him in the present — not that we should take the artist’s word for that sort of thing, especially when the artist in question is fond of offering wildly contradictory meanings of his work, depending on whatever it depends on in a Paul McCartney interview.³

But while Paul’s on-the-record interpretations of his songs are often wildly inconsistent with the actual song, everything about “Got To Get You Into My Life” supports his claim that he was writing about what was happening for him at the time the song was written.

While the lyrics do sometimes reference the past, absolutely everything else about “Got To Get You Into My Life” — from the title to the arrangement to Paul’s incendiary vocal performance — suggests that he’s very much in the present. In fact, urgency seems to be the overall theme of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

So maybe Paul didn’t write “Got To Get You Into My Life” in 1966. Maybe he wrote it soon after the Dylan story took place in 1964, but didn’t record it until 1966. Maybe it’s one of those songs written years prior to being included on an album — like “I’ll Follow the Sun” and “Michelle” and “One After 909.”

This scenario is certainly possible. But it, too, seems unlikely.

As was standard for pop stars of the era, The Beatles were expected to record two 14-song albums a year and a double-sided single every three months. That’s forty new songs a year — very nearly a new song every single week.

By today’s standards, that’s obviously an unreasonable expectation. But in the early 1960s, before The Beatles rewrote the rule book, pop music worked very differently than it does today.

Back then, it was assumed — especially in the UK — that even the most successful pop star’s career would last at most a few years. The thinking was to make as much money as quickly as possible — mostly for the record company and the manager — before the star’s popularity waned and they were replaced by a new face. This is why reporters continually asked The Beatles “what will you do when the bubble bursts?” Everyone — including The Beatles — assumed it would.

But of course, The Beatles were not the usual kind of pop stars. The rules that worked for, say, Cliff Richard or Tommy Steele, didn’t work quite so well for the Fab Four.

For one thing, no one seems to have thought to adjust this two albums/four singles a year expectation for artists who wrote most of their own material — because until The Beatles, there hadn’t been any, at least not in the UK and only a handful in the US.⁴ Instead, artists of the era were expected to record songs chosen for them by their producers and managers — covers of songs already released by other artists, along with new songs written by professional songwriters who were not themselves recording/performing artists and could thus spend all day every day writing a steady stream of new material.

Time to write new material was not something The Beatles had a lot of in the early years, given their relentless touring and public appearance schedule. This is why from 1964 through 1966, Paul and John struggled to find time to compose enough songs to meet their contractual obligations. That struggle is why they filled out their first few albums with cover songs like Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.”

By the time they recorded Beatles for Sale in August 1964 — just before leaving for their first US tour during which the Dylan story takes place — Paul and John were scavenging their unfinished material for anything they could quickly shape into a recordable song.⁵

All of which makes it a pretty safe bet that if a song with the voltage of “Got to Get You Into My Life” had been floating around at any point prior to spring of 1966, it would already have been recorded for an earlier album. At the least, there’d likely be studio outtakes of attempts at recording it prior to its finished version, as there are of the March 1963 recording of “One After 909.”

The most intriguing explanation for the year-plus gap between the Dylan story and “Got To Get You Into My Life” is that Paul didn’t write “Got To Get You Into My Life” about cannabis at all, and that’s why the timing doesn’t match up.

John doesn’t believe “Got To Get You Into My Life” is about cannabis. He thinks Paul wrote it about LSD, or at least that’s what he told David Sheff in 1980—

“Paul’s again. That— I think that was one of his best songs too, because the lyrics are good and I didn’t write ‘em, you see? I mean, so when I say that he could write lyrics if he took the effort, then there’s the occasional song like that where he says “I took a ride...” and — and you know, I mean it’s— it’s— it’s not sort of wishy-washy, it actually describes his experience on taking acid. I think that’s what he’s talking about, really. But I couldn’t swear to it, but I think it was a result of that.⁶

We’ll get back to the part about it being one of Paul’s best lyrics in the next chapter, when we do our deep dive into those lyrics. For here, what matters is that if John is correct that Paul wrote the song about LSD rather than cannabis, then “Got To Get You Into My Life” is tangential to the Dylan story and we don’t need to consider the two in relation at all.

So to explore the possibility that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is, in fact, about LSD, let’s temporarily bid farewell to 1964 New York and travel forward in time to Swinging London and another party, this one hosted by socialite Tara Browne,⁷ and another first — this time, Paul’s first experience with LSD.

Here’s Paul telling the story in his quasi-memoir Many Years From Now—

Tara was taking acid on blotting paper in the toilet. [already this is less poetical than the Dylan story....😎] He invited me to have some. I said, “I’m not sure, you know.” I was more ready for the drink or a little bit of pot or something. I’d not wanted to do it, I’d held off like a lot of people were trying to, but there was massive peer pressure. And within a band, it’s more than peer pressure, it’s fear pressure. It becomes trebled, more than just your mates, it’s, “Hey, man, this whole band’s had acid, why are you holding out? What’s the reason, what is it about you?”’ So I knew I would have to out of peer pressure alone. And that night I thought, well, this is as good a time as any, so I said, “Go on then, fine.” So we all did it. We stayed up all night. It was quite spacy.⁸

The Beatles began recording “Got To Get You Into My Life” in April of 1966. Paul goes on in Many Years From Now to date the Tara Browne party as having taken place in 1966. He doesn’t offer a more specific date — though it would obviously have been prior to Tara Browne’s death in August of that year. So it’s not clear from Paul’s account alone whether Tara Browne’s party happened before or after Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

But we do have some clues about the date of the Tara Browne party from other primary sources.

Viv Prince, the drummer for Pretty Things, claims he also took his first LSD trip at the Tara Browne party. Prince told Beatles biographer Steve Turner that he remembers this party taking place not in 1966, as Paul claims, but in December 1965.

Now maybe Viv Prince is another example of someone trying to buy themselves some cultural status by falsely claiming to have been present at a culturally significant event — in this case, Paul McCartney’s first acid trip. But I don’t think that’s what Prince is doing.

I won’t quote Prince’s entire story, as it’s lengthy and filled with detail we don’t need to worry about right this second— but I’ll footnote it for those of you who want to read it.⁹ The thing to know here is that Prince backs up his recollection with verifiable, time-specific details about how he happened to be at the party. And more than that, those details match the recollection of another as-far-as-I-can-tell credible primary source — Tara Browne’s former wife Nicki, who also dates the party to 1965, although she remembers it being in November, not December.¹⁰

Because November or December of 1965 is not long before Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life,” Beatles writer Steve Turner — like John — also believes the song is not about Paul’s first experience with cannabis, but about his first experience with LSD. And in his book Beatles ‘66, Turner presents his supporting analysis for his theory.

Turner’s theory gets a lot of traction in the Beatles world — mainstream and countercultural. And it’s increasingly cited as — here’s that word again — definitive. And that means it’s not going to work to talk about “Got To Get You Into My Life” in the context of the Dylan story if many of you are thinking Paul wrote the song about LSD. So before we begin unfolding the deeper narrative I’ve been hinting at, we need to first take some time to consider whether or not Turner’s theory is credible.

After presenting Viv Prince’s account of the Tara Browne party, here’s what Turner writes in his book—

“Paul has agreed with John’s statement that no one is the same after taking LSD and had called his experiences “amazing” and “deeply emotional.” In 1967 he told the Daily Mirror that his initial trip was “quite an incredible experience” that lasted for six hours; he said, “[It] opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God” and “made me a better person.”

The first of Paul’s songs recorded by the Beatles after December 1965, and therefore almost certainly the first song he composed after tripping, was “Got to Get You Into My Life.” Believing he first took LSD in late 1966, he has said in interviews (and in his book Many Years from Now) that the song was about pot, but the language of taking “a ride,” seeing “another kind of mind,” and not knowing what he “would find there” is more consistent with the language of a psychedelic trip than a marijuana high. In the song he’s talking about getting this new perspective, this new consciousness, into his life. “Far from harming me,” he told the Daily Mirror, “it helped me to see a lot more truth. I am more mature. I am less cynical. I have started to be honest with myself.”¹¹

It turns out that John was right after all when he told Playboy, “It [“Got to Get You Into My Life”] actually describes his experience taking acid. I think that’s what he’s talking about. I couldn’t swear to it, but I think it was a result of that.”¹²

Notice first that unlike John, who qualifies his interpretation with an acknowledgement that he doesn’t know for sure if he’s right, Turner concludes with absolute certainty that his theory is accurate and that “Got To Get You Into My Life” was written about LSD, full stop.

You’re probably already sensing that this rock-solid certainty isn’t going to end well for Turner. But before we go further, it’s important to acknowledge that Turner is doing a lot of very good things here — things that most mainstream Beatles writers do not bother to do.

Turner bases his theory on primary research, and looks beyond the established narrative to a more careful read of Paul’s lyrics as a source of the truth of the story. In doing so, he implicitly acknowledges the obvious truth that — bizarrely enough — most mainstream Beatles writers refuse to acknowledge — that the art reveals the artist, and that the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney are a legitimate source of primary research when it comes to understanding their story.¹³

Most of all, Turner doesn’t just advance his theory and expect us to take his word for it, as happens so often in mainstream Beatles writing. Instead, he shows his work for why he thinks Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD and then offers his conclusion based on that work.

All of this is cause for amen and hallelujah (even if it feels somewhat Grail-phobically¹⁴ in service of proving Paul “wrong” and John “right,” as Turner puts it).

But Turner gets himself into dangerous territory when he presents his theory with absolute certainty. Because I hope you’re starting to see that absolute certainty is dangerous when it comes to— well, most things, actually, but especially the story of The Beatles, in which almost nothing is certain. And sure enough, a more careful look at the research Turner cites to support his theory reveals that none of this is quite as straightforward as he makes it out to be.

On the surface, Turner’s theory (along with John’s not-so-certain guess) sounds highly plausible.

Paul frequently claims to have trouble with dates, and given that the 1965 date is corroborated (within a month) by both Viv Prince and Nicki Browne, it’s very possible that Paul has conflated the two experiences in his mental timeline. Dylan in New York and Tara Browne in London are maybe not that different, if you’re a Beatle in the eye of the storm of Beatlemania wherein the passage of time is not at all the same as for non-Fab people like Viv Prince and Nicki Browne (and for that matter, Steve Turner).¹⁵

But for Turner’s theory to work, it’s not enough to show that Paul took LSD for the first time a few months prior to writing “Got To Get You Into My Life.” Turner also needs to show that that first trip — almost certainly Paul’s only LSD experience prior to writing the song — was sufficiently transformative to inspire him to feel he needs it — as he writes in the lyric — every single day of my life (factoring in, of course, that Paul might be exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect).

And to his credit, Turner does attempt to show that Paul was transformed by the Tara Browne trip — in part by quoting what he claims are Paul’s descriptions of that first trip from a 1967 Daily Mirror article.

Here that’s passage from Turner’s book again, just to refresh our memory—

“In 1967 [Paul] told the Daily Mirror that his initial trip was “quite an incredible experience” that lasted for six hours; he said, “[It] opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God” and “made me a better person.”

Okay, so y’know how I keep going on about all the monkey business with the quotes, and about how that’s one of the reasons we can’t trust biographies because that monkey business means there’s no way to know for sure if what the person being quoted said is actually what the person said, or what the context was if they did say it?¹⁶

Well, I’m sorry to say that here we are again.

Turner doesn’t footnote his work (which is especially problematic when presenting a new theory), but fortunately, this article is relatively easy to find. Or I should say articles plural, because the quotes seem to be taken from two different articles published a day apart — one in the Sunday Mirror and the other a UPI wire service article that might have run in the Daily Mirror but as far as I can tell, did not. A small quibble, to be fair, but nonetheless.

Before we look at the quotes themselves, it’s maybe worth mentioning that I’m not convinced it’s the bestest idea ever to base theories of any kind on quotes from newspaper articles, and especially Daily Mirror articles, and especially Daily Mirror articles related to LSD.

Granted, I’m considering this from a non-British perspective many years in the future, but I’ve scanned through dozens of editions of the Daily Mirror from the 1960s, and it definitely doesn’t present itself as a serious news source. It looks and feels like a tabloid, not unlike the New York Post — complete with sexy pictures of girls in bikinis and clickbait headlines and sensationalist stories about horrifying things happening to people who violated society’s norms.

For example, in the June 20 1967 edition — only two days after the Sunday Mirror article Turner quotes in his book — there’s a full page story titled “Taking a Trip To Danger” and filled with lurid accounts of accidental deaths, insanity and murders allegedly caused by LSD.

Even in respectable newspapers and magazines, interview quotes tend to be aggressively edited to fit the length, format and sensibility of the newspaper or magazine. And that’s especially problematic in a tabloid like the Daily Mirror (or in this case, the Sunday Mirror) where odds are high that Paul’s actual words have been distorted to fit the Mirror’s clickbait agenda.

So keeping that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the quotes themselves.

The articles that Turner quotes were published on June 18 and 19 1967. Those articles were a reaction to a June 16 1967 Life Magazine story titled “The New Far-Out Beatles,” in which Paul publicly acknowledged for the first time that he’d tripped on LSD. Paul’s “confession” triggered an Establishment media freak-out that included a series of news articles based on at least two follow-up interviews that Paul gave about his LSD experiences.¹⁷

a selection of headlines from the Great Establishment LSD Freak-Out of June 1967.

Turner quotes Paul as having told reporters that his “initial trip” was “quite an incredible experience” that lasted for six hours and that “[it] opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God.” That language doesn’t seem to have been printed in the Daily Mirror, but it does appear in a June 19 1967 UPI London wire report published in The Independent.¹⁸

Turner also quotes a Sunday Mirror story published on June 18 1967 — Paul’s 25th birthday — in which Paul is quoted as saying that LSD “made me a better person” and that “far from harming me... it helped me to see a lot more truth. I am more mature. I am less cynical. I have started to be honest with myself.”

So far so mostly good. That all sounds like it supports Turner’s theory. But remember, these interviews are from 1967, a year and a half after the Tara Browne party. And that’s where right away Turner’s theory is in a bit of trouble—

—because, again, it’s not enough to quote Paul as having said positive things about his experience with LSD in general. For Turner’s theory to work, Paul has to have said those things specifically about the Tara Browne trip — almost certainly his only experience with LSD prior to writing “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And indeed, Turner claims that Paul is specifically referring to his “initial trip” when he references his transformative spiritual experiences.

The problem is that the words “initial trip” do not appear in the articles Turner is citing. Nor — as far as I can tell — do the words “initial trip” appear in any of the news coverage from that time period — not in the Daily Mirror or the Sunday Mirror or The Independent or anywhere else. And that means that the words “initial trip” are almost certainly not Paul’s words, but rather Turner’s interpretation of Paul’s words.

Turner is probably getting his “initial trip” interpretation from the following passage, which does appear in the June 18 1967 Mirror article—

“I had read a lot about LSD and finally I decided to try it. It was right here in this room. Each session lasted about six hours.”¹⁹

Paul’s phrase, “finally I decided to try it” does suggest he’s going to tell us about his first LSD experience — and, again, this is probably where Turner is getting his “initial trip” language from, since it doesn’t seem to appear anywhere else.

But Paul isn’t saying what Turner claims he’s saying — not in the article Turner is citing, and nowhere else that I’ve found either.

Instead, Paul goes on to specify that “each session lasted about six hours.” And while that language could be inclusive of his first trip, it’s not specific to his first trip. That’s the crucial distinction — because again, for Turner’s theory to work, it doesn’t matter how Paul felt about LSD in general. It only matters how he felt about his first trip —aka the Tara Browne trip, almost certainly the only trip he took before writing “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

In other words, the language in the article doesn’t disprove Turner’s theory, but it doesn’t prove it, either — because Turner’s “initial trip” language is not an accurate paraphrase of what Paul is actually saying. And what Paul is actually saying doesn’t specifically link his descriptions of his LSD experience with his initial trip.

But you might have noticed that the bigger problem for Turner is Paul’s reference to all of his trips having taken place “right here in this room.”

For absolutely sure, “this room” isn’t in Tara Browne’s house — because by the time Paul gives this interview, Tara Browne has been dead for six months. And in fact, the Sunday Mirror article that Turner quotes from specifies that Paul is giving the interview at Cavendish, his London townhouse.

And that means that in saying all of his trips took place “in this room,” Paul isn’t just not including the Tara Browne trip, he’s specifically excluding that trip from his descriptions of his experience with LSD.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the Tara Browne trip didn’t happen. There’s no reason to think either Viv Prince or Nicki Browne are making anything up. By specifying that all of his trips happened at Cavendish, Paul may simply have been protecting the other party guests from possible legal consequences, not to mention the media harassment he himself was being subjected to on the heels of his acknowledgement about using LSD.

There would be precedent for this.

The day after the Sunday Mirror article, Paul gave an on-camera interview to ITV. In it, he declines to answer a question about who gave him the LSD — and the reason he gives for refusing to answer is that he’d be implicating someone else in a criminal act. And not doing that might have been especially on Paul’s mind—

— because this was all playing out against the backdrop of the infamous “Redlands bust,” in which Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and gallery owner Robert Fraser — all friends of Paul’s — were arrested for drug possession. In the Redlands bust, Keith Richards was charged not with possessing drugs himself, but with being the owner of a property at which illegal drugs were used, regardless of where those drugs came from.

All of which is to say it’s very possible that Paul is setting all of his trips at his own home to protect his friends from arrest.

But regardless of why Paul is excluding the Tara Browne trip from his recollections in the Sunday Mirror interview, the fact remains that he is excluding it. And that means — again, absent another article I haven’t found — that while none of these quotes disprove Turner’s theory, they certainly don’t prove it, either.²⁰

There’s one more thing to notice about these 1967 newspaper articles. Turner doesn’t quote this part, but in the June 19 UPI wire story, Paul says he’s tripped on LSD four times. If his first trip was in December 1965, that’s four trips over a timespan of a year and a half. And that would seem to be wildly inconsistent with wanting it every single day of his life, as he writes in “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

What’s more, Paul has said that after the Tara Browne party, he didn’t take LSD again until March 1967. And unlike the Tara Browne trip, Paul is for sure not confusing the timing of that second trip, which is uniquely memorable and also tied to a specific, locked-in-time event — and also one of the few examples in the story of The Beatles in which everyone who was involved agrees on what happened, where, and when.

We’ll get back to that second trip later in this chapter. For here, remember again that unless Magic Alex built a time machine to transport Paul forward to his future LSD experiences, and then back to spring of 1966 to write the song, any LSD experiences that Paul may have had after writing “Got To Get You Into My Life” obviously don’t count towards Paul having written the song about LSD. Only that first trip at Tara Browne’s party counts — because it’s almost certainly Paul’s only trip prior to writing the song.

Let’s also notice that Paul waited over a year after the Tara Browne party to try LSD a second time.

That year-plus gap between his first and second trips wasn’t because Paul lacked motive or opportunity. By late 1965 when the Tara Browne party happened, George and especially John were tripping regularly, and pressuring Paul to do the same²¹ — which means Paul could easily have gotten LSD into his life at any point after the Tara Browne party, had he chosen to do so. And he does not seem to have chosen to do so.

And in fact, so notoriously did Paul not choose to seek out LSD after the Tara Browne trip that during the Anthology interviews — almost three decades after the fact — George was still bitching about how few trips Paul took compared to him and John.²²

But let’s give Turner’s theory every chance — because again, he did a lot of things right in presenting it. And to be fair, he’s not just relying on the Daily but really Sunday Mirror et al. He also pulls language from Paul’s quasi-memoir Many Years From Now, pointing out that Paul has called his LSD experiences “amazing” and “deeply emotional.” And this is accurate — Paul did say those things in Many Years From Now.

Here’s the complete version of the passage Turner is quoting from—

“Then I had [LSD] on a few occasions after that [the Tara Browne party] and I always found it amazing. Sometimes it was a very very deeply emotional experience, making you want to cry, sometimes seeing God or sensing all the majesty and emotional depth of everything. And sometimes you were just plain knackered, because it would be like sitting up all night in a train station, and by the morning you’ve grown very stiff and it’s not a party any more. It’s like the end of an all-nighter but you haven’t danced. You just sat. So your bum might be sore, just from sitting. I was often quite wiped out by it all but I always thought, Well, you know, everybody’s doing it. This is why I am always keen to warn people about peer pressure. I’ve certainly experienced it.

It was quite freaky but I guess it was something I wouldn’t want to have missed in many ways. I had mixed feelings about it, certainly, but we took it and in songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, when we were talking about “cellophane flowers” and “kaleidoscope eyes” and “grow so incredibly high!”, we were talking about drug experiences, no doubt about it.”²³

As always, context is everything. Because maybe you noticed already that Paul’s language in this passage is wildly contradictory.

Paul does say that his LSD trips were “always... amazing” but in the same passage, Paul goes on to specify that what was “amazing” was the “few occasions after” the Tara Browne trip. And by specifying that he’s talking about the “few occasions after,” Paul is not only not including the Tara Browne trip in his “amazing” description, he’s specifically excluding it — just as he did in the 1967 interviews.

It’s possible Paul’s exclusion of the Tara Browne trip in this passage is just a bit of awkward phrasing. As with the Sunday Mirror article, this isn’t Paul writing his words out in formal prose. Paul’s extended quotes in Many Years From Now are transcriptions of taped interviews — much like the written version of Anthology.

There would be precedent for Paul getting his words tangled. Despite his reputation as a smooth “PR man,” Paul (like many of us) frequently gets tangled up in his thoughts in interview, especially when talking about deeply emotional experiences — probably because of his self-acknowledged lifelong struggle with sharing his innermost feelings that we talked about at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility.²⁴

But I don’t think this is what’s happening here, because it’s not the only time in this passage that Paul excludes the Tara Browne trip from his descriptions — there’s also the part that Turner quotes in which Paul calls his LSD trips “deeply emotional.”

Again, context is everything. Because what Paul actually says is that “sometimes” his trips were “deeply emotional.” “Sometimes” is not all the time — and it probably doesn’t include the Tara Browne trip because Paul’s “sometimes” is, again, in the context of “a few times after that” — the “that” referring specifically to the Tara Browne trip. Meaning that Paul is — once again — taking care to exclude that first trip from his description of LSD as a deeply emotional experience.

I don’t think this is Paul getting his words tangled — because he excludes the Tara Browne trip not once, but twice in the same passage. And this repeated pattern makes it pretty clear that it’s not a misspeak, but an intentional exclusion.

I also think it’s unlikely that Paul is scrambling his words because he’s overcome with emotion. Later in the passage, Paul likens his LSD experiences to sitting awake all night in a train station — which I suppose is deeply emotional if you count boredom, fatigue and a sore arse as deep emotions.

And more than that, Paul concludes the passage by saying tripping on LSD was “freaky.” It’s not clear in this context if “freaky” is a good or a bad thing — but it’s probably not that good a thing, given Paul adds that he “guesses” he wouldn’t have wanted to miss it “in many ways. It’s as if Paul starts off each thought trying to muster enthusiasm, but by the end of it, he sounds like he’s been made to wait all night in a train station.²⁵

There’s more, too — because Paul makes a similar distinction in his actual description of the Tara Browne trip, also in Many Years From Now, which Turner also references in presenting his theory.

Here’s part of Paul’s description of the Tara Browne trip—

“Everything becomes more sensitive. Later, I was to have some more pleasant trips with the guys and outdoors, which was nicer. I was never that in love with it all, but it was a thing you did. I remember John saying, “You never are the same after it,” and I don’t think any of us ever were. It was such a mind-expanding thing. I saw paisley shapes and weird things, and for a guy who wasn’t that keen on getting that weird, there was a disturbing element to it. I remember looking at my shirtsleeves and seeing they were dirty and not being too pleased with that, whereas normally you wouldn’t even notice. But you noticed and you heard. Everything was supersensitive.”

There’s a lot to notice in this passage. Most notable is Paul’s repeated reference to being “supersensitive” — which we’ll come back to, because that’s going to be important in our unfolding of the deeper story.

What matters here is that Paul offers us two specific pieces of information about his Tara Browne trip. First, that he saw “paisley shapes and weird things” and that he was “disturbed” by this. And second, that he noticed dirt on his shirtsleeves and “wasn’t too pleased.”

Turner ignores Paul saying he was “disturbed,” and “displeased,” and instead, focuses on the dirty shirtsleeves — which, oddly, Turner interprets as proof of his theory, citing it as evidence that “there suddenly seemed to be so much more to be gleaned from the simple things of life—depths of experience that he had so far ignored or glossed over.”²⁶

I mean.... it’s just... forgive me for the lapse in scholarly dignity, but what is Turner even talking about here? I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but this might be one of the silliest examples of confirmation bias I’ve encountered in Beatles writing and that’s saying something.

I suppose what Turner’s suggesting is technically true — but it’s a pretty big reach to suggest that Paul being displeased and disturbed by dirt on his sleeves is evidence of an “amazing” and “deeply emotional” experience of spiritual enlightenment, especially since there’s no indication that Paul viewed it that way. Obsessing over dirty sleeves is certainly not an experience one would want every single day of their life. Or even any single day of their life.

Also notice that the only positive language Paul uses in this description of his first trip once again excludes his first trip. It’s only the “later” trips — again, after the Tara Browne trip — that Paul remembers as “more pleasant” and “nicer,” two words that — again — do not suggest any kind of deep emotional experience.

Paul has been remarkably consistent in his descriptions of the Tara Browne trip. In every example I’ve found — from his 1967 newspaper interviews to his two published memoirs in 1997 and 2022 — Paul has made it explicitly clear that his positive experiences of LSD do not include his first trip at Tara Browne’s party. And that trip, remember, is the only trip that matters when it comes to whether Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD — because it’s almost certainly Paul’s only LSD experience prior to writing the song.

What Turner is consistently doing in order to make his case is cherry-picking the parts of Paul’s descriptions that support his theory and ignoring the rest of what Paul has to say about his LSD experiences — lifting the words out of the context in which they were said and misinterpreting them on their own to mean something they were explicitly not intended to mean.

Without those quotes meaning what they clearly do not mean, Turner isn’t left with much of anything to support his theory, other than the date of Tara Browne’s party. And the date alone is insufficient to make his case that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD.

Before we move on, there’s another piece of primary research relative to the Tara Browne party that wasn’t publicly available when Turner wrote his book. Remember that Tara Browne’s wife Nicki was also at the party that night — and it turns out she also doesn’t seem to think Paul had an especially good trip.

Here she is talking with Paul Howard for his 2016 biography of Tara Browne—

“What Paul did was he spent his whole trip looking at this art book of mine called ‘Private View.’ He wasn’t interested in any of the females there. He wasn’t interested in listening to music either. He was just staring at this art book. I wish it had been more fun for him.”’²⁷

Nicki Browne’s quote here is somewhat ambiguous. On one hand, her regret that Paul didn’t have “more fun” and her disappointment that he “wasn’t interested in any of the females there” suggests that her definition of a good trip is less spiritual and more... recreational.

Nicki Browne also gives a title to the art book that Viv Prince told Steve Turner he noticed Paul being lost in — Private View, which is a 1965 coffee-table style book on the history of British art.

Private View includes a lot of trippy, brightly coloured abstract photographs and paintings.

selections from A Private View: The Lively World of British Art, Nelson Press, 1965.

That’s certainly the sort of book one could easily get lost in while tripping, especially if you’re deeply sensitive to visual aesthetics, as Paul has shown himself to be. Given her focus on fun over spiritual enlightenment, Nicki Browne might not have recognised Paul’s focus on the art book as a deeper and more profound experience than shagging the party guests.

What’s more, I can easily imagine Paul — who as a boy chose a book on modern art as his prize for winning a school essay contest²⁸— being enraptured in a book like that even without LSD.

But Nicki Browne also noticed that during his trip, Paul wasn’t interested in music — which certainly suggests something was amiss at a deeper level, because I’m not sure it’s possible for Paul McCartney to have a profound spiritual experience in which he loses his interest in music. That would be as unlikely as— well, as Paul McCartney losing his interest in music.

The only time we know for sure that Paul lost his interest in music was in Scotland during the darkest days of the breakup, when he was so immobilized with grief, anger, heartbreak, and depression that he could barely get out of bed and drank too much when he did. That was for sure a “deep emotional experience” — but, again, not exactly an amazing one that he’d want to have every single day of his life.

Also, to add a personal and admittedly subjective observation, Nicki Browne’s description makes my heart ache a bit at the thought of Paul sitting alone with his art book, working his way through the disorienting effects of LSD in the midst of a Swinging Sixties party crowd looking for “fun” and casual sex, and not at all in the right mindset to support Paul through the experience.

There’s one more thing to notice about Paul’s Tara Browne trip — or rather not about Paul’s Tara Browne trip.

Not only does Paul consistently exclude that first trip from his positive experiences of LSD in contemporaneous interviews and in Many Years From Now, he also seems to have found it so unmemorable that by 2022, he’s erased it from the story altogether, claiming instead that his first LSD trip wasn’t until 1967, and that it was with and for the benefit of — this should not be a surprise by now — John.

Here’s Paul in The Lyrics—

On the subject of coloured landscapes, I was the last in the group to take LSD. John and George had urged me to do it so that I could be on the same level as them. I was very reluctant because I’m actually quite straitlaced, and I’d heard that if you took LSD you would never be the same again. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I wasn’t sure that was such a terrific idea. So I was very resistant. In the end I did give in and took LSD one night with John.²⁹

If you’re at all versed in Beatle Lore, you’re probably familiar with this incident. It’s one of the handful of events in the story of The Beatles in which everyone involved tells it more or less the same way—

One night during a late night recording session for Sgt. Pepper, John accidentally took LSD instead of speed. George Martin — by his own admission clueless about such things — took John up to the roof (not that roof) and left him up there alone to clear his head. After Paul and George rescued John from potentially plummeting to his death, Paul took John home to Cavendish and tripped with him.

Everyone involved agrees that this trip with John at Cavendish happened in March 1967 — the timing of which isn’t hard to verify given we know it was during the Pepper sessions and we have the studio logs for the night in question.

In Many Years From Now, Paul gives a more detailed account of that night at Cavendish — although in 1997, Paul’s still (just barely) recalling it not as his first trip, but as his first trip with John.

Here’s Paul’s account of that trip. It’s a lengthy passage, and because the full description is important, it’s not edited for length—

“I thought, maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with [John]. It’s been coming for a long time. It’s often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John’s on it already, so I’ll sort of catch up.

It was my first trip with John, or with any of the guys. We stayed up all night, sat around and hallucinated a lot. Me and John, we’d known each other for a long time. Along with George and Ringo, we were best mates. And we looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mindboggling. You dissolve into each other. But that’s what we did, round about that time, that’s what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.

There’s something disturbing about it. You ask yourself, “How do you come back from it? How do you then lead a normal life after that?” And the answer is, you don’t. After that you’ve got to get trepanned or you’ve got to meditate for the rest of your life. You’ve got to make a decision which way you’re going to go. I would walk out into the garden “Oh no, I’ve got to go back in.” It was very tiring, walking made me very tired, wasted me, always wasted me. But “I’ve got to do it, for my well-being.”

In the meantime John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as a king, the absolute Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip. It was great but I wanted to go to bed after a while. I’d just had enough after about four or five hours. John was quite amazed that it had struck me in that way. John said, “Go to bed? You won’t sleep!” “I know that, I’ve still got to go to bed.” I thought, now that’s enough fun and partying, now ...(sic) It’s like with drink. That’s enough. That was a lot of fun, now I gotta go and sleep this off.

But of course you don’t just sleep off an acid trip, so I went to bed and hallucinated a lot in bed. I remember Mal coming up and checking that I was all right.³⁰ “Yeah, I think so.” I mean, I could feel every inch of the house, and John seemed like some sort of emperor in control of it all. It was quite strange. Of course he was just sitting there, very inscrutably.”

Notice — once again — Paul’s ambivalent feelings about LSD, in both of his descriptions of his trip with John. Just as with the Tara Browne trip, Paul describes his trip with John as “great’ and “a good trip,” and also remembers that it was “disturbing” and “tiring.” He also expresses concern about how it permanently changes a person’s outlook — a concern he repeats in both descriptions that we’ll come back to in a bit.

For here, what matters is that when Paul told the Sunday Mirror in June 1967 that he took all of his trips “in this room,” he’s excluding the Tara Browne trip — but he’s including his second trip —which is also his first trip with John. He’s replacing his memory of his first trip with Tara with his memory of his first trip with John.

Paul’s erasure of the Tara Browne trip in favour of the “Emperor of Eternity” trip is most likely related to what LSD guru Timothy Leary called “set and setting” — meaning how we experience LSD depends on both our internal state of mind and also the external conditions — where and with whom we take the trip. Paul is talking about set and setting when he shares that the later trips “with the guys” (meaning the other three Beatles) and “outdoors” were “nicer” and “more pleasant” for him — which again, while positive, isn’t especially enthusiastic.

There seems little doubt that for Paul, gazing into John’s eyes at Cavendish after a recording session is a “set and setting” more conducive to a positive experience than tripping with casual friends and strangers looking for sex and fun rather than spiritual connection. And it’s likely this less-than-ideal “set and setting” is why Paul confined his Tara Browne trip to sitting alone in a chair lost in an art book and contemplating his dirty shirt sleeves.

But what’s most striking is that in both of his published memoirs, Paul makes it explicitly clear that his motivation for the “Emperor of Eternity” trip was less about seeking out a connection with LSD and more about seeking out a deeper connection with John.

And if you add in Paul’s repeated references to the pressure he felt from John and George — but let’s be real, probably mostly from John — to try LSD, and also that John was pressuring Paul not long before the Tara Browne party,³¹ then a credible argument could be made that a desire to connect more deeply with John is the only reason Paul tried LSD at all—

—because maybe you noticed that in his description of the “Emperor of Eternity” trip, Paul reserves his most vivid and emotional language not for LSD itself, but for the intense and apparently emotionally overwhelming connection he felt with John when they tripped together.

Consider again this passage—

“We looked into each other’s eyes, the eye contact thing we used to do, which is fairly mindboggling. You dissolve into each other. But that’s what we did, round about that time, that’s what we did a lot. And it was amazing. You’re looking into each other’s eyes and you would want to look away, but you wouldn’t, and you could see yourself in the other person. It was a very freaky experience and I was totally blown away.”

Paul is without question describing a powerful emotional and spiritual experience.³² What’s not at all clear is whether Paul’s crediting that experience to LSD.

When Paul says that dissolving into one another’s eyes is “what we did, around that time, that’s what we did a lot,” it’s not clear if he’s saying that he and John frequently tripped on LSD while dissolving into each other’s eyes, or that they frequently dissolved into each other’s eyes independently of LSD, and that LSD heightened and prolonged the intensity of that habitual experience.³³

This might sound like a trivial distinction, but it’s not — it goes to the heart of Paul’s relationship with LSD and his relationship with John. So let’s take a minute to see if we can figure out which is more likely to be the intended meaning.

On one hand, Paul’s told us a few sentences earlier that this was the first time he and John tripped together. And that means that, grammatically, Paul’s “that’s what we did, around that time, that’s what we did a lot” refers to something that regularly happened prior to that first trip — aka, spending long hours together dissolving into each other’s eyes, with or without LSD. And note the repetition and the emphatic addition of “a lot.”

Maybe that grammatical structure is just a bit of scrambled language. After all, this isn’t an intentionally crafted song lyric, it’s a taped interview with Barry Miles.

But while this is a quote from an interview, it isn’t a one-time interview with a random journalist, where Paul didn’t have the opportunity to go back and correct his words — like, say, the Sunday Mirror. This is a passage from Many Years From Now, Paul’s formal, authorized biography, written and edited by his close friend Barry Miles in multiple drafts over the course of multiple years and signed off on by Paul.

And as with Anthology, Paul’s official stamp of approval on Many Years From Now (including Paul having written the introduction in the first person) makes clear that he’s signed off on his language in the book. And that’s true even if Barry Miles hadn’t confirmed as much for me in an email exchange. And that means we can take Many Years From Now as a credible primary source.

That doesn’t, obviously, mean that everything in Many Years From Now is word-for-word accurate to what happened, or even that it’s a 100% accurate reflection of Paul’s memories of what happened. But the method by which Many Years From Now was written does tell us that Paul’s description of staring into John’s eyes as being something the two of them did “a lot” is intentional — especially given that it’s a memory that’s clearly deeply emotionally resonant to Paul. And especially because it’s a memory related to his relationship with John.

Paul likely took extra care with the passages related to his relationship with John in Many Years From Now, given that Paul made it clear at the time that his main reason for cooperating with Many Years From Now was to correct the distorted “John vs Paul” narrative that was at its peak when the book was published.³⁴ Correcting that distorted narrative is the explicit reason Paul gives in both his first-person introduction to the book and the pull quote that appears on the back cover.

There’s a bit more to notice in Paul’s “Emperor of Eternity” passage from Many Years From Now — like that Paul repeats himself when it comes to the part about “staring into each other’s eyes,” when he says “that’s what we did” and “that’s what we did a lot.”

When we repeat something — especially within a single sentence — it’s often out of a need to make sure we’ve been understood. And when we’re taking care to make sure we’re understood — especially about an emotional truth — it’s virtually always because we’re communicating something that’s important to us.

Whether LSD-inspired or not, the “Emperor of Eternity” story is easily Paul’s most detailed and emotionally explicit description of his LSD experiences. It’s also among his most detailed descriptions of an intimate memory of his relationship with John. That’s significant, because given Paul’s self-acknowledged lifelong reluctance to share his innermost feelings, it’s unlikely he’d be willing to overcome that reluctance if his feelings about the incident weren’t genuine.

We’re stepping through this in detail — and again, thank you for your patience — because when it comes to understanding Paul’s LSD experiences, his description of his and John’s “Emperor of Eternity” trip — along with his consistent omission and eventual erasure of the Tara Browne trip in those descriptions — tells us something far more valuable than just the small-t truth about what might have happened at Cavendish Avenue on that night in 1967.

In the prior chapter, as well as in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked about how memory — and thus history and even more, mythology, be it personal or cultural — is shaped not by what literally happened, but by what we remember having happened. More importantly, memory is shaped by the even softer contours of how we feel about what happened. We tend to remember what matters to us, what we have a strong emotional reaction to, and we forget the rest — which is why what a person chooses to remember tells us a great deal about what’s important to them.

Paul makes explicitly clear in both of his published memoirs that the most memorable part of tripping with John is the way in which LSD deepened the connection between the two of them. And it’s significant that Paul reserves his most intense, detailed, and emotional descriptions of LSD for his trip with John —which is probably why the “Emperor of Eternity” trip has, over the years, gradually replaced the Tara Browne trip in Paul’s memory.

Absent extreme trauma, we don’t tend to replace memories we care about with memories we care less about. And when it comes to Paul’s memories of LSD, it’s not LSD that takes centre stage — it’s John.

We’ll talk a lot more about how Paul and John’s relationship factors into all of this beginning in the next chapter. For now, let’s wrap up our consideration of Turner’s “Paul wrote ‘Got To Get You Into My Life’ about LSD” theory — which hopefully you’re seeing doesn’t appear to hold together, when we consider the research Turner cites in its full context.

If there’s a moral to our deconstruction of Turner’s theory, it might be that it’s risky business, making black-and-white declarative statements about Beatles theories (or anything else, really) — which is why it would be foolish of me to say that I knew for sure whether Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD. But Turner certainly hasn’t proven that he did.

While it’s always possible I’ve missed something, nothing in what we know about Paul’s trip with Tara Browne — other than the proximity in time of the two events — even remotely suggests that Paul’s first LSD trip with Tara Browne was anywhere near memorable or significant enough to inspire a song like “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

I want to emphasize again that Turner is doing a lot right here. He’s questioning the established narrative, and he’s attempting to show his work in support of his theory rather than just expecting us to take his word for it. And he’s naming his sources (well, sort of).

Most of all, he’s making an attempt to be Grail fluent — meaning able to recognise and interpret emotional subtext — by considering the emotional implications of Paul’s language. He’s at least wrestling with his fear of softness — meaning the fear of being receptive to emotion — even if he’s not overcoming it altogether. And if you’re familiar with Part One of Beautiful Possibility, you know that’s no small thing, for a man in Western culture.³⁵

The problem is that Turner’s absolute conviction that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD seems to be the same sort of faulty cause-and-effect based on a misread of the primary research, that plagues virtually the entire story of The Beatles as it’s currently told. And as we’ve seen and will continue to see, that faulty cause-and-effect is the result of a couple of things that are epidemic in mainstream Beatles writing.

First — and I don’t say the following with any malice, but I do say it with frustration and no small amount of sadness — I think there’s an arrogance, albeit probably unintentional, on the part of most mainstream Beatles writers, and especially those of a certain generation who have not for the past sixty years had their right to control the narrative questioned in any serious way.

You can probably see how this unearned arrogance might have come to be — and to be fair, not all of it is because of the writers themselves, at least not directly.

However well-intentioned a Beatles writer might be at the start, the inevitable result of having controlled the narrative for so long is that it leads to the temptation to cut corners with their research and analysis, expecting the public to simply take them at their word when they assert that their work is credible and their theories are accurate. It’s easy to start to believe your own PR about how “definitive” your work is, when that claim is splashed across the top of your book cover and press releases.

Paired with that arrogance is what I think is the deeper cause of the faulty cause-and-effect that appears throughout mainstream Beatles writing — and that’s a lack of fluency in the softer language of the Grail — aka the ability to recognise and interpret emotional subtext and a willingness, or in this case, an unwillingness to acknowledge the importance of emotion, and especially love, in the story.

This lack of Grail fluency is also, strictly speaking, not the doing of the writers themselves. As we talked about in depth in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, this lack of Grail fluency is the direct result of the fear of softness — aka the fear of being receptive to emotion and again, especially love. That fear of softness has for thousands of years been beaten and brainwashed into all of us in Western culture — and especially men.

But while again, that fear of softness is not the doing of the writers, it is their choice not to take steps to get past that fear. And that’s a fatal flaw, when it comes to understanding The Beatles and indeed the story of any artist — because what is art but the expression of human emotion?

That fear of softness, and the “hard” culture that results from that fear, has also taught us — and again, perhaps especially men — that being anything other than rock-solid sure about a theory is a sign of weakness.

The fear of appearing less-than-confident in his own work is probably the root of Turner’s need not just to present his theory as a possibility, but as rock-solid definitive proof that Paul was for sure “wrong” and John was for sure “right” — even though Turner’s research and analysis does not in any way prove that. And even though he can’t possibly know for sure what’s in Paul’s head or what happened at events he wasn’t even present for — any more than I can be rock-solid sure of my own theories relative to the deeper relationship dynamics between John and Paul that we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility.

Before we leave Turner behind and begin the unfolding of our deeper narrative, I want to add one more observation about his unqualified pronouncement that Paul for sure did not write “Got To Get You Into My Life” about cannabis, and that he for sure wrote the song about LSD.

It’s one thing to suggest that an artist’s stated interpretation of their work may not be accurate — either because the artist isn’t consciously aware of the deeper meaning in their work, or because the artist has chosen not to share that meaning with us outside of the work itself.

That kind of speculation, done respectfully, is fair game —artists are often not consciously aware of or willing to disclose the meaning of their art. And that kind of speculation is especially fair game when it comes to Paul’s lyrics, given that Paul has explicitly told us that the truth of his life is hidden in meanings of his songs that “are not always obvious on the surface.” And that he has specifically and explicitly invited — and even directed — us to go looking for that truth.

But it’s another thing entirely to tell an artist that they are for sure wrong about what their art is about. That’s not respectful speculation — that’s a clear violation of personal agency.

Any time we decide that we know for sure what someone else is thinking or feeling — be it Paul McCartney or anyone else — we’re trespassing on that person’s right to be their own person, by suggesting — erroneously — that we know better than they do about their own thoughts and feelings.

And that goes to the ethical guidelines we established in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — that while that it seems clear that both Paul and John have given us license to speculate about their lives and their art, they haven’t given us the right to conclude definitively that we know better than they do about the truth of their lives and their art.

And while I confess it’s been a while since I’ve read Turner and I can’t know what in his head or heart any more than either of us can know what’s in Paul’s, and while I don’t recall his position on the “John vs Paul” distorted narrative, I can’t help but wonder if he’d be as confident in his theory if he didn’t believe it “proved” Paul wrong and John right.

All of this is why my frequent use of words like “consider” and “maybe” and, yes, “possibility” are not just decoration. And those words are certainly not about being wishy-washy or indecisive, nor do they indicate a lack of confidence in my work.

Those modifying phrases appear in abundance throughout Beautiful Possibility and in Seven Levels and on The Abbey in general because I think “consider” and “maybe” and “possibility” is the only respectful and ethical way to talk about the truth of another person’s life.

Those modifying phrases are also the only “truth” a responsible scholar can offer in any field. I can leverage the full weight of my intellect, along with my ability to interpret language and emotional subtext, to tell you that I don’t think Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD and I can show you that the research doesn’t support that theory. But I can’t know for sure one way or the other — and neither can Turner.³⁶ And acknowledging that lack of certainty isn’t a sign of weakness — it’s an acknowledgement of the limitations of even primary research, when it comes to knowing why Paul wrote the song as he did.

We’ll come back to all of this and its implications for Part Two of Beautiful Possibility in the Wrap-Up to Seven Levels. For now, let’s continue on with our quest to unfold the deeper narrative of the Dylan story and “Got To Get You Into My Life.” Because while Paul’s feelings about LSD seem at best conflicted, and his experience with LSD limited to a handful of occasions, Paul’s experience with cannabis is an entirely different story.

“For the pot smoker is more than a hedonist bent upon wringing the last drop of pleasure from his jaded senses ... or obliterating his awareness in alcoholic escapism. He is an individual who, in a very personal way, has discovered that muffled entryway into the secrets of his own mind which this mildest of the psychedelics opens up.” — Open City, Sept 20 1967

We’ve covered a bit of ground in this chapter, so before we continue, let’s refresh our memory on what Paul has said about his discovery of cannabis, relative to “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

Here he is in Many Years From Now in the quote that introduced this chapter—

“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.

And here’s Paul in The Lyrics—

“This song is my ode to pot. It was something that entered our lives, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a song with ‘Got to get you into my life’, and only I would know that I was talking about pot. Many years later I told people what it was about, but when we made the record it was just, ‘I was alone, I took a ride / I didn’t know what I would find there’. It was very joyous at that time. The scene turned darker a few years later, as the whole drug thing did, but it started off as a rather sunny-day-in-the garden type of experience.

The obvious thing to notice is that Paul’s language here is significantly more positive than his descriptions of LSD, in that there’s a conspicuous absence of the negative. In fact, Paul goes out of his way to say that for him, when it came to cannabis, there were/are no negatives. Instead, he describes his experience of cannabis as “uplifting” and “very joyous,” and compares it to “chocolate or a good claret.”

That also doesn’t sound like the stuff of which the passionate urgency of “Got To Get You Into My Life” is made. But notice also that in this passage, Paul describes cannabis as “mind expanding, literally mind expanding” — and notice Paul’s repetition (and the use of the word “literally”) for emphasis, making sure we get the message about what’s important to him about the experience. And notice also his lack of qualification or contradiction relative to those glowing descriptions. Some of them are more glowing than others, but all of them are unambiguously positive.

We’ll get back to the “mind-expanding” part, because there’s more to talk about relative to that. For here, let’s point out that Paul’s use of that language probably isn’t a big surprise. We know from what all four of them and those around them have said that once the Fabs got their hands on the good stuff — whenever and wherever that was — they took to cannabis like the paisley-patterned, technicolor avatars of the Love Revolution that they were.

None of The Beatles, though, embraced the lovely Mary Jane with more enthusiasm than Paul. While Paul’s feelings about LSD seem consistently and deeply ambiguous and contradictory, there seems to be nothing ambiguous or contradictory about Paul’s feelings about cannabis.

In fact, I’m not sure Paul has ever said a bad word about cannabis. For sure, I’ve not found any examples whatsoever, other than his occasional half-hearted comments about how people shouldn’t smoke it — which he always makes clear (sometimes with a literal wink³⁷) he’s only saying to pacify the moralizing minority, as if he’s being made to do some sort of hostage video against his will.

Over the years, Paul has acknowledged experimenting — cautiously — with alcohol, benzedrine, Preludin, sleeping pills, cocaine, heroin, STP, LSD, and cannabis. But cannabis seems to be the only consciousness-altering experience that captured Paul’s imagination enough for him to continue to consume it anywhere close to every single day of his life.

As we saw in the first half of this chapter, during the Great Media Freakout of June 1967 Paul offered a relatively restrained public endorsement of LSD — including many qualifiers that of course he wasn’t suggesting that everyone else try it, only that he had chosen to do so.³⁸

In contrast, less than a month later, Paul signed, and got the other Beatles (and Brian Epstein) to publicly sign their names to a full-page ad — paid for by the Fabs — in The Times of London advocating for the legalization of marijuana.³⁹ And he’s continued to advocate for its legalisation through the “Just Say No” ‘80s and ‘90s right up to the present day.⁴⁰

The Times of London, July 24,1967

But we don’t need to look further for evidence of Paul’s enduring relationship with cannabis than his history of arrests, court appearances, fines, and — most infamously — nine days in a Japanese jail cell in 1980 facing the possibility of a multi-year prison sentence for bringing a bag of cannabis into the country.

John and George were both convicted of cannabis possession in the ‘60s, but we tend to forget that of the four Beatles, it’s Paul McCartney who has by far the longest “rap sheet” — and with the exception of speeding tickets, all of those offenses involve possession of cannabis.⁴¹ In fact, if my research is correct, Paul’s been arrested for cannabis possession more often than that most famous of cannabis possessors, Willie Nelson.⁴²

And that brings us back to the Dylan story, and to my suggestion in the prior chapter that Paul’s version of the Dylan story differs in an intriguing way from that of the other three Beatles. Because when it comes to the Dylan story, Paul seems to have had a very different experience from the other three.

Whatever the exact circumstances and whether or not it was their first encounter with cannabis, John, George, and Ringo’s memories are remarkably similar in describing their emotional experience of the Dylan story.

George’s memory is that “we all got on very well and we just talked and had a big laugh.”⁴³ And in that same interview, he also described the effects of cannabis as the equivalent of “having a couple beers.”⁴⁴ Ringo remembers that “we got high and we laughed our asses off.”⁴⁵ And John recalls that The Beatles and Dylan “did nothing but laugh all night” and describes cannabis overall as a “harmless giggle.”⁴⁶

Paul also talks about the laughter and fun of partying with Dylan — but he then goes on to tell a very different story. Here he is, in Many Years From Now (reluctantly edited for length) —

“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?”’ ...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!” ... And we pissed ourselves laughing, I mean, “What the fuck’s that? What the fuck are the seven levels?”’ But looking back, [“there are seven levels”] is 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.”

Obviously, Paul’s telling of the Dylan story is radically different from the other three — and indeed, radically different from any other descriptions of the Dylan story from anyone. He’s the only one who describes an experience of being shown the meaning of life, even if that revelation was a little fuzzy the morning after. As much as Paul tries to laugh it off at the end, this clearly wasn’t just “party time” for him. And indeed, Paul acknowledges this when he says (also in Many Years From Now) that, “The first time I took [marijuana] I got very high indeed. It was quite a breakthrough, it was something different.”

We’ll get back to Paul’s “seven levels” story in a minute, but first, there’s a lot happening in this short quote. Just as Paul erased his first LSD trip with Tara Browne in favor of his “Emperor of Eternity” trip with John, so, too, is Paul erasing what was likely his first cannabis experience in early days Liverpool in favor of the Dylan story. And he’s probably doing so for similar reasons, because—

Paul’s right, when he says his “seven levels” experience is “something different” from a garden-variety cannabis high. It’s also in marked contrast with the fun-and-games descriptions of the other three. Individual results may vary, but most people most of the time seem to experience cannabis less as “mind-expanding” and more as mind-relaxing — not so much taking you to another world as making this world a little softer, a little easier to live in, like chocolate or a glass of good claret.

But while there’s no way to know for sure exactly how another person experiences cannabis, what Paul is describing in his “seven levels” experience certainly doesn’t sound like chocolate or a good claret.

Instead, Paul’s description of having his mind expanded by being shown the meaning of life sounds much more like an experience in altered consciousness. It sounds like— well, it sounds like what he writes about in the opening verse of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — that same language that Turner observed — accurately — was more indicative of an LSD trip than a marijuana high.

And since it’s highly un-likely Paul’s writing about an LSD trip, this in turn offers an intriguing possibility — that Paul may be among the small minority who naturally experiences cannabis not just as a mind-relaxant, but as a mind-expander — as a psychedelic. And this might be why he’s called the impact of cannabis in his life “mind expanding, literally mind expanding.”⁴⁷

It seems likely that what happened that night with Dylan is that John, George, and Ringo enjoyed some mighty potent weed that floated them, laughing and giggling, to the ceiling — while Paul had his consciousness blown open.

And if that’s what happened, then that is indeed “quite a breakthrough” for Paul McCartney of The Beatles in 1964. Because Paul’s “seven levels” trip pre-dates John and George’s initial encounter with LSD by almost six months, and it predates Ringo’s first LSD trip by exactly a year.⁴⁸

And that — if my read is accurate — makes Paul the first of the four Beatles to have an experience of higher consciousness. And given their status as leaders of the world-changing cultural revolution of the Sixties, to say that’s a culturally significant event is a massive understatement.

Self-portrait by Paul McCartney, Beat Wave 1967.

When Paul says in Many Years From Now that his “seven levels” insight was “the first thing,” it’s not clear if he’s speaking only about his own spiritual journey, or if he’s also intending to suggest that his experience was the inciting incident for what would evolve into the widespread exploration of altered consciousness and spirituality that became so much a part of the Love Revolution.

If Paul is speaking more broadly, that “first thing” observation is more accurate than it might seem.

Paul ends his “seven levels” story with all four of the Fabs laughing off his insight. As with the laugh track at the end of George’s “Within You Without You,” this reads to me like a self-conscious attempt to puncture the profound nature of the experience he’s describing, lest it come across as either ridiculous or pretentious.⁴⁹ It’s exactly the sort of thing someone afraid of expressing their innermost feelings outside of song might do. But in this case, he who laughs first laughs best — fast forward a year or so, and John and George will be talking like that, too.

Now, obviously The Beatles were not the first to explore higher consciousness — humanity has been doing that since before the beginning of recorded history. The Beatles weren’t even the first to explore higher consciousness during the Love Revolution — the beatniks got there long before the Fabs, along with a lot of others in the counterculture, including Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

But Paul’s “seven levels” experience seems quite clearly to mark the true beginning of The Beatles’ exploration of higher consciousness. And that’s a seriously culturally significant event for The Beatles, and thus also for the Love Revolution, and thus ultimately, for all of us — because as we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, while The Beatles didn’t invent do-it-yourself spirituality, they were and still are, without question, its most influential ambassadors.

To simplify all of this more than we probably should, the Fabs’ explorations into higher consciousness led ultimately to their involvement with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation movement and The Beatles’ iconic visit to his ashram in India in the spring of 1968.

And (again, oversimplying a bit) because of the unprecedented influence that The Beatles had in the wider culture — meaning in all of those suburban living rooms we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, including things like being pictured meditating with Maharishi on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post — their very public spiritual explorations were a major catalyst — maybe the major catalyst — for the spread of mainstream interest in personal spiritual exploration outside the structure of organized religion.

The Saturday Evening Post was, perhaps along with Reader’s Digest, the most mainstream “suburban living room” magazine of the time.

And this widespread discovery and integration of Eastern spirituality into mainstream Western culture is, in turn, the flashpoint for the ascendance of “spiritual but not religious” as more or less the default “religious” affiliation of much of the Western world.⁵⁰

In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked in some detail about the ascendence of “spiritual but not religious.” Prior to the spiritual revolution of the Sixties, it was not considered acceptable in mainstream culture to seek out spiritual connection to the Divine outside of organized religion — which had always functioned as a sort of “middle man” between humanity and God (in whatever way you want to define that word). Anyone who rejected that middle man and sought a direct connection with the Divine was considered to be on the extreme fringe of society.

These days, because of the spiritual revolution of the Sixties, seeking connection to higher consciousness outside of organized religion is not only acceptable, it’s more or less the norm — as is evidenced by the many self-help spirituality books and lifestyle practices widely available everywhere from your local discount store to the meditation group and yoga classes available at your local community centre. We take that sort of thing for granted now, but it simply did not exist in any mainstream way prior to the Beatles’ trip to India.⁵¹

What I’m suggesting is that Paul’s “seven levels” experience — and thus the Dylan story as a whole — might be more than just a colourful folk tale about Dylan turning The Beatles on to the feel-good delights of cannabis. It might be a seminal event in the world-changing mythological earthquake that became the Love Revolution.

All of this is, of course, directly relevant to the larger story we told in Part One of Beautiful Possibility. But what I want to talk about in this series is the impact of Paul’s “seven levels” experience on his own life, and more than that, on his creative process and on the dynamic of both The Beatles and Lennon/McCartney—

—because what’s also undeniably true is that Paul’s experience that night was a seminal inciting event in the musical development of The Beatles—

— because as we all know, the Dylan story happens on the cusp of the revolutionary breakthroughs of Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Sgt. Pepper. And as we’re about to explore, the effects of cannabis on Paul during this time period — beginning with his consciousness-expanding “seven levels” experience — may also have been a seminal event in the eventual disintegration of Lennon/McCartney.

To explore that not-so-beautiful possibility, the next question to consider relates, once again, to Leary’s “set and setting.”

Why was Paul able to have what seems to have been a profound consciousness-opening experience in the middle of what everyone involved, including Paul, has described as a raucous party? The “set and setting” certainly doesn’t seem to have been all that much more conducive to a meaningful spiritual experience than the Tara Browne party — although being safely enfolded in the inner circle and the generally good vibes was almost certainly a crucial difference. And it might also matter if the setting was the out-of-the-way Riviera Idlewild at the end of the specularly-successful, history-making 1964 tour.

But I wonder if the more important explanation for why Paul was able to have a “seven levels” experience in the middle of a party might be found by taking a closer look at the specific language that Paul uses to describe his experiences with LSD, cannabis and other mind altering substances.

As we saw earlier in the chapter, Paul has sometimes had positive and profound things to say about LSD. But he inevitably follows those positive and profound things with a lot of less-positive and less profound qualifications. I think there might be a specific and unique reason for Paul’s self-evidently conflicted feelings about LSD.

In Paul’s description of his LSD trip at Tara Browne’s party, he remembers that “everything becomes more sensitive” and then repeats for emphasis that “everything was supersensitive.” Paul has also described tripping on LSD as sometimes being “a very very deeply emotional experience,” repeating for emphasis that it made him see “the emotional depth of everything.”

And then there’s his “Emperor of Eternity” trip with John, where Paul remembers going to bed with the sense that he “could feel every inch of the house.”

Paul has also consistently described tripping on LSD as “oppressive,” saying he felt “wiped out” and “heavy,” and “wishing it would wear off, discovering it wouldn’t.”⁵² And as we already considered, perhaps most memorably, that his LSD trips tended to end with him feeling like he’d waited all night in a train station.

In the late 1990s, Paul told Robert Fraser’s biographer Harriet Vyner that—

“The thing I didn’t like about acid was it lasted too long. It always wore me out. But they were great people to be around, a wacky crowd. My main problem was just the stamina you had to have. I never attempted to work on acid, I couldn’t. What’s the point of trying, love?’”⁵³

Both Paul and Nicki Browne also remember that Paul had a severe LSD hangover the morning after the Tara Browne party. And that hangover was debilitating enough that — uncharacteristically for Paul — he asked her to phone Brian and cancel his schedule for the day with the excuse of having the flu.⁵⁴ That suggests a level of fatigue consistent with feeling “wiped out” and “heavy” and not having the stamina for it.

Paul’s descriptions of experiencing mind-altering substances as heavy and oppressive aren’t confined to LSD.

Here he is talking about his experience with Preludin — which is an amphetamine, aka “speed” — during The Beatles’ early days in Hamburg—

“I knew that [Preludin] was dodgy. I sensed that you could get a little too wired on stuff like that. I went along with it the first couple of times, but eventually we’d be sitting there rapping and rapping, drinking and drinking, and going faster and faster, and I remember John turning round to me and saying, ‘What are you on, man? What are you on?’ I said, ‘Nothin’! ‘S great, though, isn’t it!’ Because I’d just get buoyed up by their conversation. They’d be on the prellies and I would have decided I didn’t really need one, I was so wired anyway. Or I’d maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five during the course of an evening and get totally wired. I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got just on the conversation. So you’d find me up just as late as all of them, but without the aid of the prellies.

This was good because it meant I didn’t have to get into sleeping tablets. I tried all of that but I didn’t like sleeping tablets, it was too heavy a sleep. I’d wake up at night and reach for a glass of water and knock it over.”⁵⁵

Again, notice the language Paul uses. “You could get a little too wired,’ “I’d maybe have one pill, while the guys, John particularly, would have four or five,” “I always felt I could have one and get as wired as they got.” And also notice Paul’s mention that he tried sleeping pills, but found them to be “too heavy a sleep.”

Paul concludes his Hamburg Preludin story with—

“So I suppose I was a little bit more sensible than some of the other guys in rock ‘n’ roll at that time. Something to do with my Liverpool upbringing made me exercise caution.”

Paul frequently acknowledges that when it came to experimenting with mind-altering substances, he was more cautious than John, George, and Ringo (and George and Ringo were, in turn, far more cautious than John). As in the quote we just heard, Paul often attributes that caution to his “Liverpool upbringing,” and specifically to his father having impressed on him both the dangers of drugs and the virtue of moderation in all things.⁵⁶

“Don’t do drugs” is, of course, standard parental advice in any generation, and Jim McCartney’s conservative, working class sensibility is well-documented. But I’m sceptical that Paul’s father’s advice on its own would have been enough to discourage Paul, had he wanted to experiment more heavily with prellies or LSD or anything else. As we’ll explore in future parts of Beautiful Possibility, Paul’s willingness to either follow or reject his father’s advice as it suited him is one of the pivot points on which the story of The Beatles turns.⁵⁷

Instead, Paul’s language in his descriptions of his experiences with mind-altering substances suggests a more intriguing explanation for his caution than simple cultural conservatism.

The following is, of course, only educated speculation. But based on his own descriptions, it’s possible that Paul is “more sensible” about mind-altering substances because he’s more sensitive to mind-altering substances. And that because of his heightened sensitivity to their effects, Paul is therefore more cautious about using them. Maybe Paul has heeded his father’s advice on moderation not because it’s coming from his father, but because Paul himself has found it to be good advice based on his own unique experience.

A heightened sensitivity would easily explain Paul’s preference for cannabis over LSD. For someone who’s naturally tuned in to its psychedelic properties — and given the right strain — cannabis offers something akin to a softer, more controllable, shorter-duration version of an acid trip. LSD-Lite, if you will. Except maybe not so light, if you’re unusually sensitive to its effects.

We’ll come back to the “shorter duration” part in the final chapter, because that’s going to matter a lot in putting all the pieces together. For now, let’s notice that if Paul is indeed unusually sensitive to the effects of mind-altering substances — and if he also experiences cannabis as a psychedelic — then that offers a new perspective on much of what we’ve talked about so far in Seven Levels.

Most obviously, it’s easy to see how Steve Turner might have come up with his theory and why he states it so definitively. Without knowing that cannabis can also be a psychedelic, it’s easy to make the assumption that the psychedelic experience hinted at in the lyrics to “Got To Get You Into My Life” automatically means LSD.

Also, Paul’s unusual sensitivity might be why Turner got confused about Paul’s contradictory descriptions of LSD — which, in view of that possible heightened sensitivity, might not be so contradictory after all.

When Paul says that LSD was a “deeply emotional” experience, we take for granted that’s a good thing. But for someone who is both highly sensitive and also uncomfortable with overt expressions of emotion, an intense and prolonged emotional experience from which they cannot escape is not a positive experience.⁵⁸ Instead, it would feel — as Paul has said it did — draining and overwhelming. And perhaps even more draining and overwhelming in the company of people who are just looking to have “fun” and who are not trusted intimates.

All of this is maybe why Nicki Browne was concerned that Paul wasn’t having “fun” at Tara Browne’s party, and instead chose to quietly isolate himself with an art book. Maybe she was sensitive enough herself to recognise that Paul was isolating himself with a book not because he was enraptured by the imagery or because he was having a “bad trip” in the classical sense, but because he was overwhelmed and possibly even frightened by the experience he was having — simply because it was a lot for a highly sensitive person uncomfortable with intense emotion to handle. And at a party where people were just out to have fun, there would have been little to no support available to help Paul through the experience.

And of course, Paul’s heightened sensitivity would be a more specific explanation for why he woke the next morning feeling “wiped out” and like he had the flu. An intensely emotional experience — especially lasting many hours and even more especially when you cannot make it stop — is a draining experience for virtually anyone. And perhaps even more so for someone with Paul’s discomfort with strong emotion and also his (possible) heightened sensitivity.

There’s more, too.

Paul’s heightened sensitivity might also be why, despite the obviously profound connection he felt with John during the “Emperor of Eternity” trip, Paul has also acknowledged feeling like he needed to give himself some distance. You might remember his descriptions of repeatedly walking out to the garden and back in again — which he noted he needed for his “well being” — and his description of eventually going to bed, even though he knew he wouldn’t sleep.

And this might be why John, having observed this reaction from Paul, made clear that he wasn’t sure that Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” about LSD. And also why John said in a 1970 interview that he thought maybe Paul regretted taking it.⁵⁹

Paul’s heightened sensitivity might also be why he expressed special concern about reports — including from John and George — that LSD permanently changes how a person’s mind works.⁶⁰ And that change might be even more dramatic if someone is especially sensitive to LSD’s effects.

It’s probably obvious that a concern over having his mental process permanently affected is not trivial for a creative genius in the midst of leading a world-altering cultural revolution — and for whom his mind is his creative workshop, and who — as we’ll get to shortly — was not having any trouble whatsoever composing revolutionary music in that workshop.

It’s possible Paul was less hesitant to experiment with cannabis because it doesn’t come with any such reported dangers in terms of permanently altering one’s mind — although a deep and profound psychedelic experience virtually always alters one’s worldview.

And finally, Paul’s possible heightened sensitivity — combined with his experience of cannabis as a psychedelic — also offers a new perspective on the so-called “acid wars” that were happening in and around Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Pepper — during which John and George were frustrated at Paul’s reluctance to try LSD, and pressured him to trip with them so that he could be “on the same level,” as Paul put it.

We often unconsciously assume that other people’s experience of a particular event is the same as our own. But of course, this is a false assumption — and even more so when it comes to the highly individual and language-defying experience of a psychedelic trip. An experience of altered consciousness is like the taste of a strawberry — we can try to describe it, but the only way to know for sure how a strawberry tastes is to taste one ourselves.

This is one of those things that’s simple to understand, but hard to explain even with our strawberry metaphor. So let’s go step by step.

Here’s how the “acid wars” might have gotten started— and keep in mind this is educated speculation, based on Paul’s possible heightened sensitivity and his experience of cannabis as a psychedelic —

When Paul got turned on to cannabis with Dylan, he almost certainly had no prior psychedelic experience with which to compare his “seven levels” trip. And given most people don’t realise cannabis can be a psychedelic, Paul almost certainly hadn’t had any advance coaching from anyone in recognising the unique experience of psychedelic higher consciousness.

That means Paul likely didn’t realise his experience of cannabis that night was unusual, or that it was an altered consciousness or psychedelic experience — because, again, those words aren’t generally associated with cannabis. And because those words aren’t generally associated with cannabis, Paul also likely would not have realised that his experience was markedly different from John, George, and Ringo’s.

And because John, George, and Ringo seem to have experienced a more traditional cannabis high — remember their references to laughter and it being “like having a few beers” — the other Fabs in turn likely didn’t realise that Paul was having a different experience from theirs.

Paul’s sharing of his “seven levels” note the following morning would have been the opportunity to resolve this disconnect by sharing his experience with John, George, and Ringo — which he seems to have very much wanted to do, given his memory, even decades later, of seeing himself as a “great discoverer” who “wanted to tell his people” about his discovery, and his preoccupation with preserving his insights by writing them down.

But any hope of sharing his experience in a more profound way seems to have evaporated when Mal read the note out loud and the group ridiculed it — ridicule that was possibly incited by Paul himself, who might well have felt too exposed and vulnerable in having his apparently very different and very personal experience exposed in that way.⁶¹ ⁶²

And if Paul didn’t realise he was more sensitive than the others to the effects of cannabis, and if he also didn’t realise that he was having a psychedelic experience that the other three weren’t having, and if the other three didn’t realise it either, this lack of communication easily translates into the peer pressure that Paul talks about relative to trying LSD.

A few months after the Dylan story, when John and George took their first trip on LSD and had their own first psychedelic experience, they likely assumed — incorrectly — that Paul had not yet had that experience because he hadn’t yet tripped on LSD.

And because John and George believed — correctly — that once someone has had that experience, it becomes very difficult to relate to someone who hasn’t, they wanted — needed — Paul to have that experience, too, so the band could maintain the close bond they’d always shared — a bond built in large part on their uniquely shared experience as Beatles.⁶³ An experience of higher consciousness was another important shared experience, though considerably less unique than being Fab.

So in an effort to protect the unique bond between the four of them, John and George pressured Paul to take LSD — but what none of the four likely realised was that they all already shared the experience. The only difference was Paul was getting it from cannabis instead of LSD.

All of this is, of course, educated speculation, but if it’s accurate, that would mean that the “acid wars” were a classic and unfortunate case of false assumptions and a failure to communicate — all of it put in motion by Mal’s reading out loud of the “seven levels” note the morning after the Dylan story, and the self-conscious ridicule that ensued.

And you can maybe also start to see that Paul’s “seven levels” experience also offers a likely explanation for why Paul tells a more detailed version of the Dylan story than the other three — and also why he’s the only one of the three who has completely erased the early days Liverpool experience and replaced it with the Dylan story as his first encounter with cannabis. Because, quite simply, it meant more to Paul than it did to the other three. And we tend to remember what matters to us and forget the rest.

And that, in turn, is probably why it’s Paul’s version of the Dylan story that’s become the traditional telling. And also why we experience it as the Delmonico rather than the Riviera Idlewild — simply because, for whatever reason and accurately or not, that’s where Paul has chosen to set the Dylan story.

There’s one more thing to notice about Paul and cannabis.

Whether or not Paul experienced cannabis as a psychedelic, it’s not mutually exclusive that he also experienced it in its more traditional form as a mind-relaxant — which in turn contributes to its powers as a psychedelic.

Timothy Leary makes this explicit in his book The Psychedelic Experience, in which he advises that in order to have the best possible experience of higher consciousness, one should — and this language will probably sound familiar — turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. Because of course, when our minds are relaxed, we are by definition more open to new perspectives. Leary is talking specifically about LSD, but his advice holds true for any psychedelic — or indeed, any new experience that has the potential to change our worldview.

And even setting aside the psychedelic effects, cannabis as a mind relaxant seems to have had a significant impact on Paul, well beyond the impact it had on the other three Beatles. Not just because of his possible heightened sensitivity, but because of who we know Paul McCartney to be.

“Paul is the definition of “you’re lucky you’re pretty.” For most people that phrase means they don’t have much else going on. But for Paul, it’s because he has TOO much else going on. He’s the magician and the magician’s assistant all at once — and somehow also the rabbit. He’s the whole magic show.”⁶⁴

Let’s start with an axiom — aka a statement of fundamental truth — and maybe one of the few available to us with regard to all of this.

Paul McCartney is, by any definition, an overachiever. And given he’s also, among many other things, the co-creator of the foundational mythology of our modern world, he may well be the most influential overachiever in the history of overachievers (not that it’s a competition, of course.😎).

But one thing that — by his own admission — seems to be absent from Paul’s long list of natural gifts is the ability to relax.

Here he is in Many Years From Now, talking about his early days with Linda—

“I remember very early on apologising because I was so tired, I said, “I’m really tired, I’m sorry.” She said, “It’s allowed.” I remember thinking, Fucking hell! That was a mind-blower. I’d never been with anyone who’d thought like that: “It’s allowed.” And it was quite patently clear that it was allowed to be tired. I think I’d trained myself never to appear tired. Always to be on the ball. “Sorry I’m yawning. I’m sorry,” which is complete bullshit. It’s a Beatles thing, you had to be there, you had to be on time.”⁶⁵

Paul is, of course, right that being “on” was a “Beatles thing.” The Beatles were in large part defined by their seemingly indefatigable work ethic and — especially during their “mop top” era — their collective joie de vivre. Journalist and friend Maureen Cleave made this explicit in 1966 when she observed that “what the Beatles have, and what has always distinguished them from other people in show business, is their enthusiasm and their energy.”⁶⁶

The Beatles in 1963. © Fiona Adams.

Now of course, what made The Beatles what they were and are is quite a bit more profound and complicated than just enthusiasm and energy. But it certainly didn’t hurt that all four of them — including, in the early years, John — possessed that energy and enthusiasm in abundance. Without it, they likely wouldn’t have survived Beatlemania. And come to think of it, without it, there likely wouldn’t have been a Beatlemania to survive.

The story as it’s told takes for granted that of the four, Paul had the least trouble with the pressures of Beatlemania and the unprecedented fame that came with it.⁶⁷ And it’s true that Paul (maybe along with Ringo) seems to have handled the screaming crowds, performing and touring much better than the others did — which is probably part of why he was the last to agree to stop touring, and why in later years he was the one pushing for them to tour again, and also part of why he’s still touring today.

But for all his apparent ability to handle the pressures of being a Beatle, it only takes watching a few live performances and early interviews of the four of them together to see that Paul is, shall we say... coiled somewhat more tightly than the other three, and that Paul’s need to be “on” all the time might have been (and still is) more than simply having trained himself to be Fab on command.

In those early interviews, it’s Paul who speaks the fastest, each word tumbling over the one before as if there’s never enough time to say everything he wants to say, his hands and body constantly in motion, fidgeting, biting his nails and his bottom lip, squirming in his chair.⁶⁸ It’s the same onstage — of the four, Paul is the only one in constant motion, dancing, twitching, singing along even when he’s not on the mic, flirting constantly with the audience (and with John and even occasionally with George), fully inhabited by the spirit of the music, which of course, he was and still is.

All of this is why I was surprised to discover that Paul suffers from stage fright — and that it was so extreme in the early years that he considered quitting the band over it.⁶⁹ Paul has confirmed this repeatedly over the years — and that stage fright would almost certainly have been particularly intense in the white hot spotlight of Beatlemania.

Added to this already volatile cocktail of nervous energy and performance anxiety, let’s also mention Paul’s demonstrated tendency to solve — or, if I might gently suggest, repress — emotional problems by working on new creative projects, and it’s pretty clear why Paul has acknowledged that relaxing his mind is not among his many natural abilities—

—which is why even beyond Paul’s experience of cannabis as a psychedelic, the mind-relaxing quality of a cannabis high may have had an especially strong impact on Paul. And it might be why Paul uses similar language to describe Linda’s permission to relax — “mind-blowing” — as he does to describe cannabis — “mind expanding.”

Once again, what I’m getting at here is simple to understand, but tricky to explain. A non-Paul-related analogy might help.

If someone who is really, really fearful does something really, really brave, that act of bravery is going to transform their life more instantly and more radically than it would for someone who’s already brave anyway. In the same way, for someone as tightly-wound as Paul, the relaxing effects of cannabis are going to make a more instant and more radical difference than they would for someone who’s naturally more relaxed — like for example, John, George and Ringo.

All of which is to say that even absent the psychedelic effects, interesting things happen when a tightly-coiled, emotionally-inhibited overachiever with lots of nervous energy who also happens to be a creative genius and who is especially sensitive to its effects, experiences the mind-relaxing qualities of very high-grade cannabis.

It’s self-evident from the music that followed that all four of The Beatles experienced the liberating creative effects of cannabis — George in particular has explicitly said as much.⁷⁰

This creative liberation isn’t surprising. Even without factoring its psychedelic properties, artists have a long history — stretching back well before the Fabs — of embracing the mind-relaxing effects of cannabis as part of the creative process. For an artist, our consciousness is our workspace, and the more relaxed we are, the more expansive that workspace is, the more room we have to create and play.

But of the four Beatles, cannabis seems to have had an especially transformative effect on Paul’s creative process, allowing him to access his creative unconscious in a way he hadn’t previously had access to, And in a way that, combined with his genius, created an unusually immediate and strong impact beyond that of the other three — an effect that would repeat itself a few months later when John had a similar experience with LSD, and we’ll get to that in the final chapter.

We could point to a number of examples of the transformative effect cannabis seems to have had on Paul McCartney’s music — in his songwriting, his basslines, and his musical arranging. But when it comes to the rewards of Paul’s newly-relaxed mind and expanded consciousness, we only need to consider a single example—

The origin story of “Yesterday” is, of course, another iconic Beatles folk tale — but more of a fairy tale, really, given its drop of magick.

Paul wakes up in the garrett of the Asher house, having dreamed the completed music for “Yesterday.”⁷¹ Half-asleep, he stumbles to the piano, works out the chords, and — depending on which version of the story and who’s telling it — spends the next weeks or months writing the lyric and playing it for various people to make sure it’s truly his composition and not a remembered melody from his childhood.

Paul’s “seven levels” experience with Dylan took place in either August or September of 1964. And we know that Paul already had the melody for “Yesterday” during the filming of Help!, which began production in February of 1965.⁷² Sometime in the few months between those two events, Paul dreamed the music for “Yesterday.”⁷³

It was, as Paul has recalled, the first time he’d ever dreamed a complete melody.⁷⁴ And given the way in which cannabis relaxes the mind and allows greater access to our subconscious — and given we’re talking about Paul McCartney — I doubt that timing is a coincidence.

On June 14 1965, Paul recorded “Yesterday” during what might be the most astonishing day of recording in Beatles history.⁷⁵ In the course of two three-hour sessions, The Beatles recorded three of Paul’s songs — the proto-metalpunk “I’m Down,” the lush, lyrical folk rock “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” and the harrowing, stripped-down lament, “Yesterday.”⁷⁶

The breadth of stylistic and musical genre and musical sophistication contained in these three songs — all written during the same time period of just a few months, and recorded in a single day — is an almost unfathomable artistic evolution by any artist over an entire career, never mind within a matter of months. It’s a stunning demonstration of — to borrow a phrase from writer Ian Leslie — a young composer unfurling the majesty of his talent.⁷⁷

And if you’re familiar with the history of “Yesterday” that we stepped through in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, then you already know the unfurling of that talent is going to cause a few problems, when it comes to Paul’s relationship with John.

We’re going to leave this thread hanging for now, but we’ll come back to it in the final chapter. To understand the role “Yesterday” plays in the deeper narrative that begins with the Dylan story, we need to first turn our attention to the song that started this chapter — “Got To Get You Into My Life”—

—because we’re not quite done with our acid trip. I’m going to suggest to you that “Got To Get You Into My Life” is indeed about acid. It’s just about a very different kind of acid than the kind that floats your mind downstream. I’m talking here about the kind of acid that’s to do with erotic obsession and romantic desperation. And most of all, it has to do with love.

In the next chapter, we’ll continue to unfold the deeper narrative of the Dylan story, as we venture — with caution, respect and no small amount of trepidation — into the softer and more perilous landscape of the vulnerable human heart, with a deep dive into the lyrics of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and what those lyrics might tell us about Paul’s relationship to cannabis — and more importantly, his relationship to John.

Meanwhile, there is as usual a lot of additional material in the footnotes, including a short explanation of how my personal experience with cannabis as a psychedelic informed this chapter.

Until next week.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

---

1. Paul McCartney, Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.

2. “Over time I came to see each song as a new puzzle. It would illuminate something that was important in my life at that moment, though the meanings are not always obvious on the surface. Fans or readers, or even critics, who really want to learn more about my life should read my lyrics, which might reveal more than any single book about The Beatles could do.” (Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.)

3. Just to name a couple of the more fun examples of Paul playing games when telling us what his songs are about—

At various times, he’s said that “Jet” is the name of a dog, the name of a pony, and a woman with marital troubles (this last one is probably pretty accurate). He’s also said that “Band on the Run” was inspired by the breakup of The Beatles (probably accurate), Wings (probably not accurate, what would Wings be on the run from?), and that it’s a fictional story about cowboy outlaws in the desert (🤔).

It’s really, really not a good idea to take any artist’s word for what their art is about — which is another reason to follow Paul’s directive when he says to look for the truth of his life in his songs rather than his interviews.

4. Chuck Berry is perhaps the most prominent of the handful of artists who wrote most of their own material. Contrary to popular perception, neither the Everly Brothers nor Buddy Holly nor Little Richard wrote a significant percentage of the songs they recorded.

5. “I’ll Follow the Sun,” written when Paul was a teenager, was one of those scavenged songs on Beatles For Sale, as was “Michelle” when they recorded Rubber Soul in December of 1965. And backing up to Help!, “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” was included as the final track presumably because the band didn’t have enough original songs ready to record.

6. transcribed directly from the audio of John Lennon’s interview with David Sheff, September 1980.

7. Tara Browne is, of course, best remembered as a possible inspiration for the opening verse of “A Day In The Life.”

It’s not relevant to the story we’re telling here, but for the record, John and Paul have different memories of this, as well as the “who wrote what” of the song.

Here’s John in 1980, in an edited audio clip from the Sept 1980 Sheff interview:

John: ...So [“A Day In the Life”] had two stories. One was the Guinness child that killed himself in a car--

Sheff: Uh-huh.

John: --that was the main headline story, uh—

(audible edit splicing together a different part of the interview)

John: On the next page was about four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire.

Paul, on the other hand, claims to have intended the opening verse as a drug reference unrelated to Tara Browne.

“The verse about the politician blowing his mind out in a car we wrote together. It has been attributed to Tara Browne, the Guinness heir, which I don’t believe is the case, certainly as we were writing it, I was not attributing it to Tara in my head. In John’s head it might have been. In my head I was imagining a politician bombed out on drugs who’d stopped at some traffic lights and he didn’t notice that the lights had changed. The “blew his mind” was purely a drug reference, nothing to do with a car crash. In actual fact I think I spent more time with Tara than John did. I’d taken Tara up to Liverpool. I was with Tara when I had the accident when I split my lip. We were really quite good friends and I introduced him to John. Anyway, if John said he was thinking of Tara, then he was, but in my mind it wasn’t to do with that.” (Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

8. Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.

9. “In the early hours of December 14 [1965], Viv Prince, the twenty-one-year-old recently deported drummer of the Pretty Things, an R & B band from London that made the Stones look well-groomed, restrained, and conventional, arrived at the Scotch with the Who’s bass player, John Entwistle. The two of them had just driven 120 miles down from Norwich, where the Who had played the Federation Club on Oak Street with Prince deputizing for Keith Moon, who was out of action for two weeks with whooping cough. At the Scotch they met Paul, John, and Tara Browne’s wife, Nicky. She invited Prince back to the couple’s mews cottage in Belgravia along with Paul, John, dancer Patrick Kerr, and a few attractive girls. John declined the offer, because he’d promised to get back to Cynthia at their home in Weybridge.

“When the revelers got to Eaton Row, Tara Browne was at home and suggested that they take LSD. Paul was still apprehensive. He was more in the mood for a joint and some drinks but the relief of the tour being over and the relaxing of responsibility that came with a few weeks of not having to write, record, perform, or be interviewed persuaded him that now was as good a time as ever to take the plunge. Prince had heard about LSD from his friend Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones but had never taken it and had no clear idea what the effects would be. The liquid drug was pure and was dropped onto sugar lumps that Nicky served with the tea, saying, “One lump or two?”

“The trippers stayed up all night. Paul saw paisley shapes and experienced “weird things” that made him feel slightly disturbed. He looked at his shirtsleeves, and the dirt on the cuffs was so intensified that it made him feel angry. He became sensitive to every kind of stimulus—light, sound, color, even the touch of fabric. There suddenly seemed to be so much more to be gleaned from the simple things of life—depths of experience that he had so far ignored or glossed over.

“Prince reacted in a very different way. Rather than becoming quiet and reflective he started drinking heavily while Paul sat leafing through a book of art. One particular image that caught Paul’s eye transfixed him for over an hour as he processed all the detail.

10. “A number of accounts had [Paul’s first LSD trip] happening early in 1966, although Nicki was certain that it was in late November 1965, shortly after her return from Marbella and before the release of Rubber Soul, which The Beatles had recorded earlier that autumn.” (I Read The News Today Oh Boy: the short and gilded life of Tara Browne, the man who inspired The Beatles’ greatest song, Paul Howard, Picador, 2016.)

NOTE: Paul Howard indicates in his endnotes that he personally interviewed Nicki Browne for the book, so it’s likely that even though this isn’t a direct quote, it’s based on direct interview. And since we’re just looking for the date and not exact language, this is a credible piece of primary research.

11. “LSD: Mirror doctor raps Beatle Paul,” The Sunday Mirror, June 18 1967.

12. Steve Turner, Beatles ‘66: The Revolutionary Year, Ecco Press, 2016.

13. We talked in detail about how the art reveals the artist — especially when it comes to Paul — and why Beatles writers are so strangely reluctant to consider the lyrics of Lennon/McCartney as primary source material in episode 1:5 of Beautiful Possibility (“He Said He Said Part 1’)

14. “Grail phobic” is a term of art we coined in Part One of Beautiful Possibility. It has its roots in the legend of the Fisher King and the Grail, but all you need to know for here is that it means being afraid of acknowledging the role of emotion — and especially softer emotions like love — in shaping human behavior.That fear is also shorthanded in my work as “fear of softness.”

15. Paul’s claim to not remember dates might also be about not being able to remember which part of the story is fiction and which part isn’t. We talked about this in the prior chapter, relative to his acknowledgement to Bob Spitz that a third to a half of the story of The Beatles as they tell it is fictionalized. In the 2008 interview, Spitz claims that Pault told him in so many words that he can’t always keep straight what’s fiction and what’s not. (https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/9125-e11)

16. In addition to our discussion of Anthology in the prior chapter, that monkey business is also discussed in detail in: https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/rabbit-hole-notes-on-research-methodology

17. If you’re thinking Paul acknowledging his use of LSD in June of 1967 is a big nothingburger, well... yeah. A Beatle tripping on LSD wasn’t exactly front page news to anyone who was paying any attention at all, in the midst of the psychedelic Summer of Love and two weeks after the release of the obviously acid-infused Sgt. Pepper.

But not everyone was hip to the vibe. The British government had outlawed LSD a year prior, and so Paul’s “confession” was very much front page news — the subject of hysterical clickbaity-y articles filled with statements from government officials and medical doctors moralizing that Paul had outed himself as a hard core drug addict. At which point, the other three Beatles and Brian all came to Paul’s defense and said they, too, took LSD, and all the Establishment heads got their knickers in a twist all over again.

18. “Beatle Paul McCartney Admits LSD Use,” The Independent, June 19 1967.

19. “LSD: Mirror doctor raps Beatle Paul,” The Sunday Mirror, June 18 1967.

full quote: “I had read a lot about LSD and finally I decided to try it. It was right here in this room. Each session lasted about six hours. It was the experience in my mind, and if you like, my soul, that was the shattering thing. I simply cannot explain what the experience was. It was different each time, and yet in a way it was always the same. All I can say is that it has shown me that there is something more to life than I have experienced before, call it love or God or what you will.”

20. Here’s another way to think of this, for those of you familiar with Part One of Beautiful Possibility—

What Turner’s claiming with his various newspaper quotes is the equivalent to me offering you a quote from Paul about how all four of The Beatles loved each other, and telling you that quote is proof of the lovers possibility (not that we’re trying to prove it, mind you). While a quote about the four Beatles loving one another wouldn’t exclude the possibility of John and Paul as a romantic couple, it wouldn’t prove it, either. And if I told you that it did, you’d probably laugh me out of whatever room I was in, and rightly so.

21. “After that [first] time,’ Harrison recalled, ‘John and I started thinking, “Hey, how the heck are we gonna tell the others?” ’Cause, you know, there’s no way back after that. It’s like you can never return to being who you were before, thankfully. I think if you come out of it in one piece, then – well, it’s individual reactions – but what I gained was certainly worth the hardship it put me through. It scrambled my brain for a year – it seems like years, but you know how it stretches time. It was actually a few months of trying to piece it back together: what do I do now, what do we do now, who am I, what is all this? Then we thought – since there’s no way you can describe it – how are we ever gonna tell Paul and Ringo and the rest of our direct entourage? We’ve got to get some more and give it to ’em.’” (George Harrison interviewed for CREEM, January 1988.)

WENNER: The other Beatles didn’t get into LSD as much as you did?

JOHN: George did pretty...(sic) in LA, the second time we took it, Paul felt very out of it because we were all a bit slightly cruel, sort of ‘we’re taking it, and you’re not.’ But we kept seeing him, you know. And we couldn’t eat our food, I just couldn’t manage it, we were just picking it up with our hands and there were all these people sort of serving us in the house, and that, we were just sort of knocking food on the floor and all of that. It was a long time before Paul took it. And then there was the big announcement.” (John Lennon interviewed by Jann Wenner, Lennon Remembers, Penguin, 1971.)

22. Here’s George on camera in Anthology (episode 6, approx 47:25) —

“Well I don’t know it just seemed strange to me because we’d been trying to get him to take it for about 18 months and then it just seemed funny that one day he’s on the television talking all about it “

23. Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.

24. We talked at length about Paul’s struggle to share his innermost thoughts outside of song in episode 1:5 (“He Said He Said Part 1”).

25. Paul was markedly more enthusiastic about LSD in his press interviews at the time than he was in later years. But Paul has acknowledged that some of his later less-positive comments about LSD are motivated by his often-stated reluctance to encourage kids to experiment the way he did in the ‘60s — a not-unreasonable caution, given what’s now once again a more punitive and judgemental cultural climate and also that today’s LSD is reportedly far different from its original and more innocent formulation.

“It’s very difficult for me, because I realise now, being the father of four kids, that if I make this sound as exciting as it was, the natural corollary is for someone to say, well, why don’t we write like that? And I don’t want to be seen to do that. Because now, as I say, it’s a much more dangerous ballgame.” (Paul McCartney, The South Bank Show, “The Making of Sgt. Pepper,” 1992.)

“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.” (Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

26. full quote: “The trippers stayed up all night. Paul saw paisley shapes and experienced “weird things” that made him feel slightly disturbed. He looked at his shirtsleeves, and the dirt on the cuffs was so intensified that it made him feel angry. He became sensitive to every kind of stimulus—light, sound, color, even the touch of fabric. There suddenly seemed to be so much more to be gleaned from the simple things of life—depths of experience that he had so far ignored or glossed over.” (Steve Turner, Beatles ‘66, Ecco, 2016.)

NOTE: Turner mentions the “disturbed” bit, but he doesn’t seem to process that it’s contrary to his premise. It’s not clear where Turner’s getting the “angry” from. Paul doesn’t mention being angry in Many Years From Now, which is almost certainly where Turner is pulling this language from, nor does he use that word in any of the other descriptions I’ve found of the night or of any of his LSD trips. But if Paul did say somewhere that the dirt on his sleeve made him angry, it certainly doesn’t help Turner’s case.

27. Nicki Browne interviewed by the author, I Read The News Today Oh Boy: the short and gilded life of Tara Browne, the man who inspired The Beatles’ greatest song, Paul Howard, Picador, 2016.

28. “In 1953, schools were preoccupied with the national celebrations for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and one project was an essay competition on the subject of the monarchy. “I obviously wrote something reasonable because I won my age group’s prize,” Paul remembered. “I went to Picton Hall, in the city centre, and it was my first ever experience of nerves. When some dignitary in pinstripes called my name “And for the eleven-year-old age group, from Joseph Williams Primary School in Gateacre, J. P. McCartney, my knees went rubbery.” His prize was a souvenir book of the coronation plus a book token. “I used it to buy a book on modern art. It was fabulous. It was just lots and lots of pictures; people like Victor Pasmore, Salvador Dali, Picasso, and a lot of artists I hadn’t heard of. I’d always been attracted to art. I used to draw a lot.” (Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

29. Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.

NOTE: An insignificant detail, but in the interests of accuracy, the last sentence in the quote in The Lyrics reads “In the end I did give in and take LSD one night with John.” I’m going to assume here that since “take” is a grammatical error, it’s either a misspeak or a typo, which is why it’s adjusted to “took” in the main body of the text. The adjustment doesn’t, I don’t think, change the meaning.

30. Mal Evans, Beatles roadie/body man, was temporarily staying in Paul’s basement during this time period due to his domestic troubles.

31. Q: The other Beatles didn’t get into LSD as much as you did?

JOHN: George did pretty... (sic) in LA, the second time we took it, Paul felt very out of it because we were all a bit slightly cruel, sort of ‘we’re taking it, and you’re not.’ But we kept seeing him, you know. And we couldn’t eat our food, I just couldn’t manage it, we were just picking it up with our hands and there were all these people sort of serving us in the house, and that, we were just sort of knocking food on the floor and all of that. It was a long time before Paul took it. And then there was the big announcement.” (John Lennon interviewed by Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone, December 1970.)

NOTE: I wish Wenner had followed up and asked John what he meant by “we kept seeing him” — and whether it’s really a “we” or John describing his individual experience. Either way, it’s an indication of how connected John and Paul (and maybe George, if it’s “we”) were — that even when they were tripping and Paul wasn’t, they were conscious of, and missing, his presence.

32. Paul also described his “Emperor of Eternity” trip to Derek Taylor —

“Unrecognisable psyches on familiar heads and shoulders: the voice was Paul’s but the tone was…(sic) God’s? Paul said he and John had had “this fantastic thing”; which really wasn’t very informative, so I pressed him to flesh it out. “Incredible, really, just locked into each other’s eyes…(sic) Like, just staring and then saying, ‘I know, man’ and then laughing… (sic) And it was great, you know.” It wasn’t easy to explain to me, whose idea of a great experience was still two Drinamyl, a large brandy and a crab cocktail.” (Derek Taylor with George Harrison, Fifty Years Adrift, Genesis, 1984.)

33. Jane Asher’s comment to Hunter Davies in 1967 underscores the closeness of the relationship between John and Paul during the recording Sgt. Pepper—

“When I came back after five months, Paul had changed so much. He was on LSD, which I hadn’t shared. I was jealous of all the spiritual experiences he’d had with John. There were fifteen people dropping in all day long. The house had changed and was full of stuff I didn’t know about.” (Hunter Davies, The Beatles, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968.)

NOTE: The period of time Jane is describing is during the recording Sgt. Pepper, when research suggests that John spent a great deal of time with Paul at Cavendish, including often staying over after those infamous and unprecedented all-night studio sessions. (which contradicts the biographies that insist Paul and John didn’t spend time together outside of band business.)

34. The history and impact of the distorted “John vs Paul” narrative is one of the major themes of Beautiful Possibility. It’s covered over the entire arc of Part One, most notably in episode 1:2 (“Love Lies Bleeding”), 1:7 (“Measure of a Man”) and 1:8/1:9 (“Ecce Cor Meum”).

35. “Grail phobia” and the “fear of softness” is another major theme in Part One of Beautiful Possibility that can’t easily be shortstroked. The short version is that both refer to a fear of emotions, especially “softer” emotions like love. Both are discussed in detail in episode 1:4 (“Are You Afraid Or Is It True?”)

36. And for that matter, neither can Paul. The creative process is a mysterious thing, even to the artist, and oftentimes we don’t actually know what our art is about or what inspired it, even when we think we do.

37. “Asked if he would smoke marijuana again, as he has pledged after similar incidents, McCartney replied, “No, never again,” but said it with a wink and a smile. Did he mean it this time? “Probably not,” he said.” (Newsday Jan 18 1984).

NOTE: This is from an interview after the 1984 Heathrow/Barbados arrest — the interview is also available on video, and the Newsday report is an accurate description of Paul’s body language.

38. “But — and I want to make this very clear — I do not advocate the use of LSD or any drug for anybody else. I have no idea what effect it could have on someone else, I only know what it does to me.” (Paul McCartney quoted, “LSD: Mirror doctor raps Beatles Paul,” The Sunday Mirror, June 18 1967.)

39. “The moving force behind the petition was the American psychologist Steve Abrams. He says today: I went with my friend Miles to see Paul to discuss my plans for the advertisement. Miles [of the Indica bookshop and the International Times] had the freedom to come and go with Paul. Paul was easy to talk to, like someone you’ve known for a long time. His position was perfectly responsible. He knew the power of the Beatles, the power of their making or not making endorsements. Though they didn’t particularly want the publicity, he was willing to guarantee the cost of the advertisement. In the end it proved impossible to keep his financial involvement a secret.” (It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Derek Taylor, Simon & Schuster, 1987.)

“Steve Abrams says The Times requested payment on the eve of publication and he obtained a personal cheque for £1,800 signed by a Beatles assistant. ‘I was subsequently told by someone that it was credited to the Beatles advertising account and in fact the four Beatles and Brian Epstein would have paid equal shares.” (It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, Derek Taylor, Simon & Schuster, 1987.)

40. “Asked whether he felt he was setting a good example for his children, McCartney held up his hands and said: “Let’s get this straight. I don’t think I’m setting an example to anyone. I’m just being my own self in my own time.”

“What about the example an alcoholic is setting? But alcohol is perfectly legal...”

“All I ask is to be allowed, in the privacy of my own room, like homosexuality, to be allowed to do something which I reckon is not very harmful.”

(The Evening Independent, Jan 17, 1984.)

SIDE NOTE: Paul also used the “in the privacy of my own home” argument relative to LSD during the 1967 Great Freakout interviews—

“It was an illegal thing I should not have done according to the laws of the country.” he said. “Like income tax dodging and playing football on Sundays. But I have the right to do something in the privacy of my own home as long as it does not interfere with other people or bring them harm.” (Daily Express, June 20, 1967.)

“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. All drugs are bad. Librium’s good, Valium’s good, ciggies are good, vodka’s good. But cannabis, ooooh!” I hate that unreasoned attitude.” (Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

41. John’s 1968 conviction arguably had the most serious consequences of any Beatles cannabis arrest — it was infamously leveraged by the US government as the on-the-record reason to deny him his green card, resulting in his not being able to leave the US without fear of not being able to return. Which also, of course, has implications for the story and the relationship between John and Paul during the 70s, in terms of their ability to communicate with one another.

42. By my count, Paul’s been arrested six times for possession. Willie, four.

43. Anthology, The Beatles, Chronicle Books, 2000.

NOTE: From the book, not the filmed interview. But since it’s a single and relatively simple thought that doesn’t depend on exact language, and since George signed off on it, I feel okay using it as primary research.

44. “It mightn’t have affected creativity for other people,’ said George Harrison. ‘I know it did for us, and it did for me. The first thing that people who smoked marijuana and were into music [found] is that somehow it focuses your attention better on the music, and so you can hear it clearer. Or that’s how it appeared to be. You could see things much different. I mean, LSD was something else, you know, it wasn’t just...(sic) I mean, marijuana was like having a couple of beers, really. But LSD was more like going to the moon.” (George Harrison, “The Making of Sgt. Pepper,” The South Bank Show, ITV, aired June 14,1992.)

45. Ringo Starr on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, March 25, 2003.

46. “Then when we were in New York during the American tour last summer somebody said, “Do you want to meet Dylan?” and we said, “Sure, if he wants to meet us,” so he came up to the hotel room and we did nothing but laugh all night. He kept answering our phone, ‘This is Beatlemania here.’ It was ridiculous.” (John Lennon interviewed by Chris Hutchins, New Musical Express, April 23, 1965.)

NOTE: This quote is part of the Anthology frankenquote about the Dylan story that we talked about in Chapter 1. Notice that John says nothing at all about cannabis being involved — maybe because this is a 1965 interview when it would have been legally perilous to acknowledge possession or use of cannabis. Or maybe because he’s referring to one of the two nights on which no one got high. Since there’s no way to know, here’s a second quote that says similar things and does specify that John is talking about cannabis—

“Drugs probably helped the understanding of myself better, but not much. Not pot. That just used to be a harmless giggle. LSD was the self-knowledge that pointed the way in the first place. I was suddenly struck by great visions when I first took acid. But you’ve got to be looking for it, before you can possibly find it. Perhaps I was looking, without realizing it, and would have found it anyway. It would just have taken longer.” (John Lennon interviewed by Hunter Davies, The Beatles, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968.)

47. For an accessible, if somewhat simplified, discussion of cannabis as a psychedelic — The Altered Mind: Cannabis, Consciousness, and the Quest for Enlightenment, Dr. R.T. Stephens, 2023.

The primary source for cannabis as a psychedelic relative to this series, though, is me. I rarely share personal experience as a data point in this work, because drawing from my own experience to understand The Beatles is obviously of limited use, given I’m obviously not a Beatle and their experience was singular.

But in this case, my personal experience is relevant — because I, too, frequently experience cannabis as a psychedelic rather than simply a mood relaxant.

Over the years, I have had many cannabis-induced and deeply profound higher consciousness experiences very similar to the one Paul describes. And it’s this personal experience that first sparked me to consider that Paul may experience cannabis in a similar way.

Like Paul, I, too, did not realise for a very long time that my experience was unusual. Since I’d never talked with anyone else about their experience of cannabis, I assumed everyone else had the same experience as I did. I’ve subsequently learned that this is not at all the case.

Also familiar to me is Paul’s story about feeling — even still to this day — that he had major insights into the nature of the universe and asking Mal to write them down, only to discover that all he managed to retain was “there are seven levels. ”

This is what tends to happen when one isn’t experienced at bringing the insights back into our waking world. It’s what happens when we struggle to translate the “received wisdom” of expanded consciousness into the limited constraints of language.

We don’t name what we don’t value, and our rationalist culture doesn’t have words for the complex and profound concepts that we experience during a psychedelic experience. I know firsthand that those complex concepts get slippery when we try to grab hold of them. And if we do try to grasp onto the wisdom we’re being shown, it often sounds silly and oversimplified the morning after, not because what we experienced was silly and oversimplified, but because that’s all we were able to grab on to — much like Alice is only able to grab onto a single and humble jar of marmalade on her way down the rabbit hole.

48. As we talked about in a footnote to the prior chapter, John and George’s “Dentist Experience,” as George calls it, most likely took place in late March or early April 1965. John and George’s second trip — which was also Ringo’s first trip — took place in late August of 1965, on the Los Angeles leg of the 1965 tour — almost exactly a year after the Delmonico. and a month short of a year after the RIviera Idlewild.

49. Like the other three, Paul has a habit of puncturing his profound stories with something absurd — most notably his allegorical story about “Jesus” coming to his door during the Pepper sessions (told in Many Years From Now.) and also here in his “seven levels” story. But what if that’s less the truth of Paul’s experience and more related to Paul’s recognition (and resulting self-consciousness) that our culture is uncomfortable with mystical experience? (see earlier footnote)

50. A 2023 Pew Research study concluded that almost a quarter of Americans identify as “SBNR” — aka “spiritual but not religious.” That same year, a Gallup survey put the figure at closer to a third.

One should virtually never trust polls as an accurate reflection of public opinion for all kinds of reasons that my clients are interested in and you probably are not. That said, the ubiquitous use of the term “spiritual but not religious” suggests that the number of people who identify that way is far higher than the surveys suggest.

This cultural shift away from organized religion and towards DIY spirituality could never have happened without the Love Revolution — which, as we discussed in some detail in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — is what gave Western cultural permission to explore connection to God (in whatever way you want to define that word) without going through the middle man of religious authority.

We’re obviously shortstroking a very big topic here, and this is not a series about the history of religion, which is a good thing because I’m neither an expert in religious history nor a historian at all. That said, for a closer look, the role of The Beatles in creating the “spiritual but not religious” identification is discussed in more detail in the context of The Beatles and the Love Revolution in episodes 1:1 and 1:2 of Beautiful Possibility.

51. There’s a fun (and at the same time, cringy and heartbreaking) moment in Lewis Lapham’s account of his time with The Beatles at the ashram that illustrates in real time this normalization/mainstreaming of direct spiritual experience among suburban Americans—

“Before I could ask how the colonel kept in touch, the two helicopters appeared, circling once over the river and then settling onto the beach in a loud swirl of sand. Out of the first of them stepped an obviously American couple later identified as Fred and Susie Smithline from Scarsdale, New York. Both in their late twenties or early thirties, they brought with them the air of big-time financial success, people capable of sustaining aggressive rates of consumption. Susie wore white boots, pearls, and a black cocktail dress; her husband, in dark glasses, a blue blazer, and tennis sneakers, was already filming the scene with a state-of-theart, high-end movie camera. Taking note of Larry’s long hair and ragged Indian pajamas, Susie was quick to spot him as a more authentic figure than either Nancy or myself.

“Hi there,” she said, “what time does the meditation start?”

“Fantastic,” Larry said again.

On the way up the hill to the ashram, Susie explained that Fred, her husband, was Cambata’s American lawyer, and because she and Fred had been traveling in India for a vacation, Kersey had asked them to come along to Rishikesh. She was terribly excited about the whole thing, couldn’t really believe it was happening. She’d heard so much about the Maharish (omitting the final vowel, she pronounced the word to rhyme with hashish); her friends in Scarsdale had said, just before she left, kiddingly, that she ought to forget about the Taj or any of that and just go and see the Maharish, and well, here she was, looking warily to her right and left, as if fearful of snakes or dead dogs.

“Ten days in India and you’re not supposed to be afraid of anything,” she said. “But you know what? It just isn’t true.”

In the Maharishi’s bungalow everybody sat on yellow cushions, and Nancy introduced the holy man to the Smithlines and the helicopter pilots. The Maharishi already knew Cambata, a follower who advised him on his investments in Switzerland, and the talk dwelled on the arrangements for the Maharishi’s flight that afternoon, first to see his ashram from the air and then to survey prospective landing strips for the twinengine Beechcraft that his admirers in Los Angeles were Said to be acquiring for his extended ministry to the poor and sick in heart. The aviation gas to refuel the helicopters had not yet arrived from

Delhi by truck, a delay for which Cambata apologized, and so Nancy suggested that the rest of us adjourn to the arbor for lunch.

The meal was not a success. The assembled meditators had come a long way to escape people like the Smithlines, and they weren’t slow to notice that Susie had failed to grasp the mechanics of the dive toward truth and light when she refused the food and asked only for a cup of boiled water, into which she emptied a package of powdered Sanka.

Fred never stopped filming, walking around the table to set up “great shots” at artistic angles, keeping up a steady flow of breezy remarks that he intended as encouragements and compliments.

“You go to a cocktail party in New York,” he said to Anneliese, “and all you hear is Indian music.”

“It’s very in to be Indian,” Susie said. “No kidding, it really is. In Westchester a lot of people are doing yoga.”

(Lewis Lapham, With The Beatles, Melville House, 2005.)

52. “We were entering a period in the mid- to late sixties when we were doing LSD, staying up all night, then wishing it would wear off, discovering it wouldn’t. A bad trip could leave you feeling a bit heavy, instead of enjoying the normal lightness of youth. You know, we started off smoking pot, and it was just giggles. It was such fun. We loved it and it was great, and the worst that would happen was you’d fall asleep, and that was fine. Once it got into sort of more serious stuff, then you were just sort of doing it and there wasn’t this light relief. It could be oppressive.”

“I was pretty lucky on the LSD front, in that it didn’t screw things up too badly. There was a scary element to it, of course. The really scary element was that when you wanted it to stop, it wouldn’t. You’d say, ‘Okay, that’s enough, party’s over,’ and it would say, ‘No it isn’t.’ So you would have to go to bed seeing things.”

Both quotes from Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.

53. Paul McCartney interviewed for Groovy Bob: The Life & Times of Robert Fraser, Harriet Vyner, Faber & Faber, 1999.

54. “Then one of the serious secretaries from our office rang about an engagement I had; she had traced me to here. “Urn, can’t talk now. Important business” or something. I just got out of it. “But you’re supposed to be at the office.” “No. I’ve got ‘flu.” Anything I could think. I got out of that one because there was no way I could go to the office after that.” (Paul McCartney quoted in, Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

“Paul stayed up all night having what he described as a ‘spacy’ experience. He told Barry Miles that he saw paisley shapes and was super-sensitive to the fact that his shirtsleeves were dirty. He had an engagement the following day, but he couldn’t get it together. When Brian Epstein’s secretary tracked him down to Tara and Nicki’s mews, he told her he had flu and asked her to cancel his commitments for the day.” (Nicki Browne quoted in I Read The News Today Oh Boy: the short and gilded life of Tara Browne, the man who inspired The Beatles’ greatest song, Paul Howard, Picador, 2016.)

55. Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.

56. “I can remember Dad always talking to us about tolerance. ‘Toleration’ and ‘moderation’ were two of his favourite words.” (Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.)

57. One of the best known examples of Paul’s disregard for his father’s rules/advice: Paul’s father forbade him from wearing the tight-fitting “drainies” that were fashionable for teenagers in late ‘50s Liverpool. Paul quietly took his trousers to the local tailor and had them altered — a little at a time over the course of several weeks — so that his father wouldn’t notice, until they were of the requisite form-fitting tightness.

Jim McCartney also warned Paul to stay away from John — “he’ll get you into trouble, son” — and even made a rule that John wasn’t allowed in the McCartney house unless Jim was home to chaperone. Paul defied his father, and continued to spend much of his time with John, including both of them sagging off school to spend time together at Paul’s house while Jim McCartney was at work.

And in the most consequential example: Jim McCartney — according to both Paul and John — pressured Paul to give up his plan to be a professional musician in favour of a steady job with a predictable future. And while — as we’ll see in Part Two — there was a moment when Paul waivered, it wasn’t long before he defied his father and threw over a prospective career as a respectable middle-class professional in favour of playing in a rock-and-roll band, with John.

Paul follows his father’s advice when Paul wants to follow his father’s advice. The Beatles wouldn’t exist otherwise. We’ll get back to all of this Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

58. In keeping with Paul’s directive to look to his art for the truth of his life, he writes explicitly about his ambivalence to and difficulty with intense emotional experience in his 2020 song, “Deep Deep Feeling”—

Emotion

Sometimes I wish it would go away

Sometimes I wish it would stay

Sometimes I wish it would go away

59. John: Paul is a bit more stable than George and I.

Wenner: And straight?

John: I don’t know about straight—stable. I think LSD profoundly shocked him and Ringo. I think maybe they regret it.

(John Lennon interviewed by Jan Wenner, Lennon Remembers, Straight Arrow Books, 1971.)

NOTE: Those of you who are familiar with Beautiful Possibility will recognise this as the interview that established the Breakup Narrative. And you’ll also maybe remember how I pointe out in Part One that the media goaded John into crafting that narrative for them. This is an example of that goading — notice how Wenner is actively trying to push that narrative on John, with his attempt to put words in John’s mouth about Paul being “straight.” And notice also how John corrects him, which he frequently did.

60. “On the subject of coloured landscapes, I was the last in the group to take LSD. John and George had urged me to do it so that I could be on the same level as them. I was very reluctant because I’m actually quite straitlaced, and I’d heard that if you took LSD you would never be the same again. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I wasn’t sure that was such a terrific idea. So I was very resistant. In the end I did give in and take LSD one night with John.”(Paul McCartney, The Lyrics, Liveright, 2022.)

And here’s George, agreeing that it does permanently change you—

“Once you’d had it, it was important that people you were close to took it too. It showed you backwards and forwards and time stood still. It had nothing to do with getting high. It was devastating because it cut right through the physical body, the mind, the ego. It’s shattering because it’s as though someone suddenly wipes away all you were taught or brought up to believe as a child and says: “That’s not it.” You’ve gone so far, your thoughts have become so lofty and there’s no way of getting back.” (George Harrison quoted in Fifty Years Adrift

NOTE: This is George Harrison quoted in Fifty Years Adrift (written by Derek Taylor and George Harrison) re-quoted in It Was Twenty Years Ago Today (Derek Taylor, Simon & Schuster, 1987.) Technically that makes this a secondary quote, but because Derek Taylor is a co-author of FIfty Years Adrift, this is a writer quoting their own work, and since it’s also consistent with George’s general comments about LSD, I think we can trust it. Also, if the need to be so pedantic about research to counter all the monkey business is giving you a sick headache, I’m right there with you.

For more thoughts on how Paul’s brain might work differently from most people’s, you might be interested in https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/fool-on-the-hill.

61. This seems likely to have been a complicated moment for Paul — his own defenses making him join in the laughter, while simultaneously having a bit of that classic nightmare of standing naked in front of the class giving your book report.

Paul seems pretty clearly to still be self-conscious about it. When he tells the story even today, he’s careful to qualify the “seven levels” insight by dismissing it as ridiculous — before tentatively suggesting that there might have been something more to it than he realised at the time.

62. Chris Hutchins (who was not present at the time) offers this in his book relative to the Dylan story that “In fact Mal Evans was always convinced that what they tried for the first time that night was LSD.” (The Beatles: Messages from John, Paul, George and Ringo, Chris Hutchins, Neville Ness House, 2015.)

This is secondary research, so take it for what you will, but it suggests that Mal may have had a similar experience to Paul’s, but perhaps chose not to share it — maybe out of fear of the ridicule Paul experienced. Or Mal might have been basing his belief on Paul’s “seven levels” experience.

63. PAUL: Tara was taking acid on blotting paper in the toilet. He invited me to have some. I said, “I’m not sure, you know.” I was more ready for the drink or a little bit of pot or something. I’d not wanted to do it, I’d held off like a lot of people were trying to, but there was massive peer pressure. And within a band, it’s more than peer pressure, it’s fear pressure. It becomes trebled, more than just your mates, it’s, “Hey, man, this whole band’s had acid, why are you holding out? What’s the reason, what is it about you?” So I knew I would have to out of peer pressure alone. And that night I thought, well, this is as good a time as any, so I said, “Go on then, fine.” So we all did it.” (Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

Q: The other Beatles didn’t get into LSD as much as you did?

JOHN: George did pretty... (sic) in LA, the second time we took it, Paul felt very out of it because we were all a bit slightly cruel, sort of ‘we’re taking it, and you’re not.’ But we kept seeing him, you know. And we couldn’t eat our food, I just couldn’t manage it, we were just picking it up with our hands and there were all these people sort of serving us in the house, and that, we were just sort of knocking food on the floor and all of that. It was a long time before Paul took it. And then there was the big announcement.” (John Lennon interviewed by Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone, December 1970.)

NOTE: Again, this is THAT interview, the one where John retracted most of it (as we talked about at length in episode 1:2 of Beautiful Possibility). And here I am quoting it again, the nerve of me! But this passage is consistent with what Paul and George have reported relative to the peer pressure on Paul to take LSD, and given John is acknowledging any bad behaviour on his part during the worst of his Breakup Tour, I think we can trust the overall sentiment.

“Well I don’t know it just seemed strange to me because we’d been trying to get him to take it for about 18 months and then it just seemed funny that one day he’s on the television talking all about it “ (George Harrison on-camera interview, Anthology, first broadcast 1994, episode 6 ep 47:25.)

Overall, despite its roots in miscommunication, I’d suggest this was informed peer pressure on John and George’s part. They were almost certainly correct that it wouldn’t have been possible for Paul to continue to co-lead The Beatles — much less shape the Love Revolution — without having tripped on LSD, even factoring in his psychedelic cannabis experience. And Paul would almost certainly have been aware of that, too.

64. This is a beautifully-phrased observation from an anonymous Beatles countercultural scholar whom I'm hopeful will someday soon be willing to let me credit them using their real name.

65. Of course, if there is truth to the lovers possibility, Paul had, in fact, been with someone “who’d thought like that.” John “I’m Only Sleeping Watching the Wheels Go Round” Lennon seems very much to have been a man who appreciated the need for relaxation. But it’s likely Beatle John, in contrast to House Husband John, suffered from the same “always on” pressure as Paul, so Paul may not have experienced the “permission” from John to relax the way he did with Linda.

66. Maureen Cleave, “What is the Beatle Trap,” Woman’s Mirror, November 26, 1966.

67. There’s little doubt that the mind-relaxing properties of cannabis that all four of them have spoken about played a major role in getting them through the singular stress of Beatlemania — which is why I can’t help but think it’s another instance of Beatle magick that Dylan arrived at the Delmonico or the Riviera Idlewild Motel or wherever in 1964 during their first US tour.

Before Dylan showed up with the good stuff, The Beatles were relying on scotch & Coke and pills to get through the stresses of Beatlemania and their punishing schedule. And we know from too many examples what happens when pop stars become overly reliant on alcohol and pills to cope with their fame.

Dylan introducing The Beatles to the safer, more natural and healthier relaxation properties of cannabis at that crucial moment offered them a safe way — and maybe the only safe way — to self-medicate their way through the singular stress of Beatlemania. Wherever and whenever the Great Initiation took place, and whatever the details of each Beatles’ individual experience, Dylan may well have saved one or more of them — and as we’ll see later in this series, especially John — from becoming another Brian Jones.

68. You might remember in Get Back, when Paul works off his nervous energy after George quits the band by literally swinging from the scaffolding on the Twickenham soundstage.

Also, by way of a data point on the Grail fluency of the Beatles countercultural world, “Twitchy Paul” is in fact a trope in the Beatles studies counterculture, especially relative to his onstage persona.

69. Paul’s stage fright is well-documented in the primary research, but I hadn’t put the individual examples together into a pattern until I read Paul’s comment in a 2013 interview—

“Incredibly, [Paul] nearly quit The Beatles at one point due to crippling stage fright. “I really used to be quite scared,” he admits. “I remember doing an NME poll-winners concert at Wembley with lots of my peers there. I was sick to my stomach. And I thought, do you know what, I should give this up. But I’m not too bad now.” (Daily Mirror, October 11, 2013.)

Larry Kane observes in his book, Ticket To Ride (Running Press, 2003) relative to The Beatles’ 1965 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, that “nerves also seemed to be a problem for Paul, who was usually calm and cool. Later, Tony Barrow would shed light on the McCartney mood. At the sound check, and before the show, Barrow said, Paul was fidgety about singing “Yesterday.” The pressure was on him. It was his song, a hard song to perform, and he was a nervous wreck about it.”

And of course, there’s the famous folk tale about Paul flubbing his guitar solo in his first onstage appearance with the Quarry Men. The research on this is ambiguous, but Paul describes it as an attack of nerves: “For my first gig, I was given a guitar solo on ‘Guitar Boogie’. I could play it easily in rehearsal so they elected that I should do it as my solo. Things were going fine, but when the moment came in the performance I got sticky fingers; | thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was just too frightened; it was too big a moment with everyone looking at the guitar player. I couldn’t do it.” (Paul McCartney interviewed for Anthology, Chronicle Books, 2000.)

NOTE: I termed this last anecdote about the guitar solo a folktale for a reason. Like the Dylan story, it’s not quite what it appears to be. We might get to that in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, or maybe in a future update,,

70. “It mightn’t have affected creativity for other people,’ said George Harrison. ‘I know it did for us, and it did for me. The first thing that people who smoked marijuana and were into music [found] is that somehow it focuses your attention better on the music, and so you can hear it clearer. Or that’s how it appeared to be. You could see things much different.” (George Harrison, “The Making of Sgt. Pepper,” The South Bank Show, ITV, aired June 14,1992.)

71. I have no doubt whatsoever that Paul dreamed the music for “Yesterday.” But as for whether it was in the garret of the Asher’s house, it’s possible that’s a bit of mythologising. After all, what’s more romantic for an artist than to dream their most iconic song in a garret?

Well, dreaming it while in the arms of your beloved might be a bit more romantic.

Consider this from John in 1965—

“[“Yesterday”] was around for months before we finally completed it. Paul wrote nearly all of it, but we just couldn’t find the right title. Every time we got together to write songs or for a recording session, this would come up. We called it “Scrambled Eggs” and it became a joke between us. We almost had it finished, we had made up our minds that only a one word title would suit — and believe me, we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there — completed. I know it sounds like a fairy tale — but it is the plain truth.” (Melody Maker, November 13, 1965.)

I’m not planting a flag on this, and we haven’t yet overtly introduced the lovers possibility in the main text, which is why it’s in the footnotes rather than in the main text. But there’s an intimacy in John’s casual use of “Paul woke up,” and an easy way of talking about “Yesterday”as a joint composition that not only speaks to the “entangled form” of Lennon/McCartney, but also to the possibility that Paul was with John when he woke up from his dream — and that the “garret of the Asher house” might be a bit of mythologizing “to protect wives and girlfriends” that we talked about in the prior chapter.

Like I said, it’s a subtle inference on John’s part, and not something I’d suggest with any kind of certainty whatsoever, and as we know from Part One of Beautiful Possibility, not even a blip in the body of supporting research for the lovers possibility — which is, again, why it’s a footnote.

Nonetheless.

72. “During the making of Help! there was always a piano around on which Paul continually tinkered with the melody, slowly perfecting it, adding a middle eight, working it into shape. Dick Lester finally exclaimed, “If I hear that once more, I’ll have that bloody piano taken away. What’s it called anyway?”’ “Scrambled Eggs,” Paul told him.” (Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

NOTE: “Scrambled Eggs” is, of course, the working title of “Yesterday.”

73. In Many Years From Now, Paul dates his dream to “May 1965, during the filming of Help!” But the research suggets pretty clearly that this is inaccurate, and an example of Paul’s difficulty with dates. Filming for Help! wrapped in March 1965, and we know he had the melody during filming. (see prior footnote — and the story also appears, though not as a direct quote, in Richard Lester’s biography, The man who framed the Beatles: a biography of Richard Lester, by Andrew Yule, New York State, 1994.)

74. “PAUL: I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, That’s great, I wonder what that is? There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot but because I’d dreamed it. I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, No, I’ve never written like this before. But I had the tune, which was the most magic thing. And you have to ask yourself, where did it come from? But you don’t ask yourself too much or it might go away.” (Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

75. Thank you to Mark Lewisohn for being the one who initially called attention to this remarkable day in Beatles history in his book, The Beatles Recording Sessions (Harmony Books, 1988.).

76. As we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, in an important way, there really is no such thing as a song written only by Paul and a song written only by John. When I use that convention, it’s to indicate the song’s primary composer — and more specifically, who set the overall tone/theme for the song, rather than how the details of composition worked out.

https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/rabbit-hole-theres-no-such-thing

77. “You were once above me, he says, but not today. This makes sense in the context of McCartney’s relationship with a woman from a higher social class. It can also be read as a demand that Lennon recognise the majesty of his unfurling talent. McCartney was coming into his own, as an adult and as an artist, and demanding to be seen.” (Ian Leslie, John & Paul, MacMillan, 2024.)

Also let’s note that George did a fair amount of “unfurling” during this time period, as well — including his interest in the sitar and Indian music, and the leap forward that his songwriting took on Rubber Soul, with “Think For Yourself” and “If I Needed Someone.” George probably only got two songs on Rubber Soul because John and Paul were short on material, but nonetheless, an unfurling it clearly was.