Chapter 4: Dangerous Speculations

“John was always the jumper, the suicide man, the one off the cliff, he always had to be bigger and bolder and brighter, which was what excited people about John. We like those people, we like high-risk people, that’s how John was and that was the radical difference between us. I’ve always made that conscious decision. It’s like the Cyril Connolly quote, “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than a pram in the hall.” I’ve always said, “Well, I obviously can’t be that interested in art then because I’m not fucking ruining my life just for a song or for a painting, particularly when I’ve done so well anyway.”¹ — Paul McCartney, 1997.

We’ve arrived at the final chapter, in which we’ll put together the pieces we’ve laid out over the course of this series into a possible answer for Whatever Happened between John and Paul in 1965 that, in turn, may have motivated the urgent desperation — and the and had you gone — of “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

Our untangling of the Dylan story concludes with this chapter. Two weeks from today, we’ll do a series wrap-up in which we’ll answer the meta questions — what all of this means relative to Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, and the practical reasons why this series is in the world as its own thing, rather than as part of Part Two.

So let’s pick up our story where we left off — with Beatles engineer Norman Smith’s observation that sometime between Help! and Rubber Soul, “there’d been one hell of a change” in the relationship between John and Paul — and that the change Smith observed was so upsetting to him that he took the extreme step of resigning his position as The Beatles’ studio engineer on the cusp of their most consequential musical innovations.

In later years, Norman Smith offered more detail on this change he saw between John and Paul in the studio—

“The change, by the time they recorded Rubber Soul, was that it was taking so much longer to put down each song. I also noticed there were musical clashes coming in. What I mean by that is it seems that Paul wanted to go one way and John wasn’t maybe too keen. There was a certain turbulence that I didn’t like. It wasn’t in the songs themselves. Certain things came up when we were recording. Things didn’t seem eye-to-eye between John and Paul. I suppose I didn’t know more than that. John wanted to go into a deeper message or psychological type of thing, and Paul still wanted to keep in the middle of the road. I guess that’s what I sussed out.”²

First, let’s notice Smith’s complaint that “it was taking so much longer to put down each song.”

That’s a very strange complaint for a sound engineer to have — and especially a sound engineer charged with recording the world’s most influential artists as they began in earnest their work of revolutionizing the way music is recorded. It’s also a pretty dodgy reason to quit, given Smith himself was no slouch as a producer, and that his next gig after leaving the Fabs was to produce Pink Floyd’s first album, Piper At The Gates Of Dawn — not exactly a “just push the record button” project—

In other words, the circumstances of Smith’s departure strongly suggest that something unusual did indeed motivate him to quit The Beatles on the leading edge of their musical revolution.

Smith doesn’t seem especially confident in his analysis of what that something unusual was, though — what with his “I suppose I didn’t know more than that” and “I guess that’s what I sussed out.” And it’s to his credit that he’s not stating something as categorically true when he isn’t certain about it, and when — given his limited perspective — there’s no reasonable way he could be certain about it.

That lack of certainty is an example of why I tend to consider Norman Smith an overall credible source, despite his often-eccentric and cryptic writing style. When someone acknowledges that they’re not sure of something, we can take them more seriously when they claim to be sure about something else. That’s still not a guarantee that what they’re sure of is, in fact, accurate — but an acknowledgement of fallibility is a good indication that they’re consciously trying to get it right. And that’s probably all we can reasonably ask for, from a primary source.

Also, as we talked about in the prior chapter, Smith’s position as a studio engineer may have afforded him a unique perspective as a “wildlife observer” — but as is usually the case with primary sources, his ability to interpret what he observed is less reliable. And Smith is right to be unsure of his stated reason for the tension between Paul and John in the studio during this time — because it’s demonstrably inaccurate.

Smith is talking here about Rubber Soul — the album that by virtually universal consensus, began in earnest The Beatles’ revolutionizing of popular music. That revolution would evolve into Revolver, and then into Sgt. Pepper and what might be Paul and John’s most brilliant and influential collaboration, “A Day In The Life.”³

Rubber Soul also saw the ascendance in earnest of Paul’s groundbreaking melodic bass lines, which redefined the use of the bass guitar in popular music. And Rubber Soul also marked the beginning of Paul’s exploration of the musical avant garde, which he and John together would bring into the studio in the form of the tape loops, reverse and varispeed recording, and (with the help of George Martin and, of course, George and Ringo), non-traditional arrangements and instrumentation.

So dramatic was Rubber Soul in its innovations that the album would compel Brian Wilson to attempt to outdo it with Pet Sounds, which would in turn be a major influence on Sgt. Pepper, which would in turn — by some reports — drive Wilson into a literal nervous breakdown in his unsuccessful efforts to top it.

By definition, an artist who’s in the midst of reinventing the foundations of popular music can’t at the same time be “middle of the road.” And reinventing popular music was without question what Paul — and indeed all four of The Beatles (along with George Martin) — were doing as they embarked on the recording of Rubber Soul.

So why and how did Smith come up with his ‘Paul wanted to be middle-of-the-road and John wanted to explore a deeper message’ analysis?

If you’re familiar with Beautiful Possibility, you’ll almost certainly recognise this duality as an iteration of the distorted “John vs Paul” narrative that we talked about at length in Part One. More specifically, you might recognise it as an iteration of the especially distorted narrative of “John/hard vs Paul/soft.”

It took us multiple episodes in Part One to step through the evolution of the distorted “John/hard vs Paul/soft” narrative — and as usual with that sort of thing, it’s not practical to repeat the full analysis here. But we can step through a quick refresher, keeping in mind that the following is very, very oversimplified—

Even during the worst of the breakup — when John was doing what angry, heartbroken exes have done since the beginning of time and hurting the person he felt had hurt him — John was nonetheless unfailing in his acknowledgement of Paul’s genius.

Instead, John’s way of doing damage during and after the breakup was to imply that Paul’s music was less interesting and important compared to John’s. And John did this by painting his own songs as “hard” — edgy, angry and political — and Paul’s songs as “soft” — all those “silly love songs.” This is, for example, the “working class hero” vs. Englebert Humperdinck comparison that John made in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview.

Despite being demonstrably untrue, John’s strategy was heartbreakingly effective — in part because, as we also talked about at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, our culture has long held that artists who make “hard” music are more important and interesting than artists who make “soft” music. And largely because of this hard/soft cultural bias, journalists tended to believe John’s distorted narrative of Lennon/McCartney and wrote their stories accordingly.

And because the wider public took their version of the breakup from how the press covered it, over time this distorted “John/hard vs Paul/soft” narrative became the core of the traditional story — the mythology — of The Beatles, passed down in mainstream writing from the breakup onwards — that Paul is the superior musician and the superior craftsperson, but that John is the mad artistic genius whose work is more profound and substantive.

Again, this summary of the evolution of the distorted hard vs. soft narrative is extremely condensed and oversimplified. And also again, demonstrably inaccurate. So if you haven’t yet read Part One of Beautiful Possibility, I encourage you to do so for a fuller analysis of the complex dynamic we’re talking about here.

There is no reason to think Smith was immune to the effects of the distorted “John/hard vs Paul/soft” narrative — especially since he claims to have maintained his friendship with John past the breakup and into the 1970s when John was actively advancing that narrative to anyone who would listen. Like almost everyone else at the time (and too many people even now), it’s likely Smith allowed “John/hard vs Paul/soft” to colour his interpretation of his memories, when he offered his guess about what was happening between John and Paul in the studio during Rubber Soul.

In other words, Smith’s ‘middle of the road vs deeper meaning’ analysis — offered in the late 1990s — is probably an example of retroactive confirmation bias — Smith looking back on his memories of recording Rubber Soul from a perspective that includes decades of exposure to the “John/hard vs Paul/soft” distorted narrative. Because when it comes to interpreting past events, we tend to see what we expect to see rather than what’s really there.

So why are we bothering to talk about this Smith quote at all, if Smith himself doesn’t even seem to believe it, and if it’s not supported by the actual music and is instead rooted in the distorted narrative?

Well, we’re talking about it because even though Smith’s analysis of the actual nature of the tension he observed between Paul and John during Rubber Soul is demonstrably inaccurate, I think we can believe him when he says this is what he saw happening between Paul and John in the studio—

—because while it’s self-evidently not true that Paul was “middle of the road” during Rubber Soul, “middle of the road” is exactly the sort of thing John tended to accuse Paul of when John was feeling especially creatively insecure — as we just briefly noticed relative to John’s breakup interviews.

And that brings us back to “Yesterday.”

In “Unscrambling Yesterday” — which is an informal part of Beautiful Possibility — we took a less scholarly, more lyrical look at the “cycle of insecurity” that seems to have played out between John and Paul from the day they met right up through the present day.

Here’s the most relevant passage from “Unscrambling Yesterday”—

As geniuses often are, John is deeply insecure about... well, everything, actually, but mostly his talent, especially relative to Paul’s (tbf, this club contains multitudes, John is just the charter member). This insecurity compels John to undermine Paul’s work, usually passively-aggressively but occasionally overtly.

Since John is Paul’s self-proclaimed biggest influence, John’s undermining does indeed cause Paul to doubt his own talent. And since Paul’s own insecurity manifests itself in his extreme work ethic, Paul responds by working even harder to impress John. This makes John even more insecure, which ratchets the whole cycle up to the next level where it starts all over again.

This cycle of insecurity has been festering since the day they met at the fête , when Paul made such an impression that John was worried about letting him in the band for fear Paul would take over even as John knew he needed Paul if the band was going to go anywhere. “Yesterday” is the first significant public surfacing of this cycle.

“Unscrambling Yesterday” goes on to consider (again in a more lyrical form) the role “Yesterday” has played in the relationship between John and Paul over the decades. We obviously won’t repeat all of that here, but the most important thing to know is that when the cycle of insecurity between John and Paul flares up in a way that’s prominent enough to be visible in the research, “Yesterday” is virtually always somewhere in the mix.

Every single one of us has been richly rewarded by this cycle of insecurity. It’s partly responsible for the revolutionary work by both of them that was to follow close on the heels of “Yesterday,” beginning in earnest with Rubber Soul. But that same revolutionary work that ascended The Beatles into musical and mythological immortality came at a very high price for both John and Paul.

“John came to my loft and he was all excited... He said, ‘I think I finally wrote a song with as good a melody as Yesterday. Yesterday drove him crazy. People’d say, ‘Thank you for writing Yesterday, a beautiful song ... ‘ He was always civil, but it drove him nuts.”

Sat at piano, Lennon revealed a title — ‘Imagine’ — but only a smattering of lyrics. For the rest he sang “scrambled eggs” — just as McCartney had when inspired to write Yesterday.

“He played it through and asked me what I thought. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘But is it as good as Yesterday?’

‘They’re impossible to compare.’

So he played it again. And again. And he said, “You’ll see, it’s just as good as Yesterday.”⁴

— journalist Howard Smith

Unlike the creative unfurling that happened for Paul after his “seven levels” experience with Dylan, there’s little to no indication that cannabis on its own had a similarly transformative effect on John’s creative life. And indeed, when asked in 1970 about the “big change-over” in The Beatles’ music that began in 1965, John answered by saying that—

“I suppose it was pot then... (sic) I don’t remember any change-over. Other than when you take pot you’re a little more less (sic) aggressive than when you take alcohol.”⁵

Of course, as we just talked about, there was without question a radical change-over with Rubber Soul. And this quote— along with its slightly scrambled logic — is from the infamous Rolling Stone interview with Jann Wenner that we discussed at length in Part One of Beautiful Possibility, in which John dismisses the entirety of The Beatles’ music and legacy, as well as his partnership with Paul, only to retract virtually everything he says, sometimes even before he’s finished saying it.⁶

We’d be wise to take everything in this interview — and any interview with John, really, but especially this one — with a very large grain of salt. But I think we can lean towards believing John when he says that cannabis was not a transformative experience for him — because John has been consistent over the years in his attitude towards cannabis as recreational rather than revelatory.

For example, John said essentially the same thing to biographer Hunter Davies in 1967, well before the breakup—

“Drugs⁷ 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.”⁸

This passage makes clear that when it came to mind-expanding substances, John reserved most of his — for lack of a better word — enthusiasm for LSD. In the same 1970 Rolling Stone interview, John recounted his first LSD trip and concluded by saying it was “terrifying, but fantastic.”⁹

And a decade later in 1980, John told journalist David Sheff that—

“We must always remember to thank the CIA and the army for LSD, by the way. That’s what people forget. Everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it? They brought out LSD to control people, and what they did was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. But it sure as hell performs them.”¹⁰

John goes on in the same Rolling Stone interview to claim that his romance with LSD “went on for years. I must have had a thousand trips.”

Now, “a thousand trips” is almost certainly a classic Lennon-esque exaggeration.¹¹ And indeed, when Wenner asks John to clarify whether it was really a thousand trips, John answers with, “Lots. I used to just eat it all the time,”¹² which — despite its lack of specifics — is probably an accurate characterization of John’s approach to anything he took a fancy to.

But like Paul with cannabis, John’s feelings about LSD reveal themselves less in what he said and more in what he did. And by all accounts, by the end of 1965, when John and Paul began to write songs for Revolver — including “Got To Get You Into My Life” — John was tripping regularly on LSD, as well as... well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Here’s Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, in her 2005 autobiography (edited for length) —

“In the following months [after his first trip in spring of 1965] John took LSD regularly. He was hungry for new experiences and never afraid to experiment. George had found it fascinating too and he also took it again, as did Paul and Ringo, but John felt it gave his life a whole new dimension. The other Beatles were much more cautious, but John threw himself into it with abandon, convinced that this was the way to greater enlightenment, creativity and happiness... (sic) Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily and I became more and more worried. I couldn’t reach him when he was tripping, but when the effects wore off he would be normal until he took it again.”¹³

And in a self-penned 1994 Hello! magazine article, Cynthia claims that —

“John by [1966] had become a heavy user of LSD. He wanted to be a genius, he wanted to travel outside his body, he wanted to prove to the world that he had a unique gift. Acid stimulated his creativity and opened up his mind to previously undreamed-of wonders, he believed.”¹⁴

Cynthia’s observations of the effect LSD had on John are somewhat inconsistent. In her 1978 memoir, A Twist of Lennon, she writes that once John began tripping on LSD, he became—

“ —like a little boy again. His enthusiasm for life and love reached a new peak; he had opened the floodgates of his mind and had escaped from the imprisonment which fame had entailed. In many ways it was a wonderful thing to watch. Tensions, bigotry, and a bad temper were replaced by understanding and love.”¹⁵

Then later in the same memoir, she also says that, “as far as I was concerned the rot began to set in the moment cannabis and LSD seeped its unhealthy way into our lives.”¹⁶ And Cynthia has also claimed in later years that she went along with John’s interest in meditation because “I’d do anything to get him off this horrible LSD and get my old John back”¹⁷ — which, again, seems somewhat contradictory to her prior claim that LSD turned John into a more open and loving person.

Cynthia’s differing observations on LSD’s effects on John might be because she sometimes blames John’s drug use for the collapse of their marriage, or because she had bad trips both times she tried LSD. Or the contradictions may simply be because the effects of LSD are themselves inconsistent — dependent, as Timothy Leary observed, on “set and setting.”

But regardless of Cynthia’s inconsistencies relative to the effects of LSD on John, one thing she is rock solid consistent about is that once John got a taste of the mind-expanding effects of LSD, it became a regular part of his life. And she’s far from the only one to comment on John’s passionate embrace of LSD.

Here’s Merseybeat founder Bill Harry, who’d known John since they were students together at art college—

“I was the first one to call John a genius and it was justified. He wanted to create so much all the time. Some people need a stimulant to get them going, and initially with John it was alcohol. A few beers would release his inner creativity and provoke him to create something new. He wasn’t drunk, but he searched for that inner soul that held the secrets of his creativity. It started with alcohol in Liverpool, and then it was Preludin in Hamburg, marijuana, LSD, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Primal Scream therapy. I believe John wasn’t just abusing his body, he was seeking an altered state of consciousness to stimulate his inner creativity to find out more and more. He was the opposite to George, who believed in inner peace and that meditation would bring out his creative genius.”¹⁸

And here’s John’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, who remained close to John throughout the Beatles years and often stayed over at the Lennon home in suburban Weybridge—

“[John] saw acid as a godsend—a magical key to uncharted regions of his own imagination, and a potential cure for most of his psychological problems. It gave almost tangible form to his lifelong perception of the world as a surrealistic carnival, and it enabled him—instantaneously, effortlessly, and without leaving his chair —to experience the semblance of mystical visions and even communion with God. By the time the Beatles started working on Revolver, in the spring of 1966, both John and George were taking the drug on an almost daily basis.¹⁹

Unlike Cynthia’s mixed messages, Pete Shotton seems to have felt LSD was an unqualified positive influence on John, at least at the beginning—

“If anything, LSD’s influence on John seemed, at the time, to be a salutary one. It brought enthusiasm back into his life, and inspired him to write the most brilliant songs of his career; it also served to smooth away some of the rough edges of his personality, virtually curing him of his arrogance and paranoia. He took to leaving the gates of Kenwood open, allowed his fans to wander the grounds, and, on occasion, actually inviting them in for tea. John even got into the habit — for a while, anyway — of rising with the sun every morning.”²⁰

Some of John’s immersive embrace of LSD was, no doubt, simply the zeitgeist of the times. Some of it was undoubtedly a way to cope with the stress of Beatlemania, as well as other problems in his life at the time that we’ll get to in a bit. And some of it might just be that this is John Lennon — as he himself has acknowledged, moderation isn’t exactly in his vocabulary.

Also — as Paul, Cynthia, Bill Harry, and Pete Shotton point out — John was possessed of a lifelong pull to explore the darker corners of his own psyche. This pull, of course, manifested most brilliantly in his songwriting. In later years, it manifested more destructively in his pull towards heroin, primal scream therapy, and other elements we’ll talk about when we get there in Beautiful Possibility.

And because this is John, it’s also virtually certain that much of his pull towards LSD was in reaction to his lifelong creative insecurity.

Consider Cynthia’s recollection that John was “convinced that [LSD] was the way to greater enlightenment, creativity and happiness,” and that he embraced it as part of wanting to “prove to the world that he had a unique gift” and that LSD “stimulated his creativity.” And then there’s Bill Harry’s suggestion that John’s use of mind-altering substances was primarily motivated by a desire to “stimulate his inner creativity” — nearly the identical language to Cynthia’s. And Pete Shotton’s observation that John saw acid as “a magical key to uncharted regions of his own imagination.”

And that brings us back, once again, to “Yesterday,” and to Norman Smith’s observation that something happened between Help! and Rubber Soul to fundamentally change the relationship between John and Paul.

Let’s take a look at the timeline of the events, relative to “Yesterday” and John’s use of LSD, that unfolded during that time period between Help! and Rubber Soul —

• August or September 1964 (depending on whether you believe the Delmonico or the Riviera Idlewild version of the story) — Paul has his first “mind-blowing” “seven levels” cannabis experience with Dylan in New York.

• October 1964 through February 1965 — sometime during these four months, Paul dreams the music for “Yesterday.”

• February 1965 — The Beatles begin recording the soundtrack album for Help! It’s the first Beatles album on which Paul’s creative contributions outnumber John’s, if only just barely.²¹

• Also in February 1965 — Filming of the movie Help! begins, during which Paul frequently plays “Yesterday” on the house piano as he works on the lyrics to the song.²² Paul remembers that during the filming of Help!, while listening (most likely) to songs they wrote for the film, John told him that “I probably like your songs better than mine.”²³

• (probably) late March/early April 1965 — John, along with George, experiences his first (nonconsensual) LSD trip at a dinner party given by his dentist.²⁴

• early April 1965 — John (with some input from Paul) writes “Help!,” a song about John’s struggle with depression and an explicit plea for, well— help. The song includes the lyric, I’ve opened up the doors, which is magpied from The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book on the psychedelic experience.²⁵ This suggests that the line in “Help!” may be a reference to John feeling a new emotional vulnerability and openness in the wake of his first LSD experience, similar to what Paul seems to have experienced during his cannabis-fueled “seven levels” trip.

• June 14 1965 — The Beatles record Paul’s “I’m Down” and “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” and Paul records “Yesterday,” the first Beatles song that involves no Beatles other than Paul in either its composition or recording.²⁶ Although he has no active part to play, John is present for the recording.

• August 1 1965 — The Beatles appear on the UK variety show Blackpool Night Out. Paul performs “Yesterday” live for the first time — solo under a single spotlight. During Paul’s rehearsal of “Yesterday,” John heckles from the wings, resulting in a very public argument with Paul.²⁷

• August 24 1965 — John claims this is when he (along with George and Ringo) takes his first intentional LSD trip, in Los Angeles during their US tour. (Note: Cynthia claims this is inaccurate, and that John began tripping regularly “within weeks” of his first LSD experience — see footnote.²⁸)

• September 13 1965 — “Yesterday” is released as a single in the US. It sells a million copies within the first five weeks.

• October 9 1965 — John’s 25th birthday. And also the day “Yesterday” reaches #1 on the US Billboard chart and stays there for four weeks.

• October 12 1965 — With “Yesterday” still topping the Billboard chart and about to top the Cash Box chart as well, The Beatles begin recording Rubber Soul. By now, John is, by all accounts, tripping on LSD on a regular basis.

This is a slightly incomplete timeline, because there’s one event that I’m holding back until later in the chapter when we have more context. The point here is that I doubt this correlation between “Yesterday” and John’s embrace of LSD is a coincidence. I think it’s cause and effect, fueled by the cycle of insecurity and by what “Yesterday” represented —

—the unfurling of Paul’s genius, at the exact same time John was struggling to write enough new material to meet the expectations from George Martin, EMI, Brian and the world — and perhaps most of all, Paul. For the past three years, John and Paul had struggled together to meet those expectations. It must’ve seemed to John that, after being turned on to cannabis, Paul now could so easily meet those expectations all on his own that he was literally composing masterpieces in his sleep.

Here’s how that cause-and-effect might have played itself out—

The mind-opening psychedelic effects of cannabis — which Paul seems to have had a heightened sensitivity to — unlocked a radical unfurling of Paul’s innate musical genius in a way it didn’t for the other three Beatles. That unfurling was so intense and revelatory that it flooded Paul’s conscious mind and spilled over from his waking life into his sleep, causing him to dream the music for “Yesterday” (and possibly other songs that he wasn’t able to consciously recall).

So radically did cannabis unfurl Paul’s creative genius that John — already struggling with chronic creative insecurity and sinking into the (probably not unrelated) depression that would torment him for the rest of his life — panicked. And if you’re even a little bit Grail-fluent — meaning fluent in emotional subtext — it’s easy to see why.

Not only did Paul dream the complete melody for “Yesterday,” but he also recorded the song with no tangible involvement from John. Given John’s insecurity, it’s all but inevitable that “Yesterday” — given its critical and commercial success and John’s lack of active involvement in its creation — would have signalled to John that Paul no longer needed him in order to stay at the toppermost of the poppermost.

Remember here the anecdote we touched on in the timeline — that Paul remembers John confessing to him upon hearing what was most likely songs from Help! that he thought Paul’s songs were better than his own.²⁹

“Yesterday” may have felt to John like “proof” — right there, sitting atop the charts for all the world to see — that Paul was the true — and only — genius in The Beatles, and that John himself was a fraud. And that (from John’s point of view) unless John came up with the goods to match Paul, he’d be made irrelevant in his own band — the band that he (not Paul) founded.

And this need to keep up with Paul in the wake of “Yesterday” — and to save face in front of a world that had its eyes on both of them — would likely have spun John into creative crisis and supercharged his embrace of LSD.³⁰

All of this would have been festering in John’s mind as The Beatles recorded Rubber Soul. And unlike Paul, John was not the sort of person to suffer in silence.

Instead, John had a demonstrated, lifelong habit of striking out at others to cope with his own demons — which is why it was probably inevitable that John’s “Yesterday”-fueled insecurity spilled out in the studio, just as it spilled out during the Blackpool Night Out TV appearance where John heckled Paul from the wings as he rehearsed “Yesterday.” And just as it would spill out during the breakup when — as we talked about in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — John masked his own insecurity about his solo work by likening Paul to middle-of-the-road balladeer Englebert Humperdinck.

And because accusing Paul of being “soft” seems clearly to have been John’s go-to coping mechanism when he felt insecure relative to his partner — and because people don’t tend to change their coping mechanisms under stress, and not without a lot of conscious effort to do so (which there’s no indication that John had done, in 1965) — it’s unlikely John came up with a whole new and different way of expressing that insecurity during the recording of Rubber Soul.

From his “wildlife observation blind” in the control booth, Norman Smith would have been in a position to witness these exchanges between John and Paul. But Smith almost certainly would not have had the Grail fluency or the context to interpret what he was witnessing as part of the cycle of insecurity. It’s not clear from his writing that Smith even understood that John suffered from creative insecurity in the first place.

So several decades later — when the distorted narrative was in full force — Smith probably did what almost every other outsider did — he rejected the evidence of his own ears, and instead interpreted what he remembered hearing John say as the literal truth, despite the fact that the actual music being recorded told the truer story.

The pressure John put on himself to keep pace with Paul’s prolific and seemingly effortless creative output must have been extreme — especially given the deep emotional and creative enmeshment between the two of them. I doubt John would have said no to anything he felt would help him keep up with Paul, as well as the world’s and his own expectations for himself. And it seems all-but-certain that in his embrace of LSD, John was intent on unlocking a similar creative unfurling in his own psyche — mostly to keep up with Paul, whom John perceived as having eclipsed him as a songwriter.

This struggle to write new material would torment John for the rest of his life, even as LSD helped to — as Pete Shotton put it — “inspire some of the most brilliant songs of John’s career.”

You might remember from Part One of Beautiful Possibility, this quote from Beatles press agent Tony Barrow —

“Beneath the bullet-proof exterior I had found a pitifully insecure man who doubted his own abilities and couldn’t concentrate long enough on his songwriting to complete more than a fraction of his best work. He had heaps of unfinished songs surrounding him throughout the time I knew him best in the Sixties.”³¹

Before we continue, I hope it’s clear that I’m not suggesting John’s creative insecurity was warranted — it self-evidently wasn’t, especially given he was yet to write his most iconic and important songs, including “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and much of “A Day In The Life.”

But we’re talking here not about our perception of John’s genius, but about John’s. And it’s demonstrably true that from this point on — maybe because of LSD — John writes at a higher level but writes less. And Paul — maybe because of cannabis — writes at a higher level and writes more. And given the cycle of insecurity, there’s no way John’s going to be okay with that imbalance. And there’s also probably no way he’s going to pass up any opportunity to go all in on anything he thinks might fix it. And since cannabis didn’t unfurl John’s talent as it unfurled Paul’s, John turned to LSD — intent on unlocking a similar creative unfurling in his own psyche.

What I’m suggesting is that “Yesterday” — as the symbol in John’s mind of both Paul’s creative unfurling and John’s creative insecurity — is likely the inciting incident for the Whatever Happened that motivated and had you gone, and thus the truer, deeper way in which “Got To Get You Into My Life” is about cannabis and also a love song — but really a song of reassurance — to John.

If so, was Paul’s merging together of his cannabis-fueled creative unfurling with the tension in his relationship with John in “Got To Get You Into My Life” a conscious choice? In other words, did he deliberately write the song with both meanings in mind as an intentional message of reassurance to John, alongside an acknowledgement of the transformative power of cannabis in Paul’s life and the way it permanently changed things not just for Paul, but for John, and for their relationship? Or was Paul’s newly unfurled creative genius working below conscious awareness, as creative genius often does — making him conscious of some of these elements, but not all of them?

There’s probably no way to know — unfortunately, these aren’t the sorts of questions interviewers ask Paul McCartney, and it’s possible he wouldn’t have the answers if they did. But the careful insertion of and had you gone into the lyrics — combined with the ever-present ghost of “Yesterday” haunting the timeline — certainly suggests that the double meaning was intentional on Paul’s part, consciously or otherwise.

We will come back to and had you gone, because I’m aware we have a ways to go to link that to what we’re talking about here. But first, there’s more to notice about the interconnection between “Yesterday” and “Got To Get You Into My Life,” and the cycle of insecurity that likely spun John into his extreme embrace of LSD.

In “Unscrambling Yesterday,” I suggested that “Yesterday” isn’t about the past at all. That it’s a hymn of prophecy — Paul sensing into the future that the cycle of insecurity will ultimately be the cause (or at least one of them) of a breakup with John.

What I’m proposing with that suggestion is that there’s a sort of a time travel loop happening — not literally, of course, but in the sense that it’s the knowledge of a future event that in and of itself causes that event to happen. And more than that, that it’s the saying out loud of the anxiety about the event that causes that event to happen.

By the time Paul writes I said something wrong / now I long for yesterday, he’s already having a lived experience of John’s reaction to the melody — which, remember, before finishing the lyrics, Paul played incessantly in the weeks or months after dreaming it, including on the set of Help!). The same melody that John was obsessed with in the Howard Smith quote that opened this section.

In this way, “Yesterday” itself is the I said something wrong that Paul is worried will ultimately make it all fall apart.

In other words, by having dreamed the melody of the song, Paul unintentionally sets into motion the very sequence of events that he writes about in the lyrics of “Yesterday.”

There’s nothing paranormal about this “time loop” situation. Or rather, there doesn’t need to be. It’s essentially another way of describing a self-fullfilling prophecy — we sometimes create the future event we’re anxious to avoid by being so anxious to avoid it.

But we’re not quite finished yet. Because I don’t know about you, but I’m unconvinced that the cycle of insecurity sparked by “Yesterday” and Paul’s cannabis-fueled creative unfurling would have been— on its own — enough to trigger the and had you gone situation in “Got To Get You Into My Life.”

It’s certainly possible, but would John really have almost left The Beatles — and Paul — solely due to creative insecurity?

The research does seem to make clear that John saw “Yesterday” as an existential threat to his own genius. But John had struggled with creative insecurity since the day he and Paul met — when despite their instant connection, John hesitated to ask Paul to join the band out of fear that Paul would take over. If creative insecurity was a deal-breaker, The Beatles would never have happened in the first place.

John’s coping mechanisms for keeping his demons at bay don’t seem to have included walking away when he felt threatened. Instead, as we’ve talked about, John’s preferred method of coping with his insecurity seems to have been to search for ways to spark his own creative unfurling — most successfully and enduringly, with LSD.

But whereas Paul’s tendency towards moderation and his (possible) heightened sensitivity motivated him to experiment cautiously, so as not to break anything along the way, John’s temperament seems to have driven him to take chances to enhance his creative genius — even when those chances came with increasingly dangerous risks to his personal safety.

“I was like an artist that went off — have you never heard of... Dylan Thomas and all them who never fuckin’ wrote but just went up drinking and Brendan Behan and all of them, they died of drink— everybody that’s done anything is like that. I just got meself in a party, I was an emperor, I had millions of chicks, drugs, drink, power and everybody saying how great I was. How could I get out of it? It was just like being in a fuckin’ train. I couldn’t get out... I was enjoying it, and I was trapped in it, too. I couldn’t do anything about it, I was just going along for the ride. I was hooked, just like a junkie.”³² — John Lennon, 1970.

When it comes to drug overdoses, LSD is on the safe side of the spectrum. Doing too much of it doesn’t cause death, other than by misadventure. So-called “acid casualties” in the Sixties were rare, a relative handful of cases sensationalized by the mainstream press — including as we saw in a prior chapter, the Daily Mirror — as evidence of the “evils of drugs.”

But though acid casualties in the ‘60s were rare, they were not unheard of. Tripping without experienced guidance, and tripping too often or in the wrong circumstances — all of which John did repeatedly — carries the very real risk of long-term psychological damage in someone not emotionally stable enough to handle the experience.

John’s “why do it when I can overdo it” approach to life made him especially vulnerable to the sometimes less-than-transcendent effects of LSD. “I’ve always needed a drug to survive,” he said in 1970. “The others too, but I always had more. I always took more pills, more of everything because I’m more crazy probably.”³³

Drugs are, of course, an important part of the Beatles’ story, and there’s a lot of primary research on the Fabs’ experiences with LSD. And when it comes to John’s use of LSD — and the extremity of it — that research is across-the-board consistent.

Here’s the continuation of a quote from Cynthia that we considered earlier (edited for length)—

“Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily and I became more and more

worried. I couldn’t reach him when he was tripping, but when the effects wore off he would

be normal until he took it again...

Soon he was bringing home a ragged assortment of people he’d met through drugs. After a

clubbing session he’d pile in with anyone he’d picked up during the evening, whether he knew

them or not. They were all high and littered our house for hours, sometimes days on end.

They’d wander around glassy-eyed, crash out on the sofas, beds and floors, then eat whatever

they could find in the kitchen. John was an essentially private man, but under the influence of

drugs he was vulnerable to anyone and everyone who wanted to take advantage of him.

I knew I couldn’t go on like that indefinitely. Our home was being invaded by people I neither liked nor wanted to know. I was afraid for Julian and myself. I didn’t want to hear loud music all night, or pick my way through semi-conscious bodies when I brought my son down for his breakfast.

But every effort I made to put an end to it was met by a brick wall. A gulf was opening between me and John and I had no idea how to bridge it. I wasn’t going to give up on my marriage without trying everything I could, but I couldn’t live with a man who was constantly in another dimension.”³⁴

And here she is again in 1994, talking about John later in 1966 —

“At home things went from bad to worse. I used to dread it when John went out at night. I’d lie awake waiting for his return just knowing what was in store. Sure enough, about four in the

morning a string of cars would pull into the drive and decant 15 to 20 people all high on acid, pot and whatever else they could lay their hands on, ready to party. I’d get up at breakfast time to find the place littered with drugged bodies and Julian, little soul that he was, couldn’t understand what was going on.

It was a nightmare period. I didn’t want to lose John and I feared for his health but I was desperately worried about Julian. I didn’t know how to handle it. My mother, who’d moved to London by this time, and often came to stay, saw what was going on and was appalled. But both of us felt helpless.”³⁵ ³⁶

Cynthia isn’t the only one to weigh in on the extremity of John’s drug use. Pete Shotton, John’s childhood friend and occasional long-term houseguest, remembers that, “by the time the Beatles started working on Revolver, in the spring of 1966, both John and George were taking the drug on an almost daily basis.”

Shotton is probably wrong about George, who was articulate and consistent in his descriptions of having tripped infrequently and intentionally, and who — unlike John — was not prone to exaggeration. But there’s little doubt Pete Shotton is right about John—

—because there’s also Barry Miles, Indica Gallery owner and a mutual friend of both John and Paul. Miles shared in a 2021 interview that he thought John was “in grave danger of being an acid burnout at one point.”³⁷

And a bit later in the timeline, Brian’s former personal assistant Peter Brown describes visiting John and finding him “crumpled on the curved sofa on the sunporch at Kenwood. He had been up for three consecutive days, tripping on LSD, and he had not washed or shaved in seventy-two hours.”³⁸

Again, like all consciousness-altering experiences, LSD is largely context and mindset dependent. As Leary wrote in The Psychedelic Experience, avoiding a bad trip generally requires a positive “set and setting.” And despite the heady joy of reaching the “toppermost of the poppermost” — and despite John’s apparent closeness with Paul during this time period — by 1965, John was in many ways in a very bad place.

We’ve already talked about John’s creative insecurity during this time period, as well as the pressure to meet expectations and to keep up with Paul’s creative unfurling. But the demons tormenting John in 1965 didn’t stop there.

John was also struggling with the unprecedented explosion of Beatlemania, and his conflicted feelings about fame and Brian’s “respectability makeover” that allowed Beatlemania to happen in the first place.³⁹ Then there was the unrelenting tour schedule Brian insisted on maintaining long past the point where it was necessary to build The Beatles’ career. And let’s not forget John’s weight gain during the Help! era — what he later called his “fat Elvis” period — which was probably related to his depression at the unwanted domestic burden of being a husband and father in stockbroker suburbia, while Paul was lighting up the society pages as the Prince of Swinging London and immersing himself in the cultural avant garde with Jane Asher on his arm.⁴⁰

And, of course, if there is truth to the lovers possibility, there would also have been the constant “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” (also on Help!) stress of concealing John’s romantic relationship with Paul from a world that adored them only as long as they pretended to be something they weren’t, and that despised who they really were to one another.

And of course, all of this is in the context of John’s lack of an internal governor that might have told him when enough was enough.

Nonetheless, LSD doesn’t necessarily seem to have been— on its own — the problem. Or at least not the whole problem. As we’ve seen, Cynthia, Pete Shotton and John himself recall that LSD (along with cannabis) helped John soften his anger and frustration. And as we already noticed, LSD seems to have been responsible for John’s own creative unfurling that led to the most iconic work of his career.

The bigger problem might have been that John’s embrace of LSD didn’t mean he gave up alcohol, or the pills that all four Beatles — and John most of all — had been taking since Hamburg in order to keep up with their grueling performance schedule.

Ivor Davis, whom you may recall from an earlier chapter as the one who claims Dylan actually turned The Beatles on to pot at the Riviera Idlewild rather than the Delmonico, remembers that during the 1964 tour—

“ — John had been popping Preludin, which he kept in a little black bag tucked away in the

bathroom. He called them “my belly warmers.” He and all the Beatles swallowed the “Prellies,” as they called the uppers, like jellybeans, ever since their days in Hamburg, where they needed them to sustain the ten-hour, seven-day-a-week sessions in the clubs.”⁴¹

On its own, dependence on pills is a risky proposition. The list of fatalities is too long to list here, and includes Brian Epstein, and a decade later, Elvis Presley. But while acid casualties may have been far and few between, combining LSD with pills and alcohol — and doing so for an extended period of time — is another situation altogether.⁴²

John’s mixing of pills and LSD seems to have started from his very first LSD trip, when — as he recalls in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview — he was also on an amphetamine high.⁴³ And for someone with John’s unaddressed psychological traumas who did not have a tendency towards moderation, the risks of that volatile cocktail of pills, alcohol, and LSD would have increased exponentially.

It’s a part of the story that’s generally whitewashed and glamorized as part of John’s “hard” and edgy image. But the reality is that by the time The Beatles began recording Rubber Soul in October of 1965, John’s drug abuse was already putting him in the red alert danger zone.

“And had you gone, you knew in time we’d meet again.” — Paul McCartney

We’re finally ready to put the pieces together that we’ve laid out over these four chapters. But before we do that, a few cautions.

First, let’s remind ourselves — as we did in Part One of Beautiful Possibility — that there is a limit to how much we can know, looking in from the outside, about any relationship between two people, even when the two people in question are as famous as John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Given the countless words written about The Beatles, It’s easy to forget that we only know — and will only ever know — a tiny fraction of what went on in their private lives, together and separately. And of course, that’s how it should be.

Long-term, intimate relationships tend to be messy and complicated. By its nature, even without factoring in the lovers possibility, the relationship between John and Paul is more complicated than most. We can put pieces together, identify patterns, and offer educated — and hopefully respectful — speculation about cause and effect. But in the end, we only get to see what we get to see.

The second caution is that to put the pieces together, we’re going to need to say out loud some uncomfortable truths about what was likely happening with John and Paul in late 1965 and early 1966 — uncomfortable truths that never quite make it into those mainstream books about The Beatles, and rarely even into the Beatles studies counterculture.

One of those uncomfortable truths is that even in our paranoid and puritanical modern age, we tend to view John as more artistically interesting in part because of his reckless use of drugs — and we tend to view Paul as less artistically interesting in part because of his caution relative to those same drugs. Paul himself even seems to view things that way. You might remember the quote that opened this chapter — Paul’s self-deprecating and explicitly apologetic comment that he’s not willing to risk his life or his family for the sake of being “the suicide man, the one off the cliff,” as he described John.

But that duality of seeing John as edgy and cool for his drug use and Paul as less so for his caution is blind (Grail-blind, in fact) to the reality of what it would have been like for Paul to be the intimate partner of — and I say this with deep respect and compassion and love for John — an emotionally unstable drug addict with chronic insecurity, an intense fear of abandonment, and a dangerous lack of impulse control.

To understand how this volatile dynamic may have played out between Paul and John, let’s go back to Part One of Beautiful Possibility, where we talked about John (and others) having acknowledged that Paul and Brian were the only two people able to keep John emotionally and psychologically stable enough to function — in the band and in life in general.⁴⁴

We will, of course, talk more about Brian and John in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. For here, let’s note that by the time we get to the sequence of events we’re talking about here, Brian seems to have already begun his own spiral into the dangerous territory of dependence on drugs to get through his own depression, and was thus hardly in a position to offer support or stability to John.

You might have noticed that Cynthia is not on John’s very short list of people who were able to keep him stable and functional. That’s probably because Cynthia herself has acknowledged— as we saw in the prior quotes — that she did not have the ability to handle John’s psychological problems or his drug addiction. And even if she had known how to help, there’s no indication that John would have trusted her to do so — John and Cynthia’s marriage seems to have been over in all but name long before the time period we’re talking about here.⁴⁵

So with Cynthia and Brian unable to help, that left Paul — along with protective “Beatle bubble” that had been built around the four of them — as John’s only stabilizing influences.⁴⁶

And that brings us back to Paul’s relationship to LSD vs cannabis.

As we talked about in a prior chapter, Paul has repeatedly identified the longer duration and intensity of an acid trip as what he most disliked about LSD, and as the main reason he didn’t trip very often, and also as one of the main reasons he preferred cannabis.

But there’s another, more sobering reason — beyond his natural temperament and possible heightened sensitivity — why Paul might have opted for the shorter, more controllable psychedelia of cannabis over LSD. And that reason might have been as much about John as it was about Paul.

As John’s primary stabilizing influence, Paul would have had to keep his head at least relatively clear in order to function as John’s tether to reality. Like any partner of an addict — romantic or otherwise — Paul couldn’t have afforded to “turn off his mind, relax and float downstream,” at least not on any kind of regular basis, not if he wanted to keep John stable and functional.

And that brings us to another of those uncomfortable truths. Because given John’s habitual, long-term mixing of LSD, pills, and alcohol, paired with the lack of an internal governor to tell him when enough was enough, it seems certain that John occasionally — and maybe more than occasionally — pushed things too far.

I say “it seems certain” somewhat out of habit — because this is not, in fact, speculation. We know of at least one such incident.

Journalist Larry Kane, who was embedded with The Beatles on their ‘64 and ‘65 tours, tells the following story in his book Ticket To Ride, about being backstage at the taping of their 1965 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show —

“The door to their dressing room opened, and lanky Malcolm Evans emerged with a worried look on his face. Evans almost never looked worried, even during those miraculous great escapes and close calls.

I said, “What’s going on?”

[Mal] answered, “[John’s] sweating, shaking, looks like too many pills and shit.”

I said, “Pills?”

“Yeah, uppers, downers, pain stuff, I think, y’know.”

Up until that point, I had never heard of any pills—over-thecounter, prescription or illegal — associated with the Beatles. So I was genuinely shocked. There had been some marijuana cigarettes around, but as far as I was concerned, the pills were something new. But they weren’t really, apparently. Later, John Lennon would talk about having taken pills of some sort since he was a young teenager

“How bad is he?” I asked Mal.

“Don’t say anything. The other boys are cool, they think he’s just nervous,” Mal said. “The boys are always nervous. They get nervous just before, you know.”⁴⁷

There’s no particular reason to doubt Larry Kane’s overall description of this incident, though his recall of the conversation is almost certainly not word for word accurate, given he’s writing in 2003 about an event in 1965. But as a journalist, he probably did take notes at the time, especially given the unusualness of the incident and his acknowledgement that he was shocked by the experience. And that he seems generally a credible source with at least a bit of sensitivity to the situation he’s describing, and thus he seems unlikely to fabricate this kind of story.

In Kane’s account, Mal is fairly obviously downplaying the severity of John’s condition, sidestepping Kane’s “how bad is he?” with a deflection to “the boys are always nervous.” And maybe this is why Kane doesn’t name this incident as what it self-evidently and without question was — a drug overdose, serious enough that it came close to making John unable to perform and scared even the generally unflappable Mal Evans.

John’s Ed Sullivan Show overdose happened in August 1965, during the gap between Help! and Rubber Soul that Norman Smith specifies — and not too many months before Paul wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life.” And — maybe not coincidentally — the set list included Paul’s solo performance of “Yesterday” — his first US performance of the song — after which John couldn’t resist offering the passive-aggressive but also perhaps telling, “thank you, Paul, that was just like him.”

And despite Mal’s claim that the other three Beatles didn’t know what was happening relative to John’s overdose, it’s unlikely that was in fact the case — if only because of the extreme closeness between all four of them during this time period and that they would likely have been very aware of the effects and quantity of the pills John was taking, given those pills had been part of their lives since Hamburg.

Mal telling Larry Kane that “John’s just nervous” and “don’t say anything” also strongly suggests the Ed Sullivan overdose might not have been an entirely new problem. That kind of protective familiarity with what was happening — along with a priority on covering it up rather than seeking medical assistance — are signs that the situation was perhaps not an unprecedented emergency, but the latest in an established pattern for which there was a well-worn protocol — which included protecting the Beatles’ image by minimizing the seriousness of what was happening outside of the inner circle.⁴⁸

But first time or not, there’s no indication that the Ed Sullivan overdose served as any kind of a wake-up call for John, given the accounts from Cynthia, Peter Brown and Barry Miles that John’s drug abuse only grew more extreme in the months and years that followed.

And that means that given there was one overdose during this time period, there were likely others. And those other overdoses might have been even more extreme, with the very real chance John might not wake up from whatever haphazard cocktail of drugs he’d taken. And in the context of John’s deepening depression, maybe even times when the overdose was perhaps not entirely accidental — when he didn’t want to wake up at all.

And now let’s recall Cynthia’s account of how LSD made John vulnerable to “a ragged assortment of people he’d met through drugs.” Cynthia’s recollection suggests that John wasn’t just indulging in his toxic cocktail of LSD, pills, and alcohol within the relative safety of the Beatles bubble — as in the case of the Ed Sullivan overdose — but that John was engaging in this dangerous pattern of behaviour unsupervised and in the company of that “ragged assortment of people,” both at home and elsewhere.

And that brings us back once again to Paul, and his role as John’s partner and primary support person.

Given the intensity of the bond between them — even excluding the lovers possibility — it seems likely that Paul was the one who was called on (maybe along with Mal) to deal with John if/when he was in a bad way, just as it was Paul (along with Mal) who took John home to Cavendish after his accidental trip in the studio in 1967 — when you might recall, that accidental trip happened because John mixed up which drug he was taking and took LSD instead of, presumably, speed.

All of this would mean Paul was by necessity on constant alert, in case one of those calls for help came. And even putting aside whether Paul was the one called to deal with the situation, it’s virtually certain that Paul lost no small amount of sleep when he and John weren’t physically in the same place, not knowing where John was or what he was doing, and worrying that John might overdose or meet with some misadventure, either intentionally or accidentally — as he might well have on the night of the “emperor of eternity” trip, had Paul and George not sprinted up to the roof of EMI Studios to save him from plummeting over the edge.

And that brings us back, once again, to the distorted “John/hard vs Paul/soft” narrative. Because obviously, that kind of constant vigilance doesn’t leave much room for trippy, reckless lifestyle choices — not even for Beatle Paul, the Prince of Swinging London.

Because while there was no language in the 1960s to describe the relationship between a drug addict and their co-dependent partner (romantic or otherwise), the co-dependency itself certainly existed. And the reality is that for decades, Paul has carried the weight that all partners of addicts shoulder — being labeled as less interesting because of a need to stay centered and sober so as to be able to support and stabilize a volatile partner.

When it comes to Paul’s use of mind-altering substances, the truer truth might be that — in combination with his natural caution and possible heightened sensitivity — it was John’s drug use that forced Paul to be “less interesting” relative to experiments with altered consciousness during the Beatles years, because that was the only way to keep the band together, and possibly the only way to keep John alive.

I’m grateful that I’ve not personally had the experience of being the co-dependent partner — romantic or otherwise — of an addict. But even from the outside, it’s not hard to see that the years-long 24/7 vigil required to keep someone you love safe from their own demons is — to say the absolute least — exhausting.

As difficult and scary as that time period was for John, it must have been equally — and in some ways, perhaps even more — frightening for Paul, perpetually on alert for a phone call telling him that John was in danger or unspeakably worse, never able to quite relax unless John was with him, and even then, knowing that relief was only temporary.

This, in turn, might have contributed to Paul’s feeling that he couldn’t afford to relax or let his guard down that we talked about in a prior chapter. What if John needed him, and Paul couldn’t respond because he was floating downstream on an LSD trip that he couldn’t find his way out of, because it was too intense and lasted too long?⁴⁹

And even beyond what was happening with John, Paul had his own stresses during this time — the same stresses and demands of Beatlemania and touring, his own childhood traumas arising from the death of his mother and his often-tense relationship with his father, Paul’s stage fright that we talked about in a prior chapter, and his role of being the one to get everyone into the studio to record — taken on, like his role as the bass player, because none of the other three were willing to do it.

And of course, if Paul and John were a romantic couple, there was the constant stress of hiding that love away from a world that adored them only as long as they didn’t too openly reveal their love for one another outside of their songs.

All of this adds up to Paul being in no way in a position to devote the necessary time, care and psychological support to someone with serious, unaddressed mental health and substance abuse issues. And that’s true even if Paul had the insight to know what to do to help John — which he almost certainly didn’t, because, again, at that time there was little understanding of the psychology of addiction, and no real opportunity for Paul to access that understanding even if it did exist.

Paul’s need to keep constant vigil relative to John in case of an emergency also offers us yet another, deeper perspective on the “acid wars” that we talked about in an earlier chapter. Because Paul’s role as the 24/7 “designated driver,” along with the need for Paul to moderate his own drug use in order to keep John stable, may have gone unacknowledged — and also maybe unappreciated — by the other three.

If this is the case, this lack of acknowledgement and appreciation would certainly not have been because the others lacked empathy for either John or Paul — it’s self-evident that the four of them cared deeply for one another.

But Paul’s demonstrated tendency to stuff down his feelings and pretend that nothing is wrong means that even those closest to him probably didn’t have a fair chance to understand the toll that constant vigil and worry was taking on Paul — especially given the lack of widespread awareness at that time of the complex psychological entanglement created between an addict and those closest to them, an entanglement that, of course, George and Ringo were trapped in as well, even if they weren’t quite as “on call” as Paul might have been.

All of that easily translates into another possible reason why the peer pressure was so wearing on Paul — and maybe even why he called it “fear pressure”⁵⁰ — and why the pressure would have added to Paul’s burden—

Not only would he have been worried about John’s safety while juggling his own stresses, but he also risked his own credibility within the band and as a co-leader of the Love Revolution, if he didn’t embrace LSD. Regardless of what Paul chose to do, he was putting at risk something or someone he cared about, whether it was John, The Beatles, or his own mental and emotional well-being and creative process.

As we talked about, Paul is still — to this day — paying the price for his choice to stay sober, in the form of the distorted narrative that paints John as “hard” and edgy for his drug use and overall recklessness, and Paul as “soft” and less interesting for his caution and moderation.

And that brings us to the most important reason why I’ve chosen to put this series into the world now and as its own thing, rather than as part of Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

Over the past months, as my initial research into “Got To Get You Into My Life” and the Dylan story unfolded into this more complex and difficult narrative, I spent my requisite sleepless nights worrying about whether or not to publish this final chapter — which, by the way, we’re not finished with yet, in terms of putting the pieces together. I’m well aware that in delving into all of this, I might be edging up against my own, self-imposed ethical boundary of not speculating on the intimate details of Paul and John’s personal relationship.

I originally intended “intimate” to refer to erotic details — specifics about their (possible) sex life. But what I hadn’t fully considered when I established that boundary is that, of course, intimacy goes far beyond the bedroom. And to me at least, the details of how Paul and John might have dealt with John’s drug abuse would seem to qualify as intimate. And while I think Paul has explicitly given us permission to speculate on anything we find in his songs — including the and had you gone of “Got To Get You Into My Life” — I’m not at all clear how many degrees of separation away from the song Paul’s directive permits us to go, in considering what we find in those songs.

I’m not yet fully sure how to sort all of that out — that’s work I’m still doing relative to determining how to approach Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, in which we’ll re-tell the story of Lennon/McCartney through the frame of the lovers possibility.

But obviously, I’ve chosen to push that “intimate details” boundary here. And I’ve made that choice — after much soul-searching — for one reason only — because of the healing that comes from giving attention to a fellow human being’s unacknowledged suffering, especially when the rest of the world seems determined to turn a blind eye.

In Part One of Beautiful Possibility, we talked about how, for a wound to heal, it first needs to be acknowledged — which is why Beautiful Possibility exists in the first place. And when it comes to the wound of John’s drug abuse, I think it’s far past time to acknowledge the pain of that wound — for both John and Paul. And more than that, I think it’s important to acknowledge that pain not from the cold, hard, dispassionate perspective of history and journalism, or out of a self-serving desire to sell books by sensationalizing sordid details for shock value — but rather from a Grail-fluent perspective of compassion and empathy and love for the actual, vulnerable human beings who lived this story and gifted us with this extraordinary music at such a tragic cost to both of them.

I suspect it’s in part the mythological status of The Beatles that makes it easy to forget that real people lived the story that we’re all so justifiably enchanted with. Because while there’s a lot written about John’s drug use, I haven’t seen much empathy outside of the Beatles studies counterculture for the pain and anguish that led John to take dangerous chances with his life in a desperate bid to dull his pain and overcome his creative insecurities.

Nor have I seen much of anything — not even in the Beatles studies counterculture, which is overall very Grail-fluent about these sorts of things — that acknowledges Paul’s profound act of love and sacrifice in keeping The Beatles together and keeping John safe, functional and alive at the expense of Paul’s own cultural credibility and emotional well-being.

In the final episode of Part One of Beautiful Possibility, I made the case that acknowledging the possibility that Paul and John were a romantic as well as a creative couple matters in part because it restores Paul’s right to have the true nature of his disenfranchised love and grief for John acknowledged for what it might more truly be — that of a surviving life partner. And I suggested that Paul deserves the profound healing that comes with a rightful acknowledgement of that status, and the respect, and sensitivity that goes along with it, rather than being afforded only the lesser status of John’s former best friend, bandmate, and songwriting partner.

The story I’ve shared with you in this series — and again, we’re not quite done with that story — is another example of unacknowledged pain. In this case, it’s the pain that both Paul and John almost certainly experienced in dealing with John’s drug abuse — and the price they both paid, and that Paul continues to pay, as a result.

I think it’s long past time for us to right this wrong and to heal this particular wound in the story — and far better to do so sooner rather than later — which is the more profound reason this series is in the world now, instead of not at all, or as part of Part Two of Beautiful Possibility, which is still a ways off in coming.

I’d also make a gentle suggestion here that most of how we interact with this story and this music amounts to mindless and unending taking — whether that taking is primary sources concerned mostly with positioning themselves close to The Beatles to score some cultural status, or Beatles writers who seem to care more about the ego boost of being called “definitive” and catering to their fear of softness than doing justice to the complexity of the story and the music and the people who lived it. Or even the way I get grouchy and sad about the research-related problems with Anthology, and often forget to appreciate that Anthology exists in the first place.

Part of my hope in writing The Abbey is that it might help us find our way to a more mature relationship with this story and this music — a relationship that includes giving back, not only by being better and more responsible stewards of the story, but also by keeping in mind George’s words in Anthology—

“It was a very one-sided love affair. The people gave their money and they gave their screams, but The Beatles gave their nervous systems, which is a much more difficult thing to give.

In some way we helped calm the places we went to, or we focused the energy on a positive energy, but for ourselves we were in the eye of the hurricane, weren’t we? Everybody saw the effect of The Beatles, but nobody really ever worried about us as individuals, or thought, ‘I wonder how the boys are coping with it all?’”

We could maybe wrap all of this up right here, with George’s plea for empathy and compassion. But we’re not quite done yet — because there’s still the matter of and had you gone.

Acknowledging again that there’s probably no way we’ll ever know for sure — and that it’s probably good and right that we don’t — in the final section of this final chapter, I’m going to offer you my best and most educated guess about Whatever Happened between John and Paul that may have led to and had you gone.

Please take what follows for what it is — speculation, though educated and researched and hopefully responsible speculation. And as something to think about, relative to that need for greater empathy and compassion.

So with that caution, and offered in service — once again — of witnessing unacknowledged suffering as a way of affecting healing, let’s finish putting the pieces together.

“Art is the agent best equipped to bring light to the world. That is its purpose. That is its promise. That it is predicated upon a unique suffering that is somehow linked to drink and drugs is self-serving, self-piteous nonsense. Don’t fall for it.”⁵¹ — Nick Cave

Hold a match to a powder keg for long enough, and it will eventually — inevitably — cause an explosion.

This menage a trois between Paul and John and John’s drug abuse spanned not weeks or months, but years. And if we add in that this “household of three” played itself out beneath the glare of maybe the whitest, hottest spotlight in human history — and if we also factor in Paul’s self-acknowledged tendency to stuff down his emotions outside of song and John’s tendency to not stuff down emotions anywhere — it’s probably inevitable that somewhere along the line, the situation reached a breaking point.

And the most likely way that breaking point was arrived at is the way breaking points are always arrived at, by virtue of being breaking points. That Paul — exhausted and terrified (and exhausted from being terrified) that John was going to burn out his brain, injure himself, or worse — expressed his fears and frustrations directly to John.

And given Paul’s self-acknowledged difficulty in sharing his innermost thoughts, and given how breaking points tend to go in general, it seems likely that Paul’s direct expression of his fears and frustrations was — might we say — somewhat less than diplomatic. An unplanned moment of desperation in which Paul might have said the sorts of things people say in that situation. Because while there was no commonly understood language for addiction and co-dependency in 1965, confronting a partner about their substance abuse probably sounds pretty much the same in any era—

“I’m tired of constantly worrying about you. And I’m tired of being the one who cleans up after the chaos you leave in your wake, and I’m tired of always having to be the grown up and carrying more than my fair share of the relationship when I have stresses, too. And most of all, I’m tired of being constantly afraid that the last time I saw you is the last time I’ll see you. This needs to stop, John.”⚠️⁵²

Given the obvious affection and warmth that we see between Paul and John during the time period we’re considering, it’s difficult to place exactly when this breaking point might have happened. Maybe it didn’t happen during this period at all — maybe Paul’s creative unfurling, along with the other stressors in John’s life, was indeed sufficient to motivate him to consider leaving Paul and The Beatles during this time period.

But given the personalities involved, that breaking point seems almost certain to have happened at some point.

Maybe it happened as early as late 1965, when John’s drug abuse was escalating and he started to become unstable enough to jeopardize an Ed Sullivan Show appearance because he’d overdosed on some haphazard combination of somethings.

Maybe the Ed Sullivan overdose itself was the breaking point — John jeopardizing a significant US television appearance would almost certainly have been an especially alarming signal to Paul that the situation was spiraling out of control. Or maybe what motivated the breaking point was another, more serious, incident where there wasn’t a reporter present to document it decades after the fact.

Regardless of the specific circumstances, if Paul did reach that kind of a breaking point, and if he did communicate it to John, it’s virtually inevitable that John — with his insecurities and low self-esteem and lifelong fear of abandonment — would have interpreted what Paul said in the most negative way possible — not as fear or exhaustion or desperation or love, but as rejection—

—and not just any rejection, but rejection by the one person John most relied on to keep him centered and steady The one person most inextricably intertwined with John’s own creative process. The one person in John’s life that he loved and trusted and relied on above all others.

Regardless of how diplomatically Paul might have phrased his words, being confronted about your substance abuse by an exhausted, terrified partner also probably feels the same in any era — which is why it seems all-but-inevitable that whatever Paul actually said and however Paul actually said it, what John heard would have been something like this—

“You’re no good. You’re not lovable or wanted. You’re too much trouble and not worth it, especially since I can now compose masterpieces in my sleep and therefore no longer need you. I have more important things to do than to deal with you, like hanging out with all the beautiful people in Swinging London while you rot away in the stockbroker suburbs, unnecessary and unwanted. Go away, John, and stop bothering me.”⚠️⁵³

And if that’s what John heard Paul say — even though Paul virtually-for-sure did not say anything like that — then that’s going to sound an awful lot like what five-year-old John might have believed his father said when he left his family to go to sea, and what John might have believed his mother said, when she (so John was apparently told) gave him away to his Aunt Mimi to raise while continuing to raise his two half-sisters. And it might be what his Aunt Mimi actually said, overwhelmed and frightened in much the same way as Paul, when teenage John got himself in yet another scrape due to his unacknowledged and unhealed childhood trauma.

And this brings us, finally, back to and had you gone.

Because in the wake of that kind of perceived rejection, it’s highly likely John would have threatened to do what people with low self-esteem and a fear of abandonment tend to do in situations where they feel unwanted and rejected — leave before he got left. Which is why John’s response would almost certainly have been something like — “If I’m so much of a fucking burden, Paul, then I’ll leave and you can go on being a Beatle and the Prince of Swinging London without having to worry about me.”⚠️⁵⁴

And this “fuck you” response from John would have been motivated not by a lack of love for Paul, or by any desire to actually leave, but because he felt too humiliated and insecure — and too untrusting of Paul’s love — to stay.⁵⁵

There’s also another possible read of and had you gone that I’d be negligent not to point out, though it’s an even less beautiful possibility than the scenario we’ve just stepped through.

Given Mal’s apparent minimizing of John’s condition during the Ed Sullivan overdose, we’ll probably never know just how serious that overdose was. It seems to have been serious enough to have rattled the generally un-rattle-able Mal, but also demonstrably not serious enough to keep John from being able to perform on the show not long afterwards with minimal signs of distress.

And as we’ve already talked about, the nature of addiction and the primary research both suggest pretty strongly that the Ed Sullivan overdose wasn’t a singular event, and that there were other, more serious overdoses we don’t know about because there wasn’t a journalist there to report on it years after the fact.

And we also know from what those around John have said that his drug use only escalated after late 1965. Maybe that escalation was in part a reaction to this potential breaking point with Paul (if it did indeed happen) — combined with the ascent of “Yesterday” — an attempt to numb the pain of what he perceived as rejection from the person he loved and trusted most.

Whatever the details, if John did indeed have even more serious overdoses in the immediate time period after (or even before) the Ed Sullivan incident in August 1965, then it’s possible that Paul’s euphoric relief in “Got To Get You Into My Life” isn’t just relief that John didn’t leave the relationship, but relief that John didn’t leave the planet. That John was, at that time, literally still here — still alive.

Paul’s deeper relief might be that John didn’t become the literal “suicide man” that Paul describes in the opening quote of this chapter — either by overdose — as in the Ed Sullivan incident — or by misadventure — as in the “emperor of eternity” incident in which John could easily have jumped or fallen from the roof of EMI Studios.

In this read of and had you gone, the lines that follow — you knew in time we’d meet again for I had told you, etc. — would take on a heightened and especially urgent meaning. They’d be Paul’s reassurance to John that no matter what happens — in this lifetime or in any other — their love for one another is eternal, and that not even death will separate them.

Either of these possible reads of and had you gone would, of course, inspire pretty much any composer to write a song —and especially a composer who has repeatedly acknowledged that he uses songwriting as both therapy and a way to communicate his feelings.

And not just any song, but a very specific kind of song in which Paul says everything he doesn’t know how to say outside of song — about how very much John is not a burden, and about how much he loves John and how much he wants to be with John every single day of his life — and more than that, how he wants John to be with him every single day of his life — and about how Paul felt on the day they met and how he still feels that way, in spite of all the danger.

And that brings us to the part of “Got To Get You Into My Life” that we haven’t yet talked about — the title, which is also the hook of the song.

At the beginning of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” the hook seems to refer to the joyful memory of Paul and John’s first meeting at the fête— Paul reminding John of their instant, passionate, mutual connection. But by the end of the song — on the other side of and had you gone — that hook seems to have morphed into something quite different.

By 1966, Paul and John were living an hour’s drive apart — for the first time ever not within easy reach of one another.

During this time, John was living with Cynthia and two-year old Julian in a 22-room mansion an hour outside of London, in Weybridge — also known as the “stockbroker suburbs” — which was (and probably still is) as white bread Establishment as the nickname suggests.

You only need to know the basics about John Lennon — iconoclast, rebel, and as Paul described in the opening quote, always needing to be “bigger and bolder and brighter” — to know that any place described as the “stockbroker suburbs” was in every way the wrong place for John to be in 1966 or at any other time.

But just in case imagination is not sufficient to paint the picture of how much of a mismatch this was—

—musician/writer Robyn Hitchcock was a teenager in Weybridge at the same time John lived there — though Hitchcock and his family lived on the less posh side. To give you some idea of just how white bread Establishment it was, here’s Hitchcock’s description of life in Weybridge during that time period—

“We are living in... a semi-detached white house opposite a cricket green, next door to the newsagent and tobacconist. Every night, my father comes home from work on the train and changes out of his city garb; then he puts on old clothes and paints pictures from his imagination while listening to the BBC Home Service on the wireless.”⁵⁶

While the Love Revolution John was shaping and and leading was in full swing in London, John himself spent much of his time on the couch in his sunroom, reading, watching television, and tripping on LSD and presumably dipping into his handfuls of pills, trapped in a marriage he didn’t want with a child he didn’t know how to relate to and a wife who wanted a pipe-and-slippers, time for tea and Meet The Wife husband.⁵⁷

Add to that John’s diminishing capacity to write new material, his sense of insecurity and abandonment, and his separation from Paul by that hour’s drive — and it’s not hard to see why John comes up with “Nowhere Man.”

Meanwhile, as we’ve already talked about, Paul was living in the heart of Swinging London, immersing himself in the emerging avant garde scene, attending lectures and theatre and experimental music performances, usually with Jane rather than John at his side. And perhaps most significantly, building a new friendship with gallery owner and influencer extraordinaire Robert Fraser, who drew Paul into his world of international art and culture.⁵⁸

In the shadow of all of this, and in the context of and had you gone, I wonder if Paul’s “got to get you into my life” — repeated at escalating levels of urgency as the song progresses — might be more than an expression of desire to spend more time with John, or a callback to the memory of meeting at the fête .

I wonder if “got to get you into my life” might be Paul’s plan to fix the problem.

We’ve seen multiple times throughout The Beatles’ story that one of Paul’s go-to ways of dealing with an emotional crisis — in addition to writing a song — is to propose a tangible, actionable solution. After Brian’s death, that solution was Magical Mystery Tour. During the breakup, it was the Get Back project and the proposal to go back on the road and play small clubs in northern England. After the breakup, it was Wings.

What if “got to get you into my life” — the phrase itself and the entire song, along with lines like I want you to hear me say we’ll be together every day — is a pledge to himself and to John to make a better effort to include John in Paul’s social life in London, rather than leaving him languishing in the stockbroker suburbs with his TV and his handfuls of LSD and pills and the parade of dodgy and exploitative strangers looking to take advantage of John’s vulnerability?

What if “got to get you into my life” is Paul’s best idea for keeping the band together — and, possibly, for keeping John alive?

If so, it seems to be a plan that Paul made into reality.

In March of 1966 — right around the time he likely wrote “Got To Get You Into My Life” — Paul moved out of the Asher house and into Cavendish, his London townhouse in St. John’s Wood near EMI Studios. And according to the accounts of the Apple Scruffs who stood witness at the gates to Cavendish, pretty much as soon as Paul moved in John became a frequent visitor, as well as a frequent overnight guest.⁵⁹

What if getting John into his life — including John regularly spending nights at Cavendish — wasn’t only about relieving John’s isolation and depression, or out of a simple desire to spend more time together? What if “got to get you into my life” was Paul’s plan to have John close by — in London and at Cavendish — so Paul could keep an eye on his drug use, and prevent an otherwise possibly inevitable tragedy?

There’s a good chance we’ll never know the answers to these questions. But whether or not this was indeed Paul’s plan, here’s where Norman Smith made his miscalculation, in quitting The Beatles on the eve of Revolver. Because history has shown us without question that his assessment of the breakdown of the creative partnership of Lennon/McCartney was, at the very least, wildly premature—

—not only because Paul and John went on to create some of their most iconic collaborative work in the years that followed, but because Paul himself has named Rubber Soul, along with Revolver, as a time when The Beatles were especially happy in the recording studio⁶⁰ — which suggests that by the time “Got To Get You Into My Life” was recorded, Paul and John had worked through — at least temporarily — the Whatever Happened between them that may have gone so very wrong.

And this is maybe why John was so caught up in the power of Paul’s vocal that he couldn’t stop himself from bursting out of the control room to shout his encouragement — evidence of, as Geoff Emerick observed, “the camaraderie and teamwork that was so pervasive during the Revolver sessions.” Maybe John’s outburst was as much John letting Paul know that Paul’s reassurance had been received as it was about Paul’s vocal performance. Maybe John was as relieved as Paul, that they’d found a way to work it out.

There is certainly plenty of suggestion of a reconciliation in their songs during this time period — in the tender affirmation of “In My Life,” and in “Here, There & Everywhere,” a lover’s lullaby, written — as Paul has told us — while John was sleeping.

And then there’s the “giggle take” of “And Your Bird Can Sing,” on which Paul and John — probably both very high on some very potent weed — record an entire take of the song laughing so irrepressibly at whatever inside joke they’re sharing that they can barely get the lyrics out, enjoying themselves too much to interrupt the recording, and John commenting at the end “that was it, wasn’t it?” as if the giggle take was the perfect articulation of their shared creative vision—

—which, on that night in April 1966, with and had you gone temporarily in the past and John safely at Paul’s side, making the music together that would change the world, is possibly — beautifully — exactly what it was.

(YouTube link: “And Your Bird Can Sing” giggle take)

I’ll be back in two weeks with the Wrap-Up. And remember the footnotes.

Peace, love, and strawberry fields,

Faith 🍓

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

2. The Beatles: An Oral History, compiled by David Pritchard and Alan Lysaght, Hyperion Press, 1998.

3. Personally, I’d be inclined to nominate the Abbey Road medley as Lennon/McCartney’s greatest collaboration, but I recognise I’m an outlier in that regard.

4. full quote: John came to my loft and he was all excited,” Smith recalls. “He said, ‘I think I finally wrote a song with as good a melody as Yesterday.’ Yesterday drove him crazy. People’d say, ‘Thank you for writing Yesterday, a beautiful song ...(sic) ‘ He was always civil, but it drove him nuts.” Sat at Smith’s piano, Lennon revealed a title — Imagine — but only a smattering of lyrics. For the rest he sang “scrambled eggs” — just as McCartney had when inspired to write Yesterday. “He played it through and asked me what I thought. ‘It’s beautiful.’ ‘But is it as good as Yesterday?’ ‘They’re impossible to compare.’ So he played it again. And again. And he said, ‘You’ll see, it’s just as good as Yesterday.’“ (DJ/journalist Howard Smith interview with Danny Eccleston, MOJO, July 2013.)

5. Lennon Remembers, Straight Arrow Books, 1971.

full quote:

Q: There was a big change in your music from “You Can’t Buy Me Love” to “We Can Work It Out.”

John: I suppose it was pot then. “‘We Can Work It Out” was... Paul wrote that chorus, I wrote the middle bit about “Life is very short, there is no time for fussing and fighting. . .” all that bit. I don’t remember any change-over. Other than when you take pot you’re a little more less aggressive than when you take alcohol. When you’re on alcohol and pills, you just couldn’t remember anything.

6. John’s breakup era interviews are considered in detail in episode 1:2 (“Love Lies Bleeding”).

7. John and Paul both occasionally use the word “drug” to refer to cannabis — which in my view is erroneous because cannabis is not an artificial compound synthesized in a laboratory, but rather a plant whose mind-altering properties come from experiencing it in its natural form. This distinction is why I’ve been careful not to use the word “drug” in relation to our discussions of cannabis, but rather than the somewhat clunky term “mind altering substances.”

This is obviously a longer discussion than we can have room for here, but the thing to know is that whenever the word “drug” appears in this series — and this is particularly relevant to John’s “drug use,” I’m referring to LSD and pills, not cannabis.

8. John Lennon interviewed by Hunter Davies, The Beatles, McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1968.

9. “John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,” Rolling Stone, December 1970, published January 21 1971.

full quote:

“A dentist in London laid it on George, me and wives, without telling us, at a dinner party at his house. He was a friend of George’s and our dentist at the time, and he just put it in our coffee or something. He didn’t know what it was; it’s all the same thing with that sort of middle class London swinger, or whatever. They had all heard about it, and they didn’t know it was different from pot or pills and they gave us it. He said “I advise you not to leave,” and we all thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house, and we didn’t want to know, and we went to the Ad Lib and these discotheques and there were these incredible things going on.

It was insane going around London. When we went to the club we thought it was on fire and then we thought it was a premiere, and it was just an ordinary light outside. We thought, “Shit, what’s going on here?” We were cackling in the streets, and people were shouting “Let’s break a window,” you know, it was just insane. We were just out of our heads. When we finally got on the lift [an elevator in England] we all thought there was a fire, but there was just a little red light. We were all screaming like that, and we were all hot and hysterical, and when we all arrived on the floor, because this was a discotheque that was up a building, the lift stopped and the door opened and we were all [John demonstrates by screaming].

I had read somebody describing the effects of opium in the old days and I thought “Fuck! It’s happening,” and then we went to the Ad Lib and all of that, and then some singer came up to me and said, “Can I sit next to you?” And I said, “Only if you don’t talk,” because I just couldn’t think.

This seemed to go on all night. I can’t remember the details. George somehow or another managed to drive us home in his mini. We were going about ten miles an hour, but it seemed like a thousand and Patty was saying let’s jump out and play football. I was getting all these sort of hysterical jokes coming out like speed, because I was always on that, too.

God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic. I did some drawings at the time, I’ve got them somewhere, of four faces saying “We all agree with you!” I gave them to Ringo, the originals. I did a lot of drawing that night. And then George’s house seemed to be just like a big submarine, I was driving it, they all went to bed, I was carrying on in it, it seemed to float above his wall which was 18 foot and I was driving it.

10. John’s not engaging in paranoid thinking when he references the CIA’s role in popularizing LSD. The history of that is way outside of the scope of both my expertise and this piece, but if you want to read more about this, I recommend the book Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond (Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain, Grove Press, 1985).

NOTE: Acid Dreams is not good at citing sources — this is the book that asserts without attribution that John first smoked acid with Dylan at Heathrow Airport in some unnamed year. But that said, in addition to their detailed examination of the role of the CIA in spreading LSD culture, the final chapter, “What A Field Day For The Heat,” offers a Grail-fluent summary — the best I’ve read so far — of the collapse of the Love Revolution.

11. Not that we need anyone else to tell us about John’s tendency to exaggerate, but Derek Taylor — who himself has a tendency to exaggerate — once observed that “John was never that accurate. He used to talk about “millions of things” when he meant “three.” (Interview with Derek Taylor, reprinted in Ticket to Ride: A Celebration of The Beatles Based on the Hit Radio Show, Denny Somach, Kathleen Somach, and Kevin Gunn, William Morrow, 1989.)

12. “John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,” Rolling Stone, December 1970, published January 21 1971.

full quote:

Q: How long did LSD go on?

John: It went on for years. I must have had a thousand trips.

Q: Literally a thousand or a couple of hundred?

John: Lots. I used to just eat it all the time.

13. Cynthia Lennon, John, Crown, 2005

full quote: “In the following months [after his first trip] John took LSD regularly. He was hungry for new experiences and never afraid to experiment. George had found it fascinating too and he also took it again, as did Paul and Ringo, but John felt it gave his life a whole new dimension. The other Beatles were much more cautious, but John threw himself into it with abandon, convinced that this was the way to greater enlightenment, creativity and happiness. When John was tripping I felt as if I was living with a stranger. He would be distant, so spaced-out that he couldn’t talk to me coherently. I hated that, and I hated the fact that LSD was pulling him away from me. I wouldn’t take it with him so he found others who would. Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily and I became more and more worried. I couldn’t reach him when he was tripping, but when the effects wore off he would be normal until he took it again.”

14. Cynthia Lennon, Hello! magazine, May 28 1994.

full quote: “John by now [here she’s talking about 1966] had become a heavy user of LSD. He wanted to be a genius, he wanted to travel outside his body, he wanted to prove to the world that he had a unique gift. Acid stimulated his creativity and opened up his mind to previously undreamed-of wonders, he believed.”

15. Cynthia Lennon, A Twist of Lennon, Avon, 1980.

full quote: “As an artist and musician, John found LSD creative and stimulating, his senses were filled with revelations and hallucinations he experienced each time he took it. John was like a little boy again. His enthusiasm for life and love reached a new peak; he had opened the floodgates of his mind and had escaped from the imprisonment which fame had entailed. In many ways it was a wonderful thing to watch. Tensions, bigotry, and a bad temper were replaced by understanding and love.”

16. Cynthia Lennon, A Twist of Lennon, Avon, 1980.

NOTE: Cynthia claims to have tripped on LSD twice and had bad trips both times — unsurprising given the importance of “set and setting” and her overall negative attitude towards mind-altering substances.

17. Cynthia Lennon, Hello! magazine, May 28 1994.

18. Liddypool: Birthplace of the Beatles, David Bedford, Dalton Books, 2010.

full quote:

“Q: Knowing John so well, how would you describe him?

BILL HARRY: I was the first one to call John a genius and it was justified. He wanted to create so much all the time. Some people need a stimulant to get them going, and initially with John it was alcohol. A few beers would release his inner creativity and provoke him to create something new. He wasn’t drunk, but he searched for that inner soul that held the secrets of his creativity. It started with alcohol in Liverpool, and then it was Preludin in Hamburg, marijuana, LSD, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Primal Scream therapy. I believe John wasn’t just abusing his body, he was seeking an altered state of consciousness to stimulate his inner creativity to find out more and more. He was the opposite to George, who believed in inner peace and that meditation would bring out his creative genius”.

19. John Lennon: In My Life, Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner, Stein & Day, 1983.

20. John Lennon: In My Life, Pete Shotton and Nicholas Schaffner, Stein & Day, 1983.

21. The math for this is — obviously — by definition subjective and imprecise. As we talked about in the Entangled Form Rabbit Hole, it’s not possible to separate out the individual creative contributions of a deeply enmeshed long-term creative partnership.

But it is possible to determine who the principal composer of a song is, as both Paul and John have done in their “who wrote what” run-down of the Lennon/McCartney catalogue. And based on Paul and John’s recollections - which line up almost precisely — on the album Help!, each was the primary composer of five songs on the album, and two of John’s songs were completed with significant input from Paul. That makes Paul the primary composer on the Help! album, if only by a hair.

22. I’m still considering the credibility of the supporting research, but there may also be some important events that happened during the filming of Help!, relative to Brian’s relationship with John, that added significantly to the cycle of insecurity as it played out during this time period.

We’ll get there in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility. I wouldn’t get too impatient, though, if I were you — you might not like that research very much.

23. ‘When we were in Switzerland doing the ski sequences for Help!, I remember, it was that nice bit of the evening when you take your ski boots off and feel the lead weights falling from your feet, and we had a tape of, I think it was Revolver or Rubber Soul. The way the side was sequenced there were two songs of John’s and two songs of mine, which were nice and maybe sentimental. ‘We were listening to them in this twin bedroom at the hotel and, again symbolically, the glasses lowered, the defences lowered, and he said: “I probably like your songs better than mine, you know.” End of subject. It was never mentioned again.” (Paul McCartney interviewed for Radio Times, March 31 1989.)

NOTE: A good example of Paul’s self-acknowledged tendency to mix up dates. Neither Rubber Soul nor Revolver was recorded until well after the filming of Help!. But given the distinctive setting of the memory — a ski chalet in Austria — it’s likely Paul’s remembering the conversation accurately, but not the actual songs that they listened to.

24. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to determine the exact date of what George refers to as “the Dentist Experience,” aka George and John’s first LSD trip. But while there are a handful of writers, including Steve Turner, who claim to have the exact date based on “the evidence available,” but he doesn’t share that “evidence” and neither does anyone else I’ve found who claims to have an exact date.

But we can come up with the approximate date range with a bit of deductive reasoning.

We know that the dinner party took place in London. And we also know that after the dinner party, John and George were both furious at having been dosed — along with their wives — without their consent. And we also know that the dentist drops out of the story after that night, presumably because John and George ended the friendship. And we know that the dentist paid a visit to the set of Help! during filming in the Bahamas, which wrapped on March 4,1965. And we also know The Beatles didn’t return to London until after the filming dates in Austria, which wrapped on March 28, 1965.

So a reasonable guess is that the Dentist Experience happened sometime after The Beatles returned from Austria, in late March or early April 1965.

While I’ve found no interviews with the dentist himself, Steve Turner writes in his book The Gospel According to the Beatles that the then-girlfriend of the dentist claims that the dosing was consensually nonconsensual, in that John had asked her to dose them without telling them first. If so, then it’s not credible that John was furious enough to end the friendship, if the dentist was simply doing what John had asked him to do.

The dosing of LSD without telling people it was happening was common in the Sixties, but while I can imagine John taking that approach for himself and Cynthia, it stretches credibility to the breaking point to think he’d make that choice on behalf of George and Patti. What’s more, if John was inclined to nonconsensually turn people on to LSD, why didn’t he dose Paul when Paul initially refused to try it, given John’s well-documented eagerness to share the experience with his partner?

All of which is to say that I think it’s likely that John and George cut off ties with the dentist following their dinner party trip is likely accurate, hence the reasoning for the late march/early April 1965 date.

25. Which in turn is magpied from William Blake’s 1790 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”

26. We’re talking here about “Yesterday” as a strictly solo composition, which in an important way, it was — and perhaps especially from John’s point of view. But in an equally important way, “Yesterday” was very much a Lennon/McCartney song (or as Paul might prefer, a McCartney/Lennon song). For more on that — https://www.beatlesabbey.com/p/rabbit-hole-theres-no-such-thing

27. The argument was — oddly enough — presented as a photo essay complete with captions in the official Beatles fan magazine (Issue 228). That photo essay is included in “Unscrambling Yesterday.”

28. This is counter to Cynthia’s recollection. She claims John began tripping regularly “within weeks” of his first experience with the dentist.

Cynthia is often an unreliable narrator when it comes to timelines, but given John’s “why do it when you can overdo it” approach to life, her timeline seems far more plausible than John waiting over six months to try LSD again.

But Cynthia also claims that by the time of John’s first LSD trip, The Beatles had been smoking marijuana “for a few years,” despite the Dylan story having only taken place six months prior — which suggests that her memory of the timeline of John’s LSD use may be a bit distorted, maybe due to her distress surrounding her attitude relative to effects of LSD on her marriage to John.

It’s also not clear to me from the research how easily available LSD was in London in 1965. It might have taken a bit more time for it to become available enough for John to have regular access — although if a dentist could access it, it seems unlikely that a Beatle could not. LSD was, however, easily available in California in 1965, where Kesey et al had been partaking for several years.

29. These songs presumably didn’t include “Yesterday,” which wasn’t recorded until June of that year.

30. And, for that matter, George, who had his own creative unfurling during Rubber Soul — three songs on an album for the first time and his groundbreaking sitar part on Norwegian Wood. That, too, might have put additional pressure on John — especially given John’s own acknowledgement that especially in the early years, he had trouble seeing George as anything other than an inferior junior partner.

31. John, Paul, George, Ringo & Me, Tony Barrow, De Capo Press, 2006.

32. “John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 2 — Life With Lions,” Rolling Stone, December 1970, published February 4 1971.

full quote:

“I was like an artist that went off. . . . Have you never heard of like Dylan Thomas and all them who never fuckin’ wrote but just went up drinking and Brendan Behan and all of them, they died of drink . . . everybody that’s done anything is like that. I just got meself in a party, I was an emperor, I had millions of chicks, drugs, drink, power and everybody saying how great I was. How could I get out of it? It was just like being in a fuckin’ train. I couldn’t get out.

I couldn’t create, either. I created a little, it came out, but I was in the party and you don’t get out of a thing like that. It was fantastic! I came out of the sticks, I didn’t hear about anything – Van Gogh was the most far out thing I had ever heard of. Even London was something we used to dream of, and London’s nothing. I came out of the fuckin’ sticks to take over the world it seemed to me. I was enjoying it, and I was trapped in it, too. I couldn’t do anything about it, I was just going along for the ride. I was hooked, just like a junkie.”

33. “John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,” Rolling Stone, December 1970, published January 21 1971.

34. Cynthia Lennon, John, Hodder, 2006.

full quote: “When John was tripping I felt as if I was living with a stranger. He would be distant, so spaced-out that he couldn’t talk to me coherently. I hated that, and I hated the fact that LSD was pulling him away from me. I wouldn’t take it with him so he found others who would.

Within weeks of his first trip, John was taking LSD daily and I became more and more worried. I couldn’t reach him when he was tripping, but when the effects wore off he would be normal until he took it again.

Initially John’s drug-taking didn’t make a big impact on his work. He took the LSD after recording sessions and concerts, not during them. Later, his drug-taking filtered through into his song-writing, but at this stage his work seemed unaffected.

Soon he was bringing home a ragged assortment of people he’d met through drugs. After a clubbing session he’d pile in with anyone he’d picked up during the evening, whether he knew them or not. They were all high and littered our house for hours, sometimes days on end.

They’d wander around glassy-eyed, crash out on the sofas, beds and floors, then eat whatever they could find in the kitchen. John was an essentially private man, but under the influence of drugs he was vulnerable to anyone and everyone who wanted to take advantage of him.

I knew I couldn’t go on like that indefinitely. Our home was being invaded by people I neither liked nor wanted to know. I was afraid for Julian and myself. I didn’t want to hear loud music all night, or pick my way through semi-conscious bodies when I brought my son down for his breakfast.

But every effort I made to put an end to it was met by a brick wall. A gulf was opening between me and John and I had no idea how to bridge it. Was this a phase I had to ride out, or was it the beginning of the end? I wasn’t going to give up on my marriage without trying everything I could, but I couldn’t live with a man who was constantly in another dimension.”

35. Cynthia Lennon, Hello! Magazine, May 28 1994.

36. In her autobiography, John (Hodder, 2006), Cynthia also offers the following anecdote—

“At the launch party for Sgt. Pepper, John was high and the journalist Ray Coleman, who later wrote a biography of him, was seriously worried about his health when he met him that night. Not only was John clearly drugged, he was smoking and drinking heavily, and looked haggard, old and ill; his eyes were glazed and his speech was slurred. Ray had mentioned his concern to Brian, who had replied, ‘Don’t worry, he’s a survivor.’

I, too, was worried about John’s health: the drugs had ruined his appetite and he did indeed look terrible. I feared he might kill himself. John had always had the potential to self-destruct and now he seemed hell-bent on fulfilling it.”

NOTE: While Coleman does talk in his biography of John about the concerns of those around John over his drug use, he doesn’t offer first-hand specifics, nor does he relate this incident — which is why I didn’t include this quote in the main text, despite it likely being an accurate description of the situation at the time.

37. Interview with Barry Miles, Please Kill Me online magazine, January 7, 2021.

PKM: Do you think John went mad?

Miles: I think John was in grave danger of being an acid burnout at one point. He did get very involved in drugs, his big problem was he didn’t want to repeat what had happened to him, with his own son, Julian. You know, because he knew what it was like not having a father around and he really did feel that Julian needed a proper family. On the other hand, he was stuck in a marriage that, you know, wasn’t working. Well, you know, Cynthia, sweet as she was, was just a regular working-class Liverpool girl, you know, with very little education and, you know, he was John Lennon. And he now had a very, very different worldview… the whole business of being a Beatle, you know? The years in Germany, the world tours and all the rest of it just changed him so much that the relationship with Cynthia just wasn’t working anymore.

PKM: Yeah.

Miles: And, it wasn’t because he had other people, necessarily; he had lots of other girlfriends. So he retreated into just staying at home, watching TV all the time and taking drugs, you know, as a way of… (sic) at least he was there …you know, and not up in London doing stuff. But people like John Dunbar would spend a lot of time down there, and they’d smoke a lot of pot and take a lot of acid, but, but also take quite a lot of heroin. So he was kind of out of it quite a lot of the time, particularly from about ’66 onwards.”

38. Peter Brown and Steven Gaines, The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles, McGraw Hill, 1983.

39. The link between Brian’s “respectability makeover” and Beatlemania is discussed in detail in episode 1:3 (“Hope for Deliverance”) and continued in the Beatlemania Rabbit Hole.

40. Paul and Jane as one of the “It Couples” of Swinging London would almost certainly have been a particular torment for John, given his (as we stepped through the research and analysis in support of in detail in Part One) love and erotic desire for Paul , acted on or not — especially given that the world that adored The Beatles was the same world whose bigotry wouldn’t have allowed John to appear in public as Paul’s romantic partner.

41. The Beatles and Me On Tour, Ivor Davis, Cockney Kid Publishing, 2014.

full quote: “In a T-shirt and white jeans, John had been popping Preludin, which he kept in a little black bag tucked away in the bathroom. He called them “my belly warmers.” He and all the Beatles swallowed the “Prellies,” as they called the uppers, like jellybeans, ever since their days in Hamburg, where they needed them to sustain the ten-hour, seven-day-a-week sessions in the clubs.

The Beatles pharmacy also included a plentiful supply of Drinamyl, tiny blue heart-shaped tablets, a combined stimulant and depressant known in England as “mother’s little helpers,” which was eventually to make its way into a popular Rolling Stones song. I later learned that Neil was the keeper of the dispensary; in the event that they were discovered, the Beatles could claim ignorance, and Neil would have to fall on his sword.”

42. This footnote appears in an earlier chapter, but it’s worth repeating here.

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 especially John — from becoming another Brian Jones.

43. “John Lennon: The Rolling Stone Interview: Part 1 — Working Class Hero,” Rolling Stone, December 1970, published January 21 1971.

full quote: “I can’t remember the details. George somehow or another managed to drive us home in his mini. We were going about ten miles an hour, but it seemed like a thousand and Patty was saying let’s jump out and play football. I was getting all these sort of hysterical jokes coming out like speed, because I was always on that, too.”

44. Vic Garbarini, Brian Cullman, Barbara Graustark, Strawberry Fields Forever: John Lennon Remembered, December 1980.

“BARB: Why did you leave Yoko in 1973?

JOHN: The truth about the separation was she kicked me out ... (sic) so I (laughter) was adrift at sea and there was nobody to protect me from myself which is fine. I should be able to look after myself. I never had, and there was Epstein or Paul to cover for me. I’m not putting Paul down and I’m not putting Brian down. They’d done a good job in containing my personality from not causing too much trouble.”

45. And really, probably before it even got started — but again, we’ll need to wait until Part Two to talk about all of that.

46. We won’t go all the way through to the breakup here, but when you consider that John rejected both Paul and The Beatles during that time, it becomes easy to see why he had what some (including Paul) have termed a nervous breakdown in 1968. That’s what happens when an already-fragile psyche is separated from virtually every source of support and stability they have. We’ll get to all of that when we get to the breakup in future parts of Beautiful Possibility.

47. Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 Tours That Changed the World, Larry Kane, Running Press, 2003.

full quote:

The door to their dressing room opened, and lanky Malcolm Evans emerged with a worried look on his face. Evans almost never looked worried, even during those miraculous great escapes and close calls.

I said, “What’s going on?”

[Mal] answered, “He’s sweating, shaking, looks like too many pills and shit.”

I said, “Pills?”

“Yeah, uppers, downers, pain stuff, I think, y’know.”

Up until that point, I had never heard of any pills—over-the-counter, prescription or illegal — associated with the Beatles. So I was genuinely shocked. There had been some marijuana cigarettes around, but as far as I was concerned, the pills were something new. But they weren’t really, apparently. Later, John Lennon would talk about having taken pills of some sort since he was a young teenager

“How bad is he?” I asked Mal.

“Don’t say anything. The other boys are cool, they think he’s just nervous,” Mal said. “The boys are always nervous. They get nervous just before, you know.”

On that evening, 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.”

NOTE — once again — the proximity of “Yesterday” to this incident.

48. The Ed Sullivan overdose as part of a pattern of behavior on John’s part might appear to contradict my suggestion in a prior chapter that The Beatles did not take chances with their music relative to their use of mind-altering substances. But it doesn’t contradict.

It’s doubtful John consciously intended to fuck up the Ed Sullivan appearance by taking “too many pills and shit.” Instead, it seems clear that what Kane is describing is an accidental overdose — which is a different thing entirely from intentionally taking a chance on experimenting with cannabis on the eve of a major performance. Also, the Dylan story involved the consent of all four Beatles, not just John.

I’ve found nothing whatsoever to indicate that John ever deliberately compromised his ability to make music for any reason, drug-related or otherwise. As we’ve talked about, his substance-use (and eventual abuse) seems to have been intended to enhance that creative ability. That he misjudged relative to the Ed Sullivan incident is a different situation from deliberately self-sabotaging a performance or a recording session — which again, I’ve found no research whatsoever to suggest that he ever did. And indeed, it’s notice that John did indeed manage the Ed Sullivan performance with little-to-no visible signs of the overdose.

49. Recall here Paul’s comment to Robert Fraser’s biographer Harriet Vyner that we considered in Chapter 2—

“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?’” (Paul McCartney interviewed for Groovy Bob: The Life & Times of Robert Fraser, Harriet Vyner, Faber & Faber, 1999.)

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

51. The Red Hand Files, Issue #234, April 2023. (Because it wouldn’t be an Abbey series without a Nick Cave quote...)

52. ⚠️NOTE: This is a hypothetical quote — a generic example of this sort of confrontation — not an actual quote from Paul or anyone else. Please do not quote this.

53. ⚠️Again, this is a hypothetical quote, not a real one. Please do not quote this.

54. ⚠️And again, hypothetical quote, not a real one. Please do not quote this.

55. To extend this speculative scenario, if this was indeed John’s reaction, then Paul, in turn, may have felt even more frustrated and misunderstood than he did before, having his words misinterpreted as a lack of love, rather than the anguished expression of it.

And that in turn would have meant that Paul’s own fear of sharing his innermost feelings was reinforced — because clearly (from Paul’s point of view) this is the sort of catastrophe that happens when he tries to share his feelings. And that, in turn, offers us some clues to why he maybe didn’t say anything during the breakup, and why the struggle-to-share-feelings/regret songs begin in earnest during that time period. .

56. 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, Robyn Hitchcock, Akashic Books, Ltd., 2024.

full quote: “We are living in Weybridge, Surrey, in a semidetached white house opposite a cricket green, next door to the newsagent and tobacconist, Mr. Hagley. Every night, my father comes home from work on the train and changes out of his city garb; then he puts on old clothes and paints pictures from his imagination while listening to the BBC Home Service on the wireless.”

57. Not that we really need anyone to tell us that John Lennon wasn’t suited for life in suburbia, but here’s Paul in Many Years From Now talking about John’s move to Weybridge—

“It just happened. You see, we weren’t used to wealth. So wealth was dealt with by other people, and we were directed into areas. They did it because Jim Isherwood wanted them living near him. I really don’t think they knew that because John was not rebellious enough to say, “Fuck that!” This is why I was fascinated by the Ashers; because the other guys were being shown Weybridge, and I didn’t particularly like the look of it, it was all a bit golf club for me, but Cynthia wanted to settle John down, pipe and slippers. The minute she said that to me I thought, Kiss of death, I know my mate and that is not what he wants. She got a couple of years of that, but he finally had to break loose and because he couldn’t tell her he didn’t want it, he had to bring Yoko to breakfast.” (Paul McCartney quoted in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles, H. Holt, 1997.)

58. In this sense, the effect Paul’s life as the result of his friendship with Robert Fraser was perhaps similar to the effect on John’s life when he met Stu Sutcliffe in art school, and we’ll get to that in Part Two of Beautiful Possibility.

59. There is ample documentation from the Apple scruffs — both photographic and in diaries — of John’s frequent visits and overnight stays with Paul at Cavendish, particularly during the recording of Sgt. Pepper, in two books by memorabilia dealer Paul Wane — Paul McCartney, London, NW8 - 1967 and Sgt. Peppers (both books self-published, 2005.)

60. “Q: In terms of atmosphere in the studio and relations within the band, what were the happiest and least happiest Beatles albums to record?

PAUL: It’s a good question, but also a difficult one because time is a great healer, and looking back on the Beatles I tend to think that it was all great fun. And that’s not whitewash, it’s just the way that memory goes. You can have a terrible holiday, it might rain all the time, but years later if someone asks, “Did you ever go to the south of France?” you would say, “Oh yes, I had a great time .. .”. So, relatively speaking, they were all great to record, and I wouldn’t take one degree off any of them. But, to answer the question, “Revolver” and “Rubber Soul” were especially nice. It was still early days and we were coming good as an album band, so they felt very fresh. On the other hand, the “White Album” and “Let It Be” had to be the most difficult because the group was starting to break up.” (Paul McCartney interviewed in Record Collector, February 1995.)

NOTE: Notice here how Paul is articulating the process of turning a story from history into mythology by blurring detail — and how, when it comes to our personal memories, it’s our individual worldviews that determine specifically how that detail is blurred. Paul is talking about blurring towards the positive as if that’s universal, but of course, that’s Paul’s particular worldview, and not necessarily the way the blurring happens for others.

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