Influence of drugs on the musical output of a Beatles - Essay Example

Your Number 14 June 2006 With a Little Help from My Friends Beneath the neat haircuts and proper suits, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were buzzed on speed from the very beginnings of their careers. They smoked pot with other musicians in England before they achieved stardom, and, in 1965, embraced LSD, becoming gurus of the acid movement. Even after they quit taking acid, their minds reacted to effects of the drug. Throughout the life of the band, drugs, particularly psychedelics, influenced the Beatles’ music. At first, the musicians took over-the-counter uppers called Preludin to keep up the grueling schedule required of young musicians under contract in German clubs. John Lennon said, “If they came in at five in the morning and we’d been playing seven hours, they’d give us a crate of champagne and we were supposed to carry on. My voice began to hurt with the pain of singing. But we learned from the Germans that you could stay awake by eating slimming pills, so we did that” (The Beatles Anthology 49). Ringo Starr remembers that they began using drugs, because, “That’s the only way we could continue playing for so long. …we’d get really wired and go on for days. So with beer and Preludin, that’s how we survived” (The Beatles Anthology 50). When they got back to Liverpool, the lifestyle had already changed the way they played music. George Harrison recalls that the club audiences “liked us because we were kind of rough…we’d come on, jumping and stomping. Wild men in leather suits” (The Beatles Anthology 57). The music was infused with the effects of the altered state. Rock and roll’s origins lie in the frenetic beat of the amphetamine rush. Like generations of jazz musicians before them, The Beatles also found inspiration in marijuana. John admits, “The drugs were around a long time. All the jazz musicians had been into heavy dope for years and years—it’s just that they got in the media in the Sixties” (The Beatles Anthology 158). They weren’t interested in getting high until, as Ringo says, “In New York we met Bob Dylan. That was the first time that I’d really smoked marijuana and I laughed and laughed and laughed. It was fabulous” (The Beatles Anthology 158). Paul McCartney remembers “thinking I’d found the meaning of life that night” (The Beatles Anthology 158). Dylan had assumed, based on their lyrics, that the Beatles already smoked pot. The surreal vision of psychedelic drugs naturally suited their worldview. In 1965, without their knowledge or consent, John, George, and their wives were dosed with a new drug. Very little was known about LSD at the time; the musicians never heard about it until after they felt its effects. George reveals thinking that the man who put it in their coffee “thought it was an aphrodisiac…and I think he thought there was going to be a big gang-bang and that he was going to get to shag everybody” (The Beatles Anthology 177). Uncomfortable with the situation, they all went out clubbing where, George says, “I felt the most incredible feeling… a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had…. I felt in love, not with anything or anybody in particular, but with everything. Everything was perfect” (The Beatles Anthology 177). From then on, their music was tinged with psychedelic undertones. George explains it by saying, “That first time I had acid, a light-bulb went on in my head” (The Beatles Anthology 180). However, he says, “after you’ve had it a couple of times there doesn’t seem to be any point to taking it again” (The Beatles Anthology 179) because “the basic thing that I first experienced was the thought: ‘You shouldn’t need this, because it’s a state of awareness’” (The Beatles Anthology 179). This jibes with Timothy Leary’s view, “The psychedelic movement was a mind-exploration movement” (Leary). What the Beatles were doing was changing their conscious perception of the world. After their experience with LSD, they could never go back to their previous state of consciousness. The revelations of the drug touched everything they ever did afterward. Although they took a lot of acid in the Sixties, they did not care to take it for long periods of time. When they became disciples of the Maharishi, LSD became passé. John “never took it in the studio” (The Beatles Anthology 242), because he didn’t want anything to affect the standard of the music. The group also witnessed the decline in their manager, Brian Epstein, who eventually committed suicide. Although a number of problems led to his tragic end, Journalist Larry Kane points out, “The Beatles were beginning to see that Brian Epstein was a different kind of drug taker altogether. He did it because he was unhappy, and he used to try to bring himself up. He would keep himself awake, put himself to sleep and wake himself up again” (Kane 216). The Beatles, however, were committed to creating work that satisfied them, and “if they had written lyrics or music under the influence of drugs and then discovered that they seemed to make no sense when sober, they would have found a way to use the music in a song that made sense, turned it into a hit” (“Synesthethia”) However, the band drank, as they’d done all along, and smoked pot while working on their albums. On Rubber Soul (1965), songs such as “Nowhere Man” indicated the direction the band’s music would take. By 1966, “a radical change would take place…with the release of their Revolver album. There was little doubt with the release of this album that the music was inspired by LSD. The album cover mostly line drawn, in the psychedelic art style” (Wong). The first lines of the song “Tomorrow Never Knows” were deliberate inductions into psychedelic thought. The words themselves were “taken from the introduction of the book, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Albert” (Wong). The Beatles followed this album up with the release of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane,” both of which reflect altered states of thought. One theory is that the drug use, along with an interest in surrealism, allowed a more meaningful stream-of-consciousness creation process. Some authors think, “The Beatles’ use of LSD, and its effect on their songwriting, strongly resembled…‘automatic writing.’ They began writing straight from their imaginations, attempting to show their fans what LSD and Eastern mysticism had shown them” (“Synesthesia”). As their producer George Martin points out, Sgt Pepper’s “was the epitome of the Swinging Sixties…the freedom of sex, the freedom of soft drugs like marijuana” (The Beatles Anthology 252). By ingesting LSD, the Beatles were actually consuming the changing ideals of their generation. These new ways of thinking diffused out into their music in songs like “A Little Help From My Friends.” In an interview with Rolling Stone in 1987, acid guru Timothy Leary expresses his belief that these influences from the culture were magnified and reflected back into the culture. He remembers that, “The Summer of Love…was triggered symbolically by the Beatles Sgt Pepper album, which changed rock and roll into a new and powerful cultural form” (Leary). Although Rubber Soul and Revolver before it had been influenced by psychedelic drugs, Sgt Pepper’s was the album that brought the culture to everyone. Of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, John remembers, “We didn’t really shove the LP full of pot and drugs but, I mean, there was an effect…a feeling that something had happened between Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s” (The Beatles Anthology 242). This effect, apparently, is the one that George talks about. When certain people are exposed to the revelations of LSD, their consciousness expands and “you don’t ever really return to how you were before” (The Beatles Anthology 179). It is a consciousness that can be discovered in other ways, however. John says, “If we’d met the Maharishi before we had taken LSD, we wouldn’t have needed to take it” (The Beatles Anthology 262). However, he also says, “We don’t regret having taken LSD. It was a stepping-stone. But now we should be able to experience things at first hand” (The Beatles Anthology 262). George suggests, “It enables you to see a lot of possibilities that you may never have noticed before, but it isn’t the answer. You don’t just take LSD and that’s it forever; you’re OK” (The Beatles Anthology 263). Rather, LSD was one tool that informed their writing, their worldview, and their consciousness. Works Cited ---The Beatles Anthology.San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 2000. Kane, Larry. Ticket to Ride: Inside the Beatles’ 1964 Tour that Changed the World. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press. 2003. Leary, Timothy and David Scheff. “© 1987 Rolling Stone Magazine Interview.” Skeptic Tank. 15 June 2006 < http://www.skepticfiles.org/weird/leary003.htm>. “Synesthesia: Surrealism in the Beatles Music.” 3 May 2003. Everything. 15 June 2006 < http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1458231>. Wong, George. “Psychedelic Fungi and Its Impact on Music and Art.” 2003. University of Hawaii at Manoa Botany. 15 June 2006 . Read More