There was one final strategy that the defenders of the straight world developed at this time. It was a common stand-by of the neighbours. They argued that the talent of such groups was shallow. The easy money would soon be spent, squandered on objects the groups would be too jejune to appreciate. These musicians couldn’t think about the future. What fools they were to forfeit the possibility of a secure job for the pleasure of having teenagers worship them for six months.
This sneering ‘anyone-can-do-it’ attitude to the Beatles wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Anyone could have a group — and they did. But it was obvious from early on that the Beatles were not a two-hit group like the Merseybeats or Freddie and the Dreamers. And around the time that Hogg was worrying about the authorship of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and turning down the bass on ‘She’s Leaving Home’, just as he was getting himself used to them, the Beatles were doing something that had never been done before. They were writing songs about drugs, songs that could be fully comprehended only by people who took drugs, songs designed to be enjoyed all the more if you were stoned when you listened to them.
And Paul McCartney had admitted to using drugs, specifically LSD. This news was very shocking then. For me, the only association that drugs conjured up was of skinny Chinese junkies in squalid opium dens and morphine addicts in B movies; there had also been the wife in Long Day’s Journey into Night. What were the Mopheads doing to themselves? Where were they taking us?
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On Peter Blake’s cover for Sgt Pepper, between Sir Robert Peel and Terry Southern, is an ex-Etonian novelist mentioned in Remembrance of Things Past and considered by Proust to be a genius — Aldous Huxley. Huxley first took mescalin in 1953, twelve years before the Beatles used LSD. He took psychedelic drugs eleven times, including on his death bed, when his wife injected him with LSD. During his first trip Huxley felt himself turning into four bamboo chair legs. As the folds of his grey flannel trousers became ‘charged with is-ness’ the world became a compelling, unpredictable, living and breathing organism. In this transfigured universe Huxley realised both his fear of and need for the ‘marvellous’; one of the soul’s principal appetites was for ‘transcendence’. In an alienated, routine world ruled by habit, the urge for escape, for euphoria, for heightened sensation, could not be denied.
Despite his enthusiasm for LSD, when Huxley took psilocybin with Timothy Leary at Harvard he was alarmed by Leary’s ideas about the wider use of psychedelic drugs. He thought Leary was an ‘ass’ and felt that LSD, if it were to be widely tried at all, should be given to the cultural élite — to artists, psychologists, philosophers and writers. It was important that psychedelic drugs be used seriously, primarily as aids to contemplation. Certainly they changed nothing in the world, being ‘incompatible with action and even with the will to action’. Huxley was especially nervous about the aphrodisiac qualities of LSD and wrote to Leary: ‘I strongly urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the bag. We’ve stirred up enough trouble suggesting that drugs can stimulate aesthetic and religious experience.’
But there was nothing Huxley could do to keep the ‘cat’ in the bag. In 1961 Leary gave LSD to Allen Ginsberg, who became convinced the drug contained the possibilities for political change. Four years later the Beatles met Ginsberg through Bob Dylan. At his own birthday party Ginsberg was naked apart from a pair of underpants on his head and a ‘do not disturb’ sign tied to his penis. Later, Lennon was to learn a lot from Ginsberg’s style of self-exhibition as protest, but on this occasion he shrank from Ginsberg, saying: ‘You don’t do that in front of the birds!’
Throughout the second half of the 1960s the Beatles functioned as that rare but necessary and important channel, popularisers of esoteric ideas — about mysticism, about different forms of political involvement and about drugs. Many of these ideas originated with Huxley. The Beatles could seduce the world partly because of their innocence. They were, basically, good boys who became bad boys. And when they became bad boys, they took a lot of people with them.
Lennon claimed to have ‘tripped’ hundreds of times, and he was just the sort to become interested in unusual states of mind. LSD creates euphoria and suspends inhibition; it may make us aware of life’s intense flavour. In the tripper’s escalation of awareness, the memory is stimulated too. Lennon knew the source of his art was the past, and his acid songs were full of melancholy, self-examination and regret. It’s no surprise that Sgt Pepper, which at one time was to include ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’, was originally intended to be an album of songs about Lennon and McCartney’s Liverpool childhood.
Soon the Beatles started to wear clothes designed to be read by people who were stoned. God knows how much ‘is-ness’ Huxley would have felt had he seen John Lennon in 1967, when he was reportedly wearing a green flower-patterned shirt, red cord trousers, yellow socks and a sporran in which he carried his loose change and keys. These weren’t the cheap but hip adaptations of work clothes that young males had worn since the late 1940s — Levi jackets and jeans, sneakers, work boots or DMs, baseball caps, leather jackets — democratic styles practical for work. The Beatles had rejected this conception of work. Like Baudelairean dandies they could afford to dress ironically and effeminately, for each other, for fun, beyond the constraints of the ordinary. Stepping out into that struggling post-war world steeped in memories of recent devastation and fear — the war was closer to them than Sgt Pepper is to me today — wearing shimmering bandsman’s outfits, crushed velvet, peach-coloured silk and long hair, their clothes were gloriously non-functional, identifying their creativity and the pleasures of drug-taking.
By 1966 the Beatles behaved as if they spoke directly to the whole world. This was not a mistake: they were at the centre of life for millions of young people in the West. And certainly they’re the only mere pop group you could remove from history and suggest that culturally, without them, things would have been significantly different. All this meant that what they did was influential and important. At this time, before people were aware of the power of the media, the social changes the Beatles sanctioned had happened practically before anyone noticed. Musicians have always been involved with drugs, but the Beatles were the first to parade their particular drug-use — marijuana and LSD — publicly and without shame. They never claimed, as musicians do now — when found out — that drugs were a ‘problem’ for them. And unlike the Rolling Stones, they were never humiliated for drug-taking or turned into outlaws. There’s a story that at a bust at Keith Richard’s house in 1967, before the police went in they waited for George Harrison to leave. The Beatles made taking drugs seem an enjoyable, fashionable and liberating experience: like them, you would see and feel in ways you hadn’t imagined possible. Their endorsement, far more than that of any other group or individual, removed drugs from their sub-cultural, avant-garde and generally squalid associations, making them part of mainstream youth activity. Since then, illegal drugs have accompanied music, fashion and dance as part of what it is to be young in the West.
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Allen Ginsberg called the Beatles ‘the paradigm of the age’, and they were indeed condemned to live out their period in all its foolishness, extremity and commendable idealism. Countless preoccupations of the time were expressed through the Fabs. Even Apple Corps was a characteristic 1960s notion: an attempt to run a business venture in an informal, creative and non-materialistic way.