I decided to start a thread on this because it seemed too serious for an album discussion.

What do you think about the Beatles' heavier use of drugs, particularly acid? Here was my initial reaction:  

Quoted from Kevin

Damn the dentist.

I know George would disagree with me, but I say "Damn the dentist" too. I think the acid particularly hurt John, who was (in my opinion) "differently wired" to begin with. I don't mean it necessarily hurt his creativity, because I know a lot of people really enjoy his acid-influenced compositions. But I think it hurt him as a person, just as someone who could be happy in a relationship, which is challenge enough for anybody, without throwing overuse of drugs into it (and I think there's little question about overuse here; John himself said "I used to eat it all the time").

Jane and Cynthia both complained that Paul and John were different after taking acid. While Paul used moderation, I think John really lost himself. One of my many books, I forget which, talks about how significant acid use puts you into this extremely loving mindframe; you don't take trips anymore, your brain is all tuckered out, so it just makes you calm and happy. I think about the change the press remarked upon during the Sergeant Pepper release party, where John is wearing a sporran. They noticed the difference instantly, after being away from the Beatles for several months. (John later reverted back to his whippersnapper self, but I definitely think the chemicals had a big influence on him... well, always.) I personally believe his latching onto Yoko so intensely was an attempt to reconstruct an identity that the drugs had damaged.

Well, enough of my rambling. What does everyone else think?

Having dabbled in acid for 30 years now I'd say its immediate effect is to turn you into either a blabbering idiot or an introverted shivering mess. Thankfully I've only experienced the former so my memories are only happy ones. I have certainly never seen or experienced any "loving mindframe."
Tripping people find straight people incomprehensible while it must be damn annoying being straight around someone tripping. It's no wonder John and Cynths relationship collapsed under its strain.
I know a few people who have done way more than they should - and they all seem to very edgy, nervous, paranoid people. One of the famous sayings about LSD is that it destroys your ego.
It's hard to see it as being a particularly creative drug. It scrambles your brain and its hard to hold on to any thought for any length of time. You definately see the world differently, but its not that "I've had a great idea!" better world you get (initially)with dope. That might explain why psychedelia as a musical trend was so short lived and produced so much pretentious rubbish.

I once took acid and it was to date the the most frightening experience of my life.
I remember sitting on the floor and watching my knees open up  , i could see worms wriggling about in a kind of jelly mush .
And each time i tried to stand up , i kept falling back on the floor .
I could feel things moving about under my skin , i was with a group of other people some of them seemed ok on it .
But i was trapped in this really bad place , it took ages for it to wear off .
Ive never done it since and would'nt recommend it to anyone .
Have the odd spliff by all means , but don't touch acid .
If i was creative like John maybe i could have turned it into song , but im not, i can paint a bit but it's only ok not brilliant.
Having done other drugs too , i would say that drugs make you lazy , i think John in particular was lazy through much of the 70's and i think drugs were apart of that lazyness.
Having said that he still came up with a lot of brilliant songs , but maybe if he had had a less is more kind of attitude with regard to drugs he may have created more in his solo years .

DaveRam

You poor bugger.
I've seen people take acid, freak out and try to stop it. But there's nothing you can do - no amount of coffee, showers, food, walks - it just keeps on coming. And you're looking at a good eight hour stretch so its best to settle in for the ride. It's like skydiving - once you jump out that plane......
You definately have to be very sure you want to do drugs before you touch it (thankfully my mind was well made up. )
I quite enjoyed it.
But when you  read the level of Johns intake it makes you shiver.

I was'nt prepeared Kevin for how long the trip lasted mine most have gone on 20 hours .
Mellow Dave is much better than freakout Dave , i can handle him, give me a giggling munching spliff anyday  

DaveRam

I've never done it personally, I don't intend to either, I'm happy with how I think and feel about the world. As with all drugs I suppose everyone has a different experience of it, makes different people think and feel differently, I suppose, I don't know. I did know one guy who was LSD psycosis (as well as being Cannabis and Heroin psycosis) he once took 13 tabs at once and wandered around West Oxfordshire for a fortnight. This Guy was little more than a reck, he had no job, no friends, no life really. I mean he was a nice fella he'd share anything he was very naive but he had the ability to turn on a six-pence, so from that I think it maybe completely erases your ego, polarises your persona (not that your not polarised anyway it just takes it to the extremes), turns you into a blank canvas Human Being.

I think the people who go mad off of any drug were mad before they took anything and were mad to take it in the first place. Those who are fine with them, those who are addicted but understand that they are, are relatively sane, many people I know take drugs (Ecstacy, Cocaine and Cannabis) and hold down jobs and have a family and are decent enough people. Whether consciously or sub-consciously I feel that when we take drugs (well when I do) we do it to kill some pain, but it don't kill it, it just hides it away until it builds up and up until it's uncontrolable that's when people go mad, but I have acknowledged that. I still smoke Cannabis occasionally but I know what it does to my brain. Ain't no chemical gonna conquor this Guy.

Who you are before dictates who you are after. In any event.

Quoted from harihead

I decided to start a thread on this because it seemed too serious for an album discussion.

What do you think about the Beatles' heavier use of drugs, particularly acid? Here was my initial reaction:  


I know George would disagree with me, but I say "Damn the dentist" too. I think the acid particularly hurt John, who was (in my opinion) "differently wired" to begin with. I don't mean it necessarily hurt his creativity, because I know a lot of people really enjoy his acid-influenced compositions. But I think it hurt him as a person, just as someone who could be happy in a relationship, which is challenge enough for anybody, without throwing overuse of drugs into it (and I think there's little question about overuse here; John himself said "I used to eat it all the time").

Jane and Cynthia both complained that Paul and John were different after taking acid. While Paul used moderation, I think John really lost himself. One of my many books, I forget which, talks about how significant acid use puts you into this extremely loving mindframe; you don't take trips anymore, your brain is all tuckered out, so it just makes you calm and happy. I think about the change the press remarked upon during the Sergeant Pepper release party, where John is wearing a sporran. They noticed the difference instantly, after being away from the Beatles for several months. (John later reverted back to his whippersnapper self, but I definitely think the chemicals had a big influence on him... well, always.) I personally believe his latching onto Yoko so intensely was an attempt to reconstruct an identity that the drugs had damaged.

Well, enough of my rambling. What does everyone else think?

Hi HH and all - what is a sporran?

And for the topic ... I think John understood that he did not belong to our world and our society, he wrote about that from the time he was in his early teens. He flamed out of grade school, flamed out of art school. During one of the breaks in the Beatles (maybe after the first Hamburg trip), he tried to get a job in a factory, and was fired with the comment "unsuitable for employment". He was able to create a protected niche where he did fit and obviously fluorished (if you can call The Beatles a niche), but after a time it became a job just like everything else, and he couldn't handle that. And so he dropped out of that. He had lots of money from the Beatles left over, so he could still basically do what he wanted to.

Put another way ... Pete Best went out and got a job when he got sacked. If John had been sacked, he would have probably wound up dead in a few years, from either drugs, alcohol, violence, or likely a combination of all 3. I just don't see that he could pull a 9-5er as a baker like Pete did.

I think the drugs changed the energetic John to a complacent one. I don't think he could have kept up the pace, and so I wonder if he would have survived the mid-60s without the LSD. A lot of people didn't (Hendrix, Joplin, Keith Moon), and I think the big surprise is really that John did.

So there's my rambling ... sorry!

Thank you, everyone, for your thoughtful and honest remarks. These are deep waters.

Alexis, a sporran is the furry pouch John is wearing in the Sgt Pepper press pics. It's normally worn in front of a kilt, but John said he needed it because his trousers had no pockets and he needed somewhere to put his car keys!  

I think this is really insightful:

Quoted from Alexis

after a time it became a job just like everything else, and he couldn't handle that.

I think you're right; he couldn't have found a "regular" job; he was never a regular person. Pete was much more normal-- and he certainly didn't get into the heavy drug use that the others did in Hamburg. They believed they "needed" it. But Pete didn't, and worked the same hours. I think even then, we saw personal choice operating. I think John, Paul, and George simply liked drugs. They liked how it made them feel, they liked the effects-- they just liked it!

In the Beatles Anthology, George spoke warmly of his LSD experience. He saw it as a turning point in his life, something that changed him forever for the good. Perhaps it was a personal breakthrough for him, but I almost can't watch the Let It Be tapes with all those pale, drugged-out faces. I know John was into heroine then, but by then the drug use had really started to show on them all. And I don't think it was a good thing for their music, in the long term.

Quoted from Kevin

One of the famous sayings about LSD is that it destroys your ego.
It's hard to see it as being a particularly creative drug. It scrambles your brain and its hard to hold on to any thought for any length of time. You definately see the world differently, but its not that "I've had a great idea!" better world you get (initially)with dope. That might explain why psychedelia as a musical trend was so short lived and produced so much pretentious rubbish.

Thanks for your personal insights. I'm sure if I had tried acid, I would have ended up like DaveRam, or worse. I react very strongly to drugs. Most perscription drugs I've taken (painkillers and the like) make me so ill, I prefer the pain to the drugs. I liked marijuana, because I could easily regulate it, but even it ended up giving me splitting headaches and just wasn't worth the toke.

But I do think that drugs (including alcohol) make you lazy. When you're as wealthy as John ended up being, if you wanted to be lazy all the time and could afford to do it, there's hardly any incentive to get out there and create anymore. But I think it was a sad loss. Paul and George seemed wiser about regulating their input. Ringo got really active again after he kicked the alcohol-- quite a brave thing to admit at the time. But I need to be sharp to create, and I suspect the Beatles were the same way. Ringo said as much during the Anthology interviews: "Whenever we overdid our intake, what we produced was just crap. We'd listen to it the next day and say, 'We have to do that again.'"

A sporran is something sweatys wear to keep themselves warm.

I've never tried LSD or any othe ilegal drug and I have no plans to do it.  The thought that a drug can alter my mind is really scary.  I think becoming addicted to drugs or alcohol brings an additional problem.  It's well documented how people become a mess when their addictions get out of control.  They can't function properly and become erratic and umpredictable.  Through music history we have seen so many talented people who had died in the prime of their careers because of these addictions.  

Quoted from Dark Phoenyx

Thriough music history we have seen so nany talented people who had died in the prime of their careers because of these addictions.  

Couldn't have put it better myself Dark Phoenyx!

Great thread; thanks for starting it.
OK, me: 45 years old, so I came along after the Summer of Love and all that (I was 5) but I remember marveling at the whole thing.  And, being a huge fabs fan, and reading how Strawberry Fields and Walrus and such were written after/about such experiences, I couldn’t wait to try it.  All of it.
My experiences with it were wonderful, except for the odd paranoid sequence.  Trying to “maintain” in a public setting wasn’t easy, or a good idea.  But, sometimes you run out of beer.  Life’s like that.
Yeah, I had a “loving mindframe,” was an introverted mess, all those things.  I’m sorry for the people who didn’t enjoy it; I can’t explain why that is.
As a student of Thanatology, I’ve read about the beneficial uses of it for therapy, and had professors who swear by it for helping people get past fear.  And, corny as it sounds, to help them have insights.
Did it change John and George profoundly?  Yes.  That’s well-documented.  It does change you. Macca mentioned that in “Anthology,” the fear of never being able to “get back home,” or something.
Was it a mistake for them?  I don’t think so.  We can never know, of course, because we don’t know what would’ve happened had they not.  Who knows?  A drunken drive might have killed them on a night when they did some.  
I think John was always a fragile guy.  His home life explains a lot of that.  At first he fought a lot, tried art, had intense friendships with Stu, Paul and others, drank a lot, did bennies, etc.  Acid seems to have finally exposed all those buried heartaches.  Deep hurt, a keen intellect, an intense curiosity, and acid.  This is a man ready for change, always ready for change.
Anyway, they did what they did, and I think their ideas exploded.  For a lot of us young lads, it was a template, right or wrong.  Turn on, be a seeker, eventually pursue philosophies, try to understand the world.  It was just one step.
I ramble.  Thanks for listening.  walrus  

  

John describes his first acid trip in a radio interview in 1970.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IaPtrmGCHA

No Comment  

For George the drug was simply a vehicle.  For John, an end in itself.  Both sought annihilation of the ego, but John had nothing left once he'd annihilated his.  So he just turned to another drug--heroin, cocaine, alcohol.  George integrated his acid experiences into a new psyche that could admit it wasn't the center of the universe.  John, for all his causes, seemed to remain self-centered to the end.  

As for people trying drugs--I think illegal drugs are one of the most dangerous things you can do.  I applaud Dark Phoenyx's pov.  We know so much more today about mental illness and brain chemistry than we did in the '60s--it's frightening to think what people were injecting and swallowing.  (And still do today--do you think anybody washes their hands before they mix up dope?  Does is matter that you cut your finger and bleed into the mix?  Nah.)  

Often, folks with legitimate mental illness self-medicate with horrific consequences.  Look at what the current type of legal drugs for mental illness seem to have done for someone like Brian Wilson (who seemed incapacitated for decades).  

I remember once in college walking up a stairwell between classes.  I think it was the history building.  Anyhow, someone had scribbled on the wall at some impossible angle: "Never do, heroin  NEVER"

The fellow seemed to know what he was talking about.