Paul McCartney (29 page)

He had first tried marijuana along with the other Beatles and Brian at the end of their second American tour, in August 1964. The place could hardly have been more public–a suite in New York’s Delmonico Hotel with thousands of fans (and dozens of police) in the street below and a music industry reception going on in the next room.

The occasion was their first encounter with Bob Dylan, a performer in whom the similarities to John were already being noted. Dylan himself supplied the drug, assuming his hosts must already be familiar with a substance beloved by musicians since the jazz and ragtime era. He was amazed to find the Beatles had never tried any narcotic stronger than amphetamine uppers and the benzedrine wicks of nasal inhalers. It turned out he’d been deceived by their Liverpool accents on ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’; when they sang ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide’, Dylan heard it as ‘I get high, I get high!’

On John, George, Ringo and Brian, the effect of that first joint was uncontrollable giggles. Paul, by contrast, became convinced that all the secrets of life were suddenly being revealed to him, and made roadie Mal Evans follow him around with a pen and paper, taking them down at his dictation. Unfortunately, he could never find the bit of paper afterwards.

From then on, in their usual one-for-all-all-for-one spirit, pot became a central element in the band’s collective life. And to begin with, little or no risk was involved. Early-Sixties Britain was a society virtually free of what would later be termed recreational drugs, although serious narcotics were available on prescription for medicinal purposes or sold over the counter as ingredients in products like cold-cures. Most British police officers in this era couldn’t have identified either the sight or smell of marijuana. Any awkward questions were easily deflected by saying it was just ‘a herbal cigarette’.

Paul regarded its effect as wholly positive, a view from which he could never deviate after medical opinion turned against it. For him, the sage-scented fumes were ‘uplifting’, though the effect on most people was to send them to sleep. He saw pot as a modern equivalent of the native American’s pipe of peace, which reduced everyone to the same euphoric, amicable haze. ‘Most people think his “Got to Get You into My Life” is a love song,’ says Barry Miles. ‘Actually, it was written about pot because he liked it so much.’

The Beatles made Help! mainly under its influence–‘a happy high’, director Richard Lester would remember. On every tour it went into their luggage with minimal precautions: roadies Neil and Mal would buy cartons of 200 cigarettes in individual 20-packs, then extract the tobacco from each paper tube and force in the straggly, aromatic strands instead. The most blatant bravado–still without repercussions of any kind–surrounded their investiture as MBEs by the Queen at Buckingham Palace. John claimed that before meeting their sovereign, they had ducked into a palace washroom and taken a few nerve-steadying drags on a joint, though Paul now says they only shared a cigarette like naughty schoolboys behind the bike-shed.

When they were recording at Abbey Road, John would set off from his new home in Weybridge, Surrey, pick up Ringo from his house on the same estate, and both would pot-smoke the 20-odd miles to London. Usually by the time they arrived, the combination of fumes and the overheated car would have brought on travel sickness that turned them almost as green as their own grass.

In the studio, they didn’t dare do it in front of the headmasterly George Martin, but would sneak off together to the gents’ toilet or huddle down behind Ringo’s drum-baffles out of view of the control room. Their producer remained equally unaware of the first drug reference John and Paul smuggled onto a track–‘turn me on when I get lonely’ in Paul’s ‘She’s a Woman’. Paul also was careful to keep his new pastime secret from his dad, although his little stepsister, Ruth, noticed that when he came to Heswall to stay, he and his musician friends spent inexplicably long, hilarious periods among the vines and tomatoes in Jim McCartney’s greenhouse.

Among his Wimpole Street circle, he discovered, pot was nothing new. Peter Asher’s friend John Dunbar had tried it–and much else besides–while hitch-hiking around America. Dunbar’s bookseller friend Barry Miles possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of creative people who had leaned on it, from the beat poets of the Fifties to the literary colossi of 1920s Paris. It was from Miles he learned about Alice B. Toklas, the lesbian lover of Gertrude Stein, whose eponymous cookbook, as famous as Stein’s cryptic poems, included a recipe for hash brownies. ‘I told Paul that my wife, Sue, was going to try out the Toklas recipe after getting it from Brion Gysin [the painter, writer and poet],’ Miles recalls. ‘When I got home later, I found him in the kitchen, sitting on the draining-board and talking to Sue. He’d called round to get the recipe. I don’t think she was ever less pleased to see me.’

The one area that pot didn’t invade–yet–was Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting. Agreeing that it clouded their minds, they continued in the old way, giving themselves a maximum of three hours per song, then each writing out a fair copy of the finished lyric. Only if the song turned out well did they reward themselves by sharing a joint. After completing ‘The Word’ and getting the joint started, they didn’t just write out the lyric but turned it into an illuminated manuscript, using coloured crayons belonging to John’s son, Julian.

Certainly, their output through 1965 shows no evidence of clouded minds: the perfect balance of McCartney optimism and Lennon pessimism in ‘We Can Work It Out’; the premature nostalgia of ‘In My Life’, that seemingly quintessential John track for which in fact Paul wrote most of the melody. Their surroundings might have changed to a Surrey mansion or a West End townhouse but the essential atmosphere remained that of 20 Forthlin Road circa 1957: cups of tea, normal ‘ciggies’, long chats about music and art, the occasional bit of schoolboy smut smuggled into a future million-seller, like ‘She’s a big [i.e. prick] teaser’ in ‘Day Tripper’ or the background vocal to Rubber Soul’s ‘Girl’ that went ‘tit-tit-tit-tit’.

They might have disagreements, even quite violent rows, but no real bad feeling ever lingered. One of Paul’s fondest memories of John ‘was when we were having some argument… and calling each other names. We let it settle for a second and then he lowered his glasses and he said “It’s only me…” and put his glasses back on again. Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the façade… the John Lennon he was frightened to reveal to the world.’

Seemingly helped by constant communal puffs at droopy little cigarettes, that same amity pervaded the whole band, no matter what pressures were piled on them. ‘They were the best example I ever saw of what Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead later called “the group mind”,’ says Barry Miles. ‘They’d been together for so long that one only had to start playing for the others to know just what to do. Even with a 55,000 crowd at Shea Stadium, the biggest concert they’d ever done, they didn’t decide on their running-order until they were in the dressing-room beforehand.’

The group mind entered another dimension that year when John, George and their consorts went to dinner with their dentist in London, and were puzzled to see a row of sugar cubes arranged along the dining-room mantelpiece. After drinking coffee containing the sugar, as Cynthia Lennon would remember, ‘it was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film’. Unbeknownst to them, the cubes had been impregnated with LSD.

Lysergic acid diethylamide, popularly known as acid, arrived in Britain from America rather like the Beatles had the other way around–as the beginning of a new age. A manmade substance processed from rye fungus, colourless and odourless, it did not dull the senses like pot, but sharpened them to an unprecedented degree, intensifying light, sound and colour and causing hallucinations that could be exalting or terrifying. The visions experienced on this so-called trip were known as psychedelic, from the Greek words psyche for mind and deloun for manifestation.

Too new as a recreational drug to have been declared illegal, its ‘mind-expanding’ powers were openly preached like some latter-day gospel by a Harvard professor named Timothy Leary. In the summer of 1965, Leary’s British associate, Michael Hollingshead, arrived missionary-like in London and set up what he named the World Psychedelic Centre in his Chelsea flat, offering LSD free to all comers, sprinkled on fingers of bread.

Acid had an immediately divisive effect on the Beatles. Following that bumpy first trip, John and George both persevered with it, quickly becoming converts as devout as any in Leary’s flock. It was the most social of drugs, recommended to be taken by groups of friends who could comfort and support each other through bad trips as well as sharing the rapture of good ones. It seemed to have worked for John and George, bridging their previously awkward two-year age gap and bringing them closer than in the band’s whole lifespan, before or after. Now they wanted Paul and Ringo to share the new togetherness they’d found.

Ringo, as always, was prepared to go along with the others–but not Paul. Though happy to smoke pot, he baulked at any suggestion of ‘the hard stuff’. Nor was he any stranger to peer-pressure: Richard Lester recalls watching ‘an absolutely chilling exercise in controlled evil’ as two of the most beautiful young women he’d ever seen deployed all their charms to try to get Paul to try heroin.

That Peter Asher’s friend John Dunbar was well-acquainted with acid, and other sorts of ‘hard stuff’, only acted as a further deterrent. He had become a regular visitor to the flat in Lennox Gardens where Dunbar lived with his new wife, Marianne Faithfull, and their baby son, Nicholas. The flat presented a weird contrast, with baby-care going on at one end and Dunbar’s druggy friends slumped at the other. Once when Paul was there, a fellow visitor had to be rushed to hospital after shooting up cocaine (then available on the National Health Service) using a length of red rubber tubing as a tourniquet. Red rubber tubes reminded Paul of unpleasant procedures his mother used to carry out in her midwife years, and were one further reason not to stray from harmless-seeming pot. Even a visit to the World Psychedelic Centre and the most persuasive of sells by John Dunbar couldn’t change his mind.

The Beatles’ 1965 American tour brought visions that LSD might have found hard to match–not only the 55,000 at Shea Stadium but an audience with Elvis Presley in Los Angeles. To add to Paul’s emotion on meeting his hero of heroes, it turned out that the only Beatles song Presley seemed to know was ‘I Saw Her Standing There’; he actually sang ‘My heart went boom when I crossed that room…’, thumbing an electric bass.

Yet for the hard-boiled John no less than Paul, there was a touch of sadness that they’d fulfilled Brian Epstein’s once-preposterous prophecy and truly had become ‘bigger than Elvis’. ‘We never wanted to beat him,’ Paul later explained. ‘We wanted to coexist with him.’

In LA, Ringo took acid for the first time, in an empathetic crowd including David Crosby and Jim (later Roger) McGuinn of the Byrds, with Neil Aspinall as a hand-holding co-tripper. But Paul still held back. ‘[He] felt very left out,’ George would remember. ‘And we were all slightly cruel to him… “We’re taking it and you’re not.”’

However, he refused to give in. ‘It was the way I’d been brought up: “Beware of the demon drug.”’

It has always irked Paul that posterity regards him as the tuneful, cosy, safe side of the Lennon–McCartney partnership and John as the rebel, experimenter and iconoclast. The casting had been decided in Liverpool, then Hamburg, where he’d always hung back, feeling himself a provincial outsider, while John hung out with the arty in-crowd. After the migration south John had had his usual shaggy head start, cast as the ‘intelligent’, ‘clever’ or ‘deep’ Beatle, as opposed to the merely ‘cute’ one.

In 1964, he’d become the first pop musician to publish a book and the only one ever to have it launched at a Foyle’s bookshop literary lunch attended by the cream of the capital’s intelligentsia. John Lennon in His Own Write was a collection of his cartoons and nonsense writings, with a deferential foreword by Paul, recollecting their first meeting at Woolton church fete (and characterising himself that day–unbelievably to millions of young women around the world–as ‘a fat schoolboy’). The book was a massive bestseller and a critical triumph, its author hailed as a joint reincarnation of Edward Lear and James Joyce.

But by the mid-Sixties, the elastic-sided boot was firmly on the other foot. As Swinging London approached its zenith, McCartney was at the epicentre of its cultural avant-garde while Lennon rarely emerged from suburban Surrey. ‘John was basically a lazy bastard,’ their former assistant Tony Bramwell remembers. ‘He was quite happy to stay down in Weybridge, doing fuck-all.’

If Paul owed his cultural education largely to the Asher family, he owed his counter-cultural one almost entirely to Barry Miles–known simply as Miles–the mildly-spoken but sharp-minded 22-year-old who, unusually, combined omniscience about modern art and literature with a love of all music, from rock ‘n’ roll to the wildest spheres of experimental jazz and musique concrète. Raised in genteel Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (where he hung out with future Rolling Stone Brian Jones), Miles had studied art, then gone to work for Better Books, London’s innocuously-named centre of revolutionary writing. Better Books was a home from home for American beat writers when they visited London, and Miles was on impressively friendly terms with Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and many others.

His knowledge of avant-garde music was also encyclopaedic; from him Paul first learned about the free-form jazz of Ornette Coleman, the avant-garde saxophonist Albert Ayler and the composer/pianist Sun Ra, who believed himself to be the mouthpiece of an ‘angel race’ who’d come to earth from the planet Saturn. At Miles’s flat in Hanson Street, Fitzrovia, sometimes smoking hash, sometimes eating Alice B. Toklas’s hash brownies, he listened to John Cage’s ‘Indeterminacy’, a sequence of ‘sonic short stories’; and the world’s first singing computer, an IBM 704, performing the Victorian music-hall song ‘Daisy Bell’.