John Lennon: The Life (55 page)

The record came out in December 1965, unfortunately coinciding with the release of
Rubber Soul
. Freddie was caught up in a whirl of promotion that included performing his monologue live on Dutch television. But in the United Kingdom, it quickly sank without trace. Far from making Freddie’s fortune, it left him £20 in debt. Anticipating a life in the spotlight, he had undergone extensive private dental work for which he was left holding the bill.

Though the record palpably never stood a chance, some journalists and disc jockeys undoubtedly did boycott it out of loyalty to John. Freddie later claimed to have heard from music-business insiders that Brian Epstein had brought pressure to starve it of coverage and airplay. A kitchen porter once again, he happened to find work at a pub in Hampton, just a mile or so from Weybridge. One day, he impulsively decided to call on John and ask point-blank whether the rumors of sabotage were true. Unfortunately, only Cynthia and Julian were at home. Cyn had never met Freddie and scarcely even knew she had a father-in-law, but was her usual kindly, hospitable self, introducing him to his grandson, making him tea, even trimming his untidy locks for him in Kenwood’s huge, incomprehensible kitchen.

He returned a few days later when John was at home, but this time did not succeed in penetrating the house. Still convinced there had been skulduggery over his single, he unwisely brought along his erstwhile manager, Tony Cartwright, for support. There was a
brief exchange among the three in Kenwood’s front porch as Lord Kitchener looked on balefully from his recruiting poster; then John retreated inside and slammed the door.

A
few months earlier, John and Cynthia had driven into London with George Harrison and Pattie Boyd for what promised to be a fairly low-key evening out. It began with dinner at the flat of John and George’s dentist, John Riley, in Strathearn Place, Bayswater. The only other person present was Riley’s twenty-two-year-old Canadian-born girlfriend, Cindy Bury, who worked at the recently opened Playboy Club in Park Lane. As the guests took their seats in the candlelit dining-room, Cynthia noticed a curious decorative touch: arranged along the mantelpiece with evident care were six sugar cubes.

Riley was one of London’s leading celebrity dentists, and already such a pal of John and George that he had flown out to join them in the Bahamas while they were filming
Help!
The plan this evening was that, after dinner at his flat, he and Cindy would accompany the Beatle foursome to the Pickwick Club, where Brian’s latest acquisition for NEMS Enterprises, a trio named Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, were appearing live. Since Klaus was John and George’s old Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann, there could be no begging off or showing up late. Riley insisted that they must have coffee before leaving, and dropped a sugar lump from the mantelpiece into each of their cups. A few moments later, John turned to George and tersely announced “We’ve had LSD.”

The thirty-four-year-old Riley was no career drug pusher; nor was he one of those sleazy people who get a kick from turning on celebrities. Both John and George had previously expressed curiosity about LSD, and, through medical connections, Riley had obtained some from a source in Wales. His girlfriend Cindy knew he planned to give it to them without their knowledge, but not that he’d chosen this particular evening or that she—and he himself—would be taking it for the first time along with them. “We were six friends and we were young, and if you were young in those days that’s what you did. You tried everything.” For Marcel Proust, a tea-soaked biscuit provided a
springboard into the past. For John—and many more than him—the future was changed by sugar in his coffee.

Cynthia Lennon, who had never heard of LSD and had been unwontedly happy and relaxed up to now, was the first to feel the drug’s effects. “It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film,” she recalls. “The room seemed to get bigger and bigger. This man [Riley] who’d been so nice and charming until then, seemed to turn into a demon. We were all terrified. We knew it was something evil—we had to get out of the house.” Cindy’s version is that they left quite normally to go on to the Pickwick Club as planned.

That evening, it so happened, they did not have John’s Rolls waiting outside but had come up from Surrey packed into George’s Mini Cooper. By the time they reached the West End some fifteen minutes later (Riley and Cindy following by taxi), their first LSD trip was kicking in with a vengeance. Normally lighted theater and cinema marquees seemed to blaze with unearthly radiance and the pavement crowds to surge and roar like multiple Royal film premieres. All four were in a state hovering between dazzled stupefaction and hysteria; Pattie, as a rule the sanest of young women, was seized by a desire to smash shop windows. “We were cackling,” John would recall. “We were just insane. We were out of our heads.”

None of them would afterward recall arriving at the Pickwick or watching Paddy, Klaus and Gibson’s debut. Klaus Voormann has no recollection of seeing John at all that night. John Riley and Cindy were left behind somewhere along the way, and neither John nor George ever saw them again. The next concrete collective memory was getting to the Ad Lib, just off Leicester Square, where they had arranged to meet Ringo. The Ad Lib was reached by an elevator that, as it carried them upward, suddenly seemed to burst into flames.

As they sat in the club, telling Ringo about the fiery lift, it seemed that their table began to alter shape, lengthening and widening into the dimensions of an airport runway. But while the others reacted in panic or hysteria, John experienced a moment, if not of déjà vu, then of déjà lu. He had, after all, grown up on
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, in which Alice had only to drink or eat something for everyday objects to magnify on this same gargantuan scale. Alone
of the group, too, he had read
Confessions of an Opium-Eater
, Thomas de Quincy’s 1822 record of drug hallucinations in which “a theatre seemed suddenly opened up and lighted in my brain [presenting] spectacles of more than earthly splendour” and “buildings, landscapes etc. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive….” Whereas the usually dour and stand-offish George experienced a sudden urge to tell everyone that he loved them, John felt de Quincy’s sensation, in more benign opium trances, of being “at a distance and aloof from the uproar of life,” when “crowds became oppressive…music even.” Sometime that night, a fellow musician came up and asked permission to sit beside him. “Only if you don’t talk,” he replied.

Later, George somehow managed to drive back to his house in Esher, keeping the souped-up Mini at a cautious 18 mph the whole way, with Pattie still suggesting mad escapades beside him and John manically telling jokes in the back. Unable to manage the further couple of miles to Weybridge, the Lennons decided to crash out at George’s, thinking that whatever ailed them would recede with a few hours’ sleep—little suspecting that LSD, unlike alcohol, does not cause drowsiness, and can take up to twelve hours to run its course.

Cyn spent the rest of the night in extreme distress, unable to sleep or make herself vomit up the poison. But for John, the continuously unfolding visions—although sometimes so terrifying that they made him bang his head against the wall—were also like watching the most exciting and gorgeously colored movie while simultaneously starring in it. In the trip’s most memorable phase, he later recalled, George’s house became a giant submarine, which he piloted single-handedly through another de Quincy vista of “chasms and sunless abysses…depths below depths…a sea paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the Heavens.” As Cyn suffered in the bathroom, he also began turning out drawings at a furious rate. One showed four of the sea faces turned to him gravely and saying—as faces in real life so seldom would—“We all agree with you.”

The substance to which that generous tooth fairy introduced John had actually been around, in various, little-publicized forms,
since his early childhood. In 1943, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann stumbled on the psychoactive properties of ergot, or rye fungus, while seeking a cure for migraine. From ergot Hofmann compounded lysergic acid diethylamide, a drug combining all the illusions of opium eating, and more, with the hazards of Russian roulette. For it had the power to tap directly into its user’s subconscious, conjuring unrealized fears and insecurities from the darkest corners of the psyche, at some times creating euphoria but at others anxiety or terror, intensifying light and color and altering physical dimensions in ways that could unpredictably enchant or repel, bringing on hallucinations that could be heavenly or hellish. Odorless, colorless, and flavorless, it was so strong that optimum results could be produced by the smallest dose, usually in liquid form on a piece of bread or a sugar cube.

Until the late fifties it was purely a tool of doctors and psychiatrists, used to treat alcoholics and as a truth serum for criminal psychopaths. Then a Harvard psychology professor named Timothy Leary pronounced it beneficial to all humankind: “medicine for the soul” that need have no adverse effects if taken in the proper way. Leary’s conviction was strengthened by Aldous Huxley, the visionary British novelist (whose works had always been to the fore on Aunt Mimi’s bookshelf). Huxley’s
The Doors of Perception
described how using a mescaline, a drug with effects like those of LSD produced by the peyote cactus, had allowed him to see “what Adam saw on the first morning of his creation—the miracle, minute by minute, of naked existence.” He believed that, through Leary’s proselytizing, LSD could make mystical experience available to millions and bring about “a revival of religion which will be at the same time a revolution.”

LSD was not yet illegal but classed merely as an experimental drug. It was nicknamed acid; taking it was “dropping acid,” after the custom of absorbing its minuscule doses into bread or sugar, or “turning on,” implying instant access to a more exciting and vibrant mental wavelength. The unpredictable journey under its influence was known as a trip, no more portentous than some little outing by motorboat, though the distinction had to be made between good trips and bad. Its dual effect on mind and vision was termed
psy
chedelic
, a word coined in 1956 by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond from the Greek words
psyche
, “mind,” and
deloun
, “to reveal or make manifest.”

John’s first, inadvertent trip having turned out a good one (like “CinemaScope in real life”), he could not wait to repeat the experience as soon as a nondental source of supply could be found. To his surprise, he found that the desired substance could be picked up around London with little more difficulty than aspirin. Generous consignments regularly crossed the Atlantic in the baggage of Leary’s American converts, notably his “high priest,” Alan Hollingshead, who arrived with five thousand doses and an almost evangelical mission to turn on Britain. Hollingshead would later found the World Psychedelic Centre, in Pont Street, Chelsea, where LSD-dipped fingers of bread were handed out gratis, much as today’s supermarkets offer free samples of cookies or salad dressing.

Since George Harrison’s first trip had, in its own way, been as good as John’s, the two conducted much of their further exploration together. Unlike other drugs, acid involved a degree of forethought and unselfishness: users were advised to take it only among friends in comfortable, familiar surroundings, and had an obligation to provide mutual support if adverse reactions set in. For George, as he later said, this one-to-one caring and sharing finally broke down the barrier he felt had existed between John and him since he first joined the Quarrymen. “After taking acid [we] had a very interesting relationship. That I was younger or smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John…. [He] and I spent a lot of time together from then on, and I felt closer to him than all the others…just by the look in his eyes, I felt we were connected.”

When the Beatles had reached California on their ’65 American tour, John and George were both carrying foil-wrapped sugar cubes with the intention of turning on Paul and Ringo at the earliest opportunity. In the event, Paul demurred and only Ringo partook, with Neil Aspinall loyally volunteering to keep him company. The occasion was an afternoon party at their rented mansion in Benedict Canyon, attended by, among others, David Crosby and Jim McGuinn of the Byrds, and the
London Daily Mirror
journalist Don Short. En
sconced by the pool, well supplied with food and alcohol, Short was blissfully unaware of the tripping going on under his nose.

The crowd who dropped by and turned on that afternoon also included a gangly young man named Peter Fonda, son of the Hollywood legend Henry and brother of Jane, who would himself one day make the most memorable film to emerge from Sixties drug culture. At one point, he buttonholed John with the rambling tale of how once, while playing with a gun, he had accidentally shot himself. “I know what it’s like to be dead, man,” he kept mumbling, as if it were a special, exclusive acid dividend. “Don’t tell me,” John protested. “I don’t want to know what it’s like to be dead.”

To begin with, John had no idea of the mystical edifice growing up around LSD—hence its first, purely flippant appearance in Beatles music, the single “Day Tripper,” cowritten by Lennon and McCartney and released in Britain alongside the
Rubber Soul
album in December 1965. The acidy title was merely to show how with-it they were; “Day Tripper” actually is a song about sexual frustration, similar to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” (even down to its guitar riff) but expressed in terms far more brazen—“half the way there,” “one-night stands,” “big teaser” deliberately sung to sound like “prick teaser.” George Martin had earmarked it as the A-side of the new single until Paul came up with a country-influenced ballad, “We Can Work It Out.” When John refused to have “Day Tripper” relegated to the B-side, a compromise was formulated: a “double A-side” single. As the waltz-time middle eight of “We Can Work It Out”—for which Paul had called on John’s help—so aptly put it, “Life is very short and there’s no ti-i-i-i-ime / For fussing and fighting, my friend….”