1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (13 page)

As marijuana drifted
out of the folk and soul scenes, it captured the minds of artists such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Stones. George Harrison said it allowed them to hear sounds they hadn’t been able to hear before, though Starr pointed out that they didn’t
record
well when they were stoned; it was better to smoke the day before, so they’d have a creative memory to work with.
1

Lennon took the twelve-string arpeggio Harrison had played at the fade-out of “A Hard Day’s Night” and slowed it down for the haunting sparkle of “Ticket to Ride.” The drone of the rhythm guitar is the first hint of musical influence from Britain’s former colony India. The Beatles also started experimenting with drums. McCartney demonstrated the unusual beat he had in mind, and let Starr take it from there. Starr’s off-kilter, rolling drums on “Ticket to Ride” cap a massive sound that Lennon later proudly deemed “pretty fuckin’ heavy for then.” For an added twist, they kick the tempo up to double-time just before the fade-out. But perhaps the biggest departure is the downbeat mood. Though the group had released dark album cuts, until then, their
singles
—their main statements to the world—were happy. “Ticket to Ride” was the first time a sad song actually made the A side.

The Beatles’ recreation regimen had consisted of amphetamines, whiskey, and Coca-Cola, but after meeting Dylan, they switched to marijuana, which made them feel more relaxed. But marijuana is a hallucinogen, amplifying whatever emotion the smoker is in, and Lennon had been troubled by a difficult childhood. He was abandoned by both parents and given to his aunt; he then suffered the early deaths of his mother, best friend, and favorite uncle. The speed (stimulant), booze (depressant), and thrill of success had blocked all this out, but marijuana brought more complex moods to the fore.

“Ticket to Ride” continues the theme of “I’m a Loser” as Lennon’s woman leaves because she can’t be free while living with him. The idea in itself was somewhat unusual for the time, as it implies divorce, separation, or “living together,” still years away from being accepted. In their early days, the Beatles played the red light district of Hamburg, Germany, where the doctors examined the hookers and issued cards to indicate that they had a clean bill of health. Lennon dubbed these “tickets to ride.” McCartney’s cousin also had a pub in the town of Ryde, England. Given the Beatles’ love of puns, the title probably reflects both meanings.

Just as the Beatles were integrating marijuana into their art, they were hit by a much more potent hallucinogen. After shooting part of their next movie,
Help!
, in the Bahamas and Austria, the group returned to England to shoot from March 22 through April 28. Their first week home, they had March 27 off; it was two nights after King’s Montgomery victory speech. Harrison was friends with his dentist, thirty-four-year-old John Riley.
2
So Harrison; his future wife, Pattie Boyd; Lennon and Lennon’s wife, Cynthia, went to Riley’s flat for dinner. His girlfriend was the twenty-two-year-old “bunny mother” at the London Playboy Club, the person who hired the women who worked there.

Either Riley or his girlfriend had procured LSD from the man who ran the Playboy Club, who had himself gotten it from Timothy Leary. At the time, LSD was still legal, though not many people had heard of it. Riley and his girlfriend hadn’t tried acid before and, Harrison later suspected, believed it to be an aphrodisiac. Without asking the Beatles, Pattie, or Cynthia, Riley or his girlfriend slipped acid-dosed sugar cubes into their coffee.
3
Riley himself didn’t take any.

After dinner, Lennon and Harrison intended to see a close friend from their Hamburg days, Klaus Voormann, play at the Pickwick Club with his trio Paddy, Klaus and Gibson. But Riley told them, “I advise you not to leave.”

When they replied that they had to, Riley explained to Lennon what he’d done. Lennon told Harrison, “We’ve had LSD.”
4

Riley admitted that he didn’t know what it was, just that it was “all the thing” with the London swingers. Harrison had heard about it but wasn’t alarmed—this was before the press had demonized the drug. Since LSD took some time to kick in, he wasn’t even feeling it yet, and presumed that their host was trying to coerce them into an orgy.

To Cynthia Lennon, on the other hand, “It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film. The room seemed to get bigger and bigger. Our host seemed to change into a demon.”
5

Like marijuana, LSD intensifies whatever state of mind the person taking it is already in. It is best to do it in a secure setting, with friends you trust. Fleeing a sex-crazed dentist and his bunny while driving into London evening traffic is not ideal. “It was like having the Devil following us in a taxi,” Cynthia said.
6

When they arrived at the Pickwick and ordered their drinks, Harrison suddenly felt “the most incredible feeling come over me. It was something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling I’d ever had in my whole life. It was fantastic. I felt in love, not with anything or anybody in particular, but with everything. Everything was perfect, in a perfect light, and I had an overwhelming desire to go round the club telling everybody how much I loved them—people I’d never seen before.”
7
This from the grumpy Beatle, whose previous compositions included such missives to fans as “Don’t Bother Me.” Later, he would elaborate that “LSD gave me the experience of: I am not this body. I am pure energy soaring about everywhere that happens to be in a body for a temporary period of time.”
8

Then an explosion jolted Harrison. Actually, it was the waiters throwing chairs onto the tables as the lights came on and the club closed down.

The group had planned to meet Starr at the nearby Ad Lib club, the ultra-hot spot that played only black music. They walked over, dazzled by the traffic lights and taxis. Harrison had to talk a hysterically laughing Pattie Boyd out of smashing a window. In the elevator to the club, the red light made them feel the elevator was in flames, and they started shrieking. The door opened, and they screamed to Starr, “The lift’s on fire!”

The Ad Lib always had a table reserved for them. As they made their way to it, the other patrons’ thick makeup struck them as masks.
9
When they sat down at the table, it seemed to stretch out before Lennon. He’d read books by Romantic writers about their experiences on opium, and as he stared at the elongating table, amazed, he realized that the same thing was happening to him. A singer came and asked if he could sit next to him; Lennon agreed, only if the singer didn’t talk, because he couldn’t think.
10

The new Mad Hatters sat there till dawn, at which point Harrison drove them home very slowly, telling Lennon to stop making jokes because if he laughed, he might crash the car. Boyd wanted to run into the fields and play football. At Harrison’s house, Lennon drew picture after picture and had the sensation of driving a submarine.

If March 27 is the correct date, as is generally believed, the next day, they were obliged to perform for the British TV show
Thank Your Lucky Stars.
In the footage, Lennon smiles as they lip-synch to their latest songs, and they don’t seem hungover or wacked out. But the experience would profoundly alter the course of the Beatles’ lives and art.

Within a year, the controversy over LSD would reach the headlines. While some psychiatrists proposed that LSD affected the neural mechanism of the brain in ways similar to mystical experiences, detractors pointed to the deformed webs spun by acid-dosed spiders. During interviews for the
Beatles Anthology
in 1995, Harrison concedes that acid had its dark side, but he said that the first time he took it, a lightbulb went on in his head that caused him to ask who he was, where he came from, and where he was going.
11

A clue arrived a week later, on April 5, as the Beatles shot a scene in the Rajahama Indian restaurant. Indian musicians played in the background, and the exotic sound intrigued Harrison. He picked up one of their stringed instruments, called the sitar. “The only way that I can describe it was my intellect didn’t know what was going on, and yet this other part of me identified with it. It just called on me. The pure sound of it and what was playing just appealed to me so much.”
12

His mother, Louise, said she “always used to fiddle with our wireless to get Indian music. I’d tuned into Indian stuff once by accident, and I thought it was lovely.”
13

Many other musicians were becoming entranced with the instrument. The same month, the Yardbirds tried to use it on “Heart Full of Soul,” their follow-up to “For Your Love.” The guitar riff on the demo sounded Indian to them, so their manager hired a real Indian sitar player and tabla player to join the band in the studio. But the tabla player couldn’t count in four/four time like the English, and he couldn’t stop when the band wanted him to stop. They also couldn’t get the mix right. So guitarist Jeff Beck imitated the sitar with a Sola Sound Tone Blender fuzz box.
14
The dynamics of shifting from the fuzz guitar in the chorus back to the propulsive acoustic guitar in the verse, along with the echoey backing harmonies, sent “Heart Full of Soul” to No. 2 in the United Kingdom and No. 9 in the United States in June.

*   *   *

The week of May 8,
1965, saw the English holding down eight spots in the U.S. Top 10, the high-water mark for the British Invasion. (And another one of the ten was an Australian folk act, the Seekers.) Gary Lewis and the Playboys were the lone Americans, at No. 2 with “Count Me In.”

Herman’s Hermits from Manchester held both the top spot, with “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” and the No. 7 spot, with their cover of “Silhouettes.” They outsold the Fab Four in the States, due to front man Peter Noone’s supremacy with the prepubescents. And while the group was considered unhip, “Mrs. Brown” was actually the first contemporary tune to look back to the British music hall tradition, something the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Stones would frequently do in the years ahead.

The Beatles were at No. 3, with “Ticket to Ride.” Then another Manchester group, named Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, held No. 4 with “Game of Love,” which had topped the charts on April 24. At No. 5 was “I’ll Never Find Another You,” by the Seekers, who enjoyed a number of folk-pop hits throughout the year, including “The Carnival Is Over” and “A World of Our Own.”

Petula Clark had scored a No. 1 in January, with “Downtown,” and now she was back at No. 6, with her ode to nightclubs, “I Know a Place.” The song takes a line from the title of Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein’s memoir,
A Cellarful of Noise
, about the Cavern Club, where he discovered the group. (Lennon joked that the title should have been
A Cellarful of Boys
, due to Epstein’s penchant for rough trade and rent boys.)

A third Manchester band, Freddie and the Dreamers, were at No. 8 with “I’m Telling You Now,” which had held the top spot for two weeks a few weeks earlier. Their bespectacled front man was known for doing “the Freddie,” in which he kicked out his arms and legs like a kindergartener—perhaps the whitest dance of all time. In marked contrast, the Stones held No. 9, with “The Last Time.” And the Top 10 was rounded out by Sounds Orchestral’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” written by Vince Guaraldi, who would score
A Charlie Brown Christmas
later in the year.

Beyond the pop charts, England dominated the Academy Awards. Julie Christie won Best Actress for John Schlesinger’s
Darling
, and David Lean’s
Dr. Zhivago
took home Best Picture. Other Brits nominated in the Best Actor or Actress category included Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Julie Andrews, Samantha Eggar, and a raft of Supporting Actors and Actresses. Leading men such as Peter O’Toole, Michael Caine, and Richard Harris were popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and British New Wave directors like Tony Richardson and Richard Lester were years ahead of Hollywood in dealing candidly with sex and class; Hollywood’s golden age of realism wouldn’t kick in until the end of the decade.
Thunderball
, with Sean Connery, was the biggest box office hit of the James Bond franchise, when adjusted for inflation.

London rose to challenge Paris as the epicenter of the fashion world, led by designers such as Ossie Clark, Bill Gibb, and Mary Quant, the mother of the miniskirt. Carnaby Street kicked into gear, and John Stephen became the rockers’ clothier of choice, with his tight suits and fitted shirts. Barbara Hulanicki’s store, Biba, popularized her black-and-white Pop Art dresses. The boutique I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet sold military jackets. In December, the boutique Granny Takes a Trip opened, specializing in both vintage clothing and, as the “Trip” implied, the colorful threads the new hippies embraced.

England’s blossoming cultural scene benefited from the government-sponsored art colleges, which took in the creatively inclined who did not seem to fit in the more traditional paths of study. Many of the leading British bands were fronted by art school rockers such as John Lennon, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, and Eric Clapton (not that they had actually graduated or even paid attention while there). Beatniks, existentialists, activists, and jazz aficionados abounded in the environment. It was the English bohemians’ synthesis of hard-core American blues and R&B with the avant-garde sensibility they picked up at art school that resulted in psychedelia as the groups began mutating the music with distortion, feedback, and foreign instruments.

The palpable sense that Londoners were living through a pop-cultural renaissance was boosted immeasurably by the rise of pirate radio. At the time, the BBC had a monopoly within the United Kingdom and did not broadcast the Top 40 records that were popular on the street. But starting mid-decade, ships moored just outside England’s territorial boundaries began transmitting whatever they wanted. Radio Caroline, Radio London, and Radio Jackie often played unknown and experimental groups, further encouraging the explosion of bands already under way.