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The Beatles, not better than Migos, but still pretty good. If you’re a fan of music, you’ve probably heard of them, and certainly of their many influential eras. Perhaps none of these were more impactful than when the lads decided to take acid and forever change their sound. This transition is most notable from 1965’s Rubber Soul to 1966’s Revolver, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. While many know that during this 12-month span, the Beatles’ minds were expanded and blown in a way that is unknowable to mere mortals, most don’t know exactly how this actually happened.
Well, the folks at Rolling Stone have drawn up a cartoon to accompany audio from an old radio interview with John Lennon which tells the tale of how he and George Harrison first took Acid, and how it changed their lives forever. As the story goes, John, George, and their wives Cynthia and Pattie were enjoying dinner with a dentist named John Riley and his girlfriend. Following their meal, Riley offered the group some tea and encouraged them to finish it. As you can imagine, he laced the drinks with LSD sugarcubes. At first, Lennon was infuriated, but Riley’s girlfriend insisted the lads had wanted to try LSD, but only under the condition that they didn’t know they had taken it.
From then on, it’s all hallucinations of the craziest order: feeling like you’re in an elevator on fire, the room growing 10 times in size, going 10 mph in a car when it feels like 100 mph. All the good stuff. Following their experience, both men strongly urged that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr both take Acid as well, and despite some pushback, they relented.
Eventually, their experiences with psychedelic drugs would manifest into 1966’s classic album Revolver, and their careers would never be the same. You can read about the experience at length over at Rolling Stone.
