Michael Gerber
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In the course of (as the kids say) “chopping it up” in the comments, I stumbled on a topic that I’d like to address. It’s one that I’ve talked about incessantly on this blog, but it suddenly occurred to me that after all the posts and all the comments over the years, I might never have explained why.

At one point I was fascinated by the intersection of The Beatles and addiction, and wrote about it a lot here. My hope was that my painfully gained layperson’s experience would embolden professionals to look at the Beatles’ story through this lens. For example, applying alcoholic family roles to The Beatles really works—Paul as the Hero, John as the Scapegoat, George as the Lost Child, Ringo as the Mascot—and a fit that close doesn’t happen by accident. Could it be that the Beatles story is really an alcoholic family with Brian as the addict? Was that what John was feeling when he said, “We’ve fucking had it”? Not because they couldn’t continue making great and profitable music, they obviously could and did, but because some psychic equilibrium had been shattered? This avenue of inquiry does solve an obvious problem. There’s a lot of evidence that the Fabs were growing apart from Brian in 1967, and some fans even think they were preparing to sack him. Yet when he died, the Chief Beatle thought their ride was over. If Brian is merely the manager of a no-longer-touring band, that doesn’t make much sense. But as the keystone of a psychological structure…

For the purposes of this post, I’m defining “addiction” in its narrow sense, how it is used colloquially—as abuse of drugs. I’m not talking about, for example, how Paul McCartney might have become “addicted to fame”—though that is an interesting idea, and one that’s probably at the heart of issues that Dullblog readers love to discuss. In 1968-70, when it was clear that if The Beatles were going to continue, it would have to be on new, different terms, did Paul’s undeniable craving for conventional stardom make him less willing or able to accommodate the others? Was an addiction to fame what made him think “we’ll bring a film crew into the studio, that’d be fun” rather than letting everybody take a much-needed vacation? It’s a question worth asking.

But not here. Here, I’m saying that the Beatles’ relationship to chemicals—what they took, how much, and when; and most importantly how that impacted their relationships and collaboration, and even the ideas they had—is central to the whole  story. It has to be. My big contention—based on my own life in an alcoholic family, and as a creative person, and as a professional collaborator, and as someone who makes a living through artistic work—is that drug use, and addiction to drugs, isn’t just part of the Beatles’ story, it is the story, because it determined who each of them were moment to moment, and how they acted towards each other. For good as well as ill; would The Beatles have even become The Beatles without Preludin? Would they have been able to persist after 1964 without the psychic cushioning of pot? Drugs drew them together, and pushed them apart, took them new places and left them nowhere, again and again and again.

You ever try to improvise with someone who is high? It’s like trying to talk underwater. That’s why The Beatles were careful about taking drugs while in the studio. It’s the time outside the studio I’m talking about.

Okay, so talk about it here? Why not gather the sources, and write a book: I’d Love to Turn You On: The Beatles and Drugs? Because all of this is very difficult to pin down, even more so than sex—after all it is illegal behavior, or at least secret. Journalists and biographers can get at the drug story to some degree, but they’re never really adversarial or tough about it, because they need access, and are part of a music business where drug use was (and probably still is) so common and intense that most people won’t even notice until a person is quite incapacitated. RIP Brian Jones, Jimi, Janis, Mr. Mojo Risin. “Squares” do not get far in music journalism. That having been said, we missed an opportunity in the decades when groovy Sixties people were still hale and hearty and their memories reasonably trustworthy. The best time to write the story of the Beatles and drugs was—perhaps not surprisingly—in the mid- to late 80s, right when Goldman was writing his book. In 1975, the effects couldn’t yet be seen; in 1995, The Beatles were big business again.

As the Beatles story has turned from journalism into history, we need to acknowledge that historians are particularly hamstrung when discussing such things; I expect Lewisohn to shed more light on every facet of the story…except this one. One, drug use is not concrete, not quantifiable, and can happen without external trace. Mentioning it can feel rude. Yet, was John Lennon addicted to some chemical for his entire adult life? Seems so. What relationship did Preludin have with his creative output? He outlook on life? His reliability? His relatability? What about booze? Pot? Acid? All different chemicals, creating different conditions inside Lennon’s brain. What role did drugs have in his immense productivity in 1966, and his hermit-like existence ten years later? Could they be the simplest explanation for both?

All these questions must be answered by the historian. How can any of them be answered by someone looking to quantify and define, and build a useful story out of the data at their disposal, the harder the better? So all the histories proceed as if drugs were cornflakes, a neutral neural act.

The second hurdle is best summed up by a question: how the heck does someone who wasn’t a rock star from 1962-1980—a period of mainstream cultural shifts in chemical use, with musicians being at the forefront—understand their relationship to chemicals? Most people today do not believe cocaine is good for you; lots of groovy folks in the Sixties honestly did. Most people today do not “eat LSD like candy,” as Lennon put it. What did that even mean? We can’t analyze Lennon as a normal, unaltered individual—the drugs can’t be ignored, but how can a contemporary scholar understand the impact of that much lysergic acid on the human nervous system? For all his flaws, and there were many, Goldman at least attempted to address this. Rather than endlessly discussing the “emotional history” of John and Paul, someone somewhere please God try to figure out what John and Paul were using, respectively, during the 1968 trip to New York, the one where they really fell out, because the drugs may well be why things got weird. Drugs make people weird, and the closer you are to someone on drugs, the weirder they feel.

Of course the user is often the last one to realize how much they are altered. Being able to handle one’s drugs was a kind of machismo in the counterculture, and that too is partly why the effect of drugs have been written out of the story, save for harmless stuff like getting high and painting George’s garage. If drugs were truly more powerful than The Beatles, the whole hippie mythology collapses. But…might the Fabs gotten back together, if the Seventies hadn’t been awash in cocaine, making each of them mean, and egotistical, and paranoid?

As someone with a front-row seat to countercultural mores between 1973-80, I can tell you that what drugs someone was using, when, and how much, was one of the main drivers of their personality. What you used determined a lot; where you went, and who you hung out with, and what you all thought. The drugs created tribes, and the tribes weren’t always friendly. “She’s not a stoner, she’s a juicer. She used to be straight-edge, because she found God, but then she hooked back up with an old boyfriend and lost God I guess. Anyway, your stash is safe from her, but whoo boy, lock the liquor cabinet.”

The Sixties and Seventies were awash with mind-altering chemicals. More people were taking more stuff—that is why the culture produced then still pops, so excessive, so bright, so fun. The music, movies, books, and art of those decades wouldn’t be what they were, without drugs. Even the Sexual Revolution was intensified by drugs. Families were made, then broken, by drugs and addiction.

The drugs made people different, that’s why people took them. I’m not just talking about the burnout cases, though those were definitely around, or the cokeheads; by 1980, whether someone smoked pot or preferred liquor was…who they were? And this wasn’t just the effects upon their neurology over a decade, or the life that said flavor of neurology allowed them to build—cokeheads flourished on Wall Street, potheads as farmers in Mendocino—it was also that which drugs you used was deeply political, and the drugs intensified your politics. How much of Lennon’s political activities were ideas he had on drugs? “We’re going to protest the war by staying in bed”—classic druggie politics.

Whenever named, admitted drugs pop into the Beatles story, things clear up. I remember when McCartney revealed that he’d been using cocaine around the time of Pepper; I was unsurprised. Frenzied activity; check. Absolute confidence; check. Alienation from one’s bandmates, who kinda think you’re a bigheaded asshole; check. Whenever the drugs are acknowledged, the story suddenly becomes much, much clearer.

Which brings me to the third hurdle: drug use is hidden, and drug abuse, even more so. For a million reasons, the majority of these kinds of secrets get kept. Ask a Boomer if you don’t believe me; they’re all teetotallers now, but someone had to be taking all that windowpane.

The entire texture of the Sixties and Seventies was, especially if you were in showbiz, determined by drugs. Peter Sellers used poppers so intensely he nearly died from a heart attack in 1964; what the hell was he up to by 1969, when he was hanging out with Ringo? The counterculture got precisely as far as the drugs could take them, and what dragged them back and dashed their hopes—also the drugs. What chemical was John on when he said he was Jesus Christ, or stormed over to Cavendish Avenue and put bricks through the window? Was Ringo drinking heavily when he left the band for no good reason in 1968? And on and on and on.

At the very heart of this story we love are these chemically driven imponderables. We take our caffeinated consciousness, sealed in the envelope of another era, and attempt to understand. We can’t, of course—but neither can we stop trying.

It’s enough to drive a guy to drink.

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