ALL YOU NEED IS BUD

The Beatles helped make cannabis cool but only after taking the heat

Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles’ Solo Careers, the new book by rock journalist Andrew Grant Jackson, has an intriguing premise. The author creates post-1970 Beatles albums by mixing together the best John, Paul, George and Ringo solo songs by year. In the book, Jackson discusses the backstory of each track, which surprisingly involved a lot of cannabis-related activity. This month marks the 50-year anniversary of the group’s first commercial single, “Love Me Do,” released in the UK on October 5 with a No. 17 chart peak. In honor of the band’s golden anniversary, CULTURE spoke with Jackson to learn more about the Beatles and the band’s greener smoking habits.

Do we know who introduced the Beatles to cannabis?

In 1960, the Beatles were given some weed in Liverpool, but George said it didn’t seem to do anything for them, though that was the night they learned how to do the Twist. For the next four years, they stuck to amphetamine pills and booze. When Bob Dylan heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” he thought they were singing “I get high” instead of “I can’t hide.” On August 28, 1964, Dylan met the Beatles for the first time at their hotel in New York City. They offered Dylan speed pills, but he said he preferred “cheap wine” and pot and then rolled a joint. They admitted they didn’t smoke, and he was shocked and asked, “What about your song about getting high?” John, embarrassed, told him the actual words.

Is it true that John called Ringo the “royal taster?”

Dylan offered the joint to John first, but John passed it to Ringo saying he was his “royal taster.” Ringo didn’t know you’re supposed to pass it around, so he polished it off and told the others, “The ceiling is coming down on me.” After that, they all wanted to try it. Dylan rolled more and everyone cracked up all night, with Dylan answering the phone, “This is Beatlemania here.” Paul suddenly thought he was metamorphosing onto all these different levels and had the roadie follow him around with a piece of paper writing down all his cosmic visions. In the morning, they looked at the paper and it just said, “There are seven levels.” They all started laughing again, and after that, they constantly smoked. Lyrical references started creeping into their songs, and “turns me on” in “She’s a Woman” (1964) might be the first, since to “turn on” was slang for getting high. Definitely by 1965, John sang, “I get high when I see you go by” on “It’s Only Love.”

Did the band say that smoking helped the music?

George said it allowed them to hear sounds they hadn’t been able to hear before. They started slowing down the electric guitar on “Ticket to Ride” and experimenting with the drums, which John later said was a heavy sound for the pop charts at the time. Influenced by Dylan and weed, John’s lyrics started turning introspective on “Help!” and “Nowhere Man.” By Rubber Soul, they had the sitar on “Norwegian Wood” and started stretching the perspective of the cover photo, elongating their faces. For 1966’s “Rain,” John came home really stoned and put on the tape of the version they had recorded that day. He put it on backwards by mistake, and it blew his mind, so they started putting backwards vocals and guitars on many of their songs. Ringo later said they didn’t record well when they were stoned, but it was good to smoke the day before so they’d have a creative memory to work with.

Did the band take any action in support of legalization?

By 1967, there were so many hit singles with drug references (“Day Tripper,” Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35,” the Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud”) that the authorities were freaking out. Early that year, Mick Jagger was going to sue the British newspaper The News of the World for libel, so the paper colluded with Scotland Yard to bust the Stones. Nineteen cops went to Keith Richard’s house where the Stones, George and friends had been hanging out for the weekend. The cops waited till George left and then raided the place. The Beatles had been given medals by the Queen so they were untouchable then. Keith was sentenced to a year in prison for allowing marijuana to be smoked at his home, and Jagger was given three months for having four amphetamine pills. Around the same time, Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones was busted for pot possession. The Beatles published an ad in the Times of London petitioning for the decriminalization of marijuana. A few days later, the Times ran an editorial calling for the Stones’ release, and the Stones were let off. Thirty years later, McCartney said he still favors decriminalization.

“I Am the Walrus” makes an allusion to Norman Pilcher. Why is this guy famous?

Sgt. Norman Pilcher was a detective who got a lot of press for busting the Stones, Donovan and hippies. John slipped that little “semolina pilchard” dig at him in a stream of surreal nonsensical lyrics at the end of 1967’s “I Am the Walrus.” The following year, John left his wife for Yoko Ono and got Yoko pregnant, and the two posed nude on an album cover together. A lot of public sentiment turned against him, and suddenly he wasn’t “untouchable” anymore. He got tipped off that Pilcher was going to bust him. He was staying in Jimi Hendrix’ place, and he tried to clean it top to bottom. Still, when Pilcher showed up with his dogs, he found 200 grams of hash, some traces of marijuana and a half gram of morphine. John thought Pilcher planted the stuff, which the detective was known to do. John and Yoko got dragged to jail, then had to return to court and push their way through a mob of 300 people. A few days after the arrest, Yoko had a miscarriage. John was afraid Yoko would be deported so he pleaded guilty and was fined 150 pounds. In March 1969, George and his wife Pattie were busted on the day Paul married Linda Eastman. In 1973, Pilcher was sentenced to four years in jail for perjury.

Tell me about Richard Nixon’s efforts to deport John over cannabis use.
John and Yoko moved to New York at the end of 1971. When the MC5’s manager John Sinclair was in jail for marijuana, John headlined a benefit concert and wrote a song for him. Sinclair was released in a matter of days. John was also urging people to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate and planned to do a tour to raise funds for him, with a concert to take place across the street from the Republican National Convention, so Nixon started a deportation campaign against John. They said it was for that 1968 marijuana conviction. They had his phone bugged, tailed him and transcribed all his TV appearances. Everything was documented in 281 pages of FBI files that were made public in 1991. For three years, John had to fight the deportation in court, until Nixon finally got booted out for Watergate. When Vice President Ford took over, his administration didn’t want the FBI’s illegal surveillance techniques to be discussed in the press so they gave John his green card.

Didn’t McCartney stay out of the U.S. for years because of a marijuana bust?

In 1972, McCartney released his third Wings single, “Hi Hi Hi,” about having sex with his woman and “getting hi hi hi.” It got banned from the BBC, and that year he started getting busted, first for bringing hash into Sweden and then for growing plants on his farm. He wouldn’t be allowed to play in the U.S. again until 1976. The other Beatles reunited on the song “I Am the Greatest” on the 1973 Ringo album, but it was recorded in L.A. so McCartney couldn’t join them. McCartney’s song “Band on the Run” was partly about how he felt musicians were being turned into outlaws just because they wanted to smoke instead of drink. In the earlier days, when the Beatles did speed pills and Scotch, John in particular would stay up for days and become a mean drunk. McCartney said, when they switched to weed instead, everyone was mellow and they’d have great discussions.

Who was the biggest stoner in the Beatles?

I don’t know how much they all smoked on a day-to-day basis in the solo years, but it definitely continued to play a major part in McCartney’s life, and he kept getting busted. Linda was busted in 1975. In 1978, U.S. customs raided the yacht Wings was recording on. McCartney wrote about it in his beautiful ballad “Wanderlust” (1982), which asks, “What petty crime was I found guilty of?” In 1980, he was busted in Japan and jailed for nine days. Then he and Linda got busted twice in 1984.

In your book, you suggest the Beatles helped make cannabis more mainstream with the white middle class. How so? 

Marijuana had always been around, but it didn’t get into the media much before the ’60s, except with the 1936 film Reefer Madness and Robert Mitchum’s pot bust in ’48. It was under the radar with the bohemians and the jazz scene. Kerouac’s On the Road and the ’50s beatnik craze exposed it to more hipsters, but the Beatles were the most famous people on the planet in the’60s. Their Ed Sullivan appearances were seen by 73 million people in the U.S. when the country only had 193 million. By the time Sgt. Pepper came out in ’67 with pot plants on the cover and songs about being as high as Mr. Kite, tons of Baby Boomers investigated what it was all about. A great rock critic at the time named Nik Cohn wrote that McCartney was so cute with his baby face and big innocent eyes that he could talk about smoking pot or doing LSD and still be forgiven. McCartney gets flak for being the “un-edgy” Beatle, but they needed him doing the all-ages, kid- and parent-friendly music to be accessible to the masses. John was too angry and not enough of a teen heartthrob to do it on his own. When McCartney began touring the U.S. again in 1976, the six o’clock news covered him at airports shaking hands with the crowd with his wife and little kids in tow. While the Rolling Stones and most rockers made their image one of decadence, McCartney had a unique, reassuring image. He was perhaps the first family rock and roller, regular pot busts notwithstanding.

The Dirty Dozen: Bud References in 12 Beatles Songs

“Got to Get You Into My Life” (1966)

Sounds like he could be talking about a woman, but McCartney later said it was his tribute to weed.
“Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” (1967)

The title is an acronym for LSD, but “the flowers grow incredibly high.”

“A Day in the Life” (1967)

“Found my way upstairs and had a smoke and somebody spoke and I went into a dream.”
“Magical Mystery Tour” (1967)

“Roll up for the mystery tour.”

“With a Little Help From My Friends” (1967)

“I get high with a little help from my friends.”
“What’s the New Mary Jane” (1968)

Mary Jane is slang for marijuana.

“Get Back” (1969)

“Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona for some California grass.”

“Because” (1969)

“Because the wind is high it blows my mind.”

“New York City” (John Lennon, 1972)

“Up come a man with the guitar in his hand singing, ‘Have a marijuana if you can’/His name was David Peel and we found that he was real/He sang, ‘The pope smokes dope everyday.’”

“Let Me Roll It” (Paul McCartney, 1973)

Self-explanatory.
“Nobody Told Me” (Lennon, 1980)

“Everybody’s smokin‘ and no one’s getting high Everybody’s flyin‘ and never touch the sky.”

“The Song We Were Singing” (McCartney, 1997)

“For a while, we could sit, smoke a pipe and discuss all the vast intricacies of life.”