The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [22]
About what to do and all of that? Like “You tell us, Guru”? Probably after acid. Maybe after Rubber Soul. I can’t remember it exactly happening. We just took that position. I mean, we started putting out messages. Like “The Word Is Love” and things like that. I write messages, you know. See, when you start putting out messages, people start asking you, “What’s the message?”
How did you first get involved in LSD?
A dentist in London laid it on George, me and wives, without telling us, at a dinner party at his house. He was a friend of George’s and our dentist at the time, and he just put it in our coffee or something. He didn’t know what it was; it’s all the same thing with that sort of middle-class London swinger, or whatever. They had all heard about it, and they didn’t know it was different from pot or pills, and they gave us it. He said, “I advise you not to leave,” and we all thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house, and we didn’t want to know, and we went to the Ad Lib and these discotheques, and there were these incredible things going on.
It was insane, going around London. When we went to the club we thought it was on fire, and then we thought it was a premiere and it was just an ordinary light outside. We thought, “Shit, what’s going on here?” We were cackling in the streets, and people were shouting, “Let’s break a window,” you know; it was just insane. We were just out of our heads. When we finally got on the lift [elevator], we all thought there was a fire, but there was just a little red light. We were all screaming like that, and we were all hot and hysterical, and when we all arrived on the floor, because this was a discotheque that was up a building, the lift stopped and the door opened and we were all [John demonstrates by screaming] . . .
I had read somebody describing the effects of opium in the old days, and I thought, “Fuck! It’s happening,” and then we went to the Ad Lib and all of that, and then some singer came up to me and said, “Can I sit next to you?” And I said, “Only if you don’t talk,” because I just couldn’t think.
This seemed to go on all night. I can’t remember the details. George somehow or another managed to drive us home in his Mini. We were going about ten miles an hour, but it seemed like a thousand, and Patti was saying, let’s jump out and play football. I was getting all these sort of hysterical jokes coming out like speed, because I was always on that, too.
God, it was just terrifying, but it was fantastic. I did some drawings at the time, I’ve got them somewhere, of four faces saying, “We all agree with you!” I gave them to Ringo, the originals. I did a lot of drawing that night. And then George’s house seemed to be just like a big submarine. I was driving it, they all went to bed, I was carrying on in it; it seemed to float above his wall which was eighteen foot, and I was driving it.
When you came down, what did you think?
I was pretty stoned for a month or two. The second time we had it was in L.A. We were on tour in one of those houses, Doris Day’s house or wherever it was we used to stay, and the three of us took it, Ringo, George and I. Maybe Neil and a couple of the Byrds—what’s his name, the one in the Stills and Nash thing, Crosby and the other guy, who used to do the lead. McGuinn. I think they came, I’m not sure, on a few trips. But there was a reporter, Don Short. We were in the garden; it was only our second one, and we still didn’t know anything about doing it in a nice place and cool it. Then they saw the reporter and thought, “How do we act?” We were terrified waiting for him to go, and he wondered why we couldn’t come over. Neil, who never had acid either, had taken it, and he would have to play road manager, and we said go get rid of Don Short, and he didn’t know what to do.
Peter Fonda came, and that was another thing. He kept saying [in a whisper], “I know what it’s like to be dead,” and we said, “What?” and he kept saying it. We were saying, “For Christ