The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [23]
So LSD started for you in 1964: How long did it go on?
It went on for years, I must have had a thousand trips.
Literally a thousand, or a couple of hundred?
A thousand. I used to just eat it all the time. I never took it in the studio. Once I thought I was taking some uppers, and I was not in the state of handling it. I can’t remember what album it was, but I took it and I just noticed . . . I suddenly got so scared on the mike. I thought I felt ill, and I thought I was going to crack. I said, I must get some air. They all took me upstairs on the roof and George Martin was looking at me funny, and then it dawned on me I must have taken acid. I said, “Well, I can’t go on, you’ll have to do it and I’ll just stay and watch.” You know, I got very nervous just watching them all. I was saying, “Is it all right?” And they were saying, “Yeah.” They had all been very kind, and they carried on making the record.
The other Beatles didn’t get into LSD as much as you did?
George did. In L.A., the second time we took it, Paul felt very out of it because we are all a bit slightly cruel, sort of, “We’re taking it, and you’re not.” But we kept seeing him, you know. We couldn’t eat our food. I just couldn’t manage it, just picking it up with our hands. There were all these people serving us in the house, and we were knocking food on the floor and all of that. It was a long time before Paul took it. Then there was the big announcement.
Right.
So, I think George was pretty heavy on it; we are probably the most cracked. Paul is a bit more stable than George and I.
And straight?
I don’t know about straight. Stable. I think LSD profoundly shocked him, and Ringo. I think maybe they regret it.
Did you have many bad trips?
I had many. Jesus Christ, I stopped taking it because of that. I just couldn’t stand it.
You got too afraid to take it?
It got like that, but then I stopped it for I don’t know how long, and then I started taking it again just before I met Yoko. Derek came over and . . . you see, I got the message that I should destroy my ego, and I did, you know. I was reading that stupid book of Leary’s; we were going through a whole game that everybody went through, and I destroyed myself. I was slowly putting myself together round about Maharishi time. Bit by bit over a two-year period, I had destroyed me ego.
I didn’t believe I could do anything and let people make me, and let them all just do what they wanted. I just was nothing. I was shit. Then Derek tripped me out at his house after he got back from L.A. He sort of said, “You’re all right,” and pointed out which songs I had written. “You wrote this,” and “You said this,” and “You are intelligent, don’t be frightened.”
The next week I went to Derek’s with Yoko and we tripped again, and she filled me completely to realize that I was me and that it’s all right. That was it; I started fighting again, being a loudmouth again and saying, “I can do this, fuck it, this is what I want, you know. I want it and don’t put me down.” I did this, so that’s where I am now.
At some point, right between ‘Help’ and ‘Hard Day’s Night,’ you got into drugs and got into doing drug songs?
A Hard Day’s Night I was on pills; that’s drugs, that’s bigger drugs than pot. Started on pills when I was fifteen, no, since I was seventeen, since I became a musician. The only way to survive in Hamburg, to play eight hours a night, was to take pills. The waiters gave you them—the pills and drink. I was a fucking dropped-down drunk in art school. Help was where we turned on to pot and we dropped drink, simple as that. I’ve always needed a drug to survive. The others, too, but I always had more, more pills, more of everything because I’m more crazy, probably.
There