GEORGE: We stayed in the house that Hendrix later stayed in. It was a horseshoe-shaped house on a hill off Mulholland. It had a little gatehouse which Mal and Neil (oficiāli - miesassargs un road manager, praktiski - paziņas no Liverpūles laikiem) stayed in, decorated by Arabian-type things draped on the walls.
There was one very important day at that house. John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid, because we couldn't relate tothem any more. Not just on the one level - we couldn't relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much. It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable: it was something that had to be experienced, because you spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think. It was all too important to John and me. So the plan was that when we got to Hollywood, on our day off we were going to get them to take acid. We got some in New York; it was on sugar cubes wrapped in tinfoil and we'd been carrying these around all through the tour until we got to LA.
Paul wouldn't have LSD; he didn't want it. So Ringo and Neil took it, while Mal stayed straight in order to take care of everything. Dave Crosby and Jim McGuinn of The Byrds had also come up to the house, and I don't know how, but Peter Fonda was there. He kept saying, 'I know what it's like to be dead, because I shot myself.' He'd accidentally shot himself at some time and he was showing us his bullet wound. He was very uncool.
RINGO: I'd take anything. john and George didn't give LSD to me. A couple of guys came to visit us in LA, and it was them that said, 'Man, you've got to try this.' They had it in a bottle with an eye-dropper, and they dropped it on sugar cubes and gave it to us. That was my first trip. It was with John and George and Neil and Mal. Neil had to deal with Don Short while I was swimming in jelly in the pool. It was a fabulous day. The night wasn't so great, because it felt like it was never going to wear off. Twelve hours later and it was: 'Give us a break now, Lord.'
JOHN: The second time we had it was different. Then we took it deliberately - we just decided to take it again, in California. We were in one of those houses like Doris Day's house, and the three of us took it, Ringo, George and I - and maybe Neil. Paul felt very out of it, because we are all slightly cruel: 'We're all taking it and you're not.' It was a long time before Paul took it.
We couldn't eat our food, I 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. There was a reporter, Don Short, when we were in the garden. it was only our second trip - we still didn't know anything about doing it in a nice place, and to cool it and that - we just took it. Then suddenly we saw the reporter and thought, 'How do we act normal?' We imagined we were acting extraordinarily, which we weren't. We thought surely somebody could see. We were terrified, waiting for him to go, and he wondered why he couldn't come over. Neil, who had never had acid either, had taken it and he still had to play road manager. We said, 'Get rid of Don Short,' and he didn't know what to do; he just sort of sat with it.
Peter Fonda came in when we were on acid and kept coming up and sitting next to me, and whispering, 'I know what it's like to be dead.' We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip, and the sun was shining, and the girls were dancing (some from Playboy, I believe) and the whole thing was really beautiful and Sixties. And this guy - who I didn't really know, he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything 0 kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, 'I know what it's like to be dead,' and we kept leaving him, because he was so boring. It was scary, when you're flying high: 'Don't tell me about it. I don't want to know what it's like to be dead!'
I used it for the song 'She Said, She Said'. But I changed it to 'she' instead of 'he'. That's how I wrote, 'She said, she said, I know what it's like to be dead.' It was an acidy song.
PAUL: Peter Fonda seemed to us to be a bit wasted; he was a little out of it. I don't know if we'd expected a bit more of Henry's son, but he was certainly of our generation, and he was all right. I don't think there were many people we hated - we just got on with them. if we didn't get on with them that much, we didn't see them again.
GEORGE: I had a concept of what had happened the first time I took LSD, but the concept is nowhere near as big as the reality, when it actually happens. So as it kicked in again, I thought, 'Jesus, I remember!' I was trying to play the guitar, and then I got in the swimming pool and it was a great feeling; the water felt good. I was swimming across the pool when I heard a noise (because it makes your senses so acute - you can almost see out of the back of your head). I felt this bad vibe and I turned around and it was Don Short from the Daily Mirror. He'd been hounding us all through the your, pretending in his phoney-baloney way to be friendly but, really, trying to nail us.
Neil had to go and start talking to him. The thing about LSD is that it distorts your perception of things. We were in one spot, John and me and Jim McGuinn, and Don Short was probably only about twenty yards away, talking. But it was as though we were looking through the wrong end of a telescope. he seemed to be in the very far distance, and we were saying, 'Oh fuck, there's that guy over there' Neil had to take him to play pool, trying to keep him away. And you have to remember that on acid just a minute ca nseem like a thousand years. A thousand years can go down in that minute. It was definitely no the kind of drug which you'd want to be playing pool with Don Short on.
Later on that day, we were all tripping out and they brought several starlets in and set up a movie for us to watch in the house. By the evening there were all these strangers sitting around with their make-up on - and acid just cuts through all that bullshit. The movie was put on, and - of all things - it was a drive-in print of Cat Ballou. The drive-in print has the audience response already dubbed onto it, because you're all sitting in your cars and don't hear everybody laugh. Instead, they tell you when to laugh and when not to. It was bizarre, watching this on acid. I've always hated Lee Marvin, and listening on acid to that other little dwarf bloke with a bowler hat on, I thought it was the biggest load of baloney shite I'd ever seen in my life; it was too much to stand. But you just trip out. I noticed that I'd go 'out there'; I'd be gone somewhere, and then - bang! - I'd land back in my body. I'd look around and see that John had just done the same thing. you go in tandem, you're out there for a while and then - boing! whoa! - 'What happened? Oh, it's still Cat Ballou.' That is another thing: when two people take it at the same time, words become redundant. one can see what the other is thinking. you look at each other and know.
Current Music: Steve Morgen - Eternity In Between