Original publication: August 2016.
How Dylan Turned On the Beatles
In his new book How to Smoke Pot (Properly), marijuana journalist David Bienenstock provides a valuable “headiquette” lesson outlining the dos and don’ts of getting someone high for the first time. In the following excerpt, Bienenstock examines how some of the 20th century’s most Influential artists first got stoned.
Even the great and exalted Bob Marley once smoked ganja for the first time. And he probably asked a bunch of dumb questions and coughed too much throughout. So if you’re ever called upon to help guide an uninitiated friend or relative into the wonderful world of herbal delights, you must strive to remain exceedingly patient, kind and accommodating throughout the proceedings—no matter what. Remember: “Doob unto others.” Also, make sure your friend’s potentially auspicious first puff takes place in a comfortable, safe, familiar setting, ideally among a small group of close friends. And don’t ever let things get overly uptight or, conversely, totally freaked-out—not for the initiate, or for you.
After all, getting someone high for the first time is both a great privilege and a serious responsibility, not to mention an excellent opportunity to recall the heady feeling of your own early days in the herb game. So rather than coming on as some kind of guru or guide, just relax, let nature run its course, and try to recapture a bit of your own “beginner’s mind” when it comes to marijuana. If you can achieve that exalted plane, you just might end up having a transcendent journey of your own.
“It’s my experience that to smoke marijuana for the first time is to explore the limits of hilarity, only to find that there are no limits,” famed music journalist Al Aronowitz once noted—an observation eerily reminiscent of my own first time behind a bowling alley. “You laugh so hard that you want to laugh that hard again, so you smoke marijuana again. And again and again and again and again. I’m told that few ever really succeed in laughing that hard a second time, but I did. The two biggest laughs of my life were the first time I smoked marijuana and the first time the Beatles smoked it.”
Aronowitz didn’t “turn on” the Beatles (who later used “let’s go have a laugh” as their private code for getting high) so much as he introduced them to Bob Dylan, who gladly did the honors. The deal went down on August 28, 1964, at New York City’s swanky Delmonico Hotel. Upon arrival, Dylan mistakenly believed the Beatles (whom he was meeting for the first time) already smoked grass, based on a misheard lyric in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—leaving John Lennon to bashfully point out that the lads from Liverpool were actually singing “I can’t hide,” not “I get high,” on the chorus.
From there, a scene unfolded straight out of a B-movie Stoner comedy, only it starred some of the 20th century’s most influential and enduring artists at the very outset of their storied careers. According to Aronowitz’s lengthy first-person account of the encounter in his book Bob Dylan and the Beatles:
The Beatles wanted to know how the marijuana would make them feel, and we told them it would make them feel good. I still hadn’t learned how to roll a joint in those days, so when the Beatles agreed to try some, I asked Dylan to roll the first joint. Bob wasn’t much of a roller either, and a lot of the grass fell into the big bowl of fruit on the room-service table.
Dylan first offered the joint to Lennon, but the group’s unofficial leader immediately handed it to Ringo, demanding the drummer serve as the other Beatles’ “royal taster”—ostensibly to make sure the drug didn’t prove poisonous or provoke insanity before the rest committed to trying it. So Ringo started inhaling. At which point the first Beatle to get high immediately (though unwittingly) committed one of the very few major pot faux pas we outlined earlier, as Aronowitz explains:
As Ringo kept taking hits, Bob and I waited for him to pass the joint to John, who was sitting right next to Ringo. But the Beatles were unacquainted with the rituals of pot smoking. Pot smokers share joints because it’s precious stuff. It’s illegal, expensive and not easy to get. Pot smokers don’t waste any smoke letting the joint burn idly like a cigarette …. I neglected to instruct Ringo about passing the joint, and it was obvious that he was going to hold onto it as if he were smoking a cigarette filled with tobacco. I didn’t want to risk the possibility that the Beatles might recoil from the idea of passing a joint from lips to lips like a bottle shared by winos on a street corner.
Dylan first offered the joint to Lennon, but the group’s unofficial leader immediately handed it to Ringo, demanding the drummer serve as the other Beatles’ “royal taster”.
A delicate moment indeed, which Aronowitz ably resolved by asking Dylan’s rolling-adept road manager to quickly produce a few more joints, until everybody had one of their own. Then, since Ringo had gotten a head start on getting high, he started to feel the effects first, and unleashed a ripple of laughter that quickly reverberated throughout the room.
Soon, Ringo got the giggles. In no time at all, he was laughing hysterically. His laughing looked so funny that the rest of us started laughing hysterically …. We kept laughing at one another’s laughter until every one of us had been laughed at. There also came a certain point when Paul realized he was really thinking for the first time in his life, and he also realized that this was a great occasion. He told [Beatles road manager] Mal Evans to get a pad and pen and to write down everything he said.
Unfortunately, more than 50 years later, that historic document either remains in private hands or has been lost to history forever. But what we do know is that shortly after their fateful encounter with Bob Dylan, the Beatles would start to rapidly transform their music from the teenybopper bubblegum pop sound that made them global sensations into the more experimental, expansive, psychedelic explorations that kick-started the social and political upheaval of the ’60s and helped usher marijuana into the mainstream.
All because Al Aronowitz made every effort imaginable to ensure that the Fab Four’s first time getting high went smoothly, despite a lot of awkward tension in the room as the world’s biggest music stars took great pains to show each other proper deference.
“Allen Ginsberg would afterwards ask me if this initial meeting between Bob and the Beatles was demure,” Aronowitz wrote, “and that is exactly the right word for it.” At least until things broke out into a spontaneous, all-encompassing five-way laughing fit.
Ginsberg, the famed Beat poet, author of Howl and running buddy of Jack Kerouac, by the way, also put great stock in the personal insights gained the first time he got high—as he much later explained to Larry “Ratso” Sloman in his 1998 book Reefer Madness:
When I smoked grass [the first time] I suddenly realized how amazing it was that on the evidence of my own senses, which I did not doubt, here was a very mild stimulator of perception that led me into all sorts of awes and cosmic vibrations and appreciations of Cézanne and Renaissance paintings and color and tastes. And here was this great big government plot to suppress it and make it seem as if it were something diabolic, satanic, full of hatred and fiendishness and madness ….It was the very first time I ever had solid evidence in my own body that there was a difference between reality as I saw it myself and reality as it was described officially by the state, the government, the police and the media. From then on I realized that marijuana was going to be an enormous political catalyst, because anybody who got high would immediately see through the official hallucination that had been laid down and would begin questioning, “What is this war? What is the military budget?”
That powerful realization led Ginsberg to co-found America’s first pro-marijuana lobbying and activism organization and become a lifelong advocate not just for cannabis liberation, but for the demise of repressive regimes around the world. He also conspired with author Norman Mailer to hijack a live episode of a national television talk show and use it as a platform for America’s first substantial, fact-based discussion of marijuana in a public forum since the herb was made federally illegal in the 1930s.
Mailer, though less enthusiastic than Ginsberg, agreed to the plan in honor of his own reverence for the herb. In a Paris Review interview, the controversial, iconoclastic novelist once claimed that his lifelong habit of intense self-analysis “started with marijuana because I found that, smoking marijuana, I became real to myself for the first time.” He later described to High Times a more sensual herbal epiphany that struck him the very first time he got high:
I was out in the car listening to the radio. Some jazz came on. I’d been listening to jazz for years, but it had never meant all that much to me. Now, with the powers pot offered, simple things became complex; complex things clarified themselves. These musicians were offering the inner content of their experiences to me.
So, to recap: When the Beatles tried pot for the first time, they metamorphosed from a hard-drinking, pill-popping, commercially oriented boy band into harbingers of a coming peacenik psychedelic revolution; when Allen Ginsberg got high, he started questioning authority and exploring the illegitimacy of the government; and Norman Mailer’s first dance with Mary Jane offered powerful insights into himself that, somewhat paradoxically, also opened him up to an empathic understanding of another culture’s art and experience.
No wonder the powers that be are afraid of this herb!
