How John Lennon’s Accidental LSD Trip During a Beatles Recording Session Strengthened His Bond with Paul McCartney 

‘John & Paul,’ a new book by journalist Ian Leslie, explores the intricacies of their complicated relationship

John Lennon and Paul McCartney changed the world with the 162 songs they wrote for the Beatles, but few demonstrate the creative and emotional complexities of their relationship quite like “Getting Better,” from the band’s 1967 opus, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Speaking to PEOPLE 50 years after writing it, McCartney would cite the track as emblematic of their contrasting philosophical dispositions — with himself handling the bright and buoyant “It’s getting better all the time” chorus while Lennon offered the tart counterpoint: “It can’t get no worse.”

In John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, author Ian Leslie details their union with perceptive insights bolstered by extensive research. The book highlights not only how “Getting Better” illustrates Lennon and McCartney’s individual personalities, but also how the recording session became an unexpected bonding experience of the psychedelic variety.

As with many songs from this era, the initial idea came from McCartney. While strolling in the park on an early spring day in March 1967, he recalled a favorite phrase of part-time Beatles’ drummer Jimmie Nicol, who subbed in for a few dates on the 1964 world tour while Ringo Starr recovered from tonsillitis. When interviewers asked how he was coping with the whirlwind role, Nicol would invariably reply with a hopeful “It’s getting better!” Nearly three years later, the line bubbled into McCartney’s consciousness, appealing to his innate sense of optimism.

Lennon, meanwhile, brought a very different perspective. “Into this song, initiated by Paul, John poured a stream of reflections on his own life — on the anger he had carried around with him as a teenager and a younger man; on the emotional and physical abuse he had inflicted on women,” Leslie writes. Lennon’s notoriously troubled upbringing was marred by paternal abandonment, frequent moves, and the sudden death of those closest to him, including his estranged mother Julia. “I grew up thinking everybody had a loving family,” McCartney would later say in the book A Life in Lyrics. “As an older lad I was shocked to find that this wasn’t true – that many people had disastrous childhoods – and John Lennon was one of them.”

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By his own admission, Lennon spent his later teenage years “in a blind rage…I was either drunk or fighting.” The final verse he contributed to “Getting Better” is believed to be scarily autobiographical. 

I used to be cruel to my woman 

I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved

Man, I was mean, but I’m changing my scene

And I’m doing the best that I can 

Many who knew Lennon commented on how his personality softened around the time when “Getting Better” was written in the early months of 1967. A vicious cycle of restlessness and depression drove him to consume heroic amounts of marijuana and LSD — plus a mix of assorted substances that he’d grind into an unpredictable mystery powder with a mortar and pestle.

A welcomed side-effect of this pharmacological escapism made him, in Leslie’s words, “calmer, nicer, and more childlike.” Rather than working himself into a fury with alcohol, Lennon became more demonstrably affectionate and embraced the act of embracing.

“This is the new thing,” he said while wrapping his arms around a visitor at one point during the Summer of Love. “You hug your friends when you meet them, and show them you’re glad to see them.” That this was a revelation to Lennon is both touching and tragic. “When [the Beatles] used to get together after a month off, we used to be embarrassed about touching each other,” he told the band’s biographer, Hunter Davies, that same year. “We’d do an elaborate handshake just to hide the embarrassment… or we did mad dances. Then we got to hugging each other.”

Lennon’s acid-induced enlightenment came at the cost of his musical productivity. As Leslie observes, “he had never found it so hard to create new songs.” Only four Sgt. Pepper tracks originated from Lennon, and McCartney had to coax them out. “Nobody, not even John, believed more in John’s talents than Paul, or was more deeply invested in him making the most of them. McCartney also wanted his friend to be happy. He could see that John was calmer and better-tempered than he had been. He could also see that John was unmoored. When John wasn’t working, he was tripping. Left to drift aimlessly, he might lose himself altogether.”

For 20-something McCartney — who’d also lost his mother as a teenager — work was the primary stabilizing force in his life. (“If it hadn’t been for Paul, we would’ve made a lot less records because he’s the workaholic,” Starr confessed to PEOPLE in 2019.) He hoped that songwriting would help ground his wayward friend.

As with many of their co-written songs in this era, “Getting Better” finds McCartney suggesting a starting point to Lennon and encouraging him to follow it. “In ‘Getting Better,’ Paul nudged John into creating a kind of self-help narrative of his own life,” writes Leslie. “The singer has been helped to put aside the self-loathing and rage of his youth by, well, someone. His realization is arrived at grudgingly, as something he has to admit, just as you might acknowledge a friend who often annoys you but who is busy saving you from yourself.” 

Lennon usually limited his psychedelic explorations to after work hours, preferring not to trip while the Beatles were working on new music. But that changed on the evening of March 21st, 1967. The Beatles were holed up at EMI’s Abbey Road studios, preparing for a marathon all-night session to record backing harmonies for “Getting Better.” To steel himself for the long evening ahead, Lennon raided the portable pharmacy he kept in a small silver snuff box in search of an “upper” — anything to keep him awake. Instead, he accidentally dosed himself with acid.  (“It’ll certainly keep him awake for a while!” George Harrison chuckled in a 1992 interview.)

At first, he didn’t realize anything was amiss. Lennon recorded a few more vocal passes until he began to feel debilitating waves of paranoia wash over him. “I suddenly got so scared on the mic. I thought I felt ill. And [then] I thought I was going cracked.” he recalled in a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone. “Then it dawned on me that I must have taken some acid!” 

Lennon alerted the band’s producer, George Martin, that he needed to take five. (“George, I’m not feeling too good. I’m not focusing on me,” was his acidic explanation.) Martin, a generation older than his musical charges and woefully naïve to the world of drugs, noticed Lennon “swaying gently…and resonating like a human tuning fork” and decided that some fresh air would set him straight. “Of course I couldn’t take him out the front because there were 500 screaming kids who’d have torn him apart,” Martin remembered in the 1995 Beatles Anthology documentary. “So the only place I could take him to get fresh air was the roof.” 

“Martin paused the session and took John up to the roof for some fresh air,” Leslie writes. “The other Beatles stayed behind. But as Paul McCartney and George Harrison discussed what might be the matter with John, they figured out that he had probably taken a tab of LSD by accident — and that maybe standing on the top of a building wasn’t the best place for him. They rushed up the stairs, hoping that John did not decide to see if he could fly before they got there.”

Thankfully they arrived to find Lennon safe and sound, pinwheeling eyes intensely fixed on the night stars. “Aren’t they fantastic?” he asked his producer. “To him, I suppose they would have been especially fantastic,” Martin continued in Anthology. “At the time they looked just like ordinary stars to me!”  

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The session was halted for the night and the band dispersed. With Lennon’s chauffeur not due at the studio for several more hours, McCartney brought him to his Regency townhouse, located just a few minutes away from Abbey Road. “Once there,” Leslie writes, “Paul decided he would take some LSD himself.”

The decision was more fraught than one might expect. McCartney had been the last of the band to experiment with the drug. “I was really frightened of that kind of stuff,” he said in Anthology. “When acid came around, we’d heard you’re never the same. It alters your life and you’re never the same again. I think John was rather excited by that prospect, [but] I was rather frightened by that prospect. Like, ‘Just what I need, some funny little thing where I can never get back home again.’ Might not be the greatest move! So I was seen to stall a little bit within the group.”

His reticence drove a wedge between him and his three closest friends. “Paul felt very out of it, because we are all a bit slightly cruel,” Lennon recalled in Rolling Stone. “Sort of ‘We’re taking it, and you’re not.’” 

McCartney eventually caved to the peer pressure — or “fear pressure,” as he called it — in December 1965. Interestingly, he took his first trip without any of the Beatles. Instead, he preferred to explore the outer limits of his consciousness with Tara Browne, the heir to the Guinness brewery fortune and a fixture in the highest echelon of London’s social scene. (Following his fatal car wreck the next year, Lennon and McCartney immortalized Browne as the man who “blew his mind out in a car” in their song “A Day in the Life.”) 

McCartney would admit that he was “never that in love” with the psychedelic. “For a guy who wasn’t that keen on getting that weird, there was a disturbing element to it,” he’d say. Still, this evening with Lennon felt like a rare opportunity. Perhaps eager to reclaim a sense of intimacy that had been fading in their relationship since the band stopped touring the previous year, or mere just to keep his friend company, he decided to drop acid too.

“I thought, maybe this is the moment where I should take a trip with him,” McCartney recalled in the book Many Years from Now. “It had been coming for a long time. It’s often the best way, without thinking about it too much, just slip into it. John’s on it already, so I’ll sort of catch up. It was my first trip with John, or any of the guys.”

The experience was powerful for them both. “That night, John and Paul did something that the two of them practiced quite a few times during this period: they gazed intensely into each other’s eyes,” Leslie writes. “They liked to put their faces close together and stare, unblinking, until they felt themselves dissolving into each other, almost obliterating any sense of themselves as distinct individuals.” McCartney would later describe it, with classic understatement, as “a very freaky experience… John had been sitting around very enigmatically and I had a big vision of him as king, the absolutely Emperor of Eternity. It was a good trip.”

Leslie recognizes the crucial role that eye contact plays among all musicians, allowing them to communicate wordlessly — almost telepathically — as they played. Viewers of the intimate studio documentary Get Back saw that, despite the fluctuating state of their interpersonal relationship, Lennon and McCartney’s eyes were frequently locked on one another whenever they sang, signaling a range of practical and emotional nuances with the slightest glance. This seemed to extend into Lennon and McCartney’s non-musical lives.

“The two friends spent an unusual amount of their lives looking into each other’s eyes,” Leslie continues. “On tour buses, in hotel rooms, in dressing rooms. On YouTube and Tumblr, Beatles fans have collated long strings of images of John and Paul looking at each other at press conferences, in interviews, on stage, at parties. All the Beatles make a lot of eye contact, but the frequency and intensity of Lennon and McCartney’s ocular communication is striking.”

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It seemed to have special resonance for both men. McCartney would always cherish the memory of one moment, ironically after a heated argument with Lennon. After some name calling, the pair took a beat to let the dust settle. Lennon broke the silence by lowering his glasses, staring intently at his partner, and saying, “It’s only me.” 

It was a look McCartney would always remember — revealing, vulnerable, and warm. “To me, that was John,” he would say in Anthology. “Those were the moments when I actually saw him without the façade, the armour, which I loved as well, like anyone else. It was a beautiful suit of armour. But it was wonderful when he let the visor down and you’d just see the John Lennon that he was frightened to reveal to the world.”

Lennon would include a song called “Look at Me” on his harrowingly emotional 1970 solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. “Look at me,” he pleads. “What am I supposed to be? What am I supposed to do?” Yoko Ono asserted that Lennon craved reassuring glances from those dear to him. “He’d always be saying, ‘What are you thinking? Why aren’t you looking at me?’ I always had to look at him in the right way, straight into the middle of his eyes, or he’d start to get upset.”

Not long after the spacey night with McCartney following the aborted “Getting Better” session,  Lennon told biographer Hunter Davies “I have to see the others to see myself. Then I realize there is someone like me, so it’s reassuring. We do need each other a lot.” 

John & Paul is available now.