Jump to content

John, Paul, George and . . .


Recommended Posts

  • 1 month later...

.... the wicked dentist

 

Revealed: Dentist who introduced Beatles to LSD

By Ian Herbert

Published: 09 September 2006 The Independent

 

Few of those many momentous nights enjoyed by the Beatles at the height of their fame were to have more profound consequences than one spent at an unprepossessing two-bedroom flat near London's Bayswater Place in April 1965.

 

It had been an inconsequential evening of socialising shared by George Harrison, John Lennon, their wives Cynthia Lennon and Patti Boyd and George's dentist, who had just drifted over their social horizon. Then the five, accompanied by the dentist's wife, adjourned from the small dining room to the lounge, where the dentist slipped LSD - a substance then as little known to the Beatles as to most in Britain - into their coffees.

 

The details of George and John's introduction to the sense-enhancing drug have, until now, remained one of the most enigmatic aspects of the band's history, despite 1,000 books on the subject, as has the name of the man described only as the "wicked dentist" by George in the one interview which relates a sense of the event for the Beatles Anthology. In a new book the music writer, Steve Turner, reveals the dentist to be John Riley, the son of a Metropolitan Police officer who, after training as a cosmetic dentist in Chicago, became a dentist to the stars.

 

It was the Beatles' first experience of the drug - one which made the small room of the flat in Strathearn Place "as big as the Albert Hall" according to Cynthia and gave George the impression that he was "falling in love" with everyone he met after later driving the group in his Mini to the Pickwick Club and Ad Lib, near Leicester Square.

 

The experience spawned the surreal lyrics of Help!, which went to number one in September 1965 with declarations such as "Now I find I've changed my mind, opened up the doors" (after Aldous Huxley's LSD-inspired Doors of Perception and "My independence seems to vanish in the haze." From the Revolver album to the acid-induced "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (LSD?) track on the Sgt Pepper album and later rows with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who disapproved of the substance, the experience shaped the band's destiny.

 

Turner's book, The Fab Four: The Gospel According To The Beatles (WJK Press,

Link to post
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...