Bob Dylan introduces The Beatles to marijuana

Until we happened upon marijuana, we’d been drinking men. We were introduced to grass when we were in the US, and it blew our tiny little minds.

I’ve touched on this before, but exactly what happened is that we were in a hotel suite, maybe in New York around the summer of 1964, and Bob Dylan turned up with his roadie, the kind of guy who was more than a roadie – an assistant, friend, sidekick. He’d just released Another Side of Bob Dylan. We were just drinking, as usual, having a little party. We’d ordered drinks from room service – scotch and Coke and French wine were our thing back then – and Bob had disappeared into a back room. We thought maybe he’d gone to the toilet, but then Ringo came out of that back room, looking a bit strange. He said, ‘I’ve just been with Bob, and he’s got some pot,’ or whatever you called it then. And we said, ‘Oh, what’s it like?’ and he said, ‘Well, the ceiling is kind of moving; it’s sort of coming down.’ And that was enough.

After Ringo said that, the other three of us all leapt into the back room where Dylan was, and he gave us a puff on the joint. And you know how a lot of people take a puff and think it’s not working? We expected something instantaneous, so we kept puffing away and saying, ‘It’s not working, is it?’ And suddenly it was working. And we were giggling, laughing at each other. I remember George trying to get away, and I was sort of running after him. It was hilarious, like a cartoon chase. We thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty amazing, this stuff.’ And so it became part of our repertoire from then on. How did we get our pot? To tell you the truth, it just showed up. There were certain people you could get it from. You just had to know who had some.

Paul McCartney – From “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present“, 2021

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