How A Bad Acid Trip Inspired “She Said She Said”
Express/Archive Photos/Getty ImagesThe Beatles at their Hollywood Hills house on August 28, 1964.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trippy, otherworldly sounding “She Said She Said” was inspired by LSD.
In August 1965, The Beatles had flown to Los Angeles to play a number of concerts in California. They had a few days off, which they spent at a rented house in Beverly Hills.
There, John Lennon and George Harrison — who had taken LSD before — convinced Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney to join.
“John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid,” Harrison later recalled, “because we couldn’t relate to them anymore. Not just on the one level – we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much.”
But at the last minute, McCartney decided to abstain. The other three went on without him, and before long, the party was in full swing.
By the time actor Peter Fonda showed up, “It was a thoroughly tripped-out atmosphere.”
Fonda recalled being approached by David Crosby, of The Byrds, who told him: “Fonda, you gotta go talk to George; he thinks he’s dying.”
So Fonda wandered to the back of the house, where he found Harrison in the throes of LSD-induced paranoia. For whatever reason, the actor thought that talking about his own near-death experience might calm the Beatle down.
“I said that I knew what it was like to be dead because when I was 10 years old I accidentally shot myself in the stomach and my heart stopped beating three times while I was on the operating table because I’d lost so much blood,” Fonda explained.
This rankled Lennon, who glanced up and snapped: “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born. Who put all that shit in your head?”
As Lennon later described the moment, “We didn’t want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn’t know; he hadn’t made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.'”
The incident with Fonda stuck with Lennon. As he sat down to start writing tunes for The Beatles album Revolver, he tried to put his encounter with Fonda to music.
With Harrison’s help, Lennon came up with “She Said She Said,” which the band recorded in June 1966.
But although the song — and the new album — showed The Beatles’ growth as musicians, it also masked new divisions in the group.
McCartney had not shared in the L.A. acid trip — although he and Lennon would trip together in December 1965. And during the recording of “She Said She Said,” McCartney walked out of the studio, something he almost never did.
“I’m not sure but I think it was one of the only Beatle records I never played on,” McCartney later recalled. “I think we’d had a barney or something and I said, ‘Oh, fuck you!’ and they said, ‘Well, we’ll do it.’ I think George played bass.”
