Bob Dylan and The Beatles | Page 4 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

That night of August 28 was the big night. The Beatles were in town staying at the Delmonico Hotel. On our way to Manhattan, we stopped by Al Aronowitz’s house in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He was hosting Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend, Peter Orlovsky, for dinner when we arrived. Al wrapped up his dinner party and jumped in the car with us, and we all headed for the Delmonico. On the way, Al told us of his plan to turn the Beatles on to pot. Al was a great believer in the enlightening power of marijuana. He considered pot a wonder drug, nourishment for the brain, the consummate head food. He had the zeal of a convert and wanted to share what had transformed his own psychic experience. The Beatles had been wary of it in Europe, but Al had convinced them to open up their minds. He believed that our influence would make it happen.

We parked three blocks away on this quiet street and Al jumped out and left us all sitting in the car. He walked off to the hotel and we waited close to an hour. He returned with the Beatles’ public relations guy, Derek Taylor, who turned out to be a fabulous guy – a truly great guy who was with the Beatles from the beginning. We all got out and started walking.

New York City seemed serene and beautiful that night; we were surrounded by huge, towering buildings all around. You could see shadows from the streetlights dancing off the windows in an endless, dizzying display of reflections. It was also very quiet, so quiet you could hear a pin drop. As we got closer, we started to hear what sounded like an ocean. Continuous noise. Like white noise from a television. We turned a corner onto Park Avenue and there was this huge crowd. We couldn’t believe it. It was like a crisis had happened. There were people behind barricades on both sides of the street and cops on horses walking up and down Park Avenue. People were everywhere; I had never witnessed such madness.

Nobody recognized Bob Dylan either, which is an interesting thing to note considering he was surrounded by a sea of people, most of whom knew who he was. I can explain it like this: Bob can walk and look unlike Bob. He hunches over, he softens his body, curls his shoulders and walks so innocuously that you don’t pay attention to him. I walk in front of him, so I block a lot of what people can see of his face and his body. He gets in step with me so we’re real close, like synchronized military walking. Later on, in the venues around the world where you have to exit out the front of the venue, we would use this same technique. And it worked! Even when we walking through a crowd of people that had just watched him onstage. Nobody would ever recognize him.

Derek Taylor led the way to the Delmonico Hotel; he had all the credentials and papers. We made it through the first barricade and approached the second one, where cops and security guards were stationed ten feet apart. There must have been a hundred cops there. We got to the second barricade and Derek showed the credentials again. I didn’t have any documents; neither did Bob or Al Aronowitz. Derek yells at the top of his lungs, “These guys are with me!” He repeats this over and over. “These guys are with me!” I don’t think the cops heard him over the noise of the crowd but they seemed to understand and let us pass.

We walked up to the hotel, which we had to enter one at a time through a revolving door. Derek went through, Al went through, Bob went through and then I went through. We had just gotten inside the lobby, when suddenly I felt a hand on the back of my jacket, on my shoulder like someone was going to ask me a question. I went through the regular door over the first barricade head-first on my back and was thrown into the crowd! Before I could blink an eye, I was back outside in the middle of the braying masses. It happened in an instant. I was thinking, Oh, f**k! I’m going to get arrested; I’m holding all the pot! People were staring down at me and the scene was a mess. I heard someone yelling over me, I looked up and it was Derek Taylor, screaming, “He’s with me! He’s with me!” They helped me up and dragged me back inside. I was extremely shaken up, my heart pounding at the walls of my chest. I was hurting a little bit, but luckily I still had all the pot in my pocket.

We proceeded to the elevator and headed up to the top floor. There was a cop in front of every door going down the hallway, all sitting in chairs in front of the doors. It was like the president was staying on the floor – totally locked down. We got to the suite where the Beatles were; everyone else was at the other end of the hallway, in another suite. Every celebrity you could imagine was down the hallway, including friends of mine – Peter, Paul and Mary and their road manager, Tom Law.

Derek, Al, Bob and I entered the amber-painted suite. Pitched against one wall was an overstuffed couch upholstered in navy blue. Against the opposite wall was a dining room table covered with stemware and ice and every kind of liquor. In the center of the room stood a glass coffee table and a few more plain wooden chairs. Brian Epstein and the four of them were waiting for us. They looked just like the pictures. Their hair was not long but neatly trimmed, combed down in their mop-top cuts. They were extremely clean and youthful looking, without a trace of facial hair. They dressed in gray collarless suits and skinny black ties, white shirts and black leather boots with a seam that ran down the middle to the pointy toes. They looked sharp, like perfect mod gentlemen. We were in jeans, T-shirts and leather jackets, looking scraggly and relaxed, the image of laid-back American youth in every James Dean movie. Bob was still wearing his motorcycle boots. Of course, they were on tour but we weren’t, but the different styles went beyond that. At that time, Bob wouldn’t have worn a suit like theirs, even if he played for the Queen of England. An ocean yawned between us, but it didn’t take us long to cross it.

Al Aronowitz introduced me. They didn’t need to be introduced to Bob, nor he to them. Bob extended his traditional limp handshake and each shook it in turn. Then they shook mine. John lit a cigarette and as they always did afterwards, offered another to everyone in the room. They were smoking American cigarettes; Bob and I accepted one to be polite even though we had our own. Al told them what had happened to me in front of the hotel, and they could see I was still a little rattled from it. They were very kind to me, asking if I was feeling all right. I checked again to make sure the pot was still in my pocket and told them I was fine.

At first Bob said very little. He cannot talk to a group of people except from the stage, and that’s hardly a conversation. It’s a monologue. John Lennon was the same way, both wordsmiths who got tongue-tied speaking to small groups. But Bob turned his smile on them, and the Beatles answered with their own happy charisma, the five of them eyeing each other like bashful kids at a dance. Bob made an effort to talk to them, answering their questions. We talked about guitars and about music, but only superficially. Their banter was very funny as they talked about people at the party down the hall and exchanged cryptic lines about New York.

Aronowitz saw his chance to spread the psychedlic gospel and asked the Beatles, “You wanna get high?”

They did. Bob took the marijuana from me and pulled up a wooden chair next to the glass coffee table in the middle of the room. He wanted to show them he knew his stuff – he tried to roll a joint and it fell to pieces in his hands, scattering pot over a bowl of fruit sitting on the table. I sat down next to him and took the pot away from him so that I could roll joints, as I usually did. The four Beatles were walking around the room, very animated, and excited about what was about to happen. They were wired, running on coffee and adrenaline from touring.

Bob grabbed a drink while I rolled a joint. When he came back to the coffee table, I lit it with a match and passed it to him. Bob took a hit and passed it to John, who then handed it to Ringo without putting it to his lips. “You try it,” John told Ringo. Ringo hesitated. John called him his “royal pot taster” and then Ringo did as John commanded. He held it like a cigarette between his fingers, taking one deep drag after another. He didn’t know the proper etiquette of pot: to pass it on to John, who was sitting next to him, patiently waiting his turn.

I wasn’t going to tell him to pass it because we just met, so I just rolled one for John. He lit up the joint and didn’t pass it either! So I rolled another one for Paul and then again for George. I kept rolling joints till everyone had their own except Bob. He just had alcohol and took a few hits here and there but not a whole joint like the rest of us. Bob had a couple of drinks and within an hour, he passed out on the floor! By this time, Paul was laughing so hard that tears were streaming out of his eyes. This was their very first encounter and Bob passed out! This wasn’t entirely because of the booze either. We were up all the time; he was exhausted. He might have been up nonstop the three days beforehand. But the booze didn’t help; it shoots you up and then crashes you down.

With Bob sleeping on the floor, one by one John, Paul, George and Ringo talked to me. We discussed life and politics. They wanted to know about everyone and everything: who was in our scene, what it was like in New York. I couldn’t believe how sensitive and aware of everybody they were. How concerned they were, whether I was okay. I was never made to feel inferior to them.

A little side note about the Beatles smoking pot: That first night wasn’t actually their first time trying it, like eveyone believes. They had tried it before but they didn’t get high. The stuff they had was cheap and low quality. They knew about hash, that kind of stuff was more popular in Europe. But until that night, they never had the rush. They’d never laughed till tears rolled down their faces.

The following morning, Paul came up to me and hugged me for ten minutes and said, “It was so great, and it’s all your fault! It’s all your fault because I love this pot!” He went into his thoughts on music while on it and how it made him feel. Ringo also came to me and said, “Is this the thing I have to be smoking now for the rest of my life, to enjoy a feeling like that?” I responded with, “Yeah, unfortunately it doesn’t stay with you. You have to keep doing it.”

Later that morning John talked to me about the other Americans he had met so far. Before Bob and I met him, he was in Texas, where he met a rancher who owned two million acres of land. He said to me, “What does a guy want with two million acres? The gentleman was so proud too!” We talked about the stupidity of excess, how accumulating wealth can be an addiction of its own. You see, John’s social-political awareness was in its infancy. I was very in tune with progressive politics at the time, due to my upbringing and my parents’ political activity. This was the beginning of many conversations with John about U.S. and world politics. We also touched on the relationship between politics and music.

We discussed black singers and black music; he was very interested in the blues. The blues were really coming into the scene. Even Bob played the blues. That was no secret. Bob basically played simple twelve-bar blues, and some people thought at this time that he only knew one song mechanically. He insisted, however, that he only knew the structure and chords of five songs and all else was a spin-off or continuation. Our conversation continued in this vein: we talked about everything, flitting from subject to subject.

John explained how the doctors had already got to him. How they had given him and the other guys open access to pills and various pharmaceuticals. Every type, you name it. They had handfuls of pills in their room – uppers and downers. I mean, handfuls that the doctors had downloaded on them. I instantly put the doctors down and proceed to explain my philosophy on the medical industry. To me they were the enemy, overmedicating and pushing pills as the only course of remedy. And in these situations they can be overzealous from the celebrity interaction, going beyond what’s necessary to impress or befriend. Just like drug dealers would hand out drugs to artists backstage, doctors played the same role for the same reasons. I watched it happen and on a few occasions, I took advantage of it too. But I believed they were the enemy then, and I do to this day. Not all doctors, but that mentality – always enabling patients to take pills, especially celebrities, giving them unbridled access to s**t they don’t need. John said this was the first time he had ever heard someone talk like that about doctors. It opened him up to the idea that what they were prescribing could be excessive.

Around midday I was walking around the suite and I went to the window to check out the scene, to see the madness below. The room was six floors up and I looked over the window’s edge down at Park Avenue. I saw the crowd below, and all of a sudden, the roar knocked me back. The noise was so great, it forced me away from the window. It felt like the crowd could come right in! And we were six floors up! It was a surreal experience because they all thought I was one of the Beatles. I looked at Bob and told him to try it out. He walked up to the window and, sure enough, the same thing happened: huge screams, a tidal wave of noise. We were laughing and carrying on with it, one by one we all did it. All the guys, each one of us, kept going back. We could control the level of noise; it was like we were making a song. Roaring cheers then subtle cheers, then roaring cheers, then subtle cheers. At the end we all went up together and the people went bananas! I thought the glass was going to shatter, it was so loud.

At one point after our window gag, George came to me and mentioned that none of his roadies knew what to do when things got a little out of hand, when things started to fall apart. He started this conversation because he saw me check it all out. I’m a restless guy and my nature was to check it all out – the whole scene, wherever we were, whatever we were doing. I was good at being aware of my environment, avoiding problems and solving them should they arise. George saw this in me and mentioned that his guys were not professional, that they were new guys, and that level of fame and touring was new to them. The thing is, I’d already had years of experience with this, years of experience promoting concerts. This was my world. George noticed that and appreciated it. This was the foundation of our friendship, this sort of respect for how we each operated. Over the years George and I would grow closer and remain good friends.

It’s interesting that Victor doesn’t have them all retreating to a bedroom/bathroom (depending on the account); that he doesn’t have Brian partaking that night, let alone have him reacting badly (despite Beatle accounts); that Bob was passed out on the floor within little more than an hour of them entering the suite (contrary to Beatle accounts); and that they were there into the afternoon of the 29th (I’ve always just assumed they stumbled out of the Beatles’ suite in the early hours, giggling their way past the policemen all in a row).

Bob and I were at a hotel with the Beatles by the airport in Brooklyn. Brian Epstein was hanging out with us now, mainly because the schmoozing was over and it was just the guys, Bob and me. All the other celebrities and industry people had left. John and Paul talked Brian into getting stoned, so he had a couple of hits and then went bananas! He was instantly in the corner freaking out and telling people to leave him alone. He went nuts; he was an extremely insecure guy and the pot exposed that.

Pot is a curious thing like that; it can either help you or expose your inner demons. I couldn’t imagine the pressure he had at the time, being gay in the sixties. At that point being gay in England and Wales was a criminal offense! It was things like that that drove him to coping mechanisms like prescription drugs, which he had open access to. Ultimately he died from an overdose of sleeping pills. It was an incredibly sad moment for everyone in our circle.

After Brian calmed down that night, we gathered our things and headed out to the limousines to drive to dinner. After we ate we were packing into the two limousines we had: Albert, Brian and Al were in one; Bob, John, Paul, George, Ringo and I were in the other. I opened the car door and they all jumped in, then I got in and closed the door. Well … somebody farted … I instantly thought it was Bob. But John looked right at me, like I did it, and said in that brilliant British accent, “The secret is to jump up and down before getting in the car to shake the farts out.” I thought that was hilarious – words of wisdom from one of the world’s greatest songwriters. I still laugh about that to this day.