Though in the past the band had relied “on pills”—like the “Prellies” (phenmetrazine) that got them through twelve-hour performances in Hamburg—to endure grueling performance schedules, it’s later revealed that during Help! the Beatles were instead “on pot,” on what director Dick Lester called “a happy high.”

According to Ringo, they have all been “smoking pot for breakfast.” To avoid arousing suspicion when they go through customs, the Beatles roadies devise an ingenious concealment: they buy a carton of cigarettes, fill each pack with joints, then use an iron to reseal the cellophane.

“I’ve always needed a drug to survive,” John admits, adding, “The others, too, but I always had more, more pills, more of everything because I’m more crazy probably.”

And in the spring of 1965, he and George are introduced to yet another mind-bending substance: LSD.

*  *  *

“Let’s go,” George Harrison says to his wife, Pattie. The two of them, along with John and Cynthia Lennon, have just finished a nice meal as the dinner guests of London dentist John Riley. They have plans to meet Ringo at a club and catch some new musical acts Brian Epstein is promoting, including their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann’s new band.

“You haven’t had any coffee yet. It’s ready, I’ve made it—and it’s delicious,” their host’s girlfriend protests as the group rises to leave.

They agree, but after drinking the coffee, John says they really do have to leave. “These friends of ours are going to be on soon. It’s their first night.”

“I advise you not to leave,” Riley tells them, revealing that he’s secretly dosed them with LSD. “It was in the coffee.”

John is furious. “How dare you fucking do this to us!”

Despite the dentist’s attempts to get the foursome to stay—“I think he thought that there was going to be a big gang bang, and that he was going to shag everybody. I really think that was his motive,” says George—the four of them take off in Pattie’s orange Mini Cooper.

“All the way the car felt smaller and smaller, and by the time we arrived we were completely out of it,” Pattie remembers. Cyn is frightened by her altered perceptions, later saying, “It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film.”

John, on the other hand, is rather enjoying himself. “We were cackling in the streets, and people were shouting ‘Let’s break a window,’ you know, it was just insane. We were just out of our heads.” George finds himself undergoing something transcendental: “It was as if I had never tasted, talked, seen, thought or heard properly before.”

Eventually they make it to the Ad Lib Club, on Leicester Place, where they pile into an elevator. It has a small red light.