Paul goes to John’s house for another of their traditional songwriting sessions. John is holding a drawing made by his son, Julian. It’s a picture of his schoolmate with the handwritten title “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

They go up to the music room.

“Cellophane flowers,” Paul says. “Newspaper taxis.”

John counters with “kaleidoscope eyes” and “looking glass ties,” and suddenly they’re riffing together like the old days.

Paul is happy to see a glimmer of the John he knows. “You’re stuck out in suburbia, living a middle-class life,” he tells his old friend.

Cyn, too, barely recognizes John, complaining that “it was becoming impossible to communicate” with her husband. “I think the drugs destroyed a lot of his creativity,” she says, despite his connecting ever more deeply with fans on songs like “Strawberry Fields,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

On the evening of March 21, at Studio Two, John accidentally drops acid, mistaking it for the amphetamine he sought to combat the boredom of watching Paul and George finesse the vocals on “Getting Better.” Suddenly, his roiling existential struggles burst into an immediate danger.

“George, I’m not feeling too good,” John tells their producer. “I’m not focusing on me.”

The ever-present fans are clustered outside. The only safe refuge is the rooftop, so that’s where George Martin takes him.

John looks up at the clear night sky. “Aren’t they fantastic?” he asks of the stars, pressing up against the eighteen-inch guardrail for a better view.

“They just look like stars to me,” the producer says, gently guiding John away from the precipice.

*  *  *

“John always had a way of having an edge to his songs,” George says.

The making of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band has further sharpened those edges. At John’s insistence, the album is “one of the most important steps in our career. It had to be just right.”

In contrast to the ten-hour recording session for the Beatles’ first studio album, Please Please Me, on February 11, 1963, the band logs seven hundred hours of studio time to create this thirteenth LP—at the astounding cost of $100,000 (more than $750,000 today).

Brian Epstein hosts two release parties for the album. The first is held for the press at his house in London on May 19, 1967. Based on the strength of her portfolio, Brian’s assistant has invited a twenty-five-year-old American photographer, Linda Eastman, to attend. By chance, Paul had just met Linda a few days earlier at the Bag O’Nails club, where she was being shown around London by the Animals, another leading British music export and one of her first celebrity photo subjects. Paul and Linda hit it off, but Paul is still in a serious relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Jane Asher, to whom he’ll announce an engagement on Christmas Day in 1967.