By Al Aronowitz, z”l
Writers, historians, and journalists like to report that it was Bob Dylan who introduced the Beatles to pot, but that isn’t exactly true. Dylan was in the room and he got high on that night, August 28, 1964, in Manhattan’s Delmonico Hotel. But blame for turning that historic moment into a smoke-filled evening of inhalation and laughter—that belongs to me. I brought the Fab Four and Dylan together and on the night they met, I made sure everyone got stoned out of their minds.
The author and George Harrison share a joint. Photo courtesy Al Aronowitz.
At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory or perverse, this is one of the proudest achievements of my life. It’s true that John, Paul, George, and Ringo inevitably would have discovered pot, with or without me. But to be the handmaiden to a moment with such vast implications for pop culture, that’s something. Almost single-handedly, the Beatles infected pop with psychedelia. Their music evolved, taking on dimensions and colors that have never been surpassed. They "began to compose under marijuana’s spell," said authors Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. "It didn't show very much on the next album, most of which was already composed and recorded anyway, but you could almost smell the pungent smoke on the album that was to follow."
I was uniquely suited to bring Dylan to the Beatles, and vice versa. I was friendly with dozens of great artists, musicians, and writers then and I was—and still am—a journalist. When my cover piece about the Beatles sold more copies of the Saturday Evening Post than any issue since Ben Franklin first founded the magazine, the editors sent me to England in the summer of 1964 to write a second cover story about the Beatles.
And I already knew Dylan by then. I’d written a Saturday Evening Post article about Bob, and in the course of reporting that piece I basically fell in love with guy. To me, no other artist had ever come along with such wit, perception, insight, charm, cleverness, and charisma. To me, Bob was doing more to change the English language than anybody since Shakespeare.
Arranging a face to face in August of '64 was trickier than you’d think. Initially, Dylan had no interest. To him, the Beatles were "bubblegum," and he had a natural skepticism about anything so popular. He certainly didn't want any of his concerts drowned out by teenybopper screeches. "It'll never happen," he told me. But I badgered him. I felt that Dylan’s message was almost holy and that it was my mission to encourage him to expand his audience, especially to the young. I wanted his lyrics to enlighten the same kiddies then trying to claw the clothes off the Beatles.
For a while, Lennon was just as reluctant, though for different reasons. He kept saying he wanted to wait until he was Dylan's "ego equal" before they actually shook hands. "Yeah, I wanna meet 'im," Lennon told me, "but on me own terms."
To him, Bob Dylan might not have been as important an inspiration as Elvis Presley, but Dylan's magic had stopped an entire counterculture dead in its tracks. It had stopped Lennon, too. It was after listening to Dylan's first album that John had written his autobiographical "I'll Cry Instead," intended for use in the soundtrack of A Hard Day's Night. The song never made it into the movie, but it very easily could have been written by Dylan about himself. "I've got a chip on my shoulder that's bigger than my feet," the song said. "I can't talk to people that I meet."
Originally, I assumed that the Beatles smoked pot. I had thought for sure that any artist who could make music sound as hip as they made it sound had to be a pot-smoker. Besides, both Dylan and I were certain that when it came to the chorus of "I Want To Hold Your Hand" the boys were singing, "I get high! I get high! I get high!"
Not so. As John once obligingly pointed out, it was "I can't hide! I can't hide! I can't hide!" Before they took their first puff, the Beatles didn’t differentiate between pot smokers and junkies. Like the DEA, they put grass into the same category as heroin. It took some convincing, but Lennon was ready to smoke right around the time he was ready to meet Dylan, and when the Beatles arrived at the Delmonico, I brought along both. At that point, I was only following orders. I had been standing in the family room of my house in the suburbs of New Jersey when John telephoned.
"Where iz 'e?"
"Who?"
"Dylan!"
"Oh, he's up in Woodstock, but I can get him to come down."
"Do it!"
When we were ushered into their suite, the Fab Four and Brian Epstein had adjourned from their room service table to seats in an adjoining sitting room, separated from the room with the dining table by a wide rectangular arch. From the front room near the windows overlooking Park Avenue, we all seemed to migrate back to the room service table. That's where the glasses and the wine and the liquor bottles were. Bob just wanted what he usually drinks, cheap wine.
"I'm afraid we only have champagne," said Brian, apologetically. There also were some expensive French wines and the scotch and Coke, which had become the standard Beatles drink. The Beatles immediately started making a big fuss about not having any cheap wine, and they were about to send Mal Evans out to get some Chianti or something, but Bob started getting drunk on the harder stuff. Alcohol always was Bob's number one drug of choice. When the Beatles offered some pills, I said we'd rather smoke some pot.
I still hadn't learned how to roll a joint in those days, so Dylan rolled the first. Bob wasn't much of a roller either, and a lot of the grass fell into the big bowl of fruit on the room service table.
About twenty cops were stationed in the corridor outside the door of the suite. Room service waiters kept coming in and out. Before we lit up, Bob and I suggested that we all go into the bedroom and shut the door for some privacy. Epstein and the Beatles stationed themselves at the far end of the room near the front windows, clustering around John, at the head of one of the beds. Bob handed the joint to John, who immediately handed it to Ringo.
"You try it!" John commanded.
That act instantly revealed the Beatles' pecking order. Obviously, Ringo was the low man on the totem pole. When Ringo hesitated, John made some sort of wisecrack about Ringo being his royal taster.
"Inhale with a lot of oxygen," I instructed. "Take a deep breath of air together with smoke and hold it in your lungs for as long as you can."
As Ringo kept taking hits, Bob and I waited for him to pass the joint to John, who was sitting right next to Ringo. But the Beatles were unacquainted with the rituals of pot smoking, which include passing it around. It was obvious that Ringo was going to hold onto it as if he were smoking a cigarette filled with tobacco.
I didn't want to risk the possibility that Brian and the Beatles might recoil from the idea of passing a joint from lips to lips, like a bottle shared by winos on a street corner. So soon, everybody was smoking his own joint as if it were a cigarette. After a while, the band’s publicist, Derek Taylor, got into the act, popping in and out from the suite where he was keeping at bay all the press and VIPs who were awaiting their turns to meet the Beatles.
It didn’t take long for Ringo to get the giggles. In no time at all, he was laughing hysterically. His laughing looked so funny that the rest of us started laughing hysterically at the way Ringo was laughing hysterically. Soon, Ringo pointed at the way Brian Epstein was laughing, and we all started laughing hysterically at the way Brian was laughing.
"I'm so high, I'm on the ceiling," Brian kept saying. "I'm on the ceiling..."
We kept laughing at one another's laughter until every one of us had been laughed at. There also came a certain point when Paul realized he was really thinking for the first time in his life and he also realized that this was a great occasion. He told one of the band’s buddy/roadies to get a pad and a pen and to write down everything he said. What happened to those notes I have no idea, but nearly every word that Paul uttered was jotted down that evening, from that point on.
Yes, we all probably had one of the best laughs of our lives that night. I hadn't laughed so hard since the first time I smoked. That's why, after that night at the Delmonico, whenever John wanted to smoke some pot, he would never say, "Let's smoke some marijuana," or, "Let's get stoned," or, "Let's smoke a joint" or, "Let's turn on." To Paul, George, and Ringo he would say, "Let's 'ave a larf!"
Al Aronowitz (z”l) was a pioneering rock journalist — the man who introduced Bob Dylan to the Beatles. He died in 2005.