Lucy in the Mind of Lennon by Kasser Tim;

Author:Kasser, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Recent Past

After his mother’s death, Lennon went on to became a full-fledged musician, form the Beatles, marry, father a child, release albums, make films, and become world-famous. While all of these intervening events are no doubt important in their own right, here I will focus on the events of 1966 so as to understand how the recent temporal context may have affected Lennon’s psychological state as he entered the winter of 1966–1967, encountered Julian’s picture, and composed Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Those months were clearly a time of flux for Lennon, marked by internal and external turbulence of many sorts.

As noted earlier, Lennon had long been a regular and heavy user of a host of drugs: cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, uppers, and downers. In January of 1966, Lennon began seriously experimenting with the hallucinogenic drug LSD. Although he had taken LSD a couple of times before (first unknowingly ingesting it in a spiked cup of coffee), Lennon now started tripping regularly, sometimes multiple times per week. On occasion he did so while reading Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience, a guidebook based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and designed to promote the user’s psychological and spiritual development; Lennon liberally borrowed from this book to write the lyrics of Tomorrow Never Knows. These frequent forays into a chemically altered state of awareness left his wife Cynthia feeling more and more isolated from Lennon, as well as worried about his mental health.

Then in July, some fans who had once so adored Lennon and the Beatles turned against him with fury. The first instance occurred in the Philippines, when Brian Epstein (the Beatles’ manager) ignored an invitation for the Fab Four to visit the presidential palace. The perceived snub of their leaders led hundreds of angry Filipinos to form a gauntlet at the airport through which the Beatles had to run to their plane; punches, kicks, and even bricks were thrown at the Beatles and their entourage. Later that summer there was trouble of a different sort in the United States, when an interview was published in Datebook in which Lennon proclaimed that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now” and that “I don’t know which will go first—rock-and-roll or Christianity.” While readers in the United Kingdom had more or less ignored Lennon’s comments when they had been published a few months earlier in the Evening Standard, youth and adults in the southern United States were infuriated. Throughout the Bible Belt, Beatles’ albums and memorabilia were piled into pyres and set aflame, and Lennon received at least one death threat. Then the reaction spread across the world, as the playing of Beatles’ music was banned in South Africa, Holland, and Spain, and the Pope criticized Lennon in the Vatican’s newspaper. At first confused by these reactions, Lennon soon became quite upset, as he and his bandmates worried about the feasibility of completing their upcoming world tour in such an atmosphere. Eventually Lennon apologized and tried to explain what he had intended by his comments.

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