George Harrison and John Lennon became close in the years they spent with The Beatles. They didn’t start out this way, though. Lennon initially hadn’t wanted Harrison to join the band, believing he looked so young that he damaged the band’s image. Harrison said that after an experience he and Lennon shared, he no longer felt he embarrassed him.
George Harrison said he stopped feeling like he embarrassed John Lennon after they tried LSD
In the mid-1960s, The Beatles began using LSD. Lennon and Harrison were the first to try the drug, and Lennon estimated that he used it 1,000 times.
“I don’t think John had a thousand trips; that’s a slight exaggeration,” Harrison said in The Beatles Anthology. “But there was a period when we took acid a lot — the year we stopped touring, the year of the Monterey Pop Festival, we stayed home all the time, or went to each others’ houses.”
Harrison said that taking LSD with Lennon changed the dynamic of their relationship. It made him feel closer to Lennon than all the other Beatles.
“After taking acid together, John and I had a very. interesting relationship,” he said. “That I was younger or I was smaller was no longer any kind of embarrassment with John. Paul still says, ‘I suppose we looked down on George because he was younger.’ That is an illusion people are under. It’s nothing to do with how many years old you are, or how big your body is. It’s down to what your greater consciousness is and if you can live in harmony with what’s going on in creation. John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death.”
George Harrison could tell he embarrassed John Lennon when they were young
When Harrison first met Lennon, he could tell he embarrassed the older musician. Paul McCartney invited Harrison to join the band, but Lennon wasn’t a fan.
“I think [John] did feel a bit embarrassed about that because I was so tiny,” Harrison said in the book George Harrison: Behind the Locked Door by Graeme Thomson. “I only looked about ten years old.”
Lennon admitted he tried to avoid Harrison, who did whatever he could to be close to him.
“He came round once and asked me to go to the pictures with him but I pretended I was busy,” Lennon said. “I didn’t dig him on first sight.”
They encouraged their bandmates to try LSD
Once Lennon and Harrison had tried LSD, they felt they couldn’t relate to McCartney or Ringo Starr, who hadn’t taken it.
“John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid because we couldn’t relate to them anymore,” Harrison said, per Rolling Stone. “Not just on the one level — we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much. It was such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable. It was something that had to be experienced, because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think.”
Starr tried it and, after some hesitation, McCartney did too.
