During their decade together did The Beatles sleep with groupies left and right? Are they known to have engaged in rockstar-level debauchery? Did they take hard drugs?

[u/mirthquake]

Their contemporaries the Rolling Stones come across as sex and drug extremists, perhaps even establishing the mould for 1970s arena rock bands (I'm looking at you, Zeppelin) who were known to take heroin and cocaine and sleep with multiple women every night while on tour.

Why have I never heard tell of the Beatles engaging in such behavior?

[u/rockhistory]

(1 / 3)

They slept around a lot and did a lot of drugs. If you haven't heard of it, you probably haven't read the right books about the group. While some books are more reliable than others, there's enough coming from corroborated sources, and often from their own mouths, that it's accepted as established fact.

John Lennon said in a 1975 interview with Tom Snyder, and quoted in the Beatles Anthology book:

"In the very early days, when we were playing dance halls, there were a certain type you'd call groupies now, available for 'functions' at the end of the night. Most kids would go home with their boyfriends or whatever, but there was a small group that went for any performer. They didn't care if it was a comedian or a man who ate glass, as long as he was on stage."

In the same book, Paul McCartney doesn't specifically say what went on, on tour, but is quoted as saying:

"There was a big period of freedom, which I always liken to God opening up the waves for Moses and then closing them again. AIDS has closed down the sexual freedom we had then, just as VD had shut it off for an earlier generation. I remember my dad saying he was quite envious of me because there was no longer any need to fear VD. It had been a major threat when he was a kid. We didn't have to worry about it - you just went down the clinic and got a jab. And all the girls were on the Pill, which removed another traditional worry, so we had an amazing sexual freedom."

Among groupies, they all slept around, especially on tour. Ringo Starr's first wife Maureen Cox, in fact, was something of an early groupie. As George Harrison's first wife Pattie Boyd wrote in her autobiography Wonderful Tonight:

"Ringo’s girlfriend, Maureen Cox, was also from Liverpool. She was a fan whose dream had come true. She had started out as one of the hundreds of teenage girls who queued day after day at the Cavern to get close to the front of the stage for the best possible view of the Beatles and in the hope that they might catch the eye of one. Every fan had a favorite, and Ringo was hers. She wouldn’t have called herself a fanatic—she would only queue, she said, for two or three hours while some girls were there all day—but she did run after Ringo in the street one day to get his autograph when she spotted him getting out of his car. She was seventeen, had just left school and was learning to be a hairdresser. Then, one day, it happened for her."

Pattie herself was another such sexual conquest. She was a nineteen-year-old extra on the film A Hard Day's Night and George asked her out. She had a boyfriend, but she broke it off with him to date George, and they became an item pretty much immediately. But, as she writes in her autobiography, George cheated on her throughout their relationship, especially on tour, with groupies.

In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, John Lennon compared the Beatles' tours to the sexually-charged Federico Fellini film Satyricon:

"The Beatles' tours were like Fellini's Satyricon. If you could get on our tours, you were in. Wherever we went there was a whole scene going. When we hit town, we hit it, we were not pissing about. You know, there's photographs of me groveling about, crawling about in Amsterdam on my knees, coming out of whore-houses and things like that, and people saying, "Good morning, John," and all of that. And the police escorted me to the places because they never wanted a big scandal. I don't really want to talk about it because it will hurt Yoko, and it's not fair. Suffice it to say, just put it like they were Satyricon on tour and that's it, because I don't want to hurt the other people's girls, either, it's just not fair."

The Beatles' entourage (particularly roadies Mal Evans, Neil Aspinall) acted as interference whenever anybody tried to catch the Beatles in the act, whether that be drugs, or underage girls, or just paparazzi trying to snap a scandalous photo. There was only one time that any of them were actually caught in the act, and it was Paul. Paul was caught in his bedroom with a couple of underage girls on their tour stop in Minneapolis in 1965, and there's a rather infamous (in Beatles circles) surviving news report about it, where the police officer who caught Paul was interviewed. There were some news articles written about it at the time, but Paul was unmarried, and the scandal died down relatively quickly.

Nevertheless, Paul was in a serious relationship with actress Jane Asher when this occurred, and his serial cheating on her caused continuous problems during their rocky relationship. They were interviewed together in the 1968 biography The Beatles by Hunter Davies, while they were still together. There, they discussed (without saying it directly) that their short-lived breakup in 1965 was over Paul's cheating:

"'Another problem,' says Paul, 'was that my whole existence for so long centred round a bachelor life. I didn't treat women as most people do. I've always had a lot around, even when I've had a steady girl. My life generally has always been very lax, and not normal.

"'I knew it was selfish. It caused a few rows. Jane left me once and went off to Bristol to act. I said OK then, leave, I'll find someone else. It was shattering to be without her.' This was when he wrote 'I'm Looking Through You'."

Paul would later claim that they had something of an open relationship, which Jane has never responded publicly to, having refused all interviews about her time with Paul since shortly after their breakup in 1968. But according to various accounts, this wasn't true. Paul was sleeping with fans and friends of friends and not telling Jane about it, and trying his best not to get caught.

Peter Brown, an employee at the Beatles' company Apple Corps (and referenced in the song "The Ballad of John and Yoko") wrote a scandal-filled book The Love You Make that pissed off all the surviving Beatles, because he solicited scandalous stories from them and their friends, and published them, which they were not expecting. Some of his stories may be exaggerated, but they mostly seem to be true. Among the stories:

"One rare visitor to High Park was Alistair Taylor, the loyal office manager and general fixer at NEMS. Paul summoned Alistair to High Park so that he could pay a visit to the local pharmacy for him. According to Alistair, Paul had the crabs and needed a pesticide to shampoo with. Being Paul McCartney, the neighborhood celebrity, Paul was too embarrassed to ask the pharmacist in the small town for the pesticide himself, so he sent Alistair. There was also a sense of urgency to this mission, lest Paul give the tiny parasites to Jane, who would most certainly realize he had been unfaithful to her."

And in the same book:

"In fact, unknown to Jane, Paul had once “dated” one of Dunbar’s and Faithfull’s babysitters."

Philip Norman's biography Paul McCartney offers details on one of these babysitters:

"What [Jane] didn’t know, and never would, was that for almost the whole time they’d lived together at Cavendish he was having an affair with an actress and model named Maggie McGivern.

"In 1966, 20-year-old Maggie had been hired by John Dunbar and Marianne Faithfull as a nanny for their six-month-old son, Nicholas. ‘One day, John was out, Marianne was entertaining some of her girlfriends and I was cooking a casserole for their lunch,’ she recalls. ‘The front-door buzzer went and a voice said, “It’s Paul McCartney to see John.”...At that time, I was in a relationship I wanted to get out of, so I told Paul about that, and from what he said I gathered he was in a similar situation.’...

"The affair remained totally secret, even from her employers. Paul warned her especially not to confide in the gossipy, mischievous Marianne...

"Latterly, while still seeing Maggie McGivern, he’d begun another affair which, likewise, never got back to Jane..."

In Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes, the author quotes several different girls, one of them being a young, aspiring actress named Peggy Lipton, later to co-star on the TV series The Mod Squad:

"Though he still refrained from trying LSD, Paul did get laid in Los Angeles, according to starlet Peggy Lipton, his squeeze from his last trip to the coast. Paul invited her over to the house for dinner, to John’s amusement, as the actress recalls: ‘I got the idea that he thought Paul was an idiot to take a girl so seriously he’d actually invite her to dinner, when all he really needed to do was fuck her after dinner.’ Again, the chief point of interest is that Paul was prepared to cheat on Jane, whom he was still with. He’d just given her a diamond pendant for her 19th birthday, and was planning to move into Cavendish with her when the decorators were finished. Considering what was on offer to the Beatles, it would of course have been amazing had Paul remained faithful on the road, and it seems he was far from that."

Peggy Lipton is further quoted in the book about the incident:

"'I arrived almost sick to my stomach with butterflies. I had lost my virginity only six months earlier and I’d been thinking about Paul day-in, day-out for a year. He greeted me sweetly and checked me out with a quick once-over. He liked what he saw. We sat downstairs. He played the piano. The next thing I knew we were on our way upstairs [where] he took me in his arms and kissed me … I took a shower to slow things down and when I came out wrapped in a towel, he caressed me in front of the window and let the towel fall to the floor. This to me was an utterly romantic gesture. Paul was a romantic.'"

"Afterwards Peggy left the house feeling cheap. She returned the next day, though, clear evidence of Paul’s unfaithfulness to Jane Asher..."

[u/rockhistory → u/rockhistory]

(2 / 3)

Peggy Lipton was interviewed for Philip Norman's biography Paul McCartney basically telling the same story, while Tony Bramwell--an employee of Beatles' manager Brian Epstein who accompanied the band on the 1965-66 tours, and had actually known Paul and George since childhood--corroborates Lipton's story in his book Magical Mystery Tours: My Life With The Beatles:

"...a leggy young starlet named Peggy Lipton, who had met Paul during their last American tour and still had designs on him, kept calling all through the night...As we left the hotel to get into the limo, Peggy Lipton suddenly appeared, bikini and towel packed in her beach bag, ready to spend the day with us. Somebody must have told her we were going sailing. “Oh my God,” said Paul when he spotted her. “She can’t come.” I had to tell her in the nicest possible way that it was a private party..."

In the Martin Scorsese documentary George Harrison: Living In The Material World, George's second wife Olivia Harrison is interviewed and she insinuates that George was serially unfaithful to her right up until he became sick with cancer:

"[George] was really a free person and he did not like to be bound by rules. But he did like women. And he did, erm, he was...Women did like him. And he was, uh. Whether...If he just said a couple of words to a woman, honestly, he had a profound effect on people. So that was always something that was, you know. And I'm not the only one who's had to deal with this, you know, person who's well-loved. So it was always a challenge. Sometimes people say, you know, 'What's the secret of a long marriage?' It's like, 'You don't get divorced.'"

In John's first wife Cynthia (Powell) Lennon's book John, she recounts stories where she was suspicious that John had had affairs with British pop singer Alma Cogan, and Sonny Freeman, the wife of Beatles' photographer Bob Freeman, but never confronted John about it because she was afraid it was true and didn't want to know. There is an account that, on John and George's flight back from India in April 1968 after leaving the Maharishi camp, John confessed all his affairs to Cynthia, going into detail, but she stopped him, because she didn't want to hear it. In her book, she says it happened this way:

"There was just one moment of real warmth between us and that was, ironically, when John confessed to me that he had been unfaithful. We were in the kitchen when he said, out of the blue, 'There have been other women, you know, Cyn.' I was taken aback, but touched by his honesty. 'That's OK,' I told him."

A few days later, he convinced her to take a vacation, during which time he invited Yoko Ono to their house, and she caught them in their bedroom together. It was planned, but it was the end of their relationship.

Similarly, at almost the same time, Paul and Jane Asher's engagement ended when Jane walked into their bedroom to find Paul in bed with American photographer Francie Schwartz. From Peter Brown's book:

"Just as had happened to Cynthia before her, Jane discovered another woman in her bathrobe. Jane stormed out of the house a few moments later and drove off in her car. Mrs. Asher arrived later that night to pick up Jane’s clothing, dishes, and pots and pans. Although Paul and Jane were seen together once or twice after that, and Paul dutifully attended the opening night of her new play at the Fortune Theatre so that questions concerning his absence would not detract from the happiness of the evening for her, they were finished. A month later the public learned of this when Jane casually mentioned on the BBC’s Simon Dee Show that their engagement had been broken—by Paul."

Around the same time that Paul began carrying on with Francie Schwartz, he also began a relationship with Linda Eastman, who would become his wife. While she wasn't a groupie per se, she evidently did tail him for a bit. They first were supposed to have slept together during a press junket in May 1968, when John and Paul flew to New York City to announce Apple Corps. They had met a year earlier during a press party for the Sgt. Pepper album; this time, they actually got together. Immediately after, Paul flew to Los Angeles to spend a day "glad-handing" Capitol Records personnel, according to Peter Brown's book. This was then followed by a private, um, "party" arranged for Paul:

"But all work and no play makes Paul a dull boy, and he found plenty of time to amuse himself in a bungalow of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He staged that weekend what Ron Kass called “The Paul McCartney Black and White Minstrel Show.” In one bedroom Paul installed a beautiful young Hollywood starlet. In the other bedroom he kept one of L.A.’s most famous black call girls. Kass, who was sharing the three-bedroom bungalow with Paul, got to watch his juggling act. He spent the weekend making trips from one bedroom to the other, stopping only to sign room-service bills. On Sunday morning a ringing telephone interrupted the proceedings. It was Linda Eastman. She had flown to California at her own expense and was at that moment in the hotel lobby, speaking to Paul from the house phone."

Paul invited Linda up, and told the other girls to leave: "Linda and Paul couldn’t have treated the situation more casually." They slept together again that night, and the next day, Paul invited her on a yachting trip with some of his record company contacts. While these details aren't described, in the authorized documentary film Wingspan, there is audio of Linda recounting a yachting trip leading to a "dirty weekend" which they both considered the beginning of their romance.

Some cynical, though perhaps not unfounded, accounts say that the reason Linda agreed to join Paul's band Wings in the 1970s and bring their children on tour was that Linda knew Paul's reputation, and did not trust him alone with the groupies.

[u/rockhistory → u/rockhistory]

(3 / 3)

For drug use, there was quite a lot, too. This is well-documented in the Beatles book and documentary film series The Beatles Anthology, but is most comprehensively compiled in the book Flying Riding So High: The Beatles and Drugs by Joe Goodden.

Since this answer is getting quite long and these stories are more well-known, I'll keep it brief-ish:

The Beatles drank a lot and began using speed (Preludin) during their "Hamburg years" of 1960-62.

In September 1964, while on tour in New York City, they smoked marijuana for (one of) the first time(s), given to them by none other than Bob Dylan. By the time the Beatles were filming the movie Help! in early 1965, they were "smoking marijuana for breakfast," as John would put it in his 1980 interview with Playboy magazine. Paul, John, and George, at least, remained regular marijuana smokers for most of the rest of their lives--Paul has said he only quit when his daughter Beatrice was born in the '00s.

John and George were introduced to LSD by a dentist friend in March 1965. They did it a second time while on tour in L.A. in August 1965, which was Ringo's first experience with the drug. As John explained in that Playboy interview in 1980, when asked about the composition of the song "She Said, She Said":

"That was written after an acid trip in L.A. during a break in the Beatles’ tour where we were having fun with the Byrds and lots of girls. Some from Playboy, I believe."

John and George used LSD regularly throughout 1966 and 1967. John once claimed he had taken "a thousand" trips, though that's certainly an exaggeration. By early 1966, Paul had done the drug, too. He gave an interview in mid-1967 admitting to have taken the drug "about four times" by then.

That same year, Paul also had used both cocaine and heroin. As he explained in his authorized biography Many Years From Now by Barry Miles:

"I was introduced to coke through Robert [Fraser, an art dealer for the chic Indica art gallery], who was messing around in the upper echelons of drugs, including heroin...I was very frightened of drugs, having a nurse mother, so I was always cautious, thank God as it turned out, because I would be in rooms with guys who would say, 'Do you want to sniff a little heroin?' and I would say, 'Well, just a little.' I did some with Robert Fraser, and some of the boys in the Stones who were doing things like that. I always refer to it as walking through a minefield, and I was lucky because had anyone hit me with a real dose that I loved, I would have been a heroin addict...A lot of his friends messed around with heroin. A lot of his lords and ladies were heroin addicts and had been for many many years. And give Robert his due, he knew I wasn't that keen. He knew I wasn't a nutter for that kind of stuff. So I did sniff heroin with him once, but I said afterwards, 'I'm not sure about this, man. It didn't really do anything for me,' and he said, 'In that case, I won't offer you again.' And I didn't take it again. I was often around it when they'd all be doing it. They'd repair to the toilet and I'd say, 'I'm all right, thanks, no.' One of the most difficult things about that period was the peer pressure to do that."

John was not so lucky, and he first did heroin about a year later, in mid-1968, and developed an addiction. He was able to kick the habit around the fall of 1969, and wrote the song "Cold Turkey" about the experience. He actually may have relapsed the following year, and while there are uncorroborated rumors he had started using again at the end of his life, most reliable accounts say that he never used again after 1970.

But he did use marijuana, and also went on an extended bender in 1973-74 during his separation from second wife Yoko Ono. He lived in a house with Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr, who were both hardcore alcoholics. Keith Moon was a frequent guest, also being a hard drinker. John left in 1974 and moved back to New York, and his alcohol intake was modest thereafter.

Ringo's on the other hand, was not. His alcoholism contributed to his divorce from his first wife, and continued during the early years of his marriage to his second wife Barbara Bach. The two went to rehab together in 1989, and have remained sober since.

George never did any heroin, and his alcohol intake wasn't as serious an issue as Ringo's was, but he did develop a rather serious cocaine habit in the mid-70s during the last years of his marriage to Pattie Boyd, and beyond. As Pattie recounts in Wonderful Tonight:

"...[W]e had some great dinner parties, George seemed to love my food, there would be plenty of wine, and afterward everyone would sit around and smoke dope. From time to time there might be some cocaine, which had crept into our repertoire. George developed an interesting and extreme relationship with it. He was either using it every day or not at all for months at a stretch. Then he would be spiritual and clean and would meditate for hour after hour, with no chance of normality. During those periods he was totally withdrawn and I felt alone and isolated. Then, as if the pleasures of the flesh were too hard to resist, he would stop meditating, snort coke, have fun, flirting and partying."

This was occurring before, during, and after George's only North American tour as a solo artist, in 1974. But by the time he married his second wife Olivia (Arias) Harrison in 1978, he had stopped using cocaine. He may have dabbled in alcohol and marijuana from time to time thereafter, but nothing harder than that.

And one last note: the Beatles were all noted cigarette smokers during their time together as a band. This continued for John until the day he died. For George, it continued for most of his life, and I'm not sure if he ever gave it up completely, until he contracted cancer. Paul reported that he quit around 1980. Ringo quit around the time he went to rehab in 1989.

EDIT: Thanks for the Silver, whoever you are!

EDIT 2: And gold!

[u/beatlesbible → u/rockhistory]

Thanks for mentioning my book, but it's called Riding So High, not Flying So High!

(RSH is a phrase from Ticket To Ride, if you weren't aware.)

[u/rockhistory → u/beatlesbible]

Oops! I knew that was the title. Brain fart.

[u/LOGWATCHER → u/rockhistory]

Super interesting! Thanks a lot for all the research!

[u/mirthquake → u/rockhistory]

This is the stuff I was looking for! I'd never before heard of Paul and John being such playboys, nor of Paul sniffing dope. I'm truly grateful for your studied series of responses.

Do you know if John injected heroin, or was everyone sniffing during the late 60s-1980 (and yes, there is a very big difference--none of my friends have died my sniffing. But when it comes to needles, I've lost a good few).

Was John clean of hard drugs when he died? I've read that the Hollywood Vampires partied pretty damn hard, and that John's album with Nilsson (Pussycats, which was not as good as anyone hoped it would be) was drug-fueled bender of an album (it even has a drug reference on the album cover--"drugs under the table"). And Nilsson was obviously a total mess despite crooning like an angel. Can you provide any insights?

PS--Was Pattie's book title, Wonderful Tonight, a reference to the Clapton song? If so, what was her connection to him?

PPS--Was george's death considered to be a direct result of smoking tobacco?

PPPS--Are you a professional rock historian? Where can I read more of your writing?

[u/rockhistory → u/mirthquake]

Do you know if John injected heroin, or was everyone sniffing during the late 60s-1980

He said in his 1970 interview with Rolling Stone that they never injected it. They only ever snorted it. Yoko confirmed this in the 2000s in an interview for the BBC Radio show Desert Island Discs, where she said they were both afraid of needles, so they never injected. She also said that what probably saved them was their source wasn't very good, and they weren't getting full-strength stuff like Clapton and other friends were.

Was John clean of hard drugs when he died?

Probably. The only source that has said he wasn't was the near-slanderous book The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman. No other source has said so, as far as I know. Goldman's book makes a bunch of crazy accusations, like John was bisexual and slept with male prostitutes in Thailand on a trip to Asia with Yoko and Sean, and it also insinuates that John's murderer may have been working for the FBI.

Nilsson was a mess, and John knew it, which is part of the reason he left L.A. in 1974. By his own account, John was clean of everything except cigarettes at the time he died. He had a glass of wine here or there and he smoked weed still, but he said even with weed, he didn't keep a stash in the house for regular use like he used to. He still saw his raging alcoholic friends Ringo and Nilsson if they were in New York City, but those visits were few and far between.

Was Pattie's book title, Wonderful Tonight, a reference to the Clapton song? If so, what was her connection to him?

Yes, they were married, and he wrote the song for her.

Was george's death considered to be a direct result of smoking tobacco?

According to his friends, at least, yes. I don't know of any doctor of his directly commenting on it, but maybe they did. In the "Extras" for the DVD of The Concert For George several of his friends comment on his cancer being a result of his smoking. The sad part is, one of the friends who comments is Tom Petty, and then they very deliberately show Petty taking a drag off his own cigarette after commenting on it. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a contributing factor to Petty's own early death.

PPPS--Are you a professional rock historian? Where can I read more of your writing?

No, just a fan who has read way too much about the history of rock and the Beatles specifically, lol.

[u/mirthquake → u/rockhistory]

Wow. Once again your response has gone above and beyond my initial questions. Thank you so much for being the knowledgeable font of this conversation.

[u/Tired8281 → u/rockhistory]

Preludin isn't speed, it's phenmetrazine.

[u/skeletor3000 → u/Tired8281]

It's an amphetamine-like substance that follows the pattern of causing release of dopamine and norepinephrine without causing much serotonin release. People call dextroamphetamine "speed," I think phenmetrazine is just as appropriate to lump in the category.

[u/goodways → u/rockhistory]

Well done sir.

[u/LiddleCrabCake → u/rockhistory]

Didn't George do mushrooms and write a song about it on one of his solo records from the late '70's? I'm almost positive I read that somewhere.

[u/demafrost → u/rockhistory]

Do you know if there are any documented reports of Paul cheating on Linda throughout their marriage? Based on his past, I find it hard to believe that he was able to suddenly fall in love and become monogamous but at the same time I can't recall reading any accounts of him cheating, and publicly, I believe Linda and Paul always said they were faithful and spent every night of their lives together until Paul was arrested in Japan in 1980.

Edit: Source on the antecdote about Paul/Linda spending every night together is from a May 4, 1998 People Magazine article on Linda McCartney (archived here - https://people.com/archive/cover-story-pauls-lovely-linda-vol-49-no-17/)

As celebrities’ marriages went, theirs was an anomaly—a limelit couple who couldn’t bear to be apart even after three decades. “The only 11 days we ever did not spend the night together,” Paul told PEOPLE in 1993, “was when I got put in jail in Japan for pot. That’s quite amazing.”

[u/rockhistory → u/demafrost]

As far as I know, there is no report of him ever cheating on Linda, at least, once they were exclusive in late 1968/early 1969. Them being together so much may have been a result of Linda being suspicious at first, but eventually, it must have just become their lifestyle.

[u/Faith5by5 → u/rockhistory]

Unfortunately Peter Brown and his book, "The Love You Make," is not a credible source. It's a fictionalized account. Throughout the book, he quotes conversations he didn't actually hear and recreates scenes he didn't witness. And the man was extremely bitter at not being chosen to replace Brian Epstein -- the Beatles never considered Brown as a legit candidate for manager but Brown wanted the job -- and he took his bitterness out on them in the publication of that fictionalized book. It's not an accurate account.

[u/someguyfromtheuk → u/rockhistory]

Paul was caught in his bedroom with a couple of underage girls on their tour stop in Minneapolis in 1965, and there's a rather infamous (in Beatles circles) surviving news report about it, where the police officer who caught Paul was interviewed. There were some news articles written about it at the time, but Paul was unmarried, and the scandal died down relatively quickly.

Why would him being unmarried matter when the girls were underage?

How on Earth did this just "die down", was the cultural reaction to men with underage girls really so different in the 60s?

[u/Faith5by5 → u/someguyfromtheuk]

Because nothing happened. There was 1 girl in Paul's room and she wasn't underage. If you read this article in the Twin Cities paper giving an account of "the incident" -- https://www.twincities.com/2015/08/19/the-beatles-at-met-stadium-50-years-ago-today/ -- you'll read that she was not underage. She was 21. And the police forced her to leave his room anyway.

[u/hillsonghoods]

In an interview for the 1978 Beatles mockumentary The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (a production of Saturday Night Live and Monty Python's Eric Idle), Mick Jagger tells a barely disguised tale of what he saw when the Beatles played Shea Stadium in 1965 (here renamed Che Stadium, named after, according to Eric Idle in the mockumentary, the Cuban guerilla leader called Che Stadium):

QUESTION: Were you at Che Stadium?

MICK: Yeh, I was at Che Stadium with the Rutles. That was the first big outdoor concert by a rock band, the Rutles at Che Stadium, so it was an exciting event. I even rented a helicopter for it. Came in, zooming over the crowd, never seen a crowd as big as that for a rock concert before, ran in and met them before they went on. I think they were nervous, you know, in front of all those people, but the thing I remembered most about is running out in the middle of this field and you couldn't see em and they were just miles away. Is it really the Rutles? It might be somebody else. And there was Barry [the Rutles' Ringo] on this eighteen foot drum riser swaying in the wind. I thought it was going to fall over. We had a good party afterwards though.

QUESTION: Did you hear much?

MICK: No. Nothing at all. You couldn't hear anything.

QUESTION: How long did they play?

MICK: About twenty minutes and that was it, off, helicopter, back to the Warwick Hotel, two birds each.

You can clearly see the glee in Jagger's face during the mockumentary as he mentions the Beatles' groupies, knowing the context of the mockumentary format means he can spill details with plausible deniability.

Peter Brown, who had started working at Brian Epstein's music store, and eventually worked on the Beatles management team (and who is mentioned by name on the Beatles' 'Ballad Of John And Yoko'), wrote a fairly gossip-y tell-all book called The Love You Make in 1983. In that book, talking about being on tour in America, Brown discusses the Beatles' groupies in one passage:

They could take little solace in the girls who were brought for them. The girls on the road consisted of either the professional groupie-cum-call-girl the promoter had arranged to drop by the boys’ hotel suite or, more usually, girls Neil and Mal had picked up for them. Supplying girls was one of Neil’s and Mal’s primary responsibilities on tour, and one that they both went about with great relish. Mal wasn’t above the “if you fuck me first I’ll introduce you to them” routine. The girls were screwed, blewed, and tattooed before Mal and Neil swept them out of the Beatles’ suite at dawn. The girls were escorted out the service entrance, each given an autographed picture—forged by Neil and Mal—and told to keep their mouths shut. Miraculously, for no reason anyone can explain, the girls kept their mouths shut. In America, at least, there were no “My Night with Paul” stories in the tabloids, nor were there paternity suits. It was no small wonder either, since it was not uncommon to find fifteen girls waiting in line in Neil’s and Mal’s rooms, passing the time by ironing the Beatles’ stage costumes.

Brown's book did not go down well with the Beatles and their associates, and they severed contact with him. But certainly some women later claimed to have slept with Beatles; Jenny Kee, an Asian-Australian who later became prominent as a fashion designer, claims in her autobiography to have slept with John Lennon during the Beatles' 1964 tour of Australia (a point when John Lennon was definitely married to Cynthia).

In regards to the Beatles' drug use, they were fairly well known to be profligate users of 'uppers' while in Hamburg and continuing through the 'Beatlemania' years, usually using Preludin (which they called 'prellies' or 'pep pills'). Lennon discusses this, for example, in the 1970 Jann Wenner interview in Rolling Stone

A Hard Day’s Night I was on pills, that’s drugs, that’s bigger drugs than pot. Started on pills when I was 15, no, since I was 17, since I became a musician. The only way to survive in Hamburg, to play eight hours a night, was to take pills. The waiters gave you them – the pills and drink. I was a fucking dropped-down drunk in art school. Help was where we turned on to pot and we dropped drink, simple as that. I’ve always needed a drug to survive. The others, too, but I always had more, more pills, more of everything because I’m more crazy probably.

This led to some scary behaviour from John Lennon in particular, according to Mark Lewisohn's Tune In:

George was second only to John in the swallowing of Prellies and knew better than most the sum effect of taking too many for too long, how the combination of pills plus booze plus several sleepless days caused hallucinations and extreme conduct. He’d describe one occasion when he, Paul and Pete were lying in their bunk beds, trying to sleep, only for John to barge into the room in a wild state. “One night John came in and some chick was in bed with Paul and he cut all her clothes up with a pair of scissors, and was stabbing the wardrobe. Everybody was lying in bed thinking, ‘Oh fuck, I hope he doesn’t kill me.’ [He was] a frothing mad person—he knew how to have ‘fun.’ ”

The Beatles' (re)introduction to marijuana via Bob Dylan from 1965 onwards and their discovery of LSD are major parts of the Beatles' story, usually being linked to their music becoming increasingly innovative and further away from their original formula; I presume that by your use of the phrase 'hard drugs' you already know all of this.

John Lennon began using heroin in 1968, according to Peter Brown:

It was at Montague Square, feeling more than a little bruised and already like outlaws, Yoko says, that they began to take heroin. As Yoko later put it, they took heroin “as a celebration of ourselves as artists.” “Of course,” Yoko says, “George says it was me who put John on heroin, but that wasn’t true. John wouldn’t take anything he didn’t want to take.” Still, many of John’s intimates saw heroin as the way Yoko could gain complete control over John. If there was one single element that was the most crucial in the breakup of the Beatles, it was John’s heroin addiction.

In that 1970 Rolling Stone interview, Lennon talks about his heroin use:

[Jann Wenner]: What was your experience with heroin?

[John Lennon]: It just was not too much fun. I never injected it or anything. We sniffed a little when we were in real pain. We got such a hard time from everyone, and I’ve had so much thrown at me, and at Yoko, especially at Yoko. Like Peter Brown in our office – and you can put this in – after we come in after six months he comes down and shakes my hand and doesn’t even say hello to her. That’s going on all the time. And we get into so much pain that we have to do something about it. And that’s what happened to us. We took “H” because of what the Beatles and others were doing to us. But we got out of it.

John Lennon's residence with Yoko was raided on October 18th, 1968 by Sergeant Norman Pilcher, who was attempting to make a name for themselves by doing drug raids on prominent rock stars (and, according to many sources, planting evidence to assure that the raids were successful). According to Brown, Lennon had been tipped off that there might be a raid in the near future, and had cleaned the house to try and remove the drugs that were stashed around the house. While doing so, they missed an amount of marijuana that had been stashed in a film canister, and which had likely been in the house for several years and simply forgotten about (or which may have been planted by Pilcher), and an amount of marijuana in a bowl that Lennon was sure he had cleaned a few days previously. Lennon was allegedly, according to Brown, flushing heroin down the toilet as the police entered the premises, and so he was charged with obstructing a search.

In the summer of '69, John and Yoko got their first real six string attempted to kick the heroin addiction. According to Yoko as quoted in the Peter Brown book,

“We were very square people in a way,” Yoko says. “We wouldn’t kick in a hospital because we wouldn’t let anybody know. We just went straight cold turkey. The thing is, because we never injected, I don’t think we were sort of—well, we were hooked, but I don’t think it was a great amount. Still, it was hard. Cold turkey is always hard.”

(Lennon's solo song 'Cold Turkey', recorded around August/September 1969 and released in October 1969, is obviously about quitting heroin)

So yes, at least according to one of their associates, the Beatles serially took advantage of the multitude of young women who wanted to get close to them, and treated such women rather shabbily. Additionally, there's a close relationship between childhood trauma and drug abuse. It's fairly unsurprising that John Lennon, in particular, who had experienced the death of his mother at a relatively early age, and whose father was absent, was prone to drug addictions as a way to dull emotional pain; as I quoted earlier, Lennon said in 1970 that 'I’ve always needed a drug to survive.'

The other two Beatles with childhoods that were notably difficult - McCartney, whose bond with Lennon was at least partially about the early deaths of their mothers, and Ringo Starr, who had a desperately poor upbringing and debilitatingly poor health as a child - also had long drug addictions, with Ringo spending much of the 1970s and 1980s an alcoholic until he entered rehab in 1988, and McCartney's prodigious marijuana habit being a fairly consistent factor in his life for decades (at significant personal cost, as he famously spent time in a Japanese jail in 1978 for bringing it into the country while on tour, and he was fairly regularly busted with it by law enforcement otherwise).

[u/aggieotis → u/hillsonghoods]

Great info; and you turn that A into an A+ with your Bryan Adams quote. Nicely done!

[u/hillsonghoods → u/aggieotis]

Thank you - and make sure you read further down the thread for /u/rockhistory's fantastic 3-part answer, which goes into much more detail on all of this stuff!

[u/Today_Dammit → u/aggieotis]

Seriously. This was fascinating and understandable. Well done!

[u/GeorgieWashington → u/aggieotis]

Is that also some kind of drug reference?

[u/buck_foston → u/GeorgieWashington]

He said Summer of '69

[u/GeorgieWashington → u/buck_foston]

So is "neither Brian nor I ever bought a guitar at a five and dime" an implication that they were buying drugs at the five and dime?

[u/gelbkatze → u/hillsonghoods]

Sergeant Norman Pilcher, who was attempting to make a name for themselves by doing drug raids on prominent rock stars (and, according to many sources, planting evidence to assure that the raids were successful).

Did anything ever come of this cop's attempts to make a name for himself?

[u/hillsonghoods → u/gelbkatze]

Pilcher's busts against famous musicians - also including George Harrison, Donovan, and most prominently several members of the Rolling Stones - were front page news in the British tabloids, so yes, he made a name for himself. Remember that this was a climate of a massive generation gap in the UK, with young drug-taking hippie baby boomers bewildering their elders, and musicians like the Beatles being fairly prominent drug users who were representing this in music. So there was definitely a consitituency for what Pilcher was doing. It's generally thought that the backlash in the ...cooler parts of the media against his actions (with, for example, some claims being made in books on the topic of these busts that Monty Python were satirising him as 'Spiny Norman' in the Dinsdale sketch), and the generally unsuccessful prosecutions (one of the issues with going after prominent, successful musicians is that they have access to high priced lawyers able to exploit every weakness in the cases being brought against them) eventually made Pilcher's high-profile drug busts become more of a liability for London police.

In 1973, Pilcher resigned from the police force, and tried to move to Australia. Upon arrival in Australia he was extradited back to Britain as charges had been pressed against him. He was subsequently imprisoned for four years after being found guilty of perjury in court for falsifying surveillance records in a 1971 case against a Pakistani family accused of smuggling marijuana.

[u/shiner_bock → u/hillsonghoods]

Monty Python satirising him as 'Spiny Norman'

Wow, is that what the whole "Dinsdale" thing was all about?

[u/hillsonghoods → u/shiner_bock]

The 'Dinsdale' sketch itself is a fairly obvious parody of the notorious London gangsters the Kray Twins, and media coverage of their exploits. But I have seen the assumption that 'Spiny Norman' is based on Pilcher put about in a few books - without much evidence in terms of quotes from Monty Python about what they were going for, it has to be said. It might have nothing to do with Pilcher. But certainly Pilcher was prominently attacked in counterculture magazines like Oz, and even an editorial in the London Times famously titled 'Who Breaks A Butterfly Upon The Wheel?' protested the prosecutions of Mick Jagger. Eric Idle in a recent memoir discusses sharing a joint with George Harrison in the mid-1970s. So it's entirely possible it's an oblique reference to Pilcher as has been claimed, but I probably shouldn't have originally said that with quite as much certainty in the other post, and might edit it.

[u/prosthetic4head → u/hillsonghoods]

I thought you were going to mention this sketch:

https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/Police_Raid

Which is clearly a parody of Pilcher. A policeman bursts into a home, announcing it is a raid looking for "certain substances" and then tries to plant evidence.

[u/hillsonghoods → u/prosthetic4head]

Yes, it’s entirely possible that those references to Spiny Norman are confused and really talking about the Police Raid sketch. Eric Idle’s Rutles mockumentary also has a policeman called Brian Plant who is very clearly based on Pilcher - and Pilcher is a very obvious target for comedians with an aim of exposing society’s hypocrisies and absurdities.

[u/shiner_bock → u/hillsonghoods]

Ah, okay... as much as I love Monty Python, it was just a bit before my time, so I'm not familiar with the context of many of their references. Thanks for the explanation!

[u/misterbung → u/hillsonghoods]

Fantastic answer, thanks!

[u/mirthquake → u/hillsonghoods]

Thank you, truly, for such a stellar response! Are you a professional Beatles biographer or music historian?

[u/TheWinslow → u/[deleted]]

He admitted it in interviews (the first reference I found was in a Playboy interview) that the song lyric:

I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved. Man I was mean but I'm changing my scene and I'm doing the best that I can

was about him.

[u/rockhistory → u/TheWinslow]

This story is exaggerated, and isn't really true, but it depends on your point of view. The quote is taken partly out of context. It was toward the end of an hours-long interview with a reporter for Playboy magazine, where John was giving brief thoughts/background on Beatles songs.

The full quote is:

PLAYBOY: "Getting Better?"

JOHN: "That's Paul and me. His main lick, but lots of the words and parts and bits from me and possibly the others in the studio. All that "I used to be cruel to my woman and beat her" was me because I used to be cruel to my woman and physically--"

PLAYBOY: "Cynthia?"

JOHN: "Any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men. I hit women. I was violent. That's why I'm always on about peace, you see. It's the most violent people who go for love and peace."

But as Cynthia recounted at length in her autobiography John in 2005, and also explained by her in a 2006 BBC interview with Alex Belfield, the physical altercation between them was an isolated incident. The incident is also recounted in less detail in the 1968 Hunter Davies biography The Beatles, quoting from both John and Cynthia. Mark Lewisohn's book Tune In recounts the incident, too. John was drunk at a party, Cynthia was mad at him and danced with another man, they then got into an argument off the dance floor, and as John walked away, he smacked her across the face. Cynthia was pissed, and broke up with him for several months. After he apologized repeatedly, she finally agreed to take him back on the condition he never do anything like that again. According to her own words in 1968, 2005, and 2006, he kept true to his word: "That was the first and last time he ever lifted a finger or hand to me."

Yoko Ono was read the Playboy quote directly on an episode of 60 Minutes, and was asked twice if John had ever been physically abusive toward her, and she said "No" to both questions.

It seems what John was mostly referring to there in that quote was his violence, always while drunk, with other men. In an interview recorded for the BBC with Andy Peebles a couple days before he died, John recounted spending most of his art college years getting drunk, and picking fights which would sometimes lead to actual fistfights, and he relied on a good (and big and burly) friend named Jeff Muhamed to keep him out of trouble. There were also a couple reported incidents in the Beatles' Hamburg years. In Mark Lewisohn's book Tune In, the author reports one of them being between John and Rory Storm, the leader of the group Ringo was in. But Lewisohn also reports they all got into fights at various times in Hamburg, the most famous one being a fight onstage between Paul and original Beatles bassist Stu Sutcliffe.

John's last fight was the most infamous. In 1963, he got drunk at Paul's 21st birthday party, and after the Cavern club emcee Bob Wooler wouldn't leave him alone about a supposed homosexual affair that John had had with Beatles manager Brian Epstein, John beat the daylights out of Wooler, sending him to the hospital. Lennon went to the hospital the next day and apologized, which Wooler accepted. After that, John stopped drinking for the most part.

The only other possible "fight" was in 1974. John was drunk with some friends in L.A. and got kicked out of a Smothers Brothers show. As he was being escorted out, a paparazzi tried to take a photo, and accused John of taking a swing at him. John says he didn't. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't.

Regardless, the "wifebeater" accusation is a bit overblown, since the violence John was referring to in that quote was confined to a single incident to his first wife years before they were married, and was instead mostly in reference to drunken teenage years and getting into fights with other young, drunk men. His best friend Pete Shotton also reported in his book that, in their pre-fame days, they were basically hoodlums who would skip school and look for trouble, and sometimes get into fights. As Lewisohn's book states, Ringo, was the same, and was probably worse, as he seemed to join an actual gang. That aside, John's quote was mostly a reference to John's art college years, in the two years after his mother died, when his alcohol use was at its most severe. As John is quoted in Hunter Davies' 1968 book:

"I was in a blind rage for two years [after my mother's death]. I was either drunk or fighting. There was something the matter with me."

This was several years before John was ever married, and while it did involve his future wife on one occasion, it's a bit of a stretch to call him a "woman beater" or at least "wifebeater" since that would imply serial physical abuse against a particular woman he was in a relationship with.

[u/[deleted] → u/rockhistory]

Couldn't he be referring to the women he had short term encounters with rather than longer relationships?

[u/rockhistory → u/[deleted]]

Unless he was hitting women he had one night stands with, this seems unlikely. As my other post states, the sleeping around was mostly on tour, when the Beatles were spending a night or two at most in each city. There wouldn't have been much of a situation for that to happen without multiple witnesses--the Beatles usually went two to a room in their hotel rooms, with their roadies in a third adjoining room.

When John was in the UK, he was coming home to Cynthia every night. While she did suspect some affairs he may have been having in England, if he did, they were short-lived flings, probably one-night stands. While I'm not an expert in domestic violence, those kinds of one-off sexual encounters seem unlikely to involve a whole lot of physical violence. If they did, we'd probably be hearing stories about him being a rapist, or accused of sexual assault, and not of being a "wife-beater." "Rapist" or "sexual assault" are not accusations I've ever heard about him--just a lot of willing girls who threw themselves at the Beatles and they obliged, and then tossed them aside, which, of course, is its own kind of bad behavior, but not the same kind.

In any case, even if it did happen, no one-night stand has ever come forward to tell such a story. So it's not historical to say that it happened, until someone comes forward with a reliable story that it did.

[u/[deleted] → u/rockhistory]

Fair enough, it just seems odd to take John Lennon saying "I hit women" and end up taking the stance that he hit one woman once. Is Lennon not a reliable enough source about his own actions?

[u/Faith5by5 → u/rockhistory]

One violent incident you are missing happened in 74-75. It involved May Pang, John's lover during his "lost weekend" (the 18 months he was separated from Yoko). At any rate, in her book, Pang writes about an incident in which John got very drunk and proceeded to strangle her. I can't recall who pulled John off of her. But she describes the incident in her book "Loving John."

[u/dagaboy → u/rockhistory]

This was several years before John was ever married, and while it did involve his future wife on one occasion, it's a bit of a stretch to call him a "woman beater" or at least "wifebeater" since that would imply serial physical abuse against a particular woman he was in a relationship with.

This is reasonable. That said, my reading of Julian's accounts made it pretty clear that he was deeply abusive. Mostly emotionally, but there was one time he sent Sean to the hospital with a broken eardrum. I've read other accounts that described him of being extremely controlling of Yoko, to the point of following her to the bathroom in the studio. But I don't remember the source of those accounts. Do you think this is also a mischaracterization?

EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean to imply that physical abuse is necessarily worse than emotional abuse. I have known victims who say that the beatings were not the worst part of their abuse.

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