‘I Feel Fine’ To ‘Lucy In The Sky’: ‘Across The Universe’ Of The Beatles’ Psychedelia

The Beatles’ foray into psychedelic music culminated with their 1967 masterpiece, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But their experimentation, with both music and mind altering substances, goes back to their mop-top Fab Four days.

The Beatles’ pioneering of psychedelic rock can be traced back to their November 1964 single, “I Feel Fine,” and its use of guitar feedback. The track is noted as one of the earliest uses of feedback on a popular music record.

Other British Invasion bands like The Who and The Kinks were employing feedback in a live setting and there’s little doubt that blues artists had discovered the technique perhaps as soon as the genre was electrified in the 1940s by legends like T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. Although Lennon was very proud that the feedback on “I Feel Fine” is seen as the first feedback used on a record, he too acknowledged that blues artists could have used it first in one of his final interviews.

“I defy anybody to find a record – unless it’s some old blues record in 1922 – that uses feedback that way,” he said.

But as any guitarist knows, feedback is often a “happy accident,” as it was for The Beatles. Here’s Paul McCartney in Barry Miles’ 1997 biography on how they discovered the feedback on “I Feel Fine.”

“John had a semi-acoustic Gibson guitar. It had a pickup on it so it could be amplified … We were just about to walk away to listen to a take when John leaned his guitar against the amp. I can still see him doing it … it went, ‘Nnnnnnwahhhhh!’ And we went, ‘What’s that? Voodoo!’ ‘No, it’s feedback.’ ‘Wow, it’s a great sound!’ George Martin was there so we said, ‘Can we have that on the record?’ ‘Well, I suppose we could, we could edit it on the front.’ It was a found object, an accident caused by leaning the guitar against the amp.”

“I Feel Fine” was recorded in October 1964, mere months after Bob Dylan notoriously turned the Fab Four on to cannabis in August of that year. Here’s Lennon on the band falling head over heels in love with grass.

“The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension,” he stated. “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.”

John was describing The Beatles in the era of Help!, their 1965 album album and madcap film — which regardless of the band being baked, also sent them further down the rabbit hole into psychedelic music. It was on the set of Help! that George Harrison discovered classical Indian music. Cannabis was first cultivated and used on the Indian subcontinent. From a Western standpoint, Indian music and art also became linked with psychedelic experience in the 1960s.

George Harrison had a lot to do with that linkage. In another first in poular music, he played sitar on Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” from The Beatles’ December 1965 record Rubber Soul — the title for which and the fish-eye cover are psychedelicized.

Harrison and Lennon had already taken LSD by the time Rubber Soul was recorded in another notorious story with their dentist, John Riley, dosing them — along with their wives Cynthia Lennon and Pattie Harrison — without their knowledge. Lennon, however, seemed to love the drug and immortalized the dentist in the song “Doctor Robert,” on The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver.

The record can be seen as the band’s first full foray into psychedelia, most notable in yet another first known use in popular music, backwards guitars, as well as Harrison’s classical Indian piece “Love You To,” and the album’s epic closer, “Tomorrow Never Knows” — the latter a full-blown psychedelic freak out inspired by Lennon’s reading of The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

With The Beatles fully experienced — Ringo Starr took LSD with Lennon and Harrison on their second encounter in August 1965 and Paul McCartney followed in late 1966 — The Beatles entered the Sgt. Pepper era. Although they wouldn’t appear on an LP until late 1967’s Magical Mystery Tour, the first two songs recorded in the Sgt. Pepper era were the singles “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane.”

Both nostalgic musings on the simpler times of their childhood in Liverpool, Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields” was a much more psychedelic piece then McCartney’s “Penny Lane” — although the latter does carry a certain psychedelia in Paul’s whimsical way. The song can be seen as a jump off point into the 1967 psychedelic opus that was Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The LP’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is a towering work in psychedelia. As such, it’s no surprise that fans and critics began speculating that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was an acronym for LSD, itself an acronym for lysergic acid diethylamide.

Lennon, however, repeatedly denied that he intended the title as such. The initial inspiration came from a picture his young son Julian had drawn in school. Ringo Starr apparently witnessed Julian bringing the picture home, telling his dad the title was “Lucy – in the Sky with Diamonds” — inspired by a real life schoolmate of Julian’s, Lucy O’Donnell, as he later recalled when Lucy O’Donnell died in 2009.

“I don’t know why I called it that or why it stood out from all my other drawings, but I obviously had an affection for Lucy at that age,” Julian Lennon said. “I used to show dad everything I’d built or painted at school, and this one sparked off the idea.”

“I thought that’s beautiful. I immediately wrote a song about it,” John later of said of “Lucy” in a famous 1971 interview with Dick Cavet. Lennon also attributed the song’s fantastical imagery to his love of Lewis Carroll and his famed work Through The Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

“It was Alice in the boat,” Lennon said in an interview. “She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that.”

While Lennon’s experimentation with LSD may have played a role in that “visualization,” the band began to fall out of love with LSD. Harrison said that he looked at the drug under a microscope and was terrified by what he saw. George had also discovered Transcendental Meditation and subsequently turned the rest of the band on to it, prompting their trip to India in early 1968 to study under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

While they would become disillusioned with the Maharishi — Lennon’s White Album cut “Sexy Sadie” tells that tale — The Beatles for the most part also did not turn back to psychedelics. Lennon perhaps fittingly put The Beatles psychedelic era to bed with the stellar song “Across The Universe,” which was partially inspired by TM and contained the mantra “Jai guru deva om.” The other inspiration for the song as John described it, is Lennon in a nutshell.

“I was lying next to my first wife in bed, you know, and I was irritated, and I was thinking. She must have been going on and on about something and she’d gone to sleep and I kept hearing these words over and over, flowing like an endless stream. I went downstairs and it turned into a sort of cosmic song rather than an irritated song, rather than a ‘Why are you always mouthing off at me?’ [The words] were purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don’t own it you know; it came through like that.”

While it was written in 1967, “Across The Universe” perhaps fittingly appeared on the final album The Beatles released, May 1970’s Let It Be. Like the psychedelic experience itself, The Beatles’ experimentation with psychedelia was fleeting. While The Beatles may have ushered the culture into the psychedelic realm, humanity had other ideas — leading society down a darker road in the late 1960s with the Vietnam War escalating and harder drugs coming into the scene. What is not fleeting is The Beatles’ immeasurable impact on music and culture as a whole, which reverberates to this day.