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The dental experience happened in 1964. Hamburg club managers had introduced the Beatles to uppers, and Bob Dylan had turned them on to marijuana. Now, at a dinner party at George's dentist's house in London, the host slipped sugar cubes laced with LSD into the after-dinner coffee of George and Patti, John and his wife Cynthia. Within months, all the Beatles were experimenting with acid, and eventually Paul was into cocaine, John into heroin and George a fan of hashish (for which he would be busted in March 1969). The music they continued to make in the studio changed. It got denser, trippier. The single Strawberry Fields was followed by the seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the Beatles led their generation into a psychedelic world. As Harrison began to emerge as a songwriter, his exquisitely arranged compositions--Within You, Without You; Love You Too; Blue Jay Way--were informed not only by drug use but, in their melody and message, also by his increasing interest in Eastern religion, culture and music.
He came by this interest, which would become the driving force in his life, when the script of the second Beatles film, Help!, called for chase scenes involving cartoonish Hindu villains, and Indian sitar players were brought in to provide some zippy chase music. George started noodling on a sitar--if indeed one can noodle on a sitar--and asking questions. This led to exotic instrumentation on the Lennon ballad Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) and later to an apprenticeship with master sitarist Ravi Shankar, who gave Harrison lessons on the instrument and in life itself. "He was a friend, a disciple and son to me," said Shankar, who visited Harrison for the last time on Wednesday. "George was a brave and beautiful soul, full of love, childlike humor and a deep spirituality. We spent the day before with him, and even then he looked so peaceful, surrounded by love."
The Beatles' famous trip to India in 1968, where they meditated under the guidance of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, was largely Harrison's show. He and Patti had become devotees of the religious leader and arranged for the band to spend time at the maharishi's ashram in the Himalayan foothills. Other celebrities--Mia Farrow, the singer Donovan, Mike Love of the Beach Boys--went on retreat as well, and the episode is remembered as one of the pivotal, if oddest, events of the Flower Power '60s. Indisputably beautiful fruits of the getaway were the songs composed there. John said he wrote "hundreds"; Paul came up with at least 15; and most of the Beatles' White Album and Abbey Road were conceived in Rishikesh. George contributed four songs, including the anticarnivore screed Piggies and the gorgeous Here Comes the Sun and Something. With more than 150 versions recorded, Something is the second-most-covered Beatles song after Yesterday, but a measure of Harrison's obscurity within the band is that Frank Sinatra used to introduce Something as his favorite Lennon-McCartney tune.