The Dental Experience

In April of 1965, George Harrison and Pattie Boyd got an offer for dinner from their dentist, John Riley, and his girlfriend Cyndy Bury, who worked at the Playboy Lounge Club. Apparently it wasn't unusual as they previous went on other dinner outings (honestly, I never really hear about a Dentist and client hanging out socially). The dinner invitation was extended to John and Cynthia. The original plan was to have dinner at the Dentist and then go to the Pickwick Club to see Paddy, Klaus & Gibson perform. Well... let's just say the evening didn't go completely as planned. The dinner was held at the home of John Riley in Bayswater Place, London. Apparently, he was the dentist of the stars in those days, and managed to get access of LSD. Unbeknownst to his guests, John Riley and Cyndy laced LSD into the sugar cubes and had them as a display. After a lovely dinner in the dining room, the party was moved to the lounge where the sugar cubes were on display and coffee (not tea?) was served. John Riley and Cyndy were determined for their guests to drink the coffee and add the sugar. Meanwhile, John, Cynthia, George, and Pattie would try to wrap up the evening as they were expected elsewhere. But, their hosts were determined for their guests to stay put. The Beatle party of four must have thought the creepy dentist wanted to do an orgy at first. 

“We had a lovely meal, plenty to drink.” 

Pattie Boyd

“It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film.” 

Cynthia

"It was done without our knowledge, so we didn't know how to handle it. We didn't know the effect it was going to have on us. It was like sitting in the room and it suddenly became like the Albert Hall. Pattie and George were opposite, John was beside me, and they started disappearing in the distance. I wondered what on Earth was happening. We just had to get out."

Cynthia, 2005

"I didn't know what was happening to me. It was more frightening than anything I'd ever experienced. I thought I would be like this for the rest of my life. John Riley said that we shouldn't leave the house because he'd given us LSD but we thought, 'So? What's that?' It was totally irresponsible thing to do."

Pattie Boyd

Not long, the guests started to feel weird. John Riley and Cyndy eventually confessed that they had given them LSD. John was furious! Oh boy, was he mad! George, Pattie, and Cynthia didn't know much about it while John heard about it. They decided enough was enough and left, despite the drug starting to kick in while John Riley and Cyndy's protests to have them stay. The dentist even offered to drive them himself but John, Cynthia, Pattie, and George went in George's car and fled. They did went to the Pickwick Club, John Riley followed them. While seated at the table, John Riley joined them, and in their hallucinations, he turned into a pig. Anyone who came to their table looked like some kind of animal, so they left and went to the Ad Lib Club where Ringo and Maureen were, including Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. While in the elevator, there was a red dot light and they were convinced that it was a raging fire, they panicked, yelled for help as John, Cynthia, George, and Pattie were hallucinating, and somehow decided to leave and George drove very carefully back to his home where they let the drug wore off at the early hours of the morning. While driving slowly, George was trying to concentrate while John was cracking jokes; in the backseat, Pattie wanted to smash windows and play sports while Cynthia was scared.

"None of us used heroin but we took acid – LSD – regularly. Our dentist, John Riley, had turned us on to it. He and his girlfriend invited John, his wife Cynthia, George and me to dinner at his house in Hyde Park Square one evening in 1965. We knew him quite well and had been to a few clubs with him in the past. The four of us drove to London in my little Mini Cooper S. We had a lovely meal and as we prepared to leave – we were due to watch some friends playing at a club – Riley's girlfriend jumped to her feet and said: 'You haven't had any coffee yet. It's ready, I've made it – and it's delicious.' We drank the coffee but by then we were really keen to get away. John said: 'We must go now. Our friends are going to be on soon. It's their first night.' Riley told him: 'You can't leave.' 'What are you talking about?' asked John. 'You've just had LSD. It was in the coffee.' John was absolutely furious. 'How dare you fucking do this to us,' he said. George and I said: 'Do what?' We didn't know what LSD was. John said: 'It's a drug.' As it began to take effect we felt even more strongly that we didn't want to be there. We were desperate to escape. Riley said he would drive us but we ignored him and piled into my Mini, which seemed to be shrinking. All the way to the club the car felt smaller and smaller, and by the time we arrived we were completely out of it. People kept recognising George and coming up to him. They were moving in and out of focus, and looked like animals. We clung to each other. Soon we moved on to a different club which we knew – we thought we might feel better in familiar surroundings. We walked to the venue and I remember trying to break a window on the way. The club was on an upper floor and we thought the lift was on fire because there was a little red light inside. As the doors opened, we crawled out and bumped into Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Ringo. John told them we'd been spiked. The effect of the drug was getting stronger and stronger, and we were all in hysterics. When we sat down, the table elongated. Hours later we decided to go home. We climbed into the car again and this time George drove – at no more than 10mph all the way to Esher – but it felt as though he was doing 1,000 mph. At one point, I saw some goalposts and said: 'Let's jump out and play football.' The journey took hours and it was daylight by the time we got home. We locked the gates so that the cleaner wouldn't come in and find us. The drug took about eight hours to wear off, but it was very frightening and we never spoke to the dentist again."

Pattie Boyd, 2007

"One night a friend of George and Patti invited the four of us round to dinner with his wife. At first it was a pleasant evening. They had a lovely home in central London and the dinner was wonderful. The wife was a superb cook and we enjoyed the meal. Afterwards coffee was served and a large bowl of sugar lumps appeared beside the silver pot. 'Have more coffee,' they kept urging, 'more coffee,' and each time they poured, these sugar lumps were loaded into the cups. They were so insistent that it began to seem a little odd but we'd drunk a lot of wine and we didn't want to offend them, so obediently we drank the coffee. How were we to know that those glistening sugar lumps were laced with LSD? Afterwards we moved into the drawing-room. George and Patti sat on one settee, John and I sat on the settee opposite and then simultaneously, we began to feel strange. 'Something's happening here,' said John suddenly. I knew just what he meant. Without warning the room had stretched to about a mile long and sort of disappeared into the distance. The host and his wife came in and when we looked at them their bodies were moving and changing, twisting and contracting in a most alarming way.George stood up. 'We've got to go home,' he said quickly. John and I were at his side in an instant. We knew these people had done something to us and our overwhelming instinct was to escape. The four of us hurried towards the door as fast as our drugged feet would take us. George had driven us here in his little Mini Cooper and it never occurred to us in our irrational state that it might not be a good idea to let him drive. 'No, no, you can't go home,' said George's friend, running after us. They were beginning to panic. 'You must come to this club we know. You'll love it.' But we didn't trust them. They'd poisoned us and we didn't feel safe. At all costs we had to get away. We dashed into the street, jumped into George's Mini and sped up the road. At the wheel, though, George began to have a few misgivings about his driving ability. We were nearing a club we knew so he suggested we stop there instead of going all the way back to Weybridge. 'We'll be safe there,' he said. So, we piled out again and staggered unsteadily into the club, wondering what had happened and what other unpleasant surprises might be in store. But we'd hardly sat down when the couple arrived behind us. Obviously they'd followed us to try and persuade us to go back with them. But in our drugged condition their appearance was positively supernatural, as if they were haunting us. We turned to look at them and each saw the hallucination. Before our eyes they turned into cadavers, then skeletons, then devils. It was absolutely terrifying. Horrified, we fled back to the car once more and this time we weren't stopping until we reached Weybridge. But the drug was tightening its hold. Halfway along the road Patti was hanging out of the window, shouting, 'Look at that shop window, I want to smash it! Stop the car, George.' She didn't know what she was saying, of course, and George took no notice. Then suddenly it was like being inside a bubble and we were flying along above the road. How we ever got home to Surrey in one piece I don't know. A combination of good luck and George's brilliant driving, I should think. Anyway, somehow we got into George's house and still we couldn't get back to normal. John was hitting his head against a wall and arguing with the fish in the fish tank. God only knows what George was doing and all I could think of was Julian. 'I'm never going to see him again,' I told myself. 'I'll never see him again.' Fighting panic, I told myself to be sensible, I'd try to be sick then I'd find one of the guest bedrooms and go to sleep. I'd be alright in the morning. I staggered upstairs, past one of the cats which was looking somehow different today. I peered closer and saw that all the hairs on its body had lifted and become animated. Each little hair moving independently of the others. Even more horrified I pressed on. I found a bedroom, sank down on the bed and closed my eyes against any visual tricks the room might try to play on me. But still sleep wouldn't come. Monstrous things were happening in my brain and I searched for some mundane thought to anchor me to sanity. For some reason a fragment of a long forgotten domestic science lesson floated into my mind. We'd been taught how to iron a handkerchief. Suddenly that handkerchief became vitally important. Blocking out all else I hung onto its image and in my mind I tried to iron it perfectly the way the teacher had shown us. Eight hours I spent mentally ironing that little white square, smoothing every crease, nosing the point of the iron down each careful fold. Over and over it I went, concentrating hard to shut out the lunacy my drugged brain was trying to produce. 'When I've finished this hankie I'll be okay,' I told myself. And I was right. At last, as the drug wore off I drifted into sleep, the beautifully pressed handkerchief still lying on my mental ironing-board.Needless to say we went home shattered and horrified by our experience. We'd been given LSD, we realised. Acid. I for one had no desire to go near it again."

Cynthia, 1994 

"The first time we took LSD was an accident. It happened sometime in 1965, between albums and tours. We were innocent victims of the wicked dentist whom we'd met and had dinner with a few times. There'd been discos and similar events; everybody knew each other. One night John, Cynthia, Pattie and I were having dinner at the dentist's house. Later that night we were going to a London nightclub called the Pickwick Club. It was a little restaurant with a small stage where some friends of ours were playing. Klaus Voormann, Gibson Kemp (who became Rory Storm's drummer after we stole Ringo) and a guy called Paddy. They had a little trio. After dinner I said to John, 'Let's go - they're going to be on soon,' and John said 'OK', but the dentist was saying, 'Don't go; you should stay here.' And then he said, 'Well, at least finish your coffee first.' So we finished our coffee and after a while I said again, 'Come on, it's getting late - we'd better go.' The dentist said something to John and John turned to me and said, 'WE'VE HAD LSD.' I just thought, 'Well, what's that? So what? Let's go!' This fella was still asking us to stay and it all became a bit seedy - it felt as if he was trying to get something happening in his house; that there was some reason he didn't want us to go. In fact, he had obtained some lysergic acid diethylamide 25. It was, at the time, an unrestricted medication - I seem to recall that I'd heard vaguely about it, but I didn't really know what it was, and we didn't know we were taking it. The bloke had put it in our coffee: mine, John's, Cynthia's and Pattie's. He didn't take it. He had never had it himself. I'm sure he thought it was an aphrodisiac. I remember his girlfriend had enormous breasts and I think he thought that there was going to be a big gang-bang and that he was going to get to shag everybody. I really think that was his motive. So the dentist said, 'OK, leave your car here. I'll drive you and then you can come back later.' I said 'No, no. We'll drive.' And we all got in my car and he came as well, in his car. We got to the nightclub, parked and went in. We'd just sat down and ordered our drinks when SUDDENLY I FEEL THE MOST INCREDIBLE FEELING COME OVER ME. It was something like a very concentrated version of the best feeling I'd ever had in my whole life. It was FANTASTIC. I felt in love, not with anything or anybody in particular, but with everything. Everything was perfect, in a perfect light, and I had an overwhelming desire to go round the club telling everybody how much I loved them - people I'd never seen before. One thing led to another, then suddenly it felt as if a bomb had made a direct hit on the nightclub and the roof had been blown off: 'What's going on here?' I pulled my senses together and I realised that the club had actually closed - all the people had gone, they'd put the lights on, and the waiters were going round bashing the tables and putting the chairs on top of them. We thought, 'Oops, we'd better get out of here!' We got out and went to go to another disco, the Ad Lib Club. It was just a short distance so we walked, but things weren't the same now as they had been. It's difficult to explain: it was very Alice in Wonderland - many strange things. I remember Pattie, half playfully but also half crazy, trying to smash a shop window and I felt: 'Come on now, don't be silly...' Then we got round the corner and saw just all lights and taxis. It looked as if there was a big film première going on, but it was probably just the usual doorway to the nightclub. It seemed very bright; with all the people in thick make-up, like masks. VERY STRANGE. We went up into the nightclub and it felt as though the elevator was on fire and we were going into hell (and it was and we were), but at the same time we were all in hysterics and crazy. Eventually we got out at the Ad Lib, on the top floor, and sat there, probably for hours and hours. Then it was daylight and I drove everyone home - I was driving a Mini with John and Cynthia and Pattie in it. I seem to remember we were doing eighteen miles an hour and I was really concentrating - because some of the time I just felt normal and then, before I knew where I was, it was all crazy again. Anyway, we got home safe and sound, and somewhere down the line John and Cynthia got home. I went to bed and lay there for, like, three years. That is what became known as 'The Dental Experience'."

George Harrison

"A dentist in London laid acid on George, me and our wives. HE JUST PUT IT IN OUR COFFEE OR SOMETHING. It was all the thing with the middle-class London swingers who'd heard all about it and didn't know it was any different from pot and pills. He gave us it, and he was saying, 'I advise you not to leave.' We thought he was trying to keep us for an orgy in his house, and we didn't want to know. We went out to the Ad Lib and these discotheques, and there were incredible things going on. We got out and the guy came with us, and he was nervous and we didn't know what was going on, and that we were going crackers. It was insane, going around London on it. We thought when we went to the club that it was on fire, and then we thought there was a première and it was just an ordinary light outside. We thought, 'Shit, what's going on here?' And we were cackling in the streets, and then people were shouting, 'Let's break a window.' We were just insane. We were out of our heads. We finally got on the lift. We all thought there was a fire on the lift: it was just a little red light; we were all screaming, 'AAAAAAAARGH!' all hot and hysterical. And we all arrived on the floor (because this was a discotheque that was up a building), and the lift stops and the door opens, and we were all, 'AAAAAAAARGH!' and we just see that it's the club, and we walk in and sit down and the table's elongating. I think we went to eat before that and it was like the thing I read, describing the effects of opium in the old days, where the table... I suddenly realised it was only a table, with four of us around it, but it went long, just like I had read, and I thought, 'Fuck! It's happening.' Then we went to the Ad Lib and all of that, and some singer came up to me and said, 'Can I sit next to you?' I said, 'Only if you don't talk,' because I just couldn't think. It seemed to go on all night. I can't remember the details; it just went on. And George somehow or other managed to drive us home in his Mini, but we were going about the miles an hour and it seemed like a thousand. And Pattie was saying, 'Let's jump out and play football' - there were these big rugby poles and things. And I was getting all these hysterical jokes coming out, like [I did on] speed, because I was always on that, too. George was going, 'Don't make me laugh. Oh, God!' IT WAS TERRIFYING, but it was fantastic. I did some drawings at the time (I've got them somewhere) of four faces saying, 'We all agree with you!' - things like that. I gave them to Ringo, the originals. I did a lot of drawings that night. They all went to bed, and then George's house seemed to be just like a big submarine I was driving."

John, 1971

"I was actually there in the club when John and George got there shouting, 'THE LIFT'S ON FIRE!' Acid was the best thing we could take after that!"

Ringo Starr 

“It was a lovely dinner and afterwards there was coffee galore and the host kept saying, ‘have more coffee, have more coffee.’ So we did, in our innocence. The next thing, everybody sort of disappeared. The stupid, stupid man had put LSD in our coffee. It was terrifying. We finally came out of it eight hours after... It was John’s first time, as it was for all of us. He thought it was wonderful. John had too much enthusiasm. I tried to pull him back, but I couldn’t. There were so many people around him trying to influence him. They’d say they could invent an island where there was sunshine all the time, and John believed them. I always hoped he would understand that you don’t have to do these things to be yourself. But it didn’t work. I could see John being sucked away into a dream world.”

Cynthia, 1976

“Really I suppose the big thing happened when John Lennon and I went to dinner at this dentist's house and he put LSD in our coffee. He dosed us and we just went off on this trip and that was it. You know what happened to me was like, it was just like lots of doors in my mind was just flying open and there was a lot of things which I knew instantly, which now I believe to be all part of what they call karma, previous karma, action-reaction. And you know, I'm a big believer in reincarnation and all that. And I think, you know, you go through things, you experience things, it's all part of that whole trip. And at that time I realized, just through looking at the grass and the trees and I could see the sap running through the trees and everything. And I just knew that there was such a thing as God. I suddenly felt happy but there was some connection, that we were all connected to this energy. And just like we sit here and talk now, the energy within you and the energy within me is the same, and not only that, I could see the space between us was buzzing too. And then I got into meditation.”

George Harrison, 1979 

"I was never anxious to try it, but our first experience was a friend of George's, actually, a dentist person, and we went for dinner. And after dinner, he put sugar cubes in our coffee which were laced with LSD. And, of course, it hit us all at the same time, and we had the most horrendous night and a very dangerous drive home. We could all have been killed, because we were absolutely out of our minds. And for me, that was hell, sheer hell, mental torture. And I couldn't cope with it, and I would never, ever wanted to do it again. And yet for John. It was something else. You see, John was a different animal. He was a searcher. He was a - he desired something new in life, constantly changing, constantly wanting new experiences. And, of course, he didn't have a bad time on this particular drug. So he tried it again."

Cynthia, 1985 

George and Pattie swore never to have John Riley as a dentist again while Cynthia never forgave him. John Riley and Cyndy Bury were married and eventually divorced. John Riley died in a car crash in Ireland in 1986: Cyndy currently lives in the South of Spain. Both Pattie and Cynthia wrote about the first LSD in their autobiographies.

"When you go for dinner with your dentist, you don't imagine a professional man would do something like that."

Cynthia