The Beatles were introduced to Ravi Shankar's sitar music by Roger
McGuinn at an LSD-fuelled Los Angeles party at Zsa Zsa Gabor's
mansion, the founder of the The Byrds has said.
By Dean Nelson
19 Apr 2010
The collaboration between the Indian composer and the British pop
band went inspired psychedelia, the 1960s movement that blended
mind-altering drugs with experimental beat music that was one of the
dominant cultural influences of the decade.
It took The Beatles to India to meet the Maharishi, inspired George
Harrison to take sitar lessons from Pandit Ravi Shankar, and had a
deep influence on albums including Rubber Soul, Revolver and Sgt
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sitar sounds later featured on The
Rolling Stones hit Paint it Black and Stevie Wonder's "Signed,
Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours".
But according to McGuinn, founder of the American rock band that had
hits with "Mr Tambourine Man" and "Turn! Turn! Turn!", has now spoken
for the first time about the moment he introduced Ravi Shankar's
music to The Beatles.
According to McGuinn, the birth of the counterculture movement began
when the Beatles sent a limousine to collect him and fellow Byrds
founder David Crosby to hang out with them at Zsa-Zsa Gabor's Bel Air
mansion, which they were renting during their 1965 tour of the United States.
"There were girls at the gates, police guards. We went in and David,
John Lennon, George Harrison and I took LSD to help get to know each
other better. There was a large bathroom in the house and we were all
sitting on the edge of a shower passing around a guitar, taking turns
to play our favourite songs. John and I agreed Be-Bop-A-Lula was our
favourite 50s rock record.
"I showed George Harrison some Ravi Shankar sounds, which I'd heard
because we shared the same record company, on the guitar. I told him
about Ravi Shankar and he said he had never heard Indian music
before," McGuinn told the Daily Telegraph from his home in Florida.
"You can hear what I played him from the Byrds' song 'Why'. I had
learned to play it on the guitar from listening to records of Ravi
Shankar," he added.
Harrison became the first Western pop musician to play a sitar on the
song Norwegian Wood, and visited Shankar in Kashmir the following
year to take sitar lessons.
After discussing Indian music, McGuinn said the conversation turned
to religion, and he asked Harrison "what he thought about God".
Harrison, who later became a disciple of the Maharishi and an
advocate of Transcendental Meditation and "yogic flying", replied:
"We don't know about that."
"Then they didn't know whether there was a God or not or about
anything going on in the spiritual world, they were oblivious to it," he said.
When he next met George Harrison on a plane some time later, the
Beatle was so focused on Indian religion that he was "transcending"
in his seat, McGuinn said.
"We talked about Transcendental Meditation and he looked like he was
somewhere else. I asked him 'what's going on?' and he said he was
'transcending'," he said.
"We planted the seeds [of psychedelia]. We loved Indian music and did
some things in that vein, but not as much as The Beatles. Later they
went out there [to India], got some sitars, met Ravi Shankar and
learned to play them, and got into the whole Eastern Thing. We didn't
really realise it but it had an impact. We loved the Beatles and they
loved The Byrds, and we were sharing influences," he added.
At the time, he said, LSD and Indian music were a natural fit at a
time when many were trying to "discover the truth about spiritual things".
McGuinn's memories of introducing the Beatles to Indian influences
were stirred when he read a Daily Telegraph article in which Ravi
Shankar, who is proud of his role as a classical Hindustani musician,
voiced his anger at the Beatles for turning him into a "pop star" and
surrounding him with drugged-out hippies.
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