Bob
Dylan
Among
Bob Dylan's prodigious accomplishments, he is credited with turning the
Beatles onto marijuana,
In their early days in Hamburg, the Beatles were expected to play four and a half hours each night, and six hours on the weekend. Club owners dispensed Preludin, an amphetamine marketed legally as a diet pill, freely to their musicians. George wrote to a friend of "eating Prellie sandwiches" and John washed copious amounts down with alcohol. Paul was cautious about them and only then-drummer Pete Best abstained altogether.
When The Beatles came to America in 1964, New York Post columnist Al Aronowitz took Bob Dylan to meet them at the Delmonico hotel. When offered Drinamyls and Preludins, Dylan reportedly shook his head saying, "How about something a little more organic? Something green. . . marijuana." Though others had passed some low-potency pot to the Beatles beforehand, the band's manager Brian Epstein was unaware of this and said, "We've never really smoked marijuana before." Dylan countered, "But what about your song. . . and when I touch you, I get high, I get high. . . " John replied, "Those aren't the words. It's 'I can't hide, I can't hide."
Dylan rolled a joint and passed it to John, who handed it it Ringo Starr, calling him "my official taster." Ringo went to a back room and smoked it down, emerging wearing a grin. Paul recounted, "We said, 'How is it?' He said, 'The ceiling's coming down on me.' And we went, Wow! Leaped up, 'God, got to do this!' So we ran into the back room--first John, then me and George, then Brian." "We were just legless, aching from laughter," George told Derek Taylor, who joined them later on. Paul greeted Taylor with a bear hug, saying "he'd been up there" and pointing at the ceiling. (SOURCE: The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz (Little, Brown and Company, 2005) (which spans the life of the Beatles from the members' births to the band's breakup in 983 pages, including notes and index.)
Dylan's only direct song about marijuana, "Rainy Day Women," with the lyric, "Everybody must get stoned" is an anthem against overindulegnce and stupidity, along the lines of The Who's "My Generation." Except for noting that his Turkish grandmother smoked a pipe, and writing about a woman he lived with who was a smoker, he doesn't mention pot in his autobiography, where he admits to monkeying with his public image to put himself out of the limelight. But after giving us timeless songs like "Masters of War," "Blowing in the Wind" and so many others, our heir to Woody Guthrie can't be blamed for wanting his privacy.