The sheer magnitude of the Beatles’ fame makes it easy to forget that when they first reached the peak of their stardom in the mid-1960s, they were just a group of ragtag, young 20-somethings who happened to land a big break. When the future Fab Four first met, they were even younger teens. For most of us, the idea of forging an entire career (and, more generally, a life) with the people we hung out with in high school. Yet, that’s how the Beatles, one of the biggest rock bands of all time, got their start.
Indeed, before they were topping the charts and touring the world, the band’s primary songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, were busy trying to see what kind of trouble they could get into at their childhood homes.
And like the resourceful lads they were, they certainly found it.
Paul McCartney Describes “Teenage Fool Antics” With John Lennon
The Beatles saw and did more exciting and wilder things during their short tenure as a band than most people will experience in their whole lifetimes. But before they got their big break in the early 1960s, they weren’t that different from any other aspiring young male musician. They taught each other chords, made up silly lyrics to their favorite cover songs, and tried desperately to attract the opposite sex with little to no avail. Paul McCartney and John Lennon longed for the day they could get famous just from playing their guitars. But before that could happen, the two friends passed the time looking for ways to feel older and “cooler” while they wrote their music.
“When we started off, I used to sag off school,” McCartney recalled in a later interview. “We’d go to my house when my dad was out at work. And we’d just sit around in the front parlor of my house and smoke Typhoo tea in my dad’s pipe. We were teenage fools, and we wanted to sit at home and do big grown-up things. So, I found my dad’s pipe, and then we didn’t have anything to load it with. So, we got the Typhoo out.”
During the posthumous induction of John Lennon to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in mid-January 1994, McCartney brought up the early writing sessions that would help develop their famous Lennon-McCartney partnership, complete with the loose-leaf tea they would smoke in McCartney’s father’s tobacco pipe, which he stored in a drawer. “It didn’t do much for us,” McCartney joked, per BeatlesBible. “But it got us on the road.”
The Pair Experienced Something Stronger Together A Few Years Later
In true best friend fashion, John Lennon and Paul McCartney continued to experience a wealth of firsts together as their celebrity and globe-trotting tendencies grew. Nine years after the Liverpool lads were smoking breakfast tea in McCartney’s dad’s pipe, they experienced something notably stronger with the one and only Bob Dylan. Dylan famously introduced Lennon and McCartney (and the rest of the Beatles) to marijuana while hanging out at an after-party at the Delmonico Hotel in New York City. Drummer Ringo Starr was the first to partake, and when the rest of his band asked him what it was like, he said, “The ceiling is kind of moving down.”
“We all ran into the backroom going, ‘Give us a bit, give us a bit!’” McCartney recalled years later. “So, that was the very first evening we ever got stoned.” We’d wager a bet that the loose-leaf substance Dylan was traveling with had quite a stronger kick than the Typhoo in McCartney’s parents’ cupboard.