Start at the beginning, because the end only makes sense if you know where it all started. It started in Hamburg, and it started with pills.

This was 1961. Four young men from Liverpool, barely out of their teens, shipped off to play the Reeperbahn, which was Hamburg’s red-light district and one of the more genuinely dangerous places in postwar Europe. They were playing five, sometimes six hours a night at clubs like the Kaiserkeller and the Star-Club, in front of sailors, gangsters, prostitutes, and drunks who would throw bottles at the stage if they slowed down. The only way to survive that kind of schedule was pharmacological. The waiters at these clubs, who were running on the same chemicals to get through their own punishing shifts, kept a supply of Preludin handy. Preludin was a German slimming pill, technically a stimulant, and the musicians called them Prellies. You took one, chased it with a beer or two, and you could play until dawn without your legs giving out. John Lennon described it plainly years later: “In Hamburg the waiters always had Preludin. When they’d see the musicians falling over with tiredness or drink, they’d give you the pill. You could work almost endlessly, until the pill wore off, then you’d have to have another.”

Before the Prellies, Lennon had already been chewing Benzedrine-soaked cardboard strips back in Liverpool as a teenager, pulling the stimulant-laced filler out of over-the-counter Vick’s inhalers. Everybody thought it was the most exotic thing going. Lennon himself said everybody just talked their heads off all night. The Reeperbahn took that amateur chemistry and industrialised it. The pills got harder. Black bombers, purple hearts, dexies. Lennon carried the band’s supply in his pockets during tours, loose, just shoved in there. He said so himself to Playboy in 1980, and said the roadies eventually took over the job when the quantities got too large to manage personally.

Paul McCartney was reportedly the most cautious of the four in Hamburg. Not clean by any means, but comparatively careful, at least at that point. George Harrison and Lennon were the ones who leaned into the amphetamines hardest. Ringo Starr, who joined the band last, mostly kept to drink in the early period. But the whole band was running on chemicals from the jump. Before they were famous, before the suits and the moptops and the Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles were a gang of wired-up kids playing until sunrise in front of criminals, fuelled by whatever a German waiter had in his apron pocket.

The public never saw any of this, of course. What the public saw was four charming young men who said “please” and “thank you” and made teenage girls scream. The image was so complete, so perfectly managed by Brian Epstein that it held for years. It held even as the drugs changed and escalated. It held through the entire touring era, through Beatlemania, through screaming crowds in every city on earth. The uppers kept them going through the punishing years on the road. When they stopped touring in 1966, when they finally came off that particular treadmill and went into the studio full-time, the pharmacology evolved. The amphetamines faded. Something else took over.

Bob Dylan gets a lot of credit, or blame depending on your position, for introducing the Beatles to cannabis properly. It happened in a New York hotel room in August 1964. The band had smoked weed here and there in Hamburg and Liverpool but had never really got properly stoned. Dylan was apparently stunned they hadn’t. The story goes that Lennon thought the lyric to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” said “I get high” when it actually said “I can’t hide,” which Dylan took as an invitation. They smoked that night and something shifted. From that point on, weed was simply present in the Beatles’ world the way cigarettes were present for everyone else. It was not recreational. It was ambient. It was in the recording sessions, on the tour bus, in the dressing rooms. Harrison would smoke before playing. Lennon would smoke before writing. McCartney would smoke. Ringo would smoke. It was so woven into the daily fabric of their lives by the mid-1960s that they actually signed a full-page advertisement in the Sunday Times in 1967 calling for cannabis legalisation in England, alongside other members of British society. This was not a radical gesture for them. It was more like a statement of the obvious.

LSD arrived in 1965, and it arrived without warning. A dentist in London invited Lennon, Harrison, their wives and girlfriends to dinner and quietly dosed the sugar cubes in their coffee without telling anyone. What followed was several hours of involuntary acid trip for people who had no idea what was happening to them. Lennon and Harrison were terrified and then astonished and then, eventually, transformed. They went back for more, willingly, many times over. LSD became the engine of the band’s creative leap from ‘Help!’ to ‘Revolver’ to ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ The music did not just reference the drug experience. It was the drug experience, rendered in tape loops and backwards guitars and string arrangements that had no precedent in pop music. Ringo eventually joined them on acid, out in Beverly Hills. McCartney held out the longest, then took it four times and told an ITV interviewer about it in 1967, which caused a media storm. He was the first Beatle to publicly admit to LSD use, which given what was actually going on privately was a mild understatement.

Cocaine entered the picture around “Sgt. Pepper.” An art dealer named Robert Fraser, one of the great tastemakers of 1960s London, introduced McCartney to it. McCartney took to it for a while during that period and later admitted to using it for about a year around 1967. He said it helped him stay focused during long sessions. The others eventually followed. Cocaine fitted the studio work in a way that LSD did not. Acid dissolved boundaries and broke open structures. Coke kept you sharp, or at least made you feel like you were sharp, which is not the same thing but felt useful at the time.

And then there was heroin, and heroin was different from everything that had come before it.

Lennon and Yoko Ono started using heroin in 1968, during the White Album sessions. Neither of them injected. They snorted it, then smoked it. Yoko was candid about this years later and so was Lennon, who wrote “Cold Turkey” about the experience of coming off it. McCartney described the moment the rest of the band understood what was happening: “The two of them were on heroin, and this was a fairly big shocker for us because we all thought we were far-out boys, but we kind of understood that we’d never get quite that far out.” That quote tells you everything about the internal hierarchy of the band’s relationship with chemicals. They had drawn an informal line, and Lennon had walked straight across it.

The White Album sessions were already in a state of controlled disintegration. Ringo quit for three weeks. Harrison wrote and recorded While My Guitar Gently Weeps while the others sat around barely pretending to be interested. George Martin was increasingly a spectator. Long-time engineer Geoff Emerick walked out and refused to come back. The band was recording in separate rooms, separately, like four solo musicians who happened to be sharing a building. And over all of it, Lennon was turning up to sessions with Yoko permanently attached to him, the two of them visibly not entirely present, operating at a remove from everything around them that the heroin made possible and necessary at the same time.

The cannabis was still everywhere, background noise, as normal as breathing. The cocaine was still in circulation. The LSD use was winding down for most of them, though it never fully stopped. Harrison had gone deep into Hindu philosophy and was using acid as part of a spiritual rather than purely recreational framework. But it was the heroin that changed the atmosphere in the room in a way that nothing else had, because unlike every other drug the Beatles had used together, heroin did not create a shared experience. It created a private one. Lennon on heroin was not more present. He was less. He was somewhere else, in a warm and padded private universe, and getting him back into the same room as the other three in any meaningful sense became progressively harder.

This is the condition that Paul McCartney looked at in January 1969 and decided he could fix.

The Get Back project was McCartney’s rescue operation, though he would not have used that word. The plan had five parts. The centrepiece was a return to live performance, the first since they had stopped touring in 1966. Strip everything back, he said. No overdubs, no orchestras, no production wizardry. Just the four of them playing together as a band, the way they had played in Hamburg, captured on film. The film would be broadcast. People would see the Beatles as a band again. The distance between them would close. He had drawn up the whole strategy. He was the only one who still believed it was possible.

Rehearsals began at Twickenham Film Studios on 2 January 1969. Michael Lindsay-Hogg was there with cameras. The idea was to document the songs being built from scratch, the process made visible and honest. What the cameras got instead was an autopsy of a band filmed in real time.

Harrison arrived having just spent time in America with Bob Dylan and The Band, at Big Pink, where musicians sat around a basement in upstate New York and played together because they loved playing. It was informal. It was warm. No cameras, no agenda, no one telling you what to do. He came back to Twickenham and walked straight into McCartney running the session like a school teacher, correcting his guitar parts, directing the proceedings with an energy that read as control even when it was meant as enthusiasm. Lennon was physically present but pharmaceutically elsewhere. Yoko sat on an amplifier. The cameras rolled. Harrison lasted a week before he walked out, leaving behind a conversation caught on microphone in which McCartney asked him what was wrong and Harrison said, very quietly, “I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all, if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that’ll please you, I’ll do it.” That sentence contains more information about the internal state of the band than most books have managed to extract.

Harrison came back, but on his own terms. The venue moved from Twickenham to Apple Studio on Savile Row. Billy Preston was brought in on keyboards, partly because he was a genuinely brilliant musician and partly because it is much harder to have an open argument in front of someone who is essentially a guest. His presence worked as a social regulator. The temperature dropped slightly. The sessions became workable, if not warm.

McCartney was on hash through most of this period, steady and functional, his drug use the most managed of the four. He was also doing cocaine, though less conspicuously than he had during the Sgt. Pepper era. He was not on heroin. He was the most sober person in that studio by some distance, which partly explains why he was the one trying to hold it together and partly explains why the others found his energy exhausting. When you are running on cannabis and occasional cocaine, trying to direct four people in a shared creative project feels entirely reasonable. When one of those people is on heroin and barely present and another has just returned from a utopian musical commune and another is sitting in the corner watching all of it with the expression of a man who has already mentally left, “reasonable” does not cover enough ground.

Lennon’s heroin use during the Get Back sessions is documented, acknowledged, and in the film itself visible to anyone who knows what they are looking at. Yoko joked to people around that time that heroin was their exercise. She said it out loud. The two of them moved through those January 1969 sessions in a fog that was not unpleasant from the inside but was, from the outside, the fog of someone who has found a more comfortable reality and sees no urgent reason to return to the original one. McCartney watched this and kept going. He ran the sessions, pushed the songs, smiled at Preston, tried to get Lennon’s attention back, and kept his own intake functional enough to stay on his feet.

What they produced in that environment, track by track, bears the marks of every chemical present in the room.

Two of Us was McCartney’s most personal contribution to the sessions. He had written it about getting deliberately lost on country drives with Linda Eastman, the woman he was about to marry. The original version was electric. He stripped it back to acoustic, which fitted the stated back-to-basics philosophy perfectly, and the song became something else in the process. He and Lennon stood at a single microphone to record it, which is the image that generated the mythology of reconciliation. The line about “chasing paper, getting nowhere” was aimed squarely at Apple Records and its spectacular financial implosion, which was by January 1969 bleeding money at a rate that would require the involvement of Allen Klein and eventually destroy what was left of the band’s business arrangements. McCartney sang it with Lennon two feet away from him and made it sound like a love song between old friends. That is a considerable act of will under the circumstances.

Across the Universe has one of the stranger origin stories in the catalogue. The refrain, Nothing’s gonna change my world, needed high female voices behind it. McCartney walked out of Abbey Road onto the pavement outside, where fans gathered every day in the hope of catching a glimpse of the band, and simply asked if anyone could hold a high note. A sixteen-year-old Brazilian au pair named Lizzie Bravo and a seventeen-year-old named Gayleen Pease came in and sang it. It was spontaneous and unpretentious and exactly the kind of thing the Get Back philosophy was supposed to produce. Phil Spector later deleted their vocals, slowed the tape down, and piled on an orchestral arrangement that turned a spare and aching song into something more palatably grand. The warmth that McCartney had pulled in off the street got buried under the production. It is an accurate metaphor for what happened to the entire project.

I Me Mine was Harrison’s. He had written it in response to his reading of Hindu scripture and his own LSD-assisted encounters with the ego, which he had come to see as the source of most human suffering, including the kind that was filling Twickenham with tension every morning. The song is a direct attack on self-centredness, on the relentless grinding first-person hunger that wrecks relationships and eats creativity alive. He debuted it at the session where Lennon and Yoko stood up and waltzed to it while he played, which was either a joke or a perfect piece of unconscious demonstration depending on how you read Lennon. Either way, I Me Mine ended up being the last new Beatles song ever recorded. Lennon was not in the room when they finished it. He had already told the others he was leaving.

The rooftop concert happened on 30 January 1969. They carried the equipment up to the top of the Apple building on Savile Row and played for forty-two minutes while office workers in the surrounding buildings climbed onto their window ledges to watch and the police eventually arrived to shut it down. Three of the album’s tracks came from that performance. It was the last time the Beatles played live. If you watch the footage now, which is not difficult to find, you can see McCartney’s face during those forty-two minutes. He looks relieved. He looks like a man who has been trying to describe something for months and has finally found the words.

The relief did not last. The tapes sat. Three different versions of the album were assembled and rejected. Glyn Johns cut one, then another. Both were turned down. Eventually the tapes were handed to Phil Spector, which McCartney never sanctioned and never forgave, particularly after Spector loaded The Long and Winding Road with orchestral and choral arrangements that McCartney had never requested and did not want. The song was supposed to be a piano ballad, bare and unadorned. Spector made it into a production. McCartney said later that he had cried when he heard what had been done to it. He sued to have his name removed from the Phil Spector version. He eventually won, decades later, with the “Let It Be... Naked” release in 2003, which restored the album to something closer to what the sessions had actually sounded like.

What McCartney had understood about the Get Back project, and what he could not fix no matter how he tried, was that a rescue operation requires the consent of the people being rescued. He wanted to go back. Back to simplicity, back to the stage, back to the four of them in a room playing music the way they had played it on the Reeperbahn with amphetamines in their pockets and sailors throwing bottles at them. He believed that if he could get them back to that place, the rest of it would follow. The closeness, the music, the band.

But Lennon was on heroin and living inside a private world with Yoko. Harrison had found something in Dylan’s basement that the Beatles could not replicate and did not want to. And the drugs that had once connected them, the shared Prellies and the communal joints and the acid trips taken together in Beverly Hills hotel rooms, had by 1969 diverged into separate pharmacological realities that put each of them in a different room even when they were standing in the same one.

The album exists. Twelve tracks, three competing masters, one rooftop. The sessions produced Let It Be and Don’t Let Me Down and Get Back and The Long and Winding Road and a film that sat unreleased for two years because no one could agree on anything. Abbey Road was recorded after all of it, in a final burst of discipline and love that stands as one of the great late rallies in the history of any creative partnership. And then it was over.

When you listen to Let It Be now, with the full picture in frame, the whole chemical history of the band running underneath it. McCartney’s presence on those recordings sounds different. Less like the controlling one, more like the one who refused to accept that it was finished. The one standing in the cold at Twickenham at eight in the morning with the studio booked and the cameras rolling, waiting for three other people who were each, in their own way, already gone.

And ironically, but not surprisingly, it’s McCartney who was the biggest star of them all not just while in The Beatles, but more importantly as a solo artiste. His body of work has completely dwarfed even the combined output of the other three completely in both quality and consistency.

By Reagan Gavin Rasquinha

Reagan Gavin Rasquinha is a writer who moves between high culture and backroom blues, tracing the quiet revolutions that shape what we see, feel and hear. 

The writer can be contacted at reagangavin@gmail.com