Dylan Got the Beatles STONED 50 Years Ago Today

50 years ago today, Bob Dylan got the Beatles STONED for their very first time. It was also the first time John, Paul, George and Ringo met the legendary songwriter—an event that quite possibly shaped music as we know it. Make sure to watch the mini-documentary below.

After playing a concert in Queens, the Fab Four hooked up with the folk singer at The Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan. As the story goes, Dylan and his friend, a reporter named Al Aronowitz, turned the Beatles on to marijuana. Dylan had assumed the Beatles had already tried weed because he thought the lyrics to the song “I Want To Hold Your Hand” went; “… and when I touch you I get high, I get high … ” instead of “I can’t hide, I can’t hide.”

We imagine the conversation went something like this:

Dylan: “What’s up, Beatles, dudes…so you guys wanna get high, man?”
The Beatles: (After a very long pause ): “Uhm, we’ve never smoked marijuana before.”
Dylan: “What the fuck? You got to be kidding me, man? But, what about your lyrics, man? You know, ‘and when I touch you I get high, I get high…’“
The Beatles: (After another very long pause ) “Uhm…the words are, ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide…‘“
Dylan: “Whatever, dudes…so, uh, we gonna smoke some weed or what?”

Apparently during their history-making smoke sesh the four lads from Liverpool didn’t quite understand STONER etiquette. Ringo Starr even bogarted the joint and smoked it all to himself.

“Til then we’d been hard scotch and Coke men,” Paul McCartney later admitted. Hours passed as Dylan rolled more joints for the group, who quickly became fans and later advocates for marijuana.

“The Beatles had gone beyond comprehension,” John Lennon supposedly said not long after that fateful day. “We were smoking marijuana for breakfast. We were well into marijuana and nobody could communicate with us, because we were just glazed eyes, giggling all the time.”

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