How a Morally Dubious Dentist Changed The Beatles’ Sound: The Financial Wayback Machine

By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content Director

In the mid-1960s, The Beatles were already the most popular band in the world. They had successfully invaded America. They had forced teenybopper girls to scream at the Ed Sullivan Show. They drew the wrath of barbers (including my grandfather) because boys wanted to grow out their hair to be more like George, John, Paul, and Ringo. They wanted to hold your hand, give you all of their loving, and twist and shout—and they had done it for eight days a week.

They were a revelation.

But in 1966, a dentist gave a dinner party at his house that included George Harrison and John Lennon, and it was an evening that would eventually change The Beatles’ sound. And while the circumstances in today’s world seem awfully sketchy and, um, rather illegal, it sounds like the Fab Four eventually appreciated the dentist’s contributions to their band.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: I’ve always loved history. I’ve always loved the idea of taking a peek into the past and studying it from the current-day perspective. The idea of time travel also fascinates me. And now that I’ve found a passion for writing about finance, I’m combining all of it together in an occasional column for WCI called “The Financial Wayback Machine.”

I want to journey back in time and look at those supposedly great ideas that now seem ridiculous, all the good and terrible predictions (crystal balls have never not been cloudy), the doctors who did great (and shady) things, and all the seemingly minor news nuggets that ended up making huge waves. It’ll be fun, it’ll be silly, and maybe it’ll be a good lesson for what not to do with your money today.

After all, as WCI Founder Dr. Jim Dahle once said, “If you've never read history, you're destined to repeat it.”

Step into the Financial Wayback Machine with me, and let’s travel back in time.]

A Dentist Slipped Something into the Beatles’ Coffee — And Nothing Was Ever the Same

The charismatic dentist’s name was John Riley, and he was well known in Swinging ‘60s London for helping celebrities enhance their smiles. Let’s allow Harrison and Lennon to describe Riley's actions on one fateful night.

If you didn’t watch the video, here’s a CliffsNotes version:

• Harrison, Lennon, and their wives had dinner at John Riley’s house.
• Riley slipped LSD into their coffee.
• Harrison and Lennon were a little sketched out about the whole evening.
• Paul McCartney was scared to try acid because he had heard that once you took it, your mind was never the same. For that same reason, Lennon was motivated to give it a whirl.

In another interview when discussing the LSD incident instigated by Riley, Harrison said:

“People who have taken [LSD] will know what I’m talking about, and anybody who hasn’t taken it won’t have a clue. It transforms you. After that, I didn’t need it ever again. That’s the thing about LSD. You don’t need it twice.”

“You only took it once?” the interviewer asked.

“No, I took it lots of times,” Harrison said chuckling. “But I only needed it once.”

Riley trained in Chicago and returned to London as a cosmetic dentist with a list of celebrity clients that included actor/comedian Dudley Moore. When Riley introduced the acid into their lives (Lennon and Harrison weren’t aware that Riley had slipped it into their coffee), the relationship between him and the guitarists was never the same. Lennon apparently was livid about the post-dinner coffee trick, and Harrison (and the rest of his bandmates) found somebody else to work on his teeth.

Said Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, to music writer, Steve Turner: “When you go for dinner with your dentist, you don't imagine a professional man would do something like that.”

Or as The Guardian wrote in 2020, “No one wants a groovy dentist, any more than they want a sybaritic bank manager or a butter-fingered brain surgeon.”

Still, The Beatles might have immortalized Riley in a song anyway. Plenty of speculation abounds about the subject of the 1966 tune, Doctor Robert—some say it’s about Bob Dylan, some say it’s about a London art dealer who was generous with his marijuana and cocaine, and some say it’s about Lennon himself. But Riley is also the potential subject.

Composed by Lennon, some of the lyrics include the phrases, “If you’re down, he’ll pick you up. Take a drink from his special cup,” and, “You’re a new and better man. He helps you to understand.”

Sounds like that could be about Riley.

Despite his initial reaction to the first LSD trip, Lennon began dropping acid regularly, and eventually, Lennon and Harrison introduced McCartney and Ringo Starr to the drug, because as Harrison said, via Vice, “We couldn’t relate to them anymore. Not just on the one level, we couldn’t relate to them on any level because acid had changed us so much.”

Harrison eventually got turned on to Ravi Shankar, an Indian sitarist and composer, and the group’s music began to take on a more psychedelic tone (Yellow Submarine, I’m Only Sleeping, Tomorrow Never Knows, and Doctor Robert were featured on the band’s next album, Revolver).

While McCartney was initially the only holdout from taking LSD, he eventually succumbed to its ways the next year, calling it “truly a religious experience.”

“It started to find its way into everything we did, really,” he said, via the Revolver Club. “It colored our perceptions. I think we started to realize there wasn’t as many frontiers as we’d thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers.”

Would The Beatles have been THE BEATLES if they hadn’t transformed from their boy-band, mop-top, pop-rock ways into something a little more experimental, a little more “out there,” a little more dangerous? And you have to wonder if they could have managed that transformation without an underhanded trick from a dentist whose questionable motives might have changed the direction of music forever.

More information here:

Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published

How Charles Barkley Learned About Finance

During his playing career, basketball Hall of Famer Charles Barkley made about $40 million, and since then, he’s earned tens of millions of dollars more for being one of the NBA’s most beloved broadcasters.

He learned some of his most important money lessons from the mother of another NBA superstar.

It was during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta when Grant Hill’s mother, Janet Hill, took a few days off from work to watch her son play with Barkley on the third incarnation of the Dream Team. Barkley said he couldn’t understand why Janet Hill and her husband Calvin would return to work after their son had already signed a $68 million contract. She then gave him some truth.

“She said, ‘Charles, I'm just going to give you some advice: do not start taking care of your family and friends,’” Barkley said, via SI.com. “No. 1, they're never going to stop and it's going to ruin all of your relationships. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, when you start giving people money, they're never going to ask you for money one time. She said, the second is, no matter what you do for them, the first time you tell them no, they hate you . . . I had to learn. People who I had been giving money to, the first time I told them no, they're like, ’Nah, we're not friends any more.’ That was a tough and painful lesson for me.”

I actually saw Barkley play in the 1996 Olympics, and before the US game vs. Puerto Rico, I distinctly remember a blonde woman getting his attention during warmups. She yelled, “Charles, do you remember me? I’m [insert name here]!” He looked befuddled and eventually turned away to return to the layup line. Now, I wonder if that was before or after his conversation with Janet Hill.

Doctors Love Their Smokes

And just because I can’t get enough old-timey commercials where doctors and/or The Flintstones characters hawk cigarettes to a nicotine-hungry public, here’s another advertisement from the 1950s.

Previous Wayback Machine columns:

One of the Filthiest Comedians Ever Solves Mr. Miyagi’s Money Problems

A Solemn Happy Anniversary to the Doctor Who Tried to Save the President’s Life

A Doc Created the Coolest Shoe in the Whole World

The Most Athletic Doctor Ever

Reddit of the Week

You’ve probably seen a similar-looking chart during your financial literacy journal. But in times that feel chaotic, it’s always good to be reminded.

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[EDITOR'S NOTE: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at content@whitecoatinvestor.com.]

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