JULY 3, 1967 – After finishing up and releasing the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album, the Beatles were ready to blow off some steam and threw a private party at the Speakeasy Club in London, England for the members of The Monkees who were in town for three sold out concert dates at the Empire Pool venue.Davy Jones was visiting his family and did not attend, and Ringo was attending to his very pregnant wife Maureen, but the names on the guest list were impressive ones. They included: John and Cynthia Lennon, George and Pattie Harrison, Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Jane Asher, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Dusty Springfield, Barry Miles, Frank Allen of The Searchers, Manfred Mann, producer Mickie Most, Lulu and all of the members from Manfred Mann, The Who, and Procol Harum.Micky Dolenz got high on psychedelics and tripped out until 6 am and started wandering around Hyde Park talking to trees and eventually singing and casually hanging out with over 700 Monkees fans.Peter Tork remembered: “Micky and I are meeting the Beatles at a London club called the Speakeasy. And in come George and John singing to the tune of ‘Hare Krishna’… ‘Micky Dolenz, Micky Dolenz, Dolenz, Dolenz, Micky, Micky.’ And Paul is with Jane Asher, and the other guys didn’t bring anybody, and I had just done some STP which was an LSD-type psychedelic drug. I mentioned it to John and he said, ‘We heard that’s no good. Mama Cass told us not to take it.’ But he said, ‘Okay’. So I went back to the hotel and I got some. Popped one down his throat. I guess he was alright because he seemed to survive. I don’t think I’m responsible for ‘Strawberry Fields’ though.”Forty years later, Clapton admitted that he took his first LSD trip that night: “I hadn’t done anything up to that point except smoke a lot of dope. Then Micky Dolenz came in and he was handing out pills to everybody, saying ‘Love and peace, man, love and peace.’ It was STP, which was like a quadruple-strength dose of acid. Within an hour or so, I was saying, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ … Then someone put ‘Sgt. Pepper’ on the turntable and that was my first experience with acid. … I remember being out of my mind and thinking I was in the presence of giants, and we were all going off somewhere together to another planet. The doors of perception were wide open.”Around 3:30 am, George Harrison started a jam session on his ukulele, with Peter Tork playing banjo and Keith Moon playing drums on a table.
