Why John Lennon wanted a hole drilled in his skull in the late 1960s
Sometimes, the most creative among us are the people who just aren’t afraid to say their ideas out loud, whether they’re bad or not. John Lennon is a perfect example of this.
The man was arguably one of the earliest examples of that typical rock frontman syndrome of crippling self-doubt tempered with an all-encompassing belief that you’re the best thing going in all the world. You’d assume that the first part would have been successfully dealt with in the case of John Lennon. Pretty much the entire world thought he was the best thing going until he started saying pretty controversial things about Jesus, but apparently not.
Lennon was neurotic in the extreme about his own abilities at pretty much anything. He famously despised the sound of his own singing voice, demanding that his voice be multi-tracked on Beatles records until it got the fullness he desired. He went through extended periods of writer’s block, fundamentally unable to put anything to tape for fear of it being terrible. Then, like so many creative types would do in their 20s for years to come, he started taking acid.
The dalliance Lennon had with psychedelic drugs fundamentally broke the hold his ego had over him, not always in a good way, either. On the one hand, this newfound willingness to experiment gave the world ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ which, y’know, we’re all very grateful for. On the other hand, ego death isn’t fun. After facing the psychological void that bad trips can give you enough times, Lennon moved from drugs to meditation in 1968, a much gentler form of self-analysis.
This suited Lennon much better and he dove into the practise whole heartedly, soon becoming a full-on evangelist for it and becoming obsessed with the idea of “opening his third eye”, of being fully aware of the truths beyond the physical world – in 1969, Lennon decided to try and do it the old-fashioned way… While he was on his honeymoon with Yoko Ono in Amsterdam, he summoned the quack doctor Bart Hughes to his hotel room with a specific question.
Hughes was an advocate of trepanning, and Lennon wanted to discuss getting a trepan of his own in order to manually open his third eye. For those that don’t know, trepanning is when some maniac cons you into letting them drill open your skull. It doesn’t often go well. Hughes, in a presumably rare moment of honesty, recommended against getting the procedure, but Lennon wouldn’t take no for an answer. Even asking Paul McCartney if he wanted to get one with him.
This sounds like an apocryphal story, but Macca himself confirmed the story in an interview with GQ – when asked whether Lennon had really asked him to go through with it, McCartney said, “John was a kooky cat. We’d all read about it – you know, this is the ’60s.”
Adding, “The ‘ancient art of trepanning,’ which lent a little bit of validity to it, because ancient must be good. And all you’d have to do is just bore a little hole in your skull, and it lets the pressure off – well, that sounds very sensible. ‘But look, John, you try it and let me know how it goes.'”
Lennon, obviously, never went through with it. It’s always possible that this was trolling on Lennon’s part. He was nothing if not a prankster. This was the guy who swore blind that he wanted to plug himself directly into a recording console via a jack cable right up his jacksie. You never could quite tell whether he was serious or not with the levels of his own creativity.
He was deadly serious about ‘Revolution #9’ after all.