"It was a market that had never been played to... Nobody had sung their song to them."

Said Peter Fonda in 2018, talking about "Easy Rider." He is quoted in his NYT obituary, "Peter Fonda, ‘Easy Rider’ Actor and Screenwriter, Is Dead at 79."

That movie was so important to us young Boomers, half a century ago.

In 1967, Roger Corman, then the king of the low-budget movies, directed “The Trip” from a script by an up-and-coming actor, Jack Nicholson. Alongside Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper and Susan Strasberg, Mr. Fonda starred as a mild-mannered television commercial director who uses LSD for the first time and makes the most of it. “Easy Rider,” which he also produced, came two years later.

There was also LSD in "Easy Rider."

What did Peter Fonda say about LSD in his later years?

“For me, it solved a great deal,” he said. “However, I didn’t take it and go out running through the city looking at lights. I was very circumspect and lay down on a couch.” Luckily, he added, “I don’t have an addictive character, and nothing except pot stayed with me.”

There's also The Beatles connection:

His mother committed suicide in 1950, when he was 10 and Jane was 13. Less than a year later, Mr. Fonda shot himself in the stomach with a pistol. Interviewed by The New York Times decades later, he insisted that it was an accident, not a suicide attempt or even a warning. “You shoot yourself in the hand or foot if you want attention,” he said, “not the way I did.”

Years later, he talked about the experience with John Lennon, who was reportedly inspired to write the line “I know what it’s like to be dead” in the Beatles’ song “She Said She Said.”

Here's how Wikipedia tells it:

Having first taken LSD (or "acid") in March [1965], John Lennon and George Harrison were determined that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr should join them on their next experience of the drug. Harrison later said that the heightened perception induced by LSD had been so powerful that he and Lennon had not been able to "relate" to McCartney and Starr since then, adding: "Not just on the one level – we couldn't relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much." At the party, the issue of taking LSD thereby became important to maintain band unity. While Starr agreed to try the drug, McCartney refused to partake.

Fonda wrote for Rolling Stone magazine:

I finally made my way past the kids and the guards. Paul and George were on the back patio, and the helicopters were patrolling overhead. They were sitting at a table under an umbrella in a rather comical attempt at privacy. Soon afterwards we dropped acid and began tripping for what would prove to be all night and most of the next day; all of us, including the original Byrds, eventually ended up inside a huge, empty and sunken tub in the bathroom, babbling our minds away.

I had the privilege of listening to the four of them sing, play around and scheme about what they would compose and achieve. They were so enthusiastic, so full of fun. John was the wittiest and most astute. I enjoyed just hearing him speak and there were no pretensions in his manner. He just sat around, laying out lines of poetry and thinking – an amazing mind. He talked a lot yet he still seemed so private.

It was a thoroughly tripped-out atmosphere because they kept finding girls hiding under tables and so forth: one snuck into the poolroom through a window...

Ridiculous to characterize girls sneaking into the stars' environs as "tripped-out." Nothing particularly LSD about louche sexuality and dominant males and teeny-tiny females.

.... while an acid-fired Ringo was shooting pool with the wrong end of the cue. "Wrong end?" he’d say. "So what fuckin' difference does it make?"

As the group passed time in the large sunken tub in the bathroom, Fonda brought up his nearly fatal self-inflicted childhood gunshot accident, writing later that he was trying to comfort Harrison, who was overcome by fear that he might be dying. Fonda said that he knew what it was like to be dead, since he had technically died in the operating theatre. Lennon urged him to drop the subject, saying "Who put all that shit in your head?" and "You're making me feel like I've never been born." Harrison recalls in The Beatles Anthology: "[Fonda] was showing us his bullet wound. He was very uncool." Lennon explained in a 1980 interview:

We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn't know; he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, "I know what it's like to be dead," and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! ... It was scary. You know ... when you're flying high and [whispers] "I know what it's like to be dead, man."

If he'd already made "Easy Rider," maybe Lennon would have given the Hollywood ingenue some respect.

Lennon eventually asked Fonda to leave the party. After this, the gathering settled down as Lennon, Harrison, McGuinn and Crosby sat in the large bathtub discussing their shared interest in Indian classical music. Crosby demonstrated raga scales on an acoustic guitar and recommended that Harrison investigate the recordings of Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar.

Acoustic guitar in the bathtub... hairy men pontificating about another culture's music.... Oh! I wish there were film of that! I love the way things got so pretentiously serious after the 4 men had ridded themselves of the prettiest boy there.



That's Peter Fonda in 1965 (with his sister Jane, who's displaying less cultural appropriativeness than the 4 men in a tub who idolized Ravi Shankar).

ADDED: The annotations of "She Said She Said" at Genius.com give some interesting extras:

1. The line "I said, who put all those things in your head/Things that make me feel that I'm mad" was originally was "Who put all that crap in your hair/it makes me feel like my trousers are torn."

2. George Harrison reported, "He was showing us his bullet wound. He was very uncool." Bullet wounds are uncool. Foreshadowing of Lennon's death.

3. The line "She said, you don't understand what I've said" was originally "I will love you more when you’re dead."

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandistein convinces me that the photo of Peter with Jane in 1965 is not Peter Fonda but Peter McEnery. This shows how I got it wrong: