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There were a couple of Beatle-related events to report today: Paul was the best man at his brother Michael’s wedding in North Wales (there he is sneaking a kiss from the bride above), and George and Ringo visited Joan Baez at her house in Carmel, California. John, meanwhile, was probably back at the house doing horse with Yoko. According to Bob Spitz’s The Beatles:
”[John] had been getting into harder drugs than we’d been into,” [Paul] recalled, crediting it to a sinister liaison with the junkie art dealer Robert Fraser, who’d only recently gained his release from prison on a drug charge. It was Fraser, according to Paul, who introduced John to heroin before the Beatles left for India, and he’d begun sniffing it with Yoko soon after their return. The residual effects both troubled and “disappointed” Paul, as well as the other Beatles. Outwardly, the drug manifested itself, he said, in John’s “adversity and … craziness.”
Both Yoko and heroin, it seems, were ways for John to wall himself from the other Beatles, not to mention from the world at large. In this way he could assert his independence and, eventually, stop being a Beatle altogether.
At this point you could say that the wheels of the Beatles breakup had been set in motion, that the writing was on the wall. But the Dream still had a while to run, so don’t wake me up quite yet.