Remember When Gram Parsons Wrote Actor Peter Fonda’s Trippy First Single in 1967

Years before Peter Fonda starred in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, the actor inspired a Beatles song while tripping on LSD with John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison (Paul McCartney refrained), the Byrds‘ Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and other guests one evening in 1965 at a house in Los Angeles owned by Zsa Zsa Gabor.

That evening, Harrison was having a particularly rough trip, prompting Fonda to recount a story about how he accidentally shot himself as a kid, which gave him a new perspective on death. Throughout the night, Fonda kept telling guests: “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

The incident inspired Lennon to write the Beatles’ 1966 Revolver track, “She Said She Said,” and switch the gender of the storyteller and use Fonda’s line verbatim—She said / I know what it’s like to be dead / And she’s making me feel like I’ve never been born.

“We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and sixties,” recalled Lennon, “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.”

Submerged in the ’60s counterculture, Fonda first crossed paths with Gram Parsons two years later, while working on Roger Corman’s 1967 psychedelic drama, The Trip, which explores LSD and was written by actor Jack Nicholson. In the film, Fonda plays Peter Groves, a television commercial director who faces the end of his marriage and looks for an escape when his friend John, the “guru,” played by Bruce Dern, introduces him to LSD, setting him on a hallucinatory and emotional journey.

At the time, Fonda suggested that Parsons’ band, the International Submarine Band, supply a song for the soundtrack. Shortly after, when jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela heard Fonda playing guitar at a party, he encouraged the actor to record some music, and Parsons supplied the song.

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‘The Trip’ and a Donovan Cover

Co-produced by Masekela, “November Night” was written by Parsons for Fonda, who released it as a single, along with a B-side cover of Donovan’s 1965 folk song “Catch the Wind.”

“I heard it and said to Gram, ‘That’s terrific,’” recalled Fonda in Sid Griffin’s 1985 book Gram Parsons: A Music Biography. “I recorded it [‘November Night’], and Gram said how thrilled he was. He taught me how to play it, and I went and practiced it and practiced it and went out and cut it.”

Set in its psychedelic-folk pace, “November Night” tells a more lucid love story in the middle of a trip.

You say that you’re restless 
You say that you know me too well 
You’ve seen all my best, and you’ve heard 
all the stories I tell 
You think you’ve been taken for granted
You’re probably right

I’ll remember a November Night, 
when the dawn on your doorway 
shone white with frost 
and the soft love that always began 
with the touch of your hand 
and recall the mornings that tossed 
your hair in the wind

A decade after releasing “November Night,” Fonda recorded more music, singing several songs on the soundtrack to his 1977 film Outlaw Blues, the Richard T. Heffron-helmed drama, co-starring Susan Saint James.

Fonda also worked on a 16-track album with help from the Byrds’ McGuinn and Crosby, along with Masekela, who played trumpet on the Byrds’ 1967 hit “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star, which was never released. In his 1999 memoir, Don’t Tell Dad, Fonda said he decided against releasing the album because “That was my right; it simply wasn’t there.”

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