Skips right over LSD

Wasn't this movie just covering a span of a few yrs during their touring? I believe the LSD came later when they were limiting their music to the studio ?

I am not sure if Howard was whitewashing the detail so much as he trusted that most viewers either knew about the influence of LSD on the band or could sense it on their own. Indeed, a digression into LSD may have derailed the film's momentum and focus.

Conversely, you could be right.

Reading the article that you linked to, I should say that having read drummer John Densmore's memoir, Riders on the Storm, multiple times, The Doors never recorded music in the studio, or played in concert, under the influence of LSD. In fact, they never took LSD as a group—Densmore never dropped acid with notoriously erratic singer Jim Morrison for fear of the results. Different twosomes within the band occasionally used LSD together, but they never did so as a collective unit. Morrison himself dropped acid when The Doors played the Hollywood Bowl in June 1968, leading to a mediocre performance. When Densmore learned afterwards from guitarist Robby Krieger that Morrison had taken LSD right before going on stage, the drummer was initially furious—but then he speculated that the singer must have done so in order to deal with the pressure. And by then, Morrison—let alone the group's other members—was hardly using LSD anymore, anyway, instead increasingly turning to alcohol and antidepressants (and, later, occasional cocaine and perhaps, most tragically, heroin).

Morrison had also dropped acid before trying to record "The End" on the band's first album in December 1966, but doing so derailed any chance of delivering a competent vocal recording. Not until the following day was Morrison able to properly record his vocals. Moreover, the band's "extended improvisation passages," as quoted in the article (in the context of the other "psychedelic" bands cited) were really a product of Densmore's and keyboardist Ray Manzarek's deep love of jazz—a genre which a less familiar Krieger was also open to—and the poetic or theatrical nature of Morrison's lyrics—very different from most popular songwriting. I doubt that LSD had anything to do with those "extended improvisation passages," and beyond a basic hypnotic quality, The Doors sounded nothing like the San Francisco-based psychedelic rock bands with which they are often grouped. The label "psychedelic" is, at best, a facile description of their music. Sure, the band's members all indulged in psychedelic drugs to one extent or another, for some time period or another, and Morrison's inspiration for the group's name came in part from Aldous Huxley's book about mescaline (The Doors of Perception). But the name's inspiration also derived from the nineteenth-century English poet William Blake and his line about "the doors of perception," and Morrison's external influences were primarily literary, not drug-based. Indeed, there is a reason why his lyrics proved so literate—he could have become an English professor had he gone that route, and his intellectual interests were organic rather than a desire by a rock musician to become more cultured and artistic. Overall, LSD appears to have had a tangential relationship at best to The Doors' music and served more as a communal dynamic—they had all used LSD by 1965 (although never all together) and thus could all distinguish themselves from the "straights" as members of the still-nascent counterculture that scarcely existed outside of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York at the time. But musically, I do not sense much influence at all.

Back to The Beatles, but along similar lines, that Rolling Stone article is compelling and may well be veracious in its basic themes, but I feel that the media often exaggerates or sensationalizes the role that drugs have played in musical or artistic creativity. Drug use creates hype and angles for a story, but based on the article, Paul McCartney made major contributions to "Tomorrow Never Knows" before ever trying LSD. Yes, the song was not his per se (it was John Lennon's), but he certainly understood it well enough to enhance the song—apparently without having tried LSD at the time. And Lennon lifted the line, "Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream," which became "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream" in the song, from a book that he observed in an off-beat bookstore that McCartney had helped open. Certainly, the fact that Lennon had already used LSD helped lead him to the book and created a context with which he could comprehend and reuse the line, but theoretically, he could have come across the same book at the bookstore, found it intriguing even if he had not tried LSD and possessed no interest in actually using the drug, and deemed the ideas compelling and abstractly inspiring. Mind expansion is not necessarily a product of drug use so much as it can be facilitated by drug use—in other words, drugs constitute a shortcut to processes and levels that can be achieved organically through other methods or experiences. Members of The Beatles and The Doors seemed to understand that dynamic, eventually turning away from LSD and toward Transcendental Meditation. But using drugs can be easier and quicker and darkly glamorous—both for the participants and the scribes looking for a story.

Many songs influenced by drug use (psychedelic or otherwise) surely could have been written without actually having used those drugs. Would those songs have emerged without the drugs? Probably not in most cases, but the possibility would have existed, especially for seekers such as McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison, who were looking to expand their artistic, intellectual, and sociological horizons via exposure to new cultural sources and resources.

That is not to pretend that LSD did not have a major impact on The Beatles—by their own admission, it clearly did. But to suggest that LSD was the real source of their inspiration—as opposed to a conduit that may or may not have been necessary—feels simplistic or distorting. Again, McCartney had not needed LSD in order to complement Lennon's vision on "Tomorrow Never Knows," nor had Lennon created one of the song's pivotal lyrics directly from his own LSD experience—he took it from a book (albeit one relating to the drug), just as Jim Morrison would sometimes lift literary lines or use them as inspirations for his own poetic improvisations and visions. Ron Howard certainly could have mentioned the drug, but doing the matter justice may have required a separate documentary. This film certainly is not comprehensive—it provides a certain glimpse yet not the whole picture.