Well, my favorite album is Revolver, so I must come down on the side of preferring the music from Rubber Soul and beyond. But each period is great for different reasons.
With the stuff leading up to Rubber Soul, they demonstrate great pop songcraft, just like Motown writers, Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys and the Brill Building writers like Goffin and King, Ellie Greenwich, etc. Please Please Me, I Want to Hold Your Hand, etc. are pop craft perfection.
With Help, Rubber Soul and Revolver, they take that pop song vocabulary and start to stretch it in different directions. Songs are still verse chorus verse, but move into different subject matter, use different arrangements and suggest that the pop song form can be used to make real, artistic statements, not just pop confections. Tomorrow Never Knows slips past some of these constraints and heralds the move to a new phase.
From Tomorrow Never Knows, Sgt. Pepper and beyond, they move past traditional pop songcraft and use the jumping off point of psychedelia to give more free range to their musical ideas.
So, from a stepping-back standpoint: I, personally, happen to prefer their middle and late periods, but the whole point to this OP is anchored more in the fact that the Beatles had a large creative arc - and the arc was of consistent high quality even as it evolved - oh, and at key points in the arc, drugs were introduced as a factor - pot in '65 and acid a year or two later.
So I don’t think the Beatles were better, per se, as much as their push to innovate creatively coincided with both the introduction of drugs and a wider culture at the time that was ready to push past traditional music structures and sounds. The fact that their output was high quality throughout this rather seismic transition both musically and culturally is what remains fascinating and historic.
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I don’t think John had a thousand trips; that’s a slight exaggeration. But there was a period when we took acid a lot…
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Now that is interesting and makes me wonder if it is then impossible to become physically addicted to lsd. You always hear about people becoming addicted to heroine, oxycontin, alcohol, etc. But I’ve never heard of an acid-addict.
I have never taken lsd, so I don’t know if it actually does “expand your mind”, if users just perceive it that way, if people with expansive minds are more likely to try it, or what, but here are some interesting Beatles quotes:
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Ringo: I think LSD changes everybody. It certainly makes you look at things differently.
George: The first time I had acid, a light bulb went on in my head and I began to have realizations which were not simply, “I think I’ll do this,” or “I think that must be because of that.” The question and answer disappeared into each other. An illumination goes on inside: in ten minutes I lived a thousand years.
Paul: Pot and LSD were the two other major influences. Instead of getting totally out of it and falling over, as we would have done on Scotch, we’d end up talking very seriously
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And having just read thru some of their descriptions of “bad trips”…I think ‘just say no’ group should change their strategy. Hearing about those bad trips is enough to scare anyone straight.
Physically no, but you can imagine how someone who feels like they’ve become one with the universe might feel like LSD is the only thing really worth doing anymore (see all the messianic LSD figures from the 60’s, Tim Leary, etc).