Soon afterwards, we found an old beautiful stone building that used to be a church in Modjeska Canyon just in the foothills of Laguna Beach, California. It was empty, and it was for rent, and we just said, Oh my God, this is a beautiful little canyon. Everybody started getting places in that canyon, and I wound up with a little cabin in the canyon. We then put the legal stuff in motion, a little bit inspired by Timothy Leary, and the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD)—that was their church in Millbrook.*4 That was kind of the pattern that we followed.
We didn’t have a name yet. We were going to be this, we were going to be that, and then Chuck Mundell said, “How about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love?” He was one of the great California surfers, along with Mike Hynson, who was the costar in the movie Endless Summer. So we called ourselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
We thought, We are going to have heaven on earth. We’re going to turn the whole world on, and we are all going to be living in paradise. We really thought so. It was so powerful to us, and we were young and naïve, and drunk on idealism. We thought we were going to live in teepees. We thought war was going to end. We thought, It’s going to be so great, you provide the LSD, and the people do the work. It just opens your consciousness, if you’re in a good setting.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
People have a hard time thinking of 1965 as not being the core of the sixties, but the sixties did not begin, in my view, until sometime in ’66. Prior to that it was Eisenhower’s America. If you look at newsreels from that period, it’s definitely continuous with the previous decade. So it still felt very much like the fifties to me. I felt like the real sea change was when the Human Be-In took place in Golden Gate Park in January of ’67. That was where I felt like things suddenly, dramatically shifted. It was the first time Timothy Leary announced his famous counterculture slogan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” I wasn’t there. But I had a lot of friends who were, and I saw the posters in their psychedelic graphical style, which was so obviously new. Psychedelic is all I can call it. It had this profound goofiness to it. It was like postsymbolic, where you’re not dealing with symbols so much as you’re dealing with representations of another reality. It just had a completely different feel; it didn’t feel like anything I’d seen before.
It’s difficult now to really explain to somebody who wasn’t there just how profound the shift was from extended fifties reality into the onset of sixties psychedelia. Because now you watch television and every ad is kind of psychedelic. The whole culture has absorbed that vision and trivialized it. I don’t know if it’s possible to take acid and feel anything like the thing one felt when it was a complete surprise. But it turned the entire culture on its ear, at least from where I was sitting. I had a sense that sometime toward the end of 1967, God Almighty was going to leap through the trance, and the world would be a completely different place.
MICHAEL RANDALL
Once you start taking acid, you’re part of something bigger than yourself. The idea that we had is that once you understood an acid trip, you could be a guide. So we would take one person from the initial group, and that person could gather five or ten souls, and go out and lead your own trips. And then all of those people could do the same. It mushroomed, and we got a lot of people high, and they all became LSD evangelists.
We always felt that our mission was to turn the world on to LSD. We were just certain that’s what God wanted us to do. So, with that job description, it was hard for us to settle into a quieter lifestyle. To tell you the truth, once you start doing the things we were doing, you don’t want to go into a quieter lifestyle anyway. It becomes really fun. Dangerous fun.
PETER COYOTE (Digger, communard)
LSD was kind of the line of initiation. Once you were on the other side, once you had had this experience of wholeness and the absolute interdependence of everything in the universe, it was like a spiritual awakening and it was perceived as a spiritual pilgrimage. People didn’t go into it lightly. Suddenly, everything made sense by showing you, first of all, that reality was not just a duality, that you couldn’t express it as right against left or right against wrong. People could begin to entertain arguments about the way in which we might not be exactly right with our greed or our warfare or our racism, in terms other than political. It opened up the possibility that true creative leaps might solve this dilemma, and it seemed like a very valuable fuel for people who were trying to imagine a better future. If you have unlimited options, there’s no such thing as a problem. So that was the teaser of LSD.
GRAY HENRY (filmmaker)
I dropped acid for the first time the day after I graduated from Sarah Lawrence in June ’65. We were in the second Be-In in Central Park. “We” is all the artists and film studios in the East Village of New York. It was Easter of 1966. Suddenly you have on television, “Here are the hippies.” The word got coined that day by the media; it was just beatniks before. We weren’t hippies. We were seekers, after an experience of the divine. Yeah, sure, it’s a shortcut to enlightenment, but what you experience is not enlightenment. I think the thing that is so incredible about it is that you have the experience that we are all one: you, me, the tree. It’s the divine unity. It sounds so trite to say, “God is love,” but if you’re in a state of oneness with all beings, the whole energy is sheer love. It’s really beautiful to experience that.
RALPH METZNER
What Tim Leary meant by dropping out was to disengage mentally, psychologically, from what he would say are the games of the culture. To retreat from it doesn’t necessarily mean to go out and live in the woods, although it could for some people. But to mentally disengage, to question reality. Later on he had another slogan: “Go out of your mind and come to your senses.” I think that was actually a much better slogan than the “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” which was subject to misinterpretation. Of course the mainstream culture misinterpreted it as “Quit your job, quit school.” He didn’t care. He liked being provocative. He hated being thought of as a guru. He’d get quite pissed-off when anybody called him a guru. “I don’t want you to follow me. Think for yourself,” he would say. So, dropping out means drop out of your psychological commitment to the preconceived stuff that’s been handed down to you. Then tune in to the natural process, to nature and the divine process. Then drop out—find your own way. Find others who are like-minded, and maybe you’ll join the Farm in Tennessee*5 and maybe you’ll go back to school and study science, but you’ll be doing it because your intuition tells you that this is what you want to commit yourself to, rather than just going in the lockstep pattern that the older generation wants you to do, like pay your taxes and get killed. That makes total sense to me.
GRAY HENRY
Millbrook was a 2,500-acre estate ninety miles north of New York City that belonged to the Hitchcock family. It had a sixty-four-room Georgian-looking mansion on it, which was the big house, and then there was a house with turrets and a bowling alley down the hill, closer to the gate. In the gatehouse lived Maynard Ferguson, the jazz musician. What happened was, after Tim and Ralph were thrown out of Harvard in 1963, Peggy Hitchcock, who had a great crush on Tim in those days, said, “Come and live at Millbrook.”
RALPH METZNER
The community at the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook came about because Leary and Alpert and Leary’s children, and the graduate students that were working on the project, were meeting a lot and talking about our experiences. Even after we were forced to leave Harvard in ’63, like any other graduate students we planned to research and publish papers and journals like we were supposed to do. But then as the popularity and notoriety of the drug escalated and more and more undergraduates were taking it at their universities, the research project basically stopped. But the people didn’t stop. Our experience at Harvard and in Millbrook afterward had all been in small groups, and then I came to California, and in came Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead. They were handing out acid and you had two thousand people dancing.
Credit 2
.1
Timothy Leary (right) with his colleague Ralph Metzner at the Hitchcock estate in Millbrook, New York, August 1965. Leary, Metzner, and a third Harvard professor, Richard Alpert, started an organization called the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD) and continued their psychedelic research in Millbrook after being kicked out of Harvard in 1963.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
My official best friend since I was fourteen in prep school, Bob Weir, had gone off and become the rhythm guitar player of the Grateful Dead. We fell out of contact with each other and I heard about the Kesey acid tests and I was just appalled. It sounded like drug abuse of the first order—people just swilling communion. I was on a very high horse about it. And then I find out that the house band for this atrocity stars my official best friend. So I came in late to that party because I was off in the Eastern Orthodox Church of LSD with Leary and Alpert and those guys in Millbrook. I spent a lot of time there.
When the Grateful Dead first came to New York and I reconnected with Weir, I arranged to drive them up to Millbrook so that they could meet Tim and the folks up there and see what was going on in that end of the culture. It was a mighty day. It was June of 1967 and the Six-Day War had just broken out, and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had just been released. We picked up a copy of the album on our way up there. It was the first explicitly psychedelic piece of media that I think anybody ever heard. If you were an acid head, you knew exactly what that record was. And if you weren’t, it would be kind of mysterious to you. But it was a fully realized way of conveying some of the obscure aspects of what was otherwise indescribable.
Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Cellophane flowers of yellow and green
Towering over your head
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she’s gone
“LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS”*6
From a cultural standpoint, we really failed to consider what a profound immediate response this could not fail to have. We had large numbers of our youth suddenly seeing the world through radically different eyes, and when you do that, there’s going to be something in the way of blowback, and there really was.
JOHN HARTMANN (music agent, manager)
I’m a music agent and manager living in L.A. and I’m pretty full of myself and I keep telling everyone that Buffalo Springfield is America’s answer to the Beatles. There’s a promoter and manager named Howard Wolf who told me, “You’re crazy, you don’t even know what’s happened.” “What are you talking about? I don’t know what’s happening? I am what’s happening.” He said, “No, you haven’t got a clue. It’s all happening in San Francisco. It’s Jefferson Airplane, it’s the Grateful Dead, it’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, it’s Quicksilver Messenger Service, it’s Moby Grape, it’s the Charlatans.” He lists all of these bands that I had never heard of. So I get on a plane, and I go up to San Francisco.
It must have been April of ’67, and I thought I knew everything there was to know about show business. I trained with the best agents. I’d been successful. I go up there, and I’m standing in a black mohair suit, chain-link watch, sapphire pinky ring, initials engraved on my shirt, hair so short it looks like it’s painted on, and I am in total shock. The show was Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, and Paul Butterfield. I turned to Albert Grossman, the manager of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who I had just met that day. He also managed Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary. I turned to him and I went, “Albert, where’s it all going?” He said, “Under the sea, man, under the sea.”
Credit 2.2
The Grateful Dead, with lead singer Jerry Garcia (right), play a concert on San Francisco’s Haight Street, March 1968. The Bay Area’s original and legendary psychedelic jam band, the Dead played their own unique blend of bluegrass, folk, rock, and improvisational jazz.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM MARSHALL.
What blew my mind were three things that defied the rule: One was unknown acts. Number two, every guy in the room had hair longer than Sonny [Bono], and Sonny was a freak in L.A. Long hair was anything that was longer than an inch. The third thing I saw that was absolutely extraordinary, it was what is known as a liquid light show. Somebody holds a tray of oils and waters that are different colors and they pulsate it on one of those overhead projectors, in rhythm to the music. So, the whole room was going “whoo, whoo, whoo.” You’ve seen it in videos of the era. They’ve got spinning lights. That’s all liquid light show.
GREIL MARCUS (music critic)
I met Jann Wenner when we were both students at Berkeley, and in the fall of 1967, he started publishing Rolling Stone. It was the first publication that wrote about music in a way that was intelligent and interesting, and it was clearly written by people who cared about what they were writing about. I couldn’t wait for every issue, and in the beginning they didn’t arrive on time because their publishing schedule was erratic. The San Francisco music scene, starting in ’65, going through ’66, ’67, was so full of life, so surprising, with every conceivable band passing through town playing the Fillmore or the Avalon. It was a thrilling time.
Jann had been involved with Ken Kesey, and the acid tests. He was much more a part of that world certainly than I was, but I was going over to the Fillmore or the Avalon every weekend in ’66 and ’67 and I was seeing Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Van Morrison, the Doors—we saw the Doors lots of times, because we loved them. In ’67 they played it seemed like every weekend. We’d see Country Joe play a little club on Telegraph Avenue, here in Berkeley. There was a tremendous sense of energy, of delight, of excitement, of surprise, of “Oh my God, this is thrilling, this is exciting, this is interesting.” The response of some people to that would be “I want to be in a band. I want to learn how to play guitar. I want to make records.” The response of some other people might be “I want to write about this,” because that’s your inclination. Or “I want to put out a newspaper about this,” and that was Jann’s inclination. He wrote a lot at the beginning. There were very few writers, and he probably wrote as much or more than anybody else. I started writing for it just because it seemed open and they had a little notice in the paper saying if you’ve got something to contribute, send it in. So I sent in a record review, and it was printed in the next issue. I never took acid. I was not a drug person.
JOHN HARTMANN
So, I went back to the William Morris Agency office and said, “Look, bands happen out of venues. Johnny Rivers happened at the Whisky, Buffalo Springfield happened at the Whisky, the Airplane had the Fillmore, the Grateful Dead happens out of the Avalon Ballroom. If we put Buffalo Springfield in a venue and package it, we will have the biggest act in the world. We will beat the Beatles.” These guys at William Morris said, “You guys, sit down and stay out of San Francisco, and get back to work.”
But I knew that we had just discovered the mother lode. What was different about this music was that it was psychedelic. They were on acid, and what was coming out of their instruments was acidesque, right? It was totally different: the sound, the feel, the energy. They had long riffs where a guy goes completely insane on the guitar. Jimi Hendrix being the best of them. We were seeing bigger bands, like five. The Beatles were four; that was the standard. Stones were five; that was acceptable. Six was starting to get big, right? A whole lot of these other bands had a large number of members. So, it was all different and we knew it was great.
Everybody smoked pot, and if you didn’t, you were an idiot. Pot was the fuel. If you didn’t smoke dope, who the fuck are you? What are you all about? So there was not even a contest or a challenge about pot, but it took a certain, more liberated person to get into the psychedelics. LSD is mushrooms on steroids. Once it kicks in, there’s a peacefulness and then your mind opens up to the collective u
nconscious. So you’re now in tune with the wisdom of the universe.
So that’s what was happening through the music; the music was telling us who to be, how to be, and what to do, which we interpreted as revolt: resist the war, resist racism, advance the peace movement, bring some justice into the legal system, defy the corporate takeover of America. And we won.
Credit 2.3
Grace Slick, a rock icon, sings with her band Jefferson Airplane in June 1969 at the Family Dog Ballroom by the Bay in San Francisco. A psychedelic light show is in the background.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ALTMAN.
The other thing that happened culturally was that when you were a hippie, you didn’t want a job. So we were doing dope, going to concerts, and having girls take you to bed, which they were flagrantly willing to do. I was taken to bed by three girls in one day. If you met someone, and it clicked, you were doing it—there was no AIDS; no one worried about any of that stuff. I mean, you could get gonorrhea but that rarely happened. So, free love worked, and women were liberating themselves. I was all for it. It was cool, it was fun, because it gave me the ability to make powerful connections in a very short time. Like, you might never see that girl again, and in most cases, that’s what happened. It just was a happening; it was wonderful. It worked for us at the time.
Witness to the Revolution Page 6