by Andy Roberts
The night before, in London, Taylor had taken his first LSD trip at a party thrown for Bob Dylan (who allegedly thought the quality of the drug that night to be so good he bought £200 of LSD to take back to the US).
For the next few years Taylor lived a street existence, taking more LSD and whatever other drugs he could get hold of, preaching he was Jesus Christ and wallowing in paranoid fantasies. In 1966 Taylor met David Bowie in a coffee bar, monopolizing the conversation with stories from the other side of madness. Bowie couldn’t “... remember if he said he was an alien or the Son of God, but he might have been a bit of both.”
Later that night Taylor showed Bowie a map of the world marked with alien bases and treasure locations. Taylor was a rock star who had lost the plot and had nowhere to go but further into his own delusions. Bowie remembered that meeting and later based his Ziggy Stardust persona on Taylor’s fractured rock life.
A similar psychological fate would later befall Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett who first took LSD when it took a firm foothold in the university town of Cambridge during 1965. A small LSD scene developed there around a group of creative people, many of whom went on to become movers and shakers in the art and music world. This set included many of the future members of Pink Floyd and their immediate circle, including novelist and playwright David Gale, who remembers, “LSD came to Cambridge, and it was absolutely imperative that you take it; you had to whether you wanted to or not.”16
LSD was introduced to Cambridge by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon; he and his friends were already enthusiastic cannabis smokers. They also occasionally dabbled with the psychedelic compound extracted from morning glory seeds. However, morning glory seeds are much less potent than LSD and have to be chewed in bulk or made into a distasteful brew to release the active chemical. This process resulted in variable effects, often making the user so ill they couldn’t enjoy the experience. Needless to say, Lesmoir-Gordon and his circle were looking for something stronger and more focused.
In early 1965 Lesmoir-Gordon moved to London to take up a place at the London School of Film Technique, moving into a flat at 101 Cromwell Road in West London. The flat was sub-let from Bill Barlow, Lesmoir-Gordon’s Cambridge landlord, and through Barlow, Lesmoir-Gordon met New Zealand expatriate poet John Esam. Esam had a ready supply of LSD – obtained from Trocchi – and soon Lesmoir-Gordon had undergone his psychedelic initiation. His first LSD experience was terrifying because, he believes, he made the mistake of trying to hang on to his ego, refusing to let his consciousness blend into the experience. Nonetheless he recognised LSD’s potential for psychological and spiritual change and continued to take the drug. On his second experience a friend, Mike Raggett, who had experimented with mescaline in Saudi Arabia, acted as his guide. Now, with Raggett watching over him, making positive statements such as, “you are the creator, you are god, you are everything, this is all yours,”17 Lesmoir-Gordon was able to let go into the experience. He stared into a crumpled up tissue for up to two hours, “seeing whole universes being born and dying”, listening to Bach’s fugues and hearing them “as music of the spheres”. He believed LSD “opened the doors of perception and thought everyone should take it.” This was a feeling shared by many once they had taken LSD a few times, an evangelical urge to share this awesome, life-changing experience with others ... “this is something we should all have, because this is the truth, a really powerful way of seeing the world and this amazing dance we are part of. It put me in touch with the universe. There were times when I just became the whole universe, when I thought I was infinite and eternal and utterly blessed.”18 Lesmoir-Gordon’s experiences with LSD led him to conclude that the key to the secret of life was love, and that God was a creative energy called love. Accounts of people’s LSD experiences may appear self-indulgent, but the insights and experiences were often indistinguishable from those gained from religious and spiritual practice and were often catalysts to major personal and life changes.
Lesmoir-Gordon was soon joined in Cromwell Road by others from Cambridge and by the end of 1965 Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett had taken up residence on the top floor where he began his descent into LSD fuelled psychoses. Esam sold Lesmoir-Gordon a bottle of liquid LSD and “I took this bottle of LSD and dropped it into sugar cubes and wrapped it in silver paper and told everyone they should take it!” He sold the psychedelic sugar for one pound per trip. Most of the other residents occupying the flats in the three floors at 101 Cromwell Road were enthusiastic LSD takers and word soon spread that it could be bought there. People visited the building every day of the week to buy LSD, many staying to have their first trip there or to repeat the experience with others in the burgeoning hippie subculture. Lesmoir-Gordon and his friends prided themselves in providing a safe place in which people could trip on LSD and they took great pains to ensure a sensuous environment was available where the music, décor and lighting was oriented specifically towards the LSD experience. This type of interior design was the forerunner of the archetypal hippie acidhead pad. Many first time LSD trippers were guided safely through their experience at 101 Cromwell Road making it what Lesmoir-Gordon called “an LSD ashram”, which continued for several years.
On weekends throughout 1965 Lesmoir-Gordon would return to Cambridge, taking LSD with him to turn on friends such as Syd Barrett, and becoming known, only half jokingly, as the “acid king”. When David Gale’s parents left him to house-sit while they went to Australia, his friends moved in and psychedelic experimentation took over.
“Earlier in the day Syd and Paul had each taken a heroic dose, as was the custom, of LSD, on a sugar-lump. Syd had giggled for a while then become contemplative. He had found, in my mother’s kitchen, a plum, an orange and a matchbox. He was sitting cross-legged on the manicured lawn, gently cradling the items in his hands, studying them intently. From time to time he would smile at them in a friendly way.”19
On another psychedelic weekend expedition to Cambridge Lesmoir-Gordon, Syd Barrett and others took LSD and went out to a disused quarry. Lesmoir-Gordon filmed Syd looning about on LSD, the film being later erroneously marketed as Syd’s First Trip.
Several other well-known musicians passed through 101 Cromwell Road’s portals in its years as an acid ashram, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, P.J. Proby and Donovan among many others. All were keen to learn how to take LSD in a safe environment. Donovan was a regular visitor to Cromwell Road during his years as a psychedelic troubadour and Lesmoir-Gordon later made films with him. He enshrined the psychedelic ashram in his 1965 song, “Sunny South Kensington”.
So come loon soon down Cromwell Road, man,
You got to spread your wings.
A-flip out, skip out, trip-out and a-make your stand, folks.20
As 1965 progressed, LSD became more widely available in London. Though no more than a few hundred people at most had experienced the drug’s effects, a definite subculture of post-beatniks and psychedelic mods was springing up, forming the nucleus of the hippie movement. The cultural explosion often referred to as the Swinging Sixties was happening all over London, with vibrant fashion boutiques and art exhibitions springing up on a weekly basis. “Happenings” – improvised, often spontaneous art and music events – were taking place and bright colours and abstract design were to be seen in the dress of those young people sensitive to the changing times. It is arguable how much influence LSD exerted on the fashion, art and music of the Sixties. Certainly in the latter part of the decade “psychedelic” was attached to just about everything. But this was largely a commercial response, entrepreneurs selling an ersatz, facsimile fashion trend back to people who hadn’t had the core experience but who wished to identify with it. However, in 1965 this had not yet taken place, but the movers and shakers of the art, fashion and music worlds were dabbling to one degree or another with LSD and so it’s a reasonable assumption that LSD use was indirectly informing hip culture, art and fashion at that time.
The Beatles were a band on whom the influence of LSD was signifi
cant and incontrovertible. They became some of the drug’s most famous advocates and for many people represent an aural distillation of the psychedelic Sixties. The band had been introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan while on an American tour in 1964 and found they liked the drug and its effects on the music they were creating. John Lennon, George Harrison and their wives were unknowingly dosed with LSD by their dentist, John Riley, in April 1965. Unaware of what they had taken and believing they had been drugged so he could inveigle them into an orgy, they fled. The realization they had taken a psychedelic drug hit them once they were in the Powick Club, after driving there in Harrison’s mini, a journey which took them several centuries in LSD time. It’s possible to read details of this LSD experience into the single “Help!”, released in September that year. Huxley’s Doors of Perception may have influenced “Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors” and the sense of ego loss LSD brought on may have led to the line “My independence seems to vanish in the haze”.
Although LSD use was on the rise, with small scenes appearing all over London, there had not as yet been a large event that brought the new underground movement together. This would take place in the summer of 1965 prompted by American beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was hugely popular among this burgeoning subculture. When he gave an impromptu reading at Better Books, the capital’s main hip bookstore the owner, Bob Cobbing, along with poet John Esam and others decided the time was right to organise a large gathering to promote underground poetry and see who rallied to the call.
The organisers, who included the omnipresent Alex Trocchi, were bold enough to book the Royal Albert Hall for the event, billing it as the International Poetry Incarnation, to be held on 11 June. The press release made it obvious what sort of event it was, sending out subliminal messages to those in the know.
World declaration hot peace shower!
Earth’s grass is free!
Cosmic poetry Visitation accidentally happening carnally!
Spontaneous planet-chant Carnival!
Mental Cosmonaut poet epiphany, immaculate
supranational Poesy insemination!
The risk that few would turn up, never mind enough to fill the Albert Hall, melted away on the day of the event. From all over London, Britain, Europe, the growing underground scene put on its finery and turned out in droves. Several thousand people turned up for the event, filling the Albert Hall, with many being turned away. Cannabis was openly smoked and it was obvious to all in attendance that they weren’t alone; others who shared their interests in alternate modes of intoxication and social expression existed.
London poet Harry Fainlight was one of the readers and declaimed his LSD inspired epic “The Spider”. As he did so Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog, high on mescaline, repeatedly interrupted him and Spike Hawkins remembers “Harry dropped a grenade into the audience by saying he’d written his piece under the influence of LSD, which was considered extremely risqué at the time – especially at the Albert Hall.”21
The event, captured on film by Peter Whitehead as Wholly Communion was a complete success. Friendships were forged and underground tribes came together. At the end of the day, poets and audience alike returned home encouraged by the huge attendance. The first major happening of the London underground had taken place.
Across London and in other parts of Britain hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had now taken LSD and had experienced the permanent change in consciousness it was capable of. A few LSD experiments went badly wrong, leaving the unfortunate drug user a psychological wreck. Often those who had experienced bad trips never took LSD again. Others worked at altering set and setting to ensure there was no repetition of the experience or, should it happen, to have a way of navigating out of it.
For Dave Tomlin, one of the unsung foot soldiers of the psychedelic era, taking LSD was a cataclysmic event which severed his ties to normality and the “straight” world, plunging him into a new way of living. In 1965, Tomlin was living in Notting Dale, married and an up and coming musician, playing with one of the emergent bands on Britain’s jazz circuit:
“I took my first trip in the winter of 1965 given to me by Steve Stollman, an American jazz record producer. At that time I was playing soprano sax with the Mike Taylor modern jazz quartet and we had just recorded an LP for Decca entitled Pendulum. Steve gave us the acid on a sugar cube wrapped in silver foil and after taking it we went to a happening in a flat in the Cromwell Rd. From that point on the group fell apart with paranoia etc. Mike Taylor went on to write material for the rock band Cream, before walking into the sea to commit suicide.”22
The experience had a profound and lasting effect on Tomlin: “It was like the feeling that everything you’d ever based and founded your life on was suddenly gone.”
With his jazz career over and his personality in tatters it would have been logical for Tomlin to fight to regain his pre-LSD state or to seek medical help. Instead, he walked out of his house, his marriage and into the burgeoning underground where he became a key figure, becoming immersed in the London Free School, the happenings at the UFO club, and playing violin on the Third Ear Band’s album, Alchemy.
During the summer of 1965 Michael Hollingshead started to think seriously about returning to Britain. This time his purpose was crystal clear, he wanted to spread the psychedelic gospel. In August he wrote to Alex Trocchi, outlining his plans to raise awareness of LSD in all the major European countries. This would include organizing major rallies in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Frankfurt at which Leary, Metzner and Alpert would speak. His letter was full of enthusiasm and hope for the future and Hollingshead clearly saw himself as a missionary.
“As a European I felt the time had come for us to share with Europe some of the things we had discovered about the methodology of taking LSD in positive settings. I wanted to rid people of their inhibitions about mystical writings and demonstrate to them that The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Tao Te Ching, and the I Ching were really basic manuals with fundamental instructions about taking LSD sessions ... From what I had heard in letters and conversations, the psychedelic movement was small and badly informed. It appeared that those who took LSD did so as a consciously defiant anti-authoritarian gesture. The spiritual content of the psychedelic experience was being overlooked.”23
A meeting took place at Millbrook to discuss how the lessons learned there could be spread to Europe and it was agreed that Hollingshead should return to London. He was to take with him Leary’s versions of the eastern spiritual classics The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tao Te Ching as well as copies of the new magazine devoted to mind expansion, the Psychedelic Review. Detailed plans were drawn up and October 1965 was chosen as the time for Hollingshead to take Leary’s brand of psychedelic religion to the UK.
Although Leary appeared publicly enthusiastic about Hollingshead’s planned psychedelic beachhead in Europe, privately he expressed serious doubts about Hollingshead’s motivations and capabilities. Author and Sixties luminary Barry Miles recalls Leary telling him, “When Dick [Alpert] and I stood on the dock in New York waving goodbye, I said to Dick, ‘Well, that writes off the psychedelic revolution in England for at least ten years.’” Hardly the sort of thing Leary would say if Hollingshead was really capable of acting as his psychedelic apostle for the planned European psychedelic revolution.
Hollingshead arrived in Britain on 5 October 1965, being picked up from Southampton docks and driven to a London hotel by his old Etonian friend Desmond O’Brien. It was decided to set up a mini-version of Leary’s Millbrook and, after discussions with O’Brien, a lease was taken out on Flat 2, 25 Pont Street in London’s ever fashionable Chelsea district. The World Psychedelic Centre was created with O’Brien, who had funded the expensive flat, as President of the WPC. O’Brien’s financial backing came from money he had made as a Lloyd’s underwriter. Like Hollingshead, O’Brien also shared a taste for opiates and amphetamines and he too soon became an addict. For some the psyche
delic experience wasn’t enough to transcend the desire for other, brain-deadening drugs and O’Brien could never free himself from their grip. In 1969 he was discovered in the grounds of his Cheshire estate at the side of his secret drug stash which, among other drugs, was comprised of thousands of heroin, morphine and amphetamine capsules.
London’s LSD scene now consisted of several locations to which psychedelic pioneers gravitated. Trocchi’s flat, the house at 101 Cromwell Road, antique dealer Christopher Gibb’s luxurious Cheyne Walk residence, and now Pont Street were the major centres, each of these scenes having their own philosophy and view on how LSD should be used. Some experienced LSD users advocated doing whatever you wanted whilst tripping, as long as you were safe, having as much fun as possible and letting the insights arise spontaneously. Hollingshead held Leary’s view that there should be structure to the experience which should have a guide skilled in the use and meaning of eastern sacred texts coupled with light-shows and readings. Others, such as Joey Mellen, evolved their own ideas on how the LSD experience could be made safe.
Undergraduate Mellen dropped out of Oxford before taking his finals, which would have led to a promising career as a chartered accountant in the City. His 1964 mescaline experience was, “... so wonderful that I am determined to regain that state of mind.” He did, a year later, in Ibiza, courtesy of an LSD laced sugar cube given to him by Dutch medical student Bart Huges. Mellen eloquently described his experience: “I felt brilliant, god-like, able to understand everything. At the same time as being fascinated by the way I could see things as though through a magnifying glass, I could hear all the sounds of the town outside the house as well as those inside, and each perception registered quite clearly, distinct from all the others though related to them, like the various instruments in an orchestra. Now I knew what eternity meant. Time seemed to stop and still everything was moving. I was ecstatic. I kept eating sugar lumps. I could feel that this was the energy I needed to get round this universe in my brain.”24