by Andy Roberts
The squat at 144 Piccadilly lasted less than a week, but the principle had been seen to work and hippies spread their wings, looking for buildings to occupy on a more permanent basis. One of the earliest large squatting communities developed in the empty Eel Pie Hotel on Eel Pie Island on London’s southern fringes. Chris Faiers lived at the squat, known as the Eel Pie Commune, from 1969 to 1971. According to Faiers’ Eel Pie Dharma, LSD was a mainstay of the lifestyle there, with large groups often taking the drug together. “Many of the communards were heavily into LSD trips. I was wary of the group trips, both because I didn’t trust the motives of some involved, and also because the effects of too much acid were becoming apparent to me.”4
Initially, the group acid trips were successful and helped bond people to each other and to the communal lifestyle. Gavin Kilty also remembers the group trips and the ethos of the commune: “We ate, danced, sang and tripped together trying with a seriousness that belied our age to forge a consciousness anew amid what we saw as the ruins of Twentieth Century Schizoid Man.”5 But as time passed, Faiers noticed: “The commune was changing for the worse, and much of the problem was the acid. Acid had a freeing effect on most people for the first few trips, but for those with mental problems, the acid quickly worsened their state. It had a similar effect on group dynamics. The effects of a strong hallucinatory trip were so overwhelming that some people looked for leadership at any cost to free them from the confusion. A few of the Eel Pie regulars, such as Magic Mike, were only too happy to assume the mantle of acid guru.”6
Many other squats quickly sprang up and by the mid-Seventies tens of thousands of young people were squatting in London alone. By 1970, a thousand squatters were occupying Elgin Avenue in Notting Hill Gate and by 1972, Camden’s Prince of Wales Crescent was home to 280 squatters, one third of them holding qualifications at degree level. Squatting became highly organised; there was even a London based squatters’ estate agency. In 1974, a group of London-based activists created the idea of a network of independent collectives and communities under the name Albion Free State. Groups such as The Diggers, who were later to become the core of the early hippie travelling community, motivated much of the early squatting movement.
Those who could afford or find a flat tended to settle in the same enclaves favoured by the squatters. These locations tended to be in run down inner city areas where property was cheap to rent and where the neighbours were working class or immigrants. From the late Sixties and throughout the Seventies the counter culture almost developed a city within a city in London. Notting Hill Gate, Ladbroke Grove and similar areas in the west of London were becoming home to thousands of young people, many of them LSD users. This neighbourhood had already been home to many of the first wave of LSD users in the mid-Sixties, and so it was natural the counter culture would increasingly congregate there. It became a hippie stronghold, a fertile breeding ground for new music, new drugs and a new way of life that encompassed both.
In Soft City, Jonathan Raban gave his impressions of Notting Hill and its hippie denizens: “Their parents are lower middle-class clerks ... ‘straights’ who, in their children’s version of them, live in a state of amazingly ingenuous incomprehension.” Raban is condescending toward the acid-based counter culture, believing “... its claims to being a counter culture are both pompous and impoverished.”7
For Raban, the inhabitants of Notting Hill and other hippie enclaves had withdrawn from the world to focus on themselves – more counter-productive than counter culture. He is scathing about the hippie preoccupation with bodily health and spiritual illumination via the agency of drugs: “Just as the body is perceived as a vessel that must be kept clean with yoga exercises and elaborate diets, so the head is the ultimate casket of the self. The pursuit of satori, of ‘inmost happiness’, is an epic journey into self-hood; and the illusion, at least, of this inward drift is made dramatically real in the acid trip ...” Despite his opinion that this way of life was juvenile and affected, in Notting Hill Gate’s alternative scene Raban could still catch a fleeting glimpse of “... a state of magic to which the fragmented industrial city unconsciously aspires.”8
The growth in “elaborate diets”, as Raban puts it, was intimately linked with LSD use. The dramatic psychological effects of LSD often caused users to examine not only their spiritual life but also their physical one. The common revelation on LSD that “all is one” was enough to lead many people to decide they could not eat animals that once lived and breathed as they did. Senses amplified by LSD could also make flesh and fat look and taste gross, while fruits, vegetables and cereals appeared wholesome. These perceptions frequently lasted when the drug had worn off, and there are numerous instances of LSD users becoming vegetarian overnight.
The desire to purify the mind with LSD led logically to the purification of the body and whole food shops and cafés sprung up in the areas where hippies lived. How and what we eat helps determine culture, and vegetarianism marked another way that hippies were able to set themselves apart from the rest of “straight” society. Living on fruit, vegetables, cereals and pulses was also relatively cheap and very healthy, a major factor when living on state benefits or low paid jobs.
One of the major proponents of whole foods in the LSD counter culture was Greg Sams. From selling macrobiotic snacks at the UFO club in 1967, Sams moved on to open various cafés including, in 1969, Notting Hill’s Ceres, to cater for the soaring demand for unprocessed foods. Sams cogently summed up the effects of LSD on the counter culture’s day-to-day existence: “We don’t ever talk about it, but the natural foods industry was largely founded by people who experimented with LSD ...”9 The insights temporarily afforded by these mind-expanding drugs inspired a more spiritual approach to life and a search for a new way of living. They created a lifestyle where food was your best medicine, prevention replaced cure, the environment was valued and protected and people lived in harmony and peace.
“The natural foods pioneers realised that the political process offered little hope so they chose the path of creating an alternative society. Some went off to Wales and bought small farms and turned them organic, some opened natural foods stores, some went on to be wholesalers and manufacturers, some studied alternative therapies and became practitioners. They knew in their bones they were on the right track, despite ridicule and hostility.”10
Purifying mind and body as a response to insights bestowed by LSD was one thing but when under the influence the majority of LSD users liked nothing more than to fill their minds with music. Music was yet another way acidheads sought spiritual truths, and certain bands were identified as producing psychedelic music: music created by acid users for acid users which revealed fundamental truths and spiritual insights if listened to when tripping.
Some musicians liked to have fun at the expense of the spiritual leanings common among LSD takers. One of the most pertinent examples was the Small Faces’ LP Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake, released in June 1968. The band was a bunch of former mod pleasure seekers, amphetamine ravers who had turned on to LSD and found they liked it very much indeed. Nevertheless, and despite their jack-the-lad image, the drug brought them to a state of humble introspection. Instead of throwing their lot in with eastern gurus as the Beatles had done, or writing facile songs about love and peace, their experiences led them to conclude that LSD was whatever you made of it. From that realization came the idea for Ogden’s.
The first side of the record was a collection of off-kilter songs about, among other things, bakers and dockside prostitutes. Swirling organ and crashing cymbals added psychedelic counterpoint to Steve Marriott’s soulful vocal to create one of the most unique and underrated psychedelic albums of the era. The closing track, “Lazy Sunday” described perfectly the feeling of coming down from a trip: “Lazy Sunday afternoon, I ain’t got no mind to worry, close my mind and drift away.”11
Side two darkened the mood and invited the listener on a cod-psychedelic quest. The idea for this came from the bizarr
e notions and thought patterns that often gripped people during LSD trips. When this happened, the most ordinary event could be instantly transformed into something of frightening and portentous significance. For the Small Faces it was the quest of their protagonist, Happiness Stan, to find the missing half of the moon, narrated by surreal comedian Stanley Unwin. Unwin twisted phrases and invented words to create a universe that fitted exactly with what the band was trying to do.
With a nod to Stan being in the LSD induced state of “hours slipping by while time stands still” our hero gets obsessed by the half moon and “absolutely smashed and flaky” sets out on his quest on the back of an insect, “Tripily how on the back of a fly”. Stan goes through a series of adventures in which his perceptions are further distorted until he is eventually taken to Mad John, a cave dwelling guru. Rather than an austere eastern guru who demands obeisance and restrictive living practices, Mad John is friendly and humorous and gently chides Stan for the futility of his quest. John explains to Stan that whatever he believes, everything works out all right in the end (shades of Huxley’s belief that the Universe is All Right). The album reinforces this message with the concluding philosophical sing-along: “Life is just a bowl of All Bran, you wake up every morning and it’s there,” which advises Stan to live the best life he can and to enjoy himself.12
At the other end of the spectrum, for those who preferred their psychedelia unusual, austere and freighted with portent, the Incredible String Band provided the era’s darkest musical excursion. Recorded during the winter of 1967 and released in 1968, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter catered for acidheads who relished a challenge at all levels. Hangman’s has no peer musically, inviting the listener to sidestep daily existence and enter a music that appears to come straight from a faerie dimension.
The album’s centrepiece is “A Very Cellular Song”, a thirteen-minute odyssey that takes the listener into a strange and distant world, where one can meet amoebas who are “living the timeless life”. The idea for the song came to the Incredible String Band’s Mike Heron while he was tripping: “All it was, was a trip, and that was the music I was listening to.”13 For some the Incredible String Band’s music only made sense when they were on LSD and although the band later eschewed the freedom of acid in favour of the strictures of Scientology, they have come to be seen as the archetypal acid folk band.
In May 1969, an article in the Evening Standard alerted the Home Office to the possibility Timothy Leary might try to gain admittance to Britain later in the year. This news quickly reached the Home Office and a flurry of internal correspondence was generated, reviewing and updating the reasons Leary was denied admittance in 1967. A memo dated 15 September noted that immigration officials expected Leary to land at Heathrow later that day. The decision to uphold the 1967 decision and refuse him entry to Britain was made while he was in transit from Tangier via Madrid.14
Leary duly arrived at Terminal 1 at 7.00 pm. He was met by immigration officials and denied access to the UK. His reason for wishing to enter the country was to take a short holiday and to attend a party. The Home Office were already aware of his intentions to attend a party as they had received an anonymous telephone call from a woman who said she believed Leary was coming to attend a “LSD party”. The caller appeared to have specific knowledge about the party, telling immigration officials that Leary wouldn’t be carrying any LSD but that, “... supplies would arrive another way from the United States for the party.”15
Arrangements were quickly made for Leary to return to Tangier or Madrid. However, Leary stated he did not wish to return to either Morocco or Spain, but “... wished to go on to a more civilised country – America”. While Leary was waiting, customs officials tried to get a decision as to whether he ought to be searched. Consideration was given to the fact that if he were found to be in possession of LSD it would cause a stir in the press, and the Home Office wanted to avoid that at all costs. Luckily, seats were found on a flight leaving for America in a few hours and customs decided against a search. After a few hours wait Leary was taken to a Securicor bus and, escorted by an immigration official, boarded a flight for New York that took off at 11.45 pm.16
The Home Office file refers often to the press and it is clear they did not want the media to know Leary had attempted to gain access to the UK and had been refused. Leary’s attempt to come to the UK, claims of holidays and parties notwithstanding, may have been manipulated by him to glean some media attention. One of the officials, Mr Geenyer, who dealt with him during his wait at Heathrow, commented, “From his manner it appeared that Mr. Leary fully expected to be refused leave to land. It also seemed that he was a little disappointed that his presence failed to attract any public notice.”17
Though the LSD party to which Leary had been invited was not identified, it was almost certainly the event held in September by the staff of Rolling Stone magazine’s London edition at a venue in Hanover Square. In his analysis of late Sixties counter culture, High Sixties, Roger Hutchinson notes: “Possibly the most extravagant mass ‘bad trip’ of the decade took place late in 1969, in Hanover Square, at a party held by the newly-launched London edition of the American rock magazine Rolling Stone to entice advertising from the music industry. The drinks served at the party had been laced with LSD, and the LSD had in its turn been laced (unbeknown to the Rolling Stone staffers) with strychnine.”18
According to DJ Jeff Dexter, “For some reason someone had laced a lot of the food and the alcohol had been laced with some substances.”19 Dexter was used to the effects of LSD but his friend, pop star Marc Bolan was not. Indeed, Dexter, who knew Bolan well, believes this was the first time he had taken LSD. This might surprise many Bolan fans as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Bolan’s group, was a favourite of acidheads and he commanded a large following with his fey, Tolkien-esque lyrics, colourful clothes and alternative lifestyle. Other guests at the party, many of them journalists from the mainstream press such as The Times and the Evening Standard, were also getting ill on the spiked food and the party was rapidly descending into chaos.
Bolan completely freaked out on the drug and had to be driven home by his girlfriend June, overwhelmed and terrified by the LSD: “By that time Marc was going crazy ... and then he bit June and started flailing and I had to hold him down in the back of the Mini. He started to cry and he really just didn’t know what was going on. June called a friendly doctor who came round and tranquillised Bolan.”20
Dexter discussed the experience with Bolan a few days later. The singer was afraid he was a faker because he had not been able to cope with the experience and could not understand how his friend was able to. “It certainly made him think a lot about who he was,” concludes Dexter.21
The Home Office may have thought it politically expedient to prevent Leary from entering Britain, but they couldn’t prevent the counter culture reading his books. Leary’s impact on LSD use and philosophy in Britain cannot be underestimated. Once LSD was legislated against, mainstream and underground books, magazines and newspapers followed his every move and pronouncement. His books were required reading for the committed acidhead, even if they weren’t always understood; many more people talked about Leary than read or comprehended him. Some LSD users found them helpful, both in navigating their course through an LSD trip and in providing a philosophy for the use of acid.
Reviewing The Politics of Ecstasy for The Times, Richard Holmes noted the American’s self-obsession and found his naïvety about the dangers of drugs disturbing. Nevertheless, he also found it an “enthralling piece of American documentation”. Holmes saw Leary’s advocacy of LSD as “just the counter used again and again in the attempt to answer one enormous overall question, which is never posed: what the hell has gone wrong on this Americanised planet? What blessed vision of the spirit will lead us all home again?”
Holmes admired Leary’s message of spiritual self-reliance and reverence for the planet, equating it with the vision sought by the American transcendentalist philoso
pher Thoreau. However, Holmes “... could not overlook the LSD vendor either. As a marketer of dream solutions for my generation I have for him nothing but scorn.”22
“Dream solutions” was one way of describing the visions of change offered by LSD, but Holmes was wrong to think that acidheads weren’t actively considering the “blessed vision of the spirit”. Religion and spirituality had been at the heart of LSD use since the Fifties and the drug set many people on a path of spiritual development that they saw as a natural conclusion to their LSD use.
The early acidheads who had travelled the hippie trail to the East in search of enlightenment were now beginning to return. With them, they brought religious trinkets, tales of ashrams where gurus offered enlightenment and a clutch of spiritual practices and techniques. This mix ‘n’ match spirituality was highly attractive, particularly to hippies who could not bring themselves to subscribe rigidly to any specific belief system. The aura of spirituality permeated the flats and squats of London and spread out through the major cities and provinces. Alternative bookshops began to stock texts from Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism. What had once been the interest of a small group of people spread to the growing numbers of LSD users. Acidheads began, in great numbers, to read books such as the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Buddhist sutras. The Taoist divination system, the I Ching was particularly popular among LSD users and it was a common book to find in flats and squats, consulted and acted on with the utmost sincerity.
Quintessence guitarist Allan Mostert noticed this change in attitude: “There seem to be more and more people in London with altars in their pads. It’s nice that people are starting to realise that their pads are shrines and temples. We’re all walking palaces. Our senses are really the gates of the palace. Some people don’t know there are gates there.”23