by Andy Roberts
The authentic LSD counter culture was about to start mobilizing itself through the free festival movement and the Operation Julie LSD manufacturing and distribution network. These two strands were crucial to keeping LSD culture alive throughout the Seventies and were to mark both the death of the LSD dream and point the way forward into the final two decades of the twentieth century.
10
BRING WHAT YOU EXPECT TO FIND
Naked she danced in the warm morning sun. Her hips swayed suggestively to the beat of the music. On her back was scrawled in ballpoint: “Got any Acid?”1
Free festivals were a response to a variety of emerging needs within the counter culture. Night clubs and commercial rock festivals did not appeal to the sensibilities of acid sensitised hippies who were questioning ideas of profit and control; wanting to be more than just consumers of entertainment industry product. There was a demand for events self-generated by the counter culture, which would provide hippies with gatherings where they could live out their lifestyle with like minded people in a spirit of celebration and purpose.
Another factor in the development of the counter culture was the growth of communes and the squatting movement in London. By necessity this had led to a more communal way of life; whole streets in London had been colonised by squatters and it was a natural progression from community in the cities to communality in the countryside.
During the Seventies, local authorities evicted thousands of squatters; many went on the road permanently, their lifestyle becoming intertwined with the free festivals. Writing in Festival Eye, Krystoff summed up the contribution of squatters to the free festival scene: “The Free City of Camden, which became the base for early Stonehenge festivals, was a loose, street-by-street network of squatters, revolutionaries and artists who subscribed to the philosophy of giving and practiced consensus politics rather than ‘representative democracy’, establishing an anarchic lifestyle and a sense of community feeling. The first festivals at Stonehenge were the expression of this kind of community feeling. They were spontaneous ‘happenings’ and quickly attracted other avant-garde groups and communes from around the country. The eviction of the Free City of Camden made tens of thousands of people homeless and many of them took to the road. The festival became the community’s home, rather than its playground.”2
The first multi-day free festival was Phun City, held on Ecclesden Common near Worthing in West Sussex on 24 July 1970. It was organised by Mick Farren and backed by International Times. The organisers made the purpose of the festival clear: “Phun City is attempting to provide a three day environment designed to the needs and desires of the Freak, not just a situation set up to relieve him of his money.”
There was no entry fee, food was cheap or free and there was an endless stream of music from the cream of Britain’s underground bands. For the 3000 people who attended, the festival proved to be enormous fun. Many went feral for a few days, living under tarpaulins and plastic in the woods. LSD was in great demand but was more than matched by the supply. One veteran of the event, “Tom” remembered: “A genuine Californian hippie in long white robes holding a plastic bag with thousands of hits of pure acid came along trying to give us some tabs, but all the people around the fire were surfing on lots of clean high quality acid and everyone had more than enough anyways.”3
Bolstered by the music and sense of communality engendered by psychedelic drugs, many people who were camping in the woods resolved to stay there. But the West Sussex constabulary had other ideas. On 27 July those remaining were unceremoniously ousted and sent on their way. Though the organisers lost significant amounts of money, Phun City had been a success, showing the counter culture they could come together in the country for several days and make their own entertainment. There was now much talk of a far larger festival, a real gathering of the tribes. But for such a festival to take place an organiser and a location were needed.
The annual Glastonbury Festival is a unique British cultural institution. Each year, in June, on the weekend nearest the summer solstice, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Worthy Farm in the Somerset village of Pilton to camp for three days. They are there to experience the dizzying kaleidoscope of music, theatre and arts on offer on numerous stages. The festival caters for all ages, cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. It is often referred to by cynics as a holiday camp for middle-class hippies. Yet the origins of this quintessentially British event are rooted deep in the counter culture and closely linked with LSD. Had it not been for the psychedelic focus of the first major Glastonbury event, the festival in its present form would not exist.
But why and how did Glastonbury become the spiritual birthplace of the free festival movement? The growing awareness among young people that the LSD experience itself was not the destination, but a catalyst to a spiritual journey, had led to an explosion of interest in a variety of belief systems during the Sixties. As we have seen, psychedelic seekers often chose to explore Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. Others found themselves drawn to the Western Mystery Tradition, Arthurian legend, magic and shamanism, wanting to discover at firsthand the legacy of spiritual traditions and beliefs of the British Isles.
The Glastonbury area is steeped in myth and legend; it is claimed Jesus visited Glastonbury Abbey, UFOs were seen flying over the Tor, ley-lines criss-crossed the area sending serpent power through the West Country, a terrestrial Zodiac could be discerned in landscape features and so on. These and many other legends had recently been re-vivified for the counter culture by John Michell in his books The Flying Saucer Vision and The View Over Atlantis. Michell wrote: “It was, I think, in 1966 that I first went to Glastonbury, in the company of Harry Fainlight ... We had no very definite reason for going there, but it had something to do with ... strange lights in the sky, new music, and our conviction that the world was about to flip over on its axis so that heresy would become orthodoxy and an entirely new world-order would shortly be revealed.”4
Michell was the counter culture’s resident philosopher, their Merlin; an Eton and Cambridge educated polymath who had taken the side of the hippies and was educating them about their spiritual heritage. Michell lived in the hippie enclave of Notting Hill Gate, as comfortable at counter culture events as he was hanging out with the Rolling Stones and minor aristocracy. His books were key spiritual guides for the British counter culture and could be found in every thinking hippie’s pad, offering a source of discussion and speculation for those long LSD trips toward the dawn.
Michell showed there was no need to take the hippie trail to the East when the West Country was just down the M4. And the visual imagery of Glastonbury was everywhere in the underground press. One very good example is the cover of issue one of the Underground magazine, Albion, to which Michell contributed heavily. Dragons and UFOs teem in the skies over Glastonbury Tor, here stylised as a woman’s breast, whilst swords, serpents and geomantic imagery are visible in the Earth below. Hippie travellers in search of enlightenment had settled in the area from the mid-Sixties onwards, fuelled by Michell’s exposition of Glastonbury as a sacred place. It was against this backdrop that the Glastonbury festivals developed.5
The first festival at Glastonbury in 1970 was a low-key, commercial event attended by a few hundred people. The festival, organised by Pilton farmer, Michael Eavis, was not a financial success. To recoup his losses, Eavis left the organization of the 1971 event, known as Glastonbury Fair, to a rather unlikely group of people.6
Andrew Kerr first met Arabella Churchill, Winston’s granddaughter, while working on Randolph Churchill’s biography of the great political leader. In the late Sixties, like thousands of others, Kerr was taking LSD and enjoying being part of the counter culture. The seed of his idea to hold a free festival at Glastonbury was planted at the 1969 Isle of Wight rock festival. Kerr was outraged that large areas near the stage were cordoned off for the press and privileged few. On the drive back to London he announced to his fellow passengers: “We’ve got to have
a proper festival and it’s got to have at least some cosmic significance. Let’s have it at the summer solstice at Stonehenge.”7
Kerr’s intention to hold the festival at Stonehenge was put in abeyance when he was given Michael Eavis’ telephone number. A meeting was arranged at Worthy Farm and Kerr prepared by spending the night before atop Glastonbury Tor on LSD. The meeting was successful. Eavis agreed to the use of his land and Kerr, assisted by Arabella Churchill and utilizing a small inheritance, formed Solstice Capers to organise the 1971 festival.
The Observer wrote: “Kerr has the intensity of a man with a deep spiritual obsession. He claims he is trying to recreate a prehistoric science, whose huge energies are not recognised by modern society. His ideas are based on the writings of antiquarian John Michell, who in a book called The View Over Atlantis, recently elucidated the spiritual engineering which, he says, was known over the ancient world.”8
These ideas were transmuted into the location and design of the stage. Kerr dowsed the site and when he located a blind spring, with Glastonbury Tor in the distance, the stage was situated above it. John Michell told him the stage should be built to the proportions of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. This suited Kerr’s intention for the festival, which was to “... create an increase in the power of the Universe, a heightening of consciousness and recognition of our place in the function of this our tired and molested planet.”9 Bill Harkin, now a respected stage designer, designed and built the stage and a silver pyramid sprang up among the cows and hedges of Worthy Farm.
Jeff Dexter, veteran DJ from London’s UFO club, organised the music, consisting of the hippie bands that had played at London’s Roundhouse, including freak favourites Quintessence, Brinsley Schwarz, Hawkwind, Gong, Traffic and Arthur Brown. These bands were open about their use of LSD and strove to create music and atmosphere to be experienced while under the influence of psychedelic drugs. Dexter tried hard to get the archetypal LSD band, the Grateful Dead, over from America to play but this didn’t come off, though they did send a financial donation to support the festival.
Psychedelics of all kinds, including mescaline, were freely available at Glastonbury, but LSD was prevalent. Author, William Bloom’s impression of Glastonbury was that “... nearly everyone was tripping at one stage or another. Sometimes it was being given away ... The festivals would not have been what they were without hallucinogens.”10
David Bowie recalled being under the influence of magic mushrooms as he took the stage at five in the morning: “By the time I was due to perform I was flying and could hardly see my little electric keyboard or my guitar.”11
Arabella Churchill didn’t indulge, but knew “there was a lot of acid because this man came up with a large briefcase and said: ‘This is full of acid, man. I was going to sell it but everyone’s doing everything for free so here, give it to everybody.’ I put it under a bed and I can’t remember what happened to it in the end.”12
Many clergymen visited the 1971 Glastonbury Fair attracted by this radical youth movement and their alternative brand of spirituality. Among them was the diocesan youth chaplain from Swindon, who was given some LSD (whether voluntarily or not is unclear). The confused clergyman ended up rushing headlong down the hillside, his cloak flaring like a giant bat behind him. However, his Christian faith wasn’t enough to help him navigate under the onslaught of LSD, and he had to retire to the bad trip tent organised by Release where he was gently talked back down to earth.13
Though the majority of LSD experiences at Glastonbury were positive there were, as at every festival, some drug casualties. Bad trip tents became a feature of the free festival scene, often full of seriously confused teenagers who had been attracted to LSD by peer pressure and expectation, but who were unprepared for the effects of the drug. These tents were the downside of the free festival experience. Quintessence guitarist Allan Mostert remembers: “A rather shattering experience I had at Glastonbury was while wandering through the audience before our set, I took a look inside the so called ‘bad trip tent’, where they took the people who had dropped LSD and gone on bad trips. This experience strengthened the idea in me of what we were actually trying to do with our music and ‘message.’”14
The mixture of free psychedelics and living out the hippie ethos made the Glastonbury Fair the prototype for subsequent events. LSD brought people together around the campfires at night, making the already otherworldly experience appear completely divorced from the twentieth century and western civilization. Mick Farren summed it up: “We might as well have been in the sixth or even twenty-sixth century as we told tall travellers’ tales of intoxication, of outwitting the law, of the lights in the sky, lost continents, the lies of government, collective triumphs and personal stupidity, while the music of past, present and future roared from the pyramid stage.”15
Following the 1971 Glastonbury Fair the area became a focus for travelling hippies. Small encampments sprang up in the country lanes and there were almost continuous gatherings on the summit of Glastonbury Tor. In the Seventies, there were people taking LSD on the Tor every night of the summer. To visit the Tor, take LSD and watch the sunrise over the Somerset levels was considered a hip thing to do, a psychedelic pilgrimage.
At one stage, the tower on the Tor had been broken into and turned into a hippie crash pad. Free festival poster artist Roger Hutchison and friends travelled to the Tor from Essex. He climbed to the summit at 3 am, to find the inside of the tower bedecked with cushions and lighted tapers with a group of hippies smoking cannabis and drinking wine. Such was the spirit of community and trust in those times that he was immediately offered LSD in blotter form by a colourfully dressed hippie, and settled down to watch the sunrise, accompanied by chanting and drumming.
This type of shamanic activity was prevalent among the mystically inclined at free festivals. Drums, chanting and psychedelic drugs have been used together since prehistoric times, each enhancing the effect of the other. This type of group behaviour had not only a strong bonding effect but served to help individuals navigate the LSD experience, either as participants or observers.
Large numbers of hippies and others seeking an ecological and spiritual lifestyle settled in East Anglia in the early Seventies and held their own festivals. Thirty such festivals, or Fairs as the organisers preferred to call them, ran from 1972 to 1985. LSD was an inspiring, though less central, factor at these events; the Bungay May Horse Fair was described as having a “... truly anarchic quality which put you up against yourself more than any amount of acid and street theatre could do at the ‘Barshams.’”16
In sharp contrast to the free festivals, the East Anglian Fairs were the expression and celebration of a static community that tried to involve the local population. Free festivals sought to isolate themselves from the local communities, intentional outsiders setting up camp for a short while before dispersing and moving on.
Soon after the success of the 1971 Glastonbury Fair, free festivals were held in north Devon and south Wales. But moves were afoot to develop large scale festivals that would run throughout the summer, becoming a focus for Britain’s counter culture. The huge festivals at Windsor, Watchfield and Stonehenge would be the events which came to define free festival culture. Yet these festivals didn’t just occur, they were initiated and planned by three key people, without whom the free festival movement would not have developed as it did.
It’s important to trace the roots and motivations of these individuals to see how crucial LSD was to the free festival movement; how LSD underpinned the creation of environments in which people could live unhindered by what they saw as petty laws and restrictions. It is also important to acknowledge that although LSD played a major part in the early free festivals, drugs per se were not central to their economies. In the Seventies psychedelic drugs were employed at free festivals as a means to an end: celebration, spiritual enlightenment and the strengthening of a community, sold at minimal profit or given away. By the Eighties LSD had become much more commodi
fied and free festivals acted as drug marketplaces, their distribution, promotion and sale being organised in a way that could rival anything from the conventional retail world.
The free festivals held in Windsor Great Park, near London, were the genesis of a free festival culture, which, building on the template set up at Glastonbury, has lasted in one form or another to the present day. This would not have happened without the efforts of Bill “Ubi” Dwyer.
In the mid-Fifties Dwyer emigrated from Ireland to New Zealand where he immersed himself in the burgeoning anarchist scene. After moving to Sydney, Australia, he continued his involvement with anarchism, but politics alone no longer satisfied him: “It was still a life from which I sensed something basic was lacking but I did not know what this something was, I had rejected religion as being a mere part of the unfree society in which we live ... but there are spiritual yearnings in man which cannot be denied.”17
Dwyer became involved with the Sydney Anarchist Group at the Cellar, an anarchist hang out off the city’s Oxford Street. He began to attract socially disaffected young people to the Cellar, which changed within six months from political meeting place to psychedelic drug den. Dwyer had begun to use LSD and had become evangelical about its use. As it has done with tens of thousands of others, LSD changed Dwyer’s life. For him LSD was a mystic, spiritual experience that “cleansed (me) of the evil of the past”.18