Astral Weeks
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“The rest of the band didn’t like it,” he says. “But that’s the one that we wrote together, that’s the one that rocked. The version we made together was rock and roll . . . it was awesome. I just wish that I had it.”
Tom Kielbania, now retired and living happily with his wife in Chicopee, has similar feelings. “In my whole life, this is all I got to offer,” he tells me in his backyard, referring to his time playing bass for Morrison. “This is it!” he says, banging the picnic table for emphasis. Would hearing the recording of the Catacombs show be meaningful?
“Yeah,” he says. “I. Would. Freak. Out.”
With all the discrepancies between the memories of Morrison’s Boston players, the tape would surely offer some clues as to whose version of events of the summer of 1968 is most accurate, as well as documenting the local contributions to the songs that would comprise Astral Weeks. But after our evening together, Peter Wolf has become unreachable, and the likelihood of my hearing his tapes has vanished.
EIGHT
A Little More Light into the Darkness of Man
HALF A CENTURY of work has paid off: The houses on Fort Ave. Terrace, once dilapidated, are now gorgeous and homey. Inside #5, each room has its signature artisan flair, such as ornate woodworking around a door frame. Two Family members, one of whom has lived here since the late sixties, are my guides. We walk through the Connection and approach a long dining room table, where fifty Family members might be seated at Thanksgiving dinner. A framed picture of Mel Lyman hangs in many of the rooms. A page of his writing, mounted and displayed, decorates a narrow staircase in the back.
On this day, residents are doing dishes, enjoying coffee, watching television. Meeting the older members, I rewind their faces by fifty years to figure out if they were once featured in an Avatar photo spread. Some people get introductions, others remain nameless. At one point, someone resembling a piano player and would-be bank robber Terry Bernhard waves hello from the kitchen. In the living room of another house, Mel Lyman’s banjo rests in a chair by the window, as if enjoying the view of Highland Park and the tower.
As we pass into the backyard, one of my hosts, a college professor named Randy Foote, plucks a grape off a vine on the trellis and pops it into his mouth. I do the same. With no fences to separate the lawns of the Family’s houses, Fort Ave. Terrace’s backyard seems to go on forever. I realize that this place is a paradise for about a dozen baby boomers. The view is lovely and the grapes are free. Is this what the endgame of a successful sixties commune looks like?
If this is a happy ending, it’s a hard-earned one. In their early years, the Fort Hill Community harassed and frightened scores of people who crossed their path. Ex-members have taken the Family to court, trying to claim their share of the communal wealth. That’s to say nothing of Mel Lyman augmenting his natural charisma with LSD, wielding the drug to foster devotion. Michael Bowen, cofounder of San Francisco underground newspaper The Oracle, recognized this when he met Lyman out on the West Coast. Upon seeing footage of Lyman’s “psychedelic sessions,” Bowen got a bad vibe. “He was using LSD to turn these people into zombies, reprogramming them,” Bowen said. “We wanted none of that.”
In the late fifties and early sixties, Boston and Cambridge served as ground zero for both the folk music revival and the origin of the American hallucinogenic revolution. From Harvard Square, chemicals and chord progressions leaked into the ether, drifting westward through America, altering the culture along the way. The histories of both movements converge in Mel Lyman. While rock’s psychedelically inclined songwriters receive most of the credit for diving into the alternate worlds opened by LSD, Lyman’s saga is a reminder that the folk revivalists, nurtured by Professor Timothy Leary’s hallucinogenic rebellion at Harvard, first took that leap into the unknown.
Leary’s explorations were often considered well intentioned if reckless; by contrast, Lyman’s had an ulterior motive. Paula Press, all of seventeen when she arrived at Fort Hill in 1968, recalled her LSD journey as arranged by Mel. “He gives really strong doses, and I hallucinated and everything,” she told Rolling Stone. “He was growing horns, they were growing all over the room, and he was changing from various kinds of animals.” Similarly, novelist Kay Boyle, who lived on the Hill to be near her two children, was aghast when she listened to a tape of her daughter, Faith Gude, in the middle of an acid trip. “I love you, I love you, this is so marvelous,” Gude said hysterically. “Oh Mel, you are the most beautiful man.”
In his published writings about LSD, Lyman sounded more like Leary than a scary man sprouting horns. “There is no reason to fear it, we created it because we NEED it, like the electric light,” he wrote, in a dense 1967 essay. “Everybody wants to know about it and that is proof enough of its importance. LSD does what alcohol did when IT was new and what EVERY new creation does, it lets a little more light into the darkness of man.”
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IT’S NO COINCIDENCE that Lyman’s acid evangelism took root in Boston, the true birthplace of American hallucinogenic culture. The year was 1949, the location was the Boston Psychopathic Hospital on Fenwood Street, a mile and a half from Fort Hill. Dr. Otto Kauders, head of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Vienna, lectured on a new drug that mimicked mental psychosis. In the audience, Dr. Milton Greenblatt and Dr. Max Rinkel listened in awe as he described how a small dose had driven its inventor temporarily crazy. “We were very interested in anything that could make someone schizophrenic,” Greenblatt recalled. If doctors could cause temporary insanity with a medicine dropper, they might better understand how to treat their patients. Perhaps LSD-25 could even help cure schizophrenia. Rinkel arranged an order of LSD-25 to be shipped from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland to Boston.
Neither Greenblatt nor Rinkel took the first dose of LSD in North America—for that, they turned to their boss, Dr. Robert Hyde. Rinkel gave Hyde a glass of water with 100 micrograms of LSD, less than half of inventor Albert Hofmann’s initial, accidental dose. Feeling no effect, Hyde insisted he be permitted to make his rounds. Rinkel trailed him, later reporting that he “berated us and said the company had cheated us, given us plain water. That was not Dr. Hyde’s normal behavior; he is a very pleasant man.” Hyde and Rinkel soon ran larger LSD-25 tests on student volunteers at Boston Psychopathic.
The CIA caught wind of the study’s unusual results and was eager to fund the operation. For them, a drug like this was valuable for far more than studying mental illness. They might develop a truth serum or find a way to reprogram minds. In 1953, Rinkel and Hyde began receiving grants from one of the CIA’s fronts, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Soon, hundreds of students from Harvard, Emerson, and MIT were unwittingly assisting the agency’s research into the possibility of mind control.
The subjects knew they were receiving something called LSD, and that reactions would range from “pleasant” to “unpleasant,” but nothing prepared them for how otherworldly, surreal, or ego-crushing the experience might be. “We lost a couple,” Philip Slater, one of Rinkel’s assistants, told author Don Lattin. “One had to be hospitalized. Another went out in the street to see if cars were real.” None of those involved in the experiments had the proper training or understanding to guide participants through what could be a positive, life-changing moment. In 1994, Dr. Robert Reid told the Globe that he was aware of at least one death associated with the program. “They gave this patient LSD one morning and when I came back from lunch that day, I was told she had hung herself in the downstairs bathroom.”*
Intelligence agency director Allen Dulles described the CIA’s efforts as a “battle for men’s minds.” It was rumored that the Soviets were working day and night on “brain perversion techniques,” so to compete, Dulles authorized a secret operation called MK-ULTRA. The objective was mind control, and LSD was just one of the possible keys, along with isolation, verbal abuse, and hypnosis.
As Murray’s tests continued in 1959, a dazzling new lecturer arrived on campus. Timothy Leary, a thirty-nine-year-old Massachusetts native, was a wunderkind in the field of psychology, author of a 1957 book, The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. Relatively “straight” when he first arrived at Harvard, Leary was permanently altered in the summer of 1960 after consuming “seven of the Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico” during a trip to Cuernavaca. By the end of the night, Leary was reborn. “It was the classic visionary voyage,” he wrote in 1968. “You are never the same after you’ve had that one flash glimpse down the cellular time tunnel. You are never the same after you’ve had the veil drawn.”
Back at Harvard, Leary wrote Sandoz, requesting hallucinogens for academic research. “We expected to receive a long form back that had to be filled out and signed by various people,” Leary’s assistant George Litwin recalled. “Instead, what came in the mail was a large bottle of psilocybin pills with a little note that said, ‘Good luck in your research. Let us know your findings.’”
Murray was interested in hallucinogenics, but hearing about Leary’s recent experiences with magic mushrooms convinced him to experiment himself. It even seemed like a professional advantage: Leary declared that he learned more about psychology in his five-hour Mexican mushroom trip than in his preceding fifteen years of research. With Murray and others swayed by Leary’s enthusiasm, the school approved the Harvard Psilocybin Project; he was now sanctioned to administer doses to students. The trips differed from those at Boston Psychopathic by emphasizing a supportive environment: Not only did you take LSD, but LSD also took you. If you were in a paranoid state under hospital lights, the trip would likely be horrific. If the tripper took the time to adjust her set (current mental state) and setting (physical location) before swallowing the pill, the chances for a positive experience grew exponentially.
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RICHARD ALPERT FIRST spotted his colleague Timothy Leary working in a tiny office he had built himself in what had formerly been a closet. They became drinking buddies, and soon taught a course together called “Existential Transactional Behavior Change.” Leary invited Alpert, ten years his junior, to be part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. During his first trip, Alpert saw the versions of himself that he had groomed over the years. Then these social constructs peeled away, leaving only “a place where ‘I’ existed independent of social and physical identity.” Alpert wanted everyone to feel this same sense of pure being. “We gave [psilocybin] to jazz musicians and physicists and philosophers and ministers and junkies and graduate students and social scientists,” he later wrote. Only 3 percent “transcended all form and saw just pure energy . . . a homogeneous field. It has been called the White Light.”
As the son of a prominent Boston attorney, Alpert had always been on the fast track to professional success; he had already been a visiting professor at Berkeley before arriving at Harvard, impressive for a man not yet thirty. “Before I got involved with Tim, I was leading a shady life,” he later said. “I was a professor and I was cruising parks and men’s rooms.” In Cambridge, he hosted dinner parties in his antique-filled apartment. He drove a Mercedes-Benz and flew a Cessna. “I was living the way a successful bachelor professor is supposed to live in the American world.” Psilocybin made him realize something was wrong: “It was a hustle.”
Despite Alpert’s upstanding reputation, Harvard still fretted over the project. The study courted controversy, which reached a fever pitch in 1962, as papers ran headlines like: “HARVARD EATS THE HOLY MUSHROOM, RELIGIOUS VISIONS PRODUCED BY DANGEROUS BRAIN DRUGS.” The chairman of the psychology department announced that any participating students would be dropped from the PhD program.
The details of how Harvard fired Richard Alpert, thus shuttering the Harvard Psilocybin Project, are not flattering to any of the parties involved. Leary and Alpert had promised the administration that they would not give any undergraduates the hallucinogenic pill, but Alpert made an exception for an attractive student named Ronnie Winston. Winston’s friend and former roommate, Andrew Weil, was also desperate to try psilocybin, but Leary and Alpert turned him down. Weil pressured Ronnie Winston for details about the experience, then published an exposé in The Harvard Crimson. The school fired Alpert in May 1963.
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YES—THAT ANDREW WEIL. Dr. Andrew Weil has one of the most recognizable faces in wellness; you’ve definitely seen him and his signature bushy white beard, whether on his PBS series, the covers of bestsellers like Spontaneous Healing, or as a guest on Oprah. Before he got famous, his writing led to the firing of Alpert and Leary; then, in 1968, he found himself in their shoes.
Shortly before arriving at Harvard, where he would study ethnobotany and become a Crimson editor, Weil read an article about a college student who died of a mescaline overdose while in search of inspiration for a creative writing class. A phrase in the piece—“galaxies of exploding colors”—captured Weil’s imagination. “I resolved to devote my ingenuity to getting and trying mescaline,” he wrote. At Harvard, Weil and Winston lobbied Leary for a dose; Leary declined but gave tantalizing descriptions of what these chemicals offered. “It is exhilarating. It shows us that the human brain possesses infinite possibilities. It can operate in space-time dimensions that we never dreamed even existed.”
Writing on Harvard stationery, Weil found a company willing to ship him mescaline directly, and soon started blasting off his classmates. He required everyone to write up a report of their experience, like a miniature version of the school’s sanctioned psychedelics project. As Weil was playing Leary Junior in his dorm, Richard Alpert broke his promise to the university and gave Ronnie Winston psilocybin. When Weil found out, he not only glimpsed Alpert’s hypocrisy, but felt personally rejected. Soon he was working with both the Crimson and the administration to expose the Psilocybin Project, even as his own mescaline experiments continued. Weil’s betrayal had a silver lining for Alpert and Leary: Both men became instant heroes of the counterculture.
Weil enrolled at Harvard Medical School, where he wanted to conduct a legitimate, properly controlled study of marijuana and bust the myths surrounding it. Studying the medical literature about any drug with any scandalous associations, he discovered only “a vast collection of rumor, anecdote, and secondhand accounts.”
It wasn’t until his final year of medical school, in 1968, that this became possible—just barely. Joe Oteri, Boston’s so-called pot lawyer and one of Avatar’s defenders, bet Weil that he would never receive approval for the experiment. Harvard was especially strict because of the psilocybin project’s demise, which Weil himself had brought about five years earlier; the threat of drug-related lawsuits loomed large. But in another irony, Weil’s role in the Leary-Alpert debacle helped push the experiment through. “I got some minutes of the debate of the Harvard Medical School group that had to approve it, and there were actually statements that I was the one blowing the whistle on Alpert and Leary,” he says. “That was one of the reasons that they agreed to let it go forward.” In a twist that Philip K. Dick would savor, the pot study was green-lit, in part, because Weil had been a narc.
Harvard didn’t make it easy, telling Weil he couldn’t give the drug to people who had never tried it before. Weil balked. His entire experiment required marijuana-naive subjects. “It was the only way to standardize set,” Weil notes. He began looking for pot virgins in his circle of friends, and failing that, took out ads in the local papers. “It took two month
s of interviewing prospective volunteers to come up with nine men from the student population of Boston who had never tried marijuana.”
Throughout, Harvard badgered Weil, threatening to deny him academic credit if he strayed from their guidelines. “They wouldn’t let it be done on their premises or any affiliated institutions, and they wouldn’t let their students be used as subjects,” Weil says. He felt so attacked he even reached out to his old nemesis.
“I’m in the same situation you were in,” Weil told Richard Alpert over the phone.
Science published Weil’s marijuana study in December 1968. “It made the front page of The New York Times, so I think people were impressed,” he recalls. The findings were simple, elucidating things anyone who has ever smoked a joint would recognize, but that wasn’t the point. The experiences offered by marijuana and more potent drugs were nearly impossible to quantify scientifically, but many of their supposed dangers found their way into print. Weil’s work was a response to antidrug propaganda that appeared in newspapers regularly, with headlines like “BABY’S DEFORMITY BLAMED ON LSD.”*
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RICHARD ALPERT WOULDN’T become a spiritual leader until 1968, but by 1963 he had a following.
After his firing from Harvard, his research was now limited to 23 Kenwood Avenue in Newton. Richard Alpert looked around at all the people suddenly living in and visiting his house—artists, socialites, madmen, and even Leary’s children—and mindfully noted that a cult was forming. “We were a cult turned inward,” he would later say. The core group comprised Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Tim’s children Susan and Jack Leary, and heiress Peggy Hitchcock, supplemented with an impressive roster of visitors, including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Mingus, and William Burroughs.