In Search of the Lost Chord

by Danny Goldberg

  Decades later, long after he had changed his focus to Eastern spiritual traditions and been renamed Ram Dass by his guru, Alpert would still acknowledge the huge debt he owed to LSD for having liberated him from that mind-set: “I was teaching at Harvard and had a highly valued position, a promise of tenure. Then I had these chemicals and I questioned the entire social structure. A part of me that I met was more valid than the part of me that had been part of the whole social game.”

  After being fired by Harvard, Leary was given the use of a mansion in Millbrook, New York, by several members of the Hitchcock family, heirs to the Mellon fortune, who admired his work. He created an organization for the study of psychedelics called the Castalia Foundation, named after a fictitious intellectual colony depicted in Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi).

  When Huxley found out he was dying, he asked Leary to get him some LSD. Huxley’s wife Laura injected him with the psychedelic. Huxley passed away while tripping on November 22, 1963, the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It would require the most hardened rationalist not to take note of the synchronicity of these deaths and their relationship to what we now call “the sixties.”

  Near the end of his life, Huxley had advised Leary on how to deal with the wave of young psychedelic seekers of my generation he foresaw materializing. “Be gentle with them, Timothy. They want to be free, but they don’t know how. Teach them. Reassure them.” He had once told Leary, “Do good stealthily.” Wishful thinking. Leary had an insatiable appetite for the spotlight. Of course, as things turned out, Leary himself would have far less influence and control over the way the masses handled psychedelics than could be imagined at the time.

  Even while performing on a much larger media platform, with a kind of showmanship that Huxley never aspired to, Leary tried to uphold Huxley’s values. He and Alpert continually stressed the importance of “set and setting” for LSD trips, suggesting that there should always be a guide and that the environment should be carefully selected for positive, inspiring, and nurturing qualities. Huxley had introduced Leary and Alpert to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which he felt connected ancient wisdom to the psychedelic experience. They oversaw a new translation of the text that was reimagined as a guide to LSD sessions. It had suggestions on how to navigate through the kinds of personality issues that could cause a bad trip. (On the Beatles’ Revolver, one of the best-selling albums in the world in 1966, the lyrics of the John Lennon song “Tomorrow Never Knows” were taken directly from the Leary/Alpert version of the ancient text.)

  Leary and Alpert were also involved in a study of twenty theology students at Boston University. They created two groups: one took psilocybin, the other took a placebo. Both groups listened to the same sermon on Good Friday and immediately afterward taped a description of their experiences. These descriptions were sent to theologians around the United States without letting them know which group each participant was in.

  Of those who took psilocybin, nine out of ten were deemed to have had a revelatory experience. Of the other group, the theologians only identified one. This did not constitute scientific “proof” but it was enough for Leary and Alpert to validate their instincts about the relationship between psychedelics and spirituality.

  When mass media and rock and roll propelled LSD to the status of a household word, the criticisms from various establishments increased. Reporters had no trouble finding antipsychedelic doctors, many of whom cited the increased presence of hippies on bad trips in hospital emergency rooms. There were reports of people who while tripping thought they could fly and jumped off buildings to their deaths. In 1969, Art Linkletter, who hosted the popular TV shows People Are Funny and House Party, would become a high-profile critic of LSD in general and Timothy Leary in particular. Earlier that year, Linkletter’s twenty-year-old daughter Diane had jumped to her death from a sixth-floor kitchen window. Linkletter claimed that she was on LSD and blamed Leary for having popularized the drug.

  One can sympathize with the anguish of a parent in Linkletter’s position and still disagree with his conclusions. The autopsy of his daughter showed that in fact there was no LSD in her system, but Linkletter speculated that she’d had an LSD flashback. Diane Linkletter’s boyfriend, Edward Durston, told the cops that she was determined to kill herself and that drugs were not a factor in her death. Nonetheless, Linkletter continued to blame Leary and the counterculture for his daughter’s death and became a prominent anti-LSD voice in the media.

  Some biologists emerged in the media suggesting that LSD could lead to chromosome damage in a way that might cause birth defects in children. In the late sixties this assertion was given credence even by some of the underground media. The passage of time and births of millions of people to parents who took LSD proved that no such pattern existed.

  Shortly before Christmas 1965, Leary was arrested in Laredo, Texas, for possession of a small amount of marijuana. The judge who gave him the exorbitant sentence of thirty years in prison referenced Leary’s pro-psychedelic writing as one of the reasons. The Supreme Court overturned that decision in 1969 on Fifth Amendment grounds, but the template for legal persecution of Leary was set. Richard Nixon, before being elected president, absurdly called him “the most dangerous man in America.”

  In his 1967 book Alternating Current, Octavio Paz wrote:

  We are now in a position to understand the real reason for the condemnation of hallucinogens and why their use is punished: the authorities do not behave as though they were trying to stamp out a harmful practice or a vice, but as though they were attempting to stamp out dissidence. Since this is a form of dissidence that is becoming more widespread, the prohibition takes on the proportions of a campaign against a spiritual contagion, against an opinion. What the authorities are displaying is ideological zeal: they are punishing a heresy, not a crime.

  Decades later, in 1989, Ram Dass still saw the criminalization of LSD as a defense of the establishment rather than having any legitimate public health purpose. “People were raised to respect authority,” he explained. “After LSD, many people saw what they felt inside as being as valid as any external institutions. So it undermined authority and was a threat to social structure. Soon, society realized people are less controllable when they have had an experience of intuitive validity.”

  Another public proselytizer of LSD in America in the early sixties was the celebrated author Ken Kesey, who in his early twenties had voluntarily participated in a study of psychedelics at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in Northern California. The study, it turned out, was the CIA-funded Project MKULTRA. The government wanted to figure out if psychedelics could be used in espionage or warfare. In 1960, at the age of twenty-five, Kesey began writing the best-selling novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  After Kesey published his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, he decided to come out of the psychedelic closet and took several of his friends on a trip to New York on a brightly painted bus he called Furthur. This was the debut of a loosely knit group of psychedelic adventurers around Kesey whom he called the Merry Pranksters. He agreed to have journalist Tom Wolfe follow him around for a year. Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which Kesey is the main character, was as influential in glamorizing LSD as Leary’s media appearances were.

  Kesey was into a much more anarchic, festive approach to LSD than Leary and Alpert. He didn’t have much use for ancient texts; his belief was to just get as far out as you could. Yet there was still a sense of mission. Furthur was driven by Neal Cassady, who was famous for having been the basis for the character Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. Comedian Hugh Romney, who had emerged in the hip Greenwich Village folk world earlier in the sixties, joined the Merry Pranksters for a time and affectionately recalls it as “a chance to sign up on a spaceship and make energetic progress toward the good.”

  One of Kesey’s frequent sayings to the group that clustered around him was, “Get them into your movie before t
hey get you into theirs.” Wolfe suggested that Kesey wanted “control” of the Pranksters and he inaccurately portrayed the novelist more like a cult leader than a catalyst who helped empower a diverse collection of people to do their own thing.

  At a Berkeley teach-in about Vietnam prior to a march on the Oakland Induction Center, Kesey surprised radicals by insisting, “You’re not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching. That’s what they do.” Kesey then played “Home on the Range” on his harmonica and suggested that the members of the crowd observe the war and then “turn your backs on it and say fuck it.” Wolfe cited this moment in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as an example of Kesey’s flakiness. Former SDS president Todd Gitlin also criticized Kesey’s speech: “This was not what the organizers wanted to hear on the verge of a march into fearsome Oakland to confront the army base.” But with the hindsight of half a century, I feel that Kesey was getting at a poetic truth.

  On November 27, 1965, Kesey threw a multimedia party called “The Acid Test” at Prankster Ken Babbs’s house. It featured music by a band named the Warlocks. A week later there was a second “Acid Test” and the members of the Warlocks played again, but under a new name: the Grateful Dead.

  Word about LSD quickly reached the minds of teenagers like me and Joel Goodman. Joel first smoked marijuana the year before I did, when we were both in tenth grade. A younger student was interviewing Allen Ginsberg for our high school paper, the Fieldston News, and Joel was asked to go along to keep him company, presumably to avoid putting a teenage boy in a position where he was alone with the poet. After the interview was done, Ginsberg took out a joint and asked the kids if they wanted to get high. “It was very, very pleasant,” Joel remembers, but he had no idea how to get more for himself.

  Joel had long, curly brown hair similar to Bob Dylan’s on the cover of Blonde on Blonde, and it was a time when hair length and body language magically connected hip people. One day, not long after the Ginsberg initiation, Joel was in a local hardware store when a young Puerto Rican clerk named Lucky asked him if he wanted to buy some pot. Joel and Lucky quickly grew close, and Joel became a dealer to some of his friends like me.

  I still remember the music that was playing at the party at Peter Kinoy’s parents’ apartment when I first smoked pot: the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, the Stones’ Out of Our Heads, and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream. (The Kinoy parents were not there. Both Peter and his younger sister Joanne, who I had a big crush on at the time, later told me that they had been subject to, and ignored, grim lectures on the perils of drugs and the unique vulnerability of the families of political radicals.)

  The next week, I was walking down a corridor in school when an older kid named Paul Mintz urgently called me over to listen to a song on one of the portable record players that had recently been introduced into the marketplace. It was Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the one with the chorus that goes, “Because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?” Mintz and I weren’t friends; his mind was just so blown by the brilliance of the song that he had to play it to anyone who looked receptive. I was definitely an apt target. Something was happening, and Joel, Peter, our other friends, and I were in on it, and my parents and the people who made decisions in Washington weren’t. As Joel recalls, “There was the world that was in the newspapers and that our parents and teachers lived in, and then there was the real world that we lived in . . . Of course, I was oblivious to the fact that while I was riding the subway, straight people had actually built it and kept it running. So in retrospect, maybe both worlds had some reality to them.”

  Richard Alpert (like Leary and Kesey) had been an achiever. I, however, was a nonachiever. For years, I got mediocre grades. (Since I did well on intelligence tests, the teachers’ name for kids like me was actually “underachiever.”) I was terrible at sports, and extremely awkward socially. Alpert had used LSD in part to opt out of the “game” he had won but felt trapped in. I was thrilled that there was an alternative to the game I was doing so poorly at.

  Joel remembers, “The idea was to try to love everybody. There was a feeling that we were part of a kind of chumminess that we were excluded from otherwise. We weren’t sports stars or straight smart kids. It was a perfect fit to have a place to belong to and a milieu. Add that to the general conviviality of getting high with friendly people. It was kind of idyllic.”

  Lucky had a connection to the pure LSD manufactured by the Sandoz company in Switzerland, where it had been discovered. Since the media had been completely wrong about marijuana leading to heroin use, and about the war in Vietnam, we had no problem rejecting the scare stories about jumping off roofs. Lucky told us solemnly, “You don’t have to be scared of yourself.” We were in.

  We had a vague respect for Leary but didn’t pay any attention to his advice about how to trip. We looked out for each other. We avoided weird scenes and mostly stayed inside listening to music, watching TV, coloring with markers, and philosophizing about the meaning of life. Sometimes we’d go to Central Park, or to an Indian restaurant on West 110th Street (we thought we were part of a very elite group who knew about curry); I liked to go to the movies on acid, and saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, Marat/Sade, and Blow-Up while tripping. The only time I got a little freaked out was when I was watching How I Won the War, starring John Lennon. I whispered worriedly to Joel, “Either this is very strong acid or this is a very weird movie.” Later, when I rewatched the film, my faith in acid was reinforced: the problem was the movie.

  One of the biggest values of LSD to me was to uncouple me from assumptions that the intellectual world I’d grown up in had made about what was considered “deep” and “serious,” which I always found depressing. I loved the “permission” to be happy. We all did. That was a big part of the revolution that was not televised. After an apparent revelation on an acid trip, I wrote a column in the Fieldston News in which I asserted that external accomplishments such as good grades should not define us. After all, we didn’t choose our friends based on their grades, but on intuitive connections. While researching this book, I came across something that Dr. Leary had written, saying virtually the same thing. I can now see that I may have been more influenced by him than I admitted at the time.

  Peter Kinoy, who’d always had a gift for drawing and painting, recalls an evening when he took acid and, in an homage to Picasso’s Guernica, stayed up all night creating a collage of images about the recent Newark race riots. His father liked it so much that he hung it in his Rutgers Law School office. “I felt it was the first time my dad understood that the culture that meant so much to me connected with what he cared about,” Peter says.

  On October 6, 1966, LSD became illegal in California and it was soon banned all over America. Leary had already contrived a quixotic response. On September 19, he had announced the creation of the League for Spiritual Discovery, which was incorporated as a religion in what would turn out to be a futile attempt to get psychedelics relegalized by defining them as religious sacraments.

  One of the organization’s stated purposes was “to help each member discover the divinity within by means of sacred teachings, self-analysis, psychedelic sacraments, and spiritual methods and then to express this revelation in an external life of harmony and beauty . . . to help each member to devote his entire consciousness and all his behavior to the glorification of God. Complete dedication to the life of worship is our aim, as exemplified in the motto, ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’”

  The big winner of the moment, however, was the aforementioned Augustus Owsley Stanley III. Owsley was thirty-two years old in 1967 and his nickname was “Bear.” He was the descendant of a political family from Kentucky. His father was a government attorney. His grandfather, A. Owsley Stanley—a member of the United States Senate after serving as governor of Kentucky and in the US House of Representatives—campaigned against Prohibition in the 1920s.

  By the end of 1966, Owsley, who had studied chemis
try, was geared up to manufacture millions of acid tablets that became known by their colors, including Monterey Purple, White Lightning, and Blue Cheer—which became the name of a very loud Bay Area rock band.

  Because Owsley’s form of delivery of the psychedelic was a tablet, the purity was assured. (They couldn’t be diluted or contaminated as could be done to the contents of capsules.) Soon thereafter, a group in Orange County, California, replicated some of Owsley’s ethos and called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Their signature tablet was called Orange Sunshine.

  By all accounts, Owsley and the members of the Brotherhood were sincere inner seekers and psychedelic evangelists, but because LSD was illegal, the dealers were, by definition, criminals. Despite their cosmic aspirations, they brought with them a connection to other criminals and to some of the darkness and paranoia that go with the territory.

  Meanwhile, all the currents of the counterculture were being magnified a hundredfold by newspapers, magazines, radio, and television—which were collectively being referred to by the suddenly trendy term “the media.”

  CHAPTER 3

  the media and the messages

  The Diggers had cautioned that the media could distort or co-opt fragile new cultures and that too much attention could create toxic ego trips and/or paranoia in newly minted, hip celebrities. SDS’s Todd Gitlin worried about the media’s influence as well: “The mass media not only shapes how others view the group but has tremendous influence over how the group perceives its own identity.”