The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Chapter Six

  If You Come to San Francisco . . .

  Trickster: San Francisco January 1967

  Timothy Leary was at the top of the bill for the great Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park, leading a line-up that included Richard Alpert, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Gary Snyder, the Grateful Dead, and “all of San Francisco’s rock bands.” It was here, dressed in white, with beads around his neck and a yellow flower tucked behind his ear, that Leary made his first public appearance in San Francisco and delivered the slogan that would follow him around for the rest of his life. Stoned on three hundred micrograms of LSD, Leary looked out from the stage, which was covered with oriental rugs, and into a crowd of twenty thousand furry freaks gathered under a brilliant winter sun. “Drop out of high school. Drop out of college,” he said. “Drop out, junior executive. Drop out, senior executive. Tune in, turn on, and drop out!”

  His messianic appearance at the counterculture classic capped an incredible thirteen months in the life of Leary. It began with his arrest at the Mexican border in December 1965 and his conviction four months later, and continued with him testifying before a U.S. Congress determined to stamp out the burgeoning LSD subculture. In June 1966, at an LSD conference in San Francisco, the event at which Huston Smith would sound his cautionary note on the direction of the psychedelic movement, Leary was as enthusiastic as ever. He predicted that within one generation the University of California at Berkeley would have a Department of Psychedelic Studies.

  His advice that the youth of America “drop out” would prove to be the most controversial component of that counterculture trilogy, and it did little to bring about a “gathering of the tribes.” Many people assume that the tribal references in the Human Be-In promotional material referred to the burgeoning interest in Native American spirituality among the baby boom generation. That’s only half true. The gathering in Golden Gate Park was also a strategic move designed to bring together the “hippie” and “political” wings of the youth movement. The event was announced in the San Francisco Oracle, an underground newspaper that chronicled the midsixties psychedelic scene in San Francisco like no other journal of its time. It called for a coming together of “Berkeley political activists and the hip community and San Francisco’s spiritual generation and contingents from the emerging revolutionary generation all over California.” These were the tribes that were to ecstatically come together in a “union of love and activism previously separated by categorical dogma and label mongering.”

  Writing in the next issue of the Oracle, Stephen Levine described the actual scene at the Human Be-In. “Bare foot girls in priest’s cloaks, madras saris, and corduroy. Teenage braves stripped to the waist in a hot winter sun. Folksingers charting mountain ranges in their imaginations. Shamans and motorcyclists, lovers and voyeurs, cowboys and Indians, cloud of gold-yellow incense geysers from the stage.”

  Levine had come to San Francisco from New York in 1964, stopping first in Mexico to kick a heroin habit he’d picked up back in Greenwich Village. He would later emerge as a fellow traveler with Richard Alpert and become a popular writer and meditation teacher in his own right. “Psychedelics were a godsend,” he would later say. “They showed people another level in themselves that they thought was just a fairy tale.”

  Leary’s self-appointed role as the messiah of that psychedelic godsend did not go unquestioned. Many felt Tim had gone overboard and was bringing on the heat. Some felt Leary’s main motivation was his own fame and fortune. Peace-movement activists called for demonstrations against Leary and his apolitical stand. Writing in Ramparts magazine, journalist Warren Hinkle mocked Leary as the “pretender to the hippie throne.” At one public appearance, a woman pelted Leary with eggs, yelling, “You ruined my son with your devil drugs!” Even Allen Ginsberg, who worked with Leary in the early days of the Harvard campaign and shared the stage with him at the Human Be-In, was starting to question Tim’s sloganeering. He put Leary on the spot during a debate held on the Sausalito houseboat of Alan Watts one month after the Human Be-In. “Everybody in Berkeley,” Ginsberg said, “is all bugged because they say this drop-out thing really doesn’t mean anything, that what you’re gonna cultivate is a lot of freaked-out hippies goofing around and throwing bottles through windows when they flip out on LSD.”

  But Leary could not be stopped. He was determined to secure his position as the high priest of the LSD movement. He knew he needed the news media to spread the psychedelic gospel, and journalists knew they needed Leary to figure out whatever it was that was going on in the early years of the counterculture. Leary’s concern for public relations was on display the night following the Human Be-In in San Francisco, when he ran out to get an early edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. He rushed the newspaper over to an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury area where Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and others were in the midst of a postcelebration party.

  Leary handed the newspaper to Ginsberg, who read the story, headlined “HIPPIES RUN WILD,” and let out a moan. “That’s ridiculous,” Ginsberg complained. “Like, it was an aesthetically very good scene. They should have sent an art critic.”

  Ginsberg picked up the phone and called the newspaper to register his complaint with the night editor at the Chronicle.

  “What is this nonsense about hippies running wild?” Ginsberg asked the befuddled editor. “Your story has the kind of inaccuracy of tone and language that’s poisoning the community. Is that what you want to do?”

  “We sent our hippiest reporter,” the night editor replied.

  “I don’t know what kind of hippies you’ve got over there at your place,” Ginsberg said, chuckling. “Besides, what is this ‘hippie’ business? What does ‘hippie’ mean, anyway? These kids aren’t hippies—they’re seekers. Today was a serious religious occasion.”

  Ginsberg promised to go over to the newspaper first thing Monday morning and talk to the reporter about doing a more accurate follow-up story. The editor said that would be fine. They’d see the famous poet at the Chronicle offices on Monday.

  “Well, peace,” Ginsberg said, hanging up the phone.

  Ginsberg, still dressed all in white, was sitting on a mattress in the meditation room in the apartment of Michael Bowen, one of the Be-In organizers. The mattress and the wall behind him were covered with Indian bedspreads. Sitting next to him was Gary Snyder, who had beads hanging over his turtleneck sweater. Most of the people at the party were still in their Be-In costumes, except for Leary, who had taken off his loose white garments and changed into a sports jacket and trousers. That wardrobe change made him look more professorial when the television news crew showed up dragging klieg lights and cables into Bowen’s apartment.

  The cameraman turned away from Leary and held a light meter up to Ginsberg’s face. Here was a guy with a bushy black beard, love beads, and white robes. Better visuals for a TV news segment on the hippies.

  The poet groaned at the TV crew. “Man,” he said, looking at Bowen, “it’s bad enough that you have a telephone in your meditation room.”

  Ginsberg lightened up when the TV reporter offered his take on the day’s festivities. “I don’t know why,” the television guy said, “but this whole day strikes me as absolutely sane and right and beautiful. You guys must have put something in my tea.”

  “What’s so insane about a little peace and harmony?” Ginsberg replied. “Thousands of people came to the park today, just so they could relate to each other—as dharma beings. All sorts of people—poets, children, even Hell’s Angels. People are lonely. It’s strange to be in a body.”

  Gary Snyder nodded. “People are groovy,” he said.

  Ginsberg looked into the television camera. “It was very Eden-like today,” he said. “Kind of like Blake’s vision of Eden. Music. Babies. People just sort of floating around having a good time and everybody happy and smiling and touching and turning each other on and a lot of groovy chicks all dressed up in their
best clothes and—”

  “But will it last?” the reporter asked.

  “How do I know?” Ginsberg said. “And who cares?”

  Leary’s media strategy for the promotion of LSD was devised with an assist from Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian communications theorist and the influential author of The Medium Is the Message. Over lunch at the Plaza Hotel in New York, McLuhan critiqued Leary’s dreary appearance before two Senate subcommittees. Keep your message positive, McLuhan advised, and keep smiling. “Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage. Never complain or appear angry,” he told Tim. “You must be known for your smile.” Leary listened to McLuhan, and became a major American media personality. Pictures of him appeared in countless newspapers during the mid-1960s and into the 1970s, and the most striking thing about that photo record is how Timothy always has this radiant smile spread across his face. He may be getting arrested. He may have just been hit with a thirty-year prison sentence. But he’s always smiling.

  Leary’s major media coup of 1966 was a lengthy interview published in the September issue of Playboy, in the same edition that featured a photo spread about the topless nightclub scene that had erupted in the North Beach entertainment district of San Francisco. The Playboy interviewer had come to Millbrook to meet with Leary during the spring, and he found him “reciting Hindu morning prayers with a group of guests in the kitchen of the 64-room mansion.” Leary led his guest up to the third-floor library, through an open window and onto a mattress placed on the tin roof of a second-story bay window. They made themselves comfortable on the double-width mattress, listening to the song of a chickadee in a nearby tree before beginning their conversation. Leary opened his shirt to the warm sun, wiggled the toes of his bare feet, and awaited the first question.

  PLAYBOY: How many times have you used LSD, Dr. Leary?

  LEARY: Up to this moment, I’ve had 311 psychedelic sessions. . . .

  PLAYBOY: We’ve heard about sessions in which couples make love for hours on end, to the point of exhaustion, but never seem to reach exhaustion. Is that true?

  LEARY: Inevitably. . . .

  PLAYBOY: How often have you made love under the influence of LSD?

  LEARY: Every time I’ve taken it. In fact, that is what the LSD experience is all about. Merging, yielding, flowing, union, communion. It’s all lovemaking. You make love with candlelight, with sound waves from a record player, with a bowl of fruit on the table, with the trees. You’re in pulsating harmony with all the energy around you.

  PLAYBOY: Including that of a woman?

  LEARY: The three inevitable goals of the LSD session are to discover and make love with God, to discover and make love with yourself, and to discover and make love with a woman. . . .

  PLAYBOY: According to some reports, LSD can trigger the acting out of latent homosexual impulses in ostensibly heterosexual men and women. Is there any truth to that, in your opinion?

  LEARY: On the contrary, the fact is that LSD is a specific cure for homosexuality. It’s well known that most sexual perversions are the result not of biological binds but of freaky, dislocating childhood experiences of one kind or another. Consequently, it’s not surprising that we’ve had many cases of long-term homosexuals who, under LSD, discover that they are not only genitally but genetically male, that they are basically attracted to females. The most famous and public of such cases is that of Allen Ginsberg who has openly stated that the first time he turned on to women was during an LSD session several years ago. But this is only one of many such cases. . . .

  PLAYBOY: We’ve heard that some women who ordinarily have difficulty achieving orgasm find themselves capable of multiple orgasms under LSD. Is that true?

  LEARY: In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms. . . .

  PLAYBOY: Have you allowed or encouraged [your two children] to use marijuana and LSD?

  LEARY: Yes, I have no objection to them expanding their consciousness through the use of sacramental substances in accord with their spiritual growth and well being. . . .

  PLAYBOY: How will this psychedelic regime enrich human life?

  LEARY: It will enable each person to realize that he is not a game-playing robot put on this planet to be given a Social Security number and to be spun on the assembly line of school, college, career, insurance, funeral, goodbye. . . . Man is going to have to explore the infinity of inner space, to discover the terror and adventure and ecstasy that lie within us all.”

  Those were just a few of the many provocative statements Leary made in the lengthy interview, which shocked even the most sympathetic scientists studying the effects of LSD. It would be cited by psychedelic research proponents as one of the many Leary actions that helped bring a total federal ban on LSD research. Did Timothy Leary really mean what he said in the Playboy interview? What was he really up to? Was he just playing the trickster? Late in his life, Leary looked back on everything he’d said over the years and compared his level of truthfulness to the batting average of major-league baseball players. “About a third of what I’ve said is just flat out bullshit,” he told a friend. “About a third of what I’ve said is just dead wrong. But a third of what I’ve said have been home runs. So I’m batting .333, which puts me in the Hall of Fame.”

  By the summer of 1966, Leary felt like he had nothing to lose. He was already facing a thirty-year prison sentence that, at the age of forty-five, was basically a life sentence. He told Playboy, “Since there is hardly anything the middle-aged, middle-class authority can do to me—and since the secret is out anyway among the young—I am free at this moment to say what we’ve never said before: that sexual ecstasy is the basic reason for the LSD boom.”

  But there was more that America could and would do to Timothy Leary.

  Seeker: San Francisco, California Summer 1966

  It was way past midnight on one of those magic nights at the Fillmore. The Jefferson Airplane was jamming with the Grateful Dead, about halfway into an extended version of the Wilson Pickett tune “Gonna Wait ’til the Midnight Hour,” when Joan Baez, who was in the audience, jumped onstage and started singing along with them. I’m gonna wait ’til the midnight hour. That’s when my love comes tumblin’ down. Richard Alpert was dancing wildly on the ballroom floor, staring lovingly into the eyes of Caroline Winter, a young hippie girl he’d met earlier that evening. They were spinning around together, stoned out of their minds, as hundreds of revelers formed a human chain and danced around them. Colors swirled. Minds did, too. “Look at those faces shine,” Alpert screamed over the music, flashing a wide grin at his dance partner. “They’re angels! Look! Look at the wings. They’re angels!”

  Richard Alpert settled into the swinging San Francisco scene the year before Leary finally made his messianic appearance at the Human Be-In. On the night Alpert met Caroline Winter, these concerts, celebrations, dance parties at the Fillmore Auditorium, an old ballroom on Geary Street, had been happening for about six months. They were the brainchild of a young music promoter named Bill Graham, and they were something new. “Acid Rock” was born amid the early flowering of the hippie scene in little pockets around the San Francisco Bay, but it took root in this ballroom and in the nearby Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco. The old music scene in San Francisco had been a few jazz clubs and poetry-reading venues and coffee houses frequented by the Beats. This was different. The drugs were different. Red wine was so yesterday. Orange sunshine was today, here and now. It fueled these Dionysian rites at the Fillmore, starting with the first concert on December 10, 1965—a benefit in support of the San Francisco Mime Troupe that featured the Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and the John Handy Quintet.

  On this night, in July 1966, the bands that came to personify the San Francisco sound—the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead—were sharing the bill. For Caroline Winter, who would soon become Richard Alpert’s first and only steady girlfriend, it was the beginning of one of those soon-to-be-infamous, long,
strange trips.

  Caroline was born in England in the middle of World War II. She grew up in the aftermath of those devastating years, when British society seemed exhausted, gloomy, and class ridden. Sure, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones livened things up during her college years, but Caroline was ready for something completely different. After college, she was accepted into graduate school in England, but on a whim she decided to head out to California instead. She arrived in Berkeley in September 1965.

  She landed in town with very little money and took the first job she could find, in a local real-estate office. Her life changed one afternoon when some guys from a band called the Warlocks came by looking to rent a place where they could rehearse. Caroline fell in with the band, which was about to change its name. Inspired, like Leary and Alpert, by an ancient Buddhist tome, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the band started calling itself the Grateful Dead. They soon outgrew their Berkeley studio and moved across the bay into an old Victorian at 710 Ashbury Street, where the Dead quickly became the house band for the psychedelic subculture that took root in the Haight.

  On this summer night, Caroline arrived early at the Fillmore. She entered the auditorium on Geary Street, walking up a staircase to a little ticket booth, turned left, then up some more stairs to the second floor. Outside the ballroom, the entry hall was lined with glowing psychedelic posters advertising the coming attractions. Lenny Bruce had appeared the previous month, sharing the bill with the Mothers of Invention. In the coming week, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg would share the stage with Sopwith Camel. Caroline turned away from the posters and headed into the ballroom, where she was intercepted by Owsley Stanley.

  That would be Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the underground chemist who’d gotten his start with the Grateful Dead. Owsley, as he was called, was the son of a government attorney and grandson of a U.S. senator from Kentucky. After a stint in the U.S. Air Force, he met Melissa Cargill, a UC Berkeley chemistry major who helped him produce his first batch of pure, powerful LSD. Owsley’s acid became the central sacrament for the tribe gathering around the Dead. Operating out of a warehouse in Point Richmond, a town on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, they churned out nearly four million hits of acid during the mid-1960s.