Alpert’s Newton neighbors had never seen anything like it: cars coming and going at all hours, rock music blasting from open windows. The city council heard complaints; the Boston Herald announced, “BIG ‘FAMILY’ STIRS PROTEST: MEN DO THE DISHES IN NEWTON COMMUNE.” The entire operation picked up stakes and moved to a mansion owned by Peggy Hitchcock’s family, a vast estate in Millbrook, New York, which Ralph Metzner later described as “an ever-changing scene of magic and creativity.” But internal disputes would eventually rip apart the community, and Alpert ditched the scene, more confused than ever.
Disillusioned with Leary, Millbrook, and, to an extent, hallucinogens too, he decided to seek answers outside the culture he was raised in. Alpert wanted to find out if Eastern holy men could tell him what LSD actually was. He spent three months wandering the Middle East with a bottle of the drug before landing in Nepal with full-blown depression. His attempts to have spiritual masters decode LSD had failed. He kept trying to explain his interesting backstory to his guide, Bhagwan Das, who would respond: “Don’t think about the past. Just be here now.” Bhagwan Das led Alpert to a valley in the shadow of the Himalayas, where they found a small man in his sixties, wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by a small group of followers. Bhagwan Dass fell at the feet of Neem Karoli Baba. Alpert expected to be disappointed. Then the guru told him that he, Alpert, had been thinking of his mother, who had died from a bloated stomach, the night before. It was true. Spellbound, the ex–Harvard professor burst into tears.
“Maharaji indicated he wanted to try LSD,” Alpert said. “I didn’t know if that was wise because he was old. One pill would have been enough for a person like me. He took all the pills at once. Nothing happened. He didn’t have any reaction. He was saying, ‘It’s in you.’” For Alpert, this was the first time he witnessed someone take acid and emerge believing that godliness remained inherently inside the self—no drug necessary. Maharaji christened him Ram Dass, servant of God. Months passed, his beard grew. “You make many people laugh in America?” Maharaji asked him one day. It was time to go home.
When he stepped off the plane at Logan Airport in late 1968, he didn’t resemble the man who had departed for India the year before. Barefoot and bearded and wearing a robe, he didn’t even have the same name. Home at last, Ram Dass just wanted to “sort of be by myself in a cabin on my father’s farm and just live like I lived in India.” But driving his father’s Cadillac to pick up some groceries in a small New Hampshire town, he ran into some kids trying to score acid.
Ram Dass asked why they were asking. “Well, we see a Cadillac from Massachusetts and a guy that looks like you and we assumed. We were waiting for a connection to come into town—we assumed you’re it.”
“I’m not that kind of connection anymore,” Ram Dass told the kids.
“Well,” one of them said, confused, “what kind of connection are you?” They listened, rapt, as he described his experiences in India. “They came to the house and then they brought their friends and then they brought their parents and the ministers and the whole thing developed until pretty soon 200 to 300 people were coming every weekend just to hang out and talk about spirit and stuff like that,” Ram Dass said.
“The family felt that to some extent it was an invasion of our privacy,” William Alpert, his brother, admitted, in the documentary Ram Dass: Fierce Grace. “On the other hand we realized that Richard was doing a very good thing here. I know my mother-in-law, for example, was absolutely in love with him. She said, ‘Whenever you have him over the house, please let me be there. I just find it so peaceful to be with him.’”
The press delighted in the story of the notorious Harvard drug prof turned guru. Reporter Robert Taylor followed Ram Dass around for a Globe profile, initially planning to unveil a fraud. Instead he found one of “the most engaging, lucid, and extraordinary persons I ever encountered and I am still deeply stirred by his splendid human qualities.”
“At Harvard I was a Good Guy. Then a Bad Guy. Then a Bad Good Guy,” Ram Dass told him. “Now I’m almost back to being a Good Guy again.”
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• • •
AS LSD USAGE skyrocketed in the United States, fewer users kept tabs on set and setting. Many didn’t know the dosage of what they were ingesting, or if it was even LSD in the first place. The backlash over psychedelics grew, until 1966, when Senator Thomas J. Dodd called for a Senate subcommittee to look into regulating the drug. Leary was brought in as an expert witness. Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy went on the attack, asking him to detail the drug’s harmful effects. “Sir, the motor car is dangerous if used improperly,” Leary told the subcommittee. “Human stupidity and ignorance is the only danger human beings face in this world.” The New York Times headline made it sound like Leary was against his own cause: “LEARY SEES CRISIS IN USE OF LSD.”
“The key to your work is advertising,” media critic Marshall McLuhan advised him over lunch, after hearing his less-than-stellar testimony. “You’re promoting a product. The new and improved accelerated brain. You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest. Associate LSD with all the good things that the brain can produce.” From now on, he always had to smile when in public: “Wave reassuringly. Radiate courage. Never complain or appear angry . . . you must be known for your smile.” It worked: The image of a smiling Leary, even when handcuffed, is what most people remember to this day. All he needed now was a slogan, which he landed on a few days later while taking a shower: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Leary’s campaign for expanded consciousness brought him back to Cambridge in 1967. He agreed to debate MIT professor Jerome Lettvin and have the whole event filmed for WGBH, airing with the title LSD—Lettvin vs. Leary. Lettvin, a frequent guest on What’s Happening, Mr. Silver?, was a boisterous, opinionated crowd-pleaser. At first, the two agreed that banning drugs outright would create a black market and increase demand. But tension mounted, culminating in Lettvin’s literally calling bullshit (the word aired, unedited) on some of Leary’s claims.
He hit a low point in 1968. “A year ago LSD was almost as big as Tim Leary,” wrote the Democrat and Chronicle. “Today they are both terribly vieux chapeau.” Even media institutions once on Leary’s side were now taking potshots at him. Reviewing his latest book, High Priest, The New Republic declared that “his rhetoric has a patina of phoniness.” The Globe hit even harder: “Leary is a pathetic pioneer, involved in a crusade that must finally destroy him, not because of the degenerative dangers in LSD, but because of the kookie manner in which he has thrown his challenge at society.” Even Mad magazine jumped in, giving his six-word mantra a dark twist: TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP DEAD.
The Staggers-Dodd Bill passed in October, making LSD illegal in the United States. A few months later, Leary was arrested for marijuana possession in Laguna Beach, for which he would receive a ten-year sentence.
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• • •
BACK IN CAMBRIDGE in 1964, Leary and Alpert had left a woman named Lisa Bieberman in charge of the boring details as they spent more time at the Millbrook commune. As a Radcliffe math and philosophy student, Bieberman had been by the pair’s side since the beginning. “I’d always wanted to have a mystical experience,” she told the Crimson. “I began to hang around Leary’s office after classes, licking envelopes, typing letters, and running errands. And I faithfully read all the papers they put out.” When Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom, to continue their work without Harvard’s assistance, they made Bieberman their office manager. Bieberman stayed the course while everyone else moved into more decadent territory. She wanted to provide sensible resources for potential trippers. “Bieberman was the ultimate responsible entheogen user,” Joyce Milton recalled. “A highly spiritual person, she took drugs only as an aid to meditation. The Millbrook crowd considered her boring.” Andrew Weil remembers her differently. “She was a wild woman, a staunch sup
porter of Leary and IFIF, often caricatured by Leary’s critics,” he says. “Very outspoken.”
While Leary, Alpert, and Metzner were writing a manuscript based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bieberman took a more practical approach to helping people. In 1963, she opened the Psychedelic Information Center in Harvard Square, publishing the Psychedelic Information Center Bulletin—the PIC Bulletin for short. Prior to Bieberman’s bulletin, the only local source of drug-related information available was a woozy, anonymous newsletter titled Leaves of Grass.
PIC’s services, it turned out, were high in demand. Her phone would ring at two a.m., the callers wanting to know “When does this stuff wear off?” or what to do when the cops pick up your girlfriend with 40 kilos of pot. These cries for help inspired Bieberman’s Psychedelic Telephone Directory, a simple list of friendly people you could call if you got into trouble. “There should be someone more appropriate to phone than your mother, your ex-girl, your psychiatrist, or the President,” she said. For fifty cents, you could purchase a large list of names and numbers that were willing to pick up your call and talk you down from a terrifying trip.
Bieberman’s no-nonsense approach now seems ripe for parody. She made an educational film titled LSD: You Are Not a Bird, and published a chart that asked “How High Are You?” As Leary and Alpert coated all of their statements with Eastern mysticism, Bieberman made sure her writing wouldn’t be out of place in a high school nurse’s office. In her definitive publication, Session Games People Play: A Manual for the Use of LSD, she laid out the possible traps one might encounter in the middle of a trip—and a guide to escaping them. “I wanted to make the drug available to people who had never taken it,” she wrote.
Her quest to bestow the miracle chemical on the uninitiated ended abruptly in 1966 when Bieberman was busted for sending LSD through the mail. The Crimson reported that it was the first trial in New England on such charges. Bieberman was found guilty on all four counts, the penalty for which could include a four-year prison sentence, but when it came time for her sentencing, the judge was lenient: “If I were you I would disassociate myself from Dr. Leary’s group and think for myself,” he said. She was given a year’s suspended jail sentence.
Bieberman already sensed how corrupt the movement had become. “Flower power is no substitute for integrity,” she wrote, describing the vacant dropouts who loitered outside the Psychedelic Information Center. Eulogizing a friend in the pages of the PIC Bulletin, she noted, “Jim belonged to a time when we thought the world could be enlightened just by flooding it with acid.”
By 1968, she was ready for a do-over. She wrote a long feature for the Globe on the “betrayal and promise” of the psychedelic experience, exposing what Leary and his followers had become. “People have left Millbrook because their marriages broke up, because they were falsely accused by Leary of being heroin addicts, because they ‘freaked out’ on LSD, because they sensed that the neuroses they went there to cure were getting worse instead of better, or because Leary just got tired of them.” In her estimation, the psychedelic establishment “brainwashed” kids into thinking they were part of a revolution, and she no longer wanted any part of it. (Leary shot back in his book The Politics of Ecstasy, calling Bieberman “a pure-essence eccentric paranoid in the grand tradition of bullheaded, nutty women.”)
She published one more article on psychedelics, in late 1968, which reads like a Dear John to the substance that changed her life. In her piece, Bieberman makes the unlikely argument that the LSD experience is actually simple. “It is not bizarre, but clear,” she wrote. The experience did nothing more than let the user be certain of several specific truths, which she outlined beautifully and succinctly, starting with:
The world is real;
The God who created it is alive, and will stay that way;
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• • •
THE GOD WHO CREATED IT IS ALIVE, and will stay that way. But what happens when users start believing they’re the creator?
Ram Dass recounted a visit to a mental asylum. “I met a patient there who told me he was God. I said to him, ‘So am I.’ He was quite upset because he wanted to be the only one.
“You see, we all want to be God. But the fact is we are all God.”
It seems fitting that Mel Lyman first got the idea that he might be God at the former Richard Alpert’s Newton home in the summer of 1963.
Charles Giuliano remembers those sojourns to 23 Kenwood clearly. “Mel always had that kind of messianic side to him even before Kenwood,” he says. “He had climbed the mountain and had the tablets.” Lyman, Giuliano, and John Kostick were all living in a house together in Waltham when Mel began to talk about the place he had been visiting in Newton to acquire morning glory seeds. The two roommates followed Lyman, stunned that they could simply walk through the front door. Alpert and Leary’s Harvard scandal had been all over the papers that spring—they were infamous. Giuliano recalls staring awestruck at a telegram from Leary in Mexico affixed to the fridge, instructing Richard Alpert to send “the best cats to Mexico.”
Giuliano recalls one man living there who would trip and take on the persona of Tarzan the Ape Man, climbing up trees in the backyard. Richard Alpert was there too, of course, but it was Bruce Conner, a powerhouse renaissance artist working in collage, film, and painting, who made the deepest impression. “Very trippy, very pranky, very complicated,” Giuliano says. “I remember him being in the basement of Kenwood editing movies and some of those movies becoming some of the most important films of that time.” Years later, on the occasion of his 2016 MOMA retrospective, The New York Times would concur, calling him “one of the great outliers of American art.” His 1962 film Cosmic Ray was an underground hit, and some see him as the father of MTV, for his video work with artists like Devo.
Winding up in Massachusetts after time spent in Mexico, Conner got close to Lyman and his folk music circle. Unable to find like-minded visual artists in the area, he performed with Jim Kweskin and Geoff Muldaur at Club 47, sometimes “flailing about” on harmonica, or using his own conceptual scores.
Conner recalled his first encounter with Lyman. “[He] was there three or four nights a week at the coffee grinder, grinding up [morning glory] seeds from this 500-pound bag we had in the kitchen,” he told Rolling Stone. “And everybody was getting fucked up. Mel just had them swallow the seeds, not soak them and everything the way it said in Anthropological Review, and all these people were falling down on their faces and hemorrhaging and falling down in the bathroom and talking about how great it was afterwards.” Eventually, Lyman and Conner got around to discussing God and cosmic consciousness. From the Rolling Stone exposé:
“And I told Mel one of my private theories. I said that mostly what people do when they talk about God is a projection of what they think God is, and it always comes down to a projection from a person. So the best way to find out what God is is to say you’re God yourself. And maybe the first way to do this was if somebody was on the phone and they said, ‘Oh my God!’ and then you say, ‘Yes? What is it?’ And you could just go on from there.
“I didn’t think about it after that,” said Conner. “It was just an idea—I wasn’t gonna use it myself. But in retrospect, I figure Mel must have used it.”*
* * *
• • •
“IT WAS THE ERA OF THE BODHISATTVAS,” Giuliano says. “Everyone at that time had dropped acid, and seen God, and thought they were the godhead. EVERY SINGLE PERSON you encountered was, to some extent, a deity.” Even a member of Van Morrison’s Boston band experienced this phenomenon—without acid. During the manic episode that led flutist John Payne to end up at McLean Hospital, the Harvard student had the idea that he might in fact be God.* “Johnny turned on the radio by his bed and instructed it to go faster or slower, and he found the radio would go faster or slower at his command, and he became frightened by the power,” Payne’s sister Sarah recalled in her
memoir.
“Don’t crucify me!” he shouted. “I came here searching for truth, veritas, and Harvard doesn’t know what veritas is!”
Meanwhile, in the letters section of Avatar, readers interrogated Lyman on the truth of his continued declarations of deityhood. One reader described a recent acid-induced religious experience wherein Mel Lyman appeared inside a Copley Square church as the face of God. “WHAT GIVES?” the reader demanded. “Either you’ve got me believing your egotistical ideas or maybe you really are him?!?!”
“I really am him,” Lyman replied. “Shouldn’t be so hard to take, imagine how it makes ME feel.”
* * *
• • •
VAN MORRISON WASN’T trying to trigger spiritual conversions with his new songs. But for producer Lewis Merenstein, something about the title track of Astral Weeks almost did.
“It was Van, alone with a guitar, and he played ‘Astral Weeks’ the song for me right then and there,” Merenstein says. “I got the distinct feeling that he was going back in time, going back to be born again, and it moved me, spiritually, quite a bit.” What he sang for Merenstein was closer to something you’d hear at Club 47 than on a psychedelic Bosstown Sound record, but on another level, the deceptively simple song seemed like something entirely original. Astral Weeks minted its own genre.
“It’s all coded spirituality,” Merenstein insists. “The whole album. That’s why people are so mystified by it. Who is born again? Who is Madame George?* The mystery grows because it’s all a spiritual quest that is essentially unknowable. The radio won’t play songs about Jesus or spirituality, you know.” Merenstein explains that had he traveled to Boston six months earlier or later, the mystery and power of the song might have been lost on him. He might have shrugged and asked, “What does that even mean?” He tells me, “It hit me right where I was in that period of my life.”
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