1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (39 page)

Neuroscientist Marc Lewis wrote in
Newsweek
that LSD “goes to work in the brain by blocking serotonin receptors. Serotonin’s job is to reduce the firing rate of neurons that get too excited because of the volume or intensity of incoming information. Serotonin filters out unwanted noise, and normal brains rely on that. So by blocking serotonin, LSD allows information to flow through the brain unchecked. It opens up the floodgates—what author Aldous Huxley called
The Doors of Perception
.”
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Sandoz Laboratories marketed the drug to the psychiatric community for therapeutic use. Psychiatrists experimented to see if the drug could treat alcoholism or mental disorders such as schizophrenia. LSD was legal, and Sandoz distributed it for free to anyone with proof that they were conducting medical research, as long as they shared whatever results they found.

The CIA thought LSD could be used to make the enemy disoriented and vulnerable, and perhaps serve as a tool for interrogation and brainwashing. To explore its efficacy as a truth serum, the CIA’s Project MKUltra set up brothels in San Francisco and Greenwich Village, where prostitutes paid by the government served drinks dosed with LSD to unsuspecting johns while CIA agents watched from behind two-way mirrors and recorded the results.
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The CIA devised the setup in part because it believed the men would be too embarrassed to talk about where they had been. These “safe houses” operated for over a decade.
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But by the end of the year, as the hippie counterculture’s experiments with LSD began to make headlines, the CIA decided to close down operations in San Francisco. Officials became concerned that their reputation would be tarnished if word leaked out, since the subjects of their experiment had not given informed consent.
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The New York safe house was closed the following year. By this time, the Agency had determined that LSD’s effects were too unpredictable to serve as a reliable truth serum. The CIA’s program was revealed in 1974, in the hearings held by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller to investigate past CIA activity. Senator Edward Kennedy’s subcommittee focused on MKUltra.

The most famous acid proselytizers were two former Harvard professors named Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (who would later change his name to Ram Dass and, in 1971, publish
Be Here Now
, a book on spirituality and yoga). Leary and Alpert believed that LSD shared the ability to induce religious experiences, along with the mescaline in the peyote cactuses used in Native American sweat lodge rituals, the DMT in the ayahuasca brew drunk by Amazonian shamans, and the psilocybin found in two hundred kinds of mushrooms. Their entourage was based in Millbrook, New York, in the sixty-four-room estate owned by William Mellon Hitchcock, the grandson of the founder of Gulf Oil. In Millbrook, Leary introduced the drug to visiting artists and politicians, believing that if society’s elite were enlightened, humanity could be steered toward Eden. They took LSD in the morning and tripped until late afternoon, often playing Indian music and meditating.

Sometimes their trips threatened to become bad ones, and in those instances Leary turned to
The Doors of Perception
for advice. Huxley wrote that he could be calmed from panic if someone was there to remind him of the Clear Light referenced in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Leary, Alpert, and psychologist Ralph Metzner developed the practice into a guide for LSD users they called
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
dedicated to Huxley. The word
psychedelic
itself was invented by Huxley (with the help of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond) to describe the acid experience. The word is derived by combining the Greek words for “mind” (
psyche
) and “to reveal, make visible” (
deloun
).

On the West Coast, Stanford creative writing student Ken Kesey had taken part in an experiment that, unbeknownst to him, was funded by MKUltra. A psychology grad student told him that the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital was paying volunteers seventy-five dollars a day to take drugs that mimicked psychosis in order to study their effects. Kesey took part, and he liked the drugs so much that he started sneaking them out and sharing them with his friends. He got a job as a night aide at the hospital’s psychiatric ward and wrote
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
based on his experiences there.

He used his profits to buy a school bus, which he and his gang, called the Merry Pranksters, painted like a Day-Glo Jackson Pollock explosion. They cut out a hole so they could sit on the roof, wired the bus for sound, painted “FURTHUR” (
sic
) above the windshield, and took off on a cross-country trip. The bus driver was Kesey’s friend Neal Cassady, the real-life hero of Kerouac’s
On the Road
, thus turning the trip into a Technicolor sequel to the Beat classic, with the Pranksters the missing link between the beatniks and the hippies. Their bus ride inspired the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” the Doors’ “The End,” and the Who’s “Magic Bus.” Tom Wolfe immortalized the Pranksters in the non-fiction book
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
.

Kesey bought property in the redwood forest of La Honda, California, forty-five miles south of San Francisco, and it was there the Pranksters spent much of 1965 trying to assemble a movie out of the sixteen-millimeter footage they had shot during their trip, but it would remain unfinished until documentarians used it in 2011 for the feature
Magic Trip
. Mainly, they hosted a series of Saturday night acid parties, frequented by counterculture luminaries such as Cassady’s close friend Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg himself had been given acid at Stanford, in experiments funded by the CIA in 1959. He, in turn, gave the drug to bebop musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.
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The woods around Kesey’s place were filled with trees painted fluorescent colors and strung with black lights. Spotlights were placed two hundred feet up in redwoods, and artwork such as random glued-together doll parts and a hanged man sculpture swayed from the branches. Speakers blasted music and weird sound effects. A metal sculpture of nude figures, called
Boise’s Thunder Machine
, was mic’d to create a deafening echo if you hit it. It was the Burning Man Festival twenty-one years ahead of time.

“The most bizarre [party] was when we invited Kenneth Anger and the San Francisco diabolists out for Mother’s Day,” Kesey recalled. Prankster Page Browning got a hen and “put its head on the stump and chopped the head off. Page threw the chicken, still alive and flopping, right into the audience. Feathers and blood and squawking and people jumping and screaming and all these diabolists and Kenneth Anger got up and left. They didn’t think it was funny at all. We thought we were paying them the sort of honor they would expect. We out-eviled them. It all had that acid edge to it of ‘This is something that might count.’ We might conjure up some 80-foot demon that roared around. As Stewart Brand said, ‘There was always a whiff of danger to it.’”
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It was journalist Hunter S. Thompson who was indirectly responsible for the arrival of the world’s most notorious bikers at La Honda. At the time, Thompson was writing
Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs
, having formed an edgy relationship with them. Some of them admired his chutzpah and shared his love of guns and flooring motorbikes down the Pacific Coast Highway at 3:00 a.m. They thought he’d offer a corrective to what they perceived as slanderous media coverage of them (especially stories of rape). Most important, he kept them plied with free beer.

Thompson looked up to the already famous Kesey, whom he’d met at a TV roundtable show for writers in San Francisco that summer. They went for beer afterward, and then Thompson said he had to go meet the Angels, and invited Kesey along. Kesey in turn invited the Wild Ones to La Honda, though Thompson didn’t think it was necessarily a good idea. They arrived on August 7 amid the dancing beatniks, writers, intellectuals, and grad students. The stereo blasted the Beatles, the Stones, and Ray Charles, as Ginsberg wrote in his poem “First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels.”
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Cop cars were parked at the edge of the property. Kesey and fourteen other Pranksters had been busted for pot in April. LSD was legal, though, and the cops couldn’t enter Kesey’s home, because they didn’t have a warrant, but they would search everyone as soon as they left the premises.

One of the most infamous moments in counterculture history happened at that weekend’s party, alluded to obliquely in both Wolfe and Thompson’s books in a way that implied that Cassady’s girlfriend, Anne Murphy, was gang-raped by the Hells Angels. But both she and the biography
Neal Cassady: The Fast Life of a Beat Hero
, by David Sandison and Graham Vickers, gave a more nuanced recount. Murphy lived a wild life: struggled with thoughts of suicide, shot methamphetamine, and participated in Hollywood orgies with as many as thirty participants. She was desperately in love with Cassady, but he saw other women concurrently. Wrote Sandison and Vickers, “Her bitter response was to slip into an ambient state of drugs and sexual promiscuity while still seeing Neal from time to time. He called her Superslut. ‘I kind of liked that, I recall,’ she later admitted.”
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At La Honda, Cassady was seeing two other women besides Anne, so when the Angels arrived, she slipped off to be, as she put it, “joyously” gangbanged by many of them.
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They brought in Cassady, and he participated as well. Afterward, they handed her a card that read, “You have just been assisted by a member of the Hells Angels, Oakland Chapter.” Cassady staggered out, naked, to curse at the police while being fellated by a new woman before leaving on a road trip the next day. At Kesey’s parties, the line between ecstasy and madness was nonexistent. One Prankster, Cathy “Stark Naked” Casamo, was institutionalized after her time “on the bus,” and another, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, also needed psychiatric treatment.

*   *   *

The Haight-Ashbury hippie
scene had its roots in the Cabale Creamery, a beatnik/folk music coffeehouse in Berkeley cofounded by Chandler A. Laughlin III. For the last two years, Laughlin and about fifty of his friends had been emulating Native American peyote ceremonies. On June 29 he opened the Red Dog Saloon in the mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, four hours northeast of San Francisco—out in the middle of nowhere, so they could do what they wanted. The era’s first psychedelic rock poster, by George Hunter and Mark Ferguson, promised the evening would be “The Limit of the Marvelous.”

Hunter and Ferguson, who played in the Red Dog’s house band, the Charlatans, wanted to embrace a uniquely American style, in rebellion against the British Invasion. They dressed in nineteenth-century Victorian clothing from old Westerns, garb that fit with the saloon. They also carried guns, not just because of the Wild West pose but for self-defense; after all, they were longhairs far away from San Francisco.
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The Charlatans played blues, country, and folk, extending their pieces into long jams. Chemist Owsley Stanley provided the LSD; later he would become the Grateful Dead’s benefactor and soundman. Bill Ham projected a primitive version of the liquid light show he was developing. Over the next weeks, a couple hundred people made the trek to the saloon.

Back in San Francisco, the music scene was just starting to pick up. The Beau Brummels had some proto-folk-rock hits even before the Byrds (produced by Sylvester Stewart of Sly and the Family Stone, no less), but they were away touring most of the year and missed their city’s transformation to psychedelia. We Five reached No. 3 with “You Were on My Mind.”

Perhaps We Five’s co-ed template was on folkie Marty Balin’s mind when he invited female Signe Toly Anderson to be co-lead singer of his new group, the Jefferson Airplane. Balin had played the character Action in a San Francisco production of
West Side Story
, painted, and sculpted, and then decided he wanted to go folk-rock after hearing the Byrds. He formed the Airplane to play at his new club, the Matrix (a former pizza parlor), and they made their debut on August 13.

They in turn inspired the formation of another group, the Great Society, which featured the powerful contralto of Grace Slick. The Great Society made its debut at North Beach’s Coffee Gallery on October 15, the day of massive Vietnam Day Committee protests. Eventually, Slick replaced Anderson in the Airplane, bringing with her two compositions that would become the Airplane’s biggest hits, “Somebody to Love” (written by her bandmate brother-in-law Darby Slick) and “White Rabbit,” Grace’s uncanny homage to the hallucinogens of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice in Wonderland.

Meanwhile, some of the regulars from “Red Dog Summer” formed a concert production collective called the Family Dog and lived in a commune called the Dog House, a large Victorian at 2125 Pine Street. To keep the Red Dog spirit going, they hosted the “Tribute to Doctor Strange” dance party on October 16 at the Longshoreman’s Union Hall at Fisherman’s Wharf. Dr. Strange was Marvel Comics’ mystic magician who, with the help of the Book of Vishanti, traveled through trippy dimensions and defeated flame-headed demons such as the dread Dormammu. Fellow Marvel superheroes such as the Fantastic Four and Thor were also favorites of the hippies, due to their way-out cosmic landscapes.

Ginsberg wore his white Indian gown, while the hippies dressed as pirates or cowboys with painted faces, or in green velvet granny dresses and lace, their lively colors in marked contrast to the black-clad beatniks of yesterday. “They all joined in a snake dance,” wrote Barry Miles, “weaving circles and figure eights through the hall” to the sounds of the Jefferson Airplane, the Charlatans, and the Marbles. Bathed in the swirling lightshow, Grace Slick howled at the revelers to feed their heads. Berkeley student Jann Wenner was a friend of one of the Pranksters, and Slick introduced him to jazz columnist Ralph Gleason, who would later help Wenner found
Rolling Stone
magazine
.
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