There are special moments in one’s life that take on mythic qualities. Most of mine have involved sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. One particularly mindfucking moment for me was the night I got shitfaced with Lester Bangs at The Village Gate while watching Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers and their opening act The Senders. Bangs and I agreed it was a mighty night and we celebrated it with reckless abandon, the kind of assault on my body that would probably kill me today. I learned to pace myself. Lester didn’t. He died a year or two later…

Phillipe Marcade, the frontman of The Senders, was a mad Frenchman who was drunk on Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. And Thunders was firmly embraced but not strangled by the arms of Morpheus. That night at The Gate, the alchemy was like mystical napalm and we all went up in some kind of cosmic smoke. I will say here and now it was a great night of rock a’n’ roll and what I can remember of bullshitting with Bangs was pretty good too. In fact, it was splendid. Having a conversation with Lester Bangs was like trying to stand up in a row boat during a hurricane. The force coming off of Thunder’s guitar provided the ballast to keep me from capsizing.

So all of that is leading me up to prepare you for another fine moment in which The Heartbreakers roared heroically with Johnny’s knees only buckling occasionally under the blow of smack’s velvet blackjack. This footage of the band at Max’s Kansas City in 1979 captures some of the raw excitement of Johnny, Walter Lure (doing most of the heavy lifting), Jerry Nolan and Billy Rath grinding out their punk bliss with the kind of transcendent energy that only loud guitars and big ferocious beats can deliver. The audio is thin, but I can guarantee that being at this show was as breathtakingly intense as being crushed by a subway train. This is Johnny shortly before the dope turned him into a helpless headcase. Savor it.
 

 
Police confiscate a 2.5lb doobie at Porter Meadows during the annual UC Santa Cruz campus-wide smoke out on 4/20.

According to the YouTube description:

This is not staged, these cops were in fact confiscating this from the event.

snip~

It almost lived to see the day…

It would take a small army of Cheech and Chongs to smoke this fatty!
 

Via The World’s Best Ever

 
You know, this is something I have wondered about… although, ahem, not for personal use. Thankfully PopSci has the answer to my burning question:

The maximum capacity of a normal rectum–meaning, before the patient is overcome by the urge to defecate–is about 350 to 500 mL, or about a pint in volume. That’s a lot; the first urge to defecate comes at about 100 mL, so if you’re storing five times that amount, you’re probably pretty uncomfortable. But repeated stretching of the rectum can increase that size markedly. “We do know that it’s not rare for people to have larger capacities,” says Dr. Whitehead. “We have certainly tested people for whom it’s 800 mL. With practice the capacity becomes larger.”

The rectum is a fantastically powerful, stretchable part of the body. The problem I kept running into in trying to figure out how much cocaine you could fit in your butthole is that, well, there isn’t really an upper limit. It’s all about conditioning and practice. That said, let’s take that 800 mL as an example upper limit. Given the density of cocaine hydrochloride, that converts to about 0.97 kilograms of cocaine, or very nearly the size of one of those big bricks you see confiscated on the news.

Read more of FYI: How Much Cocaine Can You Fit In Your, Ahem, Body? at PopSci.

Via Nerdcore

Soon.

An interesting police report from Friday, April 19, in Steamboat Springs and Routt County, Colorado via Steamboat Today. I hate it when this happens… 

10:05 p.m. Police received a call from a woman who said her juvenile granddaughter was at the ski area last week and ran into a person who was selling bags of what she thought were portobello mushrooms dipped in chocolate for $30. Police said the granddaughter further informed her grandmother that giraffes were chasing her down the hill after she ate the mushrooms.

Via Nerdcore

 
My feelings about the Grateful Dead are not complicated. I like a lot of their music just fine, but it was their audience that turned me off.

I never got into that whole spinning hippies/Hacky Sack patchouli vibe, but I love the shit out of Workingman’s Dead, Anthem of the Sun, American Beauty, Live Dead and Terrapin Station. Notwithstanding the above, what I did like about Deadheads was when the tie-died circus came to the New York area, all of sudden there would be plentiful amounts of blotter acid, quality mescaline, DMT and opium around for weeks afterwards…

Drugs. Which brings me to the media below, recordings made of The Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters at the infamous San Francisco “Acid Tests,” as immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s classic book of “new journalism,” The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

This is the Dead in 1966, some of the earliest recordings that exist of the group, but what makes these tapes of even greater historical interest is that this is the soundtrack, essentially, of the “early adopters” of the psychedelic culture getting turned on together, as large groups gathered together in one place.

On that level, the recordings go from being merely an early period Grateful Dead bootleg and become something weirder, deeper and of Smithsonian Institute-level historical importance. Incidentally, today, April 16th,  is the 70th anniversary of Dr. Albert Hofmann’s 1943 discovery of LSD.

The sound can be ropey, but here it is…
 

 
This early film of the group playing at an “Acid Test” in Los Angeles on March 19, 1966 at Carthay Studio is some of the earliest footage that I’ve ever seen of the Grateful Dead:
 

 
These anti-Acid House headlines are giving me a case of the giggles. The majority of the newspaper clippings—circa late 80s—are from British tabloids The Sun and Daily Express. I don’t think they were very effective. 

All clippings were collected by Flickr user KRS-Dan.
 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

“Now I might take a drank…”

This hilarious parody of an anti-drug PSA has been hanging around on YouTube since 2007. The video—deservedly so—has spawned its own remixes and memes galore.

How have I never seen this sublime masterpiece?! I can’t believe it!

The man in the video is comedian Shane Caldwell. According to several comments, this was taken from an early 90s short-lived local Nashville TV show called Cuts.

For most of you, this will probably be tucked into the “oldie but goodie file.”  But if you’ve never seen this before—I hadn’t—you’re in for a treat.

 
Via WFMU on Twitter

 
Jerry Garden—apparently a man who enjoys both fine dining and tripping—reviews The Sparrow restaurant located in Plateau Mont-Royal, Montréal.

Jerry Garden starts out with “Just finished eating at sparrow.” I imagine Jerry tripping feverishly and saying to himself, “Must. Get. Back. Home. And. Write. Review. For. The. Sparrow.”

Please enjoy Jerry’s review of The Sparrow via Urban Spoon:

Just finished eating at sparrow and had a great time! I must say that this is the best restaurant in Montreal to attend while high on acid.

My dining partner and I dropped two tabs of LSD right before entering the bar. It’s probably a good thing that the waitress took a half hour to come to our table as by that point we were tripping balls. I ordered a st Ambroise oatmeal stout and my friend ordered a varietal of scotch. It was while he was ordering that I noticed that the flowery print on her shirt seemed to meld into the extravagant wallpaper (which also featured sounds of tw rainforest and real bird calls).

For an entree, I ordered the BLT and she got the hamburger. My BLT was great and the overflowing boar bacon juice moisturizer my hands nicely. My dining partner could not approach her burger as they kept returning it too rare (she swears that the patty was pulsating and full of blood, perhaps still alive).

After we finished, we waited for what seeme like forever before we got the bill. To our amazing surprise, the bill had been there the whole time and the waitress abruptly asked us to settle up. I was simply having too great a time with the ceiling fans and over-the-top wall paper! Sparrow rules, as does LSD.

I got pretty confused while trying to sort out the bills in my wallet as the colors seemed to bleed together and almost speak to me… But our waitress was so helpful with the math!

I highly recommend this restaurant for anyone high on acid!

With thanks to Reuel!

Father Kevin Wallin aka “Monsignor Meth’”

A cross-dressing, gay priest buys an adult bookstore and uses it as a front to sell meth? You couldn’t make it up!

And before you ask, no, it’s not an April Fool’s joke. From Irish Central:

Monsignor Kevin Wallin, a Connecticut priest now being nicknamed Monsignor Meth, is expected to plead guilty next week to participating in a conspiracy to distribute crystal methamphetamine in Connecticut.

The Connecticut Post reports that court papers filed on Tuesday show that 61 year old Monsignor Wallin is expected to enter a guilty plea, which will have him facing a mandatory 10 years in federal prison.

The Associated Press reports that Connecticut authorities said the Wallin had meth mailed to him from co-conspirators in California, and made more than $300,000 in drugs sales out of his Waterbury apartment in the second half of last year.

Wallin had also purchased a bookstore - one that sold primarily pornography and sex toys - which he used as a front to launder money.

...

Wallin served as the pastor of St. Augustine Parish in Bridgeport for nine years until he resigned in June 2011 citing health and personal problems. Prior to that, he served six years as pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Danbury until 2002.

While still serving as a priest, many noted his “off-kilter” behavior in early 2011. One church worker said that Wallin had grown “disillusioned with the bureaucracy of the Church.” The same worker, along with others, said the priest had long had sex with men and was a cross dresser.

On January 3, federal agents arrested Wallin, and on January 15 a grand jury indicted him and four other people on drug charges. All are charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute 500 grams or more of a substance containing meth and 50 grams of actual meth, a crime that carries 10 years to life in prison upon conviction. Wallin plans to plead guilty to that charge.

This would be funny if it weren’t also creepy and sad. As if the Catholic church needed any more scandal!

 
The documentary How To Go Out Of Your Mind - The LSD Crisis was made for Canadian TV in 1966 and features some great footage of Tim Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Meltzner on the grounds of the legendary Millbrook estate.

I remember my first acid trip vividly: Falls Church, Va., 1967, half a tab of Monterey Purple, listening to the Doors’ Strange Days and taking a beautiful early evening walk down a garden path blooming with the reddest roses I’d ever seen. From that day on, my relationship to the world around me was far more sensual and connected. The only “LSD crisis” I ever experienced was trying to get my hands on more.