Timothy Leary’s famous Cooper Union address in New York City on November 1964 was the one of the pivotal moments in the cultural revolution of the Sixties.
The audience seems to be on Leary’s wavelength, laughing and applauding with the excitement and enthusiasm of people who are ready for the change that was rising on the horizon like an orange and purple basketball.
This wonderfully insightful documentary on one of the 20th centuries most significant discoveries will make you long for the day when pharmaceutical-quality LSD is once again made available to adults who want to experience it. As humanity seems to be on a de-evolutionary course, the responsible and conscious use of LSD may be one of the only genuinely effective antidotes to what ails us.
Forget Prozac, Klonapin, alcohol and TV, let’s legalize Hofman’s potion and re-awaken the beauty at the core of who we all are.
And for you naysayers who still think LSD was some badass hippie shit with little or no redeeming qualities, get off your computers now. Without acid, this technology we’re using at this very moment would probably not exist as it does in its present form. Suggested reading: click here.
In case of any confusion, the big black arrow is pointing out the drug-addled gorilla.
Over at his essential NeuroTribes blog, Steve Silberman—who knew poet Allen Ginsberg well for twenty years, and was his teaching assistant at the Naropa Institute in Colorado—interviews author Peter Conners about his new book White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg, recently published by City Lights Books.
In November of 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg made a modest proposal to a room full of Unitarian ministers in Boston. “Everybody who hears my voice try the chemical LSD at least once,” he intoned. “Then I prophecy we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful community.”
The poet had been experimenting with drugs since the 1940s as a way of achieving what his Beat Generation friends named the “New Vision,” methodically keeping lists of the ones he tried — morphine with William Burroughs, marijuana with fellow be-bop fans in jazz clubs, and eventually the psychedelic vine called ayahuasca with a curandero in Peru.
For Ginsberg, drugs were not merely an indulgence or form of intoxication; they were tools for investigating the nature of mind, to be employed in tandem with writing, an approach he called “the old yoga of poesy.” In 1959, he volunteered to become an experimental subject at Stanford University, where two psychologists who were secretly working for the CIA to develop mind-control drugs gave him LSD; listening to recordings of Wagner and Gertrude Stein in the lab, he decided that acid was “a very safe drug,” and decided that even his suburban poet father Louis might like to try it.
By the time he addressed the Unitarian ministers in Boston, Ginsberg had become convinced that psychedelics held promise as agents of transformative mystical experience that were available to anyone, particularly when combined with music and other art forms. In place of stiff, hollow religious observances in churches and synagogues, the poet proposed “naked bacchantes” in national parks, along with sacramental orgies at rock concerts, to call forth a new, locally-grown American spirituality that could unify a generation of Adamic longhairs and earth mothers alienated by war and turned off by the pious hypocrisy of their elders.
Ginsberg’s potent ally in this campaign was a psychology professor at Harvard named Timothy Leary, who would eventually become the most prominent public advocate for mass consumption of LSD, coining a meme that became the ubiquitous rallying cry of the nascent 20th-century religious movement as it proliferated on t-shirts, black-light posters, and neon buttons from the Day-Glo Haight-Ashbury to swinging London: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.
Among those who took up the cause was the Beatles. John Lennon turned Leary’s woo-tastic mashups of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into one of the most profoundly strange, terrifying, and exhilarating tracks ever recorded: “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver, which swooped in on a heart-stopping Ringo stutter-beat chased by clouds of infernal firebirds courtesy of backwards guitar and a tape loop of Paul McCartney laughing.
As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Ginsberg and Leary made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, Hebraically-bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation.
By the close of the ’60s — which ominous stormclouds on the horizon in the form of violent debacles like Altamont, a Haight-Ashbury that had been taken over by speed freaks and the Mob, and Charles Manson’s crew of acid-addled zombie assassins — Ginsberg was already looking for more grounding and lasting forms of enlightenment, particularly in the form of Buddhist meditation.
The poet retained his counterculture cred until his death of liver cancer in 1997, but Leary didn’t fare as well. Subjected to obsessive persecution by government spooks like Watergate plumber G. Gordon Liddy, Leary launched a series of psychedelic communes that collapsed under the weight of their own ego-trips. Years of arrests, jail terms, spectacular escapes from prison aided by the Black Panthers, disturbing betrayals, and bizarre self-reinventions followed the brief season when the psych labs of Harvard seemed to give new birth to a new breed of American Transcendentalism that was as democratic as a test tube.
Read the interview at NeuroTribes.
Below, an early interview with Leary, before he started wearing the guru drag…
This poor guy recounts the time he accidentally took 30 hits of liquid LSD with an eyedropper. It actually doesn’t sound as awful as I thought it would. (NSFW due to multiple F-bombs)
(via BuzzFeed)
Mark Christensen discusses his new book about Merry Prankster/novelist Ken Kesey, Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy. Christensen himself, “grew up around the Kesey Chautauqua,” and weaves in incidents from his own life (like arm-wrestling Kesey!) into the narrative, in the process speaking to the notion of how Ken Kesey influenced his own life and values, coming of age within the hippie/counterculture milieu of the Pacific Northwest. Acid Christ is a “sheep’s eye-view of the shepherd,” and an interesting experiment in biography.
Here is a visual interpretation of the type of hallucination one can experience on LSD while wearing an executioner’s hood.
I’ll have to try this sometime.
The Beyond Within is a well-balanced two part documentary on LSD featuring Albert Hoffman, Ken Kesey and British politician Christopher Mayhew.
While the entire documentary is filled with absorbing insights, The Mayhew segment is particularly fascinating.
Media and public interest in LSD reached a point in the early 60’s that a politician by the name of Christopher Mayhew agreed to undergo an experiment, and for this experiment to be filmed by the BBC. This fascinating experiment involved his taking a dose of Mescalin in the company of a physician, and answering certain basic brainteasers over the course of his little trip. The footage of his experience is extraordinary, as this eloquent upper-class aristocrat describes what he is experiencing under the influence of the drug, his eyes wide as saucers. Indeed, the footage proved too controversial for the BBC at the time, and was not shown until this Everyman documentary broadcast it in the 1980’s. Interestingly, Mayhew, who in 1986 was a member of the House of Lords, watches the footage, 30 years later, and stands by his description of the experience. “I had an experience in time” he says, and his conviction is apparent.”
There has been a recent resurgence of interest in psychedelics within the psychiatric and scientific community and I personally think it’s about time. The benefits of psychoactive drugs, DMT and LSD in particular, far outweigh the hazards. It’s time to make pharmaceutical quality LSD available to adults who want an alternative path to mental well-being and spiritual insight. We need to re-approach this extraordinary chemical without hysteria and hype.
Made in 1986 for BBC television, The Beyond Within explores the rise and fall of LSD. Here it is in its entirety.
In 1967, I hitchhiked from Washington D.C. to the Haight-Ashbury to get in on some groovy hippie shit.
As a former acidhead who took multiple trips in many different settings, I never encountered anything remotely like ‘Blue Boy’. But, I’m glad that I didn’t see this episode of Dragnet when it aired in 1967. Talk about a bummer. This probably triggered a few bad trips.
I remember the anti-acid hysteria that dominated the media of the time, from chromosome damage to people jumping out of windows to kids staring at the sun until they went blind. All of which were lies. It seems there’s a renewed interest in LSD and MDMA among psychologists and therapists. I’m looking forward to the day when pharmaceutical grade LSD is made available to those of us who respect it. I haven’t done acid since 1970 and I’m about due. But, it’s gotta be the real deal.
Warning: this video could trigger flashbacks and/or serious injury due to laughter-induced hyperventilation.
Starring Michael Burns as Benjie “Blue Boy” Carver.
The Mind Benders: LSD and Hallucinogens. Good production values give this drug scare film from 1967 the sheen of respectability, but it’s still full of the same old bullshit. At a time when kids needed a Psychedelics For Dummies instructional manual, we got the kind of spooky propaganda that caused more bummers than strychnine-laced STP.
The late animation genius, Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby, describes his experiences in the sixties when he was given LSD by his psychiatrist. From the Emmy award-winning documentary, Gumby Dharma.
Via Planet Paul
Stu Mitchell was the drummer for Edmonton, Alberta instrumental rockers Wes Dakus’s Rebels. He had a brief solo career, releasing a handful of singles for Kapp Records. Acid was the B-side of a 45 released in 1967.
Mitchell, sounding a whole lot like Jim Morrison, takes us on a trip down “nowhere street in a town called LSD.” While the lyrics seem to be a cautionary tale about the hazards of acid, the end result is actually pretty psychedelic. I can imagine Scott Walker covering this.
Formed in London in 1963 by singer Phil May and guitarist Dick Taylor, The Pretty Things played raw R&B that shook up the English music scene. In addition to being musical pioneers, The Pretty Things were among the first of the Brit bands to experiment with LSD (they recorded a song of the same name) and the first to be arrested for drugs.
Sounding like an American garage band with a punk attitude, the Things were the least celebrated of the bands on the scene at the time, which included The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and The Yardbirds. It wasn’t until the late 60s / early 70s that group had both commercial and critical success with Parachute (1970 Rolling Stone Album of The Year) and concept album SF Sorrow. David Bowie covered two of their tunes for his Pin Ups album. Phil May left the group in 1976, but the band continued with shifting personel.He later rejoined the group and he and Taylor continue to perform till this day with various sidemen.
In this video from 1966 (a pristine master copy), The Pretty Things exude an effortless cool that makes Mick Jagger’s tar baby shtick seem absolutely vaudevillian.
