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.
 

 
In one of her very few televised appearances, Nico performs “You Forget to Answer” on French TV’s POP2 program in 1972. The songs’s cryptic lyrics convey the despair the avant garde ice queen felt over hearing of the death of her former lover Jim Morrison and how she was unable to reach him by phone on the day he died. It would eventually appear on her 1974 album The End, which takes its title, of course, from her infamously doomy cover of the already infamously doomy Doors’ original.

Talk about low budget, it looks like they’ve got her singing in a rec room or something, here, but still, once she gets started, it’s like she blots outs everything else and pulls this remarkable, spine-tingling black musical shadow from deep within her desolate junkie soul.

In case it passed you by, last November Universal Music Group put out an expanded 2 CD edition of The End and it sounds a lot better than the old CD does (comparing the two, it sounds like the earlier “budget” disc that Island put out in 1994 wasn’t even mastered for CD). I’ve gotten massively into this album over the past few months, playing it from start to finish on headphones in the darkness (the way it was obviously meant to heard) dozens of times.

Produced and arranged by John Cale and featuring Brian Eno (doing some astonishing things on his VCS3 synthesizer) and Phil Mananzera, The End is clearly not for everybody—or even most, or even many, people when you get right down to it—but to my ears, the new deluxe set, with outtakes, OGWT performances (audio only), Peel sessions and her controversial take on “Das Lied Der Deutschen” from the June 1st, 1974 concert (If Jimi Hendrix could play “The Star Spangled Banner,” why couldn’t Nico perform the German national anthem?) makes for one of the most satisfying releases of the past 12 months.
 

 
Below, Dangerous Minds pal Danny Fields tells the “meet cute” story of how he introduced Nico and the Lizard King at The Castle in Los Angeles.
 

 
Apropriatey walking onstage to Elmer Bernstein’s theme for The Man With the Golden Arm, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreaks perform a shambolic, but great, set at London’s Lyceum Ballroom in 1984.

I remember debating on whether or not to see this very gig before ultimately deciding not to for reasons I can no longer recall. Of course it became regarded as a legendary show, my bad! You can get a pretty good sense of what Walter Lure thought of the proceedings at approximately 18:12.

Back then a concert like this at a place like London’s Lyceum Ballroom would have cost you only about 4 pounds…
 

 
This limited edition bong, appropriately called “Floyd,” is named in honor of the wake-n-bake stoner character played by Brad Pitt in True Romance.

It’s from New York-based artist Glen Baldridge and while I do like the idea, the $525.00 price tag seems a wee bit steep!

Below, “Floyd” and his famous bong:

 
Via The World’s Best Ever

 
Crimestoppers, an organization that encourages busy-bodies [surely ‘do-gooders’? - ed.] to anonymously grass-up suspected crims (or possibly neighbors they don’t like?), has launched a Scratch ‘n’ Sniff card to help would-be drug enforcers recognize the tell-tale smell of a cannabis farm.

The card is being distributed across England and comes with a helpful check-list of ‘signs to look out for’:

1. Strong and sickly sweet smell
2. Cannabis growing equipment
3. Constantly covered or blocked-off windows
4. Visitors at unsociable hours
5. Strong and constant lighting day and night
6. High levels of heat and condensation
7. Constant buzz of ventilation
8. Lots of cables

On their website, Crimestoppers also helpfully tells users…er…informers which areas produce the most weed:

Hotspot areas targeted in this campaign include West and South Yorkshire, London, Greater Manchester and Avon & Somerset, which have all been identified in an ACPO report as areas with the highest number of cannabis farms in the UK. With nearly 1,800 cannabis farms found, West Yorkshire ranked the highest of all areas where cannabis farms were identified by ACPO across 2010/2012. South Yorkshire ranked second across the UK with over 1,600 found, London was the fourth highest with over 1,200 cannabis cultivation properties located in the same period.

Crimestoppers is “an independent charity which helps the police to solve crimes, making communities safer”, and is encouraging Scratch ‘n’ Sniffers to “spread the word on social media by using #weedthesigns.”

I think I’ll wait for the Scratch ‘n’ Sniff cocaine cards…