ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND

Bad Moon Rising

It was awesome to behold: a wide, sloping pasture paved with humanity, countless bodies nestled together in a swirl of dazzling colors. Close to a half million people had descended upon Max Yasgur's farm in August 1969 to attend the Woodstock music and arts fair. The three-day "Aquarian Exposition" was the greatest be-in of all, and a good many acid heavies came out of the woodwork to join the celebration. A full busload of Merry Pranksters, wildly attired in their Day-Glo costumes and American flags, drove all the way from Springfield, Oregon, where Kesey was sitting out three years' probation for marijuana possession on his brother's farm. The Yippies were also there, along with a rabble of Crazies, Motherfuckers, White Panthers, and Weathermen, who came to politicize the stoned masses. The activists set up booths and a printing press in a choice spot known as "Movement City," situated next to a psychedelic forest where headshops and dealers advertised their wares: "Acid, speed, mushrooms, mesc ..." As soon as they arrived, the Motherfuckers struck a blow against hip capitalism by tearing down a portion of the wire fence that surrounded the natural amphitheater, and Woodstock became a free festival by default.

But losing money was not the primary concern of the promoters at this point, for they had an enormous problem on their hands. By the second day food was running out, the wells weren't pumping, and trucks couldn't get in to service the overflowing portable toilets. After the first downpour the field turned into an oozing crater of mud, with collapsed tents, bottles, tin cans, and garbage galore giving off a horrible stench. Medical supplies were brought in by army helicopters, conjuring up images of a Vietnam delta under siege, and the press carried a very plausible report that the entire festival site was about to be declared a disaster area.

But there was no disaster -- no riots and no violence despite the abominable conditions. What kept the peace was no great secret. Nearly everybody was buzzed on something, and the unarmed policemen, clothed in bright red T-shirts with the words "love" and "peace" emblazoned across the chest, wisely followed a laissez-faire policy and let the dopers do their thing. Orange sunshine was plentiful and lumps of hash appeared like manna from heaven. Some badly manufactured LSD also circulated among the crowd, and the makeshift hospital staffed by the Hog Farm, a New Mexico-based commune, was crammed with hundreds of freaked-out trippers. For the most part, however, the drugs had a calming effect, and a spirit of goodwill prevailed throughout the weekend. Woodstock "was less a festival than a religious convocation," wrote Myra Friedman in her biography of Janis Joplin. "Its ceremonies were the assertions of lifestyle, and the lifestyle included a celebration of the mystical relationship between drugs and rock.... What ruled was the rock world's Realpolitik: you are only as good as the number of joints you smoke, only as blessed as you are high. It was as if Woodstock was the ultimate declaration of dope, not as an incidental euphoriant, but as some kind of necessary virtue."

If rock-dope had become a new American religion, then the musicians were akin to prophets. Thirty-one of the finest musical acts, including a number of San Francisco acid rock bands, performed that weekend. But the real stars of Woodstock were those who sat in the mud and listened to the assembled talent. Never had a hippie gathering been so successful, so impressive by any standard. Here, it seemed, was irrefutable proof of the moral superiority of the new order. The sheer power of the cultural mood was overwhelming. "One, Two, Many Woodstocks," Rolling Stone exulted in an article that told of plans to repeat the triumph. Not every segment of the youth culture, however, was wild about what went down at Yasgur's farm. "Fuck hippie capitalism," the Weather Underground declared. "Events like the Woodstock gentleness freakout ... indicate that as long as militancy isn't a threat, pig and ruling class approval is forthcoming." The Yippies agreed with their Weather brethren. "The revolution is more than digging rock or turning on," said Abbie Hoffman. "The revolution is about coming together in a struggle for change. It's about the destruction of a system based on bosses and competition and the building of a system based on people and cooperation."

Hoffman was high on acid when he ran on stage at Woodstock to deliver his political rap about the plight of John Sinclair, Pig Nation, and the whole shtick. Just as he started to talk, the microphone went dead, and Peter Townshend, leader of the Who, bonked Hoffman over the head with his electric guitar. So much for the grand alliance of cultural and political rebels that the Yippies were trying to forge under their banner. The two factions were at odds once again, reflecting the old split within the youth movement that became impossible to reconcile as the decade drew to a close.

The once fruitful dialogue between head culture and activist politics had degenerated into acrimonious word-slinging. Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, the one national magazine that came out of the Haight-Ashbury subculture, dismissed the New Left as "a completely frustrating and pointless exercise of campus politics in a grown-up world." Wenner believed that rock and roll, in and of itself, would bring about the millennium. But the mystical aggrandizement of rock as "the magic that can set you free" concealed the fact that it was just another form of entertainment for most people. While Woodstock showed the vast size of the rock audience, it also symbolized the rapid growth of the music industry, which by 1969 had become a billion-dollar enterprise. Rock and roll was a victim of its own success, and the new music, despite its frequent anti-authoritarian overtones, was easily coopted by the corporate establishment. At one point Columbia Records actually ran an advertising campaign based on the moneymaking slogan, "The Man can't bust our music."

Economic factors had little to do with the original impetus of acid rock -- a vital, seething outburst that blew apart the established world of record company rules. The bizarre, twisting rhythms of the early psychedelic bands were too long and formless for AM radio airplay, so there was little national exposure for this type of music. It wasn't until after the major record companies swooped down upon the Haight and used their formidable financial clout to sign, record, and promote the most successful acid rock performers that the San Francisco sound was reduced to formula. Earsplitting volume and light shows became standard fare at concerts. "It's like television; loud, large television," Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead said of acid rock after it became institutionalized. "It was a sensitive trip, and it's been lost. ... [It] hasn't blown a new mind in years."

The capacity to absorb its critics is among the chief characteristics of American capitalism, and one of the keys to its enduring hegemony. Although they begin by posing a symbolic challenge to the status quo, rebellious styles invariably wind up creating new conventions and new options for industry. Even long hair -- the outstanding symbol of revolt in the 1960s (at least for men) -- proved to be a commercial bonanza for hairdressers: $20 a clip and everyone could look like their favorite rock star! By the turn of the decade the counterculture had millions of visible adherents. Rock and roll, drugs, and hip fashion were incorporated into the social mainstream like so many eggs being folded into batter.

The Yippies and their allies in the youth movement tried to resist this trend by promoting the myth of a unified counterculture. "We are a people ... a nation," said John Sinclair. This unique psycho-geographical entity had its own media, its own music and dance, its own youth ghettos and communes; moreover, its citizens were involved in a struggle for national liberation against the "fascist pigs" of the Mother Country. Abbie Hoffman called the budding youth colony "Woodstock Nation," and in his book of the same title he blasted the movie Woodstock for extolling hip capitalism while steering clear of politics. He and his cohorts felt it was high time for the hippies to grow thorns and defend themselves and their life style, which had come under increasing attack. There was even talk of forming the Woodstock People's party, which would serve as the militant vanguard of the psychedelic liberation front.

Such a notion was yet another example of the megalomania of the younger generation, which blithely "mistook its demographic proliferation for real political power," as Stanley Aronowitz put it. (We Are Everywhere was the title of Jerry Rubin's second book, which he dedicated to the Weather Underground.) In their stoned hubris the Yippies, the White Panthers, and the Weatherpeople misread the depth of the cultural revolution and its impact on the political situation in America. Their delusions about the omnipotence of the Movement derived in part from their experience with psychedelic drugs. They believed that LSD contained an intrinsic revolutionary message; such a notion, however, was essentially an amplified reflection of their own political inclinations. ("Woodstock was political because everyone was tripping," said Karl Crazy, a member of the YIP steering committee.) Like so many others, the turned-on activists succumbed to the perennial "LSD temptation" and assumed everyone else would have similar insights while buzzed on acid. "I didn't have a sense of how unique I was," John Sinclair later recalled. "I projected so much for so many years that it blinded me from seeing it.... LSD did that, you know what I mean -- 'Everyone is one, and da-da-da.' ... I just thought that this is how I got to where I was, and I figured everyone was in the same place.... I was so deep into it, I didn't see what was going on."

When Sinclair first turned on in the early 1960s, there was a prevailing sense among hip pioneers that acid should be used for initiation, in the way that Huxley implied when he spoke of opening the doors of perception and widening the area of consciousness. Sure, getting high could be loads of fun, but it was rarely a matter of just kicks, a pure recreational buzz; the era demanded more than that. "Drugs had a lot to do with placing people in a historical context -- of placing people in a radical position," wrote George Cavaletto for the Liberation News Service. "Using drugs was the revolutionary first step a lot of people took."

By the late 1960s, however, so many people were getting high that the identification of drug use with the sharper forms of cultural and political deviance weakened considerably. Instead of being weapons in a generational war, marijuana and LSD often served as pleasure props, accoutrements of the good life that included water beds, tape decks, golden roach clips, and a host of leisure items. High school kids were popping tabs of acid every weekend as if they were gumdrops. And much of the LSD was like candy -- full of additives and impurities. The physical contamination of street acid symbolized what was happening throughout the culture. "The pill was no longer a sacrament," said Michael Rossman, "but a commercial token, stripped of its essential husk of love, ritual and supportive searching community."

Many people who tried LSD for the first time during this period indulged their appetite for altered states in a confused, unfocused, and self-destructive manner. This was certainly the case when a horde of young people flocked to the Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California, in December 1969 for a free rock concert featuring the Rolling Stones. With the crowd came the dealers, selling every type of drug, including large quantities of LSD. Mick Jagger floated over the stoned throng in a helicopter with the High Priest himself, Timothy Leary, who was then awaiting trial for his marijuana bust in Laguna Beach the previous year. Even with the long arm of the law preparing a stranglehold for him, Leary still flashed that giant lighthouse of a smile wherever he went. His effusive demeanor gave no hint of a man destined for prison as he and Jagger landed at Altamont. They emerged together, with Leary grinning and waving the peace sign.

Security for the festival was entrusted to the Hell's Angels, who busied themselves guzzling their allotment of beer and eating acid by the handful. Fights broke out near the stage while the Angels faced down a crowd of a quarter to half a million. To make matters worse, there was some contaminated LSD circulating among the audience, but the scene was so violent that people were freaking out regardless of what type of acid they took. The paramedics and physicians from the Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley free clinics treated so many bummers that they ran out of Thorazine in half an hour. Thousands of others suffered cut feet, broken bones, head wounds, and worse as the Angels went on a rampage.

Into this maelstrom walked the Rolling Stones. Leary sat at the side of the stage brooding over a vast sea of bad trippers as they launched into their set. The violence reached its inevitable climax while the Stones did "Sympathy for the Devil," their song about everyone being implicated in life's evils, the sinner and the saint as two sides of the same coin. An eighteen-year-old black named Meredith Hunter was knifed and stomped to death by a gang of Hell's Angels. He was one of four people who died at Altamont. But Jagger couldn't see anything more than swirling shapes and shadows, and the Stones continued to play, at times with amazing beauty and urgency, even as fights erupted in front of them.

Things went from bad to worse as the decade drew to a close. The week of the Altamont fiasco, Charles Manson and his "hippie" followers were arrested and charged with the murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends. The glamorous young film actress, wife of director Roman Polanski, was eight months pregnant with her first child. She was stabbed forty-nine times with a butcher knife in July 1969, and the walls of her mansion in Bel Air, California, were smeared with slogans written in the blood of the victims. Sensational tales of black magic, hypnotism, and intimidation by spell-casting were played up in the national media, which fastened on the Manson case as if the entire youth culture were on trial.

The newspapers made much of the fact that Manson had once been a familiar figure in Haight-Ashbury and that he and his family used acid and chattered about revolution. The lawyers for the defense tried to blame the slayings on the deleterious effects of hallucinogenic drugs -- an argument that had about as much credence as the notion that LSD was responsible for generating the good vibes at Woodstock. If the Tate killings showed anything, it was that acid has no implicit moral direction. The Manson affair was a vivid refutation of the sixties myth that anyone who took LSD would automatically become holy or reverential or politically conscious or anything else except stoned.

The canonization of Manson by certain segments of the counterculture was a measure of how desperate and bitter people had become in the final days of the 1960s. Jerry Rubin confessed that he fell in love with Manson's "cherub face and sparkling eyes" when the accused murderer appeared on television. Tuesday's Child, an underground paper in Los Angeles, named him Man of the Year and ran his picture with the word "hippie" as the caption. The Weathermen went a step further by lauding Manson as a heroic, acid-ripped street fighter who offed some "rich honky pigs." "Dig it!" exclaimed Bernardine Dohrn. "First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" The Weatherpeople proclaimed 1970 "the Year of the Fork" in Manson's honor.

Dohrn's remarks, which she later came to regret, were made at the drug-crazed Wargasm conference, otherwise known as the National War Council. Held in Flint, Michigan, over the Christmas holidays in 1969, this meeting was the Weathermen's last public fling before dropping out of sight, a farewell to the shattered remains of SDS and the old Movement, and a final appeal for comrades to join their underground crusade. There was general agreement that armed struggle was necessary to smash the "imperialist motherfucker," and much of the discussion focused on possible terrorist actions. Someone proposed attacking the Strategic Air Command base outside of Dayton, Ohio, to knock out an H-bomb. "It's time to get down," the Weather Bureau declared. "Any kind of action that fucks up the pig's war and helps the people win is a good kind of action."

At the close of the four-day conference the Weatherpeople dropped acid and danced all night long while Sly Stone sang "Thank you for letting me be myself" over and over again on the phonograph. A terpsichorean frenzy filled the room as everyone burst into Indian war whoops and spirited chants: "Women Power!" "Struggling Power!" "Red Army Power!" "Sirhan Sirhan Power!" "Charlie Manson Power!" Some had dressed in hippie garb, with headbands, beads, and capes, while others wore leather jackets and chains for the wargasm climax. "It was like a collective puberty rite," one participant recalled. There was heavy laughing and heavy fucking until the wee hours of the morning, and then they all dispersed. Before long approximately one hundred of the Weather cadre were living clandestinely with the avowed objective of making war on the state.

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