[THS] Trip of a lifetime: How LSD rocked the world

[Peter Webster]

Trip of a lifetime: How LSD rocked the world

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/trip-of-a-
lifetime-how-lsd-rocked-the-world-818714.html

It's the psychedelic drug that inspired Hendrix and The Beatles - and
shaped the music, art and literature of a generation. As the world bids
farewell to the bicycling Swiss chemist who created LSD, John Walsh
explores his mind-altering legacy

1 May 2008

It was known as acid, blotter acid, window pane, dots, tickets and mellow
yellow. It was sold on the street in capsules and tablets but most often in
liquid form, usually absorbed on to a piece of blotting paper divided into
several squares: one drop, or "dot", per square. Lysergic acid diethylamide,
or C20H25N30 to give it its snappy chemical formula, derived from lysergic
acid, and it introduced you to a world of cosmic harmony and all-embracing
love, or a black schizoid hell of paranoia and screaming demons.

The letters LSD once denoted English money in pre-decimalisation days:
librae, solidi, denarii, the Latin forms of pounds, shillings and pence. From
the mid-1960s, however, the letters had only one meaning: they stood for
the most powerful mood-altering drug in the world.

Those who experienced the 12-hour "trip" it engendered would report back
with all the fervour and awe of travellers returned from mystic lands,
desperate to relay the sights and sounds of their wild adventures, but
frustrated by the impossibility of making their listeners see or understand
their experiences. Sometimes, they'd been on a physical journey (usually no
further than the garden or local shops); but mentally, the trip had taken
them into a new realm of consciousness that was a) hard to evoke and b)
very boring to listen to. They talked about the blinding sensory
enhancement, and the synaesthesia of hearing colours and smelling the
stars. They saw profound truths in cracks in the pavement and cosmic
harmonies in a match flame. They tended to mention God, several times.
The man who invented the stuff had a lot to answer for. He was a Swiss
chemist called Albert Hoffman, and he died on Tuesday morning.

The fact that he reached the age of 102 seems a tribute to the efficacy of
his invention. But its importance to the 20th century isn't as a therapeutic
medical treatment. It may have altered some lives for the better, but its real
importance is cultural. For LSD gave the Sixties a brand-new concept to
embrace and apply to every area of life, especially the arts: psychedelia.
The word was spelt wrongly ­ it should, strictly, be psychodelia ­ but its
meaning was clear. It meant the making-visible of the soul: opening up
your inner, half-glimpsed metaphysical self for inspection while in a state of
profound relaxation and pleasure.

The English writer Aldous Huxley had, of course, been there years before,
when he experimented with mescaline in the early 1950s. His 1954 book,
The Doors of Perception (the title is taken from William Blake ­ "If the doors
of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite") argued that altered-state-inducing drugs were good for you, if you
were sufficiently clever.

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few
timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal
obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and
notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by the
Mind at Large ­ this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and
especially to the intellectual," he said. But LSD was, by 1968, becoming
available to all, and seemed, for a time, a thing that could change the
world.

In theory, the entire young "counterculture" of the West, the same young
people who listened to rock'n'roll, smoked dope, rejected the values of their
straight, bourgeois parents and demonstrated against the Vietnam War,
could all drop acid, discover their transcendent inner being, forsake their
redundant ego and refuse to cooperate with the ordinary forms of society.
They could, in the immortal phrase of Timothy Leary, LSD's greatest fan
and most articulate zealot, "Turn on, tune in and drop out."

They could share with each other soul-perceptions that were denied to the
straights, the military-industrial complex, the politicians and judges.... It
didn't happen. But, for a few years, it felt as if the doors of perception
might budge an inch.

The first acid trip was on 16 April 1943. It was an accident. Dr Hoffman had
been conducting experiments with LSD-25, which he had synthesised from
lysergic acid in 1938 and was trying to make again, having a "presentiment"
that it could possess "properties other than those established in the first
investigations". The doctor got some of the stuff on his fingers. In the
afternoon he felt dizzy, couldn't work, went home to bed and wrote later
that he entered a dream-like state. Behind his closed eyes, he saw streams
of "fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play
of colours" for a whole two hours.

Three days later, with a Dr Jekyll-like foreboding, he put himself through a
guinea-pig experiment. He took 250mg (a colossal dose by blotting-paper
standards) and went for a bicycle ride. Wherever he looked, the landscape
became distorted as if seen through a funfair mirror. Though he was
moving fast he felt completely stationary, as though the fields were whizzing
by him.

Back home, he experienced the world's first bad trip. He became convinced
that he was possessed by a demon, that his neighbour was a witch and
that his furniture was trying to kill him. The doctor was summoned, found
nothing wrong beyond a dilation of the pupils, and packed him off to bed.
Hoffman's panic subsided and he started to enjoy the visions and exploding
colours, the shifting kaleidoscope of shapes breaking up and folding into
themselves. Every noise from the street became a visual event.

He woke next day full of beans, refreshed, reborn. His breakfast tasted
delicious. In the garden, looking at birds and smelling the flowers, he
described his senses as "vibrating in a condition of highest sensitivity, which
persisted for the entire day".

"Bicycle Day", 19 April, was later commemorated by acid enthusiasts
because it was the first conscious "trip" and it had had ­ just about ­ a
happy ending. But the doors to perception are, for some truth-seekers,
booby-trapped and dangerous. When LSD was co-opted by medical staff
for recreational use, two decades after Hoffman's bike ride, users learnt the
hard way how impossible it was to control the wild ride once it had started.

At Oxford in the early 1970s, we were frankly intimidated by the drug's
reputation. We all wanted to try it, but were too chicken. The word in the
quad was: if you had any secret hang-ups, mental instabilities, phobias,
sexual inadequacies or social insecurities (the kind that surface in dreams,)
you were wise of steer clear of acid. We knew when one of us was going to
try it. "Tonight," I'd hear during dinner in hall, "Roger's tripping for the first
time. But he'll have Will and Ollie with him, so he'll be OK."

I've always remembered Roger's first trip (so, I'll bet, has he). We all knew
he'd be fine because he was so perfect: cool, handsome, easy-going, a hit
with the girls, a dead ringer, with his corkscrewy curls, for Marc Bolan of T.
Rex. And he was rich; he owned a Morgan, which he casually parked in the
back quad. We knew Roger would survive the experience and bang on
about it, like he banged on about his Bang and Olufsen state-of-the-art hi-
fi. And anyway, Will and Olly would look after him.

The evening started well. The three students took a tab each, drank some
wine and waited for results. An hour later, they were happily tripping on
the college lawn, listening to the grass grow and hearing their voices
transforming into harp notes. They went to Olly's room, smoked, listened to
Tubular Bells in a haze of bliss. Then Roger went the gents. This proved a
mistake.

After using the facilities, he washed his hands, dried them and looked in the
mirror. Something caught his eye. He looked closer. Just below his cherubic
lower lip, there was a spot. It's wasn't huge or septic, but it was
unquestionably a skin eruption, a blemish. As he watched, it grew bigger
and bigger until it took on the size and texture of a Brussels sprout. Roger
was transfixed. He looked on in horror, as the distended spot grew
wobblingly larger, and began to pull his features into its green heart. His
nose disappeared, his cheeks and eyes began to twist down, his Marc Bolan
curls hung uselessly over his aghast, imploding face.

Roger, you see, was indeed a near-perfect human being but he was as vain
as a canary. And discovering a spot on his immaculate physiognomy played
straight into his worst insecurity: that he might secretly be unattractive. He
ended up imagining his whole head was a great blob of pus; and sat
screaming with paranoia for two hours as his friends dosed him with orange
juice (vitamin C is the only known cure for bad trips). Other occupants of
his staircase, alerted by the noise, called in to discover a scenario straight
from the locked unit of Bedlam hospital, circa 1880.

During the Cold War, both the British and the US governments were keen
to exploit LSD's unique qualities, for "social engineering". They were
convinced it would be useful as a "truth drug" during interrogations ­ a
rather prosaic understanding of the kind of visionary truth revealed by
communing with one's soul.

In 1953 and 1954, scientists working for MI6 drugged servicemen with LSD
without telling them what to expect; the scientists told them they were
looking for a cure for the common cold. One soldier, aged 19, reported that
he saw "walls melting, cracks appearing in people's faces... eyes would run
down cheeks, Salvador Dali-type faces... a flower would turn into a slug."
Not surprisingly, the experiment failed; MI6 reported that LSD was of little
practical use as a mind-control drug. It took 50 years for the human
guinea-pigs to be compensated for what they'd been put through.

If LSD was no use in war, what was it good for? At first, the scientific
community thought it could be a wonder drug to use in psychoanalysis,
because it would help patients unblock repressed subconscious thoughts
they couldn't unblock by other therapies; more than 2,000 research papers
were written about the compound's possible applications.

At Harvard University in the early 1960s, the psychologists Timothy Leary
and Richard Alpert set out to show that it could be used as a path to
spiritual enlightenment, a catalyst to religious experience, a tool for
accessing the divine; they preached their gospel all over America. As time
went by, they seemed less and less like scientists, and progressively more
like visionaries; Leary came on like a hippie, a guru, a slightly creepy uncle
to the teenage students he was seeking to "turn on". By 1966, just as LSD
was becoming established as the ultimate recreational drug, the US
government lost patience with the mystical bullet, and banned it.

From that moment, it took off as symbol of the enlightenment that cops,
governments and teachers didn't want you to experience. It was a holy
drug that wasn't allowed near your tongue, no matter how much you
craved communion with the cosmos. Instead of rebelling (that would come
later) the counter-culture embraced the whole idea of LSD, and celebrated
its effects in music, art, film, books, clothing, dance routines and in the
floaty patterns of light-shows on walls.

Becoming stoned, murmuring "Wow, the colours, man..." while weaving
across a roomful of acidheads listening to Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of
Dawn ­ that was the UK version of psychedelia, the diluted legacy of Albert
Hoffman's great discovery. Not that he regretted its chequered history. His
book about the drug that turned the world inside out was titled LSD: My
Problem Child.

The acid effect: LSD's influence on...

Movies

The definitive acid movie is The Trip, scripted by none other than Jack
Nicholson, directed by Roger Corman and starring Easy Rider duo Peter
Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Because it's wholly in favour of the acid
experience (ad-man Fonda drops a tab and suffers nothing more than a
swirly, psychedelic hallucination on the beach), it was refused a certificate
by the censors. The LSD binge in Easy Rider, in which the boys celebrate
their arrival in New Orleans by tripping with two hookers, features some
vérité footage of Fonda enduring a real-life acid moment in a graveyard,
wailing about his dead mother. The clash of violence and rock'n'roll, and
the mingled identities of the lead characters in Performance, directed by
Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, is resolved when Mick Jagger and James
Fox get weirded-out together on acid, and seem to enter each other's
heads (shortly before a bullet enters Fox's.) Ten years later, in Altered
States, Ken Russell attacked the enlightening powers of acid when he
portrayed a psychedelically grooved-up William Hurt heading for perdition.
Three decades after The Trip, LSD became a transformative magic spell in
Irvine Welsh's 1998 film The Acid House (where a single tab makes a Hibs
hardnut swap personalities with a yuppie infant) and a terrible means of
torture in Dead Man's Shoes, as Paddy Considine feeds bad-trip acid tablets
to the horrible men who made his brother hang himself.

Music

The combination of flower power and hallucinogenic drugs in Haight-
Ashbury in 1967 was as potent as gunpowder and matches. Rockers who'd
tried the big blotting-paper experience strove to replicate it in performances
that were floaty, spacey, woozy and seemingly without beginning or end.
The result was called acid rock: it was supposed to suggest the album had
been recorded by a band in the grip of LSD, and was to be listened to by
fans similarly stimulated. Lyrics were often minimal, and the sound often
relied on randomly wacky special effects, complemented, during live shows,
by a light show of wiggly patterns playing against a wall.

The Grateful Dead, from San Francisco's Bay Area, were the key US acid
rock band; their leader, Jerry Garcia, a portly figure with a prodigious
beard, could spin out the solo on "Dark Star" for 25 minutes. Jefferson
Airplane also hailed from San Francisco and defined acid rock in 1967 with
their album, Surrealistic Pillow. It featured "White Rabbit," which sneakily
refers to the apparent drug consumption in Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland and ends on the line: "Remember what the Dormouse said:
Feed your head, Feed your head." Elsewhere The Doors drew their name
from Aldous Huxley's book, and their leader Jim Morrison sang "The End"
and "Riders on the Storm" in a blurry, reflective drone, like one intensely
drugged.

In the UK, 1967 was the year of The Beatles' masterpiece, Sergeant
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, whose early highlight was an
hallucinogenic vision of tangerine trees and marmalade skies called "Lucy in
the Sky with Diamonds". The capitalised letters seemed a dead giveaway,
but Paul McCartney always denied it was a song about LSD. He later
revealed that he'd tried the hallucinogenic, and is thought to be the person
who first introduced it to Bob Dylan. The pre-eminent UK acid band was
Pink Floyd in the days of Syd Barrett and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Their song titles took their cue from space travel ­ "Astronomy Domine",
"Interstellar Overdrive" ­ as did the Rolling Stones in their single burst of
psychedelia, "2000 Light Years From Home".

Literature

Because of the fundamental difficulty (pace Aldous Huxley) of evoking an
acid trip in any meaningful way, the literature of LSD is limited. Heroin,
cocaine, marijuana and alcohol may inform The Man with the Golden Arm,
Bright Lights, Big City, Junky and The Lost Weekend, but the acid trip has
proved elusive to prose. Perhaps the most notable literary "trip" was indeed
a genuine trip: the journey taken by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in
1964 in a psychedelically painted school bus called "Further". The
pranksters included Neal Cassady, Sandy Lehmann-Haupt, Stewart Brand,
Carolyn Adams (the wife of Jerry Garcia) and two proto-hippies called Wavy
Gravy and The Cadaverous Cowboy. They rolled east to New York, giving
out tabs of acid to strangers, and were immortalised in Tom Wolfe's The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It was that kinda time ­ when, in the words of
William Burroughs, "a tiny psychoactive molecule affected almost every
aspect of Western life".

Design

Swirling shapes, paisley patterns, surreally "fat" lettering, howlingly
discordant but vivid colours and lots of strobe effects were the characteristic
of acid art. The acid genre hardly lasted long enough to establish a niche in
art history, but it enjoyed a considerable vogue in the world of posters.
Between 1967 and 1972, there was hardly a "progressive" rock-gig poster
that did not feature distorted lettering and swirly colours. Much of it was the
work of Karl Ferris, a Hastings-born photographer who worked on the
Psychedelic Happening shows of the mid-1960s, and, through them, met
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Graham Nash, Eric Clapton, T Rex and Pink
Floyd. He brought his fish-eye lens and infrared colour film to several classic
LP covers, including the US versions of Hendrix's three albums, Donovan's A
Gift from a Flower to a Garden and The Hollies' Evolution.

Elsewhere, the market was dominated by Hipgnosis, a British art design
group made up of Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, who were
responsible for the freaky early covers of Pink Floyd and Genesis. Other
artists influenced by psychedelia include Victor Moscoso and Alan Aldridge.