Through the past brightly
One pill makes you largerand one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all— The Jefferson Airplane from “White Rabbit”
Before we continue with our mind-opening discussion of LSD that we began last week, I want to give a shout out to Lentz’s Physical Therapy and Fitness Center in Mecosta, Michigan. First, I find it a marvel that we have such a fine facility in the boonies of mid Michigan and second, I want to express my thanks to proprietor and physical therapist par excellence, Becki Lentz and also to Roland, who’s making my right arm, shoulder and hand, work a whole lot better than they were when I first showed up.
If any one of you has ever wondered how the hippie movement got started among young people, virtually the world over in the 1960s, I’m about to tell you. And yes, LSD was integral.
First, we can dispose of the word “hippie” for the remainder of this piece. It is strictly a media term, coined by longtime San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Herb Caen, who, coincidentally, also came up with “beatnik.” We were (and still are) . . . “Freaks.”
While the Beatles popularized long hair for men, kicked off the “British Invasion” and started a thousand garage bands, the. rejection of conventional society, wearing wild, whimsical clothing, communal living, a casual approach to love making, and more specifically, the use of marijuana and other hallucinogenic drugs, flowed from essentially one wellspring— Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
An argument could be made that the whole ’60s counterculture was a continuance of the same Bohemian wave which had its start with the Lost Generation in Paris in the ’30s (Hemingway, Dos Pasos, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others) rolled through the Beat Generation (Kerouac, Snyder, Diprima, Ginsburg) and continued with the freaks (Kesey, Brautigan and Robbins, to name a few).
Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” provided the perfect segue from the “Beats to the Freaks.” At his side through much of the merry making was Neal Cassady, THE Neal Cassady, who, back in Beat days, was the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s road-blessed wild child, Dean Moriarty.
Kesey’s participation in the LSD experiments opened a new world and he was anxious to share it.
Ken’s followers, who lived communally with him on his ranch at La Honda in the Santa Cruz mountains south of San Francisco, became known as the Merry Pranksters.
A key figure in the proliferation of LSD that the Pranksters spear-headed throughout in the San Francisco Bay area, was the sound engineer and part-time chemist, Augustus Stanley Owlsley.
By his own account between 1965 and 1967 Owlsley produced 500 grams of LSD, enough for more than five million doses. Things were about to get weird.
And so it went.
Next week: You’re either on the bus or off of the bus