TRIP OF A LIFETIME: HOW LSD ROCKED THE WORLD

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

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 verite 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 power! s 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.