28 May 2010

things are darn psychedelic on the home front

[click image]

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And NOT, by any stretch, in a good way.
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\\\\\ 5/28/2010 03:16:00 PM \\\\\ ,

41 comments:

  1. Bluebear25/28/10, 4:12 PM

    Oh the stories I could tell after working Acid Rescue at a huge rock festival near Stevens Point Wisconsin 1969.

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  2. Larry Bergan5/28/10, 5:52 PM

    I haven't done any acid for around 40 years. Most people stop after just a few experiences. Who knows what other substances are being combined here. All I know is that the last thing I wanted to do was end up down at the police station on a "trip", and didn't.

    The last type I imbibed was called "clear light" and had to be very "clean" because it was provided on a tiny sheet of plastic about two millimeters square and about as thick as a sheet of paper.

    I would hate to see another Charles Manson type media frenzy here, further demonizing the peace movement of the sixties. It has been shown that the legal substance called "alcohol" can cause heinous violence in certain individuals too. I like to call it "acid without the bad part", because it ALWAYS makes you feel good; no matter what.

    Honestly, there is nothing I can gain by being so honest about these things. I just like to keep the records straight.

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  3. Bluebear25/28/10, 6:57 PM

    Oops - wrong date - It was the Iola Rockfest. References I've found peg it as 1970 or 71.

    I had been on a month and a half long cross country trip from Stevens Point to San Fransisco and back, arriving in time to go straight to the festival, no stop at home.

    Friends of mine had organized the event which drew an estimated 100,000 people.

    The lineup was a somewhat odd combination. Terry Reid, Ravi Shankar, Buffy St Marie are some that I remember. The closing act was Iggy and the Stooges - I had never seen anything like that before. Diving off the stage and crowd surfing etc.

    The event was marred by a bunch of bikers that showed up and tried to take over. Sunday morning - last day - a rumor went around that the bikers had raped a girl. The crowd went crazy - ugly hippies on violence scene. A mob went after the bikers, sending them scattering, shooting into the crowd as they hopped onto to their bikes to escape. The crowd caught several who had trouble getting their bikes started and chopped up the bikes with axes and set them on fire!

    I had just come up the hill from bathing in the pond when I heard the gunshots. At first I was laughing, thinking they were firecrackers, but then I saw all the people diving under cars.

    At least one guy I saw was wounded. The acid rescue tent went crazy after that so I was tied up there soothing freaked out trippers.

    Shortly thereafter a Cessna airplane showed up - sheriff department - and the sheriff was on a loud speaker assuring the crowd the the bikers were gone and many had been arrested.

    The sheriff spent the next year or so going around with undercover videos they had, giving speeches to the populace laying blame on the bikers and proclaiming the hippies to be peaceful folk. (This was in the center of an agricultural area)

    The strangest part had to be the numerous motor homes with middle aged dudes in suits selling drugs out of the window. Mafia? Weird!

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  4. Bluebear25/28/10, 7:00 PM

    The following summer my friends and I went back to the site to finish cleaning up any remaining items which had been missed the previous year.

    There were watermelons, cantaloupes and pot growing everywhere!

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  5. wimpy5/28/10, 7:05 PM

    That's why they call it "weed". It's like kudzu.

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  6. wimpy5/28/10, 7:13 PM

    I have had extensive experience with people on psychedelics of one sort or the other, and there was NEVER any violence. ONCE a guy wouldn't stop coming on to me, even with my most man-evaporating discouragement, but other than that, not even a bummer. Coming down is a drag, even from clearlight. Everything seems grubby and you can't get it clean. The BEST by far is peyote. Raw fresh buttons, with the white fur [poison] cut off, chased down with Coca Cola. Sublime and no bummer coming down, except, of course, missing that bliss.

    Booze in moderation is pleasant. Otherwise, SERIOUSLY unpleasant all the way through, for everyone.

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  7. wimpy5/28/10, 7:21 PM

    I'm pretty freaked out that we've had this Christo-psychopath running around loose here all this time. There are more churches than PEOPLE here. You can't go into town without bumping into people wondering aloud if The Lord would mind them buying a Lotto ticket or a candy bar. It's fuckin' macabre, and it turned at least one of them into an Apocalypse Now style psychopath. Shroom tea doesn't do THAT to you. It might make you paranoid, and maybe even a really freaked paranoid guy might not know his own strength and somebody could get hurt or dead... on accident... but the shit doesn't turn you into a gore-wallowing fiend who rips someone's heart out of his chest and cremates it in the woodburner while smearing the blood all over his nude body. Nope. Nossirreebob. Bullshit.

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  8. wimpy5/28/10, 7:24 PM

    THEN the cops put him in the lockup, leaving him still naked and covered in the victim's blood, for how long? Musta been hours.

    Gross.

    JUST when I'm trying to get everyone fired up to go in and MELLOW out our freaked fascist local cops.

    Great.

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  9. Bluebear25/28/10, 7:41 PM

    Acid, Peyote, I finally settled on mushrooms while out in the wilderness by myself as the ultimate experience.

    Acid was fun in groups - we had a way of giving a contact high to everyone around us, getting them to partake in our silliness.

    On that cross country trip we stopped and dropped at the Grand Canyon Desert Watchtower. Once we were off we went inside and played with the echoes inside. Singing various notes in harmony, searching for the right note to get the place to resonate.
    A tour bus showed up and the people got off the bus and started heading for the tower. As they got close and heard us, they broke into a run to get inside and join us. They were a choir on tour. Pretty soon we had the whole place resonating with harmonies and drones.

    The attendants even joined in.

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  10. Larry Bergan5/28/10, 8:13 PM

    99:

    I had a chance to do real peyote only once. It was fresh and succulently green. You had to cut out what we were told was strychnine, (so, of course, we did.) It was at a party my very closest friends were throwing and I became very ill, so I decided to try and walk it off around the neighborhood by myself. I'm not sure if people were alarmed that somebody was walking rather briskly around the neighborhood, or that we were throwing a party and making a fair amount of noise, but somebody called the police. One of the attendees who had a bag of marijuana ditched it in my best friends sofa and the police found it. As is typical for those days, nobody was arrested, possibly, because we were not considered to be a big threat.

    I didn't hear about the pot ditching incident until days later, because I went home, stopped being sick, and had a wonderful evening of bliss all by myself, just thinking about things and VERY happy to be alive. I will never forget it!

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  11. Larry Bergan5/28/10, 8:25 PM

    Bluebear2:

    GREAT story!

    I was once in that tower too, but nothing like THAT ever happened. The "natives" would have been impressed!

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  12. wimpy5/28/10, 8:31 PM

    The white fur on the buttons is strychnine and THAT is what makes you sick. You have to cut ALL of it off. Or, yes, you will get sick. It's been about forty years, but I think I only took about a quarter of a button. It was the most wonderful high of my entire life. There were about six of us, and we didn't have to SPEAK to talk to each other. We didn't need a ball to play basketball. It was total bliss. Plenty of energy. Total love. No effort.

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  13. Larry Bergan5/28/10, 9:31 PM

    I would do it again, but the chance of my getting any real peyote is probably nil. Alcohol; just a trip down to the store.

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  14. Larry Bergan5/28/10, 10:02 PM

    On bikers:

    It's a fantastic triumph, isn't it! How they divided us!

    I'm not saying, by any means, that I have the facts on this, but I have read that the Hell's Angels were bikers made up of a group of war veterans who were supposedly ignored or rejected by the larger American populace! They were so rejected that they organized into "gangs" to protect themselves. I don't know, I can only surmise. My own father never talked to me about his experiences in World War II.

    We are told that there were two large musical events in America: Woodstock and another festival which hippies hired Hells Angels to police. The later resulted in the death of peace concerts due to violence in which "The Rolling Stones" band was horrified.

    It probably wouldn't have been hard to convince a war veteran to disrupt a peace concert when they had been told that peace protesters were spitting on war veterans.

    I don't know! I have no godly way of knowing!

    Those are just the things I have been told by the media.

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  15. wimpy5/28/10, 10:10 PM

    Hell's Angels, and other groups, tend to be really nice guys when they are alone, but pretty much trying to outdo each other in how outrageously raunchy they can be when together. It's a strange psychology. Mostly, alone they have nothing to prove and easy to get along with, but as a group they're fanatical chest-beaters and they were seeeeeeriously into the idea of being "impressive" "security" at Altamont. It was no media hoax. It happened. They didn't need it to crack down on the big music festivals -- they were doing that everywhere already -- but they used it.

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  16. Larry Bergan5/28/10, 10:16 PM

    But who hired them, and why? Do you know?

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  17. wimpy5/28/10, 10:47 PM

    They weren't hired. They agreed to help for beer. Wikipedia's account of it is pretty good. The part about it being against Jerry Garcia's advice is bullshit, and they say so, but probably should not even be in the article. The whole reason the Angels were providing this amorphous muscle function was because that's exactly what they'd be doing for Dead concerts, all kinds of free concerts in Golden Gate Park and other Northern California spots.

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  18. Larry Bergan5/28/10, 11:28 PM

    So the media coverage of "Altamont" was defined by violence because of one homicide and nothing else.

    I'm sorry, but I'm pissed! This seems to be just another fabricated bunch of bullshit, as usual; from Wikipedia:

    "The event is best known for having been marred by considerable violence, including one homicide and three accidental deaths: two caused by a hit-and-run car accident and one by drowning in an irrigation canal. Four births were reported during the event as well."

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  19. wimpy5/28/10, 11:47 PM

    The place was a sea of PISSED OFF DRUNK people, who'd had to wait around for stupidly long while packed like sardines. I think the thing was announced only the day before it happened, to manage the size of the crowd, and people got up in the middle of the night to get there for it. They're out in the elements, can't get comfortable, but CAN get wasted. Watch the movie. It was COMPLETELY out of hand. It was NOT this long plotted and planned thing like Woodstock was. It was the Rolling Stones coming in to do a free concert in the style of the Airplane and the Dead and many other bands.

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  20. wimpy5/29/10, 12:16 AM

    Here....

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  21. Bluebear25/29/10, 12:22 AM

    When I first came to Sacramento I went to a bar called "The Zoo Tavern". By total coincidence it turned out the owner was from the town in Wisconsin where I went to college, I knew most of his nieces and nephews and his brother-in-law was my high school history teacher - but that all is another story.

    I met a couple there, guy and gal, and became friends with them. I didn't know at first that they were members of the Misfits Motorcycle gang. The were low key about it, didn't wear "Colors" etc.

    One night they invited me to a party, as we walked in the door she whipped out a big knife and announced to the crowd of very big scary guys that I was her pet hippie and if anybody fucked with me they would have to answer to her.

    I ended up having a great time, nobody fucked with me and many were friendly to me.

    I hung out with that crowd for about a year until the bar shut down. By then, through my roommates, I had been absorbed into a different crowd centered around my roommate who was a champion in the intermediate dirt bike race scene. Plus I had a job and was no longer living in my van behind the bar doing janitorial work in exchange for a bar tab.

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  22. wimpy5/29/10, 12:27 AM

    Here's the Angels' defense... if you don't want to go through the whole thing.

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  23. wimpy5/29/10, 12:35 AM

    Here's a good sample of the Crowd vs. Angels thing....

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  24. wimpy5/29/10, 2:26 AM

    I'm sitting here, thinking about how bummed I was not to get to go. I was 16 and my boyfriend was 21. It wasn't that they announced the concert only the day before. It was that they moved it to Altamont from Sears Point the day before. My boyfriend was taking me to it, but when they moved it clear over to the Altamont Pass, he said he didn't want to do it, didn't like the lay of the land, and it was too much further away, would have been a drag. Everybody was uptight because it was too big for Golden Gate Park and the Sears Point people kept trying to back out of it, and everyone was afraid it was going to be canceled altogether. We didn't find out until the afternoon before that it was moving to Altamont.

    I know a lot of us in Marin didn't go because it was going to be too much of a drag to get over there. Turned out to be a good thing we didn't go, but it was a serious bummer anyway. None of us kids were scared of the Angels. They were always mellow when they came to our parties. They were only awful at THEIR parties.

    Could have been agents provocateurs causing all the shit. They didn't like hippies, or rock stars, or Angels, or Panthers... AT all. That never entered my mind... but nowadays it's pretty clear that they've been doing that shit for a very long time, and they were right in the middle of their war on our antiwar... so...? It's fucking CREEPY still to think of ANYONE with a gun at any of those free concerts. The guy was wearing a damn SUIT... albeit a scary color... but still. If he was an agent, he really paid for it.

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  25. Larry Bergan5/29/10, 2:47 AM

    I'm almost half way through the "Stones" video and I have to get to work in the morning. The "Rolling Stones" had a perfect grip on the music of New Orleans and may have kicked their asses, (which is OK.) Competition used to be a good thing! You should salute your competition and try to better them, NOT gun them down with your media.

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  26. Bluebear25/29/10, 5:15 PM

    Sounds like that stuff has made its way down here...

    http://cbs13.com/local/rampage.assault.burglary.2.1723012.html

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  27. wimpy5/29/10, 5:36 PM

    You know, I'm working on a theory of it being the kids' biochemistry and fucked-up heads creating so much havoc, here... that it might be the condition of the people rather than the quality of the psychedelics that is explaining these violent, satanic-feeling freakouts. A lot of people went apeshit on them in the past, but it wasn't self-and-other-destructive kind of stuff. At worst it was thinking they could fly and splatting on the pavement.

    It's not just acid. It's also other hallucinogens. So I'm thinking it's the physiology and/or the psychology.

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  28. Anonymous5/30/10, 12:05 PM

    (i)It's not just acid. It's also other hallucinogens. So I'm thinking it's the physiology and/or the psychology.(/i)

    I wonder if the kids in the picture link were on Ritalin in the past.

    As for the mixed martial artist/cage fighter, I wonder if steriods had anything to do with it.


    DGPNorth

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  29. Bluebear25/30/10, 1:07 PM

    As for the mixed martial artist/cage fighter, I wonder if steriods had anything to do with it.

    Good point.

    DGP - Use the "less than" and "more than" signs in place of your parenthesis to make the italic.

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  30. wimpy5/30/10, 1:47 PM

    Or the lab food they're eating.

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  31. Larry Bergan5/30/10, 7:53 PM

    Thanks for the videos 99. I didn't realize there were documents of the Altamont Festival. Looks like the Jefferson Airplane appearance had some problems too. Also didn't realize the guy that got stabbed probably had a gun. I think the media was more then happy just to report that the concerts were failing. Although nothing like today, some of the media was probably pro-war back then.

    Interesting stuff!

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  32. wimpy5/30/10, 8:11 PM

    Yer welcome.

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  33. Larry Bergan5/30/10, 9:19 PM

    I loved growing up in the time I did and I was young enough to look up to the people who were trying to bring and end to the Viet Nam war, (16/17 years old.) Utah was so removed from that scene but they people I hung with were starting to experiment with the drugs.

    I didn't realize until the 80's that we were going to be blamed for everything bad that happened in this country.

    I was doing a little research about the time period around Woodstock and found out the Manson murders happened just one week before the event. The press really ran with that one, didn't they! It was the top story for months and really pissed me off. How could such a wonderful time be defined by one madman. The very strange "Paul is dead" hoopla also found it's way from a radio talk show host to the mainstream at that time. Maybe that was when they realized they could use the radio to "break" stories.

    The corporate businesses were more then happy to tweak our wallets and call us the "Pepsi Generation", but if we rejected war, we were thrown to the gutter.

    The guy the New York Times sent to cover Woodstock was told directly to report the event as a total disaster, but he refused and even demanded to see his article before it was published. These kinds of journalists are gone today, and THEY are the ones who are ruining our society, NOT the peace conscious.

    Just some thoughts from a confused American, but this generation is even more confused. They never had a Walter Cronkite or a Country Joe to speak out for them.

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  34. Larry Bergan5/30/10, 9:24 PM

    By THEY, I meant today's journalists, of course. Proof reading can never by underestimated.

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  35. wimpy5/30/10, 9:29 PM

    You might be interested in Mae Brussell's work on Manson....

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  36. Larry Bergan5/30/10, 11:28 PM

    I was definitely too hard on Wikipedia earlier, but I have found some discrepancies there. In truth, it's much better then the hard-bound encyclopedias we've been buying.

    This is the first time I've ever heard of Mae Brussell, (not surprising.) I read the whole thing. I don't know what she could have gained by introducing all of that incredible information. She couldn't have made a lot of money, (and obviously no great fame), as she claims Manson and Susan Atkins did.

    Damn interesting and that's why we'll probably never know anything about this Charles Watson character or how Manson came up with the cash to do what he did.

    Did Watson come up in Vincent Bugliosi's book or trial? Do you know? Interesting that Bugliosi out-rightly discounts any conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination.

    We certainly live in a tangled web, don't we. Probably one that wasn't made by spiders on LSD.

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  37. wimpy5/30/10, 11:33 PM

    Mae Brussell ROCKED. She was a very HIGHLY-respected researcher.

    I see you found my Spiders on Drugs link... :o)

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  38. Larry Bergan5/31/10, 12:30 AM

    Interesting that Brussell kept bringing up a term I NEVER heard in the sixties or even the seventies - rap and rappers. From what very little I've heard, the original rap movement wasn't based on bling-bling, but on people just standing up and ranting or talking about about things which concerned them. No violence or money involved.

    Obviously a movement which had to be corporatized into something it wasn't. I don't have the facts, maybe someone can help me here.

    One thing I found very funny about the Jefferson Airplane concert was that my brother-in-law left Utah and went to San Fransisco in the "hippie, (corporate label)" migration there. He met Marty Balin as a fan and said he was a prick. Apparently one of the other band members thought so too, (to say the least!) We've all known that band members often have differences, but HOLY COW!

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  39. Larry Bergan5/31/10, 12:36 AM

    It must have been a "telling moment" for the CIA to find out they couldn't fuck spiders up with acid. :)

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  40. Larry Bergan5/31/10, 1:01 AM

    Jefferson Airplane was a great band and all of us have our differences. These differences are magnified in the public square. My brother-in-law was also a prick at times, but we had many good times together trying to figure things out in those times.

    You simply cannot heard cats; Republicans, yeah, sure! If there's money to be made, we're all brothers/associates.

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  41. Larry Bergan5/31/10, 11:43 PM

    One of the funniest things I ever heard was that the Rolling Stones came to America, not give a concert, but to find out more about the music they made. If you listen to early Stones music, it is based on American Black music and they completely got that sound and possibly even improved upon it, (I'll leave that analysis to historians or somebody else), but the fact is that the Stones were driving on the wrong side of the road and got pulled over.

    The force of habit caused the Rolling Stones to drive on the wrong side of the road because that's the side of the road the the English drive on! The steering wheel is on the other side of the car!

    Funny stuff!

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