Garcia told Denselow that the times might have changed but the scene remained just as vital all those years later. “[Haight-Ashbury’s hippies] are still pretty much doing what they were doing then, but… the difference is now they have 15 years of experience under their belts and have gotten to be experts in what they do, just like we’ve gotten to be experts in what we do – sort of.” He said that when the Grateful Dead first started out, the US was largely unchanged from the staid 1950s era: “A lot of times we would come into a town and they wouldn’t let us into the hotel, whether we had reservations or not… As soon as they saw long hair and eccentricity of any sort, you know, that was it.”
Getty ImagesWhile they may have come in peace, it’s easy to see how these wild-haired hippies’ transgressive lifestyle might have alarmed the uninitiated. Indeed, the band’s formation was inextricably linked to the glorification of taking LSD. The hallucinogenic drug was discovered in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. When a few years later he accidentally ingested some of the drug through his fingertips, he experienced visions of what he described as. “fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours”. While Hofmann argued for decades that LSD could help treat mental illness, others envisaged very different applications for its potentially dangerous psychedelic properties.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA created a secret programme to research mind control. Known by the code name MK-Ultra, it funded experiments on unsuspecting patients, among them people in psychiatric institutions and prison inmates, using methods including administering psychedelic drugs, sensory deprivation and electroshock treatment. In 1960, CIA-funded researchers at the Menlo Park Hospital in California were paying students $40 a day to take LSD.
One volunteer was Ken Kesey, who would later write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Awed by the hallucinogenic power of the still-legal drug, Kesey began to distribute it to his friends and in 1964, he assembled a string of like-minded people dubbed the Merry Pranksters and set off across the country in a brightly painted bus. The trip was chronicled by writer Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. A year later in California, he began staging a series of parties he called Acid Tests to promote the taking of LSD. The second event on 4 December in San Jose was where the Grateful Dead played their first gig. The band had played before as The Warlocks, but it turned out that there was another group with the same name, so Garcia’s gang switched to the name by which they would be known for the next few decades.
