Albion Dreaming (18 page)

So come loon soon down Cromwell Road, man,
You got to spread your wings.
A-flip out, skip out, trip-out and a-make your stand, folks.
²⁰

As 1965 progressed, LSD became more widely available in London. Though no more than a few hundred people at most had experienced the drug’s effects, a definite subculture of post-beatniks and psychedelic mods was springing up, forming the nucleus of the hippie movement. The cultural explosion often referred to as the Swinging Sixties was happening all over London, with vibrant fashion boutiques and art exhibitions springing up on a weekly basis. “Happenings” – improvised, often spontaneous art and music events – were taking place and bright colours and abstract design were to be seen in the dress of those young people sensitive to the changing times. It is arguable how much influence LSD exerted on the fashion, art and music of the Sixties. Certainly in the latter part of the decade “psychedelic” was attached to just about everything. But this was largely a commercial response, entrepreneurs selling an ersatz, facsimile fashion trend back to people who hadn’t had the core experience but who wished to identify with it. However, in 1965 this had not yet taken place, but the movers and shakers of the art, fashion and music worlds were dabbling to one degree or another with LSD and so it’s a reasonable assumption that LSD use was indirectly informing hip culture, art and fashion at that time.

The Beatles were a band on whom the influence of LSD was significant and incontrovertible. They became some of the drug’s most famous advocates and for many people represent an aural distillation of the psychedelic Sixties. The band had been
introduced to marijuana by Bob Dylan while on an American tour in 1964 and found they liked the drug and its effects on the music they were creating. John Lennon, George Harrison and their wives were unknowingly dosed with LSD by their dentist, John Riley, in April 1965. Unaware of what they had taken and believing they had been drugged so he could inveigle them into an orgy, they fled. The realization they had taken a psychedelic drug hit them once they were in the Powick Club, after driving there in Harrison’s mini, a journey which took them several centuries in LSD time. It’s possible to read details of this LSD experience into the single “Help!”, released in September that year. Huxley’s
Doors of Perception
may have influenced “Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the doors” and the sense of ego loss LSD brought on may have led to the line “My independence seems to vanish in the haze”.

Although LSD use was on the rise, with small scenes appearing all over London, there had not as yet been a large event that brought the new underground movement together. This would take place in the summer of 1965 prompted by American beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was hugely popular among this burgeoning subculture. When he gave an impromptu reading at Better Books, the capital’s main hip bookstore the owner, Bob Cobbing, along with poet John Esam and others decided the time was right to organise a large gathering to promote underground poetry and see who rallied to the call.

The organisers, who included the omnipresent Alex Trocchi, were bold enough to book the Royal Albert Hall for the event, billing it as the International Poetry Incarnation, to be held on 11 June. The press release made it obvious what sort of event it was, sending out subliminal messages to those in the know.

World declaration hot peace shower!
Earth’s grass is free!
Cosmic poetry Visitation accidentally happening carnally!
Spontaneous planet-chant Carnival!
Mental Cosmonaut poet epiphany, immaculate
supranational Poesy insemination!

The risk that few would turn up, never mind enough to fill the Albert Hall, melted away on the day of the event. From all over London, Britain, Europe, the growing underground scene put on its finery and turned out in droves. Several thousand people turned up for the event, filling the Albert Hall, with many being turned away. Cannabis was openly smoked and it was obvious to all in attendance that they weren’t alone; others who shared their interests in alternate modes of intoxication and social expression existed.

London poet Harry Fainlight was one of the readers and declaimed his LSD inspired epic “The Spider”. As he did so Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog, high on mescaline, repeatedly interrupted him and Spike Hawkins remembers “Harry dropped a grenade into the audience by saying he’d written his piece under the influence of LSD, which was considered extremely risqué at the time – especially at the Albert Hall.”
²¹

The event, captured on film by Peter Whitehead as
Wholly Communion
was a complete success. Friendships were forged and underground tribes came together. At the end of the day, poets and audience alike returned home encouraged by the huge attendance. The first major happening of the London underground had taken place.

Across London and in other parts of Britain hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people had now taken LSD and had experienced the permanent change in consciousness it was capable of. A few LSD experiments went badly wrong, leaving the unfortunate drug user a psychological wreck. Often those who had experienced bad trips never took LSD again. Others worked at altering set and setting to ensure there was no repetition of the experience or, should it happen, to have a way of navigating out of it.

For Dave Tomlin, one of the unsung foot soldiers of the psychedelic era, taking LSD was a cataclysmic event which severed his ties to normality and the “straight” world, plunging him into a new way of living. In 1965, Tomlin was living in Notting Dale, married and an up and coming musician, playing with one of the emergent bands on Britain’s jazz circuit:

“I took my first trip in the winter of 1965 given to me by Steve
Stollman, an American jazz record producer. At that time I was playing soprano sax with the Mike Taylor modern jazz quartet and we had just recorded an LP for Decca entitled
Pendulum
. Steve gave us the acid on a sugar cube wrapped in silver foil and after taking it we went to a happening in a flat in the Cromwell Rd. From that point on the group fell apart with paranoia etc. Mike Taylor went on to write material for the rock band Cream, before walking into the sea to commit suicide.”
²²

The experience had a profound and lasting effect on Tomlin: “It was like the feeling that everything you’d ever based and founded your life on was suddenly gone.”

With his jazz career over and his personality in tatters it would have been logical for Tomlin to fight to regain his pre-LSD state or to seek medical help. Instead, he walked out of his house, his marriage and into the burgeoning underground where he became a key figure, becoming immersed in the London Free School, the happenings at the UFO club, and playing violin on the Third Ear Band’s album,
Alchemy
.

During the summer of 1965 Michael Hollingshead started to think seriously about returning to Britain. This time his purpose was crystal clear, he wanted to spread the psychedelic gospel. In August he wrote to Alex Trocchi, outlining his plans to raise awareness of LSD in all the major European countries. This would include organizing major rallies in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Frankfurt at which Leary, Metzner and Alpert would speak. His letter was full of enthusiasm and hope for the future and Hollingshead clearly saw himself as a missionary.

“As a European I felt the time had come for us to share with Europe some of the things we had discovered about the methodology of taking LSD in positive settings. I wanted to rid people of their inhibitions about mystical writings and demonstrate to them that
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Tao Te Ching
, and the
I Ching
were really basic manuals with fundamental instructions about taking LSD sessions ... From what I had heard in letters and conversations, the psychedelic movement was small and badly informed. It appeared that those who took LSD did so
as a consciously defiant anti-authoritarian gesture. The spiritual content of the psychedelic experience was being overlooked.”
²³

A meeting took place at Millbrook to discuss how the lessons learned there could be spread to Europe and it was agreed that Hollingshead should return to London. He was to take with him Leary’s versions of the eastern spiritual classics
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and the
Tao Te Ching
as well as copies of the new magazine devoted to mind expansion, the
Psychedelic Review
. Detailed plans were drawn up and October 1965 was chosen as the time for Hollingshead to take Leary’s brand of psychedelic religion to the UK.

Although Leary appeared publicly enthusiastic about Hollingshead’s planned psychedelic beachhead in Europe, privately he expressed serious doubts about Hollingshead’s motivations and capabilities. Author and Sixties luminary Barry Miles recalls Leary telling him, “When Dick [Alpert] and I stood on the dock in New York waving goodbye, I said to Dick, ‘Well, that writes off the psychedelic revolution in England for at least ten years.’” Hardly the sort of thing Leary would say if Hollingshead was really capable of acting as his psychedelic apostle for the planned European psychedelic revolution.

Hollingshead arrived in Britain on 5 October 1965, being picked up from Southampton docks and driven to a London hotel by his old Etonian friend Desmond O’Brien. It was decided to set up a mini-version of Leary’s Millbrook and, after discussions with O’Brien, a lease was taken out on Flat 2, 25 Pont Street in London’s ever fashionable Chelsea district. The World Psychedelic Centre was created with O’Brien, who had funded the expensive flat, as President of the WPC. O’Brien’s financial backing came from money he had made as a Lloyd’s underwriter. Like Hollingshead, O’Brien also shared a taste for opiates and amphetamines and he too soon became an addict. For some the psychedelic experience wasn’t enough to transcend the desire for other, brain-deadening drugs and O’Brien could never free himself from their grip. In 1969 he was discovered in the grounds of his Cheshire estate at the side of his secret drug stash which, among other drugs, was comprised of thousands of heroin, morphine and amphetamine capsules.

London’s LSD scene now consisted of several locations to which psychedelic pioneers gravitated. Trocchi’s flat, the house at 101 Cromwell Road, antique dealer Christopher Gibb’s luxurious Cheyne Walk residence, and now Pont Street were the major centres, each of these scenes having their own philosophy and view on how LSD should be used. Some experienced LSD users advocated doing whatever you wanted whilst tripping, as long as you were safe, having as much fun as possible and letting the insights arise spontaneously. Hollingshead held Leary’s view that there should be structure to the experience which should have a guide skilled in the use and meaning of eastern sacred texts coupled with light-shows and readings. Others, such as Joey Mellen, evolved their own ideas on how the LSD experience could be made safe.

Undergraduate Mellen dropped out of Oxford before taking his finals, which would have led to a promising career as a chartered accountant in the City. His 1964 mescaline experience was, “... so wonderful that I am determined to regain that state of mind.” He did, a year later, in Ibiza, courtesy of an LSD laced sugar cube given to him by Dutch medical student Bart Huges. Mellen eloquently described his experience: “I felt brilliant, god-like, able to understand everything. At the same time as being fascinated by the way I could see things as though through a magnifying glass, I could hear all the sounds of the town outside the house as well as those inside, and each perception registered quite clearly, distinct from all the others though related to them, like the various instruments in an orchestra. Now I knew what eternity meant. Time seemed to stop and still everything was moving. I was ecstatic. I kept eating sugar lumps. I could feel that this was the energy I needed to get round this universe in my brain.”
²⁴

Through Michael Rainey, who had just started Hung On You, one of London’s first psychedelic boutiques, Mellen became aware of a budding hippie scene in a flat on Cadogan Lane. He moved in, acquiring a plentiful supply of LSD from John Doyle and “Cadogan Lane became one of the happiest turn-on centres there’s ever been ... I don’t think anyone had a bad trip”. Mellen attributed this success to another potentially dangerous compound, sugar.
He insisted that bad trips were caused by a deficit of sugar in the system of the LSD user and that if sugar lumps or confectionery were eaten throughout the trip, bad experiences would be minimised. “Sugarlack” was the term he gave to the problems he believed LSD users were encountering, and he worked hard at spreading his particular version of the LSD gospel. Sweets and sugar were always available at LSD sessions run by Mellen and he enshrined the principles of Sugarlack on a wall scroll which he gave out freely to those experimenting with LSD.

Michael Hollingshead visited the Cadogan Lane flat and was “... very impressed by the happy scene he found there. Lots of young people on acid, eating sugar, with no one putting over a big mystery scene.” The emphasis was on unrestrained fun, nothing was planned and according to Mellen, “... it was just one long happening.”
²⁵

Mellen’s approach to taking LSD was very different from Hollingshead’s, which was very much focused on the symbols and texts of Eastern religious systems such as Buddhism and Hinduism. Mandalas, mantras and
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
were staple fare at the World Psychedelic Centre. Although Mellen was serious about LSD as a tool for personal transformation, Hollingshead’s approach to LSD sessions disquietened him, being, “... always in a darkened room, smelling of incense, with a commentary by the guru. That was the way the Americans had devised to keep people on sugarlacks in control.”
²⁶