18

ACID

If LSD wasn’t invented by accident, it might as well have been. Albert Hofmann, a chemist at the Sandoz Company in Switzerland, searching for a treatment for poor circulation, had fruitlessly experimented with lysergic acid in the 1930s. In 1943, while examining his old work, he came across his twenty-fifth mixture—LSD 25. He took the first trip inadvertently when some of it got on his finger. Intrigued, he intentionally dosed three days later. It kicked in as he bicycled through Basel. “I had great difficulty in speaking coherently,” Hofmann wrote in his journal. “My field of vision swayed before me and was distorted like reflections in an amusement park mirror.” He did not record tangerine trees or marmalade skies, but he did speak of a loss of ego.

News of the drug spread—scientists told friends, who told other scientists and their friends, until an army of evangelists formed. It began with CIA agents and government types who believed LSD was either truth serum, a way to dispel fears of death, or the key to understanding the universe. Aldous Huxley, the British novelist and dystopian who’d written the paean to hallucinogens, The Doors of Perception, believed that the mind is a filter. It gives the illusion of individuality but blocks ninety percent of what’s out there. LSD tears out the sieve, letting you experience the fantastic plethora of creation. The self dissolves. You taste music and hear colors and realize you’ve never been alone. On his first trip, Huxley said he had seen “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation.”

When rock stars began experimenting with the drug, the result was a new kind of music, a new kind of song. Bob Dylan pioneered it, the Beatles perfected it. As for Dylan, no one is sure when he took his first dose. Some date it to April 1964, by which time the singer had fallen under the spell of the French Symbolist poets, especially Arthur Rimbaud, who described the artistic process as a kind of derangement: “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses.” In this way, the acid freaks were really just a modern version of the old absinthe drinkers. Questioned directly, Dylan said, “[I’m] pro-chemistry.” Phil Ochs described him as “LSD on the stage.” It explains the leap he made from faux-naïf folk ballads to Ezekiel visions of the fiery wheel. Bringing It All Back Home, released on March 22, 1965, is forty-five minutes of delirium. “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden,” “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” The songs caused a sensation among musicians. It made them all want to hallucinate.

By the midsixties, LSD had remade everything. There were the clothes, the godawful drapey parrot-colored shirts and coats, which, being studded with beads, made a terrific racket in the dryer. There were the cars, Kandy-Kolored, riding in first gear along the Sunset Strip. There were the movies—The Trip with Peter Fonda, Easy Rider, the chopper blazing down the roads of small-minded America. There were the novels and festivals and be-ins and dreams of a new age—Aquarius—when people would wander as freely as the lilies of the field, how they grow, though they toil not, neither do they spin. There were the spiritual quests: the Beatles following the Maharishi, Jimmy Page studying Aleister Crowley’s satanism. There was the language, the repurposed adjectives and verbs that might well stand as the era’s most enduring legacy: bummer, burnout, bad trip, crash, dose.

And there was the music. Acid rock. Psychedelia. The first such songs, apparently recorded by a Texas band called the 13th Floor Elevators, opened the age of the endless jam, laser show, and parking lot concessions. You go to the bathroom and return twenty minutes later to find the guitarist trapped in the same never-ending riff. The Animals had a hit with “A Girl Named Sandoz.” The Byrds had a hit with “Eight Miles High.”

What makes an LSD song?

The lyric, of course, but also the minutiae, weird effects cooked up in the studio, Eastern instruments, trippy bells, pennywhistles, bouncing balls, and bits of code written for the whacked-out close listener perfectly prepared to play the record in reverse. The main action is between musician and chemistry. It sounds terrific when you’re high, but it ages like a blacklight poster. One does well to consider Keith Richards’s distinction between “druggy songs” and “songs about drugs.” The Beatles wrote druggy songs. The Stones wrote songs about drugs. “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from Revolver, 1966, is the Beatles’ “LSD masterpiece.” John Lennon said it was inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I defy anyone to listen to it while jogging, or writing a book. It’s less song than relic, proof of a strange mood that overtook millions.

Psychedelia was a closed loop. It led only back to itself. John Lennon said he dropped more than a thousand hits of LSD, quitting only when his body became immune. He said acid had destroyed his creativity. For years, convinced of his unpersonhood, he couldn’t write. For what is a more audacious expression of ego than imposing your will upon language? He was one of a legion of trippers who did not make it all the way back. When I asked Paul Jones about LSD, he talked about the ruins, all the damaged kids who, as if at the end of a blaze, stood gutted and hollow.

The Stones came to the party late. The first time most of them remember seeing a joint was backstage in 1964, when they were on the same bill as Bo Diddley. Some hanger-on was leaning in a corner, smoking a bomber. It caused a panic among the boys, who, imagining headlines and perp walks, kicked out the offender. This was akin to a Jew asking Elijah to leave the Passover table. For here was the liberating ganja—in ten years, Keith and Peter Tosh would smoke until the walls melted into Jah. According to Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts was the only Rolling Stone who knew anyone who indulged, because Charlie hung out with jazz musicians, and you know what they’re like.

Linda Keith, whom I tracked down in New Orleans, told me Richards was an unbelievable drug prude. The fashion model and wild child who broke Richards’s heart, Linda turns up in a handful of Stones songs, notably “Ruby Tuesday.” When she started dropping acid in the midsixties, Richards had no clue. She scattered wine bottles around the apartment so he’d assume she was drunk. “I was a year or two ahead of him, but back then it might as well have been a century,” she told me. “I was going through things that scared him, things he could not yet understand.”

That changed quickly. Keith said the Stones returned from their third American tour with pockets full of acid. Brian did it first, which is important. It’s not just what you do, but when you do it. There are three tenses: too late, too early, and just right. Brian was always too early. Fast to live, fast to impregnate, fast to get famous, fast to disorder his senses. In a way, he was just another acid casualty. His mind opened too wide, to the bad as well as the good. According to Tony Sanchez, the band’s drug dealer and author of Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, Brian began to deteriorate soon after his first acid trip.

(Can you imagine your story as written by the guy who sells you dope?)

In a moment, the bluesy guitarist gave way to the freaked-out, baggy-eyed, Kandy-Kolored wastoid.

Richards dosed next. “The first time Brian and I took acid we thought it was like smoking a joint,” he said. “We went to bed. Suddenly we looked around and all these Hieronymus Bosch things were flashing around. That was in 1965.”

Bill and Charlie avoided the scene altogether. It cast them as bystanders, looking on from the back row. “Regretfully, I never took acid,” Watts said later. “I say regretfully because I’ve been terrified of the fuckin’ stuff and I wish I’d taken it to know about it. I think I was the only rock star never to wear a pair of beads. I wished I could have done, but it never looked right on me.”

Mick Jagger was the last to go. He’d always been prudent, calculating. One foot in the London School of Economics, another in Edith Grove. One foot in the boardroom, another on the stage. He finally succumbed because it was the sixties and if you were a pop star and a leader you had to do it. For a dangerous moment, he flirted with the fecund language of the hippie aristocrat. “When I’m on stage I sense that the teenagers are trying to communicate to me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency,” he told The Daily Mirror at the time, “not about me or about our music, but about the world and the way we live.” I could fill pages with trippy Jagger quotes, but I won’t because I recall things I said in my twenties that still make me burn with shame.

Each Stone reacted to the drug in his own way. Whereas Mick became a hippie king, Keith entered the cloud where, in a sense, he’d spend the rest of his life. Look at pictures of Richards taken before 1966. His eyes are clear and sharp, his face is drawn in simple lines. Now look at pictures of him taken in ’69, ’75, ’97. It’s the same guy, but the look is foggy and unfocused. Something has been lost, but, weirdly, something has been gained. By the seventies, he is wizened, tolerant. The Buddha pre- and postenlightenment. He dropped acid under the bodhi tree. He levitated as he meditated on Muddy and Wolf. In short, drugs are bad for everyone but Keith Richards, whom they almost killed but enriched instead.

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What was the Stones’ first drug song?

Some name “Satisfaction” (“He can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me”). Others posit “Mother’s Little Helper” or “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Over time, it became one of the band’s great themes: getting high, coming down, and the weightless moments in between. To my mind, the Stones composed the best drug songs of the era. Unlike most examples, the Stones’ songs can still be listened to without nostalgia or irony. Like literature, the best of them have stayed new. You think less of titles than of particular phrases. “Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues.” “There will always be a space in my parking lot, when you need a little coke and sympathy.”

These songs survive while so many others—I’m looking at you, “White Rabbit,” “White Room,” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”—have curdled because the blues put bedrock beneath them. While Beatles drug songs seem untethered—a spirited attempt to recreate an acid trip—the Stones still chug like Chicago. They are less like missives from inside the hippie than reports from the back room where the hippie is slumped in a chair. With two exceptions, the Stones never gave in to the sixties, or sat at the foot of the Maharishi, never became besotted by abstract notions of peace or thought themselves bigger than Muddy Waters. While the Beatles ran hot, the Stones kept cool, writing about drugs in the gritty way of old cowboy singers. Dick Justice, say, who recorded the first hillbilly version of “Cocaine” in 1929, or Tommy Duncan, whose 1937 “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas” includes the line “I can sell you morphine, coke, or snow,” or the Texas Rhythm Boys, who in 1948 sang, “Throw away your Ovaltine / Buy yourself some Benzedrine / and roll, roll, roll on down the line.”

Aftermath, the first Stones album composed entirely by Jagger and Richards, was released in America in June 1966. Brian, frozen out of the songwriting, sought to distinguish himself elsewhere. When you hear a strange instrument on that record, it’s Jones: the sitar on “Paint It Black;” the dulcimer on “Lady Jane” and “I Am Waiting;” the xylophone on “Under My Thumb.” Between the Buttons, released a year later, includes a handful of obvious drug songs, including “Connection” and “Something Happened to Me Yesterday.” Though it’s considered a great album, it’s the cover people remember: the Stones in overcoats on a cold day. Charlie is out front and sharp as an injury, but the picture blurs at the edges—an effect Gered Mankowitz achieved by smearing Vaseline on his camera lens. Keith is fuzzed like the pope in the painting by Francis Bacon. It spoke in code of acid, of general distortion. Brian grins maniacally, in the way of a warlock or wizard.

When I asked Gered Mankowitz about the photo session, he spoke mostly about Brian, who was increasingly becoming a problem. “They were recording at Olympic,” Mankowitz told me. “In those days, they used to start at about ten, eleven at night and go on until six or seven in the morning. I often spent the night with them, hanging around, taking pictures. One morning as we tumbled into the dawn, I turned around and looked at them and I thought, ‘Jesus, they look just like the Rolling Stones.’ Everything that we thought about the Rolling Stones was embodied in this sort of blur. They were out of focus, if you know what I mean. And I said to [Oldham], ‘I think it would be great to do a session right now.’ I suggested Primrose Hill, which was on the other side of London, but in those days and at that hour it only took about twenty-five minutes to drive there. I wanted early light, sky and trees. It would only last twenty minutes or so because we were tired, stoned, and cold. So it had to be fast. I got angry because I thought Brian was fucking the shoot up, burying himself in the collar of his coat, or reading a newspaper, or turning his back to me. I told Andrew, ‘I’m worried about Brian, what can I do?’ And Andrew said, ‘Don’t worry about what he does, because we’re at a point with the band that it doesn’t matter. He can’t take away from the Stones. He can only contribute.’ It was brilliant direction because it freed me completely. I just stopped worrying about Brian. And funnily enough, he’s fantastic in every shot. But it was because Andrew recognized it didn’t matter. He had a band where if you couldn’t see all five of them equally or smilingly or looking into the camera, it didn’t matter. It just made them more intriguing.”

Mankowitz photographed the Beatles as well as the Stones, so I asked which band was more interesting to work with.

“The Beatles had their moments visually,” he said, “and there were two or three fabulous covers right at the beginning. Rubber Soul is fantastic. But the Stones had something magical. They didn’t appear to play any game. The Beatles—at the beginning, at least—were always very willing to smile, grin, pose. Shirts and ties, for Chrissake! They looked clean. Your granny liked the Beatles. It was terrible. But the Stones? They’d piss anywhere, man.”