Lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD or “acid” for short, was a cultural rather than a chemical phenomenon. It emerged from the Swiss laboratories of Roche in the 1950s into a world that believed that it was about to unravel the secrets of the self, and that inner space would surely be colonized and conquered along with outer space.
What that conquest would result in depended on what school of psychology one was enrolled in: Behaviorists imagined a world without crime achieved through the conquest of free will, Freudians a world of pleasure through the conquest of guilt. LSD appealed to those in search of the keys to Paradise, to those who wanted the human race to retake the Garden of Eden on its own terms.
LSD is usually described inaccurately as a hallucinogen. Although hallucinations are not unusual in LSD experiences, they are not universal. There are profound visual experiences, the sense of pattern and color are vividly enhanced. Whether he or she sees demons or spends an hour studying the carpet, the LSD user feels the experience is not drawing them to another, illusory world but deeper into the nature of reality.
LSD is not a hedonistic experience—many of its effects are emotionally bruising—but for many people it was a revelation to be evangelized as widely as possible. LSD makes its subjects highly suggestible, and during the 1960s the LSD experience was highly colored by the expectations of the user.
LSD crept into London in 1965, brought in by an Englishman, Michael Hollingshead, who was a disciple of Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor whose academic experiments into the psychedelic experience had mushroomed into a campaign to overthrow all knowledge that was not psychedelically inspired.
Hollingshead began his operations under the grand title of the World Psychedelic Centre. His evangelism was directed to those in high society. The headquarters of the (21) World Psychedelic Centre were a flat at 25 Pont Street, Belgravia, the grand residential district of eighteenth-century houses where many English aristocrats have their London address.
The LSD sessions Hollingshead hosted were highly ritualized and very different from the parties the Oregon author Ken Kesey was organizing simultaneously in San Francisco. They were held in a room dedicated to the purpose, on the night of a full moon. What was to be found in the room was strictly prescribed: hand-woven cloth, uncarved wood, flowers, ancient music, burning fire, a touch of earth, a splash of water, fruit, good bread, cheese, fermenting wine, candlelight, temple incense, a warm hand, fish swimming, and anything over five hundred years old.
The ancient music came over a sound system and light shows were projected on screens. A LSD trip at the World Centre was a guided experience, punctuated with readings from Timothy Leary’s adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to announce to the experimenters that they had crossed a bardo, the measures the Book of the Dead uses to divides the different levels of psychic experience, like so many floors in an elevator ride.
Another object to be find in the ritual room of the World Centre, and elsewhere on the premises, was hashish. LSD was not illegal in England in 1965 but hashish was, and a police raid closed the World Centre down six months after it opened.
The three thousand hits of LSD Hollingshead had imported had already begun to leak out into less formal surroundings by then. Into the Troubadour coffee bar in the nearby Old Brompton Road, for example, and also just around the corner into a flat at (22) Lennox Gardens, where a brilliant young dilettante named John Dunbar lived with his beautiful young wife, Marianne Faithfull.
They were a golden couple, living off Dunbar’s occasional freelance journalism and the proceeds from Faithfull’s success as a pop star, a career her husband had absentmindedly launched her on. The son of diplomat, Dunbar had been born in Beirut and spent part of his childhood in Stalin’s Moscow. His wide cultural horizon and gift for friendship made him the nucleus of otherwise unlikely social connections.
The couple had honeymooned in Paris with the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky. Ginsberg had headlined at the International Poetry Festival, an audacious event organized by two graduates from Oxford University, Michael Horovitz and David Sladen. Held in the domed (23) Royal Albert Hall, on Kensington Gore, a large auditorium built for orchestral concerts, the event attracted an audience of seven thousand, an astonishing crowd for a poetry recital. Dunbar had been impressed at the underlying potential for a London counterculture.
Among Dunbar’s wide circle of friends and acquaintances, which included the Queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, was Peter Asher, the brother of Paul McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher. Through this connection the Beatles were initiated into the LSD experience in the harum-scarum atmosphere of Lennox Gardens, where nobody waited for the full moon, and even the pregnant Marianne Faithfull took a trip.
The (24) Indica Gallery, 6 Mason’s Yard, was the place where John Dunbar’s eclectic interests—international art, alternative literature, and social networking—came together. Indica was built, indirectly, on Beatle money. Peter Asher had taken part in what turned out to a lucrative experiment. Uneasy as to how much of the Beatles’ success was due to hype, McCartney had experimented by releasing a Lennon and McCartney song anonymously through two unknown artists. “World Without Love” by Peter and Gordon proved to be a substantial hit. As the Peter of Peter and Gordon, Asher had a lot of money that he used to found Indica, with Dunbar and the writer Barry Miles given joint ownership.
Indica was by no means a dilettante enterprise. The gallery’s first show, an exhibition of Latin American artists based in Paris, sold out within days. Dunbar had entrepreneurial acumen as well as social panache. Above all, he had an adventurous disposition and nurtured what is now known as conceptual art. In the spring of 1967 Indica hosted a show by Yoko Ono that featured living sculptures of people with handkerchiefs covering their mouths. The idea was to challenge assumptions about which parts of the body can be displayed in public and which must remain hidden. Ono was at work on a companion piece, a film called Bottoms, which consisted of a series of stills of bare behinds.
LSD was initially confined to a small word-of-mouth culture; few outsiders had any idea what was going on. In the autumn of 1966 the jazz singer George Melly attended an exhibition of the work of Aubrey Beardsley at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Melly had always been a man of eccentric, even lonely, interests, and he expected to find an exhibition dedicated to an all but forgotten decadent artist who had briefly shocked Victorian London deserted. Instead he found it thronged and that everyone present was under twenty-five. Something was stirring underground, he realized.
In the early summer of 1967 London woke up and discovered it had acquired a counterculture, and Jimi, who had had little do with it so far, was one of its emblems.
Jimi had come across LSD in New York and tripped with Linda Keith, who recalls him as nervous about it and not sure whether LSD and acid were the same thing. In London any inhibitions he might have had were soon forgotten, and he tripped with Brian Jones, whom he had met through Kathy. Unlike other London guitarists, Jones’ admiration for Jimi was not crossed with any sense of rivalry. Jones was among the first who heard the acetates of Are You Experienced? and he was full of encouragement and admiration.
Are You Experienced? was finally released at the end of the second week of May. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp had originally planned to release it in March, a bold move because album sales were supposed to be driven by success in the singles chart. After “Hey Joe’s” slow rise into the charts, “Purple Haze” had been released at the end of March, almost as soon as it was completed, and had reached number three in the Top Ten. The Experience’s third single, “The Wind Cries Mary,” was released simultaneously with Are You Experienced?
The release had been delayed because the project was frequently overtaken by the speed with which Jimi was producing new material, and delayed because Chas was learning to produce as he went along and mixed and remixed, not always sure of what he was trying to accomplish. An album by an artist just discovering his voice and a producer still finding his feet was hardly likely to be a statement of any kind, but in the climate of the time it could not escape being taken for one.
An anonymous reviewer in the Melody Maker was bemused but encouraging: “One of the most pleasing aspects of Jimi Hendrix’s success is his refusal to be blatantly commercial. Subsequently the more ‘real’ Hendrix we hear the more commercial it becomes. Subsequently with Are You Experienced? we’re getting the real Hendrix, and although it might seem weird and freaky to some, at least you can be sure it is, repeat is, the real Hendrix Experience.”
To read that on Thursday, when the Melody Maker came out, and then go out and buy Are You Experienced? on the following Saturday, when you had time off from work or school, was an adventure and an act of trust. Albums, still referred to as LPs, usually delivered the familiar: more of the same from an act that had established itself through the singles chart. You bought Are You Experienced? with no expectation of enjoying it at the first play and no guarantee that you would come to like it all. You handed over your nineteen shillings and sixpence and hoped Jimi knew what he was doing and was not taking you for a ride.
Naturally there were those who thought the emperor had no clothes. Tony Palmer, pop music critic for London’s oldest Sunday newspaper, the Observer, was unimpressed. “Owes everything to Cream,” he wrote. “over laden with electronic effects, confuses gimmick with invention. One song hardly distinguishable from the next, and all characterised by moaning, groaning, and sobbing. Mostly out of tune and probably out of time. But much respected in the pop world because they are so ‘meaningful’.”
Even the Financial Times, that somber, stuffy newspaper aimed at bankers and businessmen, felt it should take a position. At the end of the year, Michael Wale summarized the Summer of Love for his stockbroker readership:
Drug taking for a time became fashionable. The Beatles admitted to having experienced LSD. It was the year of the big “turn on”. Pop lyrics had begun to simulate LSD trips and being high on marijuana and, with the use of flashing lights onstage, so did the groups. The leading exponents of this particular second hand freneticism were The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Hendrix brought something new if only it was his incredible hair style which stood on end and looked as if he’d just touched the electric mains which fed his guitar.
Hendrix with a wild, untamed guitar sound and only another guitarist and his drummer for accompaniment, filled the role vacated by the Rolling Stones. There was a hint of voodoo about the group’s music as “Hey Joe” “Purple Haze” and “Burning of the Midnight Oil” [sic] soared up the charts, rather bizarrely because the Hendrix tunes had no fixed shape and certainly no commercial sound. Presumably with the general acceptance by the adult population of all their heroes from The Monkees to The Beatles young people needed a point of musical revolt and try as hard as The Rolling Stones did, it was Hendrix who provided it in 1967.
It was correct to write of the Jimi Hendrix Experience as a “group” rather than as a single virtuoso. “Hey Joe” was built on Chas’s ideas rather than Jimi’s, and Jimi all but disowned the record as his own ideas took shape. But the smartest thing that the Financial Times’ critic had to say was to ask why these records were hits at all.
“No fixed shape” is not entirely accurate. “Red House,” which appeared on the British version of Are You Experienced? but not on the U.S. album released by Warner Brothers, is a deeply conventional twelve-bar blues. Yet the singles had no recognizable shape and eschewed the formula of hook, chorus, and bridge that pop music was based on then and is based on now. After forty years of continuous play it is easy to forget that Jimi’s music was strange when it first emerged, and what is strange can also be forbidding and menacing.
Where Michael Wale is wildly wrong is in his supposition that Are You Experienced? is intentionally forbidding and menacing and that Jimi’s music was an “anti-music,” deliberately ugly and confrontational—music made so that it could not be co-opted as entertainment by mainstream society and would instead forever remain a shibboleth of the counterculture.
Not that the counterculture was sure about Jimi. At the other end of the cultural and political spectrum from the Financial Times was the International Times, London’s underground newspaper dedicated to psychedelic revolution.
The newspaper of London’s counterculture began to appear at bimonthly intervals at the end of 1966. Edited by a committee, it chose to expand its readers’ consciousness through cold print rather than hot graphics. Behind the beautiful cover art work were densely printed articles pursuing philosophical points. The style was that of a Leninist journal rather than a comic book, and much space was dedicated to international news.
“The LP [Are You Experienced?] is definitely worth listening to, even if you are not a Hendrix fan, to see what advances are being made in this realm of music,” concluded a brief review, signed “Dick, Vick, Richard.” In other words, International Times readers should listen to Jimi, whether they liked it or not, as an educational exercise.
Jimi was an experimental musician but he was not an iconoclastic one. His ideas of what music is were naturalistic. His music stirs deep passions but there is nothing anarchic in it. He was not reaching out for chaos but attempting to awaken something within. He believed music could change people but that change would awaken dormant potential rather than shatter everything, leaving it to be remade anew.
“We were interested, Jimi and I,” recalls Roger Mayer,
in taking someone on a space journey—it would take them out, the sound of the guitars. It’s well known that if you hit the right notes on the guitar, the right sound on the guitar, it’s got sexual connotations for women, it’s got rock and roll, it’s got power, it’s got all kinds of stuff. But that’s historical; lots of people cleverer than I have written books about it, whether its martial music, or military music or whatever. And it comes from the Church, it goes through choral music, it goes through chants, all sorts of stuff you can follow how various people have used sounds and environments for different purposes.
It was with Roger that Jimi shared his underlying ideas.
We just used to chat about it, like we are now. And we’d say, “Oh that’s interesting.” The idea really is to paint a picture with the sound that takes somebody on a journey. And if you do that with a classical symphony or with rock and roll, and you get it right, it’s an enduring thing. And the interesting thing is that if you get it right, it’s perceived universally. Jimi’s not the only artist I’ve worked with. I’ve worked with Bob Marley and a lot of people. And when you get the quality of the sound right, it internationally travels, because it’s all about sounding good. If I said to you that sounds good, you could be uneducated, you could be in Africa or Chinese—[but] if you get the sound right you’re going to hit some primitive, or whatever you want to call it, chord inside the person.
Noel, Jimi, and Mitch touch down on their return to London from the Monterey Festival in 1967.