”’All that campus confusion seemed laughable,’ Garcia said. ’Why enter this closed society and make an effort to liberalize it when that?s never been its function? Why not leave and go somewhere else?’
That’s what the Grateful Dead did. They started as a barroom rock and blues act in and around Palo Alto. As bohemians in that place and time tended to do, they gravitated toward the drug and experimental art scenes happening around the redoubt of renegade novelist Ken Kesey and his cronies, the Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters had settled in the nearby woods of La Honda and became famous for their ’Acid Tests’ — wild, psychedelic-fueled art parties. The Dead became the house band for the tests, and it was in that atmosphere that the Dead became the Dead — an LSD-fueled improvisational groove machine without peer or even comparison.
One of the ironies of that scene was the U.S. government’s key role in creating it. Robert Hunter suggested that in a way the U.S. government ’created me…and Kesey and the Acid Tests,’ and thus the Grateful Dead. Both Hunter and Kesey were first exposed to powerful psychedelics such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin as volunteers in government military research in the early ’60s. (That research didn’t just create hippies. Military strategist Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation was also a heavy Army acidhead. He insisted that during one particularly heavy trip when he seemed to be just lolling about on the floor muttering ’wow,’ he was really quietly reviewing potential bombing strategies against Red China.)”
Läs mer på Reason. [Länk via Arts & Letters Daily.]
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