Part I: High Times. Winter 1964 through May of 1967. | Part II.
A 1964 Film-Or Auditorium Prelude: Flash those Beatles Backers.
My first wife Susan acquired her 'Wolfie' nickname one year on campus after wearing her hair long and puffed out, which suggested a 'Wolf Woman' image to her friends, or 'Wolfie' for short. As for me, I happened to play a Wolfman in a movie special featurette shown just before the Beatles film A Hard Days Night (YouTube Video) in 1964, in which the Wolfman dove out of the screen into the audience to abduct a kicking maiden and carry her back into the screen at the command of a mad scientist. The stunt was implemented by dazzling the audience with a flash bulb, after which we quickly assumed our positions on stage. It reminds me of the blinding moment that the photographer's flash bulbs went off when King Kong was on stage in New York.
 "There she is!" said the mad scientist,
gesturing toward the audience just recovering from the blinding flash bulb.
"Go get her!" I had to fight
my way through popcorn-throwing kids in my wolfman suit and brave kicking girls
with their knees up to their chins to get to our plant, who I carried up onto the stage over
my shoulder. I had been hired to play the Wolfman for the featurette while standing in a ticket
line for A Hard Days Night by the fellow who
really played the mad scientist in the movie, who noticed that I was a weight-lifter who could probably pick
the girl up from her movie seat and carry her back up into the picture, all right. He had me working
"like a dog". I was paid with 5 or 6
free tickets to A Hard Days Night.
Although I was a performer on the stage in North High's Thespians at the time, this
was the first pay I collected as an actor.
It was an education in a stunt to fill more auditorium
(*).
[YouTube: Psychedelic Beatles].
Years later, in 1969, Dr. Timothy Leary
seemed to flash me from another dimension with the brilliant white light of a film projector
that held me in its lens against a
diamond-like background
in a surreal moment mirroring this flashbulb stunt, appearing in a role suggestive of the mad scientist from the featurette [Part II: HOWL]. Perhaps I should also note that today this light also reminds me of the first light of the sun striking the new moon in a thin cresencent on the back of its mythic star, a book-bewinged impetuous soul pictured as a dog [Moon Map].
"In the beginning was the TURN ON. The flash, the illumination. The electric trip.
The sudden bolt of energy that starts the new system.
The TURN ON was God.
All things were made from the TURN ON and without Him was not anything made.
In this TURN ON was life; and the life was the light of men.
It has always been the same.
It was the flash that exploded the galaxies, from which all energy flows. It was
the spark that ignites in the mysterious welding of amino-acid strands that creates
the humming vine of organic life. It is the brilliant neurological glare than
illuminates the shadows of man's mind."
- From the first lines of High Priest by Timothy Leary
| Diamonds Are Forever
|
Searching for a heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like
the splendor of The Enlightened One."
My 1967-1973 Psychedelic Period: The Super Sandoz LSD-25 Retinal Circus
 A few years later in May 1967 [audio: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out], I sampled the amazing Sandoz LSD-25 [ *, links], which was being promoted by Dr. Albert Hofmann's firm Sandoz Pharmaceuticals ( see Sandoz photos), Dr. Timothy Leary and The Beatles, and which was a campus fad for quite some time. (Click for Ringo Starr's No No Song, (2), Timothy Leary's Deoxy/Leary radio address at Harvard University, " LSD: Methods of Control, and Talking History's recording Timothy Leary at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on April 8, 1967... with Arthur Brown's
'I am the God of Hell Fire, and I bring you...Fire (3) or (8)...'") As I recall, the dosage of 150 micrograms was specified on the pill along with the brand name "Sandoz" and "LSD". It was perhaps a standard dose of Delysid (LSD 25)
D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, a solid "ampoule" of 1 ml volume containing 0.1 mg. (100 μg) designed for oral administration. The word "ampoule" is associated with a liquid dose and is sometimes rendered "ampulle", suggesting its historic connection with the "ultimate" trip. I can hardly believe that it was a sugar-coated tablet containing only 0.025 mg. (25 μg), though these were also sold by Sandoz. The optimum dosage initially promoted by Sandoz was determined by gradually increasing the number of 25 μg LSD-25 pills taken in a series of psychoanalytic sessions, and was usually found to be between 50 and 200 μg. I may have taken a Sandoz pill not described in LSD: My Problem Child that was provided to supply a typical optimum dose. In my first experiment Dr. Albert Hofmann's LSD (LSD-150?) very well lived up to its reputation as a consciousness-expanding drug and hallucinogen as described on television and in magazines. It was awesome and spectacular, showing formerly hidden Bardo demon scenes inside the May scene fashioned from grass, leaves and shadows shimmering in the wind and sunlight rather like Salvador Dali's Slave Market with the Apparition of the Invisible Bust of Voltaire, together with exceptionally vivid amplification of sensory impressions and access to alternative states of perception, including elaborate streaming hallucinations of scenery with the eyes closed and slowly undulating phantasmagoria mildly suggestive of sexual intercourse covering the face of my guide, philosopher Lynn Stephens, who kindly agreed to accompany me after I showed up and surprised him by stating that I had just taken some Sandoz LSD. Prior to this, we had just heard or read of LSD in the news. Because of the undulating Bardo demons visible to my perception in the trees and grass as alternative figures, the experience reminded me of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Leary, Metzner, and Alpert observed in their guide to The Psychedelic Experience, although it also seemed quite futuristic and modern.
 "0 nobly-born, when thy body and mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse Of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in spring-time in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it."
[YouTube: Albert Hofmann Interviews | Albert Hofmann's LSD].
The landscape on the walk with my guide swam with alternative scenes or "gestalts" my sensitized brain could discern in the trees and grass. The entire visual field of view was sharply thrust into consciousness, so that the whole image resembled a picture taken with a fish-eye lens. The brilliant colors of the May scene, now vividly amplified, seemed to be associated with something like an audible hiss. A car rumbled past, and I could see vibrations corresponding to the rumble, and feel them on my tongue. Later, talking at his place, I found I could relax the focus of my
perceptual analyzer and let the scene slip into rings, reminiscent of the later Beatles tune
Glass Onion, and that this could plastically slip into a vision of a set of faces seeming to show the evolution of my guide from a primitive dog-like form with hound's teeth into a human being with a prominent brow. After philosophical reflections, we watched Paul Krassner on television in the living room, who was briefly needled in an interview on Firing Line regarding his LSD experiments. Following 8 hours of intense psychedelic experience, I retired into my bed and watched ornate scenes featuring moving landscapes and unfolding patterns of elaborate intricacy play out over my closed eyelids for perhaps another hour. When I awoke, that was virtually all of my first stunning trip, save the memorial psychedelia. I may have seen weaker phantasmagoric patterns with my eyes closed the next day. Press here for Dr. Timothy Leary's The Incredible Lightness of Being Molecular from Deoxy/Leary, including remarks on LSD's 50th birthday and congratulations to Dr. Albert Hofmann, who prepared his PhD thesis on "chitin" before discovering LSD, the visionary psychedelic.
Yahoo
| Google
| YouTube
|| Home
| On-Line Music
| MP3
|| No No Song
|| USsat
| Music[2]
Michael McClure [Home] - Star
| Psychedelic Store
| Native American Church
| Peyote
Plants that Make You Loco: Mind-Altering Plant Alkaloids
Ergine Poisoning Links
| Morning Glories
| LSA
| LSA FAQ
| Erowid/LSA
LSA: Psychoactive Ergot Alkaloids in Microfungi
Google: cyanogenic glycoside poisoning links
The Beatles and Drugs - A YouTube Video Interview
Marijuana Vaporizers [Links, Images].
The First Hyperlink Manifesto
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, we call it, is but one special type ... whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness that are entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.
- William James | autonomic writing
- James A. Green, February 7, 2006, quit smoking in 1986,
quit psychedelic pills in 1973, never drinks and drives.
Part I: High Times: LSD Links & Recollections 1967-1973
Part II: Surfing the Psychedelics: The Dark Side (1967-1973)
Part III: The Visionary & the Psychedelic: Supplemental Notes
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