Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way Of Life by Patrick Lundborg

Author:Patrick Lundborg [Lundborg, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lysergia - Subliminal Sounds
Published: 2014-11-27T06:00:00+00:00

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After an unexceptional Friday night, the Monterey International Pop Festival began to pick up momentum during the Saturday, which offered 13 hours of almost uninterrupted live music. A series of blistering blues and blues-rock performances during the afternoon had created a climate of strong emotional bonds within the vast crowd, further fuelled by the 'Monterey Purple' LSD handed out by Owsley's distributors. As the sun descended and evening fell over the festival grounds, performer after performer turned in outstanding sets, and some of those present began to realize that this was not just another concert weekend, but the arrival of a new and vital sub-culture, so wide that its net stretched from central London to rural California. Drawing inspiration from Michael Bowen's and Allen Cohen's skillfully executed Human Be-In earlier in the year, the music industry forces behind the Monterey festival took San Francisco's regional gathering of the tribes and developed it into a heavily publicized international event, and they did so with a combination of two powerful elements that a few years earlier had seemed miles apart; psychedelics and rock'n'roll.

Standing in the wings, soul man Otis Redding shook his head in amused disbelief at what he called the 'love crowd' of some 50.000 freaks. Soon about to take the main stage for his own performance, Redding watched as the Byrds opened their set to enthusiastic applause. Before kicking off their second song, David Crosby announced that he had something he wanted to share with the audience. Everyone listened attentively to the nehru-collared, mustached Byrd:

I don't know whether any of you have seen… Life magazine this week. In it there's a statement that affects our times and it's going to cause a lot of trouble…'I believe that if we gave LSD to all the statesmen and politicians in the world, we might have a chance at stopping war'. That's a quote from Paul McCartney! I concur… heartily! 4

An awkward silence follows, before the band goes into an off-key version of "Have You Seen Her Face". The Byrds were rarely much of a live band, but their poor performance here is hardly the reason why people prefer to forget this segment when discussing the otherwise resounding success of Monterey Pop. Whatever Crosby hoped to achieve with his excited invocation of a non-present Beatle discussing a topic (war) unrelated to the music festival, it fell even flatter than those poorly synched harmony vocals.

Crosby sounds like a fool today, and apparently he did so even to a crowd of euphoric acidheads from his own generation, who at other occasions would readily acknowledge the potential power of LSD and the need to end war. In fact, some of them may have heard similar sentiments about the pacifying power of psychedelics uttered by Aldous Huxley's widow Laura on an album released the year before. Interviewed by free-lance photo-journalist Larry Schiller, who had written about LSD already at the time of Owsley's earliest batches, Ms Huxley can be heard on the resulting documentary record L.S.D (Capitol,

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