Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America by Jesse Jarnow

Author:Jesse Jarnow [Jarnow, Jesse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9780306822568
Google: 0tMVBQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B017QL8UJ8
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2016-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

AND, OH SHIT, here come the bad trips.

There’ve been bummers before, but the reaper has arrived in Grateful Deadland, and the karmic Hells Angels are pushing their way to the front of the stage. There are too many people around the Dead, and bad stuff is starting to happen.

The Dead come through Hartford, Connecticut, in ’88, where eighteen-year-old Timothy Tyler is a busboy. He has never heard of the Grateful Dead. His girlfriend’s sister tells him about the people who are camped downtown, on the lawn of the governor’s mansion. Tim goes down there. There is someone passing out LSD and Tim takes some. He wanders around all night, just looking at the sights and the strangeness. He sees people selling nitrous, and the massive crowds curling towards the tank-hiss transform into cartoonish dollar signs in Tim Tyler’s already troubled teenaged mind.

When he finally sees a Dead show, a few days and some five states later in Illinois, someone gives him acid again. “I began to really love the feeling and energy that was at this concert,” Tyler will write years later. “The music felt and sounded better than any I had ever heard. I decided right there that I would be seeing this band whenever I can. The show ended and I went outside. I walked up to the first person that I saw and asked him if he knew where I could get some LSD. I was steered in the right direction and I bought 200 hits for $99.”

And, ugh, do we really have to go on? No good is going to come by learning the specifics of the story of Timothy Tyler right now, but that is one way that bad stories can start. He is not the type of person who should be doing acid, let alone in those quantities.

There’s another guy, too, who gets nabbed in June 1988 with 11,751 hits of blotter during the Dead’s run at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin. Because the hits are on paper, heavy when weighed, the new mandatory minimum sentences kick in and he’s sentenced to twenty years in jail. It’s ugly. Real ugly. He’s not even a big player, just a mid-level kid dealing acid on paper who gets nabbed. The word around the parking lot is that two federal agents had come into the show and pulled him out.

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