Albion Dreaming (19 page)

Whatever the differences between the two, LSD became a levelling factor and an alliance was formed, with Hollingshead supplying Mellen with as much LSD as he required. When the owner of the Cadogan Lane flat became aware of what was taking place in his property the LSD scene there came to an abrupt end and the occupants were thrown out. Mellen immediately moved into Hollingshead’s Pont Street flat and observed the parade of hip young (and old) things that passed through the World Psychedelic Centre, either as observers or participants. Everyone who was anyone in swinging London wanted to be part of the growing psychedelic revolution. Among them were film maker Roman Polanski, future
Oz
magazine editor Felix Topolski and Paul McCartney.

When not hosting LSD sessions for the elite, Hollingshead kept up his friendship with Alex Trocchi and in doing so revealed yet again the dark side of his personality. On 6 December a meeting took place at which there was a breakdown of relations between the two. Trocchi wrote a heartfelt letter to Hollingshead accusing him of driving a rift between him and Desmond O’Brien. While there is no evidence the disagreement was related to LSD, Hollingshead’s response is indicative that he might, once again, have been playing mind games with people. Hollingshead simply returned Trocchi’s letter with the words, “What a load of balls. Don’t try this kind of con again – last warning” scrawled across the top of it.
²⁷

At the end of 1965 Hollingshead, in festive mood, sent out a selection of hand-made psychedelic Christmas cards. A typical card was a collage made from a bizarre, detailed drawing of a man’s head, imagery cut and pasted from a magazine over an abstract backdrop of paint that hinted at a face and a penis. Affixed to this mélange were a Viva Sativa cannabis badge and a provocative quote clipped from a magazine: “Bizarre reactions become normal under the influence of the controversial drug, LSD, which medical science continues to study to determine whether it is good – or evil.”
²⁸

The first six years of the 1960s had seen recreational use of LSD in Britain develop and spread. What had once been an obscure and hard to find drug, the province of a few thrill seeking jazz musicians and beatniks, was now available to anyone with the will to look. People were still taking it for the thrills but a growing number considered it a holy sacrament and a catalyst for consciousness expansion. The drug was still legal and there had been relatively few problems with those who used it, and LSD’s profile had been raised. Influential musicians such as Donovan and the Beatles had sampled LSD and were cryptically singing its praises. Word had reached the authorities that a number of psychedelic evangelists were plying their trade in London and more and more people were turning to LSD as their drug of choice. Big fun was clearly being had, minds were being blown and new ways of thinking and living were coming into being. Behind the scenes the authorities took a dim view of the untouchable goings on in flats across London.
It just wasn’t the British way and it wouldn’t be long before the media and the establishment took a greater interest in what was going on in sleepy London town and elsewhere in Britain. The times, to quote Bob Dylan, were very definitely changing.

Things are not what they appear.

Dr. Strangely Strange
¹

L
SD took London’s bohemian community by storm during 1965, leaving those who had taken it shaken and awed at the drug’s effects. Under the influence of LSD many users had a numinous, often religious, experience that changed their lives irrevocably. New ways of thinking and living were being discovered as users threw off their old lives and entered the world of LSD. The new way of living embraced a kaleidoscope of elements: music, food, spiritual beliefs, anti-authoritarianism, interest in ecology and much more. The notion of the “acidhead” – someone whose life was structured around the LSD experience and vision – came into being. The effects of LSD were so powerful that some believed it couldn’t have been discovered entirely by chance, investing the substance with an ill-defined supernatural origin.

Albert Hofmann took his famous LSD trip in 1943, the same year the atomic bomb was developed. For those in the LSD subculture who grew up in the Cold War with the shadow of nuclear annihilation still hanging over them, LSD represented the possibility of a worldwide shift in thought. Poet George Andrews, an enthusiastic advocate of psychedelic drugs, went so far as to claim “LSD is the only answer to the atom bomb”.
²

To the early LSD users the new drug signified unconditional love for other human beings and for planet Earth. It was this possibility of personal and planetary salvation that initially drove the LSD culture and which led eventually to its users becoming involved in a wide variety of transpersonal and ecological belief systems.

Hippie author John Michell summed up the hopes and aspirations surrounding the early use of psychedelics: “Occurring at a time when no further progress seems possible within the present system, their appearance as ‘
deus ex-machina
’ to expand the limits of experience is remarkably opportune. It is hardly likely that their development and use at this very time can be a matter of pure chance ... there is no doubt that the appearance of increasing use of mind-expanding drugs has already influenced the development of our philosophy, opening the way to what may be an entirely new series of concepts.”
³

Through the World Psychedelic Centre Michael Hollingshead sought to formalise LSD use, hoping that Timothy Leary’s approach was transferable to the British LSD subculture. But by the time of Hollingshead’s arrival in October 1965, the blossoming London hippie scene had begun to develop its own ways of using LSD. Some people were accepting of Hollingshead’s ways; others tolerated his views on the drug because he was a source for good quality LSD and provided comfortable surroundings in which to take it. But for some his overpowering personality was too much. LSD users didn’t want to be told how to take LSD, they wanted to explore the psychedelic universe themselves, and although many were in broad sympathy with Leary’s thoughts about LSD, they did not want his system imposed on them by an outsider.

January 1966 found Hollingshead’s hopes for a British psychedelic revolution in disarray. Though the WPC was still initiating cultural movers and shakers into the psychedelic mysteries, there were problems. The original plan, formulated with Leary at Millbrook, was that Hollingshead would act as a vanguard for Leary’s brand of psychedelia. Hollingshead would use the WPC to turn key people on to LSD and Leary and Ralph Metzner would join him in Britain before Easter. They would then stage a psychedelic rally at the Albert Hall, fronted by Leary and featuring key figures from the
British underground. This, they theorised, would establish Leary and Hollingshead as leaders of the British psychedelic scene and promote Leary’s pseudo-religious ideas about LSD use. But in January 1966 Leary was on bail for possession of marijuana, unable to leave America and his impending trial in February cast a long shadow over Hollingshead’s plans.

The vast majority of London’s LSD users neither knew nor cared about Hollingshead’s problems and continued to make merry with the new chemical discovery. The parties and LSD initiations at the WPC and elsewhere in London continued unchecked. But the police and press had heard enough rumours about the new mind-altering drug and were slowly and methodically marshalling their forces against the lysergic lotus eaters.

In mid-January, Hollingshead received some unwelcome visitors at his Chelsea flat. The World Psychedelic Centre in Pont Street had been under police surveillance for much of the winter, infiltrated by undercover police officers. The scene there had become wild, the parties growing larger and noisier and with less control on who was attending. This made it easy for police disguised as hippies to mingle unnoticed among the spaced-out WPC crowd. At one party the undercover police were accidentally dosed with LSD when they sampled the fruit punch, which had been liberally spiked. Even without this, the constant stream of visitors, loud music and parties would certainly have attracted police attention. At the back of his mind Hollingshead was aware of the inevitable consequences but was “unable or unwilling to do very much about it”, believing, somewhat naïvely, that the situation wouldn’t get too serious.

Perhaps because of the problems with Leary or because of his unshakeable inner demons Hollingshead was also acting strangely. He had become dependent on methedrine and heroin, mixing them with LSD and rarely sleeping. Worse, he was surreptitiously giving large doses of LSD to women to whom he had taken a fancy. Spiking (giving people LSD unbeknown to them) was anathema to the LSD subculture and stories about Hollingshead’s indiscretions were soon a talking point among London’s drug cognoscenti. Yet again Hollingshead, the man who introduced Timothy Leary to LSD and so changed the course of history, had proved he was
deeply flawed. As Amanda Fielding, Joey Mellen’s partner and an early acquaintance of Hollingshead noted, “he was an extremely clever man, but a black magician at heart”.
⁴
But Hollingshead’s mind games only worked on those within his circle and not the Metropolitan Police Force. At the distinctive knock on the door the inhabitants of the WPC went into a well-rehearsed routine to hide or destroy any incriminating evidence. The ensuing search failed to turn up any LSD, but the police did find cannabis and Hollingshead, along with five others, was charged with possession. Hollingshead was also charged with allowing the flat to be used for smoking cannabis and with possession of heroin and morphine.

Though the police had failed to find LSD, the arrest of Hollingshead and friends sent shockwaves through London’s psychedelic community. LSD users now had proof that the police had them under close scrutiny and the police knew exactly who the main players on the LSD scene were but were frustrated by the lack of a successful arrest. With typical disregard, Hollingshead’s reaction to this worsening situation was to leave London for a skiing holiday in Switzerland. The LSD guru took adequate mind food with him, writing from Gstaad to Alex Trocchi that he hadn’t had a broken leg yet because he was “too high to ski”.
⁵

The World Psychedelic Centre had lasted barely four months, and though it struggled on until April, it was a spent force in the development of Britain’s LSD subculture. Its effect within that four month period however had been incalculable. Countless people had their first LSD experience within that Chelsea flat and the vast majority of those who had been initiated went on to spread the LSD gospel, helping the drug permeate all levels of society.

With the rise in LSD use some professionals on the fringes of the LSD scene began to speak publicly about their belief in the drug. Psychiatrist R.D. Laing, who first took LSD in 1960, was one of those who became more outspoken. At the end of January, Laing gave a paper on the “Phenomenology of Hashish, Mescaline and LSD” to psychiatrists at London Hospital. Laing had taken LSD over thirty times by the end of 1965 and was now utterly convinced of its efficacy as a therapeutic tool. His support of LSD and brand of anti-psychiatry made him popular among the underground and
he became an active participant at many counter culture events. At the annual conference of the National Association for Mental Health, in the last week of February, Laing shocked the delegates with a twenty-minute speech on the therapeutic benefits of LSD. He summed up his thoughts on LSD and its place in therapy with: “An LSD or mescaline session in one person, with one set in one setting may occasion a psychotic experience. Another person, with a different set and different setting, may experience a period of super-sanity ... The aim of therapy will be to enhance consciousness rather than to diminish it. Drugs of choice, if any are to be used, will be predominantly consciousness expanding drugs, rather than consciousness constrictors – the psychic energisers, not the tranquillisers.”
⁶

While some LSD users preferred to take the drug in the controlled and safe setting of their home, others wanted somewhere to go where they could meet others who shared their interests. Of course it was possible, if you could navigate LSD’s powerful effects, to go to pubs and clubs while under the influence, but this meant mixing with the unpredictable “straight” world. Since 1965 small scale events for LSD users had been given by the LSD collective living at 101 Cromwell Road. These events featured musicians and poets sympathetic to the LSD experience, including Alex Trocchi and Harry Fainlight, as well as singer Donovan. A variety of art forms sprang from within the LSD subculture and throughout 1966 music, poetry and art was being created by LSD users for LSD users. There was still a need for regular places to perform, and so a new breed of acid entrepreneur arose to cater for the demand.

In the first few months of 1966, John “Hoppy” Hopkins put on the Spontaneous Underground at London’s Marquee Club in Wardour Street. The first event on 30 January featured Donovan and by all accounts LSD was freely available. Subsequent Spontaneous Underground bands included the LSD users’ favourite, Pink Floyd. The poster for their 13 March gig may have baffled the straight world but its encoded message to the acidheads was clear: “TRIP bring furniture toy prop paper rug paint balloon jumble costume mask robot candle incense ladder wheel light self all others March 13th 5pm.”