Albion Dreaming (32 page)

Jeff Dexter, veteran DJ from London’s UFO club, organised the music, consisting of the hippie bands that had played at London’s Roundhouse, including freak favourites Quintessence, Brinsley Schwarz, Hawkwind, Gong, Traffic and Arthur Brown. These bands were open about their use of LSD and strove to create music and atmosphere to be experienced while under the influence of psychedelic drugs. Dexter tried hard to get the archetypal LSD
band, the Grateful Dead, over from America to play but this didn’t come off, though they did send a financial donation to support the festival.

Psychedelics of all kinds, including mescaline, were freely available at Glastonbury, but LSD was prevalent. Author, William Bloom’s impression of Glastonbury was that “... nearly everyone was tripping at one stage or another. Sometimes it was being given away ... The festivals would not have been what they were without hallucinogens.”
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David Bowie recalled being under the influence of magic mushrooms as he took the stage at five in the morning: “By the time I was due to perform I was flying and could hardly see my little electric keyboard or my guitar.”
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Arabella Churchill didn’t indulge, but knew “there was a lot of acid because this man came up with a large briefcase and said: ‘This is full of acid, man. I was going to sell it but everyone’s doing everything for free so here, give it to everybody.’ I put it under a bed and I can’t remember what happened to it in the end.”
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Many clergymen visited the 1971 Glastonbury Fair attracted by this radical youth movement and their alternative brand of spirituality. Among them was the diocesan youth chaplain from Swindon, who was given some LSD (whether voluntarily or not is unclear). The confused clergyman ended up rushing headlong down the hillside, his cloak flaring like a giant bat behind him. However, his Christian faith wasn’t enough to help him navigate under the onslaught of LSD, and he had to retire to the bad trip tent organised by Release where he was gently talked back down to earth.
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Though the majority of LSD experiences at Glastonbury were positive there were, as at every festival, some drug casualties. Bad trip tents became a feature of the free festival scene, often full of seriously confused teenagers who had been attracted to LSD by peer pressure and expectation, but who were unprepared for the effects of the drug. These tents were the downside of the free festival experience. Quintessence guitarist Allan Mostert remembers: “A rather shattering experience I had at Glastonbury was while wandering through the audience before our set, I took a look inside the so called ‘bad trip tent’, where they took the people
who had dropped LSD and gone on bad trips. This experience strengthened the idea in me of what we were actually trying to do with our music and ‘message.’”
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The mixture of free psychedelics and living out the hippie ethos made the Glastonbury Fair the prototype for subsequent events. LSD brought people together around the campfires at night, making the already otherworldly experience appear completely divorced from the twentieth century and western civilization. Mick Farren summed it up: “We might as well have been in the sixth or even twenty-sixth century as we told tall travellers’ tales of intoxication, of outwitting the law, of the lights in the sky, lost continents, the lies of government, collective triumphs and personal stupidity, while the music of past, present and future roared from the pyramid stage.”
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Following the 1971 Glastonbury Fair the area became a focus for travelling hippies. Small encampments sprang up in the country lanes and there were almost continuous gatherings on the summit of Glastonbury Tor. In the Seventies, there were people taking LSD on the Tor every night of the summer. To visit the Tor, take LSD and watch the sunrise over the Somerset levels was considered a hip thing to do, a psychedelic pilgrimage.

At one stage, the tower on the Tor had been broken into and turned into a hippie crash pad. Free festival poster artist Roger Hutchison and friends travelled to the Tor from Essex. He climbed to the summit at 3 am, to find the inside of the tower bedecked with cushions and lighted tapers with a group of hippies smoking cannabis and drinking wine. Such was the spirit of community and trust in those times that he was immediately offered LSD in blotter form by a colourfully dressed hippie, and settled down to watch the sunrise, accompanied by chanting and drumming.

This type of shamanic activity was prevalent among the mystically inclined at free festivals. Drums, chanting and psychedelic drugs have been used together since prehistoric times, each enhancing the effect of the other. This type of group behaviour had not only a strong bonding effect but served to help individuals navigate the LSD experience, either as participants or observers.

Large numbers of hippies and others seeking an ecological and spiritual lifestyle settled in East Anglia in the early Seventies and held their own festivals. Thirty such festivals, or Fairs as the organisers preferred to call them, ran from 1972 to 1985. LSD was an inspiring, though less central, factor at these events; the Bungay May Horse Fair was described as having a “... truly anarchic quality which put you up against yourself more than any amount of acid and street theatre could do at the ‘Barshams.’”
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In sharp contrast to the free festivals, the East Anglian Fairs were the expression and celebration of a static community that tried to involve the local population. Free festivals sought to isolate themselves from the local communities, intentional outsiders setting up camp for a short while before dispersing and moving on.

Soon after the success of the 1971 Glastonbury Fair, free festivals were held in north Devon and south Wales. But moves were afoot to develop large scale festivals that would run throughout the summer, becoming a focus for Britain’s counter culture. The huge festivals at Windsor, Watchfield and Stonehenge would be the events which came to define free festival culture. Yet these festivals didn’t just occur, they were initiated and planned by three key people, without whom the free festival movement would not have developed as it did.

It’s important to trace the roots and motivations of these individuals to see how crucial LSD was to the free festival movement; how LSD underpinned the creation of environments in which people could live unhindered by what they saw as petty laws and restrictions. It is also important to acknowledge that although LSD played a major part in the early free festivals, drugs per se were not central to their economies. In the Seventies psychedelic drugs were employed at free festivals as a means to an end: celebration, spiritual enlightenment and the strengthening of a community, sold at minimal profit or given away. By the Eighties LSD had become much more commodified and free festivals acted as drug marketplaces, their distribution, promotion and sale being organised in a way that could rival anything from the conventional retail world.

The free festivals held in Windsor Great Park, near London,
were the genesis of a free festival culture, which, building on the template set up at Glastonbury, has lasted in one form or another to the present day. This would not have happened without the efforts of Bill “Ubi” Dwyer.

In the mid-Fifties Dwyer emigrated from Ireland to New Zealand where he immersed himself in the burgeoning anarchist scene. After moving to Sydney, Australia, he continued his involvement with anarchism, but politics alone no longer satisfied him: “It was still a life from which I sensed something basic was lacking but I did not know what this something was, I had rejected religion as being a mere part of the unfree society in which we live ... but there are spiritual yearnings in man which cannot be denied.”
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Dwyer became involved with the Sydney Anarchist Group at the Cellar, an anarchist hang out off the city’s Oxford Street. He began to attract socially disaffected young people to the Cellar, which changed within six months from political meeting place to psychedelic drug den. Dwyer had begun to use LSD and had become evangelical about its use. As it has done with tens of thousands of others, LSD changed Dwyer’s life. For him LSD was a mystic, spiritual experience that “cleansed (me) of the evil of the past”.
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The Cellar was transformed with mattresses, music and psychedelic lights and up to 200 hundred people at a time could be found there. A cage was built from which Dwyer sold LSD, “tickets” in Australian drug argot, through a curtain. A friend of Dwyer’s recalled her visits to the Cellar: “It would’ve been 67 or 68; I was eighteen at the time and thought the Cellar was unbelievable ... For a start, it was free; although you had to pay for your ‘tickets’ once you got in there. They were purchased from an old movie box office. You put your money down and a hand appeared from under a curtain with the appropriate number of tickets. He had all the best and latest music, and all the grooviest people hung out there – it was magic.”
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Dwyer identified those who frequented the Cellar as “... the ones most likely to find the anarchist message true to their aspirations”, and he took them to his heart. Foreshadowing the ethos of the 1970s free festivals Dwyer recalled: “To promote the cultural and
hedonistic aspects we hired double decker buses and drove off into the country complete with psychedelic musicians, where city kids often had their first real taste of nature.”

The police sent undercover officers to the Cellar but this did not seem to bother Dwyer. Friends believed this lack of concern was due to his faith in LSD. In fact it was because he was buying his LSD directly from the police, who largely controlled the Sydney LSD trade at that time.
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When Dwyer began to buy his LSD from another source he was soon arrested and imprisoned, later being deported to Ireland before settling in London. There he began dealing LSD again and according to Sid Rawle, had a unique way of doing so: “He would take money from people for an order of acid and it would be delivered the next day by the Royal Mail.”
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In London Dwyer once again became involved with anarchist groups. He helped produce
Anarchy
magazine and was instrumental in issue three being “The Acid Issue”. The cover featured a graphic of the LSD molecule and ninety percent of the content dealt with LSD, its effects and potential, mostly written by Dwyer. His articles are well written and make a persuasive case for the individual’s right to use LSD.

Dwyer was passionate about the causes he held dear. In London he was often seen in full oratorical flow at Hyde Park’s Speakers Corner eulogizing about, among other things, LSD. As a committed squatter, he also ranted against paying rent. His idea for a free festival came when he was tripping on LSD in Windsor Great Park. There he had a vision of a “... giant festival in the grandest park in the kingdom.”
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Windsor also appealed to the anarchist in Dwyer; it was on royal land, within spitting distance of the Queen’s residence at Windsor Castle.

The 1972 Windsor free festival (slogan: “pay no rent”) was the first of what were known as the Peoples’ Free Festivals. A few hundred people partied for several days in Windsor Great Park, causing no problems. LSD was freely available to anyone who wanted it. Bolstered by the success of the first and of the growing numbers of other small free festivals, the second Windsor festival, in 1973, was a much larger affair.

LSD was not only sold cheaply at the Windsor festivals, large
quantities were given away. Roger Hutchinson recalls an incident at the 1973 festival when he “... was on stage when this chap came up with a brief case, quite smartly dressed, and said: ‘Is there anyone I can talk to about the distribution of the contents of this. I’ve got all this acid that I want to give away.’ It was microdot in strips of sellotape.” Hutchinson was acting as stage manager at the time and made an announcement over the PA: “‘Does anyone out there fancy getting a bit higher tonight, we’ve got some little tablets here, yours for the taking, free,’ and literally the audience just came up as one and went straight at the stage. It wasn’t a very clever thing to do. The idea of it was sound I suppose, in a way, but it was already well into the festival and people were pretty wrecked and then to put on some extremely good microdot of 200 μg plus ... was an absolute bloody disaster. There were people who had never tripped before, people who were used to London microdot, which was half the strength, so they were expecting one thing and they got something that took them to a completely new level, some people had taken more than one, and it was just chaos.”
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Hutchinson didn’t partake of the free LSD, having been tripping the previous night and needing some sleep. The next day he woke “... and found the site strewn with tripped out knackered folk, entangled with mangled tents.”
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Following the 1973 event, word spread rapidly among Britain’s grass roots hippies and through the growing network of communes, shared houses, squats and travellers, that the 1974 festival would be huge. The event was planned for the August Bank Holiday period and over 30,000 flyers and posters were distributed to advertise the festival. Hippie entrepreneur, Richard Branson paid for a Virgin Records stage to showcase his new acts, and individuals and hippie-friendly businesses made financial donations to the cause.