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Origins of Psychedelic Music

Cage staged a “happening” at the Stock Pavilion.

Summer 1966. A Beat symposium is held at the University of Illinois where John Cage is artist in residence.

A local Countess who had a long-running affair with John Roselli is the most powerful person in town not connected to the University. Among other holdings, she owns the local newspaper and TV station, and frequently jet-sets off to Europe, LA, and Palm Beach, when not holding court at the Champaign Country Club.

After the Italian Count she lifted out of poverty (to buy her title through marriage) was caught poking his secretary, she fired him. He fled back to Italy to plot his divorce settlement, but ended up with a bullet in the brain courtesy of Handsome Johnny.

Bill Harvey had been the first assassin she’d approached and declined. Roselli did not, however, and did it for free because the Countess had recently bank-rolled his return from Federal prison. Her empire was supervised by a local lawyer who was also the only known conduit to the Chicago mob.

Local teen Joe Sanderson was backpacking around the world. He would eventually become one of two Americans killed fighting for the Salvadorian revolution. David Foster Wallace had just entered classes at Yankee Ridge elementary, in the newly built suburb for the University of Illinois faculty. He would become one of the most celebrated novelists of his generation.

Spokesperson for the newly forged John Birch society, whose odd name was a palindrome, could be seen slinking around campus in trench coat and fedora, from one conspiratorial meeting to the next. He had recently testified before the Warren Commission. His house on West Ohio Street radiated with spooky vibrations, and children were cautioned to keep clear lest they be subjected to a sermon on the dangers of globalization.

A British noble, Sir Thomas  Willes Chitty 3rd, had recently arrived in town, intent on taking acid and having sex with the hottest super hottie he could find, on or off campus.

Allen Ginsberg informs the leather-coated, long-haired teens attending the Beat conference that his first psychedelic experience was on glue and this leads to a rush to Lincoln Square to buy glue and then to the barn at the Shirley Farm where they hold their secret beer and wine-fueled ceremonies, only this time with glue, and out pops Only Me, an amazing song, written by 15-year-old Mark Warwick, the first psychedelic anthem I ever heard, a song that urged everyone to “let their minds be free.”

The word “psychedelic” was coined in the mid-fifties in a letter from Humphry Osmond to Aldous Huxley. Osmond gave mescaline to Huxley in LA and Huxley soon wrote The Doors of Perception. Both men began looking for a word to describe their experiences with altered states. The book’s title came from England’s greatest visionary poet.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Huxley suggested “phanerothyme,” from the Greek words for “to show” and “spirit.” 

“To make this mundane world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.”

But Osmond chose “psyche” (for mind or soul) and deloun (for show). 

“To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” 

Huxley on his first mescaline trip courtesy of British Intelligence.

Osmond announced the new word at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting in 1957. That same year, R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president at JP Morgan, published a photo essay in Life magazine detailing a trip to Mexico to imbibe mushrooms with a Mazatec shaman.

Wasson would go on to publish a ridiculous book claiming Soma of the Rig Veda was a mushroom. This rabbit hole concealed the real identity of Soma, which was cannabis mixed with milk and spices, something known as bhang in India. At the time, Wasson was in close contact with intelligence agent Dr. Andrija Puharich who would soon be arranging seances with the rich and famous. Puharich had been a frequent visitor to Fort Detrick, where the CIA’s MK/Ultra project had originated. He would later become the biggest booster of fake Israeli psychic Uri Geller.

For those teens seeking a mind-altering experience in the early 1960s, Huxley’s book was often the first step. The rock band The Doors took their name from the book. Jim Morrison’s talents were staggering and their psychedelic jams were among the best of the era for evoking a mystical experience. All fueled by the band’s extensive tripping together. When I think of Morrison in the late sixties, I also think of Jean Michel Basquiat in the late eighties. They both died young, but left a massive body of work.

But in 1964, Timothy Leary had captured the center of gravity by publishing The Psychedelic Experience. Sadly the book was a complete mess of no use to anyone and inscrutable to the average teen as Finnegan’s Wake. Really it was just a money grab. Leary lifted ancient material from Tibet, so there wasn’t much original writing to do. The book led people into a rabbit hole and did zero to enhance enlightenment.

Leary’s book was nothing like Huxley’s poetic account of the spiritual effects of mescaline or Osmond’s descriptions of Native American peyote ceremonies, or Wasson’s description of the shamanistic use of magic mushrooms.

Instead Leary guided the youth (including the Beatles) to look east for enlightenment. It’s the same basic hoodwink laid down in The Razor’s Edge by British secret agent Somerset Maugham, who, like Osmond, worked for MI6. One thing about the early history of psychedelic studies is that most of the major players turned out to be secretly working for MI6, the CIA, or both.

The cliche of the bearded yogi living in a cave in the mountains who meditates until he reaches some satori moment and is transported to a permanent state of bliss is total jive. The religions of east and west are equally corrupt, run by oligarchies, and exist mostly to make money and ensnare acolytes. The Buddhists are perhaps the least corrupted (although there are good and bad in all cultures), but all talk of eternal life is complete bunk. Nothing lasts forever. There is no soul, no nirvana. But if you want to get popular fast, tell the people what they want to hear. If you are looking for enlightenment, take Zoroaster’s advice and just be as kind and empathetic in thought, word and deed as you possibly can. But also realize no state of bliss can last forever, and there is no bliss without an opposite: so everyone is vulnerable to spurts of paranoia, rage and jealousy and other states of mind from the dark side.

Westerners are used to looking east for enlightenment because eastern traditions are older and thought to be wiser. The Zoroastrians invented the word “magic,” and were among the first to learn the secrets of higher math, something learned through a study of harmony. They were also the most advanced astronomers and chemists of their time.

During the enlightenment era, secret societies based on eastern mysticism were all the rage and many fraudulent books were conceived purporting to reveal the true secrets of the universe. All these efforts were hoodwinks and money grabs.

Just as the emergence of psychedelics was carefully stage-managed by intelligence agencies, so was the evolution of these occult societies. Aleister Crowley was one of the first to declare himself an advanced yogi with magic powers out of The Razor’s Edge. In fact, it was Maugham who made Crowley famous through a novel titled The Magician. They were both secret agents plying dialectical games to advance secret agendas.

Groupies try to get close to the Beatles in LA.

Meanwhile, after Harrison laid down a raga in “She, Said” garage rockers across America began tinkering with eastern scales.

The 13th Floor Elevators were the first to use the word “psychedelic” in an album title in 1966 and had a minor hit with their first single, but never really fully penetrated outside Texas until Lenny Kaye released Nuggets. The Texas bands of the time had a distinctive sound with a lot of fast picking on the fat strings. The cowboy guitarist had been an icon for generations. Texas rock and surf rock shared similarities, but there were no eastern scales in Texas at the time. The first song to reference LSD was released by in 1960 by surf rockers, The Gamblers.

Mark Warwick’s song Only Me is a better example of psychedelic rock than Your Gonna Miss Me. Both songs were written in 1966.

Other songs in this vein also released in 1966 would include East West by Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a jam devised by Mike Bloomfield after his first gig in San Francisco, where he could have bumped into a slew of bands working on defining an emerging genre; and, of course Section 43 by Country Joe and the Fish, ranks high on the list of early psychedelia. The appearance of cheap, portable organs from England and Italy played a major role in crafting a psychedelic ambience, and most of the original psychedelic bands made use of either the Vox or the less expensive Farfisa.

In November of 1966, Bronx-based band Blues Magoos released the album Psychedelic Lollypop, which included the hit song We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet, which rose to #5 on the charts, far higher than anything by the 13th Floor Elevators. Ralph Scala on Vox and lead vocals.

One of the first novels to contain a description of having sex on LSD, it was written by a visiting Baron from England and set entirely in Champaign-Urbana, IL. The longhaired, leather-jacketed teens who pioneered the local garage rock scene make a brief appearance guarding the beer stash in the fridge at a student-faculty party.

The following year, Strawberry Alarm Clock and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band would form in LA, and H.P. Lovecraft in Chicago, while the Finchley Boys (Warwick’s band) would travel to San Francisco and become adopted by the Cockettes as “the next big thing,” only soon to break apart.

But it was the Cockettes themselves who became the next big thing as they launched glitter rock in a trip to New York City in 1971. Had the Finchleys hung around and gone on that voyage, they might have been as big as the New York Dolls. Glitter would eventually usurp psychedelia as the next big thing, and by the time punk rock appeared, the mystical excesses of acid rock were soundly rejected in favor of a return to more primitive garage rock.

After Peter Fonda gave Lennon and Harrison some Sandoz in LA in 1965, out popped She Said, She Said.

Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds were also there tripping. McCartney did not imbibe and left the later session when they were recording the song in a huff, refusing to contribute. In the week that followed their first trip, Lennon and Harrison could not relate to the other two because acid had changed them so profoundly. Although McCartney was the last to drop acid, he was the first to inform the public, which annoyed Lennon and Harrison.

Guy Maynard was the leader of the Seeds of Doubt, the principle rival to the Finchley Boys. In 2010, he wrote one of the best descriptions of an LSD trip in a book set in 1969 in Boston with flashbacks to 1966 in Champaign-Urbana.

She Said, She Said is an amazing tune that shifts from 4/4 to 3/4 while deploying a sitar scale. The seeds of acid rock were planted in Rubber Soul with a brief sitar solo, used only for its distinctive tone.  It was David Crosby who showed Harrison how to play raga scales on an acoustic guitar. He also suggested Harrison check out a dude named Ravi Shankar.

They kicked Fonda out of the party for talking incessantly about his gunshot wound in the stomach and how he was momentarily dead on the operating table from blood loss. Lennon was horrified and when Fonda showed the bullet wound, he said, “You make me feel like I’ve never been born.” Fonda’s talk of death while Lennon was tripping is reminiscent of Leary’s use of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a tripping manual, something that undoubtedly led to some seriously bad trips. Pushing that sort of dogma on western teens was the equivalent of distributing The Book of Revelation to teens in India as a true road to enlightenment.

Compare the intro to Eight Miles High to the opening moments of Coltrane’s Africa/Brass album, released in 1961. Some critics believe The Byrds wrote the first real psychedelic song. It counterpoints some Texas-style fast picking with an open D played on a 12-string. That chiming D would soon appear over and over in songs like Hey, Joe by the Leaves and Going All the Way by the Squires. Many attributed the sound to Bob Dylan, but Dylan claims it was all the Byrds covering his songs, and he had nothing to do with spreading the chiming D chord.

Southern California is where LSD landed because the film business has long had deep connections to military intelligence. Fonda starred in the first LSD film, The Trip, but there were others in Hollywood getting a supply of LSD-25 from Sandoz chemists who secretly worked under CIA supervision. The real acid guru in California was John Griggs, founder of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and he got the acid by stealing it from the fridge of an LA film producer. Griggs would soon turn up dead and his group swiftly usurped by intel operative Ron Stark.

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Battle of Algiers

The award-winning 1966 film Battle of Algiers documented the explosion of terror and violence that paved the road for Algerian independence. As Africa’s largest country…and rich in natural gas…Algeria was a choice plum for European imperialism. In 1830, under the shakiest of pretenses, the French invaded and within a few years 825,000 Algerians (one third the population) were dead.

The French confiscated choice lands and awarded real estate to European immigrants who arrived in droves, eventually becoming the majority in the capital city of Algeria. Citizenship was granted to Europeans, Christians and Jews, but Muslims were denied. The Jews became the go-between Muslims and French, and both sides initially tried to recruit them, although most sided with France, something they may have regretted after Vichy France began persecuting Jews. The Nazis built an ideological bridge between fascism and Arab nationalism fueled by mutual hatred. When the British and Americans landed in Africa, the Vichy forces initially tried to repel the Allies, but were eventually allowed to switch sides, greatly angering the free French forces led by Charles de Gaulle.

On May 8, 1945, the same day Nazi Germany surrendered, Muslim activists held victory marches that provoked violent responses from French occupiers. The ensuing street massacres put a lid on the simmering independence movement for almost a decade, but in 1954, the movement resurfaced in force through the appearance of the National Liberation Front (FLN), a merger of Communist and Islamic ideologies. The FLN began a savage campaign of assassinating Harkies and their dependents. Harkies were Muslims serving in the French army who acted as police. As many as 150,000 may have been murdered. Harkies and their families weren’t the only casualties as the French launched a counter attack on Muslims. As many as 700,000 perished and two million displaced during the eight years of unrelenting violence.

Shot in black & white, Battle of Algiers had the look and feel of a behind-the-scenes newsreel. Rather than take sides or mine the subject for emotional response, it coolly revealed turpitude and affinity for violence shared by both sides. Within a few months, the FLN became the template upon which the savage Weather Underground was created. Strangely, the leaders of that movement (which effectively destroyed the non-violent Students for a Democratic Society), were sons and daughters of the super wealthy, although they rounded up a handful of acolytes by preaching a twisted form of self-hatred for the American middle class, an indoctrination accompanied with drug-fueled orgies designed to break down individuality and moral codes. It had all the makings of a intelligence mind-control operation.

After the Weather Underground declared war on America and went into hiding, they divided into cells exactly like the FLN and began releasing communiqués exactly like the FLN, and informed their ranks millions would soon die in the coming war. Many of their parents would be forced into concentration camps once the revolution succeeded. The war was quietly launched with some small pipe bombs planted in police parking lots in the Bay Area, set to go-off during lunch hour. Although they never took credit for these two bombings, rest assured they were most likely the initial attempts to spark war between police and the emerging counterculture. Like all Communist revolutions, the Weather Underground cell structure was designed to protect the organization’s leaders from exposure once the killing began. In truth, the Weather Underground cells had been penetrated on inception, although the many FBI informants planted in the lower ranks, had no idea the key lawyer running and funding the organization had his own mysterious connections to counterintelligence.

The springboard used to catapult the organization into the national spotlight was the murder of Fred Hampton by Chicago police connected to counterintelligence. Not so coincidentally, Bernadine Dohrn was immediately on the scene leading the press on tours of the murder site (strangely left wide open by Chicago police) while giving lectures on the need for reprisals, despite Hampton’s total dedication to non-violence. Hampton was rising inside the Black Panthers, the most respected black rights organization, and leading the membership away from armed insurrection and toward what Hampton dubbed “the rainbow coalition.” Hampton was the biggest detractor of the Weather Underground inside the counterculture and dubbed the group as insanely “Custeristic.” So you can see how killing Hampton served the interest of the Weather Underground while also allowing them to exploit his death as a fulcrum for convincing clueless teenagers to support violence as the only logical response.

The blood bath they plotted was severely hampered, however, when their first major bomb blew up while being constructed in New York City and killed three of their own. The mega-bomb had been planned for a cadet dance at Fort Dix but instead destroyed a million-dollar townhouse in Greenwich Village. The deaths sent shivers through the organization, and the leaders rapidly dialed back on future murder plots, although the “kill-cop” rhetoric continued unabated and infected many others. Eventually the Weather Underground would be responsible for four police murders, but played a role instigating at least fifteen others fomented by the United Freedom Front (1), Symbionese Liberation Army (1), and Black Liberation Army (13). But that’s just the tip-of-the-iceberg, because our interventions in Indochina resulted in 3.5 million deaths, and many of those could have been avoided had the senseless war ended sooner. Had a vast majority of Americans rejected the war early on, President Nixon would have been forced to dial back. But by presenting the counterculture in such an intensively negative light, the Weather Underground made sure middle America sided with the President’s reasonable requests for the rule of law and order to prevail.

Even stranger is the fact that after Timothy Leary was renditioned back to a high security cell and held in isolation while enduring the most savage interrogations of his life, he caved and told everything he knew about the Weather Underground that had broken him out of jail, provided him with a fake passport and whisked him off to Algeria to join forces with Eldridge Cleaver in fomenting a wave of violence. They even had put out a press release claiming Leary was now “armed and dangerous” and ready to join the ranks of the immortal cop killers, unrepentant murderers the Weather Underground lionized. Strange that upon his caving, the word immediately went out that Leary was a stool pigeon. Predictably, the head of the National Lawyers’ Guild called for someone to assassinate Leary, a feat designed to send a message to future traitors to the Communist cause. Unpredictably, Leary was taken out of prison and driven around the country so he could point out the safe houses he’d stayed at while describing the occupants in great detail. During this escapade, a revolver placed on the floor of the vehicle by the FBI agent in the passenger’s seat slid back into Leary’s view, and he realized he could easily pick it up and assassinate both cops. Fortunately, he declined to touch the weapon, and that likely saved his life, for I feel sure had he picked up that gun, he would have been instantly killed on the spot. Strangely, although Leary spilled all the beans he could, his confession never amounted to an arrest or interrogation of anyone. Soon the principle leaders of the terrorist Weather Underground would emerge from hiding, but only after all the FBI files on them mysteriously disappeared, which allowed them to accept high-paying gigs at major universities. Now retired, they continue to collect pensions.

Meanwhile, there’s an attempt to whitewash the Weather Underground as being led by earnest radicals, instead of exposing the organization as the state-sponsored counterterrorism psyop it really was. The purpose of the organization was not to foment a revolution as that concept never had a prayer of success due to their tactics. The real purpose was to frighten middle America away from supporting the peace movement sweeping the country, something they were easily able to accomplish with some random bombings and advocation of Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan as counterculture heroes. But there’s a karmic load that accompanies violence and a day of reckoning is coming. You only have to turn this log over to see the vermin hiding underneath.

The proletariat must organize lawyers in various countries who sympathize with the liberation struggle. Together with the legal bureau of the International Red Aid (IRA), organize in every country, in particular England, the USA and Japan, and strive to enlarge the number of new cadres.
IRA directive issued in at the Second International Conference, Moscow, 1927.

Admission to the bar is not just about training, but moral character and a sacred oath to uphold the Constitution. Participation in conspiracies involving subversion, violence and terror is a gross violation of this oath. The National Lawyers Guild was founded by Communist Party members to spread a Communist agenda. Of course, propaganda was designed to make the Guild appear as a do-gooder champion of the little guy. Behind the scenes a different story was unfolding.

It would be naive not to realize the Communist Party has been dotted with spooks of all persuasions since inception. They did not provoke the revolution in Russia, they subverted a democratic/socialist government that had emerged. The first act of the revolution had been to abolish the death penalty, as the Czars secret police had murdered so many. The first act of the Communists (Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin) was to reassert the death penalty and use it on the Czar and his family, including the children. This is all you need to know about the origins of Communism.

My thesis is that a group of secret agents were sent into this orbit for the purpose of managing counterintelligence operations. These lawyers were pretending to submit to Communist dogmas, but were really spooks reporting to the highest levels of the national security state.

In the 1960s, the primary mission of this operation was to outflank the emerging peace and freedom movement by fomenting acts of terror that would drive the population toward the political right.

The spearhead of this infiltration was Louis Boudin (working with John Reed and Jay Gladstone), and later passed to Boudin’s nephew, Leonard, whose daughter Kathy would join the Weather Underground, assist the assassination of three police in a failed bank robbery, and wind up a tenured professor at Colombia University. Go figure.

In 2008, Boudin was Sheinberg Scholar-in-Residence at New York University’s School of Law, lecturing on “the politics of parole and re-entry.”

The takeover of the Russian revolution by a small cadre funded by Wall Street was mirrored by the Weather Underground takeover of the SDS funded by the National Lawyers Guild.

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Can Cannabis Cure Stuttering?

The National Institute of Health (NIH) just released the first image of the internal structure of the brain, and it turns out to be wired like a Persian carpet: long strands of perpendicular ribbons. Although the image displayed here came from a monkey brain the NIH crew added: “This grid structure is continuous and consistent at all scales and across humans and other primate species.”

Most of my early life, I had a really bad stuttering problem. When I was excited, it was very hard for me to communicate. I didn’t realize how embarrassing my affliction was to my father until the day I took my first bike ride. My older brother Paul told me it would be easier to learn if I did it on a hill so I could keep my speed up without pedaling. I didn’t know anything about braking, I just took off down the steep hill in front of our house in Arlington, Massachusetts. It was an unpaved, gravel road, unfortunately, quite bumpy, and, right as I neared the bottom I hit a pothole and lost control. After the crash, I ran back to the house in tears. I was really pissed at my brother for encouraging me to go down that hill. When I found my father he asked me what was wrong, and all I could do was stutter. “Come back when you can tell me what happened,” replied my dad coldly.

That was the beginning of my problems with authority. I went back to my room, thought it over rationally and decided my dad was not only not perfect like I had thought, but he had done something very wrong. I didn’t mention the incident to anyone after that, but this revelation turned me against blind authority worship that nationalism and fascism both feed on. Authority would never look the same again.

Later in life, I wondered what had created that stuttering problem and remembered a recurring nightmare I’d had starting in nursery school: I was in the back seat of a car crash in front of our house. That nightmare had stuck with me for years, which is the only reason I still remember it today. Eventually, I linked this to a vicious beating I’d taken from my grandmother for crossing the street. Although my grandmother thought I’d run across on my own, in fact, another parent across the street had signaled me it was ok to cross. My grandmother was just visiting from Kansas and didn’t know about our neighborhood kid-crossing code. I guess my mom witnessed the whole thing and told me about it later. I realized while my grandmother was spanking me (pants down, in front of the neighborhood), she was yelling about a “car accident.” So that trauma incident undoubtedly created the nightmare, and, so I thought, the stuttering problem.

But lately I’ve begun to consider another factor: left-handedness, which runs in the Hager family. I was allowed to be a leftie when it came to writing and drawing, but somewhere along the line, both my brother and I were switched to right-handedness for sports, probably because it was much more difficult to find left-handed gear. I’ve come to consider that forcing people to change their natural handedness can lead to dyslexia and/or stuttering. What you are doing in these cases is fighting upstream against the brain’s natural wiring pattern. It can be done, but for some people, there will be serious complications. There appears to be a strong duality in the wiring pattern.

Sometime in 1967, my dad became the first person to notice a change in me, and, in fact, he’d already formed a theory on it. While we were sitting at dinner one night, he turned to me and said, “You haven’t stuttered since you started smoking marijuana.” Now, my dad went to Harvard at the same time as Timothy Leary, which is why we lived in Arlington in the first place. But he hated Leary with a purple passion, and felt pretty much the same way about the emerging counterculture. Obviously, marijuana was forbidden in our house, but my dad was wise to my developments and directions and secret ceremonies. Did marijuana cure my stuttering? Can’t say for sure, but the stuttering disappeared right around the same time I discovered cannabis.