The long and strange success of the Grateful Dead

Garcia told Denslow that times may have changed but the scene remained vital all those years later. “[Haight-Ashbury’s hippies] They’re still doing pretty much what they were doing back then, but…the difference now is that they have 15 years of experience under their belts and they’ve become experts at what they do, just like we’ve become experts at what we do – sort of.” No…once they saw long hair and eccentricity of any kind, you know, that was it.

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Although they may have come in peace, it’s easy to see how the lifestyle of these wild-haired hippies might have unnerved uninitiated. In fact, the band’s formation was closely linked to the glorification of LSD taking. LSD was discovered in 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. A few years later, when he accidentally took some of the medicine through his fingertips, he saw visions of what it prescribed. “Exquisite images, unusual shapes with intense and varied play of colours.” While Hoffman argued for decades that LSD could help treat mental illness, others envisioned very different applications for its potentially dangerous psychedelic properties.

Kool-Aid electrophoresis acid test

In the early days of the Cold War, the CIA established a secret mind control research program. Known by the code name MK-Ultra, it funded experiments on unsuspecting patients, including people in psychiatric institutions and prison inmates, using methods including narcotic drug administration, sensory deprivation, and electroconvulsive therapy. In 1960, CIA-funded researchers at Menlo Park Hospital in California were paying students $40 a day to take LSD.

One of the volunteers was Ken Kesey, who later wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Terrified by the hallucinogenic power of the still-legal drug, Casey began distributing it to his friends and, in 1964, assembled a chain of like-minded people he called the Merry Pranksters and set off across the country in a brightly painted bus. The flight was chronicled by writer Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. A year later in California, he began organizing a series of parties called the Acid Tests to promote LSD use. The second event on December 4 in San Jose was where the Grateful Dead played their first gig. The band had previously played as The Warlocks, but it turned out there was another group with the same name, so Garcia’s gang switched to the name they would be known by for the next few decades.