Monterey Purple LSD explained by one of the people who helped make it, Tim Scully, and the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival as experienced by a 14-year-old, me.  

On this date, June 18th, in 1967, I was in Monterey, CA. It was the last day of the seminal three-day music festival there that set the bar for all future outdoor musical festivals that came after that, including Woodstock. In this short essay, and with the accompanying photos, I am going to share the story of how I came to attend that festival and what I can still clearly remember of it. I also have the great fortune to be able to include in this essay a memo from Tim Scully. Tim learned how to make very, very pure LSD from Owsley Stanley, aka Bear in the mid 60’s. He was a close friend of my mother’s going back to the mid 60’s when they first met. He remains a friend of mine to this day. I asked him by email the other day if he had any information about the famous Monterey Purple LSD that was handed out for free at that festival. He took time out from his busy schedule of writing his own memoir to answer my question, and has allowed me to include his answer in this essay. I’m going to start this essay off with a little background on myself, so that the reader will have the appropriate context to understand how and why I got to go to this festival at age 14, and what the adults in my life were up to at that time that led us all to be there.

I was raised by my mother, Marge King, and somewhat also by my aunt, Jean Mayo Millay. They were older than most people of the hippie generation, but that is the crowd they hung out with. For various reasons, they ended up right smack dab in the middle of some of the most important and seminal events of the hippie generation. Because of that, I got to meet and hang out with some of the more famous hippie people also.

In the early 60’s my Aunt Jean had a transformative experience with peyote. She shared about that with my mother in a way that caused my mother to want to learn more about the use of psychedelic substances to produce a chemically induced spiritual awakening. My aunt and my mother had both already become seekers of spiritual truth. They had read and discussed books by Aldus Huxley, Edgar Cayce and Carl Jung. They attended a lecture by Timothy Leary in Berkeley in 1964. In October of 1964, they attended a seminar held by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner at Esalen Institute on the Big Sur coast of California. I have several photos from that event that I will share with this post. They had previously acquired and read the book by these three presenters titled The Psychedelic Experience. I’m pretty sure that event is where my mother got Timothy Leary’s autograph on our copy of that book. My mother and my aunt stayed in touch with those presenters for a long time. My mother and Richard Alpert in particular hit it off and stayed good friends for about a decade. If you would like to read how our friendship with Richard Alpert turned into friendship with Ram Dass, the details of that are on a website I published this past winter. Do not miss the ‘My personal blog page’ where I have posted stories like this one that talk about growing up as a hippie and taking very strong, very, very pure LSD back before it was even illegal, in 1965.   www.ramdasslove.org

(Note: When I committed to paying the $300 to $400 annually to maintain that site on that website hosting service last winter, I was sure it would easily pay for itself in donations. So far it has not. I live on a tiny, fixed, retirement income and HUD housing assistance. That amount of money is actually a bit of a stretch for me. Please consider donating to help fund my site so I can easily continue publishing blog stories like this one on it. There is a link to a donation page in the header and footer of each page.)

In the fall of 1965, we moved from the little town of Fair Oaks near Sacramento, where I had been born and raised, to Venice, California, near Santa Monica. That is where I had my first experience being given very pure LSD. It was done in the proper set and setting. Just before I turned 12. I remember seeing swirly colors everywhere, and in the fog on the beach. And feeling connected to everything.

I realize that the idea of giving a powerful drug like LSD to a young child like me at that age is a controversial decision. I have been told it constituted child abuse. In today’s modern age, knowing what we know about adverse childhood events, it would certainly be categorized as abuse. It is not something I would ever choose to do with my children. But I think it has to be judged in the context of the time. My mother and my aunt believed that they were taking part in a consciousness revolution. My mother told me many years later that she felt it would have been an abuse not to share the spiritual discoveries that she had found with me. Waiting until I was an adult was not an option. All I know for sure is that all the adults in my life did the absolute very best they could with the tools that they had. The fact that they were short a few important tools in their toolbox at times has to do with the way they were raised as a child, and the abuse or trauma that they suffered as children. I am extremely grateful that my mother and my aunt felt that they needed to share this enlightening experience with their children. At that time and in the manner we consumed it, LSD was not a party drug. Not at all. It was a sacrament. Their decision to share it with us was not one they made casually. It was one they put a lot of thought into.

The most powerful, transformative and enlightening LSD trip I ever took was at Christmas time in 1966. A friend of ours came to visit us directly from a lab that was manufacturing very pure LSD. I watched him put three drops from a dropper bottle into a gallon of water and mix it up. We all had one 6 oz glass from that gallon. Looking back and comparing it to other trips I took, I am guessing that it was around 600 to 800 micrograms. A normal dose, if it is very pure, was then, and is today, around 270 micrograms. LSD is measured in micrograms. That is one millionth of a gram. It only takes such a tiny, tiny amount because the molecules of LSD are able to cross the blood brain barrier and act as neurotransmitters in the brain. They cause all of your brain cells to talk to each other in ways they never could before. That is part of what engenders a feeling of oneness with everything.

As was usual for our trips like that, we had candles, incense and soft music. There was always one person who was not high and who was our guide. Kind of like a designated driver. I saw colors that I didn’t know existed. And I felt the presence of what I would now describe as a cosmic consciousness. I had recently turned 13. During that psychedelic session, I had an intense and powerful direct experience of the manner in which everything is in fact connected to everything else. The desire for transcendence is self-nurturing. That little taste of the higher realms of consciousness has continued to motivate me to be a seeker of spiritual truths and has kept me coming back to a path I think leads to enlightenment, not that I will ever get there, from that day on.

We read from The Book of Tao to each other. That is a westernized version of the Tao Te Ching. Wikipedia describes that book this way: “The text concerns itself with the Dao (or “Way”), and how it is expressed by virtue. Specifically, the text emphasizes the virtues of naturalness and non-action.” A major takeaway for me from these early chemically induced spiritual awakening experiences combined with the truths in The Book of Tao has to do with how people describe their God. My direct experience of the cosmic consciousness, what I call the Almighty Isness, combined with the teachings in that book, have given me a particular and useful gem of wisdom that I have carried with me my entire life now. That is the sure knowledge that whatever our three-dimensional brain can conceive of, and whatever terms our words are used to describe God or a Higher power, can always only be a very limited version or expression of that higher reality we are all enmeshed in. Words, and event thoughts, can never be sufficient to fully describe it. Or, as it says in a funny meme I recently collected: “The Tao that can be posted on Facebook is not the eternal Tao.” But it can be experienced, if one is open to it.

In late 1965 or early 1966, my aunt and my mother held a fundraising event for Timothy Leary. He had been busted in Texas for two joints and was looking at 30 years in prison. It was at that event that my mother first met Owsley Stanley, aka Bear, and Tim Scully, with whom they stayed close friends with. In early 1966, my mother and my aunt attended the Watts Acid Test with Owsley and Tim. I got to go also because there was a hand cranked strobe light that my aunt wanted me to operate. The story of that is on the website that I published this last winter.

In early 1966 we had a house on the beach in Venice. Bear and Tim came over one night with the entire Grateful Dead Band. They all tripped. Hard. The story of that LSD adventure at our house that night made it into the book that Phil Lesh, a Grateful Dead band member, wrote many years later.  You can read about that night and that trippy event at our house on page 83 of his autobiography titled Searching for the Sound.

It was early that year that I first met Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass. I was 12. We discovered a common passion for a particular science fiction book. For years after that initial meeting, he would refer to us as his ‘water brothers’ in the letters that he sent my mom. Because that is how certain characters in that book referred to each other.

At some point in 1966 my Aunt Jean met, and hooked up with, Alla Rakha, the tabla player who played with and toured with Ravi Shankar. She became his mistress for four years in the late 60’s. That is what set us on the path to attend the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha’s performance on the Sunday afternoon at that festival is what brought them more fully to the attention of the American people. As did the performance of many of the other artists at the festival, who were previously relatively unknown, and who later became very famous because of their performance there. Such as Janis Joplin.

End Part One – Part Two Continues Below

Part Two

And so it happened that on June 15th of 1967 we packed up everybody and everything tight into my aunt’s old 1958 Ford sedan and headed north up highway 101 from LA. To be in the audience that Sunday afternoon in Monterey when Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha were to perform. I know for a fact that none of us had any real clue as to the enormous historical significance of the events that were about to unfold.

We rented a couple of rooms in a motel near the fairgrounds where the event took place. I remember the air being often cool and somewhat foggy. I remember noticing the face paint, the hippie beads and the colorful clothes worn by some people there. I remember the sense of excitement that would run through everybody when the first notes of the different shows started up. I only have two really vivid, clear and unforgettable memories. One involves Janis Joplin and the other involves Ravi Shankar.

I was in the audience for Janis Joplin for her Saturday afternoon performance, where she completely blew everybody’s mind. That performance was not captured on film. She is reported to have been very upset about that. They brought her back for a second performance on Sunday night, just to get her on film. That is her performance that made it into the movie about this event.

I had never heard a singer like her before, or a band quite like the one she played with. I was not high anytime during that weekend on any substance. But her music took me to a higher realm. Her voice was more than just captivating. It captured me completely. I was glued to her every note. I was stunned, along with most of the rest of the audience. The energy that she put into singing those lyrics was just incredible. It was like she was using her force of will to just implant the notes and lyrics directly into my brain. When she sang the last notes of the last song, Ball and Chain, I was in tears. I was standing on my chair to get a better look. I was not the only one. People were stunned and amazed. We all knew instantly that we had just witnessed something so extraordinary, amazing and beautiful that we would be talking about it for a long time. None of us would have guessed then that her performance that day would still be a topic of interest 54 years later, but here we are.

The other memory that was etched indelibly into my brain during that event had to do with Shankar’s performance that Sunday afternoon. I had been to a few Ravi Shankar performances. Up until that one, I had thought of them as somewhat dull at times. Ravi did this thing that my aunt explained to me once. She said that he ‘tuned’ everybody into their Delta waves. Delta and Theta waves are the electromagnetic waves that the brain produces when we are asleep. Ravi Shankar would deliberately put everybody almost to sleep with his music, in order to wake them up with it afterwards! At one point during his performance, an airplane flew over the arena just low enough that everyone could hear it. Ravi and Alla Rakha changed up the beat and the tone of the music they were producing in a way that incorporated the airplane noise into the song! The last 20 minutes of their performance was incredibly profound. They did a back and forth calling response. It just got faster and faster. It was unbelievable. When they ended, everybody jumped to their feet and applauded and cheered as loud as they could.

Something happened for me at the end of their performance that has been completely and totally unforgettable for me my entire life ever since. After everybody leaped up and loudly expressed their amazement at what they had just heard, I wandered towards the stage. My aunt beckoned me up onto the stage. She and Alla Rakha had me help them put one of the 2 tabla drums into a protective carry bag. They asked me to walk with them and carry it to their car. So, I got to carry one of the drums that had just completely blown 10,000 people’s minds. Off that stage and around to the back of the stage and out to the parking lot with my aunt and Alla Rakha, to put it into the trunk of their car.

Today, writing about this, exactly 54 years later, I can still feel the tingle that encompassed all of my nervous system while carrying that tabla drum. I can still clearly recall how every moment of that walk was just indelibly etched into my brain. Looking back, I think I may have sensed the weight of history being focused on those moments. To better understand where I was feeling, you have to keep in mind how everyone was stunned by the performance. Stunned in much the same way that we had been the day before by the performance of Janis Joplin. There was a huge, overwhelming feeling that could best be expressed by: ‘Oh my God, I was not expecting that!’ No one thought that either of these performances alone was going to transport them into some higher realm. But they did.

The 20-minute clip of the end of their performance is available on YouTube. It has been viewed over two and a half million times. That is about 200 times the number of us that were in attendance that afternoon. The first part of this clip shows the crowd at various stages during the weekend. At 6 minutes and 30 seconds into this clip you get a look at Jimi Hendrix grooving to this Indian music. Just after that is a long close up of Mike Bloomfield who played guitar with The Electric Flag. He is looking higher than a kite (there was a lot of pure LSD handed out free that afternoon). Click here for the video of Ravi Shankar at this event

I did not partake in any of the Monterey Purple LSD that was given away for free at this event. At that time, and at that young age, LSD was only something I would do when in the exact proper set and setting, and with a guide.

An article in the Rolling Stone magazine described it this way: “The smell of pot was everywhere, and the cops either ignored or didn’t recognize it. The punch backstage was spiked with the hallucinogen STP. And famed LSD evangelist and chemist Owsley Stanley was on hand with a special gift for the attendees: 14,000 tabs of a potent batch of acid he dubbed Monterey Purple. Adler had to beg him to stop giving it to the crew before the show fell apart.” https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/why-monterey-pop-was-a-turning-point-for-sixties-rock-194407/

Here is what my friend Tim Scully had to say very recently about Monterrey Purple LSD, when I asked him what he could tell us about it. He mentions Don Douglas several times. Don was also a very, very close friend of ours back then, who also remains my good friend to this day.

——
From Tim Scully:

Don Douglas and I set up the first Denver lab in early 1967 in the basement of a house near the corner of 26th and Ash streets, not far from the Denver Zoo. We had worked as assistants/apprentices for Bear Stanley in the Point Richmond Lab the previous year and learned his process for making pure LSD.

In early May 1967 Bear, Rhoney and Melissa arrived for the first time at the first Denver lab, bringing some of his stash of lysergic acid with him. Bear had the essential raw material we’d been waiting for.

Bear Stanley had a very powerful personality and tended to dominate the lab when he was there. We started processing his lysergic acid in batches of about 25 g. The process we used included a recycling loop to recover iso-LSD and ran 24 hours a day. I worked while Bear was sleeping or resting.

Bear, Rhoney and Melissa had to leave the lab for court appearance in New York in mid-May; they’d been busted there for driving while looking weird and holding a lot of dope in the trunk of their car. But they soon returned, their bail continued. Criminal court proceedings often drag on for months or even years of intermittent hearings.

Bear left the lab again in late May or very early June with some of the LSD we’d made and some of the STP. He and Rhoney flew to California where they met with the tableting crew. Don and I had located a remote farmhouse in Cotati in late 1966 which we helped set up as a tableting facility. We had soundproofed and light proofed a room where the one punch compression molding tablet press was set up. Bear had managed to buy it from the Acme Machinery Company and was proud that he had pulled that off; buying a tablet machine was not easy. The little one he got produced 60 tablets a minute and required quite a bit of preparation of the material to be tableted.

Bear made up a batch of about 14,000 purple tablets of LSD which later came to be called Monterey Purple. He gave all of them away, some in stashes to famous musicians and the rest to the crowd at the Monterey Pop Festival, which he and Rhoney attended.

Bear also arranged the tableting of some of the STP we’d made in Denver, in orange tablets using different dies, and gave a lot of it away in Golden Gate Park at the Summer Solstice. Those doses of STP turned out to be too large and some people had rough trips!

Meanwhile Don Douglas and I remained in Denver and continued to work at the lab there.

Tim

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Peace, love and may the force be with you.

Storm