The February 12th, 1966 Watts Acid Test as seen from the eyes of a 12 year old boy, me. 

Part 1. Pre-event Stories – For Context

This first story is going to sound like it is not relevant, but I think it will help the reader understand the internal changes that I describe later. The changes that occurred in me, from age 12 to 16, due to taking a half a dozen trips on healthy doses of very, very pure LSD – 25. The changes in my understanding of the nature of the world, and the people in it, that have affected me and guided me all of my life.

By the time I was 10 years old my siblings and I had been taken to a church service a handful of times. I don’t remember much except we got to participate in the Easter egg hunts held there because of that. My mother and father divorced when I was 4, but they were very together on the message they wanted to impart to their children regarding organized religion. They both told us, anytime we wanted to know, that what we should do in life is listen to everybody respectfully, and then make up our own mind as to what religious beliefs we wanted to adhere to, if any.

I was talking to one of my mother’s very best friends, whose name is Bunny Bonowitz, out in front of our house one afternoon at age 10. I told her that I just could not believe in a God in heaven that watched me and judged me or in the existence of heaven or hell. She explained to me what pantheism is. I have been a pantheist ever since. Pantheism is a very simple philosophy. That God and the forces of the universe are the same. Albert Einstein was a pantheist. Carl Sagan was a pantheist. Pantheism is for people who would otherwise identify as an atheist or an agnostic, but who have had spiritual experiences they feel they need to acknowledge. Experiences that caused them to understand at a deep level that there is some sort of infinite consciousness, something beyond the normal, day to day three dimensional space-time, that we are immersed in and are a part of. A whole that is much more than just the sum of its parts. Something science will never be able to measure or fully explain. “Pantheism is the belief that reality is identical with divinity.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheism

In 1963 my aunt, Jean Mayo Millay, my mother’s much younger sister, was working as an art teacher in the town of Mendocino on the coast of California, north of San Francisco. Somebody gave her some peyote. That changed her life drastically, and mine also by association. Later that year Jean, Bunny and my mother, Marge King, attended a lecture on the UC Berkeley campus. One of the presenters was Timothy Leary. They then acquired and read the book that he co-authored titled The Psychedelic Experience. In October of 1964 my mother and my aunt attended a three day symposium at Esalen Institute led by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass, and Ralph Metzner. There they learned even more about the use of psychoactive substances for the exploration of spiritual realms  See http://box5495.temp.domains/~unclaim9/ramdasslove.org/?page_id=818 

The Psychedelic Experience book was the how-to manual in the mid to late 60’s for people wanting to use LSD and other psychedelics as an entheogen. “An entheogen is a psychoactive substance that induces alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, or behavior for the purposes of engendering spiritual development in sacred contexts.” Wikipedia. The Psychedelic Experience book “discusses the various phases of ego death that can occur on psychedelics and gives specific instructions on how one should regard them and act during each of these different phases. In addition to containing more general advice for the readers on how to use psychedelics, the book also includes selections of writing presented with the intent for them to be read aloud during events during which users take psychedelics collectively.” Wikipedia.

In 1965 Jean made a movie depicting some visual experiences she encountered while under the influence of psychedelics. It has an introduction by Timothy Leary, who gave her permission to title her movie after this book he co authored with Richard Alpert. It featured music by Ravi Shankar. This may have been her first meeting with Ravi Shankar, who was to become an important figure in my life in the late 60’s. See http://box5495.temp.domains/~unclaim9/ramdasslove.org/?page_id=2884  The film won the ‘Film as Art’ award at the 1965 San Francisco International Film Festival. It can be viewed from this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjJwQt9EN84   A friend recently shared with me two ads in the LA Free Press from March, 1966 that describe an event where this movie was shown and where the Grateful Dead also performed.

LSD is different from other drugs in several important ways. Its action on the brain is not at all like most other drugs that people use to alter their senses. Drugs like cocaine or alcohol cause changes in levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. Neurotransmitters are the molecules that flow back and forth in the gaps between where two brain cells connect to each other, the synapse. They are the means by which one brain cell communicates with another brain cell. Drugs like ecstasy cause the body to produce more of one of its own particular neurotransmitters, like serotonin. The LSD molecule is a neurotransmitter.That is why doses of LSD are measured in micrograms. One microgram is one millionth of a gram. An average dose of LSD is 200 to 600 micrograms – an amount roughly equal to one-tenth the mass of a grain of sand. LSD travels through the bloodstream, across the blood brain barrier and fits itself in the synaptic gaps between brain cells, along with other naturally produced neurotransmitters. The exact mechanisms of this is a matter of continuing research.

This dramatic increase in available neurotransmitter molecules causes brain cells to communicate with each other in ways they never did before, never could before, and may never do again, for up to 8 hours. This direct action of facilitating a vast increase in brain cell to brain cell communications is the neurological phenomena that frequently translates to the person under the influence reporting the psychological awareness of, and astounding comprehension of, the oneness of everything. Of feeling connected to everything. Feeling part of everything. Comprehending at a uniquely deep, personal, experiential level the existence of everything being connected to everything else. A chemically induced spiritual awakening. This experience of a higher state of consciousness occurs much more frequently if the set and setting of the LSD experience are designed to promote that particular outcome. I was introduced to that kind of LSD experience just before I turned twelve. As per the instructions in the how-to manual The Psychedelic Experience, we always had one person who was the guide, who was not tripping. We had soft music, candles, colored lights, incense and we read spiritual writings to each other.

Here is an audio recording of Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, in 1966 talking about “exploring various uses of psychedelics including creating social institutions that utilize trained personnel to guide psychedelic sessions.” LSD and the Art of Conscious Living – Pt. 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1v7rtDDQ7E

In the summer of 1965 I was 11 years old. My older brother, Forrest, was 12. He’s the first one in my family that I remember being given LSD. He spent most of that trip on the couch in our living room. The adults came and went and were talking about him and checking on him. I really didn’t have much of a clue of what was going on.

Before I tell any more of these stories leading up to my attendance at the Watts Acid Test, I want to address this issue of adults giving LSD to children. In the course of my life I have had people, including therapists, tell me that this constitutes child abuse. I have had people tell me that they were saddened about this and sorry for me that I was exposed to “too much” at such an early age. Very few people I have told about this have not judged this part of my story negatively. I want to be very clear. I am extremely grateful that my mother and my aunt made the decision that they did about sharing these chemically induced spiritual experiences with their children. One time in the 80’s or 90’s I discussed the idea with my mother that people were calling what she did child abuse. She said that she felt so strongly about the profound, incredible, life-altering, spiritual experiences she had under the influence of the LSD that was available at that time, that she felt it would have been child abuse NOT to share that with her children. I don’t expect anyone who wasn’t there and who didn’t experience that kind of mystical, transformative LSD experience to understand. I just tell them that my mother and my aunt did the best they could with the tools that they had. They may have been short a few important tools in their toolbox at times. But aren’t we all, at times. And that LSD, as it was given to me, was not a street drug, it was not a party drug, it was more like a sacrament.

In the fall of 1965 both my mother and my aunt moved to Venice, California from the town of Fair Oaks near Sacramento, California where I had grown up. My siblings and I rode with my aunt and my two cousins for the long drive south. To pass the time my aunt had us kids learn a new song, one she made up on the journey. It was a psychedelic version of The 12 Days of Christmas. Only the gifts were psychoactive compounds. It went like this:

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a glass of water with an LSD. On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me, two toad skins and a glass of water with an LSD. On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me, three mushrooms, two toad skins and a glass of water with an LSD.  Day four was four Morning Glories. Day 5 was 5 kilos clean. Day 6 was dexedrines. Day 7 was 7 DMT’s, day 8 was peyote buttons day 9 with woodrose seeds. After we got that far I think my aunt ran out of psychoactive substances to sing about. The song ends when we get to day 5 on the way back down. It then changes to “Here comes the fuzz. Hide all the stash, flush it down the toilet, change the song – and a partridge in a pear tree.”

My first LSD experience occurred shortly after we moved to Venice, just before I turned 12. I remember wandering on the beach in the light fog, at night, with my sister, listening to the waves. The sand felt really strange between my toes. The cool air was condensing on my skin. Everything I looked at was surrounded by swirling colors. I don’t remember much more than that. What I sensed and what I felt and what I experienced under the influence of that powerful, pure psychedelic was the beginning of a new understanding for me of the spiritual nature of my life and of all life. A few years later I wrote an expression that reflected this new knowledge. It starts with a well-known phrase attributed to Aristotle. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” That is my religion. My philosophy is that I am sometimes a whole, and sometimes apart.

On December 23rd, 1965 Timothy Leary was arrested in Texas for two joints of marijuana. He was facing 30 years in prison because, Texas in the 60s. Aunt Jean was the West Coast coordinator for the Timothy Leary defense fund. She held an event for that fund in January, 1966. It was at this event that my mother and my aunt first met Augustus Stanley Owsley the third, aka Bear, and Tim Scully. My mother maintained a long lasting friendship with Bear, Tim Scully and Richard Alpert. You could read about how her friendship with Richard Alpert became a friendship with Ram Dass at www.ramdasslove.org

In early 1966, possibly after the Watts Acid Test, Bear and Tim Scully and all the members of the Grateful Dead band showed up at our house on the boardwalk in Venice and took LSD. It was a very long, strange night. It was a large house but to have it full of strange adults was both exciting and kind of weird. Phil Lesh discusses this party on page 83 in his autobiography ‘Searching for the Sound.’  I remember when the one person who freaked out was screaming at the top of his lungs and how alarmed that made all of us. I remember when the police showed up at our door to investigate the noise. I remember the huge relief I felt when the noise of the screaming stopped and the police left.  I think I mostly stayed in my room. I’m pretty sure I was not awake much past 1 a.m. I was 12.

Part 2 below.

Part 2 – The Event.

Throughout the course of my life I have had numerous occasions to mention to people that I attended the 1966 Watts Acid Test. At age twelve. I was there to operate a hand-cranked strobe light. I was there with my mother, Marjorie B King, and her much younger sister, my aunt, Jean Mayo Millay. If the occasion warranted a more elaborate explanation, here is what my memory told me, that I have shared over the course of the years:

It was crowded when we got there. The main hall was up some stairs and then to the left. The lighting was dim and made everything look brown. It was very warm. The music took forever to start. There was some major problem with the equipment. Part way through, people were using the fire escape to climb in a window because it was too crowded for anybody to get in the front door and up the stairs. The strobe light I operated was plugged into the wall to the right of the stage where the band was set up. Further along that same wall was where they were handing out the Kool-Aid. Behind that was the window and the access to the fire escape ladder.

The strobe light that I operated was a large black, round solid wheel,  mounted on a wooden platform, with several slit openings in it. It turned with a handle so that the slit openings would move past the front of a beam lamp mounted on the left a foot or so above the base platform. The whole thing was rather heavy and it was probably at least 3 feet high. I could time it to the music just by turning it faster or slower.  My aunt Jean had built it from scratch. My cousin recently made a sketch of this contraption, which can be seen at the end of this story.

The few perfectly clear images that have managed to stay alive in the back of my brain for the last 50 plus years are of people dancing in front of me. I can still see the really strange movements that appear when people dance in front of a strobe light. I can recall perfectly the fun and excitement I felt when changing the speed of the strobe light to match the music.

That is about the extent of the actual memories my brain contains. Those are the details that I have repeated the few dozen times in my whole life this topic came up. How much of that recall is an actual, accurate accounting of what occurred is it difficult to know for sure. Some of it matches what is known from published reports of that event. Some of it doesn’t.  But then some of the published reports don’t match up with each other completely either.

Wikipedia says “The strobe light was popularized on the club scene during the 1960s when it was used to reproduce and enhance the effects of LSD trips. Ken Kesey used strobe lighting in coordination with the music of the Grateful Dead during his legendary Acid Tests.”

Google did direct me to the information I was looking for to try to fact check my memory or jog lose some more of it. The most helpful page had excerpts from a handful of books. It reproduced just the part of those books that discussed this particular Acid Test. Excerpts from several books about the Watts Acid Test can be found at http://www.postertrip.com/public/5580.cfm 

Here is a brief summary of some of the ‘facts’ that are well known about the Watts Acid Test:

It’s where the book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test got its name because it was at the Watts event that LSD was first used to spike the Kool-Aid.

Paul Foster, one of the original Merry Pranksters, painted one half of his face one color and the other half a different color. This is probably the event  where my mother first met Paul Foster. They had a very long and close friendship. You can read about how he influenced me directly on this blog page of mine http://box5495.temp.domains/~unclaim9/ramdasslove.org/?p=6068

Owsley, also known as Bear, who I saw work frantically that night to fix the problem with the audio equipment, later reported that this was the event where he first remembers experiencing synesthesia. He saw sounds and heard colors. He realized then how people with special powers, like Uri Geller, could bend spoons with just mental energy, because they had figured out how to do that without the amplification provided by LSD.

Here is a short audio clip of his report about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_4IBpkTgsY 

Wavy Gravy made a heroic effort that night to direct only people to the Kool-Aid that was laced with LSD that wanted to participate in that experience. This may have been the first meeting of my mother and my aunt with Wavy Gravy. They maintained a casual friendship with him for quite a few years after this event. I remember the one trip we took to the Hog Farm north of LA to visit Paul Foster there. Tiny Tim performed that day and I have a picture of that. Here is a 3-minute video clip of a younger looking Wavy Gravy were the Watts Acid Test is mentioned several times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixaOIn1-ups 

An interesting and little known fact that they had in common is that both my mother, Marge King, and Wavy Gravy maintained a very close friendship with Richard Alpert after he became Ram Dass a few years later. The short poem that Wavy Gravy wrote to honor Ram Dass after his passing in December of 2019 is available at the bottom of this page on my website where I give details of my mother’s friendship with Ram Dass. http://box5495.temp.domains/~unclaim9/ramdasslove.org/?page_id=3612 

By far the most authoritative and most frequently cited source for information about the Watts Acid Test is of course Tom Wolfe’s very famous book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I heard about this book all my life but I’ve never actually read it. I mean why bother when you lived it right? LOL.  I had heard from my relatives that my mother was mentioned in this book only not by her name. One of the other facts about the Watts Acid Test that I have related to people over the many years since then is that the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test refers to an old lady in a robe that was most likely my mother.  Well I gave it a close reading and sure enough she is clearly in there. And so am I! Not me by name or even me as a 12 year old boy. But there’s a number of mentions of the strobe light that I operated.

The handful of pages in that book devoted to this event are mostly a first-hand account by a young lady named Clair Brush. She worked for the LA Free Press. One of her co-workers, who went by the name Doc Stanley, told her to check out this acid test. When I saw the mention of the name Doc Stanley the other day my brain lit up like a firecracker going off. So now I get to tell a short side story about why that occured. It had been decades since any thought of Doc Stanley had crossed my mind.

Doc Stanley, not to ever be confused with Owsley Stanley, was the only man my mother ever dated after she left my father when I was 4 years old. Their relationship was short and intense because he was really crazy. He taught my younger brother how to play the guitar. He came with us on a short vacation to Baja Mexico. And he shared with us kids a number of times what seemed to be his motto in life. He said that one should never have more than one can carry in two suitcases at a dead run. I don’t know if he originated that expression but it sure stuck with me the way he said it. It sounds like something Hunter S Thompson would have said.

A side story to this side story is about how Doc Stanley was responsible for me getting an autograph from Bobby Fischer. Yes, that Bobby Fischer. The world chess champion a few years later. In the summer of 1966 the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica hosted a round robin tournament of 10 of the world’s top chess players at that time. Called The Piatigorsky Cup.  An adult friend of my mother’s found out that I was very, very interested in chess and somewhat knowledgeable about it. He offered to take me to quite a few of the days of the tournament, which lasted 4 or 5 weeks. When Doc Stanley found out about this arrangement he said that I was now working for the LA Free Press under him and that I was to interview these world famous chess players and write a report for the Free Press. I was still 12 years old. I didn’t turn 13 until later that fall. When the day came and I was talking to Bobby Fischer and getting his autograph, I asked him if he thought three-dimensional chess would ever become a thing. He said no. I got Boris Spassky’s autograph also and I still have them. I never wrote the article or got published in the LA Free Press.

Back to the Watts Acid Test and the first-hand report about it by Clair Brush in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book. Here are four excerpts from her account and my comments about them:

“Severn Darden was there, and Del Close, of course, and I knew them from the Second City in Chicago. Severn and I were standing under a strobe light (first time I’d seen one, and they are kicky) doing an improvisation…” Page 273.

This would have been the first time almost anybody saw a strobe light. Readily available, inexpensive, electronic, adjustable strobe lights could only be found in science fiction books in 1966. The clunky, hand operated contraption that my aunt had brought and that I was there to operate only worked well because the lighting was very dim.

“I looked around and people’s faces were distorted…lights were flashing everywhere…the screen (sheets) at the end of the room had three or four different films on it at once, and the strobe light was flashing faster than it had been…the band, the Grateful Dead, was playing but I couldn’t hear the music…people were dancing…” Page 274

The strobe light was flashing faster because I was cranking it faster.  I could hear the music very well and I was keeping time with it as best I could.

“The strobe light broke midway…I think they blew something in it…but that was a relief, because I had been drawn to it but it disturbed the part of me that was trying to hang onto reality…playing with time-sense was something i’d never done…and I found it irresistible but frightening.” Page 275

I have no memory of the strobe light breaking. It’s possible it broke. I think it’s more likely that my aunt unplugged it and moved me to a different part of the room for a while. I remember her doing that once during the evening. It’s also possible that she wanted to arrange for different lighting effects for a while. I don’t know exactly what she was doing but I know that she was involved in the lighting effects and the films that were shown on sheets that night.

Here is where the quoting from the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test book gets really good.

“There was a witch who was very kind and sent out the best warm and lovely vibrations. She was wearing red velvet and she’s an older lady, really a witch in the best possible way. I was glad she was there, and she was smiling and understanding and enjoying, mothering those few who were not reacting well.” Page 277

That would be my mother, Marge King. She was born in 1921 so she would have been in her mid-forties in 1966. Clair Brush is described as being a young 20 something. It’s possible this is a reference to my Aunt Jean, because she was older than most of the crowd there too and she always wore loose robes also. But my mother was eight or nine years older than my aunt so I’m pretty sure this was a reference to my mom.

Everybody wore loose clothes and robes. We had robes we called tripping robes just to be the maximum comfortable while tripping. The last thing you’d want to be in while under the influence of LSD or dancing your ass off to the Dead was in tight fitting clothes. To this day I don’t wear anything that fits me tight.

My mother, the Good Witch of the Watts Acid Test. I’m so glad I finally read the book. LOL

That concludes the story of my participation in the Watts Acid Test.