056 - The Harvard Psychedelic Club

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Gunther Weil

Gunther Weil

Today’s podcast from our Psychedelic Salon 2.0 track features some epic stories from a psychonaut who’s seen it all. His name is Gunther Weil.
Gunther escaped the Holocaust, worked with Tim Leary on the LSD Concord Prison Experiment, worked on Aerosmith’s first album, recieved a Ph.D. from Harvard, and hung out with Alan Watts, Alan Ginsberg, and Ram Dass.
These are his tales of adventure, curiosity, betrayal, and triumph. Gunther Weil shares with us a life of stories and adventures from political uprisings, government drug experiments, and his first-hand view from the start of a cultural revolution.

Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
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Transcript

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

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And it’s really good to be back with you after these past few weeks.

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If you’ve been keeping up with my latest shenanigans, well, then you know that during these past several weeks,

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I’ve been more or less preoccupied with moving to a new apartment.

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Since our landlord raised our rent once again this year, we were finally forced to find another apartment.

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And that was after living in our last place for eight years, so you can imagine how much cargo we had to move,

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and this is to a second-story apartment, so it was a back-breaking effort. But we’re now in a much

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smaller apartment, and well, I’ve had to put my library of almost a thousand books, along with

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over a dozen cases of tools,

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into storage, and that also included several dozen boxes of my journals and unpublished writing.

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Hopefully, I’ll be able to reunite with my books, tools, and other sentimental stuff again one day,

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but for now, outside of my clothes and computer, the rest of my cargo is all digital. However,

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I do have with me the last 500 books

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that I’ve read because, well, they’re all on my Kindle, which is a lot easier to move.

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Now, over the last couple of months, particularly during the live salons on Monday nights,

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I’ve also talked about my plans for the future. And since they are in flux at the present moment,

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it seems that some of our fellow salonners are quite confused about where I am and what my plans are.

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You see, two months ago I was considering a move to Orcas Island with my oldest son.

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My thought was to live there during the summer and return to San Diego during my granddaughter’s school year.

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However, those plans have now changed,

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and instead of Orcas Island, my son wants to move

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to Port Townsend, Washington, where he already has some friends. And after checking it out, I now think

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that Port Townsend is also a better fit for me as well, because I want to become more involved in

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sailing once again, and that seems to be the perfect place to do so. Well, now our plans have become a bit more complicated in the past two weeks

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because the company that my son has been working for these past years just merged.

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And along with a bunch of other employees, his position was terminated.

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Well, now Chris has to regroup in Florida for a year or so

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while we both save enough money to afford to move to Washington.

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So the bottom line is that for at least the next several years,

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I’ll still be living here in San Diego County, producing podcasts,

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writing more books, and hosting a live salon every Monday night.

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And I think this is all going to be really perfect as long as you decide to stick with me

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while I get the live salons better organized and have featured speakers join us several times

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a month. But that’s enough about me for a while. Right now, we’ve got an interview to listen to

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that I am anxiously waiting to play for you. Thanks to my good friend Lex Pelger, I’m going

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to be able to podcast some fresh new material for us to enjoy while I continue to get settled and

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to travel to speak at the Convergence Conference

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at the end of this month.

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So today’s interview is a perfect way to begin this short series of podcasts from the Salon

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2.0 track.

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So now here is Lex Pelger, who will introduce today’s program.

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The colonial powers, they assumed that we were in cahoots with this guy to create a revolution using the psychedelics.

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I’m Lex Pelger, and this is The Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

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Before the hippies, it was the beatniks and jazz musicians

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who experimented with strange, mind-altering substances.

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Those were the cats who inspired Gunther Weil. It was the beatniks and jazz musicians who experimented with strange, mind-altering substances.

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Those were the cats who inspired Gunther Weil.

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Gunther escaped the Holocaust as a child.

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He helped Timothy Leary at the Concord Prison Experiments work with LSD and convicted felons.

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He was deported for associating with political rebels in the old British colonies,

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and he helped record Aerosmith’s first album.

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He’s seen it all, and these stories are fascinating as they are important.

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Strap in for two hours of adventure with the cheerful tripper, Dr. Gunther Weil.

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Hello, everybody.

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I’m very happy to be here with Gunther Weil.

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Thanks so much for joining us.

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Happy to be here with Gunther Weil. Thanks so much for joining us. Happy to be here.

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Before the story really gets exciting when you get to Cambridge in 1960, can you tell me about where it was that you grew up and what it was that you thought you were going to do when you were a youngster? I came to with my parents in this country in 1939 as a Holocaust escapee, you know, a refugee, essentially.

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We emigrated on what was, if not the last boat,

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certainly one of the last boats.

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So my early childhood, which I’ve explored in some psychedelic experiences

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and some of those experiences which were actually pre-verbal,

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were very formative, you knowative in my own psychological conditioning over many years.

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And so I grew up in Milwaukee,

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and I attended Kenyon College in Ohio

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when it was a small men’s college, there were 500 guys,

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very good liberal arts background with also a strong party school.

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The women came in on the weekends, you know,

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or we went to a couple of female colleges in the vicinity, you know, or whatever.

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But I had a great education,

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But I had a great education, and then I was given a Fulbright fellowship to go live in Europe for a year in Norway. There was a philosopher there who was working on psychological research.

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He was combining philosophy and psychology, and I had a dual major at Kenyon in that, so I went to work with him.

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psychology and I had a dual major at Kenyon in that so I went to work with him and I ended up spending a lot of time in Paris and playing hooky from Oslo which at that time was coming out of

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being a kind of a little bit of a third world country before they discovered oil in the North

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Sea so it was a very you know it was beautiful there wonderful people but it was a little boring

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so of course I gravitated to Paris. And my background earlier

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than that, I had fallen in love with bebop

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and jazz.

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I come from a different era.

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I come from the

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beatnik era, not

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the hippie era. So my

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reference points were

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Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who I

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then met later with Tim

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and a bunch of people from the Bay Area, from San Francisco in particular, and internationally.

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So I had an interesting background.

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When I arrived at Harvard after the year in Oslo, I went to meet my faculty advisor, who happened to be Timothy Leary.

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I didn’t know who he was.

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I didn’t know anything about him.

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And we met in the Center for Research in Personality, which had an auspicious address.

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It was 5 Divinity Avenue in Cambridge.

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It was a colonial house. in Cambridge, you know.

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It was a colonial house, you know.

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And I walked in the door, and I was looking for his office.

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I was expecting, you know, a normal office. Well, it turns out, because there was a space shortage,

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he had been delegated to a former utility closet on the first floor,

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and he kind of had a little desk there.

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It was a very small space, but it was very engaging. But he made it clear from the very beginning that his

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research focus had shifted in the previous year. I don’t know if you know his background, but he

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was very well known in the field of psychological testing and theory of personality. His test, actually,

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multidimensional personality test,

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was later administered to him

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when he was in prison, actually, years later.

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That’s like a footnote on some of the history.

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So he was very clever

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and very ahead of his time

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in terms of that particular diagnostic.

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But he made it clear to me

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that he was no longer assuming that that was maybe why I would be interested in working with him.

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But he dissuaded me of that quickly and said that the previous summer he had been in Cuernavaca.

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He had taken the mushrooms along with a few other people.

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Frank Barron, who was a good friend of his from the University of California,

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played also a significant role early in our research around creativity.

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So he said to me, this is what I’m interested in.

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I’m interested in consciousness.

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I’m interested in the use of psychoactive substances.

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If you’re interested in that, I’d be delighted to have you as my graduate student.

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If not, you’re better off finding somebody right away.

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I said, sign me up.

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Because my background, as I said earlier, I had been involved with bebop in Paris,

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where I hung out during my Fulbright.

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I got to know a lot of amazing artists, Bud Powell and people, Oscar P Pettiford and the great bebop jazz players from

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that era, a lot of whom were expats. And there was a big expat community in Paris there in the

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literary and jazz and, you know, the whole scene. And I stayed for a few months in a small hotel

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on Rue Saint-Germain, where there were like three jazz clubs on that street, right on the left bank.

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Up the street was Sartre’s Cafe, where he would hang out, you know.

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And so it was a really interesting time, and I was like, you know, in my 20s,

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and like really into it, you know.

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So I said, sign me up, you know, because I had already had experience smoking marijuana

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with jazz musicians when I was in my late teens in Milwaukee and Chicago.

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You know, when I would go to hear people play, I heard Miles and Coltrane in Chicago early on.

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And, you know, it was a whole different scene then.

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Even the racial issues were, they were always there.

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But for a young white guy to go into a black neighborhood

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to hear bebop was pretty unusual, but it was so unusual that people were just kind of protective

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and friendly and, you know, almost kind of amazed that someone like my skin color and background

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would, you know, go to them, right, to hear those guys play. So I said, of course, yeah, sign me up.

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So within the first two weeks of my graduate program,

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I had my first psilocybin experience with Tim, and I got married.

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All of that happened in the first two weeks of graduate school.

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So the first experience with Tim was at his home in Newton.

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He had rented a big old house in Newton, Mass.

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As you know, Newton is a wealthy suburb of Boston,

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and a lot of old, big mansions there,

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and he had rented one of those.

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And Frank Barron, who was on a sabbatical

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from the University of California, Berkeley,

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was living with Tim.

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And there was an initial session with a lot of interesting people.

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There was a black psychiatrist who was gay, who was the chief psychiatrist at Concord Prison, and who led a double life.

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He had this beautiful black wife,

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you know, beauty contest who was his front, basically, you know.

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And he was a character and a half.

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And he ended up,

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because shortly after that,

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we started the prison project at Concord,

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which you’ve probably heard about,

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which I’m happy to talk about

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in this session today as well.

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And a number of other people.

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And so, you know,

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my background in philosophy and psychology became embodied in a way.

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I actually went beyond the conceptual reality of those fields of knowledge, and I had my

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first experience of, or started a body experience, and my first experience of the kind of intense

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aesthetics of

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specifically of psilocybin

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which you probably know is

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among

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multiple dimensions. What I experienced

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a la also the

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mescaline, you know,

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question of mescaline is a very intense

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sensory aesthetic

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dimension to that particular.

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But it just blew me away, and it was really positive.

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And all of the philosophical and psychological and the beginning of spiritual themes

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that I was later to explore in much more depth became like a lie for me

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in a way that I had never had before.

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So that was my first experience there.

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And then there were a number of other experiences and sessions.

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We were doing sessions, I would say almost weekly,

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for three or four years while I was there.

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So it was a range of people coming in and out from Hollywood,

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from politics, from sciences, from all walks of life who were drawn to our work, basically.

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So there were a handful of us there, Tim primarily,

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and then, of course, Richard Alpert, now known as Ram Dass for many years.

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We’re good friends. We see each other.

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Whenever I’m in Maui, we try to get there once a

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year and spend some time with him. And, you know, we continue to trade stories. Last time I was

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there, actually last year, he was coming out of a physical therapy session where I was about to

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enter. We have a mutual friend there who was a wonderful PT. And he caught my eye and looked at me, and it wasn’t the first time that we would see each other in that context.

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And the first thing out of his mouth was he looked at me and said,

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I really missed him.

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And it was so sweet, you know, it was so genuine.

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And he’s at a place now in consciousness which is really, I would say, really refined and really present, really alive.

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His long, many-year desire to become an embodied guru actually happened.

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He really became who he wanted to be for a lot of years

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and so he’s very genuine and very extremely present and kind and loving and his mind is

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very alert and very clear he has a little difficulty sometimes expressing there’s a gap

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between his ideation and his articulation as a result of the stroke, you know, but it also gives

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him a certain weight also to his words because the words are crafted, they’re presented in

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a way that have substance and weight and, you know, intention behind it.

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It’s not just free associating on some trip, you know, or preempting what the

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next person is saying. It’s a very, the quality of presence is very, very, very clear. So it was

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Richard at the, you know, I still occasionally call him by Richard because I know him from that

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period, right? And Ralph Metzner, another guy named George Litwin, who ended up spending some years at the Harvard Business School after the psychedelic period.

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And then a lot of other people who were a little bit more on the periphery, but it was basically the kind of the core group of people that were kind of driving this apocalypse were Tim and Dick and Ralph and George and myself, basically.

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So I’ve lost touch with George.

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I think he’s still living in the East Coast,

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in the south of Boston, in Plymouth, in that area.

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I’m not sure.

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I see Ralph occasionally, not that often.

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And I do see Ram Dass Richard almost yearly when we take some time and go to Maui to get out of the cold.

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So that was the beginning, basically, Tim being my advisor at meeting in the utility closet, which was his office,

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and then proceeded almost immediately within a week or two with my first psychedelic session.

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And then it went on until it stopped.

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We all know that story, and I’m happy to shed some color on that too if you’re interested.

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Well, to begin, I’d be curious, since you were such at the forefront before as even in the public consciousness,

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what did your team learn about set and setting and these psychedelics in the early years of giving sessions to all manner of people?

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That became clear at the very beginning.

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And also, it became clear experientially.

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And also, as we were studying reports of people that were doing research on what was then called psychotomimetic drugs, psychotomimetic, psychosis-mimicking drugs.

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So there was a psychiatrist in Boston who was a German psychiatrist.

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He looked like a character out of a silent movie with a kind of, you know,

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what do they used to call it, a monocle, you know, and very stiff, you know,

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and Rinkle, Max Rinkle, that was his name.

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And he was among a group of people who turned out were funded by the CIA

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to do this work on psychotomymedic drugs.

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And they would give LSD to a patient, patient, right,

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or even the word patient was used

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or volunteer

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experimenter or whatever

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in a, essentially in a hospital

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setting, in a

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white room with fluorescent lighting

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with steel cots

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and white

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aprons and syringes

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and a lot of equipment

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and lo and behold they created psychosis

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because that’s what they were looking for.

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And the setting predisposed itself to a dissociation.

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Dissociation would be like actually a creative escape

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from that scene, if you will.

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But they created a lot of suffering

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and a lot of psychosis-mimicking reactions

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and responses in people.

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And then, as I said, we were aware of that

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because people would come to us

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when they began to discover

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that we were doing things in a different way.

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And we had started to read widely.

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We became very interested in the curandero tradition

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and the tradition of psychedelic use in many different cultures.

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So people like Gordon Wasson, the banker, the retired banker

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who funded Schultes, who wrote a major book on the magic mushrooms,

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and many other people, anthropologists and healers and other people who had, we read

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stories about them, we read a lot of literature.

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We just, and then Tim really, in his own brilliance, arrived at this insight that the setting in

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which the experience occurs and the set or the expectation that you

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have going into it constitutes about 95 or 99 percent of what happens. There’s also a fact

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that has to do with the purity of the substance that you’re taking, you’re ingesting. That’s a

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small element compared to the power of the expectation in the environment.

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And so it became clear to us that in order to, for our own experiences and our own well-being and the well-being of the people who came to us to explore consciousness,

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that we needed to create that kind of setting.

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And we did that.

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needed to create that kind of setting.

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And we did that.

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We used a lot of Indian prints and incense and

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music and

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all the available sensory

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tools, right?

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All classic, all great ritual

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basically makes use of sensory

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impact to create

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altered consciousness

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or an opening in consciousness, if you will.

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So the set and setting, which is now, you know,

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the kind of norm of the work that is being done

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by maps and other groups in this renaissance

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that we’re experiencing now, that’s a given.

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But early on, we rediscovered it.

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I should say we rediscovered it

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I should say we rediscovered something

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that’s always been known

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because in indigenous cultures

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the use of these substances

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in indigenous cultures

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was always utilized in a

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highly sacred

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and meaningful and purposeful way

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and so for the most part

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we approached it that way

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and we had fun and games too know, and so for the most part, we approached it that way.

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You know, and we had fun and games too along the way, but for the most part, our intention was to really research and discover. And so in the course of that, we did a lot of interesting projects.

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We ended up in the second year, we made an arrangement with the Department of Mental Health and the Corrections Department in Massachusetts to administer psilocybin to a group of inmates at Concord Prison, which was a maximum security prison.

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Which at the time we were doing this was, I think, over 100 years old.

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It’s like a scene out of some horror, gothic horror movie, you know, this prison.

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I mean, you know, dark gray walls and, you know,

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and gigantic, you know, iron gates and clanging and sounds.

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And, you know, it was really like a scene out of the Inferno.

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So we made an arrangement with them,

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and there’s a history in criminology, basically,

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in the prison work of convicts volunteering for drug experiments.

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And often these were life-threatening or potentially harmful because they’re early-stage experiments by pharmaceutical companies.

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They would get what they called in the vernacular time off.

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They would get time, good time, basically.

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That was what it was called, I believe.

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They would get time off their sentence.

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So the administrators, you know, in the prison system and the Department of Mental Health,

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they just put us in that box of being drug experimenters.

00:23:27 ►

And they didn’t know from psychedelics or, you know, as far as they were concerned, it was Harvard University.

00:23:32 ►

It’s all they really needed.

00:23:35 ►

And a few PhDs and the door was open.

00:23:39 ►

So we would drive there early in the morning.

00:23:42 ►

We’d get from Boston to Concord.

00:23:48 ►

It was about a 20-minute drive from Cambridge to Boston. It was about 20, to Concord, about a 20-minute drive. We’d get there at 8 in the morning.

00:23:52 ►

They’d let us in through the initial gates, multiple gates, and we’d

00:23:56 ►

walk through this courtyard and to the back of the prison where there was a

00:24:00 ►

hospital ward. It was a room, oh, I would say maybe

00:24:04 ►

a 1,200-square-foot room,

00:24:08 ►

maybe a little larger,

00:24:10 ►

with a lot of different cots.

00:24:12 ►

And we did our best to kind of, you know,

00:24:15 ►

bring in a few Indian prints.

00:24:18 ►

And the incense, they didn’t really want us

00:24:20 ►

to do the incense, so we couldn’t do that.

00:24:21 ►

But we did the best we could

00:24:23 ►

to kind of dress it up a little bit, given the context, physical context.

00:24:28 ►

And then there would be a group of volunteers, cons, who were volunteering.

00:24:34 ►

Most of them had already a release date

00:24:40 ►

because part of the rationale for the work we were doing

00:24:44 ►

was predicated on the idea

00:24:46 ►

that we would we were attempting to see if we could lower the recidivism rate which historically

00:24:52 ►

is around the mid-70s 72 to 75 percent recidivism rate just as a footnote on that it was it wasn’t

00:25:00 ►

long before we’re there before tim realized and we realized that the prison system is like basically a graduate school.

00:25:09 ►

It’s like where young criminals go to learn the craft, basically, and they’re taught by older criminals.

00:25:14 ►

And it’s just a repeating pattern, a self-fulfilling pattern.

00:25:18 ►

To break that was very challenging.

00:25:23 ►

Break that was very challenging.

00:25:31 ►

The initial break would be through the psychedelic, you know, understanding, if you will.

00:25:34 ►

And so these were cons, I said, who had release dates.

00:25:37 ►

There were generally about 10 or 12 in the room.

00:25:41 ►

Half would get a placebo, half would get, you know, psilocybin.

00:25:45 ►

Tim or I or Ralph, and we would alternate.

00:25:49 ►

One section would be Ralph and Tim, and the next one would be Tim and I.

00:25:52 ►

Occasionally, Ralph and I would do it together.

00:25:55 ►

One of us would take psilocybin, the other would take a placebo.

00:25:59 ►

Of course, we were pretty good navigators at that point.

00:26:01 ►

We knew pretty quickly what was going on. And we’d proceed for the next seven, eight hours,

00:26:06 ►

locked in this back ward of a prison with these tough guys

00:26:11 ►

who, you know, had been sentenced for a variety of, you know,

00:26:17 ►

of issues and violations and crimes.

00:26:20 ►

And we had a lot of really powerful experiences with these guys.

00:26:25 ►

One of the first things that happened was the distinction between doctor and patient disappeared.

00:26:32 ►

So the doctor-patient game, you know, couldn’t sustain itself in that setting.

00:26:41 ►

So Tim was like right away pointing that know, pointing that out to everybody and everybody

00:26:46 ►

kind of chuckled about that. And again, the set and setting, you know, given the really

00:26:53 ►

horrific lives a lot of these men had lived, the psychological conditioning, the wounding,

00:27:00 ►

the trauma, it was amazing some of the psychic breakthroughs that we had, you know, of tears

00:27:06 ►

and laughter and hugs. And it was just amazing. People came to terms with their lives, basically,

00:27:14 ►

you know, with a degree of compassion and understanding. And there were like some bad

00:27:19 ►

trips, too. I had a bad trip there. I had like one trip there where I, um, I was speaking, uh, at one point I, I,

00:27:28 ►

I got a little, I got on a little bit of a, of a, you know, of a, what am I trying to say here?

00:27:34 ►

A little bit of a run, you know, I, I, I felt empowered and I was, I was kind of preaching

00:27:40 ►

and, uh, and I saw like, I was looking out through my eyes and I saw I had an audience of

00:27:46 ►

these, you know, Ralph was kind of looking at me a little bit strange. And these guys were just,

00:27:52 ►

I had captured them hypnotically, basically, in terms of my ideation and my communication.

00:27:59 ►

And that went deeper and deeper. And I was kind of fascinated by the power that I was channeling there and then

00:28:05 ►

suddenly what came in was this this understanding that I was that I was basically manipulating them

00:28:12 ►

that’s the take I had and and I you know I felt this tremendous shame and and and feeling of, what am I doing here? I felt really badly that I had caught in that identity,

00:28:30 ►

and I collapsed.

00:28:33 ►

I swooned, and I went unconscious,

00:28:37 ►

and the next thing I know, I’m lying on one of the cots.

00:28:42 ►

I can see it now as I’m speaking.

00:28:44 ►

I’m laying on the cot, and I see these faces above me

00:28:48 ►

looking at me with concern and with love and with attention.

00:28:54 ►

And these are the cons, right, who I’m supposed to be.

00:28:57 ►

And the complete role reversal, I’m laying there like, you know,

00:29:02 ►

needing their help, and they’re assuring me that everything’s going to be okay

00:29:06 ►

and with a lot of loving presence, you know.

00:29:09 ►

So that was one example.

00:29:12 ►

There was another example one day when I was working with a guy named Jimmy Kerrigan.

00:29:18 ►

And he and his brother were Irish mafia.

00:29:23 ►

They had been in jail most of their life from their early 20s.

00:29:26 ►

He was in his late 40s at that point.

00:29:28 ►

Gnarly, tough,

00:29:30 ►

Irish,

00:29:31 ►

you know, hit man.

00:29:33 ►

These guys had done everything.

00:29:36 ►

And so

00:29:38 ►

I was working

00:29:40 ►

with him. He was on a cot, laying down,

00:29:42 ►

and I was attempting to be a guide

00:29:44 ►

for him. And he was almost catatonic. He was on a cot laying down, and I was attempting to be a guide for him, and he was almost catatonic.

00:29:46 ►

He was very stiff.

00:29:48 ►

He would occasionally glance at me out of the corner of his eye

00:29:51 ►

with a lot of fear and aggression, and I just didn’t know what to do.

00:29:58 ►

I was just let on alone.

00:30:01 ►

So I sat there trying to hold his hand.

00:30:04 ►

It was really tough.

00:30:07 ►

So I was completely mystified, and I didn’t feel good about it.

00:30:11 ►

So two weeks later, we would come back, and we would do a debriefing.

00:30:15 ►

We did intermittent debriefings between the sessions.

00:30:18 ►

At that point, he was back.

00:30:20 ►

He had clarity, and he was back and embodied. And he shared with me that he had fallen into a

00:30:27 ►

paranoid trance where he believed that we were actually manipulating them using a form of truth

00:30:34 ►

serum, that the psychedelics was like a form of truth serum to discover all the crimes that he

00:30:40 ►

had committed he had never been arrested for. And he was planning to have me killed.

00:30:46 ►

He was scheming in that moment there,

00:30:49 ►

in those moments laying on the cot,

00:30:51 ►

how to have me executed by his buddies on the outside

00:30:56 ►

so there would be no trace of Gunther Weil,

00:30:58 ►

you know, and no reporting of, you know.

00:31:01 ►

And we both laughed about that

00:31:02 ►

because it was so insane.

00:31:09 ►

We both found it, you know, it’s hard to believe,

00:31:14 ►

but we both found it like I kind of found a dark humor in that.

00:31:19 ►

So fast forward years later, I have a faculty appointment at the University of Massachusetts Boston, an administrative appointment,

00:31:23 ►

and it’s late in the afternoon, and I get a call, and it’s Jimmy Kerrigan.

00:31:30 ►

And he said, Gunther, I’m out.

00:31:32 ►

I’m on probation.

00:31:34 ►

I’d like to come and talk to you.

00:31:37 ►

I said, great.

00:31:38 ►

Jimmy, you know, how about I’m pretty busy until early this evening.

00:31:42 ►

How about coming by then?

00:31:44 ►

And he said, great.

00:31:46 ►

So he shows up in my office at the university,

00:31:48 ►

and he walks in, and we begin talking,

00:31:51 ►

and he tells me he’s just violated parole,

00:31:53 ►

and he’s on the lam,

00:31:55 ►

and he’s going to be leaving the state,

00:31:57 ►

and I’ll never see him again,

00:32:00 ►

and that his career as a criminal probably wouldn’t change.

00:32:05 ►

It would no longer be violent.

00:32:07 ►

He would no longer commit any violent crimes,

00:32:09 ►

but basically that was his karma, his path, that was his destiny.

00:32:13 ►

And he thanked me for the work that we did together at the prison project

00:32:18 ►

a few years earlier, a number of years earlier.

00:32:21 ►

And we embraced, and he left, and I never heard from him again.

00:32:25 ►

But it was that kind of relationship with another human being

00:32:29 ►

that went beyond the title, the name, the status, the bank account.

00:32:35 ►

It was just a human-to-human connection at a fundamental level

00:32:40 ►

with no judgment about each other at all.

00:32:43 ►

It was just a lot of love, basically.

00:32:45 ►

So we had a lot of experience, Ralph and Tim and I,

00:32:50 ►

we had a lot of experiences along those lines with those guys.

00:32:53 ►

And actually, my friend Bruce Poulter, who’s about to speak,

00:33:03 ►

we were reminiscing a little bit about that not long ago because the founder of MAPS, Rick Doblin, was a graduate student at that time, I believe at BU.

00:33:16 ►

And we met because he wanted to do a follow-up study on the Concord Prison Project.

00:33:21 ►

And for those listeners who are listening to this podcast,

00:33:27 ►

if you do a Google search on the Concord Prison Project,

00:33:29 ►

you’ll find stuff on Wikipedia on that.

00:33:34 ►

But Rick did an initial master’s thesis or a paper on that,

00:33:35 ►

and that’s how we met.

00:33:40 ►

And we convened a meeting of the ex-cons that were still living that we could find at Tim’s house in Beverly Hills.

00:33:44 ►

And we had about seven or eight people quite a few years later and traded some stories

00:33:49 ►

about that whole epoch.

00:33:50 ►

And Rick helped organize that.

00:33:52 ►

Gunther, could you talk about this idea of truth serum?

00:33:56 ►

Because there is reality in that, right?

00:33:58 ►

Yes, yes.

00:33:59 ►

But it isn’t the kind of, I forgot that the, you may know, like the biochemists, the technical name of truth serum, the substance they use.

00:34:11 ►

That has a completely different set of receptor sites and reactions than this.

00:34:17 ►

Certainly the psychedelics are a truth serum, but in a different sense of the word truth. It’s like experiencing not the truth or falsity of an event,

00:34:29 ►

but the relative truth or congruence or falsity

00:34:35 ►

of one’s experience, one’s life.

00:34:41 ►

I’m reframing the word truth here in the context that we’re speaking now.

00:34:47 ►

It’s not about whether I committed this event or not,

00:34:51 ►

or if I have a memory that’s being triggered of that event.

00:34:55 ►

That can happen.

00:34:57 ►

It can be traumatic recall.

00:34:58 ►

It often does.

00:35:00 ►

But again, it’s a very different set and setting that is operating here.

00:35:05 ►

It’s not like some investigator trying to extract something from me.

00:35:11 ►

And sodium pentanol.

00:35:13 ►

That’s right.

00:35:13 ►

Yeah.

00:35:14 ►

It’s what they traditionally think of.

00:35:17 ►

But a lot of this work using psychedelics as a truth theorem was being done during World War II and in the 50s already.

00:35:22 ►

There was a lot about using these psychedelics like that.

00:35:27 ►

And through the course of this, I was curious what it was like for your team to realize

00:35:31 ►

that there was more and more federal research going on at a dark level using these things

00:35:36 ►

wrong.

00:35:36 ►

We didn’t really know at that time.

00:35:38 ►

And I didn’t really discover that until quite a few years later.

00:35:42 ►

Even, I mean, even the work being done on the psychotomimetic,

00:35:47 ►

I had no idea.

00:35:49 ►

I can only speak personally.

00:35:50 ►

I had no idea that there was CIA backing.

00:35:53 ►

All that stuff came out later,

00:35:54 ►

the MKUltra experiments, all of that,

00:35:58 ►

quite a few years later.

00:35:59 ►

And Tim was somewhat implicated in that,

00:36:02 ►

according to some people.

00:36:05 ►

But again, I had no knowledge of that.

00:36:08 ►

We were just kind of blazing trails, basically.

00:36:12 ►

We were going to change the world through psychedelics, through that.

00:36:20 ►

And the Concord Project came up as just one among many different things we did you

00:36:28 ►

know every week people would come in from all over the world Arthur Kessler a famous author

00:36:35 ►

from that period who was had written a lot about creativity he came in did a session with Tim

00:36:41 ►

and had a bad trip and left with a with a a very negative view of Tim and the psychedelics.

00:36:47 ►

He just had a really bad trip.

00:36:51 ►

And we had politicians.

00:36:53 ►

We had people from the entertainment industry and musicians.

00:37:00 ►

Years later, when Tim and Dick were living in Millbrook, New York,

00:37:05 ►

under the auspices of the Hitchcock family,

00:37:09 ►

Peggy Hitchcock and her two brothers,

00:37:11 ►

which were part of the Mellon family,

00:37:13 ►

the American, very wealthy, dynastic family.

00:37:18 ►

Peggy met Tim and Richard in New York.

00:37:26 ►

We spent a lot of time, we were living in Cambridge, Boston,

00:37:29 ►

but we spent a lot of time in New York City.

00:37:31 ►

She was very connected into the New York social scene

00:37:34 ►

and into the arts, into music,

00:37:37 ►

was very close with Miles Davis, with Charlie Mingus,

00:37:40 ►

Dizzy Gillespie, and those people.

00:37:41 ►

And so a lot of those people came to Millbrook to do psychedelics with us,

00:37:48 ►

and I got to know a number of them.

00:37:50 ►

I had a couple of experiences with Charlie Mingus,

00:37:53 ►

which were really interesting.

00:37:55 ►

We just had a really nice connection, a real human connection.

00:38:00 ►

So one night, I had been living in Millborough.

00:38:06 ►

I was given a teaching position by Abe Maslow at Brandeis in 1965.

00:38:13 ►

I barely got out of Harvard because there was the gates closed, right?

00:38:21 ►

And Tim got fired, and Dick got fired, Tim got fired.

00:38:27 ►

The faculty were in an uproar there’s a whole story here about Andrew Weil my namesake you know which you’re interested I’ll

00:38:32 ►

give that became public in recent years his role in that and I can share a couple of insights about

00:38:38 ►

that but uh so there was a closing of those gates and and I had a couple of protectors there,

00:38:46 ►

a senior faculty who knew me, who trusted me,

00:38:50 ►

and one of whom actually knew my father in Germany,

00:38:53 ►

who helped get my father out of Germany,

00:38:56 ►

because he had read some of my father’s research in German on synesthesia.

00:39:05 ►

My father was an expert on synesthesia,

00:39:07 ►

which is hearing, seeing sounds and hearing colors

00:39:15 ►

and that kind of thing, where you cross modality of sensors.

00:39:19 ►

My father was an early student and researcher in that area,

00:39:23 ►

had no experiences with psychedelics at all.

00:39:25 ►

He was just interested in that.

00:39:27 ►

My father had a lot of artistic leanings.

00:39:29 ►

He was a violinist and a pianist,

00:39:31 ►

and he had a Ph.D. in psychology

00:39:33 ►

and a Master’s degree in chemistry, physics, and math.

00:39:36 ►

Also, he was a very interesting man, my dad.

00:39:39 ►

And so his early writings came to the attention of Gordon Allport,

00:39:43 ►

who was a senior psychologist at Harvard,

00:39:46 ►

was a leader in the field of studying prejudice,

00:39:50 ►

and was a Quaker.

00:39:52 ►

And he helped get us out of Germany

00:39:54 ►

by getting my father a teaching position

00:39:57 ►

at a small Quaker college in Nebraska,

00:40:01 ►

where when we first left Nazi Germany,

00:40:03 ►

we arrived in New York, we

00:40:05 ►

moved right out to Nebraska, to the Plains, and that was, you know, my earliest memories, I was

00:40:10 ►

two and a half years old, we’re about from that period, so he helped kind of ensure that I could

00:40:16 ►

get out with a PhD, otherwise I would have been, you know, excommunicated, so he helped, because

00:40:22 ►

he was very senior, he was tenured, he was internationally

00:40:25 ►

known. And also another psychologist there who had been a student of Jung, had been analyzed by Jung,

00:40:34 ►

and I’m trying to remember his name now, he’s very famous. He invented the TAT,

00:40:39 ►

you know, the thematic apperception test. There’s a park in New York City named after him and his family.

00:40:47 ►

And he wrote a book on Moby Dick, a psychoanalytic study of Moby Dick.

00:40:52 ►

I’ll come up with his name before…

00:40:54 ►

Hey!

00:40:57 ►

So, and he had taken psychedelics with Tim, actually.

00:41:02 ►

And I actually interned with him the summer I arrived before the fall that I started at Harvard before I met Tim that first week.

00:41:09 ►

I had actually studied with this gentleman who’s a name I’ll try to remember for the

00:41:14 ►

end of this interview. So I was able to get out with a PhD and resume my life, or start

00:41:23 ►

a life, basically. And Abe Maslow gave me my first teaching position at Brandeis

00:41:27 ►

because he was at that point focused on the study of peak experiences,

00:41:34 ►

and we were, of course, in the business of creating peak experiences.

00:41:37 ►

So he was fascinated.

00:41:39 ►

He was like a moth to the flame with us.

00:41:42 ►

He was kind of entering, you know,

00:41:45 ►

it scared him, but he was also intrigued.

00:41:49 ►

So he and I met a number of times.

00:41:51 ►

I had dinner with him,

00:41:52 ►

with his wife Bertha and his daughter.

00:41:55 ►

It was a little girl at that point.

00:41:56 ►

She lived in Boulder, apparently, for years.

00:42:00 ►

She died quite a number of years ago,

00:42:02 ►

his eldest daughter.

00:42:04 ►

And he offered me a teaching position,

00:42:06 ►

and he expended a fair amount of political capital with his colleagues.

00:42:10 ►

In doing so, people realized that Abe Maslow was not considered a hero,

00:42:16 ►

so to speak, at that time within his own department.

00:42:18 ►

He was a head of his time, like most prophetic people are.

00:42:22 ►

And it was a department of psychology that was dominated by psychoanalysts on the one hand

00:42:27 ►

and cognitive psychologists on the other.

00:42:29 ►

And he was somewhere in the middle doing humanistic self-actualization work.

00:42:33 ►

So neither of those two groups who hated each other, they equally disliked him.

00:42:39 ►

And so, although he was head of the department at that time,

00:42:43 ►

so as I said a moment ago, he expended some political capital in getting me there.

00:42:48 ►

And in the course of teaching that year, I realized I really didn’t really want to be there, you know.

00:42:57 ►

And my parents were very chagrined because, you know, being a nice Jewish intellectual family,

00:43:04 ►

they were, like, thrilled that I was given a teaching position

00:43:07 ►

at the first Jewish university in the country

00:43:09 ►

which by the way, there’s a back story here

00:43:13 ►

that Dick Alpert’s father was a benefactor

00:43:17 ►

and a contributor to Brandeis

00:43:20 ►

actually, he sat on the board of directors

00:43:23 ►

of Brandeis, he was very eminent

00:43:24 ►

he owned the railroad

00:43:26 ►

basically you know the

00:43:28 ►

forgotten which railroad but so Richard grew up

00:43:32 ►

he talks a lot that he’s referred to that often having

00:43:35 ►

his own his father had his own railroad car

00:43:38 ►

you know basically

00:43:39 ►

so because Richard grew up with that kind of wealth

00:43:44 ►

he had an airplane a small single engine airplane

00:43:47 ►

he had collected antiques, he was driving one of the early Mercedes

00:43:50 ►

he was living the gay bachelor’s life

00:43:53 ►

in Cambridge to the hilt

00:43:56 ►

and then when he met this madcap Irishman

00:43:59 ►

his world completely turned upside down

00:44:01 ►

so it was funny.

00:44:06 ►

So it was, you know, this was the group of people.

00:44:09 ►

And I realized early in my career at Brandeis

00:44:17 ►

that I really wanted to be with Tim and Dick.

00:44:19 ►

Meanwhile, I had moved to Millbrook, New York,

00:44:22 ►

under the auspices and the support, the patronage of the Hitchcock family and the Mellon family on this 30,000-acre estate in Millbrook, New York,

00:44:36 ►

that had been built by a man by the name of Diederich, I believe, who brought the gas lamp to New York.

00:44:43 ►

It was a multimillionaire of his era.

00:44:45 ►

And he recreated this Italian villa in this enormous, you know,

00:44:49 ►

expansive and spacious and very luxurious estate.

00:44:55 ►

So we were ensconced in one of the large homes on the estate.

00:45:00 ►

They were like 40 rooms, and that’s where they were holding forth

00:45:04 ►

when they got kicked out. I hung around for another year to finish my degree, as I said earlier, under

00:45:10 ►

difficult circumstances, but protected. And then when Abe gave me that teaching offer, I took it.

00:45:16 ►

But midway into the year, I realized that, you know, I actually want to be with these other guys

00:45:22 ►

in Millbrook. So I stayed for the year. I resigned my position, and Abe was very chagrined and unhappy.

00:45:28 ►

And my parents, you can imagine, were distraught.

00:45:32 ►

But as always, they were supportive at the end.

00:45:36 ►

And they came to actually visit me at Millbrook at one point.

00:45:41 ►

I’ll tell you that story.

00:45:42 ►

And so my wife at that time and I, and I

00:45:46 ►

had two young children, my son, who was, I think, maybe three years old, and my daughter, Rachel,

00:45:54 ►

five years old. They’re now in their mid-50s. And we packed a Ford station wagon and left Cambridge and moved to Millbrook, New York, upstate New York.

00:46:09 ►

And we had a couple of bedrooms there, and we were living there with lots of other people.

00:46:16 ►

And I proceeded to, my parents were fearful of the decision I had made,

00:46:30 ►

and so they wanted to come and see me, and they weren’t hesitant to visit Millbrook at all.

00:46:36 ►

In fact, my father, having been a scholar and a researcher,

00:46:41 ►

became a subscriber to the Psychedelic Review, which I was editing, and he was very proud of me

00:46:48 ►

as an editor of this magazine.

00:46:53 ►

And he had a collection at home in his home in Milwaukee.

00:46:59 ►

We published it for about three or four years, I think.

00:47:02 ►

He had all the editions there.

00:47:04 ►

And so he came, and Tim was very generous and very kind and very loving

00:47:10 ►

and showed them around.

00:47:13 ►

Tim could be the perfect host and gentleman at one moment,

00:47:19 ►

and the next moment be the most irascible, unpredictable, nasty,

00:47:24 ►

short-tempered Irish drunk,

00:47:27 ►

you know, and you never, you didn’t know who would show up moment to moment, you know,

00:47:32 ►

but he also was very traditional in a way, you know, having been raised in the Catholic

00:47:37 ►

and in certain kind of mannerisms and aspects of his childhood. So he played the role perfectly there.

00:47:47 ►

And my dad and mom really liked him, my dad in particular.

00:47:52 ►

My mom wasn’t so sure.

00:47:54 ►

She’s a double Pisces, and she had a more refined intuition

00:48:00 ►

than my father was a Sagittarian adventurer.

00:48:06 ►

intuition that my father was a Sagittarian adventurer. But they ended up driving in a,

00:48:11 ►

driving, they were driving back to New York to catch a plane to go back to Milwaukee.

00:48:17 ►

And Tim asked if he could hitch a ride with them, if they could drop him off at Sing Sing,

00:48:23 ►

because he had a friend who was in prison there he wanted to visit. So they actually did a slight detour, took him to the Sing Sing prison, and then went on their way.

00:48:26 ►

And my father would talk about this years later of meeting Tim under those circumstances.

00:48:32 ►

It was part of his repertoire of stories, as is mine.

00:48:39 ►

So that was the parents’ visit to Millbrook.

00:48:43 ►

But what happened there was I was there for the summer, and I was planning to live there.

00:48:50 ►

And I had one of my first lucid dream experiences where the dream was revealing its intent and content in real time as opposed to being kind of a union symbolic

00:49:07 ►

and you know post-dream analysis i was awake in the dream and and i and i knew what the dream

00:49:14 ►

meant as i was having it it was literally informing me moment to moment and i my dream was i was in

00:49:21 ►

this lead line chamber with this gigantic flywheel like ship’s wheel, with a big gauge in front of me.

00:49:30 ►

And the name of the game in this chamber was to let in cosmic radiation by cranking open the wheel and redlining the gauge.

00:49:41 ►

And I realized that’s what I’m doing with my life right now.

00:49:46 ►

This dream I’m having, I knew it as I was dreaming.

00:49:50 ►

This was like a visceral, literal manifestation

00:49:54 ►

of how I was conducting my life at that moment,

00:49:58 ►

and I realized I had to leave

00:49:59 ►

because I was really playing a suicidal game.

00:50:03 ►

There was a red line.

00:50:04 ►

Yeah, and the game was to game. Because of the redlining.

00:50:05 ►

Yeah.

00:50:09 ►

And the game was to stay as close to the red line without, you know, overdosing or whatever.

00:50:16 ►

So I left, and so we packed a wagon and drove back.

00:50:22 ►

You know, my wife, God bless her, was all loving and supportive.

00:50:27 ►

We moved back to the Boston area.

00:50:31 ►

I took an interim job working on the development of a device,

00:50:39 ►

a sonar device for blind people that would be embedded in a cane

00:50:43 ►

that would give them feedback on objects using early sonar device for blind people that would be embedded in a cane that would give them feedback on objects, you know, using early sonar experiment.

00:50:49 ►

This was in a cane.

00:50:50 ►

This was in Newton at the Perkins School for the Blind.

00:50:55 ►

So I designed and conducted a research.

00:50:58 ►

I was there for a couple of years running that research,

00:50:59 ►

and then I was given another teaching position at Boston College.

00:51:03 ►

So I resumed my academic career, and I kind of, you know, I landed on my feet,

00:51:08 ►

and I was able to support my family and get back.

00:51:11 ►

And then I began to study, I began to practice coaching and consulting work

00:51:18 ►

with different organizations and individuals, which I continue to do to this day.

00:51:22 ►

So I landed on my feet,

00:51:25 ►

resumed my career, and continued, you know, living my life that way. But there are a lot of other

00:51:32 ►

incidents and stories which I’m happy to describe. For example, going to Mexico for the first time

00:51:39 ►

with Tim Dizihuatanejo to set up our community there, and what happened there with the federales and the whole experiment

00:51:46 ►

there which fell apart there’s another story relating to that the next year where a friend

00:51:55 ►

of mine who lives in boulder here and from that era who i’ve known since childhood actually he and I were commissioned to go by Tim and Dick to go as a scout party to Dominica, this island, this black sand island, which has one of the, at that time, I don’t know if it still is the case, but had one of the last, if not the only, remaining Carib Indian reservations,

00:52:25 ►

the original Carib Indian reservations there on this island,

00:52:30 ►

which was like a scene out of a Conrad novel.

00:52:32 ►

It was like a volcano and black sand and amazingly thick, rich jungle.

00:52:38 ►

And so we landed there as a beachhead to see if we could form an intentional community,

00:52:44 ►

a psychedelic community there.

00:52:46 ►

And there’s a whole story about that running into the guy there

00:52:51 ►

who had been an American there, who had been living there,

00:52:55 ►

forming his own society and wanted to join with us.

00:52:58 ►

He had a society called Carista.

00:53:01 ►

It was like a free love society, a utopian free love society.

00:53:04 ►

So he said he would help us adapt, and he knew people there.

00:53:09 ►

And he had been a national hero there on the island

00:53:11 ►

because he had rushed into a burning building the year before and rescued a few nuns.

00:53:17 ►

And so he became a national celebrity there, and everyone was treating him like royalty.

00:53:22 ►

And so he was really well connected.

00:53:25 ►

So through his auspices, we landed there, and we began talking to people

00:53:30 ►

and setting in motion for Tim and Dick and Ralph and the rest of them to come a month later

00:53:37 ►

once we had kind of cleared the ground, so to speak.

00:53:40 ►

But it turned out that we discovered that this guy actually had been leading

00:53:46 ►

simultaneously a political revolt. They’re working with some revolutionary leaders in the island

00:53:57 ►

who really wanted to overthrow the colonialist British government that ran the island.

00:54:06 ►

This was the end of the British colonial empire, basically.

00:54:10 ►

I mean the end of it in the sense this was the furthest outpost, right?

00:54:14 ►

So the British civil service that were living there were all alcoholics.

00:54:18 ►

They were like, you know, ruddy-faced and drunk half the day or sleeping.

00:54:22 ►

And it was hardly anything for them to do

00:54:25 ►

in this outpost right at the end of the world,

00:54:28 ►

in this little poor island in the Caribbean,

00:54:31 ►

the last remnant of the English Empire.

00:54:36 ►

And so somehow Interpol got involved,

00:54:40 ►

and there was some reporting that we had landed there,

00:54:43 ►

and we were working with this guy, who I mentioned, the Carista guy,

00:54:49 ►

and the powers that be there, the colonial powers,

00:54:54 ►

they assumed that we were in cahoots with this guy

00:54:57 ►

to create a revolution using the psychedelics

00:55:00 ►

as a kind of dropping him into the water supply kind of idea.

00:55:07 ►

And that was the first thing from our,

00:55:09 ►

we had no conception of that at all.

00:55:13 ►

But this whole paranoid scenario developed there,

00:55:16 ►

and suddenly we were caught up in a revolution.

00:55:21 ►

And so that involved Interpol and a lot of policing, and we left that island,

00:55:24 ►

we were deported from that island in a hurry, basically.

00:55:27 ►

And we went to Antigua because we were offered another base there,

00:55:30 ►

and that was a whole other story, somewhat similar, somewhat different,

00:55:35 ►

but a whole other story.

00:55:37 ►

We ended up on a place, on a spit,

00:55:41 ►

where there had been a former World War II Navy base.

00:55:46 ►

The remnants of it had been eaten away by erosion and sandstorms and hurricanes,

00:55:51 ►

you know, but there was just a few structures left on that place.

00:55:55 ►

So we ended up staying there, exposed to all the elements, you know,

00:56:00 ►

and trying to figure out what to do next.

00:56:02 ►

and trying to figure out what to do next.

00:56:11 ►

And one of our team at that point had a really bad trip.

00:56:16 ►

And the first thing we knew, this guy Frank was standing.

00:56:18 ►

He was a very tall guy.

00:56:21 ►

He was about like 6’4”, wiry, strong. He was standing at the door like Da Vinci’s figure,

00:56:28 ►

you know, with his arms outstretched,

00:56:30 ►

blocking the door.

00:56:32 ►

And we couldn’t figure out

00:56:33 ►

if he was blocking us from leaving

00:56:35 ►

or blocking people from coming.

00:56:37 ►

It wasn’t clear at the moment.

00:56:39 ►

But he wouldn’t speak to us.

00:56:43 ►

He was ferocious.

00:56:43 ►

He was like some kind of ferocious deity.

00:56:46 ►

And we were trying to talk to him and cajole him

00:56:49 ►

and figure out what was going on to try to help him.

00:56:52 ►

Suddenly he bolts and leaves, and he’s gone.

00:56:58 ►

And we don’t know what happened.

00:57:00 ►

We’re trying to figure out what happens to him.

00:57:03 ►

Another character emerges on the scene

00:57:05 ►

who is a Hungarian psychiatrist,

00:57:09 ►

also with a monocle and a bald head,

00:57:12 ►

who is noted and celebrated throughout the Caribbean

00:57:17 ►

for his work on doing lobotomies throughout the Caribbean.

00:57:24 ►

He is like Mr. Lobotomy.

00:57:27 ►

And he’s awarded all these prizes from these medical societies and governments

00:57:31 ►

and the different Caribbean nations for his work on the traveling lobotomist.

00:57:36 ►

Have lobotomy, we’ll travel, kind of.

00:57:39 ►

So he ends up, we end up figuring that this guy has,

00:58:03 ►

our friend Frank has ended up in this guy’s clutches and somehow that he’s going to get lobotomized by this guy, who we believed was an ex-Nazi who was hiding out, you know, because there were a few Nazis hiding out in the Caribbean, mostly in Argentina, but a few in the Caribbean, too.

00:58:08 ►

So we go, finally we find out that he’s been captured by this guy, and he’s been put into this mental hospital

00:58:11 ►

which is a stockade in the jungle in

00:58:15 ►

Antigua. And so we go there, and it’s literally made of

00:58:20 ►

chicken wire and framing. It’s like a really

00:58:24 ►

primitive place. And he’s in a cage with

00:58:27 ►

this old man there with a long white beard who’s psychotic, who’s just kind of mumbling and, you

00:58:32 ►

know, kind of gazing at the sky, pretty harmless. And Frank had sobered up at that point pretty,

00:58:38 ►

and Frank is wondering, what the hell have I gotten into, you know? So we see him there in

00:58:43 ►

this cage, literally his cage.

00:58:46 ►

So we were able to get him out,

00:58:48 ►

and we brought him back to where we were staying.

00:58:51 ►

And then shortly after that, we also were deported.

00:58:54 ►

We had to leave, basically, because of all the scandal

00:58:56 ►

and everything that was happening there.

00:58:58 ►

But there were a lot of adventures.

00:59:03 ►

So we gave up on the idea of finding another country

00:59:06 ►

at that point that would host our work and support.

00:59:10 ►

Although the second year, the next year, Tim went back to Mexico.

00:59:13 ►

I didn’t join at that trip.

00:59:15 ►

And that’s when the Federales came in and busted.

00:59:18 ►

There were a lot of crazy things that happened there.

00:59:20 ►

Can you talk more about your experience in Mexico?

00:59:23 ►

Because I think it’s a part of the story that’s not as well known with the experiments. Well, again, I was a graduate

00:59:31 ►

student. I was married. My son was not born. My daughter was not an infant, but she was a little a tiny little girl, and we brought her.

00:59:50 ►

We lived in a hotel in Zihuatanejo.

00:59:54 ►

I don’t know if people have been to Zihuatanejo, but have you ever been there?

01:00:00 ►

It’s a very jungle place and beautiful bay, incredible bay, a pristine place.

01:00:08 ►

It was undiscovered at that point. It was where people who were retiring of Acapulco and a lot of people retiring of that very early would go there because it wasn’t

01:00:12 ►

well known. And this hotel, I forgot the name of it,

01:00:16 ►

was on a hill and there was a

01:00:18 ►

I forgot the technical word, a vehicle like that would

01:00:23 ►

like a chairlift,

01:00:26 ►

like a ski lift, you know, that would kind of go up the hill to drop you off at your apartment, right, or your room.

01:00:34 ►

So we were up on the hill overlooking this bay, and again, we were taking psychedelics almost daily there.

01:00:40 ►

And the place was very fecund and very rich and plants would grow you know you’d cut a plant

01:00:46 ►

down and overnight it would grow an inch you know it was so so rich there and so one evening I found

01:00:52 ►

a scorpion in my daughter’s crib basically it’s like it gave us pause you know uh so I don’t

01:01:03 ►

remember too much about that uh other than that, you know, we were

01:01:06 ►

like tripping like daily there, you know, and really, we started experimenting with seeing what

01:01:13 ►

tripping daily would do, basically, you know. And of course, as you know, you build up tolerances,

01:01:21 ►

and so you’d have to increase the dosage.

01:01:30 ►

But the setting there was so powerful, so tropical and rich,

01:01:34 ►

and it was in the Mexican state of Guerrero, which was a big bandit state.

01:01:38 ►

Maybe it still is in Mexico, but a lot of violence there outside of the tropical resort where we’re staying.

01:01:42 ►

But it was a major center for uh for growing marijuana

01:01:46 ►

uh and other drugs and and so you had to be really careful driving you know uh there was a

01:01:53 ►

i believe there was a small airport there but only a flight maybe once a week

01:01:58 ►

a shuttle flight from another place you know it wasn’t a direct flight from mexico city i think

01:02:03 ►

you had to go through somewhere else so it was was hard to get to, and we mostly kind of

01:02:07 ►

drove there, jungle roads. It was a really inaccessible place.

01:02:12 ►

But once you got there, it was gorgeous, really beautiful.

01:02:16 ►

Then years later, it became well-known.

01:02:19 ►

Zihuatane was a destination resort.

01:02:24 ►

But that was really early on.

01:02:27 ►

And as I said, the second year I wasn’t part of that experience.

01:02:31 ►

The second year I was starting to burn out a little bit.

01:02:35 ►

Again, this was before my Millbrook experience, which I talked about earlier,

01:02:39 ►

but I was beginning to get a sense that this was probably not a way to live.

01:02:45 ►

And to be honest, Millbrook was not a place that was good for children.

01:02:50 ►

You know, there was a certain amount of narcissism associated with the work we did.

01:02:55 ►

I would say, to be fair, you know, we had the self-image of being explorers,

01:03:01 ►

and we were, and we were like opening up, you know, worlds.

01:03:06 ►

But there could be a kind of, I use the word narcissism, a certain preoccupation with our own vision, you know,

01:03:15 ►

that wasn’t the best necessarily for raising children.

01:03:19 ►

You need a lot of support, and the children were really ignored a lot there.

01:03:23 ►

They weren’t abused.

01:03:24 ►

There was nothing like that, but it wasn’t the best place.

01:03:27 ►

And Tim had his daughter, who later committed suicide,

01:03:32 ►

and his son Jack, for whom he became estranged later.

01:03:36 ►

And the good part of that was that Ram Dass, or Richard,

01:03:41 ►

became like a surrogate mom, basically, to both of Tim’s children.

01:03:47 ►

And the archetype that they played,

01:03:49 ►

and I talked about this in a biography of Tim

01:03:53 ►

that was written years later by someone who interviewed me,

01:03:56 ►

was Richard played the mom and Tim played the Irish father.

01:04:02 ►

Richard was the Jewish mother and he was the Irish

01:04:05 ►

father and their

01:04:07 ►

fraught relationship over the years

01:04:10 ►

because Dick,

01:04:11 ►

Richard Ramdas was the responsible

01:04:14 ►

adult basically. He was

01:04:15 ►

taking care of raising the money and making sure

01:04:17 ►

people were fed and clothed and the logistics

01:04:19 ►

were working and he was super

01:04:21 ►

responsible. And Tim was

01:04:23 ►

the madcap Irish explorer right

01:04:26 ►

he’s breaking through boundaries and you know and this is the next thing we’re going to do and

01:04:31 ►

and it worked well for many many years and then it just stopped working for the two of them and

01:04:38 ►

they began to split you know and that happened shortly after they went to India.

01:04:47 ►

So Richard’s experience in India where he became Ram Dass through Neel Karoli Baba.

01:04:53 ►

And that whole part of his life began there when he gave a couple of acid tabs to Neel Karoli Baba

01:05:00 ►

who looked at him and said, oh, or something like that.

01:05:08 ►

And Tim, who went with his bride, Nina von Schlaeger, who was Nina Thurman’s mom,

01:05:18 ►

married later Bob Thurman, who we knew as an undergraduate student at Harvard,

01:05:23 ►

who was kind of on the

01:05:25 ►

periphery of what we were doing at that time, along with Andy Weil and Andrew Weil and some

01:05:29 ►

other people. But Bob was wonderful. He was a madcap character from the time of his youth.

01:05:36 ►

I think he grew up in a wealthy family in New York, and he was always experimenting and playing

01:05:41 ►

around. He lost his eye in some kind of madcap accident he had when he was young.

01:05:47 ►

But he was really interested in the work.

01:05:50 ►

He was good friends with another Harvard undergraduate there who was working with us.

01:05:57 ►

And, of course, then again, as I said earlier, that blew up.

01:06:01 ►

But a lot of characters, a lot of stories.

01:06:05 ►

I’ve shared a few of them with you today.

01:06:09 ►

And I’ll probably share a few more if you’re interested.

01:06:13 ►

And I would be curious what it was like to watch the evolution.

01:06:18 ►

Because you started in on this when the only people who knew about psychedelics

01:06:20 ►

were as a small group of academics and the Beats and not all of them.

01:06:24 ►

And then by the end of it, it was notorious.

01:06:27 ►

It was on every news magazine in America.

01:06:29 ►

What was it like to watch it go from unknown to known in all of these different ways?

01:06:36 ►

Well, we were bemused in part by that, you know, kind of participant observers knowing

01:06:43 ►

that we were responsible for some of that

01:06:45 ►

not all of that because there was a whole Mary Prankster thing

01:06:48 ►

on the west coast, that’s just a whole other story

01:06:51 ►

when they came to visit Millbrook

01:06:52 ►

so there was this coastal stuff going on

01:06:57 ►

as you mentioned the early beatniks who were interested

01:07:00 ►

who had been reading early accounts

01:07:03 ►

of poets and artists, you know, were

01:07:09 ►

experimenting with mescaline and similar substances in Paris in the 30s. Because this isn’t new,

01:07:15 ►

this is universal, it’s episodic, it’s cyclic. You know, we’re experiencing that now,

01:07:20 ►

a renaissance of that happening again. There was an article in the New York Times last

01:07:26 ►

week. Did you see the piece on

01:07:27 ►

psychedelic guides?

01:07:29 ►

It’s a major piece. Major piece

01:07:32 ►

on that, actually.

01:07:34 ►

01:07:35 ►

we’re witnessing

01:07:37 ►

a resurgence of that.

01:07:39 ►

But to answer your question,

01:07:41 ►

we were so into

01:07:43 ►

the vision and mission of what we were doing

01:07:46 ►

and the impact we were having, the impact on our lives, the impact on other people,

01:07:51 ►

the opening of the heart, the opening of the mind,

01:07:54 ►

reading a lot of literature that connected to spiritual awakenings,

01:08:00 ►

including the Gurdjieff work, which I said I would talk about, which I will.

01:08:03 ►

including the Gurdjieff work, which I said I would talk about, which I will.

01:08:09 ►

And so in retrospect, as you’re asking me the question,

01:08:13 ►

I think back about how we kind of, did we see our place in history?

01:08:15 ►

Did we have any sense of our role?

01:08:17 ►

I think we did. I think we had a sense that we were like on the bleeding edge of change.

01:08:23 ►

Remember, this is Nixon, right? This is like big time, you

01:08:27 ►

know. People tend to forget the Trump era, some of the echoes of the Nixon era, which

01:08:35 ►

in some ways were even worse, actually, you know, some ways. The outcome yet remains to be seen how that’s going to turn out.

01:08:50 ►

So it’s hard when you’re in the middle of something

01:08:52 ►

to get a sense of your role or place

01:08:58 ►

in the larger picture.

01:09:00 ►

It takes some years, historically,

01:09:02 ►

I think, to have enough of a back view through a rear-view mirror, I guess, right?

01:09:09 ►

Or you can reflect a bit on that and try to be honest about it, too.

01:09:14 ►

I mean, with regard to that, one of the current complaints about Tim is that he kind of ruined it for everybody

01:09:28 ►

for 30 years and that his behavior

01:09:31 ►

set us back. We could have done so much more. There’s a measure of truth in that.

01:09:37 ►

As a matter of fact, at one point

01:09:40 ►

a la the Gurdjieff story, because it relates to this,

01:09:45 ►

Ralph had, we had been reading a lot,

01:09:47 ►

and we ran across Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous,

01:09:50 ►

which is kind of the introduction to the Gurdjieff work.

01:09:54 ►

And Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff in that book,

01:09:58 ►

talking about certain substances that people can take

01:10:01 ►

that can help them to wake up,

01:10:05 ►

to realize their mechanicality

01:10:07 ►

and the robotic nature of their social conditioning.

01:10:12 ►

And so Ralph discovered this teacher in New York City

01:10:14 ►

named Willem Nylund, who had worked with Gurdjieff

01:10:17 ►

when he was a young man in the 30s,

01:10:21 ►

and then a long interview interlude

01:10:23 ►

during the Second World War and

01:10:26 ►

then rejoined Gurdjieff for a few years afterwards had been a senior teacher in the Gurdjieff work

01:10:31 ►

had been a member of the Gurdjieff Foundation so he discovered him and and we discovered he was

01:10:36 ►

giving group meetings in New York I also discovered he would coming to Boston once a month they had a

01:10:42 ►

group in Boston so I joined that work.

01:10:51 ►

And for the next 12 years, I was deeply involved with him and the group in New York and Boston.

01:11:00 ►

And at one point, I visited him, a friend of mine, who later went on, Alan Cohn, who later went on to become a figure in the Reagan administration around

01:11:04 ►

just say no to drugs campaign. He actually created that.

01:11:09 ►

That’s another interesting story.

01:11:12 ►

Because Alan had been deeply involved and then

01:11:16 ►

kind of did a complete 360 or 180 and

01:11:20 ►

became an avid anti-psychedelic guy

01:11:23 ►

and became a clinical psychologist

01:11:27 ►

and was responsible for drug rehab and that stuff in New York.

01:11:30 ►

And the just say no to drugs was actually his motto

01:11:34 ►

that Nancy Reagan adopted.

01:11:37 ►

So a lot of backstories here that people don’t know about,

01:11:41 ►

including when Tim got busted at Millbrook,

01:11:48 ►

G. Gordon Liddy led the team that busted Tim,

01:11:52 ►

and later they became friends

01:11:53 ►

because they were doing time together in jail.

01:11:58 ►

The funny part of that story is their handprints

01:12:00 ►

are in the concrete in front of Boulder Theater

01:12:02 ►

just a mile from here.

01:12:03 ►

Really? I didn’t know that. You can see both of their handprints because afterwards the concrete in front of Boulder Theater just a mile from here. Really? I didn’t know that.

01:12:05 ►

You can see both of their handprints because they were the –

01:12:07 ►

afterwards they did a tour around the country.

01:12:10 ►

You can see it in Tim’s newspaper clippings.

01:12:12 ►

And they were great together.

01:12:13 ►

They liked each other.

01:12:14 ►

Yeah, the arch villains of either side.

01:12:17 ►

They did hard time together, solitary, big time, you know,

01:12:21 ►

because Liddy had led the raid on Millbrook, which brought him, you know, with like a Zapata gun belts and, you know, 50 sheriffs and, you know, searchlights.

01:12:34 ►

And it was a whole big drama that they did.

01:12:37 ►

I wasn’t there when it happened.

01:12:46 ►

of that, he came to the attention of the Nixon administration, and they promoted him to the head of the office of the drug enforcement, the DEA, or version of the DEA. And one of the first things

01:12:52 ►

they did, a la Trump, is they shut the border down in Tijuana for like 48 hours or whatever it was.

01:13:00 ►

And it caused an international rift between the State Department and Mexico

01:13:05 ►

because there’s so much commerce that happens there.

01:13:08 ►

It was like a big deal, but they were like strip-searching people

01:13:12 ►

at the border for drugs.

01:13:14 ►

It was a whole calamity, and it was like a political calamity

01:13:19 ►

that came out of the fact that Liddy was actually appointed

01:13:22 ►

and given this position in the Justice Department.

01:13:27 ►

So then when Watergate happened and he was implicated in all of that

01:13:32 ►

and was convicted, he and Tim met in prison.

01:13:35 ►

I forgot in California which prison it was.

01:13:38 ►

And they were doing hard time, and over the course of a couple of years,

01:13:43 ►

they kind of developed a level of

01:13:45 ►

respect for each other that cons will often do who are doing similar hard time you know they’re

01:13:51 ►

completely different ideologies and then they went on tour and they would entertain people with their

01:13:57 ►

you know their their raccoon their rep repartee so to speak you know and when they would do their

01:14:03 ►

public i didn’t know that that they did it in Boulder

01:14:05 ►

and that their handprints were on like Hollywood Star, right?

01:14:11 ►

Yeah, and some of their performances are on YouTube

01:14:13 ►

if anybody wants to listen to them.

01:14:15 ►

Step back in time.

01:14:17 ►

So anyway, coming back to the Gurdjieff work,

01:14:19 ►

so Nyland, Mr. Nyland knew of my background, you know, because we were pretty transparent and he was super conscious.

01:14:29 ►

And so one thing led to another.

01:14:34 ►

And he said to me one day, I said, he said, I would like to meet Tim.

01:14:38 ►

I’d like to talk with him.

01:14:39 ►

He said, what you guys are doing there is really important, but you’re fucking it up.

01:14:44 ►

He said, what you guys are doing there is really important, but you’re fucking it up.

01:14:53 ►

He didn’t say that that way, but he said, you’re ruining what could be a very, very important piece of research on the use of these substances for mental health and a number of other areas.

01:14:58 ►

It was very early. He knew that.

01:15:01 ►

And so I talked to Tim, and he agreed.

01:15:04 ►

And so we had a meeting

01:15:06 ►

Nyland came up from New York City with a group of his students

01:15:10 ►

and we met on the grounds of the Dietrich estate

01:15:14 ►

you know in this sumptuous living room

01:15:16 ►

in this building

01:15:17 ►

and this home

01:15:19 ►

and they proceeded to dialogue

01:15:22 ►

and Nyland spoke to Tim

01:15:25 ►

and again reiterated his point

01:15:27 ►

that research was really important,

01:15:31 ►

that what he needed to do

01:15:33 ►

was to create a scientific organization

01:15:35 ►

to house the work,

01:15:38 ►

that this vision

01:15:43 ►

really needed to be done, basically, needed to be implemented.

01:15:49 ►

But Tim wouldn’t listen to it.

01:15:50 ►

At that point, Tim, again, he had this very strong, sometimes impulsive aspect,

01:15:58 ►

this kind of self-image of the visionary.

01:16:01 ►

You’ve got to understand that Tim is like a black Irishman.

01:16:11 ►

He comes from the Brendan Bahan school of black poetry and, you know, and kind of, it’s like a fuck you to any authority, left, right, or center.

01:16:13 ►

It doesn’t make any difference to him.

01:16:15 ►

You know, if you’re exercising authority, you don’t get much mileage with him.

01:16:21 ►

And this comes out of his early days at West Point, the story about how

01:16:25 ►

he, you know, he violated the West Point canon and was put on suspension for a year, a silent

01:16:31 ►

treatment, and lasted the whole year because he smuggled a woman into his room or something. And,

01:16:36 ►

you know, and I don’t know what the actual, this is all in his biography, an autobiography. But

01:16:43 ►

they didn’t kick him out.

01:16:46 ►

They put him on suspension.

01:16:47 ►

The punishment was that nobody could speak to him for a year.

01:16:52 ►

He lasted the year.

01:16:53 ►

The day before his sentence was over, he quit.

01:16:56 ►

So he spayed the whole year and then did a major fuck you

01:16:58 ►

by staying the whole year and leaving.

01:17:01 ►

That was Tim.

01:17:02 ►

That was like in a nutshell, really.

01:17:03 ►

So he liked

01:17:08 ►

Nyland. He respected Nyland, but his vision was to

01:17:11 ►

transform society. Playing the game of

01:17:15 ►

science, he was beyond that at that point in his own mind.

01:17:20 ►

So that was the end of that.

01:17:23 ►

Nyland shared with me that he admired Tim.

01:17:26 ►

He liked him.

01:17:27 ►

He liked the rebel in him.

01:17:29 ►

He liked the fact that he was pushing the boundaries of social convention and social conditioning.

01:17:39 ►

But he felt that what we’re doing was potentially so important that it needed to be given safer harbor through a different vehicle,

01:17:49 ►

which is essentially what MAPS has now been doing for a bunch of years.

01:17:53 ►

They really took that idea and have acculturated, institutionalized it in a form

01:18:00 ►

that’s made it possible now for important research to actually happen

01:18:04 ►

and to prove the

01:18:05 ►

efficacy of these substances in many different ways. So I’m finding this really interesting.

01:18:12 ►

At this stage of my life, I’m 82. I’ll be 82 next month. And I’m still vertical and,

01:18:19 ►

as you can see, fairly alert. And to me, it’s like it’s watching the wheel turn again now

01:18:27 ►

as we’re coming around this second iteration of psychedelics.

01:18:32 ►

And I’m curious.

01:18:33 ►

I’m interested, actually, in seeing if there’s something

01:18:36 ►

I might be able to do in this area.

01:18:39 ►

I don’t have a strong need for it,

01:18:41 ►

but I’m interested in kind of going back into,

01:18:46 ►

not so much into the work on trauma and so on.

01:18:49 ►

I’m more interested in some aspects of creativity and other aspects of that,

01:18:55 ►

and also around political leadership and things like that.

01:18:59 ►

If you look at the history of breakthroughs in science,

01:19:03 ►

the paradigm shifts all come from a deep experience of consciousness.

01:19:09 ►

The next 20 years are mopping up operations

01:19:11 ►

where people do testing and so on.

01:19:14 ►

But the real breakthroughs, whether they’re Newton or Einstein

01:19:17 ►

or Bohm or Leary or what have you,

01:19:22 ►

they come through these transformational experiences.

01:19:27 ►

And we know, for example, the discovery of DNA came from that.

01:19:32 ►

There are a number of other breakthroughs that have happened.

01:19:35 ►

Steve Jobs was very influenced by his exposure to acid

01:19:39 ►

and his correspondence with Hoffman.

01:19:42 ►

And the Zen experiences of the kind of minimalist

01:19:45 ►

Japanese culture which impacted

01:19:47 ►

his design sensibilities.

01:19:51 ►

So I’m

01:19:52 ►

interested, you know,

01:19:53 ►

if and when the time is right, if I’m still

01:19:56 ►

mobile and alive,

01:19:58 ►

I would love to explore

01:19:59 ►

an opportunity if one came up where

01:20:02 ►

we could, in the

01:20:04 ►

right circumstances,

01:20:05 ►

could do some research in that area again.

01:20:08 ►

It would be interesting.

01:20:10 ►

It would make a lot of sense.

01:20:12 ►

It’s some of the most important of the early work that happened

01:20:15 ►

that hasn’t been replicated very well is the work into creativity.

01:20:19 ►

And in some ways it’s so obvious,

01:20:21 ►

but another it really needs some scientific rigor to make people believe.

01:20:26 ►

Yes. And also I would say revisiting the work on recidivism and now there’s a new prison reform

01:20:33 ►

initiative starting. It might be a window to be able to re-explore that. I understand there’s one

01:20:38 ►

researcher in New York, perhaps, I don’t know where, and I don’t remember exactly who was interested in that.

01:20:52 ►

The work that we did with Walter Penke, the psychiatrist, theologian on the Good Friday experiment.

01:20:53 ►

I was part of that, by the way.

01:20:54 ►

I didn’t talk about that today.

01:20:59 ►

But, you know, I joined in that experiment, which was pretty remarkable.

01:21:04 ►

And Houston Smith, the famous theologian, was part of our team. He took LSD with Tim.

01:21:08 ►

Zalman Schachter, who lived here in Boulder for many years,

01:21:11 ►

who was a great teacher of Jewish mysticism,

01:21:16 ►

I knew him way back when in Cambridge.

01:21:20 ►

I actually helped connect Tim and Zalman.

01:21:26 ►

And Zalman had his first psychedelic session in a Vedic ashram in Kohasset on the south shore of Boston

01:21:32 ►

with a student of Ramakrishna, a woman guru teacher there.

01:21:39 ►

And so here’s this Irish, this madcap Irishman, this Jewish mystic,

01:21:44 ►

So here’s this Irish, this madcap Irishman, this Jewish mystic,

01:21:50 ►

and this Vedic Hindu teacher doing ashram.

01:21:56 ►

And this is where Zaman had his experience of what’s called in Jewish mysticism the shekhena, the mystical feminine descending.

01:22:01 ►

He had that experience.

01:22:06 ►

descending, right? He had that experience. He had spent years earlier in the New York Talmudic, the New York, you know, Orthodox scene, basically, but this was the first time the,

01:22:16 ►

you know, he actually had the experience. So when I moved to Boulder years ago, and then I

01:22:23 ►

discovered he was, I think, yeah, he moved here first.

01:22:26 ►

I’ve been here about 14 years.

01:22:29 ►

And so we reconnected.

01:22:31 ►

And he would always speak very publicly and with great praise about Tim and his own experiences.

01:22:38 ►

He didn’t hide it.

01:22:38 ►

He was very forthcoming about the role of psychedelics in his own development.

01:22:44 ►

very forthcoming about the role of psychedelics in his own development.

01:22:48 ►

Can you talk more about that history?

01:22:51 ►

Because a lot of people think about the Vedic tradition with psychedelics,

01:22:54 ►

but the Jews are still so involved with the entire scene.

01:23:00 ►

The drug world and the sex world both are just, the people are there for some reason. And can you talk about how Jewish mysticism and those thoughts seem to play into this? I don’t really know. You know, it’s maybe as a, you know, as an ethnicity, as a race,

01:23:13 ►

as a culture, I don’t know what we would call us. But, you know, we have a, maybe a propensity for

01:23:19 ►

the, for that. More than other people? I don’t know. I don’t know. But there certainly have been a lot of us involved in the

01:23:27 ►

boo-jews, the hidden Jews, and the psychedelics, and that

01:23:31 ►

continued. When I first,

01:23:35 ►

as I told the story earlier about coming to

01:23:39 ►

Harvard and meeting Tim, I had a background in philosophy.

01:23:44 ►

My parents were conventional

01:23:47 ►

religious Jews, but had not very much around any kind of

01:23:51 ►

mystical orientation at all.

01:23:55 ►

I first got some glimpse of that early on through

01:23:59 ►

marijuana, basically, through cannabis.

01:24:04 ►

And certainly when I discovered bebop

01:24:08 ►

that was sort of like a mystical transformation

01:24:11 ►

and I knew a lot of those players early on

01:24:16 ►

I spent, I didn’t talk about this but I spent

01:24:20 ►

10 years in the music business actually along the way

01:24:23 ►

and 10 years in the music business, actually, along the way. And starting in the early 70s

01:24:31 ►

up to about 87 or 85, it was about a 10, 11 year period, I ran a recording studio in Boston called Intermedia. And it was on Newberry Street, right, you know,

01:24:46 ►

right between Mass Avenue and Hereford Street,

01:24:50 ►

I think is the other one.

01:24:51 ►

It was right in the, you know, at that point,

01:24:54 ►

it was also a high-end place in Boston.

01:24:55 ►

It was a recording studio that had been built by two people

01:24:59 ►

way ahead of its time, was very advanced.

01:25:03 ►

They had, it wasn’t digital.

01:25:06 ►

We were still using two-inch Ampex analog tape,

01:25:10 ►

but we had like shoebox-sized Dolby noise reduction equipment there,

01:25:14 ►

a wall of Dolby, which you now can put on a centimeter of electronics.

01:25:24 ►

And I was in that studio that day mixing a recording

01:25:28 ►

of i have background in audio production by the way so and audio visual production so

01:25:34 ►

i was mixing a recording of a tim spoken voice album like an audio collage of tim which got

01:25:42 ►

released on rhino records years later it’s a you. It’s a multi-track, Tim reading stuff and voices and music.

01:25:50 ►

It’s all blended, kind of a psychedelic audio collage, basically.

01:25:54 ►

So I discovered the studio was going out of business

01:25:57 ►

because they had built this very high-end studio

01:26:01 ►

with Bolt Bermack and Newman, which was at that time the highest-level acoustic consulting firm in the country,

01:26:08 ►

based in Boston.

01:26:10 ►

And they built a floating floor and a beautiful studio right in

01:26:13 ►

on this wonderful street in Boston.

01:26:16 ►

So I went back, and we were taking our company public at that time.

01:26:21 ►

And so we had some money, and I said,

01:26:24 ►

we ought to consider buying the studio and get it

01:26:26 ►

for nothing. And my colleagues, Garrett Stern, who was the head of Usco, and you know about

01:26:32 ►

Garrett Stern, that’s a whole other wing of the story, which I haven’t talked about.

01:26:37 ►

And we formed the company, Intermedia, based on the work that Garrett and his colleagues did in

01:26:44 ►

Woodstock, New York, because they later met Tim and us, and we colleagues did in Woodstock, New York,

01:26:45 ►

because they later met Tim and us, and we did a series of shows in New York,

01:26:50 ►

Steppenwolf, and we did a series of psychedelic shows

01:26:52 ►

using Gerard’s multi-image displays and kaleidoscopic imagery

01:26:57 ►

and people dropping acid and coming to the performances.

01:27:01 ►

So it was a whole other piece of that.

01:27:03 ►

So Gerard and I and George Litwin, the guy who I mentioned earlier,

01:27:08 ►

was part of our team who went to the Harvard Business School.

01:27:11 ►

We formed this business called Intermedia.

01:27:14 ►

And so we bought the studio, and I was put in charge of the studio

01:27:17 ►

because I had a background as a bebop drummer and as a musician

01:27:21 ►

and interested in music.

01:27:22 ►

I was the most qualified, so to speak,

01:27:25 ►

you know, not really qualified.

01:27:28 ►

So I had to learn the ropes pretty quickly.

01:27:30 ►

I brought in a guy who became well-known in Hollywood

01:27:33 ►

in L.A. as a music producer.

01:27:38 ►

And so we ended up running that,

01:27:41 ►

and I ended up doing Aerosmith’s first album in my studio.

01:27:45 ►

up running that and I ended up doing Aerosmith’s first album in my studio. They were like,

01:27:53 ►

they were street kids from, you know, from north, from south shore of Boston, basically,

01:28:02 ►

who had a demo, they came in with a four track demo. And they wanted to make a deal, they had a drunken Irish manager who was, like, you know, really messing up.

01:28:07 ►

But I liked the music.

01:28:08 ►

You know, I wasn’t a rock and roller, but I saw the potential.

01:28:11 ►

I heard the potential in their music.

01:28:13 ►

So I arranged to get them a producer from New York who was an Englishman named Adrian Barber,

01:28:20 ►

who I had met through my friend Michael Kamen, who was the founder of the New York Rock and Roll Ensemble

01:28:25 ►

and led that group for years.

01:28:28 ►

And I went on to become a very prolific music writer for Hollywood.

01:28:32 ►

He wrote the music for many famous films.

01:28:36 ►

And he died at the age of 55 in London of a massive heart attack,

01:28:40 ►

you know, at the height of his career.

01:28:42 ►

But we would vacation together in the Caribbean

01:28:44 ►

and play music together. Wonderful guy. And so I met Adrian through Michael. Adrian had

01:28:51 ►

produced a few of Cream’s albums, was this maniac Irish, you know, psychedelic character.

01:28:59 ►

And he was the perfect person to both, he was an engineer and a producer.

01:29:10 ►

So they liked him, and they came in and we produced the whole album,

01:29:14 ►

the first album, which was produced for Columbia Records.

01:29:20 ►

And then they delivered the master to Columbia, and they released the album.

01:29:22 ►

People don’t know this, it didn’t do that well.

01:29:26 ►

So with my help, they fired the manager they got another they got new york representation of people who

01:29:32 ►

were real pros in music and columbia reconsidered and they released a single from the album which

01:29:37 ►

was dream on which became a gigantic hit and launched their career you know and my son michael

01:29:43 ►

you know was he was like a 10-year-old

01:29:46 ►

sweeping the floor of the studio and helping out.

01:29:49 ►

So it was an interesting period.

01:29:51 ►

I have photos from that period in my beatnik aura.

01:29:58 ►

So there were a lot of music that came out of that.

01:30:01 ►

We had Bonnie Raitt’s second album, Boston,

01:30:07 ►

a whole bunch of jazz recordings that came out of that. Bonnie Raitt’s second album, Boston, a whole bunch of jazz recordings that came out of the studio. We were at the center of the so-called Boston music scene.

01:30:13 ►

In fact, there’s a book that just came out a few months ago based on the lyrics of a Van Morrison

01:30:18 ►

tune that describes that whole history in Boston during the 60s,

01:30:25 ►

including my studio and the psychedelics and the prison

01:30:28 ►

and the Good Friday experiment.

01:30:32 ►

I forgot the lyric, the famous lyric from Van Morrison,

01:30:37 ►

one of his spiritual lyrics.

01:30:39 ►

Because he came to Boston and lived there for a number of months

01:30:43 ►

during that period with different band members.

01:30:48 ►

So that’s a whole other part of the story around the music business.

01:30:54 ►

And I spent 10 years in that business before I realized that that was also a potential blind alley.

01:31:00 ►

Too many late nights, too much cocaine, too much carrying on, you know, and I was trying to be

01:31:05 ►

a dad and, you know, and keep a family together too. And it was, I was a, you know, an anomaly.

01:31:12 ►

I was like a PhD from Harvard running a recording studio in Boston and working with rock and rollers.

01:31:18 ►

But I was also interested in other forms of music. And I had a friend who I met in New York who became a really well-known record producer,

01:31:26 ►

Alan Douglas. He was a

01:31:28 ►

legendary character in jazz production

01:31:30 ►

and had recorded

01:31:32 ►

Mingus and Monk and many

01:31:34 ►

other people. The Last Poet,

01:31:36 ►

I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, they were the first

01:31:37 ►

group to really create

01:31:40 ►

essentially

01:31:43 ►

rap.

01:31:45 ►

They were early and they were really gifted. really create, you know, essentially rap, right?

01:31:48 ►

They were early, and they were really gifted.

01:31:50 ►

So Alan and I became friends,

01:31:54 ►

and he was doing a spoken voice recording of Malcolm X and Lenny Bruce.

01:31:59 ►

So that was my exposure early on to these characters and that work.

01:32:03 ►

So when I ended up inheriting or buying the studio,

01:32:07 ►

Alan was coaching me on different projects and things.

01:32:08 ►

I spent a lot of time in New York with him,

01:32:13 ►

including recording Jimi Hendrix on the Sly in a four-track studio that he had

01:32:15 ►

when Hendrix was under contract with other people,

01:32:19 ►

which he then re-released years later, mixing in other tracks,

01:32:23 ►

and he created a whole scandal and suits from the

01:32:26 ►

Hendrix estate and so on. But Alan was a legendary guy who had incredible taste in music, you know,

01:32:34 ►

and really was recording really brilliant artists way before they were discovered,

01:32:41 ►

including some great legendary jazz artists, you know. And so he was a big influence introducing me to the music business.

01:32:48 ►

So when the opportunity to do the studio came up,

01:32:52 ►

I was with his guidance and some of the contacts.

01:32:55 ►

So I got to know a lot of heavy hitters in the music industry,

01:33:00 ►

including Ahmet Ergen and people like that.

01:33:03 ►

So one artist came into the studio one day by the name of Paul Pina.

01:33:07 ►

If you’ve heard of him, check him up on, check it out on Google.

01:33:11 ►

He’s a blind artist, was, was, grew up on Cape Cod from Cape Verdean parents, had, was

01:33:19 ►

an amazing artist who had mastered many different guitar idioms,

01:33:25 ►

12-string and Spanish guitar and rock and roll and blues.

01:33:29 ►

He was on the folk circuit at that time,

01:33:32 ►

opening in the Newport Folk Festival.

01:33:35 ►

People got wind of him, like Bonnie Raitt and other people,

01:33:37 ►

and said, this guy is the next Stevie Wonder.

01:33:40 ►

I mean, he really had it.

01:33:42 ►

So I produced his first album for Capitol Records

01:33:45 ►

and I’m trying

01:33:48 ►

my hand at producing.

01:33:49 ►

The album did okay. It wasn’t

01:33:51 ►

great. At that, it was the point

01:33:54 ►

when

01:33:54 ►

Capitol was being bought

01:33:58 ►

01:33:59 ►

a British label

01:34:01 ►

who were launching the Beatles.

01:34:04 ►

So our project got lost during that transition.

01:34:10 ►

But Albert Grossman, who was the manager of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin and the band and

01:34:17 ►

the Weavers, he was an accountant from Chicago who grew up on the folk scene,

01:34:26 ►

got interested in being a manager,

01:34:28 ►

and then became, at that time,

01:34:30 ►

the most powerful manager in the music business.

01:34:32 ►

He had his own label, Bearsville Records,

01:34:35 ►

that was distributed by Warner Brothers.

01:34:37 ►

He owned the town of the Hamlet of Bearsville

01:34:39 ►

next to Woodstock.

01:34:41 ►

And his recording studio and his homes there

01:34:44 ►

that he rented to Dylan and Joplin,

01:34:47 ►

he had a kind of an indentured servant model of the music business. He owned these people,

01:34:52 ►

he owned their contracts. So a classic Hollywood, you know, kind of, you know,

01:34:58 ►

indenture, I call it indentured servitude model, until they eventually all broke with him. So he

01:35:03 ►

got wind of this artist, Paul Pina, that I

01:35:05 ►

ended up managing. He had heard the first recording, he liked it, so he came to me and he wanted to

01:35:11 ►

make a deal to record a second album. At that point I knew I didn’t have the chops to actually

01:35:17 ►

produce it well enough, so I hired a friend of mine who I recently met, a musician named Ben Sidron,

01:35:26 ►

who is well-known for his work with many artists.

01:35:29 ►

He was Steve Miller’s keyboardist.

01:35:32 ►

He wrote a lot of tunes.

01:35:33 ►

He’s also a jazz guy and also a PhD.

01:35:38 ►

He’s written a lot.

01:35:40 ►

He’s been on NPR.

01:35:41 ►

He had various shows.

01:35:42 ►

So we became friends.

01:35:44 ►

He introduced me to Miles and Tony Williams a little bit later.

01:35:49 ►

And so I recruited Ben to produce the album, and Albert agreed.

01:35:54 ►

Now, it was very unusual because at that time,

01:35:57 ►

I was a little guy in Boston running a recording studio,

01:36:01 ►

and it was unheard of to do what was called a master purchase.

01:36:04 ►

Master purchase is where you create the album with your own producer, with your own ideas,

01:36:09 ►

and you deliver it to the label to distribute it.

01:36:13 ►

Now, artists who sell millions of records and who spend years laboring to get to that

01:36:20 ►

point generally are given that option at a certain point.

01:36:23 ►

Not even then often.

01:36:26 ►

In the old days, it just wasn’t done. For some reason, Albert agreed to it. I put it out there in a fit of

01:36:32 ►

egotism, and he said, okay. And we signed a contract, and I had the sense actually to put

01:36:39 ►

in the contract what was called a release clause, which is basically that barring anything having to do

01:36:46 ►

with a technical insufficiency in the recording,

01:36:49 ►

he had to release it, and he agreed to that.

01:36:53 ►

So we brought Ben Sidron in, and over the course of the year,

01:36:56 ►

we produced an album with Jerry Garcia playing steel guitar

01:37:00 ►

and The Persuasions doing backup vocals.

01:37:02 ►

It was a fucking brilliant album.

01:37:05 ►

And we gave it to Albert, and he wouldn’t release it.

01:37:10 ►

And he claimed it was technically unsatisfactory,

01:37:13 ►

and it wasn’t.

01:37:14 ►

It was recorded in this really high-end studio.

01:37:16 ►

It was perfectly technically satisfactory.

01:37:20 ►

But the game he was playing all along

01:37:22 ►

was to string me along,

01:37:24 ►

knowing at the end of the day that when he threatened the suit,

01:37:29 ►

and he’s got like, you know, 50 grand a month attorneys on retainer,

01:37:33 ►

I’m a little guy in Boston, we would collapse in the face of that.

01:37:37 ►

And in fact, we did.

01:37:39 ►

So he wouldn’t release the album.

01:37:42 ►

We wouldn’t give him the master.

01:37:44 ►

And so we were in a, you know, a standoff for the next 25 years, basically.

01:37:49 ►

And Paul’s career took a nosedive at that point.

01:37:53 ►

So he moved to San Francisco.

01:37:55 ►

He wrote this coon called Jet Airliner that Steve Miller recorded

01:38:00 ►

about that whole experience or part of that experience.

01:38:03 ►

If you listen to the lyrics, you can hear it in the lyrics.

01:38:07 ►

And Steve Miller went on because the drummer on the date, Gary Malabar,

01:38:12 ►

who had worked with a number of other artists, including Van Morrison,

01:38:17 ►

and the bass player whose name I forgot who had worked with Miles on Bitches Brew

01:38:21 ►

and also had been Dylan’s bass player off and on.

01:38:27 ►

So this was the team we had recording,

01:38:31 ►

and Ben Sidron doing the production.

01:38:34 ►

So we delivered a perfectly good master.

01:38:38 ►

So Gary Malabar, the drummer,

01:38:40 ►

took the cassette tape of some of the tunes to Steve Miller and knowing that

01:38:47 ►

Ben Sidron was involved

01:38:52 ►

and Ben and Steve Miller were old friends and

01:38:54 ►

they both went to the University of Wisconsin together and toured together in the early days.

01:38:59 ►

Miller fell in love with the material and released Jet Airliner on his own label

01:39:04 ►

not his own label,

01:39:10 ►

not his own label, on one of his earlier albums, became a gigantic hit.

01:39:19 ►

It became platinum and gold and continues to this day to produce about $12, 000 t o$ 15,000 a year in royalties,

01:39:25 ►

publishing royalties, because it’s become part of the of the you know the rock and roll American songbook basically so you hear it everywhere you hear it in high school

01:39:29 ►

marching bands you hear it in elevator music you hear it in movie soundtracks

01:39:34 ►

so I worked out a publishing arrangement with Paul and I ended up benefiting

01:39:41 ►

significantly from you know from the royalties from that,

01:39:46 ►

thanks to Miller.

01:39:50 ►

And then quite a few years later, about ten years ago now,

01:39:53 ►

nine years ago, my attorney in New York,

01:39:55 ►

who helped me put the deal together originally,

01:39:57 ►

we said, let’s release the album.

01:39:58 ►

We still have the master.

01:39:59 ►

So we had to go back.

01:40:01 ►

Meanwhile, Albert had died.

01:40:05 ►

And his wife and the estate, they didn’t care anymore.

01:40:07 ►

It was old news to them.

01:40:09 ►

So we got the rights back, and we re-released the album.

01:40:17 ►

And again, it wasn’t a massive commercial success, but it was a tremendous artistic success.

01:40:22 ►

And people still write about it, and you’ll see it referenced all over the Internet, actually.

01:40:25 ►

You see it on U-Tunes, it’s on Apple Music, it’s on

01:40:27 ►

Spotify. You can find

01:40:29 ►

pieces from the first album that I

01:40:32 ►

produced and the second album there.

01:40:35 ►

And Paul

01:40:35 ►

Pina was a wonderful,

01:40:38 ►

very insecure, very

01:40:40 ►

gifted.

01:40:41 ►

I remember one night

01:40:43 ►

Stevie Wonder got interested and I had a call,

01:40:48 ►

a brief call with him before I put Paul on to speak with him. He was, the people, the artists

01:40:54 ►

who heard that album, the first album, the second album, they, as did Albert Grossman,

01:41:01 ►

they saw in him a talent of the level of a Stevie Wonder, of a Ray Charles, and he was.

01:41:08 ►

But he got caught up in the machinations and the politics of the business.

01:41:12 ►

And Albert saw it, and he wanted me out from the beginning.

01:41:15 ►

He put up with me.

01:41:16 ►

He gave us this deal, only knowing fully well that at a certain point, he was a very clever man, very cunning.

01:41:23 ►

And at the end of the day, he knew that he could

01:41:25 ►

basically overwhelm me with

01:41:27 ►

legal threats.

01:41:30 ►

That Paul was

01:41:31 ►

kind of a

01:41:33 ►

victim of all that.

01:41:35 ►

At one point, Albert said to me,

01:41:38 ►

he said, look, I’ll make

01:41:39 ►

a deal with you. You’ll come out whole on this.

01:41:42 ►

I just want to take this over, and I’ll do

01:41:43 ►

a much better job of building this career than you will. It was probably right. So I went to Paul. I said,

01:41:49 ►

here’s the deal. Albert has made this offer. I’m going to be okay, Paul. So worry about me,

01:41:54 ►

because Paul was always concerned about me. One day, for example, we were doing a concert in

01:42:02 ►

Venezuela, a big concert in which

01:42:06 ►

Paul and Michael Kamen from the New York Rock Ensemble

01:42:09 ►

and Roger Powell who I produced one of his

01:42:12 ►

the first synthesizer albums combining

01:42:15 ►

acoustic piano and synthesizer he went on to

01:42:18 ►

become very well known I forgot the artist

01:42:21 ►

another one of the artists that

01:42:22 ►

Albert managed.

01:42:26 ►

He played with the band Utopia.

01:42:28 ►

You know that band?

01:42:30 ►

I’ve forgotten the artist now.

01:42:32 ►

He’s still around.

01:42:33 ►

But one day we were doing this concert, you know, and there was this ramp.

01:42:38 ►

And I had taken, you know, something that night.

01:42:42 ►

And we were walking on the ramp.

01:42:43 ►

If you fell down, you could kill yourself, hurt yourself.

01:42:47 ►

And Paul, you know, I’m on the outside to protect Paul,

01:42:52 ►

and I start to slip, and I have his elbow.

01:42:55 ►

He has my elbow.

01:42:56 ►

He pulls me off the, and he’s blind.

01:42:59 ►

He pulls me off the edge of the abyss, you know.

01:43:04 ►

So we have that kind of relationship.

01:43:06 ►

So when I went to him with Albert’s offer, you know, I said, look, Paul, I’ll be okay.

01:43:12 ►

You know, in fact, I’ll do very well here.

01:43:15 ►

And this guy can really make your career.

01:43:17 ►

He said, I’m not going to be his house nigger.

01:43:21 ►

Paul said that.

01:43:22 ►

Paul said that because he already knew

01:43:24 ►

that you know

01:43:26 ►

what the price of working with Albert was

01:43:28 ►

a la Dylan, Joplin

01:43:30 ►

the early people that were basically

01:43:32 ►

as I said indentured servants

01:43:33 ►

they all broke with him sooner or later

01:43:35 ►

because it was of his style

01:43:37 ►

and Paul didn’t want to have anything to do with that at all

01:43:40 ►

so he said you’re my guy

01:43:42 ►

and you know

01:43:43 ►

win loss or whatever you’re my guy so we stuck together

01:43:48 ►

until just we couldn’t and at that point i had been like 10 11 years into the music business i

01:43:54 ►

as i said earlier was too many late nights too many uh unsavory characters although there were

01:44:01 ►

some wonderful people that i met along the way, really wonderful people, but also a lot of low lives.

01:44:07 ►

A music business has got a lot of racketeering and stuff

01:44:12 ►

in the early days in that business.

01:44:15 ►

But I had an interest in other forms of music as well. I was interested

01:44:18 ►

in Indian music and world music. Through Alan Douglas,

01:44:22 ►

who I mentioned earlier, this record producer. He got interested in Indian music, and he sent me to India

01:44:27 ►

with a Nagra tape recorder, you know, the early production quality Nagras.

01:44:34 ►

And I traveled around.

01:44:36 ►

I recorded a lot of esoteric and abstruse Indian music.

01:44:41 ►

Pandit Trinath, who became well-known in esoteric music circles

01:44:45 ►

in the late 60s,

01:44:46 ►

who was a vocalist of Vedic chanting.

01:44:49 ►

He ended up working with Brian Eno

01:44:51 ►

and Terry,

01:44:56 ►

it was an ambient music scene.

01:44:59 ►

They would weave computer loops

01:45:03 ►

of Indian ragas

01:45:05 ►

into their ambient sound stuff.

01:45:09 ►

So that was another aspect of that experience.

01:45:13 ►

And then being in India and exploring different aspects of ganja

01:45:19 ►

and different ways of preparation,

01:45:21 ►

I had a guide there who took me through India, who was a yogi.

01:45:27 ►

I was a member of a sect called the Nagasadus, which are, you know, they wear loincloths,

01:45:33 ►

and they’re all tall. They’re like Rastas. They have knotted hair. They’re tall, muscular guys

01:45:39 ►

with a trident, you know,

01:45:47 ►

and their ashram is in a place called,

01:45:49 ►

one of their two or three ashrams,

01:45:52 ►

major ones are in a little town called Bareilly,

01:45:54 ►

which is northeast of New Delhi.

01:45:58 ►

And my friend Harish Johari, who at that time was a well-known sculptor and poet in northern India,

01:46:00 ►

had created Hanuman sculptures all over temples in northern India.

01:46:05 ►

And Hanuman, by the way, is a favorite saint of Ram Dass, basically, as in many people.

01:46:12 ►

So he was well known, and he lived in Bareilly, and his family compound had been there for

01:46:19 ►

many, many years on the edge of the Naga ashram.

01:46:25 ►

So one night, he took me there.

01:46:28 ►

Indian clothing.

01:46:29 ►

I was there about six weeks and traveled with him.

01:46:31 ►

A lot of mysterious, marvelous experiences.

01:46:34 ►

He took me into this ashram.

01:46:36 ►

And these guys are on ganja 24-7.

01:46:40 ►

They take it smoking.

01:46:41 ►

They make tea extracts.

01:46:48 ►

They’re constantly high on ganja,

01:46:50 ►

and they use it as part of their meditation.

01:46:52 ►

They have a belief system.

01:46:55 ►

They’re reincarnated warriors, and they look like it, you know,

01:46:59 ►

and they’re doing penance in this lifetime for other stuff.

01:47:03 ►

So in the middle is ashram, you know,

01:47:07 ►

and there are thousands of bells of all sizes and shapes on the limbs of these trees.

01:47:09 ►

And at midnight, they do a puja, a ceremony,

01:47:12 ►

and they shake the limbs, they shake the trees,

01:47:14 ►

and there’s this cacophonous sound of these overtones and bells going on,

01:47:19 ►

and they’re hitting a drum, a large drum,

01:47:21 ►

with a rhythm of a human heartbeat.

01:47:23 ►

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,

01:47:25 ►

while these bells are going on.

01:47:27 ►

And the thing is completely deafening and psychedelic like beyond.

01:47:30 ►

It’s mind-boggling.

01:47:33 ►

And I’m like really on major doses of ganja

01:47:36 ►

and sitting around a campfire with these old babajis and these old gurus,

01:47:42 ►

and they just kind of welcomed me in because of my friendship with Harish.

01:47:47 ►

So there were a lot of, like, side stories there, you know, from all of that.

01:47:54 ►

And you mentioned that you also got to meet the Beats that you were reading about.

01:47:58 ►

Yeah.

01:47:58 ►

Yeah, well, the second section or third section, I don’t remember,

01:48:02 ►

was also with Tim where Alan Watts, well well Alan Watts, that’s a whole other story

01:48:07 ►

but Alan Ginsberg came to

01:48:10 ►

this session along with his lover Peter Olowski

01:48:14 ►

and this was the famous night where they

01:48:18 ►

decided to call Khrushchev to call off the Cold War.

01:48:23 ►

I remember that incident that night.

01:48:26 ►

This was that same house in Newton that I mentioned earlier.

01:48:29 ►

It had this big staircase in the center of the foyer where you walked in,

01:48:33 ►

kind of classic design of mansions.

01:48:36 ►

At one point, like 2 or 3 in the morning, I don’t know when it was,

01:48:39 ►

Peter and Alan walked down the stairs stark naked,

01:48:42 ►

their arm around each other,

01:48:44 ►

and announcing that they had just tried to call Khrushchev at the Kremlin,

01:48:49 ►

but they wouldn’t put him through.

01:48:52 ►

And they wanted to call off the Cold War through the psychedelic vision.

01:48:58 ►

So at that night, for them, there were other people.

01:49:01 ►

Aldous Huxley’s son was there.

01:49:03 ►

There were a couple of New York models who were hooked on heroin there were a number of other people there were always

01:49:11 ►

these characters you know larger than life characters from fashion from entertainment from

01:49:17 ►

politics from academia it was just kind of circling through, you know, and joining our sessions. That was my second or third session that night.

01:49:26 ►

Frank Barron was there.

01:49:27 ►

I remember that, and Ralph.

01:49:29 ►

And so that was another example of…

01:49:36 ►

Alan Watts came and spent a semester at Harvard as a guest instructor at Tim’s invitation.

01:49:42 ►

And, you know, we joined with him in a number of sessions.

01:49:46 ►

He was a character.

01:49:47 ►

Tim always called him the sports reporter of the spiritual scene.

01:49:52 ►

That was his kind of damning with faint praise kind of appellation for Alan,

01:49:58 ►

who was a heavy drinker.

01:50:01 ►

People don’t know this, actually.

01:50:03 ►

Alan was an alcoholic, straight ahead alcoholic.

01:50:07 ►

But he was functioning. He could function. But sometimes when he was high on alcohol,

01:50:14 ►

he could be very abusive, as Tim could be sometimes, and didn’t show up very well in

01:50:21 ►

long-term relationships, marriages and things like that.

01:50:26 ►

But he was incredibly engaging and brilliant and funny

01:50:30 ►

and a raconteur, and, you know, you forgave him a lot

01:50:34 ►

for these other, you know, idiosyncrasies

01:50:38 ►

because of just who he was, you know, he could show up.

01:50:42 ►

Then another character showed up early on that marked the

01:50:46 ►

transition from psilocybin to lsd his name was michael hollingshead he’s a character from that

01:50:51 ►

era the maybe the character from that era yes one of the major so one day he shows up in cambridge

01:50:58 ►

with a suicide note that is delivered to tim i’m michael Hongshead. I’m from London.

01:51:06 ►

I turned on the Beatles.

01:51:10 ►

I’ve gone through psychoanalysis with Anna Freud, blah, blah, blah.

01:51:15 ►

He gives a whole litany of his biography, and I’m desperate.

01:51:19 ►

And if I don’t hear from you in the next 24 hours, I’m going to kill myself.

01:51:21 ►

So, of course, Tim reaches out to him.

01:51:25 ►

He has a mayonnaise jar full of acid, basically,

01:51:26 ►

that he brought from England.

01:51:29 ►

He’s close friends with Huntington Hartford,

01:51:31 ►

who was a socialite in New York.

01:51:33 ►

There’s a building named after him in Columbus Circle. It used to be the Huntington Hartford Museum,

01:51:37 ►

who procured young models from England.

01:51:42 ►

Michael’s job was to procure women for Huntington Hartford.

01:51:46 ►

So it was like a whole scene.

01:51:48 ►

And he shows up in Cambridge, and he introduces Tim to LSD,

01:51:53 ►

which is now another dimension beyond psilocybin.

01:51:59 ►

So within weeks, all of us then have our first acid experience

01:52:03 ►

after about two years or so of

01:52:06 ►

psilocybin and that opens up a whole other dimension you know that’s when things got

01:52:10 ►

really wacky at that point because it psilocybin there was still a modicum of research and control

01:52:17 ►

and and you know experimentation and writing up accounts of of experiments and things.

01:52:28 ►

When LSD came on, it was a whole other… It just blew the lid off, right?

01:52:31 ►

And part of the problem was undergrads were starting to get their hands on these.

01:52:35 ►

Well, that was where Richard got fired, basically,

01:52:38 ►

because of an undergraduate who was the son of a famous diamond family in New York,

01:52:45 ►

one of the major diamond retailer families in New York.

01:52:49 ►

His father was also on the board of directors.

01:52:53 ►

It was called the Board of Overseas of Harvard.

01:52:56 ►

This guy had a gay relationship with Richard as an undergraduate,

01:53:02 ►

which at that time was also pretty far out,

01:53:07 ►

combined with psychedelics,

01:53:08 ►

because Richard had agreed not to give psychedelics to undergraduates.

01:53:12 ►

He violated that agreement on this instance.

01:53:15 ►

He wouldn’t give psychedelics to Andrew Weil,

01:53:17 ►

which was the basis for Andrew’s discontent in his attack

01:53:22 ►

because he felt excluded from that.

01:53:27 ►

But for this other young guy, he did.

01:53:29 ►

So this is the Winston family, Ronnie Winston.

01:53:34 ►

The Winston Diamond, you’ve probably heard of that family, right?

01:53:37 ►

So they’re a famous New York wealthy family.

01:53:41 ►

So Ron Winston was the kid, and his father was on the Board of Overseas.

01:53:46 ►

And so the father went to Edgar Pusey, or I may not have the first name, Pusey was the president of Harvard at the

01:53:51 ►

time, and that was the last straw, and so they fired Richard, and Tim just stopped showing up

01:53:58 ►

for work. So he basically, I don’t know if they ended up firing him or not, or his contract elapsed. He just stopped coming.

01:54:06 ►

But it was Richard who had actually violated the agreement,

01:54:10 ►

and Andrew Weil, who blew up the story, basically.

01:54:13 ►

He was writing for the Harvard Crimson.

01:54:16 ►

So one day I’m sitting in, I just happened to be at the right spot.

01:54:21 ►

I was sitting in this coffee house in the middle of Harvard Square,

01:54:27 ►

right spot. I was sitting in this coffee house in the middle of Harvard Square. And I’m sitting next to a table where Andrew Weil is with a few of his buddies. And he’s talking about doing a

01:54:33 ►

mescaline deal with them. And I’m overhearing it. And he doesn’t know who I am. I know who he is.

01:54:39 ►

So I’m hearing this deal. And in the middle of while he’s reporting on the crimson around the violations of, you know, Richard and so on,

01:54:48 ►

he’s blowing the whistle on our work.

01:54:50 ►

He’s doing his own drug deals on the side at the same time, right?

01:54:54 ►

So I went back to Tim and Dad.

01:54:56 ►

I said, this is who this guy is.

01:54:59 ►

This is what’s happening.

01:55:00 ►

So that was the beginning of, you know, of a rupture that went on for the next 30 years

01:55:05 ►

I think he and Richard had a

01:55:08 ►

rapprochement years later when he visited Maui

01:55:12 ►

Tim at the end of the day

01:55:14 ►

always saw things in a more cosmic scheme

01:55:17 ►

he just saw this as all just characters in this cosmic dance

01:55:20 ►

he didn’t

01:55:22 ►

I don’t think he held Andrew personally.

01:55:26 ►

He did for a while, but after a while,

01:55:27 ►

he just, you know, didn’t care anymore.

01:55:30 ►

Richard held onto it for a long time.

01:55:33 ►

But so he was another character in this play,

01:55:37 ►

you know, many characters,

01:55:40 ►

like a Strindberg production, you know,

01:55:42 ►

who’s in the audience, who’s in the cast,

01:55:45 ►

or, you know, what’s going on.

01:55:49 ►

Anyway, there you have it, or most of it.

01:55:54 ►

Gunther, I just want to say thank you so much

01:55:55 ►

for this great piece of history.

01:55:56 ►

It was really a pleasure to learn

01:55:58 ►

all of these insider pieces of the puzzle.

01:56:01 ►

My pleasure.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

056 - The Harvard Psychedelic Club

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Program Notes

Previous Episode

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Similar Episodes

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