The Summer of Love – Ch 7 – Going Off The Rails

During the Summer of Love in 1967, I flipped out on what I have always assumed was the drug LSD.  I truly went nuts and was picked up by the Highway Patrol out on the Tiburon Overpass and incarcerated in Napa State Hospital for 3 weeks.  In attempting to write about this experience many years later, I’ve done a great deal of research into the hippie phenomenon of that time and came across a drug which had its heyday in that summer of love.  It was called STP.

   The only thing I knew about the drug STP was what some hippie guy said over the microphone at a concert up at the Mountain Theatre which featured Eric Burdon.  This guy announced to the audience: “Eric Burdon is on STP.”

   This made no great impact on me at the time.  STP was the famous name of a car engine oil product but was borrowed for the monicker of this particular drug.  Years later, after reading an online article entitled: Learning about STP by Matthew J Baggott, I started to wonder about the drug that had knocked me off my rocker all those years ago.  This exhaustive essay started me thinking that maybe it was actually STP and not LSD that sent me off the rails in 1967.  I do know that another friend who took the same drug as I did, also had a very bad experience with it.

   STP, according to Baggott’s article “had a chemical structure like a hybrid of the stimulant amphetamine and the psychedelic mescaline.”  He went on to explain that it appealed to local acid producer Stanley Owsley as it could be “a gateway drug for ‘speed freaks’ to switch from addictive amphetamines to nonaddictive psychedelics.”

   It was Owsley who produced the first batches of STP which were devoured in the Haight Ashbury district.  The underground newspapers The Berkeley Barb and the San Francisco Oracle praised the new drug as a legal alternative to LSD (California had outlawed LSD in October, 1966).  Owsley even distributed it free at the Summer Solstice celebration in Golden Gate Park on 21st June, 1967.  It was after this event that the adverse reactions to STP began to appear.  According to Baggott: “The first case of STP intoxication seen at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic was a nineteen year old man who sought help after being up for two days.”  On that same evening, more than twenty three STP patients were treated at the clinic.  The clinic ultimately saw thirty two patients and another thirteen were treated at the SF General Hospital over the next few days.  Dr David E Smith, the Haight clinic’s founder, believed that for every patient who sought treatment, another thirty nine were riding out bad trips in the community.

Two photos inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and one of their posters warning about STP. The eagle eyed amongst you might spot the photo from my Yardbirds poster on the wall in the photo on the right.

   Joining up with colleague Frederick Meyers, a UC Medical Centre pharmacologist, Smith and he held a press conference in June to warn of the dangers of STP.  In the press conference, Meyers and Smith stated that the greatest danger was that “giving chlorpromazine, the drug usually prescribed as an antidote for bad LSD trips, intensifies the potentially fatal side effects of STP.”  This fact inspired a sensational headline in the SF Chronicle: “A Warning on New Drug – STP Can Be Lethal.”

Two articles in the press about the dangers of STP and a photo of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

   But as all these events were unfolding down in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, I was sitting at my drawing board up in North Beach trying to think of ideas for posters.  I quickly executed the logo of my signature as Tom Connell had suggested for I was pursuing my poster business idea with him.   In addition to regular weed smoking, I was still pining for a good experience with LSD and it wasn’t long before I found myself across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County where I acquired a capsule of acid.  

   There was a drinks party I attended at the Dreyfus household in Mill Valley.  Babbie and Barney Dreyfus knew how to throw a good bash and their house up in Blithedale Canyon was packed with interesting people, all getting plastered.  I found myself in conversation with Jared’s new partner Val, a good looking young woman from London.  Having now lived most of my adult life in London I am seriously embarrassed to report that I was insisting on doing bad imitations of English accents in her presence and she was patiently correcting me, insisting that no such accents existed.

   I don’t believe that Jar and Val had yet married but they soon did and went onto have two sons, Adam and Christian.  In the early to mid 1970s we had a good visit in London where I first met the boys and she probably doesn’t remember correcting my ghastly British accents.  

   After the party was over I stayed the night, crashing on their sofa and decided to take my capsule of LSD.  It was a very mild dose which, nonetheless, kept me up all night.  There was, adjacent to the Dreyfus living room, a large porch enclosed by windows with views of the sizeable garden below.  There were a few whicker chairs and several large plants in pots which I spent a good deal of time exploring.  For some reason I had the Jimi Hendrix single Purple Haze pounding through my head.  I guess I had been listening to it a lot and I very much liked that the instrumentation conjured up an image of large iron machinery at work.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience performing in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. I witnessed this show from the street above.

  So this music played in my head over and over.  When the sun came up I heard Jar’s dad Barney coming downstairs for his breakfast before heading to the city for a day’s work at his office.

   The previous year Barney had helped me out of a jam when I had been arrested in Mill Valley for a marijuana offence and he dispatched one of his lawyers to sort things out.

   Not long after Barney had gone, I left the Dreyfus house and walked downtown.  I felt good.  It was said by people in my circle that one should let at least twelve days pass between LSD trips so your system could be cleansed of the drug.  So I was content that I would not be taking any acid again until such time had passed.  The sky was blue and the sun shone as I walked down West Blithedale towards the Bus Depot.  I made my way onto Miller Avenue and just past Brown’s Department Store, I stuck out my thumb.  Hitch-hiking was the way I commuted between Marin and San Francisco.  Before long I got a lift all the way into the city.

   Back at my drawing board in North Beach I sketched ideas for posters along the lines that Tom Connell and I had discussed.  It was on the second day of my LSD abstinence that a close friend from Mill Valley turned up at my parents’ apartment.  He had some acid and wanted me to take it with him.  I knew that I should wait out the full twelve days but he showed me two chunky white tablets. I wavered.  On a whim I decided to take it.  I got us glasses of water from the kitchen and we swallowed the pills.  The now familiar swirling visuals set in immediately. We decided to go to Mill Valley.  As we left the apartment, we stood for a moment on the steps leading down to Union Street.  I said to my friend: “We are gods visiting this planet.”  This marked the beginning of the madness which consumed my soul in the coming weeks.  We got in his VW Beetle and drove over to Marin.

   We went someplace on the lower slopes of Mount Tam where a group of our friends were sitting under a tree surrounded by hills covered in the long grass, bleached white by the summer sun.  In one of my mother Beth’s books she referred to “the warm hills of Marin” and it was this long grass which made that image so right.  I don’t remember which friends were there or what I said to them but I’m certain it was something weird.  The swirling visuals of the acid we’d taken wore off pretty quickly but the state of mind I found myself in persisted.

Some samples of Marin County grass in the summer.

   When I returned to North Beach in the evening I had become convinced that I was waiting for someone to arrive.  I looked out my bedroom window onto Union Street and watched strangers come and go as the darkness settled over Russian Hill.  I was in the grip of a premonition that someone was coming to see me.  It was now dark outside as I descended the steep staircase to the front door and opened it.  I stood at the top of the steps leading down to the street and gazed below.  I was jittery and nervous about the arrival which I felt was imminent.  The street lights came on.

   I stayed out in front of the apartment for about half an hour then came inside but decided to leave the front door open.  I climbed the stairs and sat down on the top step.  After awhile my mother Beth appeared and asked why the front door was open.  I said that I was expecting someone but she protested that any visitor could ring the bell and that it was dangerous to leave the front door open at night.  I walked down and closed it.

   The next day I expressed a need to go to the Haight Ashbury to meet the person that I felt I was meant to meet.  My father Blackie decided to accompany me.  I can only guess that my folks sensed that something was not right.  Perhaps they were humouring me, going along with my notion that someone was coming.  

   I wasn’t used to being accompanied by Blackie anywhere at this time.  We took a couple of buses to get to Haight Street which was packed with hippie pedestrians and it’s safe to say that Blackie was completely out of his element.  He hated long hair on men and he didn’t like the drug culture.  After all, the hippie phenomenon was barely two years old at this time and I think it had taken his generation by surprise.  When I was growing up, drug activity was a thing you’d read about in newspapers and it was something which was always happening on the other side of the tracks.  Not in our lives.  But ever since the big bust at Tamalpais High School in June 1965, it had invaded the American middle class in a big way.  Puff the Magic Dragon had clearly arrived and taken a sizeable proportion of the children away.  And now clearly I was one of those children.

Haight Stree in the summer of 1967.

   Blackie and Beth were not at all typical American parents and the irony was that I really never had much to rebel against in my family because my parents were such rebels themselves.  Both my folks had turned their backs on their religious backgrounds: Beth was an American Irish Catholic and Blackie had a Protestant father and a Catholic mother.  They had each gravitated to the political left and devoted their lives to furthering the cause of socialism.  When the anti-red witch-hunts began in the post-war period, they paid a heavy price for their beliefs.  Blacklisted out of his trade as a merchant seaman, my father was unable to hold a job down for more than a few months on the east coast as the FBI would turn up, informing his employer that he was a dangerous radical.  This was the reason my family drove across the country as it was implied that he could get work on the San Francisco waterfront through Harry Bridges and his longshore union the ILWU.

   Whatever the reasons, the work on the waterfront didn’t materialise until we’d been in Marin County for almost four years.  Blackie worked on the Golden Gate Bridge, he delivered dry cleaning and whatever else that brought the groceries home.  

   It may well have been the severity with which the federal government came down on Vin Hallinan for defending Harry in his 1949 court case which delayed his employment on the waterfront.  Vin was first sentenced to six months for contempt of court and later to eighteen months for income tax evasion.  I now wonder if the board members at the ILWU figured that letting Blackie work on the front would further provoke the government.  After all, before he was blacklisted, Blackie was a very prominent and popular trade union leader who regularly featured in the media.  I remember Black telling me that he simply didn’t see the red scare coming.  One day he and Beth were well known folks about town in Greenwich Village and the next people they knew well would pass them on the street without a glimmer of recognition.  They went from minor celebrities to pariahs practically overnight.

   One thing which always surprised me about Black was that none of the hardship thrust upon him seemed to make him an outraged person.  He’d get cross about political things he didn’t agree with and phony politicians would always inspire one of his colourfully caustic comments, but he was not a bitter man at all.

   So here he was, accompanying his twenty year old son, who was  in the early stages of a psychotic state, on a cockeyed visit to the centre of the hippie scene in San Francisco.  Haight Street was throbbing with long haired freaks of all ages.  Lifeless looking young people sat on the sidewalk as hippie drug dealers whispered coded pitches to passing strangers.  Young men and women sold copies of the San Francisco Oracle, a hippie newspaper.  A steady refrain of: “Spare change?” echoed throughout the atmosphere.  After about half an hour of wading through this long haired horde, we gave up and made our way back to North Beach.

On the left a shop called Head Quarters followed by photos of three different people selling The Oracle and an Oracle cover.

   To be honest I didn’t understand my conviction that I had to meet someone, so what the hell Blackie made of it, I have no idea.  Once back in North Beach I had a phone call with Tom Connell who told me that he had secured the financing to proceed with the poster business but I was in another zone altogether.  He asked if I had thought of new ideas for posters and it was not something that I was even thinking about.  All that seemed important to me was meeting these people that I was meant to meet.  Tom told me that he had found a few other poster artists willing to do the work and, as he sensed that I wasn’t in my right mind, he said that he was going ahead with me or without me.  In my right mind I’d have been very upset by this and would have tried to mend the situation but in my frenzied state it was totally irrelevant to me.

   I went out for a walk, taking Union down to Columbus.  As I got to Washington Square I turned right.  

To be continued

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