Sweet Adeline, Rocky Top, King Bean and How LSD Saved My Life 30 Years Ago

My years of elementary school were spent living as a latch-key kid in Cole Valley, adjacent to the Haight-Asbury neighborhood in the heart of San Francisco. My bi-polar mother, reached the hippie mecca a good decade too late, but there we were. Things were decidedly a little more sketch around those parts during that time. Some occasional moments of wonder and joy were far more eclipsed by the unpredictable volatility a mad-woman who would shift between engaging moments of charismatic grit and extended runs of rage-inflicted instability. This reality crafted a blinding nucleus of unresolved (hers) and new foundational (mine) trauma. I remember getting into my mother’s special brownies that one time. I remember a party we went to over in the East Bay and being up in a loft jumping on a bed with other kids, as the adults below were hopped up below on white line yeyo with Rod Stewart’s Da Ya Think I’m Sexy blasting at top volume. I remember we went to another party one time at this famous blues singer’s house down near San Jose. It was John Lee Hooker. There was the Grateful Dead at the Greek in 1981 in Berkeley, on shoulders as a bewildered 7 year-old. One of my mom’s good friends, the one who presumably helped talk her in to moving to California, was a British music fan very much like the Penny Lane character from the seminal coming-of-age, Cameron Crowe semi-autobiography Almost Famous. For how much rock n’roll was around though, my mother was just as likely to be blaring Luciano Pavarotti on the hi-fi as anything. I’m not sure how much her and running crew did psychedelics. I suspect it was in the mix as much as anything. I will say, my mom was trippin’ for skipping me by 2nd grade at my Catholic grade school St. Agnes, which was across the street from the Grateful Dead house on Asbury. I was bright then, but that move seemed as much about her ego as it was about any exceptional academic ability of mine. Being young for my grade certainly didn’t help after she abandoned me with extended family back in Nashville before 5th grade.

 High School in Nashville in the late 80’s and early 90’s was wild. I went to Hillsboro High School (HHS) in Green Hills. In those days, HHS was often winning awards for being a top public high school nationally, but it was still erratic. We had the biggest and most diverse ESL (English-as-a-Second-Language) student population around with Laotian, Cambodian and especially Kurdistani kids. We had a good contingent of black kids and some latino kids. The white kids were varied. Some were the children of famous and not-so-famous working musicians and music industry folks. The sons of Roger McGuinn and Dr.Hook and more. We even had a recording studio at HHS. One kid was even the daughter of Tennessee’s Governor, but even she was a neo-hippie like so many of the rest of us. There was also a surprising number of kids that got kicked out of the many private schools in the surrounding areas for behavioral, or more often, drug issues. Most of the rest were from middle and working, or even lower-class families. I was in this group. My friend Kevin King, the eldest son of Nashville resident celeb and foodie icon Daisy King, was from the former group. He was a year over me at HHS. Like me, I understand he was fatherless at that time. I think his state was due to his father passing early. I never knew mine at all. We knew each other some in high school, but we really reconnected once we were up at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville together. We shared the same music tastes and recreational habits.

During my second year at UTK, I lived adjacent to campus in a house in the Fort Sanders neighborhood with four other guys. Our place had a white picket fence, shrubs and a big, old maple out front that covered one side of the house. We called it the White House. The tree and fence are long gone but the house remains. My housemates were all one to two years over me by grade, meaning they were 2-3 years older than me by age. They were all fraternity brothers of mine. I was the young guy. And they made me feel it. They weren’t mean per se, but there was a lot of “tough love” given. I deserved some of it though, I’m sure. It’s taken me years to not let the dishes sit in the sink. I’m better now, but by no means perfect on that front to this day. I learned a lot that year living with those guys. Yes, I did.

It was a freezing on February 18th 1993 in Knoxville, Tennessee. A newer band that a lot of us liked, Phish, had just released a new album. It was a concept album called Rift and they were early on into a grueling national tour. They were swinging through Knoxville and we we’re stoked for the show. We had a small get-together at the White House beforehand. My old buddy Kevin King (aka King Bean and Hamster) came by. He was in a different fraternity, but none of that mattered back in the 90’s at UTK. You tended to hang out with the guys that were into the same things as you were as much as rote socializing with your paid-for friends. Kevin brought some sugar cubes with him. Each was dosed with liquid LSD. How much? It was hard to say. Each cube was darkly discolored suggesting that they were generously saturated with more than a single normal dose. If I recall, quite a few us partook that night.

This wasn’t my first time. In high school, a lot of the kids I knew at HHS and elsewhere, experimented. Most were just drinking and smoking grass. But more than maybe expected, were those of us that dabbled in psychedelics too. Psilocybin (mushrooms) and LSD were the easiest to find. The spring of my sophomore year, I remember going to see Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale speak at Vanderbilt for a “60’s Revisited” event. It was fascinating and it certainly energized those of us kids that attended. That same Spring, a friend of mine (who will remain unnamed) gave me some LSD early one day during school, also generously dosed. That was a wild day. Dazed and Confused-esque shenanigans all around back then. The Wild West Nashville.

The venue where Phish was playing was called the Electric Ballroom. It was a big old industrial, warehouse type brick facility. It was only 5 or so blocks from the White House so I’m pretty sure we walked to the show. It was cold that night. Lip-splitting, blistering cold. But it was super toasty in the Electric Ballroom. The show was packed.  I remember the end of the first set pretty clearly with Reba, Lawn Boy and Run Like an Antelope. Three songs all off Phish’s 1990 album that was a mainstay of my senior-year-in-high-school listening. Here are these two screen captures from Phish.net and Phish.com that provide the setlist and some notes about the show.

During the second set, the throbbing and heat prodded. And the dripping bricks, along with dense foggy mist of condensate sweat and vaporized glycol. Oh yeah, and the pulsating ceiling. The Mike’s Song, I Am Hydrogen, Weekapaug Groove suite is still clear in my mind. As was the end of the show. If you don’t know about the band Phish, they are notorious for tomfoolery, inside jokes and bizarre stage antics. The last few songs of the show were performed unamplified as mostly acapella with Trey (the guitarist and front man) playing acoustic guitar. It was unclear why they did this at the time. At least to me. I assumed they were just being Phish. Strange and unpredictable. The last two songs were Sweet Adeline and Rocky Top. I was pretty close to center stage by this time. I remember this show closer like it was yesterday, even though I was spinning. Years later, I would name my daughter Adeline. Not for the night of 02/18/93 though. Or at least, I don’t think so.

After the show, things are a little blurry. I think I went to an after-show house party near the White House. But feeling out of sorts and needing a respite, I made it back home. Nobody was there. See, my whole second year in college, I didn’t have a steady girlfriend. I had a steady girlfriend for a couple of years in high school and one for most of my freshman year at UT. However, most of the other guys in the house did. I guess everyone else was with them that night or crashing elsewhere. I shared a room with one of my housemates and he had shacked up that night. I turned off the lights and tried to go to sleep. As you might imagine, I couldn’t. And here’s something about LSD trips, if some of your senses are deprived, the others will often step up to fill the gaps. It was dark in the room. I couldn’t see and the visuals had subsided (a bit). But I thought I heard whispers across the room. Over where my roommate’s bed was. I thought he and his girlfriend might be over there trying to be quiet, but nah, they weren’t. I remembered I was alone. I was alone.

I was a bit scared by this time. I forced myself to go take a shower. We had one of the house’s bathrooms connected to our bedroom, so it was easy…ish. This was going to help a bit surely, I thought. I got in and thankfully the water was hot. But quickly, I slinked down to the stall’s floor. I thought about how I never knew my father. I thought about why my mother left me with her mother and sisters and never came back for me. I felt terrified and alone. But then, I heard a voice. It sounded different than my own inside my mind that I knew well. This felt like something, or someone else. It was big. It had a loving timbre. The voice essentially told me this:

“Josh. You are alone. You are terrifyingly and shockingly alone. But that’s okay Josh. Everyone is terrifyingly and shockingly alone. But here’s the thing, you’re all alone together. You’re gonna be okay kid. You have your whole life in front of you. Nothing about how you got here is either your fault or needs to stop you from living your life. You get to make it up from here. So, go find your path and connect with the world and people. Go explore. You’re gonna be okay.”

Surely, this was just my own voice. Right? It was me, utilizing a self-preservation technique. It was a trauma response. It was fighting. Me fighting to live. Right? Fighting to feel that this orphaned kid must have some purpose and value here. This moment helped. It was the initial kernel of transformation. This gave me a glimmer of a future that I could help mold. A future that could be whatever I wanted it to be. The present of the present and the possibilities of the future yet to be scripted.

I didn’t come into 2/18/93 consciously looking for a fight, but I believe one found me that night. People who don’t take psychedelics and who may be apprehensive of them ask me what it’s like and how do you know that you won’t have a bad trip if you take psychedelics. I often use the following analogy to describe how one should prepare their mindset before taking a trip. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke and Yoda finish the day’s training by the entrance to a cave, a cave that is strong in Dark Side energy. This is right after Luke and Yoda have a discussion where Yoda tells Luke “Beware of the Dark Side. Anger, Fear, Aggression. The Dark Side of the Force are they. Easily they flow. Quick to join you in a fight.” Luke senses the darkness, coldness and death from the cave and asks what’s in there? Yoda replies “Only what you take with you.” Luke looks a bit trepidatious, but then starts to strap on his weapons belt. Yoda tells him “you will not need them.” Luke doesn’t heed his master’s command and goes into the cave. If you know the scene, you know that Luke encounters his fear. His fear is of Obi-Wan’s apprentice Darth Vader, the twisted monster who turned from heroic Jedi to the most feared Sith Lord in the Galaxy. Luke hallucinates having a lightsaber battle with Vader, winning the battle by decapitating the Sith Lord. Luke is shocked when Vader’s helmet explodes on the ground only to reveal Luke’s own dead face staring back up at him. By the conclusion of the movie, we understand that this is a foreshadowing that Luke’s path could become like his father Darth Vader’s if he doesn’t stand strong against the temptations of the Dark Side of the Force. Luke let his fear of the unknown, distrust of himself and cynicism towards his new teacher guide his actions. “Away put your weapons.” If you don’t want to have a bad trip on LSD, you need to check your weapons at the entrance and leave anger, fear, trepidation, and aggression outside. If you don’t, there’s a good chance you’ll have a bad trip. On that cold, February night in 1993, I didn’t think I had my weapons with me, but maybe I did. Did I have a bad trip that night? Perhaps, but I came out of that cave, or shower as it were. Alive and changed. Like Luke.

LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938 while working on pharmaceutical compounds for Sandoz Laboratories. In 1938, Hofmann was experimenting with the Ergot fungus, investigating ways that it might be utilized as a respiratory and circulatory stimulant. LSD was first made then, but it wasn’t until five years later in April of 1943 that he realized the effects of the LSD when he topically ingested some accidentally. He described his experience:

“(I was) affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.”

A few days later, Dr. Hofmann intentionally ingested 250 micrograms of LSD. The average microgram dosage for one “hit” of Acid is 100 micrograms. This more potent, higher dosage trip provided a markedly different experience for the chemist. He reported that people around him appeared to become demons, that furniture morphed into devilish creatures and that he himself felt “possessed by demons.”  April 19th is now known as “bicycle day” as it was while riding back to his home from the lab where he first experienced the effects of the compound.  That experience withstanding, Hofmann continued with his research for years. He later identified, named and synthesized the psychotropic molecule found in psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and understood both compounds as having the ability to broaden human consciousness and as possible tools to aid in healing mental illness and psychological trauma. From the year of its discovery until 1970, LSD was considered a wonder drug in professional Psychiatry. In that time, almost 10,000 scientific publications were generated about the drug and its potentials. The word Psychedelic is derived from the Greek words Psyche (“soul/mind”) and Deloun (“to manifest”). Hofmann was aware of both the transformative power of LSD and the potential dangers from it if not utilized responsibly. By the mid-60’s, LSD had hit the street as a recreational drug, converging at a time when the Counter-Culture movement was exploding in the U.S. alongside our military engagement in Vietnam.

In the 60’s, LSD worked its way out of the labs and psychiatry offices, landing in the hands of disenfranchised, Baby Boom teenagers. On the West Coast, the legendary Kool Aid Acid Tests and exploits of Ken Kesey & The Merry Pranksters were chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. On the East Coast, Harvard clinical psychologist Timothy Leary began testing the therapeutic effects of both psilocybin and LSD in the early part of the decade. Leary was let go by Harvard in 1963 for the controversial nature of the work but went on to become a leading and public-face advocate of the benefits of psychedelics.  He popularized the phrases “turn on, tune in, drop out” and “think for yourself and question authority.” The later catching the attention of President Richard Nixon who called him “the most dangerous man in America.” By the late 60’s, Leary was considered a fugitive. Nixon’s borderline obsession with him, led to a two-and-a-half year long, international cat-and-mouse chase led by the FBI. Nixon was looking for a scapegoat to blame for anti-war civil disobedience from the hippies and also a way to criminalize African-Americans for their increased agency and continued progress from the Civil Rights struggle. In 1971, harsher laws were enacted against marijuana use (already outlawed since 1937) to punish the hippies and heroin was scheduled to help incarcerate African-Americans. Both were justified as tools to subvert the anti-war movement in general. LSD and Psilocybin were also scheduled under the ruse that they had no medical value. The fact is, Nixon and the Establishment feared a citizenry waking up and realizing that a lot about our modern existence and the truths we’ve been told, are bullshit. The War On Drugs was declared in 1971 and for that we lost around 50 years of corroborative research into the helpful, medicinal qualities of psychedelics.

But thankfully, things are changing.

A new psychedelics movement began in earnest in the middle of the last decade. In 2015, the last surviving members of the Grateful Dead played a three-day concert event in Chicago at Soldier Field called Fare The Well. It received a lot of fanfare. I got to see the last night. Thanks Lewis and John! Shortly thereafter, the creation of Dead & Co. with most of the surviving members and the addition of young, pop icon John Meyer was announced. 20 years after the death of Jerry Garcia, this conjoining of the old with the young brought in a whole new generation to the music, and thus also the adornments of 1960’s counterculture. This, along with the remnants of the rave culture of the 90’s morphed into a new EDM (electronic dance music) scene and the mainstream growth of Eastern philosophical lifestyle practices such as Yoga, the United States was prepped for a resurgence of interest in alternative ideas and also, psychedelics. Additionally, since the turn of century, states have increasingly been decriminalizing if not outright legalizing “the gateway drug” marijuana. In the past couple of years, several cities and states have gone further, by decriminalizing psilocybin.

The wildness of that spring 1993 continued beyond February 18th. A month after the Electric Ballroom night, Knoxville had a record snowstorm right before Spring Break. Campus shut down and it was nuts. We explored all weekend long. A little more than a week later, Kevin King and I found ourselves together again for the Grateful Dead shows in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The second night, King Bean and I were once again spending time with our friend LSD at the show. We got disconnected from our crew. Somehow, in the freezing cold and in the days before cell phones, the two of us together found our way back to the hotel room, miles from the Dean Dome (the show’s venue). It was miraculous. I still don’t know how we did it. Our patriarch Alfred was there to give us safe harbor and “Spermy” barged in right after us donning a Clint Eastwood-esque, full length Mexican poncho. And all was good. By the end of that semester, I got arrested for “inciting a riot” when confronting police brutality (you can read about it here - https://www.joshwomack.com/editorials-thebodhipolitic/to-protect-and-serve-who-and-what). Think for yourself and question authority, right Tim?

That transformative experience in 1993 helped set me on a path to healing and prepared me for what was to come. In my last two years of college, I lost my grandmother and two aunts. They were the family who were instrumental in raising me in my mother’s absence. The losses were hard and hit deep, but I was in a better position to absorb it and work through it.

If you’re wondering why I would divulge all this heavy personal information, I have a very easy answer. I firmly believe in the power of psychedelics as a medicinal tool to help people heal and grow and I really don’t care who knows this about me. Also, this goes beyond my personal anecdotes. Scientific studies are renewing on this topic and the data coming back corroborates my opinion. Last year, John Hopkins released the results of their study showing that psilocybin relieves major depression symptoms (go here for more - https://tinyurl.com/mrydybuj). Links to more studies on the positive affects of psychedelics use can be found in the is article from Discover - https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/psychedelic-research-on-how-mushrooms-can-help-combat-depression

Albert Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul” and continued doing small amounts of LSD all throughout his life up until he passed at the age of 100. I agree with him, LSD is a powerful tool and I don’t advocate its use unless one is of willing and open state-of-mind. Also, it’s always good to have an experienced psychonaut, shaman or professional to guide you through your early journeys. It is roundly understood that psychedelics are NOT habit-forming or addictive. To me, it’s downright unconscionable that as this country is still being eviscerated by pharmaceutical opioids (oxycontin, etc.) and dangerous fentanyl is being cut into every street-drug imaginable (psychedelics included), we have not taken the steps to decriminalize, legalize and regulate psychedelic medicine. There’s the case of a bi-polar 15 year-old girl in Canada who accidentally was overdosed on 1100 micrograms of LSD (remember, 100 micrograms is a normal dose) at a party. The day after her overwhelming experience, she told her father that “it’s over.” He thought she meant the acid trip, but no she clarified, she meant that she thought she was cured of her debilitating bi-polar disorder. 20 years+ later, she has reported no more instances of depression or mania associated with bi-polar disorder. Vice wrote about it here -https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkeqd8/what-happens-lsd-overdose

While I do feel deeply and occasionally get the blues, I don’t believe I was handed down bi-polar disorder from my mother. It’s said that bi-polar disorder skips a generation, so I am always watching my young adult children to see if there are signs. So far the only signs I see, are signs that my children do not partake in ANY substances, legal or illegal. The kids are all right I think, so far. They don’t even use our society’s favorite and devastating legal drug: Alcohol.

I had been out of touch with my friend Kevin during the late aughts. I was saddened to learn back in 2010 that Kevin had passed away at the age of 38. While I don’t know the hard facts of his death, it is understood that he overdosed on opioids, dying in his sleep. I don’t think it was intentional. I believe that it wasn’t. I was never to take another trip with King Bean. My mother died of complications of cirrhosis of the liver in 2002. Essentially, my mother drank herself to death. Her stronger demons won a lifelong battle she was always under armed to fight. I’ll never know how much or what kind of psychedelics my mother tried over the course of her life. Maybe the tool didn’t work for her, or maybe she mis-used it. Or perhaps, maybe she didn’t use it enough.

I see the value in these tools. I use them, consciously and with respect. I believe that LSD saved my life. Perhaps, it could save yours too.