I thought I had known where the LSD subculture came from, Leary, Huxley and the like. I didn't know about the experiments with psychedelics by the military, the Nazi's, OSS and CIA. Not when I first tried it. Years later I would play the character Albert Hubbard in THE ACID TEST (1*), the man who actually introduced LSD to the general public. He had been in OSS, and depending on which version of his life you want to believe, he was also a CIA prankster who would on occasion slip the drug into the coffee machine at the CIA cafeteria. (Which apparently turned into laughfests and who knows what else. In the CIA cafeteria you can sit for 20 years and never know the name or job of the person across from you - no matter how beautiful. Then you're tripping together! There are stories he bought gallons of real LSD. Here is mostly what we know about the Johnny Appleseed of LSD - who never, ever meant for a kid like me to trip......
... Captain Hubbard is a breath of fresh air. A
spy by profession, he lived a life of intrigue and adventure befitting his
chosen career. Born dirt poor in Kentucky, he served with the OSS (precursor
to the CIA) during the Second World War and went on to make a fortune as a
uranium entrepreneur.
The blustery rum-drinking Hubbard is widely credited with being the first
person to emphasize LSD's potential as a visionary or transcendental drug.
"Most people are walking in their sleep," he said. "Turn them around, start
them in the opposite direction and they wouldn't even know the difference."
As a high-level OSS officer, the Captain directed an extremely sensitive
covert operation that involved smuggling weapons and war material to Great
Britain prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. In pitch darkness he sailed
ships without lights up the coast to Vancouver, where they were refitted and
used as destroyers by the British Navy. All of this, of course, was highly
illegal, and President Truman later issued a special pardon with kudos to the
Captain and his men.
During his first acid trip in 1951, he claimed to have witnessed his own
conception. "It was the deepest mystical thing I've ever seen," the Captain
recounted. "I saw myself as a tiny mite in a big swamp with a spark of
intelligence. I saw my mother and father having intercourse. It was all
clear."
The coarse, uneducated Captain lacked elegance and restraint -- "I'm just
a poor son of a bitch!" he'd bellow. Nonetheless he teamed up with a tall,
slender novelist who epitomized the genteel qualities of the British
intellectuals by the name of Aldous Huxley. In 1955 Huxley wrote to a mutual
friend "Your nice Captain tried a new experiment -- group mescalinization."
Captain Hubbard had provided Huxley with mescaline, a semi-synthetic extract
of the peyote cactus.
Though Huxley waxes poetic about his experiences with mescaline, his
poetry is tempered by the authors' introduction of the subject in "Acid
Dreams." The drug, they tell us, was used "in mind control experiments
carried out by Nazi doctors at the Dachau concentration camp during World War
II... the Nazis concluded that it was 'impossible to impose one's will on
another person as in hypnosis even when the strongest does of mescaline had
been given...
"The mescaline experiments at Dachau were described in a lengthy report by
the U.S. Naval Technical Mission, which swept across Europe in search of every
scrap of industrial material and scientific data that could be garnered from
the fallen Reich.
"It was without question the most extraordinary and significant experience
this side of the Beatific Vision. ...it opens up a host of philosophical
problems, throws intense light and raises all manner of questions in the field
of aesthetics, religion, theory of knowledge," Huxley said of his mescaline
experience in a letter to a friend. Going on to praise Hubbard he wrote "What
Babes in the Woods we literary gents and professional men are! The great
World occasionally requires your services, is mildly amused by mine; but its
full attention and deference are paid to Uranium and Big Business. So what
extraordinary luck that this representative of both these High Powers should
(a) have become so passionately interested in mescaline and (b) be such a nice
man."
Said Hubbard of his proselytizing escapades, "Cost me a couple of hundred
thousand dollars. ...I had six thousand bottles to begin with."
Hubbard promoted his cause with indefatigable zeal, crisscrossing North
America and Europe, giving LSD to anyone who would stand still. "People heard
about it, and they wanted to try it," he explained. During the 1950s and
early 1960s he turned on thousands of people from all walks of life --
policemen, statesmen, captains of industry, church figures, scientists. "They
all thought it was the most marvelous thing" he stated "And I never saw a
psychosis in any one of these cases."
Hubbard had such remarkable credentials that he received special
permission from Rome to administer LSD within the context of the Catholic
faith. "He had kind of an incredible way getting that sort of thing," said a
close associate who claimed to have seen papers from the Vatican.
Even though Hubbard took a lot of acid and was a maverick among his peers,
he remained a staunch law-and-order man throughout his life. The crew-cut
Captain was the quintessential turned on patriot, a seasoned spy veteran who
admired the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. Above all Hubbard didn't like weirdo's -
- especially longhaired radical weirdo's who abused his beloved LSD. Thus he
was eager to apply his espionage talents to a secret study of the student
movement and acid subculture... And so on though a psychedelic topological
maze alternating cloak-and-dagger with enlightenment.
http://www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0049.htmThe bible of hippie culture was HOW TO SPEAK HIP by Del Close and John Brent. I didn't know who Del was, but I assure you just about every hippie bought the album. I had no idea when I got mine that years later we would be on stages together.
How to explain the psychedelic experience to someone who hasn't tripped? Is there a test? (2*)
How to explain this..... when a person trips they notice the leaves on a tree, the sun and the clouds. Broken glass on the street becomes shining, shifting explosions of light. They might draw or think of a line or do something creative- but the thing is, the leaves were always there. The sun. The clouds. Broken glass has always reflected the light. You stopped noticing. Likewise, that talent was there before you ever took a drug.
Ahhh, but that's me today saying that and when I return, I will try to show what a first trip on a sugarcube was like........
Mike Flores puts improv technique to the acid test
By Robert K. Elder
Tribune staff reporter
May 19, 2004
If Mike Flores had a resume, which he doesn't, the "experience" portion would look something like this:
Movie director, scriptwriter, disc jockey, playwright, actor, improv comedy troupe leader, Vietnam War protester, underground journalist, hippie and founder and president of Chicago's Psychotronic Film Society.
This week, he's adding "improv dramatist" to the list with " The Acid Test 1966," a psychedelic ensemble theater piece performed by The Wrecking Crew, Flores' improv comedy troupe.
Film composer Mark Mothersbaugh, the former frontman of post-punk icons Devo, provides recorded music for Flores' loony vision, which takes its name from Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' 1966 trip across the U.S. exposing
the populace to psychedelic culture and LSD.
"I was fortunate enough to make friends years ago with an older, more mature [ acid guru] Tim Leary," Mothersbaugh says. "Although my days of dropping acid had long been over, I associated the era with a lot of positive change and spontaneity. It always fit into my life in a positive way, and to create music for [Flores'] project -- it's a chance to work muscles that were already there."
From 1966 to 1967, Flores says, the whole country went through a major cultural shift. Students were protesting the war in Vietnam, " the pill" ushered in the era of free love, and politics became a powder keg sitting in the middle of many family dinner tables.
Flores, who turned his 43-week run of "Bettie Page Uncensored: The Unauthorized Story" at Lakeview's Playground Theater into an independent movie last year, says he wants to explore the significance of those few mid-'60s months.
"I'm interested in that moment when things began to change, and the versions I've seen of that moment so far [have been lacking]," he says.
"
The stuff that's left over from the era really doesn't capture what happened to the people, what was on our minds and what started the ripple that would change society."
Flores' " The Acid Test 1966" revolves around a party and a sextet of youths from different walks of life. One character has run away from the home of her Navy officer father, which reflects Flores' own biography.
"All of the characters probably represent some part of me," concedes Flores, a frenetic, motor-lipped raconteur. "Many of the experiences the characters have, I had at some point."
Friction on home front
A former military brat, Flores was born in San Diego, then raised in Osaka, Japan, and Atlanta. He says he left home because of friction with his parents over Vietnam.
"I was being groomed for military school, then a second lieutenant [position] in Vietnam," he recalls.
The turning point came, he says, in 1966 when his father, a lifetime Navy man, was visited by a friend, just back from a tour of Vietnam. The visitor brought along a slideshow, Flores remembers.
" The first slide was of him on top of a pile of bodies and the second was guys with enemy ears strung around their necks," Flores says. "I think it was those slides that shook me up."
So, he left home, hitchhiked through 36 states looking like "a stalk of broccoli," rail-thin with a large Afro. He survived by writing for underground newspapers, and in 1971 got an offer from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Chicago to write and organize demonstrations against the war. After the SDS gig ended, Flores hung around Chicago floating from job to job, watching bootlegged Japanese animation. In 1979, friend Del Close, legendary Second City personality and founder of the ImprovOlympic, turned him on to improv.
"I also got excited by what Del was trying to do with it," Flores says. "Del's vision was the long-form improv method could be used to create shows, movies, TV shows -- and then when you have something you feel comfortable with, you keep it."
From 1979 to 1985, the pair performed as "Pope Michael Flores and Rev. Del Close" on television, radio and nightclubs, Flores says.
Close died five years ago of complications from emphysema. People still misunderstand his long-form improv methods, Flores says, which is basically using improv to create characters and plots spontaneously, then honing
the end result into a cohesive narrative structure.
"Unfortunately, it got labeled as an improv exercise and no one tried to carry it to the next step," Flores says. " The Acid Test 1966" is his attempt to demonstrate Close's vision.
"I liked the idea of characters creating themselves," Flores says. "I have a skeleton of where we're going, where the dance numbers come in, but everything else is created by the actors themselves."
George Dickson, 28, plays Wild Bill in the play, host of the " acid test." He says he joined The Wrecking Crew after answering Flores' ad in the theater magazine Performink.
"He's either crazy or a genius, or maybe both," Dickson says of Flores. "He has big plans and ideas and unorthodox methods. I like the freedom that he gives you. He's the only director I've had who shows up with a 12-pack of beer."
Championing cult movies
Flores hasn't had a day job in 10 years and spends most of his time working on plays, movies and projects with
the Psychotronic Film Society, which champions cult movies. An Internet enthusiast, Flores showers his cast, friends and colleagues with multiple daily e-mails about new music, politics and conspiracy theories.
Starlet photos and autographs, including signed glossies of Sean Connery, Johnny Carson and Kate Moss, decorate an entire wall of the Rogers Park apartment he shares with wife Kat Southerland, " Acid Test's" executive producer.
In a gravelly voice with a vague Southern accent, Flores recounts the time he dropped acid with rocker Duane Allman, the time he dated actress Kim Cattrall (a signed cast photo of "Sex and the City" hangs on the wall), the time his wife proposed to him "over hot wings at Hooters" and the tale of turning 16 in a New Mexico jail -- all stories his cast has heard, some more than once.
"He has a story for everything; he's done just about everything," says Kai Collins, 27, an Uma Thurman lookalike who plays free spirit Eve in the show.
During their first, hour-long, phone conversation, Collins remembers, "I doodle when I talk on the phone, so when we were done talking, I had about 10 pages and at the bottom, I wrote, `This guy is totally nuts.'" Collins has since, affectionately, upgraded her assessment of Flores to "functionally insane."
Ever the non-conformist, Flores isn't moving his production into traditional venues.
"I'm moving it into nightclubs, movie houses, art galleries -- places where people don't expect to see improv anything," Flores says. "We do shows like a rock group."Part of the reason is the form of the show. There's no stage, and audiences are encouraged to mingle and interact with the characters at " the party." Non-traditional venues also have economic benefits.
"Theater people wait for the critic to show up," Flores says. "Then they hope it's a good review and they hope they can sell enough tickets to at least cover the rent. This is unacceptable for me. If I did that, I'd have to take a job."
He is convinced Chicagoans want to see something new.
"There's about 200 theaters and about 700 theater groups in Chicago and they all pretty much battle for the same 2,500 people. So they end up running for four weeks, six weeks. They spend a year developing a show, they don't have a chance of getting back any of what they've invested," Flores says. "My shows tend to run so long -- they've gone 33 weeks to a year and a half. They appeal to people who are experience-oriented. They want to experience something new, want to feel like they are involved in something exciting."
Connection to the fringe
Mothersbaugh says this passionate point of view helped draw him to
the project.
"I've always been connected, through Devo, to the more interesting fringe artists, so I meet a lot of madmen and really talented visionaries," Mothersbaugh says. "I think of [Flores] as somebody who is very enthusiastic about . . . all the little bits of shrapnel that influence and make up culture."
The pair had tried to team up before, but something always got in the way, Flores says. "But when I told him I was going to basically re-create an acid trip [in the performance], his reaction was immediate. He volunteered to do the music."
Flores wants to take the experience from " The Acid Test 1966" and create an unrelated improv indie movie. There are also plans in June to do a comedy concept CD with The Wrecking Crew, produced by Joe Cassidy of local band Assassins.
"I call myself an entertainer, as opposed to being a theater person. I don't hang out at actor bars, I don't talk about the family of theater," Flores says. "I'm easy to miss in the theater community until you look in the paper and say, `Damn, that show is still running?'"
(2*)
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