Owsley, an Ode

First, my credentials: I did attend a Cream concert at the Denver Coliseum in ’68, but fell asleep. Although a mere fifty miles from the event, I did not attend the ’69 Woodstock Festival, nor once ever lied and said I did. I did attend the 1970 New Year’s Eve Jimi Hendrix concert at the Fillmore East, but fell asleep. If I were French and old enough I would admit I was not in the French Underground.

I posit the above to help you believe the relevant assertion; I did ingest one of the famous Purple Owsley tabs of acid in June, 1967. Oh my God, did I ever.

I was not, and am not the Robert Parker of LSD tasting, but by the tender age of 16 going on 17 my fairly expanded consciousness was able to discern good from bad psychedelic bouquet, and with Owsley’s recent death (from of all things, a car accident) it is fitting to pay tribute to his greatest achievement.

I rolled into Haight soon after ‘Sergeant Pepper’ was unleashed, with ‘Lucy’ skying from every tie-dyed curtained window, halter-tops the eye-boggling rage, the Straight Theatre in full blast, and the San Francisco Oracle office ephemerally posted on 1371 Haight Street. In that stark office foyer I was offered the tab.

The Monterey Pop Festival had just ended days before, which I mention because someone said Owsley whipped up the batch of Purple specifically for that event (which I missed; more cred, no?).

Purple. Such a lovely, tempting purple had never lain in my palm, another testament to Owsley’s absolute combination of science with esthetics. The enticing color overwhelmed my usual half-tab wussiness, and I downed the whole thing.

The Summer Of Love is true and sad, true that there had never been a moment of such generational bond, sad that it evaporated by August. No surprise, six weeks had to be the limit for such a good binge; the effort to maintain the high inevitably unveiled the rather seedy core of peace & love (as George Harrison would identify and complain about later that summer).

But baby, this was June, and who knew?

From the Oracle we wandered into Golden Gate Park (friendships were so easy to strike up), where after just minutes the back of my throat tingled, followed by a radiance felt throughout the body, and then… see how astronauts describe that moment when the engines are fired, and the scaffolding falls away...

Or try; WHOOSH, “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in every thing…”

Or, perhaps most usefully, abandon astronauts and Shakespeare and summarize the sensation in today’s parlance, :-) :-).

Anyway, with fireworks blazing we were off to the Avalon Ballroom for a Canned Heat concert. While waiting in line, one of my mates went cosmic (a good rehearsal; several months later he would remove everything but his glasses and run down Avenue B in the Lower East Side; it got him out of the draft), but we ushered him inside, and into an environment where a nuclear fuel rod could have melted without attention. Wow, the drummer passed out!

Then it was over to the Spiritual Mother’s place on Frederick, where I would be introduced to the milieu’s version of a den mother; unfortunately she had not yet arrived home from the hospital to where she had been sent a day or so ago after self-introducing an abortifacient with both desired and dire effect. While waiting for her homecoming with several bearded cub scouts, her twelve year old son, dressed as a cowboy, kicked incessantly at my shins. I was told that Owsley tested every new batch on the buckaroo; if true, well, every great man has his smirch, although at the time I thought, gosh, how cool is that?

It was the only trip where I had the honest-to-God ‘white light’ experience. I somehow had shucked off the little buckin’ buckaroo to enter into a quiet meditation, during which the universe vanished, and I looked into the Void, almost white; a little golden glimmer flickered in midst of the infinite expanse, it grew more glittery, it gestated a form, it became a... empty quart carton of Knudsen milk sitting at the top of Spiritual Mother’s garbage pail.

;-) ;-)

She arrived! Indeed, carried in like a pasha and settled on the sofa and immediately provided with a bottle of Ripple from a six-pack (cowboy was, too). She looked a hundred — everybody over thirty did — and to the question, “How was it?” she answered, “Embarrassing, I went into the emergency room crying, ‘My baby, oh, I’ve lost my baby’ [abortion very illegal in ’67] and they find this gigantic spike in my womb.”

What happened after that?

Well, here I am after all these years. Last acid I dropped (and it wasn’t an Owsley; nothing like it) was the day Nixon resigned (I scribbled on a pillow, “Nixon Failed History;” it seemed very clever at the time). Jobs (plural), wife (singular) and kids (two). Been a long, but I wouldn’t say strange trip.

It won’t be long before I’m sucking up the Social Security, and the disposable income my cohort enjoyed in the Haight (did I mention the Free Store?) today’s tykes will never know, what with digging deep to make sure I get my monthly check. I hear that the reefer’s gotten a lot better, but sold for a price no kid wandering into Haight today could possibly afford. That whole era seems like a hallucination; money did buy happiness, at least six weeks of it.

I would say goodbye to Owsley, except I thought he died decades ago, and I’m still weirded out that his name was Owsley Stanley.

So, goodbye to all that Purple Owsley; it sure kept me awake!