Was Helter Skelter “unreasonable”? Part 2: LSD/Psychedelics

To the acid enhanced mind, the philosophy and resulting “prophecies” of Helter Skelter do not necessarily appear nonsensical or even untrue. While many laugh at the apparent folly of living in underground cities, having shrunk in size to get into the hole in the desert, it is frequently overlooked how one of the effects of LSD is the distortion of size & space. Charlie’s mate, ‘Phil’ Phillips recalls during his first acid trip “I wanted to get out of the bus and I looked out the window and the bus was about 10,000 feet up in the air and all I could see down there was the earth. So I changed my mind, I said ‘I don’t wanna get out of the bus.’

John Lennon on being in George Harrison’s bungalow during his first trip; “And then George’s house seemed to be, you know, just like a big submarine.....it seemed to float above his wall which was 18 foot, and I was driving it.”

Without a doubt, the use of psychedelic drugs like LSD, peyote, psilocybin and mescaline played a major role in opening up new and unusual doors for various family members to pass through, both before and during their time with Charlie. Writer Steve Turner in his book “Hungry for Heaven {Rock and roll and the search for redemption}” observes of LSD, “this was the Damascus Road tablet. People started out on trips as hard nosed materialists after a bit of fun and emerged with their egos ripped & mauled, unsure at first whether they’d seen God or were God. Whatever they’d been through, the world appeared different....to many, such experiences were devastating. There was nothing in their background or education by which to interpret it. Literally overnight all their values & assumptions were challenged.”

It’s worth looking at some of the things said by or about some of the people of the period in relation to psychedelics, in particular LSD, if only to get some sense of the internal changes that young Westerners, contemporaries of the family, were experiencing.

George Harrison {The Beatles}: “It’s shattering because it’s as though someone suddenly wipes away all you were taught or brought up to believe as a child and says ‘that’s not it.’ You’ve gone so far, your thoughts have become so lofty and there’s no way of getting back.” 

For Timothy Leary, according to author Jay Stevens, his first trip “was the most shattering experience of his life.” Ralph Metzner said of Leary the following day, that he had the “blank look of someone who is seeing too much” and he kept blabbing on about the “plastic doll world & the total death of the self.” Stevens describes Leary as having “soared off the map” and Leary himself stated “from the date of this session, it was inevitable that we would leave Harvard, that we would leave American society.”

John Lennon {the Beatles} said that after his first trip “I was pretty stunned for a month or two.”

Jerry Garcia {the Grateful dead}: “It was the truth so you know it absolutely. You don’t have to wonder whether it is, it’s not in the form of an idea. It’s in the form of a complete reality....it freed me because I suddenly realised that my little attempt at having a straight life was really a fiction.”

Eric Clapton {Cream, Yardbirds}: “Part of the trap is that they open the doors to unreleased channels or rooms you hadn’t explored before or been allowed to open. It shook all your foundations. After the first couple of times you realised that everything you’d been using as guidelines up to that point was actually pretty flexible if you happened to question it, which acid obviously did”

Brian Wilson {Beach boys}: “Glen Campbell exclaimed ‘whew Brian ! What were you smoking when you wrote that [Good vibrations] ?’ A better question would’ve been ‘what was I dropping ?’”

Writer and former actress Thelma Moss says she became convinced of the unconscious because of LSD. During one trip she became a legless beggar in a desert sandstorm and heard a voice deep within her whispering “I died here...” She later said that “truth & lies & absurdity & grandeur were all mixed together in the psychedelic experience.” On another trip, she came to an abyss: “as I plummeted down, I felt myself growing smaller & smaller...I was becoming a child, a baby. I was a baby. I was not remembering being a baby. I was literally a baby. The conscious part of me realized I was experiencing the phenomena of age regression, familiar in hypnosis. But...though I had become a baby, I remained at the same time a grown woman lying on a couch. This was a double state of being.” A rather eye opening statement of hers: “I travelled deep into the buried regions of the mind. I discovered that in addition to being, consciously, a loving mother and respectable citizen, I was, unconsciously, a murderess, a pervert, a cannibal, a sadist and a masochist.”

Catherine Share: “LSD... completely destroyed my mind and made me like a little child for many years.”

Keith Richards {Rolling Stones}: “There’s not much you can really say about acid except God, what a trip ! Stepping off into this area was very uncertain, uncharted...the most amazing thing that I can remember on acid is watching birds fly – birds that kept flying in front of my face that weren’t actually there. I could almost see every wing movement. It was slowed down to the point where I could even say ‘I could do that !’ That’s why I understand the odd person jumping out of a window, because the whole notion of how it’s done is suddenly clear.” He adds, “it was the unknown with acid {you can’t really control it}. You didn’t know if you’d come back or not.”

Susan Atkins: “You’d have to understand what acid does to the mind in order to understand how a person can get confused behind drugs. And that would take a thesis, writing a book on what LSD can do to the mind.....I used to think that you came down off an acid trip after 12 hours; that’s not true. Every time you take LSD you [inaudible] expand, the moral fibre of your character which is put in you or when you grow up – everybody grows up with different morals according to their culture- when you take acid, your mind expands beyond these moral characteristics and your concepts of right & wrong so you step out beyond those bounds and when you step out beyond those bounds the imagination begins to take over and the imagination can be a very deceitful thing, it’s a fantasy. When you take acid, you go out beyond that and you think you’re coming back to where you started from originally. You don’t.  And every time you drop acid, you get a little bit further away from reality. And I took so much acid that I was what I would term ‘spaced’ and it took me many years to, what I term now, ‘re~enter’ and that was just through not having any acid and having to deal with reality every day.”

Adelle Davis: “The most lasting value of the drug experience appears to be a number of convictions, most of them religious in nature, which are so strong that it makes not one iota of difference whether anyone agrees with them or not.”

Phil Phillips {Jail friend of Charles Manson}: “So I walked up to the front of the bus where Charlie was and Charlie was facing to the front...and then he turned around and he looked just like the Devil. And I said ‘Man, we’re in Hell’ and he says ‘Yeah, ain’t it groovy !’........I couldn’t, like, believe what was happening to me. Everything was just changing before me....I couldn’t quite grasp what was happening, so we’re back to Charlie again and I said ‘what’s wrong with me, like, what’s happening to me ?’ And he says ‘this is insanity’ and I says ‘yeah, but you know, I wanna go back.’ He says ‘no, stay over here, it’s better.’ I thought I was over like in another world....”

Jay Stevens again, on Michael Hollingshead after mixing up a batch of LSD in confectioner’s sugar: “Unthinkingly, he licked the spoon. Now, 250 millionths of a gram, which is a healthy dose of LSD is little more than a speck, so you can imagine what happened to Hollingshead after his impulsive lick. He went roaring off to ‘the Other World’ where he experienced a rare but not unknown problem: he couldn’t come back completely. It was as though he was lost midway between this world and the other one, a little like a spirit who ends up in limbo because of improper burial.”

Charles Watson: “All your life you had been taught a certain way to think, a certain set of moral values, a certain perspective on the world, how it worked, what was real. Most of these things you never questioned; it never occurred to you that they were a framework in your head which you used to understand and organize the constant sensory perceptions and information and experience that were being poured into your brain. You didn't think about this framework because it wasn't what you thought about, it was the way you thought. But acid changed all this by letting you see your familiar little mental world as separate from the sensory data it arranged in such neat, conventional packages. Acid shattered the connection between raw experience and your handy pre~programmed responses and judgments and categories. Space and time melted in your vision to take new forms; common objects could become monsters or revelations of God.” 

Tony Visconti {Record producer of David Bowie & Marc Bolan, among others} on his acid excursions: “Sometimes a feeling of sheer terror came over me when I listened to what normally seemed harmless songs. I sometimes heard nefarious messages in the lyrics that conjured Bosch like images of hell.”

Robert Hendrickson {Film maker and author}:”LSD was developed for psychiatrists to administer to their most disturbed patients so that their deepest and darkest secrets could be brought to the surface and dealt with. But it’s use has always been considered a very dangerous method of dealing with otherwise ‘unreachable’ patients. Thus LSD was the perfect tool to be used for extracting years of ‘establishment’ programming from the minds of the Family. It was their method for obtaining an ‘ego death’ state of mind.”

Pete Townshend {The Who}: “the Owsley LSD trip on the aeroplane was the most disturbing experience I had ever had....I was on the verge of really losing my mind when I floated up to the ceiling, staying inside the airframe, and watched as everything changed in scale. Karen & Pete [himself] sat below me clutching onto each other....from my new vantage point the LSD trip was over. Everything was quiet and peaceful. I could see clearly now, my eyes focused, my senses realigned, yet I was completely disembodied.” 

Paul Watkins: “If acid does anything, it dissolves filters and buffers through which perceptions are ordinarily channelled. Three-dimensional physical reality is suddenly expanded. It puts you in direct contact with the energies all around you; nothing is dead or inanimate. It magnifies and expands your awareness in all directions at once ~ a grain of sand becomes a planet, a single voice becomes a symphony. If you resist it, the slightest fear can become a nightmare.....With these filters removed, you are no longer divorced from what you perceive. Knowing this makes it easier to understand how Charlie was able to get inside people's heads; there were no barriers to obstruct him; his energies moved in and out like the tide; he was everywhere at once. When he said, ‘No sense makes sense,’ and ‘I am you and you are me,’ he was, in terms of acid consciousness, absolutely correct.”

Grace Slick {Jefferson Airplane}: “Peyote, when boiled down to a concentrate, became a vehicle for going out of our minds. Or, in a more gentle interpretation, going from one plane of reality to another and another and another.....flying off the edge of a cliff or trying to embrace a moving vehicle is not an uncommon desire for psychedelic drug participants ~ not that people become suicidal, it’s just that in such a state anything seems possible.”

Lemmy {Motorhead}: “Real acid tripping in those days wasn’t all groovy, like, peaceful shit. The first trip I took lasted 18 hours and I couldn’t really see. All I saw were visions, not what was actually around me...all the time your mind felt like you were on a rollercoaster, sometimes slow at the approach to the top of each drop then wheeee ! Your teeth would kind of sizzle and if you started laughing, it was incredibly hard to stop. Acid is a dangerous drug if you’re complacent because it will wake your ass up ! If you were a little uneasy about yourself you would either be catalyzed by it or you wouldn’t show up again – you know, they’d take your tie and shoelaces away, and your belt and they’d put you in a room with no windows and a lot of soft walls. A lot of people I know went to the basket weavers’ hotel on acid.”

John Densmore {The Doors}: “I looked down over the frayed edge of the couch at the floor between us and saw a dark pit 1000 feet deep. I was a child again, afraid of the monsters outside my crib. Helplessly I began slipping off the couch into the bottomless abyss. I started getting scared and shouted to Grant that I was falling into the void.....the whole episode took only about 2 or 3 minutes but it seemed to last forever....acid had more of a kick than the stale wafer I swallowed on my first holy communion. LSD was a direct experience with God that I felt or at least something otherworldly or mystical. A couple of days after our trip, I still felt a little high, or at least different. I knew that the drug had worn off, that I was back into more or less my previous state of mind, but the sense that there were other ways of experiencing things was a powerful new awareness that is still present to this day [1990]. A crack had appeared in the facade of reality and I had peered through. Nothing had changed, yet everything had.” 

Charles Watson again: “What I remember most was...the ability to see into the pores of my skin. I still don’t know if what I saw in my skin was real or not. I do know that as a result, I became a vegetarian....I guess I liked the psychological effects. It was a way to escape what was really going on in my mind. Walls appeared to move, colours seemed stronger & more brilliant, with unusual patterns unfolding before my eyes. Flat objects seemed to stand out in 3 dimensions. My senses seemed more acute, one merging into another; for example music appeared as colours and colours seemed to have taste. Sometimes I even lost the normal feeling of boundaries between body and space.” 

Chris Squire {Yes}: “I had a rather nasty experience with some LSD and was in a bit of a haze for a few months...I stayed in my girlfriend’s apartment for quite a few months recovering: I didn’t take acid again after that. Having seen the end of the world I thought I’d gone far enough. I had taken it so many times when it was all fun and great and colourful....so somehow or other I ended up in a Fulham hospital being interviewed by the cops. I didn’t know where I was. I was just smiling at them, thinking they weren’t there.” 

Bob Dylan: “When psychedelics happened, everything became irrelevant....people were deluded into thinking they were something that they weren’t, birds, fire hydrants, whatever.”

Dave Davies {The Kinks}: “As I started to inhale I felt as if there were two of me inhaling two separate cigarettes, each of ‘me’ experiencing two different and quite distinct effects. I was suddenly transported into another dimension or, I should say, dimensions. Before me I could see the universe and all it contained and I was rushing at the speed of light into what seemed the very heart of it. At first it was a phenomenal sensation of travelling very fast when, in fact, I was virtually motionless...a world of energy opened up to me, everything throbbing with relentless life force, breathing, vibrating in every molecule. This was the most incredible experience that had ever happened to me. Explosive, completely revealing, enlightening, illuminating and exciting, but strangely sad. I would lapse into profound moments of excruciating and unbearable sadness. Then I would suddenly be lifted into mystical realms of ecstacy, where answers to the riddles of life would be answered in an almost alien, ineffable language of mind energy. During the whole experience, I sensed a being above my head who talked me through it all. He told me he was my captain. He explained so much to me and helped me out of my tangled moments of confusion. He showed me in a scintillating, almost cinematic way that all I had ever learned would now have to be unlearned.”

Mick Fleetwood {Fleetwood Mac} recalls looking at Peter Green while tripping and seeing “him dead, a skeleton without flesh. I couldn’t even look at the others !”

Andy Summers {The Police}: “The room in front of me dissolves into an egg yolk rainbow of bright plastic colours and all that once had dimension and solidity becomes liquid....I start down a tunnel of intense kaleidoscopic imagery...Alice going down the tunnel into Wonderland and it’s scary and exhilarating as hell. One second I am surfing a rainbow, and the next moment - if I open my eyes – the room appears to be full of horrible little monkeys staring at me with burning eyes....I notice that the bin is like a box of incredible jewels. Old banana skins, cereal boxes and cigarette packets are dazzling jewels of incredible energy that appear to me now in either particle or wave form.” He later reflected that “clearly LSD is not for the fragile; it’s risky, it’s dangerous, a journey from which you may never return.”

Not for nothing did Grace Slick and friends plan to dose President Nixon with enough acid to get him “talking to paintings, watching walls melt and thinking he was turning into a bulldog.”

I make no apology for the number of varied experiences or thoughts concerning the psychedelic experience that have been related here. These aren’t even a drop in the ocean of the vast amount of what has been said or related about psychedelic drugs. We’ve barely touched on the bad trips or delusions that often came with the experience, such as Dave Davies communicating with alien beings for many years after or Sting being transported to his mother’s womb or a trench during WW1 {during an ayahuasca ‘trip’} or John Lennon and Vince Taylor {and indeed, Charles Manson} becoming convinced that they were Jesus Christ, let alone the large number of people that became acid casualties, many occurring in popular music {Syd Barrett, Roky Erikson, Skip Spence, Steve Took, Brian Jones, Vince Taylor, Victor Unitt, Dave Bixby, Gene Clark, Peter Green, Danny Kirwan, Mike Taylor, Brian Wilson, to name but a few}. Or the power of psychedelics to enhance suggestibility.

Many have wondered and continue to wonder how anyone could believe something as “ridiculous” as Helter Skelter. Not everyone did. But when you take into account just where a constant diet of psychedelics could take you {and most of the family were, in the main, trippers for at least a couple of years}, it’s not hard to see how some would have taken it in and believed it all the way. Then acted upon it......

Written by Grim Traveller