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MK-Ultra was a secret CIA program founded in 1953. Their primary focus was testing the efficacy of psychedelic drugs as a truth serum, or a tool for psychological manipulation.
The program was birthed from a Cold War suspicion that the communists were working on a mind-control drug, and the US needed to beat them to the punch.
It just so happened that MK-Ultra director, Sidney Gottlieb, had learned about a substance that was accidentally synthesized in a Swiss lab back in 1943. It was reported to have strange, disorienting effects. Gottlieb wondered if it could give interrogators the upper hand over anyone intoxicated by the drug.
So he attempted to buy the entirety of the world’s supply for $240K.
Flush with LSD-25, as it was known then, the CIA began distributing the substance to hospitals, universities, and prisons, under the names of phony philanthropic societies.
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A redacted excerpt from an MK-Ultra Subproject 58 approval document (Image: The Black Vault)One famous example of such a false foundation was the so-called Geschickter Fund. It was an official letter from this fake organization that convinced a mushroom enthusiast named R. Gordon Wasson to make a funded journey to Mexico and bring back psilocybin mushrooms for testing.
Not only did it work, but Wasson went on to publish an article titled “ Seeking the Magic Mushroom” in Life magazine in 1957, giving psychedelics their first major public spotlight in America.
As an aside, some theorize that Wasson knew of the CIA’s involvement in this expedition, as Wasson was friends with CIA director Allen Dulles and had a continued correspondence with him throughout his life.
Acid Tests
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Drs. Harry Williams and Carl Pfeiffer administer LSD via syringe (Image: Bettmann/Getty Images)Another secretly funded center for research was at Stanford University. There, research guinea pigs were paid to sample substances like LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.
Volunteers included a famous poet of the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg, as well as two aspiring writers named Ken Kesey and Robert Hunter.
Here is where the groundwork for the Grateful Dead is laid — particularly with Kesey and Hunter.
The men did not overlap in their experiments with MK-Ultra, with Kesey joining the experiments in 1959 and Hunter in 1962, but the effects on each would change the course of rock history.
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Another quick aside, Kesey’s time as a research guinea pig at Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital, where he was also a night aid, inspired his 1962 book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
One of many Acid Tests posters (design by Norman Hartweg & Paul Foster )Over the course of the early 60’s, Kesey amassed a friend group consisting of artists, psychedelic enthusiasts, and ne’er-do-wells who became known as The Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters lived communally, hosted parties, and distributed LSD to the masses.
In 1965, they had begun to organize regular parties for similarly experimental young adults like themselves. These were known as The Acid Tests.
The Tests began in La Honda, outside of San Francisco, and soon bopped around the San Fran area administering LSD, featuring strobe lights, dancing, and often live music.
Jerry Garcia Meets Robert Hunter
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A young Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter (Image: Jerald Melrose)Around the same time, there was an up-and-coming singer and guitar player in San Francisco named Jerry Garcia. In 1961, at the age of 18, Garcia’s then girlfriend introduced him to her ex-boyfriend (weird, but we’re thankful) — Robert Hunter.
The two became fast friends, and even had a brief stint playing music together as ‘Bob and Jerry’, but they soon disbanded, still maintaining their friendship.
Over the next few years, two important things would happen.
In 1962, Hunter would have his first psychedelic experiences at Stanford, catalyzing within him a crystal-bright, visually-focused style of poetry.
And in 1965, Jerry Garcia’s up-and-coming band, The Warlocks, would be invited to the Acid Tests.
Bringing It All Together
One of the Pranksters had seen the Warlocks playing at a local bar and invited them to come by to a party in La Honda that next Saturday.
So the Warlocks first attended an Acid Test not to play, just to check it out. LSD had been making its way into social circles around San Francisco, and by this time the members of the band had all had their own psychedelic experiences. So it sounded intriguing.
Even at their first Acid Test, though they did not have the intention to play music, the Warlocks ended up diddling around on the instruments that the Pranksters had brought.
As Jerry Garcia described it:
“We played for about five minutes and it completely devastated everyone. They begged us to come back to the next one.”
And thus, the Warlocks were a regular band at the Acid Tests. Shaping their style for the remainder of their career.
As Garcia and many others have always said about the Tests, “Everyone there was as much performer as audience”. This loose, freeform style, coupled with the psychedelic state of affairs, lent itself to experimental, communal, jam-style playing. This would become the bedrock of the Dead’s signature “jam band” style. And even Garcia himself attributes the influence to their time as the Acid Tests house band:
“That was probably the most important six months in terms of directionality”
The Acid Tests ended in late 1966 when LSD became illegal in California. Around the same time, The Warlocks realized that there was already a band with that name, so Jerry Garcia fatefully opened a dictionary to a random page, with the phrase “grateful dead” catching his eye.
By 1967, the Dead were officially releasing studio music, with Hunter and Garcia always staying in touch. But it was in 1968, with the writing and recording of the album Aoxomoxoa, that Hunter began to sit down and write songs with Garcia. The two wrote the entirety of that album together, and for the rest of the Dead’s career, Hunter was their primary lyricists, penning such songs as “Ripple”, “Truckin’”, “Dark Star”, Casey Jones”, and many more.
Thank You, CIA
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Sidney Gottlieb, the unknowing (and undeserving) godfather of psychedelic rock: (Image: Associated Press)To think that Robert Hunter’s poetry, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Acid Tests, and the Grateful Dead all had its origin in a secret CIA mind control program trying to get the upper hand in the Cold War.
