Breaking Open the Head: Michael Hollingshead, the World Psychedelic Center, and Self-Trepanation - the Alternative Lifestyle Choice that Never Took Off.

This story is made up of a couple of curious and eye-opening foot-notes to the history of psychedelia.  My sources are Storming Heaven by Jay Stevens, Turn Off Your Mind by Gary Lachman, and some webpages that I'll link at the bottom.

In 1970, Amanda Feilding, the Countess of Wemyss and March, then aged 23, put on a bandana and went to eat a steak in a restaurant near the Chelsea embankment, London.  Feilding was tucking into her steak in order to replace the blood she had recently lost - by boring a hole in her skull with a dentist's drill.  The operation had been filmed by her boyfriend Joey Mellen, to be used in a documentary called Heartbeat in the Brain.  To elaborate on the milieu out of which this bizarre London evening emerged, we will divert to the life and times of another man who opened his mind - this time with a mayonnaise jar which would become the stuff of legend.

         Michael Hollingshead outside the Harvard building were he turned Timothy Leary on to LSD.

In 1960, Michael Hollingshead was an expatriate Englishman with a slightly shady reputation, living in New York and working in some kind of capacity for the British American Cultural Exchange Institute.  One day, a small package arrived from the Sandoz corporation in Switzerland, containing one gram of LSD, roughly five thousand hits.  (Hollingshead became interested in LSD after reading Huxley and experimenting with mescaline, and claimed he had persuaded a doctor friend to write the request for the acid on a hospital letterhead, ostensibly for the purpose of some kind of bone marrow experiments.)   He decided to mix the acid with water and confectioner's sugar, and store the whole fiendishly potent stash in a sixteen-ounce mayonnaise jar.  The problem was that Hollingshead had been carelessly tasting the mixture with his finger as he worked on it, later estimating that he'd unconsciously absorbed 5 strong doses of pure Sandoz before screwing the lid on the legendary jar for the first time!  He went off on a 15 hour trip from which he never fully returned:  "It was a very strange first trip indeed, and it was of many hours' duration, perhaps fifteen. What I had experienced was the equivalent of death's abolition of the body. I had literally 'stepped forth' out of the shell of my body, into some other strange land of unlikeliness, which can only be grasped in terms of astonishment and mystery, as an état de l'absurde, ecstatic nirvana. I could now 'understand' why death could produce the sort of confusion I was experiencing. In life we are anchored through the body to such inescapable cosmic facts as space, gravity, electromagnetic vibrations and so forth. But when the body is lost, the psychic factor which survives is free to behave with uninhibited extravagance."  (The Man Who Turned On the World, 1973.)

 On Huxley's advice, Hollingshead packed up his mayonnaise jar and headed for Massachusetts to seek out Leary.  The rest is fairly well-documented history: Leary had been on a kind of collision course with the straight, middle-class world for some time, but in the shattering nirvana of his first acid trip, the Harvard professor finally got off the boat and split from the whole fuckin' programme for good.  Everything was revealed to be a tawdry television-set, and like the WS Burroughs of Nova Express, Leary felt compelled to Storm the Reality Studio and Retake the Universe.  An anarko-hedonistic-egotist was born.

At the back of all this, Hollingshead's role as Leary's lysergic Svengali is somewhat murky.  There is the palpable air of a dark magus about him, the air of somebody who found anything but the Light on the Other Side of the Rainbow.  According to Lachman in Turn Off Your Mind:  "Hollingshead would get a reputation as a real demon of a psychedelic guide, spiking people with massive doses, or leading trippers down convoluted paths and then abandoning them....his penchant for manipulation, lying, and coercion are clear signs that he was basically interested in power.  Like Charles Manson and the CIA, Hollingshead 'grokked' LSD's potential for mind control."  At first falling at his feet like a student to his guru, Leary eventually wearied of Hollingshead's disruptive presence, and sent him to London to proselytize the acid revolution on his home turf.  Like Johnny Appleseed-cum-John the Baptist, Hollingshead set sail with another gram of LSD and thirteen boxes of psychedelic literature, quickly establishing a apartment, 21 Pont Street, Belgravia as "The World Psychedelic Center."

 The location of Hollingshead's Psychedelic Center (picture from The Great Wen blog.)

All serious misgivings about Hollingshead aside, the World Psychedelic Center sounds like a hell of a scene while it was was going; basically the ultimate chill-out zone with quasi-religious overtones.  The place was decked out with cushions and candles everywhere, a projector that showed slides of mandalas and Hindu deities and Bodhisattvas, a sound-system that played Ravi Shankar and John Cage space music and wild Moroccan pipes (and the ubiquitous Bardo or two, of course)....the ceremonies usually began at midnight, when grapes laced with 300 micrograms of acid were passed around.   I don't know who actually cleaned the place up, but I could definitely imagine curling up of an evening in 21 Pont Street.  Unsurprisingly, with acid in London in relatively short supply during this period, the World Psychedelic Center became a mecca for serious scenesters and a nexus point of hip London royalty and avant-garde notoriety.  During its short lifespan, Roman Polanski, Paul McCarthy, Eric Clapton, the Stones, Donovan, Burroughs, Alex Trocchi, and many others passed through, sampling the grapes and opening fourth, fifth and sixth eyes.....what a scene.  Fuck Clapton, though.

Needless to say, a visionary, Eleusinian speakeasy like this couldn't stay in business for the long haul.  For one thing, the host was gradually turning into a scarily drug-fried zombie of the highest order: "Hollingshead himself was increasing his drug intake to incredible levels, soaking his nervous system in hashish, methedrine, acid.  He never slept, and shocked himself out of a zombie-like walking coma with injections of dimethyltriptamene, a fast-acting psychedelic." (Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind.)  Yikes.  Eventually busted for possession of an ounce of hash, Hollingshead elected to defend himself, while dosed on acid.  The story just keeps on giving.  Sent down for 21 months to Wormwood Scrubs, Hollingshead receives a batch of acid from visitors Richard Alpert and Owsley Stanley, and decides to turn on his cellmate.....who turns out to the English double-agent and KGB-aiding traitor George Blake......who naturally enough freaks out, thinking Hollingshead is a spy.  Blake eventually escaped from Wormwood Scrubs with the aid of two anti-nuclear protestors, and fled for the USSR; Hollingshead's next port of call was the Scottish island of Cumbrae were he hung out with an acid cult for a while (assumedly no virginal constables were sent from the mainland to harsh up the scene)  before embarking on some globe-trotting.  Anyway, that's all I know of Hollingshead's story; let's bring it back to the gruesome head-trip we started at.

                                           Bart Huges Breaking Open the Head in 1965.

Just about every adult in the world must have an acute sense at some time or another of how much fresher, richer, and more expansive were their consciousness and perceptions when they were children, how much slower time seemed to move, and how more novel and interesting everything appeared.  In fact, we devote a great deal of time and energy to trying to restore this prelapsarian vivacity of consciousness,  this condition which Huxley in The Doors of Perception called "the perceptual innocence of childhood, when the sensum was not immediately and automatically subordinated to the concept", whether it be via drugs or sex or absorption in the heightened emotional landscapes of movies and music, or anything that might puncture the comfortable numbness of adult perception.  But all these restorations are only temporary; you can't stay high forever.  During the early sixties, a Dutch librarian turned medical revolutionary named Bart Huges thought he had found the answer to this perennial  problem - and it wasn't pretty.  Trepanation is the practice of drilling a hole in the skull, normally as a surgical procedure designed to alleviate some mental or inter-cranial illness.  It is in fact one of the oldest surgical procedures for which we have archeological evidence, and it was practiced all over the world.  Huges, however, came to believe that trepanation could restore the lost vivacity and intensity of childhood perception - could in effect "cure" the debilitating illness of adulthood - by increasing the flow of blood in the brain.  He was so convinced of his thesis that he performed the operation on himself, eventually unveiling the results to a crowd of hip cats at an art happening in Amsterdam in January of 1965.  According to John Michell in Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions:  "Babies are born with skulls unsealed, and it is not until one is an adult that the bony carapace is formed which completely encloses the membranes surrounding the brain and inhibits their pulsations in repsonse to heart-beats. In consequence, the adult loses touch with the dreams, imagination and intense perceptions of the child. His mental balance becomes upset by egoism and neuroses. To cure these problems, first in himself and then for the whole world, Dr Huges returned his cranium to something like the condition of infancy by cutting out a small disc of bone with an electric drill. Experiencing immediate beneficial effects from this operation, he began preaching to anyone who would listen to the doctrine of trepanation. By liberating his brain from its total imprisonment in his skull, he claimed to have restored its pulsations, increased the volume of blood in it and acquired a more complete, satisfying state of consciousness than grown-up people normally enjoy".

Huges, then, believed himself to be a self-mutanted child of the New Aeon; as he wrote in his manifesto Homo Sapiens Correctus, "Gravity is the enemy - the adult is its victim - society is its disease...I think that no construction of adults can work optimally unless each adult in the construction has been trepanned."  Needless to say, trepanning didn't quite take off with the same intensity as Leary's proselytizing on LSD's behalf - indeed the first response of the Dutch authorities to Homo Sapiens Correctus was to place Huges in a mental hospital.  But Huges did find a disciple in the form of Joey Mellen, who would become one of Hollingshead's main partners in the World Psychedelic Center.  Mellen first met Huges in Ibiza, and became so impressed by the trepanning philosophy that he eventually secured the fiances to bring Huges to London and set him up in a Chelsea flat.  (Where did these cats get all the bread for setting people up in flats from?)  Polanski and Clapton weren't lining up like they had been for Hollingshead's grapes, and a Sunday newspaper rather uncharitably suggested THIS DANGEROUS IDIOT SHOULD BE THROWN OUT.  Nevertheless, Mellen eventually followed in the footsteps of his master.  Unable to persuade any medical professional to perform the operation, he was forced to do it himself.  After a couple of grisly botched attempts - undertaken while under the influence of LSD....YIKES - Mellen finally performed the operation successfully.  (His partner Amanda Feilding followed him in 1970 in the circumstances described above.)  Joey Mellen documented his experiences in a kind of Doors of Perception for the drill-bit set called Bore Hole; its first line is up there with Call me Ismael:  "This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my skull to get permanently high."

. “Gravity is the enemy. The adult is its victim – society is its disease…I think that no construction of adults can work optimally unless each adult in the construction is trepanned. - See more at: http://www.madscientistblog.ca/mad-scientist-6-bart-huges/#sthash.f52z9n27.dpuf

Well, that's tonight's episode.  Are Joey Mellen and Amanda Feilding courageous mutants, harbingers of a new, free-floating and permanently childlike consciousness?  Or just suggestible people who followed the yearnings of a strange time for transcendence from the tedium of the adult world to a gruesome and insane extreme?  Whatever the answer, don't try any of this at home - except maybe mayo.

Secret London: LSD Experiments at the World Psychedelic Center.

The People with Holes in their Heads by John Michell.

Mad Scientist 6: Bart Huges.

LSD: LETTWIN V. LEARY (MIT, 1967)

On May 3rd, 1967, Timothy Leary, in the height of his Marshall McLuhan-coached High Priest phase, debated psychiatrist and neurosurgeon Dr. Jerome Lettvin in MIT.  The debate was televised by WGBH -TV, gaining some notoriety for Lettvin's use of the word "Bullshit!"  Leary's performance is sometimes inspiring and incisive, and sometimes glib and rambling; Lettvin is certainly an energetic critic of Leary's hedonistic gospel.  A very entertaining cultural artifact of its time:

Tim Leary Wants to Turn On William F Buckley.

Unsurprisingly, the gentleman is not for Turning On (or is he?  Watch through to the end):

Via dangerous minds.  

"Well, Dr Leary, I find your product boring."

"He's not making this up. It's from the Tibetan Book of the Damned."



Meanwhile, at roughly the same time, in a mansion at Millbrook, New York, in the more or less real world...

"The long telephone wire of history, which goes back 2 billion years, and which is buried somewhere inside your brain and mine...."

Lurking outside the Millbrook estate hoping to bust Leary was an FBI agent called G Gordan Liddy, who would later supervise the break-in and wiretapping of the Democratic National Commitee headquarters in the Watergate Complex, and make guest acting appearances in various TV shows, including Airwolf, Perry Mason, and Miami Vice.

"It is primo, radical, bitchin' trip.."


It's a strange world



Kosmische Musik: Timothy Leary, Brian Barritt, Ash Ra Tempel, and the Making of Seven-Up.

On September the 12^th 1970, Timothy Leary escaped from San Luis Obispo minimum security prison, in one of the most colourful and scarcely believable episodes in his remarkable biography. In January of that year, he had been sentenced to twenty years in prison for two relatively minor drug charges. Given a psych test in order to assign a suitable location and occupation while incarcerated, Leary answered the questions in such a way as to suggest that he was a low-risk, docile conformist who loved forestry and gardening. Leary could manipulate the test so easily because he had played a crucial role in designing it himself some years earlier. This fact in itself is telling of the extraordinary trajectory of Leary’s life in the sixties – how he had transformed himself in a few short, helter-skelter years from a respected Harvard lecturer to a charismatic Pied Piper of the counter-culture whom Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America.”

It was via that skilful manipulation of his psychological profile that Leary found himself in the gardens of the California Men’s Colony West at San Luis Obispo. On the night of the 12^th, the then fifty year old former Harvard lecturer climbed a tree in the exercise yard, jumped from there to the roof of the cellblock, and from the roof clambered across a telephone wire to freedom, while an unwitting patrol car passed underneath. A few days later, Leary (disguised under a bald wig) and his wife Rosemary Woodruff were flying to Algiers with false passports. Their escape out of the country had been masterminded by the Weather Underground, and funded by a group of LSD distributers and connoisseurs from Orange County who called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. You couldn’t make it up.

In Algiers, Leary sought the patronage of another revolutionary and fugitive from the US penal system. The writer, activist, and Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver had fled a charge of attempted murder to Cuba, and from there established a small Black Panther “government in exile” in Algiers. However, Tim and Rosemary’s time with the Panthers was tempestuous; Cleaver regarded Leary’s espousal of drug use as inimical to the revolutionary struggle, and eventually placed the Leary’s under “revolutionary arrest”. This ideological disagreement between Leary and Cleaver is captured in this fascinating short piece of film from that period:

From Algiers, the Leary’s next port of call was Switzerland, the birthplace of LSD. Here they were initially supported, and eventually incarcerated once again, by an extravagant arms dealer called Michel Hauchard. Hauchard rather nobly claimed that it was his “obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers”, but it is suspected that his real motivation lay in the possibility of a lucrative film deal. Eventually, however, Leary did find a certain brief oasis of stability in Switzerland; a stability relative, of course, to the general hedonistic chaos that he had eagerly courted since turning his back on the Establishment in the sixties. Rosemary, perhaps unsurprisingly, divorced him, but he had sold a book, Confessions of a Hope Fiend, to Bantam and brought a yellow Porsche with the proceeds. According to a 1972 Oz interview, Leary found himself initiated into the upper echelons of decadent and enlightened Swiss society: “In Europe we have been contacted by several elitist, aristocratic, thoughtfully decadent drug taking groups of older people, who follow traditions which trace back through French poets, German mystics, elegant hashishines, silk-satin opium adepts. It’s a deep, wise old continent, and quite together at the moment.” Leary was also contacted at this time by a representative of a burgeoning and culturally prescient musical scene that had emerged in Europe: the Kosmische (Cosmic) Musik scene in Germany.

While popular British and American rock music of the seventies was laying the foundations for heavy metal and the eventual self-parodic heat-death of 80s poodle rock, something altogether more futuristic and strange was happening in Germany. Beyond their respective cult followings at home, and a small but feverish underground audience in Britain, the significance of the various bands that would come to be labelled “krautrock” was little understood or appreciated at the time. In the twenty first century, 70s German experimental rock would be lionised and even fetishized to an extreme degree by musical connoisseurs with an increasingly vast and atomised store to draw from. As such, it was apt that Leary, who always seemed peculiarly ahead of the curve, should have wandered briefly into the orbit of this musical future in the making, more or less by accident. Ash Ra Tempel were working on their third record in 1972, and wanted very much to collaborate with Alan Ginsberg; however Ginsberg was nowhere to be found. When they discovered that Timothy Leary was in Europe, they decided that he would make a perfect Ginsberg-substitute. Leary, meanwhile, suffering from writer’s block, had enlisted the creative assistance of counter-culture writer and psychedelic adventurer Brian Barritt:

Leary and Barritt were a marriage made in some kind of heaven. Prior to working with Ash Ra Tempel, they had channelled the spectres of Alesister Crowley’s notorious Enochian encounter in the Algerian desert, dabbled in heroin, allegedly established an occasional telepathic rapport, and developed a complex theoretical taxonomy of human consciousness which came to be known as the eight circuit model of consciousness. The eight circuit model is a little too involved to get into here, but it should suffice to say that the eight circuits are latent or potential mental states or modalities contained in human consciousness. The initial four, or larval circuits, are concerned with basic survival instincts and desires for egotistical satisfaction; the larval circuits are rooted in terrestrial evolution. The concluding four, or stellar circuits, are concerned with mystical, higher, integrative states of awareness and psychedelic experience; they are perhaps evolved specifically for future generations that will successfully migrate off-world to explore cosmic space. Barritt and Leary suggested to Ash Ra Tempel that they make the proposed album a kind of aural modelling of the ascent upwards through the eight circuit model of consciousness. The result was Seven Up, a record named after a bottle of the innocuous beverage that Leary’s son in law had passed around to the band, without informing them that it was spiked with potent crystal acid. The making of the record looks like it was the kind of gas that most mere mortals could barely withstand:

You can listen to the whole record below. The opening sections, composed of ragged blues work-outs fading in and out of spacy washes of synth, don’t immediately inspire confidence, but it’s worth toughing it out. The concluding ten minutes are a gorgeous catapult into the higher reaches of the lysergic empyrean. Shortly before his death, Leary commented to Brian Barritt regarding their involvement in kosmiche music, “Well, Brian, we landed in the right place at the right time….”, a sentiment that could easily have served as an epitaph for the whole of his incorrigible adventure in the culture of the twentieth century.

http://www.higgs1.demon.co.uk/barritt/mojo.htm