Tripping out from San Francisco

Abstract

A he first night of the San Francisco Trips Festival at Long- shoremen's Hall in San Francisco coincided with the $3.50 dinner of the Northern California Cartoonists at Caesar's across the street, an event often decorated by such artists as the creators ofCharlie Brown, Steve Canyon, and Dennis the Menace. Thought: perhaps the hearty Italian dinner would ballast me against the onslaughts of the several rock-and-roll groups from around San Francisco, now gathered under one roof to present an audience-experienced psychedelic reaction without the use ofdrugs but with strobe lights, girls nude and body- colored, an Indian tepee, and other surrogates. I could meet a big or two, duck the after-dinner talks, and walk across the street. Regretta- bly, the walk was too late. The Festival was a sell-out—a thousand turned away that night, with an attendance of ten thousand on three nights, 21-23January 1966, reported and commented on in the news- papers for a week. ' So I missed that seminal gathering ofthe so-called tribes, that happening.2 It was the event that signaled the incursion of the hippies into San Francisco, and projected a term with multiple connotations into the national vocabulary. Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, synthesized LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) while seeking something else, an occasional hap- pening in science, though hardly serendipitous.3 Having accidentally inhaled or absorbed the chemical through the skin, Hofmann experi- enced hallucinations. A few days later he ingested what he thought was a minute amount of the substance. While bicycling home he found Basel distorted and on this first trip suffered the delusion that he had left his body and was hovering nearby. Hofmann's report on this effect set off research and experimentation around the globe. (From American Speech, 56 (Summer 1981), 98-102. Reprinted with the kind