In the movie “The Third Man” Harry Lime, the character played by Orson Welles, famously says: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Well, apart from the fact that democracy and peace are not so bad to have, there is so much factually wrong here. For a starter, the cuckoo clock is a German invention, not a Swiss one. Also, the Swiss were a major military power during the time of the Borgias, which is why Pope Julius II asked the Swiss in 1505 for a permanent corps of Swiss Guards, which the Swiss still provide today. But more importantly, Switzerland has made some pretty important contributions to the world, even to Rock’n’Roll: the electric guitar and LSD.
Let’s start with the electric guitar. During the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 1930s, guitarists faced the problem that guitars were not loud enough in a Jazz ensemble or orchestra. Attempts to use microphones were not very successful, because such a setup is prone to microphone feedback. So in the mid-1920s in Los Angeles, a guitar player named George D. Beauchamp set out on a quest to make the guitar louder. He first cooperated with an instrument builder named John Dopyera, and they invented the resonator guitar. The fabrication of the guitar’s nickel silver bodies was outsourced to an engineer named Adolph Rickenbacker (1887-1976). Rickenbacker was born in Basel, Switzerland, as Adolph Rickenbacher, and he had moved to the United States in 1891.
Although the resonator guitar was louder than a normal guitar, Beauchamp was not satisfied. The crucial insight that led to the invention of the electric guitar was his realization that instead of trying to amplify the vibrations of the body of the guitar, he could amplify the vibration of the strings directly. This he achieved with an electromagnetic pickup and guitar strings made of steel instead of intestine, silk or nylon. The vibrations of the steel strings cause fluctuations in the magnetic field created by the pickup, which in turn generates an electric signal than can be amplified. With this innovation, Beauchamp and Rickenbacker founded the first company to manufacture electric guitars in 1931, calling the instruments Rickenbackers.
In the late 1950s Ricky Nelson and his band, which included the exceptional guitarist James Burton, promoted Rickenbacker guitars. But the big success came in the 1960s with the Beatles playing Rickenbackers. John Lennon had started playing a Rickenbacker already during their Hamburg days in 1960, and George Harrison followed in 1963, the same year he also got Rickenbacker’s new electric twelve strings guitar. Rickenbacker didn’t invent the electric twelve strings guitar, but improved it by reversing the stringing (lower string first), which made it easier to play. In 1964 Paul McCartney also exchanged his Hofner bass for a Rickenbacker bass.
Influenced by the Beatles, Rickenbacker guitars became the choice for many musicians during the 1960s. Byrds’ guitarist James Roger McGuinn bought a Rickenbacker electric twelve string after having seen George Harrison play one. It became a trademark sound of the Byrds. Pete Townshend of the Who drew attention to his Rickenbacker guitars not only by playing them but by destroying them on stage. According to Townshend, the fact that he was smashing up the most expensive guitar available in London shops during the early 1960s only added to the theatrical effect. This act was only surpassed by Jimmy Hendrix, who not only raised the bar on rock-guitar virtuosity but also by setting his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 (even though he used a cheaper Fender Stratocaster). The iconic picture of Hendrix kneeling in front of his burning guitar went around the world, and Monterey marked the breakthrough of Psychedelic Rock into mainstream popular culture.
Psychedelic Rock, or Acid Rock, is the name given to rock music inspired and influenced by perception-altering hallucinogenic drugs, notably LSD. The “Father of the Psychedelic Age” was a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann (1906-2008). Hofmann was the first to synthesize LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) in the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, in 1938, when investigating the chemical and pharmacological properties of ergot, a fungus that grows on rye. It has been suggested that ergot was the basis for Kykeon, the sacred potion consumed during the culminating ceremony in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece. Supposedly, the ritual provided initiates with a vision of the afterlife so powerful that it changed the way they saw the world and their place in it. Socrates and Plato, and basically every other important thinker and writer in antiquity was an initiate of the Mysteries.
LSD was the twenty-fifth in a series of ergot derivatives that Hofmann synthesized. But given that tests with laboratory animals didn’t provide any interesting results, scientists at Sandoz lost interest in the drug. That changed on a Friday afternoon on April 16, 1943, when Albert Hofmann accidentally absorbed a small dose through his fingertips and thus became the first person to experience an LSD trip. In his journal, he specifically noted the extraordinary aesthetic experience: “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” In the interest of science, he decided to experiment on himself, and on April 19, he thus experienced a second trip while riding home on his bicycle. This became the first “bad LSD trip”, at least until he was at home and could relax under the supervision of a Doctor he called. To commemorate Albert Hofmann’s bicycle ride, some people celebrate today, April 19, as “Bicycle Day.”
Amazed by the fact that such tiny amounts of LSD could have such large effects, Sandoz began to investigate LSD. The first systematic investigation of the effects of LSD on human beings was carried out at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Zurich. Werner Stoll, the son of Sandoz president Arthur Stoll, published the results in the Swiss Archive of Neurology and Psychiatry in 1947. In 1949, research psychiatrist Max Rinkel requested a supply of LSD from Sandoz and became thus the first person to bring LSD to the US. He gave a sample to his partner Robert Hyde, who in the interest of science experienced the first LSD trip in the Western Hemisphere. Rinkel and Hyde then tested the drug on one hundred volunteers at the Boston Psychopathic Institute, a clinic affiliated with Harvard University, and reported their findings in May 1950 at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. According to Rinkel and Hyde, LSD produced a “transitory psychotic disturbance” in patients, providing the possibility to study mental disorders in a controlled experimental setting. These findings aroused the interest not only of researchers but also of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The CIA and its predecessor institution had been looking for ways to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means at least since the early 1940s. In particular, the CIA was looking for a mind control drug that could be used to program a person to do things, or cause a person give up secrets during an interrogation. They had already experimented with marijuana, cocaine and heroin. What made LSD so interesting was that only miniscule amounts were required, and that the drug was colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and therefore easily concealed in food and beverage. In the interest of national security, CIA agents started to do a lot of self-experimentation. They tripped alone and in groups, and also slipped LSD into each other’s drinks to see what happened to unsuspecting victims. The CIA also had CIA trainee volunteers pass acid tests about a decade before Kesey started doing his own acid tests (see below), but they did it to screen personnel for “anxiety proneness”.
The US Army, too, got interested in LSD, particularly as a potential weapon to incapacitate a force entrenched in a city or in difficult terrain. To determine how well soldiers would fare while high on acid, military units were given LSD and asked to perform operational exercises. Concerned that LSD might be used covertly against US units, Chemical Corps officers were required to familiarize themselves with the effects of LSD. So in the interest of national security, officers …. you get the picture.
But already in the 1950s there were also LSD proponents who praised its potential benefits. A young British psychiatrist named Humphry Osmond reported positive results with LSD as a cure for alcoholism. It was also Osmond who in 1956 suggested the more neutral term “psychedelic” to describe the effects of LSD. The British novelist Aldous Huxley undertook self-experiments under the supervision of Osmond, first with mescaline and then with LSD. His favorable description of the experience in “The Doors of Perception” and “Heaven and Hell” brought LSD to the attention of the intellectual class.
In the late 1950s, LSD gained popularity in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, as psychiatrists started to use it in psychotherapy. Movie star Cary Grant’s confession in a magazine that he is an LSD user together with his claim that it made him more attractive to younger woman must have further increased its popularity. And for psychiatrists, who could get LSD from Sandoz without a charge, the therapy was profitable. In the meantime at Harvard University, psychologist Timothy Leary – whom President Nixon would later describe as the most dangerous man in America – was handing out psychedelic drugs to students and faculty as a tool for expanding consciousness. At the University of California Irvine psychiatrist Oscar Janiger began studying LSD and creativity. Following the cue that LSD caused vivid aesthetic perceptions, he conducted experiments with painters.
In music, LSD made its presence felt relatively late. But once it did, it did so with great impact and it not only reshaped music forever, it turned music into a social movement, reshaping society in the process. In 1965, the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, started to have regular psychedelic happenings with the Charlatans as the house band. These events became the model for the San Francisco Bay area, where a group called Family Dog began organizing psychedelic dances, turning San Francisco into the Acid capital of the world. Around the same time, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took the concept on the road, travelling the country in a painted school bus and organizing psychedelic events called “acid tests”, with the Grateful Dead as the “house band.” Tom Wolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” gives an account of these events.
In London, weekly psychedelic events called the Spontaneous Underground with Pink Floyd as the house band started in January 1966. But it was the Beatles who became the Apostles of LSD, introducing psychedelia into the mainstream. LSD heavily influenced their 1966 album “Revolver,” and the Beatles made no attempt to hide it. This is especially true for the song “Tomorrow Never Knows,” with its notable studio effects and lyrics adapted from Timothy Leary’s book “The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.” The following year, Psychedelic Rock reached its climax during Summer of Love in 1967, with the Beatles’ releasing in June their “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album and telling the world the same month in the first-ever global television broadcast via satellite out of Abbey Road studio in London that “All You Need Is Love.”
At the same time, Oswley Stanley in San Francisco was generously supplying the Love Generation with self-manfactures LSD, which was even purer than that produced by Sandoz. His different brands of pills became names of rock bands and rock songs: Blue Cheer, White Lightening, Purple Haze, and the most widely disseminated Orange Sunshine. As always, however, subculture and idealism do not scale well. With the breakthrough into mainstream came the problems. The Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco became a Psychedelic Disneyland, attracting tourist tours and Weekend-Hippies. Concerned about the wide, uncontrolled use of LSD and its association with counter-culture, LSD became Public Enemy Number One and was made illegal around the world. To this day LSD remains one of the most stigmatized and legally restricted drugs, even for research.
With the counter-culture becoming mainstream the difference between the inward oriented camp who wanted to use LSD to change their consciousness, the political camp who wanted to use LSD to change the system, and the party camp who just wanted to use LSD to have fun became ever more apparent. The differences were visible at the Woodstock music festival in August 1969. While the political camp tore down a portion of the wire fence to protest against “hippie capitalism,” turning the festival into a free festival, Pete Townshend of the Who bonked Abbie Hoffman over the head with his guitar when Hoffman ran the stage during their show to deliver a political speech. Later the same year at the free rock concert in Altamont, California, real violence broke out while the Rolling Stones performed and four people died.
In recent years there has been a revival of research interest in LSD, and a number of researchers and institutions have called for a relaxation of the tight restrictions. Most recent neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) confirm Hofmann’s hypothesis that the psychic effect of LSD is not a result of toxicity but rather associated with alterations in functional brain connectivity. Albert Hofmann retained his belief in LSD’s therapeutic benefits up to his death at the age of 102. At a symposium marking his centenary in Basel, Hofmann told the crowd he last took LSD at the age of 97!
Literature:
- Hofmann, Albert (1979). LSD: My problem child.
- Lee, Martin A. and Bruce Shlain (1994). Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond.
- Rodriguez, Robert (2012). Revolver: How the Beatles Re-Imagined Rock ‘n’ Roll.
- Smith, Richard (1987). Rickenbacker: The History of the Rickenbacker Guitar.
- Tolinski, Brad. and Alan Di Perna (2016). Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound, and Revolution of the Electric Guitar