Albion Dreaming (33 page)

The poster for Windsor 1974 had tantalizingly advertised the presence of “psychedelicatessens”. As the event unfolded, it was clear that though there were no psychedelicatessens there was a great deal of LSD.

Release set up a “bad trip” tent and prepared themselves for the inevitable onslaught of the first acid casualties. One of the staff
there wrote: “A lot of us were running on natural speed by now and the first wave of heavy trippers inundated us fairly early. An inordinate number of them seemed to be ‘wankers’ i.e. sexually repressed individuals liberated in a bizarre kind of way by the acid.”
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Windsor veteran Allan Staithes recalls, “there was a vast amount of acid at Windsor in 1974. Everyone was talking about it and it was obvious it was the focus of the festival. Around lunchtime on the Saturday a guy came to our tents and asked if we wanted to score any acid. We did. He produced a bottle containing tiny brown microdots at 50p each. It was the strongest acid we had yet encountered and the afternoon dissolved in a blur of wild dancing and celebration. Luckily we met up with some experienced acidheads from Wrexham who looked after us. We thought we were experienced but the acid at Windsor 74 was something else! It wasn’t a bad trip but it was powerful, disorienting and shook me to the core of my being.”
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The effects of the extremely strong LSD took its toll on the first day at Windsor. The Release report continues: “By late afternoon the area around the Release ambulance was reminiscent of a scene by Hieronymus Bosch. Yea, there was lamentation, weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Those unprepared for the psychic and spiritual upheaval LSD caused were unable to keep their thoughts to themselves and, as the Release report dryly notes: “Worst of all were the juvenile philosophers who bellowed tedious cosmic observations about the state of the universe.”
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The festival newsletter published on the Sunday concurred on the strength of LSD available, “WARNING brown acid is very strong don’t drop more than one tab.”

Though many people took LSD during the day, the evening at free festivals was the optimum time to take acid. Staithes remembers a notice board appearing at Windsor each day with suggested “dropping times”, the time of day at which LSD was best taken to enjoy the bands later in the evening. As the shadows lengthened, the real weirdness began.

To enhance the LSD experience several light shows had sprung up in Britain. They projected heated oil slides, films, cartoons and
images of spirituality and nature on screens behind the stage. Even ordinary light sources could be a source of fascination for the LSD user and so these specially designed light shows became a valued contribution to any free festival as a backdrop to the live music.

The most celebrated of the British light shows was John Andrews’ Acidica, a professional set up using up to thirty projectors. As the name suggests, the Acidica crew were well aware that the drug of choice at free festivals was LSD. Being LSD users themselves, they knew exactly how to tailor the light show for best effect: “We cater in the main for trippers. When we started we’d been every heavily into acid – the whole psychedelic thing and I knew that hints rather than specific designs would prompt a reaction from our audience. Most of our material is purposely ambiguous to allow individual interpretation of what we’re up to. Now this is interesting because most people get off, but others freak out, it all boils down to where their heads are at – cos we’re just putting up patterns!”
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Nigel Ayers, who as a teenager spent the summer of 1974 travelling round the free festivals, remembered LSD being given away in 1974 at Windsor when he was “... nearly crushed in the handout of hundreds of tabs of free acid in the final Windsor ... There was a whip-round for a few days for ‘free dope and acid’, but only the acid materialised. Distribution wasn’t from the stage but the stage probably announced it. Maybe six to ten people gave it out, scattered around the periphery under cover of darkness. The tabs were sandwiched in long strips of sellotape, which the distributor was biting off into individual tabs as he handed them out. There were loads and loads but a hell of a scrum to get them.”
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Though the intent behind the distribution of free LSD may have been philanthropic and in keeping with the free festival ethos, the consequences of giving out quantities of strong LSD were ill-considered. Most of those who clamoured for the drug had already been at the festival for a few days, not eating or drinking enough and exhausted through lack of sleep and cumulative drug use. This combination of physiological and environmental factors intensified the LSD experience and, stuck in a field with minimal
comforts and facilities; there was no way of moderating the drug’s effects. This set of circumstances – the setting of an LSD trip – paradoxically, strengthened the sense of community and created a “Dunkirk spirit” atmosphere. Friends helped each other through difficult trips and older, more experienced LSD users were on hand if needed.

Not all the LSD dealers were particularly concerned about the effect LSD could have on the young and inexperienced user. For instance, Ayres saw one LSD dealer’s tent at Windsor painted with: “I WANT TO DISTROY YOUR BRAIN CELLS” [sic]. Even among the largely mystically inclined free festival attendees there was a hard core who were just there to party and to get as intoxicated on whatever they could, with no thought for the consequences. It was this attitude, uncontested by the majority, which eventually brought the free festivals to the point of extinction and gave the authorities a good excuse to hound the counter culture.

There was also a hard core of free festival attendees for whom LSD was an essential tool in the goal of creating a society run on anarchist principles. Squatting, drug laws, the back to the land movement and a certainty that an alternate lifestyle could supersede the status quo were principles held dear by thousands. Though few did very much about it, their intent was certainly there, summed up in the Windsor newsletter
Maya
, as: “We shall celebrate with such fierce dancing the Death of your Institutions.”

Several religious sects were in evidence at most free festivals, offering friendship, advice, and free food. They were also ever-hopeful of gaining converts from the ranks of those hippies left spiritually bereft by the LSD experience. The Divine Light Mission, followers of Guru Maharaj Ji, attended Windsor in 1974. Pat Conlon was a Premie or devotee: “I did service in the bad trip tent. I got stuck with one guy for most of one day. He was really freaked and two sisters in those ugly long dresses gave him satsang [devotional speech, chants, etc.]. He ripped his clothes off and wanted to fuck them ... He was masturbating furiously and unashamedly. Being in pharmacy, I knew that he needed Thorazine but there was none to be had. I was told to give him satsang but could not bring myself to tell him as he was not in the mood for it.”
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Another Divine Light Premie who worked in the bad trip tent had this to say: “I was in and around the tent for three days. There were always at least three or four people being cared for at a time, when I was in the tent. I suppose I saw fifty to sixty people over the three days.”
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Given that the festival ran for six days, it would appear that at a rough estimate, a minimum of 120 people had LSD experiences bad enough to warrant spending time in the Divine Light bad trip tent. Factor in the Hare Krishna people, the Release ambulance, other organizations who dealt with bad trips at the festival and the many individuals who were cared for by their friends or people they had met and it’s clear that hundreds of people had problems dealing with the strength of LSD on offer at Windsor.

Windsor 1974 seems to have had more acid casualties than any other documented free festival. Set and setting, as we’ve seen, would have contributed to the situation to a certain extent. But, by all accounts, it was the sheer potency of LSD that caused the problems. This has led to speculation that it was the “super LSD” that had been developed by LSD chemist Richard Kemp, later to be arrested in the 1977 Operation Julie raids.

It is perhaps unfortunate that bad LSD experiences are the ones most often recorded in the media and in memory. For every bad LSD experience there were many more good ones; trips which changed peoples’ lives irrevocably and pointed them down their career and life path. One person who underwent such an LSD experience at Windsor was author Graham Hancock: “I took LSD once in my twenties, at the Windsor Free Festival in 1974, and had a fantastic, exciting, energizing twelve-hour trip in a parallel reality. When my normal, everyday consciousness returned – and it did so quite abruptly, like a door slamming – I felt grateful for such a wonderful experience but so much in awe of its power that I vowed never to do it again.”
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Hancock went on to become a best selling author and explorer in the field of fringe archaeology and consciousness studies. His website doesn’t record whether he took LSD again but in 2005 he reported, “Now, in my fifties I had to confront the psychic challenges of major hallucinogens again”, and has frequently taken
psychedelic compounds, such as ibogaine, used by indigenous tribes. There was no formal police presence on the actual site of the Windsor 74 festival but the roads around and leading to the site were thronged with police, on foot and in vehicles. Many festival-goers were stopped and comprehensively searched but due to police ignorance about LSD, and how easy it was to hide, very little was discovered. It turned out that the purpose for the strong police presence wasn’t primarily to find drugs; it was to ensure enough police were present to decommission the festival when the order was given. As cultural commentator, George Melly wrote after the event: “The last bastion of all that was the free festival occurred at Windsor last week and anyone rash enough to prefer to go there was at risk. Free food, free music, people peeing in bushes and whatever and poking wherever and whenever they felt like it, and on Royal ground too and without permission – there’ll be no more of that!”
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And there wasn’t. On the morning of 29 August, after more than a week of often violent confrontation on the festival’s perimeter, hundreds of police moved in. Campers were told they had ten minutes to gather their possessions and move off. Many were given much less time than that before the police brutally attacked unarmed men, women and children, trashing tents, stages and possessions. This was the first serious attempt by the authorities to damage the counter culture, but it wouldn’t be the last.

At the same time as the Windsor festival another, much lower key, event was taking place at Stonehenge. This was the first in a series of free festivals at Stonehenge which continued until 1984. Like Windsor, they were instigated by one man driven by his LSD experiences.

“Wally” was a cry heard at festivals and music gigs throughout the Seventies, often to people’s annoyance as shouts for Wally echoed around camping sites through the night. Whether taken from the name of a lost dog or a lost soul, Phil Russell took Wally as his name, adding the surname Hope, in his campaign to hold free festivals at the ancient monument.

Wally Hope has become a free festival icon and his name lives in free festival legend as a dream of what could have been. His story
is a sad tale of enthusiasm and naïvety. Wally came from a wealthy background – his legal guardian was the BBC newsreader John Snagge – and until he came into his inheritance he had a trust fund which allowed him to live as he chose. Early involvement with hippies, drugs and a group of street anarchists in London called the Dwarves embedded Wally firmly in the counter culture, but it was on a visit to Cyprus that the idea for a festival at Stonehenge was formed. There, he had a vision under the influence of LSD, a drug which he regarded as a sacrament. He saw the sun as God and he realised his mission was to reclaim the sun temple of Stonehenge from the authorities and turn it into a place of living celebration and worship.
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Wally attended the 1973 Windsor free festival but was unhappy with what he saw there. As an idealist, the idea of hippies demanding money from commercial traders clashed with his belief in the concept of “free”. Wally’s friend Tim Abbott noted: “He was disillusioned by what was already happening at the ‘People’s Free Festival’ ... As well as being a psychedelic anarchist, he had a strong traditionalist streak, and was upset that the Queen’s back garden should be littered and fouled. He had a vision that it could be done in a purer way.”
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Wally set up camp at Stonehenge in the summer of 1974, in good time for the solstice, and he and his followers occupied a site near the stones until the winter. Officials from the Department of the Environment, who came to investigate who was squatting on their land, were told that everyone there was called Wally. When asked their names by journalists or at the court proceedings to evict them from the site Wally’s followers always gave their name as Wally.

Nigel Ayers spent several weeks at “Fort Wally”, as the camp was dubbed, and was able to observe it closely. There was a hard core camp “... of thirty or so people ... There were many different motivations behind the people at the camp. Some were obviously from highly privileged backgrounds, some were minors who had run away from abusive parents, some were petty criminals and addicts, some were mentally ill, some were hardcore mystics and some were teenaged hedonists.”
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