like if you go from here to there, youre going to find Eureka. It only showed you that youre on the road that you found this rhythm and this zone, which is what made musical invention possible.The Acid Tests of the early sixties had a tremendous influence on the Grateful Dead. The initial experiments had been launched by the Central Intelligence Agency, which began to investigate mind-altering drugs and parapsychology in 1953 under the program called MK-ULTRA. MK-ULTRA had its roots in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) wartime fascination with so-called truth telling drugs like mescaline, Scopolamine, and liquid marijuana. The first governments Acid Tests were carried out on workers in the Manhattan Project new mind control program. Later, MK-ULTRA was mainly conducted at prisons and mental hospitals.By 1959-1960, the CIA had started farming its research out to VA hospitals and Army Chemical Corps. In university cities such as Palo Alto and Boston, volunteering for an LSD trip became the hip thing to do. These explorations took place weekly sensations where they were paid between twenty and seventy-five dollars a day more each time to keep you coming back, says band member Robert Hunter, who signed up to test drive a batch of what the government called psychotomimetic [madness-mimicking] drugs. During one session, tears had poured out of his eyes, and the clinician asked why he was crying. Im not crying, Hunter said. Im in another dimension. Im inhabiting the body of a great green Buddha and theres a pool that is flowing out of my eyes.The constant abuse of drugs led to some high tension between band members in the late sixties and early seventies. Weirs, whose tuning and timing were off, was doing too much acid in Jerrys view. Pigpen was also falling behind. He was drinking more and rehearsing less, and visibly struggling with the huge Hammond organ that had replaced the carry on keyboard that he used to play. Neither musician was...
