The Generalist: INSIDE DOPE: MICHAEL HOLLINGSHEAD LSD'S COSMIC COURIER

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

INSIDE DOPE: MICHAEL HOLLINGSHEAD LSD'S COSMIC COURIER

Over recent years there has been a string of titles that add a new richness and new narratives to both the histories of 1960s/70s culture and psychedelics. Several of these have been published by Strange Attractor and have been reviewed on this blog. This latest title is an intriguing addition.

'Divine Rascal: On the Trail of LSD's Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead' by Andy Roberts is a valuable follow-on to his excellent 'Albion Dreaming: A Popular History of LSD in Britain' which The Generalist reviewed in October 2008.

Up until this book, Michael Hollingshead had been a mysterious enigma who was known mainly as the man who had a glass jar of fresh LSD mixed with icing sugar which he spoonfed to leading figures in the US and UK counterculture and many others. Only Stanley Owsley, The Dead's favourite chemist, creator of Orange Sunshine, ranks as a similar high-level name check.

Hollingshead wrote his own autobiography 'The Man Who Turned On The World' which is highly unreliable but entertaining. Here's a short extract:

Eagerly I unwrapped the package. The acid was in a small dark jar marked 'Lot Number H-00047', and in appearance looked a bit like malted milk powder. My problem was how to convert the loose powder into a more manageable form. One gram would make 5000 individual doses and I was obviously going to need to measure it out in some way. I decided to randomise it by mixing it into a stiff paste made from icing sugar.
I cleared the kitchen table and set to work. First I poured some distilled water into a bowl, and then mixed in the LSD. When all the acid had dissolved I added confectioner's sugar until the mixture was a thick paste. I then transferred my 'divine confection', spoon by laborious spoon, into a sixteen-ounce mayonnaise jar, and, by what magical alchemic process, the stuff measured exactly 5000 spoonfuls ! In other words, one teaspoon of the stuff ought to contain 200 gamma (millionths of a gram), which would be sufficient for an eight-to ten-hour session, and a pretty intense one at that.

Andy Roberts' biography is the first attempt to bring together the scattered letters, the remembrances of family and friends with existing print and photographic evidence. Unable to stay in one place for too long, MH flew frequently in search of the next adventure, Roberts' intro summarises these journeys and different stages of his strange life in this extract from his Introduction:

Michael Hollingshead wasn't even his real name. So, who was Michael Hollingshead? This lack of information, and the mystery which accompanied it, piqued my curiosity about his life before and after his fateful meeting with Tim Leary.

As I dug deeper into the arcane reaches of psychedelic history, I found references to Hollingshead everywhere, Zelig-like, stalking the landscapes of western psychedelic culture's most iconic events.

Look back to 1961 and there he is in Boston, Massachusetts, an enthusiastic catalyst for Leary's lysergic initiation and ascension to fame and guru-status.

In 1962 you'll find him assisting with the legendary Harvard-Concord prison and Marsh Chapel psilocybin experiments, and in 1963 heavily involved with the little known but highly influential Agora Scientific Trust.

In 1964, Hollingshead is trying to stage an LSD exhibition at the World's Fair in New York while simultaneously debating the founding of Sigma with beat poet and author Alex Trocchi, before collaborating with Leary again in LSD fuelled mischief at the infamous Millbrook mansion.

In 1965 Hollingshead returned to Britain, roaming swinging London like a sinister Austin Powers; making everything psychedelic baby by turning on the hip, the rich and the famous, whether they wanted it or not.

If you were in prison during the 1966 and '67 Summers of Love, you might have heard Hollingshead tell how he gave LSD to a Russian spy or how trepanation was the new method of consciousness change.

In 1968 you'd find Hollingshead hanging out with the fabled Brotherhood of Eternal Love in the mountains and beaches of California, before flying to Kathmandu in 1969 to cause ripples on the hippie trail and start a psychedelic poetry magazine.

Fast forward eighteen months and he's back in Britain, founding a hippie commune on a Scottish island with the aid of Franciscan monks before in 1972 creating the world's first multi-media predictive art installation in Edinburgh.