FIFTY years ago, Jan. 21-23, 1966: Grateful Dead, Big Brother headline Haight "Trips Festival"

[Miles Archer]

On Jan. 21-23, 1966, the Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco was the site of the Trips Festival. The event, which featured performances by the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company, is widely credited with being the start of the hippie counterculture that would emerge within the next year.

The Trips Festival was the brainchild of author Ken Kesey, who was conducting “acid tests” — wild parties in the Bay Area that featured music, dancing, theater, strobe lights, Day-Glo paint and free access to LSD, which was legal at the time. He and writer Stewart Brand decided to take it to the next level and spread out the acid tests over three days. More than 6,000 people filled the hall.

Promoter Bill Graham helped organize the event, billed as a “new medium of communication & entertainment” that promised “a JUBILANT occasion where the audience PARTICIPATES because it’s more fun to do so than not.”

The acid test was held on Saturday, Jan. 22, featuring punch spiked with LSD. Tom Wolfe described the scene in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “Lights and movies sweeping around the hall; five movie projectors going and God knows how many light machines, interferrometrics, the intergalactic science-fiction seas all over the walls, loudspeakers studding the hall all the way around like flaming chandeliers, strobes exploding, black lights with Day-Glo objects under them and Day-Glo paint to play with, street lights at every entrance flashing red and yellow, two bands, the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company and a troop of weird girls in leotards leaping around the edges blowing dog whistles.”

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/trips-festival/

[CanSocDem]

1. That's a great video.

K & R


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