The horrific $50k acid trip behind The Grateful Dead’s ‘Black Peter’
Robert Hunter was not afraid of death; he experienced it a thousand times over. The American musician composed the lyrics to many of The Grateful Dead’s most successful songs and played an essential role in curating the band’s mythos, one that saw the psychedelic rock outfit earn hordes of dedicated fans, or ‘deadheads’. One such song was ‘Black Peter’ – written for the band’s 1970 album Workingman’s Dead.
After playing in various Dixieland jazz and folk groups in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Hunter volunteered to participate in a Stanford University experiment run by the CIA – although he didn’t know it was a government programme at the time. He was given doses of mescaline, psilocybin and LSD well before the latter had entered the mainstream drug market. On taking the drugs, his writing immediately improved. Importantly, he was able to use that writing to capture the feeling of being locked in an altered state of consciousness: “By my faith, if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to be insane,” he once wrote.
Sadly, the drug trials also led to a damaging fondness for amphetamines. Perhaps to be closer to the object of his obsession, Hunter decided to leave California and settle in New Mexico, where he began writing song lyrics. He sent songs like ‘China Cat Sunflower’ and ‘Alligator’ to Jerry Garcia, who was so impressed he invited Hunter to come to San Fransisco and join his fledgling group, The Grateful Dead. In this new context, Hunter’s frantic evocations of altered states came to reflect the madness of a country in the midst of a cultural revolution: “Wake me up, I’m fever dreaming,” Garcia sings in ‘Alligator’, “And now I lose control, I’m fever dreaming /Shake it out, it’s just what I’m feeling / And now I take control, I’m fever dreaming.”
By 1969, The Dead were practically synonymous with the liberal drug culture of the hippie era. In the June of that year, Robert Hunter and the gang were given a glass of apple juice laced with “probably a full gram of crystal LSD … worth perhaps $50,000.” The intense trip that followed would completely reinvigorate Foster’s understanding of death and influence his subsequent lyrics for ‘Black Peter’. Bassist Phil Lesh would later recall tasting the LSD in the juice after a single sip: “I wish you could be where I am right now—it’s so beautiful,” he told drummer Mickey Hart, “but I couldn’t possibly play music now. I don’t even know what music is.” Still, there was a job to do, so the band played anyway.
You might think you’ve been high. But you’ve never been as high as The Grateful Dead were during that performance. Hunter hallucinated blood pouring from Janis Joplin’s open mouth. He experienced the deaths of JFK, Abraham Lincoln and countless other assassinations in an infinite chain. He, himself, died countless times. His soul left his body over and over again – as if death were a beach onto which his entire being was gently lapping. The experience saw Foster come face to face with death. It sounds terrifying, but he seems to have found great comfort in the meeting.
In ‘Black Peter’, Hunter writes, “All of my friends come to see me last night
I was laying in my bed and dying / Annie Bonneau from St. Angel / Say the weather down here so fine.” Here Black Peter’s bed is also a stage. His friends have gathered to watch him die. In this moment of passing, he is a performer, and obviously, he’s a little embarrassed by that. But soon enough, all human frailties cease to matter. “Just then the wind came squalling through the dark / But who can the weather command,” he asks, allowing himself to be embraced by something eternal, something even death can only quench for a single season: the earth itself.
