Steely Dan, The CIA, and LSD: the strange tale of the acid anthem ‘Kid Charlemagne’
It seems very un-1960s-like to mention admin, but in 1963, the patent for LSD expired. A lot of the culture thereafter spun out from that tie-dye three years where mind-bending acid was basically legalised. It wasn’t just the hippies at it, either. The CIA, an organisation that has seemingly welcomed more well-manicured arseholes than every one of Hugh Hefner’s pool parties combined, were dabbling in its kaleidoscopic properties to no end. Somewhere amid this melee of psychedelic mania derives the Steely Dan anthem ‘Kid Charlemagne’. Be forewarned before you trip down this rabbit hole; things get fairly strange, dude.
In the opening stanza of the track, Donald Fagen sings, “On the hill, the stuff was laced with kerosene, but yours was kitchen clean.” There was only one place in the San Francisco valley where you could get acid of that Lemon Pledge purity — enter the protagonist of the song, the famed narcotics chemist Owsley Stanley: the premiere acid man of the East Coast.
Augustus Owsley Stanley III, to give him his full ludicrous name, was an American audio engineer by day and a clandestine chemist also by day, night and sometimes morning. In perhaps the most ’60s-defining tale ever put to print, Stanley became soundman for the Grateful Dead after he met the band at one of Ken Kesey’s (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) acid parties. Although calling him a soundman is also a misnomer, he basically mobilised music to the point that it could actually be played in stadiums, but you shouldn’t hold that against him.
Aside from mixing the wall of sound that blasted The Dead’s gigs into a sonic maelstrom that changed the shape of live music and assisting in the design of their now-iconic logo, Stanley was also the first known individual to casually begin manufacturing LSD en masse. That’s quite a résumé.
During his time on the acid run, it is alleged that Stanley produced at least five million doses of some of the finest wall-shifting tabs to ever grace the market. The musical Heisenberg basked in the good times of legality as he, his girlfriend Melissa Cargill, a skilled chemist and scion of the uber-wealthy Cargill-MacMillan family, and a leg-man dubbed Scully, brewed up LSD in a Californian basement. Looking back on this time, there are many questions as to why it took three years for laws to be passed against the substance—a substance that Charles Manson and many others who stepped one toke over the line dabbled into a debauched degree.
Hell, the CIA knew of its dangerous potential more than anyone, too. In 1953, the organisation began an illegal programme that experimented with the potential of using LSD and other psychoactive drugs to achieve mind control. This is not a conspiracy theory; this is all declassified truth… somehow. At the time, the CIA bought the entire world’s supply of LSD for $240,000. They had so much of it that they gave 297mg of it to Tusko, a three-tonne Asian bull elephant. Within five minutes, the poor beast had shit itself and died.
But this beleaguered animal wasn’t the only testing subject. With copious acid to administer, the CIA soon looked to enlist volunteers for testing. Robert Hunter, who would go on to be the Grateful Dead’s chief lyricist, was one of the first to sign up.
“I couldn’t figure out why they were paying me good money to take these psychedelics,” Hunter told Reuters when reflecting on his involvement in MK-ultra. “At first, they gave me LSD, then the next week, I think it was mescaline, the next week it was psilocybin, and the fourth week it was all three at once.”
He explains that the aim of this psychoactive cocktail was to see “if I was more hypnotisable when I was on them than I was when I wasn’t on them. I didn’t find that to be the case. I didn’t find myself being hypnotised”. Part of the reason for this was because he was out of his gaud. He couldn’t even concentrate on what they were saying, let alone carry out some covert mission for them. So, from that standpoint, MK-ultra might have failed to achieve mind control, but it did succeed in figuring out the inverse: how to make someone lose control of their own mind.
While many acidheads in The Dead would argue otherwise and explain to you that LSD can heighten your control and bring about elevated states of consciousness, the troubling flipside of people falling off the rails and dropping out of the counterculture movement altogether proves that the inverse is just as possible. Stanley’s own life even serves as evidence as he eventually left the frontline of his strange and noble cause behind and headed over to the Australian outback—but for a time, he was at its heart, enjoying a windfall of good fortune.
What’s more, not only did he enjoy the dealer’s boon of administrative oversight, but once criminality was imposed in 1966, Stanley and Cargill simply shifted production to a lab in Denver, Colorado, and began brightening the daydreams of counterculture kids once more. Their new headquarters were stationed across the street from Denver Zoo, and tales are bountiful in the region’s subterranean realms of old acidheads staring agog at a gibbon or some other higher simian and having evolutionary epiphanies whizz into their addled minds while the funky primates looked on wondering why the hippie who just shat his pantaloons had been staring at them for hours.
Alas, the famed zoo trips are a side note that has nothing to do with Steely Dan. But the question of why the kids of the counterculture were able to freely get high on Stanley’s wicked acid supply remains a pertinent one. It has been posited by many that the answer comes from the time when Stanley was finally arrested in 1970. “You watched that high of the hippie thing descend into drug depression,” Joni Mitchell once said. “Right after Woodstock, then we went through a decade of basic apathy where my generation sucked its thumb and then just decided to be greedy and pornographic.” They dropped out in a different way—in a politically nullified way.
Woodstock was in 1969, and, in many ways, it was the last hurrah of counterculture. As Mitchell suggests, thereafter, things became commercialised, and flower power fell into the comedown of a reflective dirge. The prelapsarian dream was over; with it, acid was largely traded for less cerebral substances. But for a while it had a good run, it just perhaps embarked on one trip too many. Whether the acid-drenched demise of the anti-establishment movement had anything to do with the establishment itself tactfully turning a blind eye to dealings while routinely finding out that it wasn’t a substance to be messed with in their own experiments (i.e. giving 297mg of LSD to an elephant and almost immediately killing it) is a tinfoil point for another day.
However, one element requiring less judicious scrutiny is how many folks in Stanley’s milieu succumbed to the sad aftereffects. You can hardly find a single member of the Bay Area movement who didn’t suffer some tragic fate, or controversial circumstance or fade into strange obscurity as though whisked away by the piped piper of trailer parks. This twisted irony is something that didn’t go amiss with Steely Dan, the most side-eyed band in rock ‘n’ roll history—if, indeed, they can even be said to be of rock ‘n’ roll history given their disdain for the genre.
Alas, with Stanley away, Manson abounding, and Woodstock marred with its own issues, the ‘60s were over when Steely Dan decided to revisit the zeitgeist in 1976; in fact, it had crumbled like Charlemagne’s Roman Empire. While the lyrical verse of a car running out of gas might form a nice metaphor for this in the song, it also hints at the eventual arrest of Stanley after his car ran out of fuel and the police discovered substances scattered around it when they subsequently picked him up, proving Fagen and Walter Becker’s eternal love for an allegory or double entendre.
The brilliant duo sutures this wild tale, with its unfurling welter of connotations, in a jazzy jam that sees guitarist Larry Carlton produce a solo that he claims is his career high— a fittingly frenzied place for such a feat.
