The festival that made Pete Townshend stop taking LSD
1967 wasn’t actually the peak of LSD usage across the globe. Even though the Summer of Love put acid at the forefront of popular culture, the hallucinogenic drug continued to be manufactured around the world into the next decade and beyond. Journalist Jesse Jarnow estimates that the peak of LSD usage actually came half a decade later in 1972, when the drug spread from major California cities across the United States and into the wider world at large. However, that didn’t help Pete Townshend at the Monterey Pop Festival.
The Who were no strangers to drugs. Keith Moon, especially, became notorious for his love of amphetamines, which often fueled his destructive antics on and offstage. Townshend had also begun to experiment with LSD, although he was more moderate in his drug intake than Moon. When The Who flew over to California in June of 1967, Townshend probably expected to take a little bit of acid while attending and performing at the Monterey Pop Festival. What he wasn’t counting on, however, was Owsley Stanley.
Stanley was the most notorious LSD manufacturer in California, and perhaps throughout the entire world, in 1967. A fellow Monterey performer, Jimi Hendrix, released the psychedelic single ‘Purple Haze’ a few months earlier, a song allegedly inspired by some of Stanley’s lysergic acid. Without Stanley, the psychedelic boom that erupted in California in the mid-1960s likely wouldn’t have been possible.
His reputation for manufacturing LSD probably would have been enough for Stanley to get backstage at Monterey, but he was actually on the clock for the festival. On top of his lucrative LSD business, Stanley was also the sound man and main benefactor for the Grateful Dead. Before his arrest later that year (and the more significant bust in 1970 that landed Stanley in prison for two years while simultaneously inspiring the Dead to write ‘Truckin’), frequent calls for “Bear” could be heard across some of the earliest Grateful Dead tapes.
The acid Stanley had manufactured for the Monterey Pop Festival was especially potent, given that most performers were experienced users. That didn’t account for Townshend, who had yet to descend into the long, strange trip that came from Stanley’s product. The guitarist managed to avoid any serious dosing backstage, but before the group departed back home to England, Stanley had gifted Moon with some purple pills containing the extremely potent LSD.
Moon wasn’t eager to trip alone, and after both Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle declined to join him, Townshend and his wife Karen agreed to split one of the pills. It took a short bit of time for Townshend to begin slipping from reality, but when he did, the psychedelic experience soon turned into a very bad trip.
“After 30 minutes, the air hostess, whose turned-up nose had made her look a little porcine, transmogrified into a real pig, scurrying up and down the aisle, snorting,” Townshend recalled in his book Who Am I. “The air was full of faint music… I finally traced the sound to the armrest of my seat. I heard a female voice gently saying, ‘You have to go back. You cannot stay here.’”
Townshend responded with fear.“’But I’m terrified. If I go back, I feel as if I’ll die.’ ‘You won’t die. You cannot stay here.” [said the voice.] As I drifted back down toward my body, I began to feel the effects of the LSD kicking back in. The worst seemed to be over; as I settled [into] the experience, though extreme, [it] felt more like my few trips of old: everything saturated by wonderful colour and sound. Karen looked like an angel.”
Despite the light comedown, Townshend swore off LSD for good after the flight. Soon after, he found the teachings of Maher Baba, and when Townshend learned that Baba forbade his followers from indulging in drugs, he decided to get clean. Townshend would have some dalliances with drugs after that, but nothing nearly as terrifying as his bad trip after Monterey.
