Roots of Rendition (Albarelli & Kaye)

[Austin Kelley]

Thank you for your astute comments, Jan.

My sense is that the real insiders of the black ops psych/chem warfare world were well aware of the effects of LSD by the mid-'50's. A significant number had tried it themselves and knew the ups and downs of it all quite well.

It's clear that it could promote an exalted, enlightened feeling that could catalyze rapid changes in core values, especially in the direction of a less grounded, less rationally-oriented way of being. It would make the tripper especially ripe pickings for new religious and personal growth movements, even for saucer cults, quasi-Templar drug dealing brotherhoods and etc.

The release of LSD into the popular culture was implemented by people with very real ties to the deep power structure: Hollingshead (British Embassy), Leary & Alpert (MKULTRA research), Kesey, Hunter, Garcia (MKULTRA test subjects), Stewart Brand (US Army Intel), Owsley (Stanley Family, Skull & Bones), Ron Stark (CIA/DIA), Hubbard (OSS) etc. etc.

So why not kill a few birds with the same "stone"?

You get thousands or even millions of guinea pigs, you blast emerging social movements, fund secret bank accounts and give operatives access in to people who are undergoing rapid psychological transformation and baring their inner souls.

It's a spook's dream...

[Keith Millea]

Austin,
Like Jan you have a wide grasp of the subject at hand.I like this thread alot.I didn't know that Alan Trists' father was involved with the Tavistock Institute,Hmmm.I know that Kesey and Robert Hunter were MK-Ultra test subjects,but I have not read that Garcia was also.I really don't think he was.If someone could point me to this information,I would greatly appreciate it.

It's clear that it could promote an exalted, enlightened feeling that could catalyze rapid changes in core values, especially in the direction of a less grounded, less rationally-oriented way of being. It would make the tripper especially ripe pickings for new religious and personal growth movements, even for saucer cults, quasi-Templar drug dealing brotherhoods and etc.

This is a good paragraph,but I would take it one step "further".LSD can not only promote an exalted,enlightened feeling,but can in the right circumstance actually "pierce the veil",and give the seeker a short glimps of that which is timeless (eternal).OK,getting too metaphysical now.......

[David Guyatt]

It would make the tripper especially ripe pickings for new religious and personal growth movements, even for saucer cults, quasi-Templar drug dealing brotherhoods and etc.

I actually think this is a most important point. The whole story about "The Council of Nine" involving Andrija Puharich (and assorted spooks) which we have previously discussed on this forum (I think HERE but am not certain), points to religious, rather than social, engineering. The same is true of the behind-the-scenes background to the creation of the Priory of Sion. The importance of choosing the new religion to be believed by great numbers of people is that you effectively control it and thus, control the deeper pulses and minds of those who believe in it.

[Austin Kelley]

...I know that Kesey and Robert Hunter were MK-Ultra test subjects,but I have not read that Garcia was also.I really don't think he was.If someone could point me to this information,I would greatly appreciate it...


...LSD can not only promote an exalted,enlightened feeling,but can in the right circumstance actually "pierce the veil",and give the seeker a short glimps of that which is timeless (eternal)...

Keith, you are absolutely correct that Garcia was not a MKULTRA test subject- my bad, I wrote in haste. I do believe that he, the Dead, the Pranksters and the whole Northern Cal psychedelic scene all developed in the shadow of Stanford, but that's a different story.

As to the power of entheogenic substances to catalyze real insight, well sure, but they also make people more manipulable at times, and I see that as a more compelling motivation for the spooks rather than that they all turned into psychedelic pied-pipers...

[Austin Kelley]

The whole story about "The Council of Nine" involving Andrija Puharich (and assorted spooks) which we have previously discussed on this forum (I think HERE but am not certain), points to religious, rather than social, engineering. The same is true of the behind-the-scenes background to the creation of the Priory of Sion. The importance of choosing the new religion to be believed by great numbers of people is that you effectively control it and thus, control the deeper pulses and minds of those who believe in it...

I very much agree and the implications of this are huge for the development of the New Age Movement and the Human Potential Movement. Not to say that it's all a conspiracy nor that transcendental impulses are inherently bad, but the development of these movements was clearly shaped by hidden forces tied to the deep power structure also...

[David Guyatt]

Agreed Austin. The expansion of consciousness is, for the most part, a laudable human endeavour. Even helping to shape this for the general betterment of mankind can be applauded.

However, using those pulses for the narrow interests of a ruling elite or in order to effect control of minds on a grand scale is quite repulsive.

[Keith Millea]

Keith, you are absolutely correct that Garcia was not a MKULTRA test subject- my bad, I wrote in haste. I do believe that he, the Dead, the Pranksters and the whole Northern Cal psychedelic scene all developed in the shadow of Stanford, but that's a different story.

Yes Austin you are correct.Stanford is absolutely critical in the initial development of the psychedelic,and counter culture scene on the West Coast.And we can add into that Stanford mix Andrija Puharich as David has mentioned.Also as Jan has documented here on the forum,the Stanford/Scientology connections to CIA remote viewing programs.


I also want to reiterate here the fact that as far as social engineering,THE PLAN FAILED imho.The movement could not be engineered.It was too big and powerful.And the directions that it traveled,just like the Grateful Deads music,was basically improvisational.You cannot "control" what somebody improvises.


Now 40 years later,I believe the movement is basically going nowhere.This can be seen most recently with that ridiculous incident down in Arizona where that so called New Age Guru charged people thousands of dollars so that they could cleanse their souls (through sweatlodge),and managed to kill three of his soul seekers.I no longer see a revolutionary movement in America.Nothing Lasts!!!!!!!!!!!!

[David Guyatt]

Keith, you are absolutely correct that Garcia was not a MKULTRA test subject- my bad, I wrote in haste. I do believe that he, the Dead, the Pranksters and the whole Northern Cal psychedelic scene all developed in the shadow of Stanford, but that's a different story.

Yes Austin you are correct.Stanford is absolutely critical in the initial development of the psychedelic,and counter culture scene on the West Coast.And we can add into that Stanford mix Andrija Puharich as David has mentioned.Also as Jan has documented here on the forum,the Stanford/Scientology connections to CIA remote viewing programs.


I also want to reiterate here the fact that as far as social engineering,THE PLAN FAILED imho.The movement could not be engineered.It was too big and powerful.And the directions that it traveled,just like the Grateful Deads music,was basically improvisational.You cannot "control" what somebody improvises.


Now 40 years later,I believe the movement is basically going nowhere.This can be seen most recently with that ridiculous incident down in Arizona where that so called New Age Guru charged people thousands of dollars so that they could cleanse their souls (through sweatlodge),and managed to kill three of his soul seekers.I no longer see a revolutionary movement in America.Nothing Lasts!!!!!!!!!!!!

Very sadly, according to one poll I have seen online, 79% believed in UFO's. Arguably, the experiment has succeeded. But this is simply a case of education. The more who understand the true origin of "Flying Saucers" and the inner-world master Lam, template of Whiteley Streiber's Grey alien, the more who will come to self reliance. "Faith" and "belief" are like putty - they are inherently subject to being shaped by other hands.

Having had many teachers in my past, I can only now applaud the greatest teacher one may ever have: the Self. But therein lies another story and an even more arduous journey. But it is, at least, dollar free. And never, ever lies.

Damn it!

Imo of course.

And my apologies for possibly intruding in this subject Keith and Austin. My only excuse is that these are subjects very close to my heart.

[Austin Kelley]

..I also want to reiterate here the fact that as far as social engineering,THE PLAN FAILED imho.The movement could not be engineered.It was too big and powerful.And the directions that it traveled,just like the Grateful Deads music,was basically improvisational.You cannot "control" what somebody improvises...

I see things as somewhere in between total success and total failure. Given that there was a rising tide of organizing whose goal was to profoundly change the institutions of society, I would say that the psychedelic subculture did make people somewhat less competent in achieving their political goals.

Of course nothing is absolutely black and white however.

The insurgent youth culture represented a compromise between the untamable power that pervaded the grassroots and the hierarchical power of the System and the ruling elite. Both have had their moments, though I don't think LSD changed the planet in the way that many once hoped.

[Keith Millea]

OK,just because this is a fresh news story,and a bit synchronistic.

http://www.counterpunch.org/yearsley02192010.html

February 19 - 21, 2010
The Musical Patriot

The Night of the Living Deadheads

By DAVID YEARSLEY
One of my college friends was a Deadhead. He had crates of cassette tapes with labels like “Bucknell, 1971”, Stanford 1973”; “Fillmore East 1970.” Of an evening he would navigate through these hundreds of cassettes and pull out “the greatest version” of a given Dead song, “Truckin’”, “Crazy Fingers”, whatever. He’d put the tape in the player and work the fast-forward or rewind button with the virtuosity of a concert pianist and get right to the start of the number and then let it pour out of the tinny little crate as if it were ambrosia. Everything sounded good under those listening conditions, largely molded by cannabis and cheap beer. The band famously did not forbid bootlegging but encouraged it: piracy was thereby converted into democratic dissemination; what was viewed as thievery by most “recording artists” fueled the unique brand of Deadheadish connoisseurship He became devotee and pedagogue, pointing out the tastiest licks from Jerry Garcia’s guitar, reveling in the ecstasy of solo voice and the rapture of harmony.
One of those college weekends I played the harpsichord with the Bach Society Orchestra for Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 and my Deadhead friend came along. He like the performance but remarked that during the famous cadenza, in which the harpsichord goes berserk in a frenzy of whirling notes and careening chromatic chords, I took too many rhetorical pauses. Music, he believed, should keep truckin’ along, those two drummers with the Dead making sure that the rhythmic lifeblood kept pumping without a stutter.
Those college evenings listening the Dead were fun though at the remove of a couple of decades things begin to blur, albeit with a different kind of fuzziness than that which attended the evenings themselves. The year after I graduated from college my friend organized a road trip up the coast to hear the Dead in Oxford, Maine over the Fourth of July weekend of 1988, and I joined in. We stayed in a cheap motel, made a long, long walk to the Oxford Plains Speedway past the vibrant Deadhead scene of VW buses, sprawling encampments, barbecues and other kinds of smoke-outs and much Dead mercantilism: everywhere handicrafts, food stuffs, and other substances for sale or for barter or just to be had. The Maine Woods was ablaze in tie-dye.
Little Feat opened the show and then the Dead came and did their two sets. I remember thinking that a motor speedway wasn’t the best place to hear music of any sort and that it puzzled me why the band felt it needed two drummers, whom together seemed to my ears to obscure rather than enhance the rhythmic energy of the rock ‘n roll resounding across the oval.
The entire spectacle and the culture surrounding such a concert certainly needed the sort of space a race track provided. There was clearly more to it all than just the tunes; the conception of music fostered by the Dead, or at least its adherents, was far bigger, more encompassing simply a combination of melody, harmony, and rhythm. At least for the weekend, music appeared to be life. Have now returned, courtesy of the internet, to the Grateful Dead’s past and my ephemeral intersection with it. At www.dead.net I find the playlist of the Oxford, Maine show, many comments exalting the event in its entirety as the greatest ever: “This was an amazing scene. Totally lawless yet peaceful.” “Great weather, great, crowd, great scene, great shows. Definitely one of my peak Head experiences.”
One of the received truths of Grateful Dead criticism is that sometimes the band was inspired and other times played poorly. My college friends could draw cassettes from his massive collection to make this point, and then further elucidate it with expert commentary.
At least around these parts of central New York, home to many a counterculture escapee from the urban centers of the Northeast in the 1960s, the 1977 Grateful Dead concert in Cornell University’s Barton Hall is held as one of the group’s ultimate concerts. The chair of the physics department happens to be a neighbor and was playing a CD (not a cassette) of that a couple months back when she gave me a lift in her Prius. She’d been an undergraduate at Cornell and been to the concert.
Jerry Garcia’s ashes have long ago been scattered over the Golden Gate and the Ganges in like part, and death itself has visited the group’s keyboardists on several occasions. But two of the founding members of the band, bassist Phil Lesh and guitarist Bob Weir brought their own group Furthur, formed way back in 2009, to Barton Hall this past Sunday, flushing Deadheads out of the wooded hills for leagues around Ithaca, and indeed from across the Empire State and country—all with much talk of the epochal 1977 show.Converted schoolbuses with chimneys sticking out the side windows and vintage VW campers appeared on Ithaca’s streets. The Holiday Inn was filled beyond capacity.
Barton Hall is an almost surreal building, and especially so for a rock concert. It was built in 1915 in the run-up to America’s entry into World War I as a drill hall for the Department of Military Science; it was an armory in World War II. Barton still serves as the home of the Cornell ROTC and is also the field house. The structure has a looming heft and indulges in much spurious crenellation. It’s like a Gothic fortress pumped up on steroids, a scary building that was apparently designed with the idea of imbuing recruits with a bit of the honor code of the medieval knight. The vast leaded-glass windows and soaring trusses of the interior inspire doubts that these architectural features can hold up the hulking stone of its walls: it is a huge castle with one vast room. The Grateful Dead scene in full force beneath all this war-like architecture must have been something to behold in 1977 in the aftermath of Vietnam with the local counter-culture still in the vigor of youth.
On the evening of what was hailed as the “return” show the aura of the famous 1977 appearance fluttered down with the snow, a wintery setting that stood in stark contrast to that hot summer of 1988 in Maine. The loose-linen dresses, and bright colors, half-naked Dead devotees were this time bundled up in parkas, the wild hair stuffed under woolen hats, the flesh sealed from the elements.
As the long line filed into the castle keep dozens of people milled about with their index fingers in the air, not gauging the icy wind, but looking for a single ticket. The 5,000 tickets had sold-out almost immediately when they went on sale back in December. The police, a strong presence outside the venue, estimated that between 1,000 and 1,5000 fans waited outside Barton during the show. Subsequent newspapers reports boasted of the “unusually large number” of drug and alcohol related arrests and with some bigger drug busts added to the nightly catch.
I did feel a bit guilty as I moved past these desperate Deadheads, but took small, if opportunistic comfort in reasoning that such exclusion is also part of the “scene”—come rain or come shine there will always be those left outside. Enough energy would certainly extrude through the thick stone walls of Barton to warm them.
Lesh is seventy years old sprightly and seemingly full of optimism on stage and in his music. Weir sports bushy mutton chops, looking like a Civil War general in shin-length trousers and Birkenstocks. Both can play and sing and seem to love it still. In the present incarnation, Furthur, they’ve assembled a younger generation of musicians for whom the Grateful Dead’s music was mother’s milk. Guitarist John Kadlecik was born in 1969 and initially made his mark in the Dar Star Orchestra, a Grateful Dead tribute band. My college friend tells me his guitar playing sounds (almost) just like Jerry Garcia, and he has fine, clear and penetrating voice. Jeff Chimenti on keyboards—among them a Steinway grand and a Hammond B-3—is also in his early forties, a downright baby by the present standard of revival bands and Super Bowl half-time shows, and certainly seen as youthful by the large body of the audience that have followed the Dead from their inception. Chimenti is a virtuoso of the kind of keyboarding gesture—thunderous octaves and karte chords—that can fill up college field house not just aurally (for the massive speakers do that), but visually. It’s as much about sight as it is about sound.
Although the music is highly mediated by the electronics there is nothing like being there. When the Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter song “Sugaree” filled Barton with its hypnotic grind, and the pscyhedlic lights volleyed off ROTC banners through the wafting marijuana clouds like battlefield smoke, one was glad to be inside and not out, in the present and in the past.
High quality digital video of the show was up on YouTube the next day: the economy of personal exchange that was such part of Dead culture seems to have been supplanted by the unlimited access allowed of the internet.
The age of the cassette is behind us, though doubtless many still use the old-fashioned technology, just as my boyhood neighbor’s grandmother clung to her gramophone. The 1977 Cornell concert can be downloaded for free from the internet. Youtube allows many a look at the Dead and those concerts; even the parking lot of that Oxford show can be scanned for those stuck in the past.
I remember now that my college friend also had the first personal computer I think I’d ever seen, certainly the first Mac, the original 128K, which sold for upwards of $2,000 back in the mid 80s when it came out. Now his own late-model Mac holds his voluminous Grateful Dead catalog in digital form in the Connecticut suburbs. During the week he’s on Wall Street using computers to predict the ups-and-downs of the stock market.
David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. He is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu