The first psychedelic revival meeting, you remember, was held on the Polo Fields of Golden Gate Park in 1967. Allen Ginsberg, whose opening benediction was something between a séance and a Hindu chant, called the inaugural Human Be-In a “mela,” or spiritual celebration. Subtitled “A Gathering of the Tribes,” it was comprised mostly of young white devotees of LSD. “Robed figures moved through the crowd with paper bags of Owsley acid,” writes Jay Stevens, while twenty thousand beatniks, activists, “pagan” Sufis, Hells Angels, Tarot-reading mystics, and Berkeley’s walking wounded—the “apostolic vanguard” of the acid culture—sat cross-legged in a semicircle around a speaker’s platform, imbibing sermons by Alan Watts and Tim Leary. According to Haight-Ashbury historian Charles Perry, rumor had it that “a flying saucer with good news” was soon going to land. At sunset, poet Gary Snyder blew and blew on a conch shell.
Ginsberg predicted a mass movement of “younger people aware of the planetary fate that we are all sitting in the middle of, imbued with new consciousness, and desiring of a new kind of society involving prayer, music, and spiritual life together rather than competition, acquisition, and war.”
Richard Alpert (later renamed Ram Dass) told the Los Angeles Free Press, “In seven or eight years, the psychedelic population of the U.S. will be able to vote anybody into office they want to. Allen Ginsberg? Sure . . . imagine what it would be like to have anybody in high political office with our understanding of the universe. I mean, let’s just imagine that Bobby Kennedy had a fully expanded consciousness.”1
Recalling the vibe a few years later, Hunter Thompson wrote of a “sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”
At some point in the afternoon, Ginsberg leaned into poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and whispered, “What if we’re all wrong?”
1In 1966, only about 2 percent of Americans, almost all of them under eighteen, had tried psychedelic drugs. By 1972, that number had more than doubled, to 5 percent, and by the end of the decade was up to 25 percent.