Speaker 1: School of Humans a mere story. Once upon a time,
Speaker 1: I thought my parents were real estate moguls. Oh you
Speaker 1: know what, actually, are you stoned right now or just tired?
Speaker 1: Just start? Just a quick reminder. I was unwittingly born
Speaker 1: into a Northern California pot smuggling family and didn't find
Speaker 1: out until I was well into my teens that my
Speaker 1: entire world could have come crashing down at any point
Speaker 1: because my seemingly straight parents were the kind of outlaws
Speaker 1: that Nixons were on drugs, and Nancy Reagan's just Say
Speaker 1: No anti drug campaign would sentence to twenty plus years
Speaker 1: in prison if they were coughed. So the vilification of
Speaker 1: pot has a long American history, and my dad's journey
Speaker 1: from LSD loving college kid in Brooklyn to an epic
Speaker 1: bicoastal pot smuggler is because of my mom. So let's
Speaker 1: start with my mom's story and her pioneering life in
Speaker 1: San Francisco's early nineteen sixties counterculture scene. I'm Rainbow Valentine
Speaker 1: and this is disorganized crime smuggler's daughter, want to do young,
Speaker 1: free and groovy, making it up. We rolled along, rolling
Speaker 1: along country. He didn't rain in the Golden gag York State,
Speaker 1: making it up as we roll. Born in Oakland, my
Speaker 1: mom grew up in LA in the nineteen forties and fifties.
Speaker 1: She remembers all her Japanese neighbors just hearing during World
Speaker 1: War two me was scarce and better we're scarce. I
Speaker 1: never had better until I was in the shifty somewhere.
Speaker 1: Everybody wore gloves when you were now, and everybody were
Speaker 1: stockings girdles. It was like the whole society was constrained.
Speaker 1: My mom's family moved from mar Vista, a beach neighborhood
Speaker 1: along LA's Prohibition rum Runner Road, a ka Venice Boulevard,
Speaker 1: to the San Fernando Valley in the fifties. San Fernando Valley,
Speaker 1: full of orange groves, was stifling for anyone who thought
Speaker 1: outside the box, and my mom has never fit in
Speaker 1: anyone's box, even though she is tiny. She lived a
Speaker 1: double life as a socially acceptable cheerleader and prom princess,
Speaker 1: but also did modern dance and shockingly at the time,
Speaker 1: was friends with non white kids, including Richie Valens. Her
Speaker 1: mom a Bay Area native from a family of mostly
Speaker 1: little people. They were perfectly proportioned adults, but everyone was
Speaker 1: super tiny, like you know, under five feet tall. They
Speaker 1: were little people. So my grandma was a discontent, repressed
Speaker 1: housewife into astrology and esoterica like theology, and her dad,
Speaker 1: a Jewish orphan adopted by Jesuit fur trapper priests in
Speaker 1: French Canada, owned diners. One was called the Teepee and
Speaker 1: located in a concrete teepee shaped building in Long Beach, California.
Speaker 1: The other was the ground roundup on Van Ey's Boulevard
Speaker 1: and San Fernando. Money was tight for my mom's family.
Speaker 1: Times were tough. You grew up in poverty. You didn't
Speaker 1: have it. You said you didn't have a doll. I
Speaker 1: had dolls. I didn't have shoes. Who socks? I to
Speaker 1: wear my brother's old socks, and my shoes had holes
Speaker 1: in them, and I put cardboard in the shoes. I
Speaker 1: made all my own clothes as a kid, and my
Speaker 1: mother shot me to so by eleven. In nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: there was a nuclear meltdown at the Rocketdye nuclear facility
Speaker 1: in Santa Susiana, California, a few miles from where my
Speaker 1: mom and her family lived in Granada Hills. For two weeks,
Speaker 1: radiation poured over the San Fernando Valley. Now this meltdown
Speaker 1: was covered up, it was never cleaned up. It's still
Speaker 1: sitting there, and it was overseen by former Nazi scientist
Speaker 1: Werner von Braun, who was brought to the US by
Speaker 1: the government in the covert operation paper Clip in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five. So when this happened, my mom was young,
Speaker 1: she was eighteen, and she had married her childhood's sweetheart
Speaker 1: because she was pregnant, and the radiation caused my mom
Speaker 1: to have a stillborn baby. So my mom was totally traumatized.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen fifty nine, and she was completely shamed for
Speaker 1: having this stillborn baby. It was a time when women
Speaker 1: were blamed for anything that went wrong or explained for
Speaker 1: everything that was the fifties. My mom was bursting with
Speaker 1: artistic tendencies. So she fled the oppressive San Fernando Valley.
Speaker 1: Just left. This eighteen year old husband left, her family,
Speaker 1: left the shame, and she took a bus up to Berkeley, California,
Speaker 1: where her best friend was going to college UC Berkeley,
Speaker 1: and they went over to North Beach. It's nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: It's ground zero for the beatnecks who would create the
Speaker 1: world famous historic San Francisco counterculture and the iconic Hate Ashbury.
Speaker 1: Now at this point we are going to leave Golden
Speaker 1: Gate Park to go in to I. I guess light
Speaker 1: sojourned through the Hate Ashbury district of San Francisco. So
Speaker 1: in order to understand why and how my parents are
Speaker 1: who they are, it's important for us to understand the
Speaker 1: political and societal culture of the nineteen sixties. And who
Speaker 1: better to explain it other than my bff's dad. Dennis
Speaker 1: McNally is an author, historian, and the former publicist for
Speaker 1: The Grateful Dead Well. San Francisco has always been a
Speaker 1: place that was hospitable to the weird, to rangeness, going
Speaker 1: back to the way it started, which was not in
Speaker 1: any conventional way but because of a gold rush. So
Speaker 1: by nineteen sixty it was politically still a relative the conservative,
Speaker 1: a bunch of Republicans, but for instance, it had become
Speaker 1: the home of the beat scene, where Alan Getsbrook had
Speaker 1: read Howell for the first time, and the beat scene,
Speaker 1: what they were doing was basically opting out of the
Speaker 1: American value system by sort of going in a sense,
Speaker 1: going underground, and they smoke pot and they listened to jazz,
Speaker 1: and they you know, thought their thoughts. There was just
Speaker 1: this bubbling cauldron, frankly of avant garde arts groups. There
Speaker 1: was room for cultural strangeness. At the center of this
Speaker 1: bubbling cauldron of the nineteen sixties San Francisco was my bohemian,
Speaker 1: beatnick artistic mom. So she says that the scene of
Speaker 1: the counterculture of bohemians, the people who formed the counterculture,
Speaker 1: was small. It was about two hundred people. My mom
Speaker 1: was friends with everyone who became someone. She's My mom's
Speaker 1: the kind of person who will just casually mention Oh
Speaker 1: the time Jack Nicholson came over for Thanksgiving and you're like, wait,
Speaker 1: what what. My mom dated pig Pen, who was part
Speaker 1: of the Grateful Dead. She chauffeured Mimi Farina to Vallet class.
Speaker 1: She also provided Janis Joplin with her signature for hat.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, I don't know Janice, who was at
Speaker 1: a North Point house. And Janice floated in with an
Speaker 1: entourage and said, I don't know what I'm gonna wear.
Speaker 1: So I always wore a rabbit for her hat, and
Speaker 1: so I said, hey, where's this She's photographed to treat
Speaker 1: her hat? Oh I know, So Now that my parents
Speaker 1: are older, I've become the appreciative and surprised audience at
Speaker 1: these little anecdotes. My parents will drop about major historic
Speaker 1: events they were part of. Oh like my mom dropping
Speaker 1: the random fact that in nineteen sixty four she was
Speaker 1: in the second row at the Beatles Cow Palace show.
Speaker 1: That was opening night for the Beatles first ever concert
Speaker 1: tour of North America. Oh, and there's my mom in
Speaker 1: the second row. No big deal, Like, wait what Mom?
Speaker 1: They only sang halfway through one song and then there
Speaker 1: was like complete insanity. The audience started pushing forward and
Speaker 1: the seat started bending and scary. It was. So when
Speaker 1: my mom arrived in North Beach, she quickly met her
Speaker 1: second husband. He sheltered her in her college trum from
Speaker 1: a creepy junkie who wanted to you know, who's hassling them.
Speaker 1: My mom's second husband was a fairly well known mid
Speaker 1: century modern jeweler and beatnick. Cohabitating couples were totally frowned
Speaker 1: upon in the sixties, so my mom married him. He
Speaker 1: had lots of friends in the jazz world, playing at
Speaker 1: the jazz clubs. So we will go to the Black
Speaker 1: Cook Jazz Club of Jazz Workshop. That's so cool, that
Speaker 1: was cool. Like pioneers, oddballs and innovators. Jazz came out
Speaker 1: West as well. It arrived in San Francisco, becoming a
Speaker 1: thing sometime after San Francisco's nineteen thirty four waterfront labor
Speaker 1: strike called Bloody Thursday, when DOC workers became the first
Speaker 1: union to reluctantly integrate. Because of blue collar jobs on
Speaker 1: San Francisco's waterfront and a shift from banking to industry
Speaker 1: during World War Two, there was a massive migration of
Speaker 1: African Americans to San Francisco, over six hundred percent population
Speaker 1: increase between nineteen forty and nineteen forty five. By nineteen fifty,
Speaker 1: over forty three thousand African Americans lived in the city,
Speaker 1: and the jazz clubs boomed. The Jazz Workshop, located in
Speaker 1: North Beach, my mom's neighborhood, was central to the action.
Speaker 1: Between nineteen sixty one and sixty for a number of
Speaker 1: live at the Jazz Workshop albums were produced. My mom's
Speaker 1: other hangout, the Black Hawk, was a famous jazz club
Speaker 1: located and was now the Tenderloin District. A short but
Speaker 1: calf strengtheningly hilly walk from North Beach tell us about Dizzy.
Speaker 1: Dizzy Gilleski Jessey was, you know, his Jessy would come
Speaker 1: over and make us. He made us breakfast once and
Speaker 1: then I saw the recipe in the Lincoln Center recipe book,
Speaker 1: the same recipe. It was very odd. You know, it's
Speaker 1: a very Southern like scrambled egg recipe with sam and
Speaker 1: green pepper and grits. So it was something I had
Speaker 1: never eaten, and you know, I just we went every
Speaker 1: night to see Dissey. It was amazing, and he was
Speaker 1: just really jolly. He was Catholic, so he was trying
Speaker 1: to be really good with his wife and not get
Speaker 1: in trouble because it was a funny guy. Yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: My mom and her second husband, the jeweler, would go
Speaker 1: to the Jazz Greats hotel rooms and they would fashion
Speaker 1: ornate rings for them and they would also smoke pot.
Speaker 1: My mom says that at the beginning of the sixties,
Speaker 1: everyone in the beat scene was smoking pot, but it
Speaker 1: was pretty underground. Everybody was really afraid to turn anybody
Speaker 1: on or show anybody what they were doing. Was who
Speaker 1: cloaked in fear. It changed with the music. When the
Speaker 1: music changed and got people got dancing and it got
Speaker 1: a lot looser, you know, because the culture of the
Speaker 1: fifties and before that it was all about suffering and
Speaker 1: you have to suffer. And then we decided in the
Speaker 1: sixties that actually life should be beautiful and I should
Speaker 1: be laughing and dancing and you know, so here, you guys,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna be like, go on our own path
Speaker 1: and have a good time. The jeweler taught my mom
Speaker 1: how to make her own jewelry. Her best selling piece
Speaker 1: was a Jesus on a cross with a giant erection.
Speaker 1: That's my mom. Before she was able to make money
Speaker 1: with her jewelry, she had a lot of other weird jobs,
Speaker 1: lots of little odd jobs. She was a belly dancer
Speaker 1: for a gay Gypsy refugee from the Holocaust who was
Speaker 1: a sword swallower okay, and together they would perform at
Speaker 1: galas for the wealthy. Another one of her gigs, my favorite,
Speaker 1: was at the Domino Club on Kearney Street in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: She posed nude on a chez lounge and a famous
Speaker 1: artist painted her on black velvet and auctioned the painting
Speaker 1: off to the gentleman crowd. She loved this job because Strangely,
Speaker 1: no one ever hit on her. Later she realized that
Speaker 1: the nude models were a cover for a gate club.
Speaker 1: My mom was also an engineer at KMPX, which was
Speaker 1: the country's first rock radio station and by Big Daddy
Speaker 1: Tom Donahue. Big Daddy Tom Donahue had all the men
Speaker 1: be the DJ's and all the women were behind the
Speaker 1: scenes as the engineers running the show because the women
Speaker 1: weren't totally stoned and they could keep their ship together. Now,
Speaker 1: because my mom was from la she knew how to
Speaker 1: drive and she would show for the rock stars from
Speaker 1: the airports to their crash pad. Now, that job also
Speaker 1: came with a task of delivering pot to the rock stars,
Speaker 1: as the performers all got a big satchel of weed
Speaker 1: with their payment. Here's your crash pad in your pot,
Speaker 1: we'll see out the show. Oh ridiculous. Did you ever
Speaker 1: sell pot in the sixties? Did I? Yeah? Oh? No? Hash?
Speaker 1: Oh so hash? Where'd you get it? You know? I
Speaker 1: started bringing up all the stuff I had when I
Speaker 1: was a kid. I had a stamp collection, So I
Speaker 1: traded my stamp collection for a couple of pounds. I hash,
Speaker 1: how come you only did it once? I didn't have
Speaker 1: any more stamp collections. My mom was deeply involved with
Speaker 1: a San Francisco improv comedy scene in the early sixties
Speaker 1: because she was a whiz typist. She was the secretary
Speaker 1: for the Committee Comedy Troupe. She was also the secretary
Speaker 1: for the Family Dog, which was the rival production company
Speaker 1: to Bill Graham Presents. My mom even helped the legendary
Speaker 1: comedian Lenny Bruce slog through his obscenity trial in the
Speaker 1: early sixties. Lenny Bruce was arrested multiple times for his
Speaker 1: vulgar and sexual material. He used words like cocksucker onstage,
Speaker 1: shocking at the time, you guys. So Lenny Bruce hired
Speaker 1: my mom to type up his notes, which were handwritten
Speaker 1: while he was on the toilet because he was a
Speaker 1: junkie and junkies spend a lot of time in the bathroom,
Speaker 1: So Lenny Bruce would be on the toilet and writing
Speaker 1: his obscenity trial. Stuffed the toilet paper under the door
Speaker 1: for my mom to transcribe. Yeah, and he kept saying,
Speaker 1: you know in his records that I was typing for him.
Speaker 1: Words can't hurt anybody you set up a story about,
Speaker 1: you know, So if you call somebody a count, or
Speaker 1: you call them a cock sucker, they're not really. You're
Speaker 1: just using words or just words. And the judge wouldn't
Speaker 1: buy it. They wouldn't buy it. They're still sent him
Speaker 1: to cheil. You mentioned you told me once that after
Speaker 1: that trial of Sutday trial, people started saying the word
Speaker 1: fuck in normal day right. Never set up right, never
Speaker 1: said up, wouldn't even say God, damn it. So my
Speaker 1: mom's relationship with her second husband, the jeweler, was volatile,
Speaker 1: and she left him and fell in love with an
Speaker 1: actor who later became a well known TV star. My
Speaker 1: mom's third husband, the actor, was an extrovert. He invited
Speaker 1: everyone to their little Telegraph Hill apartment after the comedy shows.
Speaker 1: My mom would cook and everyone would dance. They play records.
Speaker 1: It was like the height of this amazing music revolution
Speaker 1: in San Francisco. While her husband, the actor, was on
Speaker 1: the road with the Rolling Stones in their groupies, she
Speaker 1: retaliated by having an affair that resulted in a surprising pregnancy.
Speaker 1: She'd been sterile for eight years. Since he's stillborn, my
Speaker 1: sister's biological father abandoned my mom and she settled down
Speaker 1: with her baby, my future big sister in a fisherman's
Speaker 1: cottage North Point, a neighborhood known for the famed Garadeli Square.
Speaker 1: I'm Ramo Valentine. You're listening to disorganized crime. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back now. The mid sixties were a volatile, transformative
Speaker 1: time in the world, particularly the US. Nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War is in full swing, drafting thirty five
Speaker 1: thousand kids a month in La the Watts Race. Riots
Speaker 1: explode between police and African American neighborhoods, and in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, US troops and m are four hundred thousand.
Speaker 1: Anti war protests are growing, The Black Panthers are founded,
Speaker 1: and West Coast Acid manufacturing King Owsley is busted for
Speaker 1: the first time. Nineteen sixty seven is the Monterey Pops Festival,
Speaker 1: The Detroit rece riots, and huge Vietnam War protests occur
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, New York, and DC. Nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: Nixon wins the presidency. Martin Luther King Junior is assassinated.
Speaker 1: The rock musical Hair All about the Vietnam War and
Speaker 1: Hippies opens on Broadway. This is a long way from
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties era of repression saw cops and Elvis.
Speaker 1: The last eighteen was as seeing a tremendous increase of
Speaker 1: the so called hippies. It is the belief of the
Speaker 1: people who live within the area that we the middle
Speaker 1: class or in the Upper franss, I've done a very
Speaker 1: very poor job running our government and our way of life.
Speaker 1: Thousands of young people are pouring into San Francisco, into
Speaker 1: the hate Ashbury neighborhood, and the press called these young
Speaker 1: people the hippies. Here's our historian, Dennis McNally. The people
Speaker 1: who lived in the hate Ashbury did not call themselves hippies.
Speaker 1: They called themselves freaks. Hippie was a word created by
Speaker 1: the newspapers because freak it had edges to it, and
Speaker 1: the newspapers just didn't like it. You know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: it wasn't a word they like to use, whereas hippie
Speaker 1: sounded sort of soft and adorable. And so they made
Speaker 1: that up and and it worked, and everybody used it
Speaker 1: as he has used it ever since. Hippy seen frequently
Speaker 1: gathered together in large groups, and you know, going up
Speaker 1: to Woodstock and you name it. They gathered around rock
Speaker 1: and roll and they used LSD instead of just smoking
Speaker 1: pot and the LSD. There's some kind of connection between
Speaker 1: LSD and rock and roll, which is to say, it
Speaker 1: makes you sensitive to that incredible sensory overload that you
Speaker 1: can get from really loud music, and you know, it
Speaker 1: just sort of it takes you somewhere. And there was
Speaker 1: this guy named Owsley in the San Francisco Bay area
Speaker 1: who was really obsessive and in the end he produced
Speaker 1: what was probably the purest and strongest LSD ever made.
Speaker 1: And he had lots of very interesting and slightly strange
Speaker 1: theories about what he was doing and why, you know,
Speaker 1: you had to do certain things, but the end result
Speaker 1: was he produced literally millions of hits of LSD. LSD
Speaker 1: no nineteen sixties counterculture stories complete without it. Along with
Speaker 1: notable acid manufacturers like Owsley, Stanford University is manufacturing acid
Speaker 1: in the early sixth season in the late fifties to
Speaker 1: test out. They have no idea what it does. Stanford
Speaker 1: University is located in Palo Alto, which is the home
Speaker 1: of many of the nineteen sixties musicians, So somehow this
Speaker 1: acid is making it up to North Beach and my
Speaker 1: mom's second husband, the jeweler has a hook up. He
Speaker 1: gets Stanford acid, and what people are supposed to do
Speaker 1: is take the Stanford acid and then write a trip
Speaker 1: report and return it to Stanford so they can find
Speaker 1: out what happens when you take acid. That's how my
Speaker 1: mom started taking acid in the early sixties. It was
Speaker 1: Stanford acid, so you know, probably pretty great. I mean
Speaker 1: that's some Ivy league acid. He got me a dose
Speaker 1: or gave me dose and then he went to sleep. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So this my first ASCID in just little Fisherman's house
Speaker 1: in North Beach. But it was great because I assumed
Speaker 1: back to when I was three and four years old
Speaker 1: and my father was super abusive to my brother and
Speaker 1: I was terrified. So I went through the experience, but
Speaker 1: as an older person, so I wasn't so terrified. So
Speaker 1: it helped peeled me reliving those experiences of fear and
Speaker 1: saying I couldn't deal with us. Now I'm in my
Speaker 1: adult body instead of my child body. And that was
Speaker 1: my first acid experience. While my mom was being radiated
Speaker 1: in LA's never cleaned up nuclear meltdown, running away to
Speaker 1: San Francisco and nude modeling for gay men, my dad
Speaker 1: was growing up in Brooklyn in a middle class, intellectual, atheist, Jewish, communist,
Speaker 1: art loving family. Throughout the nineteen sixties, a new wave
Speaker 1: of immigrants was starting to move into New York City.
Speaker 1: As American immigration laws relaxed and white residents moved out
Speaker 1: to the suburbs. New York City was turning into a
Speaker 1: multicultural metropolis unlike the world had ever seen. Across the decade,
Speaker 1: as a whole, people all over New York, like the
Speaker 1: rest of the country, were fighting for change. New York
Speaker 1: City in the sixties saw countless strikes and protests, sometimes
Speaker 1: boiling over into violence. Now, let's also remember the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties are fifteen to twenty years after World War Two.
Speaker 1: Every adult had gone through World War Two in some way,
Speaker 1: New York City is full of refugees and survivors. My
Speaker 1: dad's mom fled the Ukrainian Pograms from the thirties and
Speaker 1: her siblings were murdered in the Holocaust. So New York
Speaker 1: City is full of humans with what today we call PTSD.
Speaker 1: My dad was the youngest of three children. His dad
Speaker 1: was a Rembrandt scholar, a book designer, and his Russian
Speaker 1: immigrant mom stayed at home, although later in life. She
Speaker 1: had her own art gallery in the Berkshires near Tanglewood
Speaker 1: in Massa. She sits. My dad's family lived in Brooklyn
Speaker 1: and my whip smart Dad was skipped a few grades,
Speaker 1: causing him to be the smallest kid in high school,
Speaker 1: an easy target for bullies. His grandparents, my great grandparents,
Speaker 1: lived upstairs, and he played in the streets with his cousins.
Speaker 1: He went to summer camp on the Berkshires, he had
Speaker 1: a dog, and well, he was, for the most part,
Speaker 1: a happy kid. According to my dad, life was uneventful
Speaker 1: until nineteen sixty three when he started at Brooklyn College,
Speaker 1: because that's when he met the Sugar Bowl Man. The
Speaker 1: Sugar Bowl Man, he completely changed the direction of my life.
Speaker 1: And there I am, and I pull up this giant
Speaker 1: BSA lightning rocket already parked there as a Triumph single
Speaker 1: cylinder five D. My dad is really into motorcycles at
Speaker 1: this point in his life. And there's this guy leaning
Speaker 1: on this bike and he's six foot five, and I
Speaker 1: pull up in my big time bike and I'm five
Speaker 1: foot eight, and he nods at me, says, hm, nice bike.
Speaker 1: I want to come over to my place and Smolka Joint.
Speaker 1: So The Sugar Bowl man is also a nice Jewish
Speaker 1: Brooklyn boy. He's super tall, has a deep voice, and
Speaker 1: he introduces my dad to a whole new world. So
Speaker 1: the Sugar Bowl I get over to his house and
Speaker 1: the apartment was dark and had all sorts of hanging things,
Speaker 1: hanging tapestries and little water lights and sort of cushions on.
Speaker 1: What was more relaxing than a couch? You know, I
Speaker 1: guess pillows guy. Basically he walked into the Brooklyn caspot
Speaker 1: and the Sugar Bowl man. I mean he's got incredible
Speaker 1: pot smoked anything like it, and he's got lots of it.
Speaker 1: He tells me here, hey, man, you want to try DMT,
Speaker 1: And sure, I mean, why not? Well, DMT diamens will
Speaker 1: trip to me is the center of a five hundred
Speaker 1: mic acid trip before you get the pipe out of
Speaker 1: your mouth from a toog and man, just a rocket
Speaker 1: ship ride and in fifteen minutes you're straight again, just
Speaker 1: straight again. It's like where was Where was I? You know?
Speaker 1: I went through the doors of perception so fast it
Speaker 1: was like light speed anyway, But I was completely enamored
Speaker 1: by psychedelics, and there I had the opportunity and so
Speaker 1: what I started to do was, I mean, I realized
Speaker 1: pretty quickly that fuck one, it costs money to do this,
Speaker 1: and two if I bought two, If I got two joints,
Speaker 1: I could sell one and pay for one to smoke
Speaker 1: myself for free. That was sort of the initial concept
Speaker 1: of it. And then the DMT and it costs money.
Speaker 1: So I ended up sort of passing it out at
Speaker 1: Brooklyn College. Were you living with your mom? Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was living at home with my mom. I was bringing
Speaker 1: all my friends over the trip. Would be up all
Speaker 1: night and my mom would say, hey, I've got bagels
Speaker 1: and locks for you here in the morning. You shod
Speaker 1: wonder what the fuck we were doing. It's not like
Speaker 1: we talked about it. Would just be up there listening
Speaker 1: to music and tripping all night. All the time. It
Speaker 1: was so great and so much fun, and so the
Speaker 1: drugs were so amazing. They were so clean. I could
Speaker 1: be able to pass them out to my friends and
Speaker 1: it would pay for me to take whatever. And what
Speaker 1: the fuck? I even made money, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden it was pretty good money. I mean, it just
Speaker 1: servil happened. Organic clich the sugar bowl man is the supplier.
Speaker 1: I mean, he had. The Sugar Bowl Man had the
Speaker 1: best drugs I'd ever had, and the acid was made
Speaker 1: by Nikky sand Mister Sunshine. Nikki Sand aka Nikki Sunshine
Speaker 1: aka Mister Sunshine, childhood friend of the Sugar Bowl Man,
Speaker 1: was another disciple of LSD and wanted to manufacture as
Speaker 1: much as possible to enlighten the world. And Nikky Sunshine's
Speaker 1: extensive LSD operation was funded by trustafarian Billy Hitchcock, a
Speaker 1: descendant of the Robber Baron family, the Melons as in
Speaker 1: Carnegie Melon. Now Nikki Sunshine's patron. Billy hitch Talk had
Speaker 1: a mansion in Millbrook, New York. This was the site
Speaker 1: of world famous acid tests and mega hippie rangers lord
Speaker 1: it over by none other than doctor Timothy Leary, former
Speaker 1: Harvard professor and pioneering acid tester. R What I understand
Speaker 1: from our signature historian Dennis McNally Millbrook was insane. Leary
Speaker 1: got booted out of Harvard and he connected with a
Speaker 1: fabulously wealthy guy by the name of Billy Hitchcock. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he was a stunningly wealthy guy, and Billy Hitchcock really
Speaker 1: liked decidedly, he really liked LLSD, and when Leary got
Speaker 1: booted out of Harvard, he ended up at their mansion,
Speaker 1: at the mansion that Billy owned in Millbrook, New York,
Speaker 1: and people started going there. At first day it was
Speaker 1: like so esoteric jazz musicians. They decided they would find
Speaker 1: artists to share the cellist with, and then it became,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of more and more people, and eventually
Speaker 1: they got started getting harassed by the guy named Gordon Liddy,
Speaker 1: who was a local investigator for the for the DA
Speaker 1: of that county. And of course Gordon Liddy later became
Speaker 1: part of the Watergate conspiracy. But that whole side story,
Speaker 1: and they they again they talked about LSD and they
Speaker 1: gave it a lot of publicity. You mentioned Nikki San
Speaker 1: Niki sand although also known as Niki Sunshine. He was
Speaker 1: a true believer in LSD and he created what was
Speaker 1: called Orange Sun Sunshine and made lots and lots and
Speaker 1: lots of that, and then when the police went after him,
Speaker 1: he did a very successful vanishing act and got away
Speaker 1: with it for but I think twenty five years, and
Speaker 1: eventually they caught up with him. There's a whole amazing
Speaker 1: pattern of people deciding that a that they liked LSD
Speaker 1: and they found it a useful thing, and then be
Speaker 1: people rising up to meet that demand. It's American capitalism
Speaker 1: at its finest. My dad never got caught up in Millbrook,
Speaker 1: but through the Sugar Bowl Man, he did enjoy Nikki
Speaker 1: Sand's premier acid Orange Sunshine, and he enjoyed a lot
Speaker 1: of it. He was running around New York with his chums,
Speaker 1: a guy were calling the cameraman and the jazz man
Speaker 1: and this guy named Nome. I mean, all I knew
Speaker 1: was it was fucking great and we were having a
Speaker 1: grand time, and we were listening to great music all
Speaker 1: the time. I mean, we were just tripping out everywhere where.
Speaker 1: Bagel traps, He's just the streets. And the cameraman says, oh,
Speaker 1: let's go up to my dad's house in Woodstock. One
Speaker 1: weekend in the middle of the winter. There was I
Speaker 1: don't know, January February of sixty seven, was me, the
Speaker 1: cameraman's house, his dad's house, Gnome and this other crazy guy, Steve.
Speaker 1: But he was really nuts and loved to drip out,
Speaker 1: and he had broken his leg and we all went
Speaker 1: up there and he went up with the broken legs
Speaker 1: the middle of the winter, the snow everywhere, and I've naturally,
Speaker 1: I've got the acid. But it was fucking fabulous shit.
Speaker 1: And these were five hundred mic tabs, beautiful little purple berries.
Speaker 1: And so the four of us drop a tab and
Speaker 1: really strong, but absolutely clean and wonderful in you know,
Speaker 1: I mean so strong you couldn't do anything to put
Speaker 1: your head in a pillow. And I would just watch
Speaker 1: blueberries float by. As the blueberry would float by, it
Speaker 1: would say blueberry or strawberry. We went on the whole night,
Speaker 1: you know, and and we're tripping out through the morning. Naturally,
Speaker 1: I said, so let's drop some more. Everybody said, okay,
Speaker 1: that sounds cool, and I said, well, you know, we're
Speaker 1: gonna have to drop two tabs this time because one
Speaker 1: won't get us off. After last we all dropped two. No,
Speaker 1: it was twice as blue beage. So by early by
Speaker 1: late sixty six, I was taking acids, you know, in
Speaker 1: psychedelics so often that I finally said, oh fuck school,
Speaker 1: and I quit college and decided to major in acid.
Speaker 1: One oh one. This is a big deal. My dad
Speaker 1: was young fit ripe for the draft. A few months
Speaker 1: after quitting school, he got the dreaded letter from Uncle Sam,
Speaker 1: and he willed to comonstrators protest US involvement in the
Speaker 1: Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations. Central Park
Speaker 1: is the starting point for the parade to the UN Building.
Speaker 1: He estimated one hundred twenty five thousand Manhattan marchers include students,
Speaker 1: pass wives, beat nick, poets, doctors, businessman, teachers, priests and nuns.
Speaker 1: Makeup and costumes were bizarre. My dad had a plan.
Speaker 1: The night before my dad's draft board interview. He took
Speaker 1: acid and stayed up all night so he'd be really
Speaker 1: spaced out for the draft board. At the draft interview,
Speaker 1: my dad refused to disrobe or pe in a cup,
Speaker 1: so they sent him to the psychiatrist, who declared my
Speaker 1: dad one why, which is just above four f one
Speaker 1: y means Uncle Sam may call again, but probably not.
Speaker 1: My dad was free. I'm remo, Valentine, you're listening to
Speaker 1: disorganized crime. We'll be right back. Many predicted that there
Speaker 1: will be no beautiful summer for the hippies of San Francisco,
Speaker 1: that the dreamy bohemia of hate Ashbridge will be destroyed
Speaker 1: like the Big generation of the fifties by thrill seekers, tourists,
Speaker 1: uncommercial exploits. The psychedelic love generation of the sixties may
Speaker 1: find that it takes more than new words and new
Speaker 1: drugs to conquer the old order. It's nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: The summer of love is in full swing. The summer
Speaker 1: of sixty seven was madness. What happened to the Sugar
Speaker 1: Bowl man was? I mean, he was just really easy
Speaker 1: and loose, and he was really supplying I guess, a
Speaker 1: lot of big stuff. And apparently one of his old
Speaker 1: friends got busted and dropped a diamond him rad it
Speaker 1: on him, and it scarce the shit out of him,
Speaker 1: and he retires. Because everything changed, The CIA came well,
Speaker 1: they had been in there, but they started fucking with
Speaker 1: the acid all over the place. So they were putting
Speaker 1: stryctine in the acid, and everybody was getting on bad trips.
Speaker 1: But what we were getting in New York was just badassi,
Speaker 1: and it was a tough It was a weird time.
Speaker 1: By the late summer sixty seven, we were just making
Speaker 1: a lot of noise and all sorts of political shit, right,
Speaker 1: and the war in Vietnam. Music was changing, the changing
Speaker 1: the world, and the basis for all of that was
Speaker 1: the drugs that turned on the brilliant people who made
Speaker 1: the music, who made the art, who created the stuff.
Speaker 1: So those who were involved in that that they were
Speaker 1: on a terror tear. Now did the CIA tamper with acid?
Speaker 1: Whether true or not, there was plenty of propaganda circulating.
Speaker 1: According to Dennis McNally, I've never seen any credible evidence
Speaker 1: that the CIA literally poisoned psychedelics. There obviously were people
Speaker 1: who made psychedelics without the care and attention of an ousley,
Speaker 1: so that you get lesser stuff. But what the CIA
Speaker 1: did very consciously is poisoned the atmosphere and nuts as
Speaker 1: much of the CIA as the FBI poisoned the atmosphere
Speaker 1: in which you were taking LSD, so that if you
Speaker 1: planned us there were the two that I remember in
Speaker 1: particular was of the person who took LSD and then
Speaker 1: stared at the sun until they were blind. There were
Speaker 1: rumors about people taking LSD and then jumping off, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking they can fly, jumping out of windows and dying,
Speaker 1: and you know, those those stories are almost you know
Speaker 1: when when you ever you try to research that stuff,
Speaker 1: you discover that most of it is fraud but it
Speaker 1: was just definitely no question disseminated, uh and and put
Speaker 1: out by the FBI. So they they they tried to
Speaker 1: poison the well, at least metaphorically. Both of my parents
Speaker 1: say that by the Summer of Love in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: the true spirit of the psychedelic revolution was over. My
Speaker 1: dad didn't want to live in the city anymore, and
Speaker 1: he moves up to Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There he becomes a
Speaker 1: humble candlemaker and burns down his house and he leaves
Speaker 1: a pot of piping hot wax on the stovetop stone.
Speaker 1: When you burn the house down, I mean we smoked
Speaker 1: a lot of pot. At one point, I invented a
Speaker 1: At that point, I invented the first electric pot bomb.
Speaker 1: I had an a pipe that was heated electronically. Electrically
Speaker 1: was something to cook the pot and then it went
Speaker 1: through the air pump and into your mouth. In Stockbridge, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: my dad hung out with his friend the cameraman, and
Speaker 1: through him, my dad ended up appearing as a featured
Speaker 1: extra in the nineteen sixty nine hippie cult classic film
Speaker 1: Alice's Restaurant with r Low Guthrie. This led to a
Speaker 1: brief career as an assistant director in New York City
Speaker 1: film and then his first hash trip opportunity arises in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight. The cameraman tells my dad about a
Speaker 1: guy interested in trading a Lotus E Lawn, which is
Speaker 1: a fancy sports car, for two pounds of Lebanese hash.
Speaker 1: So my Dad goes to the hash guy tells him
Speaker 1: the Lotus guy, I will trade three pounds of hash
Speaker 1: for the car. The hashguy psyched, He agrees, and my
Speaker 1: Dad clears one pound of hash for profit. It's a
Speaker 1: winter snowstorm and my dad and his VW Bug is
Speaker 1: smoking hash and driving the two pounds of hash to
Speaker 1: the Lotus guy. When the pipe falls in my dad's lap.
Speaker 1: In the skirmish to put out the burning embers, my
Speaker 1: dad fears off the road into a snow bank, and
Speaker 1: the state police appear. My dad is quietly freaking out.
Speaker 1: His VW Bug, stashed with two pounds of hash, is
Speaker 1: stuck in the snow bank in a blizzard. My dad
Speaker 1: is totally stoned. His crutch is burning. Not an ideal
Speaker 1: situation for a drug smuggling draftable, young, dark, olive colored man. Luckily,
Speaker 1: the police want to get out of the snowstorm as
Speaker 1: fast as possible, and incredibly, my dad for his VW
Speaker 1: from the snow bank and unaware of the illegal drugs,
Speaker 1: send him on his merry away. This is just the
Speaker 1: start of my dad's good luck in the smuggling industry.
Speaker 1: So this is your first big deal? How do I
Speaker 1: make you feel? Are you kidding? It was so great?
Speaker 1: It was really exciting, and we had a pile of
Speaker 1: money again, and you know, and it was cool, you know,
Speaker 1: and fuck, you know, I'm selling candles for three dollars
Speaker 1: a candle or whatever. The fuck. I'm living like a pauper,
Speaker 1: you know. And then here I was, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: back to back to being cool again and free. I mean,
Speaker 1: money is freedom. In nineteen seventy, my dad decides to
Speaker 1: head out west, where the action is. After dropping off
Speaker 1: five hitchhikers on Berkeley's University Avenue, my dad heads to
Speaker 1: Marin County, where he crashes on the porch of some
Speaker 1: grateful dead roadies for a couple of weeks. Then he
Speaker 1: had a buddy decided to go on a road trip
Speaker 1: to Big Sir to get some redwood burl slabs. That
Speaker 1: buddy was my mom's brother. My dad, ever an art
Speaker 1: enthusiast visionary, wants to make redwood tables to sell to
Speaker 1: the high end New York City store Hammocker Schlemmer, apparently
Speaker 1: the fanciest store in New York. In Big Sir, my
Speaker 1: dad exchanges some nicky Sunshine acid for eight burl slabs. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I can't say the most hippy thing. You're treating acid
Speaker 1: for a VW bus redwood slab? Right, well, that is hilarious.
Speaker 1: The redwood burl guy named Crazy Richard gives my dad
Speaker 1: some of his own acid, and my dad trips his
Speaker 1: balls off, as he says, So I started getting really high,
Speaker 1: and it was great. I mean it was not uptight.
Speaker 1: I wasn't It wasn't physical. It was strictly phenomenally hallucinatory
Speaker 1: and not uptight, not not stressful, not speedy, not any
Speaker 1: of that stuff, but just so high all you could
Speaker 1: do is watch and there you are. You could understand
Speaker 1: people talking, but you were so high you couldn't speak.
Speaker 1: Instead of leaving my dad at SF's General Yar, my
Speaker 1: uncle chooses to leave the New York Filmmaker as my
Speaker 1: dad is reputed to be at his sister's house to recover.
Speaker 1: My mom has a history of helping people come down
Speaker 1: from bad trips throughout the sixties and seventies. Brother says, hey,
Speaker 1: he can you take care of him or something? Do
Speaker 1: you remember any of that here you take care of
Speaker 1: and would you say okay, yeah, but you must have
Speaker 1: said something earlier about how how oh the filmmaker's pretty
Speaker 1: cute or something? Did you think the filmmaker was cute?
Speaker 1: You made? I must have, you must have. My mom
Speaker 1: says he was catatonic for two months. My dad says
Speaker 1: two days. You didn't have to help him go to
Speaker 1: the bathrooms. No, nothing like that. I just couldn't. I
Speaker 1: could and speak. And for how long? No? No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: he just remember how long it was out? How long?
Speaker 1: Long term? She like, a couple of weeks or a
Speaker 1: couple of months. Yeah, those are two different things. Regardless.
Speaker 1: My dad was psychedelically plopped at my mom's Fisherman's cottage,
Speaker 1: where she lived with her one year old my big sister, Vertica.
Speaker 1: My dad never left, and since he had a family,
Speaker 1: my dad needed to make money. On one hand, his friend,
Speaker 1: an Academy Award winning director, invited my dad to La
Speaker 1: to work with him. And on the other hand, he
Speaker 1: was enchanted by my mom, his family, and the inner
Speaker 1: circle of West Coast psychedelic pioneers and rock and roll.
Speaker 1: He could move his hippie family from the rock and
Speaker 1: roll counterculture country living county the hustle and bustle of Hollywood,
Speaker 1: or he could stay in Moran and make big money
Speaker 1: being his own boss film or rock and roll outlaw.
Speaker 1: It's Sophie's choice for dudes in their twenties, right, So
Speaker 1: my dad chose smuggling, and my adrenaline loving parents began
Speaker 1: a dangerous double life of extremeize and lows, truly living
Speaker 1: in a house of cards that could fall apart at
Speaker 1: any moment. And I was in that house of cards
Speaker 1: playing pretend. Little did I know my parents were also
Speaker 1: playing pretend. Theirs was a far more dangerous game though.
Speaker 1: In the next episode, my Dad's first big trip, his
Speaker 1: first big deal. It involves seven hundred pounds of Colombian pot,
Speaker 1: police blackmail, and the Redwood City Jail. We'll dive into
Speaker 1: that next, plus some esclin a nutcracker in the outregeous
Speaker 1: history of reefer Madness. I'm Rainbow Valentine and this is
Speaker 1: disorganized Crime Disorganized Crime. Smuggler's Daughter is written and recorded
Speaker 1: by Me Rainbow Valentine. Our producers are Gabby Watts and
Speaker 1: Taylor Church. Executive producers are Brandon Barr, Brian Lavin, Elsie
Speaker 1: Crowley and Me at School of Humans and Connel Burn
Speaker 1: and Charles Bryant at iHeartRadio. Our music is by Gabby,
Speaker 1: Lala and Claire Campbell, with original theme by Mark Karen
Speaker 1: and Me. You can find us online at iHeart dot
Speaker 1: com slash Podcasts