Purple Haze was in my brain, lately things don't seem the same...
Jimi Hendrix brought the thrills and spills of the LSD experience into shag-carpeted rec rooms across America, playing a brand new, wildly improvisational electric music some enterprising cub reporter labeled "acid rock." Like it or not, acid played a huge role in the counterculture, and eventually undermined the dominant mainstream culture. Or did it? Here's Jimi playing "Purple Haze" at Woodstock.
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky...

The Pink Panther must have dropped acid in this cartoon. At the very least, the psychedelic artwork associated with the LSD experience influenced the animators. Acid had a widespread impact on the mainstream culture, and affected not only art but music, advertising, hairstyles, and social and sexual mores.
In the interest of keeping things weird, we've decided to explore the psychedelic phenomenon that unites this drug-addled panther with such luminaries as Ken Kesey, Jimi Hendrix, and The Beatles--not to mention Cary Grant and Groucho Marx. In this puritanical age, with the no-fun fundamentalists trying to control everyone's private lives, and with so many unfortunate druggies and failed seekers crashing and burning like vehicles on the road out of Baghdad, it might seem strange--or even irresponsible--to look into the strongest mind-altering drug known to man, Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

This next clip explores the "acid tests" put on by Ken Kesey and his merry band, The Merry Pranksters. Kesey, the celebrated author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the quintessential 1960s novel of man against heartless authority, was a student at Stanford when he signed up for psych experiments conducted by the US government. Among other hallucinogens, Kesey was administered LSD. Soon afterward, he secured some of the drug and turned on his friends. Before long, the party spilled out of the Stanford enclave of Perry Lane and into the streets, fueled by acid and an almost missionary zeal. The acid tests were conducted in the Bay Area, and participants were given "electric Kool Aid" dosed with LSD in a highly psychedelic environment with colored light shows and music provided by the house band, The Grateful Dead.
Without any more government acid to fuel their hi-jinks, the early explorers used acid synthesized by a number of hippie chemists, the most famous being a genius level scientist named Augustus Stanley Owsley, or simply Owsley. He was legendary for the purity and strength of his product, which included the holy grail of early LSD, Orange Sunshine. Owsley was honored in this song by the rock band Steely Dan, "Kid Charlemagne."
While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
Thats when you turned the world around
Did you feel like jesus?
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes?
On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home...

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