Psych-Out! Jack Nicholson and the “megahallucinogen” that had the Haight freaking the fuck out
Photo & Editing: The Grass Agency
STP was a helluva drug. Or so we’ve been told.
No one knows for sure where the initials came from. Some people say it’s a reference to STP motor oil. According to Playboy, the hippies nicknamed it “Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace,” while the cops lovingly referred to it as “Too Stupid to Puke.” Some called it a “megahallucinogen,” others “the caviar of psychedelics.” All epithets aside, by the time The Summer of Love was over, those three letters were synonymous with a bad trip.
STP, aka 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine, was introduced to the hippies of Haight Ashbury by Owsley Stanley, a renegade chemist who’d become a household name for his top-notch LSD. He kept musicians and counterculture leaders supplied in the stuff, and became the source for Ken Kesey’s drug-fueled parties, memorialized in Tome Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. His clients included The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Pete Townshend, among others.
But Owsely wasn’t just about slinging to the elite. His drugs fueled crowds at countless concerts and festivals in the late 1960s. In June of ‘67, Owsley distributed a reported 5,000 hits of STP at the Summer Solstice Festival in Golden Gate Park.
Owsley told Rolling Stone that he got the recipe from Alexander Shulgin, who would later bring ecstasy to the rave generation. Shulgin, a former Dow chemist, originally formulated the stuff for use in psychotherapy. He was later quoted in Playboy saying, “Three milligrams will produce a good high. Ten milligrams will allow you to take your brain out of your head and examine it.”
Max Julien and Jack Nicholson: “You ever seen the universe explode over your head?”
Owsley was passing out 20 milligram hits and people were freaking the fuck out. Reports poured in of hippies who’d been tripping for days showing up at the ER or being admitted to mental institutions.
“I saw myself on fire and then I began to feel the pain of fire … If I closed my eyes I knew I would die … I was in hell,” a 23-year-old Ontario woman who’d taken three hits told The New York Times. The outbreak was short-lived and there was only one casualty tied to Owsley’s bad batch, but STP’s legacy lives on in Psych-Out, a psychedelic love story starring Jack Nicholson and produced by Dick Clark.
I came across Psych-Out on Wikipedia while researching Hare Rama Hare Krishna a few weeks back. Just under the writing and directing credits for the 1972 Bollywood breakout is a note: “Based on The 1968 movie Psych-Out by Richard Rush.” There’s no other reference to the film’s association with HRHK and no citation to backup the claim.
I’d just read an excerpt from Romancing with Life, the autobiography of HRHK’s writer / director / star, Dev Anand, who tells a very detailed story about his inspiration for the film. Had his recollection of hippies strung out on drugs in a chic hotel in Kathmandu been a bunch of bullshit? Had he really met a beautiful desi hippie named Jasbir, who’d run away from her family in Montreal and changed her name to Janice? Or did he just repackage an obscure Hollywood film about drug culture in the 1960s? Within minutes I’d found the full director’s cut of Psych-Out on YouTube, remastered no-less for BluRay in 2015.
The two movies have common themes: the excess of 1960s counterculture, the dangers of drug use, the unravelling of traditional ideals. Both revolve around beautiful young runaways who fall in with bands of hippies, HRHK’s Jasbir in Kathmandu, and Psych-Out’s Jenny in SF’s Haight Ashbury. They also feature big-name male leads and extended party sequences punctuated by shakey dialogue. But only one of them has STP.
Like I said, STP is one helluva drug, and while Psych-Out may not have Zeenat Aman, or her fire filmi fashions, the visuals are a real trip. The plot is pretty simple: a deaf girl from the country travels to San Francisco in 1967 to find her brother who’s come to the city to drop out during The Summer of Love. Unbeknownst to her, her brother Steve (Bruce Dern), known to his followers as “the seeker,” has taken to dropping STP, and pissing off gangs of junkyard hooligans.
Anyway, Jenny (Susan Strasberg), the deaf girl from the country, is quickly taken in by a band of dropouts that includes Stoney (Jack Nicholson), Dave (played by Dean Stockwell, aka Al from Quantum Leap), and the Strawberry Alarm Clock (played by themselves). After a few days cohabitating with a house full of hippies on a permatrip, Jenny falls for Stoney and the two get it on, but Stoney isn’t looking to be tied down. So Dave swoops in and convinces Jenny to share a glass of red Kool-Aid laced with STP.
Great balls of fire Jenny! Those are cars flying at you.
The sequence that follows is a cacophony of visual effects, psychedelic music, and creative camera tricks that adds up to one of the most memorable drug sequences I’ve ever witnessed. The film ends with Jenny standing in the middle of The Golden Gate bridge tripping balls, dodging balls of fire, and screaming bloody murder. When Dave leaps into traffic to save her, he’s struck by oncoming traffic. As he bleeds out on the side of the road, he utters his final words: “Reality’s a deadly place. I hope this trip is a good one.”
That final scene is just one of many drug sequences that play like a greatest hits of lo-fi visual effects. There are gels, and mirrors, and projections, and kaleidoscopes, and transparencies, and duplication, and distortion, and body paint, and smoke, and soft focus, so much soft focus. Add to that a soundtrack that includes songs like The Strawberry Alarm Clock’s Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow, and you have yourself a near perfect picture to get high to. Sure, the acting is subpar and the plot is half-baked, but Psych-Out is still worth the trip.
STP, on the other hand? We’ll consider ourselves lucky that we missed it.