Robert Hunter, MK-ultra, the CIA, and the Grateful Dead
(Credits: Far Out / Ed Perlstein / Paul F. Kisak)
In 1953, the CIA began an illegal programme that experimented with the potential of using LSD and other psychoactive drugs to achieve mind control. This is not a conspiracy theory; this is all declassified truth… somehow. While the MK-ultra experiments may well have failed to achieve mind control in the intervening years, they did, nevertheless, change the world as we know it.
The organisation bought the entire world’s supply of LSD for $240,000. They had so much of it that they gave 297mg of it to Tusko, a three-tonne Asian bull elephant. Within five minutes, the poor beast had shit itself and died. But this beleaguered animal wasn’t the only testing subject. With copious acid to administer, the CIA soon looked to enlist volunteers for testing. Robert Hunter was one of the first to sign up.
One of the cohorts he met during this very weird time was Ken Kesey, the man who would later write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Both had been attracted to the programme thanks to the fact it offered pretty handsome payment to volunteers and because the rise of pop culture and the fucklessness of the Beat generation had somewhat lowered inhibitions when it came to getting out of your gaud.
In this regard, the subject’s revelations were far more impactful than anything the CIA would learn about psychology. Once Hunter and Kesey were freed from the programme, they were the ones who made great leaps when it came to shaping the minds of the future, not the CIA. Kesey set up a psychedelic touring van and a clan called The Merry Pranksters, who drove around America throwing Acid Test parties in remote corners.
These parties featured LSD-laced Kool-Aid and bands looking to embody the sound of freedom in every sense. One of those bands was the Grateful Dead. The rudimentary Jug Band stylings of this outfit were irrevocably altered in a tie-dye swirl when acid was stirred into their welter. But putting such expansion to words was no easy feat. Thankfully, for their sake, as they jammed under the Bay Area sun one afternoon, a young fellow in need of direction was watching on agog.
That fellow was Kesey’s old buddy Robert Hunter—a man whom Bob Dylan would later call one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest lyricists. But at the time, he was just living off what he could pull off of the fruit trees in Palo Alto. But suddenly, he was hypnotised by the sound of this alluring band before him. This was more than he could have said for the CIA a few years earlier.
“I couldn’t figure out why they were paying me good money to take these psychedelics,” Hunter told Reuters when reflecting on his involvement in MK-ultra. “At first, they gave me LSD, then the next week, I think it was mescaline, the next week it was psilocybin, and the fourth week it was all three at once.”
He explains that the aim of this psychoactive cocktail was to see “if I was more hypnotisable when I was on them than I was when I wasn’t on them. I didn’t find that to be the case. I didn’t find myself being hypnotised”. Part of the reason for this was because he was out of his gaud. He couldn’t even concentrate on what they were saying, let alone carry out some covert mission for them.
However, when a trip incapacitated Hunter, he saw that the Grateful Dead were going right where the CIA had gone wrong. A fellow with a headful of acid might not be able to pay attention to some lengthy lecture by someone in a lab coat, but they can tune into a wall of wavering sound.
For years after the experiments, Hunter had felt a strange sense of loneliness. LSD wasn’t out on the streets yet, so he was a wandering soul wondering what he had been part of. Would his fellow man even know the places he had been? Would a day come when he babbled about men in white coats giving him mind-altering substances and envisioning worlds untold within our own in a bar to disbelieving strangers who shrugged him off as a madman?
Now, while watching the Dead, he knew he was finally among his people—and he knew that they presented an opportunity to recuperate some money, seeing as though his CIA funds had long since dried up. After meeting the band and mingling, he decided to grab Jerry Garcia’s contacts and send him some songs. The songs in question were, in essence, borne from his days in MK-ultra—a flowing stream of colourful nonsense.
This further highlighted the possibilities of musical freedom to the band, and they signed him up as a lyricist. His acid-infused anthems emboldened the band, made them a full-formed beast, a travelling road show now with poetry in their ranks – an odd form of poetry strangely conceived in a CIA laboratory.
So, does that mean that, in some way, the success of MK-ultra was in producing the most counterculture band of all time? Was the organisation hoisted by their own petard in the most glorious fashion? Hunter simply says, “Who can say?” but there’s no doubt that LSD gave the band their voice, and it was a weird one that still echoes.
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