heres a section taken from an interview with owsley I find relevant to the topic...
B: In those days, the orientation was more toward that mystical experience. Today it’s probably different, a lot of the kids don’t even have that framework that people had back then, because there was an intellectual tradition, people were writing books, The Beatles were singing about Magical Mystery Tour. There was a spiritual context for taking acid, and people shared information with each other about what to expect from the higher dosages.
O: I don’t think so.
B: More so than now!
O: You think so? I don’t know. I’m not out on the street anymore. But I did come across a very interesting program on television recently,. I just tuned into the middle of it. It was about techno. Basically it was about the acid scene, the modern scene: the music, acid, ecstasy, etc. It was an in-depth. Some techno is very good, some of it’s uninteresting to me, but some of it is so good, it’s amazing. It’s modern, complex, electronic music, and it’s usually done in real time by musicians. So it’s sort of like performances that resemble in some ways John Cage, Berlioz and Sobotnik. Real cutting edge, heavy duty. I’ve been thinking of trying to contact Phil Lesh about this, I was really impressed. It started in Goa.
B: With Goa Gil.
O: Yeah, it started in Goa, this whole thing.
B: That’s what Goa Gil claims.
O: I don’t doubt it. Some of the strangest parties I’ve been to here, and we’re talking 13 years ago, I went to a party that people who had come from Goa were running, and it was full of the strangest, heaviest, most psychedelic music. I was stoned myself, so I tried to find out later what records they used. They showed me this box full of records. I said what did you play, he said man I don’t know, whatever I thought was good at the time! There was a lot of African stuff, techno stuff, an amazing mix, and all of it was good. I didn’t connect the thing at all in those days. Until I saw the show the other night, I wasn’t really that aware of the depth of the scene. It looked like early Grateful Dead, looked like the Acid Test. Images of parties and people dancing, and freaking to music. It’s the same kind of stuff. It’s Acid Test stuff. So if somebody tells me: “You were doing this then, but they’re not doing that now”, I’d just tell them, you might not be in contact with the scene, but that scene is very much alive.
