3. Being an historian of California art and a
museum professional that has lived in Laguna
Beach since 1988, it was inevitable that I would
become interested in the wide array of regional
art developments.
Susan M. Anderson’s 1993 exhibition at Laguna
Art Museum titled Hand and Spirit: Media
Exploration in Laguna Beach, 1918-1993 first
introduced me to the work of Dion Wright
and other interesting artists active in Laguna
Canyon during the 1960s. However, it was the
publication of Nick Schou’s Orange Sunshine,
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest
to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World
in 2010 that revealed the significance of the
active and vibrant exhibition program at the
psychedelic emporium called Mystic Arts World
in Laguna Beach. That exhibition program
turned out to be substantial not only in terms
of the number of artists involved but also in
terms of its geographic reach. Remarkably,
Dion invited some fifty artists from New York to
Laguna Beach to show at the Mystic Arts World.
This exhibition and publication represent but a
cursory look at the art and artists shown during
the gallery’s four years in operation.
One might question whether such regional
studies of obscure developments are worth
the time and effort. However, one study builds
upon another and over time a clearer picture
of the culture and history of a place comes into
focus. What has become irrefutable over my
last almost thirty years of study is that Laguna
Beach has long provided an inspiring and
beneficial environment for the artist, one that
has few equals anywhere. Historically, that
was mainly due to the region being remarkably
beautiful and still undeveloped at the turn of
the twentieth century, a blank slate that allowed
personal freedom and the sense that anything
was possible. This aura of openness and infinite
possibility surely was still in the air in the 1960s
in Laguna Beach. The Mystic Arts World tapped
into that earlier zeitgeist, reaffirming decades of
artistic aspiration to participate in the birth of a
new order.
As is always the case with the organization of
any art exhibition, many people helped to make
this exhibition happen and gave unstintingly of
their time and enthusiasm. First and foremost
is Dion Wright for his hours and hours helping
to identify and recruit the artists, explaining the
history of the period, and providing insight at
every step in the development of the exhibition.
In addition, he wrote an invaluable narrative
to accompany the exhibition, parts of which
are included in the exhibition labels and this
publication. Along with Dion’s observations
and commentary on the artists and the period,
the exhibition also incorporates additional
short narratives by Regumbah Connolly, Craig
Lockwood, and Allan Seymour.
This exhibition, which I originally conceived
in 2011 when I was director at Laguna
Art Museum, lay dormant for two years.
I am grateful to Greg Escalante for his
encouragement, his help in finding Coastline
Community College as a site for the show, for
tirelessly promoting it, and for helping to find
underwriting for the show. David Lee, Assistant
Professor and Gallery Director, made amazing
things happen, especially given that he is a staff
of two (the other invaluable staff member being
Mitchell Nomura). Jane Bauman, the Chair of
the Visual and Performing Art Department,
offered valuable support, enthusiasm, and
advice as well. The Grand Central Art Forum
board and, in particular, board member Julie
Lee, deserve my special thanks for their early,
unwavering encouragement and support of the
exhibition. I also want to thank Marni Farmer
for expertly marketing the exhibition and Cindy
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Paul Darrow, Omniscience, c. 1968
Oil on canvas, 71 x 50 inches. Courtesy of BC Space.
(cover)
Robert Altman, Mystic Arts World, 1968
Black and white photograph

5. Schwarzstein at Cartwheel Art for being the
media sponsor. Finally, I want to thank my
wife, Susan M. Anderson, for her thoughts on
the show and for making several insightful
suggestions. As always, her advice and feedback
were invaluable.
The exhibition has been made possible through
the generous underwriting of presenting
sponsor RVCA. Pat Tenore, Casey Holland,
Aaron Rose, and Brian Cassaro at RVCA
immediately saw the potential of the show and
realized how it dove-tailed with RVCA’s interest
in this era. Additional generous support comes
from the Croul Family Foundation, Jennifer
and Anton Segerstrom, an Anonymous Donor,
Jennifer Vaughn and Larry Gonzalaz, the
William Gillespie Foundation, Grand Central
Art Forum, and Mary E.M. Houseal.
Many others played important roles in helping
to make this project happen including: Sarah
and Michael Abram, Isaac Abrams, Gary
Aldcroft, Tom Aldcroft, Robert Altman,
Kevin Ancell, Abbie Argersinger, Mark Arico,
Mike Bajc, Ian Bernard, Tom Blackwell, Art
Brewer, Regumbah Connolly, Hugh Davies,
Paul Darrow, Jeff Devine, Janet Eggers, Anne
England, Chuck Everts, Diane Factor and
the Factor Family, Herbie Fletcher, Mark
Chamberlain, Jason Cohn, Christine Hallen-
Berg, Andrea Harris, Sue Henger, George
Herms, Dave Hickey, Eric Jessen, Adam
Kaplan, Kent Kelley, Steve Kensrue, Terry
Lamb, Craig Lockwood, Julie Lee, Beth Leeds,
Ashley Lopez, Gordon McClelland, Doug Miller,
Joe Miller, Valerie Miller, Tobey Moss,
Mitchell Nomura, Sara Murray Novak, Bill
Ogden, Jimmy Otto, Nelson Petrovich, Beth
Pewther, Mary and Herb Rabe, Carol Griggs
Randall, Mike Randall, Noble Richardson,
Mary Riker Segal, Star Shields, Gerd Stern,
Mike Stice, Allan Seymour, Jon Stokesbary,
John Upton, Debbie Young, George Wanlass,
and Ruth Wright.
Artists who exhibited at the Mystic Arts World
included: Isaac Abrams, Richard Aldcroft,
Roger Armstrong, Jan Peters Babcock, Tom
Blackwell, Mark Blumenfeld, Robert Ronnie
Branaman, Jane Callender, Italo d’Andrea,
Paul Darrow, Louis Delsarte, Khigh Alx Dhiegh,
Philip Freeman, Ray Friesz, Louis Goodman,
Reuben Greenspan, Bill Groves, George Herms,
R.L. “Holly” Hollingsworth, Robert “Jocko”
Johnson, Julie Kahn, Steve Kensrue, Karen
Kozlow, Terry Lamb, Bob Laney, Ed Lutz,
Robert McCarron, Joe Miller, Dwight Morouse,
Jim Nussbaum, Harve Parks, Beth Pewther,
Noble Richardson, Larry Rink, David Rosen,
R.L. Bob Ross, Mary Riker Segal, Gayl Stenlund,
Gerd Stern, Jon Stokesbary, Wiktor Sudnik,
John Upton, Gordon Wagner, Andy Wing, Dion
Wright, and Bob Young. To them I owe my deep
appreciation for their vision and contribution to
the history of art in California.
Richard Aldcroft,Two screen shot photographs from the film
Infinity Machine, copyright 1992
(opposite)
Portrait of Richard Aldcroft, Black and white photograph.
Courtesy of Gary Aldcroft.

6. (clockwise from top left) Photograph of Italo d’Andrea by Doug Miller;
Photograph of Beth Pewther by Reuben Greenspan; Photograph of
Isacc Abrams; Photograph of Mary Riker Segal.
(opposite)
Beth Pewther, Body of Christ-Body of Man, 1966
Collage and oil on canvas, 72 x 48 inches

9. Transformation and the Mystic Artists, 1967-1970 is the first
exhibition to examine the art and culture of the Mystic Artists, a loosely
organized group of artists interested in alternative culture, mystical
experience and the transformation of society. These artists congregated
and exhibited at Mystic Arts World, a psychedelic emporium in Laguna
Beach, which was ground zero for psychedelic culture in southern
California during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This groundbreaking
exhibition includes works of art by artists that exhibited at the Mystic
Arts World as well as related ephemera. Together they provide a
glimpse of an adventurous, experimental flowering in the cultural
history of southern California.
Who were the Mystic Artists and what did they exhibit? Dion Wright,
who was the curator of the gallery program at Mystic Arts World
and collaborated on this exhibition, archived a treasure trove of
photographs, posters, exhibition announcements, flyers, and other
material relating to Mystic Arts World. These ephemera helped to
reconstruct a list of some fifty exhibiting artists, few of who are well
known today. The exhibition includes both art that was exhibited
at Mystic Arts World and, out of necessity, work by Mystic Artists
dating from roughly the same time period. Many of the works of art
and artifacts in the show are in fragile condition. Unfortunately, some
Mystic Artists and their work could not be located. However, what we
did find is revealing.
Artistic expression ranges from Beat assemblage (Jane Callender,
George Herms, Paul Darrow, Louis Newman, and Andy Wing), to
Visionary (Carol Abrams, Tom Blackwell, Robert Branaman, and Dion
Wright) to craft and figuration (Roger Armstrong, Italo d’Andrea,
Robert “Jocko” Johnson, Beth Pewther, David Rosen, and Jon
Stokesbary). According to Wright,
“While it lasted, Mystic Arts World was a focus of seminal,
sometimes cosmological, and always super-conscious Art.
This writer was dragooned into service early-on by John
Griggs, who was determined to feature my Taxonomic
Mandala within Mystic Arts World, and feature me
personally as the maitre d’ of presenting ‘far out, outtasight’
works of Art. What you see in this exhibition is a collection of
surviving works of that wild period.”
The exhibition program of the Mystic Arts World had precedents
regionally in a psychedelic emporium in Los Angeles off Fairfax called
The Infinite Mind (1966-1967) and the Café Frankenstein at 860 South
Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. Café Frankenstein, owned by Doug
Myers, existed from 1958-1960 and was a Beat hangout with black
walls that featured poetry readings and music. The Infinite Mind,
TRANSFORMATION AND
THE MYSTIC ARTISTS, 1967-1970
Jeff Devine, David Nuuhiwa and Johnny Gale, 1972
(opposite)
Robert “Jocko” Johnson, Jocko’s Pocket Rockets, Humidor,
and Streamliner Scale Models. Courtesy Classicsurf.com.
(following spread)
Dion Wright, Taxonomic Mandala of Life on Earth, 1965-66
Oil on plywood, 138 x 96 inches

10. owned by Regumbah Connolly, exclusively exhibited works
of art by Laguna Beach artists, focusing on Tom Blackwell,
Andy Wing, and Dion Wright.
According to Wright, sometime around 1964 (about two
years before LSD was declared illegal), an entrepreneurial
young man named Bill Baldwin enlisted a chemistry savant
named Mike Moon to manufacture LSD in Laguna Beach.
1
The psychedelic substance in the form of an electric blue
liquid was made in the basement of a house at the south end
of Glenneyre Street, distributed in the community, and said
to be very pure. Those that shared its use were committed to
a natural healthy lifestyle and centered around Bill Baldwin’s
house. This circle included some of the most prominent
artists working in the region at the time, many of whom later
showed at Mystic Arts World. Rich artistic and perceptual
experimentation grew out of this burgeoning psychedelic
culture in Laguna Beach. 2
There are a number of key works in the exhibition that give
a sense of the diversity of expression shown at Mystic Arts
World. One pivotal piece is Robert Young’s large Opus for
Milo (c. 1968-1969). A transitional work for Young, Opus for
Milo bears some of the sensibility of his earlier color-field
abstractions and anticipates his later hyperreal underwater
sea-life paintings. Opus for Milo hovers on the edge of
chaotic abstraction, manifesting itself in a vibrant primordial
sea of shape and color, with Baroque spatial twists and turns.
Other key works include Tom Blackwell’s Periphery, 1966,
and Dion Wright’s Taxonomic Mandala, 1966, both of which
make reference to primordial earth and, indirectly, to the
growing environmental movement of the 1960s. Blackwell’s
Periphery, like seeing something out of the corner of your
eye or on the edge of your vision, is hard to grasp visually.
The entire painting is slightly out of focus and its details
muted. What you see in Periphery is the skin of the earth.
According to Blackwell, his paintings “are concerned with the
transformation of matter into energy and vice versa, with the
thin line between subjective and objective reality.”3
Wright’s monumental Taxonomic Mandala was the
centerpiece of the meditation room at Mystic Arts World and
a breath-taking, incredibly detailed, biologic description of
the world. Painted at Woodstock and then installed at Mystic
Arts World, it miraculously survived the fire that burned
Mystic Arts World to the ground in 1970.4
Mandalas are
ritual symbols that are believed to establish a sacred space
and stimulate transformation of the psyche. 5
Beth Pewther’s Body of Christ-Body of Man, 1966, reflects
the turbulent ethos of the period, and in particular,
juxtaposes American consumer culture with the realities of
the Vietnam War. Photo-based artists in Southern California
like Robert Heinecken and Martha Rosler were also
mining the crossover between artistic experimentation and
dissenting politics at the time. However, it is the fusion of
psychedelic culture and Christianity in the work of Pewther
that is of note. Psychedelic Christianity, a subgenre of “born
again” Christianity, would eventually have an influence on
Calvary Chapel and other religious organizations in Southern
California.
Alistair Gordon aptly sums up the cultural gestalt of the
1960s versus that of today in his online overview for his book
Spaced Out (Rizzoli, 2008). Gordon explains that he wrote
the book “in response to the culture of control that arose after
September 11, 2001” versus the freedom of the sixties, which
he saw as “a period of unbridled experimentation.” 6
Today
there is a built-in cultural inclination to dismiss works of art
that make reference to use of psychedelic substances. While
the reasons are many, including the fear of promoting the use
of LSD, the attitude is a bit like throwing the baby out with
the bathwater. The search for self--the ultimate quest of the
Baby Boomer generation--set the stage in the 1960s for one
of the most remarkably open-minded and culturally fertile
periods of the century, and mind-altering chemicals were a
catalyst in making that possible. Given the level of fear and
control prevalent in our culture today, it is worth taking a
look at the cauldron of art and ideas arising out of the Mystic
Arts World. The artists’ countercultural activity and mystical
quest can still inspire us today in our thinking about personal
and global transformation.
Bolton Colburn
Guest Curator
(Endnotes)
1 Dion Wright, Bathtub Chemistry, an unpublished manuscript
emailed to me by the author in January 2015. This was prior to the
Brotherhood of Eternal Love’s presence in Laguna Beach.
2 Just over the hill from Laguna Beach, the University of California
Irvine was being established along with its art department and
gallery program. There are parallels between the art experimentation
and perceptual exploration occurring at UCI and in the growing
psychedelic culture in Laguna Beach. Additional work needs to be
done on this crossover and the cultural forces in play at the time that
affected every young person in California in unprecedented ways.
3 Robert E.L. Masters & Jean Houston, Psychedelic Art, Grove Press,
Inc. New York, 1968, page 174.
4 Nicholas Schou, Orange Sunshine, The Brotherhood of Eternal
Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World,
Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2010, page 228.
5 Marie von Franz, C.G. Jung: Man and His Symbols, p. 225.
6 Alistair Gordon, online overview of his book Spaced Out,
www.spacedoutthebook.net/overview.html.

13. In 1966 LSD was a legal avenue to hope. American
youth who had been opened by the experience of
LSD made plans to gather the next summer in the
City of San Francisco in a semi-spontaneous, semi-
tribal catharsis known as The Summer of Love.
The initial foliation was all that could be hoped
for, but by the following summer, the awakening
authorities had illegalized LSD, the lines of
contention were being drawn, and the tipping-
point onto the long downhill slide to the present
day had commenced.
In 1967 LSD was still a hopeful thing that had
not yet been thoroughly demonized. It was a
gateway to visionary experiences that also had
the effect of revealing hypocrisy. Once a person
had been smacked across the brain with what
was so convincing as the obvious Truth, it was no
longer easy to swallow slogans apparently foisted
on a trusting public by an unworthy authority.
The mainspring of social tension that drove the
widening fracture between the generations was the
Vietnam War. Remember that this era was “led” by
LBJ and Nixon, both on the same side, as far as the
Flower Children were concerned.
By 1967, the subconscious bedrock of the American
psyche had been marinating in nuclear angst
for twenty-two years. Growing up in that milieu
made perceptive youngsters unsure about their
own future and far from convinced that there
would even be a future. People who had solidified
their views before the nuclear age may have
been less profoundly affected by the specter of
nuclear annihilation, but the suspicion that there
might be no tomorrow was all too real to their
children. All through the troubled psychological
history of Homo sapiens, carrying in each
individual’s cells the terrifying genetic memory
of the hungry, coughing leopard in the night, we
have imagined the predator, and often in places
where it was not altogether appropriate. But the
qualitative difference in survival-motivation by
1967 was the novel apprehension that we might
all be extinguished at once, and through our own
tinkering folly at that. The horrors of Vietnam were
proof that we hadn’t learned anything. LSD eroded
lockstep synchronicity with the Leader, at least
among the inoculated, by plainly revealing the web
of propaganda, false assumptions, and political
cynicism that created the war. Youth, as usual, was
cannon-fodder, for all the indubitable courage and
patriotism of individual soldiers. Into this roiling
situation came a sort of eccentric, redneck savant,
John Griggs.
John Griggs was either the right man in the right
place at the right time, or a dangerous criminal,
depending on which side of the expanded-
consciousness divide one found oneself. There
was no doubt that he had been on the wrong side
of the law during his violent post-adolescence,
and there was even less doubt that after he had
been opened up by LSD he was an unquenchable
prophet. He knew that everything was God, and he
constantly said so all through his all-too-brief life.
There is nobody so relentless as an enlightened
testifier of God, and no one on the idealistic side
of the consciousness-expansion movement was
as energetic, clear and inspired as this boundless
sparkplug of a man. (The name Griggs derives
from the Old English noun meaning “merry
cricket,” which suited John to a T.) Unfolding
events piled vicissitudes upon him until he was
extinguished, but during his short run he pried
open the vaults of the unconscious so that direct
experience, and the idealism attending it, might
flourish for an hour or two.
MYSTIC ARTS WORLD
Louis Delarte, Untitled, 1968
Pencil and ink on paper

15. Mystic Arts World was the mercantile expression of John
Griggs’ idealism. He was a great, if somewhat tacky, coiner of
nomenclature, having imagined this lurid name for the store,
and also the name Brotherhood of Eternal Love for his group of
joyous proselytizing smugglers. The thing to realize is his absolute
sincerity. His cultural opponents were riddled with hypocrisy and
all stripes of self-interest, but John was as pure as an acetylene
flame. His idea, based on Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island,
about a spiritual community, was to capitalize on LSD and the
legitimate Mystic Arts World business to buy a remote island on
which to try to work out and into a future of spiritual revelation.
This was a pie-in-the-sky vision on the face of it, but John was
impervious to thoughts of its improbability. It would have been fine
to see how the idealism might have developed, had it been allowed
to, but it was not. The social forces of reaction, not untouched by
fear, gathered and marshaled all their resources of repression to
squelch the zanies, and their cat’s paw was Dr. Timothy Leary.
Timothy Leary eventually proved himself capable of betraying his
closest associates, but he was probably not a snake in the grass
from the get-go. He was, however, a self-indulgent sybarite who
loved the limelight and who used his exceptional brilliance in
this cause. John Griggs thought Leary was a sort of savior and
subdued his own light to become Tim’s acolyte. This was his doom.
Tim warped the stage of the Huxley/Griggs vision, changing the
scenario from a separated island in the open sea to a landlocked
ranch on a mountaintop, and here the catastrophe worked itself
out, ending in the deaths of several Brothers, including John
Griggs, and the arson of Mystic Arts World, perpetrated by pillars
of the law-and-order community. All of these melodramatic
scenarios played out in a few years against the backdrop of the
endless, dreary, and somewhat racist war in Southeast Asia.
While it lasted, Mystic Arts World was a focus of seminal,
sometimes cosmological, and always superconscious Art. This
writer was dragooned into service early on by John Griggs, who was
determined to feature my taxonomic mandala within Mystic Arts
World and to feature me personally as the maître d’ of presenting
“far out, outtasight” works of art. What you see in this exhibition is
a collection of surviving works of that wild period.
- Dion Wright, 2015
Gerd Stern, Untitled, c. 1968
Collage, 10 x 10 inches

16. (clockwise from top left) Photograph of Bob Young;
Isaac Abrams, Seed Dream, 1969, Oil on canvas,
54 x 44 inches; Photograph of Steve Kensrue

18. Happiness Tent at the Laguna Beach Christmas Happening,
1970, Photo by Jim Koch. Courtesy BC Space.
(opposite)
May the Great Spirit Watch Over You, 1970

19. BATHTUB CHEMISTRY
Human beings will pursue the light, and
if the light comes through a chemical,
they will pursue that chemical.
Psychedelic consciousness-expansion is
the case in point. The chemicals that
helped that pursuit of heightened
awareness had been made illegal almost
as fast as they had appeared. Apparently
Society, being largely a conglomeration of
historical privileges and vested interests,
doesn’t easily tolerate sudden and
extreme consciousness expansion, maybe
because it sometimes has the drastic
effect of demonstrating how “the emperor
has no clothes.”
Human beings will also pursue chemicals
which make them feel good, but which
dim the light, such as alcohol and opiates,
one being legal and the other illegal. Why
is there a distinction of this kind? Both
are destructive.
All that is necessary to encourage a
personal pursuit to bloom into a major
social confrontation, it seems, is to
prohibit it. People, being what they are,
will test laws which deny them what they
see as their innate rights. If the unfolding
of their nature comes through the use of a
substance, they will want that substance,
whether society nixes it, or not.
Commercial exploiters will see profit in
egging-on resistance to prohibitive
statutes. In America, partly because of
Puritan cultural roots, substance-use is
often seen by some moralists as
substance-abuse.
Substance abuse is a real thing which
does occur, but all substances are not the
same, although many basically different
sorts of chemicals are lumped together as
unacceptable, while others are accepted,
despite their obvious destructiveness,
alcohol and nicotine being the most clear
examples. No chemical groups could be
more different than psychedelics and
opiates, yet they are forced together
within the social mechanics by definition
as “drugs.”
The idea that control is lacking over
self-indulgence drives the stewards’ of
proper behavior into action. Reaction
comes in the form of repression. A
culture of suppression takes shape, soon
punctuated by all the excesses that go
along with trying to control the
uncontrollable, up to and including
murder and mayhem. A bureaucratic
machine emerges, and grows into an
establishment with a life of its own. Once
the control mechanism has gathered
momentum, the conflict between
repression and resistance naturally gives
birth to an illicit commerce. After that it
becomes almost impossible to get back
into a state of balance. When economic

20. forces are in play, the inertia becomes tidal.
Reevaluation of the “problem” in the light of new
knowledge, and reconsidering data misunderstood
earlier, become next to impossible. The police
function has become concerned with its own
survival, annual budgets need to be increased
because of the momentum, and the illicit
commerce has become concerned with
maintaining profits, both for the malefactors and
the police, with the individual, as usual, caught
between titanic forces.
The experiment of Prohibition in the American
1920’s was our parents’ and grandparents’
case-in-point. The most otherwise well-behaved
citizens went to “speak-easies” to have a drink or
three. It became a fashionable behavior,
associated with entertainment and being
‘modern’, to support a culture which was driven
and made possible by gangsters like Al Capone
and others. These gangsters set a deplorable mode
of behavior, which, nonetheless, and through the
very media run by the conservative element of
society, became romantic icons of noble
resistance. Filthy thugs were willy-nilly embraced
as Robin Hoods. This folly had echoing effects into
the future, when bad boys later aped these worst
persons in the history of the Republic as some sort
of heroes. Prohibition, an experiment so profound
that it was defined in a constitutional amendment,
and then undefined by a subsequent amendment
of repeal, failed utterly, but the lesson of it was
lost to subsequent generations. It was repeated in
all its woes when the Consciousness-Expansion
movement within academia blossomed into the
Psychedelic Revolution, which was carried into
the streets by blue-collar activists led by the
novelist Ken Kesey and Dr. Timothy Leary, the
Harvard University psychologist.
During the ‘20’s, “moonshine”, or “white
lightning” was the fire-water concocted in “stills”,
short for distilleries, which dotted the rural
backwaters of the nation, producing alcoholic
beverages utterly without quality control, and only
inhibited by violent repression. Instead of
regulation to ensure quality, anything went, and
people sometimes died or went blind behind
poison “hootch”. The same mechanism of legal
suppression leading to home-made liquor during
Prohibition occurred four decades later with
regard to psychedelic chemicals. The fact is that
psychedelic chemicals are far more complicated
and unpredictable in their manufacture and
results than mere alcohol ever was. The
professional manufacturing controls on LSD, legal
as it was before 1966, were stringent enough to be
a bottleneck. Soon after entering government
(CIA) and academic circles, where it was lavishly
distributed as an “inside” marvel, a demand for
chemical enlightenment had been created by
turned-on citizens wishing to turn on all their
friends. Because of the bottleneck it became a
profitable endeavor for some entrepreneurial
persons to start trying to make bathtub chemical
LSD outside of the control of the pharmacological
houses like Sandoz in Switzerland. One of these
new entrepreneurs was Bill Baldwin of Laguna
Beach, California.
Bill Baldwin was a breezy, slender, button-down
Ivy-League appearing young man who looked like
he might be a car or real estate salesman, so
toothy and wide was his perpetual smile. How
could anyone talk like that and never stop
grinning all the while? Bill Baldwin had a constant
air of expectancy about him, as if he were waiting
for your signature on the dotted line, and sure
he’d get it, too. It was a matter of Southern
California controlled style. He was a salesman,
alright, but what he sold was marijuana. The
clientele was there, and required no convincing.
Bill was a slippery eel, and always managed to stay
ahead of the law, although the law was well-aware
of him, and longed to arrest him.
Norm Babcock, a cop on the Laguna Beach Police
Force, often mentioned Bill Baldwin, and how his
smooth operation was frustrating the folks down
at City Hall. Norm, who was raising three boys
himself, was always at pains to present a
reasonable facade, however agitated he may have
been underneath, commenting laconically and
moderately in his mid-western twang,
observations which might be supposed to have
strong underlying emotions. His wife, Jan Peters
Babcock, was the perky purveyor of excessive,
overbearing, in-your-face enthusiasms, which may
have been, partially at least, a symptom of denial
that her sons might be drifting into the fringes of
expanded consciousness.
Bill Baldwin was not a raging criminal. He was a
public servant, in his own estimation. When Bill
decided there might be both some bucks and
public service in the manufacture of LSD, ca.
1964, he searched for somebody who could do it.
He found a sort of savant of chemistry, a
pubescent kid serendipitously named Mike Moon.
However Bill had managed to discover this
pimply, bespectacled and overweight prodigy, he’d
struck gold, because Mike Moon could definitely
produce results. Bill set him up with a laboratory
in the garage/basement of his large and charming

21. white-framed house on the south end of
Glenneyre Street in Laguna Beach, where
young Moon began turning out a lot of
excellent LSD in the form of electric blue
liquid. Mike Moon was happy as long as
he was provided with a constant supply
of comic books and candy bars. They
were the currency behind which Mike
Moon flourished. Who knows if he
sampled his product? He must have
done. Bill Baldwin and his colleagues
certainly did. New horizons opened in all
directions.
One day I looked up from welding on the
giant brass serpent I was making in my
driveway on the Big Bend of Laguna
Canyon, for the facade of the Santa Ana
Medical Arts Building, and there was the
smiling Bill Baldwin with his Peter Gunn
haircut, his button-down collar and his
Sansabelt slacks, breezily offering me
glass vials full of brilliantly blue liquid
that would please a neon tetra by its
chromatic intensity. “Try out this LSD,”
he said, “and tell me what you think of
it.” “OK,” I replied, “but give me three.
Chipmunk and Charlene will want to try
it too.”
We all loved it. It was ‘da kine’, as the
idiom later went. Janie Chipmunk liked it
so much that she wheedled more of it out
of Bill Baldwin, and started turning on
the neighbors, including our morbidly
obese landlady, Sally Sortomme. When
she came on, Sally fell on her back on the
kitchen floor like a beached pilot whale,
waving her arms and legs helplessly in a
swoon of ecstasy as her energetic brats
stared on, non-plussed, at the strange
spectacle. She soon afterward started
losing weight, the sort of positive
consequence often seen in turned-on
people before the demonization of
psychedelics had kicked in. Baldwin was
the true Candy Man, taking up where the
LSD “therapist”, Dr. Frank Dunne, had
left off, and increasing the effect on the
artist community exponentially. The
police were frustrated, because LSD was
still legal, even if it’s manufacturing in a
garage was not. Apparently the police
hadn’t figured that part of it out yet, for
Mike Moon continued to produce in high
gear for many months.
Into this milieu came the artist, Tom
Blackwell, and his hip little wife, Rosalie.
Tom and Rosalie were early psychedelic
hands, as befitted genius artists. Rosalie
was a small, dark, acute girl with one eye
disconcertingly larger than the other one.
She was a fine artist in her own right,
producing excruciatingly sensitive
spidery drawings that were of unique
character, suggesting Morris Graves,
Edward Gorey and Goya. Tom was a
serious and sober-sided young redhead
(from above)
Photograph of Dion Wright by Doug Miller
Dion Wright, Starseed, c. 1975
Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 inches

22. with zero sense of self-irony, a W.C.Fields
schnozzola, and a humorless conception
of himself as an important artist, which
he actually was. He had an intense talent
that burst out whenever he used paint,
that caused every gesture he made on
canvas to be naturally compelling to look
at. Yes, he was a stunningly talented
painter, but his grave attitude of
self-importance was quite undone by his
unfortunate resemblance to the TV
puppet, Howdy Doody. That popular
puppet wore a permanent smile, but
Tom’s signature expression was a
dignified scowl, which did nothing to
reduce the comedic essence of his face.
This unwelcome comic aspect was further
emphasized by Tom’s bouncing gate, his
heels seemingly never touching the
ground. The Blackwells had been living
down on cliffs overlooking the beach in
South Laguna, but with the burgeoning of
the LSD plenitude had moved into the
fold of Baldwin’s establishment. For Bill
Baldwin, Tom was a sort of iconic
emblem of creative respectability which
reflected well on the whole scene. That’s
what THEY thought. How Tom appeared
to the rest of the town is a moot point,
although cultural cover was no doubt a
part of it.
One of the effects of LSD enlightenment
was an emphasis on healthy living. All of
the folks at Baldwin’s place became
vegetarians. They were fanatical
consumers of carrot juice, which they
kept flowing through an Acme Juicer
which seemed to run constantly. In the
back yard was a large mound of compost
which was solid carrot pulp. In my mind
is burned a memory of Bill Baldwin’s
spacious kitchen. Large plastic bags of
carrots are leaning against the counter
cupboards while Rosalie feeds one after
another into the humming juicer. Once in
a while she adds a beet or a stalk of
celery. On the floor against the wall is a
collection of one gallon glass jugs, at least
three dozen of them, half of which are full
of opaque orange carrot juice, and half of
which are full of dazzlingly blue,
transparent LSD. Tom Blackwell is
tossing back one glass of juice after
another. His pale complexion has actually
turned orange from carrots; almost as
orange as his hair, and the riveting effect
is enhanced by his chartreuse-sprayed
Little Abner boots. Low-profile he was
not, as he bounced around town like a
(from left)
Bob Young, Ode to Milo, 1968-1969
Acrylic on canvas,120 x 96 inches
Steve Kensrue, Holy Man, 1968
Pencil and ink on paper, 8 x 8 inches

23. technicolor wizard, his high profile all the more
exaggerated by his habit, for a while there, of grabbing
people by the lapels and telling them in no uncertain
terms about how his next project was going to be a
“Fuck Death Machine!!!”
By the summer of ‘64 I had completed the
daunting Medusa sculpture, taken it to San Francisco,
broken up with Charlene, and stumbled back to Laguna
in the early fall. At this point I left Laguna for an
abandoned cabin near Woodstock, New York, hitch-
hiking across the country in need of a change of scene,
and also on the track of «where it was at», having paid
enough attention to know about Timothy Leary in
Millbrook, New York. There I became socialized with
the USCO experimental mixed-media Art group of
supposedly ego-less makers, including Bob Dacey, The
Hip Leprechaun, who held forth engagingly in his home
on Byrdcliffe, a mountaintop overlooking Woodstock..
Meanwhile our old buddy, the foxy Sandy Shaw, had
entered a new incarnation, and was living in South
Laguna with Bill Baldwin’s somewhat sinister partner,
Bill Grimes. They were feeling increasing heat from the
police, and were soon busted for dealing marijuana.
Breezy Bill Baldwin always knew when to disappear, so
when his sense of imminent catastrophe became
pointed, he liquidated his assets, jumped into his nice
new Jaguar XKE, and split town. Rosalie went with him.
In synch with the curious incidence of names which
were uncannily appropriate to their owners, when Tom
Blackwell was fallen into the depths of his endemic
depression, he was indeed a ‘black well’. After Rosalie
had taken off for parts unknown with Bill Baldwin in his
XKE, Tom was really down in the pits, broke and
homeless. He was taken in and encouraged by none
other than Jan Peters and Norm Babcock. Jan loved
Tom for his artistic chops, and Norm saw him as the
potential key to a success which he needed in order to
score a win in the drug-enforcement arena, after his
recent demotion from detective back to uniformed
officer. Norm tried not to bust his friends, unless he had
to, but Bill Baldwin was fair game, and big game, too.
Being activist liberals in a reactionary town was never so
easy for the Babcocks, who should have known better
than to let themselves be as vulnerable as they were.
They were stung by their own inattentiveness to legal
protocol, and it happened like this: They had sponsored
a fund-raising event in their home for the NAACP,
which was not a universally respected outfit in 1960’s
reactionary Laguna Beach. They committed the folly of
raising the money, in part, by selling mixed drinks. They
had no license or permit to do this, and were busted for
it. Of all people, one would think that Detective Norm
Babcock would be aware of this well-known law, but he
somehow allowed himself to be caught with ‘his pants
down’, and suffered demotion back to uniformed patrol
officer on account of it.
When Tom Blackwell defaulted into the gracious
Babcock home, an opportunity to make a restorative
coup must have been on Norm’s mind. If he could
arrange to nail Bill Baldwin, he might once again
become a favored cop on the force. Norm and Jan set
about turning Tom Blackwell into a secret agent, and
they succeeded. Tom was simmering in bile after Rosalie
had run off with Bill, so he was vulnerable to a revenge
screenplay. Apparently he was also ambivalent about
reversing his idealism, for he let it slip to Sandy Shaw
what was in the wind: that he was going to New York to
try to set up Bill Baldwin.
Sandy reacted with appropriate alarm. Her paramour,
Bill Grimes, the erstwhile colleague of Bill Baldwin, had
been convicted, and sent away, but Sandy had been
acquitted, so she was enough at loose ends that she was
able to pull up stakes and rush to New York ahead of
Tom Blackwell, to sound the alarm. She had no more
idea of where Baldwin and Rosalie actually were than I
did, or Tom did, so she came to Woodstock, the
magnetic scene where we, whom they knew, actually
were. It was all a sudden crisis to us, but a somewhat
academic one, since we were not directly threatened by
anything. It really seemed that Tom was endangering
himself. We awaited his arrival, which was immediate.
His deep-set, close-together, suspicious little blue eyes
were darting uncontrollably from side to side when he
arrived. He had dark bags under his eyes, and looked so
obviously like a person who was up to no good that it
was almost amusing to see, but we knew the gravity of
his situation and dealt with it the way we knew how. We
all; Chipmunk, Dacey, Sandy, Tom and several others;
experienced together on good LSD, and sat down at a
big round table in Dacey the Hip Leprachaun’s house,
eating bowls of brown rice. As we came on, all our feet
melted together, and we turned into one large organism.
Coalesced as we were into a single unit at our nether
regions, above the table our heads continued to operate
as individuals. Bob Dacey undid Tom Blackwell with a
reminiscence. With the great and droll good humor he
always had, Dacey reminded Tom of how they had been
friends years earlier, how Tom had been a sailor who
came to visit Dacey in San Francisco upon his discharge,
and how he went bonkers over Dacey’s girl friend...
Rosalie! He, Tom, had run off with Rosalie. How, asked
Dacey, could Tom now be seeking revenge against Bill
Baldwin, when Baldwin had only done to Tom what
Tom had done to Dacey? He, Dacey, was never vengeful,
was he? Tom melted and morphed back into a relaxed
and self-deprecating human being again before our

24. astounded eyes, and no more was heard
about plots. Neither Rosalie nor Baldwin
were ever heard from again, either. Tom
became a famous artist.
The USCO period elapsed, with Tom
holding himself aloof from such idealistic
scorning of individuality. When USCO
fragmented I took my Mandala to San
Francisco, following in the wake of
Stewart Brand. It was the fall of 1966.
10/6/66 was the day that LSD became a
proscribed substance on the list of illegal
things not to be possessed. Mavens of the
occult were making much of the symbolic
“Number of the Beast: 666”. I was in San
Francisco that day (serendipity again),
and went to the Golden Gate Panhandle,
where the psychedelic/liberal element
was staging a protest. The action was the
preamble to the so-called “Summer of
Love” which would overwhelm San
Francisco the following year. I passed a
few non-sequitur words with Neal
Cassady, who was there dripping sweat,
his eyeballs popping from his face, chin
tucked down, wearing a tight t-shirt with
the sleeves rolled up, and tossing that
little sledge hammer into the air over and
over, like the neurotic repetitions of a
confined bear. If I’d known a little more, I
would have realized that Neal’s presence
was a herald that Ken Kesey was not far
behind, despite Kesey’s fugitive status
just then. It was a very idealistic moment.
At that time the “movement”, which was
really the natural political consequence of
expanded consciousness, was still
uncorrupted by much nefarious
cops-and-robbers type of action, and no
cynicism had yet set in. The commercial
thrust so painfully obvious a year later
had not yet gone into gear.
Stewart Brand mounted his cultural
broadside extravaganza at San Francisco
State College in a matter of days. He
Tom Blackwell, Periphery (series), 1965
Acrylic and oil, 48 x 48 inches

25. called it “Whatever It Is”, a name which pointedly
underlined the experimental nature of the moment, a
really undefined pressure area of the creative flux of the
future as it was actually being birthed. Stewart had taken
everything he learned from the USCO media-mix events,
most recently the Psychedelic Art show, “USCO Down by
the Riverside” at the Riverside Museum in Manhattan,
and gone beyond them . Along with all the many wonders
of neo-hip which Stewart assembled, there was the
disembodied voice of Ken Kesey booming over the
speaker system across the campus, “The head has become
fat. The head has become fat. The head has become fat.”
New California Governor Ronald Reagan, who WAS the
head, reacted by closing down the campus.
We left the San Francisco turmoil, and went back to
Laguna Beach, which was still laid back and sleepy. We
took a house on Woodland Drive in the Canyon. I met
John Griggs. Mystic Arts World was on the drawing
board. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was swinging
into high gear, accelerated by the illegalization of LSD.
The gates of opportunity swung wide open, and the zany
banditos rushed through, doing whatever they could to
encourage new sources of LSD. Chemical savants
flourished, and bathtub psychedelics proliferated as the
only game in town; any town in America. Psychedelic
evangelism was in flower, and John Griggs was its
prophet. The demand exceeded the supply, allowing the
Brotherhood to flourish mightily. They weren’t the only
ones. Bathtub chemistry was practiced in many places,
and yielded many different results. The will to produce
the real sacrament was present, and there were chemists
of great talent pursuing success at it, but with mixed
results. The problem was that the consumer in the street
never knew what the true nature of the substance of the
moment was. It’s built into individual initiative that the
ego of a chef will be part of the production, ergo:
inconsistency at best. Many “brands” of LSD came and
went until The Brotherhood hit upon a substance they
called, “Orange Sunshine”
Orange Sunshine became #1 on the top 40 list of hit
psychedelics in 1968 or so. The folks who made it said it
was LSD, but I was never convinced of its purity. I
thought it was similar in some ways to real LSD, but with
a strong component of speed, and therefore paranoia,
factored into the bathtub formula. (God only knows
WHAT is being sold in the street nowadays as LSD, since
we see no symptoms of spiritual revival, such as were
constant signatures of the movement in the late ‘60’s).
MY opinion about bathtub chemicals is strictly subjective,
and only based on my extended experience with a variety
of consciousness-expanding substances, but what the
hell... I calls ‘em the way I sees ‘em, as Red Skelton used
to say. I perceived Orange Sunshine as a dirty,
unpredictable chemical which stimulated definite, and
more than occasional, inclinations toward craziness. I’d
love to know the comparative statistics of how many
experiences of enlightenment there were, as opposed to
excursions into the “territory of Sammy the Butcher”, as
William Burroughs put it. Potential “bad trips” or
“bummers” were always a possibility when taking a
psychedelic. These usually had been the result of
individuals’ ego-armor resisting melt-down into
universality, but now they became commonplace, even
among seasoned veterans.
Whatever used car salesman-type claims may have been
made for this or that personal chemical concoction,
pharmacology, as controlled within a professional
laboratory and held to regular standards, will be
consistent and reliable, while bathtub home-brew will
always be the opposite, so far as any ordinary citizen can
tell. Chemicals cooked-up by prima donna artistes
working as egomaniacal impresarios may be this or may
be that, but they will always be inconsistent and
unreliable. That’s one of the reasons why the mean streets
of America are currently awash in a confusion of bastard
chemistry of unknown and unknowable provenance.
Making pharmaceutical quality chemicals illegal has
resulted in metabolic dirt being pumped into society far
and wide. The arm of repression can only ever have
temporary and occasional successes fighting an evil that
reflects a hunger in human nature. Such craving will
always continue to be exploited. Today’s highly trumpeted
drug enforcement success does not balance tomorrow’s
failure, which is proved by the fact that the drug wars go
on and on, and get worse and worse. Bad chemical
products will squirt into the system forever, until the
availability of pharmacologically reliable substances is
restored. Available quality via legalization is the only
practical solution to the growing avalanche of illegal crap.
Real life, and the literature which derives from it, is
chock-full of absurd irony, whether the form is urban
legend, or not. We are always only a cell-wall away from
eternity, and we ought to conduct our lives in the light of
that precarious reality. Looking around, it seems that not
everybody is in the same state of mortal awareness, which
has something to do with the panicky reaction to the
sudden immanence of some latest catastrophe or another.
Un-philosophical, and lulled into soporific
unconsciousness as they are, a looming threat sends
ordinary folks off pell-mell after the current pills reputed
to cure it, like startled chickens, thinking this buzz-word
anodyne will preserve them, and allow them to slumber
anew. Chemicals will save us! What a way to work off
karma...
copyright 2011 by Dion Wright

26. Let it be said that the waters are clear and they are no more muddied.
As a crown of light to the wonder of the matrix man, a mystery wherein
he may unite all contradiction, beholding with the eye of oneness the
eternal wonders of His revelation unfold in TIME as a reward for His
victory over the beast.
Peter, the cornerstone, the firestone, the touchstone, as Jesus was about
to be taken, took out his sword and cut off the right ear of the centurion.
Jesus picked up the ear and placed it back onto the head, so that it was
healed, and he said, “Do not stop me. I must drink of this bitter cup,”
Oh my shepherd Ayil Ayil
is a mighty hunter
Ram Ram
He aims at a bird and hits a donkey. He tries to get milk from a ram. He
crowns his stupidity by clumsily shearing off the ears and the tails along
with the wool. His fellow shepherds dance toward him chanting and
mocking, “Ram. Ram, son of horns!” What idiocy will he show them next?
They laugh in anticipation.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not
anything made that was made.
TIME - sand clock
How does God’s messenger appear in time? His is the Word. Time is such
a word. Four letters here (hear). Yet each letter is a light unto creation.
There are four letters, and the fourth is silent. Otherwise it would sound
like Tim. Yet the silent letter reveals the Word. In the right hand of your
daughter and in the right ear of her sister is the full truth to be seen. Yet
their brother carries the wine to the table, and six years hence will they
drink fully of it. There are 72 meanings to every word. When the Prophet
came, only two letters had been revealed. Opening the seventh seal
revealed the 25 others, making 27 letters.
Which end of the telescope? Teleos. Seer of eternal time. The Warriors of
the Rainbow arise in the West.
Sin is the fire wherewith God perfects his works. We have both eaten
of the same book. Let us forgive each other our sins. For now we are
brothers. Forgive brother, brother forgive. For just as there was dancing
in the Lord’s tabernacle, so was there blood, and the Lord revealed His
Name therein.
May God bear me witness to this testimony, of which my life is unworthy.
These words I have learned from the blessed above me. They are not my
own. May my life and the lives of all my lives be a sacrifice to the Lord.
May we learn to serve Him. May He teach us His Love.
Israel. Abraham
Rabindrasvorup
LOTUSEAT
Here is the revelation
of Bob Lefkowitz
as hand-written on
the back side of a
visionary drawing in
crayon. He handed
me this on the day
he performed the
Milk and Honey ritual
during the Summer of
Love...Dion Wright

27. Published by RVCA Corp © 2015. Reproduction in whole or in part is
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