My First (and Last) Acid Trip

DISCLAIMER: This article is only to be read for entertainment and informative purposes. I also feel it's important to say that I certainly don't think I'm special for trying the things I've tried and I've not wrote this to glorify or brag of my experiences. Most ordinary people take drugs and have stories to go with them. This one is simply mine.

28th May, 2013. I'm 15 and I'm on a day out in Southport with my mum and sister. We see the sights: the pier, Silcock's Funland, and lunch in a fish & chip shop. A typical summer's day out. But what does a day out in a run-down seaside town have to do with taking acid?

It's essentially the first of a sequence of events that led me to a point of no return, which sounds ridiculous, and for the past 6 years, I've always thought it sounded ridiculous. But the more I've looked back, which I've done more so recently (now aged 22), I've questioned many times as to whether the experience was a benefit or a curse, but in that curse, did I realise something about myself? Which actually means it's a benefit and has enriched my life? Do I really regret taking it? Or am I grateful that it turned out the way it did and for the lessons it taught me?

So, anyway. Southport, May 28th, 2013. The sun is shining, it's warm as hell, we've had possibly the best fish and chip lunch ever at Silcock's Embassy, which in my opinion is THE place to go for a classic, British, fish and chip dinner if you happen to be in Southport. So afterwards, we take a leisurely walk through the town centre and decide to wander off into the shopping arcade, we wander around and then head out the other side, which leads us to a row of four, maybe five shops on a back alley. I'm pretty sure one of them was an art gallery, and on the far end was a furniture shop. Fuck knows what the third one was. BUT. The final two shops. One was a Wicca-themed shop from what I remember, you know the ones, very darkly lit, the reek of patchouli-flavoured incense, dream catchers, Himalayan throat singing on the stereo or some kind of mountain music. You know the drill. And next to it, was a record store. I didn't have a record player but I had twenty quid in my pocket, for some reason, buying a record seemed like something worth doing. There was something alluring for some reason about buying something that I couldn't even listen to. Sometimes you don't need a reason to do something, you should just do it. Shoot now, ask questions later, or whatever it is that they say.

Anyway, so I'm walking around this store and my goal was simple: Find the maddest-looking album cover and buy it, doesn't matter who it's by or how it sounds (don't have a fuckin' turntable anyway) and buy it.

And I did. I landed pretty quickly on The Artie Kornfeld Tree's 1970 LP, A Time To Remember. I bought it without hesitation. I had no idea who Artie Kornfeld was, I had no idea how his band's album sounded and wouldn't be able to until my 16th birthday which was 2 months away. Nobody at the time had uploaded any tracks to listen to, or at least any I could find. But the important thing to remember, is this is what started this story off. This is what got the ball rolling for me to tie & dye t-shirts for friends, buy incense (which I did straight after I bought the record from the witch shop next door), and grow my hair long. A few other things, admittedly, occurred that inspired this phase: seeing Temples play Deaf Institute, seeing The Doors movie, Taking Woodstock, Fear and Loathing, all the classic cliches. But that Artie Kornfeld album, is what kicked it off for me.

So fast forward a year, it's 2014, first year of sixth form is over (for Americans I think that's 11th grade?), I've got a job working in McDonald's, I've finally started playing in a band. Granted, we're a covers band playing in a church hall, but you've gotta start somewhere I guess. The rhythm guitarist in this band becomes a very dear friend of mine, we'll call him Jeff. Jeff wrote original songs and did acoustic gigs on the side with his childhood friend, Mickey. Jeff and Mickey were looking to form a band, they wanted me on bass and the covers band drummer on... Well, drums. Jeff would be singing so we sort've left the covers band singer in the dark and just stopped showing up for practice. Looking back, I regret we left in that way. I'm sure he's doing great. So Jeff and Mickey are HUGE Arctic Monkeys, Courteeners, and Bloc Party fans, of course not forgetting the daddy of all indie music lover's music collection. The Smiths. I'll be honest, I'm not overly keen on any of these groups, but I loved how nuts these two guys were. To an innocent and inexperienced 16 year-old, these whiskey-drinking, cigarette-smoking, and cocaine snorting older lads seemed like perfect people to be in a band with. Plenty of stories to be told about those two, but for another time.

So my 16th birthday has passed, I now have a turntable. The record collection has since expanded. I've bought many albums but 3 particular albums out of the collection at that time were my favourite and bear significance to this part of the tale. 2 were the psychedelic 'freakbeat' Rubble Collection compilation albums, A Trip In A Painted World and The Clouds Have Groovy Faces. Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II also. For quick context, Dylan for me, like a shitload of people, is an ol' reliable. He's always been music you can come back to. There, that's the context.

I'm pretty sure the full Rubble albums are up on YouTube and if you have a spare minute, give them a listen. I'll link all the music involved at the end. But, while writing this, I've gone back to listen to them, having not listened to them really since the 'incident', and I have to say, they really are just a great collection of songs. (I brought them round to a girl I dated briefly's apartment about 3 years later, things soon broke off and I never saw them again. So first lesson of youth's ignorance: Never, EVER bring a pile of records you adore to a girl's apartment, whom you're only casually dating, to impress her. 1) It's a bit intense and full on. 2) The likelihood is that you both won't even listen to them. Showing off your record collection to impress someone, in my opinion, is pretentious and ridiculous. Especially when you have Spotify. 3) You will leave them as it's a hassle to take them back home. And that will be the last time you see them.)

So summer is upon us once more, my hair's pretty lengthy and I pretty much wore nothing but baggy, floaty, shirts with various loud patterns. I'd all but pretty much grown apart from all my school friends, which seemed pretty normal to me, we went to different colleges and had completely different interests. That is, all apart from one friend. I knew this friend since year 7 (5th grade) but we never really became actual friends until year 10 (8th grade) when we started having classes together. Who knows what it was: interest in making music, creativity, offensive sense of humour? Fuck knows, but we were boys of the best kind, we were brothers. He'd gone off to a different college also but we'd catch up at parties we were usually both invited to. The boxing day of that year, we both attended a party hosted by former school friends. I was late to the party and couldn't stay long as I was working the following day. But this friend, (to make it easier and also hide his identity, we'll call him Alan) seemed engaged but separate at the same time. I sat by him, he was finishing off what, to me, seemed like a very coherent conversation. He them turned to me, probably said something like "what the fuck do you want? You scrub." I replied to him, "just seeing how you are man, we've not had chance to catch up!", while I'm saying all this, I noticed how wide his pupils were. Alan's eye contact kept jumping around my face, I decide to question it. "You alright mate?", and he just slowly leaned over, his eyes fixated above my head and said quite calmly, "I'm on acid." I couldn't believe it but at the same time I could, if anyone was gonna do it, it would be him. And I knew his slow leaning over was a piss take and he could actually function quite normally. I didn't really think it at the time, but when I look back at the age I am now, I'm always quite astounded how he managed to keep his cool and enjoy such an experience with so much going on, but then again, I might still be as naive as I've always been.

So, after going off on what must be my fourth tangent. But I needed to in order to give context to what happens next. As what happens next (what you've been waiting for) involves myself, Alan, his attic, those 3 records and 12 hours of... Well, lets begin.

So I've said all that about how summer's begun, I've got 2 festivals lined up in a few weeks. The summer will be filled with gigs playing in Jeff and Mickey's band, of which our first practice session is the following day! It's a beautiful day, as warm and bright as it can be, absolutely serene. I'd been writing songs religiously and he had as well, I thought it'd be a good idea to have a night at his with a few beers and record some demos together like we did in school (minus the beer), only this time around, Alan was now a seasoned stoner and acid head. So after everything's been arranged. I feel that I'm ready to finally find out what all those bands are singing about in those Rubble albums. Bearing in mind, I'd only smoked weed a few times. So I message Alan, "do you reckon we could get a couple tabs?", he replies, "are you serious?", I say, "yeah, of course! Why wouldn't I be?", so he says, "okay, if you're really sure that you want to, they're £5.00 a tab". So I head over to Alan's house, about 20 minutes away from me. His family's having a barbecue in the back yard, we have a few drinks, say our hellos and we head up to his room and set up the 'den' in his attic, which was a really nice room with a roof window, it had a huge floor bed surrounded by cushions and a gorgeous 70s vinyl stereo system. It looked like the ideal room to trip in.

As night fell, most of Alan's family had left, with his parents spending the rest of the evening in the living room, it was time to head out. Now, I can't remember for the life of me what Alan said to his folks before we headed out, but I know if I said the same thing to my folks, they wouldn't believe me for a second. So we're walking what Alan said would be five minutes to this dealer's house, we must've ended up being 30 minutes to the middle of nowhere. We walked through various housing estates that definitely looked like they'd seen better days, then country roads, parks, and back lanes of supermarkets. And to top it off. It started raining. Heavily. We had nothing but shorts and hoods on. I remember thinking, "christ, I hope this is worth it." We meet up with a fella who's name I can't remember for the life of me, he was some sort of middle man between us and the dealer, as we approach the dealers house, it was exactly as young, naive me pictured it: Cracked windows, a supermarket trolly in the front garden, loud muffled music which from what I remember, must've been some sort of jungle or garage. Torn and heavily stained curtains and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling with no lampshade. It glowed bright red for some reason. Like it was a room for developing photographs. In a nutshell, it looked like a serious smack den. Then I'm overhearing conversation between Alan and Middle Man how the dealer drank a shots-worth of acid and tripped for a month or something like that. You hear stories like that all the time, I don't know whether I could call bullshit on that or not. Knowing what I know now, if I could design a house that an acid head lived in who tripped for a whole month, it would look like the house in question. You just knew it belonged to someone who's mind was no longer on this plane and functioning. Or he was just a slob, it swings in roundabouts.

Anyway, after a few minutes of them yacking while I stand there smoking one of Alan's cigarettes, Middle Man walks in and shuts the door. It's a bit of a blur from that point in regards to what Alan and I talked about, no doubt I was asking him a lot of questions about what to expect. The main piece of advice that I got from both Alan and Middle Man was, "no matter what happens, don't fight it. Let it take you on a journey." I assured them that I would, like I knew what they were talking about. I didn't. When Middle Man walked out and handed us the goods, he said something like, "this stuff's really strong, it's NX32B (that's not it's name but it was something like that, some kind of LSD derivative)", he looks to me and says, "you sure you're ready for this?", and me in my endless fountain of naivety, thinking he means, 'is your imagination capable of this?', I say, "yeah man, for sure".

So, we get back to Alan's and head up to the attic. He says it's best to wait for his parents to go to bed, then we can begin. For now, we drink a couple more beers and set everything up, I decide to try out his huge stereo, on goes A Trip In A Painted World (the best track off this album in my opinion is Running By The River by Philamore Lincoln). His parents have gone to bed, the mood is set. We've set up provisions, a few cans here and there, a bag of crisps that Alan insists "will not get eaten." I put beside me a drawing pad and a pen, as well as a notepad. I must've had it in my head that I was going to be able to document everything as it was happening. As soon as Alan saw my stationary, he burst out laughing. I ignore this for some reason and still believe I'll be the next Hunter S. Thompson and that documenting my drug experiences as they happen will make me revolutionary. I'm not really sure, but I'm definitely not writing this 6 years later for the same reason. I have my laptop at the end of the cushioned floor with YouTube on, we put on a selection of different videos. Comedy, music, cartoons. A few moments later, it's time.

I'd say it was around 10-11pm when we dropped, that part I forgot to document in my notepad. So much for the new age of gonzo journalism. Alan walks me through how it's done, he advises on cutting the tab in half and taking it, I can't really remember if I did that but I'm pretty sure I didn't. In the films, you see people stick it on the top of their tongue and swallow. What Alan told me to do was put the tab underneath my tongue and have it rest towards the front of the floor of my mouth, then he said to let it sit there for 10-15 minutes so the saliva builds up and mixes with the acid, which as you can imagine, tastes fucking disgusting. When I think it's the right time to swallow, I swallow this huge buildup of spit and chemical that burned and made me wretch. I turned to Alan and I said, "done it!", he replied, "fucking hell man, I swallowed mine a while ago!".

Approaching midnight, I'm not really feeling anything, I'm just overly happy and a lovely warm rush courses through me. It could be the acid, I could just be excited. It's starting to kick in already for Alan, he's touching the walls, he looks and me and says how the swirls in the ceiling are moving with each other. Before I knew it, I was there, I couldn't quite believe it. The rush of overwhelming happiness only made what was happening at this very moment even better, if I flicked the wall, it rippled, just like when Neo touches that mirror in The Matrix, I turn to look at Alan, his face morphing and changing shape. I say to Alan, "this is incredible!", it really was a revelation, it was everything I'd come to expect. We put on the video of September by Earth, Wind and Fire. Now, if you notice how the visual feedback of the video trails everything in view off into the distance, that trail pulled the room in as well, like we were being sucked into the laptop's screen. I'd never seen anything cooler in my life, I was blown away. This was the greatest thing I'd ever experienced (you'll find that I'll say that about a lot of things). We put all sorts of music on that we thought we were supposed to listen to on acid. We're giggling and staring at the ceiling, basically having a blast. I look up and see Alan getting up and stuffing weed in a pipe, no tobacco to space it out, just straight gear. He opens the roof window and smokes some outside. He turns his head to me and says excitedly, "are you enjoying this?", I look him straight in the eye, as incredibly difficult as that was to do and say, "this is the best experience of my life, man", he says "I'm impressed with how well you're handling it... Do you wanna take it further?" suggesting I smoke some of the pipe. I was having the time of my life, I was completely on board with taking it further. So I get up and take his place in the window, I take the lighter to the bowl of the pipe, I burn it some and I inhale, and I burn some more and inhale, and some more, and some more, and some more, and some more...

I don't know how long I was smoking that pipe for, but when I look back, I'm pretty sure I was there way longer than I should've been. Not out of greed or anything, but I just completely lost track of time, it was like the bright, vibrant experience I was first introduced to, it's lights were being turned down, I'm not really sure how I could describe it other than it's like someone turned the lights off in my head. I come away from the window and everything seems different, but I keep optimistic and try to ride through it. I sit next to Alan, he seems distressed, I go "what's up man?", he says, "...can you hear that at all?", meaning the music on the laptop. I turn to the laptop, music is playing. I laugh nervously, "eh? You just need to turn it up!", I begin to repeatedly tap on the volume keys on my laptop to turn it up, only to see it's playing music full blast and we can barely hear it. Alan sees the volume way up, "woah fuck mate! Turn it down!", I shout, "but I can't hear it!!", "shut the fuck up!" he loudly whispers, "my folks are asleep!". I lean back to get myself together for a second and try and calm myself down, Alan says to me in a panicked tone, "I can't gauge how loud anything is!". Now I'm freaking out, it's my first trip on acid and my seasoned acid head friend is freaking out. Great! I say to him, "let's just lie down a sec and look at the ceiling, we'll ride it out! We'll be fine!" Not particularly knowing if we were going to be fine or not. Little did I know, that grass I was smoking earlier was starting to creep up on me. I'm ignoring it as best as I can, but it's only getting more and more uncertain.

Then, out of nowhere... Blackness. Nothing.

I bolt up and Alan turns the light back on, "what?! What is it?!" he panics, "don't turn the light of!!" I replied. By this point, it's way to late. It's waaay too late. If you've done acid before and it's gone wrong. If you know, you know.

So at this point, I'm scrambling for my life as my body feels like it's being cocooned by the mattress beneath me. The only way I can describe what happened for the next hour or so... Was the mattress was trying to eat me, or at least swallow me into some kind of dark abyss. A bit like in A Nightmare on Elm Street when whoever it is gets pulled into the bed, I think it was Johnny Depp's character. The ordeal somewhat wears off and I can sit upright just about. As I stare at the room and compare it to how I looked at it at the start of the night, it looks beyond grim, nightmarish. My vision isn't 'wiggly' or 'far out', it's actually fairly static, it just doesn't look real. When you imagine what you see in your nightmares and how what you see isn't as clear if you were awake. Well to risk sounding like I'm being over the top and exaggerating. At this point, it was like being awake in a nightmare. I couldn't be doing with this, I needed something that would bring me back to reality, I was doing what Alan and Middle Man told me not to do, which was fight the trip. By this point, Alan is fine and is just trying to comfort me. But I can't get comfortable. My throat is sore and burnt from the weed smoke, the vibration and distortion of physical feeling makes me think I'm coughing up blood, or at least choking on it. My body seems to separate from my brain and I feel the need to rock back and forth, sometimes clap just to "stay in time with the world" I would say. There wasn't much Alan could do apart from try to talk sense into me and just make sure I didn't hurt myself. I'm racking my brain trying to think of what can be done to bring me back to reality, which is not what you should try to do. The Clouds album was playing at this point I think and just plain weirding me out, taking me further and further away from comfort as opposed to 'immersing me in euphoria' as I'd strangely hoped it would. I bolt up, "Alan!! Put Bob Dylan on!" I shout, 'old reliable', I thought, 'that'll bring me back'. Alan shoots up, he puts the album on, I'm waiting on the reassurance of his voice like my life depends on it. It starts. But I don't recognise the song. Well, I do. But I'm questioning it... "What the fuck is that..." I say. Knowing that Don't Think Twice, It's Alright is the song that is playing. But it really, really does not sound like it. I mean really doesn't. So I pull the record off quite violently, scratching it in the process. My heart is beating so fast it feels like it's pulsing in morse code. 'That's it, this is where I die', I thought. 'My uncle had a heart attack and now so will I' was my incredibly paranoid thought process at this point, which would actually become a permanent anxiety of mine for the following 6 years, of course not doing any noticeable exercise and not taking care of my self till I turned 22.

The next six hours or so consists of pretty much the same sort of routine and would be a bore to go through every little detail that I can salvage. I lie down, I get up, I rock back and forth and clap my hands to 'stay in time'. If it's not already obvious, the notepad has all but been forgotten about. I thought drawing might make me take my mind off things. If I could... Just... Grab... The FUCKING PEN!! I never did find that satanic scrawling I did once I had some sort of grip of the pen, probably with Alan's assistance. I'm pretty sure Alan put me on the phone to some of my pals who were half asleep, that didn't really do anything. But at this point, it's really just a case of repetition until exhaustion finally swoops in as the effects start to wear off somewhat and one ends up feeling subdued. One thing I do want to mention that I do actually love mentioning which I thought was terrifying at the time but this part of the bad trip was quite cool. If you remember the level in Crash Bandicoot 2, Road To Ruin, in the background were silhouetted structures that would break apart and fall down every so often. Well, when I went to the window to get some air, that's exactly what all the houses in the street were doing as I looked out. Wispy stick people running round the street as well!

The remainder of the evening is very much a blur, I think the last few hours just consisted of waiting for it to wear off to a point that I could regain my sanity. Now, with every other drug I would take from this point, 95% of those highs, I never want to come down from. Going back to sober reality would be the worst possible thing to happen, but must happen. Acid was the only drug that I was excited for coming down off.

It must've got to about 6 o'clock in the morning. I don't remember a whole lot at this point but I manage to sleep a bit, maybe 4/5 hours or so. I wake up with various blankets draped over me, I'm on my back for some reason, but what position I wake up in is the least of my concerns at this point. I get up and walk to Alan's room where he's smoking a cigarette out his window, no doubt he was trying to enjoy the remaining hours of his trip without me ruining all it for him. I could function but walking was still a chore, very little control of motor function with the floor feeling soft and uneven. I was still pretty freaked out at this point, I had to leave. I felt I had stayed in this realm my mind has built up for too long and I needed to speak with someone on the outside who was grounded in reality.

So I call my dad, my voice is cracking from the distress and still not really being able to articulate a sentence. He knew immediately what had happened. I begged him over the phone, "please don't be upset with me!". He just said very calmly, "mate, relax, tell me where you are and I'll pick you up. I'm just coming back from golf with grandad." So to avoid suspicion from Alan's parents, Alan sneaks me out the house and walks me to my dads car, parked a few blocks away. I get in, Grandad says hi, Dad says hi, ask if I'm alright, "not really", I say. "We're on our way to the White Boar (pub)", my dad says. "I'll take you for a pint and then band practice."

'Fuck! Band practice!', I thought. Ignorance of Youth Lesson to self 2: Don't take acid before any kind of task that involves leaving the house. So we arrive at the pub and we sit in the beer garden, my Grandad goes to catch up with some of the punters while me and my dad talk. I don't remember a lot of what was talked about, but I wasn't in trouble, it just mainly consisted of my dad regaling in his own acid stories and mishaps which I found to be quite comforting. I've always felt I can rely on that man whenever I'm in trouble or a dark place.

So then the aftermath of it all, what had changed? To me, I felt like a completely different person, I felt like I'd lost a part of me for a long time that I really cherished. I felt more anxious, more cynical, more paranoid. I couldn't stand psychedelic music, I hated hippie culture and saw the 60s counter-culture as a group of sweaty, mentally-ill people who were all the Manson Family or a Rajneeshees. Or was I just jealous that these people who made great albums and did great things who were influenced from their acid experience had a better time than me? I could function, but things seemed less enjoyable from time to time. For the past 6 years, so many questions have arisen regarding that night. Am I grateful that I got the worst drug experience out the way to prepare me for far more amazing experiences? Teaching me what drugs work best for me? (I dropped my first E about 2 months later which would become my drug of choice.) Had I not smoked that pipe, would I have stayed in the same enjoyable state for the remainder of the night and probably want to do it again? (Very possibly! I would learn a couple smokes later that weed was notorious for giving me paranoia and anxiety. I haven't smoked it for about 2/3 years now.)

Had I not taken acid, would me and Alan still be close? That's something important I need to mention, if not most important, or was it? Me and Alan never really spoke again after that incident, he came to a gig about a year later, but other than that, I never heard from him again. Did that experience of seeing me the way he did cause the dissolution of our friendship? Possibly. Could it also be that we just had lives that were becoming even more separate? Probably more so! That doesn't mean I don't miss him, he was a great friend and we had great times. Wherever that man is, I hope he's successful and in a good place.

For the first maybe 3 years since the incident, I was overly anti-acid, almost like a snob towards anything with ties to psychedelic music or culture, I became a devout punk and metal enthusiast (I'll always love metal, metal was my first love, discovering Iron Maiden at 10), even getting 2 Black Flag tattoos. I'll be honest, at 22, I still find people who act 'cosmic' or 'floaty' highly irritating. But to be honest, I find people who act like Sid Vicious and wear mohicans irritating too. But not as much as hippies. If you're my age and you refer to things as 'groovy', please don't talk to me. There's a massive 'holier than thou' persona that these people (you'll find a lot of them in LA) create for themselves who are involved in this type of subculture, where they think because they've got some Doors and Beatles records and smoke dope and take acid that they have a higher consciousness than you. Fuck off, no you don't. That goes for white 'Buddhists' too. Fuck you. That's not the ideals 'peaceful' of 'enlightened' people are supposed to possess.

Now, before you stop me for being a hypocrite, that's right, that's exactly how I saw myself when I was 16. I didn't anymore after taking acid. So going back to the questioning, I'm very glad that it yanked off that paisley-patterned blindfold my head. I'm very grateful that acid made me a realist. I still have my long hair at 22, I appreciate all forms of music and creative arts. But don't be pretentious and self-centred because you've got records no one's heard of and you take 'organic drugs'. And I suppose the big one is, would I try it again? I probably would. 6 years on, I've had some great and strange experiences, I might have a better idea of what was coming if I did. Maybe. But not for a while.

Artie Kornfeld Tree - A Time To Remember! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1z_a9-fsoFk

Rubble Collection 17: A Trip In A Painted World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qayTG5o2y8U

Rubble Collection 6: The Clouds Have Groovy Faces Faceshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-sUz6uWg9g&t=1005s