Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America

by Jesse Jarnow

Overview

Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America uncovers a hidden history of the biggest psychedelic distribution and belief system the world has ever known. Through a collection of fast-paced interlocking narratives, it animates the tale of an alternate America and its wide-eyed citizens: black market chemists, the LSD-slinging graffiti writers of Central Park, the Grateful Dead-loving AI scientists of Stanford, utopian Whole Earth homesteaders, government-wanted Anonymous hackers, rogue explorers, East Village bluegrass pickers, spiritual seekers, Internet pioneers, entrepreneurs, pranksters, pioneering DJs, and a nation of Deadheads.

Drawing on extensive new firsthand accounts from many never-before-interviewed subjects and a wealth of deep archival research, music writer and WFMU DJ Jesse Jarnow takes readers on a panoramic tour of a comic-book-colored American landscape. And with psychedelic research moving into the mainstream for the first time in decades, Heads also recounts the story of the quiet entheogenic revolution that for years has been brewing resiliently in the Dead's Technicolor shadow.

Featuring over four dozen images, Heads weaves one of the 20th and 21st centuries' most misunderstood subcultures into the fabric of the nation's history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780306921988
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	326,344
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Jesse Jarnow is the author of Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock and Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America. His writing on music, technology, and culture has appeared in the New York Times, Pitchfork, Wired.com, Rolling Stone, Dupree's Diamond News, and elsewhere. He is a contributing editor at Relix and hosts the weekly The Frow Show on independent Jersey City radio station WFMU. He lives in Brooklyn and tweets via @bourgwick. JesseJarnow.com

Editorial Reviews

"Music, history, and psychopharmacology blend together in Heads.... Jarnow describes in colorful and scrupulously researched detail how psychedelic music fused with actual psychedelics to create a ceaselessly regenerating 'hip economy' that persists to this day.... It's a head trip and then some."—Rolling Stone, "10 Best Music Books of 2016"

"A brilliant study of the transformative impact of LSD on a half-century of US art, music, movies, spirituality, and technology."—Uncut, "Book of the Year," December 2016

"If you are a fan of books dealing with the history of salt, timber, or something more exotic like sex, you will delight in Heads, a book about psychedelics.... [A] well-documented spiraling history of how these drugs transformed our present culture."—Bookcase TV


undefined—Addicted to Noise, "Best of 2016: Top 5 Books"

"[Jarnow] is our generation's foremost Grateful Dead chronicler, and something of a cultural ambassador to the punks and indie kids who might not otherwise pay the band any mind."—Spin


"Engaging and deeply researched... Generously illustrated with archival photos and artifacts."
—Ugly Things

From the Publisher

2016-02-15
A history of the interplay between hallucinogens and rock music in the innocent minds of young America. Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, felt guilty about that achievement because, among other things, he worried that getting a clear view of the universe would keep youngsters away from church, where they belonged. But when acid hit the streets of California, the kids turned to the church of rock 'n' roll—and, more to the point, the church of the Grateful Dead, the heroes of rock journalist Jarnow's (Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock, 2012) book. In a time when Charlie Manson was lurking right around the corner, they were there to spread lysergic sunshine across the land. "The happy apolitical psychedelic world unfolds like a patch of greenery wherever they go," writes the author, reveling in the historic present to describe events of a half-century ago. Manson, yes, and capitalism: hucksters always surrounded the Dead, trying to cash in on their craze and "franchise [the] very concept" of being…well, heads. Jarnow has a bloodhound's sense of the marrow of an argument and the meat of historic fact: no one else has so clearly pointed out the path that led from Garcia's old lady to the "delicious seedless pot" that turned smoking a joint into a gasket-blowing trip. The author is also dogged in tracing the psychedelic activism of Ken Kesey, Owsley Stanley, and company over the decades into the present, with weird and shadowy groups preaching the acid gospel. Though Jarnow is sometimes unduly celebratory and sometimes begs credulity—is the fact that we use emoji on our mobile phones really evidence that the psychedelic revolution carried the day?—his book is a lot of fun to read, and it absorbs its own weight in excess reality. And reality, he reminds us, is always a lot weirder than anything drugs can cook up. Latter-day heads—as well as "relentless dabblers" and the historically minded—will enjoy this well-researched, mind-altering excursion.

Kirkus Reviews

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