Fantastic Trips

This in-depth, large-format book is a study of how psychedelic drugs created god, pop, and just about everything! In particular, it traces how young people took hallucinogens to make music and dance to the results from the beginning of the 20th century onwards.

In Fantastic Trips, Scott Meze describes a fictional species, only a little like the one in our own anthropology textbooks, that started taking drugs when it had barely come down from the trees, and continued to take them in vast quantities throughout the tens of thousands of years in which it also created science, society, a working moral code, and democracy.

In the course of this book, you'll meet fictional members of this fictional species, people like Humphry Davy, Aldous Huxley, Albert Hofmann, Sigmund Freud, Alexander Shulgin, Terence McKenna, and Timothy Leary, who exposed and explored and proselytized about drugs. And you'll meet fictional users such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Burroughs, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jerry Garcia, Syd Barrett, and Daevid Allen, who made lasting contributions to the cultural richness of their fictional species while under the influence of drugs.

There's a whole world in here, and it's obviously not the one we live in. In our world drugs are bad, drug users are degenerates, and drugs lead only to damage, disease, and death. In our world heavy drug abusers like Keith Richards couldn't possibly live to a ripe old age. He must be made up.

GOD In the first section, Meze describes the contents of the chemical selection box that lies all around us. He explores how drug use informed all our major religions, and how hallucinogenic visions created god in the first place.

POP In this section, Meze follows the influence of hallucinogens through our art, literature, and music. He shows how young people used psychedelic drugs to make music and dance to the results from the beginning of the 20th century, and how this led to the eruption of creativity we remember as the 1960s. He explores in detail the technical breakthroughs, musical styles and albums that resulted, and reveals the ways in which they built today's nightclubs, rock concerts, and every large scale event from political rallies to the Olympic games.

EVERYTHING ELSE Finally, Meze looks at the current explosion in synthetic hallucinogens and discusses how they may fundamentally change our culture and creativity in the century to come. In an appendix, he gives novice experimenters Ten Rules For A Great First Trip, only one of which involves cotton candy.

Informed, irreverent and controversial, Fantastic Trips is essential reading for anyone embarking on the psychedelic experience, and an indispensable briefing for everybody else.

Special features include:

In-depth discussions of the history and effects of opium, heroin, magic mushrooms, peyote, cannabis, alcohol, coffee and tea, chocolate, sugar, cocaine, solvents, hallucinogenic gases, uppers and downers, ecstasy, LSD, and many more How the psychedelic experience informed religion, folk and fairy tales, and science fictionStudies of psychedelic rock pioneers from the Byrds and the Beatles to Jefferson Airplane, the 13th Floor Elevators, the Grateful Dead, Country Joe And The Fish, Jimi Hendrix, the Soft Machine, and Pink Floyd (among many others) Psychedelia in electronic music, and its links to the development of the synthesizer The rock concert and dance venue as a multimedia assault on the senses Psychedelia in the art fringe The rise and fall of the London underground and Haight-Ashbury The second wave of European psychedelia, including Daevid Allen, Todd Rundgren, Hawkwind, Man, Second Hand, and the krautrock bandsThe constant churn of psychedelia since the 1970s