Professor Donadrian Rice is now the chair of the University of West Georgia's psychology department. In 1969, however, he was an undergraduate researcher in Krippner's lab and a small-town South Carolina kid in the big city. At one point he told the dream lab director that he'd never tried mescalin. That's an odd thing to say to your boss, but Krippner's response was more unconventional still. He scored Rice a hit and escorted his tripping assistant to a showing of Fantasia. This is a fond memory for Krippner; the movie is one of his favorites, and he recalls he made sure to take Rice to a 3-D showing so "all the characters would be jumping off the screen." Rice, who had never seen Fantasia — let alone while on mescalin — recalls it as "a pretty intense movie to see under those conditions."
The mescalin and other hallucinogens were floating around the lab, in Rice's recollection, for "side research" and "off the record" studies on telepathy. Krippner remembers things differently than his longtime friend — experiments involving illegal drugs, he says, would have put him in a bad place with the hospital board. Hallucinogens around the lab were "only being used during recreational periods." There was, however, that one experiment where, per the words of Bob Dylan, everybody must get stoned. That was the one written up in the Journal of the American Society of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine. But that wasn't in the lab.
Photo by J.P. Dobrin
A lifetime of awards, works in progress, and ephemera surround Krippner in his San Francisco office.
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The music died down on a February night at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., and 2,000 heads gazed up at the stage, nearly all of them "in various altered states of consciousness induced by marijuana, hashish, LSD, and the music itself," per Krippner. On a screen suspended above the Grateful Dead, the following words appeared: "YOU ARE ABOUT TO PARTICIPATE IN AN ESP EXPERIMENT." The concertgoers were informed they would soon be shown a picture, which they should "TRY USING YOUR ESP TO 'SEND'" to Malcolm Bessent, a self-proclaimed psychic dozing in the dream lab, 45 miles off.
Asking a member of the Grateful Dead if he remembers any particular concert is akin to asking Willie Mays if he recalls a random midseason ballgame. But band members haven't forgotten "the ESP shows."
"Oh, I remember," confirms Mickey Hart, one of the band's drummers. The Dead, in Hart's recollection, stopped playing while the crowd read the instructions. But as soon as the images were projected onscreen "we began playing really hard to be totally engaged in that experiment. We were the vehicle, the thing at the center of it all."
On four of the six concert nights, a pair of independent judges deemed Bessent's dreams to be highly relevant to the image sent his way by the Deadheads. On Feb. 19, 1971, for example, concertgoers were shown a painting titled The Seven Spinal Chakras, picturing an ethereal man hovering in the lotus position with symbols projected onto his spinal cord. That night, Bessent reported dreaming about a man who was "suspended in mid-air or something.... I was thinking about ... a spinal column."
In their subsequent writeup, Krippner and his colleagues remarked on the need for "future work" to explore the "intriguing" notions that being high on LSD, miles away from your telepathic subject, and having thousands of senders might have an effect on the yet-unproven power of telepathy. That didn't exactly happen. Krippner, however, did later that year debrief an auditorium full of Soviet scientists about his work with the Dead ("a band with a keen interest in both ESP and altered states of consciousness") and gifted his hosts with several of the group's LPs.
For decades, this study was known only to those Soviets and the most staunch aficionados of psychosomatic dentistry. Then it was exhumed by the Dead.
The burgeoning ranks of academics analyzing the Grateful Dead unearthed Krippner's works in the late 1980s, declaring them to be the first scholarly papers on the band. In the ensuing decades, members of the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus have published hundreds of papers and dozens of books. The group has held a national gathering for 15 consecutive years; Krippner is a frequent guest and is hailed as the field's godfather. "The proper way to contextualize Stanley's work is that it was a way of measuring the bond between the fans and the band," says Nicholas Meriwether, director of U.C. Santa Cruz's Grateful Dead Archive and founder of the Scholars' Caucus. "Even though he wasn't making this claim, that's the great claim found there." Hart agrees, noting "the powerful buzz" and "great union" pervading the ESP shows.
Hart credits Krippner with an even more seminal role in the lore of the Dead. On a number of occasions, Krippner hypnotized Hart and Kreutzmann to better synch their drumming. "We'd find the inner workings of rhythm, a special lock between me and Bill. We found what we would call 'The Root Lock,'" Hart recalls. In hypnosis, the drummers could play for eight, 10, or 12 hours straight without a break. "Bill and I were able to go deep. Sometimes he'd play with his right arm around me and I had my left arm around him; we were one organism." It was only with two drummers in deep unison, Hart continues, that the band could produce the Dead's signature sound. And it was only with Krippner's direction that Hart and Kreutzmann managed to start their own long, strange trips. "We never got into that before we met Stanley," Hart says. "He was the catalyst."
