![]() ![]() "Runaways, 16 or 17 years old, dropping acid and sitting in a supermarket staring at the breakfast cereals. "I saw a dark side to it," says Schiller. Moral panic ensued, followed by legislation. "Can any law keep the awesome drug away from reckless hands?" screamed the caption. The Cassady photo ran as part of a feature in Life magazine. "At one point I went over, and he started dancing with his silhouette. Mid-trip, they skipped down the block to pose for portraits. Through acid guru Timothy Leary, Schiller made contact with Kesey, who told him the Pranksters were due to hold an Acid Test on Sunset Boulevard. By the early-60s, following a meeting with the author Ken Kesey, Cassady had become the amphetamine-fuelled driver for Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a troupe of Californian hippies who piled into a brightly painted bus and set out to introduce the mind-expanding properties of LSD to the stuffy straights of middle America.īy this time, Schiller was a photojournalist of some renown, and with a batch of good-quality LSD finding its way into counterculture circles and talk of so-called Acid Tests – musical events fuelled by Kool-Aid laced with psychedelics – taking place along the west coast, he set out to document the new scene. A teenage dropout who fell in with the young Jack Kerouac, Cassady became the inspiration for perhaps the quintessential Beat generation figure, Dean Moriarty, the restless, superhuman drifter of Kerouac's 1957 novel On The Road. Those thousands singing along to Why Does It Always Rain on Me?, in the drizzle, are probably kicking themselves over a decade on that they missed the opportunity to be at what was, in hindsight, Ground Zero for The Flaming Lips’ evergreen appeal.The photo's title, The Acid Test: Neal Cassady, reveals that this anonymous figure is one of the most iconic – if elusive – figures in 20th-century literature. This is an album of its time, sure – but one with a reach that continues to feel its way around the modern musical landscape. Just as previous releases had influenced the likes of Grandaddy and Mercury Rev, The Soft Bulletin and its successor Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots have informed acts including MGMT and Empire of the Sun. Ultimately, this record paved the way not only for The Flaming Lips to enjoy commercial success far beyond their homes, but also opened the doors for younger acts with a spirit of adventure in their blood to breach the pop charts. Race for the Prize and Waitin’ for a Superman – these are anthems built for mass celebration, and while the crowd isn’t wholly won over yet, fast-forward a few years and the reverence for these tracks is clear wherever The Flaming Lips pitch up with their travelling freak(ishly brilliant) show. In the presence of Wayne Coyne and company, with hand puppets in place of crowd-surfing bubbles and multiple dancers dressed up as aliens, everything’s exactly as it should be though. That stage, after 17 years: the New Bands tent. Seventeen years and nine albums since their formation, The Flaming Lips are headlining at Glastonbury, playing to a packed tent. It’s proggy, it’s rocky – but it’s not prog-rock, really nothing that the average man on the street can’t lean an ear towards and be immediately rewarded. Experimentation has been tempered the group’s out-there tendencies reined right in for a collection that sings with the same warmth and composure that characterised The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. The Flaming Lips, Oklahoma oddballs responsible for the four-discs-at-once headache of 1997’s Zaireeka, have crossed into the mainstream courtesy of The Soft Bulletin, NME’s album of 1999. But this is something I only witness in passing, as another band has had an equally brilliant year. The crowd for them goes back, back, and back some more, fires flickering up the hillside. Travis have had an amazing 12 months, their second studio album The Man Who earning the Scottish outfit the Best Album and Best Newcomers awards at the Brits in March. And Saturday’s Pyramid Stage headliners could well be described similarly. Glastonbury Festival, in the summer of 2000. ![]()
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