Interviews with Icons: Flashing on the Sixties • by Lisa Law

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You may not know who some of Lisa Law‘s 60s-icons interviewees are, but you will enjoy the trip inside their heads. These are some interesting minds who have done some astonishing things: Taj Mahal, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Mickey Hart, Peter Coyote, and 20 or so more.

counterculture icons reminisce about the sixties

Lisa Law is a skillful interviewer who brings out the shining personalities and wild reminiscences of these counterculture trailblazers, as she talks to them about the 60s. Spiritual teacher Stephen Gaskin describes how the community he helped found, the Farm, ran on solid psychedelic tripping principles. Poet Allen Gisberg plays word association with Lisa Law. Mountain Girl (Jerry Garcia’s wife) talks about psychedelics and why she isn’t taking them at the moment. Here’s an excerpt from a Wavy Gravy interview:

Lisa: How did you happen to be living at the Hog Farm?

Wavy: What it was is Kesey was on the lam in Mexico, and we were doing a traveling road show, Can You Pass the Acid Test?, with a band called The Grateful Dead. And Life magazine was shooting us all for their cover, and people were posing away, and Ken Babbs stole the bus and took off to join Kesey in Mexico. So my wife then, Bonnie Jean, and I were living in a two-room cabin in Sunland, California, and suddenly we had thirty or forty houseguests. And the landlord came by and said forty-two people is too many people for a two-room cabin. And we sort of concurred from there out. We were being evicted, but in the life-in-the-bizarre-lane of kitchen synchronicity, along came Bud Pelsue and said, “Old Saul up on that mountain, he’s had a stroke, and they need somebody to slop them hogs.” I remember driving up in the dead of night to check out the venue, and there was Burbank laid at our feet like luminous jewels on a field of black velvet. And I stood on this knoll to get a better look, and the knoll stood up and starting walking with me on its back. It was this big old black sow. Forty-eight hog farmers a year are devoured by their livestock, so I remember feeding them in groups of two.

Lisa: And then one of those little babies became Pigasus.

Wavy: We ran a pig for President, it’s true, in 1968. We had no idea when we went on the road, with one pig to remember our humble beginnings, that she would be the first female black-and-white candidate for the presidency and would require her own truck and several body servants.