Nick Schou sits one cubicle away from mine at OC Weekly. And yet, I interviewed him
about his new book, Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World, from my home while he was on the road to his home in Long Beach.
Complicating
matters was the fact that I can't make long distance calls from my land line,
my cell phone is shut off and Schou's cell cut out a couple times. And made weird beeping noises. Or maybe that was the “L” talking.
Anyhoots, the
shameless promotion of my colleague's second book (2006's Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb being the first) is dealt to my bruthers and sistahs the same day Orange Sunshine hits store shelves. Dig it!
CLOCKWORK: So, Nick,
what's your book about?
NICK SCHOU: It's about the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a
group of streetwise surfers from Orange County who . . . you
know, I emailed a blurb to Gustavo. What I wrote down is better than anything I
can say about the book.
]
THE BLURB: Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and its Quest to Spread Peace, Love and Acid to the World, by OC Weekly's Nick Schou, is the true story of the best-kept secret of the 1960s: the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Dubbed the “Hippie Mafia,” the Brotherhood began in the mid-1960s as a small band of peace-loving, adventure-seeking surfers in Southern California. After discovering LSD, they took to Timothy Leary's mantra of “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” and resolved to make that vision a reality by becoming the biggest group of acid dealers and hashish smugglers in the nation, and literally providing the fuel for the psychedelic revolution in the process. Journalist Schou takes us deep inside the Brotherhood, combining exclusive interviews with both the group's surviving members as well as the cops who chased them. A wide-sweeping narrative of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (and more drugs) that runs from Laguna Beach to Maui to Afghanistan, Orange Sunshine explores how America moved from the era of peace and free love into a darker time of hard drugs and paranoia. Kirkus Review hails the book as “a fascinating read for any audience and essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of psychedelia.”
So, Nick, what gave you the idea to write this book?
Basically, we ran a story in 1999 or 2000, “Laguna on Acid”
by Bob Emmers, about a big Christmas concert, and deep in the article it
mentioned this little-known group of surfers dropped acid onto the show from a
plane. That led to the idea to track those people down for a feature story. But
no one from the Brotherhood talked to me until I was writing the book. This
solves one of the last remaining mysteries of the 1960s: Who were they, and
what were they trying to do?
So, how many of those
people were you able to talk to?
From the Brotherhood?
Yes.
The original Brotherhood was only about a dozen people. I
talked with maybe half of them. A whole bunch have died off in the last few
years, so it was a sort of a now or never kind of situation. Guys in the Brotherhood
realized they are getting to the point where no one really will be able to remember
what happened. So, I talked with about six or seven in the original group and a
whole bunch of other people who were part of their tribe as it picked up speed
in Laguna. I also talked with the main players on the law enforcement side of
the story, including the cop who busted Leary in
Beach
of prison in
a plane in
Was Leary in the Brotherhood?
Naw, not really. They read his books. These were street guys
from
after reading The Psychedelic Experience–the same book that inspired John Lennon
to write “Tomorrow Never Knows”–it changed their lives. They looked up to Leary
and lured him to
to be their spiritual advisor. But Leary called John Griggs, the most influential
member of the Brotherhood, his spiritual guru. Leary actually looked up to Griggs,
who was a wild guy with mystical powers of persuasion, as it were.
Did you have to go to
any strange lengths to report out this story?
Yes, in the foreword I write about how I had to hike a mile
up a really remote slope in Maui to talk to a Buddhist hermit who was able get me
an interview with Ram Dass, Leary's Harvard philosophy colleague and acid
researcher. Another time, I had to play guitar with a Brotherhood smuggler who
has a cable access television show in
Cruz
Did he like your
playing?
Yeah, he liked it a lot. He wouldn't let me interview him
unless I went on his show. Another guy, shortly after I interviewed him, spent eight
months in jail for a massive marijuana growing operation.
Where?
Temecula.
[
So, how were you able
to do all this and write the book given your busy OC Weekly schedule?
Well, basically, a lot of the reporting was stretched out
over the five years from when I first reported on the Brotherhood. I took three
months off to write the book. For interviews, I'd basically drive up to Northern
California on weekends, or the Inland Empire or down to
as many places where story took place as I could. It wasn't really a sacrifice
to go to
story took place in Kandahar.
That's where they got their hash from, the pipeline to
time he got arrested for a pot growing operation in the '90s until Sept. 11 [2001],
he had a surf resort in
called Playa Kandahar. It was an inside joke. Then, after 9-11, business went
down.
Here's a cliché
question: What do you hope readers get from the book?
Well, I think it will be interesting to anyone who was alive
back then. They'll realize the Brotherhood played a very important role in the changes
that would happen. I think also the relatively young readers today will see
that most of what they were doing then are mainstream American values now, at least among
the enlightened part of society. Marijuana is almost legal. That's what they
were really about. And acid. But I think it shows that, in some ways, it's a
very tragic story. These guys really tried to change the world in five years.
Instead, the world changed them. Something very ideal turned into something
more cynical. They were declared the first real enemy in the so-called “War on Drugs.”
You think of them and then see the kind of violence on the border [thanks to
Mexican drug cartels], and it's pretty clear these were not the bad guys cops
made them out to be, when they were called the “hippie mafia.”
Tell me more about
what younger readers might get from this.
It will just blow their minds. I think young people today
think
divided, the two
that is still talked about all the time. But in the '60s, it was way more
divided than the way it is now. It's important to realize that and learn a lot
from that decade. It was more complicated than it's been made out to be. Yes, Leary
is the one who said, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” But he also wrote a book titled, I've Got America Surrounded,
who wanted to run for governor of
so he could ban football and make baseball the national sport, and even get rid
of all money and shift to a barter system. And he also wanted to legalize
drugs. You know who he was beaten by?
Who?
Ronald Reagan.
Orange Sunshine Facebook fan page
Orange Sunshine author signing at Latitude 33 Books, 311 Ocean Ave., Laguna Beach, 5-6 p.m. Sat., April 10.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.