In 2006, as part of his lecture on “The Human Beast” delivered as the 35th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Warner Theatre in Washington DC, Tom Wolfe flashed back to his days of reporting on the infamous “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests” of the 1960s California hippies:
I thought bohemia had been brought to its apogee in the 1960s, before my very eyes, by the hippies, originally known as acid heads, in reference to the drug LSD, with their Rapunzel hair down to the shoulder blades among the males and great tangled thickets of hair in the armpits of the women, all living in communes. The communes inevitably turned religious thanks to the hallucinations hippies experienced while on LSD and a whole array of other hallucinogens whose names no one can remember. Some head — short for acid head — would end up in the middle of Broadway, one of San Francisco’s main drags, sitting cross-legged in the Lotus position, looking about, wide eyes glistening with beatification, shouting, “I’m in the pudding and I’ve met the manager! I’m in the pudding and I’ve met the manager!”
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