Fads: The Psychedelicatessen

It was a foregone conclusion that as soon as LSD became the daring, far-out thing to take, entrepreneurs would be gin to peddle psychedelic accessories —the stuff to take on the trip. The paraphernalia ranges from such objects of contemplation as a polished cow’s tooth ($2.50) to poster-size enlargements of current underground heroes such as Lenin, Dostoevsky and Oscar Wilde. But not even Thomas DeQuincey in his wildest opium-pipe dream could have imagined the success that such accessory shops are beginning to enjoy.

Psychedelic central for the U.S. right now is a half-mile stretch along San Francisco’s Haight Street, which has 27 shops catering to the needs of hippies and trippies. One of the earliest, simply called the Psychedelic Shop, opened in the psychedelic Paleozoic era: in January 1965; the latest, barely six months old, calls itself The Phoenix. Their hottest items: incense, cigarette papers and bells. The bells are to hear, naturally, and the incense to sniff. And the cigarette papers? “Well,” admits bearded Owner Robert Stubbs, 26, “we have sold an awful lot of papers, and no one has asked for tobacco yet.” To further aid his pot-puffing patrons, Stubbs carries a line of water pipes from India; to nourish their spirits, he has English kites. “Kites fit in with the psychedelic state of mind,” claims Stubbs. “It’s a state of mind, flying, free of the bonds that tie you down.”

Love Oil & Roach Clips. In Los Angeles, the leading psychedelicatessen is The Headquarters, not far from the gates of the U.C.L.A. campus. It was opened last November by two ex-television writers, Jerry Hopkins, 31, and Corb Donohue, 26, who invested $1,000 to make it a shop that any junkie could call home. In the first three months, HQ passed the acidhead test, grossed $11,000; Hopkins and Donohue expect to gross $50,000 in 1967. It is hard to see how they could lose money. Their rent is $225 a month, and more than half of their goods are on consignment. Among the Headquarters merchandise: prism spectacles that even without drugs make the world seem askew, roach clips (ornamental holders for “roaches,” the butts of marijuana cigarettes) and Psychedelic Love Oil, a scented baby oil made by a local perfumer and priced to sell at $1.95 per bottle.

Incense has become a smell celebre in the L.A. area: Loyola University now fines students who burn it in dormitories; and at a West Los Angeles high school, a girl who lit some in the ladies’ room was sent to the fire chief to be lectured. Yet the pungent odor is likely to linger on; legend has it that it masks the fumes of marijuana.

The odor of joss sticks also hangs heavy in the air of Hollywood’s newest psychedelic store, The Infinite Mind, which is barely a month old. Proprietor Eldon Taylor, 25, insists that The Infinite Mind is “really just a toy shop for teen-agers,” but he provides the ideal station from which to start a trip. Light boxes around the walls blink and fade and oscillate, floodlights of red, blue, yellow and green flicker on a paisley-patterned tapestry while the sounds of the Beatles or Ravi Shankar boom from strategically located loudspeakers.

Kaleidoscopes & Mini Marvels. In Cleveland, there is another Headquarters shop, this one located in the town’s beat and offbeat section on Euclid Avenue, just east of the Western Reserve campus. Owner Stan Heilburn considers his store “a propaganda agency for LSD users, to counter the effects of a bad press.” The propaganda works—at least in Ohio: 200 to 300 people press in on weekday nights; weekends, up to a thousand customers clamor for medium-priced trivia, including Yugoslavian pipes ($3.00), and off-beat books and records. “We sell a lot of things that are generally available,” concedes Heilburn. But the psychedelic label adds a commercial gloss. “It puts things in a new light. This is what makes these places go.”

In Manhattan, the light goes on at the Head Shop, a hole-in-the-wall Lower East Side shop opened last year by Jeff Click, 25, and Ben Schawinsky, 27, who wanted “to do something legal and be in touch with the beautiful people.” Their initial $500 investment turned into a $3,000 a week bonanza, so last October they opened a Greenwich Village branch. Both shops keep psychedelic hours (2 p.m. to 10 p.m.), sell up to 5,000 packs of cigarette paper a month, count as regular customers Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and by now, say the owners, “we’ve reached the Madison Avenue crowd.” Among their best-selling items: Japanese colored balls, kaleidoscopes, avocado hand cream, Mini Marvels (stamp-size comic books) and diffraction disks—small metallic decorations to be worn on the middle of the forehead.

Vicarious & Tantalizing. The key to the cross-country psychedelic-accessory explosion probably lies not in how many items can be used by the trip taker but in how few. The dedicated drug user may have some use for the paraphernalia. But many shoppers who intend trying nothing stronger than a Bloody Mary find that the clashing, primary-colored psychedelic fabrics, the bold, wobbly colors of posters advertising Light Shows and the glittering kaleidoscopes and prism glasses offer them a vicarious if tantalizing hint of what the authentic acidhead sees when he is away on a trip.

Others, like Jackie Kennedy, who bought a set of psychedelic-colored plastic boxes, do so just because the shape and shade of the things appeal to them. And still others—maybe the majority—buy conversation pieces that they can add to their collection of comic books and Humphrey Bogart posters, reducing the whole march toward mind expansion to a close-order drill on the old campground.