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Aged 43, David Solomon was the oldest member of the Microdot Gang and represented the vanguard of LSD culture, pioneers whose youth was played out against the backdrop of world war, nuclear bombs, anti-communist witch-hunts and rapacious consumerism. People like Solomon were part of a slow-burning protest against the mainstream, an informal underground. When their experiments went spectacularly over-ground during the 1960s, they faced a clear choice. Embrace the new generation or step back. Some did, appalled by the flower children’s apparent naivety and reckless hedonism. Others claimed the mantle of leadership – Solomon included. Ironically, a movement associated primarily with youth followed gurus and prophets who were often middle-aged or older.
David Solomon was born in California in 1925. During the war he was called up but spared combat duties after his two brothers were killed on a bombing run over Germany. Instead he did clerical work for the OSS – the forerunner of the CIA – before being discharged in 1946. Solomon headed for New York, enrolled at NYU to study English literature, and dived into the city’s pulsing jazz scene where he discovered a new form of music: be-bop. A dazzlingly fast, rhythmically complex, harmonically adventurous and blues orientated style that sent convulsions through the jazz world and eventually the wider one, be-bop’s main practitioners adopted a provocative anti-establishment stance with a distinctive style and their own hipster language.
Solomon was an instant convert and quickly befriended one of be-bop’s leading lights, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. At the same time, Solomon was introduced to cannabis, which had been circulating in the jazz community since the 1920s and spawned a sub-genre of tunes known as ‘reefer music’; Dizzy Gillespie observed that ‘jazz musicians, the old ones and the young ones, almost all smoked pot’. On graduation, Solomon settled with his wife Pat in Greenwich Village – ground zero of the post-war counter-culture – and began working as a critic for the jazz magazine Metronome, which championed be-bop. Working for Metronome gained Solomon kudos, but not much income. By the early 1950s, he had two daughters to support. Thankfully, his credentials were good enough to land him a job as an editor at Esquire magazine.
Founded in 1933, Esquire mixed high-brow fiction and topical discussion with life-style features, sports profiles, motor cars and drawings of naked ladies. Esquire also had a strong tradition of jazz coverage – running a Jazz Forum and a yearly Jazz Awards – and welcomed be-bop. Solomon slotted in nicely, working on articles like ‘Dizzy’s Jazz’ (June 1957), and ‘The Golden Age of Jazz’ (January 1959). As the decade progressed, Esquire picked up on messages from the underground transmitted by creatures known as the Beats who attempted to capture the intensity, freedom and spontaneity of be-bop; shared a fondness for drugs and Paris; and lived hand to mouth from city to city, rubbing shoulders with the marginalised and dispossessed. Head tribesmen were the poet Allan Ginsberg and fellow writers William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Though both Ginsberg and Burroughs transcended the Beat label, Kerouac was shackled to it due to his staggeringly successful set text On the Road (1955). Solomon’s home turf of Greenwich Village was one of the nexus points of the Beat scene, showcased in the November 1954 issue of Esquire in ‘The Lives and Loves of Greenwich Village’. Other Beat hotspots were given similar treatment; in the May 1958 edition it was ‘San Francisco: The Magnet City’.
As well as being deeply embedded in the same cultural milieu as the Beats, Solomon was prepared to take similar risks to achieve a heightened state of awareness. During his tenure at Esquire, Solomon embarked on his psychedelic initiation when he ingested 400 milligrams of mescaline, a by-product of two strains of cactus – the San Pedro, a mountain plant from Peru, and peyote, a desert variety found in Mexico – that had been central to sacred rites and rituals for thousands of years before Spanish conquerors arrived in the sixteenth century along with Christianity. Determined to crush any indigenous religions, the emissaries of the Church demonised mescaline. According to them, the ‘devilish root’ opened a gateway for Satan to enter and possess his victims. During the nineteenth century, peyote was adopted by Native American tribes after they were shunted onto reservations, in the hope that it would give them access to the spirit world. Their use of mescaline was studied by anthropologists, which led to it gaining the attention of scientists, psychologists, philosophers and artists and writers, whose experiments with mescaline in the first half of the twentieth century laid the groundwork and created the terms of reference for the first generation of LSD consumers. For Solomon, his encounter with mescaline was like nothing he’d ever experienced before: ‘I had never seen, touched, tasted, heard, smelled and felt so profound a personal unity and involvement with the material world.’
Solomon’s first psychedelic adventure occurred because of his involvement with the English writer and intellectual Aldous Huxley, best known for his sci-fi masterpiece Brave New World (1932). During 1953, Solomon contacted Huxley about a newspaper article he’d written about drugs: Solomon suggested he might like to do a longer version for Esquire. Huxley agreed in principle, but publication was delayed and then abandoned when the material appeared as The Doors of Perception (1954), perhaps the most significant single work on hallucinogens.
Marked by the horrors of the First World War, alienated by industrial society and materialism, fearful of the rise of Communism and Fascism, Aldous Huxley rejected modern society and dedicated himself to finding ways to overcome the human malaise and reconnect to spiritual values. Having settled in California, Huxley was contacted by a psychiatrist working in a state mental hospital in Canada who was researching the effect of mescaline on schizophrenics. He began a correspondence with Huxley. Spring 1953, Huxley offered himself as a test subject; ‘thus it came about that one bright May’ he ‘swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water and sat down to wait for the results’. After about half an hour some flowers caught Huxley’s eye and he saw not merely a set of well-arranged blooms but the essence of life itself: his trip had begun. Time and space became dislocated and displaced. Everything around him, including the folds in his trousers, revealed themselves in microscopic depth and detail.
LSD followed on 23 December 1955 and, a year later, Huxley coined the term ‘psychedelic’. Meanwhile, his writings on the subject, though mauled by the critics, quickly gained traction and hit a nerve with legions of potential followers, Solomon included: ‘my own excursions … were largely the result of a deep curiosity engendered by reading such books as The Doors of Perception’. Suitably inspired, Solomon moved onto psilocybin – a synthetic derivative of magic mushrooms that first emerged from a Swiss lab in 1958 – and LSD two years later. By then, Huxley was increasingly preoccupied with how best to harness LSD’s potential for the good of mankind. His solution was essentially elitist; LSD would benefit the more enlightened members of society, but the masses would be overwhelmed and disorientated by it. Solomon shared Huxley’s concerns, but came to less conservative conclusions. Solomon wanted to spread the word and help LSD gain wider acceptance. So he decided to compile an anthology of writing about acid.
LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug (1964) was a varied collection that mixed scholarly articles on the subject that Solomon selected from a range of scientific journals with more mainstream offerings, including material he’d commissioned and edited for his new employers at Playboy – which Solomon joined in the early 1960s after leaving Esquire. Hugh Hefner had launched Playboy in 1953 with capital from his mom as a raunchier version of Esquire, with real nude ladies rather than drawn ones. Within a few years, it was outselling its rival and shifting millions of copies. Though Hefner essentially reproduced Esquire’s basic formula – and its extensive jazz coverage – Playboy was more explicitly attached to the counter-culture. As a result, Solomon was able to push his agenda and he recycled three articles from the magazine in his LSD book, each one a personal account of a psychedelic experience.
To guarantee the anthology’s success, however, Solomon needed to acquire some new material by ‘celebrity’ authors. Solomon contacted Alan Watts – a well-known expert on Buddhism who had married LSD to Zen philosophy. In his piece for Solomon, Watts asked whether ‘the risks involved in using these chemicals was worthwhile’: his answer was ‘yes’ on the basis that LSD could help us throw off our ‘insular identity’ and become ‘thoroughly at home in our own world … swimming in the ocean of relativity as joyously as dolphins’.
More significant was a contribution by William Burroughs, one of the few ’60s icons to be equally revered by the ’70s punks and ’80s ravers: Solomon called him a ‘reformed junky turned literary genius’. A pathologically secretive man who felt like an alien on an undercover mission to Earth, Burroughs had been thrust into the limelight because of his experimental novel The Naked Lunch (1959), which had inspired rave reviews and moral outrage. Burroughs welcomed Solomon’s request as he’d gone out on a limb to showcase the author’s work in Metronome. Solomon was now overall editor at the jazz magazine and was trying to steer it in a more avant-garde direction; one of his staff recalled that ‘under Solomon’s leadership we were publishing a magazine that featured something truly revolutionary … the young black jazz performers who were transforming music in America’. Keen to add literary fuel to the fire, Solomon got Burroughs’ permission to run extracts from the author’s latest novel, The Soft Machine – where characters, plotlines and locations were chopped up and spliced together in fractured sentences and repetitive patterns – alongside an essay about ninth-century hashish-eating Arabic assassins: not exactly what the average Metronome reader was expecting to find next to reviews of the latest Miles Davis album.
Burroughs was grateful for the commission – and the $50 that came with it – and wrote to Solomon thanking him for ‘the excellent job you did with the two pieces I sent you’. When he next passed through New York, Burroughs dropped by the Metronome offices to see Solomon, but was informed that he no longer worked there. After over fifteen years as a contributor and barely a year into his editorship, Solomon had been ‘let go’. His determination to push the boundaries (he encouraged his reporters to take acid and then write about it) had backfired. At least Solomon had the LSD book to fall back on, and Burroughs duly submitted Points of Distinction between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs for inclusion in the anthology. As a long-term heroin addict and authority on drugs of all kinds, Burroughs approached the subject with scientific rigour; his forensic analysis of the differences between stimulants – LSD, cannabis, amphetamines and cocaine – and depressants – alcohol and heroin – ended with the claim that ‘hallucinogens provide a key to the creative process’.
Another coup for Solomon was securing an appearance by Aldous Huxley. Hallucinogens: A Philosopher’s Visionary Prediction was the last thing Huxley wrote before his death and was trailed in the November 1963 issue of Playboy. Huxley warned that the world was suffering a life-or-death crisis caused by ‘explosive population increase’ and ‘head long technological advance and militant nationalism’. Action was needed to transform humanity through education, meditation and ‘the use of harmless psychedelics’.
To complete the line-up, Solomon roped in Dr Timothy Leary, the poster boy of acid who exhorted the youth to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’. Vain and narcissistic, Leary had the ability to relay sophisticated and complex ideas in readable and memorable prose, which he combined with an instinctive understanding of how to manipulate the media to propel himself into the limelight. When Solomon first entered Leary’s orbit in 1961, the self-appointed ‘high-priest’ of LSD hadn’t even tried acid yet, despite studying the effects of mescaline and psilocybin as part of a research programme that he’d started at Harvard after his introduction to magic mushrooms, during which he claimed to have learnt ‘more in the six or seven hours of that experience than in all my years as a psychologist’. When Leary finally took LSD – not long after he’d met Solomon – he called it ‘the most shattering experience of my life’.
Solomon and Leary shared a mutual acquaintance in the jazz world, the trumpeter and big band leader Maynard Ferguson, a precocious talent who had just finished a lucrative gig writing and performing the soundtrack for a primetime TV drama about racing drivers. Ferguson and his wife Flo – ‘a radiant redhead in her mid-forties’ – ran an open house that attracted a steady stream of bohemians like Solomon, all drawn by the easy-going atmosphere, stimulating company and availability of drugs. A young writer remembered participating in a psilocybin session there in April 1961 after Ferguson urged him to sample the fruits of the ‘sacred mushroom’. Arriving at Ferguson’s house, he was ushered into a dimly-lit room with a huge fireplace, ‘dark woodwork, heavy beams’ and ‘leaded windows’. Also present were Leary, a prison psychiatrist and about eight others. Leary handed him a pink pill ‘the size of a baby aspirin’ from ‘an amber plastic bottle’ and off he went into the realms of supercharged consciousness and sensory overload.
Recognising that Solomon was a potential ally with access to all sorts of interesting people, Leary gave him eight psilocybin pills to distribute as he saw fit. Solomon needed no encouragement as he was already dishing out acid to his contacts in the jazz community. One of those Solomon introduced to LSD was the young free jazz clarinettist Perry Robinson, who regarded Solomon as a ‘progressive leftie’ and ‘family friend’. Solomon convinced Robinson that he needed to take acid (‘you’re ready for it, and I’m going to turn you on’), and invited him over to his Bronx apartment for an LSD session. Robinson remembered how fascinated he was by ‘an oil painting of Dave’s wife’ and how he immersed himself in its colours before reaching a transcendental state of awareness as he glimpsed ‘the pure undulating energy of the universe’ and understood ‘the true one-ness of life’.
Throughout, Solomon was at his side giving encouragement. Reminding Robinson that ‘you can do anything you want to’, Solomon urged him to experiment with his facial expressions and watch himself transform. Robinson went to the bathroom, stared in the mirror and decided he ‘wanted to be a werewolf’. Then Solomon took his pupil out for a walk in the park – ‘I had an impulse to fuck a tree’ – and then across the bridge to a Manhattan bank where Solomon kept his drugs in a safety-deposit box. According to Robinson, Solomon was able to score pharmaceutical-grade LSD from local hospitals because ‘he knew all the doctors and nurses’.
Solomon dedicated LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug to Huxley – ‘guru extraordinaire’. In his preface, Solomon observed that psychedelic drugs were seen as a threat because they ‘enable one to see through the myriad pretensions and deceits which make up the mythology of the social lie’. However, LSD wisely used could ‘offer hope and encouragement to a democratically orientated social structure’. The book was released in 1964 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a long-established publisher whose list of authors included nineteenth-century giants like Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville as well as current literary stars like Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lolita (1958) had caused a sensation. Solomon’s debut garnered generally favourable and respectful reviews. The New York Times recommended it to ‘all who wish to learn about the way in which the mind of man may be influenced’ and praised Solomon’s ‘erudite treatment’ of a ‘difficult and possibly personal topic’; The Berkeley Daily Gazette gave its seal of approval: ‘an interesting and informative book’ that provided ‘fresh insight into new and fascinating frontiers’.
The book’s appearance coincided with an outbreak of media interest in LSD. Overall, the tone of the coverage was cautiously positive, but tempered by anxiety over the potential effects on society if LSD got into the wrong hands. The Saturday Evening Post ran an article with the headline ‘The Dangerous Magic of LSD’, while Cosmopolitan breathlessly declared that LSD was ‘the sophisticated’ and ‘fun thing’ to take if you ran with ‘the fast set and the beat set’. Thanks to all this attention, Solomon’s anthology sold well and a sequel was on the cards. Solomon chose cannabis as his next subject, signed a contract with a different publisher – The Bobbs-Merrill Company, which had been turning out bestsellers for over a century – and began assembling The Marijuana Papers: An Examination of Marijuana in Society, History and Literature.
As cannabis had been around for thousands of years, the anthology had a wider range than the LSD one. There was the history of the plant, its cultural and social uses, and a selection of dope literature featuring Rabelais, Baudelaire and the Beats. Solomon also assembled a number of papers and lectures examining the therapeutic and medical applications of the herb, and once again reached out to Burroughs, who let him reprint the essay that had previously appeared in the LSD book. The two of them had stayed in touch since the Metronome incident and, in a letter dated 20 April 1964, Burroughs told Solomon that his cannabis book sounded ‘great’ and would act as a corrective to the American government’s ‘pernicious falsification of facts’ and suppression of any ‘scientific evaluation of marijuana’ that contradicted its propaganda.
Solomon also commissioned a piece by Leary on the politics and ethics of marijuana. By then, Harvard had expelled Leary after the good doctor had ‘tested’ some trainee priests from Andover Theological Seminary – half with LSD, half with amphetamines – and sat back to watch the results. Cut loose from Harvard, Leary and his co-conspirators immediately started the International Federation for Internal Freedom and launched a serious-minded journal called The Psychedelic Review. At the same time, Leary began looking for ‘a setting free from secular distractions’. After several aborted attempts to establish a base, a suitable resting place was found thanks to the intervention of Peggy Hitchcock – ‘a free-spirited jazz buff’ – who’d met Leary at the Ferguson home. A jet-setting party animal with a mischievous streak, Peggy took pity on Leary and his failed attempts to find a safe haven. She asked her twin brothers if Leary could use the ‘lovely big property’ they’d recently acquired.
Of the two siblings, Billy Hitchcock was particularly taken by Leary. According to a close family friend, Hitchcock was easily influenced – ‘he never liked to confront anybody about anything’ – and quickly fell under Leary’s spell: ‘he got Billy totally enthralled and became a sort of father figure to him’. Hitchcock’s own father – who died when Hitchcock was a child – was an impossible act to follow. Aside from being a successful banker who helped set up Lehman Brothers in 1937, Hitchcock’s father had distinguished himself in the First World War by escaping from a POW camp and walking several hundred miles to safety, lit up the inter-war years as a star polo player – considered to be one of the best ever – and was killed test-flying a prototype fighter plane during the Second World War. If that wasn’t enough of a legacy to contend with, his mother’s side of the family was even more intimidating. Billy Hitchcock was the great-grandson of Thomas Mellon, who established the Mellon Bank in 1869, and grandson of William Mellon Snr, who set up Gulf Oil in 1901. The Mellon family also had controlling interests in US Steel, Heinz, Credit Suisse Bank and General Motors and were patrons of Yale and the University of Pittsburgh, while the Carnegie Mellon University was named after the family. Aside from Hitchcock’s lucrative job at Lehman Brothers, his trust fund provided him with a further $15,000 a week.
The property Hitchcock offered to Leary was called Millbrook, a sixty-four-room Gothic mansion – though the word mansion hardly does it justice – surrounded by 25,000 acres of land featuring orchards, forests, rivers and waterfalls, 80 miles north of Manhattan in Duchess County. Hitchcock used Millbrook as his weekend pad, staying in a complex of buildings – a bungalow and a four-bedroom cottage – a mile from the main house. Hitchcock handed the keys to Leary and a small tribe of devotees moved in. The rent was $500 a month. LSD was acquired from chemical traders in London and brought in via Montreal. Leary installed himself as resident ‘spiritual teacher’, hoping to combine ‘the humility and wisdom of a Hindu guru … the sensitivity of a poet and the imagination of a science fiction writer’. The emphasis was on LSD sessions that incorporated elements of Eastern religions. Hinduism was popular, particularly after Leary had made the pilgrimage to India. The I Ching did its work. The Tibetan Book of the Dead loomed large. Visitors paid $60 for a weekend’s reprogramming. They wore togas, ate their meals – consisting of dyed food – in silence, took part in role-playing games and produced primitive art. One resident compared Millbrook to an ‘orbiting astral space station, where beings on different levels of consciousness converged to exchange communications’.
Solomon frequently visited the house to soak up the atmosphere and mingle with his jazz buddies: Maynard Ferguson was an almost permanent fixture, as was the explosive bassist and virtuoso composer Charles Mingus. Solomon had known Mingus for years and lobbied hard to get extracts from the musician’s devastatingly honest autobiography reproduced in Playboy. Aside from these familiar faces, there were many new ones as word of Leary’s acid hotel spread – including a certain Gerald Thomas who, some years later, would be in a Canadian jail ratting out his colleagues. Thomas was in his early 30s, a chemical engineer with degrees in physics, maths and chemistry. While still on the fringes of academia he had developed a serious interest in LSD. Solomon and Thomas became friends and stayed in touch outside the magic kingdom.
When he wasn’t at Millbrook, Solomon was trying to capitalise on the success of his books. There were various creative projects: an unpublished humorous piece called Psychedelic Satire and a feature film project about LSD – Flight to Reality – that Solomon developed a screenplay for but never got off the ground. These failures, added to a dearth of magazine work, must have been frustrating for Solomon, who was approaching 40. However, 1966 promised to be a good year for him, kicking off with the publication of his cannabis book on 1 January with a photograph on the cover of a neatly rolled joint resting under a brass microscope. Reviews were universally good. The Washington Post called it ‘interesting and controversial’. Following on its heels was the paperback edition of the LSD book, which appeared with an eye-grabbing marine blue cover that displayed a distorted image of a human face blurred and twisted out of focus and a quote from The LA Times describing it as ‘the most balanced and informative book on the subject’. The blurb on the back boldly asserted that Solomon’s ‘lucid, provocative and totally absorbing account’ would reveal the truth behind ‘the intriguing and revolutionary world of consciousness expanding drugs’.
The paperback hit the stores in the midst of a growing media furore over LSD, with newspapers and magazines competing to see who could print the most shocking scare stories. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times were worried about a potential LSD epidemic when students returned to college. The front cover of Life Magazine (March 1966) warned of ‘The Exploding Threat of the Mind Control Drug that Got Out of Control’. Reader’s Digest featured tales of students being hit by cars and middle-aged women committing suicide on LSD. One report described how a man drilled a hole in his skull while under the influence. More ominously, the slumbering American Leviathan finally woke up to the LSD ‘problem’, flexed its muscles and extended its tentacles. On 7 June 1965, New York State reacted to reports of LSD use in high schools by outlawing the ‘possession, sale, exchange or giving away’ of ‘hallucinogenic drugs or preparations’, with the exception of ‘licenced physicians’ buying from ‘registered manufacturers’. Shortly afterwards, Washington introduced an amendment to section 201 of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which came into effect on 1 February 1966 and added LSD to the list of controlled substances only available to authorised healthcare professionals, while criminalising ‘the widespread illicit trade’. By that summer, three other state legislatures – California, Nevada and New Jersey – had passed similar measures.
Meanwhile, the authorities went after leading figures of the counter-culture. The easiest way to bring down heat was by exploiting America’s draconian anti-cannabis laws, which were considerably more severe than the ones introduced to police LSD. First offence for simple possession of marijuana was two to five years; second offence, five to ten years; third, twenty years with no possibility of parole. Leary was busted December 1965 on the Texas/Mexico border carrying $10 worth of weed. He was charged with smuggling and transporting narcotics, a felony. At Leary’s trial a few months later he was sentenced to thirty years and given a $40,000 fine. He immediately launched an appeal, increased the self-promotion and did the prestigious Playboy interview.
Solomon’s reaction was much less cavalier. He saw the writing on the wall. The cannabis book, coupled with the one on LSD, made him a prime target. As he had no intention of changing his behaviour – he was known to stroll through customs with marijuana in his pipe and drive round with a big joint on the go – he was vulnerable to arrest and incarceration at any time. Rather than take the risk, Solomon and his family high-tailed it to Europe and ended up in Deya, a small Majorcan fishing village just north of the capital Palma.
Close to the beach, on the slopes of a beautiful valley rich with olive groves, consisting of 200 solid stone houses and a church built on the shrine of an Iberian moon goddess, Deya was a magical place. Before the Spanish Civil War it attracted writers, painters, musicians, academics and Buddhists. After the Second World War, they returned, and during the 1950s they were joined by holidaymakers who flocked to the island, sucked in by Majorca’s 200 miles of unspoilt beaches. Hotels and villas sprang up on Palma’s Golden Mile. By 1965, 5,000 charter flights were landing a month. But Deya was spared the tourist invasion. Instead, it got hippies. By 1966, when Solomon arrived, ‘the village had become … increasingly a centre of the hippie culture … pot and acid were readily available in the cafes, lacing people’s drinks was common’.
Solomon was quick to seek out Deya’s most famous resident: the English poet, author and classical scholar, Robert Graves, who was the same generation as Aldous Huxley. He endured the trench hell of the First World War, recorded this nightmare in his autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929) and quit the UK for good. Graves was searching for a refuge from modernity, which he regarded as a purely destructive force: ‘the indiscriminate use of scientific invention without regard for consequences and devoted solely to commercial gain is poisoning earth, sea and atmosphere to a degree which threatens soon to destroy populations’.
Deya offered him the perfect ‘background to my work as a writer’. Immersed in ancient Greek and Roman culture, he produced his most famous works of prose, I Claudius and Claudius the God (1934), and continued to produce love poetry at a prodigious rate. Keenly interested in all things mystical, Graves experimented with psychedelic substances while investigating their role in early European religions. On 31 January 1960 in a darkened hotel room in New York, Graves ate mushrooms while listening to a recording of a Mexican priest: ‘this was not merely a red-letter day but a day marked with all the colours of the celestial rainbow’. After repeat performances, Graves concluded that this sacrament was ideal fuel for ‘poets and artists’.
Graves accepted invitations to Solomon’s frequent parties and was introduced to two of his American associates who’d recently landed in Deya: the ubiquitous Gerald Thomas and Paul Arnaboldi, who’d befriended Solomon at Millbrook. Born in New Jersey in 1938, Arnaboldi graduated college and worked for a construction company in the Middle East, before a car accident curtailed his career. A handsome, buccaneering type, Arnaboldi bummed around, did the occasional male modelling job – he got the nickname ‘Captain Bounty’ after appearing in an ad for the chocolate bar – and lived off compensation from the crash. Together with Thomas, Solomon and Arnaboldi began planning for the future; that future was THC. Extracting the psychoactive element from the cannabis plant was something of a Holy Grail for heads in the late ’60s. If pure THC could be produced successfully, the sky was the limit.
However, not everybody in Deya welcomed the hippies. The locals didn’t like the loud music, the mess they left their rented houses in and the fact their children ‘were openly handed marijuana to share with their friends’. The villagers blamed Graves for the invasion as ‘the hippies seemed to be friends’ of his. The local police warned Graves’ son William that Solomon and co. thought they were untouchable when they were with his father, but ‘one day we will have orders from Madrid and we’ll have to pull him in’. Desperate, William asked one of his father’s old friends – a thriller writer – to seek out and destroy any marijuana in Graves’ house. After Graves gave up his stash, the friend ceremoniously burnt it on a compost heap ‘then summoned Solomon and lectured him on the dangers of getting caught’.
Solomon did take the hint and relocated to Palma. However, by spring 1967, Solomon was in jail: according to Graves, he’d made the mistake of smoking dope with a local teenager whose father happened to be a cop. Released on bail, but with a huge fine hanging over him, Solomon prepared to quit Majorca, but not before confirming with Gerald Thomas and Paul Arnaboldi that the THC plan was worth pursuing. They agreed that Arnaboldi would buy a boat, stay on the island and await further instructions; Thomas would remain in Deya a bit longer before joining Solomon in England; and Solomon would leave immediately to begin searching for THC.