We’re dipping into the Far Out Magazine vault to witness a feat of unbelievable tolerance, not of the Buddhist kind but certainly of the mind-altering kind, as The Grateful Dead chow down on a birthday cake laced with acid.

If there’s one thing you associate with The Grateful Dead it is almost certainly ‘groove’. While much of that is aligned with the band’s inception in the counter-culture movement of the 1960sm a large chunk of it is also attributed to their love of psychedelic drugs.

The group had quickly become the underground face of the counter-culture movement. While acts like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix were taking to the stage and singing about the free-thinking, free-love and cheap drugs of the hippie movement, The Grateful Dead were living it. And living it hard. It led to some more than precarious situations.

One such occasion, while the band were in San Francisco getting ready to perform at the legendary Fillmore Theatre in the mid-1960s (a likely hotbed of psychedelia), Jerry Garcia was enjoying life backstage when suddenly a “known freak” brought in a beautiful birthday cake. Now, we know what you’re thinking, and you’d be dead right, but still Garcia only “suspected” it may be “dosed”.

Perhaps the singer was in a Devil-may-care mood or perhaps he just really wanted some cake (or acid). Either way, the Grateful Dead leader soon found himself cutting a small slither of the cake which was largely frosting. It wouldn’t be long before things turned a bright shade of crazy and he soon found out that the frosting had indeed been dosed. With a humongous 800 hits of LSD.

The situation, as one might imagine, soon deteriorated.

He recalls in the video below: “I’m looking at it, and looking at it, and looking at it. But it looks good! I’ll just take a little of the frosting here. I’ll just take a little snack. So I took this, and then someone comes in and says, “Yeah, we put about 800 hits of acid in that frosting.”

He continued: “And I go, ‘D’oh, oh God, oh Jesus Christ, I’m going to be totally wiped out’. By this time, I didn’t really enjoy playing under the influence of psychedelics because I didn’t have the freedom to quit if I wanted to. It wasn’t that much fun to play if you don’t have the option.”

Watch Jerry Garcia explain the whole sordid event below.

[MORE] – Watch the earliest footage of The Grateful Dead in 1966

Source: Ranker