Nick Schou Scores "Orange Sunshine"

​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 Laguna Beach and the DEA agent who captured Leary after he was busted out of prison in California, as he was getting on a plane in Afghanistan. Kabul.

Was Leary in the Brotherhood?
Naw, not really. They read his books. These were street guys from Anaheim who, 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 California 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 Santa 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.

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