Roger Steffens remains a psychedelic photographer par excellence. 

Steffens took a wide variety of photographs beginning in the '60s, but in the mid-'70s he experimented extensively with double exposures: taking a second photo over the same frame of 35mm film he'd already shot in order to create an overlapping image. In 2013, his daughter Kate created an Instagram page The Family Acid showcasing the scope of her dad's work. The Instagram page — and subsequent volumes of books bearing “The Family Acid” name — have received wide media attention, as well as invitations for Steffens to exhibit his photographs.

Quite a turn of events for Steffens, already a longtime media professional himself. He wrote about reggae music in the magazine he founded called The Beat, in addition to having been the DJ (“Ras Rojah”) of a syndicated reggae music radio show. As an actor and narrator, Steffens has lent his rich voice to a variety of projects, like the Oscar-winning short documentary The Flight of the Gossamer Condor. He's authored several books, including the Bob Marley oral history So Much Things to Say. And within his Los Angeles domicile, Steffens is said to have the largest — and rarest — collection of reggae recordings and reggae-related artifacts on Earth, which he's still hoping to find a good museum home for after a previously-announced deal collapsed. (A documentary on his devotional musical pursuit, Livicated, is still in the works.)

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As an early Baby Boomer (he just turned 84), Steffens grew up listening to Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Swan Silvertones and The Soul Stirrers. As a youthful poet, he admired how Beat Generation writers like Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac turned street vernacular into literature, and they made him wish he had been old enough to have been a beatnik. Steffens wore a beard and his hair down to his shoulders. But he was also a conservative-leaning young man, who grew up Irish-Catholic in North Jersey. Getting drafted during the Vietnam War in 1967 — in addition to LSD – shook up his worldview dramatically, with him saying “when I got to Saigon and saw how it all operated, I realized that my changing instincts about patriotism and the war were bonded in reality.”  In addition to the love of his close-knit family, Steffens counts noted actors, poets, war correspondents, film directors, and musicians as dear friends. 

You met your wife, Mary, while you were both tripping on LSD. Is that correct? 

My first wife Cynthia and I had just broken up and I was living with Tim Page, who was the guy that Dennis Hopper played in Apocalypse Now!. So it was on his birthday on the Memorial Day weekend of 1975 that a whole bunch of us from this mad apartment house we lived in, on Channing Way in Berkeley, were invited to visit a midwife friend, Sheila Curran, who lived in the woods in Mendocino, for a mass acid trip. And Sheila had a roommate named Mary Higgins. And my mother's maiden name was Higgins. So that was a connection right away. Mary was just gorgeous. And she had the greatest laugh. She laughed at all the right parts of my poems when I recited poems on acid! And we fell in love instantly. And we got married 10 days later. So that was a hell of a trip!

And it's thanks to the children you've had together that you have online popularity for your photos as well as a series of books bearing “The Family Acid” title.

Oh, yeah. I never would have set out to do any of that. When my daughter Kate started The Family Acid [Instagram profile], I had 40,000 slides sitting in the closet. Our son Devon spent all of 2013 sitting in a corner of the archives digitizing them. And then when he was finished, Kate said, “Why don't I start an Instagram page?” I'm computer-phobic: I don't have any knowledge or interest in the Internet. I don't even have a cell phone. I'm pretty primitive. So Katie explained what Instagram was all about and I said sure! And then she called it “The Family Acid”; the reason is, she said her friends told her when she was younger that our family was “like the Waltons on acid.” So that's how that came about.

Well, you certainly achieved a very psychedelic effect with those photographic double exposures you took.

I think that's a good way to describe it. I've always had multiple images in my mind based on acid trips that I've had, and a different way of seeing — how things merge and change your perception of what you're actually seeing at the time while tripping. I've probably done over 100 trips, so I'm very acidified. 

I can't find any good acid anymore. I've tried for the past, you know, 13 years. People have given me stuff. Young kids come and say, “You should only take half of this tab, because it's really strong.” And I don't even get lift-off. So I stopped trying. I don't trust any of this so-called acid these days.

Some of your images have appeared as blotter art prints. Can you discuss that?

A few were done with Zane Kesey, Ken Kesey's son. Yeah, that's been fun. He picks out images he likes. One of them was of his dad on Furthur at the Hemp Fest in Oregon in '98. Ken Babbs and Kesey came down with the latest version of Furthur, and I shot pictures of Kesey inside the Merry Pranksters' bus. 

We also did a sheet with the photo of the gas station on my way to the Altamont free concert. I got out of the Army in December of '69, the week of Altamont, and I gassed up on the corner of Shattuck and Ashby in Berkeley at a gas station, where the gas was like 19 cents a gallon. They were having a price war then. And the sign in the entrance to the gas station said, “Gas cheaper than LSD.” So that made a great blotter acid sheet.

What year was your first trip? 

1966

And what do you remember the most about it?

All my early trips were on the purest Sandoz acid when it was still legal. And I was in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. I was a member of its resident company from '65 to '66. And in early '66, these two guys, I was kind of crashing at their apartment. They got a bag of pure Sandoz direct from Switzerland. It looked like a bag of powdered sugar. And they were putting it by hand into gelatin capsules. So they were getting stoned through their fingertips. They were awake for six, seven nights, never slept, giggling the whole time. All kinds of early hippie-freaks coming through the apartment to score.

And I didn't see anybody having a bad time. On the contrary, everybody was just ecstatic. And I had never smoked a cigarette — let alone a joint — at that point in my life. I was a good Catholic boy after 15 years of Catholic miseducation, and acid was the beginning of my transformation into the Roger Steffens that the world knows now.

What was the setting for the trip?

Milwaukee, on the edge of Lake Michigan. And I had a lot of poet friends. I was reading poetry in a coffee house called the Avant Garde. What I remember most was this mad poet named Bob Watt, who was an exterminator, a World War II vet, who wrote deliberately bad poetry, so you could compare your own to his and feel much better about your own work. And he had a company called Rid-O-Pest, and he had an old Chevy that was covered in pink bunny fur. And he had inscriptions written all over the car: “End your bugdom now with Rid-O-Pest.” So Bob was with me on my first acid trip. 

We went down to the all-night delicatessen on one of the main streets of Milwaukee, about four in the morning. And he picked up an orange, and he put his fingernail through the skin. And the burst of scent went straight up my nose and to the top of my brain. And I'd never experienced anything like that before. Then he said, “Come on, let's go watch the sunrise at Lake Michigan.” And we went down there — and we were mesmerized by what we were seeing. I said, “Bob, what are you seeing?” And he says, “I see a bunch of Vietnamese peasants in conical hats planting rice.” I said, “So do I.”  And a year later, I was watching Vietnamese peasants plant rice in the Mekong Delta after I got drafted.

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You went to Vietnam as a Goldwater Republican?

Pretty much. Although after basic training and my advanced trainings, I still didn't see the Army in operation. And when I got to Saigon and saw how it all operated, I realized that my changing instincts about patriotism and the war were bonded in reality.

I started a refugee campaign that raised over 100 tons of food and clothing during the next two years.

Got a bronze star for that, never fired a shot. I kept extending to get an early out. I was in 31 months instead of 36.

I got all over the country from the DMZ to the Delta distributing refugee supplies and taking photos, and saw all the different cons that were going on. And, you know, the ridiculous waste of lives on both sides for no legitimate reason.

The war was just wrong from start to finish. After I got out of the Army, I lectured against the war for a year in 1970 — the time of the Kent State and the Jackson State murders, schools going on strike. A lot of people knew me as a Goldwater conservative before I had gone into the Army. A lot of Republican organizations brought me in to speak and I put a 300-slide show together. I'd say, “All I'm going to do is tell you what I personally experienced.”

While you were still in the Army, you wrote an article in 1970 under a pseudonym for Rolling Stone about Park Lane cigarettes, which were Vietnamese cannabis joints that looked like professionally-made cigarettes, and which, almost unbelievably, were widely advertised and sold to troops in Vietnam.

In fact, I've got a pack sitting in front of me right now. Unfortunately, it's empty: William Burroughs stole all my joints when he lived in my apartment for a week and trashed it. But that's another story. So I had to learn how to smoke. And I'm glad I did, because it took a lot of the unease off my 25 months in the country. I needed something to quell that constant fear. And I didn't want to drink. Most of the lifers were drunks, but you can't straighten out if you're drunk; but if somebody starts shooting at you and you've had a joint, you can straighten out pretty quickly. So the guys in my psychological operations unit taught me how to smoke Park Lanes. Soldiers were smuggling Park Lanes by mail back to the states in hollowed-out speakers. 

You wrote in the Rolling Stone article, “Acid and mescaline imported from the States can be found occasionally, but are generally reserved for weekend tripping.”

Yeah, we dropped acid on the Coconut Monk's Island.

Can you describe the place?

To this day, that's the most incredible place I've ever seen in my life. It was basically a mile-long sandbar, but there were thousands of deserters from both sides of the Vietnam War who eventually came there. And it was a religious Disneyland led by a pacifist, the hunchbacked Coconut Monk. At the end of the island, there was a circular prayer platform with nine columns surrounded by swirling yellow dragons, which is the symbol of Vietnam, and capped with pink lotus blossoms. And one of them had a statue of Buddha shaking hands with Christ. Another had a statue of the Virgin Mary hugging the Chinese female deity Guanyin. Every three hours, both day and night, each family on the island would send one representative to the prayer platform to pray for peace. And across the river from the island, the North Bank was controlled by the Americans and the South Bank by the communists. They basically never touched the island with their shelling back and forth. Anyone who came without a weapon was welcomed, no questions asked.

What's a specific recollection about tripping on LSD there?

They had a double bell tower on the near end of the prayer platform underneath a two-story peace conference chamber where the Coconut Monk wanted all the major participants in the war to meet around a nine-sided table. The double bell tower had two nine-ton bells, one on top of the other. And they were struck all day and all night with tree timbers and guys rearing back and forth two or three times and then slamming them into the bells. And you could hear that sound up and down the river for miles and miles. So we would drop acid, Johnnie Steinbeck and I, and lie underneath the bells. And they were rather transformative, let's just put it that way.

You've had relationships with a lot of different reggae artists over the years, but Bob Marley you're especially well known for reporting on. Do you think he gave you his benediction in a certain way by calling you “Rojah,” since the nickname has “Jah” in it?

Well, you know, I just adopted that because Bob couldn't say “Roger.” “Rojah, come here!” I had so many outlets: the magazine The Beat, the television show, the radio show, the lectures on Bob Marley, all the tours I did around the world, from the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the outback of Australia to a 12th century palace in Poland. And, you know, I think what reggae artists realized was that I was a genuine lover of their work, and I wanted the whole world to know about it. And that opened a lot of doors for me. 

Reggae artists are known for their relationship with cannabis but not LSD. Is that because they don't consider it natural since it's a man-made chemical?

I've never been able to figure that out. I don't know why they're so anti-acid. But, you know, they readily embraced coke in the Dancehall age — and that destroyed roots reggae. So it's not that they're uninterested in other forms of consciousness-changing. I've never been into cocaine. It's a terrible drug. I've seen it destroy a lot of people. And acid could have awakened a lot of different forms of reggae music, but I've never met a Jamaican who's done acid.

Let me tell you one more story. Is that okay?

Absolutely.

The year is 1966. I've just begun doing the poetry show, mostly in Catholic schools. There was a school there whose English department chairperson, a nun, really took a shine to me. And she brought me in three times in the space of a year to read poetry and do my show. And she called me in that summer of '66, and she said, “Do you do banquets?” And I said, “Oh, gosh, sister, I am incredible at banquets! I just kill at banquets!” (I'd never done a banquet.) She said, “Well, here's my problem: The Catholic Art Association is having its convention in Milwaukee three nights from now. And our banquet speaker, Sister Corita, just dropped out.” Do you remember Sister Mary Corita Kent, the artist?  (She eventually left the Order.) The nun said, “Would you like to be the banquet speaker?” I said, “Absolutely!”

So there's about 350 or 400 nuns, priests, brothers in this big hotel in downtown Milwaukee. And I read some of Bob Watt's poetry. And I mentioned that Bob Watt once took LSD and became absolutely straight — tied his tie, buttoned his buttons — until about 10 hours later when he came down and was back to mad, mad, mad Bob Watt. So I go out to the lobby after the dinner was over, and three brothers and a nun and a priest sought me out and brought me off into a corner. And they said, “Have you ever taken LSD?” And I looked around to make sure no one else was listening and I said, “Yes.” And the priest says to me, “Do you know where we can find some?!” And I said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I'm living with a couple of dealers right now! Would you like to come back there with me?” And they said yes, so we get a cab and we go back to the apartment. And they all drop. And one of them was a little tiny guy, about five foot one, Brother Lawrence. I'll never forget him. He taught art in Cleveland. And he's lying on the couch on his back with this beatific smile on his face. And he's got his hands cupped and he's bouncing them up in the air and he's moaning, Oh...Oh! And I said softly, “Brother, what are you seeing?” He said, “Oh! I'm rolling air into bubbles—and inside each of them is the Virgin Mary!” 

So I kept in touch with all of these people all through my time in Vietnam, because I got drafted shortly after. And when I came back from Nam, I looked up each of them. And every one of them had left their orders. So, my work was done! [Laughs.]

What do you think the young Roger Steffens growing up in New Jersey would think of himself today? 

Unrecognizable.

And what words of advice would you have for the young Roger Steffens back then? 

Aim high! Spread joy and One Love!

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