The March 1970 cover of Esquire magazine featured a sombre portrait of one of the leading film stars of the day and an ominous statement: ‘Evil lurks in California. Lee Marvin is afraid.’ The implication was clear: if an exemplar of American masculinity such as Lee Marvin was freaked out, everyone else should be too. Much of the issue was devoted to articles in which a macabre portrait of the Golden State was presented. Looming over everything was the ghastly shadow of the Tate–LaBianca murders, which had taken place only seven months before. As James Riley puts it, Charles Manson came to ‘signify the devil's business done; the traumatic cancellation of the hippie project; the dashing of the decade's utopian hopes; the end of the sixties’.

The opening article, ‘California Evil’, began with an italicised list of recently deceased public figures, amongst them Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate and her houseguests, and Hollywood star Ramon Novarro who, like Tate, had recently been murdered by strangers. ‘Dead in California’ was appended after each name. The article's author, Craig Karpel, asked: ‘What is the agency of this aberration – madness? Drugs? Or is it simply California?’

LSD was singled out as a catalysing agent. Karpel made a striking analogy between the mind-expanding potential of psychedelics and the historical event which had vastly accelerated the Americanisation of California: ‘Now in 1970 the Gold Rush is on again. Only this time Leary's brain is the Sutter's Mill and some Californians are breaching the inward frontier, panning the trailraces of consciousness for some pinch of the precious stuff itself.’ But whilst the drug, Karpel claimed, allowed users to access parts of themselves that were previously unreachable, there was also a potentially devastating side effect. What if, he asked: