The Family Acid sounds something like an adult swim cartoon, but the truth is so much more awesome. They are in fact responsible for some of the most visually intriguing and detailed documentation of the counter cultural movement of the 1970’s on, out of the U.S and beyond. Roger Steffens’ – Dad’s – photographic work covers his career in the Vietnam war, as a writer, lecturer, editor and expert archivist of Bob Marley and the inner circles of Reggae music. The mind blowing collection, thousands of images deep, is finally digitised by the Acid kids and shared on Instagram and in the book of the same moniker. AHB caught up with Roger, Kate and Devon Steffens of The Family Acid to talk about their adventures growing up across generations, and the project of piecing it all together now.

So I guess let’s start with the beginning – wait, what is the beginning for you? Is there a kind of leaping off point to the story behind The Family Acid? Also – can you please briefly introduce everyone? KATE: The Family Acid is Roger, Mary, Kate and Devon Steffens. Devon spent a year scanning dad’s Kodachrome slides, I curate and run our Instagram page and my parents provide the stories and memories for each photo. Our dad always has a camera with him, and we got so used to his constant picture-taking that we didn’t realize the full extent of how amazing his archive of images was until Devon did the initial scanning of the slides. I started the Instagram over a year and a half ago because it seemed to be the best way to find an audience of photography lovers, without the hassle of having to build and promote a website. We are still finding and scanning slides and negatives, and I just completed scanning hundreds of rolls of black and white negatives from the Vietnam War.

Roger, what made you take up photography, and how did you develop your skills as a photographer throughout your life? ROGER: I was aware of on-going “historic” events at a very young age: the earliest memory that I can place in time was the end of WWII in Brooklyn, standing on the edge of the Narrows looking toward Staten Island and seeing all the ships in the harbor spraying water high into the sky, listening to hundreds of car horns, church bells peeling loudly and joyfully, and everyone out in the streets. It was a few days short of my third birthday. When Gen. MacArthur was fired by Truman and then given a ticker tape parade up Broadway; when the Army-McCarthy hearings were held all summer long; and when Winston Churchill visited America, I was soaking it all up with the idea that these would be things that would make their mark in years to come.

Thus, when I was drafted and sent to Vietnam in early November 1967, one of the first things I did was to buy a camera at the Cholon PX in Saigon – a Canon FT. I began shooting my first impressions, always the best thing to do, because once you’ve been introduced to a person or place, you will never see it that way again. I knew I was in a significant place at a significant time, and that became only too apparent three months later when the sudden TET Offensive devastated vast parts of the city, and left 52 families living in huge sewer pipes on the street outside my hotel barracks in Saigon’s downtown district. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Racine Journal-Times, asking for food and clothing, promising that I would distribute it personally to insure it didn’t get onto the black market.

Imagine my shock when, three weeks later, two five-ton trucks arrived in my PsyOps compound bearing my mail. Ten thousand pounds of little packages, all addressed to me, filled with food and clothing, toys and tooth-paste. I was told I could go anywhere in the country I wished, work on any project I thought worthwhile…but, “Just Take Pictures!”

So for the next two years, through December 1970, I had free film and free developing and traveled everywhere from Hue in the immediate aftermath of the terrible TET battles where 90% of the ancient city was destroyed – to the Mekong Delta, where I encountered the most amazing place I have ever seen in my life: The Island of the Coconut Monk, a mile-long sandbar in the middle of the Mekong River, on which lived a colony of around 6,000 pacifists led by a 4 1/2ft tall hunchbacked monk. Anyone who came without a weapon was welcomed, no questions asked. Deserters from both the North and the South Vietnamese armies lived there and a few thousand Taoists. Every three hours, day and night, each family on the island sent a representative to a huge circular prayer platform at the western edge of the island, praying to Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tse, Confucius, Sun-Yat-Sen, Victor Hugo and Winston Churchill. It was the only place I saw happy people. I met my first wife there, a blonde Californian war correspondent named Cynthia Copple.

At times, standing on the muddy banks for the Mekong and watching near naked boys climbing palm trees barefoot and leaping into the onrushing cocoa-colored river, it seemed like a benign version of “Lord of the Rings,” and then a rocket or mortar would go screaming overhead, or a sci-fi hydrofoil would whiz past at 70 knots. After your service, and the war, ended, where did you go? ROGER: As a student, I went through 15 years of Catholic schools, and was taught by the Irish Christian Brothers in high school and at my first (of five) colleges. I had a very right-wing conservative background and cast my first vote for president in 1964 for Barry (“Extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”) Goldwater, and wept the night he lost the election.

Then I went to Vietnam. Within weeks I had seen into the rot behind the whole affair and the duplicitous nature of the rah-rah media, and marveled at the outright corruption that was going on on every possible level. As a result, when I came home I lectured against the war throughout 1970, criss-crossing America three times, and speaking to many organizations who had hired me in my pre-war “Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry” days and had known me as politically conservative – people who would never dream of hiring someone anti-war. So I put together a 45 minute slide show/lecture and told people only what I had experienced personally and why I had come home such a different person.

At the end of the year I was so profoundly ashamed to be an American, with that traitor Nixon still in office and the mass murderer, Henry Kissinger planning the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, that I wanted to leave the country. I was looking for a warm place, one in which I could learn French and where I could live cheaply with my “war bride”. We chose Marrakech and had a letter of introduction to a French countess there who lived in a 40 room palace with the largest private cactus garden in North Africa.

In 1973 I got divorced. I was living in an apartment in Berkeley, home base when I wasn’t on the road during the September – May school lecture season. Thom Steinbeck, John’s other son, who directed my TV show in Vietnam on Sunday afternoons reading poetry to the combat troops, brought the infamous Tim Page to meet me one day, and we became instant friends and he moved in with me. As a teenage Brit adventurer, he basically hitch-hiked his way around the world at 17 ending up in Nam where he was hired by Time-Life and had 87 published pages. He was wounded four times, the last time having the right side of his brain blown out the back of his head. He was in the hospital for a couple of years and tells this story in his brilliant first book, “Page After Page.” Among his first jobs when he began to get better was working as a photographer for Rolling Stone, assigned to a young writer name Hunter S. Thompson. After two gigs together, Thompson went to Jann Wenner, editor of Stone, and said, “I can’t work with this guy Page any more – he’s too crazy!” Tim wore that as a kind of badge of honor, along with a button on his cap that said “drain bamaged.” His skill with his Nikons was pretty astonishing to me. He explained how upon his arrival in Nam he’d been taken under the wing of the legendary Larry Burroughs who taught him some of the tricks of the trade. I learned from Tim how to frame instinctively and how to be ready for anything at any time anywhere. Some of these results, including the near miss of a wild horse while driving on a dusty road in Baja, are in my new (and first) book of photos from SUN, called “The Family Acid.”

Where did you guys, Kate and Devon, grow up? KATE: My brother and I grew up in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. What was home life like? Apart from ‘normal’ which is I guess is anything to anyone… Did you guys feel like you were living a different kind of lifestyle to other people, or the rest of America? KATE: Home life was a strange mix of normality and surreality. My parents raised us pretty typically in some ways: we went to public schools, played with the neighborhood kids and had a supportive, loving home life. At the same time, there was a constant stream of people visiting, and we never knew when we came home from school whether or not there would be a house full of rastas, or Vietnam vets, or famous musicians and actors. One thing that we learned from these experiences was to treat everyone with respect, as our parents did, whether they were famous or the janitor. Because we grew up in Los Angeles, we didn’t feel like our lives were that different than many of our friends, but we also knew that not every little kid gets to meet Nina Simone.

Roger, can you tell us a little more about your trip criss-crossing the U.S in a VW for the one-man poetry show? “Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry” – what did that mean for you? ROGER: What the Poetry show did was help me to meet talented off-beat writers all over the United States. Between 1966 and 1976 I spoke to over two million people, sharing the works of living American writers only – along with the revered E.E. Cummings, who was just too good to not include. I read Ferlinghetti, Corso, Brautigan and dozens of interesting beatnik, hippie, and an occasional academic poet. Eventually even, one or two of mine. One of my all-time favorites is Bob Watt, a soi-disant “insincere Zen master” exterminator in Milwaukee who got rid of cockroaches by telling them to leave. And they went. He wrote deliberately bad poetry so you could compare yours against his and feel much better about your own stuff. He would write lines like, “Don’t forget: I am you disguised.” He had a red beard and a red walrus moustache and he looked like a debauched pageboy in a depraved Renaissance castle.  Everybody loved him.

I wonder how these photographs circulated, or cropped up in the family home as they were taken… Were they mostly private until now? KATE: The vast majority of these photos have not been seen outside of our family until now. My dad used to do slideshows for us and friends of our family, but mostly these slides and negatives have sat in a closet for decades. Luckily dad meticulously labeled everything with places, people and dates.

How did Devon go about the process of digitising everything? DEVON: I was hired by my father to digitize his slide archive a few years ago. No one knew how long it would take or how much work it would be. I basically pulled out sheets of slides from a wall of them, along with boxes here and there. Then I went about scanning them in, sometimes in groups, sometimes one at a time. The whole process took about a year to complete, or so we thought. We are still finding new slides or negatives to digitally archive to this day. It was at the same time tedious and enlightening and incredible. To see shots that no one had viewed in decades, combined with the quality of the photographs, blew my mind.

How did you get in to reggae, the culture, lifestyle, and of course music? How did you come so close to the centre of things – knowing, and photographing, Bob Marley for instance? ROGER: I am first generation rock ‘n’ roll, born in the summer of ’42. I loved the doo-wop of the ’50s and saw most of the major figures back then – Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, teenage Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Jackie Wilson – and then in the ’60s I got into folk and the conscious music of Dylan and all his acolytes. By ’71, the lawyers and the accountants had taken over the music business, and emasculated it from any meaningful content, shoveling disco dreck at the mass audience. I, like many of my fellow counterculturists, was looking for something that would combine the musicality of the ’50s with the political and spiritual commitment of the best of the ’60s, and when I read an article in Rolling Stone in June of ’73, I discovered reggae.

Since then my life has been on a reggae trod. With collector Hank Holmes we started a radio show, the “Reggae Beat,” on the NPR outlet in L.A, KCRW, in 1979 that rapidly became the number one non-commercial show in the city, ultimately syndicated to 130 stations worldwide. In 1980 I started a cable TV show called “L.A. Reggae” which ran 23 years; followed by a magazine, The Beat, which ran for 27 years with world-wide circulation. In 1984 I was asked to create and head a Reggae Grammy Committee, which I did until 2011. Also, since ’84, I’ve toured the world with a one-man show called “The Life of Bob Marley,” two hours of unreleased footage and hundreds of unseen photographs, during which I tell Bob’s life story. It’s been presented from the bottom of the Grand Canyon (where many members of the Havasupai nation believe Bob Marley is the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy that says Chief Red Cloud will return as a black man to lead the red man forward to his freedom again) to the Outback of Australia, where Aboriginal people tout Marley as a divine figure.

All of these things gained me entrance to the most innermost circles of reggae, and I’ve been going to Jamaica for forty years now, most recently to deliver the annual Bob Marley Lecture at the University of the West Indies. My first guest on the Reggae Beat was Bob Marley himself, and I spent two weeks on the road with him on the “Survival” tour of late ’79, his final one in California. Since then I have written six books about him and the history of Jamaican music, several of them award winners. I’m finishing up now on my seventh, my magnum opus, an oral history of Marley for W.W. Norton, coming out early next year.

What were your experiences, Roger and Mary, lecturing for Aboriginal elders in Australia? What led you there, and what kinds of things did you discuss? ROGER: Mary is my video technician when I tour abroad with the Marley show, and she accompanied me on two major speaking tours of Australia in 2004 and 2007, circling the country’s coasts from Perth to Darwin, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. In Kuranda, above the Great Barrier Reef of the continent’s northeast coast, we encountered an Aboriginal elder named Willie Brim. He was a dreadlocked reggae musician, as was his son Astro, and he took us on a walkabout to an area in the hills where the rain forest met the outback, explaining the use and significance of all the trees and rocks and boulders and caves and plants. He showed us how to read the trees for boundaries and directions, and took us to a clearing where his ancient forebears, tens of thousands of years ago, had lived. “I can see them now,” he said. We had been scheduled to do a show in Arnheim Land, the exclusive Aboriginal preserve at the top of the country, but one of the chief elders had died, and month-long funeral ceremonies, forbidden to outsiders, were held instead. I’ve always regretted not having had that opportunity.

Kate, why’d you choose to take to Instagram? KATE: Instagram, with its built-in community of photography lovers, was an easy choice. I thought about creating a blog or website, but it’s difficult to promote and find an audience that way. With Instagram, I appreciate being able to leverage the technology in a way that it’s not typically used for. Instead of a feed full of food and selfies, it’s a historical record. In addition to reconnecting with many of the people seen in the photos, we’ve been able to make real-world connections that have lead to new friendships and collaborations. I have to ask about this awesome shot. How did you meet Fela Kuti? ROGER: In 1980 I began another radio show on KCRW, “Morning Goes Makossa,” with the station’s music director, Tom Schnabel. It was devoted to African music and I played groups from Nigeria to South Africa.

I played Fela Kuti so often on MGM that I got a call from an amazing woman named Sandra Isidore, who had exercised a profound influence on Fela’s thinking. She is a principal character in the recent Broadway smash hit musical “Fela!” Sandra connected me for phone interviews with Fela, who had once married 27 women in a public ceremony in a stadium in Lagos.

Placed in prison under false charges in an attempt to silence his virulent protest music against the illegal Nigerian regimes, Fela served 18 months. When he got out in ’86, I did the first interview with him in the States for my cable TV program. He wore nothing but a pair of purple bikini underpants for the show. “You must have been very glad to get out of prison and get back to your 27 wives,” I observed. “Oh, no!” he demurred. “When I got home from prison I divorced them all!” “Why?” I asked, stunned.  “Oh,” he said, shaking his head, “marriage is too confining.” Now that the book is compiled, and the Instagram is ongoing, what are your plans? KATE: The most important thing for me is to help my parents financially and to preserve the archive for the future. We have a lot of ideas that we hope to bring to fruition. Dad will be doing a signing at Paris Photo LA in May, and we are working toward exhibiting his photography and doing some slideshow events. We are definitely doing another book, this time about Vietnam and the Island of the Coconut Monk. Dad wrote a manuscript in 1970 about his experiences in Vietnam that I have slowly been transcribing. I am also working toward fully digitally archiving all of his photographs, which is a lengthy process. Don’t get me started on the hundreds of thousands of digital photographs he’s taken in the past 10 years- I haven’t even begun to delve into those!   Interview by Emilia. Images By Roger Steffens and The Family Acid