So where did it all begin for me? Really with the first Beatles album in a way. I remember buying that album, along with Herb Alpert and Stan Getz albums and realizing that the world was about to change. That summer I hooked up with a very strange group of people - we're talking 1965 - (I was in junior high) and things started to really pop.
A little backtracking: I have seen ghosts since I was very young, and started reading philosophy well before I got out of grade school, sort of hoping to make sense of what I saw and believed - which was a far, far cry from the Christian Midwestern world around me.
So this group - "The Magic Lantern Theater" (from the book, natch) was populated with 7 priests, the prince of an African nation (I could say which one, but he's the King now, and that wouldn't be cool), a madam, her husband, a revolutionary and a guy who had just spent a year with Timothy Leary. The revolutionary was the real deal: he taught Che Guevara's folk small arms skills, and was in and out of Cuba like it was his second home. He disappeared eventually. The LSD started being passed around - this was a time when grass was "reefer" for real, and hardly anyone knew what it was or what it could - or couldn't - do. Being quite the junior person there, I didn't get my hands on anything for a little while, but otherwise was immersed in these early experimentations.
I remember the week we spent making a recording - reel to reel, no less - of Bach's Canata and Fugue, using bird calls, toilet flushes, the pipe organ of a church, and various kitchen utensils. Half the people were tripping the whole time, and the house went from drab nondescript mid-Western to blown out hippie colors. only we weren't hippies then - just beatniks on acid. Cotrane was pumping out albums, the Dead and the Airplane were just buying guitars, and the world knew nothing of Viet Nam.
I remember hanging out in the house discussing Etre Et Neant as it was being translated - the definitive translation - and watching folk paint the floor, themselves, and anything else that they could touch with color. There was no counter-culture yet; there was only a desperate driving need to create, to break the mold, to go beyond the Dadaists and Surrealists, and see what this "mind" thing really could do!
so that's not really a story, but it's sort of where things start. maybe next time I'll write about getting to SFO in 66...
A little backtracking: I have seen ghosts since I was very young, and started reading philosophy well before I got out of grade school, sort of hoping to make sense of what I saw and believed - which was a far, far cry from the Christian Midwestern world around me.
So this group - "The Magic Lantern Theater" (from the book, natch) was populated with 7 priests, the prince of an African nation (I could say which one, but he's the King now, and that wouldn't be cool), a madam, her husband, a revolutionary and a guy who had just spent a year with Timothy Leary. The revolutionary was the real deal: he taught Che Guevara's folk small arms skills, and was in and out of Cuba like it was his second home. He disappeared eventually. The LSD started being passed around - this was a time when grass was "reefer" for real, and hardly anyone knew what it was or what it could - or couldn't - do. Being quite the junior person there, I didn't get my hands on anything for a little while, but otherwise was immersed in these early experimentations.
I remember the week we spent making a recording - reel to reel, no less - of Bach's Canata and Fugue, using bird calls, toilet flushes, the pipe organ of a church, and various kitchen utensils. Half the people were tripping the whole time, and the house went from drab nondescript mid-Western to blown out hippie colors. only we weren't hippies then - just beatniks on acid. Cotrane was pumping out albums, the Dead and the Airplane were just buying guitars, and the world knew nothing of Viet Nam.
I remember hanging out in the house discussing Etre Et Neant as it was being translated - the definitive translation - and watching folk paint the floor, themselves, and anything else that they could touch with color. There was no counter-culture yet; there was only a desperate driving need to create, to break the mold, to go beyond the Dadaists and Surrealists, and see what this "mind" thing really could do!
so that's not really a story, but it's sort of where things start. maybe next time I'll write about getting to SFO in 66...
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