Autobiography pt 3 - 1969-1970

 

The Great Realization 

It was late November.  I planned this acid trip at least a week in advance.  I wanted to explore the history of music through listening to famous oratorios.  I had the Bach St. Matthew Passion.  I borrowed Penderecki's St. Luke Passion from the record store.  I thought I'd also listen to Brahms' German Requiem.  I dropped around 8 o'clock in the evening and waited until I started to peak around an hour and a half later.  Then I put on the Bach.  It was a version, in English, directed by Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic.  Upon listening to it as recently as 2014 I've now realized that this was an overly mannered version, hard to listen to now.  But at the time, as I listened, I became aware of an essential childlike quality in Bach's public music (as opposed to his private study pieces such as the Well Tempered Clavier).  I realized the work, as beautiful as it was, spoke the language of diatonic counterpoint, a very formal and innocent language of sweetness and devotional sadness.  Bach was writing to an audience with a childlike soul.    

I then listened to the Beethoven's Fifth piano concerto, hearing the consciousness of a young heroic European man, one who was ready to take on the world.   The Brahms Requiem followed and I heard the sounds of a now mature and settled culture of refinement and beauty, the evolutionary thread as set down by Bach and Beethoven.  Brahms was the great Alpine lullaby maker, the sun setting on the nineteenth century, the beginning of the end of an old tradition of grace, order, symmetry and dramatic equipoise, all in pursuit of Truth in music.  All these composers were striving for the legendary "music of the spheres," to enter a realm of consciousness that was close to what I was experiencing on this acid trip.  All sense of clock time vanished.  Musical time was all there was.    

It was as if I was receiving a major documentary, essay, poem, myth, movie about the time and culture of the musical piece.  All the works dealt with the feeling of the tenderness and innocence of childhood.  Bach's tone painting was an almost operatic passion play, as antique and cultured as a Gothic cathedral.  As European tradition and technology matured in the nineteenth century, so music took on a mystical context and became the patina of the inner world of Europe.  It was a world of hand made craftsmanship, not a world of the machines which would generate the rhythms of the twentieth century.  

All those classical pieces I'd heard before for years, were all preludes to the main event, the St. Luke Passion by Penderecki.  This work was written in 1964, in a highly experimental and advanced type of twelve tone writing.  To me, it sounded literally like sci-fi time travel back to the soul of first century AD, Roman empire.  A world of brutal power, of transactional cynicism, where crowds could be easily manipulated to do the bidding of the ruling classes.  Penderecki, using a Latin text, takes us back two thousand years, into the dark heart of the world.  One of the few diatonic, or what you might call tonal, chords in the piece comes near the end, when Jesus dies.  For a moment there is an E major chord, but it lasts just a moment, like a rainbow shining through a thick drizzle, only to fade out into darkness again.  

Penderecki's music was modernist avant-garde serialism, inspired by Schoenberg and Stravinsky.  This was a post-chromatic language that, though enormously powerful, was far too sophisticated for young audiences who heard pop music as "music" and classical or contemporary classical music as "weird" or "boring."  But people like sic-fi, and Penderecki and Ligeti were the two most brilliant modernists, practically redefining what modern classical music sounded like.  After all, the sci-fi and horror music genres were the great contributions modernist music made to 20th century popular culture. 

If nineteenth century composers were exploring emotional and psychological states of the heart and mind, then the modernists were more cinematic visionaries, creating soundtracks for movies that played on your inner movie screen.  Ives practically invented modern film score writing, as did Stravinsky.  Penderecki made the St. Luke Passion a symphony of ghosts, full of wild animal sounds, ancient languages and an orchestra that sounded at times like herds of galloping horses, at times like the flutter of birds or butterflies, and sometimes like ghost chants from the catacombs. It was the most powerful musical work I'd ever heard.   

LSD gave me a transcendent experience of music, not just as music, but as a living breathing experience of the soul of a culture, the past made present by the performance itself. It wasn't music anymore.  I was at one with the culture that produced this music.  And since German musical culture was about an essential search for truth and enlightenment, for "joy," as Beethoven would put it, it was considered the most serious of all the different ethnic genres in Europe.  

But, in the aftermath of WWII and the Communist takeover of Poland, the suffering of the Polish people at the hands of Nazis and then of Soviets produced a seriousness and depth of humanity that expressed itself in the St. Luke Passion and made me realize that while Bach, Beethoven and Brahms all spoke from their emotional centers, Penderecki was using music as a cinematic lens by which one could peer into the past and gain an immediate experience.   

The power and intensity of the Penderecki work shook me to my bones.  It seemed like there was nothing after modernism, that music had come up against a brick wall.  What was the answer? 

 

Spiritual Crisis

My mother was a religious person who went to church every Sunday, an active member in the Presbyterian church, and my sister and I were expected to go to Sunday school.  By the time I was seventeen I'd had more than enough.  The tenets of Christianity, or of the type of modified Evangelical Christianity that had infected this church, didn't make any sense to me.  The idea of God first impregnating a betrothed virgin, then performing a murder/suicide, while impersonating himself disguised as his own son was something so bizarre it made me laugh to think about it.  

It had to be a lie, a heresy.  I couldn't believe something so crazy.  The Bach oratorio proved to me that these stories were made for children.  They were myth, and Bach's music was the new vehicle for mythological truth.   Penderecki's work demonstrated the power of compassion to crack the mask of evil that had taken over the world.  That night, inside of this particular trip, I had reached a point where I felt I could make a decision about my beliefs.  I declared to myself that I didn't believe in anything.  If God were real, he should let me know.  But as of that moment, I didn't believe in beliefs.  I was open to suggestions.   

Was I losing my mind?  I looked in the mirror and saw someone who was crazy. The Voice, the same calm, ancient, adult voice that had always been with me since I was a toddler, kept telling me it was alright, I was just on acid.  But I felt like the world of music was dying.  I walked from the bathroom to the living room and looked through my  record collection, filing through all the records I had, so much of it trivial, so much of it pointless entertainment.  Then I came to my Beatles albums and saw the future.  They projected a hopeful, joyful spirit, something that was new.  I put on the new Beatles album that had come out a few months earlier, Abbey Road, and listened to that.  By side two, I realized the Beatles had technically topped themselves by creating a suite of songs that formed a singular mosaic of their experience.  This was classical rock music, but it was something that had nothing to do with traditional classical music.  It was, in its own way, a return to simplicity and direct emotional power, the kind of joy found in the music of the young Mozart, or in some of Vivaldi's concerti.  This is what rock music, at its best, could do.  It had the joyful power of simplicity, honesty and directness of energy.  It was a great Yes! to the universe.  

Still, the despair I'd heard and experienced in that transformational acid trip haunted me for weeks and months after.  

 

Altamont

Jim Powell had stayed in the background all through the summer.  He lived at the house Mark and Ira rented in downtown San Jose, where the group practiced for the Gaslighter show.  I gradually got to know him when, after the show was done, a group of about five friends all went to see the Rolling Stones at the Oakland Coliseum.  The show opened with Ike and Tina Turner blowing the lid off the place, a group the Stones couldn't even touch for their sexy professionalism.  They were simply great.  It took the Stones over an hour to start.  Everyone assumed it was to cool off the crowd from coming on too soon after Tina Turner.  

When they did come out, starting the set with Jumping Jack Flash, the equipment almost immediately began to break down.  I watched a silhouette of Keith Richard smash some roadie with his guitar in back of the curtains.  First Keith was gone, then Bill Wyman's bass broke down, and we were left with Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts, and Mick Jagger desperately trying to save the opening.  Hopeless!  Pathetic…. unprofessional!  

I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.  A complete breakdown - pure Rock mythology.  Tina Turner put on the greatest show in the world, and the Stones come out and completely fall apart.  I thought it was perfect.  After a few numbers the Stones got their act together and the show went on, but it never got back the momentum it needed to really put it over the edge into greatness.  That would have to wait for the next night.   

Jim and I gradually got closer, and after awhile we started going to the Filmore together.  He was discovering blues.  A big revelation for both of us was the show with BB King and the Allman Brothers, who he loved.  When Altamont was announced he said he was going, and I didn't see him again until after the concert.  The day after the concert in the afternoon, he shows up.  He's wild eyed, crazed.  He said he'd dropped acid at the concert and watched Jagger turn into the devil.  I remembered another guy I knew who worked in a psyche ward, who thought Jagger had merged with the Satanic persona to create a catharsis that he could work through with the audience.  I thought Jagger was pushing the bad boy image he'd created as a counter to the Beatles' good guy pop star image, and he just pushed it to its psychedelic conclusion. I thought he was just doing it for the money.  The Stones were a type of anti-art art.  It was casual.  Rock music was basic, simple, made for dancing.  Past that it became progressively hybridized with other genres.  The Stones kept it simple and basic, and snuck the deep wisdom in between the grooves. 

Powell was a combination of exhaustion, elation, and a kind of awestruck wonder at the intensity of the experience.  I noted this, began thinking of it symbolically, as an astral battle for the soul of the counter-culture, and was not surprised when Time magazine called it "The Death of Rock and Roll."  Hyperbole is the American way, I guess.  But it was the death of '60s idealism, thinking that Rock music could be anything more than entertainment.  It had been as electronic technology began developing better amps, PA systems, keyboards, and guitars back in the mid-60s.  By 1968 the essential power issue of Rock music was settled.  The louder the better.  Guitars ruled, and the music became mostly about power and amplification.  The rock music I knew was over; it had morphed into something else more powerful and direct, but with little nuance or subtlety.  By the early '70s it was a different musical landscape altogether, more corporatized, professional, money driven and boring.  

Rock helped solidify and grow a fan base that was used by anti-war movement politicos to alienate the left from mainstream political life.  Long haired freaks and hippies scared middle Americans and therefore guaranteed Nixon's election.  With Nixon as president, the counter-culture tried to solidify into a quasi-cultural political movement.  But Altamont proved that Rock music was just another type of entertainment that could be part of something perceived as positive (Woodstock) or negative (Altamont).  And at that point, Rock music began to lose its bearings as a force for good or bad, with the exception of groups like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Grateful Dead and Dylan.  Most new groups coming up were just interested in party music, stadium rock, getting rich, and living the sex, drugs, and rock lifestyle being promoted in Rolling Stone magazine.  Bob Dylan had gone country, the wind was going out of the sails of whatever fantasy anyone had about Rock being more than mere entertainment.  

I had been into Laura Nyro since 1966 when I heard her version of the song "Wedding Bell Blues," but I didn't seriously get inside her sounds until 1969, when her third album "New York Tendaberry," that dark and personal statement of emotional catharsis completely bowled me over.  I had never heard anything like it.  Her power was completely mesmeric.  I listened to it every night when it came out in October of 1969.  I'd already been playing the first album since early 1968, so I was well aware of her songwriting and arrangement skills.  I just thought this was what was expected from such an eclectic culture.  I didn't think of her as anything but the best New York songwriter in the business.  Her innovative style didn't register because to me it sounded like a natural hybrid of a lot of New York styles, from Broadway to Doo Wop to Bernstein.  

Her music was emotionally overwhelming, to the point that in my growing depression I started to fantasize about traveling to New York and meeting her.  My fantasies were growing obsessive.  I had been taking acid since October, and now in November I was getting pretty strange and sad, even to myself.  But Nyro was so compelling and influential I felt drawn to write songs like hers - a big mistake.  I was young, and as a young songwriter I was absorbing everything I heard, and the things I really liked I was trying to incorporate into my own style.  But trying to imitate Laura Nyro's songwriting style put me at odds with the blues side of my own sound, and made me more schizophrenic than I would have been if I hadn't become addicted to her.  I identified so much with her New York melodicism and her uber feminine persona, that it split me in two.  My Dylan-Stones-Band-Hendrix-Blues masculine side was completely at odds with my Nyro-Beatles-Pop feminine side.  Was I maybe schizoidal?  And fantasizing so vividly about her disturbed me to the point that I worried I was going crazy.  

By mid-December, I descended into a kind of hopeless funk.  Depressed and lonely because I had isolated myself by dropping acid so often, I realized I was becoming unhinged.  On December 19, 1969, I got a phone call from a college friend, Kitty, who asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with the old crew.  I hadn't seen these people in nine months.  So, about five of us went to see Yellow Submarine and an Elvis movie it was paired with.  Of course, Kitty and I took acid.  We'd seen all the big films on acid, 2001 Space Odyssey, even the redistribution of Disney's Fantasia, which was a favorite among hippies.  Yellow Submarine had a wonderful message of love through Beatles music and technological innovation.  I began to laugh, to come back to the manic side of my manic-depression. 

After the movie we all went to a bookstore managed by a guy in our party, looked at black light posters and listened to the Steve Miller Band album.  I was a born again hippie.  I felt good again.  I was ready to shift gears. 

Not that I was well at all.  Unfortunately, I'd become one with the schizoidal times.  I really wasn't even an individual as much as a construct of all the things I'd been listening to uncritically, just absorbing the mystery of it all.  LSD had begun to crack the brick wall of my ego, exposing me to my own neurosis.  But for right now, in December 1969, I felt redeemed.   

Acid in high dosages has the capacity to turn reality into a schizophrenic surrealist waking dream.  The smallest thing has enormous meaning if one happens to see it that way.  Paranoia or ecstasy can change places in an instant of thought, and you can convince yourself of nearly anything so deeply that the craziest thought can seem to be perfectly reasonable.  But, if you have a strong mind, and are a mature enough person, you can distinguish truth from bullshit, and experience the truth at the core of your being.  So too with music.  Acid had made my musical adventure self-conscious instead of what it had been, subconscious.  My exploration was just beginning. 

 

1970 A New Direction

It was around ten o'clock in the morning on a clear day in February.  I'm sitting on the front porch of this old house I just moved into, smoking a joint.  It was a quiet rundown neighborhood in Campbell, California.  Separated by sprawling farmland from the other small villages that dotted the South Bay Area, villages like Saratoga, Los Gatos, Campbell, Milpitas, and Alviso were, by the late 1950s, quickly being assimilated into the sprawling suburban maw of San Jose, Santa Clara, and Palo Alto.  

The suburban movement was about making San Jose the Los Angeles of the north.  Whoever thought this was a good idea was obviously insane, but by 1970 there was a land grab on and a plan to turn the entire Bay Area, from Santa Rosa, 50 miles north of San Francisco, to Los Gatos and Gilroy, 60 miles to the south, into an enormous complex of suburbs, shopping malls and tech companies.  Now, in 2018, it is difficult to distinguish one place from another.  San Jose, and the surrounding small towns, numbers around two million people.  The entire Bay Area is now close to eight million.  

But on that morning in 1970, smoking that joint, I pinochiated into a real hippie.  My hair had grown down to my shoulders.  I wore the clothes, had the look, the whole thing.  I took acid every five days or so.  It was actually quite innocent.  My friend Kitty had invited me to live there with her and about five other people.  I set up my piano in a laundry room, and kept writing songs.  I had dropped out of school, while most of the other kids who lived there were students.  It ended up being a typically high turnover place, with a lot of personal dramas going on all the time.  I was mostly oblivious to everything but the music I was writing or listening to.    

Jim Powell and I had started going to concerts at the Fillmore on a semi-regular basis, starting in fall of 1969, because it seemed that all the shows were classics.  I met a hippie girl from Palo Alto whose parents lived across a shady tree lined street from the garage where the Grateful Dead practiced when they were the Warlocks.  She said her boyfriend was the drummer in Joe Cocker's band and would we like to go see him?  It was pretty cool who you would meet and what you could do if you had your own car.  Wheels were a ticket to all kinds of adventures.  Girls needed a ride. We saw Cocker, Little Richard, then later B.B. King, the Allman Brothers, Delany and Bonnie with Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, and on and on.  Tickets were cheap, rents were low, and it was easy, if you had a little job where you could have enough time and cash to go out and see shows if you wanted to.  I worked at my dad's machine shop.  Hot, sweaty, industrial honest labor. 

The Campbell house lasted until May, when I met a young girl about seventeen who was working in a bookstore.  She was short, smart, and beautiful - a Spanish hippie girl who was street wise.  She was different, and when she found out I was a musician, she got interested.  I found out she wanted to be a singer, had one of those clear as a bell alto voices, true pitch, and I knew something was beginning to happen.  We fell in love one sleepy evening at the bookstore when I dropped acid and we kept throwing a tarot deck until the thing became a series of symbolic statements of the moment, and we didn't need to talk anymore, we were reading each others minds through this tarot deck.  Or at least that was my acid soaked fantasy about what happened.   

It seemed as though time had telegraphed itself so that the few months between January and May were filled with all kinds of events.  But after I met Eucalyptus it all changed and an event happened that put us on the road for the rest of the year.  

One evening in late May, everyone was sitting around smoking joints and listening to records, when cops invaded the house, illegally of course, but who cared.  We were hippies, which, to a cop at that time, wasn't much different from being black.  Cops did whatever they wanted with black and Mexican people, and so breaking into our house from the back and the front was shocking, but not particularly out of the ordinary for those times.  But what made it weird was that they were looking for me.  Me? I hadn't been drafted yet, but I didn't know what was going on, and I was deeply stoned.  

They took me outside and shined a light in my face and started asking me questions. I had no idea what they were talking about.  It turned out that my sister had written a letter of encouragement to a school friend, who had been drafted and gone AWOL from the military.  The FBI had found my sister's letter, which advised him to "follow your heart."  He skipped out.  His father was an IRS agent who went ballistic when he found out, and decided to bring the law down on my family.  He threatened my father, me and my sister.  Later I found out that this guy beat his son regularly.  But on this night, they were going to take me out.  Just as one cop was about to get physical with me, a young woman I knew from high school, an athletic, courageous, tall amazon of a girl, got between the officer and me, and standing there like Wonder Woman, told the cop that she wouldn't let them hurt me.  I had to hold myself back from laughing at the absurdity of it all.  The father was a bullet headed moron of a man, who was dressed exactly like Jack Webb from the Dragnet tv show, a trench coat with a fedora.  He wanted to know where his son was.  I said I didn't even know his son, and I didn't know what he was talking about.  He continued spewing hate, and I asked him, "do you love your son?"  He was completely disarmed at this, and didn't know what to say.  So he said, "yes I do,"  and I said, "I believe you."  I left it at that, and for some reason they backed off and left.  I have no idea why, except they'd broken a dozen laws doing this job.  Off duty cops, acting as paid thugs for an irate IRS agent attempting to intimidate young people in order to find his missing kid.  It was lucky I wasn't black, or I might have ended up dead or in the hospital.  They had no warrant, no authorization, nothing.  They were working as private agents for this schmuck.  

After this, it was decided that I should probably move out.  The paranoia was building, now that the house was a known hippie drug house.  So, Euca and I headed out.  I had about $2000 from a savings account my folks had set up for me, and this allowed us to live foolishly for several months until the money ran out.  By fall, 1970 we rented a twelve acre horse ranch in Saratoga, where we lived with various roommates until we decided to take the road trip to Oregon to visit Kesey.   

We named the ranch the "Shire" because the beautiful view reminded us of Hobbits.  The reason I mention this otherwise lovely, but irrelevant place is that it was here I had one of the most important experiences with psychedelic drugs in my life.

 

I'm From Mars 

On a morning in September, 1970, on a whim, I took a tablespoon of mescaline powder.  I began to come on almost immediately.  By the time I was dressed again I was rushing on this incredibly powerful dose I'd given myself.  I put on the new Jimi Hendrix album, Cry of Love.  Hendrix had died a few days earlier, and it made the album creepily prophetic.  "I'm going back up my belly button window, cause all I see are a whole lotto frowns…"  by the time the second side ended I had had a schizoidal break.  I thought I was from Mars, that I had inhabited this body, and I hated it.  It hated my body so much because my spirit felt trapped inside it and couldn't move around in it.  Of course, I couldn't talk about this with anyone, so I spent the day just sitting in a juniper bush looking over an enchanted view scape of a valley, with lush pines, oaks, redwood stands, and incredible fall clouds.  There was an old gelding there.  I made eye contact with him.  He had never met a psychedelicized human.  My energy levels must have been intense, because my look knocked him off his feet.  When I approached him, I noticed his unique face, and his gentle personality. 

As I sat in the juniper bush, I was receiving instructions the entire time from this critical voice in my head that felt trapped inside my body.  Next thing I saw was my cat, Fairbanks, a big black and white long hair, who was jumping back and forth through the juniper and lavender bushes as if to teach me that having a body was a lot of fun.  Leaping around, jumping, playing, using it was what it was all about.  This was the lesson I learned that day.  The brain doesn't run the show.  The whole body makes the brain work better.  This was a fundamental lesson that was completely opposite to what I had been taught.  And my cat was my teacher.  

By the following Spring we had run out of money, so we split.  We just took off, and moved.  We took another road trip.  This time the mission was to go to Kesey's house up in Oregon, and pay respects.  

 

Kesey 

Kesey was the man, the chief, the most important leader of the burgeoning counter-culture movement in the West.  His reputation was legendary in the Bay Area.  He and the Pranksters had seeded the Haight Ashbury with their own brand of LSD inspired craziness.  They had invented the light show, used the Grateful Dead as musical shaman for their famous Acid Tests.  I was too young to have been part of the initial scene.  I just missed it by a year, but in those days, a year was like a decade. Every year from 1964 to 1967 was like a different dimension, especially where I lived, in the music.  By 1970, Kesey had served his time in jail for a pot bust, and was back on his farm writing books and raising his kids.  

For me, visiting Kesey was paying tribute to the Chief of the Tribe.  The counter-culture was spreading, but even in 1971 it was not that many people, perhaps only several thousand in the whole Bay Area.  The Baby Boomer generation was still just coming of age.  I was an early Boomer, being born in 1949, so the flood of kids that would change everything during the late '70s and '80s were still in school.  

By the time I graduated from high school in 1967, Kesey was a legend in the Bay Area.  I first met him at San Jose State College at a lecture he gave.  He was charismatic, a compelling teacher, a natural leader, and above all else an unpretentious man with a good sense of humor.  A lot of older artists, teachers, writers, musicians had a basic surliness or arrogance in their attitude toward other people.  Kesey was a new model of what it meant to be an American man.  He was friendly, assertive, funny and ambitious, an alpha male to be sure, but easy, like Oregon.  You liked him on first sight.  

We drove up on a bright weekday morning and got to his house about 11am.  I'd called him earlier to let him know we were on the way.  "We'd like to come over and say hello." I blurted out. First thing out of his mouth was "there are no answers."  I stammered something back.  He told us to come on up.  

As we drove into the farm and parked, we were met by a dog pack of 7 to 10 dogs of all sizes and shapes, barking as if they would rip our throats out.  Ken broke them up when he greeted us at the gate. He invited us inside.  It was a big farm house, half built, under construction, and the Kesey's were living in it anyway.  It was a colorful happy place, the floor on the kitchen was hand painted in that familiar psychedelic style the Pranksters were known for.  The mailbox had a colorful red white and blue motif and flowers painted on the outside.  For the time this was novel, different, and the colorful artsy way of living was becoming a hippie signature.  

Ken was working on a new book called "Garage Sale."  He had a couple of artists sitting at drafting tables working on the project.  I mentioned a guy I knew who said he'd known Kesey, but Kesey didn't remember him.  Then he asked me, "you have any pot?"  I said, "I've got something better than that…"  Ken's eye's brightened up….  "Acid!"  He gave me a big ol' sigh, as if he'd done this hundreds of times before.  I took some pot out of a matchbox I had and put it in a Sherlock Holmes style pipe I used.  Kesey thought that was funny, then told us a story about a pet cow he had.  He said he used to lean back onto this cow, stretch his arms way out and just lean back into her sides, and she'd stand there with him leaning into her.  He loved that old cow.  He invited us to look around the farm.

Woody Guthrie sang from the second story record player where the two draftsmen worked on the book.  The whole experience was lit up.  I think Ken knew I was on acid.  I don't think anyone could avoid a contact high from me that day.  We walked out to the bus.  It was parked about ten yards from the house just there out in the open.  It was pretty weather worn and obviously in need of repair.  It hadn't been driven in years, obviously.  But it was still historic and pretty amazing.  The significance of what I was looking at was magnified in my mind. It was a holy object, a shrine.  I got inside the bus and sat down, allowing the ghosts of many an adventure to enter my already wasted mind.  After a few minutes, I got out and walked around the farm, with Woody Guthrie playing in the distance.  Some moments etch themselves into your memory for life.  This was one.  

On the way out Ken gave us an I Ching owned by Ron Bevert, the famous Hassler of Tom Wolfe's "Electric Kool Aid Acid Test."  He asked us to take it back to the Bay Area and he'd pick it up.  I was surprised that he'd give a complete stranger a book that made it into Wolfe's novel, but back in those days, you could tell who was honest from who wasn't. Kesey could see we were sincere. We exchanged phone numbers and drove off.  

On our way home, we stopped at a friend of Euca's who, although she wasn't there, allowed us to stay overnight at her house.  She lived on a lone farm house on property with an enormous lawn, with a few large trees.  A vision of heaven. There was a copy of the new John Lennon album, "John Lennon Plastic Ono Band."  

The surest sign the '60s were over was the breakup of the Beatles, but this new Lennon album came out right on the heals of the George Harrison's successful double album, "All Things Must Pass."  While Harrison's album was your classic massively reverbed Phil Spector Wall of Sound, Lennon's album was the exact opposite, a spare, minimalist album of confessional songs, the most confessional thing Lennon had ever done.  It was basic and it rocked very hard, when it rocked. The ultimate summation of 1950s rock.  Also produced by Phil Spector.  Since I'd had a history with this music since 1964, I knew Lennon's personal life had always been all over his music, but never had he done anything like this.  And, it was not easy getting into it.  In fact, I'd drifted away from the Beatles after they broke up. But that day, in this place, I heard the truth in it.  I was overwhelmed by it.  It was such an emotional experience I was crying at the end.  It was Lennon cutting his heart out of his chest and leaving it on the table for everyone to see.  I was not the same after that experience.  This is what a record can do.  

I was at work when Bevert picked up his I Ching.  One of the women who lived in the house we were staying at answered the door.  Erde, who was a six foot one inch tall outrageous hippie earth mother, greeted him at the door completely naked.  She said he looked stunned, grabbed his I Ching and got out of there as fast as possible.