Post Script 1970s

 Post Script #1 - The Early 1970s

Acid Dreams

By 1971 we met a couple, Bobby Broms and his wife, Rachel, who for some reason connected with Euca and me to the point where Bobby bought a couple of small cabins in the Santa Cruz mountains.  It was there, in Ben Lomond, living in a redwood forest, where I had my first series of what I call Great Visions.  These are the kinds of visions you read about in Black Elk Speaks, or the Bible.   

Carl Jung first saw the difference between a common personal dream and a "big" collective dream.  In other words, dreams which are of no particular cosmic consequence, versus dreams which are really coded collective messages your own mind has picked up and recoded in its own way to fit your own needs.  The difference is that small dreams you don't remember.  Big dreams you never forget. 

After a while I'd exhausted my interest in tripping during the day, or with people.  I started dropping acid at night, right before I went to sleep.  The first time I did it I just wanted to see if I could fall asleep on it.  I was looking for acid dreams.  It allowed me to explore my own mind, quietly, alone, and at night.  

The first great dream happened in 1972, the week Nixon went to China.  I think I took some window pane acid, very pure.  The trip began as a peaceful, gentle passage into dreamland.  I was very calm, and went to sleep right away.  The dream snuck up on me as if it wasn't a dream, as if it was real.  It felt real, not dreamlike.  

I went into a meditation as I fell asleep.  After an hour I was still technically awake, and the acid was coming on strong.  Suddenly, I was lifted out of my body and into the protective arms of an invisible presence.  I don't know who it was or what was happening, but it felt like I was taken into a space ship, which gave me an overview of the LA basin, with all its myriad lights and lines.  I was in a space ship observing this scene, and I was with at least one other being, a spirit I couldn't see but could feel her presence.  She was comforting and amused by my spiritual questioning. 

Next thing I know, I'm Nixon as a young man.  I'm observing his career as if I am him.  I am in the dream as Nixon himself.  I start out as an idealistic patriotic believer, and then through the rage born by life traumas, compromise and bitter manipulation, became the craven, bitter, mobbed up pol Nixon was by 1972. 

It started with me as Nixon, trying to figure out how to survive while I grew more and more paranoid.  Events were moving quickly out of my control.  There were deals being made, decisions, compromises, assassinations, murder, war, all growing progressively more complex until everything in the dream was spinning around like Dorothy Gale's tornado.  I looked down, it seemed like a million miles down, and saw the toes and feet of a young girl.  I had become a young girl.  I had breasts.  I was naked.  I looked up into the sky and saw the smiling bluish plaster cast face of Chairman Mao, looking like some kind of Pokemon character. Then I looked to my right and faced the long dark hallway of a Hollywood noir movie.  At the end of the hallway was Nixon, wearing a fedora, a trench coat, and smoking a cigarette like Bogart.  At the sight of that image I started to crack up laughing, and immediately heard Carol King singing "I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky shattering down…."  and I felt the earth under my young girl toes and looked up in the sky at the bluest blue I'd ever seen before.  

Sunlight had broken on my face. and the Carol King song was still playing in my mind as I opened my eyes.  I had met my anima, my female side.  I'd found the groove, the beat locked in.  I'd felt it in my hips, in my toes, in my heels.  I became solid as a rock when it came to playing piano.  I was as steady as a metronome. I felt like a real musician, almost for the first time, like I'd passed out of the first fundamental test a musician needs to pass - can you keep a beat? Are you steady?  Drunk, stoned or sober?     

As for my revelation about my anima, my female side, I would later mistake that which was inside myself, of and for my own personal use, and transfer it into women I knew.  I even fell in love with a persona I had created of my own wife, and it kept me from being able to see who she really was.  I was a Pygmalion in love with his own creation. The real women had other ideas.  This was an acid addled type of narcissism that took me years to work out.  

I learned two things about songwriting that morning.  One concerned the power of image.  The other concerned the power of the fundamental statement.  "I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky shattering down…"  is a statement of primordial ecstasy, a statement that opens the mind to the first full spiritual experience a human could ever have, connection with the earth, feet in the dirt, and head with the heavens.  It resonates as a universal in soul and cannot be forgotten.  It is the first cosmic ecstatic experience.  I felt connected to a million years of human consciousness. The line has universal power.  That's what a song can do.  And the power of King's lyrics were so spiritually deep that the song is still true and fresh fifty years later.  Universally potent forever.  

My next sleep trip, I was trying to get the same result.  I wanted another trip in a spaceship, another beautiful dream.  Instead, I'd taken Orange Sunshine, which was well known for being laced with speed, as I found out. I lay there unable to sleep, with electrical impulses zooming through my head.  As I came on I noticed that I had been bitten by a mosquito and I had mosquito venom making its way through my body.  It was getting into my mind, and pretty soon the visions in my head were like Escher insect machines pumping furiously - long chains of electric bugs.  This went on and on until I got fed up and decided to change the channel in my brain.  Then I heard the Who playing "Baba O'Reilly" and realized that it was extremely powerful but low chakra music.  I got inside their sound and it turned into pure pain.  The Who were channeling a lot of generational pain, turning it into brilliant music.  But as I went through this I realized that this too was just another acid crazed distraction from my peeling back the layers of my psyche and getting to the truth of what this acid trip was about.  

The previous afternoon we'd gone to visit Euca's grandfather, who was supposedly on his death bed.  I'd never met him before, but there he was, a tiny little Spanish peasant who looked a little like Picasso, laying on a bed in the center of a dark room full of crucifixes and pictures of family.  It was all very stark and very Spanish.  He was a tough old guy, and there were spirits of dead ancestors in the room, which put me into the most altered state of mind, because I felt them hovering.  I became my true self at that moment.  After greeting, he asked me, "What do you do?"  I said, "I work for my father," a true statement, since I did work at my dad's shop, and had all my life.  He got a severe look on his face and spat out, "Well, I work for myself…"  I immediately understood he was grappling with surrender.  He was dealing with his own soul.  My statement was mundane, but on a soul level, it meant I was in God's hands, and he was protecting himself, and wouldn't let go.  This is the soul struggling to resist the inevitable surrender to death.

In the middle of the night, I had an acid vision that Euca's grandpa had died.  I interpreted it wrongly though dramatically, and was glad the next day when she found he hadn't.  But the vision opened my heart to thinking about my own father.  What a good, decent, honest and true man he was.  He wasn't perfect - he had a temper and was sometimes frustrated by his situation in life, as we all are.  But he was a genuinely loyal, good and honest person.

I woke up at dawn, crying, and hearing a song in my head.  "Father, father, I will work for you, to someday, some way, see this battle through."  It became the first real gospel song I ever wrote, and it got me to pull my tendency to over-complicate melodies and arrangements back to basics.  I now would do the opposite, I would aim for simplicity and purity of line, go after the truth in the music. My father had a talent for finding simple obvious solutions to problems that seemed complicated and difficult.  He turned forge shop which originally required five people into a nearly one man operation by inventing ways to run two man machines by himself.  

Somehow, my dad inspired me to go after that which was simple and deep, not just simple for its own sake.  But I needed another experience to show me how civilization was created by pain and anger, on the antagonism between generations, between fathers and sons.   

The third acid dream took place about a year after our son Jade was born.  This time, I dropped at night, expecting to sleep.  Instead, I sat the whole night in my grandmother's red leather chair that I'd inherited when she died.  I saw the thread of all the men in my family, my grandfather, my great grandfather, and on and on back.  I felt the deep level of cruelty that these men reserved for each other, the harshness, the mocking, the brutality they instilled in their sons, and how this "man's world" scene translated to damaged personalities, damaged by anger, disrespect, racism and violence.  This was how certain men raised their sons.  To be tough guys, bullies, hard, never to show or feel anything for fear of looking or feeling weak.  This was the way of a certain kind of man.  I spent the whole night feeling the pathos, the hurt, the pain of all that experience in my own family, why my dad resented his father so much.  Why, going back generation after generation, men were so hard on each other.  It's just tragic.  And the fullness of this universal tragedy was made vivid to me as I tripped about the past.  I realized that I had to break the chain of abuse that perpetuated personal violence and war.  Both are the same thing inhabiting different domains.  

That last night trip felt like a war, so much pain.  In the morning it led to more song ideas. Lyrics, above everything else, from now on, had to be truly multi-dimensional.  It would only come with experience. I was at the beginning of a career, and was hungry for living.  I was learning to take things in fully.  I was learning to see things with the eyes of a writer.  I was learning to think like a poet.  

There was one more trip, in 1977, the last in a strange series of four acid dreams that symbolized the growth of my internal path.  I got to sleep well enough, didn't even notice the lsd coming on.  When I became "conscious" of the dream itself, I was in the middle of an erotic episode which spun out of control into another strange image.  The story started out as a series of metaphors that I thought were about my temporal situation, but it was a much more universal series of tableaus than I even understood at that point.  

I was observing all the band members riding stationary exercise bicycles.  At first everyone was laughing and having a good time.  But then the order was given to go faster and faster.  Pretty soon the laughter had turned to complaining and groans as the people in the band got tired.  At that point these long wormlike penis headed snake things with sharp teeth came out of the floor and began snapping at the people riding the bicycles.  Now the groans turned to screams.  The snake like things were nipping and biting people as bicycles went faster and the screams got louder.  Things, as usual in these dreams, accelerated into a spin out, and I turned my giant head a million miles to the left.  

I saw a round lagoon, a small Japanese pond.  There were five koi swimming in the pond. They were the band members transformed. By the side of the pond was a figure, a protector samurai with a demonic face.  I bent ten miles down and scooped up one koi, looking it in the eye.  The fish had human eyes, and the eyes were crying.  Just then I look over at the demon, who pulled his sword out in that classic samurai stance.  I didn't understand what had happened, but at that moment, I knew.  I just didn't understand what I knew.  I interpreted it to mean that I was growing away from being a fish in the pond of South Bay bar bands.  But I now know it was a metaphor for a human condition.  The visual metaphor of the exercise machine was obvious enough, since working bands of that era made dirt wages, even working four nights a week the way Streamliner did.  The koi pond with the protector god was a more subtle metaphor, but I understood it to be the pool of tears that symbolizes human endeavor.  The band had failed to become marketable product, but it had created a pool of good music.  The pool and the warrior who protected it were the symbols for memory, my own, and the worlds. 

The 1970s were the end of a great century long democratic experiment.  Within a few years, Reagan would begin the process of turning America back into the plutocratic corporatocracy it had always aspired to.  But, for me, the dream represented real experience, and that I must protect my memories, because this is the pool of experience an artist draws from.  

Post Script #2 (1970s on)  

For the rest of the 1970s I was mostly concerned with learning my craft.  Songwriting was my primary avocation, the only thing I really valued because it was the only thing I could do well.  But day to day life also continued and this involved many changes of residence, nearly a gypsy type of lifestyle for the entire decade, even into the 1980s.  Euca and I had a son together, Jade, born in 1973.  We broke up in 1974.  We continued to work together, starting a band, Streamliner, from 1975 to 1979, which grew into one of the South Bay's top bar bands.  

After the Punk Rock explosion of 1977, I saw the writing on the wall.  Within five years most of the South Bay rock clubs would turn into comedy clubs or discos.  Rock music, the pre-Punk/Disco style, couldn't compete with the producer driven electronica and drum machine hypnosis of Disco.  Mainstream Rock, unless you were the Stones, Tom Petty or Bruce Springsteen, seemed old fashioned compared with the energy of Punk music. Disco, which I simultaneously loathed and loved, dominated both radio and the dance clubs. While  there was work for journeymen rock bands, there was no real money in it, and to anyone who saw what was happening, no future.  The club owners respected bands less and less, paid less and forced them to do their own promotional work.  By 1979 I was determined to get out of the South Bay.  

The night it ended for me was on my last gig with the band, when I looked at the marquee above the door to the club, and saw the word "Streamliner."  With the letters which formed my name, "Larstein" taken out, what was left spelled "mer" - the ocean, or "rem" - dream sleep.  I felt like I had been asleep a long time, drifting in a turbulent ocean, and was just beginning to wake up.   

I left Streamliner in fall 1979 and joined a Santa Cruz "New Wave" band, the Humans.  I jumped on board as they toured all over the West Coast, North West, Chicago, New York and Boston.  From 1979 to 1983 we were often called Santa Cruz' most exciting band.  For me, the Humans were a vacation from the responsibility of being the principle songwriter. There were already two good songwriters so I accepted my role as a sideman.  I appreciated the break, and I got to go on a real tour, with a signed (IRS Records) band, and pretend to be a rock star.  And I made some lifelong friends.    

The Humans broke up in 1983.  Eric Gies, bass player and songwriter, and I had become good friends.  We were both living in Santa Cruz as we started our recording studio project. Since we had no money, it grew slowly, from a four track set up, to an eight track, and evolved into something we called "Ed Hatch."  We developed a chaotic method of collaboration, but produced three albums of our own hybrid style of Rock music.  We were soon doing environmental recording.  We produced eight albums of nature sounds, and a series of four albums recorded in Yosemite.  

The experience I had recording birdsong at daybreak in the fennel at Happy Isles in spring of 1989, was right up there with my acid dream experiences.  I realized that nothing human could touch how complex, immediate, and intense birdsong was.  It was the ultimate source of human music, to be sure, but so much greater, especially with headphones on turned up to ten.  Human music, by comparison, is extremely simple.  Maybe that was the point.  Human music, as complex as it can get, cannot approach nature for sheer depth of sonic complexity.    

Human music must be about something other than the imitation of nature.  Human music springs from the imagination.  What I experienced transformed my understanding of music, putting everything into proper perspective.  Simplicity could be the key to a search for truth.  This is the thread I'd been on since becoming a lover of complexity, a modernist, an Ivesian, a nature imitator at the age of thirteen.  Birdsong made me realize that a great deal of art was an Aristotelian attempt to pay homage to or imitate nature, when it was the imagination itself that was the source of a kind of Divine awareness.  

Beethoven, whose mind was fixated on the struggle for truth, had his musical priorities in the right place.  Ives documented the schizophrenic complexity of the modern psyche better than anyone.  Finally Cage, whose zen appreciation of sound for its own sake, ended the conversation about "meaning" in music. He essentially declared that ALL sound is music if the listener hears it that way. 

The musical thread from Beethoven to Cage concerned man's relation to nature and to the natural world.  But Beethoven and Cage were coming from opposite ends of the musical spectrum.  Beethoven was Platonic, an idealist who constructed brilliant architectural forms in a diatonic exploration of the process of the creation of Divine Joy.  Cage was an Aristotelian who invented new ways of scoring music that literally "caged" time and space to offer the spontaneous potentialities of every sonic frequency and timbre room for expression.  Beethoven was about the human mind discovering iconic ideals.  Cage was about learning to hear the sounds of the world as the iconic ideal.  

Blues is somewhere in the middle of this.  

In the end, meanings, especially extra-musical meanings, are beside the point.  Great music, like great poetry, offers a metaphoric experience of something divinely human and humanly divine.  The vision of heaven on earth.  

I found that rock music was an organic language rooted in the blues, the original musical form of America. I suffered for many years, peeling off  layers of schooling, learning to relax into the moment of the note.  As a piano player, playing rock music and blues when you're trained in classics, is not as easy as it might seem.  In this world, technique wasn't built on how many notes you played, but on the soul of what you left out.  Do you have something to say? Can you say it in the note, NOW!  Once you get into that "now" moment, you are beginning to transform your mind into a usable instrument which can be of service to the muse.  It is then that you begin to realize, music has seduced you, and you are its slave.  And I mean that literally since now there is never a time except in sleep, where I do not hear music playing in my head.       

After George McGovern's defeat in 1972, Rock music was captured by money:  stadium rock, glam rock, heavy metal, etc.  What started as vital joyful expression in the 1950s, had, throughout the 1960s, been transformed into a protest against injustice and war, and had ended up in the 1970s, as mere entertainment for white audiences, decadent trash.  There was not much that was essential. The music business had, by 1970, segregated black and white music in a new way.  Rock was now white boy music, Soul was black.  In black music, however, Stevie Wonder was the new Beatles, Bob Marley the new Dylan, and funk and disco turned out to be more fun than rock music.  But the whole character of the era, except for the prophet Bob Marley, was a monstrous distraction of drugs, sex, and decadence, all of which distorted and dumbed down the music, in spite of the heroic attempts by Springsteen and the Ramones to connect with Rock's original spirit.             

For me, 1975 and '76 were lost years.  I was deeply depressed because of the complications around the breakup.  I got a bad case of writers block. Then the first Ramones album mysteriously appeared with a brand new sound, compelling and fun.  Almost immediately a new way of hearing things opened up.  I began to write again.  Punk was exactly what I'd been waiting for.  It revitalized Rock with a darker, harder version of its original spirit.  That was good for a few years until the new technology opened music up again.     

The second half of the decade saw the rise of a lot of sub-genres - Disco, Reggae, Funk, Punk and Rap music, and an industry created genre dubbed "New Wave."  By the beginning of MTV in 1981, Rock music was growing as far away from the tradition I'd grown up with, as Dixieland Jazz had been from the Cool Jazz of the 1950s. 

The era of commercial genres had taken over.  The music business was growing balkanized and repetitive.  By the early 1980s MTV shaped its direction.  The sound of the Reagan years brought a merger between Pop, Disco and Electronica.  Madonna, Michael Jackson relegated guitar rock back to its own genre while Prince made a hybrid type of Rock/Soul/Funk and grew into one of the great guitarists of the '80s.  It was no longer a part of Pop music anymore.  Pop was electronica.  Electronica was keyboard driven. And most importantly, anyone who wanted to play in this game had to be telegenic.  

By the end of the 80s technology had left the band concept with little to hang on to.  It was a world of producers, female singers, vocal groups, digital sounds, entrepenours and agents.  The corporate model had won out.  Except for Nirvana, the last big stadium rock band, Rock, Folk, Country had become genres of the past. Pop was on top. To me, the music business looked like organized crime. As a songwriter I was now in my 40s, too old to enter that arena, and I wanted nothing to do with it because its glitz was horrible to me.  I was too alienated, a chronic outsider my whole life, and more interested in devloping my own sound than anything else.   

By 1992, i decided it was time to recap unfinished business.  I had dropped out of college in 1969 because of the Vietnam War, which was strange, since it meant I was in more danger of being drafted.  (I was, in fact, drafted and rejected in the Spring of 1970.)  But I listened to the Voice, and it told me it was time for the next phase to begin.  By '92, after all I'd been through paying dues in Rock music, I knew it was time to go back to college, with an eye toward being a music teacher.  Five years later I'd managed to get a graduate degree in music composition.  I also transformed my whole life, remarried, and moved to the country.  My wife, an artist and I have been together over twenty five years.  The way we view life and work is complimentary and creative, but also solitary and silent.  I'm still an outsider, and I still love Rock music, my Rock music.  

Around the time I completed my thesis composition, an orchestral symphony, the Korg Corporation released the first Korg Triton music workstation.  It was a "band-in-a-box," and it represented the latest and most affordable version, for its time, of a 16 track, multi-track keyboard which offered competitive sounds.  With it, a good keyboard player could compose, produce, and even perform entire albums alone, without the need for even an engineer. This meant that a songwriter could produce music the same interior way a writer writes novels, or a artist works in oils or sculpture.  For a few months the instrument was a big hit.  I started hearing it in everything - commercials, pop songs, hip-hop and rap records.  And by 2000, I recommitted myself to a promise I made back in 1972 - to make one album a year for the rest of my life.  

For over 20 years now I have lived up to that pledge.  From 1998 until 2003 I made a series of six instrumental albums.  From 2004 to 2015 my 12 album three part song series, "demos of david larstein Pt 1, 2, and 3" - an homage to my formative years in the 1950s and '60s - took most of my creative energy. From 2016 until 2020 I produced five albums of original music.  I have continued to produce albums by myself, on my own terms to the present day.

Conclusion

What I have described, the era of the LP record, from 1950 to 1990, was unique in American history.  It was a time of experimentation and technological innovation, a nation divided and damaged by assassination and injustice, by racism, corporatism, war and militarism, and by a radical fracturing of popular culture itself. Because of this, the music of the time attempted to assimilate all kinds of eclectic influences and at the same time be authentic to the electric ethos of Rock.  It produced a musical revolution that was more than just commercial production. Most of it, as it always is, was worthless, made for the moment or simply mediocre.  But some of it was good commercial art.  And there were a few groups who made real, lasting art, music for the ages.  

My experience with psychedelics in the '60s and '70s was about spiritual growth at the service of music.  All rock musicians of that time were well acquainted with all kinds of drugs.  It was endemic to the lifestyle. For me, it went away after I got off the road. Except for cannabis and coffee, I gave it all up.  Psychedelic experience changed me for the better but it also put me through hell.  It was a painfully difficult psychic struggle.  In the amounts I did it, acid was in no way fun or easy.  In fact, facing psychosis and schizophrenia in confronting my own psyche was the hardest, most traumatic internal work I have ever done.  But it clarified a way of seeing past the grid of the psychological mask imposed by culture, parents, religion, ideology and ego.  It turned music from being simply compelling sounds and rhythms, into a mystical language of gestural metaphor which speaks to the body, mind, and heart in ways that linguistics cannot.  And it integrated the Voice I'd been hearing since I was a toddler, into my being, identifying itself as... me!  I have always claimed that I took acid until I didn't come down anymore.  But contrary to the lies fascist politicians and media told about them, psychedelics are not addictive, in fact they are the opposite of addictive because they are so transformational, which to many can be very disturbing.  They are not in any way "party" drugs.  

My music is the record of my own time on this planet, a universal and personal expression.  As a songwriter, I've chosen the demo as my medium.  Since the most amazing recording technology ever invented is now available to anyone at affordable prices, anyone can produce a state of the art sounding recording in their own bedroom.   Songwriters now must be producers of their own work.  This has led to an enormous glut of every type of music imaginable, and because the internet makes music free to everyone, there is no money in it anymore. We are back to making art for arts sake. Avocation. Meditation.   A divine gift.  It is what I do.  It is my homage to Love.  It is life itself.     

Hands connected to the heart.        

  

  

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