In the Big Roll Band we continue on with a strong following around England, but I begin to feel as though we are rapidly becoming an anachronism. The new thing is here and we aren't part of it. I begin to feel uncomfortable with the music we're playing, the nightly funny entertainment we are putting on, playing other people's songs. Our show suddenly feels too jollytoo showbiz. In the new mode you write your own songs, crank the amp, and dress in the coat of many colors. A great cultural shift is taking place; I want to be a part of it and express this desire to the band, hoping we'll all feel the same way and freak out together. It falls on deaf ears, but with all the changes that are happening around us in London, a double rainbow is beginning to arc through my skull-and this needs a different kind of musical expression.
We have been friends for a while with the Animals, who are a hit group, almost at the level of the Stones or the Beatles. Constantly touring in the United States, they sit at the edge of the new scene and frequently mention something called acid. They chuckle to themselves about Owsley, sunshine, and windowpane and we don't really know what they are talking about but are intrigued. I sit in a doctor's office in Earls Court one afternoon and read about the dangerous new drug that is now epidemic in the United States, how it's ruining the minds and lives of young people. I can't wait to try it.
Inevitably, via the Animals, it will come our way-and the redbrick greyness of West Kensington, with its moldering architecture, Carlsberg signs, sublets, and language schools, will be the initiation scene of the orgasmic, kaleidoscopic mindfuck known as acid.
Almost every night when we return to London after a gig there will be a rave or a get-together in Zoot's flat. The word spreads and it reaches the point where most of showbiz London seems to pass through or pass out. By eleven-thirty or midnight there will be a motley group of the famous, the semifamous, and their suppliers, all in an elevated state and having a jolly good time. These include musicians, entertainers, girls, hangers-on, and drug pushers, all of whom lie around in the flat and usually partake of illegal substances accompanied by large amounts of alcohol. The Animals are regu lar visitors and, already pioneers of the new consciousness, seem to be in an advanced state of chemical usage.
Their talk is full of California, San Francisco, the Fillmore, Jim Morrison, L.A., and Owsley. Hilton Valentine in particular appears to be the leading head, and it is he who tells me with enthusiasm about acid and its effects. I am nervous but willing to try it-my head is already full of tripped-out psycho material, the books of Thomas de Quincey, Aleister Crowley, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Coleridge, and Blake-I tell myself this is just another step in that direction.
Eventually the night arrives when we are to try acid for the first time, but for me it is preceded by a complicated little event on the mundane plane. Naturally, it involves a woman, a girl I have been living with, a very pretty Angle, Indian girl from Chingford in Essex named Angela.
Angie had been the girlfriend of Chas Chandler, the bass player for the Animals, for a while, but has moved in with me. I am hung up on her in a way that isn't healthy because we are patently unsuited for each other and, apart from the sex, there is no way I can relate to her-a full-tilt hedonist with no visible boundaries. Most nights I arrive home around one or two A.M. to an empty flat and then twitch in an empty bed until about five A.M., when she will stagger in., reeking of alcohol and cigarettes. I can't handle her, I'm suspicious that she's having sex all over the place, and I simply don't have the experience yet to deal with someone like this. I should kick her out and move on, but instead, I moon about in a feeble way.
I read books about Zen and Scriabin's experiments with synesthesia; she swallows another vodka martini and fucks the next drummer. Later I recognize that it was nothing more than an early rite of passage and give a hollow laugh about it. We break up for a while but I get sick. Every time I try to eat I vomit, as if I have some form of bulimia. I grow thin and weak to the point where people start to notice and make comments. This goes on for a couple of months. I lose weight and become listless. But finally, as if the hex has finally worn off, I wake up one morning with the smell of food in my head and rush to the nearest Chinese restaurant to wolf down a plate of noodles. It's over. I remember where I was before and gradually start to recover. It's as if I have been under some sort of shamanic curse. I have had dozens of girlfriends in London but for some reason with Angie I have lost all sense of myself.
So tonight Zoot and I are going to try out this LSD stuff with the Animals, and I am interested but slightly nervous. Coinciding neatly with this and executing the coup de grace to our fun-filled relationship, Angie is in Chiswick at St. Mary's Hospital, having what is delicately known as a scrape-in other words, an abortion. Whether it's me or some other lucky guy who has planted the seed, I don't know; but as a last-ditch attempt, and with the usual apprehension I have come to experience regarding this girl, I make arrangements to go over and collect her. With a churning stomach, a bunch of roses, and a box of Cadbury's milk flake, I mount the stairs to Ward Six. The day feels like lead.
Like a long white coffin, the ward stretches into infinity. Angie is in the last bed at the far end, or so I think. With a look on my face somewhere between a shit-eating grin and a death's-head rictus, I begin the long-roses-andchocolates trek. With my Cuban heels clicking like overheated castanets on the stone floor, I wake one or two patients who stare at me with downturned mouths and say, "What's that?" I keep smiling and go forward like a prisoner on the way to the gallows. Eventually I get there and, of course, the bed is vacant. In shock and paranoia that come at me like deja vu I stare at the ghostly white sheets and ask the ward sister where Ms. Angela King is. This is the bed, isn't it? Or is she actually in another ward?
She looks at me with a Nurse Ratched smile that seems to convey pity, disdain, and chilling contempt for the male of the species.
"She left this morning with someone called Eric Burder-a pop singer or something."
Fuck, the bitch-I should have known-fucking cheated again. And with him-my friend!
I feel a strong urge to lie down and throw up, but I toss the roses on the bed, decide to keep the chocolates for later, spin on my heel, and make the mile-long fandango back down the ward, all eyes on the one-man carnival, fringed leather, girl's hair, eyeliner, and cowboy boots.
Back in Kensington, I kick the wall and throw an LP across the room. It smashes on the floor and I start laughing-this is ridiculous, I am giving her all the power, what about my power, and ... oh, fuck it all. I lie down on my oversize orange bed, staring at the ceiling. Fuck it ... what is it with women? ... or is it just this one? ... I can't handle her ... I'm too hung up on her. Just like the Mothers' record is going on about at that very moment: Are you hung up? Do you have any hang-ups? Well, yes, I fucking do-it's this Anglo Indian with the incredible body that I seem to be sharing with about two thousand other people in London. After a while, helped by the spacing effect of the Nepalese, a new peace flows through my mind. It's all in the past, I am free, I am free-bye-bye, have a good life-and the Zappa record grows large and deep in my mind as I drift into a rose-colored sleep.
I wake up around nine-thirty P.m. feeling groggy, hungover, and with a sense of something missing. What-oh yeah-her. I sit on the edge of the bed for a moment and think, This time its different... that's it.. . victim no more ... must eat ... Chinese. I play a few eleventh chords on my Telecaster-they have the right air of renewed hope, a new beginningthrow on a jacket, grab a book on Zen, and slam the front door to cross the street to the Lingam and Lotus. I plonk down in a dark corner and squint at the menu: sweet and sour shrimp, vegetable fried rice, and crispy seaweed, that should do it. I open my book, sip a beer, and try to make up some Zen koans. Where is your girlfriend when eating rice (on the end of someone's dick)? No, that's no good.... Ummm ... where is God when practicing (having it off with her)? What is your name before you are born-oh, for fuck's sake. This is pathetic. I look at the greasy menu and change my min
d-vegetable fried rice, kung pao chi ... no, Mongolian beef and spring rolls ... yeah. I stare at my book-"to give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is to control him." Christ, what does that mean: give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves? I must stop thinking about her, let her/it go, there is peace out there, another world, the guitar-that's right, the guitar-the savior of my soul ...
I eat, and with the nutrition I start to feel better. The food, the earthy clarity of Zen, the shrouded peaks of Japanese mountains, and the words of Bodhidharma, the twenty-eighth patriarch, crowd into my mind and suddenly I start laughing. A tear forms in my eye and mistily I stare up at the Hokusai print of Mount Fuji on the wall. It's all beautiful: this place is beautiful, the rice is beautiful. I laugh some more-the guitar-ha-ha. Li-chee the waiter comes over. "'S everthin awright?" He smiles anxiously through several gold teeth. "Yeah, great." I smile back. "'Cept could I have some jas mine tea-ta?" I stare down at the tablecloth with its brown stain like a Rorschach test. "Strive on with diligence," I say to myself-the last words of the Buddha-and, placing some pound notes on the chipped white plate and patting the table in thanks, get up and raise my hands in namaste to Li-chee, then exit.
I return to the flat, remembering that tonight we are supposed to take a mind-altering drug, but I feel like practicing and pick up the guitar to play for a while. I feel light and strong, the guitar feels good in my hands, I'm filled with a pleasant new resolve: I am who I am ... I have leapt over an obstacle ... what doesn't kill you makes you stronger-yeah, that's it, okay.
I play a beautiful raga scale called "Purvi" that has been taught to me by Nazir Jairazbhoy-it has a mood that is sweet and romantic and I work my way into it, finding variations and centering myself with its structure. After playing for three-quarters of an hour, I hear the sound of voices upstairs and, with my new light but steely resolve in hand, decide to go up to Zoot's to see what is going on. The illuminati are arriving, bottles are being opened, sounds are coming out of the record player, and smoke is drifting upward. By about twelve-thirty A.M., with a nice crowd of fifteen or twenty hanging out amid a smorgasbord of scotch, vodka, wine, and hashish, the fiesta is grooving and convivial with the sounds of Ravi Shankar, the Beatles, Ray Charles, and Tim Hardin in the background. Hilton Valentine and Chas Chandler of the Animals arrive and slide into the well-oiled groove. After a while Hilton comes over and says, "Feel like tripping?" I feel a sliver of apprehension, but all innocence and wanting to be a groovy cat, I smile and say, "Yeah, man-yeah." I don't have a clue about the seriously mindbending effects of this drug, that it might put you into a psychotic state from which you may never return, that it's akin to being asked to go jump out of a plane with no parachute and told to fly, but I keep smiling. As the clock strikes one, Hilton places a capsule in my hand between the heart and life lines. I swallow it and go on enjoying the party, not feeling anything much other than the nice buzz I already have. But after half an hour Hilton looks at me and says, "I think you're ready." He pulls Timothy Leary's book The Psychedelic Experience from his bag, studies my face carefully again, opens the book, and begins to read.
In a low voice he starts intoning the following: "Andy ... the time has come for you to seek new levels of reality. Your ego and the Andy game are about to cease, you who are about to enter the nameless void-turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream." As he speaks, my mind, my perception, my visual sense somersault into a new hyperkinetic reality-the room in front of me dissolves into an egg-yolk rainbow of bright plastic colors and all that once had dimension and solidity becomes liquid.
"It's a trick," I croak, "a trick," and it comes to me in an instant that my whole life up until this point has been a cosmic joke, a hoax perpetrated on me by everyone else, they are all in on it, they know, but now I am ready for this sacred moment and they are pulling back the veils.
I hear a voice say, "And he's off," and I start down a tunnel of intense kaleidoscopic imagery propelled by the music, which now takes on incredible significance and seems incredibly loud and right inside my head. Alice going down the tunnel into Wonderland, oh yeah, oh yeah, so this is it, and it's scary and exhilarating as hell, but like a returning memory, I know in the way that you can't speak about, this is the hot line. Burroughs, Ginsberg, Watts, Huxley, de Quincey, the Zen masters, Lords of the Realm Within, this is what they are talking about.
I shoot from one brilliant cartoon image to another, barely able to keep up with the speed of my own mind. Now I'm in a brilliantly lit cave of sparkling jewels; now I float down rivers of gold; now I merge with sky-silvered dragonfly wings of shining translucence; now I see the eternal Buddha smile and impossible towers of iridescent blue-this is it! "This is what you have been looking for, the search is over, you are home," I whisper to myself.
As the trip continues I experience extremes of joy with wild swings of intense paranoia. One second I am surfing a rainbow, and the next momentif I open my eyes-the room appears full of horrible little monkeys staring at me with burning eyes. I try to let the music take me and return to that vast cosmic moment that always has been and always will be, the canopy of space time. Vast infinities illuminate my soaring consciousness, and West Kensington dissolves into the flow of eternity: no birth, no death, just shining mindlessness-inseparable from radiance. A ceaseless transformation of life energy, rhythmic pulsing activity, the molecular dance of infinite change; interconnected, interbeing.
I stagger out into the kitchen and try to eat a piece of cheese. How so normal an activity manages to pierce my Krishna consciousness at this point I'll never know, unless it's the voice of my mum echoing in some deep recess to make sure I eat, but it tastes like cardboard in my mouth and I try to spit it into the rubbish bin. But as I do I notice that the bin is like a box of incredible jewels. Old banana skins, cereal boxes, and cigarette packets are dazzling jewels of incredible energy that appear to me now in either particle or wave form; everything is a dance, a pulsating waltz of the submolecular world-electrons, nuclei, quarks, and hedrons.
And I know. I know in a way that I have never known before-and I know that I know it, and it is familiar in the sense of finally returning home. "It is," I whisper to the used box of sugar-frosted flakes lying on top of the garbage like a handful of quartz crystals. "It ... is." I become sentient and about a billion years old; I myself-and what or who is that? I snigger at the concept-am nothing more than a complex of energy passing through the infinite spiral. I place my hand on the draining board and watch the atoms that are me happily sink into the dance that is masquerading as a draining board. I stare up at a strange relic from the mechanistic universe, a clock, an artifact of classical physics, the cosmic machine, the meeanique celeste. I wave my hand through the air and see it atomize into a fan. Energy packets, photons, quanta, probabilities of interconnections, tendencies to exist, all dancing together in Smith and Gardner-Brown's subatomic kitchen. I cackle like a mad parrot and see my life unfolding as if in a series of corridors like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
I float back to the far-off land of the sitting room, examining the corridor wallpaper on the way because now it's alive with exquisite mountains, valleys, and rivers, and I talk to it for a while and then like the Archangel Gabriel arrive by the record player, which shines like an ancient source of energy, with everyone now sprawled out on the floor around it. A few million years later the trip levels out into a steady cosmic plateau and I find that I am able to control the pendulum motions and steer myself toward the beautiful, the beneficent, and the ineffable light. By now I am standing in the center of the room, radiating bliss and God power like a celestial blast furnace, and into the room walks the Betrayer-She, Angela, Kali-and with her, him-Eric, Shiva-but I see them as part of the cosmic fabric and from some remote Tibetan mountain peak I bless and shower them with my radiance. We all love one another; we all love one another, says a distant heavenly voice that is mine; and I continue my spiral on through the whirling geometric dance, the fire flow of internal un
ity.
At this point two things happen as I am standing and reaching upward for the bliss, the ineffable source of all being. I surrender, and like a giant sun of peace, light floods my mind, my soul, my being. Radiant bliss? God? There is no other description, and maybe it is the most singular moment of my life. But on the earthly plane on ironic little event animates this moment, for as I experience this absolute mind with both arms raised overhead, the action causes my pants to fall down around my ankles. Somewhere miles below me there is laughter, but I am elsewhere, I am in the ray of God, the alpha and omega, the peace that passeth all understanding, the Buddha field, the Void, I am bathing, swimming, spiritualizing here, in this eleven-quida-month flat in West Ken. This is the Clear White Light, the infallible mind of the pure mystic state, and direct experience and phrases from Buddhism float like ticker tape through the white field of my mind: "Obtain Buddhahood in the realm of the densely packed." "Merge into the heart glow of the Buddha." And then somewhere far below a flat London voice says, "It's horrible." It's Angela staring at my writhing and reaching with a sick look on her face, but I bless her again and continue to illuminate the wallpaper. Eventually the light fades and I slump back down on the couch full of love and rainbow color. But here, tonight, in this one-bedroom flat in London, I have received the light, I have known.
Sometime around six A.M. I feel myself drifting toward Earth and float off downstairs to my bedroom, but when I get there I feel afraid to be alone in a different place. I stare at my face in the mirror and watch as it goes through a metamorphosis of Hindu princes, princesses, animals, kings, queens, eagles, Cherokee Indians, skulls, and various historical personalities. Obviously they are all the incarnations I have lived through, but it is frightening and I have to turn away from the intensity. Exhausted, I finally crawl between the sheets and attempt sleep as the working day begins. As if in litany, the words of John Dowland pass through my mind: "Come, heavy Sleep, the image of true Death / And close up these my weary weeping eyes," and through the darkness and the blackness of closed eyelids, I observe the final burst of fireworks, the hymn of the universe singing softly in my head-we all love one another, we all love one another....
One Train Later: A Memoir Page 10