Air Guitar

by Dave Hickey

  Volbach’s seminar, however, took place before that, during the heyday of Hemingway, Pollock, and Kerouac. So, the issue in those days was the conflict between masculinity and commerce—between the tragic condition of the heroic artist and the ludicrous spectacle of the effeminate sell-out. The issue kept coming up in the seminar because a couple of fledgling Brandos were as deeply concerned with their putative masculinity as my sculpture professor, Mr. Olivadetti, who reminded us about once a week that “an artist—a real artist—is not a god-damned sissy!” I found this daunting: As the product of smash-mouth Texas, I was looking forward to a long career of unrepentant sissydom.

  Thankfully, old Volbach set things straight, casually dismissing all this heroic posturing as misty bullshit. “These muscle-bound whiners,” he said, “they do not want to make the new world. They want their power back. They want to turn back the clock. You should not let them do it.” He then proceeded to explain to us that, in case we hadn’t heard, there had been two great wars in this century, and a number of smaller ones, into which most of the able-bodied and apparently heterosexual men in Europe and the United States had been drafted—excepting those in critical industries, in government, or in education. Moreover, he pointed out, the arts—theater, dance, music, painting, and sculpture—were not critical industries, nor were they government, nor were they education. They were little businesses, so all the heterosexual men were drafted out of them. “So who is left?” Volbach asked, thrusting his finger into the air and swaying behind it, “Queers and women and a bunch of old Jews! Suddenly, they are the arts! They do a little business in the night. They get paid a little for it and do their best, while the government and the goyim are out killing one another.”

  “Then the war is over, and all the big, brave soldiers come home—feeling very angry and very heroic—and what do they find? They find the world has changed. This was true in Weimar and it is true again today. All these soldiers look around and see the culture of their nation being run by effeminate, Semitic, commercial pansies! And they are shocked! For the first time in history, the songs we sing, the pictures we see, and the plays we attend are not being dispensed by over-educated, Aryan muscle-boys, and these muscle-boys are very upset. But what can they do? Business is business, after all. Even Aryan muscle-boys believe in that, and as long as pictures are being bought and plays are being attended and songs are being sung . . . ?”

  “Well, you might think they can’t do anything,” Volbach said slyly, “but you would be wrong. Because the muscle-boys still control the government and the universities. The professors and the bureaucrats, they were not drafted. They are cozy in their little Bunde pleasing no one but themselves. And they tell themselves that even though business is business, culture is culture too, and culture is public business. So all the muscle-boy artists and writers, they will become professors and the darlings of professors, and they will teach the young to revere their pure, muscle-boy art, because it is good for them, and they will teach women and Jews and queers to make this muscle-boy art, too. And it will be very pure, because they are muscle-boys and they don’t have to please anyone. So there will be no cabaret, no pictures, no fantasy or flashing lights, no filth or sexy talk, no cruelty, no melodies, no laughter, no Max Reinhardt, no Ur-Faust, no A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And nobody will love it. And nobody will pay money to own it or to see it, but that will not matter.”

  “The government will pay for it, and the universities, because paying your own money for culture, and making your own money out of it, this is a Jew thing, a queer thing, and a silly woman thing. It means you are not satisfied with what the professors provide, with what the Reichsminister tells you is good. It means you want more and that is unpatriotic . . .” Here Volbach paused for a moment, and even though I hadn’t said a single word, he fixed his gaze on me and continued. “So all you Aryan muscle-boys down there at the end of the table, Don’t be Aryan muscle-boys! I have seen enough official culture. I will teach you how to hit your marks and set the lights and make the tempo float. The rest you will have to learn from women and queers—out in the dark. Also, don’t be too artistic to count your own receipts. Also, carry your pistol. There are thugs out there.”

  Thus spoke Herr Volbach; and, even though it’s not Volbach verbatim and does not begin to convey the majesty of his disdain, this is the world he showed to me—which was the world that I found when I abandoned my graduate studies in 1967 and opened a commercial art gallery. It was heaven, in other words—danger, glamour, queers, women, and Jews—no structure, no credentials, just soldiers of desire doing a little business in the night. And even though that world is dead, thoroughly institutionalized and never to return, the pale, angular ghost of Herr Volbach continues to flicker in my consciousness—as he used to prowl the back of the darkened theater, like a lion-tamer banished to a petting zoo, berating us for our lack of energy and nerve.

  “Hey! You up there!” he would shout, “Yes, you! Aryan muscle-boy! Can’t you count? Don’t you have any bones? You look like a piece of meat up there. Be electric! Act like a human creature! You poor fool, do you want to starve in the streets?”

  FREAKS

  I have not thought about psychedelics for a long time, nor thought with them for even longer, but I have been thinking about them lately because kids are tripping again. Techno-raves are brightening the nights in light-industrial neighborhoods, and fledgling hackers, crouched before their flickering monitors, are blowing their minds to get the feel of their brains, scrambling around for some kind of anti-protocol cyber-aesthetic. Even here in Las Vegas, local kids have taken to dropping acid and dragging The Strip. I have no intention of trying this myself, but my first response to learning of the practice was Wow! Because it really sounds like fun. Because I have not forgotten. Nor, unfortunately, have I forgotten the futility of trying to verbalize the lascivious intensity of such experiences on the page.

  One just knows, as certainly as one knows anything, that recasting those folding, psychedelic moments in words simply undoes what the chemicals have done—but writers can’t not try—and usually they try too hard. So, when I set out to write this essay on psychedelic art and its culture, I set myself a single parameter: Nothing too fancy. As it turned out, I needn’t have bothered, since, almost from the outset, I was amazed at how marginally my actual, private psychedelic experiences figured in my memories of that time. This may be an idiosyncrasy, but when I recall the acid years, I remember a great deal about the culture that surrounded dropping acid and not much at all about those “mystic, crystal revelations,” whose lessons I immediately internalized, whose specifics I immediately forgot, and whose intensity, I soon discovered, lessened dramatically when you stopped being anxious about losing control.

  Thinking back on those days now, from the vantage of the present, I remember the people. I remember dropping acid with Gilbert Shelton and racing him to solve The New York Times crossword puzzle. (After a while, we sort of forgot about the clues and just filled in the blanks with interesting words and even more interesting crosswords.) I remember Duane Thomas, who played running back for the Dallas Cowboys, describing what it was like to play pro football on acid. (Very sexy once you started running, but veeery scary when you popped out of the tunnel and got blasted with all that color and light and noise.) I remember the people I tripped with and the trips we took while tripping, to Mexico and beyond. I remember the people I bought from and the language we used to describe what happened. (Far-fucking-tastic!)

  I also remember the music—early Stones, Coltrane, Bird, John Lee Hooker, Johnny Cash. And I remember the labs. I loved their stink and the atmosphere of techno-adolescent criminality—the priestly mock seriousness of the chemistry nerds who presided over the brewing batches. Actual psychedelic art and self-consciously psychedelic music would come later but only a little, since, for my generation, the psychedelic posters and the woozy musicology of bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Bubble Puppy, and Shiva’s Headband were p
roducts of that original chemical experience—aids to enlightenment for the younger set, who would actually see the things we showed them and feel the things the lyrics made it possible to feel. My contemporaries, under the influence of psychedelics, tended to understand things rather than see them.

  In fact, the only people I know who actually saw things were the two Billys. My friend Billy Joe Shaver, the songwriter, saw Jesus, but that didn’t surprise us much, since Billy Joe also saw Jesus when he got drunk. My friend Billy Lee Brammer, the novelist, who was a fool for glamour and for grammar, saw Kim Novak reciting from Tender is the Night against a field of stars, but this didn’t surprise us much either, since we were all familiar with Billy Lee’s aspirations. Mostly, though, we just saw what was there, restructured, bejeweled, and radically recategorized. Once the cultural mythology of LSD was in place, of course, Shiva, Kali, Dick Nixon, Jackie Kennedy, Jimi Hendrix, and various armadillos would make regular appearances in the acid visions of fledgling hippies and teenyboppers. But not in ours. This tends to reinforce Foucault’s ideas about the cultural inscription of the body’s chemistry, and to suggest further that the idiom of “psychedelic art” was as much the cause as the consequence of psychedelic vision.

  In any case, psychedelic culture was a culture, and a surprisingly social and public one. So, one’s actual, private chemical experiences functioned less as ends in themselves than as occasions for its discourse and confirmations of its politics. Other drugs produce intense experiences, of course, and other drug cultures produce artifacts, but none of them seduce the autonomy of the self. Consequently, they do not generate politics. Heroin culture has produced some great jazz and some even greater writing; amphetamine culture has cranked out zillions of good country songs, lots of hot rods, tons of high fashion, and some very shiny art; and thanks, but no thanks, to cocaine, we have Rambo flicks, disco, and Freudian analysis. In each of these cases, I would suggest, the artifacts are less products of the subculture than byproducts of its members maintaining their habits, their rushes, and their elite lifestyles.

  Psychedelic culture was different. First, since LSD is not physically addictive, and second, since Protestant America finds it hard to denounce anything that promotes charismatic revelation, acid tripping in the sixties was perceived as less bad than weird—and dangerous to the weak of spirit. Thus, the minions of freakdom remained a motley republic with no trendy ambiance of street cruelty or elitist wickedness. (It helped that you didn’t have to smoke it or shoot it.) Further, since psychedelic vision is bestowed by chemistry and not by character, dropping acid is about as anti-elitist as rapture is likely to get—a fact to which legions of Deadheads must bear mute testimony.

  Moreover, since anyone could drop acid and tinker with their psyches, it didn’t really matter if you did. A lot of people didn’t and said they did, but that was cool, too. Simply knowing what tripping was, and proclaiming it an okay thing to do was sufficient to confirm one’s psychedelic politics. For a teenybopper in Idaho, a tie-dyed T-shirt and a Strawberry Alarm Clock album was as good as a tab of windowpane, since the republic of freakdom was neither a cult of experience nor a supply-side elite. Extreme experience was not required, nor was cultural production. One simply proclaimed a commitment to whatever ideology that psychedelic experience signified at that particular historical moment.

  But timing was important, since the ideology of psychedelics shifted radically in its progression from the dharma beatniks of Kerouac’s generation, though the feedback hedonists of my own, to the Day-Glo teenyboppers who followed soon after. I can honestly say, however, that I had no real cognizance of just how profoundly I had lived—and continued to live—within the ideological precepts of my own psychedelic generation until I read James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault and came across Simeon Wade’s account of Foucault’s first encounter with LSD. My response to Wade’s narrative was strong enough and strange enough that in the process of deciphering it, I was able to formulate, for the first time, the subliminal postmodernity that, unbeknownst to me, underpinned my own psychedelic ideology.

  Foucault’s initiation into acid culture took place one night in 1975, at Zabriskie Point in the Mojave desert, in the company of Wade and a friend, while the ditties of Karlheinz Stockhausen wafted out into the desert night. For the philosopher, it was an altogether salutary experience. He saw the stars fall and the sky fold, just as I had back in Austin in 1963. He also claimed to have understood something about his relationship to his sister that altered his philosophical understanding of sexuality and subsequently altered his ongoing history of it. Further, although he could not have known it then, this psychedelic moment marked Foucault’s introduction into a world that he had only imagined back in France—into one of those “fissures” in the filigree of power and surveillance whose existence he had theoretically extrapolated from his reading of modern culture. Columbus could not have been more delighted at finding the Indies. Subsequently, Foucault would follow that fissure from the acid-stained desert to the baths of San Francisco, reveling in the privacy of that cultural riptide, free at last in an environment where he might deploy his body’s will in all of its power and perversity.

  I was amazed at this narrative. Amazed, first, that my man Foucault (who had been on the barricades in ‘68) had made it to 1975 without acid, and unaware of the baths—and distressed as well that he had fought the brave fight without respite, without that ever-available American option of throwing up one’s hands and slipping invisibly into the fissures that run through this society like fault lines across California. I had lived my life in these fissures, in their turbulent flux, and had followed them across the continent as they opened before me and closed behind, comfortable in their privacy. No wonder I was mystified by the dry anxiety that haunts Foucault’s prose—and no wonder I found the scene of his psychedelic initiation so innocent and so fucking infelicitous.

  Too late! I thought immediately. Too Euro, and too Castañeda. Bad place! Wrong music! Yikes! First, Zabriskie Point was wrong. One doesn’t go to a landmark with the intention of getting lost. Also the desert was bad, too redolent with modernist metaphors of transcendence—Malevich’s “desert of pure feeling” comes to mind—and the purity of Stockhausen’s music only reinforced this aura of connoisseurship. Finally, I decided, Wade’s psychedelic agenda seemed designed to mystify the chemistry while I had always, instinctively, held to the project of demystifying the mysticism, of literalizing rapture, of putting the hormones back into it, the molecules of desire.

  If it was just another fucking religion, it didn’t seem worth doing; and taking acid in an empty place, in a cosmic cathedral, seemed designed to reinforce all those fictions of spiritual interiority that psychedelic experience, at its best, so readily dispels. Acid is best taken in the midst of things, so it can teach you how much is literally out there—how far away it really is and how important it is to reach out and touch it, to live in the middle of it and let the chemistry lead you toward it. Which is not the truth, of course, only the rock-and-roll, psychedelic agenda in which I was nurtured, and which I am only now putting into words—and which, having been put into words, sounds a little like Charles Peirce on acid. In any case, this scenario does, to the best of my knowledge, characterize the ideology of my generation of acid heads and distinguish it from the transcendental orientalism of the beatniks, who were somewhat older, and from the quasi-spiritual whimsy of the Day-Glo hippies, who were somewhat younger.

  The generation-distinction is consequent, because it was the artists of m-m-m-my generation who made the first posters for the Fillmore, the Vulcan Gas Company, and the Family Dog—who designed the album covers and founded Zap Comix—establishing a canon of psychedelic art premised on an exteriority and complexity that was always political in its implications. Certainly none of us, in our connoisseurship of psychedelia, ever thought to attribute its quality to spirituality, or to the inspired or heroic individuality of the artists who made it, or even to their mela
ncholic alienation. That was for Dutch dudes who cut off their ears. We were interested in the effect—in having our minds blown, and our vision reordered. So, for all its apparent celebration of interior vision, this art was always about the extension of that vision into the culture as a form of moral permission. It was a communal, polemical art, vulgar in the best sense and an international language.

  Within the deeper history of image-making, psychedelia is yet another manifestation of those anti-academic strategies that arise in the seventeenth century concurrent with the rise of the academies. They manifest themselves first in the Rococo, then reappear periodically in Pre-Raphaelite, Art Nouveau, Pop, Populuxe, Psychedelic, Las Vegas, and wild-style Graffiti incarnations—all of which are characterized by visual maneuvers that have been permanently out of academic fashion for nearly three hundred years, and show no signs of becoming otherwise (dealing as they do with extravagant permissions, rather than reductive disciplines and institutional prohibitions). All of these styles flourish and survive in opposition to everything that academic Western civilization is about, and so, not surprisingly, they all manifest a conscious orientalism whose focus shifts radically from generation to generation. Most hark back to pre-Renaissance strategies of patterning and elaboration—to that Venetian moment before East and West diverged.