JD was a Straightedger back before there was even such a thing, and I had a gallon of some really rank Mushroom Tea that he was quite interested in. He and I had a friendship based on Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and King Crimson and the fact that JD had a cute little sister who, given a year or two, was going to be really something. But for a straight guy, JD dug the shit out of trippy music. We'd put on Master of Reality and I'd tell him:
"Dude, this music is so good with the Microdot"
and he'd just shake his head "no"; or we'd be listening to "Dark Side of the Moon" and that part would come on where it sounds like a dude is trying to get away from a helicopter and its so realistic when you're stoned you almost need seat belts and a barf bag, and I'd look over at JD and offer him a toke and he'd just shake his head.
I wonder how do you listen to that shit straight? Now that I'm clean, maybe I should try it one time. I'm afraid I won't like it, that the child will be grown and the dream gone, and my whole sordid past will have been in vain.
But back to the gallon of Mushroom Tea. It had been in my trunk for about a week. I started hittin' on it pretty hard early Friday evening when I ran into JD. We went down to Devils Backbone and cranked up the tunes and he gazed at the jar. His curiosity finally got the best of him right in the middle of "Gallows Pole". I was trippin pretty good, and he says:
"I might try some of that."
"No shit JD! Its about time!" and I handed him the jar.
But poor JD, he raised the jar to his lips and took this baby sip, amde a bitter beer face and spewed it out all over the place.
"Oh, that shit is NASTY!" he says.
"Thank you" I said, because I had made it.
"No really, that shit is foul" he says.
"I know! Ain't it great!" and I took the jar and tipped it back and took a huge belt off it, singin':
"Brother, I brought you some silver, yeah.
I brought a little gold, I brought a little of everything
To keep you from the Gallows Pole.
Yes, I brought you to keep you from the Gallows Pole."
Well, it was pure torture for JD, because he finally got the courage to do some shit, but now he couldn't get past the taste and smell.
I kept tellin' him how great it would be, and I kept showing him how to just blast it past his tongue and down his gullet, and he just kept taking baby sips and spewing it out and I'd tell him "I'm going to put it up" and I'd go open my trunk, and he'd say "Let me try again" and this went on all the way around till the 8Track tape was back on the Gallows Pole and the end result is I've never been so fucked up my whole long life.
"Ah-ha-ha
Swingin'
Swingin' on the gallows pole!
See-saw marjory daw
See-saw knock at my door
Swingin' from the Gallows Pole"
Friday, March 18, 2011
THE GALLOWS POLE
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7 comments:
What a great story, per usual. I did my share of mushrooms, and while they tasted shitty I never let that stop me. Mushroom tea I never did. Generally my friends recommended putting them in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but I just chewed 'em up. Sometimes you have to suffer for your art.
UF Mike
The dried ones, I just chewed them up too. I chewed a few too many at a Who concert one time, had 'em in a little pouch and I was eating them like peanuts, to the point I was no longer there.
I think I must be somewhat like JD, because I was always protected from addiction to alcohol by the fact that too much made me nauseous, and I hated bumping into things, falling down stairs, vomiting, hanging onto a spinning bed and trying to will the ceiling to stop moving...Urgh. I could never get beyond that. The wall.
When I listened to Pink Floyd, Curved Air, King Crimson, Amon Duul, Tangerine Dream, Led Zepp, all of them without extra chemical interference, they worked pretty well for me when consumed raw.
I also tried them after significant amounts of beer and whisky. They definitely worked better when I was sober.
Friends had a farm in Wales, (coincidentally, very close to the place which gave its name to Led Zepp's "Bron Yr Awr Stomp"), their fields up on the mountain had plentiful mushrooms of tea-making variety.
Agh!
I prefer a nice pot of Assam.
I think the stuff that goes on in my head and around me is already weird enough, and pretty cool too. I don't need to mess with my neurons to be happy.
Souby, I love falling down and running into walls. Ever see a kid spinning hiself around to get so dizzy he can't stand up? That was me, over and over and over again.
I tell you what...I go bowling on friday nights with a group of people and we have a blast. And at the bowling alley there is a Juke box and they have
"WAR PIGS" by Sabbath on there, and when it comes on it makes me feel just the way i used to feel back in those days when I could dance some real shit to War Pigs. I want you to know I can still dance that shit to War Pigs, only without all the black light paint smeared all over myself.
I love it, and music like that changes the way I feel even when I am stone cold sober and I always thought that Planet Caravan was one of the sexiest songs ever written.
A superstory, wild & thundering. I never tried any mushrooms, because I am big pussy & all... and in general afraid of mind-opening drugs (since usually a lot of horrible creatures come crawling out, singing nasty songs in barber shop style, and they're egging on the millipedes... ). My friend Pedro liked all that stuff. He even ate large numbers of fly agarics, to see what they did. 'Aren't they poisonous?' I asked. 'Oh... hmmm only a few are deadly.' That's the spirit! Hey, Steve!
Martijn, the whiole deal is to have a near death experience. Its simple as that.
Hi Martijn
I was into Carlos Casteneda back in the seventies, and really wanted that mushroom experience ("Nobody knows who I am or what I do. Not even I"--CC)
but I never had the opportunity to try them; I paid for them a few times but got ripped off. It's probably all for the best. What would be really cool would be to read Casteneda now, completely sober.
But the point you make about music, Mr BH, is what I have been dwelling on since I first read this post a few days ago, how powerful music is without the drugs. I heard When the Levy Breaks a bit ago and was transported back to those days when we would sit in the dark and trip out on Zeppelin. "All last night, I sat on the levy and moaned..."
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