Near the end of my freshman year of college, goth, newly broken-up from my lesbian girlfriend, wearing black trenchcoats and smoking clove cigarettes, depressed and trying to impress a girl I barely knew, i did a hit of acid. (The other acid voyagers were the lady and her ex, and our minders were his pals. I had no idea how vulnerable acidheads are, or how messed up this dynamic is. In retrospect I'm lucky they were nice guys, or they could've really destroyed me.) The results were bad.
I felt my flesh become clay; I saw the thin air become frozen crystal; I ground my teeth heroically as the cold steel bones of the universe revealed themselves through geometric and unexpected apertures in solid reality. I was convinced that I could see past and future, and into the minds of my companions. Ordinary humans became bizarrely proportioned sideshow freaks, and I myself an ancient and decaying corpse. There were unexpected moments of reward and beauty: shimmering dragons emerged in institutional bathroom tile, and forlorn trees amidst the halogen-lit parking lot deserts suddenly bloomed into complex mathematical spirals filled with sublime divinity. But coming down the next day, I listened to Echo & The Bunnymen (another post, perhaps) and watched mutilation and torture movies projected from my eyeballs to the dorm ceiling. Several months passed while I slowly put reality back together, unhappy and in existential shock. I believed then (and believe now, somewhat) that what I experienced on the drug was just as real as what I experience off it. This raises some difficulties, to put it mildly.
Later I tried acid again, and low doses of mushrooms. In better mind-states I found a higher ratio of beauty to horror, though always there was some terror, whether of the lurking divinity's brilliance (a sunset on ocean endlessly fractaled into unbearable delight) or of the cruelty and emptiness of the surrounding world (helicopters in the city night, hunting shrieking human prey). But for many years these experiences defined much of who I was. To this day a great many of my personal spiritual beliefs have to do with the sacred geometry of nature and the omnipresence of divinity, which tenets I first glimpsed on that one banal night of risk-taking and fear.
Anyway, during this initial refractory period I picked up a Spacemen 3 album on cassette. It stayed on heavy rotation through many years afterward.
Now, a decade and a half later, this album sounds like a pastiche of influences: Stooges, MC5, Stones, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, etc. But what the hell. The band members were working what then (in the bleak end of the 80s) was an untapped vein, and they worked it hard. Some of this still is startlingly great. Later they made Spectrum, and Spiritualized, and E.A.R., all of it worth hearing, and all of it devoted, at least in some degree or fashion, to the inital promise of the motto: "Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to". (I'm keenly aware that much of the album is more heroin-chic than acid-head, at least in intention. But my experience was all about bong hits and trips, so that's what it means to me).
Post is in two parts due to filesize restrictions. Unzip to one folder and put it on your tongue.
Among my all-time favorite reggae albums. This was mixed by Lee Perry (tho only intermittently in dub style), and the musicians include Sly Dunbar and Ernest Ranglin; but the real heart of the Congos is the singers, whose shimmering, gorgeous harmonies make every song a spine-tingler.
