Back in the hippie days - and I'm talking about the days before hard drugs and barefoot little jailbait runaway girls with dirty bellbottoms and needle tracks on their arms to prove
I knew people and I knew people who knew people. It was like having personal shoppers. And I hung out with a better class of druggie, grownups mostly, people with jobs, working people, professionals, weekend hippies who had slipped into the '60s dragging a lot of the '50s with them in spite of themselves. There were several lawyers, a doctor, college teachers, an accountant, a banker or two, social workers, some newspaper people, a former up-and-comer at IBM. I hung out with some politicians too, black and white candidates running for various things, earnest liberal losers mostly, pleasant pot smokers who turned into celebratory cocaine types the election night they surprised themselves and won.
Those were heady days in Georgia. Pot was recreational, cocaine was celebrational, LSD was revelational. Duane Allman was dead but there was free music in Piedmont Park on weekends. Maynard Jackson was mayor of Atlanta and Jimmy Carter was governor.
Which brings me back to Bach. And LSD.
The first LSD I took was something called purple microdot and a friend brought it all the way from San Francisco. It made the earth shift in large chunks before my eyes, words became pebbles clattering around the room, black became too dark to tolerate, white too white, there was music somewhere and I do not remember what it was but I do remember slipping between the notes and into the sound, etc. I liked it. The whole outing lasted for 16 hours or so. I slept a little, then I got up at 6 a.m. and went to work. That's how the world worked for those of us who acquired our work ethic in the 1950s before we acquired our drugs in the 1960s.
Not long after that first trip I met a theoretical physicist from one of Georgia's finer universities who became the only person I did LSD with after that. It was an instant friendship but we were an unlikely duo. I was a word guy, he was a math guy; he had a Ph.D. and had done post-doctoral work with Richard Feynman, I was a college dropout autodidact who worked at a newspaper, read a lot about various things and had never heard of Richard Feynman until then; his father (also a Ph.D.) was a vulcanologist and his father-in-law was a university president (also a Ph.D. physicist) who had worked on the Manhattan Project before being frightened off into academia after watching the first atomic bomb explode in New Mexico, I longed to be related to people like that (I longed to be around people like that); he was not from the south and I wished I wasn't either; I had dealt with who I was and where I came from by putting it miles behind me and it turned out he had done the same thing (though I couldn't understand why he would want to); and there we were; he had his calculus, I had my vocabulary and it turned out we were both in creative pursuit of something all the time in pretty much the same way; I was a smart guy, he was a smart guy with credentials - and these incredible custom built models of molecules (his theoretical physics involved evolution at the molecular and sub-molecular level) in his office we could mess around with while we got high and talked. And we discovered we had a lot to talk about. And not always high. It was a conversation that lasted several years.
And from time to time there was LSD involved.
We took our LSD seriously. And cautiously - his brother, a medical chemist, at Harvard always tested it before we ever took it. We were not recreational users, though recreation happened sometimes. We were so serious it's a wonder we could enjoy ourselves at all. My friend believed hallucinogenic drugs had liberated science by liberating the brains of young scientists to let all the stuff they ever knew slide around in chunks they'd never even recognized as chunks before. That notion, a little experimentation and an altercation with a Nobelist named Shockley over the great man's crackpot racial theories had cost him a spot as a Rockefeller Fellow. But I agreed with him, mostly based on my experience of watching the world slide around in chunks the day I first took that purple microdot. I understood what he was talking about. Somehow it liberated my head from its vocabulary - or at least from control of its vocabulary - and I saw what he was talking about in his wordless calculus-ified way. Or something like that (though it turned out in the long run that LSD didn't liberate language with the same efficacy it liberated calculus and theoretical physics. Ever tried to read hippie-lit?). But everything we ever knew, everything we thought we knew, was slipping, sliding, banging around, melting and firming up again inside our heads. Things reshaped themselves from the inside out, evolving molecularly, organically, not theoretically (lucky for him). And together we watched it happen. Of course when the LSD wore off most of that acid-powered reality disappeared into theory again. But we brought back what we could and would spend months and months sorting it all out before we decided it was time for another trip. And we took it. Seriously.
It wasn't like we never had any fun. Once we went camping in north Georgia, studied the hallucinogenically and Perseid-enhanced sky all night (meteorites and LSD can chase all your cares away) then ran around half-naked all morning chasing crawfish up and down a little north Georgia creek that ran by our campsite. We were grownup boys full of science, stars and LSD who turned into barefoot and naked crawfish catchers. We stole corn out of a farmer's field for dinner.
But it was mostly serious stuff. At least that is what we believed. And Bach came along. My friend wasn't much of a rock music fan. I was. But music was mostly in the
We even pursued it into concert halls and pipe-organed churches. A little acid, a little Bach, sometimes a little PDQ Bach (you take your pleasures where you find them), organ recitals (we were the guys giggling and muttering in the back pews). It was soul music of the highest order. At least that's what it felt like.
Then it was over. He and his wife had a baby. I moved west (stopping off to see the carnivorous plants in the university greenhouses up toward Strawberry Canyon at Berkeley because he recommended it). Then I went on and acquired my own smart-guy credentials (something I question doing to this day). I have spoken to him only once since then, a call a few years ago. He said he was the head of the physics department, no Nobel and no chance (every year I checked the Nobel list for his name), divorced, and the baby had grown up and just graduated from Harvard. My only satisfaction is that I left him a lawyer friend to talk to (the guy who bought my car before I drove off in somebody else's) and they have gone on talking for all these years. Word guy, calculus guy. It was the least I could do. Sometimes I wish I could have been there. But I wasn't. And most times I don't. I had other things I didn't know I had to do and isn't that what LSD is all about - to remind you of the things you didn't know you had to do (of course there are people who argue that's what life is for and who needs LSD. Let 'em, I say)? Besides, when LSD became purely recreational it took all the fun out of it.
But when I hear Bach or Buxtehude on the organ I think of him. Bach, Buxtehude, calculus, words, and the world as we never knew it until then. At least for a little while. I do not miss LSD but I do miss him sometimes and I miss those days when we were having serious fun rebuilding the world out of chunks we never knew existed before and then watching it fall apart mostly in the same old ways. It is as close to nostaligia as I am likely to come.
