![]() The first time I took LSD was in 1969, when I was seventeen. I had seen them from the corner of my eyes, as it were-in storms, in the ocean in winter, in the stillness in the middle of the night, beneath the surface of the water, or in dreams. I liked being in the presence of what I thought of, with no particular originality, as the wonders, and for a long time I had sensed that they were somewhere close at hand. “Francis, we’re on a planet called Earth in a country called America,” and so on, until nearly daylight.) He kept appearing to have his identity almost in hand, then he would lose his grip on it and we would have to start over again. (I am thinking of a friend who took two tiny barrels of orange sunshine one night when the rest of us took one, and we had to show him the photograph on his license to convince him that he had a name and that he wasn’t an explorer from outer space. ![]() I mean that I liked it when I took it I don’t mean that I took it serially or in amounts that made you forget your name or where you were. I wouldn’t take LSD at gunpoint now, but I used to like it a lot. ![]() I hadn’t yet been given the key to the mystery, which was LSD. The song’s mystery seemed to lie somehow in a fracture of ordinary circumstances, as if you had taken a hammer to a mirror and cracked it in such a way that it now reflected a multiplicity of images. I am the youngest by some degree of four brothers, so I was conditioned to believe and to feel that the secrets of existence were in the possession of people a few years older than I was, who were closer to the ages of the Beatles. “She Said She Said” described a mystery I could see on the horizon, vibrating like a mirage. Adolescence, though, is almost purely a landscape of feelings, and I could believe that being in love was a lacerating, self-annihilating experience, and that a man could be in thrall to a woman. It was a blues song, essentially, and the blues are about things one feels most powerfully in apprehending the world’s design-in maturing, that is, and I hadn’t matured sufficiently yet. I was in eighth grade, and the emotions it concerned and the scene it described were so far beyond my knowing that I didn’t even really know they existed. Of course, I couldn’t understand “When a Man Loves a Woman,” either. I played “When a Man Loves a Woman” because of how beautiful it was. ![]() I played “She Said She Said” because I couldn’t understand it. That year, I did the same thing with “When a Man Loves a Woman,” by Percy Sledge. (People tend to look like their names, and when they sing they often sound like their names, too.) When “Revolver” came out, in 1966, I already knew who the individual Beatles were-they had cunningly saturated the culture by then-but, even so, I stared at their images while I played “She Said She Said” so many times that I thought I might wear out the groove. Likewise, several years later, staring at the cover of the Grateful Dead’s first record, I determined who was Bob Weir, who were Captain Trips, Phil Lesh, and Bill the Drummer, and who was Pigpen. I played it often enough that I was able finally to establish who among the three men on the cover was Dave Guard, who was Bob Shane, and who was Nick Reynolds also, who had the husky voice, who had the tenor, and who had the slightly stiff delivery. The first record I did this with was the Kingston Trio's “At Large,” which belonged to one of my older brothers. I liked to be in the woods by myself, I liked to sleep, I liked to swim underwater, and I liked to sit in my room and listen to music, usually repetitively, while looking at the record’s cover. I was the species of moody adolescent who drove people away from me when that was the last thing I wanted, so I spent a lot of time alone. Very few songs influenced by a drug reproduce the sensation of taking the drug, but “She Said She Said,” from “Revolver,” comes close. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |