So where did it all begin for me? Really with the first Beatles album in a way. I remember buying that album, along with Herb Alpert and Stan Getz albums and realizing that the world was about to change. That summer I hooked up with a very strange group of people - we're talking 1965 - (I was in junior high) and things started to really pop.

A little backtracking: I have seen ghosts since I was very young, and started reading philosophy well before I got out of grade school, sort of hoping to make sense of what I saw and believed - which was a far, far cry from the Christian Midwestern world around me.

So this group - "The Magic Lantern Theater" (from the book, natch) was populated with 7 priests, the prince of an African nation (I could say which one, but he's the King now, and that wouldn't be cool), a madam, her husband, a revolutionary and a guy who had just spent a year with Timothy Leary. The revolutionary was the real deal: he taught Che Guevara's folk small arms skills, and was in and out of Cuba like it was his second home. He disappeared eventually. The LSD started being passed around - this was a time when grass was "reefer" for real, and hardly anyone knew what it was or what it could - or couldn't - do. Being quite the junior person there, I didn't get my hands on anything for a little while, but otherwise was immersed in these early experimentations.

I remember the week we spent making a recording - reel to reel, no less - of Bach's Canata and Fugue, using bird calls, toilet flushes, the pipe organ of a church, and various kitchen utensils. Half the people were tripping the whole time, and the house went from drab nondescript mid-Western to blown out hippie colors. only we weren't hippies then - just beatniks on acid. Cotrane was pumping out albums, the Dead and the Airplane were just buying guitars, and the world knew nothing of Viet Nam.

I remember hanging out in the house discussing Etre Et Neant as it was being translated ...

So where did it all begin for me? Really with the first Beatles album in a way. I remember buying that album, along with Herb Alpert and Stan Getz albums and realizing that the world was about to change. That summer I hooked up with a very strange group of people - we're talking 1965 - (I was in junior high) and things started to really pop.

A little backtracking: I have seen ghosts since I was very young, and started reading philosophy well before I got out of grade school, sort of hoping to make sense of what I saw and believed - which was a far, far cry from the Christian Midwestern world around me.

So this group - "The Magic Lantern Theater" (from the book, natch) was populated with 7 priests, the prince of an African nation (I could say which one, but he's the King now, and that wouldn't be cool), a madam, her husband, a revolutionary and a guy who had just spent a year with Timothy Leary. The revolutionary was the real deal: he taught Che Guevara's folk small arms skills, and was in and out of Cuba like it was his second home. He disappeared eventually. The LSD started being passed around - this was a time when grass was "reefer" for real, and hardly anyone knew what it was or what it could - or couldn't - do. Being quite the junior person there, I didn't get my hands on anything for a little while, but otherwise was immersed in these early experimentations.

I remember the week we spent making a recording - reel to reel, no less - of Bach's Canata and Fugue, using bird calls, toilet flushes, the pipe organ of a church, and various kitchen utensils. Half the people were tripping the whole time, and the house went from drab nondescript mid-Western to blown out hippie colors. only we weren't hippies then - just beatniks on acid. Cotrane was pumping out albums, the Dead and the Airplane were just buying guitars, and the world knew nothing of Viet Nam.

I remember hanging out in the house discussing Etre Et Neant as it was being translated - the definitive translation - and watching folk paint the floor, themselves, and anything else that they could touch with color. There was no counter-culture yet; there was only a desperate driving need to create, to break the mold, to go beyond the Dadaists and Surrealists, and see what this "mind" thing really could do!

so that's not really a story, but it's sort of where things start. maybe next time I'll write about getting to SFO in 66...