The Garage Sessions

In the last two years of School I moved into the back garage at our place, which was good because it was stand alone and had rear street access, which meant friends from school could drop in mostly undetected and we could smoke some weed and then listen to Pink Floyd.

It could be that smoking weed and listening to Pink Floyd first opened me up to the inner life (although, I am not completely sure about that, and it could have been Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha). Anyway, when I first heard Great Gig in the Sky I thought it was a religious hymn. It sent me way upwards from the mundane world and soaring upwards towards the angels. When I heard Have a Cigar, boy I almost instantly became an anti-capitalist. The bells in The Dark Side of the Moon sounded like a wake up call to me from some far distant archaic past, an old epoch was ending and there was a new epoch beginning.

That is the thing about weed you start thinking about epochs and things like that. It is like time starts getting stretched out (and also now including the primordial past). We thought Pink Floyd made music specifically for stoned people. And it led to all kinds of questions as well as to long and meandering conversations. Like with where does the Hippie Trail actually lead? Most of it was intuitive and hard to express, but looking back now, I would say it is one way of wandering out of the village and into an unfamiliar world.

Maybe it is a left-handed path into the right brain. Or maybe it is like a Gestalt therapy, where there is a foreground and a background, and when you smoke weed the foreground of what you should be doing in the world of action recedes and then you fall more into the background of your hidden teeming unconscious life which has been repressed and then that starts coming into the foreground and what you start thinking about.

And there were other questions, Like how did Pink Floyd get from their Sixties album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn to Dark Side of the Moon? And did that have anything to do with Sid Barrett taking one too many trips? We had been influenced by the Sixties zeitgeist, or by the Sixties spirit of the times and its mood and its self-exploration and discovery. But one thing was certain and that is that Crosby Stills Nash and Young sounded like the Sixties.

We were probably drawn together because we didn’t trust anyone over twenty-eight. And also because we thought Bob Dylan was a genius, and even though it was now the Seventies, we thought if we could understand his lyrics we would be able to get to the bottom of Sixties Philosophy (which wasn’t that easy because sometimes he spoke in strange and mysterious tongue’s). And you had to be stoned to understand his lyrics properly. And the main thing to be able to leave your parents home was to understand Sixties Philosophy.

Looking back on it now, we might have been swept away by the Sixties zeitgeist or its spirit of times or its mood (or its self-exploration and discovery). But we couldn’t really understand the 1950’s and why some people did what they did. And life wasn’t meant to be a replay of My Three Sons. And the Sixties had been sent as a breath of fresh air. The Beatles also had to be geniuses, but even parents liked Paul McCartney, which wasn’t a good sign.

These days i see smoking weed more through Carl Jung’s ideas about directed and undirected thinking. The modern secular world loves directed thinking, because of its efficiencies and productivities, but smoking weed is like a left-handed path into undirected thinking and some of its óther ’imagination’’ or its reveries and then where you start speaking about these things with your friends from your Right Brain straight to their Right Brain.

These days I might see the Sixties more through James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology. The Sixties youth were carrying the new spirit of the times. They were swept away by the puer spirit. A puer spirit erupted into the world in the Sixties. The long-haired youth had the wandering, idealism and creativity of the puer in Hillman language. They loved to fly way above. They had the adventurous free spirit of the youth. The self-exploration and discovery. the long-haired Sixties youth were carrying the spirit of the times.

But I was still doing some of the disciplined work of organizing a countercultural library in theat back garage. To try and find a language for what was happening, maybe. And I loved George Orwell because he seemed prophetic (and because animals weren’t meant to be on a farm like that but should be let out back into the wild). I also loved Erich Fromm because he was my first introduction to psychology. And he was grounded in a Depth Psychology. which seemed to bring some psychological grounding to some of the more free-floating puer Sixties spirit and that zeitgeis and that spirit of the times.

But there was still Jack Keruoac’s ‘’On the Road’’ and Tmothy Leary’s ‘The Politics of Ecstasy’ as essential Sixties reading. I liked Colin Wilson ‘The Outsider’ which helped to understand something about how The Romantic outsider was still interested in the verticalities of the spirit, and pushing back against The Rational Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. That opened up something something within me and led to more long conversations.

But there was one book that had a big influence on me and that was ‘’Siddartha’ by Hermann Hesse. I was reading ‘’Siddartha’ one night and it was the first time I had really read something that spoke about a spiritual journey like that. And I came to a passage where it said something like ‘Gautama chanted the holy word Om’. I had never heard of that word before. And I said it out aloud to myself. And you might not believe this, but I had an out of body experience and the room became bathed in golden red light and felt like an ocean of love.

And the next morning, I thought I am not going to tell anyone at the Claremont Football Club about this. It could ruin my reputation on the street, but there were quite a few synchronistic experiences soon after that. Not that long after I went to India. I went up the mountain in India, so to speak. And had many experiences, and one thing that happened is I gave up cigarettes, alcohol and marijuana in one week. This is how I was swept away by the spirit of the times and then accidently began an individuation process

…….

I had moved into the garage mainly because my mother said to me once ‘Ýou know, you are never going to find someone who cooks like me’. And that was enough to freak me out, and soon after I moved into the back garage which seemed to give some urgently needed separation.

I decorated that garage all by myself and the first thing I did was set up a sound system and moved in two massive matt black speakers which had sub woofers and things like that and that looked like they had somehow fallen off the back of Pink Floyd’s tour bus. Then I had bean bags strewn all over the place so that we could have proper conversations. Then there was a single Modigliani print mainly for the pretense of some sophistication.

And so many different people came in and out of those garage sessions. ‘H’ knew every Sixties album that had ever been made. Kim wanted to be a writer and had even read some French authors and Albert Camus which I found impressive. Gary was only interested in what side of the hill the weed had been grown on and which strain of weed we had. Frankie and Ariane were two sisters from France (and come to think of it they didn’t come from our school, but they did come from France and no-one seemed to be arguing about them being there (and lets face who was going to argue about two French sisters).

We did have another incident with my mother one day. When we had decided to roll one of the world’s biggest ‘numbers’. And just as I was about to light up she walked in and took one look at me and then at everyone else and then said that she would like to see me upstairs. Which didn’t sound good, but I went upstairs, and then she said ‘ John, You were smoking marijuana down there, weren’t you?’ And I thought of denying it, but eventually after a long time said ‘Umm, well…yes’. And then she said ‘I would like to try some’.

And then I was thinking maybe, she is having an existential crisis or going off the rails. And I thought maybe it is time to give up weed because this home was falling into dis-repair. And what kind of Rebellion was it when your mother wants to join in (not to mention how that could ruin my street credibility). And dont get me wrong my Mother was a beautiful person, but up to that point in time, she had never even smoked a cigarette. Anyway, I was stalling for time, and said I would have to talk to my friends about it.

And then I went back downstairs and said something like my mother wanted to join the Revolution. Anyway, we talked about it for what seemed like a long time. And I put forward a theory that I thought she was already somehow naturally producing THC in her brain(because she laughed and hugged people randomly and things like that). And I didn’t think we should give her any weed under any circumstances, she already saw the world like a Fellini movie, full of acrobats and circus clowns and lion tamers, and things like that and besides you never really knew what could happen if you got your parents stoned. Maybe, if we could get her to listen to Pink Floyd first and take it from there.

Maybe, in retrospect, we should have let my mother join our revolutionary cell, she was only pretending to be mainstream sometimes. But at the time it felt like we were striking out on our own, and the revolution wasn’t a family event. And I hadn’t fully forgiven her for always kissing me in public and saying ‘Í will always be her lovely boy’. Anyway, I was making some kind of a display out of my independence at the time, and I was also scared that she had a plan to keep me at home until I was fifty or maybe even Sixty.

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The biggest thing we did in our Garage Sessions was go back into Sixties music. ‘There is Something in the Air’ said Thunderclap Newman. ‘Something Happening around Here’ said Buffalo Springfield. There was something ‘Blowin in the Wind’ Bob Dylan said. ‘The Times they are a Changin’ he said.

I didn’t always understand Bob Dylan, because he sometimes spoke in strange and fast and flashing poetic images. But he did seem like a prophetic voice, or a mercurial messenger, And he had probably said, everyone ‘must get stoned’, so that they could understand his lyrics.

The old road is agin’ he said. It wasn’t old people, as such, but the old way of seeing the world. There might be some people that like the old order best, but whatever was true in the 1950’s was no longer true in The Sixties.

‘Come senators, congressmen’, he said ‘please heed the call, don’t stand in the hallway, don’t block up the door’. That was directed towards whoever was standing in the old institutional hallways of power. The senators and congressmen and any other old men. And whoever was in charge of the grubby and corrupt world. And all he was saying was please don’t stand in the hallways, or block up the doors, and stand in the way of the new spirit of the times.

Then in ‘The Chimes of Freedom’, the sky was like ‘a wild Cathedral’ he said. There was a ‘thunder and lightning’ striking like a primitive force. It was shattering the old reality. It was radically altering the universe. It was changing the cosmological situation(and it wasn’t The Sixties youth that started the Sixties Revolution, but the thunder and lightning). And also he said that ‘The sky was cracking its poems in naked wonder’.

Sometimes I sat in naked wonder listening to Bob Dylan’s lyrics (and could feel the thunder and lightning striking like a primitive force) and how the sky was cracking its poems which were then falling down to earth and into Sixties musicians and artists and poets and into their songs and their lyrics, which was the Swinging Sixties version of the Revelations.

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