The Dead had inspired the Allmans to incorporate jazz into their extended blues rock improvisations, while the Band had inspired the Dead to explore their Americana roots on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. The Dead was moving away from Americana now toward a smooth jazz sound with the arrival of keyboardist Keith Gordchaux.
The main Dead Head tradition, of course, was going to a show, ingesting hallucinogens to block the serotonin receptors, and “somehow hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all,” as comparative religion scholar Joseph Campbell put it in his symposium with Dead drummer Mickey Hart called Ritual and Rapture: From Dionysus to the Grateful Dead.10 As Tom Wolfe noted in, hallucinogens created a chemical reaction in the brain analogous to religious awe.
Alpert embodied a preferable trajectory: Western academic psychiatry to psychedelics to Eastern mysticism. He traveled to India and met fellow seeker Kermit Riggs, who had renamed himself Bhagavan Dass. “When my mind would go off into Jewish neuroticism, Bhagavan Dass would say, ‘Come back here and be here now.’” Alpert renamed himself Ram Dass and published Be Here Now in 1971. He hit the lecture circuit in a white robe, sponsored retreats, and sold tapes.
Houston was a figure in the Human Potential Movement, which had its own Shambala in Esalen, off the winding Pacific Coast Highway in Big Sur. Nude sulphur baths built into the mountains looked out over the ocean as the surf crashed and shimmered in the moonlight. Founders Michael Murphy and Dick Price brought in speakers and held workshops covering the latest advances in Western psychiatry along with Eastern philosophy and psychedelics.
A third author who combined ancient mysticism with psychedelics was about to join Castaneda on the chart, though he was painfully up-front about his tortured past. Robert Pirsig’srecounted his attempt to reconnect with his son on a motorcycle trip following a nervous breakdown and electroshock therapy, precipitated by his quixotic attempt to create his own system of metaphysics.
The Club 101 mansion boasted waterbeds and a chamber of mirrors. In a Detroit swingers gathering, guests mingled as at any cocktail party until the appointed time, when the host announced that “anything went” as long as all partners consented. Some couples waited in line for private rooms; others made do with the rows of cots in the basement. The “key party” was recreated in the 1997 film. Attendees threw their car keys in a bowl, then plucked them out at random to see who would go with whom.
What the fuck does rolling stone care about rock music all of a sudden
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