| 1. | David Grisman | The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest |
| 2. | Bob Dylan | Bob Dylan's Dream |
| 3. | Ramblin' Jack Elliott | Friend of the Devil |
| 4. | Jimmie Dale Gilmore | Ripple |
| 5. | Canned Heat | On the Road Again |
| 6. | REM | Kerouac No. 4 |
| 7. | The Byrds | Mr. Tambourine Man (a capella) |
| 8. | The Cure | Out in This World |
| 9. | The Godz | Turn On |
| 10. | LCD Soundsytem | Hippie Priest Bum-Out |
| 11. | Scott H. Biram | Hit the Road |
| 12. | The Satelliters | Burn Out |
| 13. | Bob Dylan | On The Road Again |
| 14. | Junior Brown | Highway Patrol |
| 15. | Wilco | Burned |
| 16. | Warren Zevon | You're a Whole Different Person When You're Scared |
| 17. | The Beatles | Los Paranoias |
| 18. | David Crosby | I'd Swear There Was Somebody Here |
“Hey, wanna make $500 on a $100 investment?”
That was how it started. Shaun calling me on some afternoon in June. It sounded alright, we were both just staring down the loaded barrel of summer, waiting for college to start. My 17-year old Kerouac and his 18-year old Cassady, except with less bennies and bisexuality and more Dylan and dope.
The plan was to take my mom’s car and drive across a few states to where the Grateful Dead were scheduled to play in a place called “Deer Creek, Indiana”. The fact that we had no tickets and derived little pleasure from the Dead’s brand of noodling didn’t really matter. The concert was just an afterthought anyway to the parking lot scene before the show, which had reached almost urban legend status around our high school as the last refuge of the Summer of Love. Shaun was determined to use the “scene” to his fullest advantage, hoping to pick up a sheet of acid wholesale and make a nifty profit back in Hometown, USA.
We found Deer Creek on a map and, on the pretense of a camping trip, borrowed my mom’s car for the weekend.
“We’ll need this to check the pH of the sheet so we don’t get screwed.”
That was Shaun’s thinking as he flashed a little glass vial filled with God knows what. Of course, I wasn’t really surprised since Shaun was a mad scientist in need of a lab. We had hated each other for no reason in particular since we met in 9th grade, but then 3 years later he shared a joint I’d brought to a party with some mutual acquaintance. The next time we got together we distilled some hash out of some ditchweed I’d scored, hunkered down in his parent’s basement when they were out on date night. Later that would add to my mother’s shock after I’d been “busted” with some rolling papers and ceremoniously dumped all of my paraphernalia in my little trash can in my bedroom (the hash, a little marble pipe and some pipe screens). The third time we got together, I took him on his first acid trip, at a science fiction convention down at the state capitol. My main memory of that night is just rolling, laughing through the motel with Klingons and our alcoholic chemistry teacher by the punchbowl. And of course somehow wandering back home after driving over two curbs heading out of the parking lot at 3 in the morning.
That little vial would raise more than an eyebrow of suspicion when Mom found it while cleaning out her car, linking it to those “crack vials” the nightly news always talked about. No, Mom, we didn’t smoke crack, just ingesting a bit of lysergic acid diethylamide to tingle our brains.
As we pointed the car out towards the horizon, not much was said, we knew our destination, the trip seemed to buzz by, passing a joint or three between each other as the miles rolled by. Shaun mentioned on the way out there that he had given $50 to the guitarist from Blue Dixie (our town’s local yokel Dead cover band, if there could be a more noble purpose in life) who was headed out to some of the California shows. Shaun figured we’d be covering our bases by having Guitarzan bring a sheet back from those California shows. I mean, if you can’t trust a Deadhead you don’t even know with $50, who can you trust?
“What the fuck are all these corn fields?”
We were in “Deer Creek, Indiana” and had not a clue where the concert was to be, among farms, cows and two-lane blacktop. Though we had some hope that there would be some hippie field just over yonder hill, we weren’t too confident. It was after dark so we decided to crash for the night. Sharing a joint under the stars with some Freewheelin’ on the tape deck brought us right down from the drive and frustration of being in the wrong place. As we awoke at dawn to the smell of patchouli, we figured we were on the right track. Only thing was it was a VW bus full of deadheads who were just as lost as we were in the wilds of the Hoosier state. A gas station attendant filled us on the fact that there was a Deer Creek Amphitheater on the east side of Indianapolis, so we were on the road again.
Seeing the lines of cars along the highway told us we were in the right place. We parked on the high side of a side gravel road above a dry creek. They were everywhere, the aforementioned “dead” heads.
As a natural Dylan fan, I had always felt the Dead represented everything distasteful of the 60s, none of the imagination and all of the sloth. And now, in 1989, they were pale imitators of their own pale imitation of what made great 60s music. No matter, we were there for business, not pleasure.
“Tickets, anybody got tickets?”
The flock of aimless souls seemed to move like schools of fish, shifting with each newsflash of available tickets. We jumped right in and seemed to shift with them and pick up on the same rumors they thrived upon. The clock ticked past the hours and we started to figure that this was where our trip would end. At some point we split up, or probably just wandered apart, because just when I noticed Shaun wasn’t with me, he came running up.
“I’ve got a line on tickets.”
Not sure what we paid, simple overhead on our whole venture. We made it back to the car and stashed the dope box under Shaun’s seat as we approached the entrance to the parking area. There were, oh, maybe 5 or 6 Indiana Highway Patrol car’s on either side of the entrance. I shifted down into second and rolled through the gate.
We found a parking spot a couple rows in, the rest of the crowd might have arrived the night before, enough time for the gypsy caravan to spread out across the couple acres on this side of the hill from the theater. We split the cash between us, not quite sure what we were getting into, but figured we had better split up to improve our chances a bit. I walked a little ahead of Shaun and he said, “Listen”.
Under the festival sound of the crowd, came a low deliberate individual murmur, almost on a different frequency.
“Doses. Doses. Doses.”
Then one guy walked past me, looking just like Keith Richards with a long blonde ponytail. I turned about to tell Shaun that hey this guy looks like Keith Richards with a long blonde ponytail and I see that Shaun was walking with the guy.
“This dude says he has two sheets of Woodstock for 100 bucks.”
As we discuss this, I notice behind Shaun a circle of maybe 12-15 assorted “dudes” for lack of a better term, some long, some short, some fat, some scrawny. At that point, any delusion of being in “hippie paradise” blew to the wind. Of course, we were in it for the money and our own proto-Gonzo sense of adventure. Born two years after the sixties ended, Blonde on Blonde and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas painted the perfect, twisted picture of that decade for me. The sight of this svelte, hippie vendor, his would-be thugs and his “fantastic collection of stamps” fit perfectly on this Desolation Row. The Las Vegas Strip right here in the pasture.
The deal was done. The sheets were handed over in baggies and as they slid into the pocket of my shorts. To this day, I can still recall the feeling as if extended acidic fingers were wrapping themselves around my leg down to the calf. We made it back to the car where Shaun had the cooler to “protect” our investment. We figured, well, for a buck, we could party with this crowd for awhile, so he cut a couple tabs off. I barely glanced at the yellow bird staring up at me as I slid it under my tongue, no questions asked.
It was probably at this point that Shaun started to really get ideas. His thought was, hell, we could sell of 20 or so of those hits here and buy another sheet before we headed back home, make a real killing this summer. Sure thing, Shaun, sounds great to me.
He was in charge of cutting up the sheet, carefully, on the grass, as we crouched down behind our open car door. As he finished snipping off the last tab, he held his hands up to the light, they glistened like a million suns. Obviously, those sheets were incredibly fresh. Not wanting that beautiful liquid to go to waste, Shaun did want any self-respecting developing acid freak would do, he licked them clean.
I’m sure which one of us said something about “finger-lickin’ good”.
Since I was a little wacked as my tab was kicking in, he would be in charge of sales. Apparently, his trip was under control (at the moment).
Again, we slipped off in opposite directions, falling into our own parade, just watching. This would come back to me later, in one of the hophead poems of my youth.
That was how it started. Shaun calling me on some afternoon in June. It sounded alright, we were both just staring down the loaded barrel of summer, waiting for college to start. My 17-year old Kerouac and his 18-year old Cassady, except with less bennies and bisexuality and more Dylan and dope.
The plan was to take my mom’s car and drive across a few states to where the Grateful Dead were scheduled to play in a place called “Deer Creek, Indiana”. The fact that we had no tickets and derived little pleasure from the Dead’s brand of noodling didn’t really matter. The concert was just an afterthought anyway to the parking lot scene before the show, which had reached almost urban legend status around our high school as the last refuge of the Summer of Love. Shaun was determined to use the “scene” to his fullest advantage, hoping to pick up a sheet of acid wholesale and make a nifty profit back in Hometown, USA.
We found Deer Creek on a map and, on the pretense of a camping trip, borrowed my mom’s car for the weekend.
“We’ll need this to check the pH of the sheet so we don’t get screwed.”
That was Shaun’s thinking as he flashed a little glass vial filled with God knows what. Of course, I wasn’t really surprised since Shaun was a mad scientist in need of a lab. We had hated each other for no reason in particular since we met in 9th grade, but then 3 years later he shared a joint I’d brought to a party with some mutual acquaintance. The next time we got together we distilled some hash out of some ditchweed I’d scored, hunkered down in his parent’s basement when they were out on date night. Later that would add to my mother’s shock after I’d been “busted” with some rolling papers and ceremoniously dumped all of my paraphernalia in my little trash can in my bedroom (the hash, a little marble pipe and some pipe screens). The third time we got together, I took him on his first acid trip, at a science fiction convention down at the state capitol. My main memory of that night is just rolling, laughing through the motel with Klingons and our alcoholic chemistry teacher by the punchbowl. And of course somehow wandering back home after driving over two curbs heading out of the parking lot at 3 in the morning.
That little vial would raise more than an eyebrow of suspicion when Mom found it while cleaning out her car, linking it to those “crack vials” the nightly news always talked about. No, Mom, we didn’t smoke crack, just ingesting a bit of lysergic acid diethylamide to tingle our brains.
As we pointed the car out towards the horizon, not much was said, we knew our destination, the trip seemed to buzz by, passing a joint or three between each other as the miles rolled by. Shaun mentioned on the way out there that he had given $50 to the guitarist from Blue Dixie (our town’s local yokel Dead cover band, if there could be a more noble purpose in life) who was headed out to some of the California shows. Shaun figured we’d be covering our bases by having Guitarzan bring a sheet back from those California shows. I mean, if you can’t trust a Deadhead you don’t even know with $50, who can you trust?
“What the fuck are all these corn fields?”
We were in “Deer Creek, Indiana” and had not a clue where the concert was to be, among farms, cows and two-lane blacktop. Though we had some hope that there would be some hippie field just over yonder hill, we weren’t too confident. It was after dark so we decided to crash for the night. Sharing a joint under the stars with some Freewheelin’ on the tape deck brought us right down from the drive and frustration of being in the wrong place. As we awoke at dawn to the smell of patchouli, we figured we were on the right track. Only thing was it was a VW bus full of deadheads who were just as lost as we were in the wilds of the Hoosier state. A gas station attendant filled us on the fact that there was a Deer Creek Amphitheater on the east side of Indianapolis, so we were on the road again.
Seeing the lines of cars along the highway told us we were in the right place. We parked on the high side of a side gravel road above a dry creek. They were everywhere, the aforementioned “dead” heads.
As a natural Dylan fan, I had always felt the Dead represented everything distasteful of the 60s, none of the imagination and all of the sloth. And now, in 1989, they were pale imitators of their own pale imitation of what made great 60s music. No matter, we were there for business, not pleasure.
“Tickets, anybody got tickets?”
The flock of aimless souls seemed to move like schools of fish, shifting with each newsflash of available tickets. We jumped right in and seemed to shift with them and pick up on the same rumors they thrived upon. The clock ticked past the hours and we started to figure that this was where our trip would end. At some point we split up, or probably just wandered apart, because just when I noticed Shaun wasn’t with me, he came running up.
“I’ve got a line on tickets.”
Not sure what we paid, simple overhead on our whole venture. We made it back to the car and stashed the dope box under Shaun’s seat as we approached the entrance to the parking area. There were, oh, maybe 5 or 6 Indiana Highway Patrol car’s on either side of the entrance. I shifted down into second and rolled through the gate.
We found a parking spot a couple rows in, the rest of the crowd might have arrived the night before, enough time for the gypsy caravan to spread out across the couple acres on this side of the hill from the theater. We split the cash between us, not quite sure what we were getting into, but figured we had better split up to improve our chances a bit. I walked a little ahead of Shaun and he said, “Listen”.
Under the festival sound of the crowd, came a low deliberate individual murmur, almost on a different frequency.
“Doses. Doses. Doses.”
Then one guy walked past me, looking just like Keith Richards with a long blonde ponytail. I turned about to tell Shaun that hey this guy looks like Keith Richards with a long blonde ponytail and I see that Shaun was walking with the guy.
“This dude says he has two sheets of Woodstock for 100 bucks.”
As we discuss this, I notice behind Shaun a circle of maybe 12-15 assorted “dudes” for lack of a better term, some long, some short, some fat, some scrawny. At that point, any delusion of being in “hippie paradise” blew to the wind. Of course, we were in it for the money and our own proto-Gonzo sense of adventure. Born two years after the sixties ended, Blonde on Blonde and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas painted the perfect, twisted picture of that decade for me. The sight of this svelte, hippie vendor, his would-be thugs and his “fantastic collection of stamps” fit perfectly on this Desolation Row. The Las Vegas Strip right here in the pasture.
The deal was done. The sheets were handed over in baggies and as they slid into the pocket of my shorts. To this day, I can still recall the feeling as if extended acidic fingers were wrapping themselves around my leg down to the calf. We made it back to the car where Shaun had the cooler to “protect” our investment. We figured, well, for a buck, we could party with this crowd for awhile, so he cut a couple tabs off. I barely glanced at the yellow bird staring up at me as I slid it under my tongue, no questions asked.
It was probably at this point that Shaun started to really get ideas. His thought was, hell, we could sell of 20 or so of those hits here and buy another sheet before we headed back home, make a real killing this summer. Sure thing, Shaun, sounds great to me.
He was in charge of cutting up the sheet, carefully, on the grass, as we crouched down behind our open car door. As he finished snipping off the last tab, he held his hands up to the light, they glistened like a million suns. Obviously, those sheets were incredibly fresh. Not wanting that beautiful liquid to go to waste, Shaun did want any self-respecting developing acid freak would do, he licked them clean.
I’m sure which one of us said something about “finger-lickin’ good”.
Since I was a little wacked as my tab was kicking in, he would be in charge of sales. Apparently, his trip was under control (at the moment).
Again, we slipped off in opposite directions, falling into our own parade, just watching. This would come back to me later, in one of the hophead poems of my youth.
as i remember those fields restless wanderings, i can escape what I thought never did fit
picturing all the faces in the parade
drifting & absolute
they move by, shimmering in the sad glow, aloof from time and all its trappings.
these people float as clearly as a freight train caught in misty dawn
"prisoners all their lives"
i could see that the limits to their insight served quietly to cage their freedom
Yeah, well, whatever. Then a little reality shook the haze from my cerebrum. Some shaggy-haired pudknocker being taken down by the po-lice most likely for just what we had been doing. Then I happened to lift my head out of its aloof laziness and look up along the top of the hill. I lost count after about the fortieth cop I saw up there, looking at all of us “psychedelic revolutionaries.”
Luckily, as this sobering realization came to me, I found the car again, with my dose running down, I decided to perk it up a bit. I couldn’t find Shaun’s surgical scissors, so instinct kicked in. We laughed later at the little hit and a half I had bit off the corner of that sheet.
Laps upon laps among the gypsies, eventually I was staggering along with Shaun, not really sure how or why. The sun was dropping down and supposedly a concert was going to start. Oh, yeah, we’ve got tickets, huh. We didn’t really say much as we fell in with the herd winding its way past those cops at the top of the hill to that “amphitheater” that we were told was where the Dead were playing. A hundred, maybe two-hundred feet into our walk, the same thought came into our heads. As many times as we had dosed together in these few months since the science-fiction convention, we were of “one mind”.
So, back to that thought we came to, "holy shit, if we follow these fuckers into that place, we’ll never go back home again". As I was all about Dylan, Shaun was all about Iron Maiden, both of us disgusted at the thought of ending up as just a couple of fucking deadheads.
So, Shaun had a new capitalistic brainstorm. Let’s sell those god-damn tickets, buy us another sheet or whatever and get the fuck out of here.
I’m not really sure how we got rid of the tickets, but soon we had another 60 bucks or so to work with. Now, to find supplies. As we walked along the north edge of the carnival, we saw this crazy fucker on the edge of the woods swinging his hairy body supported by a five-foot tree branch.
“Psychedelic tree branch, three bucks a foot!”
Man, that dude was fucking gone, we thought as we walked on past.
“Psychedelic tree branch, three bucks a foot! … shrooms, doses, shrooms, shrooms … Psychedelic tree branch, three bucks a foot!”
This time I was paying more attention and grabbed Shaun to say this fucker’s full of shit. Another reality check when we approached him about the products he was mentioning under his breath when the dude stood straight up and I guess what you would call his “posse” came out of the woods at his flank.
Sitting on a log while the dude goes to dig up the sheet he’s got for us. He had first dumped a bag of shrooms in Shaun’s hands, luminescent azure, the psilocybin just shimmering. Shaun later told me he wasn’t really sure what stopped him from popping the whole handful in his mouth, which would have doubly screwed us, they were out of our budget and it would have completely blown the mind of my designated driver.
“Fuck, man, that’s only 50 hits.”
At least Shaun could still do some quick math.
“These are double dose Lucky Charms, man.”
I was more interested in getting us the fuck out of that increasingly heavy situation than haggling over the particulars of the deal. Besides, didn’t Shaun know that a deadhead would never screw us?
So, we packed away our bounty, some 240 hits (after our own and Shaun’s dubious sales scheme) for $165 bucks, not bad considering they would go for $4 to $6 a hit or more back in Hometown, USA.
“Are you okay to drive?”
I figured I was so I slipped into the driver’s seat and pulled out of the parking space. Fortunately most of those damn hippies had headed over the hill to their own version of hell, 3 hours of Jerry, Weir, Lesh and the rest. Two God-damn drummers, fuck!
So that was a real Kodak moment, two basically underage kids with out-of-state plates, their pupils blown out to the size of quarters, leaving a Grateful Dead show early, a suspicious cooler between them holding what we had been told, were 240 or so felony possessions with full intent to distribute. Good thing I couldn’t see the big picture at that point or I might have really freaked as we pulled between those line of Highway Patrol cars. I might have even had a mild stroke as the cherry tops appeared in my rearview mirror a few moments later. I know I have probably never exhaled greater than when that cop turned down a side road. Probably some stray deadhead peeing in the public roadway.
Shaun swore we must have driven for hours in the wrong direction on the Indianapolis outer belt. No, Shaun, I assured him, Bringing It All Back Home was at the end of side 1, we listened to the 5 minutes or so of Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream is all. We were turned around and headed back down to the interstate as the first notes of Tambourine Man came on.
As the sun was going down, the headlights on the opposite side of the highway swirled up into unmanageable shapes (bat-free, for the moment) before my very eyes.
“Uh, maybe you’d better drive, Shaun...”
Luckily, as this sobering realization came to me, I found the car again, with my dose running down, I decided to perk it up a bit. I couldn’t find Shaun’s surgical scissors, so instinct kicked in. We laughed later at the little hit and a half I had bit off the corner of that sheet.
Laps upon laps among the gypsies, eventually I was staggering along with Shaun, not really sure how or why. The sun was dropping down and supposedly a concert was going to start. Oh, yeah, we’ve got tickets, huh. We didn’t really say much as we fell in with the herd winding its way past those cops at the top of the hill to that “amphitheater” that we were told was where the Dead were playing. A hundred, maybe two-hundred feet into our walk, the same thought came into our heads. As many times as we had dosed together in these few months since the science-fiction convention, we were of “one mind”.
So, back to that thought we came to, "holy shit, if we follow these fuckers into that place, we’ll never go back home again". As I was all about Dylan, Shaun was all about Iron Maiden, both of us disgusted at the thought of ending up as just a couple of fucking deadheads.
So, Shaun had a new capitalistic brainstorm. Let’s sell those god-damn tickets, buy us another sheet or whatever and get the fuck out of here.
I’m not really sure how we got rid of the tickets, but soon we had another 60 bucks or so to work with. Now, to find supplies. As we walked along the north edge of the carnival, we saw this crazy fucker on the edge of the woods swinging his hairy body supported by a five-foot tree branch.
“Psychedelic tree branch, three bucks a foot!”
Man, that dude was fucking gone, we thought as we walked on past.
“Psychedelic tree branch, three bucks a foot! … shrooms, doses, shrooms, shrooms … Psychedelic tree branch, three bucks a foot!”
This time I was paying more attention and grabbed Shaun to say this fucker’s full of shit. Another reality check when we approached him about the products he was mentioning under his breath when the dude stood straight up and I guess what you would call his “posse” came out of the woods at his flank.
Sitting on a log while the dude goes to dig up the sheet he’s got for us. He had first dumped a bag of shrooms in Shaun’s hands, luminescent azure, the psilocybin just shimmering. Shaun later told me he wasn’t really sure what stopped him from popping the whole handful in his mouth, which would have doubly screwed us, they were out of our budget and it would have completely blown the mind of my designated driver.
“Fuck, man, that’s only 50 hits.”
At least Shaun could still do some quick math.
“These are double dose Lucky Charms, man.”
I was more interested in getting us the fuck out of that increasingly heavy situation than haggling over the particulars of the deal. Besides, didn’t Shaun know that a deadhead would never screw us?
So, we packed away our bounty, some 240 hits (after our own and Shaun’s dubious sales scheme) for $165 bucks, not bad considering they would go for $4 to $6 a hit or more back in Hometown, USA.
“Are you okay to drive?”
I figured I was so I slipped into the driver’s seat and pulled out of the parking space. Fortunately most of those damn hippies had headed over the hill to their own version of hell, 3 hours of Jerry, Weir, Lesh and the rest. Two God-damn drummers, fuck!
So that was a real Kodak moment, two basically underage kids with out-of-state plates, their pupils blown out to the size of quarters, leaving a Grateful Dead show early, a suspicious cooler between them holding what we had been told, were 240 or so felony possessions with full intent to distribute. Good thing I couldn’t see the big picture at that point or I might have really freaked as we pulled between those line of Highway Patrol cars. I might have even had a mild stroke as the cherry tops appeared in my rearview mirror a few moments later. I know I have probably never exhaled greater than when that cop turned down a side road. Probably some stray deadhead peeing in the public roadway.
Shaun swore we must have driven for hours in the wrong direction on the Indianapolis outer belt. No, Shaun, I assured him, Bringing It All Back Home was at the end of side 1, we listened to the 5 minutes or so of Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream is all. We were turned around and headed back down to the interstate as the first notes of Tambourine Man came on.
As the sun was going down, the headlights on the opposite side of the highway swirled up into unmanageable shapes (bat-free, for the moment) before my very eyes.
“Uh, maybe you’d better drive, Shaun...”
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