From Transition from College to Bands
As befits “The Lost Year”, I don’t remember how I ended up at Medway Forest. Probably I was picked up on Alpine Road by Jim Poston while I was hitchhiking to the Anonymous Artists.
In 1966 I was 22 years old. Chuck and Danny, who seemed slightly younger, also lived in this little compound in the woods off Alpine Road. Danny Wai had been a bass player in a band in San Diego. Somehow after I lived there a while Warren Phillips tracked me down and communicated (I don’t remember how) that he wanted me to be the drummer in his new band in San Francisco. He said he didn’t have a bass player so I told him about Danny, Warren said bring him along, we’ll see if it works out. Next stop was San Francisco and the formation of Mount Rushmore. The transition from college to bands was almost complete.
Here’s what I wrote about Medway Forest in 1976 in the Altered States of Consciousness section of my Antioch Portfolio. It was notated there as trips 10, 11, and 12.
10. Medway Forest – La Honda (1965)
P/R: Down the road from the Anonymous Artists was another commune called the Medway Forest. The renter of this property, Jim Poston, had been taking LSD and experiencing very primitive states. He had changed his name to Jwab. I spent a trip out in the woods with him and his wife and son. At that time I was reading Meher Baba and I can remember at one point hugging a tree and crying to be heard by Baba. At another point I was lying on my back looking up through the trees and listening to a stereo Jwab had imported into the woods.
S/K: I began to explore the communal aspects of stoned consciousness, sitting all day with a family in the woods, exploring each other’s fantasies.
11. Medway Beach Outing (1966)
P/R: Some of us who were living at Medway took some LSD and went to the beach. The day consisted of looking in awe at the patterns in the rocks and trying to negotiate our way to and from the beach. We laughed a lot.
S/K: I began to experience the sense of travelling communally while stoned. The given was the sense of awe and wonder at everything presented. The learning was that we could navigate almost as well as in normal consciousness, or at least well enough to get ourselves to the beach and back.
12. Medway DMT day (1966)
P/R: One afternoon at Medway, Pat and Donna, who had a separate little cottage, invited me in to have some DMT with them. They had a round table hanging from the ceiling. We all sat around the table, took a puff of DMT, and spun the table slowly. Whatever item on the table ended up at your position became your whole universe for about ten or fifteen minutes. I remember spending that time with a page from the Bible, although I can’t remember the passage. Later than evening I borrowed their copy of Tim Leary’s record, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,” and listened to it.
S/K: I learned from Leary’s record that there was a more or less coherent social theory that went along with what we were doing.
Trip 13 must also have happened when I was living at Medway. I was only involved with the Manbeavil Sneak Music Band for a short while. During that time we went to the Avalon Ballroom to see the Steve Miller Blues Band. Miller didn’t form his band until October 1966, and first played the Avalon in December 1966 and January 1967. Since I went directly to Mount Rushmore from Medway Forest, and Mount Rushmore started in March 1967, I think I was hitchhiking to Santa Cruz to visit the MSMB while living at Medway.
13. Hitchhiking: Palo Alto to Santa Cruz (1966)
P/R: I was still wanting to do something creative with all this energy and hitchhiked down to Santa Cruz to see some friends who had a blues band and were looking for a drummer. The experience of being on the road alone was pretty scary. I was lucky that the officer who stopped me at the off-ramp in Santa Cruz didn’t hassle me any more about the blue work shirt I was wearing and which make him think I had escaped from an honor farm or something. I remember walking down the road writing angry comments about the people who wouldn’t give me a ride on the back page of my copy of Perls’s “Ego, Hunger, and Aggression.”
S/K: I learned that a lot of the credit for navigating while stoned went to my partners and it was very difficult for me to do it alone.
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