We all know that music creates mood, and mood can be very conducive to your experience when taking a high. No-one in their right mind would take an e then stick Radiohead on their i-pod, for example!

I was discussing past experiences with a friend the other day, and relived the first time I ever took magic mushrooms, whilst they were still legal to buy over the counter at headshops. At the fore-front of my mind when thinking about that evening was how I listened to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and really got it for the first time, and how I quite simply couldn’t imagine my life without Jimi Hendrix.

For those of you who have never taken a hallucinogen before, let me explain. The world outside where you are ceases to exist. If you are in a room with 4 other people, they become the only people you know. You cannot remember what it was like to not be on that trip. There is no past, no future; you can only deal in the present. You would, therefore, think nothing of having the same song on repeat for an hour at a time. Which is precisely what happened to me when my Best of Jimi Hendrix CD reached ‘Hey Joe.’ I had, at that moment, never heard anything that spoke to me so deeply and fundamentally, that I had to listen to it again and again and again. (After hearing it maybe four or five times I was beginning to lose interest. It was only accidentally leaning on the remote control and taking it off repeat that enabled the CD to continue.)

After the magic of Jimi ended, the CD changed to Sgt Pepper by The Beatles, and my God. Wow. I have always considered myself a big Beatles fan, but listening to that album whilst tripping was an incredibly profound experience for me, as I felt that I finally understood what Messrs Lennon and McCartney were trying to say back then, in the LSD fuelled days of 1967. I wish I could explain in sober words how I felt at that incredible moment during ‘A Day In The Life’ when the orchestra builds to a crescendo; all I can say is that at that moment it felt as if my whole life had been leading to me listening to that song, and that once the orchestra ended the meaning of life itself would be revealed.

Was it? I cannot say for sure. By that time I had noticed a Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow poster, and he was standing on a dock, his hair blowing in the wind, waves crashing behind him and flames erupting in the air, and at that moment nothing else mattered….

Filed under: Natural on July 9th, 2010