Jackson Brown, werewolves, jumping frogs, and destruction of government property that was me.

In the mid-seventies I did something that was very untypical for the hippie group that I grew up with. I joined the United States Air Force. The first real job I had after I got married young at age 20 was milking cows on a dairy. It paid under the table and it came with a house to live in. I milked 100 cows twice a day 6 days a week. My wife was pregnant and I thought it would be a move in the right direction to take a similar job in Morro Bay. So I moved us from Lincoln, north of Sacramento, to Morro Bay which is on the coast halfway to LA.

This turned out to be a very bad move on my part. I hated the new job. I hated the house that came with it. One day I wandered into a recruiting station at a mall. I found out that armed services would be willing to send me to school for one whole year, out of the four years of an enlistment. That seemed like a pretty good deal compared to what I was doing at the time. The Vietnam War was over. I knew that there was not going to be another War for some time so it seemed like a safe gamble.

After basic training I knew I was going to be in Biloxi Mississippi for 9 months of tech school. I got trained in air traffic control radar repair. My wife and I looked at the map and got all excited thinking we’re going to be right on the coast. We had visions of laying around on the beach and body surfing in the waves. What a big joke on us that was. The Gulf of Mexico is as different from the Pacific Ocean coast of California as it could possibly get. Biloxi was still trying to recover from Hurricane Camille. The beach was dirty, the waves were about 2 inches high. I don’t recall that we ever spent any time on it. One of my favorite Ram Dass quotes says “Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.” I can laugh now but at the time it didn’t seem so funny.

So many things were so different in the mid-seventies than they are now. When we packed up our big Ford truck to drive back to California, we put our 5 month old baby in a wicker basket on the floorboard of the passenger side. My mother had sent me some pot brownies that I had saved for the journey. I did one of those things that often happens with edibles. I ate one. I waited a little bit and nothing happened. I ate another one and I waited a little bit and nothing happened. I ate the last one. Oh my God. There’s a stretch of road between Biloxi, Mississippi and New Orleans that’s about an 80 mile straight stretch through the swamp. I felt like I was driving from 20 feet above the road for that whole way.

I was stationed at Beale Air Force Base near Marysville Yuba City north of Sacramento for my three years after tech school . That base was the home of the SR-71 super spy plane reconnaissance jet. The fastest one ever made. In 1978 decided to attend a Jackson Browne concert at Angels Camp, in the foothills of the Sierras south of Sacramento.

Angels Camp was first put on the map by Mark Twain in the late 1800’s he wrote a fictional tale about a contest between two frogs to see which could jump the farthest in that town. In 1928 the town of Angels Camp decided to start holding annual Jumping Frog contests for real. It is a bizarre event’ People scream at their frogs to get them to jump. But it was a great venue for the concert. Outdoors, real close to the stage seating.

From 1970 on I only took LSD a small handful of times. There are a few reasons for that but one of the main ones is that the quality of it was just not the same. In the Eagles hit song Hotel California there’s a line they sing that says “We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.” I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re talking about. Between 1965, at age 12, and 1969 I took the very pure, Sandoz quality, Owsley grade, Orange Sunshine type LSD a half a dozen times. None of the trips I took after that were quite the same. The best way I could describe the difference is that under the influence of the later LSD if I wanted to focus my mind I could start thinking pretty straight again. That wasn’t possible with 200 to 400 micrograms of the really pure stuff.

By 1978 it had been a few years since I had tripped and I acquired a couple of tabs for the concert. My wife stayed straight so she could drive us home. And it was a fantastic concert. Somebody named Warren Zevon who I had heard hardly anything about was the opening act. When he launched into Werewolves of London I was stunned. It was powerful, it was driving. I still have no idea what the lyrics mean but it’s a great freaking song. Jackson Browne had recently released his Running on Empty album. I consider that to be one of the top 10 rock and roll albums of all time. We had listened to it a lot and we knew every word of all the songs. There is one part in particular that lots of people are very fond of. After his moving song called The Load Out, where he sings about playing his piano while the roadies pack things up, they launch into a version of the song Stay. “Oh won’t you stay just a little bit longer.” At some point a really extremely high pitched voice comes in to sing that one line. I don’t know the name of the artist but when I saw him perform it live it was an unforgettable event. I think it was the keyboard player. He took a hit off a helium balloon and then belted out that chorus line. That’s how they got those really high pitched notes in that song.

I wore cut-offs to the event. I sat in the sun all day. On the long drive home I realized I had gotten an extremely bad sunburn on the top of my thighs. When I called my sergeant to tell him I couldn’t come to work because I had a really, really bad sunburn, he told me they would have to consider charging me with destruction of government property. The government property being me. That I had destructed. Me. I was sure at first he was joking. He was not. They did not charge ma. I pulled it together somehow and showed up for duty to my scheduled shift.

Peace, love and may the force be with you.

Storm.

This post is now a blog page along with the others I have posted here. At www.ramdasslove.org To be notified of any new encounters with Ram Dass or future personal blog posting there, follow this facebook page:
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Here is a link to a short blurb on the Jumping Frog contests:
http://www.calaverasenterprise.com/fair_2019/article_bc10bf22-62db-11e9-bbcb-83a5a278bb1a.html

The wikipedia page on the history of LSD had a lot of details about its use but doesn’t mention how or why it changed after 1969:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_lysergic_acid_diethylamide#Production_of_LSD

I just decided to do an interview with Tim Scully on the topic of why really pure LSD could not be manufactured after 1969. He told me a bit about that a long time ago. He was then, and is somewhat now, a member of my extended family. Assuming agrees to it and agrees to let me make it public, I will post it here and on my blog page. More about Tim Scully:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Scully