Flashes

Torn curtains of lace hang in the sky
Cool tendrils that grow, whither and die
All good is to be
Minds open to sight
Things that crawl from your brain are not real.

Trees wave to the stream - rocks in the sun
Who lives in my head? where have I gone?
All life is but one
Steps, cold in the night
Can you see like I do without light?

Watch galaxies whirl inside a rose
Feel thought as it melts, see where it flows
All love is to know
Rain, crystals of light
You cannot know the place I have been.

W/67 - Austin Street

Richard Griggs

This song describes my first three LSD trips, during the summer and fall of 1966, each verse describing elements of one trip. The "torn curtains" of verse 1 were a visual hallucination that appeared above the Anderson Footbridge across the Charles River. Trip 2 was taken by a stream in the White Mountains. On our way home we got pulled over by the police near Manchester, NH and the car was impounded for expired plates. We spent a couple hours in the police station (part of this sitting on the front steps) waiting for our friend Vicky Kent to drive up from Boston in her VW beetle. Since there were six of us it was a cozy trip back. I had a very freaky flashback/bummer a few days later, brought on by reading the acid-scare book Nightmare Drugs by Dr. Donald Louria. As a consequence, trip #3 was rather tentative and was my last psychedelic drug experience for several years.

As you may have guessed, Flashes was to have been the title song for our album (at producer Tom Wilson's suggestion) but the recording wasn't working so it was dropped. There's a live version on this Web site.

<RZ>