A vision
That breathes upon its own
An incision
To cut it out, alone
I will stand apart
As the stars align
There's nothing left of me to malign
Help me to get out of my mind
from "Get Out of My Mind"
by "The Plasma Miasma"
Once again, thunder roared. As before, demons shrieked pain from
the darkness. Fire Brisbane lowered his hands, touching fingertips to
bone-white keys and bringing forth a wraithlike swirl of sound. It was an
ecstatic moment.
It was hard to be sure when exactly Fire had realized that it was
going to work. Not the moment when he'd met Danny at the bus station; that
had been awkward, Danny seemed the whole time as if he were marching to the
scaffold and not about to jam with some old friends.And not when Wild
Willie had strolled through the door; despite the fact that his hair was
still longer than Danny's, Willie seemed more a part of the straight world.
He looked more tamed. And it sure wasn't the moment when Gene walked into
Fire's basement studio. One look at the gangly teen who intended to replace
poor John Symonds was enough to set all eyeballs in the room rolling
skyward...
Maybe it was when Gene plugged in his Stratocaster. Maybe the sound
that came out of Gene's vintage Marshall amp, so nostalgic in an era of
cold solid state circuitry and yet at the same time so vital and alive,
touched a nerve in the back of everyone's mind, awakened a long-disused
ganglion and set it screaming to activity, pulling them back to a place and
time when they were a band, when incense and patchouli filled the air and
music and magic didn't seem to be such separate things. Maybe it was when
Daniel Hawthorne smacked the skins of his old kit and grinned like the
Danny Thorny that he used to be; it certainly showed in the matching grin
that surged onto Wild Willie's face as he churned out a fast scale on the
frets of his Fender Precision. Fire was certain his own face bore a
matching toothsomeness as he tore into a brief progression on the Hammond.
Slowly they came together; from scales and warm-ups grew a jam, hesitant at
first but ultimately confident and exciting.
And psychedelic.
If there was any debate about just exactly what the word
psychedelic meant these days, the jam that the reunited, rejuvenated Plasma
Miasma struck up could serve as a primer. The sounds coming from Gene's
guitar were filled with brain-piercing intensity, with haunted overtones of
longing and a low-bore sexual growl of a fuzz underpinning. Danny's
drumming, though obviously rusty, was the optimum combination of tribal
thud and rock-n-roll excitement; his fills grabbed you by the chest and
pulled you bodily onto another level of existence, while Willie's bass was
a low stable throb that pulled and pulsed alongside the drums, then leapt
suddenly into a riff like a rearing hippo.
Fire listened to his old friends, his fellow musicians, making
music again, making music the old way, and he let the sound reach down into
his arms and tell his fingers what to do. He began playing a choppy
staccato rhythm, never quite fully depressing the keys so that the sound
that came out was abbreviated and odd, like the organ was hyperventilating.
Then, catching the feel of a rising swell from the other musicians, he
caught it at its peak with a full-throated D-minor chord, which he held
long enough so that the sound of the whirling Leslie speakers had time to
build to its fullest; then he cut the chord off with a keyboard slide at
exactly the right moment, launching into a series of runs that complemented
the leadwork being laid down by Gene.
It was a spectacular jam, spooky in its precision. But even that
wasn't the moment. No, the moment when Fire Brisbane knew that this wild
idea was going to work came right after the jam.
The moment came as the jam began to wind down. One by one the
musicians began to drop out, first Fire, who slowly faded the keys with his
volume pedal; then Gene, who ended with a screaming wah-wah flourish and a
slide up the low "E" string with his pick, rattling it against the
wound-metal texture of the string with full -on fuzz and echo... it was a
shattering sound, like a space-ship from the far future anachronistically
taxiing in on an Earthen runway. Finally Wild Willie slid his fingers up
the neck of his bass for a brief, funky solo. And then it was just Danny,
keeping to an iron-hammer beat, no sign of fading, or slowing. It was clear
that he had no intention of stopping the jam just yet.
Gene looked over at Fire. He shrugged. But Willie knew what to do.
Without looking up he began the slow descending pattern that was
the hallmark of "Get Out of My Mind". Gene heard that and grinned,
immediately picking it up on his guitar. He had the sound and the
inflection perfectly, Fire thought. And there was something else; the kid
had style. The sound was pure John Symonds, yet Gene took it somewhere a
little beyond that; he was only a little younger than Symonds had been when
the Plasma Miasma had originally recorded the song, yet his playing was
more mature, more seasoned, more full of depth and nuance. Fire was so
amazed that he barely remembered to play his own instrument.
He entered with the keyboard trill on the high note of the
progression and felt transported in time. He was thirty years younger, and
so was the world; anything was possible, and the future wasn't just bright,
it was goddam enlightened.
Fire Brisbane grinned from ear to ear and began to sing:
"A vision, that twists inside your brain"...
And with those words his own mind was swept with a vision of its
own, the Plasma Miasma reborn renewed reanimated and resuscitated, a four
headed apocalypse beast-horse pulling itself from the grave with hooves
like hands and galloping from the weed-choked Psychedelic Wing of the
"Rockers of Yore Cemetery", surging away past headstones of The Brothers
Grim and The Barrow Wights, past The Beacon Street Union and The Ultimate
Spinach, past The Castaways and The Seeds and out into the sunlight of a
newly born day, bringing Rock the Way it Was to a new generation and an old
one, and maybe, just maybe...
Reawakening the Great Soul.
It was a concept that Fire had come to believe in over the past
three decades. He first had the idea in the early seventies, when things
first started falling to pieces; then he refined it in the soulless
eighties; and now it had become a sort of article of faith to him in the
millenarian nineties, this unnerving decade of random violence and casual
insanity. He rarely put it into words, of course; it was more of a guiding
concept, a feeling, an ideal.
The Great Soul.
In Fire's mind, it was a sort of "Spirit of the 60's", though it
was more than that, of course. It was the raising up of consciousness that
came with the dawn of the psychedelic movement, but it was more than that,
as well.
It was a sort of Mass Intelligence, given life by the psychedelic host.
It partook of each person who felt it, as they partook of it. It
was vast, it was incredible, it was frightening in its implications...
But it was Good.
One had just to touch it with one's opened mind to know that, to
know it through and through. It was one with peace and freedom, and it
brought laughter, and love, and the breaking down of cold ape-society
social barriers. It was Great, and it was Good.
Until its dark brother killed it.
Fire had thought about the Miskatonic Acid Test many times in the
past three decades, many, many times. Like everyone else who was there, he
had seen things, many things, that didn't make sense in any rationally
constructed universe. Things that would flit about in the dark corners of
his mind, that would flash suddenly before his eyes upon waking some
dreamless mornings, that would flicker behind him in mirrors and beneath
the surfaces of still pools and dark slow rivers.
How real these things had been was a question he had often asked
himself. There was acid involved, lots of it; and he had always assumed it
was "bad acid". But over the past few weeks, as he had relived the old days
in his mind and listened to the old songs, trying to rediscover the Andy
Brisbane he had once been, he had begun to re-formulate the idea of the
Great Soul, and to wonder just how it had been extinguished so thoroughly,
so quickly. The answer was in the music, somewhere... he was sure of it.
The music was the key. Listening to the records from the sixties, and then
listening to records from the seventies, even those by the same musicians,
you could hear it, or, that is, no longer hear it... it was gone, the Great
Soul was gone.
But where had it gone? And why?
After thinking about it for a good while, he thought he had an idea.
It was crazy, so much so that if he were to tell anyone he just
might find himself paying an involuntary visit to John Symonds' ward room.
It even sounded crazy to Fire, once in a while. But more and more he was
beginning to think he was right.
The Dark Soul.
It would be the bastard twin of the Great Soul, Shiva to its
Vishnu, Loki to its Balder, Jagger to its McCartney. Always there, always
watching, always waiting... waiting for a chance to pounce and kill.
For some reason, it got its opportunity at the Miskatonic Acid Test.
Of course it wasn't that simple. The Souls weren't people, or
myth-figures with names and quirks and pet owls. They were forces,
energies, multi-minded incomprehensible things, Fire's perception of which
may have merely represented in their most prosaic form. They may have even
been different aspects of the same being, though that was not Fire's
perception. But for some reason, maybe the bad acid, maybe that crazy
professor, maybe even that damn book he'd brought with him, the lurking
darkness had spilled into the hall those college kids had rented, and
usurped the Great Soul from its position in the hearts of all assembled,
and touched them all with its poisons. Nothing had been the same since, for
anyone.
Fire Brisbane never told anyone about this, of course. He knew that
neither Willie nor Danny wanted to think much about the old days, not the
bad times, anyway; and Gene, who might understand someday, for the love of
Mike he might, was too fresh, too green to think of the music as anything
more than something cool he was into. Someday he might stop and think about
just exactly why this particular music appealed to him so strongly, and he
might understand; but for now, Fire would keep his theories and his
cosmology to himself, and just plain belt out the tune.
"Help me to get out of my mind..."
It was working. For God's sake it was working.
Maybe they couldn't bring back the Great Soul. But maybe they could.
Hell, maybe they could even raise the dead.