While I don't advocate drug use for anything other than medicinal purposes, it wasn't always that way. I went through a period where I regularly listened to music in an altered state or went to gigs and got stoned. Sometimes it really took the music somewhere else. Other times it just gave me a headache.
Two happenings in particular stand out from the dim and distant past. A tune that was great to listen to stoned was "Echoes" by Pink Floyd. Those 23 minutes were a trip in themselves. I used to feel myself going 'into' the music, especially during
David Gilmour's first solo, as it reaches it's peak, it would feel like a great weight was pressing me into my bed and beanbag. It was such an incredible feeling. It happened a few times and I loved that sensation then I found I was listening to the song
looking for something like that to happen and it wasn't any more.
I had been into the Beatles for 6 or 7 years before I ever listened to them under the yin~fluence and you'd think that a band whose music was so readily identified with drugs would be a great listen. But they weren't really, no more than other artists like Styx or Stanley Clark. But on one occasion I was listening to "Rubber Soul" and I'd not taken anything for a very long time and as I listened, in my minds eye, the music became these incredible coloured shapes. It was in the song "Think for yourself" that this really stood out because the top and the bottom of 'the music' separated and were like venn diagram wheels {in the loosest sense of the word, wheels} and they were moving in completely opposing ways. It's a song with a really strange riff anyway but it was fascinating seeing how each part of the music had it's own character and separated into top and bottom. The top was going in one direction, the bottom in another but the entire musical block remained.
If I was a cartoonist, I'd try to make an animation based on it.
