There is a connection between truth and depression, as clearly evidenced by scientific studies, some of which are cited in Robert Ornstein's Psychology: The Study of Human Experience. Simply put, "normal" people with no depression overestimate their chances of winning the lottery, underestimate their chances of having various negative experiences, attribute more honorable motives to others than is actually the case. To get realistic estimates of how likely something bad or good is to happen, or of the motives of others, you have to go to mildly depressed people. Thus at least some of the appeal of the depressed Reid heyday with Procol Harum, where he touched on some very interesting perceptions.
Our topic has some relation to the connection, again well documented in the psychological literature, between creativity and manic depression. A measure of bipolarity, a sine wave of higher highs and lower lows than "normal" seems to produce more profound work in almost all realms of creativity- provided that the author is not so dysfunctional as to be unable to complete things. To me this is the most significant reason why John Lennon is a better songwriter than Paul McCartney for example, or Matthew Fisher a better organist than anyone.
While far ahead of his time and unable to ultimately address the situation in a personal sense, it is clear to me that Nietzche among Western philosophical writers got closest to the crux of the problem of organized Christianity in a post-feudal world. And I believe that examining Nietzche's situation is relevant to that of Keith Reid, and indeed to anyone who attempts to boldly go outside the standard norms for either artistic or spiritual purposes, or both.
Simply put, the forces of bureaucracy, with their need for dogma, control, consistency, optimism and so forth absolutely must converge on the repression of truth... for the greater good of the greater number if you view it positively, to assure their position and income with minimal hassles if you view it negatively. Because it is unlikely for reasons too complex and multiple to discuss here for let's say 90-99% of people to actually arrive at a mystical goal comparable to the experience of Christ, and to even discuss such a matter is full of all sorts of magical taboo problems involving elitism and airy fairy metaphysics and various power and control issues... organized religions the world over have simply shut down the mystical branch of experience, consigning it to the magical realm of the founder and closing it to everyone else. In the case of Christianity, as 2000 years have ensued during which basically NOTHING happened in the mystical plane according to church dogma, this has become quite wearing on that proportion of the populace that has some conception of such experience being possible or desirable or, God forbid, accessible to everyday people.
This dismal outcome, mystically speaking, can be traced back to the original codification of the Bible in the fourth century at the Nicene council, sponsored by the Catholic Church of the time. No Christian religion, no matter how Protestant or anti-Catholic or charismatic, has bothered to go back to this point and reexamine the available Christ-related materials and reconfigure the Bible on the basis of historical accuracy, scholarship, or any other reasonable criterion. Everyone has built upon that version of the Bible, which many scholars (including the noted poet Matthew Arnold) have proven to be arbitrary and highly unreliable in an historic sense. There is far more information about Jesus and his life, including quotes, anecdotes, and even hints of mystical techniques, than appears in any official Christian text used in the contemporary world.
All bureaucracies, all organizations, converge on a self-preserving, taboo-enforcing tribe regardless of their original intent or that of their founders; that is a simple fact of life on earth. Attempting to change it is like trying to find wetter water. Realizing it is a profoundly disturbing moment... for while these same institutions do have a positive and needed role in preventing chaos and anarchy and such in a far from perfect world, at the same time they impose limits on the high end of experience that have a steep price. The analogy is that of limiting how fast you can drive your car... it saves lives for 90-99% of people, and for the 1-10% who can handle faster speeds it inhibits them. We can afford this on the roads... but perhaps not on the Path if you catch my drift.
I now cite a quote about Nietzche from the Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, well known Sufi mystic and author, then one from Keith Reid. TheSirdar speaks about Nietzche as the latter relates to devising modern methods of achieving mystical experience:
"Perhaps a psychopath endowed with great intellect- the combination is not an impossibility- may give us a clue to such a technique. In modern Europe Nietzche, whose life and activity form, at least to us Easterns, an exceedingly interesting problem in religious psychology, was endowed with some sort of a constitutional equipment for such an undertaking. His mental history is not without a parallel in the history of Eastern Sufism. That a really "imperative" vision of the Divine in man did come to him cannot be denied. I call his vision "imperative" because it appears to have given him a kind of prophetic mentality which, by some kind of technique, aims at turning its visions into permanent life-forces. Yet Nietzche was a failure; and his failure was mainly due to his intellectual progenitors such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, and Lange whose influence completely blinded him to the real significance of his vision. Instead of looking for a spiritual rule which would develop the Divine even in a plebeian and thus open up before him an infinite future, Nietzche was driven to seek the realization of his vision in such schemes as aristocratic radicalism.... Thus failed a genius whose vision was solely determined by his internal forces, and remained unproductive for want of expert internal guidance in his spiritual life."
Motivated perhaps by similar impulses, Keith Reid said in Barnyard Stories:
"Now and then my life seems truer, now and then my thoughts seem pure All in all my thoughts are fewer, maybe death will be my cure."
The connective thread with where we began is the now and then, the rhythm of the spheres or manic depression or what have you, as perception waxes and wanes, even as the moon. It is lines such as these that are both the charm of Procol Harum in a philosophical sense, and also why the group could never be a big mainstream success. The audience is, after all, for the most part:
"The dead, who spend their lives in fear of a death that they're not sure of, of a life they can't control." (this from the magnum opus In Held Twas In I)
This is absolutely true, that is its strength. And absolutely, or almost absolutely, no one wants to hear, or face, or deal with it, often with good reason.
In 1971 or so I had the privilege of studying Modern Poetry with Alicia Ostriker at Rutgers University. Alicia was a poet in her own right and a pretty good critic as well, chain-smoked and wore miniskirts and long hair, very much in a sort of academic/Beatnik tradition. Thanks to her, Marius Bewley (Romantic Poetry), T. R. Edwards and others, I actually have some sort of critical pedigree that could be used to justify my attempts at analysis, such as the present. In any case, the material we studied was what you'd expect, T.S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Leroi Baraka/Jones, Sylvia Plath. And of course the students in the "permissive" atmosphere of the time were given the opportunity, if they so chose, to teach one class each on some modern poet they liked.
The only other person I can recall chose Mose Allison and his extremely pessimistic jazz/blues. The lyrics were a riot, very comic and very dark, sort of Lenny Bruce set to a slow twelve-bar, over and over and over.
I of course as you have by now deduced chose Keith Reid's Procol Harum lyrics. This was in a time frame where Broken Barricades was the latest album, but Grand Hotel had not yet appeared. In honor of both Alicia's miniskirts and my relationship with a certain long-haired blonde student, I managed to include Luskus Delph as an example of something or other.
It was so long ago, that in order to reproduce the lyrics for all I had to type them onto mimeograph... I recall making really obvious comparisons like Whaling Stories to The Waste Land, and A Salty Dog to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (on acid), things like that. Still There'll Be More I likened to the ancient insult poetry of the Roman poet Martial.
This particular class was taught in a set of rooms on the very bottom floor of a dormitory, with the paperthin prefabricated nature of most such ticky-tacky Sixties construction. Thus the foreign-accented professor who was teaching Physics 101 to pocket-protected future employees of Dow Chemical seemed to have a constant problem with the volume of my presentation... this probably had something to do with me piping my turntable through a Fender Bassman amp with two 12" speakers. I was a bass player at the time and couldn't afford a stereo... twenty-five years later I read in my alumni newsletter of someone recalling the sound of Cream's Sunshine of Your Love blasting out of the very dormitory where I lived... hey, that was me, dude, I had to practice.
Of course I got an A on the thing, mostly for having I think the guts to do something so bizarre, and marching out the proper big words and literary associations and whatnot. Alicia had two sort of I think interesting attitudes in response... one, she was struck by the "harshness" of the sound... now, granted, Robin put out some rather nasty sounds, but PH as a whole was pretty mellifluous relative to a lot of the other rock around. Must have been that beatnik background, bongoes and automatic writing and all that stuff.
The other thing she noted in both my presentation and the Mose Allison one was the pessimism, realism, cynicism, whatever you want to call it- lack of optimistic naivete and belief in whatever. The depression and mania alternating if you will, bridging this section with the one before and the one after, the author hoped fondly.
I guess she must have really liked the flower children period, and had hoped that somehow this generation would be able to do something impossible like change human nature and repair the world. But this was after Altamont, Hendrix and Joplin dead, the murders at Kent State and so many years of futile resistance to the war in Vietnam. To me and many others, by this time the dark predilections of Keith Reid seemed to be more in tune with what was actually happening than the perhaps sincere but certainly unrealistic views from the last few remaining hippies in the Joni Mitchell/CSNY mode.
Other tunes to which I recall discussing the lyrics include Nothing That I Didn't Know and the Dead Man's Dream. To someone who was 12 when the schoolgirls were crying at recess during the Cuban Missile Crisis while waiting for the clouds to turn mushroom, who had practiced hiding under his desk in first grade in preparation for global thermonuclear warfare, and had seen his contemporaries die at an early age both at home and away in pursuit of whatever the American establishment was chasing in Vietnam... death was something all too real that could happen to anyone at any time. Worse, it was random and arbitary, meaningless, as best exemplified by that wonderful lottery they held to determine who went and who stayed. The beautiful irony of basing it on one's date of *birth*.
Something about the "sweetness of melancholy" in Keith's lyrics and Gary/Matthew's music seemed to deal with that and resolve it in some way as something you had to cope with, but were better able to deal with once it was accurately described... Peter Handke has written better than I and at great length about this subject.
Somewhat bizarre in a Kafkaesque hunger-artist sense is the notion of dealing with such matters poetically, and then packaging the result as a form of "entertainment" in competition with the mindless oral fixations of the Sugar Sugar, Yummy Yummy Yummy, and Chewy Chewy songs of the world. We- "my generation-" were certainly weird at times, inefficient, unrealistic, whatever you want to call it. But certainly a major part of our problem/attitude was the unremittent, totally unacknowledged weirdness of the standard consensus reality we were expect to accept, and even give our lives for, just on someone else's sayso.
One matter I didn't explore in class for obvious political reasons was the method Keith probably used to attain his psychotic Nitzchean revelations. It was axiomatic among my fellow psychedelians in the late Sixties and early Seventies that Keith Reid's lyrics were of, by, and for mind-altering psychedelic drugs, LSD, mescaline, peyote, mushrooms, psilocybin, what have you. There is a clear track record across at least the first four albums of songs that markedly reflect the altered state produced by such substances, and a clear and convincing set of direct and indirect verbal allusions to same.
Rather than do a strict English paper on the subject, I will assume that this audience has almost all of the relevant lyrics memorized or can easily find them on CD covers or at the Beyond the Pale website. So, we can start at the beginning, or begin at the start as the case may be.
"She Wandered Through the Garden Fence" spills all the beans on album one. A potion is involved, brought by a female, which bends the mind. He tells lies and believes himself, the woman interrogates and teases, he forgets who he is, she sees what he is and leaves him on his own. Less overt but still heavily trip influenced, and certainly about similar experiences, are Cerdes and A Christmas Camel. The first can be likened to a trip outside the gates of certainty by means of drugs, down technicolor blind alleys so to speak. The nature of the trip is a colorshow, third party observer type of experience, less social than the one in Garden Fence, but less introspective than the somewhat paranoid bad trip in A Christmas Camel which probably documents a psychedelic experience during the holiday season. The transformations of objects in the latter song, the vivid color images in Cerdes, are firmly steeped in acid lore and imagery of the times as reflected in the writings of Timothy Leary and the adventures of the Ken Kesey merry pranksters chronicled in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Which segues us quite nicely so to album two, and its Prussian blue electric clock, waking up the author to the infinite. Many tabs of acid in those days were blue... and attempts to structure the experience, often had in the evening or night (by candlelight) into rational roads, to find signposts as it were, are generally futile. Literal, yet usually tolerable schizophrenia is one temporary result, where at one and the same time a person realizes that they have taken a powerful drug that has rendered them functionally insane, while they are also able to observe and analyze and even enjoy the experience at the same time. Delusions of grandeur, believing literally or symbolically that one is somehow Messianic in nature or potential, are a possible result and could lead to visits from the Three Kings; intimations of the unity behind all religions could introduce other notions such as that of the Buddha. The experience ultimately cannot be integrated into the standard consciousness or understood in ordinary terms, resulting in a rain (reign) of confusion and the tongue of language running aground on the shore of ineffability.
The overall shape of In Held Twas In I is a more extended version of exactly this type of experience, the sudden changes in tempo, musical material, focus from the objective/cosmic to the personal/emotional, the journeys far from home to exotic ideas and places, ending with a healing and major-key soothing Grand Finale are in many ways reminiscent of a sort of ideally shaped journey of self-discovery under the influence of psychedelics.
On the third album, the title cut is clearly another chronicle of a psychedelic experience. Rather than running aground, one runs afloat... sailing for parts unknown to man in this case is a metaphor for taking the drug. References to the whiteness of the sand, the blueness of the sea, an immortal place, tie together the visual effects of getting "colors" and the psychological senses of cosmic and timeless connections so often sought and experienced by trippers, almost always lost when the drug wears off. The poem seems to relate coming down from the trip with tears of joy, and to be looking at it in retrospect rather than in real time as in our next example. The last three lines refer pretty clearly to a sexual experience, probably masturbation, as part of the "coming down" process. Unless someone can thing of another log-shaped doggish body part that can produce salty semen (seaman) by hand... Later reflections on this experience and approach are most probably the cause of "Pilgrim's Progress" where the pirate's gold is the psychedelic substance.
Lastly we come to Home, and the extended work Whaling Stories. The sea connection informs us that the subject matter probably relates to that of both A Salty Dog and Pilgrim's Progress; interestingly, the poem self-documents itself as an exercise in attempting to write a long poem under the influence of psychedelic drugs. After sixteen(?) hours (days) of tripping (paling!) he sets himself the mammoth task of writing a long poem about it and society in general (sack town, rob tower, steal alphabet). Sequestering himself in writing room with closed door and barred gates, he keeps his eyes (windows) inner and outer clean, to observe and record his hallucinations that are both divine (God's alive) and artificial (inside a movie, watch the silver screen).
The traitors, pygmies, bloodhounds and slaves can be viewed as images of characters in his surrounding social scene, as archetypal views of other people, or as mental subprocesses of the author himself... his deceptive/dishonest, trivial, investigative, and submissive aspects respectively. At about six AM (six bells, recalling the ocean imagery again) while making tea, hallucinations occur about spilling soup and mumbling angels (again, divine revelation, but garbled and incomprehensible, as in Shine On Brightly), all closely watched by God. The divine notion introduced this section, the hallucinatory cinematic middle, and is closed and capped by the nonverbal guitar solo and dark musical ascent that follows and bridges us to the end.
The piece closes, as the drug wears off, with reflections on the death that awaits all, with a sense of final trumpets and the end of everything: the drug experience, the revelations, individual life, society, and the world. The "wake" seen by those at peace is the trail left by a ship in the water, a funeral rite, and an awakening, likened to the White Death of mysticism. The overall shape of this piece musically and contentwise is similar to In Held, not just because they are both long multipart songs, but because they attempt to use similar techniques to treat an extended psychedelic experience.
The interpretations I present above are supported by personal experience and (I believe) a very clean reading of the texts, especially in light of other psychedelic literature and art of the time. Certainly alternative interpretations are possible... but their validity would not necessarily exclude the validity of these: words, phrases, sentences, and whole songs are quite capable of carrying more than one meaning, thank you. Even overt denials by any or everyone concerned, along the lines of "it was just about a drawing my child brought home from school" or somesuch, would have to be evaluated for their motivations before being accepted against the evidence in the songs themselves. I certainly believe Lennon when he says that Lucy isn't about acid, but anyone who tries to state that Reid's songs are not steeped in pychedelics would have to completely redefine much of the dictionary to get there.
That the revelations are often negative, temporary, misunderstood, don't lead anywhere and so on is why the psychedelic experiment proves to be ultimately a short cut to a dead end. There is some value in having the experiences, but it is far from any sort of free lunch, and it does not last. At best the hints it provides have to be followed up using completely different techniques, at worst, they can drive a very small percentage of people more or less permanently crackers. The late Isaac Asimov, very much a NON tripper, described LSD from the outside as a form of Russian Roulette. As a member of the Century Club I would agree, provided that Isaac would concede that the revolver involved has a hundred chambers; one with a bullet and ninety-nine containing all sorts of things including whipped cream, water, urine, confetti, a sign reading "Bang!" and just about anything else you can name: among them, pure light.
Certainly Keith's lyrics, which in their salad days were a sort of Hippie Romantic Surrealist approach, very pretentious yet humorous and self-aware, replete with drug and literary references and attempts at stating cosmic truths- cut both ways. That is, they made the group what they were and contributed to its success, but also resulted in limiting their commercial appeal.
I wouldn't say so much he didn't know what he was talking about, so much as to state that, like Nietzche in a way, he knew he was talking about more than he could say- due to both the limitations of sung/written language itself, and his own personal limitations as well and those of anything induced by drugs. The compulsion to create or what have you, the need to feed oneself and the absence of less desirable alternatives, the sheer fun of a well turned phrase, the catharsis of treating a feeling by capturing and communicating it- all these forces of circumstance led him to write what he could, anyway.
The problem with truthful content on any level is that you will always end up displeasing some significant subset of people. Get too acerbic and personal like Lennon, you offend somebody. Get too emotional and yet impersonal like McCartney, you offend somebody. Write simple things about bodily feelings like whomever, you offend somebody. Write pretentious and cosmic things like Reid, and mock yourself along the way, and you offend somebody. As I am sure I have done several times already in this and other pieces, and will continue to do.
Like others I perceive a degeneration over time in Keith's ability, too many upbeat cliches for example in his more recent Nineties work. This was probably an effort to avoid displeasing one subset of people, or to please them. To me it sounds like there is at least a possibility of antidepressant medications and/or some form of therapy intervening as well, probably in an effort to "cure" some of the attitudes and emotions (and symptoms of acid abuse) that produced his earlier work, but caused him various levels of personal distress, and were considered by the consensus reality to be dysfunctional. Considering the mass of people to be a "sea of wheat" who speak but seldom meet (from Quite Rightly So) is *inappropriate*, and *not positive*. I am not the first one to say that the proverbial child who pointed out the Emperor's lack of clothing would no doubt in today's culture be quickly hustled off to counseling, and roundly and soundly criticized if he refused to go.
The above is not to state that therapeutic approaches do not make a positive contribution in cases where people cannot stop washing their hands, or have violent impulses and so on. The recently published 5% error rate of hospitals, for example, does not mean people should not go to the hospital. It does mean that at least in some cases the cure is objectively, provably worse than the disease, as in the story of the blind man with the unspeakably ugly wife. Similarly, when it comes to things of the mind, treating the symptoms may at least in some cases result in a zero sum game where there is no free lunch and gains in one area (the patient is better adjusted to the consensus reality) are offset in another (he loses his ability to view it from the outside in a productive critical fashion for his own benefit and that of his audience). Treat the "disease" with LSD and you have poetry and unhappiness, treat it with other chemicals and you have happiness but no real poetry.
Some problems, I think, are more productively sustained than solved by simplistic methods. In America, for example, I think we'd be better off accommodating different types of children (among which are certainly some future hip-romantic-surrealist poets-in-waiting) in our educational system by diversification of methodology, than by medicating them with Ritalin and so on by the millions while programming them with Pavlovian anti-drug propaganda. This obviously means I have a bad attitude and need counseling- but I refuse to go...;-)