Psychedelic Transcription: The song written by LSD
The moment that you witness a former politician chowing down a raw kangaroo’s spam javelin on a family television show in order to remain captive in some permanently surveilled jungle as a form of PR repentance proves many things, chief among them is that the impact of LSD on popular culture cannot be understated. Since the drug went mainstream following an admin oversight in 1963, it has sprung a surrealness upon reality.
It might not always be direct, but as Tom Wolfe described when he purveyed the confounding drug-free weirdness of sections of the 1960s, its reverberations have always made things wavy: “Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that’s all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That’s nice.” Exactly what LSD looked like was at the forefront of the thinking when Being Dead wrote – or rather transcribed the movements of their acid-laced fingers – the psyche track ‘Muriel’s Big Day Off’.
Inspired by the members’ acid trip in which — after drinking wine on their porch and “having a really nice time with a tree” — they returned home and picked up their instruments. Thereafter, they found themselves entranced by the patterns of their fingers on the guitar fret, rather than the way the chords actually sounded. This resulted in the wild track; ostensibly a garage punk number that dips into multiple genres throughout its mere three-and-a-half-minute trip.
When they tried their best to detail this process to me, they half-explained: “We’ve been macro-dosing LSD every day for three years so as you can imagine, things have gotten pretty blurry but we’ll do our best. As far as we can remember, this started off as a relatively typical trip for us: sitting peacefully – cross-legged in an all-white room – filing our teeth into points and spit-polishing our immense vintage marble collection to the glorious sounds of industrial noise music.”
So, you can be in no doubt of their obtuse quirkiness here. As they continue: “At the top of each hour, we would take a four-minute break to improvise a song that our assistant, Joaquin, recorded to tape. We happened to listen back to the tape from that night to discover this track. Upon relearning it, we fell in love with its irresistible charm and the mere choreography of our hands as they danced across the fretboard. How could we resist you, Muriel? True story.”
The band met at Cinnabon in LAX and bonded over their mutual hatred of the job. “For real the line is nonstop y’all,” they tell me. Since those days, however, they seemingly have been experimenting with colouring over the banal tones of queued-up banality. So, while a few might find their ways infuriating, you can’t help but credit LSD-choreographed chord progressions as a novel way to reinvent musical notation. Fittingly, the result is also somewhat entrancing. This, it seems, is where acid’s unfurling journey through pop culture has brought us now: to debase musical science with a dance across the fret.
