The “groundbreaking” album Ann Wilson listened to during her first acid trip
According to George Harrison, John Lennon on acid was very different to John Lennon in any other circumstance or under any other influence. According to Harrison, LSD Lennon would unfurl like a crumpled piece of paper, sharing his darkest secrets with a strange sense of casual resignation. The point is: acid has been known to access different parts of the brain for countless musicians, especially the ones they usually hide away.
Perhaps this is why, the first time Ann Wilson tried it, her trusty soundtrack was one that went through the whole journey of life: from childhood to old age. Suppose this also taps into the one thing musicians often romanticise or glorify when it comes to this particular subject: the idea that, under any drug (but mainly acid), your mind accesses places you can’t otherwise reach, creating experiences where everything feels weirdly distorted and time and space feel way different to anything you feel in sobriety.
The key is in the name “psychedelic”: if everything we know to be real is in the mind, what happens when all of those tone indicators fall away? And become replaced by logic-less abstraction? For some, the prospect of living however momentarily in a Salvador Dalí-esque reality feels like a nightmare, while, for others, say, John Lennon, the escapist dreamlike quality is probably enough to escort the darkness away to somewhere else, somewhere it can make itself present, opening doors usually kept shut or protected from outsider judgement.
Either way, there’s a transparency to it that’s like running water, the kind that, for Ann Wilson, came hand-in-hand with Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends. Now, as Bookends captures all stages of life, from being young to growing old, and is based on the idea that all we are is our own memories, it makes sense why this would appear to someone doing acid for the first time. For Wilson, it also attached itself to a specific memory, time and place.
“The first time I ever dropped acid, I went to this girlfriend’s dorm who was at University of Washington,” she recalled to Goldmine. “And that was the only record we had the whole time, and we just looped it and it stood the test. Great record; so groundbreaking.” Most songs on the album feel immediately evocative of this kind of coming-of-age association, and not just the more obvious ones like ‘America’, ‘Mrs Robinson’, and ‘Old Friends’.
The whole thing is also a trip, literally, filled with various twists and turns, some less expected than others. Most people who used this record as a specific point of reference at this particular time in their lives, some even moulding their music around it, immediately fell in love not just with its subject matter but the way it cushioned its own darkness. After all, we all know the more lighthearted, upbeat tracks before we go digging deeper into the more serious ones, which also made Bookends a masterclass in nuanced listener experience.
Like the concept of life itself, it covers many avenues, playing with expectation while also going in its own specific direction, almost like they were acknowledging what they were supposed to be doing without pandering too much to whatever felt would be the more “safe” option. In other words, it’s also serendipitous in a way you might expect an acid trip to play out: flashes of different parts of life, the good and the bad crossing over like two streams heading for nowhere in particular. Enlightening but entirely open. Meaningful yet untethered.
