Welcome back to another episode of “The Soundscapes of LSD”. The previous edition looked at the phantasmagorical world of The Beatle’s Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Kenny Roger’s experience of having his sense of Self diced up and sent down twisting rabbit holes, and A$AP Rocky’s luscious, lust-soaked experiencing of floating on a wave of Love Sex Dreams.

Today, we turn to a new collection of songs that further illuminate this fascinating intersection of chemistry and creativity – the dance between altered perception and artistic revelation. With great pleasure, I welcome you to the second feature in this three-part series.

…

Lake Shore Drive (1971) Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah

Lake Shore Drive is a scenic route that runs along the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. On a literal level, this song recounts the delights of cruising along this freeway of freedom, joy, and the beauty of the city.

Like with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the writers of Lake Shore Drive attest that it was purely coincidental that the song is again an acrostic of LSD. It is good practice to take people at their word, but doing so here stretches the limits of plausible deniability.

There’s a confidence, a certainty, a magical bravado to the trilling piano, which skitters gleefully across the guitars and drums. The chords teeter behind higher and deeper notes, hinting at a rolling through peaks and lows.

Jeremiah evokes the sage, the wizened and the experienced, sharing with a passing traveller insights accrued. He lets us into a sacred secret, and invites those listening to follow him on these travels.

It feels like skipping down a sun-drenched traffic-less road, with a lake of infinite size and promise extending beyond the horizon. It feels like driving down pavements lined by great oaks, with your head out the window and a breeze licking your face.

No instructions on how to enjoy the Drive are found here, nor normative statements on how we ought interpret it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the passing of all that is beautiful.

“There ain’t no finer place to be than running Lake Shore Drive”.

…

History Eraser (2013) Courtney Barnett

Courtney Barnett is cool. Known for her witticisms, deadpan delivery and genre-bending work, she is invariably funny and very insightful on many flavours of the human experience.

History Eraser is a disorienting mix of indie rock, punk and folk which lolls along a meandering path of unpredictability. On a hazy and winding night out, she “drifted to a party cool”, where the people “went to arty school, they made their paints by mixing acid wash with lemonade”.

Each line ebbs into the next idea, whose train of thought is then lost in some other noun completely nonsensical, as she “jumped aboard the Epping as the doors were slowly closing on the world”.

Ordinarily mundane things are imbued with a seemingly confused profundity, too big or palpable to make sense of. Her characteristic monotonal intonation, paired with her humorous lines, deepen the sense of the absurd.

As the chorus fades in, a group of layered male vocals almost him with more than a hint of The Beatles’ Revolver-era sliding psychedelia. Their chant – “In my brain I rearranged the letters on the page to spell your name” feels like something digestible but regardless not. One gains a sense of wisdom awaiting just on the other side incomprehensibility, but rather than reaching it, gains a sense of our ignorance.

A synesthetic blend of artistic medium, genre, concept and sense.

…

White Rabbit (1967) Jefferson Airplane

It is fascinating that artists so often reach for Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland when trying to transmit their experiences of LSD to those willing to listen.

The imagery of Alice’s journey through a surrealistic world, entirely different from the one she had always known, perfectly encapsulated the themes of a counterculture foraying feet first into mind expansion and psychedelic experience.

Grace Slick, the song’s writer, does exactly so when attempting to convey new ways of seeing, of conceptualising, and of speaking. White Knights, Red Queens, hookah-smoking caterpillars and door mice provide the archetypal framework for figures in a world unknown.

When “logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead”, Alice is deemed the only person capable of understanding and translating such experience. The “ones that Mother gives you don’t do anything at all”, suggesting an emptiness to the normative education we have been provided by society.

The song screams reverence and dread, and commands a respect for such consciousness. Drums toll the sounds of preparations for battle, a foe approaching on the horizon. Vocals speak to a heightened sense of awareness, and instructions to “Feed Your Head” imply a sacrifice of Self.

Go forth with caution, respect, and a knowledge that you may indeed know nothing at all.