Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

David Bixby released Ode to Quetzalcoatl (OtQ) in 1969 and it has since become a cult classic album in the loner acid-folk-rock subgenre of American music.  Original pressings of the album have sold for thousands of dollars at auction and made David Bixby a figurehead for ex hippies and psychedelic hipsters who are seeking guidance in a world that has become more destructive and distorted than a bad trip.

In my interview with David, he tells me about growing up in the midwest during the late 60′s.  Echoing the story he tells on OtQ, David says that he took too much acid in too short a time and, without proper guidance or debriefing from his psychedelic experience, he found himself desperate for support and assimilating into a Christian cult, which he refers to only as “The Group.”

In at the ground floor, David grew into this new identity as loyal cult member and second-tier leader.  His music helped draw impressionable young people who were then assimilated and exploited for their own individual talents.  The women were targeted for their sexual attributes as well as their managerial ones.  Men like Bixby were made into workers of this amorphous colony referred to as “The Group.”  A pyramid scheme in the truest sense, they were made to sell goods door-to-door for a well-known franchises, which the leader profited from primarily.

David’s second album, Harbinger, was marketed and sold in support of this cult.  He was not credited anywhere on the album at the behest of The Group leader.  I’d call it a hijacking but David assures me that he gave it willingly at the time.  This lead us to the heart of the interview, the golem.

Golems are constructions of any given group of people.  People assume that cult leaders are ego-driven, paternal or maternal sociopaths (this is true; I used to work for one) and that the cult members are victims.  But, you can’t sell what people aren’t buying and, in many ways, cult members build up their leaders and the leaders then turn into the monstrous golems that gain all the notoriety.  Pathological golems like Jim Jones, Charles Manson, David Karesh… they wouldn’t have been so monstrous without the support of their drones who are, themselves, miniature monsters dropping Caesar’s coins in the basket to buy lawyers or weapons.  The bundle of sticks surrounding the axe moves the same way.  The macro structure of the cult is fractally reflected in the micro structure of every interpersonal relationship or individual schema within it.

Conformity is an active process.  You have to willingly give up your personal power and let the shell of your former self be zombified by the voodoo of a nearby egomaniac who claims to know a better way.  Vulnerable are the guilty, the fearful, the lonely, and the self-loathing.

Psychedelics are powerful medicine.  Recent studies suggest that psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD have a great amount of power to facilitate change in personality, parsing truth from pretense and letting the individual regain control over their cognitive behavior.  I’m inexperienced in this (… and my personality sucks…) but I hear that the successful use of this medicine requires guidance.  The psychedelic territory is so foreign that someone needs to lead you through it.  The tricky part is finding a guide, not a leader.  You need someone who translates what the mycelium is saying, not someone who spins the message to benefit them or their privates.

“Hey pretty lady on drugs, the mushroom gods are telling me to tell you to take off your clothes.”

We all search for meaning.  We all need answers of one sort or another.  Some are happy distracting themselves with material things like shoes, outfits, or vibrators.  Some of us build elaborate metaphorical mental structures called dogma.  Others are less cognitive and more behavioral, performing redundant rituals in search of something less redundant, I think.  Others just say, “fuck it,” and kill themselves in order to escape the sadistic suffering imposed on them by their creator.  Even Jesus knew that, when surrounded by ignorant fools, your best bet is to just GET THE FUCK OUT.

… more to come