Beast...

It was another bone chilling winter in Woodstock. The barn we were recording in was insulated with nothing but the wood that was used to build it, and the ceiling was so high that the sound of george hitting the snare drum would bounce from one end of the splintered wall to the next so fast you could barely hear the echo. The fact that I was slightly dopesick did not help much either. But back then I was young and able to actually get out of bed and somewhat function without heroin.

Our friend Ted was mixing and recording us from a warm, carpeted loft just above the barn. The wires ran from the huge bitter space the three of us were standing in up over the beams into a room clouded with pot smoke. I'm pretty sure he just pushed the reverb nobs as high as they would go and just rolled joints for himself the rest of the time we were playing. Jenn's voice echoed through the barn like an angel soaring over our heads, that blended with the feedback from her Fender strat was temporarily replacing the heroin that I needed. Her music was like a drug to me, I could get lost in the music like I never did with any other musician I ever played with. We froze in that barn all afternoon, the strings on my bass were ice cold and would numb the tips of my fingers with every touch of a fret. The smell of wet wintery wood, the pot smoke layering over our heads like a stratus cloud, and the angelic music wooming out of our amps while George's gloved hands smashed the drums lightly matching everything up perfectly in my head, made it the perfect day.

I found out later that day that George and Jenn had split a bag of heroin before we got there. I remember being livid. All I needed was a tiny little line to snort up my frozen little nostrils to warm my bones just enough to flow like I needed to. It was a magical day for music anyway, but with that little bit of heroin it would have been perfect. The reverb on the snare would have been amplified in my head surrounding the thoughts clouding my visions making it halfway dealable. The bending of the strings would have come from my heart and not my head. It took a long time for me to learn how to play without drugs or alcohol. That was not the day that i started to take that into consideration though....