Heard the song A Whiter Shade of Pale on XM’s Classic Rock yesterday as I was driving down the road to the Store and it brought back a nice but sort of scary little memory of when I last took LSD.
I was in the Army, stationed in Germany and a buddy had a stash of Orange Sunshine (for related story and history of this type of acid click here.) As he laid it on me and a couple other bozos, he advised us “Careful, this is a 4 way hit so be sure to cut it up before you take it and only take a little at a time.” Of course the very first thing each of us did was to pop the whole hit into our mouths and swallow it.
Hours, make that what seemed like days, later I was sitting at a picnic table in the middle of the night adjacent one of the barracks and completely lost in my muddled up mind. My buddies were nowhere to be found and I had been tripping thru all of the lights and colors similar to the 2001 Star Gate sequence for quite sometime. It was starting to scare me though. I was starting to panic and worry that perhaps I had overdone it this time and should have listened to the advice of only taking a little bit instead of ingesting the entire hit.
Just about that time though, I heard the opening organ chords to A Whiter Shade of Pale being played in the adjacent barracks somewhere and I immediately calmed down. Then the lyrics kicked in about feeling kind of seasick, the room humming harder and the ceiling blowing away and I just knew that God had sent that song for me to hear at that time and that everything was going to be ok. And it was. To this day, that song will always bring me down in a good way like it did that night I od’d on the Sunshine.
I don’t know if the XM dj knew this yesterday when she played A Whiter Shade, but I learned that today (24 June) marks the first time that the song appeared in Billboard’s Top 100 back in 1967.
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| From http://www.thisdayinmusic.com/search_result |
P.S. When I told Pam about all this, she remarked that she always preferred Sarah Brightman’s version. At first I reacted “You’re kidding right?” But upon listening to Sarah’s take, got to concede, it’s not bad either even if she does have a moon floating around in it.