Ep4 In The Shadow Of The Mountain C.L

In this episode, the speaker discusses his technical difficulties with recording and the strain his voice has experienced over the years. He reflects on his time coaching sports and the impact it had on his voice. He also expresses his desire for the people he's connected with to listen to his story and engage in critical thinking. The speaker briefly mentions his experiences with drugs, particularly LSD, and how he believes that God used those experiences in his life. He shares a story of hitchhiking up and down the coast of California and attending a concert where the Grateful Dead performed. The concert was accompanied by a strong LSD trip and an impressive light show. So here we are, episode four. I'm sitting in my truck, I'm going to record here, I noticed on the last episode that there was a plane flying overhead and the sound stayed on there forever, I guess the microphones are quite sensitive. I need to really work on the tech part of this for my own sake, if not for your guys' sake. That noise, the noise just really bothers me. And the same when I'm listening to me sing, it's peaking and it's getting distorted. So I've got to get that technical stuff figured out and get my voice figured out. My voice isn't what it used to be back in the day, I could sing all night and still have a clear voice. Now if I do five or six takes of one song, my voice is feeling it. So part of that might just be working it back up, but a lot of it is, I think I coached soccer, softball and baseball for about 25 years, all of them combined. I had four kids and all of those kids, I coached every single one of them in soccer and for baseball or fast pitch. And I don't, you know what, I yell. My voice naturally is, I can project quite well, but especially in baseball, I felt like sometimes I was in a competition against the other bench. Not just baseball, fast pitch even more, like the girls' fast pitch, a lot of competition coming from the benches. Girls got all their cheers and stuff, it's a gas, you know, I learned a lot about life there. Anyway, and I mean, I'm hoping some of those girls I coached will get to listen to this because I never really shared much about who I was with those people, not just them. Like I coached my oldest boy, I coached him from the time he was like six till he graduated in soccer and baseball and softball before baseball. And you know, met a lot of kids and kids' parents, which are my age and some younger, maybe even a few older. And I think, you know, my hope is like I can get all these people that I touch to get in on this, my story. Like it's, I don't know, you know, I don't want to be egotistical about it. I just think it's a really interesting story. Plus, my whole drive is to get people thinking. And so I will present questions and I'll even present answers. And I, you know, I really try to encourage thinking out of the box and critical thinking and looking at stuff that we say we believe and stuff like that. So here we are, episode four. In the last episode, I talked about when I was 16 and getting high on hash after not using any drugs for about three years. And yeah, and that experience was kind of like taking LSD for me. Now, I still haven't gotten to the details of the first time I took LSD. I did to the last time I took LSD, I was going to talk about one of the times where I took LSD when I was 12 years old. The thing is, is like, I don't want to glamorize the use of LSD. It's, it's, I believe that for me, God used it in my life. And, and when, you know, when I say God, I'm talking about the biblical God, the Creator God and, and Jesus, so the, the Trinity God. So that's, to be clear, like, that's to be clear, I feel like all of the stuff that happened in my life, and really, I think in everybody's life, led to me where I am today. And some of that would be good, and some of that would be bad. So anyway, I want to go back to this story in California. Okay, so when I was 11, I left my home in Birmingham, Alabama, I dropped out of school in grade six. And there's a story there of how I got to California, but and I will get to that story. But that's not this story in particular. Once in California, I was with a fellow who was 21 years old. And we hitchhiked up and down the coast of California from, well, we flew into Los Angeles. So we flew into Los Angeles, and we had friends in Newport Beach. So south of Los Angeles, we went down and stayed with them in Newport Beach for a couple of weeks. Anyway, you know, I can't really remember, everything's a blur as far as time is concerned, there was no time constraints on us, we were just living free. So it was in January, when we flew out to LA from Birmingham, just the two of us. And hitchhiked up and down the coast. After we left Newport, and we went up to San Francisco, we had friends in San Francisco, we had friends in Los Angeles area, friends in San Francisco, friends in San Diego, which I think we actually did go down. Yeah, we did. We went down to San Diego at one point. That's where I met on that trip down to San Diego. That's where I met Peter, who actually lives in Qualicum now, I'm not going to use last names. In fact, after the last podcast that I did, I had somebody request that I not use their name. So I apologize for that. And I'm going to either I'll use pseudonyms, somebody else's name, or maybe just letters, you know, like, you know, just the first letter of their first name. That might be too revealing, even so I'll have to decide as I go how I'm going to deal with that. That's, that's one thing. Another thing that's interesting is a couple of people have contacted me through messenger Facebook Messenger, and they have asked me a few questions about my life and my experience and some of the stuff I said about the Bible, like wanting clarification on that stuff. I'm open to doing that. In fact, that's I love dialogue. I mean, the only reason I'm on any kind of social media is to try and get a dialogue and sometimes that dialogue is, it seems like conflict. For me, it's not so much conflict, it's a it's an it's an opportunity again to get people to dialogue, to start using their brains, start thinking more, you know, asking questions and answering questions and me too, like to take people's challenges, it's, it's important. It's an important part of growth. And I think that's something that we as a culture really need to look at. Okay, back to the story. From LA, we went to San Francisco went to a lot of concerts, like we we basically followed the Grateful Dead. So I saw the Grateful Dead during that from January to end of June or whatever it was while I was in California before we hitchhiked up to Seattle and met my folks there. I I'm sure I took acid over a dozen times. In that period of time, I'm, you know, and I was introduced to cocaine and other drugs and, and the thing about all of that stuff is I feel like it all form, like I remember a lot of it. So it formed a sort of a net for me. So there's this thread that goes through my life, and it touches on those experiences that I had as a as a preteen, taking LSD and other psychedelics, and just my life, you know, that whole experience. So I feel like God protected me through that. And I can guarantee you that he did, because I know people that were my age, older and younger, that were devoured at that by that, what was happening at that time. And my heart goes out to him, if I can help you in any way, give me a message and you know, gladly do what I can to help you work through whatever your problems are. Yeah, some saint. We ended up going towards the end of our time in California, we ended up going back to Los Angeles. It's my memory that it was in Los Angeles. And there was a concert that we went to. Yeah, it was it was Los Angeles in Los Angeles. It was the album release tour for the Grateful Dead's Working Man's Dead album. So we went there was three bands on the bill, the Grateful Dead had the top billing, which a lot of people might be surprised. But in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berkeley, California, the Grateful Dead were were a big deal. They were more underground, maybe for the rest of the country for a long time. And they've had super devoted followers forever. So this was in 69, was it? No, 70. We were into 70 by then. Let's say I was 12. Yeah, so 70. We were into 70. And we went to this concert. It was the Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. And we didn't know it was an album release. It wasn't advertised at that, but that's what the plan was. So we all the group of us that went, I think there was four of us went to this concert. We all took acid before we left. It was it was we knew it was good, good acid. And we were ready to go and trip all night long to these to live music. And once we got there, the the Grateful Dead, I don't know if you've read the electric Kool-Aid acid test or you know anything about it, but the Grateful Dead are represented in that story. They are that's their story. So the they were there with shopping bags, there's people walking around with shopping bags that were like, I wouldn't say full. They were probably, I don't know, eight, eight inches of acid in the bottom of each of these paper shopping bags. And they were spread out throughout the whole arena. So they were getting the whole arena stoned on one of the most orange sunshine barrel is what it was called. It was the it was like it's a champagne of LSD. It was the LSD that was made by the chemist from the electric Kool-Aid acid test. And so this acid was throughout the whole everybody in that stadium that took LSD that would take LSD, took LSD. And it was wild. Plus, I was already stoned. I'd already taken a tab. So I had when they came around with the shopping bag, I took I took two tablets. I only took one. I saved the other one for another time. And then they came back and and offered us more. And I took another one. So I can't remember if I took three that night or just two, but I was really stoned. Everybody was really, really stoned. And the the the whole light show, like the way they did light shows back then was wild. Like they had overhead projectors and they put like vegetable oil and food coloring and they'd move it around by heat or air or whatever. And that would be projected onto the onto the wall. Plus, they had graphics. And the graphics at this concert were the Silver Surfer and the Hulk. And there was a little kid walking around naked. It was it was like a comic, like a comic kid, like a comic drawing. And he was walking around naked. He had no pubic hair. He had a sort of a chubby belly and he had hair about as long as mine was at that time. And then there was there was a number of other graphic representations of this kid as he grew up into a man. And as a man and as a full grown man, he he was tortured. He like mentally he was mentally tortured, like emotionally wracked with pain and the pain that pain was was radiating out of him in this this comic, like this character. So it was it was outrageous. And I was right in the front of the stage when we first started. I was up in the front within the first three, five rows, three to five rows from the front of the stage, but off to the right hand side. And as the concert progressed, I ended up being right in the middle of the stage, right in the front. And there was this lady there that everybody was stoned, like I said, she said to me, she said, that's that's you. And she pointed at the comic book character, you know, the cartoon character and of the little boy. And she said, that's you. And then she said, oh, my gosh, this whole concert is for you. And I turned around and I looked in the stadium was full, like I don't know how many people, 20,000 people, 30,000 people. It was huge. And she said, this whole this whole concert is this whole night is just for you. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, like I was absorbed into it then, like I was part of like this was my life story or whatever it was. So we listened to the to the first band and it was like they're one of my favorite bands. They always have been Quicksilver Messenger Service. And then anybody that knows Jefferson Airplane, fantastic 1970s freeform kind of a band music, like great, great music. And then The Grateful Dead. I was a deadhead. So The Grateful Dead came out and they're all plugged in and they're playing and it's like it's just raucous and everything. And then they all put down their instruments and they pick up these acoustic instruments and they say, we're going to introduce you a few songs from our new album, which is being released the end of this month. And they started playing these songs, the songs from Working Man's Dead, and they were acoustic. It was so different. It was way different than what The Grateful Dead had done and what that whole concert had been. There was an acoustic. It was an acoustic concert. It was electric. And it's like the whole mood shifted. And I can't remember if that's when she said that this whole concert was for you or if she said it at the beginning. I don't know. It doesn't matter because in my head, that whole concert was directed at me, for me. Now, I want to jump back ahead to that story in my living room when I was 13, when I was turning 13. That album, Working Man's Dead, was playing on our record player. We had one of those record players with the arm. And so you could stack up and put out records on and then one would fall and you put the arm over. Well, if you didn't have any records and you left the arm, it would just keep playing the one side over and over and over again. So we listened to that one side, I don't remember which one it was, over and over and over again for, I don't know, at least three times, I would say. And that sort of directed me. I went back to that trip where the concert was for me and it directed me. And that's why I thought I was God and that's why I thought I realized I wasn't God. So all of this stuff ties together. I mean, it doesn't start there. There's this stuff that ties all of these stories together that goes back to Alabama. And then this thread never stops. This thread never stops working and influencing my life for my whole life. Right. So anyway, I'm going to get to more of that stuff. I think that maybe right now that's enough. Thanks for joining me. I don't know what song I'm going to do yet because I haven't recorded it yet unless I play one that I've already got recorded, which I might. I've got one that I've never played public since the 80s. I wrote it in 1981, I think, after I was married. And started getting involved with a church community. I might play that one, but I think I might try to find a different one. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, again, thanks for joining me. And I hope it was interesting. And see you at episode five. Well, I've got so much I'm dying to tell you, but I can't bear to hear it now. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Well, I've got so much I'm dyin' to tell you But you can't bear to hear me now And in a little while I must move on But I'll send my love to you You can call my name and I will find you Heaven and hell can't separate my love I'm doin' this all for you, my love And I'll come back, yes, I'll come back, yes, I'll come back to you You can call my name and I will find you Heaven and hell can't separate my love I'm doin' this all for you, my love And I'll come back, yes, I'll come back, yes, I'll come back to you