I’d begun writing Cathedral back in 1971, around the time we played the Royal Festival Hall. After that gig, Leo Makota, my road manager, and I decided to drop acid around six in the morning. We hired a 1928 Rolls-Royce and a driver because neither of us had any business being behind a wheel. Two hippies tripping. “Let’s go see Stonehenge!” Back then, you could actually touch the rocks, embrace them, which I did, perhaps excessively so. The site still had an anything-goes policy. And so I lay on the grass, on acid, in the middle of Stonehenge, for hours (although maybe it was twenty minutes). It was an incredible trip. My big revelation was that I was as insignificant as a speck of dust in this vast universe of ours. Acid can be good for perspective. On our way back to London, we stopped in Winchester, first at the Great Hall to see where the fabled Round Table of King Arthur and his knights was kept. Now, I knew that it was probably bogus, more mythical than real, but that myth has tantalized English schoolboys for four hundred years, so I wanted to see it. As I approached the building, there was a man standing in front of me dressed in something resembling a beefeater’s outfit, holding a small tray in his hand. On the tray were small horn beakers of water and little squares of bread. “Here ya go,” he said, pushing it toward my face. Now, I was peaking, so I didn’t quite grasp his intention. “What do you mean, ‘Here ya go’?” I asked. He gazed into my eyes and said, “Don’t you know it’s just okay to be?” On acid, it was the most profound thing that anyone had said to me in my life. Don’t I know it’s just okay to be? All this posing as a rock star, musician, famous hippie, millions of seats, hit records—it meant nothing, if you could just be. From there, we took the five-minute walk to Winchester Cathedral. Leo and I made our way to a side chapel with an aboveground grave resting on a huge marble plinth, where one of England’s early kings was buried. As we entered the church, the sun had been blocked by clouds, but it eventually appeared, shining through the stained-glass windows, which, on acid, was a mind-blowing effect. I started to walk down the nave toward the cross of Jesus. I was still peaking, and I felt a strange, unworldly presence at my feet. It stopped me in my tracks. I looked down and my legs began wobbling. I was standing on the grave of a soldier who died on my birthday, February 2, but in 1799. I’m not sure if it was real—I was on acid, what did I know from reality? But that’s what I think I saw, and it became part of my song “Cathedral.” I found out later that, in fact, I was not hallucinating. Someone sent me a photo of the actual grave. Go figure. Nash, Graham. Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 16:02:35 +0000
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