Featured Book: Hallelujah Junction, continued

Copy at Case Memorial Library
"I thought that LSD did open what Huxley (and Jim Morrison) called the 'doors' and give a hint of the universe as it might be if only I could shed my habitual way of being in the world. Of course the next step was a choice between more drugs and more trips or taking the slow, laborious road of mental and spiritual discipline offered by religion, specifically Tibetan or Zen Buddhism. … The last of my trips was pure Monty Python. … I wandered into a rehearsal of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy and watched the great Austrian pianist Rudolf Serkin play a gleaming black Steinway that stretched out in front [of] him from nine feet to twelve feet, and then to twenty feet and so on, à la R. Crumb, until it became the world's longest stretch limousine. That image may have been what gave birth years later to my piece Grand Pianola Music. By the following year, 1971, I more or less gave up all psychedelic encounters, including marijuana. They seemed tied to a time and place, and I felt that getting to the truly important spiritual and mental 'there' would require a more serious and arduous journey." (p. 46)