“We’re either called McCarthy Creek or Woodknot,” says Walker. I hand back his drink as we stroll into the roadhouse beer garden, where instruments and sound gear are set up in a corner for the band he’s with. Walking with Walker is like walking with Where’s Waldo, clad as he is in the horizontal red and white stripes of an old-school surfer’s shirt - the uniform of the Merry Prankster psychedelic commando squad - but even in his wobbly 80s, he has the strong, weathered arms of a shipbuilder. Merry Prankster, logistics man to renegade novelist Ken Kesey, Indy race-team owner, sailor, Oregonian, kazooist, restorer of ancient buses, preserver of ancient memories, yachtsman to the stars, alleged beneficiary of David Crosby greasing palms to erase a drug case, elusive all-American playboy character in Tom Wolfe’s breakthrough Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, trust fund kid, preacher of eco-consciousness, squanderer of privilege, rethinker of privilege, descendent of America’s pioneers of filbert (hazelnut) orchards, nostalgist, casual cultist, son of the dead, father of the dead, spirit medium to the Beatnik proto-man, mythological maintenance man, anachronism, cautionary tale, and psychedelic financier of the very moment the American eagle began flying not east, not west, but directly over the cuckoo’s nest. Meet 83-year-old George Walker: octogenarian psychonaut, O.G. “I don’t take street acid because I’ve had the real pharmaceutical-grade stuff and it’s different.” “I do mushrooms more often now,” he says. “Long COVID’s left me a little unsteady.” He chuckles.
“Carry my beer?” he asks, passing his glass and taking the rail for the descent. Here at this roadhouse in northwestern Oregon, at the Scappoose outskirts by the Columbia River, I pay for mine, and we turn for the stairs. Neil Young and Stephen Stills Join Forces at L.A. Nils Lofgren Gets a Lift From Ringo Starr, Neil Young, David Crosby on New Solo LP The fleet manager and bankroller of the American LSD revolution - an old man that my mother swears died long ago - tells me that there is no need to buy him a beer. High Notes: How I Learned To Play Straight After (Barely) Surviving the ‘90s and Its Drugged-out Retro Death Trip
0 kommentar(er)
