I was surfing the web last night and read an article in
THE GUARDIAN about Glastonbury Music Festival. Memories! memories! (mine follow) Fellow Eel Pie Island communard Weed posted this online in 2005, from my self-published 1990 book,
EEL PIE DHARMA. Tai Grove, publisher of Hidden Brook Press, encouraged me to do a professional reprint in 2012 as
EEL PIE ISLAND DHARMA. There's now a great selection of pics online about this seminal festival, and I've pasted one I found of our pyramid below.
EEL PIE DHARMA - a memoir / haibun - © 1990 Chris Faiers
Chapter 24 - Glastonbury Magic Festival
Word went out through the hippie grapevine of a magic festival to be
held in Glastonbury. Glastonbury was a legendary sacred site in
England, with a cathedral where one of the apostles had planted a rose
bush which bloomed all the year round. Nearby loomed a mysterious
conical hilltop, called a tor, which was rumoured to be hollow.
Glastonbury Tor
was said to be a 'sending station' on the system of ley lines, a power
grid which lay over the English countryside, and which is the planet's
equivalent of the magnetic fields which surround the human body which
acupuncturists use.
Jeremy and I had earlier visited another of these mysterious tors,
Michael's Mount off the Cornish Coast. Another such tor is Mont San
Michel off the French coast. In the olden days festivals were held to
replenish the 'dragon power', or earth magic which kept fields fertile
and the inhabitants prosperous. Supposedly the twelve signs of the
zodiac were laid out around Glastonbury Tor, and from the small chapel
on top of the Tor one could see the zodiac's unusual shapes blended in
with the English countryside.
This was an event not to be missed. The festival was to be held for the
summer solstice, June 21, and I left my dossing friends in Cornwall and
began to hitchhike. I got a ride as far as Salisbury, travelling
quickly through the ancient fields of Stonehenge country. Walking
through Salisbury, a hippie/student came up to me, and gave me a hit of
acid wrapped in foil. He bragged how he and his mates had put hits of
acid into the milk bottles which the local police used for their tea,
and how that day a couple of cops had gone to hospital with
hallucinations, while the other policemen wandered about in a happy daze
all day, smiling at everyone.
I thanked him for the acid, and not knowing what to do with it, and not
wanting to be caught with it in my possession after hearing his story, I
put the foil packet in my mouth and resumed hitching. Rides followed
quickly. First a van full of black musicians on their way to a gig
picked me up, hoping to score some dope. Then a mysterious
business-type man in a sleek Jaguar told me to hop in.
As we sped through the darkening evening his conversation became more
and more questioning. He seemed to know a lot about the forthcoming
festival, and was eager to know as much as I could tell him about it. I
realized that I was beginning to babble, and then it occurred to me
that the acid had been dissolving in my mouth, depite the tinfoil. So I
was starting to trip, and at this point, speeding through the night, my
mysterious driver told me he was the police chief for the area, and
that he wanted to know what to expect from the festival goers. I tried
to put his mind at ease, that we weren't going to be smuggling dope or
sacrificing virgins. I also realized that I wanted to get out of the
car before a full-blown acid trip took over.
He let me out on the outskirts of Piltdown, after pointing me in the
general direction of the farm where the festival would be held. I
wandered down the lonely highway in the dark with only starlight to
guide me. The white lines in the middle of the road began stretching
and blurring in an effect I knew was the result of a mild acid trip, but
the effects weren't overpowering. At the juncture with the road I was
to follow the next day, I slipped into a field and fell asleep,
exhaustion overcoming the weak acid dose.
I awoke late the next morning, still feeling some effects from the acid,
and lay in the field watching the clouds make incredible patterns in
the clear blue sky.
Finally excitement at the thought of the festival overcame my lethargy,
and I started to walk down the country road. Surprisingly I got another
ride, this time from a local who also had heard a lot about the
festival. He was dubious about the quality of our hippie magic, as the
weather had been overcast for the past few days. His tone wasn't
ironic, and I realized how many of the British, especially in the
countryside, still believe in magic and a lot of the Celtic mythologies.
The road was becoming jammed with fellow festival goers, and when my
ride let me out, I joined the throng. This was a more serious and
committed type of hippie. We were the true believers for the most part,
not just students growing their hair long for a wild summer.
A local farmer let us use his fields, with his stone farmhouse as
headquarters. By the time I got to the site it was dinner time, and
some self-styled diggers had set up a kitchen beside the farmhouse in
the barnyard. I ate some stew dippped from a huge iron pot, and soon
was reviving old friendships with people from the Richmond scene and
elsewhere.
There was a magical excitement in the air, and the view over the
festival site was typical of Somerset's hilly beauty. I wandered from
the throng at the soup kitchen, and fell asleep on a hill in the middle
of a field. A very odd snuffling noise awoke me very early the next
morning:
Asleep in a field
a browsing cow
my alarm clock
|
I was too excited, for once, to fall back asleep, and made my way down
the hill to where some vans were unloading around the base of an unusual
structure. The rock'n'roll bands were going to play on a platform part
way up a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, which we were going
to build with construction scaffolding which an enlightened builder had
loaned us.
Everyone was smoking dope and unloading trucks in a flurry of manic
activity, and I joined in. I was proud of the muscles I had developed
as a gravedigger, and I spent hours unloading scaffolding. After
unloading, I joined the construction crews, and very quickly the pyramid
began taking shape. One job I had to perch on a rail high in the air
and saw off the end of a piece of pipe with a hacksaw. Halfway through
the job, someone handed me a carrot carved into a chillum and stuffed
with pungent hash. We were a crazy looking construction crew, but
somehow through the haze of hash smoke, the pyramid grew skyward.
Boards were laid for the performance area, about twenty feet off the
ground, and the scaffolding continued to a peak about seventy feet above
that.
After working on the pyramid all day, I took off for a tour of the
festival site. The farm was about a hundred acres, with hedgerows
dividing the area into several major fields. Tents were appearing
everywhere, and many hippies were building huts in the hedgerows.
Banners and tents and colourful people were everywhere, like some
medieval camp before battle.
For a bunch of spaced-out freaks, things were amazingly well organized.
Six-foot deep latrines were dug, and metal pipes were laid across
them. Another free kitchen sprung up towards the bottom of the site,
and everyone looked like they were going to be housed and fed. At the
bottom of the hilly fields, the pyramid stretched into the sky, and
after several days of building, the musical part of the festival was
about to begin.
I settled in a giant wigwam tent, at the bottom of the fields about a
hundred yards from the pyramid. Quickly our tent became a family, and I
met a blonde girl who hitched into Piltdown with me to buy food for our
tribe. That night about ten of us dropped acid together while we sat
huddled in blankets before the stage.
Arthur Brown was the first performer, and he tried to bum people out.
He sang about how the Aquarian dream was a fake, and that we should all
examine our consciences. We countered his rock star negativity by
staying in our group, and whenever one of us looked a little
uncomfortable, the rest of us would put our arms over them and tell them
they were in a big egg and about to be reborn.
The positive group dynamics soon had us all on great acid trips, and we
felt free to wander as a group. We danced and listened to the music
under the stars with hundreds of other stoned worshippers, and all was
at peace. Someone had gotten hold of a jug of scrumpy, a strong local
cider, and that also helped ease any acid paranoias.
Later in the evening, one of us had to take a dump, and so the whole
gang of us dutifully trooped over to the open air latrines, and all of
us sat in a long row on the poles and had a good shit or pee, men and
women, young and old. It was one of the most liberating experiences of
my life, all of us sitting there in the open air under the stars, making
the natural and rude noises we all must make every day of our lives
without any embarrassment. Some of us got the giggles from the acid,
and the relaxing sound of laughter mixed well with the rock music and
the sounds of nature.
We all stumbled into the wigwam and fell asleep in each others' arms. I
slept with the blonde girl, but we wanted to remain celibate to keep
the spiritual atmosphere. In the middle of the night there was a
commotion outside, and when we went to investigate, we noticed a giant
shining star. On acid it hung in the sky like a space ship - it was
the morning star, and we all stood in awe for several minutes.
After a week of wandering in the fields, listening to music around
campfires and eating with our fingers, we were incredibly dirty. I
decided to walk the mile to a little pond where there were thirty or
forty skinnydippers splashing around. I slipped off my dirty
bellbottoms, and swam around in naked bliss, the water cool under the
high afternoon sun.
Late the next morning a hippie gave me a hit of acid, and then suggested
we walk across the fields to Glastonbury Tor. It was a long hike, and
after the usual hour the acid started coming on. It wasn't enough to
overwhelm us, though. After several miles we came to a country road
with a pub, and we stood and watched the swaying patterns the wind was
making by sweeping through the ivy on the walls:
Wind
through ivy mat
pub walls
|
Finally we reached the Tor, and began the slow hike up. After twenty
minutes we completed the steep climb, and there below us was laid out
the Somerset countryside. Try as I might, I couldn't make out the
mythical zodiac patterns, but the
old chapel
on the top of the Tor had a very magical aura about it, and the view
itself was enough to make any other kind of magic irrelevant.
The festival had lasted over a week. It was much written about in the
British musical and countercultural press, and I believe that the
festival is still being held annually, almost twenty years after our
inaugural event with the great pyramid.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Ed Baker has left a new comment on your post "Glastonbury Fayre 1971 - When I was a naked, tripp...":
those WERE the daze.... eh ?
and the festival... there in England...
did you know, that England is the northern-most
point of land that is above water of what was Atlantis ?
(see Donnelly)
so... this kind of celebration/festival is fitting.
a fun read. cheers, Ed
Posted by Ed Baker to Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens at 9 June 2015 at 13:25
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On Jun 9, 2015, at 4:39 PM, Chris Faiers <zenriver@sympatico.ca> wrote:
thanks, Ed ; )
It was kinda sad finding the article in The Guardian about the current state of the Glastonbury Festivals - it's VERY commercial now - believe it's the largest muzak fest in the English speaking world. But ... once upon a time ... at the northernmost edge of Atlantis, 7,000 stoned hippies celebrated the Summer Solstice the way we used to millennia ago!!!
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On 2015-06-10, at 12:04 AM, Dr. John wrote:
Great memoir, Sensei. You vividly recreated the early 70s for those who, ahem, don't clearly remember them. And yes dammit, there WAS a pyramid. I thought for sure you had conjured that up in a flight of poetic fancy. But no, the latter day Druids built it, and come they did.
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Conrad DiDiodato has left a new comment on your post "Glastonbury Fayre 1971 - When I was a naked, tripp...":
This is the best protest song ever by 10 Years After
Your haibun kinda reminded me of it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg6xaFZStEI&index=80&list=PLsOVMhzv5cZOHXfdvqWYN3A0sZMCvWf3Y
Posted by Conrad DiDiodato to Riffs & Ripples from ZenRiver Gardens at 11 June 2015 at 04:59
A.
