up a joint. Now, back then, we’re talking 1961, a joint was thin. They were tiny. Pot was so illegal I didn’t want to know about it. Another night I went into town to see a band at the Barn and one of the guys rolled a joint in the bathroom. He goes, “Hey, you want to smoke this?” “Nope,” I said. “I don’t need that! I got enough problems.” Plus I’d seen Reefer Madness, so I passed it up, but then I got curious. I don’t know if was the smell or the romance, but eventually everything that I did was illegal, immoral, or fattening.
Shortly thereafter I started growing pot, hiding it from the family—as if they would ever know what it was. I thought if I put it right there in the field, knowing my luck someone would probably mow it down. So I went up to the power lines and planted some seeds, thinking that maybe that was far enough away. I figured I could just go up there and water the plants whenever necessary. But first off, I took a fish—a perch that I’d caught in the lake—chopped it up in little pieces, and put it on the stone wall so the summer heat would ferment it. After two weeks, flies are buzzing around it. It’s rotten, just stinky! I mulched it with dirt, put it in the ground, took my pot seed, and went up and watered it every day. Two months later, I have a freakish bonsai of a pot plant. It’s had plenty of fertilizer, but for some reason it wasn’t growing. The stems were hard like wood. What’s wrong? I wondered. Maybe it was because New Hampshire’s cold at night—that’s it! Wrong. Turns out they’d sprayed DDT or some pesticide under the power lines that stunted the plant’s growth. Hey, motherfuckers! I was pulling leaves off and smoking it and getting high anyway. But the plant only had seven leaves on it. Still, I loved getting high and being in the woods. I would trip and go up to the mountains and streams with Debbie Benson—she was my dream fuck when I was fifteen.
I’d get high smoking pot with my friends in my cabin. We’d lock the door, even though I never had to hide my pot smoking from my mom. I’d say, “Mom, you’re drinking! Why don’t you smoke pot instead?” I’d twist one up and say, “Ma, see what it smells like?” She never said, “Put that out!” mainly because Mom loved her five o’clock cocktail (or the contact high).
When I couldn’t get a ride from Trow-Rico down to the harbor—which is what, four miles?—I walked. In New Hampshire at night in the woods, it was so dark, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. All those terrifying stories I’d told to my friends back in the Bronx came teeming to life. Wolf packs! Black widow spiders! Silhouettes of the Boston Strangler! Blood-thirsty Indians! I knew there weren’t any Indian tribes left up at Sunapee. We—the white man—had wiped them out. But what about the ghosts of the Indians? They would be really pissed off, rabid with unquenchable bloodlust. Or else I was trippin’ on my mom’s homemade hard cider.
When clouds went over the moon the road got pitch black and I went, “Oh, shit!” I tapped my way with a stick like Blind Pew from Treasure Island. Really lonely . . . and scary. Yonkers and the Bronx were always lit up. You could hide in the snowbanks and when a car came around the corner you could grab on to the bumper and ski along behind it. But in Sunapee I almost had to crawl on my hands and knees to follow the white line down the middle of a dark country road. Later on I’d be back on my hands and knees following another kind of white line down a different dark road.
When I lived up there and September came and everybody was gone, I’d feel abandoned. Rough stuff when you’re young. I used to think, am I going to be that crotchety old fuck yelling at kids to get off of my lawn? No, that’s not me. I was the kid pissing on the lawn. You know, at this point in my life, I’m still in the woods. There’s still so much I’m not sure of, and I kinda like that. It’s the fear that drives us.
“Seasons of Wither” comes from the angst and loneliness of those nights when I was walking down that spooky road.
Fireflies dance in the heat of
Hound dogs that bay at the moon
My ship leaves in the midnight
Can’t say I’ll be back too soon
They awaken, far far away
Heat of my candle show me the way
Now something new entered my life, less scary in one way but in another, more terrifying since it involved girls—that was long before I figured women out. “Right, Steven. You never did figure them out, did you? Just became a rock star and that sort of solved the problem.” Ya think?
Anyway, my cousin Augie and I had talked these two girls into going camping overnight with us. Two girls, a tent, day-gives-way-to-night, booze. Oh, man, you never know what could happen with that scenario. We could get lucky. . . . We came to a beautiful, rolling hill. It looked so plush and soft at night: “Wow! Where are we?” “I don’t know, man, but let’s pitch the tent and, uh, heh-heh, y’know. . . .” We had a six-pack of beer, girls, what could be bad? I don’t think we were doing the wild thing, but definitely making out and getting drunk. I wish I’d had the evil mind back then that I have now—but when you’re a boy you’re mortally afraid of girls! Terrified!
We wake up in the morning to someone shouting, “Four! ” I will never forget that. We looked at each other. What does that mean? Four? Louder this time, and then a golf ball slams into the side of the tent. Oh, “Fore!” We’d pitched the tent on the third hole on the golf course. Naked and hungover, we grabbed our stuff and ran like hell.
When I was six or seven, I went to church and sang hymns. There was a table with candles on it, and I thought God lived under that table. I thought that through the power of song, God was there. It was the energy rolling through those hymns. When I first heard rock ’n’ roll—what did it do to me? God . . . before I had sex, it was sex! The first song that went directly into my bloodstream was “All for the Love of a Girl.”
Way before the Beatles and the Brit Invasion, when I was nine or ten, I got a little AM radio. But at night up in Sunapee, the wind howled and I couldn’t get the radio stations I wanted, so I ran a wire up to the top of the apple tree. It’s still there! And I picked up WOWO out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and heard “All for the Love of a Girl.” It was the B-side of Johnny Horton’s “Battle of New Orleans.”
“All for the Love of a Girl” was a slow pick-and-strum love song with Johnny Horton, curling his lips around the lyrics, twanging each word as if it were a guitar string.
It was very basic, almost the archetypal love song. It’s kind of an every-love-song-ever-written ballad. It’s all there in four lines. Bliss! Heartbreak! Loneliness! Despair! I sat in the apple tree and lived every line of it. The only thing missing was my raging schooner—the likes of which you could pup a tent with.
When I heard the Everly Brothers’ “I Wonder If I Care as Much” and those double harmonies . . . I lost my breath! No one ever did that anguished teen love song better than the Everly Brothers. “Cathy’s Clown,” “Let It Be Me,” “So Sad (to Watch Good Love Go Bad),” “When Will I Be Loved?” Oh, man, those heartrending Appalachian harmonies! Those harmonic fifths! I mean, God lives in the fifths, and anyone who can sing harmonies like that . . . that’s as close to God as we’re gonna get short of a mother giving birth. Behold the act of Creation . . . divine and perfect.
If you have any doubts, try this: Take a deep breath and hold one note with somebody—a friend, your main squeeze, your parole officer: “Ahhh.” When two people hold the same note and one person goes slightly off that note you’ll hear an eerie vibration—it’s an unearthly sound. I think in those vibrations there exist very strong healing powers, not unlike the mysterious stuff the ancient shamans understood and used.
Now sing in fifths, one sing a C and the other a G. Then one of you goes off key . . . that’s dissonance. Fifths in muscal terms are first cousins and in those fifiths there’s a magical throb. If you close your eyes and you touch foreheads, you’ll feel a wild interplanetary vibration. It’s a little-known secret, but that’s how piano tuners tune a Steinway.
God and sound and sex and the electric world grid—it’s all connected. It’s pumping through your bloodstream. God is in the gaps between the synapses. Vibrating, pullulating, pulsating. That’s Eternity, baby.