immanence

My musical, intellectual, and ecocultural interests would not have evolved the way they did without Daevid Allen — beat poet, musical visionary, and psychedelic rocker who died last week at age 77. Here’s a personal account of why.

In the background are the social, material, and ecological connections that I intend to examine more closely in future writing on the ecologies of music: networks of musicians and artists, political events (like May ’68 in France), places and landscapes (Glastonbury, Deia, Canterbury, et al.), objects and techniques (like tape loops, or Allen’s dissemination of the style of guitar playing he called “glissando guitar” and the surgical instrument he used for it), and ideas and images (like the Tantric graphics employed by Allen to convey Asian and occult ideas about subtle bodies, higher harmonies, and other such things). 

In the days before the internet — when information, image, and sound from anytime-anyplace wasn’t accessible at the click of a computer or cell phone key — one had to work hard to find out what was “happening.” It was a self-fulfilling sort of thing: if it took real effort to find it and you found it, the reward was that you figured you were “in the know” and could share that with others. (But others found other things, which resulted in a competition of vanguards. Mods and rockers, progs and punks, and so on.)

I was fortunate to grow up in a metropolitan area, with some good college and alternative radio stations (like Radio Glendon, and the early CFNY before it became “The Spirit of Radio,” at which point that spirit was evaporating quickly); even better record and book stores (like The Record Peddler, where I could peruse NME’s Encyclopedia of Rock, ask the staff to play something from it and tell me all about it, and walk away with a new album by a band I’d never heard of, like Can or The Soft Machine, which was to influence me for life); and clubs like The Edge, the punkish, arty haven that burned brightly for its 3-1/2 years of life in the seediest heart of Toronto’s downtown. It was at The Edge where I first heard Daevid Allen, founder of the same Soft Machine and Gong, two of the more adventurous bands to come out of Britain’s and France’s underground rock scenes of the late 1960s.

Allen was gentle, pixieish, yet with a barely constrained intensity, when I met him during his solo N’Existe Pas tour in 1979. Gong had already disbanded a few years earlier, though the name was carried on for a few years by percussionist Pierre Moerlen, and the many reformations — Planet Gong, Mother Gong, New York Gong, GongMaison, and later Gong revivals — were to continue for years.

In its “classic” era of 1971-74, Gong had brewed up a musical potpourri — psychedelic rock, bouncy jazz, tape loop experiments and spacey synthesizers, Indian, Javanese, and gypsy scales, Daevid’s hilarious tales of Zero the Hero, the Pothead Pixies, and the Invisible Opera Company of Tibet, and the “space whisper” (and sometimes cackle) of ecofeminist witch and poet Gilly Smyth, a.k.a. Shakti Yoni and Mother Gong. And they delivered it all in a cartoonish narrative that combined hippie mysticism, esoteric spiritualism, a proto-punk anti-establishment energy, and — their most redeeming quality, for many — a humor rivaling Monty Python’s.

To those with ears to hear such things, the spirituality of the western mystery traditions (and their variations on Asian religion) were left, right, and center in what others saw merely as Allen’s eccentric psychospiritual ramblings. Allen’s commitment to consciousness raising through music is detailed in his book Gong Dreaming, volume 2, and was most evident in his glissando guitar “meditations” and other spiritual “exercises” he undertook after giving up drugs in 1974 and separating himself from what he saw as the “negative energy” that had accumulated around the band at the height of its popularity.

Among the things I learned from Daevid was that glissando guitar technique, which he had picked up from Syd Barrett and which he associated with musical consciousness raising. (He used a stainless steel gynecological surgical instrument, which he found in antique shops, to slide up and down the strings, and funneled the sound through ultra-heavy reverb to create an ethereal wash of slowly changing harmonic textures. Good examples include the second last clip below, “I Am,” or the first few minutes of the preceding one; but it fills up the background space of a lot of Gong’s music.)

And it was from him that I learned about a place of freaks and sacred energy — a place I was to travel to several years later, and which I ended up writing half a doctoral dissertation and book about — Glastonbury, England. (I met Allen there again in 1988, at a yoga class taught by his then partner, Wandana Bruce, a.k.a. Turiya, a.k.a. Arrowheart.)

Ultimately, I concluded it wasn’t so much the place itself that mattered — Glastonbury, or Deià on the island of Mallorca, where Daevid kept returning to for years — as it was how that place was orchestrated by an ensemble of diverse actors, including the landscape itself and the people that came to it. There was something crucial in the relational lure that made these places what they became — pockets of experimental, artistic liveliness burnished in an alchemical mix of untamed, somewhat zany personalities open to the world around them and a landscape that responds to that openness. Whatever it was he was channelling, Daevid knew how to set up connections for that polarized, “electromagnetic” flow to occur.

A perpetual wanderer, I don’t know if Daevid ever found the place he was looking for on Earth. But as a man of many faces and transformations — Zero the Hero, Divided Alien, Captain Capricorn, Dingo Virgin, Bert Camembert, et al. — he is still on his pilgrimage to that “Other Side of the Sky” that he sang about:

“To pass beyond the countless worlds, the eternal wheel, the ceaseless tides of selves ever passing away before our eyes…”

which ended in a delirious

“Hari Hari Supermarket! Hari Hari London Bus! Hari Hari Ladies Lavatory! Hari… Hari… Hari…”

Or, as he put it in the next track, “Sold to the Highest Buddha” (on Angel’s Egg, clip four below), “Captain Capricorn is goin’ back where he was born.”

Here are a few glimpses from his journey…

The classic middle album of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy:

And the New Age he and Gilly were pointing toward… They’d be the first to acknowledge it hasn’t arrived here on Earth, but their belief that it’s somewhere “within” at least comes with some compelling accompaniment here.

Finally, here’s one of his glissando guitar meditations:

… followed by his love song for the goddess of his beloved Deià (Deya) in Mallorca:

Rest in peace, Daevid. Long may the Octave Doctor ride.