Hi Sixties Chick.

Spirituality in the sixties was driven by acid, at least that's how it seemed to me. The music that really influenced me was Van Morrison, starting with Astral Weeks.

If I ventured in the slip stream
Between the viaducts of your dream
Where mobile steel wheels crack
and the ditch in the back road stops.
Could you find me?
Would you kissa my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again?

From the far side of the ocean
If I set the wheels in motion
and I stand with my walls behind me
and I'm pushing on the door
Could you find me?
Would you kissa my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
to be born again?

Indian music was very spiritual to us at that time. Our flat resounded with rumbling tablas and ragas by Ravi Shankar, and Ali Akbar Khan. I remember one of our favorites was from an album called Morning and Evening Ragas by Akbar Khan on the saroad. It was called Mishura Mand.

We found Manitos De Plata very ecstatic. At times it was like his guitar notes were handfuls of colored beads he would cast in intricate cascades of tumbling forms. You could see and taste music in those days. Certain songs by the Grateful Dead stand out in my memory. Remember In the Attics of my Life?

When there were no words to speak
You spoke to me
When there were to songs to sing
You sang to me.

Also very spiritual was Van Williams The Lark Ascending.

We would never, ah, meditate, without playing the Butterfield Blues Band's East West. An incredible piece event to this day. I recently bought it on CD and I was amazed at the brilliance of the improvisation and the final East West jam with its driving ascendance pushing you higher and higher from melodic plateau to melodic platue, a moments rest and then upward again to reach an insestant, savage, throbbing crescendo of ecstasy. Too bad that word has become corrupted. It had quite a different meaning in the Golden Age.

G.G.