Freak Out!

I've been loading my CD collection onto my new iPod and rediscovering a lot of music I haven't listened to in years.
This album is a perfect example.
I hadn't listened to the vinyl version for years when I bought the CD to update my library. I think I played the CD once.
Just now, I floated through "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet" and suddenly I was back in the autumn of 1966.
I was in my first newspaper reporter job in a small north central Indiana town, making $65 a week and living in a $20-a-week mobile home about a block from the newspaper office.
My college friend Steve Power had recently returned from wandering the West and introduced me to what passed for the drug cluture of the period.
Steve would show up at my trailer on a Saturday evening with an armload of record albums, including this one, and we'd smoke a few joints and down a bottle of Romilar cough syrup each. The active ingredient, dextromethorphan, is a semisynthetic derivitive of morphine and it produces an LSD-like experience. It's not addictive, especially considering that everytime we slammed down a bottle of the stuff the taste became more and more of a barrier. If someone walked into the room with an open bottle of the stuff today, I'd have to leave.
Steve also brought a supply of amyl nitrite capsules - made to relieve the symptoms of angina pectoris, they cause an instantaneous rush made all the more intense by Romilar and pot.
I remember having what I thought was a powerful insight during one such rush and hurried to write it down in one of my college notebooks that were lying around. The next morning, I opened the notebook and discovered I'd written, "There's no bad. It's just a different kind of good."
True enough from a cosmic perspective, but hardly practical advice for day-to-day living.
There were moments while listening to this album and others on my RCA console stereo system when we felt like we'd actually merged with and become the music.
Far out, man.
Anyhow, Freak Out! was an obligatory part of the Romilar trip soundtrack.
And I'm still getting a buzz out of it 40 years later on my iPod.