Back in the mid-90s I collaborated briefly with ‘K’ on a book that ended up getting shelved. Despite the fact that we never completed the project, it was a hugely enjoyable experience. K was an old ‘head’ from the psychedelic scene of the 60s and 70s. He’d hung out with Tim Leary, was a close friend of Jerry Garcia and as a result of an elaborate FBI sting, had spent a few years in prison for conspiracy to supply LSD. Suffice to say, he had some good stories to tell.
Once, after we’d finished working on the manuscript for the evening at my flat, he opened the oversized briefcase that he carried with him at all times and lifted out a record. He handled it with such care that I immediately felt I was in the presence of a precious artifact.
Fire up that thing, would you? He pointed to the bong that lurked in the corner of the room. You’re going to hear something unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.
I didn’t exactly need to be told twice, and I filled the bowl with a bud of locally grown hybrid known as “Willesden Green”. K examined the stylus of my record player carefully. I suspect had the needle not been in pristine condition, it wouldn’t have been allowed close to this record. I had two coins blu-tacked to the top of the stylus. He gestured towards them with a quizzical look. “Don’t worry”, I assured him, “it’s the optimum weight”. He accepted this without question.
This record has only been played 4 times so far, he told me, This will be number five.
I passed the bong to him and he took a long, satisfying hit before passing it back to me for refilling. He insisted we have two such tokes each before listening to the record. It’s called “Justice is Done” he muttered from within a rapidly enfolding haze. There’s were only five copies pressed, one for each band member…
“Which band?” I asked, automatically impressed at the rarity despite not having heard a single bar.
We called ourselves ‘The Transfer’… there was me, Jerry, Tim, Janis and Big Joe.
To this day I have no idea who “Big Joe” was, except that K said… he went to Mexico a few weeks after we recorded this… never saw him again, though I heard he changed his name to ‘Jesus Wept’. But I do know that Jerry was Jerry Garcia, Tim was Timothy Leary and Janis was Janis Joplin.
Soon afterwards the Willesden Green made its presence known and he started the record. The first side was one long fried guitar solo with the occasional wail from Janis Joplin. Side two involved a conversation between Tim Leary and K while Big Joe played bongos and Jerry and Janis made a godawful racket in the background. To all intents and purposes it was fricking awful.
But there was something very magickal about hearing a recording pretty much nobody else will ever hear.
Now it has to be said that the world already has enough Jerry Garcia guitar solos. Tim and K’s rambling (clearly acid-peaking) conversation was mostly indecipherable and often descended into bouts of giggles that lasted a minute or two. Big Joe couldn’t play bongos to save his life and Janis was identifiable alright, but hardly at her best. So musically speaking, Justice is Done won’t be missed. But it’s an historical oddity that some might claim should be preserved before those 5 copies get misplaced or destroyed. Assuming they haven’t been already.
I lost touch with K a few years back, and while there’s a part of me that would like to hear the record again for old time’s sake, I kind of hope it never gets mp3-ed and bit-torrented (it doesn’t appear to have been as yet). I suspect that if it does, then it won’t be K’s copy. I know he’d like to keep it as a sacred relic rather than converting it into just another weird download for completeists to collect and never listen to. And I think I agree with him on that. Not everything needs to be digitised.
