Free The Big Whatever by Peter Doyle Page A

Stan.
    Over time the money side picked up, thanks to a knockabout guy named Vic, who arranged the muscle for some of the rougher suburban rock’n’roll gigs I still did from time to time. Vic was a pill-popper from way back, but I’d turned him on to powder speed one day, and Jesus god he took to it. Came back the next day and bought – yes, bought – half a dozen caps. Same again a few days later.
    Vic was a bikey, but not your stereotypical kitten-drowning, flying-booted brute. He was a short, nuggety bloke, ginger-haired, with a broken nose and a pugnacious air, yet quietly spoken, a thinker of sorts, who always figured the odds, planned his play. A good person to sell dope to. Stuck to his word, was good for credit. Vic made the Barrel scene too, and palled up pronto with Stan and Jimmy, who recognised a fellow hardhead.
    When the booze was all gone and the partyers had drifted off, it’d be those same few diehards remaining – me, Stan, Jimmy, the Captain, Denise, Clive, Bobby and Vic – still playing records, jamming, sniffing lines of speed as the sun came up.
    The Oracles had been working plenty that winter, but they had started heading in what I considered to be square and unhip directions. Bobby had taken to wearing long robes, with little mirrors and shit sewn into them. His afro hairdo was big enough to hide a cat in. Me, I still wore my beret, sunglasses, black skivvies and such. I had long since reverted to my bad hombre moustache, but the fellers in the band had begun nagging me about the “look,” saying I needed to grow my hair longer. They wanted me to wear the kaftan, beads and so forth. Dig, chillen, this tragic shit was uttered to yours truly, Mel Parker, King of the Hipsters! But since my hair is naturally curly, I grew it out, and let Bobby’s hairdresser girlfriend Maysie turn it into an afro. With my swarthy Levantine complexion, I was quite the white negro.
    But yeah, the aforementioned unhip directions: the band was playing longer and longer songs, with drum solos that went on forever. The guitarist had two amps now, and played loud enough to be heard in Antarctica. Audiences stopped dancing and took to squatting on the floor instead, zombie-staring at the band. A head named Zack put on a light show, and the group no longer played dances or discotheque gigs – no, that was old-hat shit. Now it had to be art. Performance. An experience . And the band name waschanged to Oracle, singular, without the “the.” I mean, what kind of bullshit was that ?
    Not that I was dead set against the psychedelic music thing – hey, my little astral travellers, hadn’t I been an acknowledged acid pioneer nearly a decade earlier back in Sydney? Oh yeah, I could tell you stories about visions and other worlds, and those old doors of perception. (And for that matter about what lies beyond, the League of Secret Rulers of the Fallen World and whatnot, who are responsible for nearly everything. But alas, another time for that one.)
    Because that spring, late 1969, was when acid really took hold. Each month more and more recruits were turning on for the first time, and thereafter doing all the acid they could gobble down. And behaving accordingly. Just as many, maybe more, trod a little more warily: they’d drop a trip or two, and then go, yeah thanks very much, very interesting, now I’d like a nice beer and a smoke of hash, if you don’t mind.
    When I’d first dropped acid, it took me deeeeeeeeep into Ornette and Albert and Miles, into art and philosophy – don’t scoff, my young smartarses – but for Bobby and his crowd, acid turned everything into a harlequin-coloured playground, and them into fairy children. Which I could dig, but only so far. Plus I’d kind of vowed not to take any more acid. Gave me funny aftershocks. And – full disclosure – yeah, I’d spent time in a certain Sydney funny farm, following what