Anyone remember these guys? First heard them about 1973. I was working construction (first job I'd ever had) and was picking up some material at a lumberyard with the guy I was working with (Jim). He gestured to me from behind a stack of plywood and fired up a joint, something which I had zero experience with at that point - it was a bit of a shock to me, a little intimidating, but I nevertheless took a couple of tokes out of curiosity. Well, nothing happened, until I reached for the door handle on the flatbed truck Jim was driving, and I was suddenly reaching waay up toward an unusually glistening piece of chrome on a broad expanse of exquisitely detailed door panel and climbed up and up into a strange new world, chugging up the road past intensely colored storefronts in a very complex state of wonder. Jim invited me to stop by that evening at the old house he and his brother and a friend were renting, and upon my arrival he placed a fat, heavy four-finger baggie of brownish red "Colombian" weed in my hand and said, "Twenty bucks, if you want it..." And I most certainly did, you betcha. I forked over a twenty, and in my pocket it went. An hour later, we were all sitting in his livingroom with all the windows open to the soft summer air, the light streaming through them deep red with the setting sun, and Rare Bird's "As Your Mind Flies By" playing on the stereo, smoking Colombian as the red light faded into night, the small red dots on the stereo and the moonlight outside the only light. And I was utterly and completely transported to the the most fantastically strange realms while the album played on and on. So the band and my initiation to the experience and the music and subsequent albums holds a magical place in my heart. Epic Forest is another of their goodies.
