7. Led ZeppelinPhysical Graffiti
I always loved Zeppelin, but Physical Graffiti became part of the soundtrack to my last year of high school. I had just met Neil and he was living in an abandoned warehouse with a few other people. They had a stereo and a handful of records: Lou Reed’s Transformer and Fairport Convention’s What We Did On Our Holidays were the only other two I remember, but it was Physical Graffiti and Transformer that accompanied us on many acid trips and the albums came to life with characters in the walls: "white doves flying around the warehouse", "satellites gone way up to Mars". There was an elderly black dude that ended up crashing there for a few months. His name was Don and he always had a "bumper" (40 oz bottle of malt liquor) in a brown paper bag. He would save all the bottles to piss in since there was no bathroom in their warehouse space.
I remember taking acid and being "stuck" on a mattress all night and day… I was tripping so hard I thought I was on a boat, which ended up being dubbed the "Hughy P Long" (still don’t know why) in the middle of the yellow ocean. By that time there were about 50 bumper bottles filled with piss surrounding the mattress in the middle of the room and the record was stuck and skipping on ‘Houses Of The Holy’ for what seemed like a year… despite being ‘lost at sea’ it was an amazing trip filled with white doves, satellites, yellow piss oceans and a mattress boat. It was unforgettable and transformative for sure.
