At the tail end of summer, 2024, two STATIC staff writers embarked on a 15-day road trip and followed King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard to ten cities on their North American tour. To be serialized weekly in STATIC across the next six weeks, God is Calling Me Back Home is a tour diary and a memoir, as well as an examination into the material and spiritual remnants of psychedelic bohemia.
PROLOGUE: A SONG FOR THE LAST ACT
September 1st, 2024
GREENVILLE, SOUTH CAROLINA
I feel silly and sick. I’ve been off tour for 2 days now, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I threw up from anxiety today, which hasn’t happened in a long time. I used to do that almost everyday my senior year of high school, worried sick about my girlfriend. Now, one day before the start of my junior year of college, I am just as worked up. I miss my family. I miss my room. I miss my innocence. I didn’t realize how alone I have felt for 2 years straight now, how lost and confused I have been.
I saw a painting by Henry Peters Gray at the Detroit Institute of Art, a little over a week ago now. It showed a veiled, nude woman holding a mirror, revealing the reflection of an upside down world, the sky where the ground should be and vice versa. A small placard displayed the painting’s title, “Truth.”
Something struck me at that moment. The woman’s soft smile seemed to call me out, calmly scolding me for confusing mere reflections of consciousness for my true mind’s eye. I have seen everything upside down for longer than I can remember. I have become a slave to my senses. I sit in my childhood bedroom, listening to “I See Myself” by Geese, and I begin to sob. I don’t know what else to do. I remember why life is beautiful.
For two weeks, I thought of nothing but my friends, family, and my favorite thing in life, which has always been and will forever be music. I will never be the same. My grandmother’s mantra has always been, “But by the grace of God go I.” Today, I begin to truly grasp what she means. I reflect on the many powers outside of my control that acted upon me on this trip, and how they ultimately delivered me back to the comfort of my Mother and Father.
At long last, I am back home, I am safe, and I am surrounded and filled with Love. I take a deep breath, and for what feels like the first time in years…all is quiet.
AM I IN HEAVEN?
August 18th, 2024
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
I look out into a swarm of weirdos and spot someone with bronze curly hair and a black, “NEW YORK FUCKING CITY” shirt . . . there’s J-Mac.
He’s sitting at one of many picnic tables, all littered with colored fabrics in the overcast backyard of a pub in Forest Hills, Queens. Displayed on his table is a white t-shirt with a sorcerer and crystal ball announcing: “KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD, 2024 SUMMER TOUR.”
When J-Mac first asked me to “go on Gizz tour” with him, I was a bit confused. I knew that he was the hippie type, but I didn’t know that there was that scene surrounding this band: chasing every set, selling bootleg merch, meeting new people, peace, love, drugs…it all sounded very exciting.
I wrestled with the decision for several months after, worrying about time and money and all the things that could keep a person from doing what they please. Yet something deep inside of me knew that I had to do this.
I admit, my mind immediately turned to the counterculture of late 1960’s America, a historical moment which has been continually graverobbed for inspiration and aesthetic; I’m guiltier than most. It’s the reason why the documentary “Woodstock 99’” was so impactful to me. The greed, rape, and fire that plagued the attempt at “3 more days of peace, love, and music,” serves as a grim but firm refutation of flower power politics. I tend to meet any attempt to revive that spirit with cynicism.
However, when I consider why I feel called to follow King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard on tour, a few things give me hope that the same spirit that flowed from the Bohemians to the Beats might be at work again. Unlike acts like Phish and Dead & Company, Gizzard feels much more representative of the compassion and resilience the original era allegedly embodied. Their music calls attention to animal cruelty and environmental rights, and they performed in drag for one of their five nights at The Caverns in Tennessee in protest of anti-trans legislation.
Gizzard released their first full length album in 2012, and in the twelve years since have released 25 more. This sort of artistic efficiency would be impressive enough on its own, but they refuse to repeat themselves, exploring different genres, instruments, and atmospheres on each album. While the band has been pumping out records for over a decade now, their heap of hippie-dippie disciples is a fairly recent phenomenon.
This seemed like the perfect opportunity to witness the type of culture that I used to only read about firsthand, only in 2024. I was excited to discover how the modern age has influenced the nature of this American tradition and add myself to a long lineage of people who love rock & roll religiously.
J-Mac has already firmly cemented himself in this tradition, having followed Dead & Company on their final tour the summer prior. Just a month ago, he traveled across North America to play guitar for the New Jersey shoegaze band High. He started his Gizz tour run 3 days before me in Washington D.C. for the opening show of the 2024 North American Tour, as well as attending the first Three-Hour Marathon Forest Hills show last night.
Tonight, I’m joining him for the second New York show, and we will travel across thirteen states and one province to see ten King Gizzard shows together over the next two weeks. Like a true Deadhead, he will be vending self-made merchandise before the shows at fan-organized meetups to help keep us on the road. This is where I first find him on a cloudy afternoon in Queens.
I walk over and give him a big hug. I sit at the table, which is displaying a stack of his white King Gizzard shirts and a few scattered light green lighters, declaring simply “gizz” in the Brat font. A bootlegger next to us sits and continues his conversation with J-Mac.
He is a scraggly, lanky hippie with long straight black hair, a scruffy beard, and one of his purple and green King Gizzard Tie Dyes. Originally from Florida, he studied Chemistry before dropping out to follow King Gizzard on tour. “When I got in line at 7 a.m. at the Anthem in D.C on Thursday, I knew that I was back home,” he tells us, seemingly rushing to get the words out, overwhelmed with excitement and passion. He asks J-Mac if he wants any mushrooms for the show tonight. “I’m actually sober,” J-Mac politely declines.
The same night that J-Mac asked me to go on tour with him, we discussed his sobriety in depth for the first time. He told me about the Wharf Rats, a support group for sober Deadheads. They organize gatherings during set breaks, pass out Narcan on tour, and provide community for fans in recovery. It intrigued me. I wrongly assumed that this sort of lifestyle was codependent with heavy drug use. It is beautiful that the joy of music and community is enough for some people and I am excited to share this experience with one of them.
I admit, I feel a tinge of temptation at the realization that it really would be that easy to score psychedelics among this crowd. “You can do whatever you want at the shows,” J-Mac had told me in the weeks prior, sensing my curiosity, “I just don’t want to travel with any drugs in the car.”
As the fan meetup dwindles, we pack up and head towards the closest thing that we will have to a home for weeks. J-Mac opens the trunk of a gray Toyota Sienna riddled with Grateful Dead Steelie stickers; one reads, “THICC DADS WHO VAPE FOR JERRY.” The inside floor is littered with supplies: Slim-Jims, Pop-Tarts, and an assortment of ramen. We both grab water and chat outside the van. We walk to the stadium while J-Mac tries to sell a few more shirts. A cop wordlessly shoos him away, so we try to find the box office.
Thanks to the savviness of the good people at STATIC Magazine and generosity of Panache Booking and Pitch Perfect PR, we will have a ticket and a photo pass for every single show on our two week tour run. As we approach, the sky darkens and it starts to gently rain. I am getting nervous. I took a photography class in Sophomore year of high school, and have used my camera very infrequently since . . . Undeterred, I decide that I will hopefully trial-and-error my way into some cool shots over the next few weeks.
As I make my way up to the photo-pit, the weather worsens. I drape myself and my bag in a poncho someone was kind enough to give me. The small space between the stage and the rail is packed full of people who seem more confident and competent than me. Geese takes the stage, the NYC based band who will travel with Gizzard for the entire first leg of this tour. Their music is charming and loud . . . really loud. I lost my earplugs on the train, and the massive PA’s assault me with guitars, drums, and lead singer Cameron Winter’s slightly sarcastic voice. Eventually, I see a pair of used foam earplugs sitting on the edge of the stage, and shove them into my ringing ears.
By the time the opening set is over, my insecurity has been replaced with excitement and awe. When the members of King Gizzard walk on stage, the stadium begins to scream. Lead singer Stuart Mackenzie approaches the microphone, a flute in his hand. He tells everyone to take a moment to look around. I turn to the crowd and receive the massive roar that the stadium full of fans offers in return. A semicircle of American flags flap in the distance, dancing in the storm.
Stu lifts his flute to his mouth and, with his first note, fires the starting pistol for tonight’s marathon. A few minutes into the extended jam of “Hot Water,” I see JMac’s curly hair and contorted face floating above the audience, before tumbling over the rail into the photo pit. He grins madly, pats me on the shoulder, and darts back into the crowd. I am immediately swept up by the collective of the photographers, the crowd, and the band.
Just an hour or so in, I begin to understand what might attract this band’s cult-like following. The band make playful quips at one another and the audience as they dance in and out of their many albums, all accompanied by trippy visuals performed live by longtime collaborator Jason Galea. During “Billabong Valley”, keyboard player Ambrose dons a cowboy hat to sing his verse, jumping into the crowd and surfing around on top of an inflatable alligator before strutting back on stage and mooning the crowd briefly.
The band’s energy grows as the night darkens, though mine dwindles. Even as I tire, I am aware that this is the most fun I have had in a long time. I get to do this nine more times over the next two weeks. Still, when the show ends, after a 13 minute long rendition of “Am I In Heaven?,” I feel a strange sadness as the band throws drumsticks, setlists, and kisses out to the crowd. I fight my way through the flood of people exiting, struggling to find J-Mac outside. Through the crowded chaos, I see a white shirt shining high in the night like the Star of Bethlehem.
He’s with our friend Sevin, and I catch up with them while J-Mac sells a few more shirts. We hop back in the van and listen to Geese on the ride back towards Manhattan. I spent my summer riding the subway for hours everyday, so there is something distinctly liberating about watching the staggering skyscrapers grow through the backseat window of a car. We cross the Williamsburg bridge, drop Sevin off in the Lower East Side, then split at my uncle’s apartment in Midtown where my parents are staying this week for my sister’s freshman year move-in at The New School. He pulls the van over on 6th Ave, and we plan to be on the road by noon the next day. I walk inside, buzzing.
After delivering a quick recap of the concert to my Mom, I lie down on the couch and look out the window at the skyline and the H&M tower. Two years ago, we stayed in this same apartment the week before I began my freshman year at NYU. I remember staying up until the sun rose, thinking about my girlfriend, thinking about how I would survive living in the city, thinking about if I was making a terrible mistake… thinking, thinking, thinking.
The memories start flooding back, so I open my laptop and look through the pictures I took today. Soon, the sun begins to rise and birds float through the tall buildings, seemingly unconcerned with the manmade monstrosities confining their flight. As I watch the concrete slowly soak up the natural light, I wonder what could have possibly led me here . . . and where I am about to go.
IT DOESN’T LAST FOREVER . . .
August 19th, 2024
BOSTON, MASSACHUSSETS
I wake up around noon to J-Mac and Catie standing over me, grinning. “Good morning sunshine,” they tease me.
We had arrived in Boston late last night after hours of driving through Connecticut flash flood warnings, listening to live Grateful Dead albums and talking about King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard. As heaps of water crashed down on our windshield, I began to suspect that the specter of the Dead will haunt me on this tour.
J-Mac and I talked for a long time that day about the differences between the two bands. J-Mac claimed that seeing Gizz is nothing like seeing the Dead. For him, that music is a spiritual experience and an American tradition. I agree that there is something uniquely American about the Grateful Dead, whose radical roots shriveled with age.
Yesterday’s psychedelic symposium lingers as I crawl out of bed and join J-Mac at the kitchen table. Catie makes us eggs and coffee. With an unfamiliar experience ahead of me, I am very thankful for the comfort of close friends. Catie, who I have known since the first grade, is starting her final year of study at Emerson College . . . she doesn’t love it, but she is doing well. She lives in a two bedroom apartment on a quiet street, about a 20 minute walk from campus. My parents call me to ask if we made it into town okay. They talk to Catie for a long time.
After a lazy day, we all put on Grateful Dead t-shirts and return to the van. It’s about a thirty minute drive to Suffolk Downs, an old horse racing track near Logan Airport. Parking is $30 dollars.
“Is there any sort of ‘I’m really cool’ discount?” J-Mac asks the attendant, hanging his wide grin out the window.
“Not here buddy,” the man replies in a thick, unamused Boston accent.
J-Mac forgot his camera at the apartment, so he borrows mine for Geese’s set while I watch with Catie from afar. J-Mac is showing us his pictures afterwards when stagehands begin wheeling out a giant table filled with keyboards and MIDI controllers. J-Mac’s eyes widen: “Holy shit, they’re bringing out the synths . . .”
The synth table has not made an appearance at any North American show so far. Excitement bubbles in the crowd. I take the camera, and J-Mac and Catie merge into the mass. The band crowds around the table, and slowly layers of bass and arpeggios start to rise. Stu dons a green bucket hat and sings the opening lines to “Gondii” into a vocoder. His robotic voice floats over the sounds of circuitry.
They start to occasionally wander away from the table as they move into “Change,” “Extinction,” and a personal favorite of mine, “Grim Reaper.” Ambrose raps over the synthy clavinet groove before the table is wheeled off entirely. “You gotta rip the band-aid off sometime,” Guitar player Joey Walker quips. They quickly launch into a trashing metal track “Supercell.”
This whole time someone has been holding a big tarp. Joey starts to read it out loud. Timmy, the tarp-bearer, was supposed to be here with his best friend, a pilot who passed away recently. Timmy wants to play the guitar part to his friend’s favorite song Perihelion in memory.
“That sounds pretty fackin’ good,” Joey says, and security pulls him over the rail and onto the stage. Timmy thanks the band for letting him interrupt their set.
“Anyone here who’s with a friend tonight, just make sure you cherish them,” Timmy says. “It’s a really hard lesson to learn that this moment won’t last forever.”
I think of J-Mac and Catie standing back in the pit somewhere. I am very aware of my breathing. Joey, free from his guitar, parades around the stage while Timmy shreds in his late friend’s King Gizzard shirt. It sounds like a stone rolling away from an empty tomb.
Soon after Timmy re-joins the crowd, the band launches into “Gila Monster.” The past few days, J-Mac has been wearing a beaded bracelet spelling out the song’s title, and I wonder where he is. As if my thoughts summon him, he appears next to me, wide-eyed and disturbed. He holds up his phone, and I read a text from his ex-girlfriend. I give him my camera again, so that I can relax and he can distract himself. After the show, we meet up with Catie and snack on cashews quietly in the van. J-Mac is still shaken.
When we arrive back at the apartment, Catie’s roommate is also having a rough night and needs some privacy. J-Mac and I head outside. We sit in front of one of the many colonial style brick row homes on the block, and talk about being on the road. I ask about his experience this summer, playing guitar for High all across the continent.
“This is all I want to do,” he tells me. A bunny hops across the empty street. “Just travel and chase music.”
We walk back inside. The situation has settled; Catie and I discuss the drama in hushed tones in her room. She starts to vent: she dislikes her major, she dislikes her school, she dislikes her city . . . “Maybe I just need an adventure,” she tells me. I understand.
After a solemn summer in New York, I am relieved to be anywhere else. It’s easy to get stuck in a city, gummed up by the same sights and sounds.
I think about all the places that J-Mac and I will travel to in the coming-days. I’m excited . . . but this has been the easiest part. I stayed with my family in New York and one of my closest friends in Boston. Many nights of couch-crashing and cozying up with a greasy hippie in the back of the van await me. The greasy hippie knocks on Catie’s door. He walks in looking sad and defeated.
“I’m tweaking,” he sighs.
We talk about the text – she wants to talk when he’s back in New York. Catie reminds him that he doesn’t have to do anything that he doesn’t want to. I share my own stories of past paranoias and unhappy hauntings. J-Mac goes back to sleep and seems a little better. Catie starts to play an episode of Good Mythical Morning on her phone. I close my eyes, and it feels like just a few seconds pass before I am shaken awake by J-Mac in the morning.
“Yo, we gotta go in 20.”
THE CLOSING OF THE FRONTIER
August 20th, 2024
PORTLAND, MAINE
“WELCOME TO NEW HAMPSHIRE // LIVE FREE OR DIE,” a road sign reads as we zip up I-95 North. The New England wilderness dances in and out of focus through the window of the van. I wonder if I’m living free right now . . . I don’t want to die.
Right before I left for the tour, I watched the film Easy Rider, starring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda as Billy and Wyatt. On a pot-fueled motorcycle trip from Los Angeles to New Orleans, the two hippies meet the lawyer George Hanson, played by Jack Nicholson, who joins them and marvels at their freedom.
“Don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free; cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are,” George warns them one night. Minutes later, he is bludgeoned to death in his sleep.
As we cross into Maine, we blast “No LSD Tonight” by Jeffrey Lewis. The myth of the psychedelic roadtrip is embodied by Ken Kesey, host of the first Grateful Dead gigs, who traveled from California to New York, giving away acid. The journey he made with his “Band of Merry Pranksters” was a fascinating attempt at a radical reversal of our violent westward expansion. However, it still accepts the fundamental argument of our American conditioning: Freedom is earned through exploration. I look out at the horizon of the highway, slicing open the soft savagery. It occurs to me that maybe I’m looking for love in the wrong place, desperate for pride in a country which offers up mostly ugliness. As we pull into the local brewery where the fan-meetup is held today, I feel anxious and uneasy. J-Mac is in a similar funk, so I decide to give him space, editing, writing, and exploring before it’s time for doors.
The sky is clear. The back of the lawn rolls off into the river, and cars zip past on the distant highway bridge. J-Mac sees two bootleggers he recognizes, Ben and George. They are all wearing each other’s shirts. Ben declares that tonight if they play “The Dripping Tap,” the band’s 16 minute opus from their 2022 record Omnium Gatherum, he’s gonna be the first one to crowdsurf.
Up front, a security guard pulls all the photographers aside and tells us the rules of the photo pit. His name is Dallas, and he wears an American flag hat atop his round, red face.
“Do you like catching crowd surfers,” J-Mac asks. Dallas grins ear to ear, revealing a chipped tooth. “I love it,” he chuckles.
During the middle of Geese’s set, Cameron stops unexpectedly. “We’d like to take a moment to wish our bass player Dominic a very happy 22nd birthday.” He holds his phone to the mic, and begins to play “22” by Taylor Swift. Soon, the synth table once again rolls onstage.
“We’re gonna try to play some techno for a little bit,” Joey says, announcing their arrival on stage.
Stu speaks next – “Look at where we are . . . this is beautiful.”
They open with several songs off The Silver Chord, including an almost 20 minute version of the title track. The air is electric as the 808 cowbells, claps, and growling bass create a deep trance.
When they wheel the table off, they launch straight into the thrasher “Gaia,” pulling the same trick from Boston. Joey even comments during a breakdown on “This Thing” that “tonight is just like last night in every way, but way sicker.”
They play the opening suite to Im In Your Mind Fuzz, the first album of theirs I ever heard. As I try and stick my camera high up enough over the tall stage, I am grinning like a little kid. I think of concerts I went to with my Dad in middle school: Tedeschi Trucks, Foo Fighters, Jack White . . . I thought nothing of weed or mushrooms or acid those days. All I knew was music. I feel a familiar high for the first time in years.
The band is riding their own high. After “Trapdoor,” Joey shouts, “We’ve tried a lot of new things together; some of them went well, some of them went crap, but overall . . . this is the best night of my fackin’ life!”
If the show ended here, it would still be one of my all time favorites. Churchlike organs start to rise. Ambrose climbs down on top of the massive subs in front of the stage. He belts out the opening stanzas of “The Dripping Tap.” Everyone screams along. Stu begins playing the main riff at breakneck speed. Ambrose shrieks, the drums build to a big fill, and I instinctively start to jump up and down as Ben’s lanky figure flys over the crowd.
After a several solos, the band teases, “I want to see you to take Stu away to that lake . . .” Stu grins. He begins to strip his shirt and socks. Security shoves us out of the way as we all stick our cameras up in the air.
“What’s gonna happen is, I’m gonna jump out, we’re gonna have a big group cuddle, and then we’re gonna go into that muddy as fuck body of water and do some weird shit,” Stu instructs the sea of people. He dives into the crowd while the band continues – “Drip, drip from the tap, don’t slip on the drip.” He floats all the way to the lake, flips off the spectators, and jumps into the water with a shirtless fan.
A few minutes later he is delivered back to the stage, wet and dirty. He picks his guitar back up, rips through the final chorus. Victorious, he declares, “We’re all gonna sleep good tonight!”
Maybe the band will, in the comfort of their tour bus. J-Mac and I, however, have to drive ten and a half hours to reach Toronto before tomorrow night. The long journey is the last thing on my mind as I wander aimlessly back to the van mumbling to myself.
When I meet J-Mac, he tells me that bootleg Ben and his friend Danny are down to convoy with us to Toronto. We plan to keep an eye on each other and make sure we all make it to Canada safely. While we fill up our cars at a nearby gas station, we all talk about the show. “This is something that we’ll tell our kids we were there for,” Ben says excitedly, and I honestly believe him. We grab some Red Bulls, agree on a route, and start the journey.
J-Mac insists that he has enough “personal demons” at the moment to keep him awake and alert, so I drive first. Ben and Danny were complete strangers to me hours ago, but tonight the sight of their white Subaru guides me down the road and puts me at peace. There is something ghostly about an empty highway.
We listen to the first Wu-Tang album as we retrace our steps from the weekend and drive through New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and into New York towards Albany. After a few hours, our convoy stops again to use the bathroom. J-Mac takes over and our comrades also trade shifts.
As we continue down the dark road, he plays music that reminds him of old girlfriends. He says that it helps him stay awake. I suspect he is looking for an excuse to wallow in it. I happen to enjoy wallowing. I ask what he wants.
“To be in love,” he says plainly. We sit in silence for a minute . . . I start to talk about it. I don’t tell very many people about it. Tonight, my words are not unkind. I tell him about love and loss and broken dreams of anarchy.
Trust me.
It was beautiful.
It was ugly.
It was music.
I write all of this at 3:38 a.m. as J-Mac silently smokes a cigarette through the cracked window of the van. Bonnie Raitt sings to us softly- “Thank you, baby, for giving me my life . . .”
The dark forest slips through the quiet concrete corridor of the American freeway.
Elements of the story have been altered and dramatized.