When my ex-wife’s dad divorced her mom and fell in with hippies, I learned all kinds of things but mainly, how to live life with open arms. He introduced me to Z, sitting outside a trailer in Oklahoma.
Z used to head an accidental commune centered around an old farmhouse he bought. “It was an experiment without consciously trying to have one, in group consciousness and the 60s and you know just living off the land. Twenty-five of us lived in chicken coops and smokehouses and anywhere we could, man, and packed into that house. And there was the greatest harmony and cooperation I have ever seen.” He and his band just wanted a place to make a lot of noise practicing without bothering the neighbors. They found utopia.
One time they played the Celebration of Life Festival, “our Woodstock,” on an island in the Mississippi River and had to take a ferry to get there. “It had this kinda Biblical look and feel, that we were about to cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land.” On the first day, an apocalyptic storm blew over the stands and killed someone. When Z’s band took the stage, black clouds threatened again, and the promoter got nervous and shouted for everyone to run for safety. But Z stepped forward with open arms to confront the storm.
“And I just kinda instinctively turned and started singing, ‘Om.’ And I got my arms up and everybody on stage is om-ing and these tens of thousands of people are singing om. And that thunderstorm split in half and went around us. We rocked the house.”
