Old Rope is an excuse to write claptrap. It probably wont be a particularly good read, but with a bit of luck it might get better with time.
What’s in a name? Well, you need to have one, I’m told. In this case the name has a dual meaning - the most obvious being a reference to the the saying “money for old rope” and this blog is nothing if not ropey. That aside, the name was in fact inspired by a George Harrison quote, a snippet of which you can see acting as a tagline under the title up above.
Harrison, along with the other D-list celebs in his boyband, was a famous exponent of LSD during the mid-to-late sixties. The influence of the drug on the music of The Beatles and many of their contemporaries is well documented (for anyone who gives half a shit a recommended read would be Ian MacDonald’s indispensable Revolution In The Head). But as the decade wore on and following an underwhelming visit to Haight-Asbury, Harrison’s love affair with acid waned.
“You know, I went to Haight-Ashbury, expecting it to be this brilliant place, and it was just full of horrible, spotty, dropout kids on drugs. It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug culture. It wasn’t what I thought, of all these groovy people having spiritual awakenings and being artistic. It was like the Bowery, it was like alcoholism, it was like any addiction. So, at that point, I stopped taking it, actually, the dreaded Lysergic. I had some in a little bottle, it was liquid, and I put it under a microscope, and I looked at it, and it looked like rope, just like old rope, and I thought ‘I’m not going to put that in my brain any more.’ “
Harrison’s decision to spurn acid serves as an amusing epitaph to an era of musical and philosophical experimentation, a period that reshaped the cultural landscape of Britain and America. It also provides a fitting name for a blog that clumsily attempts to misappropriate these subjects for its own nefarious ends.
We seek to redress the balance – put Old Rope in your brain instead!
Peace and love,
Your oldest of ropes,
Old Rope
Patti and George having a bad trip in Haight-Ashbury, man
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September 29, 2009 at 8:40 am |
Hmm,
I think the Beatles experimented with LSD, and Transcendental Meditation, as part of the sixties give it a go vibe which went with creating a new future, where non-existed. This wasn’t just a mindless hedonism it was part of the unshackling of the ongoing post-war depression which kept the country sad, and in black and white until, as Philip Larkin describes it, “sex was invented in 1963, somewhere between the end of Lady Chatterley and the release of the Beatles first LP”. Or put another way in took eighteen years before sex and drugs and rock n roll began to raise the gloom of post-war Britain. Like most things they tried it, advocated it, and moved on. Then it (psychedelia) became part of their creative palette. George nailed how fake drug-fuelled enlightenment can be; maybe I Me Mine came from this?