Be ye as wise as feathered serpents
Michigan baby boomer Dave Bixby took a route into music typical for his time: after playing as a kid, he had his mind changed by The Beatles and The Beach Boys, started smoking pot and formed a band with friends, playing jangling garage pop with Peter & The Prophets. And then, in 1968, Bixby took part in US governmentsponsored LSD tests. “I felt like Major Tom,” he says today. “It was a controlled study, an eight-hour trip into the evening with a debriefing questionnaire. The next day I felt a little bit spent. I knew I was not in my body or mind, but the observer watching from the other side. Recreational and daily use took me out of the mainstream of the human experience, and I had trouble with re-entry. LSD opened me up to other dimensions to the point I couldn’t function in this one.” It’s this strangely vacant state that can be felt in the minimal acoustic guitar and pained vocals of his 1969 LP Ode To Quetzalcoatl. The album was assembled as Bixby was saying goodbye to drugs and hello to new ideas of the divine: recalling his post-acid burnout as “being in hell with no way to communicate”, he’d been introduced to a Grand Rapids prayer circle in 1969. As his mind began to clear and new songs began to flow, he started playing his acoustic guitar at weekly meetings held at the home of charismatic local Don DeGraaf. Soon he found himself moving from the misery and solitude of the lyrically troubled Drug Song (“Life used to be good/Now look what I’ve done/I’ve ruined my temple with drugs”) on to hope-infused religious songs including Free Indeed and I Have Seen Him. Eventually, an album was recorded in DeGraaf’s living room: “It was done on a Roberts 2-track reel-to-reel with echo capability,” Bixby recalls. ”The echoladen sound was perfect for the loner theme. I recorded the 12 songs in the order they appear on the album. I was used to doing concerts, and the studio felt empty without people, so I put on the earphones and just disappeared into the songs.” After two four-hour sessions, two reels of tape were sent to Nashville for pressing at $2 per copy. It was sold to raise funds for the religious group. The resulting album – ostensibly a Christian folk record – captured a man flickering between despair and hope, casting out the drug demons whilst trying to find room for a more spiritually rewarding presence. Subject matter and presentation were similarly contrasting. The title of 666 may scream hell and demonic fury, but the song’s underpinned by a subtle and beguiling melody that’s gloriously at odds with its prophecies of Christ’s return and the end of the world. His smooth, creamy
This month’s stateless traveller trapped in rock’s deserted airport departure lounge; an acid-fried folk glimpse of heaven and hell.
voice and elongated tones – not unlike Richard Hawley’s – make the going similarly easy on Lonely Faces’ tales of “Friends selling their soul, existing in a living hell”, while Free Indeed sugars the pill of religious submission with a velvet folk-pop balm. The finished album also aided Bixby in avoiding the Vietnam draft. When attending his medical – his lottery number was 64 (“that was going to make me dead meat bleeding out in a rice paddy,” he says) – he submitted a letter from his Second World War veteran father requesting his exemption, and showed the examiners the contents of Ode To Quetzalcoatl. He was granted a temporary deferment to do counselling work with returning soldiers who were deemed a suicide risk. The world was calling on him in other ways. “Religion and drugs have this in common: too much of either knocks you out of balance and leaves you empty,” he says. Don DeGraaf’s prayer circle had eventually turned into a multi-state cult called ‘The Movement’, with DeGraaf appointing himself leader and renaming himself ‘Sir’. Under this guise he formed Harbinger, a new group led by Bixby, who went uncredited: the band was set up to tour, recruit members and raise funds. Things turned very sour in the years that followed, with accusations of brainwashing and manipulation leading to a relocation to Florida, where Bixby remained until becoming disillusioned with the group and leaving in 1975. He drifted somewhat in the ensuing years, staying in a cabin in the woods of New Mexico, then earning a living as a performing musical cowboy at the Grand Canyon and later working in TV in Seattle, followed by living on a boat for several years before a shipwreck ended that. He’s now back in Arizona forming a relationship to his old work. “These songs are now a psalm for me,” Bixby says, “OTQ has a life of its own and that now includes me while I am still alive.” Its continuing reappraisal has revitalised Bixby, who’s now singing and performing again. “The feeling of giddy has returned,” he says. “It also came with a feeling of worth and confirmation that I am truly a folk singer and was capturing a moment in time and giving it to the future. Now, I want to finish life doing concerts, and to meet the people who get what I am saying.”
Daniel Dylan Wray