Track 17: "The Mushroom Sweet"
Explore the Forbidden Cavern and the Hysterical Vortex and, maybe, win a date with the Purple Girl
Hear me, Mushroom Intelligence
Hear me, Invisible Hand
Reverently, I've eaten of your flesh, now
In me your spirit lives again
xx
Teach me, Mushroom Intelligence
Shake me, Invisible Hand
Drop me in the Hysterical Vortex
Pull me to safety once again
Bridge
Little mushroom feelers
Little mushroom eyes
Massive mushroom moon
Lights the purple mushroom skies
Mushroom Gods and Devils
Dance behind the shroud
Little mushroom cities
'Neath the mushroom cloud
{Initiation Hall / The Sacred Shroud (Instro, backward masking, madness)}
{PURPLE GIRL}
Went to sleep, dreamed I was dead
A big fat raven sat on my head
She chewed my ears, she chewed my eyes
Then I was her and she was I
CHORUS:
Purple Girl comes creeping in
Succubus of the purple skin
Purple Girl, spins her loom
In a secret corner of my room
xx
I woke up in a house of mirrors
I woke up with this gnawing terror
Saw the Purple Girl standing there
Her purple image it was everywhere
(Repeat chorus)
{Hear Me (continued) }
Woman, woman is the catalyst
Woman, desire of all Unknown
Woman, priestess, sweet Forbidden Cavern
Goddess, woman, desire of all Unknown
The secrets have been shown
Hear me, Mushroom Intelligence
Hear me, Invisible Hand
Reverently, I've eaten of your flesh now (CHOMP CHOMP)
In me, your spirit lives again
copyright Sidhe Gorm Music (BMI)
(written 1982,1983, 1984)
No, despite what the Sidhe Gorm Legal Division and the Blue Elf Public Relations Office tried to tell you back in 1984, this song was not about one of my favorite pizza ingredients.
It was about drugs.
If you followed my first Substack, Steve Terrell’s Snazzy Life, you know that I’ve written before about my use of psychedelics in my 20s and 30s. There’s one chapter devoted to the subject. And there’s another chapter in which I even mention this particular song.
As I wrote there, by the time I wrote "The Mushroom Sweet," my tripping daze were almost all behind me by this time. But around 1982, there was one trip at my old house in Santa Fe’s South Capitol area that inspired me to start writing the lyrics for this song.
If memory serves, that night just included my wife, myself and one other couple. Our baby daughter was safe with my mom and grandmother that night.
About the only thing I remember from that trip was going to the bathroom and seeing a sleeping bag, which for some reason, my wife had put in the bathtub earlier.
At first, in my altered state, the sleeping bag resembled a human body in rumpled clothes. I knew right away that this was a hallucination — and I found that incredibly funny.
When I left the bathroom, I shouted to my wife (I think the other couple had left at this point) "THERE’S A BODY IN THE BATHTUB!!!"
She went to see and I exclaimed, "IT’S MR. BAXTER!!!!"
I don’t know where that came from. Neither of us knew any "Mr. Baxter." But, we both shrieked with laughter.
If you’re not shrieking with laughter right now, well, I guess you would have just had to have been there.
Perhaps I should have written another segment of "The Mushroom Sweet" titled "The Lonesome Death of Mr. Baxter."
Or, maybe not.
While there have been countless songs about weed, and a whole lot of songs about LSD, for some reason, there haven’t been many about magic mushrooms, not even from the "psychedelic" era. This arguably is one of the few from back in that day.
I’ve found a couple from the 1980s. This one from Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper was released in 1985, the year after I released Pandemonium Jukebox.
Here’s Mojo’s masterpiece:
And there’s this 1988 classic from The Angry Samoans:
Actually just last week I asked Gregg Turner, the former Angry Samoan who sang this song, (and an old friend) if it was about the cow-pie high. No, he explained, the song “Attack of the Mushroom People” was based on a Japanese science fiction movie "where those stranded on a tropical island had to eat the mushrooms (to stay alive). But then they grew mushrooms on their faces and became Mushroom People."
Turner added, "So typical these days."
The writing process for "The Mushroom Sweet" continued through 1983 and early 1984, which is when Tom Dillon and I recorded it.
When we began the recording, I decided to string together a couple of stray songs I’d been working on, which I don’t think I’d even played in public before.
Self-consciously emulating — and ridiculing — prog-rock pretentiousness, I decided to call it a "suite," but turning the title into a dumbass pun.
That ought to appeal to the all the prog-rock hobbit-huggers in Yes and Genesis fandoms.
I wrote the first and final parts of the "sweet" shortly after that night I discovered the remains of Mr. Baxter in my bathtub.
But instead of recounting that goofy night, I tried to make it "spiritual," even including an analogy equating eating the mushrooms to Christian communion.
I was so reverent I even included a shout out to Tony Joe White and “Polk Salad Annie” right near the end of the song (CHOMP CHOMP).
The lyrics address the skating right up to the danger of losing your mind on the drug — being dropped into the "Hysterical Vortex," but being pulled back to safety by the "Invisible Hand"
And, in the bridge, I connected the psychedelic experience to nuclear apocalypse.
"Wow man! That’s why the nukes make mushroom clouds …"
The whole "woman is the catalyst" verse was based on something profound and goddess-like that my wife did or said the night we found Mr. Baxter.
Trouble is, I’ve forgotten what it was she did or said that was so profound and goddess-like.
Drugs’ll do that to you sometimes.
Sometime after writing "Mushroom Intelligence" I had a very cool, if very bizarre conversation with my daughter. It actually was the very first time with Molly, who still was a toddler, basically learning how to talk at this point.
She told me about a scary dream she had, a dream in which she encountered a mysterious character she called "Purple Girl."
I didn’t understand everything she was saying. Like I said, she was a newcomer to the English language, or any language, at that time.
But Molly was upset because when she tried to talk with the Purple Girl, the cruel bitch told her to "shut up."
Fucking Purple Girl!
The most fun part of recording "The Mushroom Sweet" — in fact one of the most fun parts of recording the whole silly Pandemonium Jukebox album, was creating the short (about 49 seconds) but totally bitchen transitional segment I called "Initiation Hall / The Sacred Shroud."
After a few seconds of hazy steel-guitar meandering by Tom, you hear what sounds like someone pounding chords on a piano. Soon it descends into chaos with some strange guitar noodling from Tom, some pounding on Pueblo drums by Tom, Alec Walling and me and barely audible chanting and mumbling.
The chanting was Tom, Alec and me reciting "Earth, air, fire water …" (The four basic elements. Heavy, no?). But the mumbling was something more sinister.
This was during a crazy time during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s (which I wrote about in a previous chapter). And one of the dumbest aspect of that moral panic was the idea of "backmasking."
A lot of third-rate evangelists made a lot of cash going around the country warning church groups and various proto-Moms for Liberty groups about this invisible threat.
The basic idea was that depraved devil-worshipping rock stars were inserting "Satanic messages" into their songs and these nefarious noises were subliminally leading the children into the clutches of the Evil One.
This idiocy had some roots in the whole "Paul is Dead" conspiracy of the late Beatles era, when some of the clues included a voice saying "I buried Paul" backwards on "Strawberry Fields Forever" and someone saying "Turn me on, dead man" in the Charlie Manson favorite "Revolution 9"
Remember when conspiracy theories were kind of fun?
That’s how I saw the whole "backmasking" weirdness. At least until 1990, when the parents of a couple of troubled young guys in Nevada sued the band Judas Priest, claiming the group was responsible for a suicide pact between their sons. The band allegedly accomplished this by inserting evil backwards messages in their song.
After that trial — which was dismissed by a judge for lack of evidence — Priest singer Rob Halford said, "Why would a band tell their fans to kill themselves? We’d be better off hiding messages like, ‘Buy more Priest records’ or ‘Buy more T-shirts’, wouldn’t we?"
Here’s an explainer of sorts for the "backwards making" phenomenon of the '80s:
So Tom, Alec and I added some backmasking of our own to "The Mushroom Sweet." I forget exactly what the other two were doing. I’m pretty sure at least one of them was reciting Beatles lyrics.
For my part, using my "Jerry Mathers as The Beaver" voice, I was saying stuff like, "Ya know, if any kids are listening to this, I think it would be very cool if you started worshipping Satan. And you should become heroin addicts. And prostitutes …"
Yes, I’m bad.
Tom was able to put all that in reverse and complete our pact with Lucifer.
I mean why should metal bands have all the fun?
For some reason, no preacher or concerned-parent group ever came after me.
But seriously, folks be careful if you must drop yourself into the Hysterical Vortex, you can’t always trust the Invisible Hand to pull you out.
Now enjoy my song:
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Credits:
Steve Terrell: lead vocals, acoustic rhythm guitar, percussion, chanting psychotic reactions
Tom Dillon: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, pedal steel guitar, chanting, percussion, backward poetry
Alec Walling: percussion, chanting, Voice of Reason