Responding to Kid Charlemagne

by Jonathan Brown

"This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow." – P.K. Dick

The Song

There is a guitar solo — sixteen bars, Larry Carlton, 1976 — that knows more about a particular American decade than most books written about it. It arrives just over half-way through Kid Charlemagne, slides in over a groove that has no business being as joyful as it is given the subject matter, says everything the lyric has been circling, and then stops. Just stops. The silence after it is the most eloquent thing on the record.

I have been listening to that solo, on and off, for the better part of forty years. It still does what it did the first time — which is to say it grieves and exults simultaneously, without resolving the tension between those two states, without suggesting that resolution is either possible or desirable. Fagen and Becker understood something about irony that most writers who reach for it do not: that it is not a form of distance. It is a form of precision. The raised eyebrow is sometimes the only honest response to material that sincerity would falsify.

The song is about Owsley Stanley, almost certainly — Augustus Owsley Stanley III, Bear, the man who synthesized an estimated five million doses of LSD in the mid-sixties, who built the Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound, who understood that the music and the chemistry were aspects of the same project. He was, in the most literal sense, a synthesizer — bringing together technology, art, chemistry and a genuinely utopian social vision into something that briefly cohered into what felt, to those inside it, like a civilization. A counter-civilization, granted, but one with its own laws, its own currency, its own emperor. Kid Charlemagne. The name is perfect: the imperial grandeur slightly deflated by the "Kid" prefix, the boy emperor, the dreamer who unified something briefly extraordinary and then had to run for it when the dream collapsed. Which it did. Rapidly. The Haight utopia had the lifespan of a mayfly and the ambition of Charlemagne's actual empire — which is to say it dissolved almost immediately, into warring successor states, leaving behind a legend disproportionate to its duration.

I encountered the edges of that legend, much later, at a remove of geography and a decade. The empire was gone. What remained were its artifacts, circulating through the residual networks — through arts communities and university towns, through the connective tissue of people who had been there and people who knew people who had. By then, Owsley himself had largely withdrawn. He was working on what would turn out to be his last project. And it was, characteristically, a statement as much as a product.

The Perceptual Record

Let me be precise about this, because imprecision has done considerable damage to any honest conversation on the subject. The clinical vocabulary — "hallucination," "psychosis," "break from reality" — carries embedded assumptions that obscure more than they illuminate, and I speak as someone for whom this is not an academic question.

What LSD does, at its most fundamental, is not generate false perceptual content. It amplifies the perceptual field. Dramatically, sometimes terrifyingly, but the mechanism is expansion rather than fabrication. The visual and auditory acuity that the drug produces is real acuity — you are not seeing things that aren't there, you are seeing more of what is there than the nervous system, in its ordinary filtering function, permits. The patterns in a surface, the overtones in a sound, the layered emotional content in a face — these are genuinely present in the environment. The sober brain suppresses them as noise, because attending to everything at full amplitude simultaneously would make functional navigation of ordinary life impossible. What the drug does is temporarily disable the filter.

Huxley called it the reducing valve — the brain's mechanism for constraining the totality of available experience to a manageable trickle. I arrived at essentially the same formulation independently, before reading him, because the experience more or less demands it. Once you understand that you are not hallucinating but misreading a dramatically expanded perceptual field, a certain quality of panic — the fear that you have lost contact with reality — begins to subside. You have not lost contact. You have, in some sense, gained it. The question of whether that gain is sustainable, or whether the ordinary filtering function serves purposes beyond mere convenience, is one the experience does not answer for you.

There is another piece of this that gets systematically overlooked in both the clinical literature and the cultural mythology, and it matters: LSD is, at its neurochemical core, a stimulant. The most powerful stimulant ever synthesized, I would argue, with — and this is not a small qualification — the worst half-life of any stimulant known. Within hours, the 5-HT2A receptors it works on begin dramatically downregulating, which is why you cannot simply redose your way back to the peak. The molecule contains its own limiting mechanism, which is more than can be said for methamphetamine in its modern iterations — a substance that has been progressively refined, across successive generations, to engineer around the body's defensive responses, to extend duration, to raise the ceiling, to eliminate the mercy of a natural terminus.

I have, over the years, had considerable experience with both ends of this spectrum. And the phenomenological overlap between a high-dose LSD experience and the particular perceptual state produced by amphetamine — not at the recreational end, but deeper in — is striking enough that I have come to think of them as related instruments playing different registers of the same fundamental note.

Philip K. Dick was on amphetamines for most of his adult life. The sheer volume of the work is, partly, a pharmacological phenomenon. So is the quality of attention the best of it pays to surfaces, to the texture of ordinary objects and transactions, to the question of what is real and what is a sufficiently convincing simulation of real. A Scanner Darkly is the book where he stopped fictionalizing the question and started reporting it — and the epilogue, which is not fiction at all, is among the most devastating things he ever wrote. A list of names. "Dana, permanent neurological damage. Donna, permanent psychosis...." And then himself, included without self-exemption. "These were comrades whom I had." The past tense doing all the work.

I have my own version of that list. I will not reproduce it here. But I know it by heart, and the names on it inform everything that follows.

Bard College, (Simon's Rock satellite campus), 1981 or thereabouts. Upstate New York, a campus that had always operated slightly outside the normal academic gravity field — self-selected students, the arts at the center rather than the periphery, an institutional culture with a higher tolerance than most for radical departures from convention. The kind of place that had produced, a decade earlier, two unusually literate young men named Fagen and Becker, who had gone away and made some of the most precisely intelligent music of the American century. A node, in other words, in a network whose threads ran back to the sixties and were still, if thinning, faintly operational.

What arrived through that network, in the early eighties, was a final dispatch from the emperor. Black 8x8" sheets perforated into 100 .8x.8" squares. Samurai clan symbols on each square, 10 designs. High liquid concentrations (LSD in an ethanol base, which we brushed onto the Samurai blotter) of Owsley's signature product — the aesthetic as deliberate as everything he had ever produced, because the container was always part of the message with him. The black and the warrior symbol spoke of discipline, of the correct relationship to extremity, of — perhaps — the appropriate psychological preparation for what you were about to undertake. Whether the preparation was adequate is a question I am still, in certain respects, working out.

I was asked to leave before the academic year concluded. The song lyric, when I eventually heard it, produced a recognition that was almost comic in its precision. "Never goin' back to my old school." Indeed.

The Prior Hallucination

Here is the irony that presents itself with a clarity so sudden it is almost funny: you discover, in the midst of what the clinical literature will later call a "break from reality," that the reality from which you have broken was itself a construction. Not an accident. Not a failure of sufficient sophistication. A construction, collectively maintained, functioning precisely because the people inside it experience it not as a construction but as the world as it simply and self-evidently is.

Money is a fiction that works because everyone agrees to treat it as real. National identity is, as Benedict Anderson observed, an imagined community — which is not a dismissal of it but a description of its actual architecture. The social hierarchies that organize daily life, the conventions that structure every interaction, the values that feel self-evident and therefore universal — these are inherited arrangements, historically contingent, maintained by a form of collective agreement so thoroughgoing that questioning it reads, to those inside it, as pathology.

This is not an original observation. It is there in the Upanishads, in Plato's cave, in the Zhuangzi's butterfly dream — the ancient and recurring suggestion that the ordinary waking state may be its own kind of sleep, that what we take for reality is a particular, culturally specific, extremely well-maintained dream. Baudrillard made a career of elaborating it. Foucault spent several hundred pages on its institutional enforcement mechanisms. Durkheim called the collective energy that sustains it "effervescence" and studied its ritual maintenance with the care of an engineer examining load-bearing structures.

What the psychedelic experience does is not introduce this idea as a philosophical proposition — you can read all of the above, and nod, and return to your life essentially unchanged, because the intellect can hold a subversive idea without being destabilized by it. What it does is make it viscerally, perceptually, inescapably apparent. Not as a thought. As a direct encounter. The scaffolding becomes visible. And the particular quality of freedom that follows from that visibility — which is real, which is not a delusion, which is in fact a more accurate perception of the situation than the one it temporarily replaces — is why the experience is so often described, by those who move through it without being destroyed by it, as liberating.

The problem is not the liberation. The problem is what happens next.

Because Odysseus has changed, not Ithaca. The people waiting there — the family, the former friends, the institutional structures, the whole apparatus of ordinary life — are still inside the construction, experiencing it as reality itself, and here you are, saltwater-drenched, trying to explain what the ocean looked like from outside the harbor. There is no shared language for this. The language is part of the construction. The very grammar of rational discourse is inflected by the assumptions of the consensus reality, which means that every attempt to describe what you've seen either sounds like poetry — which is safely aestheticized, harmlessly beautiful, filed under "interesting experience" and left there — or sounds like symptoms.

It sounds, specifically, like schizophrenia. And at that point the machinery engages.

The Return

There are two ways to come back, and society has a prepared response for each of them.

You can come back shattered. Weeping, disoriented, unable to account for yourself, haunted by residues of the expanded perceptual field that won't resolve back into the ordinary filtering mode. This response can be accommodated. It confirms the available narrative perfectly: you went somewhere dangerous, it broke you, and we will now manage your brokenness in ways that serve as a demonstration of our own sanity. The psychiatric facility, the Thorazine, the careful erasure of whatever you came back knowing — these are presented as treatment, and in a limited, functional sense they are, because the goal is reintegration into the consensus and Thorazine reliably produces something that resembles, from the outside, a person who has stopped arguing with the consensus.

What Thorazine actually does — chlorpromazine, to use its proper name — is aggressively block dopamine receptors, enforcing a perceptual narrowing, a pharmacological reimposition of the reducing valve. It does not treat anything in any meaningful clinical sense. It sedates. It corrects. The message it carries, beneath the clinical language, is precise: your perception is deviant and we will adjust it with chemistry until it conforms. The irony, which is not a small one, is that this is exactly what MKUltra was attempting from the other direction — the use of chemistry to manage what people perceive and report, the state as the administrator of perceptual experience. The polarity of the intervention is reversed. The intention is identical.

The second way to come back is clear.

Not undamaged — that distinction matters, and I'll return to it. But clear. Possessed of a perception that, whatever its cost, has genuinely seen something, and that retains, in the aftermath, the capacity to see it. To look at the machinery of the consensus reality — the money, the hierarchy, the organized violence dressed in institutional clothing, the vast and intricate apparatus for not noticing what is actually happening — and to name it with accuracy and without sentimentality.

This response is not accommodated. This response produces the truly punitive reaction, because it cannot be managed through pity. A shattered person can be pitied, and pity is a mechanism of control — it positions the pitier as sane and the pitied as the proof of sanity's value. A clear person cannot be pitied. A clear person must be discredited.

The schizophrenia diagnosis is conveniently available. So is the more informal apparatus — the withdrawal of employment, of housing, of relationship, of community, the quiet and cumulative removal of everything that makes ordinary life navigable. The Soviet Union ran a formal version of this: "punitive psychiatry," the diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia" applied to political dissidents whose perception of the Soviet system was accurate and whose accuracy made them dangerous. The West has always preferred the deniable version, where the enforcement is social and economic rather than overtly state-directed, where no one has to sign an order because the mechanism is distributed across a million small and individually defensible decisions. I no longer know what to do with you. You make people uncomfortable. You've changed. It's probably better if —

And then the silence. Not even the dignity of rupture. Simply the gradual, undramatic cessation of relationships that turned out to have been contingent on your remaining inside the shared dream. The moment you step outside it, you discover their actual structural basis, which was not affection or history or any of the things you believed it was, but rather a mutual investment in a particular version of reality that you have now, unilaterally and without adequate consultation, abandoned.

In a social sense, you have died. The informal gulag of the expelled is populated entirely by people who made this discovery at various velocities.

I should say — because honesty requires it, and because the essay that soft-pedals this particular truth is not the essay worth writing — that I came back by something less than the cleanest possible route. The cost was real and extended and I carry parts of it still. What I will not do is present that cost as evidence for the prosecution, because the prosecution's case is exactly what I've been describing, and its evidence is always the damage, never the perception that the damage was the price of. The damage and the perception are not separable. That is the thing that cannot be said in the available clinical vocabulary, and that the song — somehow, in sixteen bars of guitar — manages to say.

The Casualties and the Survivors

Dick's epilogue to A Scanner Darkly is the most honest piece of writing about this era that I know, and its honesty consists precisely in the absence of the literary devices that make the rest of his work so extraordinary. No unreliable narrators. No reality-bending conceits. No ironic distance. Just the names, and what happened to them, rendered in the flat declarative of a man who has given up on making it mean something beyond what it simply, terribly is.

He includes himself. That is the thing that makes it unbearable and also the thing that makes it true. "These were comrades whom I had." The past tense is doing more work than most writers achieve with entire paragraphs. He knew what he was part of, and he knew what it cost, and he did not exempt himself from the accounting.

The question the epilogue raises and cannot answer is the one I find myself returning to: what was the difference? Not a moral difference — the casualties were not weaker, or less careful, or less intelligent than the survivors. Not a pharmacological difference, necessarily, though dosage and frequency and the specific chemistry of individual nervous systems are real variables that the mythology tends to flatten into irrelevance. Something more contingent than any of those. Something closer to luck, in its most stripped-down and philosophically uncomfortable sense — the thing that happens to you rather than the thing you do.

What I know, from the inside of this rather than from the literature, is that the damage tends to arrive not in the experience itself but in the return, and not from the perceptual expansion but from the collision. The expanded perception, in itself, is not destructive — it is disorienting, certainly, and at high enough doses or in psychologically unprepared individuals it can produce acute crises, but the acute crisis is usually survivable. What is less survivable, sometimes, is the sustained pressure of a social environment that reads your perception as pathology and responds accordingly, over months and years, with the full apparatus of diagnosis and marginalization and the quiet withdrawal of everything that makes life navigable. The damage that Dick catalogs in his epilogue is downstream, in many cases, not of the drug but of the return.

This does not excuse the drug. It locates the injury more accurately.

The amphetamine thread is worth naming here, because it runs through too much of the century's significant creative work to be dismissed as coincidence or romantic mythology. Dick's extraordinary productivity — fifty novels, hundreds of stories, the sheer impossible volume of it — is partly a pharmacological fact. Kerouac's On The Road was written in three weeks on a benzedrine roll and reads like it, which is not a criticism, because the benzedrine metabolism is built into the book's actual syntax, its breathless accumulation, its refusal to stop. Auden took Benzedrine every morning for twenty years. The postwar American literary acceleration has an amphetamine engine underneath it that the literary histories tend to politely omit.

Gibson is more inferential — he has not, to my knowledge, discussed his pharmacological history with anything like Dick's devastating candor — but the early Sprawl novels have a phenomenology that feels chemically informed in a way that is difficult to account for otherwise. The hypersaturated sensory field, the prose perpetually finding detail at the edge of perception, the sense that the pattern recognition is running at maximum and finding signal in everything — these are not descriptions produced from outside a particular kind of cognitive state. They are reports from inside it. The map has the texture of the territory.

What survives all of this — the casualties, the institutionalization, the damage, the long tail of consequence — is the work. This is not consolation. It is simply a fact, and a complicated one. Carlton's solo on Kid Charlemagne is not consolation for anything. It is proof that something real happened — that the civilization, however brief and however violent in its final accounting, produced something that the chemistry and the vision and the particular quality of attention that Fagen and Becker made possible, and that we would not otherwise have. You cannot unhear it. You cannot institutionalize it or correct it with Thorazine or remove it from the record of what human beings have made when they were fully, dangerously, unrepeatable alive to what they were doing.

The emperor is dead, his ashes on a soundboard in Chicago. His empire lasted three years and the songs about it will outlast us all.

What the Song Knows

I am not, in the end, writing about Steely Dan. Or rather — I am writing about Steely Dan in the same way that the song is writing about Owsley: using a specific, datable, richly particular subject as the instrument through which something larger and less easily nameable can be approached without falsifying it.

What Fagen and Becker understood, and what the song demonstrates rather than argues, is that irony is not the enemy of feeling. It is its most honest available register, when the subject is one that sincerity would either sentimentalize or condemn — and the history I've been tracing here is one that has been damaged, in roughly equal measure, by both of those responses. The sentimentalized version — the Summer of Love as innocent golden age, the casualties as brave explorers, the whole soft-focus mythology that the sixties generates about itself — is a lie of omission that serves the living at the expense of the dead. The condemnatory version — the War on Drugs narrative, the clinical vocabulary of pathology and deviance, the pharmacological correction of perception that dares to see the scaffolding — is a lie of commission that serves the consensus at the expense of the truth.

The song holds both without resolving them, which is the only honest position available. The groove is magnificent over images of the ruins. Carlton's solo grieves and exults simultaneously. The lyric is sardonic and the music is alive and neither cancels the other out and the resulting thing is more true than either would be alone.

I should say — because the essay demands it, and because anything less would be a betrayal of everything that precedes it — that I do not know, with any certainty, what I survived or what it cost me or what, if anything, it gave me in return. The accounting is ongoing and the books don't balance cleanly, which is itself perhaps the most honest thing I can report. What I know is that I heard the song, and I knew what it knew, and the knowing was not theoretical.

There is a quality of recognition — not nostalgia, not quite grief, something more complex and less domesticated than either — that arrives when the Carlton solo begins. It is the recognition of someone who is being told, in a language that bypasses the available clinical vocabularies, that what happened was real. That the civilization, brief and costly as it was, was real. That the perception, however socially inconvenient, was not pathology. That the dream, even as a ruined thing, even as a cautionary tale, even as a list of names on a dedication page that reduces grown men to silence — that the dream had in it something genuine and irreducible and worth the honest telling.

Those San Francisco nights. The gentle people, scattered. Kid Charlemagne, running.

A solo begins. Sixteen bars. Telling the story that the words were not meant to carry.

Jonathan Brown writes on technology, security, and culture for bordercybergroup.com and aetheriumarcana.org.