Seeking The Toad Transmission


I think we can all agree that something like “psychedelic music” exists, even if no one can say what the hell it actually is. Is psychedelic music made on psychedelic drugs, or music that imitates psychedelic acoustic effects, or music that sounds good on psychedelics, or music that sounds like it’s supposed to sound good on psychedelics?
If we take canonical examples of “psychedelic music” we almost immediately find ourselves in more murk. In what ways is Ravi Shankar “psychedelic?” What about Tiny Tim, or Unknown Mortal Orchestra, or dub, or Solange Knowles? Is a faithful cover of a Marty Robbins cowboy tune made “psychedelic” by the fact that the Grateful Dead are doing it?
Are there objective features of psychedelic phenomenology — like visual trails, pareidolia, or temporal stutters — that form the basis for objective features of psychedelic music — like drones, 140-150 BPM, or endless jamming? Is there any psycho-acoustic expertise at play in the emerging profession of drug journey playlist DJs, or is it all just feather-waving?
And what about music associated with specific psychedelics? Do different substances create different “sub-genres” of psychedelic music? Maybe the now antiquated term “acid rock” had it on the money. After all, a lot of old school psychedelic music was actually “LSD music,” a category that is still capacious enough to rope in everything from proto-punk garage to Krautrock space-drift to noodling Phish to the very different noodles of Terry Riley.
At the same time, all this LSD music is still worlds away from “peyote music”, which is essentially a body of non-electrified indigenous songs, more modern than traditional, sometimes passed down and changed orally and sometimes channeled anew, and accompanied by a quick heart-beat drum.
Do the differences between LSD music and peyote music only reflect distinct cultural histories, or the fact that peyote grows in the soil and has been used for millennia, while LSD was cooked up with lab apparatus a couple generations ago?
Waves of Cosmic White-out
By all rights, “Ayahuasca music” should be characterized by the medicine songs known as icaros, whose sometimes nasal tones seem to catalyze particular phenomenological potentials of the material. But under the pressures of globalization, icaros are giving way to all manner of heartfelt acoustic schmaltz and pan-indigenous soundtracks.
“Ayahuasca” is also, it bears repeating, the traditional name for a plant preparation, which generally contains “DMT” — meaning “N,N-DMT”, which is a modern scientific name. Evidence shows that DMT-containing plants have been used as far back as 2000 BCE. However, “DMT music” might not have found its true groove until it started coursing through electronic circuits a few decades ago, roped to a militant psytrance beat or the more down-tempo stylings of Shpongle, whose unforgettable machine-elf mantra animates the classic track “Divine Moments of Truth.”
And what about the inevitable sub-genre “5-MeO-DMT music”? While this tryptamine cousin of N,N-DMT is present in some ancient indigenous snuffs and smoking mixtures, the specific term “5-MeO-DMT” reflects an abstract, more clarified kind of modern magic. The occult British band Coil instinctively recognized this when they released the track “5-Methoxy-N,N-Dimethyltryptamine: (5-MeO-DMT)” on Time Machines. Like “Divine Moments of Truth,” Coil’s set of experimental soundtracks keyed to different mind-bending compounds came out in 1998.
Coil no doubt had their mitts on synthetic 5-MeO, which, previous to the publication of James Oroc’s Tryptamine Palace in 2009, was a rather closely held secret among heads and underground therapists. Unlike the better-known and more classically psychedelic N,N-DMT, 5-MeO-DMT was not officially scheduled, so it could largely fly under the radar.
But what sort of music is shaped by 5-MeO, whose sublime ferocity and implacable, if often featureless, immensity can melt space, time, and subjectivity into a cosmic white-out hurricane of Nevernow? What does that sound like? Coil honored the compound with a vast scuttling electronic space, at once insectoid and reverberant. But maybe “5-MeO music” is really just a perfect sine wave, or utter silence.
Or maybe a gutteral, gobbling croak. After all, 5-MeO-DMT is the dominant alkaloid found in the secretions of Bufo alvarius, the rather massive Sonoran Desert toad (the taxonomists have formally changed the genus name to Incilius, but we are sticking with the cooler Bufo). Here we have a psychedelic that seeps from the glands of an often subterranean amphibian who crawls out of the ground during monsoons to fuck, producing an animal effluvium that had no history of psychoactive use until some white freaks read a scientific paper and took a weird-ass gamble. What does that sound like? What about “toad music?”
The Mighty Bufo
The long-hairs in the back of the class may blurt out Bufo Alvarius, the title of the 1995 debut from Bardo Pond, a highly respectable, long-running psych band from Philly, who probably invoked the toad for the same reason they named their follow-up Amanita: to wear their freak flag on their fucking sleeves. And the music? A shambling, sludgy, often weed-choked middle path between Sonic Youth and Spiritualized, sometimes slight, sometimes severe, and always, on this album, deeply Nineties.
Mighty stuff no doubt, but Bufo Alvarius is not half as strange and timeless and haunted as the Bufo album that beat Bardo Pond to the toady punch by a single solar loop: Alvarius B.’s eponymous solo debut, which appeared on the Abduction label, vinyl only, in 1994.
Abduction was formed in the early 1990s to put out music by the Sun City Girls, one of the most notoriously caustic and musically adventurous bands of the American underground. Formed by brothers Rick and Alan Bishop with drummer Charlie Gocher, the all-male Girls crawled their way out of Phoenix, Arizona in the early 1980s to become mondo mystic noise-rock, jazz-punk greats.
Alan Bishop’s first solo project was the aforementioned Alvarius B. Though Alan played bass in the Girls, he also played a mean and chaotic acoustic guitar, and recorded various ditties with a variety of cheap portable tape recorders throughout the 1980s. Around 1992, he decided to name his solo thang Alvarius B., and started gathering the twenty-eight instrumental tracks that appeared on his debut album. This wordless music gives off few conventional signs of psychedelia, but is deeply trippy nonetheless. Call it American Feral Guitar — twangy, buzzing, slicing, biting, creepy, droning, gorgeous. Night music, desert music, culvert music. Toad music. In case there was any confusion in the matter, the first track on the album is “The Mighty Bufo.”
The exact role that psychedelics played in the post-punk undergrounds across America remains a complex and open question. Some scenes embraced them while some rejected them. But it should surprise no one that exotica fiends like Alan and Rick Bishop were acolytes.
Alan says they gobbled a lot of LSD, took mushrooms even more, and tried peyote a couple of times. Occasionally they tripped for shows, which subsequently went off the rails. Alan remembers dropping acid about thirty minutes before hitting the stage at one desert party in Chino Valley. “It was in a yard in a middle of a valley north of Prescott, maybe fifty to seventy-five people,” he says. “I remember soloing for ten minutes and then I left the stage and never came back. It was the best Sun City Girls show I had ever played up to that point. Nobody recorded it of course, it’s all up in smoke.”
Ambiance of Arcana
The brothers heard about the toad through a friend of Rick’s girlfriend, a woman we will call K. She regularly smoked the toad with a small group of Anglo shaman heads, and became evangelical about the drug. This is not unusual behavior. There is something in the extraordinary depth and immediacy of 5-MeO that makes some of us want to spread the flash. (One of these days I may share tales of the initiatory cult I was intimate with in the late 1990s, known to some as the Church of the Motherfucker.) But K was having trouble finding newbies willing to roll the toad bones.
Before approaching the Bishops, she offered to turn on another pair of fraternal acid-damaged, post-punk Arizona musicians, Curt and Cris Kirkwood from the almighty Meat Puppets. They declined. This set a warning flag flapping in Rick’s brain, but he and Alan accepted her offer nonetheless. They gathered at Alan’s small apartment in Tempe, and K conscientiously walked the brothers through the process, giving them a sense of what might happen. She placed a small pile of the material, which Rick compared to little flakes of crystal glue, into the pipe. Her instructions were simple. “Just take it and suck it until you drop the pipe.”
Richard went first, and the wild ride that ensued is still sharply etched in his memory. “Right off the bat there were these flashes of bright lights, almost blinding at first. Not too far after that, I was moving at an incredible speed through space. It was incredibly intense, just a tremendous speed through the universe. It was scary, at least at first. I was conscious through all of it, I was totally aware it was a God experience, that I was about to meet my maker. It became a weird kind of death trip. I thought, they are gonna find me right here, just where I am lying. But though it was a death experience, I was fine with it, even though it was scary. The constant movement wouldn’t stop, it wasn’t floaty-happy, it was boom. I was also getting some weird Native American vibe, like it was some sort of Native American experience. Later I found out otherwise. But I mean, who would have thought of drying up toad crystals and smoking them?” Twenty minutes in, Rick was feeling much less frightened. “I knew that I wasn’t going to die,” he said.
Then Alan took his turn, and had a fine old time. “It’s its own thing,” he says now, “a completely separate type of experience compared to all the drugs I had done up to that point. It wasn’t hallucinogenic like DMT, it was more like tuning into this place, a reality that was completely separate from anything I had ever known. But I remained completely cognizant of where I was.”
Obscene and Holy Harvest
In the afterglow of their trips, the Bishop boys described their experience to K, and she told them how her friends sourced the material. Out near Mount Graham, in Safford or maybe Willcox, there was a high school parking lot that hosted an immense Bufo orgy following the first big summer rains. At night, hundreds of toads came out of the muddy ground to mate, and the psychonauts would milk as much venom as they could onto plate glass to dry for later processing.
Directly or not, they probably learned this extraction and preparation protocol from the pamphlet “Bufo alvarius: the Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert,” which had been published locally four or five years before. Pseudonymously credited to “Albert Most,” the pamphlet’s author was later identified by Hamilton Morris as a kindly gent named Ken Nelson, who lived in Gila, Arizona at the time and has since passed away.
Readers, please take a moment to imaginatively extract yourself from the Googlebrain you partially inhabit, and reflect on what manner of furtive desert-rat networks spread this curious lore from Most to K and her crew. Try to turn from the banalizing glare of the all-knowing screen and sniff the ambiance of arcana that must have surrounded the obscene and holy harvest at this high school parking lot back in the day in the middle of nowhere.
Rick sure was fascinated. He hunted for more toad lore through the Arizona State library. While he found stuff about the cane toad, he could find nothing about Bufo or its venom being used in any ceremonial or indigenous context. “A few years later I found a reference in Terence McKenna,” Rick said. “I heard about toad licking but I never knew anyone who did that.” Mostly it remained a mystery.
In the few months following his first trip, Rick did the substance a couple more times. “The other times it was interesting but it wasn’t as mind-blowing or intense” he recalls. “There wasn’t any revelation, and I really don’t remember the other trips. The first one was the big bang.”
Given his positive, if sometimes frightening, experiences, Rick decided to share it with his partner at the time, who had a horrible trip. “She would never talk about it. She was terrified and came out of the experience in tears, and not tears of joy. Maybe it was her constitution, but I dunno. For me, I realized that this isn’t all fun and games, it’s not something you can just say try this, it’s fine.” After that experience, he never smoked it again, or turned anyone else on. “I didn’t want any responsibility like that,” said Rick. “To this day I have never had that inspiration to try it again.”
The second time Alan smoked the toad, he did it on a lunch break during a work day. “I astral-projected up onto the ceiling and watched myself re-enter, swimming back down to my body.” He tried it a few more times and started to get more of the classically hallucinogenic moments he associated with acid or mescaline, but he never met any “creatures.” Later that year, K and crew came over to celebrate Alan’s birthday, and gave him this custom-made coffee cup.
The Authentic Toad Transmission is Wordless
There is a difference between psychedelic experiences and psychedelic people. Not everyone who has psychedelic experiences, or wants other people to know that they have had psychedelic experiences, are psychedelic people. Alan and Rick are psychedelic people, which means they aren’t particularly interested in linking their music directly with drugs. As Alan put it, “You are always informed by your experiences.”
While Bardo Pond may have named their album after Bufo alvarius, Alvarius B. is the name of the act, which means that Alan Bishop is performing as the toad, or at least as its emissary. And most of the time, the toad has a voice, since all the Alvarius B. albums following the debut are full of songs rather than instrumentals. This voice is dark and feverish, a glittering spew of flashbacks, insults, threats, oracles, and visions, all delivered with the snarling confidence of a street-smart poète maudit.
This toad’s songcraft has changed over the years. Alvarius B.’s earlier albums present a lo-fi and jagged approach to solo guitar whose spirit is summed up in the album title What One Man Can Do with an Acoustic Guitar, Surely Another Can Do with His Hands Around the Neck of God. For a taste of this you could go back to his second album, also named Alvarius B., and check out songs like “Seeing-Eye Latte,” “Black-Eyed Boat,” “The Clear-Out,” and “Disallowed.” The tunes on his most recent studio album, 2017’s highly recommended double-CD With a Beaker on the Burner and an Otter in the Oven, are performed with a band and are largely conventional in structure — the mutant cover of Johnny Cash’s “Wanted Man” that closes the album seems of a piece with Bishop’s own masterful grasp of American song form. But that’s why Alvarius B.’s all-instrumental debut represents the authentic toad transmission. Here, even Alan Bishop — a prolific songwriter and lyrical motormouth — is rendered wordless.