Do androids dream of electric sheep, or why does it hurt when I pee?
A loving look back at the lives and loves of two of the 20th century's most eccentric and prolific artists: Frank Zappa and Philip K Dick.
When I was trying to get my sister to sign up to this newsletter the other day, her immediate response was, “yeah but Chris, I don’t want to be reading articles about how alcohol is bad for me, week in week out, it’s exhausting” fair enough I laughed, and so this got me thinking, what on Earth am I trying to do with this publication? On one hand I am trying to capture my thoughts digitally in preparation for the Singularity when our biology fuses with technology and all our lives will be spent on the world wide web; on the other I am trying to entertain people, namely YOU, yes you, reading this on your smart phone, tablet or desktop computer if you’re over 50. I want this to be time well spent for you and contrary to what you might think, I would not be offended if you read this in the morning whilst completing your ablutions – in fact I would be honoured, sharing this space with one of your most precious and necessary rituals.
We don’t talk about shit enough in this world, partly why everything is so messed up I think. But that is not why I got you out of bed this morning, I got you out of bed to tell you a bit about alcohol and why it’s bad for you... nah kidding, I wanted to share some stories about culture, tradition, survival, ritual and how these relate to us, the wise ape, Homo sapiens, the only multicellular organism on our planet simultaneously capable of space travel and the ability to wipe all living species off the planet in a heartbeat with a nuclear holocaust.
And I wanted to do this by creating a web of connection between the science fiction savant Philip K Dick, the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis and the genius that was Frank Zappa and his 1974 song “Approximate” from his mind-blowing album You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore Vol. 4.
Is everyone ready, you, you over there, yes you, at the back of the class, can I get your attention please? Yes, you, stop jumping between this screen and Instagram, I want your undivided attention, eyes forward, ears peeled, brain primed. Alright here we go.
One single point mutation
That’s all it took, for humans to go all bat shit about alcohol. Not sure how much you know about genetics out there, so I am going to assume not a lot, when geneticists talk about a single point mutation, they're talking about one single nucleotide in your genome getting switched out for another. This can be caused via faulty translation (as it sounds, literally, genes getting translated into amino acids) during DNA replication, deliberate mutation via radiation or other cellular trauma or just plain old divine interference. Alcohol can also induce DNA mutation, so that renders what follows as slightly ironic, perhaps.
This point mutation is old. Very old. It happened a couple of million years ago, probably around 10, as our ancestors started walking on two legs, upright, all evolved. DNA sequence data has revealed that the ability to metabolise and process alcohol in these early apes went up by a factor of twenty back then, allowing them to eat greater volumes of these fermented fruit and not die. Remember, they were eating these fruits for nourishment, not to get inebriated.
No, inebriation, the loss of sensory perception, means one thing in the jungle: You get eaten a whole lot quicker because you don't see the predator. So it couldn’t have been done for shnicks and giggles by our primate ancestors, to bed a mate or have more fun while swinging in the trees, it was more likely it was a by product of seasons where there wasn’t an abundance of food lying around. Hence it was for survival. Not fun.
Holy water, fermented
Why were monks so fascinated by alcohol? Was it maybe because otherwise their lives sucked, big time – and they needed to get shitfaced in order to enjoy a couple of hours a day in their miserable, supremely boring existence? Reading about Jesus alone wasn’t enough to put them to bed at night? Yes. For the monks it was escapism at its finest.
Speaking of brewing, monkeys and champagne
Do you know how ethanol is created? Most of you hobby brewers probably do. The ethanol molecule is created when yeasts start metabolising sugar, here they produce ethanol so as to kill any competing bacteria that want to feed on the tasty sugar morsels. And the more this happens, the more alcohol is created and because in the proverbial jungle, ripened fruit were few and far between back in our halcyon monkey days, and this alcohol created a trail of smell that attracted us and other animals who didn’t necessarily want to get wasted, they just wanted to eat.
So that's what we're imbibing, the antibacterial jizz produced by greedy yeast organisms, gosh were so sophisticated aren't we, us fancy humans? Reminds me of one of the characters in KurtVonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions, the brilliantly named Kilgore Trout, who wrote a short story that was essentially a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
Don't Eat the Yellow Snow
Before his untimely death in 1993, Frank Zappa (middle name Vincent) released an unbelievable 63 studio length albums of the highest musical complexity. He is the only artist to have ever walked the earth who posthumously brought out nearly as many albums as when he was alive. Since 1993, 55 posthumous albums have been released and more are reportedly on the way (if the genius documentary biopic Zappa, based on his life released in 2020, is anything to go by.)
Zappa wrote the song “Approximate”…
… in 1974 and his vision was to create a song that could be appreciated by “any human on earth, whether they could sing, play an instrument, walk, talk or even comprehend music.” If you’ve ever listened to this song you’ll realise quickly that it takes you on a proper journey, evoking a real mish-mash of overly forlorn emotions, from gung-ho euphoria to strangely satisfying jealousy to panic-riddled anxiety and back to safety and a comforting feeling of being ‘held’ (especially the drum solo at 1min30).
If you dug that version, here is an amazing live performance of the song at the Purple Lagoon.
Approximate was Zappa’s Mona Lisa, it was one of the greatest pieces of musical composition ever conceived by anyone and chances are it will not be touched by anyone for a long time or possibly ever, no matter how hard Kanye West tries. Sorry Yeezy! Approximate is not only one of the most rhythmically complex pieces of music to date, it is also one of the most physically demanding songs to perform, as can be witnessed in the live version above. The song kills you a little every time you perform it. It was once voted the “most difficult” song ever made by Guitar Magazine and it was one of the ways Zappa used to test potential new band members during their interview. As it is with most geniuses of the world, Frank could be a real stickler for detail (read “asshole”) and would notoriously dig into any musician who couldn’t keep up with him, “Approximate” was his torture instrument of choice for casting new band members: Because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
There once was a particularly gruelling casting session one hot August day in LA in 1979, where a neighbour counted 52 different drummers walking in and out of Zappa’s garage – not a sound studio, his garage – all because they couldn’t get the drum solo right on the song (have a listen back to the drum solo, it's crazy good)! Perfectionist, yes, ADHD, most definite, Narcissistic Personality, quite possibly… does anyone care, no! Just listen to approximate the man.
Frank was a teetotaller
He never drank a drop of alcohol nor did he ever take any drugs. He claimed purity as he liked to call it. Ironically he smoked cigarettes like a chimney and was once asked by a reporter about his so called purity and how he couldn’t be pure with his tobacco addiction, to which Frank just replied, “cigarettes are like food for me!” When it came to alcohol and drugs he wasn’t so lenient:
“A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole. Ever try to have a conversation with someone on drugs? It just doesn't work...”
And the following quote should turn everyone off drugs in a heart beat:
“Drugs will turn you into your parents.”
Yikes!
And finally and perhaps most heartbreakingly,
“I knew Jimi (Hendrix) and I think that the best thing you could say about Jimi was: there was a person who shouldn't use drugs.”
Amen Frank, amen.
“If I’m not me, then who the hell am I?”
Philip K Dick is not only one of the greatest science fiction writers out there in this spatial dimension, he's also arguably one of the greatest writers who ever lived, period. He wrote and published 121 short stories and 44 novels during his career. His middle name was Kindred, if you were ever wondering. How cool is that name? His musings were made into movies a whopping 26 times by Hollywood. Among his adopted books were such notable films as Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, The Man in the High Castle and A Scanner Darkly. The only author to beat Dick in this regard is the behemoth that is Stephen King, whose middle name is Edith would you believe it, with 34 movies. The bronze medal in this movie list is a tie at 11 adaptations, held between law porn uberlord John Grisham (middle name Ray) and feisty nigh’ homeless-at-one-point fantasy tsaritsa J.K. Rowling (middle name Kathleen).
So now you’re aware of how genius Philip Kindred was, let me tell you a bit about his life. He was a heavy, heavy drinker and drug enthusiast, when he wasn’t consuming enough amphetamines to kill a small elephant, Dick spent most of his time in an “alcohol-induced haze” – he argued that losing all of his senses, helped him regain other more inaccessible senses commonly shut out by the human brain. If you want to see how far his lateral thought experiments travelled, have a listen to this 45 minute speech he gave in Metz, France in 1977 about the existence of aliens, artificial intelligence and the unique possibility that the world we are experiencing is indeed a multidimensional computer simulation. Step aside Elon Musk, you weren’t the first to ponder this idea – by the way here is a transcript of the video, if it is unintelligible to you as he does slur his words quite a bit.
He famously said the following regarding the actual possibilities that multiple universes are in fact a real thing, years before quantum physics actually confirmed the existence of multiple dimensions of space and time:
“If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others.”
When I sent my father the above speech about multiple dimensions and the whole “world is a simulation” idea, he had the following to say
“Philip K Dick was often so full of LSD, amphetamines and horse tranquilizers (but, I guess, he never had them simultaneously – that would have shortened his life even more) which would have “helped” him come up with these visionary ideas, concepts and interpretations of what we might call reality. As you know, I enjoyed his writings a lot – challenging overly simplistic beliefs that what we think we know and experience determines what may possibly could be – exploring the boundaries of human society. I also love that he never says that his views, experiences and interpretations are correct and the only ones that are true – quite the opposite.”
I have to agree with my dad here, as much as Philip may not have actually been here, present on this planet with all his senses whilst prolifically writing all these outrageous stories, he never did proclaim himself to be a prophet or indeed a visionary of some extant future, which I really adore, there was a certain humility about Mr Dick. A supreme imagination, indelible talent for writing good stories with no God delusion anywhere in sight.
This token humility was not so recognisable in other well-known sci fi contemporaries of his time, ahem L. Ron Hubbard – whose L stands for Lafayette by the way. No, some of these 70s sci fi guys were to become billionaires of their own self-generated computer simulation in due time. In fact, we actually can reduce the phenomenon that is the church of Scientology down to one single bet made between the genius science fiction writer Robert A Heinlein (middle name Anson – for real) and L. Ron Hubbard back when they were both in their twenties.
These two made a bet as to who could write a book first that would have the potential to start a new religion. This is not made up, it's as true as gravity strong!
In response to the bet, Heinlein wrote the Hugo Award winning “Stranger in a Strange Land” about a messianic human figure who grew up on Mars then came back to Earth and L. Ron wrote, surprise surprise “Dianetics” … and the rest is history. Heinlein was another teetotaller; L. Ron on the other hand? A bona fide Olympian alcoholic. A drunken monkey hypothesis enthusiast if you must. Bless him. Or not. Tells you all you need to know about the deleterious effects of alcohol in the wrong hands, or indeed brain.
Genius and juice
The parallels to their genius are quite remarkable, both Frank Zappa and Philip K Dick churned out a plethora of art, one with and one without the need for external stimuli in the form of alcohol and drugs. Both were weird as hell, an extra level of unique to put it mildly. And both had an immensely powerful impact on my adolescent psyche as I can imagine was the same for those of you readers who had the fortune of being exposed to these great human beings in your formative years.
The beauty of this whole story is that both of these artists were aware of each other’s genius while they were alive and creating, so much so that Philip K Dick actually mentioned Frank in one of his novels, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (one of Dick’s epic Valis trilogy books) - where the protagonist gets asked about Frank, and what ensues always makes me giggle, it's one my favourite pieces of writing ever:
He now, as was his custom, abruptly shifted mental gears. "I'm commissioning a rock mass to be given at Grace this Christmas." Scrutinising me he said, "What is your opinion about Frank Zappa?"
I was at a loss for an answer.
"We would arrange for the actual service to be recorded," Tim continued.
"So it could be released as an album. Captain Beefheart has also been recommended to me. And there were several other names offered. Where could I get a Frank Zappa album to listen to?"
"At a record store," Jeff said.
"Is Frank Zappa black?" Tim asked.
"I don't see that that matters," Kirsten said. "To me, that is inverse prejudice."
I find the fact that we evolved from monkeys eating fermented fruit picked up from the jungle floor at one point in history, to imagining different worlds, creating bedazzling music like Joe’s Garage or books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, truly quite remarkable. We went from playing with our faeces in the savannah to playing taught pig skin drum sets and writing with ink on papyrus in the span of a couple of hundred thousand years. Then Moses came along and ruined it for everyone.
Just kidding. Or am I?
Anyway, that is it for today. Well done for getting to the end of this saga, it is exactly 2000 words long and I thank you for sticking with me till the end.
To end on a sober note, today is my 365th day without a cigarette, my 211th day without booze, coffee or cannabis and I feel kind of at peace with myself for the first time in a long time. So hooray me! I guess when it comes to drugs and alcohol, genius and pariah, sympathy versus empathy, ego versus selflessness, and how to enjoy this computer simulation without any chemical stimulation; it is always good to follow Frank Vincent Zappa’s advice:
“I tighten my headband for an extra rush.”
Bonne nuit, stay excellent and don't pull those headbands too tight.
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Thank you very much.
Mauri Ora.
“It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.”
The legend himself, Jacques Yves Cousteau.