"Enchanted Rock"

When Miracle Room was on its American tour in 1990, we were booked to headline at the Cannibal Club in Austin on a Friday and Saturday night, with Ed Hall and Crust opening the two shows. For the second night’s performance, we decided to try something different and put together a whole set without playing guitar or bass, instead using our homemade electric 2x4 and bass 4x4 instruments, plus loops, pipe, and the like. It was the first time we had attempted this, and it became the template for my follow-up band, Wisdom Tooth.

Our next show was a few nights later, in Tucson, so we decided to take the next night off at one of my favorite “power locations”, Enchanted Rock. We got there before sundown and headed up onto the rock. At the top, we took some acid that a friend had given us in Chicago and took in the beauty.

Before we knew it, it was dark. As in, total blackness. Our sound guy, Jonathan Nelson, had a pocket camera with built-in flash (remember those?), and our drummer, Clem Waldmann, proceeded to get completely naked and jump around maniacally in the dark, illuminated only by periodic flashes from the camera! It was brilliant! When we checked the film later, none of the photos came out. But Clem’s naked white body with shaved head, suspended in space by the flash and hovering there in the aftereffects in various contorted shapes, is still seared into my memory to this day!

We spent a long time enjoying this experience and then watching the spectacular light show of the Milky Way, but eventually some were ready to head down off the rock. Having been up there a lot in the past, I knew the way down, but everyone else thought they knew better, so I watched as each person attempted to direct the party to the edge, only to find a steep drop-off awaiting. We spent quite a while tramping around looking for the exit.

As we followed the last person’s lead around a curve in the rock, we were suddenly confronted with an image of sublime beauty: a perfect half moon, shaped like a boat, seemed to be floating in an ocean created by three perfectly parallel lines of cloud. We sat down in silence and took this view in, completely outside of the passage of time. As a larger cloud bank eventually swallowed up the scene, I said “Right this way, everybody”, and led us off the rock.