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September 9, 2020
Bett Williams' Playlist for Her Memoir "The Wild Kindness"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Bett Williams' memoir The Wild Kindness is a fascinating and compelling exploration of self and discovery through psychedelics.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
"An exuberant endorsement of the use of psychedelics as an instrument of self-discovery."
In her own words, here is Bett Williams' Book Notes music playlist for her memoir The Wild Kindness:
I hosted a radio show for two years on KMRD Madrid Community Radio, during the period when I was writing The Wild Kindness; A Psilocybin Odyssey. The opportunity allowed me to deepen the range of music I’d been listening to. I always keep a playlist to listen to when I trip. I said in my previous memoir, The Wrestling Party, that I’m a DIRL (Dated Indie Rock Lesbian.) But when I transformed into something psychedelic, Sleater-Kinney and the Breeders didn’t scratch the same itch.
My girlfriend Beth and I attended the Marfa Myths Festival for two consecutive years, put on by the label Mexican Summer. The music line-up was high art drone meets West Texas Swing and Psychedelic Rock. I watched Conan Mocassin in heavy make-up crawl across the ground clearly tripping while a band called Tonstarbaandt was playing outside a gallery featuring Alexander Calder’s kinetic sculptures. It sounds pretentious on the page but I’m not sure if I knew what festival fun was until Beth and I started taking LSD at Marfa Myths those two years. Sadly, it’s not happening anymore. I finished many drafts of my book in the lobby of El Cosmico in Marfa, celebrating its completion by accidentally ingesting too much acid. It was Halloween. I ended up in a room with the most beautiful day of the dead altars made for locals who had passed on - corn meal, chocolate and flower petals arranged like Tibetan sand paintings. The night ended at the Lost Horse Saloon where all the town dogs were wearing outfits. Marfa has been my gateway drug to the rest of West Texas. My mother and grandmother are from Lubbock, a place that needs some easing in to especially if you don’t drink. The band, The Flatlanders are from there. Jimmy Dale Gilmore’s croon, along with the bands’ theramin, conjur the relentless wind that once caused dust storms miles high to swallow the city in darkness, scaring my mother to death. She decided there could be no such thing as God, if there were things like dust storms and also, lynching. My Lebanese friend Pirrah Malouf ran for mayor of Lubbock. She also ran a bar there that showcased the Butthole Surfers and other bands that were part of a specifically Texas psychedelic scene. She was Ravi Shankar’s personal assistant during the time he toured with the Beatles. She did LSD with Timothy Leary countless times. Pirrah and I have stayed up late many nights, drinking Cuervo back when I could. I learned from her what it means to be a human being who is also an intersection where worlds meet and transmogrify into something utterly new and never seen before.
I listen to music primarily to locate myself in a geography as well as connect to lineages that tell a story about the origin of things. I was born in Santa Barbara and Toad the Wet Sprocket wasn’t going to cut it. I had to get closer to highways and long expanses of desert because in the alchemy of what music has to show us, “nothing” is very strong medicine. And nothing ain’t nothing. As I write in my book, “Let’s sing praise songs with a raw head in honor of who we’ve been the whole time.” Many of the songs on this playlist have become such a part of my being there’s no way they haven’t found their way into the book, if not mentioned directly, they are invisible tonal signposts. No one likes your mixtapes as much as you do, I said in The Wrestling Party. If you enjoy these songs even a fraction as much as I have, that will make me really happy.
Howl – Tara Jane O’Neil
I want to be part of a cult where "Howl" is piped into all the yurts, playing on repeat until everybody’s hearts explode and we die. We then ascend to one of Octavia Butler’s planets where we live as telepathic agender hypersexual parasites that heal the sick. But that’s probably not going to happen.
I’m a Rabbit, I’m a Fox – Laura Jean
Certain cultures have taboos against talking about the situation in which a person transforms into an animal. It’s witchcraft. Laura Jean however, makes the dark art of shapeshifting sound so joyous, wholesome, and Susan Vega-ishly smart. She’ll probably pay for it later.
Guadalupe – Kristin Hersh
This hairdo is truly evil, I’m not sure it’s mine, was a quote from a Kristin Hersh song I used as the epitaph for my novel Girl Walking Backwards. I met her years later through my partner Beth, her longtime friend. She and I sat at a table and began talking about writing. Within a few minutes we realized we had been circling obsessively around the same single image, a thing we had seen that we couldn’t shake – that of a roadrunner eating ground meat hanging from the needles of a cactus. What are the chances of that? There’s no chance. It’s pure magic. Of course, we would also share a love for the queen of heaven who connects mycellially with all her devotees, the Guadalupe telephone as I like to call her.
Rabbit Hills – Bridget St. John
I listen to this song and fantasize about my book being made into a Netflix show. This would be the theme song. It’s very sad but the theme song for the show Eight is Enough was also very sad and I’ll never forget it. "Rabbit Hills" is about a woman who doubts her own imagination because she has been taught that it’s not worth anything. It connects me with all the women I’ve read about who led tragic lives as psychedelic folk singers in Europe in the sixties and seventies, one who lost her voice after a bad LSD trip, another who went off the deep end and wandered the Scottish countryside for decades, everyone thinking she was dead, only to return post-menopause, to record a final album.
Green & Gold – Lianne La Havas
We grow up alongside the plants and if we tune in, our dreams for our whole life are conjured in collaboration with them.
Abrete Corazon – Alfonso Del Rio
This is a common ayahuasca song that comes out of a syncretic nomadic scene found throughout the Americas. Argentinians, Cubans, Indigenous Mexicans, Israelis, Americans and others are creating an ayahuasca culture that borrows from whatever and whoever happens to be around. They tend to be fiercely disciplined, devoted and attractive – the best party in the world on a weekday or a Saturday night.
The Will to Grow – Ben Lee
Ben Lee married Ione Skye as part of an ayahuasca ceremony, if I am remembering correctly. I have always liked his music but his ayahuasca songs are my favorite. He made a musical about Tom Robbin’s book, B is for Beer, which is a psychedelic book for children? Adults? I’m not exactly sure, I need to read it. Ben Lee and I need to talk.
Shine a Different Way – Patty Griffin
It’s my favorite song about not drinking alcohol.
Fire – Waxahatchee
“I’m down on my knees, I’m a bird in the trees, I can learn to see with a partial view.” For me, alcohol gave me the sense of seeing, of being able to move socially, spiritually, creatively, more easily. God, this song, this whole album, speaks to all of that.
Abilene - Dave Alvin
My grandmother’s name was Wilma Simpson. She lived in Lubbock, TX. After her first husband died in a crane accident she supplemented her income by doing sex work, or so my mother thought, judging from the dollar bills found on the nightstand in the morning after the men left the house. She got pregnant, tried to give herself a coat hanger abortion and almost died. The only doctor who would see her was Joel Prince, the town’s black doctor. They got married. They were pulled over by a cop for speeding at the border and guns and morphine were found in the trunk. The cop said he would let Wilma go if she said she was kidnapped. She told him to fuck off. The year was 1936, the year Robert Johnson wrote "Crossroad’s Blues." This song is for my mother who carried this story in the center of her heart until the day she died.
Lateness of Dancers – Hiss Golden Messenger
It’s in the book - my ex falsely accused me of felony burglary. We hadn’t been in contact at all for over a year and a half when it happened. Cops came over and read me my rights. I was accused of stealing two televisions, two computers, a jar of change, other random items, and the dog. There are no words for the rage I felt at the injustice of this. I played this song on hikes during the long drawn out period of court cases that went on and on. The song is about a warrior who surrenders his sword. I would listen to it and dream of a future that hadn’t arrived yet, when I could surrender mine.
Astral Traveling – Pharoah Sanders
LSD came to Pharoah Sanders through John Coltrane or maybe it was the other way around. Its influence created a whole genre called Spiritual Jazz, but that doesn’t sum it up well at all. Beth and I were tripping on LSD at Marfa Myths when we saw Pharoah Sanders play in the middle of the afternoon. The writer Eileen Myles was there and I was shy about them seeing me tripping. When the music started the most mysterious thing occurred. Tears began spilling out of my face. Same thing happened to Beth. The bass player also had tears rolling down his cheeks. It wasn’t that the music was sad. The tears were not connected to emotions but to a cellular rearrangement that was set in motion by the primal scream of Pharoah’s saxophone. It conjured the spirits of the ancestors, not symbolically, not in a vague inference, but actually. The ancient ones were in the room with us. Afterwards, I asked Eileen Myles how they liked the show. “I just kept crying,” they said. “It’s the strangest thing.” Their friend said it happened to them too, and that others near them also had tears. This song is always a reliable one to play in a mushroom ceremony or while tripping on acid. If you’re ambivalent about doing psychedelics I recommend you try them once if only to hear what Pharoah Sanders sounds like in the higher dimensions.
Liar - Kelsey Lu
In an interview with Pitchfork Magazine, Kelsey Lu said there are teeth marks on her cello from when she was tripping on acid and tried to eat it.
La Vita – Beverly Glenn-Copeland
In the Hindu religion, it’s called Shaktipat. In the Christian tradition its simply called getting hit with the spirit. Whatever the name is, it happened to me when I listened to Mr. Copeland sing this song during the whiplash collective moment of Covid-19 shifting into a Civil Rights Uprising. I never imagined music like this existing. It changed my life to hear it.
Diamonds – Rihanna
The very definition of a medicine song.
Ahead – Wire
The reason songs by Wire never reek of nostalgia despite the fact goth kids gorged on it in their bedrooms as teenagers is because Wire is psychedelic. I can’t say how or why, they just are. It’s why this song always sounds brand new.
Sunrise – Blackwater Holylight
If all the femmes who worked as weed pickers in Portland rose up and killed all the rapists in their sleep, then stole the horses from the trail ride ranch nearby and rode into the forest to perform ancient Celtic rituals while high on mushrooms, and Pat Benatar was throwing down Flock of Seagulls keyboard sequences into the shoe-gaze doom of a psychedelic lead guitar riff played by a long haired queen/king wearing career-wear shoulder pads right out of Dynasty, you’d have Blackwater Holylight.
All That’s Left is Fare-Thee-Well – Terry Allen (Ft. Charlie Sexton, Shannon McNally)
This entire album is a work of prophecy. It came out before the Covid-19 pandemic and speaks directly to it. Terry’s from Lubbock, Tx; all his songs speak to my blood. In The Wild Kindness, I write about a time when I longed for him to be my surrogate Dad.
Gracias a La Vida – Violetta Parra
Whenever I am asked what’s the best music to play during a mushroom trip, I have one sure answer - Violetta Parra. Nothing else comes close save for Maria Sabina’s chants. Parra’s version of this song is way better than the more popular one by Mercedes Sosa, who sings it with a shine of grandiosity, like a well-meaning Italian gondola operator, as opposed to the tender devotion and humility Violetta Parra brings to the song. Be aware, when heard in ceremony, the holy human heart of it is almost too much to bear.
Bett Williams is the author of The Wild Kindness; A Psilocybin Odyssey (Dottir Press Fall, 2020), a memoir about growing mushrooms in the high desert of New Mexico. Her novel, Girl Walking Backwards (St. Martin’s Press) was mentioned as one of the ten best young adult queer novels by Vogue. Dennis Cooper calls her 2003 memoir The Wrestling Party (Alyson Press), “Fantastic. An absolute dream of a book. Bett Williams writing has brains, charisma, beauty and wit.” She was a featured speaker at Kai Wingo’s 2015 Women and Entheogen’s Conference and the Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics Conference in 2018. She and her partner, Beth Hill, host No Cures, Only Alchemy, an event series and podcast centered around psychedelics and culture making. In 2018 they received the Kindle Project Maker’s Muse Award. She has written for many publications including DoubleBlind, OUT Magazine, Flaunt, Lucid News and Lenny Letter.
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