Enjoy.Ĭan you recall the very first album that you owned in your youth? Can you recall the very first album that you purchased on your own, using your own money? What was it about that music that initially captured your attention? How have you thoughts about that music evolved over time? What impact, if any, does that music have on your life today? We feel fortunate that Peter Bebergal decided to share his story and his thoughts with the world at large, and equally fortunate to present this interview with the author below. What’s more, we are totally sure that we will return to “Too Much to Dream” the book, in both reading and recommendation, much the same way we return to the song from which it takes it’s name, as a glorious and unforgettable electric-spirit signpost. Until then, we will simply say we totally agree with that dude, with a concurrent familiarity of that feeling of shadows falling upon our lonely room. When the day comes that we can improve upon the words of Peter Coyote, we’ll be sure to make note of it (in fact, we’ll be sure not to shut up about it). His journey, essentially religious, no matter how waylaid and temporarily diverted by youth, drugs and error it may have been, was as familiar to me as my childhood room.” Mysticism or magic, communion with God, or power over his angels.’ ‘… what I was looking for was spiritual in nature. Between his dedication to comic books and games of Dungeons and Dragons, an estranged and confused suburban existence in an unsteady secular Jewish home, and with older siblings slipping beyond his grasp into their tantalizing, initiated teenhoods, Bebergal describes his personal quest for wholeness and meaning with language that’s fresh and new, and yet also timeless: “Peter Bebergal’s story elegantly elucidates that adolescent murk. To describe what the book is, we turn to the words of Peter Coyote – no stranger to inhabiting the role of the seeker himself – who provides the book with its graceful forward: “Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood” carries the written equivalent of the buzzing, transformative urgency employed in song by The Electric Prunes nearly fifty years ago, reverberating in time with the legions of seekers that preceded the Prunes for millenia – if more upfront from the outset that this quest for communion with God will remain necessarily unfulfilled.Īs a book, Bebergal presents something several degrees beyond simply a memoir. It’s appropriate, then, that a recent, sensational book by author Peter Bebergal should carry the same title. Yet like so many things, the truth of The Electric Prunes was and is more complicated than its initial promise (beginning with the fact that they didn’t write “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” nor was “Mass in F Minor” their idea). Not that they didn’t try – coming perhaps even closer to prying open the third eye, once and for all, one night on Stockholm, and later, taking part in an nontraditional, traditional petitioning of the heavens above. They did not exist solely to give spiritual solace, to provide an expressway to ecstatic, neo-ancient wisdom. Quite surprisingly, the The Electric Prunes were not the harbingers of the dawn of heaven. Inexplicably not included among the golden records included onboard the Voyager spacecrafts, the song is a fuzztone-fueled firestorm, one that immediately, perhaps unconsciously, comes within an inch of the ultimate prize: tangible enlightenment and radical spiritual transformation, via Bixby wiggle stick. “Last night your shadow fell upon my lonely room,” opens the song “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” with utmost urgency, placing the listener immediately within that familiar, eternal “lonely room” of our shared consciousness, delivered there by a buzzing, eternal American psychedelic-pop hymnal that remains as close to the perfect musical expression of cosmic yearning as has ever been recorded.
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