Kingdoms of the Radio: Chae Burton 2

UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO  |  1995

I guess Lucious Cole was just on our minds that night. He was all over the radio as he had just been reported missing. The pirate radio station out of Boonville had been playing nothing but National Loaf records all weekend. It was a weird soundtrack to the founding of Girassol.

I was seeing Charlie at the time and he was helping Zongo and Enrique move a bunch of lumber and building materials up to the scene. I was a big Lucious Cole fan in those days, and was probably driving Charlie crazy by moping around his pad so he took me with him on some of the runs.

You can say what you want about our generation, but when we set our minds to something, we can really get things done. I had never seen so many groovy people in one place working so hard.

Everybody there had given up on the plastic lives that the prevailing death culture had prescribed for them. There was a real feeling that we were starting something authentic, for lack of a better word.

I had just really gotten into astrology, and it was a new moon that night, the perfect time to be starting a new venture. So when this groovy chick brought out what we starting calling her Moon Juice, it was to celebrate the birth of a new society. It probably sounds naïve now, but we really thought that we could transcend the trips that our parents had laid on us.

There were about a dozen of us all sitting around the bonfire, partaking of a little pakalolo, when the morning glory started coming on. I don’t remember who dug it first, but pretty soon we were all seeing a huge meteor streaking across the sky. It was so big and so close that you could hear it tearing through the atmosphere, and then as quickly as it came, it was gone.