On the Beach

from the LP What Does Anything Mean? Basically, Statik Records, 1985



I was 14 years old the first time I really got off on LSD; we’d dropped acid a couple times in middle school before then, but it was either bunk or really weak, because I was taken very much by surprise that one autumn evening when those two doses of purple shields I’d taken earlier began to come on, strong. Admittedly, my heart was pounding pretty good and I was getting a little scared, but thankfully our pal Marshall (who we all called ‘Sheesh’) had brought a boombox along for the journey, and right as the tall grass I was lying in began to streak upwards, swaying to the music like emerald spires shooting thousands of miles into the electric dusk sky, I happened to glance at the rising moon----that moon saved my ass man! I glimpsed my mother’s face smiling down at me with the most serene look, and it was all my mind needed to proceed joyfully through that rite of passage, dancing around to Jethro Tull & the Beatles, tripping the light fantastic. “…I thought I heard her calling, hush now don't you cry; figure in the sky, figure in the sky… can't stop myself from shaking, my mind at last is waking… hadn't time to analyze, what I saw before my eyes, but nothing would surprise me, here on our beach…” The Chameleons resided in a gauzy, guitar-driven world that attracted a bigger audience in their native UK than over here, although American college radio gave them a cult base. Their lyrics often play with double meanings, and they even took their meshing of drugs & religious imagery onto the art for this LP, one of coolest and trippiest covers of the decade, in my opinion.