Asylum Manor was the perfect place to house a jazz rock folk psychedelic band
excerpt: “History of the Groove, book three” Russell Buddy Helm © 2014 all rights reserved
1970. Looking out onto Main Highway in Coconut Grove from the vantage point of my second story apartment in a Cape Cod style house on Royal Palm Avenue. The sky piled high with fluffy white and grey tropical squall clouds. This crow’s nest of an apartment afforded me a great view one block off of the hissing tropical Main Highway. The sounds were rain on the road, tires and wind, and Maynard Ferguson’s big band on the reel to reel tape player. The incredible gift of this apartment, completely furnished with everything; a library of literature, poetry, philosophy, esoterica, and music. A music library of everything: but mostly great jazz. I curled up on the sitting room couch, as the green light hovered around the thrown open sash windows, The air was moist and comforting. I picked up a nearby paperback and scanned the title, “Listen here, little man!” I opened and read. My life changed, shifted into new directions. Who was this man? Wilhelm Reich?
Marilyn had gotten me the apartment from the couple who were leaving to go to the Caribbean. I was to look after all of their things until they sent for them. I read as much as I could of Wilhelm Reich. He had discovered and defined the life force and called it orgone. It was in everything and he created a way to contain it, generate it, direct it. People were getting instant remissions from cancer after sitting in an orgone accumulator . He was making it rain with his cloud buster orgone tubes. He was finding an antidote for radiation poisoning for the military.
It was a blue white light emanating from living cells. But his last book, the original little paperback, was his condemnation of the human race from his cell in a penitentiary in New Jersey where he died several months later, a bitter man. In nineteen fifty seven.
We moved into larger digs down the road; a coral rock mansion from the thirties. It was the perfect place to house a band.