Jay Stevens in his kitchen in Vermont in 2022.
For the past seven years, since 2018, my world has been dominated by work on the two books Retreat (2020) and The Garden (2025). There have been other projects during this time, the comic book TPM (2022) and my book about spirituality in alternative music, The “S” Word (2022), but these were essentially accompanying volumes to the big two.
Not everyone I met I ended up interviewing or being part of the fabric of these books: most notably, one particularly special person, Jay Stevens, who to my eternal sadness died of a heart attack with brutal abruptness this February 2025.
Storming Heaven.
I first contacted Jay out of the blue in 2018 when I was writing Retreat. I was searching for contacts, and wanted his advice. Jay’s book Storming Heaven (1988) is, without a shadow of a doubt, the very best book about LSD. I think it’s also one of the very best books ever. There can be only two or three books I have ever bothered to read twice, this is because, in its pages, Jay touched upon the fundamental nature of reality, on the very fabric of the universe itself. Jay was an incredibly perceptive, startlingly intelligent, and highly sensitive individual. And enchantingly modest to boot.
After giving me some excellent advice, we stayed in touch. Jay was passing through London on a trip to Europe in 2022, and we met for lunch on Old Street. I told him what I was working on as a sequel to Retreat, and Jay came up with some great insights that were helpful with The Garden, the most important of which was hipping me to the New Alchemy Institute and the Green Machines. I had never heard of them and their work. Jay, whose family had farmed for decades in Vermont, instantly understood how radical agriculture connected together with the counterculture when I pitched my idea to him. That was a massive encouragement to me, as was his very generous contribution of an endorsement to the book.
Yurt with Jay’s trailer loaded with books visible
One of Jay’s collection of Indigenous artwork.
When I was passing through Vermont in 2023 he put me up for a night in the yurt in the garden and regaled me with wonderful stories of Rudolf Steiner, his brush with Bernie Sanders, time spent with Stephen and Ina May Gaskin, and Vermont’s period as a rebel republic.
Moonlight in Vermont
In the yurt
In 2024, Jay and his lovely wife Sara came for dinner with us at home on Old Street, and it really felt that we now knew each other well. Jay and Mrs Ingram talked art history together. I was looking forward to many years of his sparkling company. That wasn’t to be.
Drumming at the Edge of Magic
When I interviewed Dave Chapman of the Real Organic Project who is based just 15 minutes up the road from Jay in Vermont, he mentioned that his wife was a huge fan of Jay’s other notable book Drumming at the Edge of Magic (1990). Despite being a music nerd I had never read this. After learning of his death, when I had dried my tears, I resolved I would find a copy and see what I had been missing.
And damn, Stevens writes like an absolute angel here, too. Once again, the research is very deep. The contributions he martialled from Zakir Hussain, Olatunjii, and Airto Moiera combine so well with the Ethnomusicological information on drumming and shamanism, and the colourful touches of Mickey Hart’s own life. It is one of the great cosmic books about music, up there with David Toop’s Ocean of Sound (1995).
But of course, I was looking out for signs of my friend and his elegant turns of phrase. When I read the following, “The Yoruba say that anyone who does something so great that he or she can never be forgotten has become an Orisha.” – and I thought of Jay himself. It was very moving to me that the book’s epilogue is about Jay, who Mickey Hart refers to as “the last dancer” and “the prince of words.” May he rest in peace.
