by Rob Brezsny
“Take and drink of this,” Madame Blavatsky intoned after she squirted, “for this is the Chalice of Your Blood, a living symbol of the new and eternal covenant. It is the mystery of faith, which will be shed for many, that they may attain tantric jubilation and kill the apocalypse.”
She handed me the gun and gestured for me to feed her.
“But first, repeat what I said,” she commanded, “only say ‘Chalice of My Blood.’ ”
I did this. When I finished, she spoke.
“Here is how I plan to kill the apocalypse, Queen Grail-Stealer. I will help you build a global network of moon lodges. Sanctuaries to compassionately murder the death culture. Havens where it is always once upon a time, far from the nine-to-five crimes against the rhythms of sleep and love. Death to Pizza Hut! Long live Menstrual Hut! From Kuala Lumpur to Seattle to Tierra del Fuego, may all women everywhere get their four days of resurrection every month!
“And all men, too, for that matter. They need it even more than we do, do they not? Otherwise they just go on and on and on and on—their poor bodies do not have a built-in mechanism to slow them down like ours do—and they never stop to peer into the heart of their own darkness. Which is why they find evil everywhere else except in themselves, and create it everywhere else, and fight it everywhere else.
“Menstrual huts will kill the apocalypse. Four days of darkish down time a month will allow us all the regular breakdowns we sorely need. No more pushing and pushing until our shadows are forced to bite us in the butt.
“Like you always say, Rapunzel, everyone who believes in the devil is the devil.”
Actually, I had never said that in my life.
“There is another way I am slaughtering the end of the world,” she continued. “I am going to help you work on producing and promoting a global festival that will take the place of the apocalypse. ‘Twenty-Two Minutes of World Orgasm’ is what we will call it. I want it to martial some of the same climactic juice as the phallocratic grande morte, but sublimate it into a more petite, if still monumental, morte. Sort of an erotic version of New Year’s Eve plus the Superbowl plus the original Woodstock plus the end of a big war. At the appointed minute of the appointed day—have not decided exactly when yet—I will help you try to get every single adult on the planet to maximize their bliss simultaneously.”
She gestured for me to dose her again with the Supersoaker.
“One more technique for murdering armageddon I would like to testify about,” she said. “It involves stopping the genocide of the imagination in my own imagination. Like for instance, right now I am imagining sex with candy bars … and homeless oil company presidents digging for food scraps in garbage cans … and a psychedelic mushroom cloud sprouting from the penis of a nine-hundred-foot-tall Christ … and the Dalai Lama channeling Salvador Dali in testimony against Salvadoran death squads … and Dionysus and Eleanor Roosevelt dramatizing the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice at a sacred shopping mall in Tadzhikistan … and a new kind of aphrodisiac that stimulates compassion as much as lust.”
Madame Blavatsky took the Supersoaker from me and shot it crazily at the walls. “Look out all you phallocratic ass-souls. Rapunzel and I will soon be spraying your decaying creation with bolts of the liberated imagination.”
Then she placed the Supersoaker gently in my arms and addressed me. “Have I inspired you at all? Would you like to add anything to your previous testimony? What exactly are you doing—what would you like to do—to kill the apocalypse?”
“I think for now, if it’s OK with you,” I say, “I’m just going to start slow. I promise that to kill the apocalypse I will pick blackberries in the rain and dance around bonfires while singing freedom songs with mysterious friends. Amen.”
If you dream of a three-legged dog
nipping at your leg just in time
to nudge you clear of a flowerpot
that has fallen off a third-story window sill,
it means
a dormant part of your genius is waking up.
If you dream you’re a mute, wheelchair-bound princess
who inherits the war-torn crown of Slavonia
when your father dies
during rough sex with your stepmother,
the evil queen Katarina,
a terribly ambitious former prostitute,
it means
that in your waking life
you should seek out some high-quality boredom.
If you dream of having fat cells
from your butt
injected in your forehead
to smooth out the wrinkles
it means
you should go outside at night
and spit in the direction
of the heavenly body that’s responsible
for the star-crossed fate you want to escape.
If you dream of gangs of wealthy feminists
fomenting sex riots
in order to liberate the political force
of the female orgasm,
it means
you’re ready to master the art of thinking with your heart.
If you dream that you are naked
in front of a large crowd
and crying out, “Help me, mommy,”
it means
you should commune more
with the Televisionary Oracle.
We can’t decide whether you remind us more of Captain Ahab in his mad pursuit of Moby Dick or Sir Galahad in his pure-hearted search for the Grail. Sometimes you seem irrationally obsessed with an unworthy quarry that brings out dark though creative sides of your nature. Other times your struggle appears to be a holy quest that’s forcing you to access the wild, smart goodness that is your birthright. We suppose it’s possible that both are true. Maybe that’s exactly the point.
The Televisionary Oracle
is brought to you by
the salt water in your blood
the medicine in your tears
and
the lightning in your brain.
My solo career as a humble bard was fun, but it was utterly off the media’s radar screen. Even local Bay Area publications ignored my creations and performances. After a couple of years of anonymity, I grew antsy to return to the cultural wars with more intensity. I felt I wasn’t living up to my potential.
There was one very auspicious development during my sabbatical from rock music, however. As I worked to refine my analysis of “entertainment crime,” I felt I was making myself immune to its ravages. Maybe, I reasoned, I’d even become savvy enough to save my own soul no matter how symbiotically I joined with the corporate beast. I fantasized that I could remain a dionysian clown-priest even in the face of enormous record sales, splashes on the covers of national magazines, and relationships with hordes of lawyers, accountants, bureaucrats, and journalists whose values were as different from mine as the Dalai Lama’s are from Bill Gates’.
Buoyed by this vision, I decided I would launch a band and snag a record deal perfectly tailored to my vision. I would trick the corporate beast into selling us to the mass audience with the very same machinery that I satirized and howled about. What a coup it would be. I would exploit the entertainment criminals for my success at the same time that I educated our fans about how evil they were. I would outwit their ability to turn everything they touched into neutered simulation, and bring the people of Earth crafty celebrations that inspired spiritual awakening and smart love. I would gain all the advantages of being a rockstar without turning into one of those ghastly monsters.
Thus was spawned World Entertainment War, my band and performance art support group.
Our songs wrote themselves. Our stage show evolved and matured with breathtaking artistry, and in close alignment with the vision I’d formulated from the beginning. I felt like a magician returning from exile, like an orphaned genius who’d finally found his long-lost family. Soon we were headlining weekends at the biggest club in Santa Cruz, the Catalyst. Next we made the leap to the
greater Bay Area and built an underground following in grassroots clubs like Komotion and the Paradise Lounge. It wasn’t long before we were headlining major venues like Slim’s and the Great American Music Hall and the Kennel Club.
Finally, I felt, record companies were ready to hear what we could do. With nine thousand dollars from a benefactor, we crafted an eight-song masterpiece in a San Jose warehouse studio, working exclusively during the graveyard shift to save money. Soon I was sending out our newborn artifact, along with my poetic propaganda disguised as a bio.
WORLD ENTERTAINMENT WAR is as much fun as you can have during a riot. Rhythmically outrageous, melodically potent, vocally incendiary, this band of entertainment guerrillas incites its listeners to simultaneously think and dance and kick their own asses.
“Theater” is too wimpy a word for what happens at their live shows. Imagine instead a pagan revival meeting mixed with a dance therapy session and a cynics’ pep rally and a tribal hoedown and a lecture at the “Anarchists Just Wanna Have Fun” Think Tank.
Likewise, “rock opera” is too pretentious a category to describe their new CD. Imagine instead a collage of eight killer songs interwoven with a conceptually rich musical tapestry of sly subliminals, hilarious media critiques, satirical commercials, and snippets of benevolent propaganda.
Soon the favorable reviews began to bubble up from both the alternative and mainstream press. One of the first was by Gus Stadler in the San Francisco Weekly:
They pack their songs full of enough heady words and phrases to fill a Greil Marcus-style rock critique. But World Entertainment War reminds us that smart music need not be the prisoner of rock academia. It’s a stirring, entertaining band with a smooth, funky sound and a loose, punky attitude.… They succeed at wresting “smart” rock out of the critics’ hands.
Shortly after we finished our eight-song album, a mysterious figure started showing up at our gigs and dropping portentous hints. Smart but evasive, half-Basque and half-Mayan, Daryl Stackman never looked me in the eyes and never appeared without his Mayan cloak draped around his shoulders or waist. “I’m gonna make you guys famous,” he assured me. A little research about his background convinced me he was a legitimate, if modest, player in the music business. We agreed to let him represent us to the record companies.
A few weeks later, while World Entertainment War was doing a spate of gigs in the Pacific Northwest, I picked up a voicemail from Daryl.
“I signed a deal with CBS,” he said. “We’re ready to go. Forget that low-budget piece of junk you’re trying to peddle. CBS is gonna give us a six-figure advance to do it up right.”
All my previous records had been recorded at mediocre studios by inexperienced engineers in the middle of the night, which was the only time the rates were cheap enough for me to afford. But our first opus under the aegis of CBS unfolded luxuriantly in a state-of-the-art studio with a producer we loved and trusted. For weeks we spent thousands of dollars a day in a perfectionist zeal to get the exact sound we wanted on every song. CBS bureaucrats and bean counters were nowhere to be seen. We played and sang and composed and messed around according to no other specifications besides our own.
The CBS suits never meddled in the design of the cover art and insert for our CD, either. Which was saying a lot, considering the fact that the format I cooked up with our graphic designer was complex and voluminous: a foldout booklet which included a four-page full-color collage and four pages of lyrics and rants and poems.
Then there was the promo package. That’s the stock info about a band sent out with every CD. Typically, this is either a facile grab-bag of smarmy clichés or a smart-ass, content-free assemblage of one-liners and soundbites. In either case, it’s almost always penned by a record company hack. In our case, though, CBS made an exception. In an alleged bow to my writing skills and well-wrought vision, some vice-president or other made the decision to let me create the bio. No guidelines. No censorship. No questions asked.
I was thrilled. Gosh, I thought, those enlightened CBS folks are really on my side. I gave them a slightly edited version of a piece I’d written a few months previously.
Meanwhile, we of the World Entertainment War tribe also signed up to be managed by a company founded by rock demigod Will Boehm. Boehm may not have actually invented the San Francisco psychedelic music scene of the 1960s, but he was the guru who turned it into a world-famous, money-making institution. When we met him, his was a multimillion-dollar empire that had made more than a few musicians wealthier than the ancient kings of Babylon.
The relationship did not start through my instigation. Boehm found out about us accidentally. One of the many minions who worked at his vast corporate headquarters had seen us getting crazy at a San Francisco club called the Paradise Lounge. This spy reported to Will that he’d witnessed the second coming of the San Francisco music scene: a fresh eruption of the primal spunk that Will had exploited to launch his career a quarter-century earlier.
In his first and most dramatic act of seduction, Will invited me and guitar player George up to his private Valhalla in the hills of Marin County for a catered tête-à-tête. There he confided to us, in a tone as gushing as his tough-guy persona allowed, that he hadn’t been as boyishly excited about any band since 1969. As he proudly led me past his souvenir cases, which included slippers once worn by Janis Joplin and a stuffed bear stabbed in the gut by the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, he casually mentioned, “One day your jock strap’ll be in here.”
I was a skeptic in the beginning. I felt that if anyone was going to manage World Entertainment War other than myself, it would have to be a smaller company than Boehm’s, more familiar with so-called “alternative” rock, and more in sync with my secret plans to forever be more of a dionysian clown-priest than a real rockstar.
But Will was unflagging. He booked us to open a show with Blues Traveler and cornered me in the dressing room to whisper more sweet nothings. (“I’m personally writing a letter to the executive producers at MTV,” he said. “I’ll contact REM’s Michael Stipe, see if he’ll plug you, help you. Let’s try to get you a spot opening up for Soundgarden on their next tour. I’ll make this thing happen no matter how long it takes.”)
Later he summoned me twice to the inner sanctum at his sprawling offices in San Francisco for private confabs. By then he was selling himself as my mentor. (“I’d like to see you do a little less of the androgynous thing on stage. Be a warrior from the steppes of Russia now and then, a big bad daddy panther. And don’t be so goddamned goofy all the time. You’ve got to make it easier for people to see you as Everyman. Put a hatrack on stage with five different hats. Change ’em from song to song. You’ve got the acting ability to change identities as fast as you need to.”)
In the end, more than half-convinced he loved us for all the same reasons we loved us, I signed us up. “We’re going to make you the Grateful Dead of the 1990s,” he confided.
So there we were: under contract to be managed by a rock legend, having completed a fabulous album under the auspices of a conglomerate whose ability to distribute, promote, and hype our product made Goebbels’ propaganda techniques look like the equivalent of a scraggly hobo walking a sandwich board down Main Street.
I might have been forgiven a bout of megalomania at that point. My master plan, I felt, was unfolding with impeccable grace. As a dionysian clown-priest plotting to slip the masses a big dose of poetic music that would delight their souls and martial their imaginations, I was about to strike a blow against the vicious homogenizing power of the entertainment industry. Against all odds, I had bamboozled the corporate beast into hawking us with the very same machinery whose danger to the imagination we so lyrically articulated in our music.
I can remember, when the recording process was freshly completed, envisioning the process by which the company’s marketing team would make World Entertainment War a household name. I pictured Daryl Stackman circulating around the central CBS offices in Los Angeles, piquing the i
nterest of the publicity team and the marketing people and the distribution crew. “This is the Grateful Dead of the 1990s,” he would rave about us. “We’ve got to make sure that every radio station, every music magazine, and every record chain knows that.”
In a massive, coordinated assault, our CD and publicity package would arrive in the mailbox of every music journalist and radio programmer in America. All of these industry VIPs would soon receive follow-up phone calls from CBS publicists and independent agencies hired to promote our record. Our reps would try to arrange phone interviews with me on radio stations and in newspapers. To reinforce the impact, the CBS marketing team would buy ads for our CD in major music magazines and local newspapers.
Meanwhile, the distribution arm of the company would make sure that our product began appearing in all the record stores of North America. In the chains, like Tower Records, CBS would arrange for prominent World Entertainment War displays, complete with, say, a six-foot cardboard figure of a rainbow-uniformed, TV-headed soldier kicking her own ass.
But everything I just described never actually happened. Not even a little. From what I’ve been able to piece together in retrospect, less than four thousand CDs and cassettes ever made it into stores. MTV never called to beg us for a video. Spin magazine never called to implore me for an interview. A grand total of three radio stations put us on their playlists.
Why? I’ll probably never know the exact story of how and why our luck finally expired, because researching the true feelings and actions of both Daryl Stackman and the CBS brass was harder than extracting a straight answer out of the CIA.
But I believe every conceivable scenario probably involves some or all of the following factors:
1. The marketing arm of CBS (as at all record companies) is only marginally in sync with the arm that signs and develops new artists. Just because some young turk gets excited about an act and brings it aboard doesn’t mean the old boys are going to love it with all their hearts.