Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722)

by Peter Bebergal

  No matter the outrage from parents and religious leaders, even Catholic youth discovered that rock offered a means to worship that felt crucial, filled with vitality. The rebellious spirit of rock was not unlike the one Jesus brought to the money changers at the temple, a raucous response to authority that had all but given in and given up. But even when put toward Christian worship, adults were hesitant to accept rock as anything more than a pagan virus. In 1957, the then Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Samuel Stritch, spoke against even allowing rock and roll to be played at Catholic youth centers, especially because it promoted dancing, hips and all. In a letter to his flock, he wrote, “Some new manners of dancing and a throwback to tribalism in recreation centers cannot be tolerated for Catholic youths. . . . Too much familiarity between the adolescent girl and the adolescent boy is dangerous and sinful.” Notwithstanding the subtle racism, the association of what was deemed tribal with sexuality, manifest in the music and rhythms of rock and roll, was exactly right.

  Eventually it was all too much, even for the record labels and DJs. Rock and roll was a force sweeping up the nation’s youth in a way parents, church leaders, and even radio music executives could not have foreseen. The only solution would be to exorcise the demon entirely, a black demon to be sure. The answer came in the form of a white Christian, Pat Boone, who sang of chaste love and never even lifted a foot off the ground, never mind pulse anything below the waist. But the attacks didn’t cease, and many suggested the fad called “rock ’n’ roll” would soon fall out of popular favor.

  In response to a 1957 article in the Chicago Tribune titled “Rock ’n’ Roll’s On Way Down, Say 3 Experts,” one letter writer was thrilled at the prospect and was glad to see that, in the wake of rock’s demise, “a trend towards sentiment, love, and romance is becoming apparent.” The subtext here is that the demon of sex, conjured by those barbaric tribal rhythms, had lost what little power it had regained and became, like many parts of the pagan world, enfolded into the dominant white Christian mainstream. The soul of American youth might have been saved, but the soul of rock had become a pale, flaccid thing.

  In coffeehouses and bars in New York City and San Francisco, writers and poets were creating their own brand of agitation. The public first took notice in 1957 when Life magazine covered the obscenity trial of the 112-line free-verse poem “Howl.” The publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights, was accused of the intent to “willfully and lewdly print, publish and sell obscene and indecent writings, papers and books, to wit: ‘Howl and Other Poems.’” The poet Allen Ginsberg first read his poem in 1955 to an astonished audience. “Howl” was perfectly timed to speak to a growing unrest among young adults; they realized that the post–World War II idealism of American preeminence was a pipe dream, consistently undermined by poverty, racial strife, and a conformist streak that covered the suburbs in a gloom of dullness. “Howl” called for a celebration of sexual and religious ecstasy, drugs, and a recognition that the “bum’s as holy as the seraphim!” “Howl” was also an attack on the dehumanization caused by the corporate machine, one that stole human souls to sacrifice to the insatiable appetite of Moloch, “whose factories dream and croak in the fog!” The judge, Clayton W. Horn, found in favor of the publisher, and concluded that the poem “does have some redeeming social importance.” The result of the trial wouldn’t have mattered, though. A movement had already begun to challenge the social and religious status quo by way of literature, poetry, and music.

  Ray Smith, the narrator of Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, introduces the rugged and humble poet Japhy Ryder. Ryder is well versed in Eastern mysticism and philosophy and believes that bodhisattvas—enlightened masters who become teachers—can be found among ordinary people. The two writers share their interest in various saints, in particular Avalokiteshvara, a bodhisattva so compassionate that, in seeing so much suffering, he literally blew up in despair. Kerouac based the working-class Buddha-like Ryder on Gary Snyder, a poet whose work shows a deep association with Buddhist meditation, as well as a sympathetic—and spiritual—affinity with ancient religions and their emphasis on the natural world as a divine expression. Snyder’s interest in Buddhism, particularly by way of Zen, exposed many other writers to the possibility of a spiritual identity far removed from what many perceived as the crushing homogeneity of mainstream Christianity. In a later conversation with the conservative writer John Lofton, Ginsberg tries to explain his use of the word madness in his poem “Howl”: “In Zen Buddhism there is wild wisdom, or crazy wisdom, crazy in the sense of wild, unlimited, unbounded.”

  As Eastern religion and occultism were becoming important tools of inspiration to what is commonly known as the Beat Generation (a term originally coined by Kerouac), these writers were inspiring others looking to understand the spiritual nature of the unconscious that Freud had failed to fully explain. Novels such as Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse were being read on college campuses, and the Beat writers themselves were citing visionary artists such as Charles Baudelaire and William Blake as kindred souls.

  Bebop provided the soundtrack. Jazz musicians had been looking for a way to challenge what they believed were the limitations of swing and big band music. Musicians began improvising, playing off of each other instead of the sheet music. Standard songs became playgrounds for experimentation. As the scholar Christopher Gair explains, bebop showed how technical prowess and spontaneity could be combined to great result. Bebop also “[e]xposed [the Beats] to an African American culture and language that would have a profound . . . effect on their own work.” The Beats would record bebop’s complex rhythms onto their own prose and verse, what they heard as a reflection of their existential and psychic angst. What better way to express the longing for a spiritual experience that was immediate and unmediated than the language of bebop. But soon the 1950s counterculture would come across a faint echo from America’s rural locations, the sounds of ghosts strumming their guitars, singing murder ballads, spirituals, hillbilly tunes, and blues songs.

  The filmmaker and artist Harry Smith, a regular of New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel, had been collecting recordings of folk songs on 78s since the 1940s. The bulk of his collection was commercial records produced between 1927 and 1932. The names of the singers and musicians were all but forgotten by the time Smith was finding the recordings. His collection came to the attention of Moses Asch, the founder of the Folkways record label, who suggested to Smith he cull the best of what he had so that Asch could release them as a set. 1952 saw the Folkways release of the Anthology of American Folk Music, a three-volume set, personally curated by Smith, and packaged with extensive notes, collages, and, inexplicably, occult symbols. The cover of the anthology is a reproduction of The Celestial Monochord, a seventeenth-century print by the astrologer and mathematician Robert Fludd. He used the monochord—an instrument using a single string to demonstrate how octaves can be understood mathematically—to imagine that the universe was a perfectly tuned manifestation of God, whose string reaches through the heavenly realm into nature. As a result, certain magical formulas can function to vibrate those parts of heaven that have a corresponding element in nature. This would become the basis of a magical practice based on the idea of “like as to like.” For Smith, this image made perfect sense. Smith was an occultist and student of the Kabbalah, magic, and peyote mysticism. The music of the anthology—social music, songs, and ballads—was separated into three sections coded by the colors red, blue, and green, corresponding to the elements of fire, water, and air. For Smith, the anthology represented a deeply human microcosm of the music of the spheres, where love, pain, joy, and death correspond to a divine property. Smith believed it was on the margins of America where an a
uthentic way of life dwelled—free from the gaping maw of Moloch, as Ginsberg might have said.

  Many of the songs in the anthology are echoes of the music played and sung in the shadows of the Appalachian Mountains, an area settled as early as the 1700s by British, Welsh, and Scottish immigrants, who brought with them their own folk music. Many of these songs came to be known as Child Ballads, named after the nineteenth-century Harvard University folklorist Francis Child, who was the first to compile them in a rigorous way. The anthology would become the creation myth for the mid-twentieth-century generation of folk musicians, such as Bob Dylan, many of whom would go on to influence rock and roll. The critic Luc Sante called the anthology “a treasure map of a now hidden America.” Smith’s anthology linked folk music to a past where the spirits of old could manifest themselves in song.

  Plutarch, in his Moralia, reports that, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius Caesar Augustus, a messenger brought the news that Pan had died—the last of the old gods to survive the quickly spreading new religion called Christianity. But if the gods are merely aspects of us, then Pan could never stay dead. His spirit hitched a ride on the slave ships under a different cover: the god Eshu, believed to be the devil by some. What was left of the old African religion was stripped bare to its fundamental core. All that was left were its methods of worship: song and shout, dance and drum. But the spiritual rebellion powering this music could not be buried. The ancient and all-too-human drive for a direct religious communion would find a way to present itself in every generation. Even when rock and roll was being exorcised of sex and rebellion in the late 1950s, a phantom was lurking on the edges of the mainstream. It was being driven by the fiery poetry and prose of the Beats as well as by experimental composers and artists. There was a wind coming in from the East, and it was bringing with it spiritual ideas that could bridge the dark pagan past and the milk-white Christian present. Gurus and bodhisattvas, some who seemed to possess their own special powers and others with a third eye open wide, came to teach the one essential truth the West badly needed. Heaven is on earth now. We had never been parted from it. There is no duality tearing apart the world, no devil trading musical secrets for souls. God is not in the starry heaven above, God is within you.

  CHAPTER 2

  RELAX AND FLOAT DOWNSTREAM

  I

  Syd Barrett’s bandmates watched in sick astonishment as their lead singer and guitarist stood at the front of the stage. His face appeared to be melting. Barrett, the mind and soul behind Pink Floyd, looked out across the audience at the Cheetah Club in Venice, California, as he strummed a single chord on his mirror-covered Fender Telecaster. In 1967, an audience watching Pink Floyd was ready for anything. Pink Floyd revolutionized the live experience as they played long interstellar jams as movie projectors flashed images and smoke swirled around the ever-moving people lit up on acid. Usually the audience grooved to their individual rhythms as much as to the collective consciousness, and rode whatever wave the band was on. But like any mystical journey, there was the danger of being seduced by the ecstasy, of mistaking one’s own hopes and expectations for the truer union and getting blasted across the universe as a result. The audience might have thought the ghastly strobing visage of Barrett was part of the spectacle, but what they were really seeing was a young man at the peak of his powers imploding. They were also witnessing a kaleidoscopic fun house of mirrors: an ever-reflecting cascade of the occult’s influence on rock and roll and, by extension, on all of pop culture.

  Both Syd Barrett’s music and his psyche were being swept up by a current that was finding new energy in England. American rock and roll had turned down its Pentecostal-like fire and dowsed its own sexual and spiritual rebellion—once the essential drive behind rock’s restless spirit. By the early 1960s rock had become neutered. In garages around the United States, teenagers were plugging in their cheap electric guitars and banging on three-piece drum kits, trying to reignite the flame, but it was in England where bands found a formula for injecting a dose of adrenaline into the syrupy pop that had become the staple of radio play. Bands like the Beatles, the Who, and others of the British Invasion looked past Pat Boone to rock’s original roots in the blues and reminded people what they loved about rock and roll in the first place. It was the LSD experience, however—held aloft by a fusion of Eastern mysticism, mythology, and occultism—that would utterly transfigure rock’s sound and performance, in clothing and staging, and in its ability to convince fans it was a transmitter for a new spiritual truth. Barrett, especially through his steerage of Pink Floyd, willingly embraced being the messenger.

  Through Pink Floyd, Barrett conjured a mystical dream for the audience to inhabit, drawn from his own drugged imagination, which was fueled by his interest in mysticism, as well as the popular fascinations of his era, such as the British pastoral fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the I Ching, the text outlining the ancient Chinese system of divination. Even more essential is what music critic Rob Young, in his essential Electric Eden, describes as Barrett being “strangely pushed and pulled between nostalgia for the secret garden of a child’s imagination and the space-age futurism of interstellar overdrive.” Barrett was channeling a spirit that was trying to pierce the veil between these worlds, and while this nostalgia and futurism, as Young puts it, seem opposed, they are actually two ideas at the heart of magic. The practice of magic is one requiring a link to the past and a vision of the future. Barrett added this directly to the lyrics of his songs and his live performances, experimenting with light and sound in an attempt to work the audience into a trance. The method is new, but the intention is ancient. On that November night in 1967, a dark magic was being worked by the young musician.

  Backstage a few minutes earlier, Barrett had poured the contents of a bottle of hair gel mixed with crushed Quaaludes onto his head. Under the hot lights of the stage, the gel and pill mix slowly dripped down his face. This was no mere prank to freak out his audience. Something had gone terribly wrong. Barrett was in a trance of his own as he played the same monotone chord over and over again. Barrett’s behavior had been getting more and more erratic, his almost maniacal LSD consumption inducing or at the very least aggravating some form of mental illness.

  His bandmates were more than worried. They were afraid. Syd had become so unpredictable, they could never be sure what would happen next. Later that year, Barrett would walk out onto a stage, helped by his fellow musicians. Barrett stood still, the tension rising. June Bolan, a friend and business associate of Pink Floyd, remembered the moment as one when the tension never lifted: “Suddenly he put his hands on the guitar and we thought, ‘Great, he’s actually going to do it!’ But he just stood there, he just stood there tripping out of his mind.”

  Acid and the pressure of fame are often blamed as the reason behind Syd Barrett’s downfall, but his drug use was mixed into an explosive compound by his compulsion for spiritual awareness. It began in 1966 when Barrett became involved with a group that practiced Sant Mat, a strange synthesis of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Sufism. The Sant Mat philosophy requires initiation into its teachings, and Barrett was not considered spiritually fit. Sant Mat emphasizes chastity, abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and a commitment to meditation practice, not something a young up-and-coming rock and roll star in the mid-sixties was likely to find easy. Barrett was saddened by the esoteric order’s rejection of him, but there were distractions to take his mind off it: Pink Floyd and LSD. Instead of a spiritual practice, Barrett tested the limitations of sound and lyrics, crafting songs about the I Ching and cosmic consciousness by way of space travel. Pink Floyd’s first album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, is a Wünderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities containing the relics that littered Barrett’s psychic landscape and a construct mirroring the counterculture’s spiritual yearning.
r />   The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is a direct reference to the chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 book, The Wind in the Willows, where the animals unexpectedly find themselves in the presence of the god Pan. Rat and Mole are traveling in a boat along the riverbank. It is Rat who hears the piping first. Mole is skeptical. That is, until he comes across the god himself. In a moment not in any way related to the main plot of the book, Mole and Rat undergo a religious epiphany as they are seemingly initiated into the cult of Pan:

  Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. . . . Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper. . . .