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

by Peter Bebergal

  But Brown might have understood this, as well. After Kingdom Come broke up, Brown traveled to Turkey to study Sufism and eventually landed in Austin, Texas. It was here he was inspired to pursue music as a means of psychic transformation through less bombastic methods. Brown received his master’s in counseling psychology and started a music therapy practice. The patient would talk about their phobias or fears, and Brown would then compose a song on the fly with a guitar in hand, the lyrics drawn from the patient’s own words. The patient would take a tape of the song home and listen to it whenever the anxiety or depression set in. Here is the location where hypnotism and magic meet.

  One of the first proponents of hypnotism was the eighteenth-century German doctor Franz Mesmer. He believed in a kind of supernatural invisible fluid with magnetic properties coursing through human beings, and, with the proper training, a practitioner could manipulate this fluid to a healing effect. Mesmer called this “animal magnetism” and, while the idea was quickly discredited, the technique, first called “mesmerism” but later changed to “hypnotism,” has become a genuine and powerful means to induce trance states by way of suggestion.

  Brown’s music therapy practice was not unlike hypnotherapy, with the song becoming a means of suggestion that the patient can then use to return themselves to the hypnotic state first induced in the therapist’s office. Hypnosis is indeed a form of altered consciousness, and while more subtle than an LSD trip, it may have more profound and long-term effects. Suggestion might be the most powerful tool in the stage magician’s bag of tricks, as much as it is for the tribal shaman and even the Freemasons’ rituals. Brown might have taken off his robes and makeup, but his therapy technique is the same, and it is also the key function of rock and roll’s occult power. The question of whether or not the supernatural is real is irrelevant. The occult doesn’t need arcane forces to give it reality. It only needs a means of transmission and a willing audience. Mesmer’s ghostly fluid might not really exist, but the current running between the practitioner and the patient, the high priest and the neophyte, and the musician and the audience is valid and evident.

  While Brown was never quite able to maintain the spell over the mainstream, the ideas and traditions he drew from would find popularity in other acts. Visionaries rarely make it across the desert, and Brown was no different. It would be others—Alice Cooper and Kiss—who would deliver more easily digestible versions of Brown’s shamanic magic. There is an apocryphal tale of how Alice Cooper got his name. Born Vincent Furnier, he was a young man who dreamed of his high school rock band becoming famous. He and his bandmates were playing with a Ouija board, and the mysterious force controlling the board communicated that he was in fact the reincarnated soul of Alice Cooper, a seventeenth-century witch who had been burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials. (Another version has him learning the secret truth of his destiny from a fortune-teller at a carnival.)

  The band became known as Alice Cooper, but soon there would be no separation between the lead singer and the name of the band. Furnier became known as Alice Cooper, and he eagerly embraced the nom de guerre. Cooper liked how simple and sweet the name sounded and how antithetical it was to his stage act. Alice Cooper turned rock into a theater of the macabre, incorporating bloody baby dolls, guillotines, electric chairs, mock hangings, and a boa constrictor named Yvonne. All these props were used to extravagant effect by a Cooper garbed in dresses, leotards, or leather, with his signature Harlequin-painted eyes. Cooper did not see himself as a shaman inviting the gods into the world, but as a rock and roll scapegoat, a gathering of the entire miasma humans have hidden inside them. Cooper made it all visible. He projected it back to the audience and turned it into spectacle.

  The band Kiss (which some Christian groups believed was an acronym for Knights in Satan’s Service and hence rejected the music) took the theatrics of Alice Cooper and crafted them into a perfectly oiled machine, a living mystery cult. Sylvie Simmons, writing for Sound, told how a Kiss performance was what Alice Cooper’s band “always wanted to be but weren’t.” For every tour, Alice Cooper created a new set piece, trying to outdo himself each time. Kiss learned that what their teenage fans really wanted was something to emulate, a mostly unchanging ritual, except for a new song now and again.

  So the band adopted perfectly crafted personas: the Demon (Gene Simmons), the Cat (Peter Criss), the Spaceman (Ace Frehley), and the Starchild (Paul Stanley). Their makeup was never altered, allowing their fan-cum-followers to don the same look. This “army” of devotees, as it was called, wanted the direct confrontation with their gods, and Kiss gave it to them by way of drum sets on hydraulic risers, mortar-rigged explosions, fire and more fire, and Gene Simmons’s ungodly long tongue. Their music, panned by music critics, was not complex. Under all the histrionics, it was just pop after all, but the music was not the thing. Kiss was a phenomenon, fueled by preteen hormones stirred into the frenzy by that ancient craft Arthur Brown had worked so hard to bring to the rock stage.

  Even today, Brown appreciates what these other acts were trying to do, but believes their work is undermined by the banality of their subject matter. It wasn’t merely theatrics. Brown likened his dramaturgy to the performance of tribal priests and shamans. Their playacting was a form of magical practice intended to draw down the divine to reveal itself to the community. Elements such as masks are particularly powerful. Masks are, as Walter Otto explains, “nothing but surface. . . . Here there is nothing but encounter, from which there is no withdrawal—an immovable, spell-binding antipode.” The representation of the spirit in the mask cannot be mistaken for something else. Add to this chanting and the ecstatic sound of drums and other instruments, and something like mass hypnosis could easily occur. And when an audience is willingly giving themselves over to be in the presence of the god, the trick is even easier to pull off. This could serve as a definition for all of rock’s performances, but with someone like Brown, and the later acts who would incorporate his ideas, it is even more fitting. However, Brown felt that songs like Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out,” for example, didn’t merit shamanic theatrics. Musicians like Cooper and Kiss turned it into pure entertainment, with shock as a means to an end: fame and fortune. Brown admits he could be shocking also, but it was merely a method to alter consciousness, just as shamans had done, to open up a space to let the gods in.

  II

  When a nineteen-year-old Cameron Crowe visited David Bowie for a Rolling Stone magazine interview in 1975, he found a coked-out Bowie lighting black candles to protect himself from unseen supernatural forces outside his window. Bowie had just finished filming The Man Who Fell to Earth with director Nicolas Roeg. It was a heady time for UFOs and alien encounters, and it was easy for Bowie to mold himself to the role. He had long before been singing about the existential dread of outer space and the descent of alien rock stars, but he was way ahead of the cultural consciousness. When The Man Who Fell to Earth was released, current pop culture was being heavily invaded by cosmic entities. The number of books and TV specials on UFOs might very well have outnumbered actual sightings at that time. But by then, Bowie was channeling something more enchanting than ancient astronauts. He was mixing his science fiction with magic and cocaine. While the results would supply rock with an occult-jolt, continuing the trend of transforming popular music, Bowie’s sanity would be the casualty. Luckily, the artist made it through mostly intact, but the legacy of that battle between the forces of magic and sanity would be the next phase in rock’s continuing occult transformation. Bowie’s exploration of his consciousness by way of costume, drama, and an unstoppable creative drive showed musicians and audiences once again that the music should never settle for any trend. The occult imagination made sure rock would never die, and Bowie injected it with the pure speedball to keep
it awake, no matter the consequences.

  While many of his lyrics drop references to various shades and types of occultism—often filtered through Nietzschean imagery, strange fascist ideology, and alien messiahs—the form in which this shaped rock culture is not as clear as Harrison’s use of the sitar driven by his devotion to Eastern mysticism, for example, or Page’s interest in magic adorning album covers and compounding the sinister vibe of Led Zeppelin’s music. It’s not enough to focus on Bowie’s mercurial interest in mysticism and other esoteric practices. Bowie’s role in this larger narrative is much more subtle, but in some ways the most far-reaching. In the history of rock, there is likely no truer magician than Bowie, as he has come to personify how magic works. As noted, in stage magic those in the audience allow themselves to be tricked, to be seduced by the illusion, just as in ritual and ceremonial magic, where a similar phenomenon is at play and is an important effect in conducting the events and rituals within the context of a group, community, or fraternity. There is a shared, often tacit, language agreed upon by the group; its power evident in the way a neophyte will accept the language or other coded acts implicitly, such as when an apprentice Freemason is given the first handshake, or “grip,” and without hesitation accepts it as so.

  Despite his dark occult interests and the almost tragic ending to a still-remarkable career, Bowie’s cosmic and magical personas lifted rock music onto a new stage. Bowie used glamour—both in the fashion and magical senses—to convert rock audiences into accepting a bisexual and binary sense of self. This was not simply the androgynous sexuality of someone like Jagger. Bowie’s sexual self is a method of transgression illuminating something universally and perhaps subconsciously human. Bowie was a cultural seer, not unlike Tiresias, the prophet in ancient Greek myth and theater who by punishment of the gods lived as a woman for seven years. Tiresias walks both worlds, both female and male, and through this wisdom is able to intuit the shape of things to come. Tiresias appears in many Greek plays, often foretelling tragic endings, or as a follower of Dionysus in The Bacchae, prefiguring Pentheus’s own transgendered moment in acquiescence to the god.

  Bowie outfitted his transgendered themes with what was cutting-edge fashion at the time—aliens, magic, and mysticism—but his tones were somewhat bleak. In the time between 1970 and 1975, there was an aura of troubled messianic and apocalyptic fervor. It was difficult to know if Bowie offered warnings or celebrations in his presentation and performance. As his drug use became more severe over time, he might not have known himself.

  Bowie’s first album, the 1967 David Bowie, was a strange bit of British whimsy, a fluff piece of pure sugary pop with an obvious intent to reach Top 40 recognition. Once he recast himself as a cosmonaut with his second outing, Space Oddity, in 1969, Bowie began his ever-shifting transmutations, a living alchemical elixir becoming more potent and dangerous with every experiment. Music critics agreed that Space Oddity was unique. The opener is a song by the same name, an existential space journey in which Major Tom finds himself untethered from both his rocket and reality, free-floating through the astral planes.

  A writer for Disc and Music Echo swooned: “I listened spellbound throughout, panting to know the outcome of poor Major Tom and his trip into the outer hemisphere.” Here was a rock song in 1969 that looked from within the starry void down onto the closing of the decade with a melancholy detachment. The song “Memory of a Free Festival” gives a generous nod to the music festivals of the 1960s, but the ultimate hope was not for the energized gathering of hippies. Salvation is otherworldly, and comes by way of “sun machines,” interplanetary starships piloted by Venusians. But hope was not everlasting.

  The imagery of forbidden fruit would underpin his next album, The Man Who Sold the World, in 1970. Something was stirring in Bowie, a kind of eerie decadence, plainly seen in the UK cover version: Bowie lounges in a dress and leather boots on a silk-draped couch, the floor in front of him littered with a deck of playing cards. The songs are heavyweight, some sounding like early heavy metal, and the themes are equally menacing and explicitly sexual. Bowie imagines himself being initiated into a forbidden sect offering salvation by way of musical Gnosticism: to know yourself, you must cast aside the illusion of convention, freely eat what the serpent offers, but never be ashamed of the knowledge you find. Themes of superhuman masters haunt the entire album, but it’s unclear if Bowie imagines himself their equal or their pawn.

  It’s on his 1971 album, Hunky Dory, that Bowie’s fascination with magic becomes less opaque as he makes reference to things fairly well-known by other seekers in the early seventies. Crowley gets his necessary nod on “Quicksand”—a downbeat song about a spiritual crisis. Bowie’s biographer Nicholas Pegg makes particular note of the song “Oh! You Pretty Things,” with its warning that “Homo sapiens have outgrown their use.” Pegg believes this is a nod to the writing of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In his 1871 novel, The Coming Race, a man finds an entrance to the hollow earth where he discovers an ancient superpeople described as a “race akin to man’s, but infinitely stronger of form and grandeur of aspect” who use an energy called “vril” to perform wondrous feats, such as controlling everything from the weather to emotions.

  This delightfully strange story might have gone the way of other quaint nineteenth-century fantasies if not for The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, first published in France in 1960 and translated into English in 1963, which created a wave of esoteric speculation and occult conspiracy theories still being felt today. The authors were inspired by the writer Charles Hoy Fort, who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, used an inheritance to spend his time in the New York Public Library, collecting stories and data from a wide range of sources, all of which suggests an underlying and connected web of paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Using Fort’s method, Pauwels and Bergier outlined a secret history in which important historical figures intuited their own role in shaping a cosmic destiny for mankind, aliens had visited mankind during the first days of Western civilization, and alchemy and modern physics were not in opposition. The seventies also needed a messenger who could personify astronomical dreams and occult permutations, a figure of decadence and wisdom who could deliver a rock and roll testament to what it’s like to fall between the worlds. Only Bowie could imagine such a creature.

  Bowie’s next release would create one of the most iconic and powerful rock personas of all time: Ziggy Stardust. Forgive the hyperbole, but in what is one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bowie subverted the grandeur of spaceflight along with the wonder and excitement over the moonwalk and turned the cosmos into a place of ominous mystery, where fallen alien messiahs would learn to play guitar. Bowie synthesized the spiritual hopes and fears of the seventies without ever resorting to New Age platitudes. Ziggy is not here to experiment on humans, he is here to experiment on himself, seeking forbidden knowledge in the urban wastes of earth.

  In 1973, Rolling Stone arranged a meeting between the two poles of cultural transgression: William Burroughs and David Bowie. Burroughs occupied a central place in the underground pantheon. Both gay and a drug addict, he explored these aspects of himself through some of the most challenging and disturbing novels written in English. Bowie was his Gemini twin, a wrecker of mores who was reaping fame and fortune as the deranged but beautiful creature of pop music. Burroughs might have been looking for a way into the mainstream, and might have believed rubbing elbows with Bowie would get him closer.

  During their talk, Bowie describes the full mythos behind Ziggy, describing a race of alien superbeings called the “infinites,” living black holes that use Ziggy as a vessel to give themselves a form people could comprehend. Burro
ughs countered with his own vision to create an institute to help people achieve greater awareness so humanity will be ready when we make eventual contact with alien life-forms.

  Bowie’s fascination with alien Gnosticism gave way to a return to the decadent magic of The Man Who Sold the World, particularly with the album Diamond Dogs, one of the most frightening albums of the 1970s. The warning of an imminent apocalypse in the song “Five Years” on Ziggy Stardust is realized in the dystopian urban wasteland where “fleas the size of rats sucked on rats the size of cats.” The only hope is in the drugs and the memory of love. The track “Sweet Thing” is a beautiful killer of a song, Bowie’s voice hitting the high notes as if desperate: “Will you see that I’m scared and I’m lonely?” Diamond Dogs might be a fictional vision, but the truth underlying it was Bowie’s increasing and prodigious cocaine use, and an even deeper curiosity with the occult. Supercharged by coke, a drug known for its side effect of throat-gripping paranoia, Bowie’s interest in magic could only turn ugly.