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

by Peter Bebergal

  Manuel Göttsching was only nineteen years old when he felt the krautrock groundswell. At sixteen he had already been introduced to avant-garde composition through Thomas Kessler, the Swiss composer who was working with electronics as early as 1965. In 1971, Göttsching’s band Ash Ra Tempel combined a more blues-based approach, but the group still disrupted rock conventions with long atonal solos, electronics, and abrasive vocals. Their mysticism was often harsh, a struggle against a bad trip with transcendence right on the horizon. A short two years later, Göttsching disbanded Ash Ra Tempel to focus more on solo projects. This would result in the forming of Ashra, an almost entirely electronic soft-rock version of Ash Ra Tempel, with little to recommend it. It wasn’t until Göttsching’s 1984 solo release E2-E4 that his vision would change popular music by steering electronic music into the club scene with its influence on techno and house music.

  One of krautrock’s most important bands, Tangerine Dream, had started as edgy experimenters. Their first album, 1970’s Electronic Meditation, sounds like an evening at the UFO Club with Pink Floyd—psychedelic-charged investigations of noise using guitars, a typewriter, metal sticks, and organs. Their next trilogy of albums—Zeit, Alpha Centauri, and Atem—were almost entirely crafted with synthesizers for the sounds of interplanetary excursions, but the band still held to their roots as cutting-edge musicians. By the late 1970s, their music was a mix of heavily produced progressive rock and synthesizer-based symphonies. Live, they played loud, accompanied by complex laser-light shows. In the 1980s, their once-evocative cosmic soundscapes were reduced to New Age balm: the synthesizer had been its applicator.

  It’s not clear if Robert Moog spoke to the buyers and users of his synthesizers in spiritual terms, but many of them quickly adopted the well-crafted instrument to communicate the selfsame ideas, and he was not shy about sharing these ideas with the friends and the musicians he inspired. At the 2004 Moogfest in New York City, Rick Wakeman of the progressive rock band Yes, and Bernie Worrell, the keyboard virtuoso who was a founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic, stood around Moog, trading stories after the show. Worrell described how playing a Moog synthesizer was like making love. More than once Wakeman said that Moog “changed the face of music.” After the conversation expanded into deeper territory, the three men admitted there was also something numinous about the instrument. Wakeman pointed a finger at Moog and said, “It comes from inside this man.” Moog, ever humble, waved at the air above him and said, “It comes from out there, it comes through me into the instrument, and then the music comes through you guys and the instrument.”

  III

  At a recent gallery show of his artwork, Roger Dean—best known for his lush and fantastical album covers for Yes in the 1970s—was enjoying the crowd when a man approached him and held out his hand to shake. “Mr. Dean, your work has changed my life,” he said. “I have gleaned so many amazing, mystical secrets from looking at your album covers. Can you tell me sort of what you meant by it?” Dean, ever polite, tried to let the man down easily. “I didn’t mean anything at all. It was just a good-looking album cover.” His superfan, disillusioned, and possibly embarrassed, now turned nemesis. “Well, what do you know?” he angrily spat. “You’re just the artist!” Despite his protestations, Dean might have taken some responsibility for contributing to casting a wide mystical net over an entire subgenre of music, known sometimes derogatorily as progressive rock. You are unlikely to find a prog-rocker who refers to their own music in that way, but the term serves as a way to describe a movement in rock, one steering a massive ship away from the siren call of blues-based rock that had so long dominated popular music, toward a more English tradition of what Greg Lake of the supergroup Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP) described as “troubadour, medieval storytelling.” Rock would inherit this mantle proudly, looking toward the mythology of the past—often heavily informed by occult images—to construct the sound of the future.

  Psychedelic rock bands set the course, but in the 1970s, a new wave of bands looked beyond the drugginess of psychedelia to classical music as the true guide. Coupled with the instruments of the future—particularly Moog synthesizers—progressive rock crafted rock suites, with some songs clocking in at twenty minutes or more. Dean’s paintings were otherworldly landscapes of floating islands and boulders, or stone structures rising up like trees. Largely unpopulated, save for the occasional butterfly/dragon hybrid, there were no aliens, elves, or wizards. His worlds might be long-dead civilizations, like the lifeless plains of Mars haunted by the once-thriving Martian societies in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, or future lands where people have taken to hibernating in the inexplicable constructions of their cities, endlessly waiting. Dean had perfected the merging of science fiction with mysticism, invoking the imagination of prog-rock listeners who were convinced there was some story or greater truth behind his art, and spent hours listening and poring over the album covers, meant to coexist in an ideological way.

  At first, prog-rock musicians were just trying to see how far outside of the accepted structures of rock they could go. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album had demonstrated that experimentation could prove commercially successful, but as Greg Lake remembers it, his first foray into pushing up against rock norms was a risky proposition. But wouldn’t rock fans, more than any others, be willing to try on the new, to accept rebellion within?

  By the end of the 1960s, rock had found a healthy balance of maintaining some degree of counterculture aspirations while at the same time being popular enough to be commercially successful. Nevertheless, change was still difficult. Very little in rock history conforms perfectly with being the first, as so much happens in a metaphorical house of mirrors, with influences difficult to unravel. But various people trying slightly different things around the same time may suddenly turn into a kaleidoscopic totality—a hundredth monkey kind of occurrence. One could argue that the first great moment in prog-rock happened at the free Rolling Stones concert held at Hyde Park in London on July 5, 1969.

  It was a strange lineup. Supporting acts included the Third Ear Band (an underground act fusing psychedelic rock with world folk music, and some of the most purposefully occult songs of the 1960s) and the British blues guitarist Alexis Korner. When the mostly unknown outfit who called themselves King Crimson took the stage, they launched into an antifolk, antiblues, antipsychedelic song of screeching guitar and angry saxophone, throwing out lyrics like “Cat’s foot iron claw / Neuro-surgeons scream for more.” The song, “21st Century Schizoid Man,” came as a shock to the stoned hippies. Footage shows the crowd looking vaguely scared, possibly worried their beloved and by then easily digestible Rolling Stones had been kidnapped and replaced with fearsome imposters. But King Crimson might, too, have felt like pretenders. Until then, the biggest crowd they had played was fewer than five hundred people. The audience to see the Rolling Stones for free numbered close to five hundred thousand.

  Greg Lake, then King Crimson’s vocalist, remembers the moment well. The audience had come to expect a certain kind of “head-nodding” rhythm, a “pulsating numbing effect.” King Crimson delivered something else entirely, a hostile, but virtuosic, attack. Along with the saxophone, they also employed a flute and a mellotron, instruments not yet typical for a rock band: “And of course it came as a shock. Then they realized that it was a good shock. And then they just stood up. The entire audience stood up. And in one split second, we knew that we had made it.”

  “21st Century Schizoid Man” is the first track on King Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, a storybook of an album crafting fantasy narratives out of deep human emotion. Lyrics like “The tournament’s begun / The purple piper plays his tune” inhabit the sa
me musical landscape as “Confusion will be my epitaph / As I crawl a cracked and broken path.”

  This would be progressive rock’s prototype, lyrical poetry fused with complex and dexterous musicianship transmitting two levels of meaning. Musically there were multiple, sometimes disparate, layers at play. King Crimson became more adept at abruptly shifting gears, playing angular noisy instrumental pieces followed by lyrical ballads. It was made cohesive by the head and heart of King Crimson, Robert Fripp. He had formed the band in 1968 with the drummer Michael Giles (together they had been two parts of the band Giles, Giles, and Fripp), along with Ian McDonald and Greg Lake.

  In early King Crimson interviews, Fripp spoke vaguely about an interest in esoteric matters, but when pushed he could spell out a systematic theology. In an interview with NME in 1973, Fripp explained that music was a kind of magic, and not in the colloquial sense. Music could actually alter reality: “If you’re in front of half a million people and you draw together the energies of that half million and you attract angelic power—which you can also do if you’re smart enough—and bind the two together in a cone of power and then direct it, you can make the world spin backwards.” Fripp’s language here implies a deep reading of occult texts, particularly those of the Western tradition by way of the Golden Dawn and Crowley. Fripp explains that the technique—also emphasized by those ceremonial magicians—is the method to express what he calls his “heart and his hips.”

  The chaotic precision of King Crimson’s music was not always welcomed. Critics called it “art rock” as an insult. In a 1969 review of one of their earliest shows in the United States, John Mendelsohn, writing for the Los Angeles Times, complimented their proficiency with their instruments, but the praise ended there. “[S]ince when do proficiency and sophistication have much of anything to do with good rock ’n’ roll?” Three years later, a reviewer of the same paper called King Crimson a “triumph of the intellect over emotion.”

  Others seemed to get it. A year later, the Boston Globe’s Neal Vitale gushed over the newer incarnation of the band, whose album Larks’ Tongues in Aspic was released that year to critical acclaim. “The songs are brilliant and dazzling exercises in dynamics and subtle textures,” the Globe wrote. “The competence of the four musicians is beyond reproach.” But this was still missing the point, at least as far as Fripp would see it. Competence was a symptom of something much greater than the band itself, something almost transcendent. As guitarist and Fripp biographer Eric Tamm explains it, by the time of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, “Fripp stressed the ‘magic’ metaphor time and again; for to him, when group improvisation of this sort really clicked, it was nothing short of bona fide white magic.”

  Fripp described the first year of King Crimson as seemingly beyond what the band was actually capable of: “Amazing things would happen—I mean, telepathy, qualities of energy, things that I had never experienced before with music. My own sense of it was that music reached over and played this group of four uptight young men who didn’t really know what they were doing.”

  Prog-rock bands were particularly adept at presenting themselves as being purveyors of the strange and the paranormal. Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s eponymous first album includes “The Three Fates,” a suite comprised of “Clotho,” “Lachesis,” and “Atropos,” which sounds like contemporary classical music. The Three Fates, or the Moirai, are of course the three sisters of Greek mythology who wove the destiny of human beings. They would become the model for the three incanting sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the witches who toil over their cauldron, cooking up spells and schemes to upend the normal course of things. In every way it was an unconventional thing to find on a rock album, and smacked of intellectualism, the antipathy of rock. But Lake, who left King Crimson to join Keith Emerson and Greg Palmer to form ELP, thinks that despite how big and complex progressive rock could and did become, it was still pop music. By all indications, though, it was pop music that presented itself as something much more arcane.

  When production was complete on ELP’s 1973 album, Brain Salad Surgery, the band agreed that they needed a standout album cover, a design that would reflect the aura of the music, which includes the thirty-minute suite “Karn Evil 9,” a science fiction epic about a despotic computer, written in part by Peter Sinfield, the scribe responsible for the lyrics of King Crimson’s fantastical early songs. ELP’s manager had seen the work of an artist in Zurich and suggested they visit his home. The artist was H. R. Giger, whose techno-fetish paintings had not yet become popularly known. (In 1979, Giger’s vision would be seen by millions in the film Alien, for which he designed the look of the alien, as well as the fossil-like spaceship where its eggs are lying dormant.)

  “It was like a horror museum,” Lake recalls, upon visiting the artist’s home. “But Giger himself is very sweet, kind, gentle and very sort of softly spoken.” The band was led into the dining room where the chairs and table were all carved with black-skull motif: “The whole thing was black. Black chairs, black table, black skulls.” Giger showed them some drawings he thought would work well with the music, with metal work and the ELP logo added. Lake insists if one looks carefully, there is a penis in the throat of the figure being “x-rayed.”

  It is the combination of the music and the cover that, Lake explains, is like a cocktail: “You can put certain elements into a glass and nothing happens. If you put one extra element in, the whole thing becomes effervescent.” This is the alchemy of rock and roll, where the songs, lyrics, art, and even the band’s logo can become a whole experience that you can hold in your hand when you hold an album.

  Prog-rock’s roots, being in European music rather than American traditions like the blues, found the genre nudging up against classical forms, which are often thought to be highbrow. But the history of classical music reveals this is not the case. Progressive rock sits more in the tradition of the Romantic composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like the Romantic poet and artists, Romantic composers were also excavating a past where they believed a more authentic human spirit dwelled with nature, where the supernatural was a shadow at the edges having never been completely exorcised by Christianity. Romantic composers wanted music to capture emotion and subjectivity. The composer and pianist Franz Liszt’s rapturous performances caused audience members to swoon, and his “flamboyant” style likely influenced the keyboardists of progressive rock, such as Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman.

  Progressive rock also found in the Romantic tradition what had been drawn from British folk music as a method for experimentation. Béla Bartók, one of the last of the Romantic composers, was enamored of the folk music of his native Hungary. As the writer Ivan Hewett explains, “The wild irregular rhythms of Balkan dance encouraged him to think about rhythm in a new way.” Bartók would make an appearance on Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s first album in the opening track, “The Barbarian,” with a folk effect borrowing liberally from Bartók’s solo piano work “Allegro Barbaro.”

  The mythopoeia tradition, popularized by J. R. R. Tolkien through using the term as the title of a poem, later came to describe a modern form of mythology, one that utilizes tropes from ancient mythology to craft contemporary stories. Progressive rock shares in this literary tradition by firing myth in a furnace of modern—sometimes avant-garde—music. The court of the mysterious Crimson King could easily be a location in Middle-earth, but it transcends it through rock’s uncanny ability to give even the most fantastical ideas a sense of realness. This is the occult’s greatest impact on rock and roll. Over time, by incorporating mystical and magical elements into its music and presentation, roc
k created a mythos around itself suggesting it was somehow heir to secret wisdom. Sometimes malevolent, sometimes mystical, this special perception of things unseen would drive both its fans and detractors to obsess over possible esoteric meanings.

  Like musique concrète and the spirit of music’s future it hoped to help shape, listening to rock became a deeply subjective experience. Sometimes it was believed the musicians themselves were just vessels, often unaware they were being used to telegraph designs beyond themselves. The fan at the Roger Dean art opening would not accept that the artist was just grooving off the grand narratives sculpted by his clients: If Dean didn’t intend to convey any spiritual riddles, then maybe the bands didn’t, either. But this would be shortsighted and obtuse. The only logical conclusion was they were simply conduits, unaware they were being manipulated by the gods. The right formula of mythic world building, extensive use of Moogs, and Roger Dean’s artwork could send a band into the stratosphere.

  Writing for Melody Maker in 1973, the critic Chris Welch called this Yes album the musical equivalent of Ben-Hur or Exodus. It was said to be the most bloated rock album of all time, the proverbial goliath that would inspire the little rascal named David, otherwise known as punk rock. It was the perihelion of prog-rock, a glorious or pretentious masterpiece, depending on your mood. Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans, released in 1973, is four songs—on four sides—running eighty-three minutes long. The double album was packaged in a Roger Dean painting of a prehistoric alien world, where fish swim on the surface of a desert and in the distance sits a pyramidal structure, a temple where one imagines mysterious beings play ancient synthesizers aeon after aeon.