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

by Peter Bebergal

  Bill Bruford describes the genesis of Tales as being somewhat prosaic, not the epic creation myth the album begs for. In March 1972, Bruford, his new bride, and assorted friends and acquaintances were in his flat to celebrate his wedding earlier that day. Two of the guests, Jon Anderson of Yes and Jamie Muir—then percussionist for King Crimson—spent much of the night talking about Paramahansa Yogananda, the author of Autobiography of a Yogi, which was by then an urtext for spiritual seekers. The conversation would put a “kink in the course of progressive rock.” Anderson would use this book as the basis for Tales from Topographic Oceans. First published in 1946, the book details the life of Yogananda and his spiritual development meeting saints, magicians, and yogis throughout India. In 1920, Yogananda started the Self-Realization Fellowship. Like the Vedanta movement that brought the teachings of Ramakrishna and Hindu philosophy to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, the Self-Realization Fellowship divorced yoga and meditation from Hindu culture and religion just enough to make it palpable to anyone, no matter their own religious tradition. Mysticism is immensely egalitarian, which is what has made it so popular, particularly in the 1970s when, despite the sad end to the psychedelic vision of the 1960s, many people were not ready to give up on a non-Christian spiritual identity.

  In Tales, Anderson took the teachings of Yogananda and attempted to turn them into a narrative, a story told by a techno-minstrel, bigger and grander than the humble, boyish face of Yogananda that stares out from the cover of his autobiography. Anderson was taken by a footnote in the book that describes the shastras, the four types of holy literature, and proposed that each of the four album tracks corresponds to one shastra. The lyrics of the album are littered with key words and phrases that evoke a vague spiritual quest. This was worrisome to the music journalist David Laing. In a 1974 retrospective of Yes’s output up to that time, Laing applauded what Yes had done for progressive rock in particular and popular music in general, but was concerned with the empty mystical gestures that the band was using too liberally. He imagined great success for the band but hoped they would cease mythologizing:

  “Time,” “eternity,” “Love,” “seasons,” “millions” are the kind of words which are constants in Jon Anderson’s poetic scheme of things. They add up to an attempt to construct a different mythology to our everyday one of historical change and evolution. To anyone who lived through the days of the Underground, this is a familiar project, yet it’s one which has very seldom been translated into artistic terms with any degree of success.

  The fans ate it up, though. The presentation couldn’t have been better to build a rock and roll tower of Babel, a musical effigy that could support any spiritual language the listener spoke. Roger Dean’s artwork became an integral part of Yes’s mystique and was also abstract enough that it could be the landscape of times past or future or even of another planet or dimension. And Yes’s music was remarkably rich and expansive. Anderson didn’t need to sing a word to keep the fans coming back. During a review of their 1973 show at the Boston Garden, a reporter all but admits the band’s sometimes “lack of cohesion,” but it doesn’t matter: “‘Topographic Oceans’ is a marvelous almost symphonically eloquent creation,” he writes. “[H]ow well it relates to the shastras becomes almost inconsequential in light of its aural beauty.”

  Spiritual excess would define progressive rock just as much as the music. In 1977, Nik Turner—one of the founding members of Hawkwind—journeyed to Egypt, where he would record four hours of playing his flute in the Great Pyramid as part of an attempt to channel cosmic forces that he could transmit back to his fans.

  Christian Vander of the influential French band Magma invented a musical language he called Kobaïan and developed an entire mythos based on the planet Kobaïa, the band members’ supposedly true homeland. One of the lost treasures of 1970s progressive rock is the group Ramases, whose two albums, Space Hymns (with a six-panel gatefold cover by none other than Roger Dean) and Glass Top Coffin, are cracked but brilliant artifacts of rock, mythology, and occult belief. The band’s leader, Barrington Frost, claimed to have been visited by an Egyptian pharaoh who told Frost to change his name to Ramases and spread the news that a new age was dawning. Despite a lineup of excellent musicians (including the multi-instrumentalist Kevin Godley, who went on to form the strange, sugary pop band, 10cc), the albums failed to garner much attention. While people were eating up spiritually laden progressive rock, they did not heed Ramases’ message. The songs feel insular, and Ramases’ cryptic lyrics and album notes come across a little cultlike or as just one big inside joke. Frost would abandon his dream of salvific rock and roll and killed himself in 1976.

  Robert Fripp saw the signs early on that the behemoth of prog would cease to be able to carry its own weight, both in terms of the hugeness of its ambition and its music. Fripp’s own spiritual identity was changing as well. Everything was feeling out of control—Fripp was trying more musical experiments that he didn’t often feel he had a hold of. In 1972, Peter Sinfield left the band, having created not only the lyrics that provided King Crimson with their mythopoeic aura, but synthesizer and lighting work as well. The band had already gone through numerous lineups, and there was tension all around. After Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, King Crimson released Red in 1974, which includes the song “Starless,” a hallmark of the band’s immense output, and what Eric Tamm calls the moment when “the door slams shut . . . on the early era of progressive rock as a whole.”

  In one of his last interviews from that time, one can begin to see Fripp’s shift in wanting to move away from the persona of rock musician to an identity built on merely being a vessel of sound as a spiritual, almost Platonic, idea. In 1974, Fripp told Steve Rosen of Guitar Player that music was simply a tool. “I would say that the crux of my life is the creation of harmony, and music you take to be one of the components of that harmony.” Personally, though, Fripp was floundering. As much as he wanted music to be an expression of this higher ideal, he felt he had lost the means to do it.

  In 1975, Fripp became a student at the International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne House in Britain’s Cotswold countryside, where the mathematician John G. Bennett attempted to synthesize the opaque and difficult teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff is as much of a puzzle as some of his ideas. He was born in Armenia, and in his formative years traveled throughout the East, sitting at the feet of mystics and holy men. During these encounters that he describes in his memoir, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff discovered a single stream of esoteric knowledge that he believed could be taught in a systematic way. In 1919, he opened the first of his schools, the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, in Russia, with other schools popping up in Paris and the United States a short time after.

  Gurdjieff taught that human beings are automatons, asleep to life, less reacting to than being reacted upon by sensations that run through them. Through various physical and mental exercises, such as ritual dance, music, and what he called “dividing one’s attention,” a process whereby the student is instructed to become aware of both inner and outer states of awareness, man can awake. Gurdjieff himself was mercurial, at one moment the serious teacher, the next a foxlike trickster.

  Bennett toned down what Gurdjieff’s student Paul Beekman Taylor called the “three-ring circus” of Gurdjieff’s personality, in an effort to present the teachings as a practical method of spiritual development. Fripp described his experience at Bennett’s school as rigorous, and when he was there, a number of students fled. The house was cold and, according to Fripp, haunted. Students were required to wake early, attend lectures, and spend much of the day in some form of manual craft, such as building walls and
metalsmithing. For Fripp, this was an ego-centering experience and taught him that his instincts regarding music had always been correct. Practical application, knowledge of the instrument, and the relationship between it and the body were the only ways to get access to the deeper, spiritual form.

  While Fripp was taking his leave of absence from rock, punk was setting depth charges under progressive rock’s massive arena-motivated music. Not quite a return to the blues, punk wanted to strip rock of all its pretensions and return to the force of the three-chord-driven, three-minute (or less) song, powered by guitar and not by synthesizers. Whereas progressive rock gazed in awe at Europe’s classical, and sometimes religious, musical heritage, punk had more in common with the Pentecostal Church’s immediacy. Punk was the energy of the shout and gospel. Punk’s more studious younger sibling, new wave, embraced punk’s aesthetic as well as the synthesizer, but replaced safety pins with skinny ties. But neither punk nor new wave could level progressive rock completely. The synth-driven explorations of cosmic and supernal realms would flower in New Age music.

  Along with elements of folk, jazz, classical, and Brian Eno’s ambient albums, New Age music would become a huge industry led by the Windham Hill and Narada labels. Progressive rock (along with krautrock) is still accused as the primary culprits behind New Age’s sterilized sound. Some of those albums that are the crossover moments, however, still merit consideration. Multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield’s 1973 album, Tubular Bells, with its Dalí-like cover of a twisted metal bell, is often considered one of the first true New Age works. It’s not nearly as sugary as New Age would become, and there’s an argument to be made that what New Age borrowed from it is no fault of Oldfield’s. In fact, the sinister flashes of the album inspired the director William Friedkin to use four minutes of Tubular Bells for the soundtrack to The Exorcist, still considered one of the most frightening movies of all time, and certainly not a film one would associate with New Age philosophy. In a 1975 unpublished Rolling Stone interview, Oldfield explained that he wasn’t aware that a piece had been turned into a single for the film and, despite how successful it made him, he felt Tubular Bells is meant to be heard in its entirety.

  Eventually the undemanding sounds of synthesizers, acoustic guitars, and flutes captured an entire spiritual movement that would come to characterize American alternative religion. In the 1980s, except for in the underground, the occult imagination’s hold on mainstream rock was becoming neutered, just like the occult itself.

  The music writer Paul Stump is even less kind: “New Age is pop music that a superior intelligence from another planet might make, musically adept . . . but utterly missing the point,” which is to say that New Age music, like the New Age movement, is filled with potential, but continually softens the impact. Occultism and mysticism were no longer the means of spiritual rebellion; they were simply another choice on the vast menu of available religious symbols and practices.

  But their job was already complete. In almost every aspect of rock and popular music, the occult’s influence could be felt. Even as more Top 40 acts turned to electronics and the digital studio, the underlying agitation was the same as it had been when young people first tossed a guitar strap over their shoulders. If you make enough noise, no matter your instrument, you can keep the old gods alive forever.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE GOLDEN DAWN

  I

  At a small independent bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Damien Echols gave a reading from his 2012 memoir, Life After Death, in which he recounts his torturous eighteen years being on death row for murders he didn’t commit, and then constructing a new life for himself when he was released in 2011. It was a brutal and unthinkable crime. In 1993, three eight-year-old boys were killed and mutilated, their bodies found near a muddy drainage ditch. West Memphis, Arkansas—the city where the boys lived and died—is a small metropolis of over twenty-five thousand residents: a town compared with other American urban centers.

  The three suspects were easy to come by. They were teenage outsiders, arrested for vandalism and other petty crimes, two of them high school dropouts, and were already pegged as troublemakers. But this was not what damned the suspects to a controversial arrest, trial, and a death sentence for one of them. Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr., and Jason Baldwin (now known as the West Memphis Three) were called Satanists, and their love of heavy metal music had been said to have soured their minds and corrupted their souls. The district attorney believed the murders were committed as part of a ritual sacrifice to the devil. An article in the Commercial Appeal, a daily newspaper of Memphis, Tennessee, reported on a possible explanation for the crime and included this from child psychologist Paul King, who was interviewed for the piece: “Heavy-metal music may sound like irritating noise, but its lyrics ‘glorify the power of evil’ and the child who sits in his room brooding over the lyrics may display an unhealthy preoccupation.”

  Much of the prosecution’s case pointed to the fact that Echols listened to the band Metallica and copied lyrics from their songs into his journal. The hysteria surrounding the trial of the teenagers in West Memphis, Arkansas, was not merely a local phenomenon, not simply a case of kids who dressed in black and listened to heavy metal stereotyped as delinquents. Their prosecution was only the most dramatic of what had been this ongoing fear of the supposed satanic power of rock and roll.

  Echols was thought to be the demonic ringleader of the West Memphis Three, convicted in 1994 for the murder of the three young boys. His interest in pagan religion and heavy metal was what led police to peg him as a suspect. Echols’s book admits to an interest in Eastern religion and magic, claiming these ideas helped him get through the dehumanization of prison life and supported him during his subsequent recovery from the trauma of his incarceration.

  Henry Rollins—onetime singer of the hardcore punk band Black Flag and counterculture icon—remarked, “I’d find myself up at 3:30 a.m. thinking about Damien. He could have been me. I had those records. I was sullen as a teenager.” Alas, the point at which the artist and the surrounding culture meet is often fraught. The necessary ingredients—mysterious and/or theatrical allusions to historically alternative spiritual paths, youth’s drive to find its own way, and a good beat—lead to the development and continued growth of rock and roll along the spectrum of sound, signal, and meaning. Even pop music, rock’s stepchild, carries the legacy, and continues to inspire exaggerated responses to its associations, intentional or not, to occultism.

  II

  The video for Jay Z’s 2009 single “On to the Next One” is a masterpiece of symbolism. Jay Z stands in the center of the frame, haloed by a circle of dim lights behind him. Throughout the video, frame after frame of flashing images, is a well-dressed man in skull-like makeup reminiscent of the Joker; a white-gowned ninja battling the air with batons; a jewel-studded skull; smoke swirling into Rorschach test patterns; a crucifix; thick red lips dripping blood; and goat skulls with massive horns. Jay Z’s raps are fairly standard as far as hip hop goes. It’s a self-referential narrative of success, of moving forward, not looking back, embracing his riches, and a warning that his fame and creative output are only going to get greater.

  But pay closer attention, as certain fans indicate in the YouTube community, and you might see that some of these gestures and images that make up his persona point to the hidden secret of Jay Z’s success. It can’t be talent alone—no black man in America could make it as big as Jay Z without help from “the inside.” Underlying the truth is that Jay Z sold his soul to the devil—seen clearly in those horns that flash during the video. But this is not any devil. This is Baphomet, believed by some to be the hidden god of the Freemasons revealed during the 33rd degree ritual, who paves the way for the initiate to be
come part of an even greater fraternity known as the Illuminati. Jay Z raps that he is in control of his own destiny but, studied from another angle, he might be merely a pawn in a sinister game of control.

  If you want to find common ground between the extreme far left and the extreme far right, conspiracy theories about the Illuminati will bring even the most hated enemies together. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as it were. While there may be disagreements over who controls what—and to what degree Jews are involved—there is a basic outline that is generally accepted. But first we have to highlight what conspiracy theorists might see as pesky facts.

  A quick look back: In 1776, a Bavarian law professor by the name of Adam Weishaupt gathered together like-minded men to form a society that would attempt to liberalize the spirit of society. Weishaupt had been educated by Jesuits but grew distrustful of a church that constantly seemed to abandon reason for superstition. He called his group the Order of the Illuminati to highlight that they believed in enlightenment—albeit through reason—for humanity. Weishaupt’s attack on religion was sure to run afoul of the royalty whose ties to the Catholic Church were stronger than the abstract ideas of humanism and freedom. Weishaupt made matters worse for himself when he joined the Freemasons and tried to align his idea with theirs. Freemasonry was too heavily invested in its own spiritual symbolism and Rosicrucian-influenced rituals for Weishaupt to make much of an impact, though. His political views were seen as anarchic by the authorities, and he was ordered to disband his order or face the death penalty.

  Weishaupt complied, the society dissolved in 1787, and the once-enlightened freethinker died in 1830 a devout Catholic. Weishaupt’s criticism of the Church, coupled with his group’s relationship to Freemasonry, led Freemasons’ critics to contend that the fraternity was in league with the devil. They would declare that Freemasonry purports to believe in God, whom Freemasons call the Great Architect, but this was just for appearance’s sake.