The connection between such recurring events is blurred, its details obscured in the mists of pre-Christian myth and allegory. Black Metal has taken the fire of Loki and used it as fuel, the accelerant for a one-way ride to hell. Have the terrifying gods of old reawakened, thirsty for blood after years of dormancy? Or is this simply their last stand, a Götterdämmerung of Wagnerian proportions as they gasp before the final curtain?
A historian of the Germanic people wrote, “There is not only a Twilight for the Gods, there is a deep, dark impenetrable night.”5 In the flaming glint of real or imagined sword blades, Black Metal’s legions have made their own desperate attempt to illumine the darkness. Their weapons are blasphemy and fire, coupled with heavy sonic artillery and spurred on by powerful internal and infernal impulses. Their methods and approach may be inopportune, the tactics crude and thoughtless, but the resulting unprecedented and unexpected crimes warrant an inquest. The implications of their behavior ripple far beyond the borders of music, youth culture, even esoteric religion. Their experiments in “evil” provide the opportunity to understand the dynamic impetus which lies behind hate-driven destruction itself.
In order to fully understand the present and future, one must gaze back into the past. Thus, we will begin our explication of a modern eruption of musical terrorism a few generations ago, before Rock and Roll had even entered the picture. Once a quick overview of Black Metal’s instinctual and visceral pedigree has been gained, the rest of the insanity quickly falls into place.
THE SABBATS OF THE OLD DAYS HAVE COME TO LIFE IN A NEW FORM— THE OUTDOOR ROCK FESTIVAL. BOTH SERVE AS A CATHARTIC RELEASE FROM THE DRUDGERIES OF DAILY SECULAR EXISTENCE. THOSE YOUNG PEOPLE IN ATTENDANCE AT THE CONCERTS ARE, FOR THE MOST PART, THOSE WHO LABEL THEMSELVES PROUDLY THE “NEW GENERATION,” THOSE WHO, LIKE THE EUROPEAN SERF, FEEL A PROFOUND SCHISM BETWEEN THEMSELVES AND THE ESTABLISHMENT. AT THE CONCERTS, AS AT THE SABBATS, THERE IS THROBBING, HYPNOTIC MUSIC, WIDESPREAD USE OF HALLUCINOGENIC DRUGS BY THE CELEBRANTS, AN ESCAPE INTO ANIMALITY...
—ARTHUR LYONS, THE SECOND COMING1
1
SYMPATHIES FOR THE DEVIL
THE DEVIL HAS ALWAYS TREASURED MUSIC. WHAT BETTER ARENA to inspire, cultivate, and propagate his will into the affairs of man? Music serves as both balm and excitant, soothing the savage or awakening dormant passions. In spiritual terms music is a magical operation, a vehicle for man to communicate with the gods. Depending on whom the celebrants invoke, this can mean soaring to heaven on the voices of angels or raising beasts from the pits of hell.
With the ascendency of Christianity in the Western world over the past two millennia, music has always been a problematic area for both religious and secular authority. While song has often served to bind the Lord’s supplicants, its seductive words and cadences may just as easily sow seeds of doubt in the mind. Mephistopheles and the Muse go hand in hand, and the folk songs of old often extol wine, women, and song—all three the Devil’s playthings. Many of the oldest known songs in European tradition derive from heathen, pre-Christian roots, and spin tales of magic, necromancy, and superstition. It is no wonder the Christian Church did its best to try to supplant such songs of the people with hymns extolling its own icons and ideals; nevertheless, tradition dies hard and has a way of resurfacing despite all attempts to discourage or silence it.
Self-proclaimed moral authorities continue to frown upon the ecstasies of revelry and lusty song, attempting to root them out. In the first half of the twentieth century, Jazz was considered particularly dangerous, with its imagined potential to unleash animal passions, especially among unsuspecting white folk. Theosophical writers on the occult significance of music even go so far as to state that the force ushering Jazz into the nightclubs could be none other than that which allows evil to operate on earth. In his book on the Rolling Stones, Dance With the Devil, Stanley Booth quotes the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1918: “On certain natures sound loud and meaningless has an exciting, almost an intoxicating effect, like crude colors and strong perfumes, the sight of flesh or the sadic pleasure in blood. To such as these the jass music is a delight [sic].”2 Early lurid scare tactics had little effect, and Jazz attracted a more genteel audience as time went on.
More directly tied to deviltry than Jazz, and likewise imbued with the potency of its racial origins, was Blues. Black slaves often adopted Christianity after their enforced arrival in America, but melded it with native or Voudoun strains. Blues songs abound with references to devils, demons, and spirits. One of the most influential Blues singers of all time, Robert Johnson, is said to have sold his soul to the Devil at a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta, and the surviving recordings of his haunting songs give credence to the legend that Satan rewarded his pact with the ability to play. Johnson recorded only twenty-nine tunes, some of the more famous being “Crossroads Blues,” “Me and the Devil Blues,” and “Hellhound on My Trail.” The leaden resignation of his music is a genuine reflection of his existence. Life for Johnson began on the plantations, wound through years of carousing and playing juke joints, ending abruptly in 1938 when at the age of 27 he was poisoned in a bar, probably as a result of an affair with the club owner’s wife. Johnson’s musical legacy would fade into obscurity until reissued on LPs in the ’60s, when it found a new excited audience among the Blues Rock musicians of that era. From the demonic songs of Delta Blues one can trace a line to the present world of Satanic Rock and Roll.
LUCIFER TURNS UP THE VOLUME
Most early Rock—despite the power commanded over youth by Elvis “the pelvis” Presley and the Beatles—was, in reality, only mildly threatening to the status quo. Its most anti-social element came from the thugs and delinquents who latched onto Rockabilly, but chances are these youths would have been stealing cars and rolling bums no matter what kind of music they listened to. As the ’60s spiraled onward, musical experimentation coupled with drug use, and a decidedly darker element came to the fore.
The Beatles appeared downright tidy next to Rolling Stones, who reveled in the role of international bad boys—boozers, fighters, and satyr-like icons of sensual excess. By no accident the Stones traced their musical lineage back to Robert Johnson and his infernal Delta swamp Blues. The Stones took their diabolical inspiration seriously, deliberately cultivating a Satanic image, from wearing Devil masks in promotional photos to conjuring up sinister album titles such as Their Satanic Majesties Request and Let it Bleed. The band’s lyrics ambivalently explored drug addiction, rape, murder, and predation. The infamous culmination of these flirtations revealed itself at the Altamont Speedway outdoor festival on December 6, 1969. Inadvertently captured on film in the live documentary Gimme Shelter, it was only moments into the song “Sympathy for the Devil” before all hell broke loose between the legion of Hell’s Angels “security guards” and members of the audience, ending with the fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter, a gun-wielding black man in the crowd. The infernal, violent chaos of the event at Altamont made it abundantly clear the peace and love of the ’60s wouldn’t survive the transition to a new decade.
Simultaneously with the ascension of the Rolling Stones to world fame, other English Rock groups entered the scene, bringing with them even more developed elements of the occult and black magic. Flower Power was a period of spiritual desperation for a vast section of youth in Britain and America, throwing off the Christianity of previous generations while seeking something truer to their nature with dabbling in Eastern mysticism and innumerable cults and sects. Occult faddism, largely dormant since the first decades of the century, began to manifest widely.
English black magician Aleister Crowley, dubbed the “wickedest man in the world” by the press in the 1930s, now rose to higher influence and prominence than he had ever experienced in his own lifetime. Through the underground films of Kenneth Anger, Crowley’s specter began to loom large over the end of the ’60s and early ’70s. Both Mick Jagger of the Stones and Jimmy Page, guitarist of Led Zeppelin, scored soundtracks for Anger�
��s Crowley-inspired films Invocation of My Demon Brother and Lucifer Rising, the titles of which betray their mystical concerns. Page’s interest in Crowley developed to a far more serious level than the Satanic dabbling of the Stones; his collection of original Crowley books and manuscripts is among the best in the world. Page held a financial share in the Equinox occult bookshop (named after the hefty journal of “magick” Crowley edited and published between 1909–14) in London and at one point even purchased Crowley’s former Scottish Loch Ness estate, Boleskine. The property continued to perpetuate its sinister reputation under new ownership, as caretakers were confined to mental asylums, or worse, committed suicide during their tenures there.
The bad vibes came with the territory. Speaking of his attraction to the strong-arm philosophy of Machiavelli in an interview, Page declared, “He was a master of evil, but you can’t ignore evil if you study the supernatural as I do ... I want to go on studying it.”3 He was also straightforward in admiration for his spiritual mentor: “I think Aleister Crowley’s completely relevant to today. We’re all still seeking for truth—the search goes on ... Magic is very important if people can go through with it.”4
ALEISTER CROWLEY
Imagery of Crowley’s Thelemic religion can be found woven throughout the albums of Led Zeppelin, along with influences drawn from Anglo-Saxon and Norse heathen folklore and traditional music, and the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary works. If there is any early Rock band bearing exemplifying the basic themes that would later preoccupy many of the Black Metal bands in the ’90s, it is Led Zeppelin. Stephen Davis, author of the Zeppelin rockography Hammer of the Gods, remarks that the music for the song “No Quarter,” which Page composed, “inspired Robert [Plant] to write lyrics with provocative images of Led Zeppelin as a Viking death squad riding the winds of Thor to some awful Satanic destiny.”5
The group encouraged such impressions with some of their antics, staging a record release party in the guise of a mock Black Mass. The event was held in the underground caves which formerly housed similar rites perpetrated by Sir Francis Dashwood and his debauched Hellfire Club two centuries earlier. In their heyday, the band—and Page especially—knew the value of a nasty reputation, much as Crowley had in his own generation. The resulting rumors ranged from the old standby of an alleged pact with the Devil signed by the group in return for success, to stories of Page’s experiments with black magic effecting the death of drummer John Bonham. In recent years the former members of Led Zeppelin have tried to downplay such interests, with Plant and Page dismissing the Boleskine property as nothing more than an old “pig farm.”6
Whether Zeppelin was in fact a “Heavy Metal” band is a point of debate, although they pioneered a sound which must be acknowledged as such in its more thunderous moments. Whether Black Sabbath is a Heavy Metal group there is no room for doubt. Sabbath slowed the contemporary framework of Blues-based Rock down to a lurching, sinister pace which perfectly suited their lyrical themes of insanity, war, and alienation. Singer Ozzy Ozbourne pioneered a haunting wail and the rest of the band made little effort to concede to any of the cheery sentiments still floating on hippy lips. Sabbath’s cover art brought Satanic imagery to its apex in mainstream pop culture of the early ’70s, with eerie demons attacking sleeping humans on albums like Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath.
Although members of the band talk of the occult, and Ozzy Ozbourne later in his solo career wrote his own paean to the “Great Beast” with the song “Mr. Crowley,” a closer look at the lyrics of Black Sabbath does not uncover any serious Satanic philosophy. To the contrary, it reveals an almost Christian fear of demons and sorcery. In a 1996 interview with journalist Steve Blush in Seconds magazine, Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler explains the truth of the band’s connection to the occult:
I was really interested because I was brought up Catholic. When I was a kid, I was a religious maniac. I loved anything to do with religion and God. Being a Catholic, every week you hear what the Devil does and “Satan’s this” and “Satan’s that,” so you really believe in it. What sparked my interest was when I was in London around 1966–67. There was a whole new culture happening and this one guy used to sell these black magic magazines. I read a magazine and thought, “Oh yeah, I never thought of it like that”—Satan’s point of view. I just started reading more and more; I read a lot of Dennis Wheatley’s books, stuff about astral planes. I’d been having loads of these experiences since I was a child and finally I was reading stuff that was explaining them. It lead me into reading about the whole thing—black magic, white magic, every sort of magic. I found out Satanism was around before any Christian or Jewish religion. It’s an incredibly interesting subject. I sort of got more into the black side of it and was putting upside-down crosses on my wall and pictures of Satan all over. I painted my apartment black. I was getting really involved in it and all these horrible things started happening to me. You come to a point where you cross over and totally follow it and totally forget about Jesus and God. “Are you going to do it? Yes or no?” No, I don’t think so.7
Black Sabbath’s flirtation with evil, filtered to their fans through a haze of barbiturates and Quaaludes, cemented them as a band tapped into the dark current. Like Led Zeppelin, the sinister image took hold and would be with them forever. Without respect or support from the press, Black Sabbath were filling arenas around the world, leaving their mark on impressionable kids who swarmed to have their eardrums pummeled in these rituals of crushing sound and volume.
Groups further from the spotlight than Black Sabbath—such as Black Widow and Coven—could afford to be even more obsessive in their imagery. The English sextet Black Widow released three diaphanous Hard Rock albums between 1970–72, and later appe"ar as a footnote in books that cover the history of occultism in pop culture. The chanting refrain of their song “Come to the Sabbat” evokes images of their concerts which featured a mock ritual sacrifice as part of the show. Beyond sketchy tales of such events, and the few recordings and photos they’ve left behind, Black Widow remains shrouded in mystery.
Coven are just as obscure, but deserve greater attention for their overtly diabolic album Witchcraft: Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls. Presented in a stunning gatefold sleeve with the possessed visages of the three band members on the front, the cover hints at a true Black Mass, showing a photo with a nude girl as the living altar. The packaging undoubtedly caused consternation for the promotional department of Mercury Records, the major label who released it, and the album quickly faded into obscurity. Today it fetches large sums from collectors, clearly due more to its bizarre impression than for any other reason. The songs themselves are standard end-of-the-’60s Rock, not far removed from Jefferson Airplane; the infusion of unabashed Satanism throughout the album’s lyrics and artwork makes up for its lack of strong musical impact. In addition to the normal tracks, the album closes with a thirteen minute “Satanic Mass.” The inside cover warns:
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Black Mass to be recorded, either in written words or in audio. It is as authentic as hundreds of hours of research in every known source can make it. We do not recommend its use by anyone who has not thoroughly studied Black Magic and is aware of the risks and dangers involved.8
Coven included the attractive female lead singer Jinx as well as a man by the name of Oz Osbourne, who bore no relation to the British vocalist “Ozzy.” In an additional coincidental twist, the first track on the Coven album is titled “Black Sabbath.” The Witchcraft album was released a year or two before Sabbath’s eponymous debut in 1970, but the hidden links that exist between the two are up for speculation. Like their English counterparts in Black Widow, Coven devised a live show that puts many of the modern Satanic bands to shame. In a 1996 interview, former member Osbourne recounted the grandiose proceedings to Descent magazine as follows:
We did a lot of our album and other things as our stage show, intermixing the Black Mass, or Satanic Mass, as kind of a segue between the song
s. Behind the stage we had an altar and on top of the altar we had what we called a Christian cross and we had one of our road people hanging on the Christian cross as Jesus, and he just kind of stayed there during the whole show. Our stage was lit with obviously a lot of reds, and we had candles and that kind of thing. Then we would do our whole album and other materials that all dealt with interesting stories of witchcraft. Of course we were costumed. ... right at the end of our set we did a Procol Harum song that was just appropriate, called “Walpurgis.” And right in the middle of it we break into the “Ave Maria.” At that point Jinx would do the benediction of the Black Mass and she’d recite the Latin bits and she would go, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” which is Crowley ... She’d say the Crowley bit then would hail Satan and would turn around and scream “Hail Satan!” at the cross and altar, at which point the guy (Jesus) would pull his arms off the cross, get down, invert the cross into the Satanic symbol, and would go dancing off the stage while the music was still playing.9
After their outrageous debut, Coven recorded a few more major label albums, the diabolism drastically toning down with each succeeding release. Stories persisted for a time of a planned “Satanic Woodstock” in the early ’70s where Coven was to play as a prelude to an address by Anton LaVey, High Priest of the Church of Satan. This rumor is verified in Arthur Lyons’s book The Second Coming: Satanism in America (later revised and reissued as Satan Wants You). Lyons traveled with LaVey to Detroit, where the festival was due to take place on Halloween, only to find the show cancelled due to controversy. Coven did manage to perform their full Black Mass spectacle at a Detroit nightclub the next evening, which frightened the living hell of out an acid-tripping Timothy Leary in attendance. The band’s only widespread recognition came years later with the unexpected national hit single “One Tin Soldier,” which some (predictably) speculated was the result of their pact with the Prince of Darkness whom they had once so boldly acknowledged. Despite Coven’s obscurity, the Witchcraft album was striking enough to be discovered by some of the more important Satanic musicians in recent years, illustrating another link in the continuum of demonic Rock over the decades. King Diamond, the singer and driving force behind Mercyful Fate, one of the most important openly Satanic Metal bands of the ’80s, acknowledges he received dramatic influences from a Black Sabbath concert he attended as a kid in his native Denmark in 1971. He also tells of finding inspiration from Coven’s lead vocalist Jinx:
Lords of Chaos Page 3