Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (21 page)

The macho image of rock was often softened by the androgynous and pansexual face attached to even the most masculine of performers, but Killing Joke, as Simon Reynolds puts it, was “reveling in male energy.” Magical practice, especially as derived from Crowley, is often driven by a phallic-oriented view of sex. The other aspect of this male-focused energy is, Reynolds rightly points out, sometimes akin to fascism. Fascism, clothed in the camouflage of occult mystery, characterized certain aspects of industrial's effete cousin, gothic rock. As Reynolds explains, this was troubling for the gothic scene, which for the most part saw itself to be thoroughly egalitarian, especially when it came to gender.

Reynolds points to three other bands that form goth's corners: Bauhaus, led by Peter Murphy, would deliver goth rock's first manifesto, the droning masterpiece “Bela Lugosi's Dead”; Birthday Party—whose deep-voiced Nick Cave would go on to form the influential Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds—played tribal, abrasive postpunk; Siouxsie and the Banshees started as sneering British punks, but softened into a goth band that
skirted the edges of the occult by using the aura as a way to construct an attitude and a fashion.

Goth cannot be compared to heavy metal's upside-down pentagrams and brandishing of Aleister Crowley. Instead, goth rock inhabits a mood, just as the original literary genre did. Goth's aesthetic is more like the tragic beauty of the Victorian Era's
memento mori. Even goth's embrace of death is not about gore, but about the melancholy loneliness of the graveyard, crumbling ancient tombstones, and, sometimes, vampires. Goth rock's literary antecedent, gothic literature, grew out of the Romantic tradition, but rather than an idealistic longing for the myth and values of the past—often by way of the natural world—the gothic story is one in which the loss of the past solicits melancholia and an inward retreat. The past is a ghost that haunts the present. While there might be supernatural or otherworldly goings-on, the emphasis is on the setting, often some decaying castle or ancient family home.

In
Dracula
by Bram Stoker, the character of Lucy Westenra—beautiful and pure of heart—is visited nightly by the vampire. He slowly drains her of blood, but to her friends she appears to be sickly anemic, dying a slow, inexplicable death. She eventually becomes a bride of Dracula. The entire subplot of Lucy's transformation is one of the most terrifying in the novel, but it is also the most strangely erotic. The taking of her blood—her innocence—at night while she is in her bed is an extreme sexual metaphor. It is an image like this, the tension between desire and purity, that forms the heart of the gothic novel. In this novel, evil is not a moral dilemma but an existential one. A
novel like
Dracula
served as a template for goth subculture, and vampires represented the perfect antihero, particularly when Anne Rice's best-selling Vampire Chronicles series gave them such elegance. But despite the eroticism, vampires are asexual.

The contemporary gothic subculture dressed itself in dark finery, disdained normative gender roles, and no longer believed music needed to change the world. It could merely mirror the inner life. Similarly, the occult is largely a fashion statement, an affect that alludes to something taboo but is only really visible as a shadow, a half-remembered dream. But while goth did not use magic as a weapon like its industrial rock cousin, it still recognized that the occult imagination is powerful all on its own. One need not cast a spell, divine the future, or hold a séance. The mere intimation of a hidden, mysterious reality can set the heart afire, ignite the creative spirit, and transform culture, and popular music, forever.

A large inflatable tent was erected just beyond the main fairground, christened Canvas City. From there you could still see the crowd of at least half a million people at the Isle of Wight Festival. Two bands from the UK underground—the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind—simply decided not to play the game at all and staged their own free concerts in Canvas City. Hawkwind would provide not only free music, it would also offer an experience in altered consciousness that received little attention at the time. Nonetheless, it was an essential moment in the transformation of rock and roll. Under this tent, Hawkwind began their decades-long interstellar mission to explore the occult mysteries of the cosmos. They would never achieve commercial success, but their influence on other musicians—particularly in regards to crafting a science-fantasy mythology—would give the occult imagination a new vessel for shaping rock and roll.

The year was 1970, and the pioneers of 1960s rock, along with some of the new breed, had done two previous successful festivals in 1968 and 1969. The muddy utopia of Woodstock in America had inspired the Isle of Wight promoters to make sure this would be comparably glorious. Over the course of five days, the kings and queens of rock and roll performed to their worshipful subjects. The acts included the Who, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix (who would die from an overdose a few weeks later), Joan Baez, Miles Davis, and the Doors, among many others. But the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s had not completely faded. Many believed the festivals should be free, and thousands ended up squatting in an area they called Desolation Row, which, to the dismay of the organizers, offered a fine view of the festival. During Joni Mitchell's set, a man by the name of Yogi Joe snuck onstage and interrupted her performance in an attempt to remind the crowd that the festival “belonged” to them and to congratulate the peaceful anarchy of Desolation Row. He was forcibly dragged off and Joni Mitchell gracefully, albeit shakily, finished her set.

On display and being played out was little more than rock's crass commercialization, an end to the free-festival spirit of the 1960s, a metaphor for the sad conclusion to the decade. Something within rock's consciousness had changed. The devastating spectacle of violence at Altamont might have prefigured the end of Aquarian Age idealism, but Yogi Joe's mad dash to get his word out was not merely the action of a raving acidhead. Joe was something of a prophet who saw the terrible truth on the horizon. Rock was selling out, and soon the festivals would become the domain of promoters and sponsors.

By the end of the five days, as Dave Smith writes, “It had become painfully clear to those still clinging on to the various philosophies of hippy culture that the shift to the commercially dominated events we recognize now was both well in motion and unavoidable.” Amid this tension, Hawkwind's music and performances functioned as a time-travel device through space and time, looking toward the future, where a new rebellion might take place and keep rock's soul spiritually intact. Just as Arthur Brown saw rock shows as shamanic rites that could transmit ideas, Hawkwind understood that the very electric currents they discharged through their music could also function as a kind of mesmeric device. After the Isle of Wight Festival, where the band had generated what Jerry Gilbert for
Sounds
magazine in 1970 would describe as “arcs of sound” using electronic noise generators, the lead singer and guitarist David Brock knew something potent had taken place. He told Gilbert that, after seeing the audience's reaction, he had a new responsibility: “You can force people to go into trances, and tell them what to do; it's mass hypnotism, and you're really setting yourself up as God.”

Hawkwind, considered the first space rock band, came to prominence in the British underground with their first, eponymous album, an intoxicating brew of psychedelic and hard rock with a nod toward what would become the overarching theme of their career: science fiction mysticism both sincere and tongue-in-cheek. They were through with the hyperidealism of the hippies' psychedelic values but still believed rock had the power to be a spiritual beacon, and even made it clear in the liner notes of the album: “We started out trying to freak
people (trippers), now we are trying to levitate their minds, in a nice way, without acid . . .” Their second album,
In Search of Space
, included a minifanzine as the liner notes, complete with astrological tables, psychedelic collages, and pulp-comic artwork, along with logs of the “spacecraft Hawkwind.” The logs document the travels of stoned alien astronauts who listen to Jimi Hendrix on their way to planet earth. The final entry is a religious evocation of space: “And now I believe in the supreme and mystic darkness of nothing, in the deepest reaches of the immaculate void . . . in the incomprehensible infinity of untold nothing, in absolute nothing.”
In Search of Space
could be considered the first truly great work of rock sci-fi, and yet the songs tell tales of journeys into the psyche. This would characterize much of space rock and later progressive rock, where the metaphors of inner and outer space are interchangeable. But Hawkwind's live elements were largely fantastical, a “sonic attack” by way of strobe lights, lasers, projectors, and Stacia, the band's nude dancer who improvised moves to the rhythm of the music.

Just as 1960s alternative spirituality emphasized the religious possibilities of the LSD trip, the 1970s would see a turn toward the heavens for meaning. Certainly, as we saw, the devil played a starring role during this decade, but images of Satan were more symptomatic than representative of any real spiritual path. But what to do about the failed 1960s Aquarian promise? If salvation wasn't found in the gathering of the tribes here on earth, then maybe outer space held the key. Moreover, a belief in a future-cosmic deliverance was not without precedent. A glimpse into the past was all the proof you needed to know outer space held the key to humanity's ultimate transfiguration.

Admit it (it has been said). It would be impossible for the ancient Egyptians to have built the pyramids. They had neither the technology nor the resources for such an astonishing feat of engineering. And even if they had, would they have really done all that dangerous long work merely to bury a king and his toys? It seems preposterous. A better, maybe even more reasonable, theory is that the Egyptians were helped. And this help came from the stars. Ancient people recognized these beings from other worlds as deities, and drew their likeness on the walls of the pyramids. In other places around the world, the alien visitors left their mark in other ways: in the giant malformed heads of Easter Island, in the great pagan stones known as Stonehenge. The Dogon people, an African Mali tribe, had mapped out astronomical charts they could never have discerned from looking at the sky with the naked eye. What we now call civilization, often driven by the massive force known as Christianity, buried these ancient people and their scientific wonders. But they were far more advanced than us, helped along by “sky-people” who still secretly visit earth, waiting for when we are again ready to accept their spiritual and technological gifts.

These ideas were first made popular in the 1968 book
Chariots of the Gods
by Erich von Däniken. Deeply criticized and largely debunked, von Däniken's work nevertheless helped usher in a new wave of belief in aliens and UFOs and sell a lot of books. Von Däniken turned the hostile Martian and the otherworldly body snatcher into quasi-divine beings who not only helped humanity achieve greatness during certain moments in history, but might one day allow us to participate in a great galactic future.

Other books would follow, such as the 1976 book
The Sirius Mystery
by Robert Temple, that concluded the Dogon people had contact with extraterrestrials. These books and still more would set off a UFO craze that would come to dominate the rest of the 1970s. In the bookstores, interest in UFOs was in high demand and publishers kept up a steady stream, with titles like
We Are Not the First
,
UFO Exist!
, and
Beyond Earth
. Space and aliens also became the stuff of some of the most inventive speculations and narratives during the late 1960s through to the latter part of the 1970s. From
Star Trek
's space-fearing utopian Federation to the star child of
2001: A Space Odyssey
, the pop culture imagination looked upward for a way to save humanity from itself.

Decades before Hawkwind dressed up space exploration in psychedelic whimsy, the jazz musician Sun Ra had already taken the journey beyond the heliosphere. Sun Ra, born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, moved to Chicago, where, in the 1950s, his exceptional piano playing brought him into the circle of the thriving jazz scene. He became, as the
Independent
lovingly put it after his death in 1993, “one of the more convincing jazz nutters who also managed to make a serious contribution to the music.” This reputation as someone possibly slightly cracked was the result of his pronouncements regarding his own outer space origins and a cosmic spiritual theology that would herald in a new age for mankind. Blount changed his name to Sun Ra and in 1956 formed a band called the Arkestra, a literal vessel of musicians taking audiences toward a new vision of music. His music was avant-garde, a future-facing music trying to break free of jazz conventions. But Sun
Ra rarely talked about his music in the context of the jazz tradition. Sun Ra believed his work was the enfolding principle, the necessary method to find true happiness: “Now, my music is about a better place for people, not to have a place where they have to die to get there.” In other words, it was heaven on earth.

Sun Ra believed people had to understand the spirit behind the music, and so developed what he called “myth science.” The basis of this is a kind of Gnosticism that sees our planet as a trap. Sun Ra once told a reporter, “I hate the idea of being on this planet. It's a terrible place, and I always knew when I first arrived here. But what can I do about it?”

Along with the Kabbalah, numerology, and science fiction, Sun Ra constructed a complex theology easily simplified by just listening to his music: “So I'm gonna take this music and give people a touch of something else, to enlighten them, so they can see how insignificant they are, and how very important they are at the same time.” At first these ideas were tied into race. Sun Ra's quasi–science fiction film,
Space Is the Place
, tells the story of a starship and its crew, the Arkestra. Powered by music, the spacecraft is traveling to a new planetary home for African Americans. A pimp, a symbol for the internal forces keeping young black Americans down, is Sun Ra's nemesis, and after a duel it is revealed that the pimp is actually a pawn in the white power structure seeking to keep African Americans spiritually and economically impoverished. Eventually Sun Ra would believe his message was for all people. Onstage, Sun Ra would wear robes and Egyptian headdresses, surrounded by musicians on bongos, drums, and guitars, half a dozen horn
players, and ecstatic dancers, all of them writhing and moving as if possessed by alien entities. But these are not individual egos, each vying for attention. It is a true collective, drawing from their bandleader's energy, offering what John Sinclair, writing for
Creem
in 1972, called “the supreme example of dedication and commitment to a common purpose that can be found in the whole music world.” Sun Ra's hope was for the whole earth community to aim for heaven, by way of a starship filled with two of every kind, as the means to escape this perpetual flood of affliction.

It wasn't in a vacuum, then, that Hawkwind saw their own spaceship as a way to craft a music and mythology that was one part occultism, one part science fiction. Their famous album
Space Ritual
, recorded in Liverpool in 1972, is the most perfect realization of a heavy rock cosmic odyssey; the liner notes refer to the band as “musicnauts.” The band had intended the live show to induce sensory overload. They added more dancers to accompany Stacia, as well as a slide show that included pulsing lights along with images of Stonehenge and sharply angular shapes. The music itself is fierce, riff-driven soundscapes accelerating as they go along. It's infectious stuff, even today, and while the science fiction lyrics are somewhat dated, they are a pulp lover's dream.

Much of this sensibility came by way of their patron saint, the author Michael Moorcock—inventor of two of the most remarkable characters to inhabit the genre: Jerry Cornelius (a time-traveling, perpetually stoned assassin whose meta-adventures are a cynical look at the shuttering of the 1960s), and Elric of Melniboné (a morally troubled sorcerer-king of a
race of debauched elves who wields Stormbringer, a demon-inhabited sword). Moorcock became fast friends with the band after seeing them live. Moorcock later told Hawkwind's biographer Ian Abrahams that the band seemed to be “like the mad crew of a long-distance spaceship who had forgotten the purpose of their mission, which had turned to art during the passage of time.” In the 1960s, Moorcock reinvented science fiction when he took over as editor of
New Worlds
magazine. Moorcock wanted to save science fiction from what he saw as the staid old guard whose imagination was limited to outer space adventures. Moorcock believed science fiction could serve as a template to explore what he called “a new literature which expressed our own experience.” Moorcock was born at the outset of World War II and being haunted by what the critic Theodor Adorno called the failure of the enlightenment. Reason gave way to suicidal irrationality. Science fiction could become a tool of the counterculture, a way to capture in literature the fantastical hopes and fears of a generation for whom rock music and LSD were methods of liberation. Under Moorcock,
New Worlds
published J. G. Ballard, M. John Harrison, and Roger Zelazny.
Lord of Light
, Zelazny's 1967 novel, tells the story of colonists living on another planet who augment themselves and take on the likenesses and personalities of Hindu deities, a story that would inspire a Hawkwind song of the same name.