Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (17 page)

The idea of isolation from a divine source is at the heart of the modern Occult Revival of the nineteenth century. The Golden Dawn understood magic to be the way to reintegrate the human with its godlike destiny. Aleister Crowley, an early member of the Golden Dawn, defined magic as “the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.” This definition was amended by a later Golden Dawn
member and magician, Dion Fortune, who wrote that “magic is the Science and Art of causing change
in consciousness
[italics mine] to occur in conformity with the will.” These two additional words are essential, as they put the emphasis on what actually happens, if anything, as a function of the mind. This, of course, is where the real magic takes place. It is the grand illusion that can only happen when the aspirant wants to be hypnotized.

When Brown's band broke up in 1970, he continued on with Kingdom Come, a progressive rock outfit producing a trilogy of albums, each one a key to his deepening quest to use music as a means of spiritual initiation. Brown had almost given up on music altogether, now drawn toward spending his time in a Tibetan monastery. But during a mescaline trip, he had a vision of a warrior angel right out of a William Blake drawing, replete with armor and sword, filled with what he described as a “mortal terror.” For Brown, this meant one thing: start a new band. Kingdom Come turned up the theatrics to “11,” performing with a giant pyramid set, flaming crosses, druids dancing in the audience, and each of the band members decked out in robes and makeup, including the guitarist dressed as a clown for good measure. Brown sought spiritual nourishment in multiple ways, from acid binges to all-apple diets. But the music, an innovative but too often flaccid progressive rock, failed to get him to the next commercial level. Kingdom Come did well on the festival circuit, but band members changed often. The last album was recorded without a drummer, and Kingdom Come was forced to become the first band to use a drum machine. It could be that audiences wanting to be entertained via an occult transmission during a concert weren't ultimately willing to
commit wholesale to Brown's somewhat scattershot shamanistic vision.

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.

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.