Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (23 page)

In the 1960s, British and American psychedelic music was selling well in Germany, but young and visionary German musicians without a trend of their own didn't want to simply mimic those bands. Psychedelic music, and the more experimental sounds of the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa, was a place to start. But they also looked to their own: Stockhausen was one such person.

His students Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay would go on to form Can, a band whose proficiency and stellar musicianship was matched only by how far they were willing to push the idea of rock and roll. Their third album,
Tago Mago
, a crucible of avant-garde, jazz, and psychedelic, includes one of the fundamental instances of mixing art and magic. In “Aumgn” an echoing guitar slowly builds into an ambient drone of chanting. The title chant is taken from Aleister Crowley's Creed of the Gnostic Catholic Church, the statement of belief recited by those who wish to join the Ordo Templi Orientis, the magical order whose practices orient around Crowley's teachings. It is a creepy but effective song, and highlights exactly how krautrock bands, as they would come to be known, would differentiate themselves from everything that came before.

Popol Vuh was something of an outlier in the krautrock scene, if such a thing can be said about a group of bands fairly diverse in their overall output. Florian Fricke, its leader, had worked with many of the central people of krautrock, but his vision for music was more religious than any of the other bands. Fricke was a voracious reader of mythology, mysticism, and Eastern philosophy. He was particularly taken by the creation myth of the Mayan people, known as the Popol Vuh, in which the creator, Heart-of-Sky, works to fashion the perfect human being, but ultimately ends up with a creature not unlike a monkey. For Fricke, the myth of Popol Vuh was the subtext for the band's first album,
Affenstunde
(literally “monkey hour”). In a 1996 interview, Fricke, who would pass away five years later, explained that first monkeys had become man, and one day would become “a human being” and “no longer an ape any longer.”
Echoing Stockhausen's idea of the suprahuman, Fricke mastered the Moog synthesizer as a way to get to his own subconscious, to unleash his potential. But he would abandon the instrument because, as his widow, Bettina Waldthausen, told the writer Jason Gross, “The electronic sound is against the natural flow of the heartbeat.”

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.”

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 same 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.