Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (24 page)

When production was complete on ELP's 1973 album,
Brain Salad Surgery
, the band agreed that they needed a standout album cover, a design that would reflect the aura of the music, which includes the thirty-minute suite “Karn Evil 9,” a science fiction epic about a despotic computer, written in part by Peter Sinfield, the scribe responsible for the lyrics of King Crimson's fantastical early songs. ELP's manager had seen the work of an artist in Zurich and suggested they visit his home. The artist was H. R. Giger, whose techno-fetish paintings had not yet become popularly known. (In 1979, Giger's vision would be
seen by millions in the film
Alien
, for which he designed the look of the alien, as well as the fossil-like spaceship where its eggs are lying dormant.)

“It was like a horror museum,” Lake recalls, upon visiting the artist's home. “But Giger himself is very sweet, kind, gentle and very sort of softly spoken.” The band was led into the dining room where the chairs and table were all carved with black-skull motif: “The whole thing was black. Black chairs, black table, black skulls.” Giger showed them some drawings he thought would work well with the music, with metal work and the ELP logo added. Lake insists if one looks carefully, there is a penis in the throat of the figure being “x-rayed.”

It is the combination of the music and the cover that, Lake explains, is like a cocktail: “You can put certain elements into a glass and nothing happens. If you put one extra element in, the whole thing becomes effervescent.” This is the alchemy of rock and roll, where the songs, lyrics, art, and even the band's logo can become a whole experience that you can hold in your hand when you hold an album.

Prog-rock's roots, being in European music rather than American traditions like the blues, found the genre nudging up against classical forms, which are often thought to be highbrow. But the history of classical music reveals this is not the case. Progressive rock sits more in the tradition of the Romantic composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like the Romantic poet and artists, Romantic composers were also excavating a past where they believed a more authentic human spirit dwelled with nature, where the supernatural was a shadow at the edges having never been completely exorcised by Christianity.
Romantic composers wanted music to capture emotion and subjectivity. The composer and pianist Franz Liszt's rapturous performances caused audience members to swoon, and his “flamboyant” style likely influenced the keyboardists of progressive rock, such as Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman.

Progressive rock also found in the Romantic tradition what had been drawn from British folk music as a method for experimentation. Béla Bartók, one of the last of the Romantic composers, was enamored of the folk music of his native Hungary. As the writer Ivan Hewett explains, “The wild irregular rhythms of Balkan dance encouraged him to think about rhythm in a new way.” Bartók would make an appearance on Emerson, Lake and Palmer's first album in the opening track, “The Barbarian,” with a folk effect borrowing liberally from Bartók's solo piano work “Allegro Barbaro.”

The mythopoeia tradition, popularized by J. R. R. Tolkien through using the term as the title of a poem, later came to describe a modern form of mythology, one that utilizes tropes from ancient mythology to craft contemporary stories. Progressive rock shares in this literary tradition by firing myth in a furnace of modern—sometimes avant-garde—music. The court of the mysterious Crimson King could easily be a location in Middle-earth, but it transcends it through rock's uncanny ability to give even the most fantastical ideas a sense of realness. This is the occult's greatest impact on rock and roll. Over time, by incorporating mystical and magical elements into its music and presentation, rock created a mythos around itself suggesting it was somehow heir to secret wisdom. Sometimes malevolent, sometimes mystical, this special perception of things unseen
would drive both its fans and detractors to obsess over possible esoteric meanings.

Like musique concrète and the spirit of music's future it hoped to help shape, listening to rock became a deeply subjective experience. Sometimes it was believed the musicians themselves were just vessels, often unaware they were being used to telegraph designs beyond themselves. The fan at the Roger Dean art opening would not accept that the artist was just grooving off the grand narratives sculpted by his clients: If Dean didn't intend to convey any spiritual riddles, then maybe the bands didn't, either. But this would be shortsighted and obtuse. The only logical conclusion was they were simply conduits, unaware they were being manipulated by the gods. The right formula of mythic world building, extensive use of Moogs, and Roger Dean's artwork could send a band into the stratosphere.

Writing for
Melody Maker
in 1973, the critic Chris Welch called this Yes album the musical equivalent of
Ben-Hur
or
Exodus
. It was said to be the most bloated rock album of all time, the proverbial goliath that would inspire the little rascal named David, otherwise known as punk rock. It was the perihelion of prog-rock, a glorious or pretentious masterpiece, depending on your mood. Yes's
Tales from Topographic Oceans
, released in 1973, is four songs—on four sides—running eighty-three minutes long. The double album was packaged in a Roger Dean painting of a prehistoric alien world, where fish swim on the surface of a desert and in the distance sits a pyramidal structure, a temple where one imagines mysterious beings play ancient synthesizers aeon after aeon.

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.