JERKY READS IT FOR YOU ~ SEASON OF THE WITCH

SEASON OF THE WITCH 

HOW THE OCCULT SAVED ROCK AND ROLL 

By Peter Bebergal 

At a slim 228 pages (plus 20 page introduction), presented in fairly large and generously spaced type, Peter Bebergal’s Season of the Witch was never going to live up to its dust jacket marketing hype, which declares: “This epic cultural and historical odyssey unearths the full influence of occult traditions on rock and roll—from the Beatles to Black Sabbath—and shows how the marriage between mysticism and music changed our world.”

It does, however, serve as a very good introduction and overview, offering a much-needed sober take on subject matter that has heretofore been the domain of evangelical “educational videos” and sub-moronic, anti-Semitic Youtube documentaries by conspiracy hobbyists who have yet to realize that if Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are in the Illuminati, then we truly have nothing to fear from the Illuminati.

I’ve been an admirer of Bebergal’s writing for The New Yorker for a while now—with his extended appreciation of the psychedelic sci-fi maverick Michael Moorcock and his think piece on Thomas Ligotti being particular standouts—so it brings me no pleasure to report that, for such a slim book, Season of the Witch suffers from a touch of undergraduate bloat. It’s almost as though Bebergal was occasionally stretching to meet a mandatory word count. This is particularly true in the early chapters, where he spends far too long leading the reader down already well-trodden paths.

For instance, there is simply no excuse for the amount of space Bebergal devotes to that hoary old blues/rock Ur-myth, the Bargain at the Crossroads, nor to the extended exegeses on the deep anthropological roots of rhythm and blues. This all merits mention, surely, but I can hardly think of anything less “occult” (a synonym for “hidden”) than the fact that rock music is African/African American music. There are literally hundreds of high quality works, for both layman and scholar, exploring these particular subjects. A few pages of summary, directing interested readers to pertinent sources, would have sufficed. Instead, Bebergal’s history lesson drones on for 30 pages; and they’re the first 30 pages of his book, not including the (thankfully, excellent) introduction. It’s a painful, dragging slog that all but dares the reader to continue.

Season of the Witch could also have used at least one more editorial pass, preferably by someone coming in fresh. This would have spared Bebergal the embarrassment of having the phrases “still wading in a bayou of voodoo and Christianity” and “still part of a culture knee-deep in a swamp of superstition” appear in the same paragraph, straddling pages 2 and 3 of his very first chapter.

There are a number of such uncomfortable echoes, all the way to pages 224 and 225, where you find the phrase “this sinister metal, one embracing decay and darkness as an essential part of the human condition” literally rubbing up against the phrase “a new mythology of metal, one that embraced decay and darkness as an essential part of the human condition” on the facing page. Ouch.

Despite these caveats, Season of the Witch serves as an excellent primer on the subject of how multiple strands of the Western Esoteric Tradition have manifested (and continue to manifest) in rock music at every level, from obscure one-hit wonders and niche acts catering to specialist audiences, all the way up to those stadium-straddling demi-gods who have forged the so-called “Classic Rock” legacy that seems destined to be at least as long-lived as those of such immortals as Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Stravinsky, et al. As such, Bebergal’s tome makes a worthy companion to Gary Lachman’s excellent A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult, which is, in actuality, a chronological roll call of significant individuals in the literary, artistic, and (to a lesser extent) political realms, all of whom were deeply influenced by, or were esteemed practitioners of, Western occultism.

And that, dear friends, is why I’ve decided to produce a mini-concordance for Bebergal’s book (with one for Lachman’s coming at some point in the near future). This project will be of a more limited scope compared to what I put together for Eugene Thacker’s In The Dust of This Planet, for which I went way overboard. But I will endeavor to provide a plethora of intriguing multimedia links relating to the acts and artists that Bebergal writes about, as well as to other writings that will help to promote and occasionally flesh out Bebergal’s various theses. These will include links to some intriguing music that I have to assume will be new to you, because I’ve made it one of my life goals to sniff out the most obscure Prog Rock ever created, and Bebergal managed to hip me to some stuff that I’d never even heard of, much less listened to.

So, let us begin at the beginning, with the…

INTRODUCTION – We Are All Initiates Now

I 

After an amusing and relevant epigraph from Euripides’s The Bacchae (“My hair is holy. I grow it long for the God.”), Bebergal regales the reader with a tale that should be familiar to most readers of a certain vintage. It’s the story of how his big brother, upon leaving for college in 1978, gave him access to “the mysteries” of his room. A record collection that was like a lexicon of the Gods (The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Arthur Brown, King Crimson, Hawkwind, Yes, Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd). A damn fine musical starter kit for a precocious 11-year-old seeker already steeping in the wonders of Tolkien reprints, Dungeons & Dragons, Heavy Metal Magazine, horror comics and the animated films of Ralph Bakshi!

Bebergal was the kind of kid who was obsessed with finding clues as to whether or not Paul was really dead, sought out secret messages like the “Do what thou will” motto etched into the living vinyl of Led Zeppelin III, wondered what exactly David Bowie’s deal was anyway, and lost himself as he gazed into album covers painted by prog rock’s premiere visual fantasist, Roger Dean.

Those days sitting cross-legged on my brother’s floor were an initiation into a mystery cult, where I would become a disciple of rock and roll. Throughout my teenage years, rock was the musical narrative of my inner life. There was always an album that spoke perfectly to whatever inscrutable feelings I was negotiating at the time. Rock’s often sphinxlike truths were the key to not only my own inner life; they could open the door into other mysterious realms. Eventually I stopped searching for esoteric riddles on album covers and in song lyrics, but I never ceased being aware of where the occult imagination was at play. It’s a plot I’ve been following ever since I first opened the gatefold cover to David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album to the grotesquely erotic painting of a caninesque Bowie, half man, half dog. I came to realize that magic cannot exist without a conduit, a means of expression. And even if it can, I am not interested in the metaphysics of the occult. I believe in those horned gods only when I hear them speaking from out of the grooves in the vinyl… And in those moments, they are as real as the music itself. I don’t need the magic to be anywhere else. 

DDD SUGGESTED READING LIST ~ DEC 28, 2014

WOULD YOU TRUST THE MAN ON THE RIGHT?

1. You know how, in the strange online world of "conspiracy theory" research, individuals who fall out of favor with any particular message board's groupthink - and stick to their guns about it - will invariably be called out as "disinfo" agents? It's a serious accusation, to declare someone a paid provocateur with a mandate to infiltrate an online group full of legitimate, unbiased truth-seekers and pervert their ability to properly assess the goings-on by mixing a little bit of truth with a whole lot of fabrication, thus rendering everything and anything that group comes to take as an assumed truth more easy to "debunk" at some future point in time. Well, after reading this article from the Leopold Report - an article that paints in intricate, detailed little brushstrokes just exactly how damaging to the concepts of truth and justice and history a real disinformation agent can truly be - you'll never again call someone who is merely wrong-headed or dogmatic a disinfo agent. 

This Oswald LeWinter fellow (1931-2013) described at the link is a criminal of the highest order, and you'll be shocked to discover how one CIA-connected literature prof's twisted lie/truth combos have hindered and poisoned investigations into everything from the murder of Olaf Palme to the October Surprise. Everyone from InterPol to Pentagon whistleblower Barbara Honegger got caught up in his web of bullshit.

A key bit:

[Journalist Robert] Parry asked LeWinter why he had contacted journalists to - as he claimed - expose October Surprise, when he had submitted so much obviously false information. One of these was that he claimed that one of Reagan's advisers had been in Paris and negotiated with the Iranian leadership, when it was easy to prove that the same person at that time was in the US - as a participant in a live television program (Parry 1993:67ff). 

LeWinter replied:

"I was asked by some people to mount a disinformation campaign". [..] "Barbara Honegger [..] had started enough interest in the newspaper community and the media to throw a negative light on George Bush's candidacy, potentially a negative light. The people who asked me to intervene felt that the country could not stand another Watergate, another major political scandal and upheaval, and also worried that the Democratic party's candidate might have hurt the intelligence community, which was just in the process of recovering from the damage that had been done to it during the Carter administration." 

His next statement is important: 

"I contacted Barbara Honegger through another person. [..] I managed to pass on some information to her which had factual elements in it, but also elements that with a little bit of digging could be discovered to be questionable. The story would lead some investigators to spend time and effort running into blind alleys, with the result that eventually the whole story would be discredited." 

LeWinter also admitted to having received USD 100,000 in payment for his disinformation campaign.

Ultimately, it took a man like investigative journalist Robert Parry (a personal favorite of mine) to suss out just a bit of the truth about LeWinter's true character. This is truly terrifying stuff, and one of the reasons why perjury is considered such a serious goddamn crime. 

2. Even though I can't help but harbor suspicions that Western accounts of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's criminal depravity have been exaggerated for a century's worth of propaganda purposes, this American Scholar article about Stalin's unlikely rise to power is still very much worth your time.

Except for Mao, and perhaps Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin stands as the greatest mass murderer in history. His war on the peasantry killed perhaps 14 million people, half of whom were deliberately starved to death. This project of “dekulakization” and “collectivization” overshadows even the Great Purge of 1936–38, which claimed some four million lives. Several small ethnic minorities suspected of disloyalty lost half their population, and tens of millions were swallowed into the massive system of forced labor camps known as the Gulag Archipelago. ... 

How was all this carnage possible? How did a revolution made in the name of social justice, and supported by so many progressive spirits around the world, lead to such monstrous results? What made Stalin capable of such cruelty, and how did he manage to accumulate the power to practice it?

Keep reading to find out more!

3. One of the most intriguing if little known episodes of the Cold War Collapse era involved Frank Zappa's brief tenure as "special ambassador to the West on trade, culture and tourism" for the newly-liberated nation of Czechoslovakia. See, it turns out Vaclav Havel - dissident author and leading figure in the "Velvet Revolution" - was a really big fan of Zappa's band, The Mothers. As journalist Jack Anderson explained it in his oddly apologetic account of the events:

Havel, a playwright known for absurd satire, met Zappa in Prague in January 1990, and the two men hit it off immediately. Havel had long been a fan of Zappa's music genius and even credited his music as part of the inspiration for the anti-communist revolution. A Czech group, The Plastic People of the Universe, named after one of Zappa's songs, copied his style and became an underground sensation in Czechoslovakia. Their revolutionary lyrics so irritated the communist government that the group was thrown behind bars for disturbing the peace. That mobilized Havel and other artists to form a dissident group that led the opposition and, after communism was toppled, formed the nucleus of the current Czech government. So Havel had plenty to thank Zappa for. He was so grateful, in fact, that he impetuously created the special ambassadorship for Zappa. The musician left town with Havel's praise in his ears and the adulation of hundreds of fans who treated him as a Czech national hero.

Unfortunately for Frank, the Bush Crime Family didn't much care for the cut of his jib. They dispatched their most trusted consigliere, unindicted co-conspirator James Baker III, to threaten Havel thusly:

"You can do business with the United States or you can do business with Frank Zappa."

Frank Zappa happens to be my very favorite musician, as well as a personal hero and an ongoing inspiration for more reasons than I could possibly list in this space. So you'll forgive me for being suspicious about the fact that this rather formidable individual would be dead and buried a mere three years after his brush with Pure Evil, chronicled above.

A&E'S BIOGRAPHY EPISODE ON FRANK ZAPPA, ONLINE AT LAST!

"American culture has a lot of great mustaches in its history. Mark Twain had a great mustache; Charlie Chaplin, Ben Turpin. But Zappa... he's got the best mustache in American history. He's got the mustache, right? And then he's got that little thing on his chin. I think it's called an Imperial. That is, like, the coolest thing. That's, like, one of the great icons of 20th century."

- SIMPSONS creator Matt Groening on Frank Zappa's sartorial splendor

AN UNPUBLISHED COMIC STRIP FROM 1992!

Hey-ho, former Daily Dirt fans, not to mention anyone else who finds themselves wandering into this, my catch-all "general interest" blog! Today, as part of my ongoing quest to provide you good people with all sorts of meaningless ephemera from my many former lives, I bring you a comic strip that I drew back in my college days, roughly in the year 1992 or thereabouts. 

As you can see, I had yet to grasp the concepts of character, narrative flow, thematic consistency, etc. Essentially a collection of non sequitur text and images thrown together in slapdash fashion, its only redeeming quality is perhaps the not entirely unpleasant level of draftsmanship. Also, is there anything quite so inadvertently funny as a vacuum cleaner's crevice tool? I think not.

***

Also, don't forget to check out our sister-site UselessEaterBlog's daily Paracultural Calendar updates. It refreshes every day with crazy new historical information. 

Highlights from the 26th of April include the Picasso-inspiring bombing of Guernica and the Chernobyl nuclear power station meltdown.

Highlights from the 27th of April include the sinking of the Sultana on the Mississippi (the worst maritime tragedy in American history) and the birth of the computer mouse AND South African Apartheid.

Highlights for the April the 28th include the launch of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki and the Port Arthur Massacre in Tasmania.