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. 

SELECTED READINGS ~ JULY 16, 2017

The recent Salon.com article asking the rhetorical question What Exactly Lurks Within the Backward Grooves of Stairway to Heaven?--excerpted from Erik Davis' Led Zeppelin IV book from the 33&1/3 series-- makes for a fun read, particularly when the authors draw a nifty parallel between 80's televangelists laboring over turntables in their efforts to suss out Satanic messages by playing songs backwards and the then novel artistry of early DJ spin-masters:

Though one doubts that Minister Mills was chillin’ with Grandmaster Flash or DJ Kool Herc, rap musicians and Christian evangelicals both recognized that popular music is a material inscription, one that can be physically manipulated in order to open up new vectors of sense and expression. For both evangelicals and rap DJs, the vinyl LP was not a transparent vehicle of an originally live performance, but a source of musical meaning itself, a material site of potential codes, messages, and deformations of time. Alongside the more kinetic and rhythmic innovations introduced by scratch artists like DJ Grand Wizard Theodore, we must also speak of a “Christian turntablism”: slow, profoundly unfunky, obsessed with linguistic “messages.” Some evangelical TV broadcasts from the early 80s even include top-down shots of the minister’s DJ decks so that viewers can admire the technique of squeezing sense from sound. However, while rap and all the sampled music that follows it treats the vinyl LP as an open form capable of multiple meanings and uses, Christian turntablists remained literalists, convinced that they were revealing a single “fundamental” message intentionally implanted in the grooves by a diabolical author. Unfortunately, when it came to “Stairway to Heaven,” these DJs for Jesus could not agree on the exact wording of Led Zeppelin’s insidious messages. Once again, ambiguity trumps.

There's something for everyone--from the casual Zeppelin fan to the committed Thelema practicing Crowleyite--in this short article. If you're any kind of pal o' mine, you'll enjoy it. Remember to pass it on!

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Continuing with today's musical theme, Washington Post political reporter (and life-long prog rock head) Dave Weigel has just published a book about the much-reviled musical genre he and I both hold so dear, entitled The Show That Never Ends. Now, thanks to the Red Bull Music Academy, you can read an excerpt from said book: an entire chapter, in fact. And it's not just any old chapter... it's the chapter called "A Billion Times the Impact", and it's about progressive rock's deepest and darkest practitioners, King Fucking Crimson. Weigel goes deep for this one, folks. After a bunch of stuff about the birth of the business end of prog (Harvest, Pink Floyd, Van Der Graff Generator, etc), we get to the meat:

Crimson made its London debut on April 9, 1969, at the Speakeasy, gigging steadily through the spring and folding into the scene. They started talking to the Moody Blues about touring with them – an embryonic band backing up the country’s symphonic hit makers. It didn’t pan out. “I think they [the Moodies] were terrified,” said Michael Giles. “There was a power and an energy coming off Crimson that couldn’t be denied.” 

None of the musicians who popped up at the shows even attempted to deny it. King Crimson settled into a sound and image. Fripp, never comfortable standing up to play guitar, decided at the band’s May 14 gig that he would play seated on a stool. “You can’t sit down,” warned an exasperated Greg Lake. “You’ll look like a mushroom!” 

Fripp was unmoved. “My considered opinion,” he’d tell an audience at a later concert, “was that the mushroom is a fertility symbol in many cultures.” So the guitarist sat down, and he won immediate validation from one of the only people whose opinion mattered. Jimi Hendrix was at the show, “jumping up and down,” and pronouncing Crimson “the best group in the world.” 

After the show, Hendrix approached Fripp wearing a white suit with a matching sling on his right arm. “One of the most luminous people I’ve ever met,” remembered Fripp. “And he said to me: Shake my left hand, man, it’s closer to my heart.” 

The Rolling Stones were set to play an outdoor concert at Hyde Park on July 5. King Crimson, just six-odd months into its existence, was booked to support them. On July 3, the Stones’ multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones was discovered at the bottom of his pool. There was a moment of panic about whether the show would go forward. The panic subsided and nothing was canceled, as funereal portraits of Jones were placed at either side of the Hyde Park stage. King Crimson would have forty minutes to play to the largest audience they’d ever seen. 

“Here’s a band that’s going to go a long way,” promised the announcer. Seven seconds later the band crashed into the first chords of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” all majors and sharps in 4/4 time, the entire band swinging like a fist. ... King Crimson held the stage for forty minutes at Hyde Park, playing highly structured songs – “The Court of the Crimson King,” “Epitaph” – and songs that served to scaffold their incredibly quick solos. Lake didn’t even get vocal parts for the last thirteen minutes. The brief “Mantra” consisted largely of a tender McDonald flute melody. “Travel Weary Capricorn” was a showcase for Giles – a song so evocative of basement jazz that the impressions of “Schizoid Man” started to fade. 

But the jazz number ended with a strangled-cat solo from Fripp, as Lake and Giles laid down a thudding beat. This was “Mars,” a travel-sized cover of Gustav Holst’s piece from The Planets. A mellotron carried the melody as the band relentlessly bent the classical piece into a Satanic groove. It ended with air-raid sirens, played by the band’s management. And that was the show. “Standing ovation,” recorded Fripp in his diary. “Mammoth Success, of importance which will take time to appreciate. We’ll look back to see this day in years to come and fully realise its significance.”

That's the shit right there, man. And as the story behind Crimson gets more chaotic and complicated, Weigel's telling of it only gets better. At one point, during an interview with Gordon Haskel, the disgruntled former singer says: "The King Crimson weapon is musical fascism, made by fascists, designed by fascists to dehumanize, to strip mankind of his dignity and soul," he said later. "It’s pure Tavistock Institute material, financed by the Rothschild Zionists and promoted by two poncy public school boys with connections to the city of London." Because of course it is. Yer old pal Jerky can't wait to get his hands on Weigel's book. 

PS - Purchase it (or anything else) from that Amazon link and you'll be supporting yer old pal Jerky's blogging efforts!

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Those of you who've been riding along with yer old pal Jerky and friends over the last little while know that we consider the UK's Adam Curtis to be one of the best and most important documentarians currently producing work. We so respect his work, in fact, that we will soon be producing concordances (like these) to go along with some of his most important and relevant films and series, such as The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Trap, and All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. But before we get to that, we suggest that you watch this early film of his, 1984's The Great British Housing Disaster, which all but predicts the Grenfell Tower disaster, which incinerated scores of innocent people alive in central London only a few short weeks ago.

LEMONS FOR EVERYONE, BY TRANS LOVE AIRWAYS

I don't know what it's going to take for me to convince you that my friend Steve Banks (peace be upon him) wrote, and his band Trans Love Airways performed, the single greatest Canadian rock song of all time. So I guess I'll just keep trying to educate you fools. I mean, just listen to that song. And then just look at that video's play count. Does that seem at all logical to you?!