Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) (19 page)

All this evocation of various personas was heightened by Bowie's uncanny sense of fashion that, even beyond his music, would stand out and inspire other musicians. In the press, Bowie would continue the construction and deconstruction of his character, as when he told a reporter for
NME
that he was not a musician but an artist using music as his means of expression. With statements like this, Bowie intended to keep himself apart from the pure rock persona to better establish himself as the
next character he might inhabit. In the same interview, Bowie also wanted to stand clear of being lumped in with someone like Alice Cooper. Bowie admitted to a kind of theatricality, but he eschewed the use of props or sets, claiming he was the “vehicle” for his songs. This also meant that when he was ready to move on to the next thing, he wasn't saddled by the production itself, as when during the final show of his Ziggy tour with his band the Spiders from Mars, Bowie returned to the stage for his encore and introduced the song “Rock 'n' Roll Suicide” by telling the audience it was the last time the Spiders would play together. His bandmates were just as shocked as the fans.

Bowie once commented that Marc Bolan was “Glam 1.0,” and without Bolan's all-too-brief tenure leading the band called T. Rex (Bolan died in 1977, weeks before his thirtieth birthday), Bowie would not have known which stage door to walk through. Bolan had transformed himself from hippie troubadour—a minstrel with a vibrato voice who sang about fairy tales and magic spells—into a glamorous and decadent rock star, trading in his paisley for high-heeled boots and sequined jackets. But he retained a mystic aura, particularly in the steamy androgyny he brought to his performances.

Fans of his earlier band Tyrannosaurus Rex called him a sellout, and music critics saw his glam pretensions as just that, a cynical showmanship devoid of any real artistic merit. But Bolan found a generation ready to embrace glam's mix of old and new, simple pop stripped of psychedelic extravagance but dressed up in cosmic finery. Glam would provide a template for a new kind of occult imagining, one where the rock star was merely a cover-up for a secret identity—alien or monster.

Brian De Palma found glam, as well as the entire culture of rock, to be ripe for a horror parody in his film
Phantom of the Paradise
,
a movie that could only have been made in 1974. Swan, a record executive played by Paul Williams (who also wrote the film's music), sells his soul for eternal life and acts as the devil's agent, soliciting others to sign away their own souls in return for record contracts. Swan discovers the musician Winslow Leach and believes his music will be the perfect backdrop for his new rock club. Swan frames him, and Leach is put through all terrible manner of tortures, including having his teeth pulled and replaced with metal, and having his face burned by a record-pressing machine. He takes to wearing a mask and black cape, haunting the nightclub, enacting his revenge on those who destroyed him.

Rock culture would continue to utilize the concept of secret identities hidden behind masks and makeup. Mercyful Fate would make its mark on the 1980s with occult and satanic imagery buoyed by a fairly generic metal sound. Their lead singer, King Diamond, gave the band its power. King Diamond was said to be a devotee of Anton LaVey's brand of Satanism, and he took to painting his face white like the bastard love child of Alice Cooper and Kiss. He often wore a top hat and a funereal morning suit, and would perform holding some bones; sometimes these were tied together to form a cross attached to his microphone. These elements signaled to rock audiences that the musician was a messenger for arcane secrets, delivered in the language of rock.

Marilyn Manson followed Bowie's template, as each one of his albums presented a new persona, but he maintained the overall Alice Cooper School of Makeup program. In 1998,
Manson told
Kerrang!
that Bowie was a crucial influence, particularly on his album
Mechanical Animals
, whose cover, the article's author notes, looks uncannily like
Aladdin Sane
. Bowie had a clearly traceable effect on popular music, but his overarching influence was more subtle. So many of his constructed personalities paralleled his real life in the 1970s, each of them depicting desperate spiritual seekers, looking toward both inner space and outer space for spiritual sustenance. But as much as Bowie was a conduit for the decade's excess, he was also a mirror.

The last song on
Diamond Dogs
is “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family,” and it mimics a locked groove on an album, when the needle gets stuck and repeats the same groove over and over. It's a frightening bit of macabre whimsy but musically is the perfect metaphor for the risky nature of occult pursuits. More so than exaggerated and often false rumors of devil worship, the true dark side of the occult is the ever-circling loop of meaning.

Because the occult is not a system, but rather a messy accumulation of bits of tradition, synthetic beliefs, and even pure fictions in the service of commercialism, there is no final word, no final wisdom. And even for some, it becomes the ruthlessness of seeking signs, where everyday things begin to take on occult connotations, each one a reference to some deeper meaning, which again only points to another possible inference. What makes Bowie the great magician is that, even as his psyche fractured under the strain of this self-imposed mission, he was able to cause “change to occur in conformity with the will.” Bowie's personas were rarely that of a magus. Instead, they were otherworldly characters from beyond space and time: Major
Tom, the space oddity whose voyage into outer space reveals an inner loneliness within an opiated dream; Ziggy Stardust, a messianic figure not unlike Valentine Michael Smith from Robert Heinlein's counterculture science fiction classic
Stranger in a Strange Land
; the futuristic glam visage of
Aladdin Sane
; and the grotesque hybrid dog creature prowling an apocalyptic landscape of
Diamond Dogs
.

With
Station to Station
in 1976, Bowie emerged as the Thin White Duke, a character most critics agree was a husk, the burnt-out shell of a man who had tried to touch the sun. Everything but the glamour had been burned away. The song “Station to Station” is a harrowing admission of an occult obsession fueled by drugs. The quest for divine truth turns into a Sisyphean task: “Got to keep searching . . . Oh what will I be believing.” Bowie makes direct references to the Kabbalah, turning over and over the hope that keeps slipping away: “One magical movement from Kether to Malkuth” that he insists is not just “the side-effects of the cocaine.”

This is an occult image to be sure, the destitute and craven lich-king, a necromancer whose soul was the last thing to be sacrificed in the search for secret knowledge. But there is also something romantic about this image of the decadent magician. He's a Faust-like character inhabiting a gothic landscape, like those imagined in the German Expressionist motifs depicted in F. W. Murnau's 1926 film of the fabled scholar who sells his soul to the devil in search of hidden wisdom. Out of this image would come two other rock movements, one that embraced the darkness as a means of psychological and spiritual subversion,
another that saw walking in the shadows a kind of authenticity, dressing it up in leather, lace, and beautiful silver crosses.

Milk and urine enemas, live intercourse, masturbating with chicken heads—all to the soundtrack of Charles Manson's singing, and interspersed with the roar of trains. This was a typical performance of COUM, the artist and musician Genesis Breyer P-Orridge's London-based performance art collective. Founded with Cosey Fanni Tutti (the name a play on Mozart's comic opera) in 1969, initially COUM was an avant-garde hippie band making noise with violins and drums. Theatrics during performances gave them the means to directly challenge the mainstream. It was the underground's turn to show off its magical acuity, using occult techniques as a means of transgression and inspiring other subcultures to do the same. The occult was not just for show, not merely a marketing ploy or a fad made possible by access to unlimited amounts of money and drugs. It was a weapon of the imagination and would illuminate the outer fringes of rock in ways that would cascade toward the middle.

Public funds were available if, as Simon Reynolds explains in his book on postpunk,
Rip It Up and Start Again
, “they described what they did as ‘performance art' rather than rock music.” The band's peak—and the public interest peaked—happened during a 1976 gallery show at the ICA in London. The installation featured porn magazines, strippers, tampons, and music provided by P-Orridge and Tutti, along with Chris Carter and Peter
Christopherson. Carter was a sound and lighting engineer who worked with a number of high-profile bands, including Yes, but was becoming interested in experimental performances using homemade synthesizers. Christopherson was working with the design firm Hipgnosis (his idiosyncratic vision is on display on Peter Gabriel's first three albums, particularly the iconic image of Gabriel's face melting). The exhibit was met with outrage. The British parliament called COUM “the wreckers of civilization,” and as a result they were no longer allowed to apply for arts funding in England.

COUM was an early attempt at cultural transfiguration by way of transgression. As Richard Metzger, the founder of the
Dangerous Minds
website, explains, the COUM performances were “about freeing themselves (and the spectators) of their own taboos by performing benign exorcisms of a sick society's malignancies.” This meant having to skirt the edges of whether or not they were celebrating or merely putting a mirror up to what they perceived as these “malignancies.” P-Orridge and company would heighten this tension with the formal creation of Throbbing Gristle, soon the standard-bearer of industrial music—a genre heralding in an underground movement in music without peer, and whose influence would extend into the mainstream by way of acts such as Nine Inch Nails and Godflesh.

Throbbing Gristle was to music what COUM was to art. Pure provocation by way of fascist imagery and songs about serial killers and sexual deviance poured out like avant-garde slurry. Their music was a pastiche of blistering electronics, mechanized dance music, ambient landscapes, and impenetrable experiments in Gysinian cut-ups. The cut-up—an artistic technique of cutting
pieces of text and allowing elements of chance and stream of consciousness to re-form them—that William Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin had developed together—was a powerful means of manipulating both consciousness and culture. It was magic: a willful intent to change reality.

The members of Throbbing Gristle were each interested in occult subjects in their own way and in Crowleyan ideas of willful intention—as well as Burroughs's magical ideas—but they eschewed using occult imagery as their primary means of eliciting a reaction from the public. Bands often employed pentagrams and satanic imagery to signal to their audiences or the media their danger or dark spiritual intentions. Throbbing Gristle never felt compelled to use arcane symbols in that way. As Cosey Fanni Tutti explains: “When your work is created from a deep connection with the spiritual, its power is manifest so using symbols is an unnecessary overstatement. I think public gratuitous display tends to reflect a weakness and insecurity, in both the work and the person behind the work.”

In 1971, P-Orridge had found a kindred spirit in William Burroughs, whose novels such as
Naked Lunch
set decency on fire. During one of their first conversations, Burroughs related a story kindling P-Orridge's entire future vision (and changing the course of Western occultism). Burroughs frequented a certain diner, where one evening he was treated very poorly. He had the perfect means at hand for revenge. Burroughs would utilize the idea of the “cut-up” for a form of sympathetic magic: a system of occult practice relying on the idea of “like as to like.” For example, a doll shaped into the likeness of a particular person could be cursed, stuck with pins, thrown under a bus.
All you needed was a good enough resemblance and the willingness to see the spell through. With this method in mind, Burroughs took a picture of the block where the restaurant stood. He developed the film and used a razor to cut the restaurant out, taping the two pieces back together. He recorded the ambient sounds of the diner's neighborhood, and then he cut in recorded sounds of guns firing, sirens, and explosions. A few weeks later, without warning, the diner closed.

Burroughs told this story to P-Orridge during their first meeting. P-Orridge had sought out Burroughs as a kindred soul intent on subverting what Burroughs called “control,” the powers seeking to contain human consciousness, to limit its freedom. The tools available to undermine control were available all around them: hallucinogenic drugs, art, and magic. Burroughs's magic shunned grimoires and ceremony, ritual and conjuration, in favor of photographs, recordings, music production, and film. He believed magic had to adapt to the technology at hand, not rely on the same old texts and traditions. Preserving the rituals of the Golden Dawn or other occult orders might be keeping those methods alive, but it wasn't doing the practice of magic (or art) any good, in his mind.

Jennie Skerl, one of Burroughs's many biographers, explains it like this: “The cutup is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness that occurs in both the writer and the reader of the text.”

Burroughs was introduced to the cut-up as a magical means of subversion by his friend and artistic collaborator Brion Gysin. The two had met when Gysin was the proprietor of the 1001
Nights, a restaurant in Tangier that Gysin co-owned between 1954 and 1958. Burroughs and Gysin reconnected again in Paris and worked on reenergizing a technique used by the Dadaists in the 1920s. The Dadaists are often framed as being against any kind of system, believing in nothing but the pure play of their idea. But as the writer Nadia Choucha explains, their quest for a pure “experience of consciousness” meant that they were indeed sensitive to the occult imagination. Collage and other cut-up techniques used by the Dadaists allowed them to tap into the unconscious and listen in to the “unknown.” Burroughs recognized that what made the cut-up so potent was how easily it could be adapted to any technology, even those not yet realized. Burroughs could not have imagined the MP3, but the cut-up can be applied to 0s and 1s just as easily as to Polaroid pictures. Cut-ups, Gysin believed, were a working of the higher self, making connections that normal waking consciousness is not able to apprehend. Together, along with the filmmaker Antony Balch, they sought to show how the cut-up was the perfect weapon in the war against control.