Ziggurat Lounge

Dark Side of the Moon

2012-02-09T18:09:00.000-08:00

Of all the albums that entered our world in the year of ‘73, this is by far the most popular. Of all the discs in the entire history of recorded music, only one has sold more copies worldwide. There should be obvious reasons for such amazing success. But explanations - obvious or oblique - break down in this case.

Charisma? Hardly. Pink Floyd in ‘73 was the paragon of cold-blooded corporate rock - faceless, arrogant and isolated from the world. Devoid of stage presence or interesting life stories, the band consisted of four ordinary-looking men with boring names and no discernible talents that would set them apart from 10,000 other musicians. Virtuosic playing? Originality? Sex appeal? The visceral throb that gets people up and moving their bodies? Pink Floyd had none of these. Early on, when Syd Barrett was their front man, they were charmingly acid-addled, whimseyed and weird. Their “Interstellar Overdrive” sent their fans out through the gleaming stars. After Syd was gone, the band kept some of its cosmic sublime, but headed into more doom-laden terrain, “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” being a perfect soundtrack for glorious teenage solar suicide. By ‘73, with Dark Side of the Moon and the hugely profitable tours around it, Pink Floyd had lumbered to the top of the dinosaur food chain, the reigning tyrant lizards of arena-rock. With upwards of 40 million units sold, with literally billions of plays, this music - like no other - flooded the earth with its message, the gospel of self-annihilation that the moon’s hidden side represents.

Golgotha is not just a place in the little Holy Land of the Middle East. The real Golgotha - “the place of the skull” - is in outer space, a quarter million miles away, orbiting around the earth. The moon is our primal, eternal skull-icon. And all of our skulls are tiny versions of the great skull in the sky. What do we see in the moon’s leering face? Eye holes, gaping toothless mouth, nostril slits, the empty stare of the Great Death’s-Head. Calvary is not just a place of ancient torture and obscure sacrifice. Calvary - “the place of the skull” - is out there, night after night. The moon is the universal face of death and also the earth’s primary mirror - shining back the light of the sun, the source of all life. So when this Face of Death stares raptly into itself, of course there is an invisible side of the reflection: the dark side, untouchable, unknowable, real and yet absolutely unseen.

As music, Dark Side of the Moon is a grand mediocrity. With its bloated blues imitations, fake soulful moaning, banal synthesizer squiggles, its utter absence of original melodies, lyrics, or musical hooks, this album should have disappeared into the great cut-out bin of LP oblivion. Instead, it sold in vast numbers and kept selling, spending a total of fifteen years in the charts. Ultimately, it colonized more brains than all of the albums released in ‘73 combined.

The secret of this record’s success is in fact no secret at all. It’s all right there in the title and the last line of the song “Brain Damage.” To the sullen, smug teenagers of the world (young and old) Roger Waters sings “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.” His lyrics mention racing “to an early grave,” exploding heads and brutal psycho-surgery. There may be many far better examples of I-want-to-die music. Originality, however, doesn’t sell. Complexity and intelligence don’t make for commercial world domination. The very banality of Dark Side of the Moon works in its favor. If a band is going to create a mass market hymn to self-obliteration, then subtlety is not going to be one of their tools. If Pink Floyd set out to make enormous profits, then playing directly to their audience’s inner deadness was exactly the right technique. Making self-pity into grandeur, numbness into stoned mysticism, stupidity into exaltation, Dark Side of the Moon is the perfect product. Heartless, pompous, blotting out everything like brain-death or an eclipse, whining and empty, this is the sound of cretinous nihilism, the wretched little self screaming “me! me! me!” in a vacuum.

Aladdin Sane

2012-02-09T18:08:00.000-08:00

What are the Third Reich’s enormous torchlight rallies but outdoor rock concerts minus the cannabis? What are dictators, with their mesmerizing stage presence, countless followers and raw power, but the original rock stars? Booming music, spectacular display, thousands of abject devotees standing for hours in the dark, thunderous waves of shouting from the crowd, mass adulation for the tiny figures on the stage, and total submission to the man with the microphone - in short, rock and roll is faschismus reborn.

And it’s not just the metal-heads with their black leather and studs, their bombast and songs of mythic manhood. When there’s 20,000 seething hormone-drunk teenagers gathered in the church of sex and drugs and rock and roll, then there’s hardly any difference between flower power and swastikas, platform glam-shoes and storm-trooper jack boots.

As Led Zeppelin conquered America, some critics called their music - and especially their stage shows - “fascistic.” Robert Plant, staring out at the enormous seething subrational crowd of fans, called it “The Ocean.” Plant was a hobbity nature-mystic hippie. A less benevolent mind might see it another way: pull the top off a human skull to look at all those seething cells. Countless flickers of illumination merging like a million neurons into one seething omni-brain. Or lift up a rock and there’s the furious scurry of a white ants’ nest. The sour acid stink, a million pincers pinching, a million legs and antennae twitching. That’s what it looks like from up on the stage. Still, Led Zeppelin retained some of their benign golden-boy glow. For all their crushing power, they were still capable of an interplay of heavy and light, darkness and light.

It was David Bowie who turned out to be the secret Fuehrer of ‘73. At first this seems an absurd stretch - a fey, bisexual, mincing, science fiction glitter boy as fascist strongman? But only a few years later, Bowie outed himself, saying “I think Britain could benefit from a fascist leader,” and “I believe very strongly in fascism.” He spoke publicly of the “magical side” and “mythology” of Nazism, and saw rock music for what it can truly be: “Adolf Hitler was one of the first true rock stars.” Some have even seen in Bowie’s persona-name “Ziggy” the exclamation “Sieg E!” (Hail Elvis!) and in his pre-moonsuit phase, Elvis certainly had a fascistic look. In black leather, head to toe, he’d resurrected his career as the hipster goon squadistro, even stealing Oswald Mosley’s on-stage leg twitch and quiver.

In ‘73 Bowie’s fascist magic came to the fore. Aladdin Sane, his huge bestseller, features the double lightning bolt, as background and painted on his face. For Americans, this might’ve seemed just glam-rock flash. But in Nazi-obsessed Britain, a pair of simplified lightning bolts are obvious: the double sig rune of the S. S., the most potent of all fascist symbols.

Opening the album reveals a naked centerfold image - Bowie as outer space messiah in exactly the same haughty pose, with the same gaze into the perfect future, as on a thousand Nazi posters and movie stills. Only this Homo Superior is as much alien as Aryan. For a sex symbol, he’s weirdly sexless: with no muscle to speak of, gleaming mylar skin and his groin airbrushed into androgyny. Shot in the same session as the front cover, this inner gatefold pinup shows his face with the double sig (Ziggy) rune - and it’s in the background too, blasting across the pure white background. Bold and brilliant, the rune became Bowie’s central icon that year, both fleeting commercial emblem and archetypal trigger.

A bit more cryptic is the subtitle to the song “Aladdin Sane” - “1913 - 1938 - 197?” referring to the years before the first two World Wars and predicting the third. Other lyrics add to the murk. There are drugs (quaaludes, sake, red wine, smack) and oblique evocations of some violent revolution: “the National People’s Gang” and Che Guevara. There’s plenty of futuristic cliché: modules, capsules, domes and an “astronette.” Someone is “strung-out on lasers and slash-back blazers.” Another creature “smiles like a reptile,” eats razors and bites on the neon. Perhaps this is just more science fictional decadence. Beside the longest atonal free jazz piano solo on any known pop album, the music here is basic Stonesy rock: hard, buzzed and crunchy.

It’s not the music that counts, or even the lyrics. It’s the most obvious and overt move Bowie makes. In blue and red, the sig runes slash across his face. He is in short, the living embodiment of faschismus. His empire, like all empires, will soon crumble. But in ‘73, there was one Reich, one Volk and one Fuehrer.

Houses of the Holy

2012-02-09T18:07:00.000-08:00

On their previous - unnamed and unnamable - album, Led Zeppelin used four symbols to represent the four members of the band. The symbols all give the impression of secret truth hidden in plain sight. The first, Jimmy Page’s, sign is sometimes read as the magical nonsense word “Zoso.” For many fans this is the name of the fourth album. But the actual glyph itself is far more complex than a childish four letter word. It’s composed of four fused elements: a sleek and slithery Z with a curving tail, an elongated S that might also be a lost musical clef, two O’s with dots in the middle connected by a slender bar, and at the bottom a calligraphic scribble-slash that might be a pot-pipe or perhaps Aladdin’s lamp. All together, they form a sigil of power and bafflement. Nonsense perhaps, a magickal hippie doodle, or an arcana-scrawled doorway waiting to be opened.

Scholars, fan-boys, paranoid religiasts and esoteronauts have assigned a wide array of meanings to the glyph. Does it make reference to some Crowleyite spell? Is it an oblique Nietzschean strategy, the name “Zoroaster” compressed? Or split into the near-palindromes “Zoso” and “Rater”? Does this refer to Zoser, the Egyptian pyramid, or to herpes zoster, the viral pestilence? Benighted christians have seen “666” (the Mark of the Beast) in the emblem. We see the astrological sign for Saturn, the ringed planet, and the alchemical symbol for lead.

This emblem, well beyond the other three, had a life of its own, appearing on Jimmy Page’s amp, his shimmering cape, his silky wizard pants. But none of the symbols were to be seen on the fifth album. In effect, they had done their job - transforming themselves, from symbol to actual ritual. Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin’s next album, contains that ancient rite.

The cover shows the Giant’s Causeway: 37,000 hexagonal basalt columns on the north coast of Ireland. Some are complete, others broken. Some have sharp edges, like huge rusted nuts made to screw onto bolts. Others are like six-sided, lichen-crusted prehistorical wheels tipped on their sides. All of them fit together not as a puzzle but a temple built before mankind had ever come to that place. Dawn, or some baleful astral being, glows at the peak of the stones - sickly orange, crimson, seething yellow.

Opening the gatefold cover reveals a scene of pagan ritual. Is it sacrifice or exaltation? Eleven naked elf-children crawling over the stones, ascending - pale and ghostly - to meet their sunrise god. White-blond hair, powder-white skin. Not pasty subterranean pallor but soft forms dusty with sky-pollen.

They’re faceless, seen from behind. Six years old, maybe eight. Natural forms, not pure but prepubescent, like something Lewis Carroll would hallucinate on laudanum. Some claim they are all the same child, the body reproduced eleven times. But clearly some are boys and some are girls. Others say they are brother and sister, like a childish Siegmund and Sieglinde in The Valkyrie.

One lies on her belly like a mermaid. One squats. Another holds her hands above her head, in awe, expectation, opening herself to the solar crest-glow, making the same Y-shaped salute to the sun that the wandervogel and yogis used to greet and worship their god.

Inside the fold-out cover, a more overtly sacrificial image is revealed. It’s now sunset and a naked man holds a naked child above his head - clearly an offering - before the fungous nightmare ruins of Dunluce Castle. Rotted stumps of stone, a ravine crossed by a decrepit bridge, two towers, all decayed, all bathed in the same arcane radiation: oozy pink and orangey-green. Rich blue in the upper sky. It could be the surface of another planet, earth a million years in the future or the past.

It’s dusk now. The pale children are gone except the chosen one, the sacrificial offering. From the top of the citadel a faint white light gleams. And a milky beam extends downward to consume the naked priest and his offering.

New York Dolls

2012-01-29T12:51:00.000-08:00

They’re the missing link, the evolutionary lost boys. Not a fossil or a dried-up dinosaur turd but a living, panting, gibbering pack of big city anthropoids, the New York Dolls carried the fool’s gold genes of glam rock and passed them on to the monkey horde of punks who followed close behind.

Glam rock, at first and second glance, was about nothing more than absurd clothes, gobs of makeup and alien aliases. Suburban kids dressed up as outer space drag queens, with feather boas, platform shoes and skintight silver pants. Scrawny white guys with boring names turned themselves into Ziggy Stardust, Eno, Gary Glitter, Jobriath, Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain. Glam is show-biz, and often is shrugged off as a fleeting shock wave from the gay-lib explosion, androgynous and pan-sexual youth gone wild on stage. And there’s no question that straight boys dressed as transsexual hookers are pushing (or at least slouching against) the walls of sexual order. There’s also the druggy halo to consider: heroin, cocaine, and speed were part of the seedy street-chic.

Still, there’s an unspoken, largely unseen element that looms here: something faintly gleaming in the corners of the mind like albino radiation sickness or nacreous moonglow. Glamor, we never forget, is in the oldest sense of the word about bewitchment. “Glamor” meant a magic spell or charm.

David Bowie sang about the “homo superior” in 1971 and about “making the wild mutation” a year later. Deodato put Nietzsche’s Uebermensch into heavy radio rotation. This isn’t progress we’re talking about, but transformation. This isn’t high tech shiny-future optimism, but real teratism - monster making. Mutants usually are highly unadaptive, often flat-out harmful to species survival. The New York Dolls got lost in the gene-jungle, pop culture natural selection making sure there were no direct offspring, no Darwinian success. They were five skinny white boys who mutated into nightmare Ken dolls - five versions of Barbie’s sexless mate dressed up as man-sluts and singing about their “Personality Crisis.” These Kabuki Kens, however, have real bulges in their pants. They’re anatomically correct and when the drugs allow, they’re ready to rut and shoot some bad seed.

Still, they’re both menacing and absurd, with their teased-up hair, gleaming lipstick, scarves, blotches of rouge and pubescent pouts. They never lost their confusion. Were they bad boys or sleazy fashion victims, sexual predators or kids playing dress-up? Later, they’d plumb the depths with too much junkie business, crashed careers, early death and the bass player converting to Mormonism. Always, though, they maintained their unapologetic stance: rude, crude, loud and wild.

There’s a “Lonely Planet Boy” and a “Jet Boy” on this album. Mostly, though, they stay in the street, bumping and grinding through “Bad Girl,” “Pills,” and “Trash.” Two largely overlooked songs point to something far more disturbing that drug-punk bad-assitude. Both are about tainted birth, the genesis of the Baleful Other. They’re not just sex songs, but confused, obsessive leaps into the pit of bio-reproduction.

After “me,” the word “baby” is probably the most common in rock and roll lyrics. In “Vietnamese Baby,” however, the Dolls are talking about about real conception and newborn spawn, the bastard offspring of a U.S. soldier and a nameless, faceless girl on the far side of the globe. The song starts and ends with a cliché Asian gong. In between there’s the standard proto-punk riffs and railing. As music, it’s okay. As a shout of confused dread (“talking ‘bout your overkill!”) it’s definitely not okay. We never know who’s the “you” of the song or why she’s got a Vietnamese baby on her “pretty little mind.” But we do understand that something is very wrong and it’s not going away.

The third Frankenstein song of ‘73 (labeled “original” on the album cover) was the last one of the year. Again we’re in movie-monster land - “shoes too big, jacket too tight.” And again Frankenstein stands for something ill-defined and intolerable. The song starts with an image of war, or biological disaster. “Something must’ve happened over Manhattan.” It quickly gets more personal, a repetitive, far-too-long track built mostly on unanswered questions. “Who could’ve spawned all the children this time?” We never find out. “Do you think you could make it with Frankenstein?” Is this about sex with a monster or is “make” here about literally making a baby, the nameless “it”?

1973 was the year of the American abortion. In January, Roe v. Wade transformed the country’s relationship with its unwanted offspring. Frankenstein’s creature calls himself an “abortion” and here on the Dolls’ first album he returns again: the divine portent of misfortune, the monster-spawn who may be loved, but who must be destroyed.

Steamroller Blues

2012-01-29T12:48:00.000-08:00

At the height of American technological triumph, Elvis released this throwback tune, his hymn of praise to 19th century low-tech machinery. He’s no Saturn rocket or lunar module. He’s not even a diesel-driven bulldozer or an 18 wheel Mack truck, but a steamroller, and this is his version of heavy metal.

The picture sleeve from the single makes it even more obvious - this machine (in sepia tone) comes clanking out of the past, with gears, chain-drive and a smokestack like you’d see on a ironclad from the Civil War. Everything about the steamroller here is archaic, weighty and slow. Yet Elvis sings with a surprising amount of swagger. “I’m a steamroller!” and, he declares, he’s going to “roll over you.” The music too - even with the Vegas big band screaming trumpets - is a throwback. The classic Elmore James “Dust My Broom” riff holds the tune together and gives it old fashioned dirty blues energy. There are no references to the moon here. This is Earth-Elvis, the low-tech destroyer Elvis.

It’s all built on a series of ego-declarations. He’s a steamroller, then a cement mixer, a “churnin’ urn of burnin’ funk.” This line harks us back to the previous year’s Big E hit: “Burnin’ Love.” Mostly that tune is built on standard love-is-fever images: rhyming “fire” with “higher and higher” and “the sweet song of a choir.” But with its obsessive chanting chorus (“hunka hunka burnin’ love”) and Elvis’s frantic “my brain is flaming!” it seems to conjure up a victim of spontaneous cerebral combustion.

“Steamroller Blues” moves on to stranger comparisons. Elvis is a “demolition derby,” not one car but the whole gear-grinding white trash apocalypse, leaving him a “hefty hunk of steaming junk.” And then he’s a “napalm bomb, baby.” After ten years of the war in Vietnam, there was hardly a word less tainted than “napalm.” For most Americans, even those who supported the war, it meant uncontrolled fiery death from the skies. And here’s Elvis saying he’s napalm and will “blow your mind.” The minds of his fans were already blown, though seldom did they think of their idol dropping jellied gasoline onto them from a helicopter gunship.

Elvis’s brain, “flaming” or otherwise, is not the frequent subject of in-depth analysis. He was, though, a man given to much thought, especially on such topics as astrology, UFOs, pyramids and reincarnation. Likewise, he was much given to reading. Wherever he traveled, Elvis always had his servants bring along his personal library of over two hundred spiritual books, which included various Bibles, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. He took his occult researches all the way to the end: dying on the toilet reading The Search for the Face of Jesus, a book about the Shroud of Turin.

In short, when he wasn’t thinking about burnt bacon, peanut butter, and “Takin’ Care of Business,” his mind went to the occult. Even his conception had a mystic quality. Vernon Presley told his son that he’d known the exact instant when he’d come into being because at that moment, Vernon had lost consciousness. Though there is a more common explanation for such an event, Elvis took this orgasmic blackout as an absolute sign that at the moment of conception his father had become possessed by a higher power, God himself. Thus exalted, Elvis embraced the notion that Vernon - ex-con and paint factory worker - was not his true “daddy.” On the night Elvis was born, Vernon walked into the backyard and saw the heavens suffused with a divine blue light. Elvis took this story too as part of his mythos, as he’d long associated the color blue with his own supernatural power, and with his fate as the “One.”

The “One” or the “All?” This is the question that truly matters. A singularity or infinity itself? A cryptic emblem featured on his stage costume points toward our answer. Elvis’s jumpsuits came from the moon, but they were adorned with far more arcane emblems than NASA might provide. Elvis had massive belts, reminiscent of those worn by pro wrestlers and boxing champions. The buckles featured Elvis’s most cherished icons of power. One of them became more noticeable and important in his last days on Earth. It was a wide rectangle, outlined in silver and set with 26 rubies. Inside the border were 16 turquoise studs and at the center were two ovals just touching at the tips. UFO fanatics have compared these ovals to two alien eyes or two flying saucers docking. There’s a far more obvious interpretation. This symbol is the lemniscate, the figure 8 lying on its side, the mathematical sign of infinity. And if anyone was going to reach the infinite in ‘73, it would be Der Elvis.

Also Sprach Zarathustra

2012-01-29T12:42:00.000-08:00

In raw schlock, pure truth is sometimes hidden. In cheap, cheesy, bottom-feeder pop fodder, secret knowledge can be found, if listeners tune their ears to the right frequencies and adjust their inner dials. Where better to conceal astral wisdom than blasting from countless radios? When Deodato’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)” hit the air waves, millions knew with their bodies what their minds would never comprehend: after the Apollo-men had been to the moon nothing would ever be the same.

Americans had made their lunar odysseys and were now - in early ‘73 - back for good. It took a Brazilian jazz pianist sleazing his way through a German’s orchestral masterpiece based on an exile-German’s most famous philosophical tract to get the message out. First, however, came the British film, 2001, a Space Odyssey. Deodato’s proto-disco version of Strauss’s tone poem would never have happened if it hadn’t been used as the film’s main fanfare theme, its clarion call to new consciousness. In 2001, it’s orchestral - a straight rendering by the denazified conductors Boehm and Von Karajan. In the top 40 hit, it’s lounge-jazz afro-caribbean funk. Starting with a sub-bass groan, Deodato adds jungle-creature noises, conga drums and shakers, electric piano and chunka-chunka pulse bottom. A swankering guitar solo comes forward, and then the grandiose Teutonic brass fanfare. If this global burst of groove-gnosis weren’t so crucial, it would be hilarious. From Nietzsche and Richard Strauss to Stanley Kubrick’s film. And from there to something that might serve better as the soundtrack for a TV sports special than for the human mind breaking into the translunar beyond and meeting the Unspeakable Cosmic Other.

Nietzsche proclaimed the next step in human development - not the imbecilic Aryan superman who crushes the untermenschen, but the self-overcoming, self-transcending man. A Darwinian post-monkey man looks nothing like Nietzsche’s Uebermensch. Zarathustra tells us: “what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” A link, a span across the void, a reach into the past and future (which are the same for Nietzsche): this is what the prophet came to show us.

How much of this did Eumir Deodato understand when he entered the studio and got the Brazilian space-funk cooking? Absolutely none of it. Other orchestral pieces had been retrofitted for American radio. “Bumble Boogie” and “The Nutrocker” had made it onto the charts. In 1972, as the last men on the moon made their final lunar sacrifices, a group called Apollo 100 put “Joy” (based on “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”) into the top ten. The year before that, Walter Carlos had made science fiction synthesizer versions of Rossini and Beethoven integral to Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Only a few years later would come “A Fifth of Beethoven,” a disco-kitsch version of the most important symphony in the history of that form.

It took the American Idiot-Zarathustra - Der Elvis - to truly integrate Nietzsche and Strauss into pop-cosmic consciousness. Once he heard the celestial brass and booming drums, he knew that this would be the perfect sound for his grand entry onto the stage, every concert beginning with Strauss’s theme of exaltation. Elvis may not have been able to pronounce the prophet’s name, but he knew a trans-galactic power riff when he heard it. His jumpsuits too, the emblem of his power and glory, came straight from the moon. He started wearing them the year that Apollo 11 landed and he never gave them up. Weighing close to thirty pounds (with another ten for the massive belt) the jumpsuits are his version of space-wear. Pure white, stiff and cumbersome, with a high napoleonic collar, crusted with arcane symbols and strange patriotic emblems, these are the magic garments needed for his liftoff into the prophetic heavens.

What was Zarathustra’s message that everyone knew with their bodies but couldn’t bear to know with their brains? It’s actually quite simple - all crucial truth is. Something is out there, something vast and far beyond our ability to comprehend. And meeting it, human consciousness is like a fluttering candle flame obliterated in the radiance of a star going nova.

Monster Mash

2012-01-22T21:05:00.000-08:00

There were two more Frankenstein records that year. The first was actually a re-release, one of those rare cases of a long-dead novelty tune brought back to life. The 1962 “Monster Mash,” by Bobby Boris Pickett - for reasons never revealed - appeared again on the U.S. charts in the summer of ’73. Doing a cheesy imitation of Karloff, Pickett had jumped on the early sixties fad-wagon of Everything Monsters: two hit TV shows (The Munsters and The Addams Family), the Aurora model kits (the first of which was of course Frankenstein’s monster), lunch boxes, stickers, board games and toys. Like the James Bond spy craze and Beatlemania that followed it, the wave of new-old monsters swept over American pop culture. The fad came and went, before the first man had put his boot on the moon. Why did it then return a decade later, as the last Saturn rocket was being prepared to put the last sons of Apollo on the moon?

“Monster Mash” is musically negligible. And the lyrics are barely above the level of a seventh grader’s high concept: “Hey, what if that Frankenstein guy from the movies was the front man for a rock and roll combo?” It has the requisite references to the lab and the undertaker’s slab, ghouls coming to “get a jolt from my electrodes,” chains, graveyards, coffin-bangers and crypt-kickers. But pulling apart the strands of the backstory, we find a far more complex tangle of knots. Here’s a nonentity American singer imitating a British actor who’d changed his name to the Germanic “Karloff” and who played both the berserking monster and the mad scientist maker. The tune comes out at the height of the craze, then disappears for ten years. Clearly, someone’s electrodes were clamped onto this musical corpse. Someone’s life-giving electro-juice ran through it and brought it back to life.

“Frankenstein,” as he first appears, is not the creature but the creator. Plays, films, and knockoff novels blurred the name’s use. Eventually, it’s the monster (a term almost never used in Mary Shelley’s book) that gets the moniker. But we do not forget that the original Frankenstein is a man, not a man-made being. He’s a scientist, a seeker, a wild-eyed Romantic Germanic hero. Shelley’s subtitle - “A Modern Prometheus” - captures the essence of his story. This is now, not the ancient days, and still there are heroes willing to risk all to grasp the torch of secret knowledge. Stealing fire from heaven and bringing it back to earth, Prometheus gained himself the eternal hatred of the gods. For his crime, he was chained to a rock, with an eagle picking out his liver. Celestial fire is for the gods, not humans, and those who dare to think otherwise will be punished forever. Yes indeed, as Neil Armstrong said when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon, “the eagle has landed.”

Perhaps linking this doomy grandeur to idiotic schlock-and-roll is simply too much. But, Shelley’s creature tells us at the end of the novel, “the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at and kicked and trampled on.” Songs are creatures too, with a life and a death, and an afterlife. Recordings live on in the heavens, though there’s nothing much lower in the musical hierarchy than a fad-riding novelty tune. Is the “Monster Mash” an abortion, a divine portent of misfortune, a piece of Top Forty drivel or an Opener of the Way? We are convinced that it can be all of these. Listen then, to the last lines of the song: “For you, the living, this mash was meant too. When you get to my door tell them Boris sent you.”

They Only Come Out at Night

2012-01-22T21:01:00.000-08:00

Edgar Winter’s White Trash came slinking out of the shadows in 1971. Two years later, he rode this cold slab of rock and roll albinism to the top. The Album and the Albino, the high priest’s Alb and Albumen, the lowly white of an egg. They’re all linked, each of them descending from “Albus,” the Latin word for absolute whiteness. Albedo is a bit more complicated. For the astronomer, it’s the reflecting power of a planet or moon. For the physicist, it’s the degree to which a surface reflects back cosmic radiation.

You want more? You need more? We’ve got it - all of the evidence hidden right out in the open. Album covers are magic amulets, containers of pop cult esoterica, squares of throwaway idiocy and at the same time secret maps of the starry regions. They Only Come Out At Night - how much more obvious does it need to be?

The cover features a Francesco Scavullo fashion photo of the whitest rock star on the planet. Naked, Winter poses at a strange oblique angle, as though he’s an astral messenger zooming through space/time. But of course he’s no angel, nor a devil. Winter, here, emerges as a true celestial emanation, neither male nor female, alien nor human, but the next species. His eyes gleam upward - toward the heavens? in drugged ecstasy? dreaming of himself as the next shooting star? Scavullo makes Winter look like a living comet - complete with tail of icy colorless hair streaming behind. A golden beauty mark pulses on his cheek. His lips are painted a vivid red. The only thing covering his naked skin is a multi-tiered diamond necklace. Here is, in short, maximum space-freak: milk-pale skin, midnight black background, and a slash of juicy crimson on his lips.

On the back cover he’s even more transgressively genderless, one half pink satin Barbie and one half Prince Charming. The other members of the band are nowhere near as fetchingly weird, mustering about as much menace as sebaceous sophomores dressed up for the prom. And for the most part, the music they create is banal white-boy schlock, party tunes such as “Hanging Around” and “We All Had a Real Good Time,” and that pinnacle of originality, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Boogie Woogie Blues.”

Then there’s “Frankenstein,” the monster hit off the album, the only cut that matters. Supposedly the track got its name because it was cobbled together out of various unrelated parts. We'll never know if this is true - the scars and seams and stitch-marks aren’t obvious. To these ears, it’s not a hodgepodge of mismatched limbs and organs, but the zap-spark sound of the mad scientist’s lab. Winter’s synthesizer dominates the mix, though there’s less bleeping here and far more squiggle-riff voltaic surges than on other synth-heavy tunes of the time.

In a way, it’s just another blues instrumental, complete with drum solo and sax break. But updated and juiced with the high tech of the day, it’s the aural equivalent of the comet Winter portrays on the cover. At one point he even gives us a perfect buzzy musical sketch of a space craft landing on the moon. Glimmer, glam, glitz - all of these of course are about reflection, not absorption, of light. And this Frankenstein shines like a disintegrating egg of trans-solar ice as it swings around the sun.

Though the entire platform shoe craze of the time can be traced back to Boris Karloff’s huge clunky Frankenstein footwear, there’s little else of him present in this track. No hints of the Thorazine shuffle, neck-bolts, growls or murderous leer. This is the monster as portent, not brainless killer hulk.

Ultimately, the Albedo of this Album, the reflection of cosmic radiation, is about Edgar Winter’s skin, not the movie monster’s. Karloff’s had a greenish cast, as least in the later incarnations. Winter’s is the pure snowy white of the albino. But they are still both monsters in the oldest sense of the word. Before it was the shambling hell-creature of horror stories, The Monster was a baleful warning or sign. In Latin, the word was “monstrum,” meaning a divine portent of misfortune. This term ultimately comes from “monstrare” - which indicates a showing or unveiling. In short, the monster is a revelation. And certainly this tune gives us a glimpse of the soul-light that only comes out of its secret place at night. This is album-as-altar and pop musician as sacrificial priest. This is the white monster as portent, omen and warning.

Raw Power

2012-01-15T18:14:00.000-08:00

Is there a more moronic band name than “Iggy and the Stooges?” Looking at the cover of this, their third album, you’d have every reason to think them to be gas-huffing clowns, midnight wankers, mental defectives. To a certain degree, you’d be right. This is a stupid record - however, stupid and smart are not mutually exclusive. Idiocy and genius sometimes travel together, like the ghosts of Siamese twins.

Raw Power is an album about war-as-sex and sex-as-war. And while it’s sloppy, self-indulgent and out of control, it is also the greatest piece of art to emerge from the imaginal jungles of Viet Nam. Was Iggy a vet? Hell no - while the grunts were dying in the mud, Iggy was in high school drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and Romilar. Did he watch the whole war on TV? Everybody did, eating supper as the seven o’clock news gave us body counts, live executions, and endless fire fights in misty rice paddies.

The album’s first track is “Search and Destroy,” and it ends with “My Death Trip.” In between Iggy howls about disease, penetration, “hallucination true romance,” falling deep into the underworld and dancing “to the beat of the living dead.” In “Search and Destroy” he warns every girl in America to look out - because he’s got a “heart full of napalm” and he’s “using technology.” This is a new kind of war with a new kind of casualties. The smoke still hangs over the jungles and bombed-out cities and this “streetwalking chetah” has already become “the world’s forgotten boy.”

In 1972, glam rock had exploded like an antipersonnel mine full of silver confetti and mylar streamers. A year later, Raw Power exploded with a far less glamorous look and sound. Punk rock is all here already: snarling vocals, sludge-guitar riffing, cretin-hop drums, caveman bass, minimalist chord structure and speed freak energy. The gleam of glam is still here too, though already tainted with street-dirt, beer stains and dried body fluids. The mascara is running down Iggy’s face and his silver lizard pants hang loose from his emaciated hips. He pouts on the back cover, trying for a soulful mirror gaze, though he looks more like a brain damaged transvestite hooker than a Glamor Boy. On the front cover he manages a slightly more dignified pose - staring straight into some celestial amphetamine spotlight glare. Still, with his jutting jaw, sloppy lipstick and blond shag he might be the bastard spawn of Mussolini dressed by his alcoholic burlesque-queen mom.

It all ends with his Death Trip. It’s all revealed in the last track, where the “sick boy sick boy going round” wails, hoots, and barks at some slime-flecked moon. He shouts in an incoherent jabber about someone (everyone?) who must “come and be my enemy.” Then as the band jerks back and forth like a shot-up jeep stuck in a swamp-hole, Iggy gives his big proclamation: “We’re going down in history.”

Who is this “we?” The Stooges, who never made another album? Iggy and some nameless girl in a sleazy hotel room? Dead soldiers? Glam rock refugees? Americans staring at their TV sets? Every survivor of the era who remembers, who keeps listening, who knows?

And what is this “history?” The truth about a lost time and place. A ghost story with a punk-buzz soundtrack. A tale told by an idiot-genius. Or maybe all three.

Faust IV

2012-01-15T18:09:00.000-08:00

This is the sound of the other Deutschland. This is Krautrock at its most alien and electro-maniacal. Bright globs and gibbering squirts of stellar sound-plasm, chimes from the sublime reaches of outer space, the grandeur and clear-minded trance of Germans who’ve broken free from history’s gravitational pull. This is Vier, the greatest album by Faust.

While Americans and Brits worshipped at the altars of guitar gods, in Germany, Faust was creating its heretic sound. Synthesizers laid out washes of cold aural slime. A buzzing organ moaned, soft and black and slippery as powdered graphite. Drums, tambourine and vacuum tube bleeps joined in a rackety rhythm. Chang-chord fuzz, shouts of a cretin, a girl muttering in Swedish, xylophones, a Teutonic Donovan crooning over muffled wobble-bass and arpeggio guitar, spells gibbered down a tinfoil-covered toilet paper tube, a long elegant sax solo, hurdy-gurdy bowed strings, rattling gear-click pulse, a keyboard ditty that stops dead on an echo and a voice from the studio talks to the void. What makes this kraut? What makes this rock?

The term “Krautrock” is idiotic, an artifact of Britain’s obsession with Germany as Nazi-land. Like so many labels for revolutionary phenomena, this one was created by its enemies. Would a term like Frog-rock have flourished if the French had produced a mutant crop of brilliantly messy, obscure and bizarre albums in the space of ten years? Calling this sound Krautrock is like calling funk “Chitlin music.” (Funk is ultimately of the lower body, the bowels, and chitlins are the bowels.) Or more to the point, it’s like labeling some of the greatest films of the 1960s “Spaghetti Westerns,” as though all a culture has to offer can be summed up by its most basic food.

But there it is: Krautrock. And given that Faust chose to play with the term, claiming it and naming the first track on their greatest album with this nazoid neologism, we use it here. Krautrock: ironic, iconic, blunt as a hammer blow that misses its mark but hits elsewhere and sets the whole world ringing like a gong.

The name of the band is also a complexity. Faust is both the medieval magic-man who makes a deal with the devil for infinite knowledge and it is “fist,” stark and brutish. Panzerfaust is both the mailed fist of the medieval knight and the handheld rocket launcher used to punch holes in the armor of American, British and Soviet tanks as they ground their way into the heart of Germany.

History is supposedly written by the winners. Here, we offer an alternative: the occult history (the hidden, lost, secret story) of the year when it all began. America had won the war and Germany had lost. American Apollo went to the moon in German-built rockets. The Germans stayed back. After seven years of war, they knew what the barren, blasted lunar surface looked like. They already lived on the moon. American music came with the armies and triumphed too. By the early ‘70s, the conquest was almost complete. But a small group of Germans - a kind of esoteric resistance movement - fought back, not with guns and bombs, but brains and synthesizers.

Faust IV is the true V-2 rocket, though it didn’t really go anywhere, at least not through euclidean space. Faust IV is the vengeance weapon out of Deutschland, blasting through the stellar void, secretly reentering the atmosphere and hitting its numinous target. Those who stand victorious claim the right to decide truth and falsehood. Here, we offer the other, the inner, story. We are the celebrants of the dismissed, forgotten, despised soundscape of that miraculous and mysterious post-lunar year - 1973.

What happened then? What happened here? Everything.

Devil in a Dead Man’s Underwear

2011-05-08T21:40:00.000-07:00

See the man, see the God.
Incarnation in progress.
Behold the man, beneath the God,
beware the dog, behind you.
Believe, begone, behave yourself.
Be there, or beware.

Behold: I sing of Spam.
Behold: I GIVE YOU SPAM!
Oblong can, silver crown,
rounded corners, mysterious key without a lock.
Spam-killing man, man-killing Spam.
Calling all gods.
Squeeze and drain the juices,
down the sink, blood and oil
trouble and toil.
When will we three meet again?
In Power, Glory or in Shame?
Spam! The god in a can.
Spam! Baal’s big bad brother.
Spam! Fears no man, eats no ham,
does not give a flying goddamn.

I’m gonna put on the Iron Jock,
and chase Satan round the block.
I’m gonna put on the Iron Fez,
and see what Jahweh says.

The spirits of food dissolve
in my body-acid and rise
as foul vapors into my brain.
Hydrochloric acid, HCL.
The magic letters
an acid bath to cook my ores.
Reagent of pure love
Caustic kisses, candy bliss,
burning in the abdominal abyss.
My body is a bag of acid,
conversion chamber, innermost lake of fire.
Have you been washed in the acid of the Lamb?

Body bag, wanna feel you in my
Body bag, gotta seal you in a
Body bag, wanna touch you in my
Body bag, you’re too much inside my
Body bag, Body bag.

My guts a blast furnace
blessed Bessemer converter.
Hydrogen sulfide, methane
from my vent holes,
flaming nether retrobooster,
deep, deeper, deepest.

On your feet or on your knees
in the grotto of my favorite agonies.
The Church of Beautiful Women
Who Hate Sex.
The Church of Hitting Each Other
With Iron Rods and
Pretending to Like it.
The Church of Our Lady of
Perpetual Mastication.
The Church of Smearing Yourself
with Lard and Baking Until Lightly Browned.
Owwwww! Brown Off!
Victory in my pants.
baby, preemie homunculus
appearing fully formed in my BVDs.
Spam whiz: aerosol processed
meat-food product
squirting out in nacreous jets.

I ain’t just whistling gristle.
Am I blue? You’d be too.
Spewing bones, gizzard, skin
and feathers too.
Don’t you know about the bird?
Everybody knows that the bird comes third.

Evil ones: Juju priests
secret Levite order
Spam-killing men of God.
Evil ones: vegetarian Hecate-jungen
black as a kite, high as night.
Evil Ones: Old Scratch rooting around
the trash. Stick Out Your Can
Here Comes the Garbage Man.
Evil Ones: goat-headed Melchizedeks
with the hots for what’s not.

I feel the heat, I sing of meat,
I long for that throbbing
luncheon treat.
Unspeakable effulgence of byproducts.
Ancient Anathema Cannibal
Spastic God in a Can.
Eating meat, spodee-odee
eating meat.
It slices, it dices, it sacrifices.
Culture is dead. Let’s eat!

I loved that pig, pink and big.
I loved that lamb, the son of Spam.
The pearl without a price.
Drop him in acid
and he disappears.
’s right, pilgrim,
the Mighty Yamm has returned.
Say it proud: I’m back and I’m loud.
The Mighty Yamm and his little lamb
are back for more
of that precious ore.
Digging deep into your mainline,
poking for your hidden vein.
I Yamm what I am and that’s all
what I am
the sweetest of potatoes,
the Uber-tuber,
the root of all evil.
Sleek and hard, throbbing lard
smooth and strong, a mile long.
I sing of me
a perfect gram of the holy I AM.

Devil in a dead man’s underwear,
uh huh.
Devil’s got a dead man’s underwear,
on his head.
He’s the life of every party
he’s a can of poison meat.
Let me introduce you to the
pretty paraclete.
Devil in a dead man’s underwear,
uh huh, uh huh.

Bird, bird, bird,
the irrational word.
Surd, surd, surd,
the irrational bird.
Everybody knows
that the word comes first.
In the beginning was
the bird dance beat
the word made meat
the dove in heat
Must I repeat?

We have met the enemy and he tastes
like ham. Too damn salty.
I am what I am -
goddamn, goddamn.
I am what I eat.
Black bran, the key bone,
fowls of the air special,
the creeping thing plate,
the cloven hoof burger.

Body bag, wanna cook you in this
Body bag, who forsook you in this
Body bag, lost and found inside this
Body bag, break you down into a
Body bag, Body bag.
Seals in flavorful juice.

ziplock, Ziplock, ZIPLOCK.

Eraser Cheese

2011-05-08T21:39:00.000-07:00

The high school cafeteria I endured for five years served something we called “eraser cheese.” These little chunks came off an enormous block of government-surplus cheddar, sliced into 3-inch oblongs and vulcanized by the passage of time. Its uncanny power resided in its ability to rub out mistakes in pencil better than any Pink Pearl or Art Gum.

Was it food? Was it a handy classroom tool? Or was it a tiny slab of compressed mystery like a miniature megalith from a dairy-based Stonehenge? Had these gummy little rectangles been transmuted by some academic abracadabra into a substance unknown to humankind? This was the era of moon rocks and lava lamps, mood rings and space-age plastics. More than once I wondered if eraser cheese could bring Superman to his knees as well as kryptonite.

In this state of confusion, if a long boring day spun me into a miserable educational stupor, I might gnaw on a real eraser and derive some satisfaction, if not nutritional value.

In college, I encountered Robbe Grillet’s novel, The Erasers, in which he dwells for 250 pages on soft rubber secrets, murders and lost memory. Soon afterward, David Lynch’s film Eraserhead opened for me vast new vistas of top-of-the-pencil dread and loathing. Had I stumbled onto the periphery of a worldwide conspiracy? Were the dietitians at Gates-Chili High School trying to indoctrinate me into some cult of edible erasure? “You can eat it or you can use it in algebra class,” they seemed to whisper.

As a kid, there was a stale stub of translucent gum eraser in my mother’s desk. It seemed more ancient than any Rosetta stone or Neanderthal bone. Faintly oily, crumbly to the touch, it was used by no one for nothing. In fact it had long ago lost its ability to remove graphite writing. It was like an office fossil, in with the rusty paper clips, bent brass fasteners and dried-up fountain pen cartridges.

So, encountering the eraser cheese there on my cafeteria tray - room temperature, oily, yet unyielding - conjured up a deeper childhood puzzle. What defines something as food, I wanted to know. Caffeine-free Diet Pepsi has absolutely no nutritional value. Yet it’s considered food. At least erasers give the teeth something to do. Eraser cheese, better in my desk than in the lunchroom, confounded my adolescent mind.

I nibbled, I rubbed, and I wondered.

My Date With Batboy

2011-05-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

The first time I attended the Monroe County Fair, I got to see an honest to-God-freak show. There was a sword-swallower, a bald guy who pounded framing nails up his nose, a girl who played with snakes and thrashed around in a bogus electric chair, and a two-headed pig fetus floating in a 3-gallon jar.

So, when I went back the following July and was told there were no more prodigies of nature on display - “We’re a family fair now” - I gave up on this annual gathering of rip-off games and tepid rides.

But the hope did not die and when I returned years later delight was mine again, finding that the Fair promoters had gotten back to basics and rescinded the no-freak rule. There, in all its sordid glory, was a tent surrounded by lurid paintings of monsters. A clamoring constant spiel exhorted me to “See the Batboy! He’s only three-and-a-half feet tall. He only weights 50 pounds. The world famous Batboy. Ask him how he got that way!”

Eagerly, I paid my buck and entered the inner zone. This was no fake, no pickled punk as they’d had years before. Yes indeed, there was a real Batboy, if not the real Batboy. He required no cage. And though he was covered with tattoos, and truly misshapen - his ears stuck out and his face was caved in - he proved to be a very polite freak. He sat with a fan blowing on him and a boombox nearby to keep boredom at bay. He nodded and greeted the trickle of fans and nervous gawkers. The kids who hung back, trying to call up a little fear or shock, exited more puzzled than afraid.

When I had him alone, I bought a cheap xerox picture as a souvenir. I lied about my name and he signed it, “Nice to meet you, Boris.”

I got him talking and here’s what I found out: he was from California, he was 26 years old and he’d only been doing this routine for a few months, traveling around the country on the county fair circuit. He did nine-hour stints, with one hour off for lunch.

The general feeling I got was more of embarrassment than terror. He made a few desultory lunges at the kids, but didn’t give even a halfhearted growl or gibber. He seemed more like a bored TV viewer in his temporary living room than a source of freak-show weirdness. He sat in his comfy chair, day after day, and watched the parade of humanity pass by, and he was not terribly impressed. “I see hundred and hundreds of people each day,” he told me. “Some of them want their money back because I don’t scare them.”

But this is not to say that the Fair held no terrors. For free, I experienced the nightmare that called itself The Puppetone Rockers. If Bertoldt Brecht had worked with the Muppets, if a forgotten Euro-trash disco act had its own cable-access kids show, if flea-bitten marionettes writhed in agony in the inferno that yawns beneath Sesame Street, then they might approach the angst generated by Puppetone. Worst of all, a section of the stage detached itself at one point and the two keyboard-pounders drove around the fairgrounds like a float from a Hieronymus Bosch hell-parade. “Superkids! Superkids!” they kept chanting. A curse? A forgotten advertising slogan? A desperate prayer to some unknown, unsavory, god?

I was trapped at one point as a giant pink monstrosity thrashed like a hanged man on the gibbet. Nearer, nearer, it loomed as the drum machine ground out its kiddie death march.

I escaped, barely, and went back to have another talk with Batboy.

Samson With Syphilis

2010-11-22T12:01:00.000-08:00

The ending goes like this: the temple at Giza crashing down around his tumescent head. A big operatic finale as he pushes aside the columns, yanking his own chains, growling and grunting and making secret shouts in Dagon’s penetralia, the innermost temple chamber, which collapses on him and swallows him whole.

But that story is just for the rubes.

Initiates, devotees and possessors of the gnosis, know that Dagon’s temple didn’t kill him. It was syphilis.

The strongman was infected, and infectious, carrying a load of sanctified body-spunk and wearing a halo of spirochetes. Faint wriggling bacteria, delicate as dust, ghostly microscopic worms, see-through microorganisms and his see-through man-flesh, too too solid, melted and reconfigured as Dog-name-man-god. Samson was the hound of Hebrew heaven, carrying the sex-pox to the enemy with purple gums and shiny ooze of slaver, howling at the moon and digging for Delilah’s bones.

Samson got his hair cut off because of the rash. His scalp was a suppurating mess: red raised lumps, itchy patches with hard chancres. He cut off his hair to get some air to the scene of the crime.

Samson the mighty man-slut whored his way from Jerusalem to Giza. Then he went blind, like Nietzsche, and deaf like Ludwig Van B. He went gibbering mad in the temple of Dagon, pushing that mill stone round and round for the Philistine Piscine slime-god, grinding dust to finer dust, not helpless because Delilah sheared off his man-mane, but because he was infected, slaving at the pulverizer in a cloud of syphilitic spores which spun round his head, the mill’s spirit-germ counter-spiral.

Lepers got out of the way when he came into town. But women could not resist his manly man-funk, his saline sweat: salt and hormones, mythic oils, a Frankincense monster. They could not resist his throbbing biceps and quads: the wild man Hebrew flex. Priestesses of Dagon, the hierodules and groupies, grew faint as he entered the temple. Their hearts fluttered and their shutters heaved as he allowed them each one a quick touch. A great circumcised muscle of love, a sleek phallic battering ram breaking down the temple door and coming inside, smeared with glycerin to make him shine.

They all wanted his infection - not just his seed to make the monster-child but the spirochete too, the agent of mutagenesis, fertility rites and ecstatic nights, and their wombs the alchemical flasks for the transmutation. Syphilitic seed is an agent of change to convert the fetus, to elevate the women to an altar and the birth to apotheosis. They wanted him as the destroyer and creator, the slayer and the player, the loner and lover.

Now we all know the legend of Samson, the killer of Philistines, destroying whole armies, reaping the fields of his enemies, jawbone as scythe and weapon and rhythmic sound machine. He wades into the enemy singing “why do the heathen rage?” - the last aria from the last opera, accompanied by Delilah’s love-moans and the rattle of teeth in a sun-bleached donkey’s jawbone, percussive buzz-riff, skitter of fragments and the hissing of the high glamor pox.

Samson and Dagon

2010-05-12T16:37:00.000-07:00

“The Hallelujah Chorus" has become the well-worn musical icon of countless Christmas rites. But Handel celebrated the fish god Dagon with as much verve, and far more wit. The same month that he finished Messiah (September 1741), he'd started Samson. As he went to Dublin for Messiah's premier, he was just finishing up his next oratorio, which begins with a chorus of crazed Philistines writhing and wailing at their altar.

"Awake the trumpet's lofty sound!
The joyful sacred festival comes round
when Dagon king of all earth is crown'd.
The solemn hymn and cheerful song:
be Dagon praised by ev'ry tongue.
In notes of triumph, notes of praise
so high great Dagon's name we'll raise."

The music could be right out of "For Unto us a Child is Born." But it's a hymn of praise to Lovecraft's favorite squamous deity instead of Jesus.

Samson, the dreadlocked Israelite muscleman had made his name killing a thousand Philistines with the jaw bone of dismembered donkey. But no asinine mandible could protect him from the charms of Dalila.

Like the Rastas who take him as their mightiest exemplar, Samson had joined the secret society of the Nazarites, devoting himself to slaughter and God by vowing never to drink wine or beer, touch a corpse or cut his hair. Sex, however, was another matter. And The Book of Judges details his various conquests and one night stands. Whores and hussies, virgins and pagan votaries feel the throb when he flexes his muscle of love. Dalila may fall for his bulging biceps, but when offered cold cash by Philistine kings, she turns betrayer.

With his eyes torn out, captive in their temple, Samson endures the taunts of the Philistines as they pray to their slimy fish god in a last drunken chorus:

"Great Dagon has subdued our foe
who brought their boasted hero low.
Sound out his pow'r in notes divine
praise him with mirth, high cheer and wine."

Yes, there is a somber resolution, Samson dying as he pulls down the Philistine temple, off-stage. But like Paradise Lost, where Satan gets all the best lines, in this one, Dagon gets the best music.

ME-262

2010-03-11T16:47:00.001-08:00

1974: Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath have risen like the Saturn rocket - a tower of thrust and antigravity combustion. They have left the sphere of earth and burned up in reentry.

1974: Blue Oyster Cult’s third album, called Secret Treaties, confirms them as inheritors of the scorched metal crown. Eight songs, eight spells: Career of Evil, Subhuman, Dominance and Submission, ME-262, Cagey Cretins, Harvester of Eyes, Flaming Telepaths, Astronomy.

The album cover shows the band gathered around a German fighter jet, the ME-262, which was sent into the skies as the Reich crumbled and the last days loomed near. A sky-shark, with two tapered jet capsules slung under the wings, with the Kronos symbol on the tail fin where a swastika might have been. A thing of beauty and terror, twice as fast as any Allied airplane, a metallic predator, a oceanic creature liberated from the sea to shoot down bombers which hang “dependent from the sky, like some heavy metal fruit.”

On the cover, the band wears shades, capes and black leather. One holds four German police dogs on straining leashes. On the back cover, the same airplane, but no human figures, only four dead dogs lying spatters of black blood.

On the inner sleeve, a quote that makes reference to Origins of a World War. “These treaties founded a secret science from the stars. Astronomy.”

Also on the slick inner jacket another image, this one in color, of the band and the jet fighter. But the background is different, a scene from a World War spaghetti western. Long shadows on the yellow desert sand, a Mexican church, shadowy men with sombreros, thick mustaches and rifles. And a German shark plane transmuted from Westphalia to Almeria in southern Spain, where all the great Italo-American cowboy films were shot.

And on the disc itself, the song “ME-262,” a hymn to the Lufftwaffe’s secret weapons, to heroes of the last battle.

Singing: “Hitler’s on the phone from Berlin, saying ‘Boy, I’m gonna make you a star.’” Guitar riffs and air raid sirens, rock and roll microsoft word.

Thus Spake Lovecraft

2010-02-03T22:45:00.001-08:00

The Exalted Aryan should lift his eyes to the worlds of space and consider his relation to infinity! He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril, which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.

The accursed rabble infests the New York streets: fungous freaks, indescribable scum, puffy rat-eyed vermin, slave-stock. Those ancient, unplumbed warrens - bulging brick kennels - teem with twisted, uncatalogued and unsuspected life.

Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers - a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to the eyes, nose and imagination.

All that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding. We advocate the preservation of conditions favorable to the growth of beautiful things - imposing palaces, beautiful cities, elegant literature, reposeful art and music, and a physically select human type such as only luxury and a pure racial strain can produce. Thus we oppose democracy, if only because it would retard the development of a handsome Nordic breed, Pan-Saxonism, or the domination by the English and kindred races over the lesser divisions of mankind, which I could not help but loathing.

Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents’ slime, these swine - the whole gigantic abortion - have instinctive swarming movements, the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground.

Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flash through my brain without the aid of sight or sound. Do you realize that to many men it makes a vast and profound difference whether or not the things about them are as they appear? Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.

Life is a hideous thing.

The Whiteness of the Wail

2010-02-03T22:44:00.000-08:00

All monsters face north.

Frankenstein’s creature scrambles over icebergs, and stops every thousandth step to stare straight upward, at the pole star, pulsing and emitting frigid stabs of light. The wendigo comes roaring over the ice floes, invisible and ineffable destroyer. Saucer-Nazis hover in clouds of antigravity hum. One-eyed Wotan crouches alone in blood-matted furs, huddled over a crack in the earth, warming his hands on deep volcanic glow. Russian ICBMs approach, gliding toward the pole on NORAD radar screens, tiny white blips, glimmers of thermonuclear doom, chittering like ghost-larva.

Here, at the uppermost spot on earth, Nordic neverland, there is no east nor west, only south in every direction.

Here, in the true north, the sun never sets, but merely declines into the horizon’s mist-fire, then looms upward - a throbbing blur - again.

In the ultimate north, Valkyries fall in electromagnetic sleet-storms, a rain of screaming virgin battle-rage, turned into light and a slime of freezing tears.

Icebergs creak and moan in a language known only to themselves.

A storm blows up, a death-blast of snow, the most beautiful of powders, whiter than any pure Germanic amphetamine, finer than anesthetic cocaine, more powerful than any pristine squalls of heroin.

Here, in this absolute here, the center of the Ur-storm, there is only sound, the whiteness of the wail, the first and final emanation of the frozen glare-midden. All colors and none, absolute presence and absence. Last cry of oblivion, suction-din draws souls from flesh, eyes from sockets, hair from skin, crystals from their grids, boulders from the earth. Pulling everything upward, into itself.

There are the black holes of outer space. And there are the red holes of the human body. But only one white hole of the north. And it opens its vast mouth, breathing all and nothing, eternity and time itself, inward, into the whiteness.

And then, again, lets loose, a wail wider than the entire world.

An Apparition of Puck

2010-02-03T22:43:00.002-08:00

On the cover of Classics Illustrated #87 are gathered the fairy queen Titania, Bottom with his grinning ass’s head, and the little green-clad puck. To complete the effect of unreality, underneath is a sleeper in Elizabethan dress, dreaming them all.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: with Oberon declaiming in lust-hardened scorn: “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.”

It’s just a 15 cent comic book, the same size and shape as any Batman, Mighty Thor or Archie. But the language is straight from the Shake. And it’s tucked into the drugstore spinner-rack with other, equally mysterious stories: Melville’s Typee (luscious south sea maidens wearing skimpy sarongs, tattooed warriors, ominous tiki idols), Treasure Island (secret maps, tricorn hats, bellowing one-legged buccaneers), and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (complete with flame-headed angels sweeping beautiful little girls off to heaven).

Buzzing fairies and mist-haunted lovers, Robin Goodfellow, the puck, flying on a bee, under a fat, glowing moon, looking more like a wicked winged Cub Scout than an emissary from the dark regions. Golden Titania glides, in her long luminous gown, with the moon around her head as a midnight halo. Another grand panel shows her and donkey-headed lover Nick Bottom. Five fairies hover above them, bowing in midair. “Hail mortal!” one proclaims. “Hail. Hail. Hail,” the others chime in.

“Hail mortal!” - the denizens of the nightworld paying homage to a moon-addled man-beast.

At the end of the play comes the duke’s pronouncement. “The iron tongue of Midnight hath told twelve.” Then he commands the three loving couples to the best bride bed, to mate and create, to breed fortunate issue free from harelip, mole, scar or any prodigious mark.

A smirking puck appears with a besom to sweep away the cobwebs of dream.

And the sleeper wakes.

Dagon is for Lovers

2010-02-03T22:43:00.001-08:00

H.P. Lovecraft, The Prophet of Providence, knew more than he allowed himself to believe. He worshipped, with his mind, the cold glittering sky. But with his heart, he paid groveling obeisance to the sea.

His claim was to be the pure psychic spokeshuman for transvoid transcendence. Yet, what else could have produced his vision of oceanic slime-frenzy, the glistening bastard fish-things flopping out of the New England surf, but abject dagonic lust?

Yes, he knew, he knew and he loved. He saw, in foetid dreams, Dagon, the national god of the Philistines, “the people of the sea, who were uncircumcised, for which they were despised.” He did the sacerdotal hand-job, stink-finger of juddering joy, and his pineal slime-vein throbbed in his skull like a psychic hemorrhoid at 20 Gs while the parade of scaled sea-spawn, all gills and gasping gizzards, marched out of the waves.

Lovecraft had the science, the starry wisdom. He knew, he saw, but his love dare not speak its own name. He could not allow himself to truly believe and thus he had to wither away with his diet of crumbly cheddar cheese and cold canned beans. He had to die a wretched death of lonely colon cancer.

The tragedy is this: if he had allowed the baleful truth of the Philistine Phrenzy, the oozing eros-gnosis to sweep over his head, hot as chowder, slick as creamed tuna on overcooked egg noodles, if he had but laid aside his sterile astro-ideology and said a big fat “Yes!” to the Soft, Wet, and Wiggly Wonder, then he might have lived forever among the stars he so loved.

For what are Cthulhu and Dagon but great vulvate deities in drag? A quivering rugose cone indeed, leaving behind a odiferous slime trail that drives men to gibbering madness? What is fish but sealed-up female and what is female but bifurcated fish?

If he had bowed down in the ancient Philistine temple-midden, bowed down to the liver-lipped sea-stench monstrosity, then he would have been raised up, up to the realms of celestial glory and love.

Ran, Ocean Goddess

2010-02-03T22:42:00.002-08:00

Norsemen against the sea: caked white with salt rime and crusts of northern spray, frozen into crackling coats of armor, driving their Viking longships, their nameless U-boats, their arcane dirigible sky-machines against darkness, against Ran, who rules the regions of watery sleep.

Ran, Teutonic goddess whose name means theft, Ran, sleek with oceanic shadows, swings her net skyward and hauls down, drowns the intruders from the regions of the sun, capturing paltry human treasures.

Iron decays in the halls of rust. Woods crumbles in the beds of rot. Sails shred and scatter. Keels crumple like ribbon. Brass cannon and human bones tumble in the subaqueous murkland deeps. Gold, here, is mere glittering gravel. Pharmaceutical white gold dissolves instantly like salt or snowflakes.

Ran wears a fringe of shimmering kelp and phantom plankton sheathes more precious than any silks. She breathes black swirls of tentacle ink. Jewels are trash compared to her living beads of sea foam. Platinum is no better than coal, soft and useless where no sunlight can make it shine. Uranium ore - unrefined - has barely a glow.

Heavy water congeals around the goddess as a luminous cape, bending gravity. When Ran reaches from the waves, trammels man, tangles science, when Ran steals the living from the sun, she needs no temptress siren song or golden Lorelei locks. Her hair, a black glimmering swirl, makes men bone-weak with desire. She merely reaches out a naked arm and drags Northmen to her breast with strong beautiful hands.

In her realm, there is no line between sky and sea. Water evaporates and rises. Water condenses and falls as freezing rain, coating the bomb-heavy zeppelins with glittering armor, burdening them with tons of sky-ice, dragging them downward to Ran’s arms, drowning in hydrogen flames and North Sea shadow tide.

Nazis and Cowboys

2010-02-03T22:42:00.001-08:00

“I have ordered,” Adolf Hitler declared, “every officer to carry with him Karl May’s books about fighting Indians. That’s the way the Russians fight, hidden like Indians. Behind trees and bridges, they jump out for the kill.”

As chancellor, Hitler had a special shelf constructed in his library. In this place of honor he kept the complete works of Karl May, specially bound in vellum. These novels, by a German who never once set foot in the American west, detail in ponderous, endless pages, the exploits of Old Shatterhand: master marksman, paranoid, frontier fighter and relentless Indian-killer.

Old Shatterhand had a lust for butchering Indians, especially the vicious Ogellallah, whose foul shadow fell across a mythic Arizona, Texas and New Mexico. In May’s depiction, the Ogellallah are cunning, thievish, brutal, and filthy. Contrasted to them are the noble Apache, led by May’s other central figure, the noble-hearted chief, Winnetou.

Inspiring Hitler with dreams of western glory, Old Shatterhand continually proclaimed himself a superior being, shouting, “I am great! I am marvelous!” after every act of ritualized butchery. Unlike Hitler, though, he liked to quote the Bible in order to prove he had the God-given right to exterminate inferior races.

Even more than Wagner’s operas, May’s work “overwhelmed” the future fuehrer, shaping the way he viewed the world and his destiny in it. He was known, to his inner circle, to praise the American model of racial hygiene, noting the efficiency and single-mindedness of the wild west Indian killers. “I owe to Karl May,” Hitler openly admitted, “my first ideas of geography and the fact that he opened my eyes to the world.”

Alfalfa and the Dog of Death

2010-02-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

The gravestone in Hollywood Memorial Park reads: “Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer, 1927-1959.” Below the dates is a carved profile of Petey, Our Gang’s mascot pit bull, and two Masonic symbols: the draftsman’s compass and a scimitar.

Alfalfa made 61 Our Gang shorts between 1935 and 1941. With his idiot grin, preternatural whine and heavily waxed cowlick (to stand up under the lights) he was the hopeless hayseed lover boy.

One episode, “Harum Scarum,” featured Alfalfa as Valentino as the Sheik. Slashing the air with his cardboard sword, he fought to the death with Butch, to rescue slave-princess Darla. Spanky made a perfect Grand Eunuch, peeking through layers of gauzy muslin as Alfalfa crooned “I’m in the Mood for Love.”

But pimply-faced and gangly at fourteen, he was kicked out of Our Gang. After a few bit parts, he ended up as a bartender and then a hunting guide in northern California. Henry Fonda and Roy Rogers were his two most famous clients.

In 1954, in Track of the Cat, he played an ancient Apache with a mystical connection to the black panther which is stalking Robert Mitchum’s farm. His makeup is so heavy, he looks more like an effigy carved out of stale putty than a human being. He doesn’t speak, just shuffles like a bent-over mummy brought back from the dead.

Death came as a dog. He lost his hunting hound, and had to pay his neighbor, Bud Stiltz a 50 dollar reward to get it back. But after forking over the fifty bones, in a drunken rage, wearing his Shriner’s fez, Alfalfa stormed back into Bud’s cheap bungalow and demanded the money back. Bud refused. Alfalfa yelled and threatened, waving a buck knife like a scimitar.

Bud produced an automatic - U.S. Army surplus. Alfalfa attacked, the two men struggled and the gun went off. Alfalfa got it in the stomach and died within minutes.

At the trial, Bud broke down and wept, describing how he’d killed his buddy. The judge acquitted him, declaring the death “justifiable homicide.”

Hitler’s Dog

2010-02-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

In 1941, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s gray eminence, gave his fuehrer a shepherd bitch named Blondi. Hitler immediately took the dog to his heart, enjoying especially his time teaching Blondi tricks. Blondi traveled with the fuehrer wherever he went throughout the Reich, sleeping in his room and having an army sergeant, Tornow, detailed to take care of her at all times.

During the most dire military crises, Hitler would take breaks from his staff meetings to walk Blondi and put her through her tricks. Watching her climb a steep ladder gave him the most pleasure. When the dog performed well, the general staff could expect the fuehrer to be in a much better mood.

As the Reich was collapsing, the Russian army heading toward Berlin, Blondi went with Hitler to the bunker beneath the Chancellery garden.

Blondi by this time had been mated with another purebred shepherd and had a litter of five puppies, which lived in a special kennel in the bunker. One puppy, named Wolf, was Hitler’s favorite. No one was allowed to touch him and as the military situation grew more dismal, Hitler used the dog - stroking him and repeatedly murmuring his name - to calm himself.

But hysterically afraid of being captured by the Russians, Hitler planned his own suicide. As the end neared, Hitler heard that even Himmler had turned traitor, opening negotiations with the Allies.

The cyanide which Himmler’s S.S. had provided for the fuehrer’s suicide was now highly suspect. Thinking it was just a knockout drug - so that Hitler could be taken east and displayed in a cage in Moscow - he needed proof that the drug would work.

So Blondi performed one last act of service for the Reich. Sergeant Tornow and Hitler’s doctor took the dog into the bathroom. There they pried her jaws open and crammed a poison ampule down her throat. With pliers, the doctor squeezed, releasing the cyanide.

Hitler inspected Blondi to make sure she was dead. The cyanide was genuine, and highly effective.
Soon afterward, Sergeant Tornow was ordered to shoot the puppies, even Wolf.

Wish You Were Here

2009-09-17T17:28:00.001-07:00

Eyepop

2009-09-17T17:27:00.002-07:00

Communion

2009-09-17T17:27:00.001-07:00

Happy Holidays

2009-09-17T17:26:00.002-07:00

Hot Moist Lips

2009-09-17T17:26:00.001-07:00

Glad Tidings

2009-09-17T17:25:00.002-07:00

Meet the Girls

2009-09-17T17:25:00.001-07:00

Which For You?

2009-09-17T17:24:00.003-07:00

I Must Be Dead

2009-09-17T17:24:00.001-07:00

Bride

2009-09-17T07:18:00.001-07:00

Apes

2009-09-17T07:17:00.002-07:00

Lunar

2009-09-17T07:17:00.001-07:00

Swami

2009-09-17T07:16:00.001-07:00

Number One With a Bullet

2009-09-03T20:28:00.000-07:00

Introduction

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake declares that “as the sayings used in a nation mark its character, so the Proverbs of Hell show the nature of Infernal Wisdom better than any description of buildings or garments.” Likewise, the songs of a nation mark its character (or expose its secret longings, fears, desires and impulses) better than its monuments or memorials.

What the United States of America (as a collective entity) was listening to the day, the hour, the moment that the assassin’s bullet struck our 35th president says infinitely more about the event than any political analysis. Democrats and Republicans, Rebels and Yankees, Liberals and Conservatives: these are meaningless distinctions for the vast majority of us. But what does matter, what has a daily crucial impact on the lives of most Americans is the popular song: the soundtrack to which we live our lives.

Even the term “Top Forty Radio” is revealing. Why forty? Is this an echo of the forty days of Noah’s flood, the forty nights Christ spent in the desert, the forty thieves of legend, the Forty Immortals of the Academie Française?

NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET, then, is a disco-psychographical inquiry into the state of the American soul November 22, 1963. Most of the songs listed here were in the Top Forty the day John F. Kennedy acquired the most significant head wound in American history. A few entries (4,5,6,7,8,21) appeared on the event horizon of the American collective unconscious before or after the Dallas Apocalypse, but are included here because of their arcane connection to the assassination. The ordering of the psycho-discography may seem arbitrary, but like everything else connected the J.F.K.’s downfall, there is at work a cryptic logic, an ordering principle that can only be called an “irrational rationale.”

Bear in mind: Time (T) + Reason = Treason

1. “Wipeout” The Surfaris (Dot 16479)

“Wipeout”: to destroy, kill, annihilate, eradicate. Wipeout: to expunge forever (as in brainwashing and “psychic driving”). From July to November 1963, everywhere in America, unsuspecting citizens were subjected to this hysterical, repetitive, mind-numbing hymn to murder! Beginning with the cackle of a diseased mind, the “song” is built on pounding, incessant primitive jungle drumming, punctuated by crazed guitar stabs made all the more insane by overloaded spring reverb. How many hundreds of thousand of times did that fiendish voice shriek “wipeout!”? Why was our collective gray matter grasped, kneaded and remolded like spongy neural bread dough at precisely this time? Why was this mindless death-ditty repeated so many times? Did the assassin - alone in his dismal garret, stroking endlessly the barrel of his “gun,” repeating his instructions like a monk telling his beads - hear the trigger-phrase “wipeout!” again and again until he had no choice but to take his place and draw the sweating, damp, quivering finger against the hard tongue of the trigger? Did he sit with a tiny, white, earphone plug in his head hearing the soul-noise, the buzzing psycho-static of the American hive-mind, and finally wake from his sleep to fall deeper into the DREAM OF DEATH?

2. “Point Panic” The Surfaris (Dot 16502)

Released a week after the Terminal Experiment in Dallas, this single, though it didn’t do as well on the charts, is a veritable copy of entry #1 (“Wipeout”). It starts with the sound of an explosion (the aural equivalent of a bullet to the brain?), then the mysterious “leader” shouts “Point Panic!” and emits a crazed yodeling laugh. Immediately we return to wipeoutesque jungle tom-toms and spring-reverb-saturated guitar blasts. Forget about back-masking and other subliminal messages - all that hysteria is sheer red herring. You don’t need a secret decoder ring or a doctorate in disinfotainment to hear what’s right before your eyes: nameless, faceless, madmen shouting “Wipeout!” and “Point Panic!” How much more obvious can it get? Yet, it’s all the more insidious because the psychic skull-controllers hide in plain sight. You need no Freedom of Information Act request to listen to these recordings. You need no top secret clearances to look at the charts. NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET! It’s all there in black and white - though spattered with red.

3. “Dominique” The Singing Nun (Phillips 40152)

Is it possible, it is conceivable, that “coincidence” explains why on the day the only Roman Catholic president in the United States history was assassinated, on the very same day (November 22, 1963) when the Vatican II council in Rome voted on the liturgy schema, overturning a 1500 year tradition of Latin-language masses, at the top of the American popular music chart was the only song to reach number one recorded by a nun in French, singing the praises of Father Dominic, founder of the Dominican Order, which with the Inquisition as its private holy-horror crusade, severely, brutally, and fanatically suppressed all blasphemy and heresy?

Is it, we repeat, possible?

The day the Magic Bullet heard the song of lethal love and flew to its beloved’s bower, there to burrow furiously into the soft, moist, sexy brain tissue and erupt on the other side, TOTALLY UNSCATHED, the most popular song, in the most powerful country in the world, was “Dominque,” by the so-called Singing Nun. A chirping, repetitive, bouncy “folk song,” this #1 hit was one everyone’s lips (though not one in ten thousand knew what the words meant) and in everyone’s ears as the homicidal radio-controlled brain probe explored and exploded the presidential gray matter.

Having joined the Fishermont monastery in 1959 (the year that “Mack the Knife,” the only song about a brutal and sadistic assassin-pimp reached #1 in the U.S.) Jeanine Deckers was dubbed with the nom-de-nun Sister Luc-Gabrielle. She entertained her putatively virginal coreligionists with winsome folk stylings, accompanying herself on guitar. At Christmastime in 1961, she and two other nuns went to the Phillips recording studio in Brussels to see if they might wax certain of Luc-Gabrielle’s songs to give away as “gifts.” At the quick, noncommercial session, a Phillips executive heard the nun (accompanied by four other sisters) and was so impressed that he released thousands of copies of the song as by “Souer Sourire” (Sister Smile). In the U.S. the record was released as by the Singing Nun and the single, “Dominique,” went gold, eventually selling a million and a half copies. But disappointed with the celibate life, “Sister Smile” left the convent two years later, took back her old name and recorded “Glory Be to God For the Golden Pill,” the only song about birth control (and in direct defiance of Papal edict) to dent the charts. The Belgian government sued for $120,000 in back taxes, though she’d given all the proceeds for “Dominque” to her order. Twenty years later, she recorded an electro-disco version, but by then no one cared about a chirping, dissolute lesbian “boogie-oogie-oogie” ex-nun, no matter how hard she might try to shake her consecrated booty. With another reprobate erstwhile “bride of Christ,” Anne Pecher, she opened a center for brain-damaged tots in 1983. On March 21, 1985, she and her tribadist paramour staged a joint ritual “suicide;” they were found with their bellies full of pills and cheap liquor.

Popular music is the insidious secret soundtrack to which all our lives are choreographed. The number one hit single at any time is the song sung by the social soul. So then, is it thinkable that there’s no connection between the #1 hit song in America on November 22, 1963 and the death of J.F.K.? Is a brain-butchering pseudo-gleeful hymn of praise to Father Dominic significant? Though the song is winsome to the highest degree, the subject (real name: Domingo de Guzman) was the founder of the most vicious order in Roman Catholic history. The Inquisition was the Dominicans’ private enterprise, compete with murder, torture, theft and spiritual terrorism. Before he died, Dominic’s mother dreamed she’d give birth to a dog carrying a torch. It’s no coincidence that the Dominicans, as the Pope’s Secret Service, KGB and Gestapo rolled into one, were called Domini Cannes - the dogs of the Lord. Also known as the “Blackfriars,” Dominic’s order hunted down all blasphemous and heretical conspiracies and routed them out to utter and absolute annihilation. After St. Dominic, the most important figure in the order is St. Peter Martyr, who was so hated and feared as the Inquisitor General that he was assassinated. He is shown on sacred medallions with a perpetually bleeding head wound.

Succeeding him as the most loathed Dominicans are Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, whose Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch’s Hammer) is a manual for hunting down and destroying Satano-reprehensible forces. Revered for centuries as being almost divinely-inspired, the “Black Book” prescribed torture to elicit confessions and gave a hearty blessing for the strangling, burning, flaying and mutilating of suspected witches.

Dominus vobiscum.

4. “Strangers in the Night” Frank Sinatra (Reprise 0470)

Taken from the film, A Man Could Get Killed, (!) this song has been called a valentine to secret assassination conspirators. “It’s so exciting . . . it’s so inviting . . . wandering in the night . . . exchanging glances.” Is this not a blatant appeal to murderers and bloody psychopaths? Or is it a reference to a Satanic sex rite? And who better to cast the SPELL than the central figure in the entire mind-control apocalypse, the gin-soaked Antichrist of Las Vegas: Francis Albert Sinatra?

The first song ever to make it to Billboard’s #1 spot was “I’ll Never Smile Again” by the Tommy Dorsey band, with Frank Sinatra on vocals. As late as 1980, Sinatra was still a baleful presence on the popular radio: a longer span of influence on the charts than any other musician. He is the colossus that strides over American popular consciousness. He is what Elvis (the so-called King) only dreamed of being: singer, movie star, husband of the most beautiful woman in the world, TV star, friend and confidant of presidents and mafiosi alike. The Beatles lasted a mere eight years. Elvis died an ignominious death (of “drug-induced” heart attack, trying to move his leaden bowels while reading a book about the Shroud of Turin). Rock and roll, Sinatra declared, “is the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd, dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.” It is, in short, “a deplorable, rancid-smelling aphrodisiac.” Doobie, doobie, do, indeed.

5. “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-haa!” Napoleon XIV (Warner 5831)

Sharing the top of the charts with the previous entry, this “novelty” record makes a very strange complement to Sinatra’s “nice and easy” lethal smarm. An incessant drum beat, insane giggles, chortles, cackles and a sniggering chant about “men in white coats” and “the funny farm,” this is one of the few pop records to openly address the fact of “psychiatric” incarceration, the imprisonment of substandard souls.

The flipside (with the label printed in mirror-image and the song pressed to run backward) has a bizarre, pseudo-Russian feel to it: gritting guttural sounds, glottal stops, obscene fricatives and moist sibilants like the commands only half-remembered by a robotic hypno-patsy. Is this psychic leakage, the content of the collective unconscious oozing out like pus from a festering cultural head wound?

6. “Psychotic Reaction” The Count Five (Double Shot 104)

Just by “coincidence,” at the very same moment the mysterious Napoleon XIV was raving about his break with reality, the Count Five charted with this overt and obvious hymn to mental breakdown. It may be difficult to imagine a 4-decker aural sandwich of these pop radio skull-softeners (entries # 4 - 7) but this quartet of audio terror-induction stimulants could be heard endlessly repeated on the third anniversary of 11/22/63.

7. “Wipeout” The Surfaris (Dot 144)

In one of the rarest of top forty events, “Wipeout” returned to the charts exactly three years after it peaked, sharing the ether with two blatant cries from the schizophrenic heart of the American dream-zombie underworld and the Satano-miraculous hoodwinkery of Frank Sinatra.

8. “Witchcraft” Frank Sinatra (Capital 3859)

Though an obvious reference to a spell or “psychic driving” (see entry #11), “witchcraft” here is also significant because it was a featured part of Frank Sinatra junior’s stage act. Attempting to follow in his father’s footsteps, Frankie Jr. sang with the Dorsey band, staked his meager claim in the Las Vegas sands and made his sub-moronic movies. All were dismal failures. How awful it must be to wake up and think “I’m Frank Sinatra!” How much more wretched and horrific to wake and think - perhaps in the middle of the night, stinking of scotch and drenched in sour sweat - “I’m Frank Sinatra junior!” Abandoned by his father while still a toddler, young Frankie was never the honored or beloved child (see entry #15). Trying to BE his father by wearing the same tuxedo, telling the same moth-eaten jokes, singing the same worm-holed songs only resulted in a baffling case of kidnapping.

A mere two weeks after the Executive Action in Dealy Plaza, young Frankie was abducted by two gunmen and held for ransom. Calling in his debts, Frank Senior contacted Attorney General Robert Kennedy to demand that every available FBI man get on the case. Within days, the extremely inept kidnappers were captured, after releasing Frankie two miles from his home. A policeman found the young Spawn of Sinatra, and in a bizarre reversal of a gangland slaying, he got into the trunk of the car. Arriving at his home and greeted by his father, he said, “I’m sorry,” as though the whole affair had been HIS FAULT.

Years later, a rumor went around that the entire episode had been staged by Frankie to bolster a flagging career, While this hypothesis has been disproved, certain loose ends remain. Why, if they were offered a million dollars, did the kidnappers only take $240,000? (N.B.: this is EXACTLY twice the amount owed in back taxes by the Singing Nun.) Why did Don Rickles’ joke - “Do you know why the kidnappers let Junior go? Because they heard him humming in the trunk!” - go unpunished? And why was Frank’s only male heir snatched two weeks (2 x 120,000 = 240,000) after the Dallas Death Debacle?

9. “Experiment in Terror” The Champs (Challenge 9140)

This is a rock-and-rollified version of the theme from a movie about a psychotic killer (released in 1962). The Champs’ version did not chart, but coming soon after their big hits (“Tequila,” “Too Much Tequila,” and “Limbo Rock” - how low can you go? where do dead Catholic babies go?) it may be a hint as to what was rapidly approaching, the beast of the Las Vegas desert apocalypse arising from its rhinestone-encrusted tomb.

10. “Wham” Lonnie Mack (Fraternity 906)

Could this refer to the impact of the Magic Bullet on the sacrificial victim’s skull? Could this be the sound of brain tissue torn and exploded like a ripe musk melon crushed under the heel of a sadist’s hobnailed boot? Could this “Wham” be the incessant brutal pounding that the American public was subjected to previous to J.F.K.’s necro-exultation? Could this “short sharp shock” be the sound of our mental jail cell door slamming shut, trapping us forever in the nightmare from which we can not even dream of waking?

11. ‘Prisoner of Love” James Brown (King 5739)

In November of 1963, James Brown was playing at the Apollo, the absolute epicenter of Black entertainment. The November 1963 show also included Major Lance, Betty Harris, the Chiffons, the Starlighters and Pig Meat Markham, whose bizarre schizophrenic dance antics (“Truckin’”) were a great hit among those who’d lined up all the way along 121st Street and down Seventh Avenue, who’d paid their two dollars, to get into the great shrine of Black music. Markham’s major contribution to American pop culture was his “Here come De Judge” routine - seen by some as a parody of guilt and complicity, and by others as a call for final judgment.

But it was James Brown who was the #1 attraction in Harlem that murderous month. With his histrionic showmanship - rivers of sweat, religio-spastic trembling, doing the splits, the mashed potato, weird buglike pugilistic contortionist slides and shimmies - he was a man possessed. Again and again he’d reenact his own death and transfiguration: collapsing on the stage, being covered with a great cape by his emcee Danny Ray, then lunging up and doing one more and one more tune, the Hardest Working Man in the come-back-from-the-dead business.

What can we make of “Prisoner of Love” riding high in the charts as the country was seized by the bloody sex conjuration? And what is the “love” that keeps him imprisoned?

Alone from night to night you’ll find me

too weak to break the chains that bind me

I need no shackles to remind me.

For one command I’ll stand and wait now

for one who’s master of my fate now

I can’t escape for it’s too late now.

Has there ever been a better description of a brain-controlled murder-zombie waiting for the “green light” from his secret hypno-master? Was James Brown admitting to the entire world that he’d been programmed to carry out the Terminal Deed? Perhaps the song he sang as the Fatal Day approached was a form of psychic leakage, the inner truth oozing out through the microwave electro-brainal mechanism of pop radio.

Notorious for his squeaky-clean drug-and-alcohol-free band, singing against “King Heroin,” he nonetheless became an abject slave to PCP in 1988. The rumors were that his thralldom to Angel Dust was cause by his “wife” Adrienne - who was indeed arrested numerous times for the use of the drug. But bear in mind that Brown and she MET THE POPE in 1987 and the next year he was a raving, gun-toting maniac. In September of 1988 he went on a rampage, storming into a building he owned, waving a pistol and a shotgun and accusing the people there of “using his private bathroom.” Police were summoned and seven cruisers were led on a multi-state high speed chase. Brown’s tires were shot out but he still keep going, speeding in the rims for another six miles. Pulled out of his truck, he started singing “Georgia” and doing the Good Foot Dance. Bob Patton, Brown’s tour manager, stated that Brown’s paranoia had “caused him to believe that the FBI, Secret Service and the Russians were after him.” This episode is likely a massive backflush or flashback from previous hidden memories. Garbled, yes. But largely true. Secret governmental agencies were truly “after him.” There was no way that a man with so powerful a “raw soul” could be kept in a state of quiescence forever. This “Prisoner of Love” had finally broken his psychic shackles.

In 1953, James Brown, a drug-using pretty thief, was arrested and imprisoned. Yet he obviously possessed a spark; he was a vessel for the psychic wind and fire. Some officials of a clandestine mind-control organization recognized his “famous flame” and took him from jail to a secret clinic to be “regrooved.” Released, he appeared on the music scene as a hugely powerful, mind-numbingly energetic “Soul Brother Number One.” But who, or what, could have had the resources and the MOTIVE for such ann undertaking?

In 1953, “coincidentally” the same year that the CIA’s MK ULTRA program was begun, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron conceived a mind-control technique he called “psychic driving.” Funded by the CIA, Cameron performed his “experiments in terror” at the Allen Memorial Institute, the psychiatric wing of McGill University in Montreal. His radical attempt to “repattern” his patients - eradicating their personalities and “regrooving” them - constitute the most massive assault on the human mind ever before performed. He used electroshock and chemically-induced sleep (Thorazine, Nembutal, Seconal and Veronal in a narco-depressive highball), sometimes keeping his subject unconscious for over a month. Then he’d employ sensory deprivation, LSD injections and the bombardment of patients with taped “do loop” messages. President of the American Psychiatric Association, and later first president of the World Psychiatric Association, Cameron was no mad doctor in the superstition-haunted backlands, but a well-respected, well-funded and well-protected employee of MK ULTRA. Suddenly and very unexpectedly, he retired from his position in 1964, mere months after the Kennedy head-rupture horror. Was his task accomplished? Had he served as the cerebral puppet-master, killing through the agency of his psycho-funk-zombie? Similarly suspicious, MK ULTRA was terminated in late 1963, only a few weeks after the “lone nut” cracked in Dallas.

A statement made my James Brown in a post-arrest interview perhaps can help us delve to a deeper truth. Raving about a trip he’d made to Graceland, Brown said he’d placed his hand on Elvis’ body. “With tears in my eyes, I said, ‘You rat, you left me.’ I know what they did to Elvis; now they’re doing the same to me. They always get the number one man.” Elsewhere, Brown said, “It was a tragedy to me. When Elvis died in 1977. I think I got a clue. But don’t blame the government. [! ! !] Disco hurt me in a lot of ways. I don’t hold a grudge. I rededicated myself to God. I’ve been the American dream.”

Dream indeed - a flaming soul sweltering in the “Sex Machine” fever, the vast hive-mind of the nation in a narco-epileptiform stupor. And perhaps - just perhaps - James Brown had managed to liberate himself, a mind once possessed but now free, rededicated to God. “As a performer,” Brown wrote in his autobiography, “I’ve had names like Mr. Dynamite, The ‘Please, Please Please’ man, the hardest working man in show business, Soul Brother Number One, and the minister of the New New Superheavy Funk. My full legal name is James Joe Brown Jr. I prefer to be called Mr. Brown. But of all the names I’ve been marked with, James Brown is probably the most mysterious. But originally my name wasn’t supposed to be James Brown at all. It should have been something else. I wasn’t supposed to be James. I wasn’t supposed to be Brown. And I wasn’t even supposed to be alive.” [! ! !]

As an agent of a great power, a pawn of the Cyclopean Dream Engine, as the living manifestation of American “soul,” James Brown is a psycho-assassination microwave avatar without equal. “The people own JAMES BROWN. That belongs to them. The minute they say ‘I’m James Brown’ and believe it, then it will be the end of James Brown. I’m James Brown.”

Were truer words ever spoken?

In the mid-1980s, his psychic programming was beginning to wear off; perhaps “disco hurt” him in a deeply unconscious way. So various agencies, his wife, and later even the Pope, were engaged o shut down the psychic truth leakage. Enslaving him with Angel Dust, these mind-murderers were hoping that he’d get himself into a shoot-out with police and be conveniently removed, killing two “free birds” with one “stone fox.”

“I have no drug problem,” he later said. “I have a problem that everyone else have. Everybody on drugs. What are we talking about? Cigarettes is drugs. Soda is drugs. Plants is drugs. Anything is drugs. They got drugstores. What are we talking about? Aspirin? Bufferin? What else? What’s PCP?”

Are these the words of an angel-dusted Bad Self or perhaps secretly-coded wisdom that only “Awakened Ones” can truly interpret and understand?

12. “Bust Out” The Busters (Arlen 735)

This instrumental starts out with insane, repetitive guitar hysteria-agogo. Then follows more three-chord madness. A virtual copy of “Wipeout,” complete with jungle tom-toms and insidious spring-reverb guitar twangs, “Bust Out” is only one of dozens of instrumental cuts to dominate the charts in 1963. Though “Bust Out,” like the previous year’s “Penetration” (by the Pyramids) has no words, still it tells a story.

1963 was the watershed year, the time when the whole spirit-slaying roboto-submission apparatus had reached its terminal velocity. This was the year to BUST OUT of the old psychic patterns, to thrown off the constraints of decency and virtue and personal autonomy. If the president of the United States could be sacrificed in a ritual public killing, if the whole weight of Roman Catholic tradition could be overturned, if Frank Sinatra could rise like the Beast of the Apocalypse and cast vile conjurations on the nation, then what new radical transformation of the American soul would soon occur?

The answer: anything and everything!

13. “Out of Limits” The Marketts (Warner 5391)

A surferized version of the “Outer Limits” TV theme, This is one more example of the pop cult transmutation that was occurring in 1963. Beyond limits, beyond boundaries, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. As a program devoted to the bizarre, supernatural, alien or insane, “Outer Limits” was a perfect vehicle - made more bestial by surfer guitars and incessant tom-toms - for a further radical shift in consciousness.

14. “I’m Leaving It All Up to You” Dale and Grace (Montel 921)

Released the week of the presidential cranium discharge, this song is an open and shut case, an incontrovertible example of the long-distance mind-hoodoo hypothesis. Who is “I”? The assassin or the entirety of the American populace? And what exactly is he leaving up to whom? Is there a more obvious expression of the brain-controlled kill-slave’s state of mind than the title of this song? Let go, give up, surrender to the “voice,” abdicate all autonomy. Similar to “I Will Follow Him,” which reached #1 in April of 1963, entry #14 is a hymn to submission, a song of abject obedience.

And surely, no one will argue that it was a coincidence that Dale and Grace (why do these people have no last names?) were in Dallas, were THREE BLOCKS AWAY from Dealy Plaza at the exact moment when Mr. Bullet went knocking on Miss Head-Wound’s front door. Touring with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars, Dale and Grace did a show on November 21 in the black magick necropolis sometimes called Dallas. The morning of the 22nd, Dick Clark, along with the mysterious Dale and Grace, Bobby Rydell (nee Ridarelli), and Bryan Hylan (the “Itsy Bitsy Teeni Weeni Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” boy) went to the front steps of their hotel to watch JFK’s cortege turn onto Elm Street. They clapped and cheered. The cars went by and three blocks past them the lethal chicken came home to roost. Think of this - think hard! - Dick Clark, the perpetual vampire of Rock and Roll, never getting older, hugely successful but with NO DISCERNIBLE TALENT, was a mere three blocks away from Dealy Plaza when the last act of the sexy murder extravaganza was brought to a close. Now some might even go so far as to argue that Dick Clark is a kind of psychic energy parasite, sucking out the “youth” of American young people, that at the moment JFK was killed, Dick Clark stole his life force. JFK, the youngest and sexiest president in American history, who drove his adulterous “Magic Bullet” into more wanton wench-wounds than any other Prez, blasted to red-and-pink flinders a mere three blocks from Dick Clark, notorious for his Vampiric relationships with the young. Has anyone investigated his whereabouts during other nationally-televised ritual murders? Is it possible that he is not only the microwave Puppet Master(bator) but also the pornocratic symbiont who looms over the American landscape? Is, in short, Dick Clark a Papal Pay-Pal sex-and-death stooge?

15. “Something Stupid” Nancy and Frank Sinatra (Reprise 0561)

The only father-daughter team to ever have a #1 hit duet single was not surprisingly Frank and Nancy Sinatra. Going straight to the top of the charts in the so-called Summer of Love (1967), it was flanked by such hippie-dippie twaddle as “Penny Lane,” “Happy Together,” “The Happening,” and “Goovin’”. The pop music brain-pressure radio-controlled assassination cabal is at time so patently obvious! What could be more clever than “Something Stupid”? Mind-numbing, soul-degrading, thought-eradicating: the ultimate goal of popular music is to lower humans to the most base, servile, groveling state in order to best control them. So it’s obvious that when the absolute King of popular music, the “Chairman of the Board” and his bikini-clad boots-are-made-for-walking crypto-incestuous daughter performs a mass media sex-magick rite before millions of listeners, its goal must be a cultural-alchemical transmogrification.

16. “Pipeline” The Chantay’s (dot 16440)

The last so-called surf instrumental to consider, “Pipeline,” with its throbbing, demoniac bass ands crashing wave sound effects, is another in the long line of covert KILL-MESSAGES. Pipeline: connection or secret message. Pipeline: lay down and close your eyes. Pipeline: a conduit for brain-pressure thought-assault long distance electro-trephination commands.

17. “My Way” Frank Sinatra (Reprise 0817)

“Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew,” Sinatra croons on his all-time biggest hit. Knew what? The obvious, the ridiculously unbelievably self-evident fact that Frank Sinatra is the living manifestation of infernal ego, the raging hell-furnace of self-infatuation, the diabolical Devil-head incarnate.

Note well: S-I-N-A-T-R-A = I R (are) SATAN!

It doesn’t take a code-cracking genius to figure that one out.

“My way or no way” was his motto. Yet he was a pawn, a puppet, a bum-boy of Mafia thugs. Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Paulie Flip, Moe Dalitz, Willie Moretti, Joe “Fish” Fishetti, Carlo Gambino were his patrons and idols.

In the late 1950s, Sinatra was friend and confidant, pimp and procurer, whoring-and-drinking buddy to then-senator John F. Kennedy. Introducing the wide-eyed Massachusetts fancy-boy to Hollywood bimbos and La Cosa Nostra thugs, Sinatra forged a link that was not even broken by the Dealy Plaza head-squirt. Creating his own “mob” - imitating his Mafia heroes with guns, sharkskin suits, snapbrim hats, tough guy lingo (God was “the Big G,” women were “broads,” “Bird” was their term for penis) - Sinatra played at being a ruthless goon. And Kennedy, before his ascension, was fascinated by Sinatra’s “clan.” As absolute leader of the Rat Pack, Sinatra was addressed as “the General,” “El Dago,” and “The Pope.” (nota bene! !)

It is his relationship with Sam “Momo” Giancanna - head of the Chicago mob, assassinated in 1975 - that concerns us most here. There existed a bizarre sexual linkage between Sinatra, Kennedy and Giancanna (who bragged with good reason that that he’d gotten the Boston Brahmin elected). Judith Campbell Exner was the sexual “pipeline” or partner of all three men, in fact ferrying their seed back and forth from Chicago to Vegas to the White House, making calls on the presidential phone to the heir of Al Capone, mixing the germ plasm of the men to form a kind of psycho-sexual homunculus. This Sicilian love-voodoo in fact played a crucial role in the assassination, “marking” and “striking” the president, putting the black hand of death on him so that the Magic Bullet - fired from any spot on the globe - could fly-fly-fly and find its target.

“And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.”

On 11/22/63 Sinatra was on Stage 22 of the Warner Brothers’ lot, making Robin and the Seven Hoods with his Rat Pack buddies, when he found out that JFK had “bought the big casino.” Learning that Oswald had watched the film - in which Sinatra plays an insane assassin paid to kill the president - “The Pope” withdrew Suddenly from circulation. He also refused to allow the rerelease of of The Manchurian Candidate, a film he’d made the year before, dealing with a killer who is brainwashed to gun down a high-ranking politician. Supposedly this was matter of respect and deference for his dead whoring buddy, but its highly probable that the two films were too close to the truth.

So then this is inarguable: Frank Sinatra was the Anti-Pope and JFK his wayward disciple. Sam Momo contrived to have a Crypto-Papal sex slave transporting presidential semen to be voodooized by a Black hand Mal Occhio practitioner. The mother of “El Dago,” (“Hat Pin” Dolly Sinatra), a convicted abortionist with years of experience in gynecological conjuring, prayed to some arcane Papist sex-idol to create the La Cosa Nostra assassination-golem, uniting the seed of the Blue Blood Catholic aristocrat and the Red-handed Roman Catholic kill-gangster.

18. “My Way” Sid Vicious (Sacam 740509)

Having murdered his sex partner, Nancy (!) Spungeon, Sid Vicious was arrested on October 12, 1978. Released from detox (or reprograming?) on February 2, 1979, he was immediately plied with strange drugs by strangers. Thirteen hours after his release, he was dead, supposedly of a heroin overdoes. His recording of Sinatra’s signature song, “My Way,” is a perfect doppelganger to the unctuous, martini-soaked smarm of Frank’s version. Alternately braying like a drunken Cockney thug and bellowing in a semi-retarded lounge crooner voice, Sid on this recording interpolates certain of his own lyrics: “I’m not a queer,” “what is a brat, what has he got, when he wears hats and he can not say the things he truly feels?” and “Today I killed the cat.” Coming 14 years after the Terminal Experiment in Dallas, this is more a distant echo, a dying cry, than hard evidence of real conspiracy. But more than one person who defied Frank Sinatra died an early and painful death. Perhaps “El Dago” saw a dim reflection of himself in the swaggering, crotch-grabbing, brawling, vomit-and-drool-crusted punk imbecile. Perhaps the truth of Sid’s declaration, “Today I killed the cat,” was too much. Keep in mind that in Rat Pack lingo “cat” meant “man.” Perhaps “I killed the cat” is a bold-faced admission of homicidal guilt.

19. “Louie Louie” The Kingsmen (Wand 143)

Who is the “KIng” in “Kingsmen”? Elvis? James Brown? JFK? Frank Sinatra? The Pope?

Though recorded by dozens of other performers, “Louie Louie” is most closely associated with the Kingsmen. It was their version which became the “hit.” By September of 1963 it was on the Billboard chart, heading upward like a V-2 vengeance rocket. A rumor that the recording contained “dirty” lyrics gave extra thrust to the song’s trajectory. Public outcry, curious teenagers, an investigation by the FCC and the FBI (ask yourself: when was the last time the FBI investigated a three-minute slice of pop pabulum?) pushed sales into the stratosphere. It was only kept out of the #1 position by “Dominique,” eventually selling 8 million copies. Everyone in America was listening closely, trying to decode the secret meaning, to unravel the sexual mystery as the song rocketed down toward the bulls-eye target in Dallas. To call this coincidence - that the day JFK was killed by an insidious Papal-Gangster-American-Bandstand conspiracy a mysteriously incoherent piece of pop obscenity and a freak French hymn to the inquisitionary monks were back to back on the charts - would be the same as saying it’s a coincidence that a song in praise of the leader of the Bavarian Illuminati sung in Platt-Deutsch would be number one when right behind was a hymn to brain-Satanist ritual murder accompanied by human thighbone trumpets and maracas made of the the skulls of unbaptized Limbo-babies.

“Louie Louie” indeed. Why the double name? Why the supposedly obscene lyrics which no one has ever found? Why the fact that the lead singer immediately quit the band after the song reached its apogee?

One line is most certainly clear however. Just before the dreaded guitar solo, the singer shouts out, “Okay! Let’s give it to him!” Who is the “him” and what are they going to “give”? It’s likely that the song was the final signal, the last psychic shove to the thought-controlled assassin. Hearing “let’s give it to him!” literally millions of times, could there be any other result than a shower of presidential gray matter and the total abjection of the American psyche? Could there be any other final consummation than every night in the dreams of America a godlike wind-up anatomically-correct John F. Kennedy assassination love-doll with swivel head and special lifelike impact-o-matic forensic action BLOWN TO SEXY SMITHEREENS?

20. “Surfin Bird” The Trashmen (Garret 4002)

Does it make any sense that as the final episode in the sex-magick spectacle was occurring that we WOULDN’T find a song blaring from a hundred thousand car speakers in praise of a dead president’s penis and blood-mad negro midnight assassins? “Papa ooh Mau Mau”: when we break down this seemingly incoherent song refrain, the truth could not be clearer. “Papa”: Daddy, the King, the Pope. And “Mau Mau”: notorious African machete assassins. “Bird’s the word”? What could this mean? In Sinatra’s parlance, “bird’ was penis. A traditional Rat Pack greeting was “how’s your bird?” So, on the charts with other songs of praise to insane violence and psychic brain submission we have a bizarre chanted invocation of the uber penis, the sex-occult male member (what else could the Magic Bullet be but a juvenile phallic phantasy?) The Mau Maus traditionally used a machete to hack the brains of their victims. And only a few notches from #1 on the day of the Great Cerebral Catastrophe we find a thrumming, mind-numbing gospel-cretin shout, the word “DEATH” made flesh.

21. “That’s Life” Frank Sinatra (Reprise 0531)

Yes, it WAS life. They had created the ultimate in blasphemo-abomination. the Papal-Mafiosi-CIA camorra had managed to finally (by the agency of black mass spermatic novenas) to usher in the End Time Horror. With reference to being “shot down,” with obvious statements such as “some people get their kicks stomping on a dream.” “I’ve been a puppet [ ! ! ! ], a pawn and a king,” and “I’m going to roll myself up in a ball and die,” there is little doubt this song refers directly to the final Sicilian hoodoo rubout seizure.

“Psychic driving” and the endless costly search for a real Manchurian Candidate had proven fruitless - a 10 million dollar dead-end. So at last, the high tech Black Friars went back to a deeper, more ancient and eldritch art: the creation of a biological murder-slave simulacrum. Using her Borgia-style seed-spell, Hatpin Dolly Sinatra conjured up a sex-magick death homunculus to enact world-shattering ritualized DOOM in Dealy Plaza. It is said in legend that where a dead man is hanged - where his ejaculate falls - there grows a Magic Mandrake. So the last act in fact was played out before millions of viewers: JFK’s brain spattered like an overripe jack-o-lantern. The pulp, the rind, the oozing orange slime, the SEED, the whole thing was captured and replayed endlessly in Zapruder home movie disinfotainment footage. The true and complete film was confiscated by Dominican Gestapo “Dogs of God,” spirited back to the Vatican’s deepest catacomb vault where it was SHOWN BACKWARD (!) in a kind of cinematic black mass: all the gore and blood and ichor miraculously reassembled again and again to form a perfect smiling Kennedy love-head.

And to this day it is looped endlessly in the dismal, smoky Vatican caverns: Halloween murder rite 365 days of the year. The head-of-state gathers itself from the ground, sucked upward by inverse gravity to form a Mandragora Antichrist secret headwound Death and Transfiguration blasphemy idol!

And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, we can do to stop it.

Maps of Meat

2009-09-03T20:26:00.000-07:00

Or perhaps my obsession with meat comes from how good it looks. I don’t mean the real thing. I mean paintings, photos, schematic drawings. As a kid I collected, and I must confess, to this day, I still collect, pictures of meat. Colors I’ve never seen in the real world lurk in ancient cookbooks. Glistening strips and gleaming circles. Crown roast, butterfly chops, riblets, standing rump, sirloin, shank and spareribs.

One picture I cut neatly from an old National Geographic shows in all its crimson glory, a whale being flensed by five eskimos in black rubber pants. The blubber come away from the carcass like greasy cinder blocks. Or tombstones from a mine slippery with blood. I even have a photo showing two hands full of ground meat. One is dogfood, the other a high grade of hamburger. Can I tell the difference? By sight, of course not. That’s the whole point of the ad.

Especially charming are those charts that show all the different cuts, lines superimposed on the cow or pig as though it were a continent divvied up by imperial powers. “I claim this brisket for the King of England!”

More to the point, these drawings look like road maps. “Just head past the Boston butt and take a left at the boneless triangle.” The word “tenderloin,” describing one of Manhattan’s neighborhoods, combined geography and butchering science in a way I found impossible to ignore. Cape Cod: an arm. Michigan: a hand. Long island: a fish. And what of the islets of Langerhans, the mysterious protein archipelago hidden deep in the human pancreas?

Meat and geography, protein and place: the link between these became even more fraught for me after getting a call from my nephew Kurt a few years back.

“People are smuggling meat out of the country.” The message came as a whisper, from four hundred miles away. The words sounded like something I might have heard at a seance. Even though the voice came from my phone, not out of the mystic ether, I felt a little ectoplasmic shiver run up my spine. “Ham. Roast beef. Salami.” A long pause. “And olive loaf.”

Kurt was working baggage security at a major airport in the northeast. He told me that people were getting on airplanes with their luggage full of meat. Rolling pop-up handle suitcases, day-glo seventies-era American Touristers, flimsy plaid valises with tattered plastic piping around the edges. Even makeup cases and vinyl bowling bags. Any kind of luggage. And it was full of meat, cooked and uncooked. Carryon carrion.

Bear in kind that this same nephew Kurt, as a three year old, had sat on my lap one Christmas making stabbing and gouging motions at my chest. When I’d asked what he was doing, he’d told me he was making a hole for the squirrels to get through. Twenty years later, Kurt had married a nice girl he met while playing hockey (yes, she has all of her teeth), and was working as a suitcase checker in America’s never ending war against terrorists and the illicit luncheon meat trade.

Perhaps “smuggling” isn’t accurate in its exact legal sense. Other than the embarrassment of being caught with a bag full of baloney, there’s no reason to hide the strange meat traffic. It of course annoys other waiting passengers. It certainly slows the line down when a cache of liverwurst is uncovered. And on occasion it can smell pretty bad. But apparently they’re not breaking any American laws.

“They’re taking meat out of the country. To small islands in the Caribbean. And Cape Verde.” I had to look that up. It’s off the coast of Africa.

Kurt’s voice was low, hushed even, as though he was afraid of being overheard. “Some of them are wearing five suit coats, six hats. I think it’s to make more room in their luggage.”

He told me that his colleagues had warned him about the “multi-hatted people,” when he started working the international flights. “The hats tend to be derbies, stacked one on top of the other. When you see a little tower of derbies, you know it’s time to get ready for some meat.”

Of course the big question is, “what kind of meat are they carrying?”

“Mostly from the deli. Packaged stuff. Unsliced hams, salami, boloney, pastrami. Some of it is wrapped in newspaper. Very leaky.”

When he sees a man coming toward him with six derbies stacked on his head, Kurt knows he’s in for trouble. “Nobody likes to open a bag full of meat.”

But why smuggle meat?

Was the on-flight food so bad that these mysterious travelers needed to bring a snack, a big snack, a very savory high protein snack, with them on the trip back home? Did slabs of processed pork have serious value on the black market? I’d heard of people smuggling blue jeans into the U.S.S.R. because of their amazingly high resale value. But Genoa salami? Or perhaps it had some ritual purpose. Many of the people carrying meat were headed for Haiti. And Kurt did have a recent run-in with a woman carrying ritual implements back to the voodoo homeland. “She had a jar with a little stick in it. And when I opened the jar she freaked out and put a curse on me. She said I’d let all her spirits escape.” Could they be using pepperonis to conjure up the ancient divine forces?

Had I gotten a glimpse - I wondered now with even more dread - of an esoteric connection between spirit and flesh, gods and meats, sacrifice and sausage?

Ziggurat Lounge

2009-09-01T17:31:00.000-07:00

COME ON EVERYBODY - LET'S GIBBER!

VUVU

2009-09-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

BETTER THAN SPAM.
PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH.
DAY 3.

Mother of Meat

2009-09-01T17:04:00.001-07:00

The absolute pinnacle of childhood disgust was something called the Tuna Teezers, which my mother would create about once a year. Just writing the name gives me a shiver of deep spiritual nausea. It’s not only my stomach that’s turning as I write these words, but my soul too, something deep and eternal revolts against the thought of Tuna Teezers. They consisted of tuna fish with lots of shiny mayonaise slathered into hamburger buns with pickle relish and then baked in the oven until the whole thing took on the consistency of salty, septic squamous ur-goo, the bottommost pukadelic sea-food underslime. This stuff was so vile, my guts were so traumatized by the taste and mouthfeel that it actually made me hallucinate.

As a kid I never used pot, I didn’t drink liquor, sniff glue, or steal pills, though I do have very fond memories of digging through my mother’s purse and using her Benzedrine inhaler. A white plastic prod-wand with a hole in the end, the sour aromatic burn in my sinuses, the buzz of whatever secret ingredient these nasal invaders contained. Also, in the bathroom cabinet was ancient bottle of paragoric with a peeling drug store label. The crudely typed instructions declared that this tincture of morphine should be used only “For teething.”

I didn’t need to street drugs, because the badness of bad food would make my brain reel and my stomach churn and the vile visions come.

Other kids were sniffing model airplane cement and huffing rags soaked with gas. I was in the kitchen facing the wriggling pinkness of baloney, the burnt horror of hockeypuck burger, the turgid terror of the Tuna Teezer.

And I’m the only man I now who knows what his mother’s hands taste like. She was a dental hygienist, old school, and quit the day her boss required her to wear latex gloves. I’d go in after-hours, to get my teeth cleaned - about as invasive a process, and about as psycho-sexually raw as it gets. A grown man with his mother’s raw hands down his gullet. Pain, scraping, smalltalk, her breath and the taste of her hands: soap mostly, but the actual taste of skin. Lick your own hand - salty maybe, some perfume, the smell of your own flesh. Too damn personal. Now imagine you’re licking your own mother’s hands. It’s been years since she retired. But that taste will stay in my mind as long as I live.

Father of Meat

2009-09-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it was my father’s very fraught relationship with meat that scarred me, charred me, so deeply.

Clearly, meat was the most important item on the supper table when I was a kid. Not just because it was more expensive than Velveeta or Fruit Loops. No, there was something far more profound about the experience of ingesting cooked animal tissue than grains or vegetables

My father’s attitude toward food was full of kinks. I, unlike most members of the American middle class, know the taste of instant dried milk tinctured with Comet cleanser, as my father would make up his foamy brew in old gallon jugs that he’d scrubbed out far more thoroughly than he’d rinsed. This was a man who put his bowl of ice cream in front of the heat vents on the floor because “it was too cold,” and went outside to get snow to cool off his soup. This was a man who spoke more highly of “gravy bread” than of the finest sirloin steak he’d ever had. Two pieces of Wonder Bread soaked in yesterday’s pan-drippings were the foundation of the happiest memories of his childhood. And this was a man who spent much time and many dollars building a bomb shelter in our basement and then stocked it with exactly three cans of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup and one gallon of Comet-flavored drinking water.

For him, there was absolutely none of the communal joy around eating that I’ve seen since in so many Italian and Southern families. Food was for him, at best, a tainted pleasure. There was no sense of abundance, or even of sufficiency. This was a caveman world, stinking of charred meat and singed hair.

Though we ate suppers all together as a family, the kitchen table was never a place of union or pleasure. Any mention of the meat being tough always elicited his standard “it’s tougher where there isn’t any.” Any extended complaint got me his other kitchen table witicism. “If you don’t like what’s on your plate, you can go out in the front yard and eat grass.”

He squirreled away food, he claimed, so that we kids wouldn’t get into it. He hid opened pop bottles in the basement joists. We’d find them sometimes, the half-drunk contents totally flat. He hid candy and cookies too, as though we were enemies who’d get at his little troves of stale treats. How many times did he tell us of his uncle who hid cash in a cigar box in the exact place he hid food? Mice got into the money and tore it to shreds for a nest. The lesson of the story? I never gleaned anything from it beside a sense that the world was full of invisible dangers. If even mice could cause financial ruin, then how much more of a threat were other people?

The malign power of mice was also crucial to the only story I remember him telling about work.

He was a production and inventory supervisor at R.T. French company, purveyers of mustard to the middle class hotdog eating world. This was well before the age of computers, so many nights he’d bring home huge sheets of paper in his briefcase. The worm-like vein in the side of his head would throb as he computed the company’s need for so many tons of turmeric and so many railroad cars of paprika.

One of his jobs was to go out to the rail sidings and check in the incoming supplies. Thousands of pounds of mustard seed, tanker cars full of vinegar.

“There’s only one way to tell the difference between fennel seed and mouse turds,” he’d say. “They look exactly the same.” Then he’d pause, even though we’d heard the story a dozen times before. “You’ve got to bite into them.”

That was it. Work and food equalled biting mouse turds.

He believed that the burnt parts of meat somehow had more nutrition than the unburnt, as though carbonizing and searing out all juice somehow imbued meat with an almost supernatural quality. And the way he said the word “protein” still gives me a little shiver of dread and revulsion. “Pro - tee - in,” with the accent on the first syllable. “Eat your meat. You need your protein.”

He never said what I needed it for. Never once did I hear about growing up big and strong. “Protein” for him, was more like money - an abstraction, a substance both useless in itself and hugely important.

On more than one occasion, my father set the hair on his arm on fire just because he liked the smell. He’d wave a match over his forearm, take a furtive sniff, and a look of defiant enjoyment would flash across his face. None of us dared question this simple pleasure. For him, there was something almost supernatural about the smell of burnt protein. And to this day, every time I singe a bit of hair while cooking, or on purpose, I think of him.

He got up earlier than anyone else in the house and made his breakfast by the soft glow of the light on the back of the stove. The few times I was up at that time, and saw the scene, it felt mysterious, private, faintly embarrassing. Sometimes he’d be making fried boloney, poking the shrivelled rounds with a fork. He cut the rubbery outer circles, but still the boloney would curl up as it blackened. By the time he was done, it had all the charm of fried leper scabs. Looking back now, I think he did this in the early morning because the smell was so vile and didn’t want to hear our complaints. It was bad enough that turned up our noses at his chlorine-milk-grit mixtures, but to whine about charred meat, this was intolerable.

Meat on the table needed to be burnt and entirely consumed. But his own body too he subjected to a kind of cooking. Every year, he tanned himself in the sun’s radiation. And in the winter, sometimes, he got out the gooseneck U.V. lamp to cook his flesh. It was a strange little contraption, like an X-ray weapon from a spy novel. There were opaque goggles to wear while the radiation gave its healthy glow.

When teenage hormonal storms messed up my skin, he touted the advantages of U.V. rays to clear up acne. He claimed this had done him wonders when he was in high school. It might have. But it also killed him. All those summer days with no shirt on, all those endless laps in the pool with the sun beating down, gave him a healthy bronze glow. And when he forty-eight years old, he was diagnosed with skin cancer. Since then there’s been plenty of strong evidence that charred meat is carcinogenic. So the two things he thought most life-giving contributed to his death.

He became the living meat, cooked and self-consumed.

Links

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Autonomedia. Autonomous zone for arts radicals in both old and new media.
Flurb. A Webzine of Astonishing Tales.
OVO. New works in the public domain since 1982.

Contact the Zigguratic Lounge

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Thom Metzger
tmetzger@brockport.edu

Th. Metzger bio

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Th. Metzger has lived is entire life in the Burnt-over District of western York State.

He is the author of:

Books:

Big Gurl - Penguin 1989
Shock Totem - Penguin 1990
Drowning in Fire - Penguin 1992
This is Your Final Warning - Autonomedia 1992
Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla and the Electric Chair - Autonomedia 1996
The Birth of Heroin and the Demonization of the Dope Fiend - Breakout Books 1998
Select Strange and Sacred Sites: The Ziggurat Guide to Western New York - Autonomedia 2002

Short nonfiction:

“Transform and Rebel” Loompanics 1992
“Vicious Protoplasm: Eugenics and Modern Sex-War” Loompanics 1994
“Tobacco in Chains” Loompanics 1994
“Dr. Ripper: the Rise of Gynecological Surgery” Loompanics 1996
“This is Your Lobotomy” Loompanics 1997
“Who Put the Coke in Coca-Cola?” Loompanics 1998
“Masturbational Insanity” Loompanics 1999
“Destroy all Goo-Goos: America’s Forgotten War” Loompanics 1999
“The Satan Sellers” Loompanics 2001
“Seized by Meat” Flurb
“Masonic Dream Egnine” Flurb

Short Fiction:

“Black Wax” and “X-Axis Versus Jocko” Semiotexte USA 1987
“All Right, Everybody on the Floor” Semiotexte S.F. 1989
“Downbound Train” Air Fish 1993
“Dark, Dark, Disco Days” Snake Eyes 1993
”Severin Hedz” Shock Rock 1994
“Star Time” Proud Flesh 1994
“Pyre” Fear Itself 1995
“The Meat Specter” Ritual Sex 1996
“Juice Boy Bucktooth Orpha Toy” Shock Waves 1996
“The Fly Room” Love in Vein II 1996

He was a feature writer and columnist for City Newspaper (Rochester, NY) from 1999-2006.

He has sung with and played tenor sax, ontic trombone, trumpet, guitar and percussion in a number of bands, including:

Metzger, Landers, Seman
Health and Beauty
The Caution Dog Orchestra
The Fabulous Rectotem
The Badenovs

The Badenovs produced two CDs: Step on it Big Boy and Fearless Lieder, which feature the following songs written by Metzger:

“Who’s Been Raising the Dead Since I’ve Been Gone?”
“(It’s Time to) Party With Hitler’s Dog”
“Codeine and Corn Liquor”
“l’ll Never Eat Human Flesh Again”
“Dead Pope in the Road”
“Old Devil Spam”
“Stinkmeat Jubilee”
“I am the Other White Meat”
“High On Depression”
“Sweet Empire of Filth”