Searching For Tara Browne

Searching For Tara Browne:
The Testimony Of Laurie O’ Leary
by
R.E. Prindle

Tara Browne

O’ Leary, Laurie: Ronnie Kray: A Man Among Men, 2001, Headline Book Publishing

A key event in British rock and roll history was the death of Tara Browne on 12/18/66 in a car crash. The death was memorialized by the Beatles in their song A Day In The Life on the Sgt. Pepper’s album. This coincided with the Paul Is Dead rumor. It has been suggested, not very plausibly, that Paul McCartney died in the Browne crash and that after a little face lifting surgery Browne took his place in the band and subsequent career.

It has been said that on the night of the crash Paul challenged Tara to a race through the London streets that resulted in the crash. Rather thin story. Paul is supposed to have fled the scene of the accident. There is no doubt that there was an accident, and a spectacular one, and that presumably Browne died. I don’t think there can be much doubt that Tara Browne was the one who died but the accident does raise questions.

Browne along with the Beatles’ George Harrison was involved with the night club Sibylla’s that opened its doors on 6/26/66, six months previous to Tara’s demise. The club that attracted the cream of the rock world was extremely successful. The club was managed by Laurie O’ Leary. O’ Leary was already connected to the notorious Kray Twins having formerly managed aspects of the Krays’ West End gambling joint Esmeralda’s Barn. After Sibylla’s was closed to would move on the very important Speakeasy Club.

In his 2001 biography of Ronnie Kray, Laurie gives the most extended account of

Sibylla’s that I have come across. While it may not solve any problems with Browne’s death, in its account the book does put Sibylla’s into perspective.

Laurie O’ Leary grew up in the East End not too far from the Krays. He was friends with them from early childhood maintaining a close relationship with them all through the years until Ronnie Kray’s death in the Broadmoor Mental Hospital (insane asylum, loony bin) in 1995.

While a ‘business’ associate he claims never to have been a member of the Krays’ criminal outfit, The Firm. O’ Leary was careful never to have become involved in overt criminal activities, although there was criminal involvement, instead becoming involved in the music business from the promotion and management side. It is not impossible that he participated in the negotiations of the Krays with Brian Epstein to take over the Beatles. As one writing of sensitive matters it isn’t so much what O’ Leary says as what he doesn’t tell us; so while we learn a great deal O’ Leary carefully conceals leads to the whole story.

The Krays, for whose who are unfamiliar with them, were twin brothers, Ronnie and Reggie, who were acknowledged as the kingpins of the British underworld during the 1960s. Their older brother, Charlie Kray, while not part of their Firm, participated in schemes and benefited from the relationship. Charlie Kray too, not surprisingly, got into show business management.

Originally from the East End the Krays made an entrance into the West End of London when by dubious means they acquired a Kensington gambling joint called Esmeralda’s Barn. This was a building of three floors of which the top floor was occupied by the gambling joint while the first floor was made into a private club and the basement was what in the US would be called a bar. O’ Leary managed the lower two floors. The Kray’s were reluctant to pay their taxes thus an un-understanding Inland Revenue closed their doors. Enter Sibylla’s.

O’ Leary says of this stage of his career: p.168

Quote.

By this time I was managing the society club Sibylla’s for an elite group of directors that included Beatle George Harrison, Sir William Piggot-Brown, the top amateur jockey, and the evergreen disc jockey Alan (Fluff) Freeman.

The club attracted a high profile clientele, which was cleverly orchestrated by one of its directors Terry Howard who worked in advertising.

Unquote.

O’ Leary does not mention two other participants in the directorship Tara Browne and Kevin McDonald. These two are the only ones who figure in the commentary from the rock and roll side. Through O’ Leary, connected to both the Firm and the Charlie Kray Agency he contracted the talent for the club. We are beginning to see a closer connection between the rock scene and the Kray led underworld.

Now, you couldn’t run a club without ‘protection’ and the protection would have to have been provided by the Krays’ Firm as well as the talent by the Charlie Kray Agency and Kray associate O’ Leary.

Ronnie and Reggie Kray

Further, the location was on a Firm controlled street, flanked by gang controlled clubs. A question then would be, who selected the site and why? O’ Leary describes the location: pp 108-109

Quote:

Sibylla’s was a small restaurant discotheque situated in Mayfair’s Vine Street, a narrow, winding cobbled road suitable only for the width of one vehicle….

Entering from Regent Street, Vine Street already had three established night clubs. Al Burnet’s Stork Rooms was the most famous. Directly next door was the less famous but well-run Hirondelle. Both were used by the Twins. At the same time, a few doors along, was Bill Bentley’s Oyster Bar, which was frequented by many a celebrity….

On the other side from Bentley’s was a rather infamous clip joint called Pipistrello’s…

Just why the directors of Sibylla’s had chosen this site for their exclusive club was actually beyond belief. The other clubs were frequently used by London’s gangsters. This kind of passing trade would have been difficult to eliminate.

Unquote.

So, the high flying music trade was placed cheek by jowl with the London underworld. The whole directorship must have been high on drugs while feeling immune to any threat from the Kray gang. As I stated the club would have had to have been paying protection. Tara Browne already worked for and or was associated with a car dealership and the dealerships were all ‘protected’ by the Kray gang.

A month or so previous to Browne’s accident his friend and business associate Kevin McDonald fell to his death from a high building. Kevin was either carelessly walking the ledge, high enough to think he could fly, purposely jumped or was thrown to his death by unknown parties.

Concerning McDonald’s death O’ Leary says: p. 171

Quote:

Sadly after about three weeks, news drifted through that Kevin McDonald had died. I was told to keep quiet about the tragedy, and that the news would finish off Sibylla’s. Nobody ever explained to me just what had happened to Kevin, of whom I had grown very fond. It appeared that he had leapt off a roof in, I think, Chelsea or Fulham while under the influence of something or other.

Unquote.

O’ Leary doesn’t indicate who told him to keep quiet or who failed to tell him what happened but I think the influence is clear that it was the Krays. Laurie doesn’t even mention Tara Browne’s death.

Perhaps, or probably, McDonald objected to some demands from the Krays while feeling beyond any threats because of the popularity of the Beatles through Harrison so that he ignored his danger. I suspect the situation was the same with Tara Browne who probably had a cognitive disconnect because of his social status.

Another jump would have been highly suspicious so an auto accident was determined. Possibly it was meant to only scare Tara but resulted in his death. If McCartney was used to lure Browne into a race through the streets then it is possible to create a scenario resulting in the Paul Is Dead rumor but, at this point it would be pure speculation.

At any rate O’ Leary’s account makes clear the Krays, both twins and Charlie, underworld connection to Sibylla’s, McDonald and Browne. It opens an avenue to further speculation.

Sibylla’s Entrance from Sara’s blog,  Sara in picture.

A Review: A Prince Among Stones by Rupert Loewenstein

A Review: A Prince Among Stones by Rupert Loewenstein
by
Review by R.E. Prindle

Loewenstein, Prince Rupert: A Prince Among Stones: That Business With The Rolling Stones And Other Adventures, 2013, Bloomsbury

Some will rob you with a six gun,
Others use a fountain pen.
-Pretty Boy Floyd, The Outlaw

Now comes the very welcome autobiography of the Rolling Stones eminence gris, financial expert, Rupert Loewenstein, a moments surcease from the excesses of Spanish Tony Sanchez, Marianne Faithfull and Keith. A respite from biographers Christopher Anderson, Philip Norman, A.E. Hotchner and the other sexually obsessed writers. A pause in the hothouse atmosphere of Mick’s groovy sexual liaisons, temporary and otherwise. Rupert keeps his dick in his pants.

When in 1968 the Stones realized that the inexperience of their youthful years was cracking down to destroy their dreams, their hopes had been concealed and buried in truckloads of contracts and documents they couldn’t read and would never understand. Enter Rupert the investment banker from The Square Mile, well mannered and ‘with it’ in ways Rockers could ever understand much less emulate. But Mick tried.

Entangled by the youthful inexperience of their first manager seconded by his partner Eric Easton and outright robbed by fountain pen wielding Allen B. Klein, Mick Jagger turned to Rupert Loewenstein as a thirsting man in the Sahara desert. As despised rock and rollers Jagger was turned down by the lawyers and accountants he pleaded with to salvage the Stones situation.

Christopher Gibbs, friend of Bob Fraser, approached Rupert as an old Etonian and asked his help. Rupert considered and accepted.

After reading internet reviews of Rupert’s book the general consensus seems to be a general rejection. The fact that Rupert took the first sixty pages to explain his origins and give some background offended the majority of reviewers who expected him to begin with glowing accounts of Mick and Keith. As Rupert’s technique was to place himself in his environment, so markedly different from the rest of us, most reviewers interpreted his method as mere name dropping.

I enjoyed the pages and thought Rupert’s technique quite skillful. As his explication narrowed down to his first encounter with Mick as he stepped over his prone drugged out form at a party I became aware of who Rupert was and how he arrived at the crossroads of his life.

At that point he was an owner of the small merchant banking firm of Leopold Joseph & Sons, both Leopold and his sons having departed the firm. Here he had a comfortable, respectable life with, as future developments would show, an opportunity for substantial wealth. An enviable situation actually.

But Rupert, apparently, craved excitement, so for reasons that escape me he took on the task of rescuing the Stones. Did I say crazy? Closer to what I meant but had too much discretion to say. At the time Rupert accepted the mission the Stones were penniless all their money controlled by Klein; they had no means to pay Rupert anything including his expenses. As incredible as it may seem Rupert worked for not only nothing but at his own expense including many trips to New York and back for three long years until he could squeeze some money out of Allen Klein. I mean, what luck for the Stones, my jaw just dropped.

The Stones had thousands and thousands of documents and papers Rupert had to familiarize himself with and this is all boring, very intricate stuff. It took Rupert a couple years alone of study before he felt competent to confront the thug Klein; and then, eighteen years of legal squabbles ensued as Klein fought to hold his ill gotten gains.

In the meantime, as Rupert learned the complexities of the music business and touring he had to find ways to make the ongoing projects profitable. He succeeded in making the perennial money loser, touring, into a cash cow.

Rupert is always understated but his efforts for the Stones in a very corrupt business were astonishing. From being penniless Jagger now has several hundreds of millions of dollars.

While discussing these financial affairs Rupert is more than discreet. One has an idea of what he did for the Stones but nothing in the way of useful details. This was Rupert’s life that so far as I’m concerned he is certainly within his rights to discuss, even revealing, some more pertinent details in his dealings with Klein.

Mick, who can explain Mick, had the effrontery to chide Rupert for, in his eyes, revealing the Stones’ finances. Revealing the Stones’ finances! Who is Mick kidding? The Stones are an untraded public company. They have imposed themselves on their public, us, and what they do is our business. Our dollars have made them very wealthy men. We’re entitled to financial reports. Does Mick have any idea of what havoc he has caused to society and we members of the public, this member, by his reprehensible shenanigans?

Personally I think it astonishing that Rupert would have associated himself with a guy who would get up on forty foot inflatable dick in front of sixty thousand people a time and shout ‘Yahoo!’ What kind of guy would do that?

In many ways that was only the beginning of Stones’ offensiveness in the seventies. One has to understand the homosexual situation of the sixties and seventies in which Mick played a leading role. Hidden at the bottom of developments was the 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. The story involves a near societal mutation of thug violence. The film rights were immediately snapped up by a combine of David Bailey, Andrew Oldham and Andy Warhol.

The original plan was to star Mick as the protagonist Alex. The movie did not come together until 1971 but then under different owners although Warhol did make an earlier version. The book’s type of violence was part and parcel of Warhol’s Factory whose members apparently took the book’s protagonists, the Droods, as their model. That combined with their homosexuality.

Mick was close to both David Bailey, the fashion photographer who describes Mick and his mate, and Warhol. As the book was a sort of revolutionary text the movie was even more so. For those prone to violence the movie serves as a primer. Yobbos in action.

Andy Warhol was also working toward the homosexual revolution that succeeded in 1969 in the Christopher Street rebellion at the Stonewall Inn in New York City. Between the book and the Stonewall the lid was off unconscious violence and homosexuality. Alex of Clockwork Orange was portrayed as an androgynous character not unlike Mick.

Thus the 1970s songs and tours took on a violent homosexual character leaning heavily toward psychotic sado-masochism. Always pushing the envelope Mick over did it with his 1976 release Black And Blue. Black And Blue was a very sick record. Of course it was only part of a very sick period fueled by the homosexual revolution. Appearing in 1976, it was after a series of albums by the sado-masochistic Negro band The Ohio Players. The OP had released a series of objectionable record covers that caused no adverse reaction as they were Negroes. Their LPs Pleasure, Pain and Angel had covers more excessive than Black And Blue. Women were dominatrices, hung from chains, the Pleasure cover shows a woman stabbing a man in the spine during intercourse. This all passed without comment but Mick apparently didn’t realize that Negroes have a ticket to ride but White Boys don’t.

Unlike The Ohio Players the Stones didn’t have the rocks to put their picture of female torture and overt sado-masochism on the outside of the cover concealing it instead within the gate fold. Perhaps Mick was realizing his Clockwork Orange fantasy identity.

To add insult to injury the Stones compelled their label to erect a gigantic Billboard of the centerfold across from the Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard in LA. The outrage was instantaneous. The outrage was so intense that Mick and the Stones were compelled to back down. The billboard was taken down while the photo was removed from the inner cover replaced by a photo of the band.

One can only imagine the effect the incident had on Rupert and his fellow merchant bankers back in London. The repercussions at all levels were horrendous.

In fact Mick owes me for that one. At that time I was in the record business in Portland, Oregon, running a large six thousand square foot store. I had a huge presence on TV and radio through advertisements thus making me an ideal target for protests. Oddly devotees of porn like Lesbians decided to target my store. A committee in combat boots stormed into my store handing me an ultimatum to not only remove Black And Blue from my racks but a long list of record covers they thought demeaned women. Interestingly The Ohio Players several covers or any records by Negro groups for that matter were not on the list. No White person was going to criticize any Negro for anything. They had immunity. The Stones however where White, objectionable and fair game. As was I.

The Lesbos put their heads together to come up with a media event that they could exploit for maximum publicity. Andy always said that any publicity was good publicity but I beg to disagree with him. They conceived the notion that if they came into my store and slashed the covers of their two hundred objections that would make the paper, TV and radio. They were complicit with my employees. As the store was open till ten they chose a late hour to do their slashing. Well done, but beyond my notice until one of the Lesbos in my employ pointed the albums out to me several days later.

Of course, as I had no idea who did it, similar incidents were always happening, I pulled the damaged covers to be sent back to the manufacturers hoping that it wouldn’t happen again. There was no reason for me to complain to the police because as a record dealer I was outside the protection of the law, the police would have laughed at me. As the evil deed had received no response the Lesbos published their manifesto in their paper. Naturally enough I didn’t read lesbian publications so no response from me.

The gay crowd had their agents in the police department and the Daily Oregonian, the local rag. Unfortunately for the Lesbos as I didn’t advertise in the Oregonian it was forbidden to either mention myself or my store hence that venue was closed. Oddly enough the Lesbos used to police to try to stir me.

Now, I was in the record business. It was universally believed that every record store was dealing drugs. There were TV shows depicting it. Therefore it was believed that I was one of the biggest drug masterminds in the world. I was actually followed by police agents in London on vacation. As it happened I was there when they made a major marijuana bust so I was given attention as it was apparently thought I was there to supervise the operation. It was an interesting time. I hope I don’t have to tell you what a fantastically absurd suspicion this was. I mean, you know, it was believed that all you had to do was ask for a certain record and the clerk would slap a lid of grass on the counter for you. I mean, with a counter full of weed nothing would have been easier than a bust. But logic….

The cops had been irritants for some time so when I got a phone call saying that they wanted to help me, I say, What kind of setup is this? The sergeant or whatever begins insultingly saying that ordinarily the police didn’t care what my kind of people did to each other but this slashing of record covers was one toke over the line. Wow. It was exceptionable wasn’t it? What other things hadn’t they investigated that’s what I wanted to know but got no answer.

Quite honestly I’d dismissed the incident, didn’t remember it and thanks, but no thanks. The Lesbos were back to square one, no media event. Time passed as they revolved the situation in their drug addled minds.

Now, not only was the newspaper riddled with gays, as was my store by the way, but so was the no. 1 TV station in town on which I was a very heavy advertiser, both its radio and TV outlets. Homos and Lesbos ran the place. Time has now flown as Time will and we’re into 1977. More objectionable covers have appeared especially Ronnie Montrose’s first with the abstract painting that resembled perhaps a woman’s crotch but given the homosexual dominance of the industry by 1978 it could have been a man’s rear; the record was called Jump On It if I remember correctly. All the sexual double entendres used for decades, remember the tune Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box? Piano was meant, box being musical slang for piano as well as…(blush) you know. The Naughty Lady Of Shady Lane, for instance who was only three years old. You just have a dirty mind, that’s all.

I was known for touting the artistic merits of the covers so getting together with their sisters at K… it was determined to do a short news feature in which I was to be induced to speak out and then they would go for the Montrose cover and get me for porno. I had no objection to their filming in my store but not having been born yesterday I wasn’t going to be drawn into the trap. I refused to speak on camera so that blew the second attempt for a media event. On to take three.

What else? The Lesbos would stage a demonstration outside the store, placards and all. However they once again made some gross miscalculations. They did get the top DJ in town also at K… and also a homosexual to announce that the demonstration would take place at noon at my store. I heard it on the radio on my way to work and was grossly offended. But, you know, too bad wasn’t it?

It was true that because of my massive radio and TV presence through advertising, and I mean massive, I was the ideal target. However many if not most people considered the demonstration as a publicity stunt which I failed to grasp at the time so didn’t turn it to my advantage and ignored it. As it would have been free advertising none of the radio and TV stations would cover the demonstration and the Oregonian certainly ignored it.

Frustrated that no media attended their media event the Lesbos decided to invade my store. A screaming horde of combat booted demons rushed in climbing on record racks, waving their signs, and with them came all the thieves and shop lifters within range of the excitement. Oddly enough many shoppers considering the ruckus a stunt went calmly about their shopping.

It took the helpful police an hour to get there and two hours to restore order. Obviously no arrests were made by the ‘helpful’ police. As Dylan sang: The cops don’t need you and, man, they expect the same. I have no idea how much money the Lesbos cost me, but they owe along with Mick. Once they realized there would be no media event their interest subsided. By that time half of 1977 was shot.

The next time Mick says that songs don’t incite a revolution smile knowingly.

Whatever was happening to me passed unnoticed as I was out on the edge of nowhere. Except for this account of the story the incident has been unrecorded. I hope the Lesbos feel rewarded. But for Rupert his world was changed dramatically on February 27th of that same year, 1977. Keith was busted for intent to distribute heroin in Toronto. The bust was as close to absolute disaster as the Stones ever came. It must also have sent a shiver down Rupert’s spine as he realized how fragile a business the Stones were.

Rupert passes over this stuff casually with a little light hearted banter but the seriousness of this ‘media event’ causes him to issue a nearly audible sigh of resignation. Rupert had spent months lining up bids from every major label for when the recording contract with Atlantic expired.

Mick gave Rupert a call to tell him the disastrous news. You can almost feel the heartbreak as Rupert resigns himself to call each and every label to ask if the bust affected their offers. It did. All signed off but…Atlantic. Ertegun stayed in but Rupert’s bargaining power went into the vein, so to speak. The Stones were only worth what Ertegun would offer. Millions down the tube. Rupert doesn’t tell us what percentage he was working on but we can assume that Keith’s bust cost him plenty.

You don’t read the story that way in Keith’s auto; he may not even still have figured it out.

That was a very serious consequence for Rupert to which I am sure Keith has given no thought ever to the possible collateral damages caused by his actions. In his drugged out haze Keith was not even aware that Rupert could no longer justify his involvement with a bunch of yobbos like the Stones. In the first place anyone associated with Rock was socially unacceptable. I as a record store owner was persona non grata in my social arena. If Rupert had held on to his social status to this point I’m sure he found that certain invitations were no longer forthcoming. Indeed, his fellows at Leopold Joseph made him choose between them and the Stones. Rupert was forced to sell out.

One feels a sort of sinking feeling in his writing as he acknowledges that Keith had sabotaged the chances of both him and the Stones. One can only hope he came out with a couple hundred million otherwise he was woefully under compensated. Rock was a world he could never have understood.

Rupert saw the Stones as a business venture without any regard of the Stones’ relationship to the expectations of their fans. Thus when he negotiated more than substantial sums for the use of Stones’ songs in advertising that was a very good business decision but a potentially disastrous situation with the fan base who saw such financial arrangements as a complete betrayal of their anti-commercialism. Rupert was frustrated that the Stones had a hard time seeing it his way.

Besides he didn’t know who the Stones were or, seemingly so. The Stones were always a minority appeal band. When Andrew Oldham cast them as the ultimate yobbo band he was limiting their appeal to a certain segment of society. In the contemporary world where modern communications allow mind sets to come into contact and maintain communications not only locally but globally mind sets were able to blast their presence into a million or millions through communications. Thus though a small percentage of the overall global population even a perversion such as sado-masochism could appear in millions, seemingly a large connected body. Effects such as this is what Warhol was doing and through associates such as Jagger and David Bailey acting globally.

While the Stones may have sold a couple two or three million globally of their records, while substantial economically, it was not that significant culturally. Beyond the yobbo mentality the Stones had little appeal. The Black And Blue album did not expand their audience but constricted it.

Of course Mick moved the band beyond mere rock and roll by making the Stones the Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey circus of rock. The show was the thing. Rupert himself usually refers to Mick as a great showman. Faint praise indeed. But, once again even though the shows generated hundreds of millions it was to an already sympathetic or curious audience. Preaching to the converted so to speak.

I think that Rupert was originally blinded by the light of the Stones publicity not realizing that he wasn’t representing a universal phenomenon but a mere yobbo fragment of the population. The money was there however. I hope he valued his services accordingly.

The last half of the book meanders with very little useful information save that Rupert negotiated with unnamed buyers to sell the Stones lock, stock and barrel much as Halston sold his name, soul and product to a major corporation.

What Rupert’s motivation was except for a huge bundle of cash isn’t clear. Perhaps in some devious way he was seeking to avenge Keith’s betrayal and cause the Stone’s the pain they caused him. In any event the idea was too novel for Keith and Mick or they were two wary so the deal didn’t go down.

Perhaps there was big money in it for Rupert so that when he lost the opportunity he lost interest in the Stones. It was shortly after the deal folded that he retired severing his relationship with the group whose fortunes he had guided quite successfully for forty years.

Rupert never satisfactorily explained why he decided to abandon his respectable merchant banking career to take up a gypsy existence with the Stones. You may be sure that if I had the choice between owning a record store or being a merchant banker I would definitely have gone into banking. Anything really. You can always buy records.

The Sixties: A Comic Book Heaven

The Sixties: A Comic Book Heaven
by
R.E. Prindle

Of course, everyone is, and always has been, slightly mad. Still, repressing the unreasonable side of his nature man in the Western world has, since the eighteenth century, built a civilization based on scientific reason and classic Aristotelian logic- the heritage of the Enlightenment. And the result, especially in this country [US] during the past fifty years [article dated 1970], has been a rational society that has made one technological break through after another, from the invention of the pop-up toaster to the ability to land men on the moon. Here, until recently, two plus two had inevitably equaled four, not five, as Eastern mystics suggest, and no one other than J.D. Salinger had been able to imagine the sound of one hand clapping.

–Thomas Meehan- Horizon Magazine, Spring 1970.

Comic books were first sold in 1933-34. Thus the first two comic book generations coincide with those too young to serve in WWII while many of the first generation was obliged to serve in the Korean war while the second generation missed both.

How deeply the mind of the first generation of comic book readers was formed is problematical. Comic books didn’t take their classic form until 1938 when the character of Superman was formed. The number of comic characters proliferated during WWII but as these, i.e. Capt. America, were war specific they fell out of favor after WWII.

The first generation of potential comic book readers, those born from 1933-34 formed the substratum for the sixties when they created rock and roll and the base for 60s pop culture during the 50s. That was Presley, Sanford Clark, Cash, Vincent, Nelson et al.

Following the war those born in 1937-38 and subsequently through about 1943-44 had their minds formed by comic books although not all to the same degree. A significant percentage of them were forbidden to read comics by their parents, perhaps wisely. There were some who indulged themselves indiscriminately. I was one of those. I read them all, avidly. The question is how were we affected?

There was a terrific reaction against comic books. Angry parents fought to have them banned. In perhaps the only, certainly of a very few, successful efforts of censorship, comics were banned in 1954. The survivor, of course, was Mad Magazine published by the worst offender, William C. Gaines. All of the comic book readers plus many of those formerly excluded shifted to Mad thus further polluting our brains. While I never gave up reading the comic books till their banning I did abandon Mad for political reasons after a year or so.

Now, with the exception of Capt. Marvel, and that may only be partial, the comics were exclusively of Jewish origins. Thus we in the US, Britain was excluded, were shown the Jewish point of view without our knowing.

One of the key themes was the all male group of do-gooders. These were some of my favorites. The tops, perhaps, was the very influential Blackhawks comics. The Blackhawks were a group of five ex-WWII pilots who each owned his P-38 fighter and flew around the world, Third World mainly, if I remember correctly, righting wrongs they recognized more quickly and efficiently, that is vigilante style, than organized government could or would. I remember the Blackhawks as terrific, I loved them. The fellowship of the pilots, each with a different character, each loyal to the others was something that I and I suppose every reader wished to emulate, especially the notion of a bonded group of five like minded guys.

Another was called the Daredevil. He had a red and blue set of body tights upper right and lower left red and vice versa for the blue. Weird but that’s the way he was. Daredevil was a surrogate father figure to five orphan boys, same character makeup as the Blackhawks, who righted wrongs in their neighborhood and lived in the same clubhouse. The later musical group The Monkees was probably based on them. The Monkees were short one, being four, which lessened their impact. If they’d had that fifth member I would have been an avid fan although older by then.

Thus in 1954 the origins of Top 40 began on radio. Twenty four hours round the clock seven days a week full time music. An innovation created by the arrival of television. The first generation of rockers were solo artists. Some came attached with a band such Bill Haley And The Comets or Gene Vincent And The Blue Caps who were proto-Blackhawk type groups but mainly they were solo artists with a band not a group. Presley, Sanford Clark and that curious mixture of both, Ricky Nelson.

The societal maturation process was continuing and then in the mid-sixties the Charlatans came down from the hills of Virginia City dressed in movie style cowboy outfits to home base San Francisco and the first group of costumed crusaders a la the Blackhawks burst forth in full flower.

2.

In Britain the situation was somewhat different although coeval with the US. While the US escaped devastation in WWII the South of England was bombarded mercilessly destroying millions of buildings. A good representation of the situation may be found in John Boorman’s I suppose accurate, I wasn’t there, movie, The Hope And The Glory. As Boorman, who was there, portrays it, acres and acres of rubble stretched in every direction. The kids who scavenged and roamed the area are portrayed as little savages. An interesting education for the age cohort that came of age in the fifties.

Those born in the early forties, the core of the second generation of rockers, themselves played in this same although shrinking devastation. But rations were short in hard hit Britain, restrictions were not lifted until 1954. How their psychology was impaired isn’t so clear, although in the mid-sixties a wild party time called Swinging London appeared. Gay abandon one might say.

The group situation there may have been the result of the generation’s discovery of American slave music- Rhythm And Blues. R&B as a new entry to the British music scene met with resistance so that the devotees were possibly forced to form small groups who recognized each other, many wanting to play the music so they naturally formed groups, two guitars, drums, bass and a singer.

At any rate the British invasion of the US consisted of these four and five man groups coinciding with the comic book groups of the US.

3.

Other formative influences other than comics and radio were films and TV. Those all involved a specific point of view repeated ad nauseum or lessons from a know-it-all crusader cum super hero.

Of course we all grew up with Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry among others during the forties but with the fifties came the fantastic science fiction movies. One of the most important was The Day The Earth Stood Still with its famous characters Klaatu and Gort. The premise was preposterous but no one got it. Klaatu is an alien landing a saucer in the US. He is here to vet Earthlings to see if the they are ready to enter the intergalactic community in which peace reigns. Alas, Earthlings, you and me, are hopelessly primitively addicted to violence. Klaatu boards his saucer with a sign of benediction delivering a long sermon about shaping up and saying he’ll be back if we ever sort things out. Alright.

Movie after movie repeated the same message until today people actually believe that extra-terrestrials are all peaceful and Earth is the only rogue planet in the universe. Ask anyone. Flying Saucers were portrayed as hovering out there where the communications satellites would soon be. There they carefully studied mankind for any sign of the diminution of violence. Boy, I bet they think they’ve been wasting their time. Imagine circling Earth for seventy years waiting for indications of peacefulness. Obviously they’ve been sadly disappointed while being joined by the Negro Mother Wheel that appeared some time in the seventies to keep them company Hello, Earth calling Mother Wheel.

These movies established the idea that the whole universe except for Earth is highly developed and pacific along with the idea that Earthlings are worthless, hence most people accepted as fact we were being watched by superior beings and found wanting. We were inferior.

The movies established the notion that there were millions of inhabited worlds out there inhabited by superior beings who could travel billions of light years and get to home base in time for dinner. ‘Honey, I’m home.’

Now, at the same time, pulp magazines existed. Monthly editions of Amazing Stories, Astounding Tales and other poured out endless reams of the most astonishing stuff imaginable. Thus, all three, comics, pulps and movies, sci-fi and movies were rushing through our minds, forming expectations. Of course, the number of us who read sci-fi, almost as despised by parents as the comics, was small, but then as TV developed, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and Star Trek came along both of which mined the sci-fi stories of the fifties while spreading the notions throughout the entire population. This reduced the intellectual discrimination of the people whose minds were prepared to accept anything.

4.

These years of the fifties were very crowded with the most exciting new developments. TV was perhaps at the top of the list. Bear in mind that cable didn’t exist. There weren’t even three channels in most places including a major market like the San Francisco Bay Area. People didn’t think TV would be profitable. The channels didn’t even broadcast until noon and shut down at ten o’clock prime time. There was no 24/7 TV.

There wasn’t even enough original programming to fill a ten hour day so they ran old movies and almost anything anyone could think up. Arthur Godfrey’s show ran for hours every day.

One of those odd things they chose to fill time was a character called Crusader Rabbit. I don’t know how well remembered the Rabbit is today but he had a profound effect in forming the minds of the 60s generation. Crusader Rabbit was a distant relative of the Blackhawks. While they flew around the world able to determine who were the good guys and who the bad, Crusader Rabbit was a self-righteous little bastard of a vigilante squad who instilled certain little minds with his self-righteousness and made them think they should impose their vision of reality on the world by mounting ‘crusades.’ Hawkeye of the later TV series Mash combined Crusader Rabbit with the Blackhawks.

Now, all this was happening in a short six years from 1950 to 1956. In many ways this was a major intellectual/psychological revolution preceding those revolutions of the sixties.

Equally, if not more important, was what was happening in the classrooms of our schools.

5.

If an astonishing variety of educations was going on outside the classrooms what was going on inside was no less astonishing. I don’t know if everyone saw it the way I did but I had a tough time assimilating what I heard. Of course American superiority and the inferiority of Europeans was standard staple. At the same time we were warned to be humble as bearers of these great gifts and to share them with our inferiors who after all couldn’t help it that they weren’t born Americans. True enough I suppose.

And, because of the success of our own American revolution, barring any negative thoughts caused by the French and Bolshevik revolutions, we were taught, indeed, indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that revolution per se was good, indeed, a blessing. Ignoring whatever may have been going on in the world we were taught to revere the South American George Washington, Simon Bolivar, who flitted from country to country on the whole continent until he came to end of it in Venezuela tossing the Spanish aside like so much chaff. Viva Bolivar, hey? Well, Viva Zapata next.

Well, I came from the orphanage and I had a different idea of right and wrong. Heroes were much scarcer for me than for the kids from normal homes.

By the time we got to high school, 1953-56, teachers were preaching revolution, revolution, revolution full bore. Revolution was everywhere. Minute changes in processed breakfast cereals were described as revolutions. Crusader Rabbit was a revo. Who wasn’t?

The reverence for revolution continued in college too. Another four years of revo, rah, rah, rah followed in college which ended for my class in 1960. Portentous year, what? That was the year our limp President, John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corp. We were eager to share our wonderful achievement so recent college graduates with absolutely no knowledge of the world and inadequate educations sallied forth to tell the world how to do it right. OK? How’s that for arrogance?

Now, there were plenty of revolutions in progress in 1960 and all those graduates from say, 1954 to 1959, were primed for revo. Lived for it, breathed for it. They didn’t even have to be recruited; they went searching for it. Give us revolution, they screamed.

These were years of the magnificent march of progress too. Years of change and hope, revolutions one might say, in all areas of endeavor. The people born from 1938 to 1945 leaped in with both feet and arms flailing. The sixties belonged to us, it was a world that we would make ourselves.

The next age cohort born from ‘46-’53 would be instrumental in forming the seventies, the eighties going to the next age cohort. Of course these cohorts created nothing merely extending the ethic of the 60s’ cohort. The interesting thing is that there was a fairly complete break between us and The Greatest Generation as our fathers have been styled.

Those revolutionary minded teachers of our were mostly born c. 1890 so they were at the tail end of the post-Civil War corps, lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. Our fathers born somewhere around 1918 caught the Depression and WWII while witnessing the Korean War. We younger ones, in the US, avoided that while TV, Top 40 and other assorted wonders made us rather distinct, nothing alike in outlook. Our fathers didn’t really like, couldn’t trust us, and certainly were not going to accord us the dignity of adulthood and the authority that goes with it. So we grew distant from them not really thinking an awful lot of them or giving them our trust. Fuck, they couldn’t even deal with the Mafia.

Politically they kept control during the sixties while culturally and socially we managed affairs. As it was a new beginning of sorts the succeeding age cohorts respected us and what may be called our achievements, sex, drugs and rock and roll, but still maintaining that sense of breakfast cereal revo.

To make the break even sharper, in 1960 the real old guard headed by Eisenhower checked out and an Irish upstart son of a bootlegger, Jack Kennedy, leader of the Celtish Camelot and a guy who could twist the night away even with a bad back, attempted to lead the way.

His best wasn’t very good and he caught a piece of flying lead allowing that pale Texan reincarnation of FDR to see how badly he could muff it. He did a good job of muffing it too.

So, there we were on the brink of 1960 raring to show the world what we could do. Really revo the whole machine? We’ll see.

6.

The psychological background of the sixties as exhibited by the second rock generation from 1938 to 1945 is a major manifestation of an effort begun back in the WWII days. It is the realization of the theologico-metaphysical notion of what Sigmund Freud dubbed the Unconscious. As the quote opening this essay indicates the sixties was the undoing of the several hundred year effort to realize the conscious. We thought we’d seen enough of the unconscious to last much more than a millennium. As the effort was begun before the awareness of the nature of the Un or subconscious the effort was achieved as Mr. Meehan states by the repression of sub-conscious motives not their elimination.

Freud quickly discerned this and he understood the function of dreams that he called the ‘royal road to the unconscious.’ Thus the motto he appended to his volume The Interpretation Of Dreams published appropriately in 1900 is ‘Flectare si nequeo, Superos, Acheronta movebo.” which translated means ‘If I cannot deflect the will of heaven I shall move hell.’

Freud interpreting the conscious mind as heaven chose to deemphasize consciousness in favor of his vision of the unconscious that he interpreted as Hell. Thus, you will find almost nothing in Freudian psychology referring to the conscious mind while he enthrones his Unconscious as the moderator of the human mind. He actually believed that the Unconscious was an agency separate from the body. In theological terms it had a supernatural existence. Thus, he has negated consciousness, or Science, in favor of Religion. As he has rejected God or Heaven then it follows that he embraced Satan and Hell.

As the sixties progressed the generation abandoned consciousness embracing unconsciousness. Time Magazine proclaimed in 1966 ‘God Is Dead’ while Satanism came alive, indeed according to Ira Levin in his novel, Rosemary’s Baby, Satan’s son, Andy, was born in 1966 just as God died. Levin continued his story in 1999’s Son Of Rosemary. Interesting.

It is no coincidence that Freud was both a druggie and a homosexual. Now, the royal road to free the mind of consciousness or Heaven is an obsession with sex and the free indulgence of drugs especially Freud’s favorite, cocaine backed with a pounding jungle beat. Eh voila- the sixties.

Sex, drugs and the hypnotic jungle beat of Rock and Roll. The sex was facilitated by the introduction of the birth control pill and anti-biotics; the amusing Shel Silverstein sang of Penicillin Penny who always had VD. If the girls took the pill both they and their boys were freed from the fear of pregnancies while the ga-ga types had no fear of Venereal disease because the cure was quick and easy by a regimen of anti-biotic pills. Almost paradise here and now and on Earth. For less than a buck you could get a nice big piece of pie too.

Freud had achieved his goal; he had overturned Aryan society.

Freud essentially by fraud allowed us to indulge forbidden appetites and responsibility from forbidden acts, for after all as the conscious mind had no authority and the will of the unconscious was unresistible we had no responsibility for our acts- If it felt good, we did it, as the mantra was. Hence by 1966 we had Richard Speck killing all those nurses in Chicago and Charlie Whitman up his clock tower at UT blowing away his fellow students. Guns aren’t the problem; Freud is the problem.

Hell, Dick and Charlie just wanted to be free. Indeed, freedom in the freest of all societies became a problem to the generation.

Sally Banks in her Greenwich Village 1963, Chapter 5, appropriately titled, Dreaming Freedom, explains her views on what being free actually meant to her and a very large part of the age cohort. She is writing from New York City.

Quote:

In 1963 freedom was a vital political issue charged with artistic consequences for both the mainstream and avant-garde. Part of the avant-garde’s utopian vision was that liberty could be found within community. But, in fact, the very concept of freedom sets autonomy and the notion of individualism in conflict with the bondedness of community. For social life is a potent source of restraint [suppression of freedom], yet, paradoxically, total freedom would mean the humanly unrealizable (and unbearable) state of complete isolation. Thus there is a deep ambivalence in Western culture toward freedom and social life. The dream of community, itself, may be incompatible with the dream of freedom, a contradiction the avant-garde sought to discover.

The Sixties artists’ constructed an art that re-imagined daily life in terms of achieving both liberation and community. If such a situation proved illusory, in 1963 it seemed necessary- and it still seemed possible given the booming economic infrastructure- to find a model that would make these imaginings concrete.

Unquote.

Yes, people wanted total freedom- that is a disconnect from the reality of having to deal with unpleasant facts- free from all restraints including gravity and mostly free from themselves. The drugs seemed to serve as those releases. Under the influence people could imagine themselves as someone else who ‘really had their shit together‘, miracle men and women able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, move mountains with the wave of a hand, fly through the air like a host of angels but they inevitably came back down where if they were anywhere near a mirror they could watch their bodies disintegrate.

Freedom from reality has its price.

So, the sixties that began with such ‘High Hopes’ to realize ‘The Impossible Dream’ of Camelot began to crash in 1966 just as like a flash of lightning in the sky the realization of those dreams seemed to dawn. As Lewis Carroll said, be careful that your Snark is not a boojum, for you see….

7.
The Truth Is No Defense

The sixties, then, was when the impasse between the Scientific Method came into its latter day conflict with the Theologico-Metaphysical mindset. The T-M system is merely a mental state that not only does not require objective validation but positively rejects it in favor of subjectiveness; what Freud called inner wishful thinking.

While the sciences of sociology and anthropology and biology produced irrefutable, by logical methods, results that ran counter to the inner wishful T-M thinking, as there were no means to refute the scientific results the T-M people merely denied them and forced scientists to suppress their accurate but uncongenial truths.

To ensure that the truths were suppressed and remained suppressed the T-M partisans passed laws making it criminal to express these truths. These laws called ‘hate’ laws were then applied to any who spoke these truths. As the truths were undeniable T-M partisans corrupted the law, common sense, and, one might say, the will of God to declare in a court of law by the judges that ‘the truth is not a defense.’

The truth is not a defense! Think about it. Such a rule of law is the triumph of absolute criminality and ignorance. And this happened during the watch of an age cohort that claimed to love freedom and revolution. Well, it was a revolution, one that enslaves the mind.

Now, in a position to punish those who disagreed with them the beneficiaries of the T-M mentality were able to enshrine their will as the law of the land. As the law was no longer concerned with the judgment of facts as evidence but the religious beliefs of the T-Ms the US at that point turned into a theocracy. The religious left became an established religion running counter to the old dispensation of the Constitution in favor of something not yet codified and something not approved by the former electorate that now became passive and an ineffective annoyance to the new slave masters.

8.

The ruling social ethos in the US when the sixties dawned was the theory of the Melting Pot formulated by the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill c. 1900. According to that theory that had nearly the effect of a law all the disparate social elements forming the population of the US would fuse into one people of uniform American belief.

In 1960 or thereabouts the new theory of multi-culturalism was introduced which stated that each culture should have an autonomous existence. This was the dream, wishful thinking, of the wannabe Jewish Autonomous people. Nothing new, it was their age old dream. Thus the body politic of the US as a matter of principle was fractured into many warring cultures.

While the Melting Pot had always been a fantasy having no real existence in fact multi-culturalism was alive and real and exacerbated in 1965 when the immigration act was reformed allowing unlimited immigration to all the peoples of the world. And if they didn’t come willingly members of the T-M mentality went into the actual jungles of Africa, dragged the natives out, put them on a plane, free fare, and flew them to the US.

What can one say to such zaniness.

The whole notion of freedom advocated by the age cohort was thus negated. Dozens of laws were passed giving these ‘immigrants’ precedence over the rights of the native population, depriving the natives of equal rights. This is a true story. Incredible but true.

9.

And lastly, for this essay we come to the complete overturn of reason in favor of a comic book utopia and the installation of an age of inner wishful thinking caused by the introduction of drugs as a mass phenomenon.

Drugs in the sixties were nothing new. Drugs begin to show up in literature during the nineteenth century Romantic period. Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions Of An English Opium Eater is the first famous confession or novel on the topic. Opium was much used in Victorian England as an ingredient in Laudanum which was given to infants to make them stop crying.

Opium was further reduced to morphine and then heroin. Freud is famous as the promoter of the joys of cocaine, synthesized from the coca plant. As chemistry developed, synthetic chemical drugs such as amphetamine began making their appearance at the end of the century.

Drug labs were busy and soon creating drugs that attacked any area of the brain. LSD was discovered in 1938 and popularized after 1943. Drugs like Miltown and other tranquilizers began filling women’s purses after 1950. Pot and hash had been simmering below the Hot 100 for some time but moved up the charts after 1960. So the whole pharmacopeia was available as the decade began. New formulas would be discovered in the following decades as drugs became part of the entertainment industry.

Drugs of course suppress the conscious mind exposing the raw wiring of the user. They also lower resistance to hypnotic influence. Hypnosis is merely a heightened sensitivity to suggestion. A drugged out population can be swayed by propaganda as no other, which is merely suggestion by another name, in any direction. They can be swayed but you mist control the means to do so. The mass media was the means, namely TV, Movies and records, and it was in the control of Jews with their special agenda.

Thus Movies, TV and Records propagandized a pro Jewish revolution agenda along with its subordinate Negro revolution agenda.

It is strange how all trends worked to favor the Negro/Jewish agenda. Of course, Jews had been instrumental in breaking down Aryan resistance to Negro music. Jewish DJs such as Alan Freed and Cousin Brucie along with Jewish song writers such as the hugely influential Leiber and Stoller and Goffin-King led the assault.

The songs they wrote were performed by Negro artists. While the Jewish song writers were not so familiar with Aryan culture as is supposed it was enough to bridge the Aryan-Negro gap making the Negro performances potable while paving the way for Barry Gordy’s Motown label.

As of 1960 there was virtually no one who listened to or was familiar with Negro Blues. The Blues was brought forward by the British Invasion who apparently listened to that crap. I am always astonished by White Blues artists citing Robert Johnson as a source. There was nothing available by Robert Johnson until 1960 when CBS released its first collection that virtually no one bought. The second collection was released in ‘62 with the same result.

I first heard of Robert Johnson in 1968 when I owned a record store. Many people talked about the Blues but when I started a first rate Blues section the records remained untouched and unsold. I doubt that I ever had a Robert Johnson sale.

I was in a university town and when such Blues artists as Lightning Hopkins were brought to town the ‘séances’ were held in someone’s living room with maybe fifteen people attending, ten of which were girls worshipping blackness. Nevertheless White Blues was popularized by the British, spreading to American performers.

I should point out that White performers of the forties and early fifties such as the Singing Cowboy Gene Autry sang may Blues based songs. Autry’s song The Yellow Rose Of Texas that is of course about a Negro woman.

By decades end the cohort’s fascination with exaggerated notions of freedom and revolution had turned into drug addiction and violence. By the late sixties looney tunes like Bomber Billy Ayers and his female side kick Bernardine Dohrn with their Weatherman organization and the Jewish Defense League and its offshoot the Jewish Defense Organization were killing and bombing at will and furthermore they would get away with it. ‘Free as a bird and guilty as Hell.’ as Bomber Billy Ayers would put it.

So by the end of decade ending with the Caped Crusader, Mick Jagger, at Altamont a comic book vision of reality had triumphed over the real thing. Who can forget Mick Jagger mounted on a giant inflatable cock on stage before sixty thousand people. Now, there was a comic book fantasy. Two and two added up to any number you wanted.

Who Is Groovy Bob Fraser?

Who Is Groovy Bob Fraser?
by
R.E. Prindle

While writing my biographies of Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull it has become apparent that some persons seemingly peripheral are more central to the story than one may at first have thought. One of these is the art dealer, Robert Fraser or Groovy Bob as he was known.

However, behind the scenes underlying all the action are the two Kray Twins, Ronnie and Reggie. As with underworld figures in the US little is going to happen in which their presence is completely absent. Ronnie and Reggie were two Jewish homosexuals. They thus had as much protection as Jews can provide for their own. On the homosexual front the Krays were procurers of young boys for members of the above ground establishment, men prominent not only in government but in the music business.

At the same time the brothers owned, or possibly fronted, prominent gambling establishments, thus people like Fraser and Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein who gambled heavily losing large sums came under their influence or control. Robert Fraser and the Krays thus became intimately connected.

Now, what about Robert Fraser? Fraser is the link between many participants in the 60’s drama. He befriended Richards, Jagger and Faithfull. He was close to Paul McCartney of the Beatles, who is somewhat of a mysterious figure in the drama, as well as being familiar with their manager Brian Epstein among many others of the rock musicians. And then he was linked with artist/film maker, David Cammell as well as arch Satanist, Kenneth Anger, and the main American link to these people, Andy Warhol. He brought Tony Sanchez to the Stones as well as the rock community while Sanchez was his link to the Kray brothers. Fraser’s friend Chris Gibbs is a shadowy eminence grise of this situation. So far, I’ve gotten little other than he was and is an antiques dealer who helped establish the Bohemian tastes a la Oscar Wilde of the rockers.

Fraser himself came from a moneyed family who financed his ventures. He was a public school boy, Eton. He served in the African Rifles in Uganda. There, as a homosexual he says he buggered a young Idi Amin. I have no doubts. Returning from the African happy hunting grounds he promptly left for the even happier hunting grounds of New York City, the sybaritic capitol of the world. There he soaked up the art scene where he learned the ins and outs of being a gallery director. He was in New York during the seminal years from 1960-62 just as the pop art scene was taking off. There he met Andy Warhol who would be the outstanding pop artist. As they were both homosexuals and revolutionaries they bonded.

Fraser, Warhol, Epstein, Gibbs, the Kray Twins and most of the cast were all homosexuals. Jagger was at least ambiguous so sexual lines blurred and those who may not have been homosexual by nature may have found it convenient to act like one. Certainly after Stonewall in 1969 the music scene became predominantly gay.

There are pictures and videos of Fraser on the internet so that we can gauge his appearance and manner. His manner was very engaging and while fey, not exceptionally so. He wasn’t camp, at least not in public.

What exactly his role in the scene was is less than clear. While apparently an excellent pop art gallerist his role among rock musicians while prominent is not clear. He frequently had large parties in his apartment attended by the cream of the rock community. Of course he sold them art work but perhaps through his drug connection Tony Sanchez he also dealt on the side to augment his income. Drugs were always prominent at his parties. Paul McCartney bought many artworks from Fraser which all appreciated significantly although Fraser is accused of overcharging. But then, why not, a collector always thinks he’s being overcharged as he buys one of a kind items.

Perhaps also Fraser was indoctrinating the musicians in tolerance for gays and other political matters. Perhaps he was seeking homosexual alliances from among these yobbos. Certainly after Stonewall it seemed that everyone in rock was fruity. It was then that Rock and Roll began to lose its appeal. When the homosexuality became so obvious rock declined in interest to non-gays leading it further into a gay audience that augmented by the evolution into all-gay Disco. YMCA and all that, and then the end.

Whatever his political intent the goals were subverted by personal defects. Of course drugs will reduce your effectiveness by a little more than somewhat, but gambling and its resultant debts were much more deleterious of personal autonomy. While gambling has never been mentioned in connection with the rockers one wonders whether McCartney and others didn’t become involved.

Now, the record business in both the US and Britain was in the hands of homosexual Jews. The British groups, especially the Beatles and the Stones were god’s gift to his Chosen People. Between the Beatles and the Stones probably a billion dollars was generated in just four or five years including ongoing royalties and residuals. The entire billion was siphoned off by the Jews in both the US and Britain with only tip money going to the musicians.

Brian Epstein was the chief beneficiary. It was perhaps through his gambling debts, described as enormous, that the extent of the cash being generated by the Beatles came to the attention of the Kray brothers. Epstein apparently lost and owed a fortune to them. The only way he had to pay his debts was the Beatles which with his contract expiring in 1967 he was afraid he would be dismissed leaving him without that extraordinary income.

The Krays conceived the idea of taking over the Beatles from Epstein. At this time Robert Fraser had gambling debts with the Krays for which he had no available resources. The Krays put the squeeze on him. Fraser didn’t know what to do but he did know a man about the scene named Tony Sanchez, the Spaniard in the works, who did. Sanchez was nicknamed Spanish Tony. He would soon figure in as Keith Richards’ factotum and bodyguard. Spanish Tony is an interesting character meriting much more serious attention. As a connection between the underworld and the above world one would like to know more about his associates both under and above. He certainly used his underworld persona to threaten Marianne Faithfull into bed.

At any rate Sanchez told Fraser that he had underworld connections and might be able to resolve Fraser’s problem for him. As usual with Fraser he only fed Sanchez half-truths and when Tony contacted the Krays he got the other side of the story. Bear in mind that the Krays were crazy. They were pimping boys from the orphanage to social figures of the status of former Prime Minister Edward Heath. I mean, the moral state of the British upper class was beyond questionable. I would like to hear what the boys who were so used have to say now that they are men. Where are those memoirs anyway?

The Krays showed Sanchez a pile of Fraser’s bounced checks they had received which made Tony reconsider his position. Whatever bargaining chips he may have had were nullified. However the Krays had a proposition. Conversant with all the gambling characters they thought that Fraser might have some influence on Epstein so that if Fraser could arrange the transfer of the Beatles to themselves they would forgive Fraser’s debt. Who wouldn’t?

Negotiations and time dragged on and 1967 appeared at the top of the calendar with nothing accomplished, no debts settled. 1967. A big year in our story. That was the year that Brian Epstein supposedly committed suicide, the year his contract with the Beatles expired. We know for certain he left this sportin’ life. And 1967 was the year of the Redlands bust in which Fraser went to prison.

Sanchez gives conflicting stories of what took place. In his published memoir Up And Down With The Rolling Stones of 1979 he says the Krays amiably reduced the amount owed by Fraser and Groovy Bob gave them a good check for it. Problem solved. Tony says in his memoir.

Improbable as that seems, a missing chapter of Tony’s book has surfaced. Apparently many of his revelations were deemed too controversial and deleted. In this missing chapter Tony says that Fraser, unable to deliver the Beatles, set up the drug bust at Redlands in order to go to jail where for some strange reason he thought that he would be beyond the reach of the Krays.

In any event he didn’t seem to resent going to prison. Shortly after he was released from prison the Krays were arrested in May of 1968 while being sentenced to life on 3/5/69.

Presumably Robert Fraser escaped payment of the debt, however with the stigma of a jailbird his career as a gallery operator drew to a close after his release. He ended his life as a casualty of AIDs in 1986.

In his prime one wonders what he was doing. He seems to have been closely connected to Warhol and his crew. Andy himself seems to have been the center of what appears to be a political conspiracy. On their trip to Paris they made a Bee line to visit Fraser. So there is probably a strong political bent to Fraser’s activities.

Much more research is needed on Groovy Bob as well as his underworld connection Spanish Tony Sanchez.

Chap. 7: Marianne Faithfull: Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

by

R.E. Prindle

Chapter 7

We skipped a light fandango
Turned Cartwheels across the floor
I was feeling kind of seasick
But the crowd called out for more
The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
And so it was that later
As the Miller told his tale
She said there is no reason
And the truth is plain to see
That her face at first just ghostly
Turned a white shade of pale.
–Procol Harum

Marianne A Few Years Back

Now in 1968 both Mick and Marianne’s life were rolling by while both were teetering on the edge. Shortly after Godard’s filming of Sympathy For The Devil in June Mick was signed by Donald Cammell for the lead role in his film Performance. The invitation to star didn’t come from nowhere. There are many links from Mick and his friends to Cammell. Cammell was already known to the Stones having met them in 1965 at the time of the Paris Olympia shows. He was naturally first attracted to Brian Jones but then found some kind of love for Mick. Over the subsequent years he formed many projects that he offered to Mick. As Mick’s asking price was a million or more the projects did not pan out.

Not only did Cammell know the Stones but his live in the Parisian model Deborah Dixon had had a menage a trois with Anita Pallenberg. She had moved on to Brian Jones, passing on to Keith with whom she was living when the movie was shot. She had also viewed and/or worked on the script with Cammell a year previously so she knew that she was playing opposite Mick in advance. She then, was well aware of what the movie entailed.

In addition Cammell knew Robert Fraser and Chris Gibbs while being involved with the American

Donald Cammell

Satanist Kenneth Anger. Anger was himself a disciple of the arch Satanist of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley. Cammel’s father had known Crowley reasonably well while Cammell himself had at least seen Crowley live. His father even wrote a biography of Crowley, so let’s just say that the sex magic of Crowley and his Golden Dawn played a prominent role during the filming.

Mick would have brought his knowledge of The Master And Margarita to the proceedings. He may have persuaded Cammell to read the book or perhaps as a Satanist Cammell had already read it.

Marianne who had become pregnant perhaps in January or February was sent to Ireland during the filming so as to be out of the way for the sex stuff where she became distraught. She was giving herself and was being given a psychological beating that was disappointing all her expectations leading her into a deep depression. This was furthered along when she had a miscarriage at eight months losing the child. I would imagine the miscarriage was the result of the stresses Mick had placed on her by sending her away along with his sexual misconduct. It may have been her own subconscious rejection of Mick that caused her to subconsciously refuse to have his baby.

Thus as 1968 drew to a close as the Stones recorded their Satanic Majesties Request album Marianne was trying to recover from her miscarriage and put her life in order. She probably ought to have left Mick at the time but as she tacitly admits in an interview video on You Tube the reason that she went with Mick was because her own royalties were dropping and she had gotten used to the money. Mick was a source untapped. I think that this is an underlying cause of her anguish. Nineteen sixty-nine would be a traumatic year for all concerned.

2.

What To Do About Brian?

Marianne was a sentimental girl who formed sincere attachments to the people of her world. Thus Brian was not just someone on the scene but one might say a part of Marianne’s life. She cared for him. As we all know Brian Jones was the actual founder of the Rolling Stones. He named them and gave them their original musical direction. He held them together during the early stages. Naturally he considered himself their leader. He was actually a much more charismatic figure than Mick. While Mick was wiggling around all eyes were on Brian. There was just something about him.

This aroused Mick’s jealousy who once stated that the lead singer was supposed to be the center of attention. Mick also had the most powerful personality so that while he may not have been the leader he made himself the director. And then he and Keith shifted the direction of the music. While never a fan of the Stones I found myself reviewing the albums when I began writing of the group. My original opinion was only confirmed.

It became immediately apparent that Oldham’s first recordings done necessarily on the cheap were not good recordings, four track on primitive and worn equipment. While Brian and the Stones thought they were doing a good job imitating American Negro rhythm and blues it’s actually not even close. Mick makes a terrible imitation of a Negro blues shouter while its painfully obvious that the music doesn’t come close to the original. It’s so far off that it might as well be an original genre while being very close to a garage band.

Perhaps Mick who thought it impossible for an English band to pass themselves off as authentic was right to change the direction of the band to Negro influenced Rock and Roll. Brian was probably too close to his aspirations to know how far from the mark they were.

The original tunes are somewhat better but the inspiration for those soon ran dray so that by the 1966 and ‘67 albums Aftermath and Between The Buttons the band was quickly approaching the rocks. The West Coast fans were disappointed by both albums and, quite frankly, they’re not listenable today. As the albums veered toward English music hall Brian was quite right in thinking that they had abandoned his original intent. The 1968 Their Satanic Majesties Request, intended to be psychedelic in imitation of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s wandered off to a musical somewhere although one can sense the transition from the Old Stones to the New Stones of Beggar’s Banquet.

The cover of Satanic Majesties must have really sickened Brian as it had the boys dressed up in some sort of magician’s getup. A long way from Negro rhythm and blues.

Mick by Andy

Mick’s conception of the band judging from the current situation was always himself, Keith and Charlie. Bill Wyman, the bass player, being several years older was always an awkward fit. Mick marginalized him as much as he could until Wyman finally gave up terminating his role in 1993. So, was Brian forced out? Of course.

Andrew Oldham who promoted the Stones to a prominence far beyond their then abilities was the first that Mick pushed away in 1967. As a parting present Oldham turned them over to the American Jewish pirate, Allen Klein. As Oldham owned the masters to the Stones catalog he sold it lock stock and barrel to Klein who then legitimately owned them much to Mick’s chagrin.

As Brian was being marginalized by Mick, losing control of the band and its direction his behavior became erratic while he also sunk in the haze of drug addiction. It became obvious to the casual viewer of him on stage that his days must be numbered. On the Ed Sullivan show in the US he could barely stand on his feet but everyone was watching him placed back in the shadows by Mick.

Mick and Keith continued their petty harassments until Brian became a shambles of himself. After the Redlands bust the police turned their attention to Brian who hadn’t the emotional resources to bear the burden. It then in June of 1969 that Mick and Keith advised him that he was no longer in the band.

Brian either drowned in his swimming pool on the night of 7 July or was drowned. There is controversy over his death that may never be conclusively resolved.

Marianne, who by 1969 was not in a healthy sate of mind, was herself sinking into drug addiction, actually becoming a heroin addict, watched these proceedings. She was shocked by Brian’s death. And this came on top of her other woes. But life goes on. It is always painful when death removes a loved one from the building but painful or not the sun does not stand still in the sky nor do the bills stop coming in. Life goes on without missing a beat and you better had too.

So, Mick had movie offers coming in. Both he and Marianne as reigning pop couple were signed to do a movie in Australia. Ned Kelley an Australian bandit. In the 1840s when plays and books began celebrating former outlaws, highwaymen and crooks they were called Newgates after the equally famed Newgate Calendar of criminal trials. This would be a sort of Newgate movie.

Less than a week after Brian’s death Marianne and Mick arrived in Australia to begin their commitment; after all they had signed well before Brian’s death. Psychologically however all of Marianne’s misgivings were adding up to a heavy burden. While the reasonable approach may be that life goes on not everyone is so reasonable and I suspect Marianne was one of these. Perhaps, too, she realized that she and Mick were becoming estranged. Mick’s history was beginning to become apparent; his abominable treatment of women, Chrissie Shrimpton, of Oldham, of Brian; perhaps she began to wonder if she were next. While Mick may have had justifiable reasons for Oldham and Jones they may not have been that apparent to Marianne.

Certainly Brian was on her mind when the place touched down in Sydney. Exhausted by the long flight she and Mick checked into their hotel. Mick promptly flopped down on the bed to doze off. Marianne troubled in mind picked up a bottle of Tuinals and perhaps in a hypnoid state of grief and confusion dropped a hundred forty of them. Wow! That must have taken five or ten minutes. Shows determination. Who would do that if they weren’t serious about suicide.

For whatever reason Mick woke up and probably groggy himself scoped the situation. He rushed Marianne to the hospital for medical attention. But Marianne had overloaded her brain, she lay in a coma for six days.

The last thing on her mind before she suspended animation or slowed her synapses to a crawl was Brian. Since she was still alive although unconscious synapses must have continued; she must have continued to work on her problems, the anguish that had caused her attempt at self-destruction. Thus, when she came to Brian was still on her mind. I quote from her auto-biography Marianne Faithfull, pp.175-79:

Quote:

By the time we got to the hotel in Sydney I’d forgotten not only where I was but who I was. I looked in the mirror. What I saw was a very thin, frightened face. I’d cut my hair, I was anorexic, and my skin looked cadaverous. I saw someone literally falling apart. Someone with blond hair and looking very scared. In my drug induced stupor I dimly recognized the ravaged face of Brian Jones staring back at me. I was Brian, and I was dead.

…At that moment Brian was my twin. I identified with him because he had been a public sacrifice; it was a role I understood.

Quite logically, I though I was Brian.

It was all very rational in the way these things are when you’re unhinged. I reasoned that since I was Brian and since Brian was dead…(ellipsis in original) I had to take the rest of the pills so I could be dead too.

…The Tuinals were taking forever to kick in, I looked down and saw things on the street that shouldn’t have been there…And then I saw Brian Jones. At that moment I went into a coma that lasted six days.

Brian Jones

When I first spotted Brian he was far below at street level, but greatly enlarged…Various parts of him- his face, his hands- expanded and extended toward me as he spoke, and then he rose straight up as from a shaft of air until he was directly opposite the window of our room.

…He beckoned to me the way spirits traditionally beckon to mortals in the movies. I passed through the plate glass and found myself outside. But instead of standing suspended above the street, I was now in an unstable landscape that pulsed and shifted as we spoke. I had I assumed gone over to the other side.

The grandeur and enormity of the place had the phantasmagoric mood of illustrations by Edmund Dulac or Durer engravings of Hell. As we were walking along, I realized that Brian had no more idea of where we were going than I did. Obviously he had woke up dead, not known where he was and decided to call for me!

It was the nicest chat I ever had with him, actually. He told me how he had woken up and put out his hand for his bottle of Valium, and about the panic that seized when there was nothing there. He said he had been lonely and confused and had brought me to him because he needed to talk to someone he knew.

We strolled blithely along as the quivering earth crumbled away on either side of us, and he told me about the miniature coronation set with Beefeaters and the coach and horses. He said he like books about railway bridges, guides to switching boxes, George McDonald’s fairy stories and Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

…Afterward he became weepy like the Mock Turtle in Alice In Wonderland and said he was sorry to have put me to all this trouble. He didn’t seem to know he was dead. I’m sure this happens frequently…They don’t know where they are. Hence ghosts.

…’Brian, Dear, isn’t this lovely, I said, trying…to distract him from grisly realities. But my sudden descent to small talk must have tipped him off that something was wrong. I was speaking to him in the patronizing way people talk to mad people, children and small dogs. Nevertheless, he plunged ahead in typical Brian fashion.

“Death is the next great adventure.” he said portentously. This something I used to go around saying myself, so I nodded wisely.

“Oh, yes, I quite agree,” I said fervently, as if we were speaking of a new religion. Or a new drug.

…”Welcome to death!” he said brightly.

…”Oh, is that where we are?” I asked.

…We came to the edge of the Dulac landscape. It dropped off abruptly and completely. There was a very obvious point where you chose to go over the edge or not. Brian said, “Coming?” and slipped off the cliff. I drew back. I heard a chorus of voices calling to me, but I wasn’t ready just yet.

Getting back took a long time. I was stranded in a desert town. The color had been drained from everything. The houses were empty. I was in Albania! Wandering down long deserted streets with names like the Avenue of the 17th October. Looking pretty incongruous, people I knew floated by (their feet didn’t quite touch the ground.) I called out, but they hurried past as if they hadn’t seen me.

I was lost in an airport. People came up to me and asked me the sort of questions you ask a child stranded at a railway station. “Are you lost, dear?” “Do you know your name?” And I would answer, “I’m waiting for Mick to come and get me.”

Unquote.

This was obviously the crisis of Marianne’s life. She associates her life with the desolation despair of Brian’s. She must have had the fate of Chrissie Shrimpton in mind, who Mick had crushed so completely. Mick had treated Chrissie and Brian in much the same way. Certainly Marianne could see the same fate for herself on the horizon. So now in an attempt to escape she slips into a Tuinal coma. She doesn’t explain what medical procedures were used to sustain her but she maintained mental activity throughout the coma.

Essentially the first half of her coma is a near death experience and a pretty interesting one. Wonderful, wonderful story; I could have stood another dozen pages. I’m sure she could call it up if she wanted to. I’ve had a couple near death experiences myself. They really leave indelible memories as this has done for Marian. It is possible to relive at any time you choose. I can run both concurrently through my mind.

Marianne’s problem at this time has been building since 1964 when the the life she living came into conflict with her youthful ideals obtained in the convent school. In those years she was much influenced by the chivalric literature of King Arthur, especially the quest for the Holy Grail.

Now, only the pure of mind and body, I. e. virginal, can ever hope to experience the Holy Grail. It takes only one sexual encounter. Even the great Lancelot who was tricked into a sexual act by Elaine forfeited the Grail even though he was innocent of intent. In chivalric terms Marianne was way beyond any hope of redemption. She must have known that. Thus the earth heaved beneath her feet and crumbled away beside her.

Having left Brian at the brink her way back was through a desolate wasteland of colorless desert. Thus, all hope had been lost. Her awakening must have been bleak, as her life would soon become.

She doesn’t mention the Arthurian fairy tales by name but she does recreate a dream landscape from the fairy tale illustrations of Edmund Dulac. (coincidentally Edmund Of The Lake). It is possible that she also confates Dulac with Arthur Rackham, another famous illustrators of fairy tales and also King Arthur.

Marianne also references other of her formative reading bringing in Alice In Wonderland, quintessential for the druggies of the sixties, plus George McDonald’s fairy stories and significantly, Fox’s Booke Of Martyrs. Very good browsing by the way as is Butler’s Lives of the Saints which is terrific.

I wondered if Brian liked books about railway bridges and the surprising guides to switching boxes? There can’t be too many of the latter so ‘switching’ may have a different reference point. It may mean switching horses in mid stream as Marianne said to Mick when she opened her eyes: Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.

The landscape ‘pulsed and shifted’ which may refer to her emotional instability. The Allman Brothers had a great line in one of their songs; See that clock up upon the wall? Rushing tides could make it fall. So possibly she could feel the ground moving out from beneath her feet.

‘He said he had been lonely and confused and brought me to him because he needed someone to talk to someone he knew! Sounds like Marianne is reversing the situation as it was only possible that she brought Brian to her reinforcing the similarity of their situations vis-à-vis Mick.

Then some more chit chat and Brian passes into the Great Beyond while Marianne stands on the brink at road’s end. Great story. I know where that’s at. In one of my experiences my heart stopped and I was standing in a huge empty concrete bunker type thing wondering what to do next. I dead no problem with being dead but I had no instructions what to do next. ‘Oh, well..’ I thought and turned to my right to start hoofing it when my heart started up and I was back in bed.

Obviously for Marianne her medical crisis passed and she was to return to consciousness. But then getting back took a long time. The first part of her fantasy then my have lasted a day or possibly two while reconstructing her nervous system took a little longer leaving room for mistakes that she feels might have occurred. She has obviously began to come to in her post-singing career with its overwhelming challenges that she wasn’t able to successfully deal with. The Avenue of the 17th October sounds as though it may be the Bolshevik October Revolution, if so she got the date wrong, it was the 25th not the 17th. She is obviously returning in a depression. I can dig that, too.

Marianne’s own brief interpretation of her experience is on p.178:

Quote.

In anguished relationships like the one I had with Mick; it’s much easier and more satisfactory for all concerned if the one playing my role dies, after which I could turn into a sainted mythical figure- like Brian- and no longer be a threat to anyone and- more importantly- no longer be a bother to anyone.

Unquote.

They martyred Marianne…thus Fox’s Book Of Martyrs.

Marianne knew she had come to a turning point in her life or, rather, a dead end. She could no longer rely on Mick, he was a weak reed, a failure as the man he posed to be. At this time she chose to renew her acquaintance with her father at his sex shop who she says was a man Mick could never hope to be. Thus, goodbye Mick. She had been financially dependent on him and having known money liked it. Why not? But she was in no position to make money or at least sufficient money. Royalties of a diminished sort would keep coming in. There was seldom a year that went by that something wasn’t released in her name although she wasn’t recording. As she says Oldham had a re-release of her greatest hits edged in black on the streets before she recovered.

But she would have to record again, perform again for any real money. It was not possible to return again as the Virgin Queen of yesterday. As she was part of the myth making period she would always be the Faerie Queene of the sixties, she was secure in that position, but with four tarnished wings. She sank into a deeper depression finally ending up sitting on her wall above the bomb pit, thinking what to do next.

Her resurrection, such as it was, will be the topic of Chapter 8.

Chap. 6: Marianne Faithfull, Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

Chap. 6, Marianne Faithfull: Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

by

R.E. Prindle

Chapter 6

Orders From Headquarters

This chapter will center around the Global Communist Cultural Revolution phase kicked off in 1968 while being managed by Mao Tse Tung who replaced the Russians as managing director.

The purpose of the CR was to destroy the Bourgeois past replacing it with itself. Hence Ira Levin who wrote Rosemary’s Baby in which Satan’s child is named Andy posited 1966 as the Year One much as the failed new dating of the French Revolution of 1789. ‘89 was the Year One of that Revolutionary calendar. Perhaps in preparation for the CR in 1965 in the US new immigration reform was pushed through Congress that opened the gates of the US to the world, especially Africa, Mexico and the East. By 1968 West and East Asians were flooding into the country. As seems obvious now this was with the intent to subvert and destroy the Aryan hold on the US.

In his song Bob Dylan would sing: In the museums infinity goes up on trial, in an opening blast on destroying past culture as displayed in museums. In China Mao was less timorous as huge gangs of the Red Guards coursed through museums smashing irreplaceable cultural artefacts. They even invaded peoples homes ransacking the houses destroying anything of value. Culture bearers such as college professors or any educated persons were rounded up and sent out to reeducation camps to work at manual labor; tens of millions were murdered outright. Regular people were called before neighborhood re-education cells to confess their bourgeois faults and pledge to Communists faults.

Outside of China local agents were recruited from Communist ranks; college campuses suddenly sprouted Chinese Communist stores selling Mao’s Little Red Book and those pretty little pins sporting a

Chairman Mao Ze Dong

gold Mao against a red enameled background. Nice work and cheap too. Any campus that hadn’t been disrupted by ‘Free Speech Movements’ now came under attack by the Cultural Revolution. The end result would be Kent State.

As no one knew what was going on the Cultural Revolutionists seized the institutions beginning to establish the tone, the matrix with which opinions would be considered. This was established in subtle ways that few noticed and even they hadn’t a clue as to who or why. The Revolutionists had seized the cultural venues of movies, TV, newspapers, magazines and music, or, recordings. One of the key units in recorded music was the Rolling Stones. Mick was a Communist, at least since his London School of Economics days.

Even before the Redlands Bust he had been bleating that victory was his side’s because ‘they had the kids’ in the palm of their hands. The bust had been a cold douche that rankled Mick to his core. The revolutionists were of the mind set that they were going to fight and win and never lose. Thus the mild reprimand of the bust struck Mick as foul play, an unforgivable insult and injury.

Many people in the US were brought up short when their outrages were tried and sentences passed. I know people who went to prison for their outrageous criminal acts. They were considered martyrs. They couldn’t comprehend what they had done wrong anyway. Of course, by their own revolutionary lights what they had done was right; unfortunately the law, the authorities and the people, who Nixon called the Silent Majority were not of the same mind.

Mick found this out to his chagrin although he vowed revenge. Like Sigmund Freud and many another if he couldn’t move the higher powers he would enlist the aid of the lower. Thus after escaping his prison sentence the Stones metamorphosed into Satanic sorcerers for the cover of their Dec. 1968 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request.

Mick After A Lifetime  Walking Down The Long And Winding Road

The title itself was a play on the Queen’s request on British passports for the visited countries to allow the visitor to pass. Thus in the Freudian sense Mick elevated himself to a competing royal status with the crown as their Satanic enemy. One presumes that being a Stones’ fan was the entre into Satanic circles.

Mick was not new to Satanic ideas. He ran with Bob Fraser and Chris Gibbs while having at least met the US Satanist Kenneth Anger who was associated with the West Coast big daddy of Satanists, Anton La Vey. In addition he was probably already known to Donald Cammell who would star Mick in his film Performance and Marianne in his Lucifer Rising.

In June of ‘68 Mick would be recording his song Sympathy For The Devil in studio while being filmed by Jean Luc Godard for his revolutionary film One+One, retitled Sympathy For The Devil. Sympathy was inspired by Satanic Russian novel titled: The Master And Margarita. The novel had been given to him to read by Marianne.

The Master And Margarita

For the promoters of The Master And Margarita the novel is an astounding mind blower. Maybe if you’re Russian and haven’t been exposed to the stunning variety of truly astonishing unending mind blowing fiction and movies of the US. The cultural scene in Russia was primitive compared to the unbroken line of development in the West where very few limitations, none actually, were placed on expression. Bulgakov has his Satanic girls running around without clothes as though that were something not routine in the West. I mean, beginning in the sixties there was a pornographic explosion. Movies were made that would have made the Marquis de Sade blush. That poor guy was egregiously defamed according to current standards. De Sade’s puerile novels were thrown into the shade. By 1972 a movie like Deep Throat was being shown in legitimate theaters to the general public. How’s that for a cultural revolution?

Before the wars we had Edgar Rice Burroughs whose female characters on both Earth and Mars ran around robust except for a few ornaments. Woo woo Bulkagov.

My god, we had the Shadow and Doc Savage and then in the thirties comic books were invented. Superman was born the same year I was in 1938 but he grew up faster and already had a job by 1948 while I was sitting in the orphanage as a kid. Superman, Batman, Capt. America came in a flood of characters that was unceasing. There were marvels presented every month that exceeded anything Bulgakov can come up with. And then…and then…William C. Gaines at EC Comics (Educational Comics, and what an education it was) came out with Tales From The Crypt with its copycats. You want to talk about mind blowing!!! There I was a ten year old kid permeated with terrific pornographic images, sadistic violence and mayhem that even I said, reading on, they shouldn’t let ten year old kids see this. I don’t know what kind of brain damage they did but I feel OK. But they did and I read every single story. Now that was mind expanding.

Of course the parents of America did catch up with Gaines forcing him to withdraw the comics. Then as if to thumb his nose at the United Parents of America he created the aptly named Mad Magazine. Boy oh boy, those were the days. Never see those again.

And then the science fiction through the fifties. My god. There was school and there was school and the best school was the sci-fi. Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos and its two movies The Village Of The Damned and the sequel Children Of The Damned. I mean, Jack Schaefer and William Tenn. Try to top those two. The movie Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Christ! And for God’s sake the stunning James Bond movies. I could go on an on. The clearly Satanic Bus Stop TV series. Jesus Christ! All the scripts could have been written by Charlie Starkweather. All that and more. Much, much more before 1967 when M&M was published. Since then, I mean, have you seen the TV shows Dexter or Breaking Bad? Hell on wheels, guys, hell on wheels. All men to their battle stations. It’s not that M&M isn’t decent sci-fi/fantasy/horror, but that’s all it is. Doesn’t even compare with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But, then, maybe I’m over educated. Still, I think of myself as an average All American Boy.

Hey, have you seen A Giant Crab Come Forth? I have. Have you seen a single octopus tentacle demolish the city of San Francisco? I have. Have you seen the eggplant that ate Chicago…I could go on.

I don’t know how deeply or extensively the Russian author Mikhail Bugakov’s novel has penetrated the Western mind. It was certainly unknown in the sixties except to the initiated. Definitely not a best seller. I can’t remember ever hearing of it until the turn of the century when references to it as a literary marvel began popping up in my reading. In 2010 the book was published as a selection of the Folio Society of which I have been a long time member and so I acquired a copy. I have read it twice and while I recognize its purpose I am unimpressed with it as a novel.

Essentially a manual of social deconstruction the book is being heavily promoted in Communist circles. In Russia the book has been turned into a TV series, at least a couple movies and several stage plays for Western consumption.

In addition to the book I have acquired a three disc set of Vladimir Bercko’s film version and the TV series. The blurb on the back cover gives some idea of what the book means to its promoters:

Quote:

…An imagined world where one’s consciousness actually perceives and experiences sorcery. The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, the novel on which this film is based, is a rare, mind-expanding pleasure, a journey whenever one takes and reads. The book is about the great, burning, perennial areas of the human predicament, story of the Christ, seen by Matthew, Judas and Pilate; the tale of Faust’s pact with the devil; the confrontation between individual genius and the demands of an ideologically driven State; the meaning of entertainment in society; and the love of man and woman. Bulgakov is an early precursor of the literary genre of magic realism exemplified by the South American writers Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Unquote.

The above seems somewhat overblown to me; about the only thing I would agree to unequivocally is that it is of the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre. Its actual purpose is as a manual for disrupting society, of cultural upending; in other words, of furthering the Cultural Revolution.

After the novel was finished , in a long post-climax, this passage is inserted into the novel.

Quote:

…the two blackguards marched down the asphalt path under the lindens straight to the veranda of the unsuspecting restaurant.

A pale and bored citizeness in white socks and a white beret with a nib sat on a Viennese chair at the corner entrance to the veranda, where amid the greenery of the trellis an opening for the entrance had been made. In front of her on simple kitchen table lay a fat book of the ledger variety, in which the citizeness for unknown reasons wrote down all those who entered the restaurant. It was precisely this citizeness who stopped Koroviev and Behemoth.

‘Your identification cards?’ She was gazing in amazement at Koroviev’s pince nez, and also at Behemoth’s primus and Behemoth’s torn elbow.

‘A thousand pardons, but what identification cards?’ asked Koroviev in surprise.

‘You’re writers?’ The citizeness asked in her turn.

‘Unquestionably,’ Koroviev answered with dignity.

‘My sweetie…’ Koroviev began tenderly.

‘I’m no sweetie,’ interrupted the citizeness.

‘More’s the pity,’ Koroviev said disappointedly and went on: ‘Well, so, if you don’t want to be a sweetie, which would be quite pleasant, you don’t have to be. So, then, to convince yourself that Dostoevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any one of novels and you’ll be convinced, without any identification card that you’re dealing with a writer? And I don’t think he even had an identification card, what do you think?’

‘…You’re not Dostoevsky,’ said the citizeness who was getting muddled by Koroviev.

‘Well, who knows, who knows,’ he replied.

‘Dostoevsky’s dead.’ Said the citizeness…

‘I protest!’ Behemoth exclaimed hotly. ‘Dostoevsky is immortal!’

‘Your identification cards, citizens,’ said the citizeness.

Unquote.

This passage served as a blueprint for obstructionists. Passing into common use by the late seventies Village Fucks of this variety harassed innocent clerks to distraction. As an instruction manual how then did the book fit into the continuum of the proto-Cultural Revolution from the end of WWI to the present, for there is a question of authorship found here.

The passage concerning Koroviev and Behemoth might well have been written by the Dadaists of the Café Voltaire in Zurich. Their efforts were meant to disorient European culture, knock it off center. Themselves Jewish they were followed by the establishment of the Jewish Critical Theory school in Germany. Critical Theory meant that European customs, ideas and politics were to be denigrated whether virtues or vices as though by superior beings viewing from above and apart. This led to the debunking school of the twenties in the US by which all American heroes were attacked turning their virtues into vices and vices as evidence of ghastly criminality. Eventually the Critical Theorists would leave Germany migrating to the US en masse along with the entire Freudian psycho-analytic establishment. How this must have cheered Hitler.

One then begins to see the similarities between The Master And Margarita and this Jewish continuum. The protagonist of the novel was Satan going by the name of Woland (Woe to the Land) who was a master hypnotist dealing in counterfeiting.

Woland is almost a duplicate of Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse who was also a counterfeiter and a master hypnotist. He also was out to destroy European society. Lang’s first effort was the silent flick Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler of 1922 which it is possible Bulgakov might seen but the events of the Russian Civil War make that improbable. There is no chance that Bulgakov could have seen Lang’s talkie sequel of 1933 The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse in which Dr. Mabuse having been placed in an insane asylum in 1922 has hypnotized his analyst, Dr. Baum, through his writing, into carrying out his subversive schemes. While Bulgakov couldn’t have been influenced by Lang the similarities are so close one may posit a central organization directing the publication of books and movies of this sort. This becomes more evident when one looks for similarities in the US.

In the US a coordinating agency had been founded in 1906 called the American Jewish Committee, the AJC, under the direction of Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall. Those are two names that don’t mean much outside of Jewish circles but they should. Louis Marshall’s collected correspondence is very interesting.

Now, the Great War of 1914-18 devastated Europe to be following by the greater devastation of WWII from approximately 1938 to 1945. At the same time in the Far East Japan opened hostilities that engulfed and unsettled that area beginning in the 1930s also through 1945. Hostilities continued in China through 1950 between the Communists and the Nationalists aided and abetted by massive shipments of US arms which even though granted to the Nationalists passed directly into Communist hands and then the Korean conflict began that ran through 1953.

In contrast the US and North America were not directly affected by these wars allowing permitting a unique uninterrupted culture to develop.

This period also coincided with astonishing technological advances that only the US was able to take full advantage. Thus radio became a reality beginning in the twenties although it didn’t become commercially effective until the early thirties. Perhaps even more significant was the introduction of sound to movies. The talkies made movies the most effective propaganda tool available until the emergence of television in the fifties.

As is probably not all that well known TV was commercially feasible in the late thirties but WWII postponed its introduction into homes until after the war.

Significantly the first successful talkie was the Jewish themed The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. Following that would be the series of films featuring the Marx Bros. Their movies would mesh with the Dada attack in art and the emerging Critical Theory school riding over a bed of Freudian psychology. All were direct attacks on Aryan Culture. As Joseph Goebbels told Fritz Lang when he denied a license to show The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse: No government could withstand propaganda if its kind. The truth of Goebbels statement was proven in 2008 with the US election of the Communist Barack Obama. After decades of the most vitriolic criticism and denunciation of US politics and society by the Left, all of a sudden such criticism was denied the opposition who were described as Domestic Terrorists and denied access to the media with the exception of the internet.

So, from 1930 to 1954 the Marx Bros. systematically mocked and vilified as many social institutions and Aryan mores as they could. In Germany before the wars this was called the Kultur kampf or culture wars, an early version of the Cultural Revolution. And of course the same program was carried on in films in general. Naturally it was all denied but now looking at those same films through the new spectacles provided post 9/11 it all seems clear and apparent. One sees with new eyes. Thus there are great similarities between the techniques of the Marx Bros. and The Master And Margarita.


What I consider the greatest of the Marx Bros. movies, although the Marx Bros. didn’t appear in it, was the movie of the Year One, 1966, A Funny Think Happened On The Way To The Forum starring the very Jewish Zero Mostel. The movie was the ultimate instruction manual for the demolition of society that The Master And Margarita follows very closely. Forum appeared in 1966 in the US while M&M was discovered in Russia the very same year #1. A succession of similarly themed movies followed of which the most significant perhaps was the movie Cabaret.

The question of the provenance of The Master And Margarita remains. Its similarities to the cultural trend of the previous decades is too strong to be coincidental. It is possible that in old religious terms the book could be called a pious fraud, something along the lines of The Protocols of Zion.

The provenance is certainly somewhat suspect. According to the legend that is impossible to adequately check, the novel was labored over for ten years by Bulgakov at which time he realized that Stalin would take the novel as a personal affront insuring that it would never be published while he would end up in the infamous Lubyanka Prison where in all likelihood he would receive a bullet to the base of his skull. No, better to put it in a drawer and forget about it until a better day should a better day ever come.

So who was Mikhail Bulgakov? He was apparently a novelist and a playwright. As improbable as it may seem, during the Russian civil war between the Communist Reds and the Royalist Whites after the Great War ended he was on the side of the Whites. In Revolutionary terminology white referred to the white cockade of the French royalists and not the color or their skin. Nevertheless according to legend he was a favorite of Stalin who actually favored this enemy of the State. Wouldn’t let his stuff be published but still thought him a fine fellow worth preserving. Bulgakov survived all the purges so common to the era.

Time passes, WWII, the rape of the German women, the Atom Bomb, the Korean War, the death of Stalin in 1953 while the precious manuscript sits quietly yellowing in its drawer. I might add that five hundred hand written pages fills a good sized drawer.

Beria and Khruschev follow Stalin followed in turn by Leonid Brezhnev and then this astonishing twist of fate happened. From the Orlando Figes Folio introduction:

Quote:

After Bulgakov’s death in 1940, the manuscript was hidden in a drawer by Elena Sergeevna until 1966, when, by one of the most ironic twists in Russian literary history, unknown until recently, it was prepared for publication by Konstantin Simonov, one of Stalin’s henchmen in the Writers’ Union who had taken part in the persecution of many writers before the Khruschev thaw. In 1956 Simonov had been made the chairman of the commission in charge of Bulgakov’s literary estate by the writer’s widow, who was an old acquaintance of Simonov’s mother, Alexandra Ivanisheva. (nee Princess Obolenskaya). Simonov then gave the manuscript ..to his ex-wife Evgenia Laskina, who was the working at Moskva (Magazine)…

Unquote.

To make a long story short, Moskva was a failing magazine and as there was great doubt in Simonov’s mind as to whether it would pass the censorship of now premier Leonid Brezhnev’s stringent rule he, I guess, decided to let his ex-wife take the fall if it didn’t pass. Better her than him and a subtle revenge indeed. But, why even take the chance against apparently insuperable odds.

Well, golly, the book did get past some very stupid or traitorous censors and the rest, as they say, is history, although the time line is very tight.

Moskva published Part One in its November 1967 issue doubling its subscriber list Moscow was so bowled over, and Part Two in January 1968. Now, Marianne received a copy of the translation of the American Grove Press imprint, read it, got it to Mick who by the June recording sessions for Sympathy For The Devil had read and digested it. Not much time in there for the Russian publication, translation into English and publication and distribution by the Grove Press, shipment to England and acquisition by Marianne. I mean, what was the big rush for something that might not sell? Therefore I believe something else must have been uppermost in certain minds. As I said earlier this book reeks of a fraud or forgery. Its happened before. The Donation Of Constantine as an egregious example.

The 1997 Hollywood movie Wag The Dog demonstrated exactly how it is done. In Wag The Dog the President of the US asks a Hollywood producer to stage a phony war to shore up his flagging popularity. The producer does this but as Shakespeare wrote: What a tangled web we weave when first we deceive. As the variables unfold in unforeseen manner the producer’s ingenuity is strained but equal to the task. He creates a war hero who while on the way to the ceremony dies. Consequently he manufacturers a sentimental story about Schumacher, the dead would be hero, who they dub Old Shoe.

The producer contacts a couple songwriters, explains his needs and they come up with an old timey 20s-30s type country cum folk ditty. The performance is doctored to sound like a scratchy old 78RPM.

Now, here’s the key point. It is arranged to place a copy of this forgery in the appropriate thirties archive location in The Library Of Congress. Miracle of miracles the forgery is ‘discovered’ becoming a hit generating a worshipful attitude for ‘Old Shoe.’ Old Shoe is buried in Arlington Cemetery, full military honors and mission accomplished.

There you have it- that was a forgery no different than, say, The Donation of Constantine or The Protocols of Zion.

The question then is why did The Master And Margarita surface in Year One in 1966 in time for the Cultural Revolution already begun actually but not announced by Mao until 1968, Year Three.

Quite simply it was necessary to place an instruction manual into the hands of certain key people and agitators. The passage I quoted at the beginning of this chapter is an example of a lesson. Mick received his copy through Marianne and understood. How then did this unknown Russian novel immediately find its way into Marianne’s hands upon publication of the English translation of Grove Press?

I mean, how did the Jewish translator, Mirra Ginsburg, receive a copy immediately after the Russian book publication. I imagine she didn’t. The window of opportunity between January 1968 and end of May 1968 is too narrow. She must have been involved either immediately after the Moskva publication of Part One or possibly even before. Therefore that indicates a plan by somebody.

We know for a fact that the novel as published was not as written by Bulgakov. We are told that several hands altered the text including various censors. A full sixty pages were deleted in Mirra Ginsburg’s translation to be restored thirty years later…to reflect what?

There is plenty of reason then to believe the book was a put up job or, indeed, intended as a disguised instruction manual for easier distribution to interested parties…like Mick.

Mick when he received his copy immediately began to write or conceive the lyrics for Sympathy For The Devil. Satan the key figure in the novel is a master magician and hypnotist. He hypnotizes virtually the entire city of Moscow. As a refresher on continuity lets remember that Dr. Sigmund Freud was a master hypnotist seeking the destruction of European civilization and so was Lang’s Dr. Mabuse who was based on Freud.

We know that Bulgakov couldn’t have been aware of Lang’s Mabuse and I doubt that Bulgakov was much of a Freudian so that leaves forgery as the most probable explanation. As a point of fact the AJC, American Jewish Committee, has employed a stable of writers in the US since at least the thirties to churn out plausibly academic diatribes condemning those they consider anti-Semites. The AJC was global in scope having been active in European politics from its beginning so it would be easy enough to concoct The Master And Margarita either in toto or possibly a revision and claim to have discovered it in a drawer in 1966 The Year One by one Simon-ov in much the same manner that the fictional ‘Old Shoe’ was discovered in the Library Of Congress.

Jean Luc Godard

In an interview Mick said that the Master and Margarita influenced the writing of Sympathy For The Devil. In the furtherance of the Cultural Revolution Jean Luc Godard of the French Nouvelle Vague school of film makers made his revolutionary movie One+One, reissued as Sympathy For The Devil filming the Stones recording the song. So the Stones are placed in the heart of The Cultural Revolution.

Mick was fully aware of hypnosis as, actually, were a very great many of the rockers, so that he and Keith set the piece to a Samba rhythm. As Mick said in the interview the Samba is a very hypnotic rhythm. Thus, by creating a hypnotic mode everyone would receive the lyrics as suggestion. The suggestion being that the devil is a good fellow and one should have sympathy for him discarding one’s prejudices. There was actually a strong effort to rehabilitate Satan in the years following Year One. It will be remembered that both Mick and Marianne were tight with the Satanist Kenneth Anger who had a huge LUCIFER tattooed across his chest. Marianne would later perform in Anger’s Lucifer Rising while Mick performed a soundtrack for another of Anger’s offerings.

Kenneth Anglemeyer aka Kenneth Anger

Mick beginning shortly after Year Three would turn his act into performance art of a highly suggestive nature accompanied by an intentional hypnotic beat with stun gun volume, flashing lights and the stimulated hysteria of the crowd reaction. A proper atmosphere for hypnotic suggestion.

Mick’s vengeance for the drug bust then was to play the Pied Piper to lead the ‘kids’ to their destruction.

Marianne would be a casualty of his mania as she sank into the deepest of depression.


Chapter 7 follows.

Chaps. I & II Marianne Faithfull, The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

Marianne Faithfull, The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

Chapters I and II

 by

R.E. Prindle

She’s one of those girls

Who come with the Spring

One look in her eyes

Makes you forget everything.

Younger Girl- John Sebastian

The sixties came walking in slowly, hands in pockets shuffling along barely recognized going down the road.  Few recognized that it was a period of god formation.  All the icons of later years came from those days.  John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger.  The comptetion for goddesses was less crowded, Janis Joplin carried too much baggage, Grace Slick had her shortcomings and the rest were wannabes- except for Marianne Faithfull.  She floated through, became entangled with his Satanic majesty, Mick Jagger, crashed and disappeared from sight to reemerge damaged but triumphant.  When she resurfaced it was in another guise bearing little resemblance to the Faerie Queene of he sixties.

Perhaps only in retrospect does she appear as the angel of the sixties.  Only looking back does she stand head and shoulders above the women of the decade.  In her day she aspired to be Guenivere to Mick Jagger’s Lancelot.  High expectations doomed to disappointment.  Buth then the high, even ridiculous, expectations of the sixties couldn’t hope to be more than failed and fail they did.

The sixties were born in the despair of the World War II, the Korean War and the Atom Bomb.  The decade was shaped by the children born from 1934-38 to 1945 most heavily represented by the years of ‘42 and ‘43.  The years had their effect on those nborn in the United States but devastated those of England who formed the backbone of the sixties in both the US and England.  Stunted by ill nutrition the English boys and girls entered childhood in a world of deprivation, millions of bomb craters, square miles of devastation, limited amounts of food that were rationed until they reached their teens.  Nutrition triumphed over genes leaving perhaps a majority stunted almost to the height of midgets.  Then in the mid-fifties they came off rations as the country rebuilt and a degree of prosperity returned.  Thus the favored members of a generation with low or no expectations burst into an energized prosperity, as the flower of the sixties grew and blown in a trice.

Marianne herself was born in 1946, a baby boomer, in one of those ill-starred marriages of the post-war world.  Thousands of young English girls married American servicemen and left the lad of their birth forever.  Perhaps more wisely than they knew as the hundred of thousands of English men who never returned live would have left them spinsters all their lives.  As it was Marianne’s father, Glynn Faithfull met her mother in occupied Austria returning with her to England where Marianne was born.  As might be expected of a marriage made under Third Man circumstances the marriage proved ill matched each partner going their own way.  Thus by 1953 when Marianne was seven and rationing was lifted she divided her time between her two parents.

One ponders the effect this had on the psychological development of the girl.  Her father was one of those strange utopianists who believed the Holy Grail of personal redemption could be found in fucking so he founded some Jim Jones type of sex retreat where all the inmates were encouraged to copulated indiscriminately and freely.

One doesn’t know Glynn Faithfull’s background.  There may have been a couple reasons for this faith in fucking.  A significant underground current was Aleister Crowley and his faith in sex magic.  Crowley and his disciples with figure in

Aleister Crowley

Marianne’s life in the sixties.  His influence would continue to grow during the forties, fifties and sixties.  Perhaps more significant was the sex therapy of the one of the centuries most eminent madmen, Sigmund Freud.  While generally unaccredited for his sexual influence, his sex theories combined with his bizarre vision of the unconscious did terrific damage to the world’s psyche, especially during the fifties and sixties when his notion dominated psychology.

As a young girl Marianne was encouraged to observe the inmates copulate.  They apparently did so in front of open windows in a series of rooms fronted by a ledge or sort of long balcony.  As a young girl her father encouraged Marianne to use this ledge to view the couples at play.  In the innocence of youth she little knew what to make of this although what effect the flickering memories  played in her development she either does not say or doesn’t know.

Her mother removed her from this environment placing her in a Catholic convent school until she was sixteen.  The transition from open sex practices to a chastity minded Catholic education must have provided an unusual contrast in the growing memory bank of her mind.  At least Marrianne was out of harm’s way for a few years.

Marrianne’s mother, Mrs. Faithfull, was an Austrian.  She had witnessed the years of the Anschluss and the Nazi administration of the war years.  Necessarily as the Soviet troops moved in she suffered the horrors of the rape of the German women by the Communist troops.  This event made the Rape of the Sabine women look like a pleasure romp.  History records that when things had settled that there were long lines of pregnant German women before the hospitals waiting their turn for an abortion of a hateful pregnancy.

It was in this environment that Eva met her future husband Glynn Faithfull.  It was possibly love among the ruins in which Marianne was conceived.  Born out of the ashes so to speak.  ;Marianne’s mother Eva was of the Sacher Masoc line; he who gave masochism its name and wrote the Venus In Furs that Lou Reed purloined for the title of his song.  Hard core rock and rollers have been in awe of Marianne’s ancestry as though she had a hand in masochism’s naming.  Sins of one’s distant relatives and all that.

When Marianne escaped or was released from the nunnery she was ill prepared to deal with life on the streets, but then aren’t we all.  So as the sixties dawned this attractive girl with no prospects began to wend her way through life.  The Catholics gave her some vocal training of some sort, perhaps Gregorian chant, so Marianne took up folk singing.  Rather than the subdued tones of A Years Go By she was more of the bellowing Joan Baez variety.  Thus when Andrew Oldham asked John Dunbar if she could sing and John answered yes he was stating a fact.

In John Dunbar Marianne fell into one of the hippest young crowds London had to offer.  Dunbar himself was of a Bohemian mentality and he associated with the future historian of the musical and artistic scene of the sixties, Barry Miles.  Miles has never gotten the recognition he deserves.  To begin with he co-founded the very avant garde Indica Art Gallery with Dunbar.  The Indica lasted only a couple seasons but those were two memorable seasons.

The two entrepreneurs were discovered by Paul McCartney who, I don’t know if active is the right word, took at least an active inte3rest in the gallery which led to John Lennon’s eureka moment with the scourge of rock and roll, Yoko Ono.

In the course of time this led to Dunbar’s being invited to the famous party in which Andrew Oldham is said to have gallantly remarked:  Who’s the broad with the big tits?  Or words very close to that.

It was at that point that Oldham asked the musical question: Can she sing?  To which Dunbar unwisely responded yes.  Marianne, given that she was already a folksinger, sagely pretended to be at sea so that Oldham was afforded the pleasure of coaching her along.  Whether he made it inside the Magic Circle or not he had to come up with a song for Marianne to record.  More at sea over this matter the legend has it that Andrew locked Mick and Keith of the Rolling Stones into a closet, toilet or kitchen and said he wouldn’t let them out until they wrote him a song.  Thus Marianne indirectly is responsible for the Richards-Jagger song writing team with its ill fated effect on popular culture.

With Marianne Oldham struck gold the first time out.  The song Richards-Jagger wrote was a languid ditty titles As Tears Go By sung in a lisping fainting manner by the newly nominated Faerie Queene.  Songs are pretty much ephemeral to the time but within the ephemera of the time both Marianne and As Tears Go By were a very major hit.  In her way Marianne and her song was the sunrise 1964 was waiting for.

Gracie

II

…I trusted you and did my best

To make you happy.

Is this what I get for loving you?

Spector, King, Goffin

Marianne was some kind of folksinger cum chanteuse.  She had a high virginal voice.  She came from a Catholic convent school that signified purity to the English public.  In her early interviews she appears shy, modest, and if I may say, virginal.  The very antithesis of the increasing vulgarity of the times.  They set Marianne on a pedestal.

In the early sixties rock and roll had not yet driven every other rorm of music off the field as it would by 1970.  From 1960 to 1964-65 folk music was the dominant musical form although not of the New York purist variety; more along the commercial lines of Harry Belafonte, the Brothers Four, the Kingston Trio and Randy Sparks’ New Christy Minstrels.  Peter Paul and Mary were at their peak not year claiming to ‘love your rock and roll music’ until 1968.  In 1966 the Christies spin off The Association was a big hit.

Apart from sappy team acts he Beatles sparked the rock and roll revival although their wasn’t too much difference between them and the sappy teen acts.  I never did understand what the public revered in them.  Listening to the early Stones recently reminded me why I didn’t like them the first time around either; they sound quite a bit like a bad garage band.  Jagger isn’t much better a singer than Dylan, he couldn’t have been much worse.  But fate is fate and a hit is a hit.  Can’t argue with it.

Marianne then entered the lists with a number nine hit in the UK and a number twenty-two in the US.  Her second song Blowin’ In The Wind, didn’t chart while her third, Come And Stay With Me was number four UK and twenty-six US.

She released four LPs in 1965 which is at an exploitative rate.  No one at the time realized that the next wave of pop acts would be extremely long lived.  No one thought that the Beatles, even though they broke up, would go on dominating popular music for fifty years.  No one would have believed that the Stone would be projected a tour fifty years on.  No one could have believed that Marianne would still have a career fifty years on.  So they were trying to gut the goose that laid the golden eggs as soon as they could.  How could anyone at the time have believed that Jagger would become a pop god and Marianne a goddess?  Icons for a generation.  Unthinkable.

The first two UK albums charted at twelve and fifteen while in he US Marianne Faithful charted at twelve.  Her US sales then were somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred thousand copies.  She didn’t make the charts with a new title until 1974s Broken English weakly settling on the US charts at eighty-two.

Prior to 1964 most British bands had little presence outside their native England.  With the arrival of the Boeing 707 in 1959 the US became readily accessible while the vista for global band was opened.  First through the breach, of course, were the Beatles, soon to be followed by Bob Dylan and The Stone and even Donovan.  Most people don’t understand how big Donovan was in the sixties; almost an equal to the Beatles and Stones.  Thus the era of global popularity was inaugurated changing the face of popular music and group economics.  Oddly enough the field was limited to English and American bands for a very long time.

An astute manager with his eye on the future might easily have turned Marianne into a global attraction.  However Marianne after jettisoning Andrew Loog Oldham after her first two single signed with some small minded English putzes who were both incompetents and only interested in exploiting her.  Somewhat like Edie Sedgwick in New York it was all there waiting to be picked up but no one saw it.

It does seem that they saw the image ready for use but ignored it.  Where was that eagle eyed Allen Klein I wonder.  Marianne herself was into Queen Quenivere, King Arthur, the Holy Grail and the faerie aspects of the epic.  The record people got it.  For instance the liner notes on the back of the US Faithfull Forever US release quote from Keats’ La Belle Dame San Merci:

I met a lady in the meads

Full beautiful- a fairy’s child.

Her hair was long, her foot was light

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head

And bracelets too, and fragrance zone

She looked at me as she did love

And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed

And nothing else saw all day long

For sidelong she would bend and sing

A fairy’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet

And honey wild and manna dew

As sure in language strange she said

“I love thee true.”

So there it was.  Everything was in place but the management wasn’t there.

It really couldn’t be seen in 1964 that this was the year of myth making in popular culture, actually ‘64, to ‘66.  Marianne had all the elements to make her as big and long lasting as, say, Bob Dylan.  She already was a myth.

Perhaps Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones surveying the horizon saw this.  Ever envious he may have said to himself ‘This woman is a threat to my supremacy;  I must destroy her.’  I can’t say but he did sidle up to her, pour some wine down between her breasts and with that introduction proceed to seduce her whispering ‘Come stay with me.’  A couple years later he threw the remains aside.

And Marianne plunged into a deep depression.

Part IV: Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones And The Yobbo Revolution

Part IV

Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones And The Yobbo Revolution

Mick, Kenneth Anger And Satan

by

R.E. Prindle

R.E. Prindle

 1.

A Musical Digression

While this part deals with the rise of the occult it will require a digression or two to flesh out the argument to provide credibility.

Mark Sullivan, the author of the fabulous turn of the twentieth century study, Our Times, quotes Plato as observing that when a people’s music changes it signifies a great change of consciousness; the only question is, for what duration.

As Sullivan notes, the incoming waves of immigration to the US during the nineteenth century each brought its musical consciousness with it which was grafted onto American consciousness; thus the German, Polish, Italian and Irish musics etc. all had their influence.  Sullivan was somewhat puzzled because with the huge Jewish influx he couldn’t find a commensurate Jewish music.

Sullivan failed to note that while the Jews had no national music of their own they were past adepts at mimicking the music of other nationalities; hence a large percentage of US music of other nationalities, Irish, Polish and German songs were actually written by Jews in the appropriate idiom.  Jack Yellin for instant within ten years of his arrival was writing quintessential Southern songs such as ‘Are You From Dixie.’  A very high percentage of what is considered quintessential Americana has been penned by Jews thus infusing Jewish culture into and replacing American culture with their own.

While immigration was held to a minimum from 1914 to 1965 there was a huge internal migration of Negroes from the South to the North and West.  The Jews served the same function with Negro music as they had with the external migrants.  They wrote the songs for Negroes to sing.  This was especially evident during the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century when the terms Negro and Jew became synonymous.

In the fifties when I was a boy Rock and Roll made its entry into musical history.  From an elders’ point of view Rock and Roll was a corruption of our musical tastes that extended into our morality.  This was as Plato and Sullivan predicted.  The intense tough and decisive battles for  supremacy in American culture were being fought between Communists and Americanists- Collectivism vs. Individualism.  The decisive battle was the failure of Joe McCarthy.  When McCarthy went down the war was lost although a long rear guard action delayed the Communist triumph that actually only took place in 2008 with the election of the Negro Barack Obama.

Dr. Strangelove by Peter Sellers. Must see movie.

Thus the fifties was a long intense struggle that was fought out in the movies, phonograph records, publishing and radio with an increasing boot from television.  While we knew we were fighting the Communists for survival the means of the warfare were noticed but by a few and they were demonized by the Communist controlled media as cranks.  Most frequently  the accusations were made by wild eyed hysterical sounding Fundamentalist ministers.  As the majority couldn’t see the accusations that Fluoride and Rock and Roll were Communist plots the accusers were laughed off.  I could never understand how something I loved, Rock and Roll, was a Communist plot.

I did note the accusation was uttered with such complete sincerity however that it troubled my mind over the decades as to how these ministers could make such an accusation.  I suppose the first seeds of comprehension were planted by the Peter Sellers’ movie ’Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned To Love The Bomb And Stop Worrying.’  The movie while hilariously funny was so skewed toward the Communist cause that it gave me pause.  I vaguely comprehended that I was being manipulated.

Shifting The Mores

     Now, after something like sixty years of thought and study, including Plato and Sullivan, I have I believe the explanation.

The Mores of the US have probably always been relatively fluid.  Almost from the beginning the mores of East Anglia clashed with those of Wessex and then came the Scots, the Rhineland Germans (known as the Pennsylvania Dutch), the Anglo-Scots of the Border Country, the Midland English Quakers and a smattering of others along with the strong Negro element.

After Independence the Negro population burgeoned when the invention of the cotton gin  created the cotton culture of the South.  This population would create the tension that led to the Civil War and from that conflict the tension that would lead to the post-WWII Negro revolt.

The Irish invasion of the 1840-60 period brought the great clash of mores between the Celts and Anglos that reached its head in the 1960 election of the Celt, John F. Kennedy.

Along with the Irish came the 48ers of that failed European revolutionary phase that would create the collective-individualist conflict in mores that has resulted in the Communist triumph of Barack Obama of today.

Then in the 1870s began the invasion of the Southern and Eastern Europeans that created a conflict in mores between themselves and the Irish, Anglo and Northern European element.  As noted things settled down into a contest of moral wills until 1965 when the gates were thrown open to the entire world as though the fraction of the world’s surface designated the US could house all humanity.  Thus any possible hope of a unity of mores was completely shattered.  Any center that might have existed was destroyed.

Now, as unpleasant as the facts may be to some intelligences, the control of the creation of a unified set of mores was seized by the Jewish immigrants in the aftermath of WWI.

To merely select a highlight of the process, in 1938 the Stalinist-Jewish agent, Congressman Samuel Dickstein. with the complicity of FDR created the House Un-American Activities Committee to root out anti-Semites and Fascist/Nationalists thus shifting control of mores to the Judaeo-Communists.  The move was only partially successful initially as it had to face an intense post-war reaction ultimately conducted by the near great Joseph McCarthy.

As ever the mores of the majority were attacked at the weak joints in their armor.  The key point was the long festering Aryan-Negro conflict.  In realistic terms it was a conflict that could have only two results, the physical subjugation or extermination of the Whites by the Blacks or vice versa or the amalgamation of the two species.

Like it or not, the Jews and Negroes are calling for the extermination of Whites.  The problem in post-war 1946 was how a small minority of Jews and Negroes representing perhaps 14% of the population could eliminate the 86% who were fully armed and dangerous.

The first step would be to knock the majority off its moral center.  Without a moral focal point the majority would flounder.  The route taken was nothing new.  Ever since post WWI when the newly formed Anti-Defamation and NAACP Leagues were formed the majority had been cast as bigots.  This caused a polarization among its Liberal and Conservative elements and Immigrants and Natives.  By 1950 there was a 50-50 split between descendents of pre-1800 and those who came after.   These splits were exacerbated by propaganda.  Outside those divisions were the Negroes.

So, then how to fracture and fragment the majority White population even further.

Until 1954 the music that you heard on the radio was all Western, not cowboy but derived from the White or Aryan

The Great Joe McCarthy

population.  And there wasn’t much of that music broadcast.  Radio was controlled by the networks and they only slotted a couple hours a day of fairly wishy-washy stuff.  Then about 1954 when television, commercially introduced after 1946, displaced radio as the source of home entertainment, radio floundered and only saved itself by going to all music that soon developed into Top 40 and teen dominance of the radio airwaves.  That was my age cohort.

That was a time when the designation race music meant the stuff that only Negroes listened to.  The designation Country and Western replaced the term Hillbilly at this time.  Some considered Hillbilly a race music with a degree of accuracy if with malice.  Hillbilly was despised by all but a minority not much larger than the Negroes of which I was one.

Strangely at about the same time efforts were made to bring both musics into the mainstream.  Actually they would combine with folk to form Rock and Roll-  Rhythm and Blues and Rockabilly.  Hard to tell which was the harder sell.

The Vile Erskine Caldwell

H.L. Mencken in the teens and twenties had excoriated the hill people, from which I derive on my father’s side, while the vile Erskine Caldwell vilified and completely defamed Southern Whites in his two hateful and extremely popular novels Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre.  The two novels remained a tremendous influence through the fifties as well as the pervert Al Capp’s cartoon strip L’il Abner.  Thus a large part of the majority population was more receptive to Negro music than Hillbilly.

Naturally the agents in the forcing of Negro music on the Aryans were the Jews.  The actual recordings of real Negroes were pretty raw and unmusical.  Though stuff to digest.  Of course there had always been Negroes catering to White audiences such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday, the Ink Spots and Mills Brothers of the earlier generation and the great Platters, Fats Domino and Johnny Mathis of the next generation but the real Negro music was unmistakable.

Thus Jewish songwriters such as Leiber-Stoller, Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman and others adopted Negro personas and wrote most of the Rhythm and Blues performed by Negroes.  It was this Negro music geared to Aryans by Jewish song writers with a foot in each camp that made the inroads leading up to Berry Gordy’s Motown Sound where you had a new generation of Negroes packaged exclusively for

H.L. Mencken

Aryans singing songs largely written by Negroes and, of course, from there it melded into the more racial Soul Music of the sixties.

So, in 1954 Rock and Roll began to develop.  First was Bill Haley, the former leader of a Country band who picked up on some Negro/Jewish shouts like Shake, Rattle And Roll and moved them over to the White side of the tracks.  And then came acceptable cuddly Negroes like Fats Domino and the respectable Bill Doggett with his great Honky Tonk Pts. I & II.  I don’t know how Little Richard squeezed between Fats and The Platters but he did.  Of course he wasn’t even of this planet and there was no discrimination toward extra-terrestrials.

Acts like James Brown And His Famous Flames were rejected out of hand.  There were no crossover possibilities there.  The greatest hit he ever made was his beloved televised funeral.  That was something else.

The Chess artists that the Brits idolized made absolutely no impression at all with the exception of Chuck Berry.  After Maybelline Chuck had tough sledding although he has fared reasonable well in the aftermath.  Memphis, Tennessee, a true classic.

The One And Only

     The Commies Were Everywhere

The Law Of Unintended Consequences

     When the Fundamentalist ministers objected to Rock and Roll as a Communist plot I’m sure they were ignorant of the actual evolution of Rock so I am not clear on what their antennae were picking up.  They may have been watching something that isn’t so obvious now.

The world of Folk Music was clearly Communist run with a very strong Jewish influence.  While other people knew of the Red influence in the arch Commie group The Weavers, it was not at all obvious to kids like myself.  The Weavers’ great hit On Top Of Old Smoky betrayed nothing that could be considered Communist.  However the idea of Folk Music which I have always interpreted as Appalachian style music, essentially real oldtime hillbilly, was slowly expanded into a political notion of poor people’s music, the music of the ‘oppressed.’   Now, let me tell you, I come from this social group but have never considered myself ‘oppressed.’  That attitude comes from some very well situated people who have never been at the bottom.  Seeger and his Almanac singers brought Depression songs into the mix so that ‘real’ people went around saying things like ‘I knowed it wan’t  no good.’  Poor people with the folkies were always illiterates who ‘knowed’ things.

Seeger and the Weavers had a hit with the Israeli song Tzena, Tzena, Tzena that was a sprightly song but hardly folk.  Apparently not realizing the song was a success because of its tune not its Jewishness the Weavers followed that song with some propaganda called The Song Of The Sabra, some kind of Israeli kibbutz song.

The Weavers w/ Pete Seeger

At that time the TV Hit Parade show was big and practically the only source of hit songs so Seeger got his song on as an extra because no one bought the record.  It may have been the first Israel as the fifty-first state attempt.  If so the reaction was completely negative.  Shortly after, Seeger and The Weavers were investigated as Reds and disappeared.

Seeger became an anti-commercial purist but a major guru of the heavily Communist and Jewish New York folk scene of the late fifties and early sixties from whence the young Bob Dylan became a stellar performer.  So, between the Negro race music and the Aryan Hillbilly race music along with the Folk music that became a part of the meld, Rock and Roll was sort of the unintended consequence of the effort to force Negro music on Aryans and the Red influence of Folk.

When Fred Hallerman of the Weavers became a consultant for the Kingston Trio in the late fifties revival of the Weaver ethic, the Kingstons did follow a Communist musical agenda that most folkies adopted.  Once again, you had to have a score card to know the players and follow the game.

In England beginning around 1960 a funny thing happened on the way to the recording studio that the Judaeo-Communists could not have anticipated.  The second generation of rockers worshipped Negroes and Negro American music especially the urban electric bluesmen of the fifties that White Americans had already rejected.  It is true that the small coterie of American White Negroes were fanatical about Negro artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and a few others but the mass market would have nothing to do with them either in the fifties or after thirty years of ballyhoo.  The fanaticism was not contagious.  Indeed a really nice picker like Mississippi John Hurt is unknown.  You can count the number of records sold by the Blues hero Robert Johnson on one hand.

Yet the English rockers born from 1940 to 1944 literally worshipped these Negro guys, listening to their records until they had them note for note, even attempting to be Negro, chasing Negro women.  Of course the music had to be adapted to the mass taste to succeed and in the adaptation a new, or at least different, style of music was created.  As strange as it may seem both the Communist Jagger and Richards of the Rolling Stones had an attraction to American Country and Western while being reared on the Englishman, Scots actually, Lonnie Donegan’s big beat folk rock.

What came out of the Stones then was a strange Negro-Country and Western sound performed by White Negroes.

Thus Negro slave music despondent and defeated was successfully laid as the basis for the Folkways of a generation or two of Whites.  Musically the revolutionary program was on course as the sixties dawned developing rapidly.  The Fundamentalist ministers as it turns out were right about Rock and Roll being a Communist plot or turning into one.

Organizing The Future

Procol Harum 1967

She wandered through the garden fence

And said I’ve brought at great expense

A potion guaranteed to bring

Relief from all your suffering.

And though I said: You don’t exist

She grasped me firmly by the wrist

And threw me down upon my back

And strapped me to her torture rack

And without further argument

I found my mind was all so bent

Upon a course so devious

It only made my torment worse.

–Procol Harum

The Communist strategy was to break up prevailing mores and replace them with its own.  Thus the so-called concept of Critical Theory, which was Jewish, was used.  Critical Theory is mostly taking a superior moral attitude as though one knew best and then carping at the existing society as though only fools had devised it and they could do better if they only had the chance.  This attitude applies to all established standards and customs.

Key to our argument here is the assault on artistic standards.  The Semitic religions of Judaism and Moslemism reject the representation of living life forms especially that the human relying on abstract designs instead.  Thus Aryan representational art is anathema to them.  More or less as the twentieth century began, coeval with the rise of Freudian psychology, the assault on representational art began.

In the US the assault began with the New York Armory show of 1913.  The most sensational work of this seminal deconstructive exhibit was the Marcel DuChamp picture of  The Nude Descending A Staircase, he, himself was a Communist agent.  The process continued led by Jewish artists who formed a blobs and dabs ethic leading into Abstract Expressionism and finally completed by the anti-art of Andy Warhol in the early sixties.

Andy Warhol-Yoko Ono Practicing The Black Arts

In 1959 thirty-two short years after the American hero Charles Lindbergh flew his single engine prop airplane across the Atlantic over a period of days a four engine Jet 707 lifted from the runway of Idlewilde airport in New York City to cross the Atlantic non-stop to London in a few hours.  This inaugurated the Jet Era while creating a new phenomenon, the Jet Set.  Logistics had been made incomparably quicker and easier.  Revolution could be co-ordinated as never before.

One imagines that David Bailey watching this first flight recognized its momentousness.  I like to think his breath was taken away by this miracle of science and that he rushed down to get a ticket for the return flight to New York.  Who was David Bailey?  He was a young fashion photographer  for British Vogue.  Antonioni’s film Blow Up was based on his career in what would be known as Swinging London in a few years.  Dave in his early twenties would catch the wave at its inception and ride the wave all the way up and all the way down.  As I write he’s still out there.

As a result of the 707 Fashion itself was made identical on both sides of the Atlantic.  New York and London became one huge metropolis for lucky Jet Setters.  While Dave Bailey was in New York either this time or another time he met fellow revolutionary Andy Warhol.  Andy was a fashion illustrator of shoes during the fifties so it is not improbable that someone at American Vogue called Andy to Dave’s attention.  Or, perhaps as Dave was a switch hitter he wandered into the Serendipity where Andy was a fixture and formed an acquaintance there.

In any event in 1963 Dave Bailey took Mick Jagger on a 707 jet flight to New York.  Mick, as we all know, was a revolutionary who at that time was attending the Communist London School of Economics while singing with the nascent Rolling Stones.  Dave took Mick to call on Andy and the three became fast friends, mates as Dave would say.  Mick revered Andy.  Andy himself playing the fey fool for security became a very important figure in revolutionary circles until his death in 1987.  Andy himself revered Marcel DuChamp while considering himself DuChamp’s disciple.

David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton today. First she’s yours and then she’s his.

Just as Yoko Ono realized the potential of the Happenings for bending society to her will so did Andy.  Having put the finishing touches to art, pop art would be followed by graffiti artists like Keith Haring and Basquiat, Andy turned to film.  His atelier known as The Factory became a very long Happening from ‘64 to’67 when Andy was turned out of his quarters.  After a hiatus of a decade the torch was picked up by the nightclub Studio 54 which in many ways was a continuation of The Factory as a social scene.  Andy was no less a fixture at Studio 54 than he had been at his own Factory.

The Union of Jagger and Warhol was fortuitous as with Andy’s blessing the Stones became practically the Village house band.  The Village was a stronghold for the Stones.  Perhaps inspired by the success of the Stones as well as Bob Dylan Andy made a foray into music when he adopted the Velvet Underground as the Factory house band launching their very short career and the much longer one of Lou Reed.

The stage on which the ‘60s revolutionaries played out their gig was gradually falling into place as the unintended consequence of the foisting of Negro music on White youth by the Jews.  As it turns out it was a Communist plot.

The Communist strategy was to break up prevailing mores and replace them with its own.  This is an age old technique.  No surprises here but to the uninformed.  To mention only one example common to all religions, when a new religion is seeking to replace an old religion the simplest thing is to build new shrines on old sites.  Thus a Christian church replaces a pagan shrine, then a Moslem mosque replaces the Christian church.  The ‘Holy’ site remains the same but faith replaces faith.

Thus, the Communists made their assault on popular culture.  Several very potent technologies had been developed by the ‘Capitalists’ that would never have come into existence under Communism, movies, TV, radio, records and print as well as the art world.  They have used them all effectively.  In authoritarian societies such as the USSR content could be strictly controlled and any deviants punished unlike the West with a long habit of freedom of expression.  As the sixties progressed any attempt to control such things as pornography, nudity and actual sexual perversity were removed.  By the end of the decade the cherished Holy Grail of the revolutionaries of being able to say ‘fuck’ in movies or on TV had been realized.   The Warhol movies of Paul Morrissey,  Blood For Dracula and Flesh For Frankenstein, carried the portrayal of Sado-Masochism to lengths that would have delighted De Sade and Sacher-Masoch themselves.

In an extreme pornographic Happening in 1971 Mick Jagger before an audience of millions would have a huge inflatable penis unroll from the back of the stage, which he mounted.  If there was any community objection it was hooted down in the name of freedom of expression.  Truly a cultural revolution of some sort had been achieved by a small minority.

Sussing Out The Ghouls

Groovy Bob Fraser- Good book.

The key to the psychology of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is Sigmund Freud and where he fits into the culture.  Unfortunately he was not on the side of the angels.  In the struggle between Reason and Un-reason Freud was the champion of un-reason, the Lord of Misrule.  He aligned himself with ancient traditions, none of them Jewish as when they were formed there were no Jews, at the dawn of human history.

Freud discussed these ancient attitudes, in one guise or another, in his 1930 complaint Civilization And Its Discontents.  To mention merely one strain, that of sex.  While we cannot hope to recreate the mind of early man let us assume that early man took a cop from the nearest available woman where he found her.  Rape was not yet a concept so for our purpose here, like Freud we’ll assume that forced sex was common and men, at least, suffered from no sexual repression.  This is the very core of Freudian psychology.

Thus in the good old days a man in the mood who came across a woman drawing water at the spring simply grabbed the woman copped and strolled away without so much as a thank you.  Nine months late the woman said a god appeared to her and the baby was his.  Easy.  But as populations evolved civilized new rules were introduced and men, at least, began to suffer the horrors of repressing their sexual appetites.  This was very nearly original sin in Freud’s mind.  Restrictions were placed on uninhibited copulation.  However the memories of the good old days lived on and men subjected to the new discipline complained of their loss of rights.

At that point society thought something had to be done to satisfy these reactionaries.  One possible solution was sacred prostitution.  Thus young girls were taken down to the temple precincts and couldn’t leave until they offered themselves to the first taker.

In other instances girls stayed until they earned their dowries.  In any event the illusion was created that any man could have any woman when he wanted her- if he had a shekel.  If not then back to laboring in the vineyards of the Lord until he earned one.

Presumably this system worked reasonably well until the mores of the Matriarchy were replaced by the mores of the Patriarchy and women became private property with the woman secluded out sight of leering male eyes.  This system had its problems, one being that some guys were so greedy for women that they collected hundreds in what they called a harem and said that these women were exclusively theirs.  A neat turnaround of temple prostitution.  Well, all systems have inherent flaws.

Middle Easterners then carried it so far that to prevent impertinent glances from passing fellow men they clothed their women cap-a-pie and then put a screen in front of their faces.  Wow! That’s thorough.

As odd as it may seem those memories persisted for thousands of years perpetuated by cults and secret societies.  In reaction to Catholic discipline societies such as the Free Spirits, the Anabaptists and such rebelled against the church in an attempt to re-establish that golden age of yore when it was supposed that men, at least, were unrepressed and could do as they pleased with any woman.  As Rabelais phrased it:  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.  Law and Civilization go together so to get rid of one you have to get rid of the other.  Freud wasn’t dumb.

Then the Enlightenment evolved and the Free Spirits morphed into the Libertines and the Libertines morphed into the Bohemians and Organized Crime and, et voila! Here we are.  Today! Or at least New York City today.  We’re getting closer to Andy and Mick’s paradise.

And then we have the problem of good and evil or, in other words, God and Satan.  A lively division was carried on in ancient times that gradually evolved into  Christian Orthodoxy and Gnostic heterodoxy.  These went through additions and subtractions, mutation and changes until there gradually emerged a clarification of the Godly Church and the Satanic occult.  The Church was able to successfully manage Satanism until the Enlightenment when with their power broken Satanism, Bohemianism and Organized Crime were able to surface and operate in the open.

Many were the advocates and cults.  The central figure of Satanism was  the Frenchman Eliphas Levy (French not Jewish, Levy was an assumed name).  Levy organized modern Satanism.  The novels of J.K. Huysmans give a good insight into this period as well as being good reading.  Important to the US was the Golden Dawn of Aleister Crowley who managed to leave England and live and die in Los Angeles.  His publishing house still survives in the desert town of Barstow.

Thus Satanism grew in significance into the twentieth century when it aligned itself with Warhol and popular music.  When opportunity presents itself, snatch it.

Today, many self-styled adepts and magi have made their appearance over the decades usually with some sort of sex therapy that involves total indulgence or submersion in sexual congress.  Thus the link between Satanism and Freudianism is strengthened.  Freud himself has an appearance of a magus.  He was steeped in the Jewish occult, Frankism, the Zohar, Kaballah and so forth.  His answer to mental health was also unlimited sexual intercourse.  He believed that the more ejaculations per day the better a man would be.  Thus, once again, we have New York City of toady in which women are expected to indulge men in the most casual of sexual encounters.  It will be remembered that the Jewish psycho-analysts fleeing the Third Reich mainly settled in New York thus once again strengthening the Freudian connection.

Thus the anger of ancient sexual reactionaries has been made the ‘sexual liberation’ of today.  Sexual revolution?  What sexual revolution?  Just a return to the most primitive sexual indulgence.

As Freud was himself a homosexual it is no accident that he quietly promoted homosexuality or, at least, the end of sexual repression leading to…what appeared to be sexual liberation in his imagination.

Now, Mick Jagger first appeared in New York in 1963 with David Bailey as his cicerone just when all this fustian was about to ignite.  A later fellow revolutionary future associate, Bob Fraser was working in New York, learning his craft, at the time so it is possible the Dave and Mick met him at that time.  We don’t know as yet what all Bailey introduced Mick to.  Kenneth Anger, the homosexual filmmaker and self styled magus and Black Magician from California was very influential not only in New York but in London as well.  He would associate himself with the leading revolutionists such as Warhol, Jagger, Bailey, Lennon-Ono and the English art dealer Robert Fraser.  Fraser spent the first few years of the sixties in New York learning the art trade while he mingled with Warhol and the NY pop artists.  He was then to introduce their work to London.

Kenneth Anglemeyer aka Kenneth Anger

Kenneth Anger made ‘experimental’ films such as the influential ‘Scorpio Rising’ the movie had a great influence on Andy when he turned to films in 1963.  Scorpio Rising is a homosexual film about a gay primping to go out catting on his motorcycle in some Brando ‘Wild Ones’ setting.  It is a silent film except for the girl group soundtrack of a dozen or so songs.

Anger would then insinuate himself into Jagger’s entourage as he tried to bring Jagger into his Satanic circle.  Mick was supposed to write the sound track for an Anger film but didn’t produce causing Anger in revenge to claim the soundtrack was by Jagger then using some horrid static as a soundtrack.  Anger would also con Jagger’s then girl friend, Marianne Faithfull, into appearing in what he considered his magnum opus Lucifer Rising.  That movie was pretty much a waste which considering Anger’s other efforts is saying a great deal.

Nevertheless Anger influenced Jagger bringing Mick into the orbit of Satanic religion at least through the sixties.  Satanic tropes also began to be marketed to the general public in the mid-sixties with dozens of Satanic movies released over the next decade. In much more than a symbolic way the birth of Satan, Lucifer rising,  was for the modern age portrayed in the 1968 movie Rosemary’s Baby directed by the Jewish Roman Polansky based on the 1967 novel of the same name by the Jewish Ira Levin.

The movie purported to be filmed in New York’s legendary Dakota Apartment building, now condos.  The movie would

The Magus- Aleister Crowley

make the Dakota a Mecca for Satanists in the upcoming years.  John Lennon and Yoko Ono would acquire three apartments in the Dakota in the seventies including two on the seventh floor on which Rosemary’s Baby took place.

Ono herself was a devotee of the Black Arts (black doesn’t mean Negro in this context nor in the term Black Magic) so that her move into the apartment building may have had deep meaning to her.

The previous year, 1967, the Stones had released their record Their Satanic Majesties Request in which Mick introduces himself as Satan.  The disc was released on the eighth of December just before the birth of the baby Jesus.  This might have been coincidental or it might have been a Jewish joke.  At any rate the heavily Fundamentalist US audience of ‘kids’ took it literally thus identifying the ‘bad boy’ Stones as Satanists.  The record also set a tone for the next few years.

According to sources such as Marianne Faithfull Mick was not seriously into Satanism.  She says that he was influenced by the Russian novel The Master And Margarita.  That novel itself has a Wag The Dog quality.  Wag The Dog was a 1997    movie in which a fake war has been reported by a compliant media for political reasons.  However man proposes and God disposes.  The scenario has to be regulary adapted to changing circumstances that often fail to occur as planned.  A key point is when a song was faked, made to sound old, then inserted into the Congressional Library to be ‘discovered.’  The Master And Margarita has that quality.

Supposedly written by one Bulgakov, nearly a legend in his time but forgotten today, for whom a romantic biography has been concocted, he was too cautious to publish in his lifetime as he was already in disfavor with Stalin.  The manuscript was placed in a drawer where it lay undiscovered until 1966.  At that time it was discovered and not only rushed through the presses but this would be classic was considered such a phenomenal find that it was also rushed through a translation that was also published in 1966.

For some extraordinary reason a copy of this amusing but hardly earth shaking novel in which Satan comes to Moscow was also rushed to the hands of the singer in a rock and roll band, Mick Jagger.   Mick not only received a copy but immediately sat down and read it.  Thunderstruck, apparently, he, one supposes, in a blind daze dashed off the lyrics in time to include the then composed music into the new album:  Their Satanic Majesties Request.  The novel ain’t that good.

While Marianne may be correct the sequence of events seems contrived.

However his movie Performance of 1968 goes a long way in reinforcing the impression that he was somewhat into Satanism.  So, within several months the Stones released their record, Jagger released his movie and Rosemary’s Baby appeared.  These were dark years and growing darker and when ‘Satan’ appeared at Altamont the result was a foregone conclusion.  It didn’t help subsequently when Mick mounted his giant inflated penis.

Nineteen sixty-eight and nine were tumultuous years in the record business as the industry moved from an entertainment backwater into a major billion dollar player.  It was then that Mick and his fellow Stones realized that although their group was earning tens of millions of dollars very little of that money was coming their way.  It could hardly escape them that while their ‘managers’ Eric Easton and Andrew Oldham showed evidence of big money they were still living hand to mouth.  They sacked Oldham and Easton only to be tossed into the mouth of Leviathan, Allen Klein, by the departing Oldham.

Klein himself would manage to snag several major British groups including the two biggest, the Stones and the Beatles, any ogre’s dream.  One imagines that he and his heirs have made hundreds of millions if not billions as a result of their thefts albeit conducted through legal methods.

It was not too long after the departure of Oldham and Easton that Jagger realized the monstrous trap that was Klein that Oldham had led the Stones into.

Actually the relationship of the goyish artists and their Jewish managers and record corporation execs is an interesting sociological and psychological study.  I, of course, follow Freudian group theory from a Critical Theory perspective hence cannot be accused of anti-Semitism as Freud approached psychology from a scientific rather than a religious perspective himself being an atheist or so he said.

In Jewish thought they believe themselves to be Chosen of God hence occupying a position halfway between the godhead and humanity.  As such they consider themselves as owners of the goyim or, in other words, human cattle.  As the very Jewish Bob Dylan was to sing- Give me some milk or go home.  Thus the Jewish personnel in the record industry consider the artists as something to be milked.

As with any cattle there are certain maintenance expenses that are unavoidable.  It isn’t all profit.  Thus of the billions milked from the British artists alone it is doubtful that the artists were allowed a penny on the dollar in compensation if that.  The ‘milk’ obtained from the most fabulously successful act, the Beatles, is almost unbelievable.   Both the Stones and the Beatles only amassed fortunes after they had freed themselves from their Jewish owners.  Which is to say they buy their way out trailing mega dollars.

When Jagger realized the enormity of the criminality of Allen Klein he was desperate to escape his clutches.  Interestingly he turned to, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, to free his group from the clutches of Klein.

When Klein took over the Stones from Oldham they were successful but not the icons they were fast becoming as the seventies neared.  After freeing themselves from Klein the Stones went on to actually earn billions.  Their concerts alone grossed over a billion dollars from 1971 to the present with another supposedly on the horizon that could possibly take in a quarter billion or more.

Now, it is nearly impossible for an artist to manage money period but money in the billions can only be managed by a competent financial staff.  Rupert serves that function.   I do note that when Jerry Hall was divorcing Mick she thought it prudent to check with Rupert to see if her money was still there.  Apparently she was aware of the financial shenanigans of money managers.  Historically they can’t be trusted.  One never knows whether the money is there until one asks for the check.

However whether Klein or Loewenstein, the management, the control, virtually the possession of those billions is in the hands of others.

One can only imagine the fear, the panic, that gripped Mick’s mind when he realized that all his and the Stones efforts of ten years had changed hands without any compensation.  One can only imagine the horror with which he received the news that he and his fellows were penniless.  One probably cannot imagine Mick’s reaction as Allen Klein told him- tough shit, so sue me.

Sue him the Stones did but operators like Klein know how to stonewall court orders while using accounting methods to conceal tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.  The Stones sued for a mere seventeen million dollars while settling for bankruptcy returns of ten cents on the dollar.  A little joke of Klein’s as he laughed merrily on the way to the bank.  How much the Stones got of the settlement and how much their lawyers took has yet to be revealed.

He was fortunate to obtain the services of Rupert Loewenstein who bore the honorific title Prince.  Rupert extricated the Stones from Klein while being associated with the City banking establishment of London and already managing the money of a couple dozen of the mega rich seems to have been a fortunate choice.  Letting himself out to pasture in 2007, Rupert will release an account of his experiences with the Stones in a March 2013 memoir ‘A Prince Among Stones.’  Sounds promising but we’ll see.  Place an advance order now and wait.

Andrew Loog Oldham

When Klein took over the Stones from Oldham they were very successful but not the icons they were becoming.  After freeing themselves from Klein the Stones went on to actually earn billions.  Never forget their are expenses, including Rupert.  I don’t know what Rupert’s fees were, perhaps he’ll tell but I imagine the Stones have made him wealthier than he had been before.

Now, artists are artists who must pay attention to their art rather than their finances so a manager like Rupert is an essential.  How trustworthy he actually was remains to be seen although no complaints from the Stones as yet.

Certainly Mick must have entered an extreme darkness of mind as he passed through the years from ‘67 to ‘71.  Psychologically he had been emasculated by Easton, Oldham and Klein.  One way to interpret his riding the inflatable penis could be as an attempt to regain the illusion of his manhood.  One could also interpret his extreme effeminacy  of this period as a result of his emasculation.  Psychologically Klein had stolen his manhood along with his money.  Not that Mick wasn’t always on the ambiguous side.

Mick’s association with Satanism then may have been prompted by his realization of just how evil life could be.  Indeed in Manichean terms the flesh and world belong to Satan while God, the higher powers, deal in spirituality which is the rejection of Satan and his works I.e. money.  Depending on what Mick was reading other than The Master And Margarita his mind may have been led to the conclusion that he was Rosemary’s Baby, that he was the Prince of Darkness.  Certainly he seems to have realized the ambitions of Their Satanic Majesties Request and become a man of wealth and taste.  Interestingly he seems able to move from the exquisite to clownish with the maximum of ease.

Prince Rupert Loewenstein

Pt. III: Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones And The Yobbo Revolution

Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones And The Yobbo Revolution

Part III

By

R.E. Prindle

Mick And Keith Come Face To Face With Nemesis

Keith Richards- Face Of The Stones

The sixties were very critical years for the various revolutions that made up The Revolution.  Yet their activities were very disguised to prevent detection.  At no time could they admit who they were or what they were doing.  For Instance the takeover of the university system of the US that began at UC Berkeley in 1964 was disguised as some sort of ‘student protest’ over some supposed lack of or suppression of free speech, hence its name, The Free Speech Movement.  While it appeared spontaneous it must have been a planned maneuver.  I was at Cal State Hayward a couple of miles down the road.  We had library privileges at UC that had one of the spectacular libraries of the world that I used so I was on campus when this noise was going down.  It was quite professional, extremely well organized and no student revolt per se.  The leaders were well instructed in the psychology of crowds.  Something the ordinary person would never recognize.  From UC it spread throughout the US intensifying in the years 1968-72.

Chairman Mao Ze Dong

Nineteen sixty-eight, of course, kicked off the worldwide  Cultural Revolution orchestrated by Chairman Mao’s China.  It was all organized from China.  The Paris fiasco, everything even into remote corners such as the University of Oregon in Eugene was run from China.  By 1968 I was a grad student at UOregon and in the poster and record business.  Some crazed Chinese styled Communists from out on the rural route opened this Communist book store right next to my store.  Needless to say police surveillance increased drastically as I was already under suspicion for selling posters and rock and roll music, literally the devil’s music in fundamentalist Eugene.  As the whole world knew anyone in the record business was also dealing drugs whether they were or not and I wasn’t.  And then the nutty SDS Jews from New York City flooded into town in their hip denims and abetted the Maoists.  This increased the fun.

Wait a minute now, there’s more.  Eldridge Cleaver and the loony revolutionaries in the Bay Area were conducting open

Eldridge Cleaver

warfare, guns and bombs you know,  with the Feds and local police that naturally enough led to the arrest of such Negro revolutionists.  But then, quite naturally, Eldridge escaped from maximum custody or something just like it and disappeared.  No one knew where he was and they really wanted to.  He didn’t surface for a few weeks so in the interim where did they look for him?

I hesitate to say this because I know you’re not going to believe it.  They asked me if I had him hidden in my four hundred square foot record store.  You see the logical progression, revolution= rock and roll= dope, Marxist store next door- where else is Eldridge going to hide, right?  The store was an open square with a two by four enclosure for a toilet in the right corner.  I pointed out to the cop that he was already looking at the entire store and he could see that there was no Eldridge Cleaver.  But he wanted to check the 2×4 enclosure.  I knew better than to laugh but I could barely contain myself.  The cop opened the door to find himself staring into a toilet bowl.  Eldridge cabled from Algeria shortly after.

I certainly was not aware of revolutionary activity per se or else I couldn’t take their stuff seriously but looking back things remained on red alert until at least ‘72.   For the election of the second Nixon term, which I now see as serious potential danger, I saw them move several truckloads of Army troops out beyond Spencer’s Butte.  One might say Mick Jagger and John Lennon, and I say this modestly in a local way, myself, had them worried.

I’ve always respected the intelligence agencies but placing me in the same category with Mick and John makes me have some doubts.  I had no revolutionary or drug connections.  It wasn’t that they couldn’t find them, as they thought, they didn’t exist.

There you have it, ‘68 was the crucial year.  The authorities in both Europe and America were aware that something was going down.  They were  not taken by surprise.  The Stones were.

They might have asked why are they busting us in ‘67 when they had plenty of cause for at least three years.  Undoubtedly in an attempt to defuse the ‘68 show as much as possible.  The direct action of the revolution failed so whatever counter revolutionary action the authorities took voided that while the revolutionaries themselves misgauged their popular support by a little more than somewhat.  There were only a few fanatics backing them.  The ‘kids’ were just not that dissatisfied.  We were getting plenty of satisfaction.

According to Tony Sanchez/John Blake in their Up And Down With The Rolling Stones Mick fumed thusly after the ‘67 bust, p. 62:

I see a great deal of danger in the air.  Teenagers are not screaming over pop music anymore, they’re screaming for much

Tony Sanchez

deeper reasons.  Pop music is just the superficial issue….When I’m on that stage I sense that the teenagers are trying to communicate with me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency.  Not about me or our music, but about the world and the way they live.  I interpret it as their demonstration against society and its sick attitude.  Teenagers the world over are weary of being pushed around by half-assed politicians who attempt to dominate their way of thinking and set a code for their living…..This is a protest against the system.  And I see a lot of trouble coming in the dawn.

I don’t know about Mick’s mental telecommunications but the message he was getting was maybe being scrambled by some alien force.  Apart from some experts at crowd control and excitation there wasn’t that much interest in fighting in the streets.

Mick remained pugnacious personally, according to Sanchez/Blake:

They think they can break us, man, but no way.  We’ll take everything that they can throw at us, and we’ll still win.  We’re in a position to tell the kids about all the shit that’s going down, and that’s just what we’re going to do.

Mick was smoking some powerful stuff while taking the teaching of the London School Of Economics a little too seriously.  He should have said ‘some kids’, by no means all the kids were concerned with the Stones while as the events in Chicago during the worldwide insurrection  of ‘68 showed that concentrating on sex and drugs was not conducive to direct political action.  ‘The kids’ made a poor showing.  Besides which teenagers were only a part of the rock audience; most of us were at least over twenty.

Nor in ‘72 in Miami after much hoopla and the expenditure of large sums of John and Yoko’s money was there much of an insurrection.  Keith in his auto of 2010 speaking of 1985 and 1972 had this to say about that on page one no less.

Every copper wanted to bust us by any means available, to get promoted and potentially rid America of these little fairy Englishmen.  It was 1975, a time of brutality and confrontation.  Open season on the Stones had been declared on our last tour [that of the inflatable penis], the tour of ‘72, known as the STP.  The Department had noted riots (true), civil disobedience (also true), illicit sex, (whatever that is) and violence across the United States.  All the fault of us, mere minstrels.  We had been inciting youth to rebellion, we were corrupting America, and they ruled never to let us travel in the United States again.  It had become, in the time of Nixon, a serious political matter.  He had personally deployed his dogs and dirty tricks against John Lennon, who he thought might cost him an election.  We…they told our lawyer officially, where the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world.

Richard Nixon

Kind of tells it like it was.  I was in the record business, considered an arch liberal, and I thought the Stones were attempting to corrupt the US if not succeeding.  I mean, you have only to look at the original picture inside their Black And Blue album to confirm that.  The Stones, Lennon-Ono, Dylan, the outlaw groups like the Baader-Meinhoff gang, the Weathermen, the Red Brigades and their ilk saw the world through some drug induced mental haze in which the finest, most just, most democratic and widest opportunity society the world had ever seen and will see was just the opposite of repressive and undemocratic.

I mean, I had been pushed down hard in life, I come from the orphanage, and I still made a major success in the record business and that was against the wishes, not of the system, but the people, the shitheads, I had to deal with.  Good god, you have to bully the bullies, elude their repression.  It will never be any other way.

Whence came such a bizarre interpretation of reality.  As the German politician in the movie, The Baader Meinhoff Complex thought, the insurrectionists were motivated by a myth.  The Robin Hood Complex.

Yes, by a sense of materialistic frustration which they justified by the myth of Robin Hood.  The problem was the same as the Negro insurrectionists in Watts.  The range and quality of material goods increased on a daily basis continually out of reach.  Yobbos like the Stones with no discernible abilities other than to write trite lines of lyrics and play hashed over music taken from nearly musically illiterate street corner Negro bands were realizing their material fantasies.  What did they do in their rebellion in Watts?  Break into stores and steal Tvs and stuff.  Mere economic frustration.  The Beatles were buying Rollers then desecrating  them with psychedelic mockery.  Richards himself driving without a legitimate license bought Rollers and smashed them up with glee laughing as he skipped away to avoid arrest.  Keith was living the Yobbos dream.  Baader-Meinhoff tried to replicate the dream by stealing Mercedes to go joy riding through the night.  Same thing the Negroes were doing.  That was what the revolution was about.  To revel in cash money as the Stones, Beatles and other rockers did they robbed banks to ease their frustration.  A leading hatred of the revolutionists was Consumerism.  In other words there were more goods than they could come up with money to buy.

Then, as that would garner no sympathy from hardworking people who looked on the cynosure of their eye- the Mercedes and Rolls Royces  being destroyed- with horror the gang claimed to be expropriating the expropriators a la Robin Hood and many another criminal but they bought no Thanksgiving dinner for the starving a la Pretty Boy Floyd.

Did the Stones believe the authorities so stupid that they didn’t know what was going on?  Apparently so.  Didn’t the Stones realize that they were merely taking advantage of the system the claimed to despise?  Apparently not.  The intelligence agencies infiltrated even the one man organizations of a nincompoop without a chance of success.  I was invited to join one by agents in which the ‘mastermind’ was the only non-agency member.  What are you supposed to think?

Who was this cocaine supplier to Keith, Freddie Sessler, if not a government agent?  I’ll go into him later.  Ask yourself, who can obtain unlimited quantities of sealed Merck cocaine containers if not government agents.  Some believe that during the sixties the availability of LSD was provided by the CIA/FBI.  There was so much LSD coming out of UC/Berkeley and Stanford programs that the whole Bay Area could have been supplied.  Who was Owsley?  Ask yourself.

The Agencies were funding programs by importing Indo-Chinese heroin also plentiful at that time.  What was the result of plentiful Acid, Cocaine and Heroin?  Incompetent malcontents.  Work it over in your mind.  Think about it.  Electro-shock therapy?  There’s a good one; scrambles your brain forever.  Then add Acid and Heroin.  Whoo-ee baby.

Anyway, the authorities knew what the Stones, Warhol, Lennon-Ono and the revolutionary crowd were up to.  If the West had been the Soviet Union the whole lot would have been shivering the winter through out in the gulag instead of making millions riding giant inflated penises.  Hello Mick, are you listening?

Andy Warhol

But, back to 1967 and the Redlands bust.

It is difficult to know exactly when Oldham and the Stones appeared on the authorities radar.  A reasonable assumption would be perhaps sometime in late ‘64 or early ‘65.   On the other hand Mick associated himself with David Bailey who probably was politically active since the late fifties who then drew Mick into a revolutionary circle including Andy Warhol in New York.  Perhaps some sort of notice was taken at that time but probably of a cursory sort.

Why the Stones would have gotten a shot on the Ed Sullivan show isn’t all that clear to me; they had no reputation in the States at all.  Or, for that matter why the Beatles got a shot.  Nor why Dave Clark and all the early Invasion groups were hooplaed and accepted so readily as the next big thing by the Sullivan show.  Obviously something was going on behind the scenes that we aren’t aware of.

Ed Sullivan

At any rate the Stones got their shot making a not overly favorable impression; definitely inferior to the Beatles although, as we were informed, top competitors of the Beatles over in England.  Well, bully.  Somebody must have figured out a money angle and it wasn’t in records.  In ‘64 a top selling record was 250,000 copies or a million dollars retail.  That was the definition of a million seller.  And there weren’t a lot of those.

Even drugs were not yet that prominent although the use of grass had been spreading since the fifties.  An elite clique in my high school in Michigan was covertly smoking it in 1956 imitating the kids in Scarsdale New York who were apparently leading the curve.

Pharmaceuticals and psychedelics were in use while I was in the Navy ‘56-’59 but not that widespread.  Then in the ‘60s psychedelics came into fairly widespread use.  I had no idea that amphetamines were practically universal in NY during the early and mid-sixties.  LSD became a phenomenon early in the sixties with Leary given the most attention at his post at Harvard becoming the spokesman for turning on, tuning in and dropping out.  One way streets were becoming ubiquitous at the time too.  That phrase may have sounded the alarm for the authorities as multitudes actually did drop out becoming rather a useless burden on society.  I can tell you, Haight-Ashbury wasn’t all that cool.

That ought to have been about ‘65-’66 when the revolution itself was gathering steam.

Mick, of course, was a political revolutionary committed to the cause while his lyrics are a negative portrayal of society if not a put down.  Richards was soured on society at age 13 or so when his voice changed.  He had been a boy soprano at his school where he and two others were so excellent that they won many prizes.  In the process they were excused from certain classes. Then their voices changed and naturally enough they were given their walking papers.

At this point their award winning efforts were thrown back in their faces as they were demoted in grade to make up the classes from which they had been excused.  The trio might have tutored to bring them up to speed but Keith felt that had been discarded like so much refuse.  Society made itself an enemy who as time would prove would be able to wreak his vengeance with effect.

Keith accepted adoption by the revolutionaries as one being shown the inner sanctum of the Red Brigades of Italy and other revolutionary groups.  So he and Mick were more or less of one mind.

Actually by even playing rock music in the fifties and sixties would be to know that he was infuriating the teacher class that had wronged him.  Rock was the devil’s music.  The notion that rock was part of the Communist conspiracy to corrupt youth was fairly widely believed, speaking of the US.  Folk Music was held to be subversive and there is a fair amount of truth in both assertions.

Certainly the Reds didn’t invent Rock but they quickly took advantage of it to inculcate their doctrines.

After the assault on youth in the late fifties when even Dion of the Belmonts was toned down by Mitch Miller and Columbia, the ‘sweet Jewish rock ‘n’ roll of Carole King and Bob Crewe’ and the promotion of a series of bland ballad singers rock seemed to have been contained by the reaction.  In Britain the pop scene had been managed so that only bright, pretty faces and perky personas were universal.

The Stones in a very rebellious revolutionary manner broke that mold.  On their entry to the United States they struck people as somehow dirty, compared to the Beatles I suppose.  They were actually more repulsive, although that might have been Oldham’s hype,  although not so much so as The Animals who absolutely horrified the old guard so that it seemed like the scruffy and scruffier were seizing the youth.  And of course even on their first Sullivan appearance you could easily see that Brian Jones was under the influence of something.  So the Stones may have come under suspicion by the authorities sometime in 1964.

Before 1965 pot and drugs were still somewhat clandestine among youth but by 1965 and after especially with the surfacing of Haight-Ashbury at least pot and LSD were endemic.  In very early ‘64 I used to know a guy who kept a bowl of LSD tabs on his living room table.  Of course that was Berkeley.  In those days acid was considered a sacrament or some kind of transcendental experience.  While not that common the experienced walked around like they had been transformed from ordinary mortals into demi-gods.  They wouldn’t talk to anyone who hadn’t dropped.  It was quite a sight to see although I never indulged myself.

There was one golden moment of, oh, perhaps a half a second in 1966 when the essence of the ‘60s came and went.  It was short and quick and even if you got it it was gone before you could grasp it, little golden shimmers filtered through your fingers and that was that.  Sic transit gloria and away we went to Altamont.  But I anticipate myself.

You’ve heard of the Generation Gap and that was real.  Nineteen thirty-eight when I was born was the year of the lowest number of recorded births in some time. We weren’t as rare as hens teeth but even the war babies out numbered us and when they were born half the male population was overseas, so you figure it.  Somebody was having a good time.  Then in 1946, of course, when the men who survived began to return the population really began to boom, hence baby boomers.  So, there was this gap between a huge youth and an older population.  The old folks didn’t like us and, well, the relationship was difficult, kind of like between Martians and Earthmen.

The Stones had that jungle beat the old folks couldn’t tolerate.  Shucks, the Stones hadn’t even heard real Negro music.  All they knew was Motown and that Chicago shit blues music that no one in the US would even listen to.  I owned a record store beginning in ‘67 and, let me tell ya, you couldn’t even give that stuff away and that includes Robert Johnson.  Oh sure, some stumblebum blues aficionado would shuffle in to ask for Lightning Hopkins, Little Walter or something like that but when you stocked it they would only fondle it say something like I like knowing it’s here.  To hell with those guys.

This was a university town and these fanatics would actually bring Lightning Hopkins, for instance, to town for a concert before twenty people in somebody’s living room.  Those guys couldn’t play guitar and they couldn’t sing.  Leadbelly!  Spare me.  Memorized Carl Sandburg’s American Song Bag.  I never could figure it out.

Shoot! The Stones missed out on the real thing.  They should have been in Oakland in ‘60 to ‘66 where I was.  Boy, we had the real thing.  The most godawful stuff you’d ever want to hear came blasting out of KDIA.  White disc jockeys though.  The Stones could have learned a lot.

The jungle beat might have garnered them some real attention.

Louis Malle

But then, under Andrew’s urging the Stones began to write and compose their own songs.   These were often cruel sexual songs expressing the desire to oppress and hurt women or else mocking the older generation.  Very strange, unsettling stuff at the time.  Now everyone has been unsettled, can’t move them now.  As Jagger and Richards, who wrote the songs, found their way in songwriting, the songs became ever more revolutionary while they meshed with a slew of revolutionary movies released during the mid-sixties on.  These were often coded plans of action that an agitator provided with the key could decode for other revolutionaries and direct action. Such a key movie that was very influential for the Baader-Meinhoff gang and among German revolutionaries in general was Louis Malle’s Viva Maria.  While on the surface a nonsensical even stupid movie when one has the key the movie becomes coherent indeed.  Part of the Matriarchal Revolution for starters, but watch it.

Jean Luc Godard, another Nouvelle Vaguer  also filmed  the very propagandistic film One + One (reissued as Sympathy For The Devil) built around the Stones song of the same title.  There was also a slew of satanic movies such Roman

Jean-Luc Godard

Polansky’s Rosemary’s Baby that aimed at undermining Christian Beliefs.  I Am Curious: Yellow that aimed at destroying female chastity.  But more of that in the appropriate place.

So, by ‘67 the time of the bust the Stones were building up a dangerous reputation.  Always remember that all of these outfits were infiltrated by espionage agents.  And those guys were the ones bringing in the dope so how couldn’t the authorities know what drugs the Stones were using and in what quantities. Nice calling card, isn’t it: an unopened ounce of Merck cocaine?

At any rate they decided in 1967 to rein  the Stones in a little bit.  Shoot the old warning shot across the bow.  Also remember that as much as the authorities wanted to suppress the Stones there were just as many Communists or revolutionaries in just as high places to thwart their efforts and actually place the Stones above the law.  Their credo: To revolutionaries all things are permitted.  Now, you figure it out.

In point of fact the older generation just couldn’t understand the youthful attitude.  Everything was going along swimmingly as far as they were concerned.  The war recovery was proceeding nicely while the economy seemed stabilized, no return of the Depression.  That’s what really scared them and now the little creeps benefiting from this wanted to destroy it.  Go figure.  That high point of Western Civilization has been subverted today.

As far as the bust at Redlands the authorities were just giving the Stones a good razzing, a taste of what could happen if they were serious.  In all likelihood they probably had no intention of making Jagger and Richards serve their sentences.  Robert Fraser, the art dealer, arrested with them, was a different situation.  He was a member of the establishment having held high military responsibility in Kenya possibly during the Mau Mau insurrection.  Therefore he had no excuse whatsoever.

The Stones are quite right that it was a setup.  The supposed dope dealer, the American Jew Schneiderman was quite obviously a CIA plant, hence his unlimited supply of pharmaceutical Acid.

Rees-Mogg’s editorial ‘Who Breaks A Butterfly On The Wheel’ was obviously an inside joke as well as well as an insult to the effeminate Jagger.  One doesn’t take butterflies seriously hence they were calling Mick a little twit.  Why bother with someone so inconsequential?  Mick and Keith don’t seem to have understood this.  Indeed, Mick, according to Tony Sanchez blubbered:

They think they can break us, man but no way.  We’ll take everything they can throw at us, and we’ll still win.  We’re in a position to tell the kids about all the shit that’s going down, and that’s just what we are going to do.

Well, bravo, Mick.  But you might have been speaking from jail, a rather poor pulpit, had they  chosen to put you there while you were not speaking for ‘the kids’ just the yobbos who weren’t going to do anything.

Then according to Sanchez/Blake Mick launches into a clairvoyant séance:

I see a great of danger in the air.  Teenagers are not screaming over pop music anymore.  We’re only serving as a means of giving them an outlet.  Pop music is just a superficial issue…When I’m on that stage I sense that the teenagers are trying to communicate to me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency.  Not about me or our music but about the world and the way they live.  I interpret it as their demonstration against society and its sick attitude…This is a protest against the system.  And I see a lot of trouble coming in the dawn.

So did the authorities and they were taking measures if not to avert it at least to minimize it.  I fail to see how the Paris imbroglio of 1968 took anyone by surprise.  I mean, there was no organization not infiltrated by the intelligence agencies.  The Chinese Cultural Revolution of which Paris and the rest was part, was directed from Beijing so the West’s intelligence agencies had to be well informed.  But as the enemy was their own children they had to be sparing in the use of force.  Even Chicago that would have been a great excuse to eliminate the proven troublemakers wasn’t used.  Instead we ended up with the farce of the Chicago Eight trial.

They should have just dumped on them.  No one was going to riot; those creeps didn’t have that much sympathy.

And then just to show Mick how little they thought of him they sent a helicopter to bring him to them for a little mocking chat.  A helicopter: give me a break.  Keith does have this to say about that in his autobiography Life of 2010:

The same day we were released the strangest TV discussion ever took place between Mick- flown in by helicopter to some English lawn- and representatives of the ruling establishment.  They were like figures from Alice, chessmen: a bishop, a Jesuit, an attorney general and Rees-Mogg.  They’d been sent out as a scouting party, waving a white flag, to discuss whether the new youth culture was a threat to the established order.  Trying to bridge the unbridgeable gap between the generations.  They were earnest and awkward, and it was ludicrous.  Their questions amounted to:  what do you want?….They were trying to make peace with us, like Chamberlin.  Little bit of paper…Yet you know they’re carrying weight, they can bring down some heavy duty shit, so there was this underlying aggressiveness.  In a way they were begging Mick for answers.  I thought Mick came off pretty well.  He didn’t attempt to answer them; he just said, you’re living in the past.

They flew Mick in a helicopter.  It was a mocking importance and it came off that way.  I saw the bit at the time and came to some different conclusions than Keith.  Mick staggered out of the chopper and had to walk across a broad expanse of lawn as though a suppliant to the haughty waiting establishment, sort of like going to see the school principal.  They awaited on the patio of a huge house.   It was the back door and Mick wasn’t even invited into the kitchen: he was treated like a servant or better yet, a beggar.  Butterfly indeed.

They were condescending enough to make your bones ache,  Rees-Mogg, one of the establishment, included.  They asked the spokesperson of the generation:  What do the kids want?  Mick flopped.  He just stuttered.  Keith may have thought he came off well but at my end of the tube I burst out laughing.  As far as I was concerned Mick humiliated himself, but then, it was planned that way.  All the power was on their side; Mick could really only stand like some penitent school boy and that’s pretty much what he did.  Mick wasn’t and couldn’t have been prepared.  The deck was stacked against him.  But then he, in his turn, shouldn’t have blustered in the aftermath.  I wonder if he had to walk home as the heli lifted off without him.  That would have been the usual part of the trick; to leave the victim stranded.

In their own way the establishment succeeded in that they knocked the Jagger-Richards writing team off center.  Or possibly the duo had exhausted their first momentum, much as Dylan had done and had to regroup as Dylan did.  Keith acknowledged that they were dry after the bust.  As he says the duo was able to find a new center that was just as successful, perhaps moreso, than the first.

The revolutions were still on and about to reach their first climax.

William Rees-Mogg 1967: An interesting article about the case:http://www.nickelinthemachine.com/2008/09/brixton-prison-and-mick-jagger/

Next:  Leading to Altamont

Pt. II: Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones And The Revolt Of The Yobbos

Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones And The Revolt Of  The Yobbos

Part II

by

R.E. Prindle

Warhol Jagger

Mick, Dave And Andy

If you had looked you wouldn’t have seen it but Sigmund Freud, or at least, his ghost was quietly at work transforming the psychology of Western Man.  The old chivalric ideals of the Arthurian sagas was rapidly being replaced by the Jewish hopes and fears of Sigmund Freud and the Jewish people.

The Aryan ideal was based on an intense consciousness and objectivity while the Jewish understanding was unconscious and subjective.  Aryans followed a concept of honor, Jews followed a concept of chutzpah.  The transformation was understood if not clearly seen by the science fiction writers of the fifties.  Stories subsequently made into movies such as The Blob, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, book title: The Body Snatchers, and I Am Legend told the tale of the subversion of the conscious as people were portrayed as the living dead or zombies.

Warhol Jagger

With the way prepared then the next step was the free expression of subconscious desires undeterred by reflection and the subversion of men and women in sex.  Freud proclaimed that the more frequently men ejaculated the better a person they would be, at the same time preaching the dangers of repressing those psychological ‘needs’ or desires to the exclusion of all others.

The Libertine element or Bohemians of society seized the opportunity while those yet imbued with  Chivalric or Christian ideals held out while those ideals were slowly eroded replaced by Jewish ideals.   Of course the Pill and drugs came along to push Freudian ideals into fast forward, a bunch of Charlie Chaplins rushing to the future.

Warhol Jagger

At the same time movies and TV began to glorify the expression of an undefined rage  against Western ideals and justifications of its impression appeared regularly in ever more sadistic and uncontrolled expressions.  Movies glorifying drug use and homosexuality appeared regularly.  This enabled homosexuals, sadists and what have you to recognize and find each other thus being able to organize in associations.  The Homosexual, Sexual and Yobbo, or Undermen, revolutions were thus able to more forward much more rapidly.  One was able to discuss these aberrations as normal conversation, mere expressions of the varieties of sexual experience.  Then in 1962 Anthony Burgess published the Yobbo bible, A Clockwork Orange, which in 1971 was made into the most despicable of movies.

The Yobbo bible apparently found a ready audience awaiting it.  In New York, the Prince, even the King, of the Yobbos, Andy Warhol, teamed up with the London fashion photographer David Bailey to buy the screen rights from Burgess at bargain basement rates.  They obviously saw the book’s potential for forwarding the revolutions on the screen for the corruption of Western youth.  Bailey who must have been one the earliest jet setters having met Andy on an earlier occasion perhaps after Andy had introduced his soup cans unless Andy had been recognized as a leader of the revolutions before he had gained fame as an artist.

Warhol and Bailey were quick off the block obtaining the rights in either late ‘62 or early ‘63.  Certainly a prescient move.  As Andy was just beginning his switch from art to film while having no experience in film making Bailey’s collaboration seems as though it were a leap of faith.  Perhaps  if they met in ‘62 or even earlier he and Andy jabbered about the potential of movies while riding a white horse name Obetrol.

David Bailey who had risen rapidly in the late fifties at British Vogue is credited with being one of the originators of

Warhol Jagger

Swinging London.  What a knockout combination that was, had us all slavering at the mouth wishing we were part of it.  Bailey even had his career commemorated in Antonioni’s film, Blow Up of 1966.  A sensational film in its day though I find it difficult to see the significance today although still good mood and photography.

David had met Mick sometime in 1963 through his girl friend model Jean Shrimpton.  Mick was dating Jean’s sister Chrissie who introduced him to Jean.  Jean had no trouble spotting the Stones potential introducing David to Mick with the giddy news that he and the Stones were going to be bigger than the Beatles.  Slightly enthusiastic; the Stones were going to be big but not bigger.  Nothing really approaches the impact of the Beatles.  The dead Lennon is either a god or nearly one while none of the Stones will reach that status.

David and Mick bonded immediately becoming in David’s word, mates.  David was five years older than Mick and already successful so that must have enhanced his appeal to Mick.  As David looked at Mick and saw the Stones play he apparently said to himself;  These are the yobbos I need for my movie, droogs if I ever saw them.  He and Mick boarded a big 707 jetliner, one assumes, in mid to late ’63 to be introduced to co-owner of the movie rights of the intellectual property as the star of the semi-porn flick, at least as it would be filmed in 1971.

David Bailey- Fashion Photographer

This was a fateful connection for Mick and the Stones.  Now, Mick had been attending the London School of Economics, LSE, during ‘62 and ‘63 only leaving university in late ‘63 when he believed the Stones were going to make it.  It is hard to believe that he would give up school for the ephemeral success of England- two good years and out, replaced by the next pretty face.  Perhaps Bailey and Warhol were already planning the exploitation of the record industry as a propaganda tool.  Certainly Bailey was conscious of the trans-Atlantic connection between British and American Vogue.  For guys on the qui vive it wouldn’t be much of a leap to imagine trans-Atlantic musicians, after all, the Englishman (Scot, I know) Lonnie Donnegan had already had a few hits, including a monster, The Rock Island Line, in America.  If, in their discussion Mick could have seen the potential, leaving university would be a bet on a bigger and more glorious future.

Some think Bailey and Warhol would have made the movie but ALO placed the price of the Stone’s too high.  As Oldham was as keen on Clockwork Orange as anyone that doesn’t necessarily ring true.  There must have been other reasons.

Nor was Mick studying bookkeeping at LSE as often represented.  The school was established by the Fabian socialist Webbs c. 1900 and was a Communist training ground.  Mick did have a scholarship which means he must have been vetted as good future material.  Although LSE does have an accounting department Mick was enrolled in political science with the intention of being a Communist politician.  So, Mick, David and Andy were to follow a revolutionary agenda pushing the envelope in sex and unruliness.  The emerging drug scene promoted both aspects and added a new one.

Shortly after Mick returned home the Beatles burst upon the scene from the Ed Sullivan show in February of ‘64.  This was the avant garde of the British Invasion opening up fabulous new vistas for the yobbos of small insular England.  For whatever reason the Beatles were an immediate sensation.  I’ve got a very good ear but I couldn’t hear it then and I still can’t.  The Stones, not really that big a deal yet, followed shortly after gaining full national exposure on Sullivan’s show.  Young America was watching.  Regardless of the opinion of Stones’ fans they didn’t cut it.  There didn’t seem to be much there other than the hype.  Mick couldn’t sing while having a very weird appearance.  All eyes were on the magnetism of Brian Jones, looking right past Mick.  You can see him noticing where the attention was going and looking over at Brian as though to say:  But I’m the singer and should be the center of attention.  Perhaps Brian’s fate was sealed at that moment.  Certainly if he had been brought up front, as all four Beatles had been, there might have been more interest.

No matter, the first tour may have been a bummer but the conquest was still quick enough.  The Stones were after all British.  Gold, at the moment.

In any event Warhol and Jagger became fast friends. A friendship that was to endure to Andy’s death in 1987.  By the time the Stones had gotten settled in Andy had been shot in 1968 actually killing him but the doctors brought him back.

The early endorsement of Warhol had cemented the relationship of the Stones with the yobbos of Bohemia.  In ‘63-64 Warhol was only just getting the Factory, the clubhouse of homosexual drug addicted Yobbos, going but that gang would have spread the word effectively in Manhattan club land.

I’m sure Mick’s sexual ambiguity, bi-sexuality, or whatever you wanted to call it kept the enormous homosexual population of Greenwich Village Bohemia in his corner.  After Andy’s recovery in 1969-70 the relationship between the two men developed.

Andy Warhol

To quote the website

http://www.montauklife.com/history/hist-main2.htm :

Mick Jagger was painted [by Warhol] while he was at the height of fame.  Andy and Jagger first met in 1963.  Warhol spent a lot of time with Jagger and his wife, Bianca, but claimed he was the closest to their daughter Jade, whom Andy remembers teaching to paint.  Over the years the artistically inclined Jagger kept tabs on the musically inclined Warhol.  Mick was such an admirer, that in 1972 when the Stones formed their own record company, they tapped Andy to design their logo.

Montauk is the easternmost town at the end of Long Island.  Andy and Paul Morrisey had bought a twenty acre compound there that they rented out.  In 1975 they would rent it to the Stones for 5K a month while they were making Black and Blue.

In the meantime the Stones expanded their list of celebrity acquaintances on their 1972 Exile On Main Street tour.  Needless to say these celebrities were all related to Warhol and the Bohemian scene.  This included meeting the Warholite photographer Peter Beard who directed the Stones to Montauk.  The linked Montauk site is worth reading.

Clockwork Orange Poster

All right.  A Clockwork Orange was released in 1971 with devastating results.  Just previously in 1969 the Homosexual Revolution had succeeded in escaping the restraints of New York City laws with the   Stonewall  Riots  leading to the golden age of homosexuality before AIDS hit.  The Stonewall Inn was on Christopher Street in the Village, the very heart of the Homosexual Revolution and Warhol’s empire. This led to an increase in the corruption of society.  Following on the heels of the Riots perhaps encouraged by them the effects of A Clockwork Orange were much greater than The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without A Cause of the mid-fifties.

There were serious consequences not least of which was a sado-masochistic tone to the Stones as exhibited in their Black And Blue release of 1975.  It is hard to believe that this record didn’t reflect Andy’s sado-masochistic influence.  The inside cover depicting a bound woman being brutalized, the title Black and Blue seeming to indicate the bruises she was getting from the beating caused a major uproar, especially amongst Lesbian groups, resulting  in the photo’s being withdrawn to be replaced by a group shot.  Warhol and Mick were in sync.

In addition to providing the Stones’ logo Andy also designed three record covers for them which advanced the homosexual sadistic agenda.  The first was the blatantly homo Sticky Fingers.  The title was interpreted to mean the result of beating off while the cover has the famous zippered jeans with the working zipper.

The second cover was Love You Live with its double entendre of cannibalism.  The third, Emotional Tattoo, a bootleg, featured Mick on the cover of 1983.

In 1975 showing Andy’s great admiration or love or Mick he made a portfolio of large 42 x29 inch prints reproduced in this article.

Bianca Jagger http://oystermag.com/street-style-before-street-style-bianca-jagger

During this whole period of the seventies Mick’s wife Bianca was the reigning queen of the Warhol/Halston entourage.   While Mick promoted satanic sex riding an enormous inflated penis on the stage he was somewhat more puritan with his wife off stage.  He found Bianca’s  sexual behavior in the Warhol entourage so humiliating that he was forced to divorce her.  One can say that he was patient with her past the endurance of most guys.

But Andy and Mick remained good friends.  In 1987 when Andy took the one way barge trip to a new life Mick was the only celebrity friend who took the time to attend Andy’s funeral in Pittsburgh.  Thus ended probably one of the most significant friendships of our time.

By the time Andy died they and one presumes, David Bailey, had been more successful in achieving their goals than they might have hoped.  Of course Sigmund Freud gave them more than a leg up.

Next:  Nemesis Catches Up With The Stones.