A Review: The Rock And Roll Circus Movie Of The Rolling Stones

A Review

The Rock And Roll Circus Movie

Of  The Rolling Stones

by

R.E. Prindle

All Dressed Up For The Party

In December 1968 Mick Jagger decided to make a film, or rather, he shot the film having decided earlier. Perhaps he was inspired by The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour of the previous year. These years from 1966 to 1968-69 were a tumultuous time for Jagger and his sidekick Keith Richards. Not least significant was that Mick had taken up with the songstress Marianne Faithfull. Then in 1967 there was perhaps the most famous drug bust in history at Keith’s Redlands house.

The boys had been pushing the drug envelope hard more or less inviting a crackdown and it came in 1967 involving Mick, Keith and Marianne with devastating results for all three characters in the drama.

As the authorities wished to make an example of the baddest boys of rock and roll Mick and Keith received prison sentences of which however they only served two or three days. Nevertheless their psyches had been criminalized, changed their views on their role in society.

While the arrest and jail time were merited in society’s eyes, Mick and Keith who were among the legions marching to Altruria on the wings of pot convinced that their elders had irrevocably messed the world up while they were going to set it right under the influence of marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and whatever else was handy, saw the bust and conviction as unjustified interference in their dreams of perfection.

The revolution was on as far as they were concerned hence they began a string of songs along the lines of Street Fighting Man and Sympathy For The Devil, unintended consequences of the bust.

Oh yeah, Mick and Marianne, Keith and his main squeeze Anita Pallenberg had become involved in Satanism which was going around like the flu. Not necessarily dilettantish either like, say, I just read a great book by Satan, but the real kind as fostered by the Great Beast 666 Aleister Crowley himself as interpreted by his epigoni Kenneth Anger and Anton LaVey, not to mention the Process Church Of The Final Judgment. Mick and Marianne disavow any serious interest in Satanism but the Rock and Roll Circus contradicts that.

Combined with these irritants in their lives Mick had just starred in a Satanic movie, Performance, and Marianne had had the misfortune of a miscarriage. To say that they weren’t suffering at the time they made their movie would be a understatement.

In this hazy mental state, compounded by too many drugs, Mick cobbled together his Circus.

What is the meaning of the title Circus? Ostensibly it meant literally a circus, after all it had a fire eater and trapeze artists. However it could also be a double entendre. Just as the title of their 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, parodied the Queens request on passports so the word Circus also parodied the name the British intelligence agency gave to their gig. The title can be construed as a challenge to the establishment. It would seem clear then that Mick was still seething inside because of Redlands.

His film is negligible as a movie but a good concert film. The symbolism is non stop as the guest audience in dressed in some sort of Munchkin costumes. The cast was bizarre to say the least. While little more than a musical oddity Jethro Tull led by Ian Anderson in his disgusting dirty old man persona opens the show while he was followed by the Who caught in pre-Tommy persona. Never one of my favorite bands, others thought they were a good performance while we are treated to a young Pete Townshend doing a series of his trademark windmills.

The couple circus acts are entertaining enough; the fire eater is pretty spectacular.

John Lennon performing separately from the Beatles was probably the musical highlight of the show for me. While obviously in the throes of a serious depression personally, as a performer once on stage Lennon is charisma spilling out all over the place. The depression does show up in the name he chose for his ad hoc group- The Dirty Mac. The name characterizes the general depression and malaise of the whole show. Lennon’s group brought together some stellar lights of the time. Besides himself he had Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums, Eric Clapton on lead guitar and Keith on rhythm. They are joined a by fiddler, I presume Ivry Gitlis, and the irrepressible Yoko Ono.

The Dirty Mac

Yoko was in her Bagism phase. While the movie is loosely shot during Lennon’s gig, if you watch the lower right corner of the film you can see a black object sort of pulsing. That’s the bag Yoko is in. I suppose as she was a performance artist the bag was Yoko’s joke- that’s the bag I’m in, get it?

After a noisy rendition of Yer Blues Yoko wiggles out of the bag bouncing up with her arms outstretched as in Here I am, aren’t I wonderful? Well, she certainly shocked Ivry when she began to squeal. Yoko is very tiny so Ivry kind of looks down at Yoko with raised eyebrows, looks over at John, backs up a couple steps, stops playing momentarily and has this incredulous am I believing what I’m seeing and hearing look on his face. One might say Yoko stole the show. Really, I had to start laughing.

Marianne: I have since learned that Marianne’s performance was deleted. Jody Klein substituted this picture from a French performance.  It has nothing to do with the Circus.

The real show stopper comes next when the camera shifts to Marianne Faithfull. She was decorously posed in a stunning black designer gown. At her most beautiful with a fine folky voice that entrancingly recalled her As Tears Go By but strong and more focused. I missed the words but caught the mood of this enchanting chanteuse. Marianne definitely trumped Yoko as a showstopper.

Taj Mahal was a special case. Believe it or not Taj is still out there challenging the Interminable Tourist Dylan himself. Taj works, or did, about 170 days a year, every year. While he is not well known he began as a duo with Ry Cooder called the Rising Sons then added a string of records on his own. The guitarist is Jesse Ed Davis, a failed guitar god, who had a couple solo Lps of his own. Taj’s first two records are superb blues Lps, two of my favorites of the period. The third LP, a two record set is also quite good but begins his political period that obviated his musical career. He goes rapidly down hill after that.

For some reason he chose a rather lame piece from his repertoire. If he was making an appeal for a girl or girls to join him backstage his salacious version of Hey, Little School Girl might have served him better.

The Stones rounded out the show at the end. While the Who were supposed to have buried the Stones I didn’t find it so. The tension had been well maintained throughout the show with the comic interlude of Yoko and the Stones maintained it through to the end with a climax of sorts.

The Who

It was obvious that Mick, Keith and Marianne were in a world of hurt….and Brian Jones. That tragedy would play out over the next year when Brian drowned and Marianne almost drowned in her own tears and Mick spawned a real live Satan at Altamont.

The movie ended in hurt and Satanism- homage to the Devil.

Mick and Marianne had gone to see Jimi Hendrix a few months earlier. After performing Hendrix had sat at Marianne and Mick’s table where he put the make on Marianne telling her to dump the White dude and go with him. Marianne hesitated a moment too long giving Mick offense so that he commemorated the evening in his song, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Suddenly I realized the meaning of the line, you and your friend Jimi as Mick shouted it to someone off stage to the right. OK, not my problem.

So Jagger was still wearing his hair as he did in the movie Performance. That soul corrupting film was obviously still influencing him. As Marianne said, it changed his personality.

The show closed with Sympathy For The Devil. There was a little stage extension on which Mick prostrated himself as though doing obeisance as the song played. It looked like he was groveling, then he looked up making a couple goofy grimaces at the camera beginning to pull off his shirt. Not necessary, Mick, not necessary. Then with the shirt off he straightened to a kneeling position to reveal Satanic tattoos a la Kenneth Anger.

Anger had a large LUCIFER tattooed across his chest. Here Mick seemed to be imitating him apparently trying to tell us that the Great Satan had arrived. I hope they were transfers. Interesting, especially as the movie Rosemary’s Baby appeared in 1968 in which Rosemary gives birth to the Son of Satan. Even more interestingly in the 1990’s book sequel Son Of Rosemary Satan’s little lad was named Andy. After Andy Warhol, I presume.

I suppose then that Mick conceived the film as a coming out party for himself as The Great Beast. Apparently he took his Satanism very seriously. It make one wonder, was Altamont a projection of the Great Satan?

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

Marianne Faithfull:

The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

by

R.E. Prindle

Chapter VIII

Changes

Would anybody like to try the changes I’m going through?

–Donovan.

In Her Glory

Life at best is difficult. Change after difficult change presents itself.  Of necessity life is lived on the fly.  One must always deal with fixtures and forces one cannot comprehend on first confrontation.  In a way then we can hardly be responsible for the decisions we make unless we have enough experience to interpret that with which we are confronted correctly.  At any point a controlling psychological fixation through misinterpretation may cause to act against our best interests.  All further experience then will be interpreted through and disturbed by one or more fixations in our subconscious of which we probably are not aware.

Sexually Marianne was probably confused by the sexual scenes she observed at her father’s Braziers Institute contrasted with her subsequent teaching of abstinence at St. Joseph’s Convent School.  The confusions conflicted her sexual attitudes in later life, attitudes she was unaware of and never resolved.

Young Marianne

Once she left her father’s governance passing into that of her mother’s she lived not in poverty but in relative hardship; luxuries if experienced at all were few and far between yet she did received an upper class education and outlook at St. Joseph’s.

Her mother was  apparently strongly Bohemian having been involved with the stage pre-WWII.  She encouraged Marianne in the Bohemian direction which Marianne found congenial, sought and never abandoned.  The girl was interested in the stage while becoming a Joan Baez style folk singer after leaving convent school in Reading at seventeen.

While not beautiful in any classic sense she was yet attractive with a great figure making her a desirable sexual object.  The sixties was the decade of wide open sex making all women mere sexual objects.  Her first reaction was to seek a stable married life choosing John Dunbar as an appropriate husband.  Dunbar was Bohemian in outlook while apparently headed for an academic career.

At this point fate intervened.  At a party with Dunbar she met the record producer Andrew Loog Oldham who perceived her persona as a marketable commodity  in the pop music world.  As an added bonus Marianne could actually sing, having performed as a folk singer.

She was still an impressionable girl of just seventeen just after the Pill had been introduced with little ability to successfully traverse the changes she would be called upon to go through.  These would be formidable and rapid calling for huge energy reserves on a day to day basis.  Not an enviable situation.

While most musicians go through a relatively long learning process and struggle to succeed Marianne struck gold the first time out without even trying.  Her first minimal three minute effort, if it was an effort,  established her as the pop princess or queen of the generation.  Her innocent convent school persona was perfect in a vulgar world.  But it was a persona at odds with the one Marianne would seek and embrace- she became the devil with a blue dress on.

While the music or, really, record business seems very attractive from a distance it is literally vile from the inside.  Everything connected with it is dishonest, the record companies, musicians, lackeys, the whole number.  Nobody remains unstained.

It is truly a man’s world, even a gay man’s world, in which the men have no respect for womankind.  Women are expected to merely service the sexual desires of the male performers.  They have no use beyond that.  Thus one has the phenomenally debauched groupie scene that amazed the world during the sixties. After that there was no longer anything amazing.

Having witnessed sex acts at Braziers of numerous descriptions the pop music world satisfied this side of Marianne’s psyche.  At the same time a desire for a chaste life pushed her in the direction of marriage with Dunbar which desire she consummated, however Dunbar proved to be not the ideal choice.

While Marianne thought she would be leading a sedate intellectual academic life with him as a professor he turned out to be as much or more a Bohemian as she was.  Quite frankly he failed her.

Having acquired a wife he did not act responsibly toward her.  He was blindsided by her recording success and perhaps belittled by her financial success.  In effect he was supported by his wife which is always a difficult situation.  The changes he faced were in themselves formidable and he didn’t have the character to meet them.  Still, a man doesn’t fill his house with dopers and heroin addicts.  Marianne can hardly be faulted for resenting it after getting up in the morning to find a house full of conked out junkies in rooms littered with used needles.  The transition from Braziers to St. Joseph’s to high degeneration must have been changes hard to adapt to.  Sent her head spinning.

Marianne Searching

The change from the straitened circumstances of her childhood and youth still actually in progress to one of affluence in which she could indulge her wildest fancies in buying clothes and more clothes.  Her lack of maturity hurt her badly.  In this case her hero William Blake’s notion that the road of excess leads to wisdom was not quite true, it led to penury.

Not clearly seen by many at the time the pop world split into two streams, the British pop stream of the fifties soon to be extinct and the Rock world  of pop princes and princesses of the future.  The Beatles straddled both worlds while curiously Marianne may have been the first to emerge as a star of the Rock world soon to be followed by the Rolling Stones.

As such even though having only one hit single to her name she was on a par with the Beatles and the Stones while being superior to the lesser groups following in the train of the Beatles and Stones.  Thus in the salon formed around the pop art dealer Robert Fraser she held a place of primacy that she never realized.  Her tragedy was that she was too young and inexperienced to grasp her opportunity making a series of inept decisions while being seen only as so much poontang by the Rockers and of transitory fame by a series of inept managers.

Thus, unable to find someone capable of carefully building her career she did become transitory, or her career going into hiatus, she did lose her place while gravitating to the dominance of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.  Gradually her royalties diminished so that she was financially dependent on Jagger while still married to John Dunbar.  Deep in a milieu of drug users she found their allure irresistible.

However conscious she was that she had been and still was to some extent a celebrity she thought to regain that identity.  Feeling unable to compete with Jagger as a recording star she chose to follow her mother’s wishes and take up acting.  In her enthusiasm to and need to show Jagger that she was somebody too, that she was his equal, as a performing artist she aroused Jagger’s interest in also being a movie star.  He, being a more marketable commodity soon gave evidence of eclipsing her as an actor rather than staying in recording as she assumed he would.

Her own space having been preempted she developed an affinity for Brian Jones of the Stones who was essentially in her situation in his relation to the group.  He too was being forced out thereby losing his identity.

When Brian died she then in sympathy decided to follow him overdosing with pills that would have killed her had not Jagger been alert enough to rush her to the hospital.  As much as anything her suicide attempt was meant to get away from Jagger’s dominance.  That move now being thwarted she had no choice but to walk out which she did in 1970.  Thus began the rest of her life.

II

Marianne The Wild Thing

The Rock and Art scene was a drug scene.  Bob Fraser’s salon centered around Rock musicians was also a drug center.  Fraser introduced members of his salon to all drugs including heroin.  Marianne had a favored position in Fraser’s salon early learning of heroin to which Fraser himself was addicted.  By the time she walked out on Jagger in 1970 she had been addicted for some time.  Heroin was to remain her central fixation throughout her life.

Jagger disapproved of her addiction so she was forced to conceal it from him.  When her royalties decreased she no longer had her own money becoming dependent on Jagger.  Not wishing to plead for large sums of money from Jagger in order to obtain her heroin she prostituted herself to Keith Richard’s factotum Spanish Tony Sanchez.

Sanchez was an aspiring criminal who came to Richards through Groovy Bob Fraser.  Sanchez had met Fraser in a bar after which the friendship blossomed.  Fraser had contracted gambling debts to the notorious Kray Brothers, the criminal kingpins of London.  The Krays were threatening Fraser with grievous bodily harm if they didn’t get their money.  According to Sanchez in his autos Up And Down With The Rollings Stones and I was Keith Richard’s Drug Dealer he volunteered to negotiate the debt with the Krays which he did.

At that time, following their US Mafia model, the Krays were attempting to lift the Beatles from Brian Epstein who also had large gambling debts to them so there is no reason to disbelieve Sanchez.  Following the episode with Fraser Sanchez was employed by Richards as drug/procurer-factotum at the fabulous salary of two hundred fifty pounds a week.  This leads me to believe that the Krays were using Sanchez to infiltrate the Stones possibly with the intent of taking them over.

Sanchez was always resented by Richards and the Stones but he managed to stick with them until the mid seventies when Richards was able to shake him.  In his vanity Sanchez considered himself an essential member of the Stones’ entourage, if not an actual member of the Stones.

Marianne’s misfortune was that everyone wanted to sleep with her, a further misfortune was that she obliged.  Thus she and Tony had a sexual liaison for several years.  This raises the question then whether Tony was also pimping for her.  Certainly as his criminal associates knew he was sleeping with her they would want to also.  Not being a fool Tony may have named a price and received it.  Whether he or she could have successfully resisted is open to question.  The US Mafia certainly used their female artists to gratify their desires.

In the mid sixties additionally, once again, through Fraser Marianne had become part of the Satanic crowd.  Through Fraser she was introduced to the arch US Satanist, Kenneth Anger.  Through them she was introduced to the writing of Great Satanist of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley and also the writing of the nineteenth century French arch Satanist, Eliphas Levi, not Jewish despite the name.  And then the modern Satanist classic the Russian Bulgakov’s The Master And Margarita published in 1968.

Also in this period she became involved with the Satanist Process Church Of The Final Judgment.  Marianne downplays her involvement with Satanism but it was much more serious than she is willing to admit.

Playing against this background Marianne renewed an acquaintance with the Irishman Lord Patrick Rossmore.  He was 43 to her 24.  I merely mention this, it makes me no never mind what the ages are so long as the couple is comfortable with each other.  In this case they weren’t comfortable.  The two, in a sort of a farce became engaged but never married parting as they met in a friendly sort of way within several months.

While Mick was aggressively dominating, Marianne seems to have chosen Lord Rossmore because shy and retiring as he was she could dominate him.  According to Hodkinson the couple rarely saw each other, he being in Ireland while Marianne remained in London closer to her dope supply.

True to her interpretation of William S. Burroughs degenerate novel, Naked Lunch,  she led a totally debased and degraded life as a street junkie or, at least, her version of it.  Remember it was her movie of Marianne and she was pretending to be a sociologist.  She cultivated the friendship of total degenerates such as the artists Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.  She also became friends with the total junkie, writer Alexander Trocchi.  Also at this time becoming fast friends with another lowlife, Henrietta Moraes who she says was a close friend until she died.  Marianne was able to sink to lower levels than any of these people and gloried in it.

It was during this period of 1970-71 that she says she sat on the wall in Soho staring into the bomb crater.  In his first biography Hodkinson scoffed at this.  According to him this wall was a waiting station lined with junkies alert for their supply.

By 1971 the Stones had become tax exiles in the South of France so that Spanish Tony was with Keith no longer able to supply Marianne with her drugs, thus, we suppose, the wall.  As Marianne had no regular income during this period, although adequate royalty checks still arrived irregularly, there does arise the question of how she paid for her dope.  As a junkie Marianne had no qualms about running up tabs she couldn’t pay and apparently didn’t.  At one point she boasts she left New York owing several dealers 20K each while flippantly adding she had no intention of ever paying.  Whether she succeeded or not is not known.

Marianne vehemently denies that she resorted to prostitution although there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence she did.  A careful reading of her second auto, Memories, Dreams And Reflections, gives some hints.  At one point she retorts to an admirer that she is not a two-bit prostitute, that it would take 200 pounds to be with her.  Perhaps a joke but the price sounds right, her retort has the ring of authenticity.

In the same auto she claims first hand acquaintance with all the working girls of the area.  There is only one way such first hand knowledge could be obtained.  There is or was a video on the internet in which a camera had been placed within a building between two half open doors.  Marianne dressed in some pretty snappy expensive looking working girl gear walks in front of the camera, notices it, shows alarm, then quickly turns a corner then flattening herself against the wall to peer back at the camera.  It seems evident that she was going to or returning from a job.

She seems to have worked from 1970-71 through at least 1974 through her association with Madeleine D’Arcy.  In 1971- during the recording of Exile On Main Street when Tony Sanchez accompanied Keith to the South of France Tony met Madeleine with whom he fell deeply in love and had a relationship with her in France.

Upon returning to England he apparently resumed some sort of relationship with Marianne as well as Madeleine.  Marianne in her turn began a lesbian relationship with Madeleine, perhaps to spite Tony, who she despised personally, or so she says.  Tony was angry at the relationship.

It then appears that Marianne and Madeleine functioned as high price prostitutes or perhaps call girls between ‘72 to ‘74.  In ‘74 Madeleine as Marianne recalls had gone back to turning fifteen pound tricks in Brighton.  ’Going back’  implies that formerly she received higher payouts, perhaps 200+ as Marianne received.

As she hadn’t heard from Madeleine for a little while she called at her apartment.  When no one answered she called a couple bravos to break down the door.  One was a Maltese pimp and drug dealer.  At that time in London the Maltese are said to have controlled crime in the West End.  That Marianne could call on them to supply help implies a certain degree of familiarity with the underworld.  The other person’s  identity Marianne doesn’t indicate so there is the possibility it could have been Tony.  When no one answered the door the two men broke it down.

Entering the apartment Madeleine was found dead on her bed.  She had apparently been beaten to death although not molested as she was artfully laid out in a beautiful full gown.  Thus whoever killed her loved her.  This points to Tony although the crime was never solved.

So, if Marianne says she never turned to prostitution perhaps not, but there is sufficient evidence to indicate she did.  The whole period from 1970-1974 is very hazy in her memoirs.

While she was supposedly incognito on the streets of Soho, as if Marianne could ever be incognito,  lost to view of the music world, Michael Leander, who had been her producer suddenly got the idea to make an LP with her so he beat the bushes, scoured the walls so to speak, like any good detective, tracking her down in Soho supposedly sitting on her wall staring into the bomb pit.  He induced her back into the studio where they recorded the LP Rich Kid Blues, a return to Marianne’s folk roots.

For some reason the record was shelved not being released until decades later.  After this she took up with Oliver Musker who she was associated with for the two years from ’72 to ’74.

III

The Myth Of Marianne

Down And Out In Soho

For all her emotional problems Marianne was a bright girl.  She read.  Among her readings were those of the psychologist C.G. Jung.  Among Jung’s ideas was that of the personal myth.  By that he means everyone must have a personal myth to survive, to make sense of what one is doing or what is happening to you.  This was more or less the same notion of Andy Warhol’s that if you don’t like the way your life is going pretend it’s a movie.  That’s a sort of displacement so what’s happening is just a script that was written for you.  Your own personal myth.  Lots of people were living in their own movie.

It seems probable, in observing Marianne’s life, that she came across Jung’s observation and set about creating her myth.  For proper understanding I quote Jung: p. 197 of the Red Book as quoted in the introduction by Sonu Shamdesani:

I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness:  “what is the myth you are living?”  I found no answer to the question and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust…

So in the most natural way, I took on myself to know “my” myth– so I told myself– how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it.”

During the period of 1970 ‘72 Marianne had fallen on the hardest times, the lack of a model for her life.  It seems obvious that the wall bit is perhaps a metaphor for her mental state while sunk into her heroin addiction which perhaps had led to other unsavory activities.

If she really thought she was incognito amongst the street people and shopkeepers who she tells us were wonderful to her, what would have been just another junkie earning money by any means necessary, she is either misremembering or was oblivious to the truth.  Marianne was a nationally recognized figure on TV and records who had won the hearts of the people.  If anything, one can only think that they wondered how she could have fallen so low but in a manner they still revered the image she had been.  On the other hand she says guys drove by and yelled ‘you dirty slag’ out the window.  Marianne was in denial.

Without a myth of herself that was all she could do.  I don’t know when after her fall from grace in 1967 she had read Jung to conceive of creating her myth but the period after 1970 has certainly been mythologized.  Remember she titled her second auto Memories Dream And Reflections  which just happens to be the title of Jung’s own auto without the And.

As it was necessary for Marianne to form a new persona after the Redlands bust it appears that the persona began taking shape during this period of extreme depression from ‘70 to ‘72.  When she met Musker and perhaps even Leander recorded Rich Kid Blues with her, she began to form the myth and regain an identity and perhaps sanity.

Musker led to Ben Brierly which was a key recovery period and then later she grabbed hold of the supreme works of despair and depression, the works of Brecht and Weil.  God, that’s hurting.

All her associates  in the mid seventies were Creatures From The Black Lagoon.  Black Lagoon was one of the great psychological sci-fi parodies of the fifties.  Freud’s vision of the unconscious dominated the period so in Lagoon some ‘scientists’, always portrayed as evil themselves, discover a black lagoon in the Brazilian jungles.  The circular pool, of course, represents Freud’s vision of the unconscious in which demons and monsters lurk so the Creature, stirred up by the scientists, perhaps it may be read as psycho-analysts, emerges in all his horror dripping with weeds from the black lagoon. Coulda been me I thought as I sat watching.

So, Burroughs, Gysin, Ginsburg, Corso, Bacon, Lucien Freud,, Moraes, all the people a reasonable person would run from.  No matter how attractive they may appear on the printed page they were much less so in person.  I’ve met a few of them and, shall we say, I knew I would never fit in.

Marianne did fit in.  She was beginning to reconcile her Braziers Park sexual education with her high Catholic teaching.  Andy Warhol said if your life is not going as you like it, pretend it’s a movie.  Marianne was in the unique position where she could live her myth in movies, on the stage and on phonograph records as well as in real life.  In her mind she could make it work but real life upsets things once in a while.  Plus Marianne in her reading read William Blake whose line ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ was the mantra of the whole junkie crowd as well as Marianne’s.  Who would be seduced by bull shit like that?  Beaudelaire, Rambeau and the French Symbolists also provided such like justification for the path she was on.  Thus Marianne was able to justify her myth by such philosophy.

Marianne could thus justify sexual excesses, perhaps even prostitution, as drinking the cup to the dregs on the path to wisdom.  At the same time she was able to split her personality in a Braziers/St. Joseph’ contrast so that she could remain ‘pure’ while sympathizing with the plight of all those unfortunate prostitutes she knew so well.  That actually was a sort of Rich Kid Blues so Leander was perhaps more prescient than Marianne thought.

Marianne who had many acting offers during these years and at least one serious role with Roman Polanski all of which she blew ostensibly because of her heroin addiction but also possibly because as she felt so degraded she didn’t think she deserved success because of Redlands.  At any rate she was the darling of the counter culture and remains so down and out or not.

Oliver Musker an old Etonian met her through Christopher Gibbs who paled with Bob Fraser at a party in 1972 so she wasn’t so incognito that she wasn’t attending parties.  Still her addiction was obvious enough that Musker wanted to save her.  Therefore he took control and put her in rehab.  But what’s rehab to an addict?  Perhaps a time out.  Of course Marianne says Musker saved her life.  Well, romance, romance, romance.

Musker was an apparent stable interlude in Marianne’s self-destructive course.  He kept her on a more or less even keel for these two years.  No less destitute than she had ever been Marianne accepted a role filmed in India titled Ghost Story.  Not quite the hardship Marianne attests, indeed, very glamorous to anyone in her fan base and elsewhere.

She and Musker traveled to India and from there to Hong Kong.  So she was leading a life many could envy.  Not too much is available about Musker but he apparently found India congenial as a business opportunity.  He currently runs a furniture factory out of Delhi.

But he was an overbearing, dominant sort enforcing his will with violence.  He knocked out Marianne’s upper two front teeth.  When he tried to manage Marianne’s career  he became too much for her and they parted company. Or, perhaps, Musker was just a crutch to get her over a very rough patch.  By 1974 perhaps she thought she no longer needed him.

And then as part of the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom Musker was a type of male and as part of her identity she was to experiment with different types. That would lead to her future second husband Ben Brierly.  The music scene about to transit the very destructive Punk era so, perhaps Marianne saw it as chance to revive her recording career.

As I see it Marianne went into shock after Redlands.  The shame of the Mars bar bit was too much for her psyche to handle.  The court’s denial of the chance to defend herself and possibly explain was an egregious insult that she could find no way to handle.  This kind of shock takes time to digest and find some way to regain one’s composure.  Thus Marianne’s life from that point to her suicide attempt in 1969 can be explained in that context.

Her rejection of Mick can largely be explained as the aftermath of Redlands.

Marianne had been used as sex object once she entered the record industry.  It was a role she didn’t reject apparently being a hot mama.  But as one matures one finds ways to use as well as be used.  Thus after 1969 Marianne turned predator using her sexual desirability  to turn predator herself.

She stayed with Lord Rossmore after leaving Mick while she used Musker to regain some balance although kicking heroin is just a mirage junkies pursue.  One grows weary of their stories  of becoming ‘clean.’  At best after Musker she discovered her limits although she really tested them.

While I don’t think it’s true, Marianne felt that Mick was a superior musician to herself. Marianne let the notion destroy her self-confidence.  Jagger is no singer, has no voice, is a mediocre lyricist, can’t dance but is a great showman with a burning desire to corrupt society.

Marianne’s problem was that she couldn’t find the proper agent or musical guide.  Issuing four albums in 1965 was a crass error for which she was apparently responsible.  She took no time to enter the spirit of the songs while many of the backing arrangements are revolting.  Nevertheless she was Marianne.

Having felt herself overshadowed by Mick she now picked the poor shlub Ben to musically dominate and overshadow in revenge on Mick.  As she left Musker she was emerging from the horrible reaction to Redlands while finding a musical persona to allow her to go on living the pop life she had learned to appreciate.

In keeping with her newly found myth combined with the Blake/Symbolist fantasy of plumbing the depths in search of the pearl of great price she embraced Brierly’s punk life style living in squalor in desperate squats.  During this period she was forming the persona that would emerge with her 1979 release of Broken English.  That record reestablished her musical credentials while providing her with a substantial cash windfall.  She might as well have worked for nothing as she took a 90K check and promptly blew it on clothes and drugs.  In some ways Marianne was a real slow learner.

She was able to disburse her cash faster than Edie Sedgwick threw away her 80K inheritance.  Edie had no hopes for another windfall although Marianne did.

Broken English was a boundary line between the middle Marianne and what came after.

Marianne Soldiers On, A Real Trooper

Chapter IX will follow but I have other projects first.

Looking For A Miracle: The Sixties And Its Religion

Looking For A Miracle

The Sixties And Its Religion

 by

 R.E. Prindle

Sigmund Freud

The deliberate pursuit of whatever type of sex is considered deviant by one’s own culture is part of the program of spiritual seekers as far removed from each other in time and space as Tantric Hindu, California Satanists, Daoist sorcerers,  Siberian shamans, and paunchy English “witches”, with their scourges and “sky-clad” retreats in the New Forest.  To break tabu is a necessary stage in vama marg tantric ceremonies, for instance, in which dietary and sexual tabus are deliberately broken one after another.  It is recognized by these technologists of the spirit that deviation from socially accepted mores is a powerful tool for awakening the sleeping powers within us, provided that this deviation takes place within the occult engines they have designed.

Peter Levenda- Sinister Forces, Book III, pp. 211-12

     The key to the Sixties is Sigmund Freud.  The Sixties was when Freud’s schemes came to fruition.  He turned Aryan civilization on its head.

As unpleasant as it may be to recognize Freud was Jewish and his activities were based on his Jewishness and the age old prophecies that govern Jewish activities.  Freud’s father came from the Galicia that was a stronghold of Hasidic magical Judaism.  Freud himself was a student of the magical Zohar and Kabbalah.

Along with them he acquired the Jewish hatred of the Other, specifically Europeans or Aryans.  He identified his psyche with the Semite Hannibal who attacked Rome- Freud’s symbol for Europe.  In actuality Hannibal defeated Rome in the field.  The Romans retreated within their walls refusing to come out and fight.  Unable to sustain his army Hannibal was forced to vacate Italy.  Thus, although he had won all the battles he couldn’t win the war.  This was a real dilemma Freud had to solve and he did.

Freud began his career as a biologic researcher looking for eel gonads.  Seeing no route to universal fame from that research he became interested in psychology.  Here was some room to move.

Freud was born in 1856 in the midst of the great unfolding of the Aryan mind.  He became associated with a fellow Jewish doctor, Joseph Breuer, who had become involved in researches into hysteria.  This led Freud to the center of research in hysteria at the Salpetriere hospital run by Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris when Freud was about thirty years old.  He could only afford Paris for a few months but they were eye opening months.  He learned the nature of hypnotism and its control element- suggestion.  This would be the stratum on which he built psychoanalysis.

Following Charcot Freud’s first book is an analysis of hysteria.  The book caused no stir.  Turning to associate Breuer and his proto-psychoanalysis Freud studied the nature of dreams.  He characterized dreams as the ‘royal road to the unconscious.’  Following Sherlock’s advice Freud carefully studied the literature on dreams which was fairly extensive.  His dream book flopped failing to make Freud a household word.

While issuing a steady stream of articles he contributed his greatest work in the form of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901. In 1905 he contributed the useful Jokes And Their Relation to the Unconscious and another significant work that gave a clear indication of Freud’s direction Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality. This small volume finally created the fire storm he had been trying for. At the time the book was considered close to or actual pornography. At any rate it attacked prevailing European or Aryan morality breaking all sexual tabus.

While one may argue that Freud’s was a scholarly approach there is undeniable smut to it.  Freud in general reveled in smuttiness.  He always leaves you with a slightly sickened feeling.  There was controversy then as well as now as to his intent.

D.H. Lawrence who was no stranger to sexual theory and controversy denounced Freud in The Plumed Serpent for wishing to destroy prevailing European morality let alone reforming it.  In this opinion he was correct.  Both Sexual Theory and his Theory of the Unconscious and mass hypnosis would be his primary weapons.

Freud, contrary to popular opinion was not the originator or the discoverer of the unconscious nor even an early investigator.  The unconscious had been a hot topic in European thought ever since Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris in mid-eighteenth century.  There were many different ideas concerning the nature of the unconscious but by 1915 Freud had swept them off the board so that by the end of The Great War his perverted version stood alone.  The question was how to use this tool he designed to destroy the conscious mind and manipulate the unconscious to attain his and Jewish ends.

In the nineteenth century the only mass media that could be used to manipulate public opinion, the unconscious, was the newspaper, but the newspaper requires consciousness making access to the unconscious difficult.  It was only in the twentieth century that the great media capable of manipulating the unconscious directed arrived.  Perhaps the most important of these was modern advertising that arose alongside the movies to be followed by radio, talkies and television.  Color photo magazines are not to be overlooked either.  Photographic images go directly into the unconscious.

Of these media the most overlooked is the power of advertising to quickly change mores, for it was mores that Freud had to alter or modify, the way of looking at and thinking about things.

Freud had a nephew in the US by the name of Edward Bernays.  Bernays being Freud’s wife’s maiden name.  Eddie Bernays became a publicist with George Creel and the Committee on Public Information during WWI turning to publicity as a vocation after the war.  Thus he became a premier advertising consultant.  His influence today is greatly overlooked.

The CPI was a tremendous propaganda, indoctrination and conditioning machine.  The Wilson administration bludgeoned the American public into its party line.  Bernay’s would use those techniques to change the mores of the American people post-war following Freud’s ideas.  First he visited his Uncle Sigmund in Vienna where they had long summer walks and quiet talks.  What was said isn’t known but can be inferred from Bernay’s subsequent career.

According to Wikipedia quoting his daughter Anne Bernays felt that the public’s democratic judgment was ‘not to be relied upon,’ and he feared that [the American public] could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had ‘to be guided from above.’

Of course, who is to judge who is the wrong man and on what basis as well as the wrong or right thing.  Who is the infallible ‘above’  who is going to force his candidate on the erring people?

In other words, Bernays wanted a dictatorship of virtue.  Unable to disturb the political system in one fell swoop it would to be don incrementally.  Using techniques imbibed from his uncle’s political agenda Bernays did just that experimenting first through the commercial field.

Old fashioned advertising in print, as radio and TV hadn’t come into existence as yet, consisted of long prose pleas trying to persuade the conscious mind.  When color printing came into common use an attractive image coupled with product ID and snappy slogan, or propaganda,  would prove to be more effective.  Thus to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes there was an incredibly attractive slender woman smoking a Lucky with the slogan ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.’  The ad then carried a number of subliminal  messages as well as the plea.

When Bernays began his work the Aryan female ideal was the Arthurian conception portrayed most notably in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings.  Virginal and desirable as a wife.  Freud’s sexual goal was to invert that image to turn Aryan women into sluts.  Smoking in women was considered sluttish at the time just as cosmetics were symbolic of the prostitute or painted woman.  Good girls didn’t wear lipstick.  Bernays through his advertising techniques was to change all this.

Meanwhile back in Vienna, Freud was developing techniques to change the mind.  As always an avid student of literature Freud latched onto a small book by the Frenchman Gustav Le Bon titled:  The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.  Freud incorporated Le Bon’s studies into his own Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.  By ego he meant group ego not the individual ego.

The analysis of Le Bon meshed with the advertising propagandistic ideas of his nephew.  Freud then combined their work with his understanding of sexuality, drugs and his version of the unconscious  to undermine Aryan civilization.  Remember he was successful in imposing his vision of the unconscious as the only version of the unconscious on the entire psychological and psychiatric discipline, hence society as a whole.

Aiding the effort was the triumph of  Adolf Hitler in 1933 in Germany.  Hitler’s anti-Jewish stance drove the whole horde of Freud’s disciples out of Europe to the United States.  While Freud knew what he knew the other members of his psychoanalytic order didn’t.  I don’t mean to be unkind to Freud’s personal lumpenproletariat but they just didn’t grasp what he was talking about.  Nevertheless they were accepted at face value becoming not only influential but directors of US culture during the fifties and sixties after which their prestige began to wane.

Most of them settled in the two culture capitols of the US, NYC and LA so that the media took their lead from them.  While few, if any, understood Freud his vision of the unconscious as a discrete entity extraneous to the mind and actually the body while controlling one’s actions to the exclusion of the conscious mind was readily accepted and adopted as was his notion of repression in a completely distorted form.

The reality of Freud’s vision of the unconscious was quickly picked up by sci-fi writers who turned out a stream of such novels as  Jack Schaefer’s I Am Legend, Jack Finney’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.  Not that we consciously understood at the time.

The State of Israel had come into existence in 1948 setting the Middle East ablaze in a series of wars.  The 1956 war was a turning  point for the Jews.  They had been shamed by their non-resistance to the death camps so the ‘56 war allowed them to assert their manhood and become fierce warriors driving US tanks and jet fighters.  The war also had intellectual consequences.

Aryan Europe and America had astounded the world by its astonishing scientific discoveries and intellectual development unshared by the rest of the world including the Jews.  Emboldened by their military success they set out to reassert their pre-scientific religious dominance they felt they had enjoyed throughout history until the nineteenth century.   Indeed a Jewish woman named Barbara Spectre has established the Paideia Foundation in Europe to claim a parity between what she calls Jewish Knowledge and Aryan Knowledge.  She specifically says that the future will not be like the nineteenth century when science wrested the crown from the Jews.

This is apparently not the first such crisis of the Jewish mind.  A site called Jewniverse published a short piece credited to Daniel M. Bronstein on 7/19/13.  I reproduce it here in full:

Quote:

Talmudic lore offers many episodes of rabbinic sages intellectually defeating the luminaries of the Hellenistic world.  Far less common are instances of rabbis dismembering their pagan nemeses.  So 2^nd-century Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananiah really stands apart.

Acting on Roman Emperor Hadrian’s dare to abduct Athens’ top philosophers, Ben Hananiah traveled all the way to the celebrated city-state and coerced a local into revealing the secret location of the philosophical academy.

Upon reaching the heavily defended abode, the esteemed rabbi tricked the academy’s elders into killing the guards.

In a match of wits, Ben Hananiah demonstrated his intellectual superiority while exposing the vapidity of Greek wisdom.  After kidnapping 60 of Athen’s best, he brought the scholars before Hadrian, who placed their fate in the sage’s hands.

Using what can only be called magic, Ben Hananiah caused the philosophers’  shoulders to be violently wrenched from their bodies.  All of them were killed.  Other sages, like Hillel the Elder, have been praised for almost superhuman patience.  But Ben Hananiah’s actions present another view of the sages: as people who were extraordinary, but flawed.

Unquote.

Of course Plato’s academy had neither a secret location nor was it heavily guarded but it makes a good story that flatters Jewish sensibilities, apparently of a highly bloodthirsty order.  Thank god he didn’t pull Moses, trick and send ten plagues on the poor nitwit, stupid Platonic academicians.  How Barbara Spectre is going to replicate Rabbi Hananiah remains to be seen.  Let’s hope she doesn’t operate in the same realm of fantasy as the good rabbi.

Just as Moses through Yahweh destroyed Pharaoh, as Rabbi Hananiah demolished the hated Platonic Academy so Freud had calculated the destruction of nineteenth century Aryan science.

Nineteen-sixty was the critical year.  Western American society reached its apex in that year, but the demands of the scientific attitude exceeded the ability of the body politic to rise to it.  The people slipped back to a pre-scientific mentality.  Whether we saw it or not the crash of Western society that resulted in the Manson murders and the Rolling Stones at Altamont began in 1960.  Actually the much celebrated Woodstock concert of ‘69 was evidence of the intellectual retreat also, a premonition of Altamont.

By 1960 TV had reached a certain level of maturity.  During the fifties when programming was developing most locales had only one or two networks while there was some concern TV wouldn’t make it commercially.  By 1960 the three networks and independent system was in place.  The sitcom and drama setup was well organized.  Hollywood had learned the Freudian formula of using the medium for indoctrination and conditioning.

The fifties had been the great creative period for science fiction both in literature and movies.  This whole body of outstanding material  was now mined by TV.  Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone successfully invaded the minds of millions while the gold standard was probably Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.  Both producers were Jewish.

It is impossible now to recount the propaganda, indoctrination and conditioning of the many, many series and thousands of episodes representing tens of thousands of hours of viewing that made war on established beliefs gradually weaning the multitudes from old mores to new.  Mostly the old mores with different content much as new religions build their religious edifices on the old religion’s sites.

The new religion was Saturnic or in another word, Satanic and the hallmark of Satanism is violence.  Few people now remember the TV series, Bus Stop, but that show was a direct assault on established beliefs and attitudes toward violence.  Incredible gratuitous mindless violence for the time far surpassed today when sadistic pornographic violence with nudity or nakedness perhaps a better word, thrown in.

One of the Twilight Zone episodes was a depiction of Charles Beaumont’s short story The Howling Man, the script also written by him, in which Monks somewhere in Ruritania had captured Satan and had him safely locked in a cell where he howled incessantly all night long.  A passing traveler asks for a night’s lodging.  Against their own strict rules forbidding it the Monks weakened and allowed him in carefully explaining to him to pay no attention to the howling man in the cell.  No good deed shall go unpunished.  The traveler naturally listens to the Howling Man’s pleas releasing him.  Satan laughing maniacally shouts Fool and rushes out the door.

Beaumont had divined the situation and put it into symbolic story form.  In the TV episode the sorry Fool spends his life searching for Satan to put him back in his cell.

It is prescient that Beaumont wrote the story in 1959.  By 1966 Ira Levin would develop the theme further when he wrote Rosemary’s Baby about the birth of the son of Satan who replaced Jesus that was made into a very influential movie a year later by that evil presence Roman Polanski.  We’ll get to that.

As is well known Sigmund Freud was a cokehead, a drug addict.  He well knew the deleterious effect of drugs on the mind and morality.  Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious but drugs are the destroyer of morality.  The Unconscious corrupted by drugs is the end of all law and order.

As Freud, the old cokehead, said there are no coincidences so it follows that the drug explosion of the Sixties is the effect of a premeditated cause.  After all, Arnold Rothstein, a Jew, did organize the drug distribution network of the US in the 1920s.  It can also be no coincidence then that Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson, latched onto amphetamines as the great corrupter of society.  Jacobson also claims to have conferred with Freud in Vienna.  Getting underway in the US in post-war NYC in the forties, by 1960 Max was dispensing amphetamines by the gallon.  Imitators sprang up who poured their own gallons of amphetamine into the veins of New Yorkers.  This is fact, now  it should come as no surprise then that by 1966 NYC was overrun by criminal behavior, that seemed to explode in that year.  Or shall we say lack of morality caused by drugs.  In essence New Yorkers could no longer tell right from wrong.  Satanism ruled.  It should be needless to add that Dr. Feelgood was a Jew.  There were many factors causing the erosion of morality in the Sixties not all pertaining to religious developments that are our interest here.

The rise of science caused the intellectual disenfranchisement of all religions but more particularly within the Aryan ranks in which science developed, hence Aryan’s became disenchanted with Christianity while Jews and Moslems reinforced their belief systems against science.

Aided and abetted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity the notion of moral equivalence took hold.  This was, one might say, cemented by the movie Mondo Cane of 1962.  While moral equivalence should have applied to all religions or moral systems it was turned exclusively against Aryan belief systems.  Movies and advertising reflected the animus against Christianity, Aryans and what Negroes called White Supremacy, that is, White rule and knowledge- science or in Negro terms, Acting White.

With all systems supposedly equal or morally equivalent while consciousness, that is objectivity was suppressed in favor of complete subjectivity or the Unconscious was endorsed, it became an easy matter to inject voodoo, witch craft and Satanism into Aryan belief systems.  Now, the transition to a satanic sensitivity was fully supported by movies and advertising as well as print media.  In 1966 the cover of Time Magazine proclaimed the message ‘God IS Dead’ in black. To the informed that was not a revelation as old gods do die while history is littered with the remains of old gods as epitomized by Shelley’s Ode to Ozymandias.  To the religious Time’s announcement was a huge blasphemy but then, the jury was still out concerning on which side the Luce’s were.

As if in celebration of the Luce’s announcement the Jew Ira Levin published his novel Rosemary’s Baby that concerns the birth of the Son of Satan although definitely by maculate means.  The novel was a commercial success bringing  the little Satan Roman Polanski on the scene who turned the novel into his equally successful movie in the year of revolution, 1968.

The impact of Polanski’s movie was quite extraordinary.  Certainly in the aftermath of the movie Satanism had been, one might say, popularized.  Of course Levin and Polanski didn’t create modern Satanism but they contributed to its manifestation.  The voo doo Saturnian cult had taken root on the East Coast being prominent in NYC.  Santeria as well all the Negro voodoo cults in the New World, of course, derived from Yoruba practices in Nigeria.  The Yoruba people combined aspects of Christianity with their own Yoruba beliefs themselves derived from Greco-Roman religious practices to create a very hybrid religion based completely in magic which through slavery passed into the New World.

Scientology, created by Ron Hubbard, one of those called UFO religions, in the forties somehow gets mixed up in this.  Certain disaffected members established their own church in England in ‘63 called the Process Church of the Final Judgment.  This outfit tried to combine Satan, Lucifer and Jesus into one religion.  No science involved here.  Charles Manson at the end of the decade would be influenced by both Scientology and the Process.

The idea was that Jesus said, Love your enemy.  Satan was the enemy of Jesus so Jesus was compelled to love Satan.  So the two along with Lucifer combined to share humanity so that virtue and evil were morally equal bringing in relativism, so right and wrong are irrelevant because what one calls right another calls wrong and vice versa.  So the law was that ‘it’s all good.’  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.  Everything is permitted.  A recipe for disaster no doubt.  A state of social confusion had been created, almost a state of sustained hysteria.

After 1966 LSD became significant reifying whatever beliefs one had into stone.  The fact is that nothing can be gotten out of a mind other than what is in it.  Education is everything.  To really expand one’s consciousness one has to develop it.  With drugs learning stops, especially with LSD.  If anything one only reifies one’s existing opinions.  One may think one is talking to God but notice that God isn’t saying anything back.  You’re only having a dialogue with yourself.   You don’t need LSD to do that.

A biker by the name of John Griggs dropped a tab, saw God, changed his ways and began his own religion based on LSD called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love.  Begun in the LA coastal town of Laguna Beach the cult, or more aptly perhaps, commercial enterprise expanded up and down California and into Oregon where it was especially prominent in Josephine County of Southern Oregon.  It is said the BEL dominated or controlled the marijuana, hash and LSD supply of the West Coast but rather strangely none of the authors concerning themselves with the Process Church or Manson’s Family have heard of it.  These authors seem to think that the Process had a monopoly on that drug trade although dealing with biker groups.  Perhaps the role of the biker BEL wasn’t apparent to them.  All three ‘religious’ groups mentioned above were seriously involved in drugs and hence lead a Freudian unconscious life.

The Process Church founded by Robert and Maryanne DeGrimston in London in 1963 as an offshoot of Scientology soon moved to the sinister sounding site of Xtul on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.  There its Satanic, Luciferian and Jesusite form took shape.  As one can see, under the influence of Freudian psychology and the rejection of the conscious mind science had been discarded while consciousness has regressed some thousand years more or in some cases less.  Magic and superstition have once again taken center stage.  Behind the magic cults lay the teaching of one Aleister Crowley of the Golden Dawn and the infamous OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) with its emphasis on sex magic(k).  The K Crowley added to distinguish his magick from stage magic.  May not look like much of a distinction but it is significant.

So, in 1967 we have Charles Manson being released from prison just as the Hippie thing with its legions of underage runaway girls took shape in the Haight-Ashbury district of the city of San Francisco.  The Haight was a hustler’s paradise and Manson was the man to mine that particular mountain.

More than anything the Hippie phenomenon was a symptom  of the rejection of science, or objectivity and the conscious mind in favor of superstition, subjectivity and the unconscious mind of Freud.  In connection with Freud it should be remembered that the motto of his 1900 book The Interpretation Of Dreams in his Latin quotation from Dante’s Inferno was Flectere si nequeo Superos,  Acheronta movebo which translated means:  If I cannot move heaven, I will stir up the underworld.

Freud had failed at the conscious level of science, which he attributed to anti-Semitism, so when he became aware of the unconscious through Breuer and Charcot he had found his underworld.  But that hell was part and parcel of his upbringing as Judaism is pure subjectivity hence rampant egoism capable only of creating a hell on Earth- hence Hollywood.

The Unconscious in Freud’s vision was the source of Satanic magic.  Hence it can be little wondered that at the very least per the Process Church the world was shared by Jesus and Satan with the Jesusites compelled to love their enemies and presumably turn the other cheek which is to say that Satan Rules.  In his own way the great Satanist Aleister Crowley had won the battle sharing the triumph with Freud.

By the way, the Process Trinity mirrors Greek mythology in which Zeus is the god of Heaven, Poseidon the God of the waters and Hades the god of the underworld.  Earth was the common property of all three.  So the Process reflects old age beliefs.

Because of the horrific nature of his Satanic practices all the attention has been focused on Charles Manson who identified himself as both Jesus and Satan.  Half or better of the biker groups derived their identity from Satan- Hell’s Angels, Straight Satans, Satan’s Disciples, etc.

In point of fact Manson was not doing anything his betters , i.e. Roman Polanski et al., weren’t.  The whole of Hollywood film was involved in Satanic practices.  Nor were Satanic practices new to the LA basin.  All of this cult stuff, snuffings and all was common knowledge in the fifties when I was there in the Navy.  I have no doubt it dated back through the forties and thirties.  Read Raymond Chandler and let your imagination go.  Watch the movies closely.

Manson said the reasons for the Tate-La Bianca killings were not what was thought but that he was no snitch.  It also means likely that these unknown forces were doing their best to help him once arrested as evidence disappeared, police bungled the process so that Manson and the Family might have beaten the rap except for the persistence of Bugliosi.

Manson appears to have been associated with the Polanski clique involving a large selection of A-list Hollywood.  They were involved in drug related Sado-masochistic practices and filmed themselves doing them.  Not surprisingly Manson was doing the same with his group.  Perhaps under the influence of hallucinogenics the significance  of a filmic trail didn’t seem so important.  In any event the police confiscated hours of Sado-masochistic  films from the Polanski residence.  Not unusually these have disappeared although they were offered for sale by the police.

In addition there were huge dope deals on the table that if Polanski wasn’t involved in he was well aware of.  His close friend Frykowski, a Pole from Red Poland, was involved in a scheme to distribute the amphetamine MDA and that would have been through the Polanski residence.    Shortly before the murders a dealer accused of burning them in a dope deal was brought to the residence where in the course of a large party he was strung up and tortured.

A few days later when Polanski was out of town Manson instructed his devotees to strike.  The result was horrific.  While it is said that the dope dealer Frykowski was the actual target it was the horrific death of Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, that garnered the headlines.

We have an interesting thing happening here that seems to have gone unnoticed.  It was a transition of consciousness that affected every member of society though few actively participated.  As an example to illustrate what was happening from 1967 through 1969 I quote from an online publication by an anonymous author concerning the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi Government of Germany.    (    hppt://thespawnofthesphinx.com ) chap.17, p. 4:

Quote:

In his book, “In The Garden Of The Beast”, Erik Larson relates first hand accounts of what it was like to be an outsider (in particular the American Ambassador and his daughter) observing Hitler’s rise from Chancellor to tyrant in 1933.  It was during that year that Germany became absolutely transformed.  “It was like watching a dear friend go insane.” as one outside observer put it.  After the great transition and assimilation, German’s collective mind was “coordinated.”

Larson quoted:

“Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life.  It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view.  At the core was a government campaign called Gleichshaltung- meaning ‘Coordination’- to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.

‘Coordination’ occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or ‘self-coordination.’  Change came to Germany so quickly and  across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern.  Gerda Laufer, a socialist wrote that she felt ‘deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.”

Unquote, unquote.

The same thing happened in the US in the fifties as Jack Finney recorded in his Body Snatchers, is happening again here at the end of the sixties and is happening now as Obama/Hitler transforms the Aryan mind.  We now have a call for a ‘meaningful dialogue’ on race which means ‘accept our views or be punished.’  There is no dialogue just an order from headquarters.

On a longer wave than Germany one entered the fun house in 1960 and through a bizarre series of dioramas one exited into an entirely different world in 1970.  On the shorter wave the rapid transition took place from 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby to the Rolling Stones fiasco at Altamont in December 1969 which had been scheduled for December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, but was delayed by a day to December 8^th.

As Dylan sang, there was something happening here but few if any knew what it was.  There was no way for anyone to gain sufficient facts to interpret the whole but those with certain roles observing specific parts knew what to do.

Thus the public had no idea what Manson was doing before or after the Tate-La Bianca killings.  The killings themselves obscured everything.  Manson based his attitudes on Robert Heinlein’s  novel of 1961 Stranger In A Strange Land.  Stranger was one of the formative novels of the 60s fitting right in with the psychedelic revolution even though Heinlein had a forties-fifties mentality while adding numerous terms to the vocabulary such as ‘grokking’ and ‘water brother’.

One can imagine Manson reading it in his cell.  Then when he was released actually being a stranger in the very strange land of Haight-Ashbury.  At the same time he realized it was a parallel universe designed with him in mind.  He combined aspects of the two lead characters, the human Valentine Michael Smith raised on Mars and his terrestrial guru Jubal Harshaw.  Jubal means father of all, a role Manson assumed.  He also named his son Valentine Michael.  Smith transformed terrestrial culture as so in his way did Manson.

While on Mars Smith learned the Martian method of mind and body control which Manson adopted and extended to his disciples.  After the killings Manson began living out some desert fantasy in Death Valley.  It was there he really overstepped the bounds bringing the Park Department down on his head which then led to his charge of the murders, but it’s the desert adventure that interests us here.  While the vast majority was unaware of the Death Valley escapade detailed in Ed Sanders, The Family, (make sure you read the first edition) Mansonites saw and learned.  In the desert Manson nearly created his own country living by his own laws.  Unfortunately his prison mentality kept him from grasping his full opportunity .  He was too much the outlaw.

While I didn’t realize it at the time his influence spread up the coast to Eugene, Oregon where I was living at the time.  Those were rough and rowdy times.  There were many crimes, frequently using shotguns.  An especially outlaw area was called Fall Creek.  At one time a truck with a light rack pulled up before a camp site turning the light rack on the campers from the road.  They stood like deer staring into the lights.  The occupants turned rifles on the campers man, woman and children and mowed them down.

As far as I know the police chose not to apprehend them.  It would have been easy.  A brown pick up with a light rack in a small town?  I knew the truck while finding a brown pick up with a light rack should have been easy.  Couldn’t have been more than one in the county.

I was lured out to the area once with my wife by a couple posing as friends.  All of a sudden at eleven o’clock at night they shooed us out of their house.  As one neared the highway a narrow stone bridge crossed Fall Creek, almost a ditch at that point.  As we approached a guy came up from under the bridge, stood in the middle of the roadway waving his arms.  I wasn’t going to stop and there was room to drive around him.  No sooner had I crossed the bridge than another guy came up from under it bearing an automatic with what looked like a silencer on it.  Both began calling me names.  So, I at least, would have been murdered on the spot.

As a footnote Diane Downs of the famous murder case in the same area said she was stopped by a guy waving his arms in the middle of the road.  She was disbelieved subsequently spending her life in prison.  I know she was stopped and I believe her story.  What the DA’s problem with her was I don’t know but she was sure railroaded.

The revolutionaries flooded into the hills above Fall Creek building concrete bunkers a la Manson that they stocked with food and weapons in preparation for the Day.  Strange robberies and shootings happened fairly frequently.  There were Manson cultists around for several years.  They may still be there, or here, actually, but I no longer have reason to be in contact with them.

Of course, Manson combined Heinlein with the various Satanic cults, the writer of the Spawn Of The Sphinx calls them UFO cults, to create his unique mixture.

Manson has taken the rap for what was going on but as I have indicated Polanski and a large part of Hollywood were as deeply connected to Satanism as he was.  Remember actually billions of tablets of prescription amphetamines and barbiturates were being sold annually in addition to the hundreds of millions of hits of illegal LSD, marijuana and God only knows what.  Frykowski was negotiating to become a large distributor of the amphetamine MDA.

Drugs were not solely a Hippie phenomenon; drugs were endemic.

Polanski, who can possibly be seen as a successful Manson, continued his nefarious career being arrested in 1977 on charges of child porn or statutory rape.  While it is said that the girl’s mother rented her out for the purpose the charge was still statutory rape.  Remember Manson said that the Tate-La Bianca victims were into kiddie porn.  Polanski believing he would be sentenced to hard time, possibly even being in the same prison as Manson, who knows, took it on the lam.  Today he is a fugitive from justice living in Europe where he has powerful protection.  Still makes movies though.

The Manson trial was docked in December being very much in the news at the time of Altamont, as was the Zodiac killer, so there was a certain atmosphere surrounding the concert.

The last half of ‘69 was in some ways the apex of Aryan consciousness while at the same time its nadir.  Even as powerful rockets were propelling a manned vehicle to land on the moon carrying an astronaut to leave a footprint three inches deep in the lunar dust the unconscious was burying the conscious mind on Earth.  A giant step forward for mankind on the moon while a two thousand year regression on Earth.

Almost simultaneously as the lunar module blasted down on the moon a half million of what used to be the hope for America’s future gathered in a muddy field in New York to show a level of culture not seen since the Anabaptists four hundred years ago.

While my generation celebrates Woodstock as the high point of Sixties culture I can see it only as an embarrassment.  Not wishing to go into detail I will only mention one thing.  Columbia Records released an album call Beautiful People, an ironic insult to the Woodstock Nation as Hippies called themselves in mockery of the Jetset beautiful people.  But, if you look at the album cover closely, in the upper lower quadrant you will see some guy standing up haveing sexual intercourse with a sheep.  Beastiality as well as NAMBLA maybe endorsed by some but damned if I’ll join in.

I know I’d never be forgiven for saying so but I consider Woodstock to be the penultimate nadir of the Sixties.  The nadir was, of course, Altamont, Satan’s triumph.

While the Rolling Stones, under whose auspices the event occurred refused to take responsibility for it, the Stones were as responsible as Levin, Polanski, the Process Church and Manson for the rise of Satanism.

The Manson trial was about to commence.  Manson to a large extent incorporated Rock into his philosophy although basing his notions more on the Beatles Double Album than the Stones.  Also bear in mind that Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land was his bedrock.  One could only hope that he had been captivated by the bible of evildoers, The Catcher In The Rye.

The character of society changed greatly after 1968 almost like Nazi Germany.  Sixty-eight was the year of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the horrors of which in China are still unlearnt in Europe and the US.  The Cultural Revolution was global.  Sixty-eight was the year of Mao’s Little Red Book and his red and gold portrait pins.  Sixty-eight was the year SDS exploded and the formation of the idiot Bomber Billy Ayers’ Weathermen organization as well as the Jewish Defense League, its offshoot The Jewish Defense Organization and the criminal activities of Rabbi Meyer Kahane.  Over the period of a couple years there were thousands of bombings in US cities.  So many that very few were ever publicized.

While the Tate-La Bianca killings dominated the headlines organizations like the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Black Panthers and numerous cults such as The Process Church were stirring up the folk.  One was practically dizzy.  In action at the same time as Manson the Zodiac killingts of the Bay Area where Altamont would be held were going on.  There was just way way too much for people to absorb or begin to understand.    As most people were busy trying to live their lives all this crazy activity had remarkably little effect.  It was just ‘news.’

Apropos of Altamont the Stones were relatively heavily involved in Sastanic matters, that, if I am right came to a head at Altamont.

Marianne Faithfull and Jagger had been familiar with Satanism before the Redlands bust.  Anita Pallenberg, formerly with Brian Jones and then Keith Richards, was deep into Satanism.  At one time she had Brian and herself dress in Nazi uniforms.  The Nazis were a fascination of the Process Church so rather than being an innocent lark she may have been showing the Church she was in a position to influence the Stones.  Indeed, they were in awe of her.

Through the art dealer and man about Hippiedom, Robert Fraser, Marianne and Jagger had met the arch American free lance Satanist Kenneth Anger, with whom they were deeply involved, and who was associated with the arech US Satanist, Anton La Vey.  La Vey would play Satan in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.  That would imply that Polanski was involved in Satanism leading back to the Tate-La Bianca killings.

Post Redlands, Mick was thrown into a frenzy of hatred of society probably having thought he was a notch or two above the law immune to arrest.  Indeed he thought the enforcement of the law against him was a violation of his ‘freedom.’  Marianne had been a bit of an innocent, too naïve for her own good.  Mick now enraged turned to Satanism posing as Satan himself in his song Sympathy For The Devil of 1968.  He allowed the Stones to be featured in Jean Luc Godard’s bizarre revolutionary movie titled One+One subsequently changed to the title of Jagger’s song.  Marianne would let herself be exploited  in a couple of French films while becoming involved with the Process Church itself while starring in a Satanic film of Anger’s.

It is said now that Satanism was a minor flirtation on their parts but the indications are that the involvement was much deeper and more serious, especially on the part of Marianne that was reflected in her persona and activities in the first two years of her parting with Jagger.

It was perhaps the Process that alerted Marianne to the publication of a Soviet Satanic novel The Master And Margarita published in early 1968.  The novel has since attained a high cult status in the US and GB while becoming an industry in the former USSR.  A number of films of the novel have been produced in Europe.  A much overrated literary effort, in my opinion but a key Satanic document.

Marianne pressed Jagger to read the novel as he was about to begin production of Donald Cammel’s movie Performance, also a Satanic film, shot in the summer of ‘68, that revolutionary year.  The movie would not be released until 1971 so has no effect on the period.

Whether or not Jagger or Marianne took their Satanism as more than a hallucinogenic lark the effect of their Satanism on their fan base was intense.  Jagger was viewed as the Great Satan or, at least, a wannabe.

So the aura surrounding Altamont was imbued with Satanism.  Haight-Ashbury was Satanic.  Satanic was.

The Altamont was an almost perfect Satanic location.  The Altamont is a pass over the hills surrounding the East side of the San Francisco Bay, the East Bay.  To the North of the pass lies Contra Costa County; to the East is Stockton, Sacramento, Modesto,  and the Central Valley.  To the South are barren hillsides, desert for miles all the way to San Jose and beyond.

The pass is only a thousand feet but very windy while when the pacific fog comes in at night cold and dewy.  Today, they’ve covered the area with wind turbines, must be more spooky than ever at night.

When I was in the Navy in the late fifties I used to hitchhike back and forth from San Diego and Oakland every weekend.  I would have a friend  drop me off at the thousand foot level to begin the return trip.  Gloomy place but a quick place to pick up perhaps a very decent ride.  The demolition derby grounds were off on the right side going down, maybe at 900 feet.  Real desert.

So, through a series of misadventures, given only a couple days to set up this site straight out of hell, cold enough to freeze a witch’s tit the Stones held a free concert.  There was no parking, cars strung out along the side of Highway 40 for miles.

Everything was jerry built.  The stage was so low and surrounded by so many Hell’s Angels that few could even see the stage in the dark.  The sound was terrible.  Out into the darkness stretched a couple hundred thousand drugged shivering people.  I mean it gets cold and damp there any time of the year and this was December.

So, picture the symbolism.  The chief Droog, the Great Satan himself  is going to take the stage surrounded by Hell’s Angels and begin shouting out ‘Let me introduce myself…’  OK.  Hello, Satan.

Well, now.  Jagger and the Stones had been positioned as the bad boys of rock n’ roll by their first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham back in ‘64.  Their reputation kept getting worse and now they have improved this rep to being the house band of Hell, Satan’s own rock n’ rollers.  Huzzah!  ‘I’m a man of wealth and taste…’

There’s a Negro in a green suit who has pushed himself stage side, right behind the not so straight Satans, the Hell’s Angels.  I mean, these guys had a worse reputation in the Bay Area than Satan himself.  They used to have their club house just down the street from me.  We will never know the Negro’s motives but he does have something on his mind and he has a pistol in his pocket.  Are we looking for trouble, do you think?  He’s apparently been waiting for the moment Jagger opens his mouth to introduce himself.  Jagger begins belting it out and at that moment Meredith Hunter, for that is the Negro’s name, whips out his pistol.  Waving it in the air he begins a charge through the Hell’s Angels for the stage.  There’s a few Angels between himself and Mick who cut short Meredith’s pilgrim’s progress.

No one can say for certain that he didn’t want to put a bullet between the Great Satan’s eyes but I am positive his intent was not to take out six Hell’s Angels and then run like hell.  I’m not a gambling man but I would wager on that.

The Angels were cranked out on drugs, pot, LSD, crank or something while getting high on being tapped for the very important function of furnishing security for The Greatest Rock And Roll Band On The Entire Planet and, perhaps.- the Universe.

Wham!  Bang! Oh God!  Meredith today rests for all eternity on the Altamont or for however long it takes Time to wear down those hills to sea level.  If not Meredith, then his shade.

As Jagger made a dash for the helicopter somewhat reminiscent of the last evacuees from Saigon he was heard to mutter, ‘Something weird always happens when we play that song.  Could have a clue, Mick.  A Clockwork Orange wasn’t released for another couple years but that was the popular impression of you up on the screen, Mick.  Bad boy, bad boy, the bad boy of rock n’ roll.

Nor did Jagger abandon the persona after that disastrous experience.  He developed his ambi-sexual persona further appearing on stage as a sadistic agitator lashing the stage with his studded belt.   The Chief Droog.

Thus by the end of the sixties the suppression of the conscious rational mind had been accomplished  in favor of the vision of the unconscious as a satanic separate being whose external control of the individual  was irresistible.  Sex and drugs were used to place a generation beyond redemption.

In support of sex and drugs, TV and movies pounded out the message that rage and violence were the proper responses to one’s inability to realize one’s fantasies.

While some may pooh pooh the advancing Satanism of the Sixties and on to the present time TV and movies did advance the agenda into the present.  As incredible as it would have been to a person of the fifties when the mention of leg for lower limb was still frowned upon, copulation, not simulated even, but actual, is shown commonly on TV and in movies.  Murder as an occupation or even pastime has openly been promoted on TV shows such as Dexter that celebrates a serial killer and portrays him sympathetically, even as a hero to emulate.

In the series Breaking Bad a mild mannered high school chemistry teacher gets into manufacturing meth and slowly turn into a Death Dealer not unlike Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The Dexter TV series is a very special case as it seem to have been designed around the philosophy of the Process Church and that of Manson.

Dexter develops around the career of serial killer, a Death Dealer in the Process term.  It is nothing less than  a series of snuff films recording many, many ritual killings.  The ritual theme is highly developed.  The ritualistic aspects are quite startling while many of the settings are quite Satanic.

The question of incest is raised as Dexter and his sister are quite close and as the series develops they become romantically in love.  Then Dexter involves Deb, the sister,  in his ritual killings.  This cause a moral conflict in her character against her love for her brother.  After an attempt to resolve the conflict by an attempted suicide and killing of Dexter by driving the car they are riding in off the road into a lake.  She is rescued by a convenient observer then goes back to save her brother.

Both are under the care of a female psychologist who his fully aware of Dexter’s career because she analyzed Dexter’s father who had trained his son but then committed suicide when Dexter’s avidity for the kill disappointed him.  The series is really astonishing.  The psychologist is then converted into an accomplice of Dexter.

In a touching scene reminiscent of the Egyptian statue of Isis beholding her son as the father stands behind her throne, one watches as the sister/wife psychologically accepts the role of serial killer, justifying it in her mind, very well acted, now Dexter’s full accomplice.  The psychologists nods her assent as Deb wonderingly says:  The family that kills together stays together.

Thus the whole philosophy for which Manson has spent his life in prison is legitimized for public emulation.  Charles Manson told his Family: You can’t kill kill.  And there on your television screen in an incredible reversal of morality in the short space of 60 years from 1960 to the present you have the rejection of God for Satan.  If in the Sixties only 2% of the population according to Scientology could be cold blooded killers the entire population of the United States, potentially,  has been indoctrinated and conditioned to kill.  It only remains for Dexter, his sister and their psychologist to become cannibals.

Thus, through the efforts of Time Magazine, Ira Levin, Roman Polanski, The Process Church and numerous other Satanic cults aided by the Sado-masochists of Hollywood Satanism has slowly displaced Godliness.  Satan has murdered Jesus.  The unconscious of Freud has displaced the conscious mind of the Aryan past.

The road to chaos has been paved.  Can the momentum be stopped?

Who Is Spanish Tony Sanchez?

Tony Sanchez

Who Is Spanish Tony Sanchez?

A Review Of Up And Down With The Rolling Stones

by

R.E. Prindle

Tony Sanchez

Published In 1979 Spanish Tony Sanchez’ memoir is now thirty-four years old. Tony tanked it in the year 2000. Had he lived he might be surprised but gratified at the success his book is enjoying. According to reviews the book as been very well received by book buyers although there are dissident views by others finding the book unbelievable.

Keith Richards- Face Of The Stones

Part of the problem is that the book was co-written by a former journalist named John Blake who appears to detest Jagger, Richards and the whole scene they created. As a journalist he was privy to all the gossip about Jagger and Richards and so chips in with opinions of his own while also citing newspaper reports. Although written as a continuous narrative, with careful reading you can separate Blake from Sanchez.

After his journalistic career blew up Blake went on to publishing at which he has been successful. His collaboration with Sanchez was fruitful. The book is a great read anyway you look at it. The question is not what Sanchez tells us but what he doesn’t tell us.

Tony says that he was under he protection of a gang boss by the name of Albert Dimes who ran the West End apparently sharing Soho with the notorious Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie and their brother Charlie. Sanchez then can be classed as a hoodlum. As Charlie Kray says his gang ran a bodyguard company it seems probable that Tony was employed by Keith in that function.

Brian Jones

One of his chief functions for the Stones was as a drug supplier. Opening the book he says apropos of Brian Jones:

I’m not a pusher, but as a boy I’d worked in Soho, first as a night club bouncer, then as a croupier, so I know exactly where to go for anything from a lid of grass to a Thompson submachine gun. Consequently people in the rock world had come to me as a reluctant go-between in their flirtations with the London underworld.

That short paragraph says an awful lot. We know, according to Tony, that he was sufficiently well known in gangland to come under the protection of Albert Dimes, a gangster dating back to the early fifties. Tony says that he worked as a bouncer in gambling joints and that would require the attitude and the temper to use violence whether necessary or not.

And then he says he was a croupier. He later tells us that the games were rigged so that he was knowingly bilking his customers, a form of theft. He then tells us that he could get anything from a bag of grass to submachines guns. This would mean that he was very knowledgeable in criminal matters.

He repeatedly professes that he didn’t sell drugs for profit but apparently had access to commercial amounts. At the same time he is married with two children, dresses like a dandy and hangs out in pricey bars. At no time does he appear to be gainfully employed until for some reason Keith Richards puts him on the payroll at 16,000 pounds a year. Well in excess of the pay for a working stiff. Plus, as Tony never seems to visit the wife and kids, room and board. Kind of a dream deal, you might say. What’s up? We’ll have to guess because Tony and John kept it quiet.

So, how did Tony get so close to Keith? Well, this is fairly interesting stuff. The stuff Swinging London was made of. The story’s real beginning is on page 39 when Tony meets Groovy Bob Fraser who was his entrance to the rock world. Tony tells it like this:

Into this world of intrigue, sudden violence, and bitter feuds dropped Robert Fraser. We met as I sipped a solitary espresso at the Bar Italian in Soho’s Frith Street. It was afternoon and I was killing time before going to work at the club.

Robert sat next to me, and we fell into conversation. Robert mentioned that he had gone to college in Spain…I speak Spanish as fluently as I speak English. This excited Robert and he jumped at the chance to talk to me in his very erudite Spanish…

From there a friendship developed around Tony’s ability to score drugs. Fraser was a gambler who had lost 20K pounds to the Kray Twins and couldn’t pay. He asked and Tony offered to deal with the Krays. Tony approached Dimes who wasn’t willing to jeopardize his wicket for an impecunious gambler. Tony decided to approach the Krays on his own. Bold move. Now, two versions exist; the improbable one of the book and another version in what purports to be a chapter of the book deleted by the publishers that might be more accurate.

The story involves criminal attempts to take over the music business. Sanchez was in a criminal occupation within the underworld while he confesses to wanting to be a criminal. p. 37:

As a teenager my great passions were rock music and big-time villainy- roughly in that order. I had a cousin who had gone way, way off the rails and who had become deeply immersed in organized crime. While my parents complained about the shame he was bringing to our family, I could only look at his big car and beautiful women and pray to God he would show me how it was done.

So, his cousin got Tony a job as a croupier and Tony began to meet big time crooks like Albert Dimes.

Rock and Roll bands at that time played in clubs and clubs are almost universally under the control of the underworld. Thus band members of the Beatles and Rolling Stones are in much closer contact with the underworld than one might assume while that is very carefully obscured by their biographers.

The Beatles played for months in the red light district of Hamburg one of the toughest criminal areas in the world. They witnessed much crime and mayhem. They were no angels. Albert Grossman in his biography gives examples while Andrew Oldham in his latest effort, Stone Free, tells of the time John and Paul dressed as priests and while so posing anointed communicants with their own piss, for which Oldham says they were arrested. At any rate they were under the protection of the crime lord of all Europe. The Krays of England would have been old hat to them.

Tony’s relationship with Keith then is suspicious.

The Kray Twins, who were England’s most prominent villains, as the English say, had taken over a prominent West End gambling spot called Esmeralda’s Barn. Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein gambled here, losing heavily so that the enormous amounts of money the Beatles were generating came to the attention of the Krays. They also knew that Epstein was gay. As they had made the previous owner of the Barn the irrefusable offer they believed they could do the same with Epstein. This aspect of the story is detailed in Colin Fry’s book, The Krays: A Violent Business so the account is not dependent on the missing chapter.

The Krays arranged a meeting with Epstein in a homosexual bar. That it was a homosexual bar indicates nothing to me as gay bars aren’t in the habit of hanging signs out saying: Gay Bar. I have been in several gay venues without knowing where I was until I was being served. The question is, would one go back?

Epstein patiently explained that managing bands was not as easy and effortless as it looked. The Krays then consulted the alleged godfather of British crime Arthur Thompson of Glasgow who as Epstein pointed out indicated to the Krays that managing the Beatles would require sustained effort and concentration to which criminals are not accustomed. Fry says the Krays thought it over, deciding to blackmail Epstein instead which they did collecting a sum every month for years.

Now to the Antiphoney’s missing chapter. Tony says, if the chapter is authentic, that Robert Fraser owed the Krays 20K in unpaid gambling debts. Tony says in Up And Down he tried to arrange a deal in which Fraser paid 30% or less thus freeing him and making him grateful to Tony.

According to the missing chapter the Krays showed him a sheaf of bounced checks and suggested that perhaps Fraser could clear the debt by delivering the Beatles into their hands, apparently not having given up their desire for the Beatles. When Tony told Fraser the idea he says Fraser embraced it setting about to woo the group. Fraser was fairly tight with McCartney to whom he sold a lot of artwork but not so much with Lennon.

In order then to co-opt Lennon, this sounds like a stretcher, he enlisted the aid of Yoko Ono who had arrived from NYC. As an avant-garde personality cum artist she would have looked Fraser up on her arrival so it is at least probable that she knew him. Yoko according to this account had been hanging around Paul who was the Beatle she wanted. Whatever the intent she did besiege John relentlessly until she got her entry and then she seduced him baffling his mind with all that avant garde BS and heroin.

If Fraser had his agenda Yoko had her own. Having conquered John she used his fame to pull off the Performance Art project of the century when he and she staged the Bed-In For Peace.

While all this was going on the Guiness heir Tara Browne entered this scene when he and his friend, , opened a night club called Sybilla’s. George Harrison of the Beatles was a significant investor. You can’t operate a club without dealing with some Mob. Perhaps the Krays saw Sybilla’s as a chance to co-opt the Beatles. Although the story is not yet clear I imagine that the Krays put pressure on Kevin MacDonald and Browne to sell their interest thus giving them direct access to Harrison as a partner. The two apparently refused so MacDonald was thrown off a roof to his death which left Tara Browne to deal with.

Bearing in mind that Paul had been under the protection of the European crime lord and one doesn’t receive favors without returning them, for that or some other reason Paul was probably compelled to lure Browne to his death. It is said, perhaps conjectured, that on that night Paul challenged Tara to a high speed auto race through London. The object being to draw Tara to a certain intersection where he could be caused to crash his car, a little flimsy Lotus. The crash ruse succeeded and Browne was killed although his supposed passenger, Suzy Poitier survived in a demolished car without a scratch sans seat belt or air bag. Doesn’t seem likely.

Browne’s death left Harrison as the sole surviving investor. I have no information as to his reaction but the club was closed and Harrison went his way. Harrison and Browne had been enough of an attraction to make Sybilla’s a hot spot with the In Crowd. That kind of lightning can strike many times.

Subsequently then, Tony, so he says, conceived the notion of opening his own club that he called Vesuvio. As he seemed to be very tight with the Stones and the Beatles he was able to feature them as attractions for his grand opening that was attended by them and the Rock establishment including Eric Clapton who was also a habitué at the Krays’ gambling club, The Barn. According to Tony the club was a stellar success but then he discovered he wasn’t the type to enjoy sustained business activity so his partner, the one who fronted the money took over management putting him on a stipend. Sanchez doesn’t say who his partner was but it surely must have been either Albert Dimes, or…the Krays.

Whatever, but Fraser was still not delivering and the Krays were getting pushy. Here comes a real leap of belief. Fraser could deliver neither the Beatles nor the money owed so, says Tony, he conceived the notion of going to prison to escape the Krays. An odd choice as the Krays had as many men on the inside as on the outside. But if you’ve snorted, puffed dropped and shot enough stuff I’m sure anything can seem like a reasonable plan.

Thus Tony says in the deleted chapter it was he, Fraser, who tipped the News Of The World to the Redlands bust which sent him to prison for six months. During that time the Krays murdered Jack McVitie, for which crime they were finally nailed. They went in as Fraser came out thus freeing him of the threat although Tony says prison was a life changing experience for Bob who became a less groovy Bob.

Alright. That makes a good story, doesn’t it?

2.

Nor was the above the only contact of the Krays with show biz and Rock

It may be time to give a little perspective to the arch-criminals, The Krays, for those who may be unfamiliar with them, at least in the US, the English underworld reformed after WWII, a whole new cast of characters emerged formed by the wartime experience. The Kray twins were born in 1933 while their brother Charlie was a few years older. Ronnie and Reggie, the twins, began to emerge after 1954 becoming powers as the sixties began.

Perhaps their main racket was Protection of which providing bodyguards was a sub-division.

As the sixties progressed and their fame grew the Sicilian Mafia of the US began to take notice of them. The Mafia had always had a stable of singers, actors and performers they controlled for their nightclubs, such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Judy Garland et al. They suggested the Krays do the same.

In that manner the Krays provided bodyguards for visiting Mafia acts in England. When gambling became legal in England during the early sixties the US Mafia opened casinos installing such as the ex-actor George Raft as front men. The Krays were flattered by the attention showered on them by Raft.

Thus the Krays moved in on the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks and others. While the Beatles Brian Epstein was paying large monthly there was probably a connection to group members also. If McCartney was used to lure Tara Browne to his death, and maybe it was only intended as a scare and a few bruises, then there was mob influence at the personal level.

As I have implied if not stated, Spanish Tony was foisted on Keith as a bodyguard and minder.

The Krays also made a move to co-opt the Kinks but that deal is said to have fallen through. Ronnie Kray as part of the deal wanted to date Kink drummer, Mick Avery.  Very flattering to Mick, I’m sure.

Later, when the Sicilian US Mafia wanted to launder money they offered the Krays 2,000,000 dollars to set up a label. The Krays went about it signing a few acts including Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. Kramer was spared further indignities when the money was withdrawn and the deal fell through.

And then in Prison after 1968 Reggie Kray decided he wanted to be a songwriter so his songs were foisted on groups who were required to record them.

Much has been made of the homosexual Communist MP Tom Driberg trying to lure Mick into politics. In point of fact Driberg was well connected with Ronnie Kray and part of ring that borrowed boys from an orphanage for their sexual deviance.

This then is quite involved and while Mick was probably not lured into this pervert scene with the Krays it would seem that there was some attempt to draw him in thus co-opting him into the underworld. The scene and Redlands situation needs a little in depth investigation to clear up details of what might have been going on behind the scene of the Bust.

3.

And then there was Tony’s ongoing relationship with Marianne Faithfull. No one associated with the Stones has anything positive to say about Tony. But, listen to Marianne, autobiography, p. 162:

Quote

…(Tony) was a dreadful person. You only had to see him eat to know how loathsome he was. He was a lowlife, a small-time spiv, but a weakling at the same time. He was as enchained as anyone else, completely hung up on his particular sickness.

Unquote

And yet,

Quote

…I was getting deeper and deeper into drugs…I was also getting involved in a long affair with Tony Sanchez, dealer by appointment to the Stones. I can’t believe I did that! I didn’t get enough pocket money fom Mick and I didn’t have any money of my own, so how else would I have been able to get my own drugs?

Unquote.

There’s a problem. And then:

Quote.

It’s odd to realize that the person you’re sleeping with is there only because you’re Mick Jagger’s girl friend. Or were.

Unquote.

This was as Marianne moved into her lost years during the seventies. During this period she makes it sound as though she were sitting on her wall over the bomb site beyond the ken of the world. It makes a good story and it drew me in. But, she says she never resorted to prostitution. Well, maybe.

While in France with Keith Tony met a woman named Madeleine D’Arcy for whom he fell hard, ditching the wife and kids. Love of his life, he said. She returned to England with Tony where Marianne apparently fell for her as hard as Tony. Sanchez came home one day to find Madeleine and Marianne getting it on. He blamed Marianne.

As all three were heroin addicts with pretty good habits; one wonders where Tony got the money if he wasn’t dealing. He was not closely associated with Keith after Keith fled the Riviera a step or to ahead of the cops so Tony may then have been off the payroll.
He would have had to be hustling something.

Madeleine was hooking. Marianne pp.225-26:

Quote:

I hadn’t heard from Madeleine for several days. Her phone was off the hook and I suspected the worst. I had a feeling she’d OD’d, and I might have to smash down her door, so when I went over to the flat in Maida Vale I took with me as muscle a burly Maltese drug dealer and a lowlife friend…Eventually the boys broke down the door and in the bedroom we found Madeleine lying fully clothed in a long gown on the bed. She was obviously dead and looked bruised and bloody…By the time of her death, she had gone back to turning tricks at Brighton for fifteen pounds a night.

Unquote.

The Maltese gangs in London were known both for drug dealing and running prostitution. That Marianne contacted a Maltese and ‘a lowlife friend’ might point to prostitution. I saw a clip on the internet in which the photographer was hidden in a sort of alcove shooting through an opening. Marianne walked in front of the camera obviously dressed as a hooker but very classy in her mini skirt and jacket. She spotted the camera, looked alarmed, and quickly ducked around a corner looking back to ascertain what was going on.

There are numerous pictures of her during her lost years so that when the record producers went looking for her she wouldn’t have been as hard to find as she says.

And then, this: p.221:

Quote.

I was constantly reminded during these years of my parasitic status in the pop world. I remember once going out dancing to a club and Rod Stewart came home with me. He thought I was just one of those girls that sort of floated around pop stars and tried to put the whole thing across like that… (Pop stars) are looking for their particular type, a girly sort of woman with pretty underwear and frocks and the whole female fantasy….I laughed and threw him out.

Unquote.

Sort of a hard Marianne. The other side of the Faerie Queen.

In 1976 Tony was cut loose by Jagger and Richards for good. I presume he passed out of Marianne’s life at that time. In any event she met her second husband, Ben Brierly, in 1976 and began a different, if not a new, life.

4.

Tony’s primary job after securing drugs was to look after Keith. Keith needed some serious looking after. As Keith says Tony’s facts are straight then the only disagreement would be that Tony mentioned things Keith preferred not be mentioned. Indeed, when a London newspaper was going to publish an excerpt concerning Marianne she got an injunction to prevent it.

If the incidents are true as Keith attests then the evidence is that Keith was, at the very least, off the rails, carefree and reckless. He seemed to be conducting a vendetta against society attempting to see how many rules and laws he could break with impunity not unlike the Droogs of A Clockwork Orange.

Unable to pass the driver’s license test Keith had someone else take the test for him. Although, test or no test, practice should have made perfect. Keith was a slow learner cracking up  car after car. As he was usually carrying, he grabbed the dope then ran off leaving Tony to deal with the police. Rather annoying from Tony’s point of view who must have been on the police radar himself.

I’m sure that Tony considered himself more than a minder or drug procurer, thinking of himself as more of a member of the group, especially as he was a friend of Robert Fraser’s before linking up with Keith.

The Redlands drug bust is far from cleared up. There is no certainty as to who alerted the News Of The World paper that drugs would be at the party and where the party was. The drug dealer Schneiderman may have been the one. His presence is certainly suspicious. I am going to suggest another possibility, admittedly a conjecture, that Tony himself might be the culprit. Sanchez ran a lot of risks for Jagger and Keith while being included in most things. Then, he wasn’t invited to the Redlands party at which he knew the regulars well. To be excluded is often considered an insult for hangers on for which vengeance is due. It is possible, then, that to wipe the perceived insult Tony himself alerted the News Of The World. It would certainly have avenged a number of indignities he had suffered at the hands of Keith.

It might have been Fraser who alerted the News as the missing chapter asserts, it might have been Schneiderman or, perhaps, it was Tony himself.

At any rate it appears that Tony was tolerated by Keith but not really welcome. As he was linked to London’s underworld it is possible if not probable that there was some link between it and Keith and Mick. When the Krays were sent up for thirty years in 1968, probably freeing Mick and Keith from their influence Tony’s days were probably numbered.

He was still useful in France but when Keith overplayed his hand finding it necessary to leave France and unable to return to England, he became a man without a country of sorts, the connection with Tony was broken, it being only necessary to sever the relationship.

Tony tells it in the brief epilogue to his book:

Quote:

I had been running from death too long, knew that I could not live this life much longer. But I wasn’t ready to draw completely away. Keith still called me occasionally asking me to get drugs for him, and usually I would cooperate. It had become my way of life. It was on August 21, 1976, that the Stones were playing an outdoor concert at Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, and Keith and Mick asked me to bring some cocaine to the dressing room for them. I was given the wrong type pass, however, and in the midst of a wrangle with a security man I suddenly realized it was all over. I turned on my heel, walked away and the next day reserved a room at Bowden House for a cure.

Unquote.

And so Tony was eased out. I have found nothing that mentions his last twenty-five years. However he died in the year 2000 short after Charlie, Ronnie and Reggie Kray had all passed away. It may have been coincidence or as some suggest…

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:

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 thought 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.”

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:

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.

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 3,4,5: Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties

by

R.E. Prindle

Chaps. 3, 4,5

Chapter 3

Of all the performers of the Rock era Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney have been the most successful while I would give the nod of most successful to Jagger. One must admire the way he learned the ropes and then used them to strangle others as he had been strangled. Mick in his own way was the Midnight Rambler and the Street Fighting Man. Don’t think I blame him; you either rule or are ruled. But, one does have to live with the reputation one creates.

Mick began cultivating his image from the beginning. As this story concerns Mick’s relationship to Marianne I will concentrate on aspects of their sexuality. Andrew Loog Oldham made a movie of the Stones’ January 1965 Irish tour. Unfortunately he sold the rights to it along with the Stones 1963-70 master recordings to Allen Klein along with, by the way, the first Marianne Faithfull masters. Klein then became the Stones’ manager.

The movie disappeared into Klein’s archives to surface in November 2012 when the Klein estate released it to DVD. It can now be purchased as I did. The DVD features both the Abkco edit and Oldham’s original Director’s Cut.

Mainly a concert film it also features group member interviews and Richards and Jagger cutting up. While they were horsing around they appear to improvise a song with the lyric: I’d rather be with the boys than here with a stupid girl like you.

While Jagger has always cultivated an ambiguous image he has also announced a record of having had sex with four thousand or more different girls. That’s only eighty per annum over fifty years so I imagine that shows an admirable restraint. Yet, at the same time Mick has always been misogynistic while always seeking to emasculate or squash his closer women under his thumb. In fact Mick probably has a domination or emasculation complex. He may have rather been with the boys but in his competition with them he sought to emasculate or squash them too. One of the favorite forms of emasculation and domination is to take other men’s women from them.

Thus when he took Jerry Hall from Bryan Ferry he quipped he had to do it to save her from going through life as Jerry Ferry. One winces when one reads of Eric Clapton begging Mick not to take Carla Bruni from him. Mick even took one of Eric’s temps, Catherine James from him.

Mick And Chrissie

Mick And Chrissie Shrimpton

When Mick first enters the scene for Andrew Oldham he is in an alley fighting it out with Chrissie Shrimpton, the model Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister. If one reads more deeply into that situation it shows a very cruel sadistic streak in Mick, quite shameful in a celebrity of Mick’s first magnitude of brightness.

Chrissie began the relationship as a strong willed girl battered by and battering Mick. In that day before the change in sexual mores girls weren’t quite so sexually open so Chrissie didn’t want her parents to know she was shacking up with Mick. They insisted to Mick that they not. As a humiliation tactic to break the girl down he let it be known to her parents that in his eyes she was little more than a common whore and she and they should see it that way too as he was in fact shacking with her.

Gradually the monster beat her down completely destroying her self-respect then, more than publicly, he broadcast his triumph on records and over the radio with such songs as Stupid Girl and Under My Thumb which their whole circle knew referred to her. Dylan would later use the same tactic against Edie Sedgwick when he wrote Like A Rolling Stone to break her down.

Both Chrissie and her parents believed Mick and she were to marry but having crushed her beneath his thumb, as it were, with a toss of his curly locks Mick sneeringly walked away adding insult to injury. Cruel in this instance it became psychotic with repeated use.

Years after word got back to Mick that Chrissie had a bundle of his letters, and, now this is unforgivable, without a word to her he immediately set his attorneys on her threatening an expensive law suit while demanding she return his letters. Even though Chrissie had not intended to publish them, still shaking this long after Mick’s brutal treatment, Chrissie without delay forwarded her letters from Mick to him. Shameful.

Mick And Marianne

 

Mick And Marianne

Mick then turned his attentions to the Guinevere, the Ophelia, the Faerie Queene of pop music, our own Marianne. While I’m sure Mick was somewhat enamored with Marianne I’m also sure he had a couple ulterior motives. Marianne was married to John Dunbar at the time while living with Mick so Mick had the pleasure of emasculating and humiliating Dunbar.

At the same time I’m sure he was envious of Marianne’s fame which was probably greater than his at the time. No room in the spotlight for two. He couldn’t stand that Marianne was getting even more press than himself. Thus he undertook to destroy her career. In the process he emasculated her and humiliated her to an astounding degree.

Marianne and Mick were playing with psychologies in a very destructive manner. The events I am going to describe did incalculable damage to their psyches while altering the direction of their subsequent lives dramatically, especially Marianne’s. Of course, few people seem to realize they have a psychology or how it was formed, what expectations they devised. Those hopes and dreams were more especially dashed when they turned to drugs. That was certainly the case with Marianne.

I don’t know how seriously Marianne took her Medieval interest and reading but she was influenced by her Arthurian studies. Like the most or possibly rest of the generation she was also influenced quite heavily by Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan, probably both books and movies.

The key for the generation in Peter Pan was his refusal to grow up or accept adulthood. It was quite fashionable at the time to pretend that you would always be young, keep in contact with your ‘inner child.’ I was a victim of the psychosis myself.

At any rate Marianne was influenced by all three. Thus, when she and Mick met she quizzed him extensively on his knowledge of King Arthur to see how much he knew as though that litmus test would seal his fate. Mick passed and Marianne moved in still married to John Dunbar. Thus her life clashed with her Catholic upbringing. At first Marianne had royalties coming in from her records enabling her to maintain a certain independence but gradually the royalty checks decreased making Marianne financially dependent on Mick.

At the same time Mick was under no obligations to Marianne and observed none. How this clashed with Marianne’s Arthurian expectations in an atmosphere of Peter Pan and Alice she doesn’t go into but there must have been a severe disappointment as Mick treated her as a mere possession.

While in California he was the object of desire for all the groupies including the doyenne Miss Pamela- Pamela Des Barres nee Miller- of Frank Zappa’s girl group the GTOs (Girls Totally Ornery or else in reference to the hottest car of the period, the GTO). Miss Pamela as well as the rest of the California groupies studied to come up with better and better more outrageous sexual thrills with which to astonish the boys in the band which easily surpassed the imaginations of the boys in the band including Mick.

Mick returned home and demanded of Marianne that she perform these tricks which astonished Marianne no less than Mick had been astonished. However she believed the tricks degrading. Marianne quite rightly refused to perform them.

But the repertoire of the boys in the band kept expanding so that the home girls were led to view new horizons. Group sex and that sort of thing became the norm.

As with all loosely knit movements or phenomena this sort of reputation brought more and more of the sado-masochistic libertine drug oriented element gradually forcing out the less inclined to sexual erotica just as bad money drives out good money. Rock and Roll became progressively more degenerate from 1964-65 on until it was disgraceful to be associated with it.

Mick and the Stones were leaders of this degeneration whether the Stones embraced sexual sado-masochism personally their public persona was based on it making them leading corruptors of youth and society in general. They did as much or more to change the sexual mores of the present than anyone. Their LP cover for Black and Blue was the apex of this very sado-masochistic misogynistic persona. The cover caused me all kinds of trouble in running my record store.

As one presents oneself so must one be.

Chapter 4

The Redlands Bust.

Many psychologically devastating events happened to Marianne in the years from 1967-70. It is very difficult from this perspective to evaluate some of them. One can’t tell how Marianne’s renunciation of her career affected her mind. After all in 1964-65 and 66 she went from just another teenager to superb success far beyond her expectations financially, while becoming the female idol of the youth of England and a phenom in the US- ultimately the Faerie Queen of rock and roll. That’s really only two short years until the Redlands bust.

In those two years she passed through several sexual transmogrifications. She went from virgin to the most outre of sexual practices. Its all very well to say that this was her decision but as Paul McCartney said of his own experience in Miles’ biography it was impossible for him to resist peer pressure, especially in the use of drugs. He was ‘forced’ to try heroin even though he was dead set against.

So peer pressure on Marianne and any young girl to be sexual ‘free spirits’ was impossible unless you were prepared to accept group rejection. The same with drugs that couldn’t be resisted so that when depression set in she ended up addicted to the greatest depression drug available- heroin. It was up to Mick to give what protection he could. Regardless of current sexual nonsense it us up to the man to guide his woman.

Now, the era began in relatively clean-cut innocence . It was never quite so white bread as it is depicted, trying to escape the sleaziness, even then, was no easy matter. Then as the decade wore on it all got worse, then it got disgusting. First pot, pills and amphetamines, then LSD that came on like a hurricane. LSD more than anything else conditioned you for cocaine that in at the end of the decade, at least on the West Coast where I was. Remember that there was no national consensus in the US
In 1964 or so when the ‘counter-culture’ hit in the Bay Area it was a very local manifestation not shared by the East Coast the Mid-West or even for that matter LA. LA was never hip in the way the Bay Area was. While the Beatles are credited with introducing long hair, when the Charlatans came down from Virginia City they had hair and they must have been growing it long before the Mop Tops showed up.

The West Coast could not tolerate New York groups. Mafia outfits like the Rascals nee Young Rascals and Vanilla Fudge made the West Coast puke. There really wasn’t any place for The Velvet Underground either. Of course the British groups that had their own sound that really couldn’t compete with that of say, The Doors, an LA group. The LA groups being more commercially oriented pretty much shoved the Bay Area groups aside, although were a couple of real successes. I don’t include freak groups like the Grateful Dead as commercial successes. Cults are cults.

But to the point, boy, LSD. Owsley Stanley kept the West supplied and how. By the time of Altamont and Stonewall the atmosphere was really foul. And then it got worse still.

About the time of the Redlands bust society and the police were losing their patience. Kesey and Leary had them terrified. The drug thing kept growing. When one says that marijuana was generational it is true only to the extent that a significant minority of the generation smoked it. The hippies were only a small and despised part of the generation but they, we, made a lot of noise and got a lot of notice. Without the radio, rock and corrupt record companies the Movement probably wouldn’t have broken the bounds of Bohemia. But, the time was ripe for the Bohemian conquest of America. That was led from New York, principally by Andy Warhol.

The records made the Bohemian life seem very glamorous. Thus the cops focused on groups where actually the greatest drug activity was located and the propaganda the strongest. As the groups began to make good and even big, very big, money they were the natural prey of the drug dealers. And don’t underestimate the role of LSD. The groups also chose to flaunt their drug use- ‘I’ve got to be free to put anything into my body and life I want to’, disdaining the law, the police and actually common decency. This was the case with the Stones and it’s the flaunting, not the use, that got them in trouble.

In 1967 they naturally were set up. Brian Jones in an interview, barroom chat actually, with News Of The World reporters boasted of his drug use. The journalists then attributed the statements to Mick, whether from ignorance or design I leave to your imagination.

When Mick read the article he was indignant. As I said, while Mick and the rockers thought they were big because of records, radio and TV they were actually socially marginal and not particularly appreciated. Musicians get no respect outside their own circle.

Rather than evaluate his situation, considering that he was doing drugs and everyone knew it thus making him an obvious target, he foolishly brought suit against the newspaper. You don’t have to be brilliant to know News Of The World wasn’t going to let that one fly. Hey! Hey! What’d I say! Mick was sleeping or day dreaming.

The police wanted to get England’s bad boys anyway. There may or may not have been collusion between the News Of The World and the police but the way the raid was conducted indicates there was.

Shortly before the bust some guy named Schneiderman drops from the sky with a brief case reportedly filled with whatever you required. Mick, Marianne and Keith and a couple others, I will mention in the next section, were having an LSD weekend at Keith’s house, the Redlands. Schneiderman insinuated himself into the party with his briefcase while probably being in the employ of the News informed them and they in turn notified the police.

For Schneiderman allegedly having a briefcase full of drugs there were remarkably few drugs in evidence at the bust. Jagger was booked only for possession of four pep pills bought legally in Italy, while Keith had no drug charges at all except for being charged with ‘knowingly’ providing a place where pot was smoked. Robert Fraser actually had heroin jacks of his own on him but Schneiderman produced nothing from his briefcase and indeed no drugs were visible in it when the police required him to open it. No drugs were seen only packaging that were assumed to contain drugs by the Bohemians. In any event he hopped the first flight to elsewhere.

While Marianne had no drugs concealed on her person her situation was the most tragic of all. The Faerie Queen would lose her official status.

When the cops came calling the crowd was of course flipped out on LSD but then that was always the danger; the cops would come calling when you’re least prepared to deal with them. Come on, this was just one of the hazards of using illegal substances. And naturally, you tend to be flippant, wise cracking and mocking. Very bad behavior in such a situation when maximum seriousness is the order of the moment. It’s not like everyone didn’t live in fear of being busted. They used to call it deep paranoia.

Marianne whose clothes had become wet from walking in the rain laid them out to dry dressing in nothing more than some sort of rug wrapped around her. Well, what is one to think of a nude woman amongst a bunch of men; what is this Dejeuner Sur L’herbe redux? Even if two thirds of them were screaming fairies as they were, how is one to know that and what to think?

It was said that Marianne let her wrap slip giving the coppers an eyeful. Of course the cops were square and the gang was hip but squares outnumber hips by a very large margin while as Roger Miller sings: Squares make the world go round. And a good thing too. Roger said that hips have too much water for their land; this was a gathering of pretty watery people. Oh, OK, my people, but folks you have to be realistic. That’s what hip means in my book.

And then someone probably at News Of The World concocted the story that Marianne had a Mars bar slipped between her legs and that Mick was grazing away at it. Preposterous, wouldn’t you think? Boy, now that was a blow that will getcha and you’ll be down for a long time too. As might be expected Marianne was devastated. Boy, that opened a lot of anfractuosities in her brain. A hit like two trains running in opposite directions at top speed on the same tracks over a two hundred foot high trestle. That’s a big crash and a long way to tumble, buddy.

It ended any hope Marianne may have had of appearing on a stage. Can you imagine stepping up to the microphone and being showered with Mars bars. Oh no, no,no, better to board a rocket ship for…oops…Mars.

Marianne and Mick may have thought they were handling it well but the bile and psycho-somatic reactions entering the sub-conscious aren’t so easily dismissed. This horror was merely added to their childhood fixations.

In the turmoil of the months succeeding this mind wrenching event fixations would only worsen. Of course the intent of the establishment was not so much to succeed in jailing them but making an example of them while hopefully destroying their careers. The bust should have been career destroying but for the generational gap. When a teacher chastises a student the other students smirk but don’t disown him. After busting Mick and Keith the establishment then went after the more fragile Brian Jones, the guy who got this whole thing rolling by shooting off his mouth. If the three could have been jailed they wouldn’t subsequently have been allowed to enter the US or so it seemed. No one could have forecast the incredible changes that were about to occur that essentially placed the Stones above the law.

Chapter 5

Enter Donald Cammell And His Movie Performance

One reads many amusing reasons for the incredible social disintegration of the sixties. One of the most preposterous to come to my attention is the notion that it was caused by lead poisoning.. There’s a hobby horse for you. While I couldn’t rule it out I think lead poisoning would be among the most obscure of reasons. No, the sixties was no more an aberration than was Hitler’s Germany; like the latter it was the result of long historical development, a part of psychological history.

If one reads a good deal with the purpose of understanding the historical background of the sixties things begin to take form. Then if one tries to make one’s intellect rise and float over the information gleaned from that reading patterns will form, a map of the past will appear. Then of course one notes nodes and axons, connections that require further reading and rereading what’s already been read so that a fair approximation of what happened can be more or less confidently stated. Much of it will be subterranean history that doesn’t make it to the history books.

Such is the psycho-sexual mind set that began to develop oh, say, about from 1890 on which a key node was from 1900 to 1920. Western understanding of the human mind developed fairly rapidly from the mid-eighteenth century rapidly gaining momentum after say 1860 and the spectacular doings at Paris’ Salpetriere mental hospital under the tutelage of the amazing Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.

While his investigations were of a psycho-sexual nature they were not perceived as such except perhaps by a transient student by the name of Sigmund Freud. Sometime after Charcot’s studies toward the nineties people calling themselves sexologists, sex therapists and sex magicians began to appear.

Along with Freud who might be called a sex therapist two leading figures slightly earlier than he were the German Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) and the Englishman Havelock Ellis (1859-1939). In the academic scientific or pseudo-scientific manner all three made their contributions although Freud managed to incorporate their discoveries or understandings into his system acquiring preeminence in the field.

Goerg Groddeck and Wilhelm Reich, two of Freud’s disciples also gained prominence in the sex therapist field.

On the religious or supernatural side the most prominent and influential of the sex magicians was the so-called Magus Aleister Crowley and his organization of the Golden Dawn.

With the exception of Krafft-Ebing all were out to overturn European sexual mores, designated disparagingly as Victorian. Of course there was never a time when men and women didn’t behave sexually because…well, how could they? The real goal then was to disturb prevailing sexual mores and replace them with sexual license. This essentially came to fruition in the 1960s when the influence of Freud and Crowley were at their peak. The two principal cultural nodes of the US, New York and Los Angeles, were flooded with European Jewish émigrés of the Freudian school while Aleister Crowley had established himself and his Golden Dawn in Los Angeles.

The corrosive sexual mores of Freud and Crowley were aided and abetted by the rise of the equally corrosive drug use and, of course, ‘lead poisoning.’

Our next object then is to discover who Donald Cammel might be.

Searching For Donald

Cammell is the central figure in this little drama so we will begin with him although even though the Stones biographers don’t delve into these other characters they are integral to the social scene of Mick, Marianne and Keith. It appears that Brian Jones, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts served a peripherals to Mick primarily and Mick and Keith secondarily. Oldham tried to make himself a third but apparently was incompatible or other interests pulled him in a different direction. By ‘67 he would be out of the picture.

In Marianne’s biography she makes it sound like Cammell was a stranger to the group while actually he was well known to Bob Fraser, and Chrissie Gibbs who were at the Redlands bust and quite familiar with Mick, Keith and Marianne. They all knew each other before the movie began to be filmed.

Cammell was older than the three being contemporary with the first generations of rockers; he was born in 1934 in Scotland. He came from a well to do family immersed in the occult; his father actually knew Aleister Crowley and wrote a biography of him. One may then assume that his father was something of a sex magician as Marianne’s father was a sexologist. It was impossible to escape Freudian influences from at least 1920 through the fifties. So some reference to repression and the unconscious is inevitable.

Cammell’s father was likely familiar with Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis with its emphasis on psychotic sexual practices. All the sexologists and magicians immersed themselves in bizarre sexual practices. If a reader counters that all sex is legitimate it shows how perverted he or she is. No argument from me, we know where each other stands.

As Cammell was born in ‘34, in ‘44 he would have been 10 and 20 in 1954. Thus he would have been aware of the war between the ages of 4, 5, 6, or so and 10 but perhaps in a muddled and uncomprehending manner but in ‘44 and ‘45 he would have been aware enough to partially comprehend. Certainly when the Big Baby turned Hiroshima to ashes in August of ‘45 something would have registered affecting his mind and outlook.

I was 7 in ‘45 and while I have a clear remembrance of VE Day I don’t have any recollection at all of the Bomb or if I do it had little or no significance to me. I have never had a horror of the A-bomb.

Obviously something other than lead poisoning affected the psyches of the crop of kids from ‘33-’34 to 1942-43. It may have had something to do with the total destruction of the world capped by the Bomb. What a terrific exclamation mark to the end of hostilities. What Cammell’s reaction to this destruction was isn’t clear to me while it probably wasn’t clear to himself.

After the war he experienced rationing during the whole of his teen years. He was probably less affected than others as he became prosperous in his teens on his own as a painter. He was successful as a portrait painter. From the pictures I’ve seen he was more than talented while possibly possessing genius. His mind already exhibited an extreme darkness with sexual confusion easily perceived.

Much of the following information comes from web sites such as the fabulous Another Nickel In The Machine that records the history of London, Sam Umland’s 60X50 and many others. I have not read Umland’s biography of Cammell as yet.

Cammell divorced his first wife and then married a very successful model, the American Deborah Dixon, moving to Paris where they both lived. Cammell apparently was supported by his wife.

Bored with painting, not unlike Andy Warhol, he began to take an interest in film. There is nothing like a movie to exhibit one’s sexual fantasies in real life; indeed a movie is a record of the unconscious. Cammell and Dixon were sexually compatible taking an interest in anything remotely copulatory. Cammell’s first few attempts at filmmaking were not successful or, at least, lacked box office magic.

Along with his lack of interest in painting and his attraction to the movies Cammell gravitated toward the pop world of rock and roll seeking out Jagger. Where was a sexual degenerate to turn? The bad boys of Rock, the Rolling Stones, Mick, Keith and Marianne at least. He found Mick and Marianne’s talked about sexual escapades irresistible. He was undoubtedly attracted by Mick’s dope legend also. Mick claims not to have been an excessive user of drugs, which may be true but I doubt there was anyone at the time who didn’t think he was a heroin addict and druggie par excellence.

As an artist Cammell was acquainted with Bob Fraser and that pop art crowd. Both he and Fraser were known to the infamous crime lords, the Kray Brothers. The Krays, of course, were homosexuals as were Fraser and Gibbs. Mick’s legend is that he is bi-sexual, at least, so there is no reason that he wasn’t sexually involved with the bunch in some manner.

Cammell and Fraser also knew the Satanist and sex magician, the American experimental film maker, Kenneth Anger, as did Mick and Marianne. Fraser introduced Anger to the underground film crowd.

In addition Anita Pallenberg knew Cammell from her pre-Brian Jones, Keith Richard days. She was shown the script in the south of France the year before filming began. So, unless I have seriously misread Marianne’s first auto-biography, Cammell didn’t just show up one day with a movie proposal; it was actually old home week.

Cammell did go on to make an additional three or four movies of which I have seen two, Demon Seed and Wild Side. The last movie has escaped my vigilance so far. Wild Side is a virtual remake or variation of Performance. Demon Seed that I will review in an addendum to Chapter 5 is actually a great movie handling a major sci-fi them to perfection.

Just prior to the beginning of filming in 1968 Mick impregnated Marianne. This is 1968 and if Marianne hadn’t been on the Pill she would have had a number of children now in addition to Nicholas her child by John Dunbar. The question then is why she allowed herself to get pregnant at this time. She was still married to Dunbar so one must think he must have suffered humiliation and emasculation to have another man impregnate his wife. Perhaps Mick’s emasculation genes or maybe just a drug haze.

At any rate Marianne was exiled to Ireland while filming was going on. One can only imagine the anxiety she felt separated from her lover in her condition. One doesn’t have to imagine; she suffered a miscarriage.

Point Blank
The Movie

In 1967 the English director John Boorman had filmed a movie that took
Cammell’s mind by storm. The movie was Point Blank starring Lee Marvin as the protagonist Walker. Cammell recommended that all the cast see the move and bear it in mind. It might be advantageous to review the movie here.

Point Blank was only Boorman’s second effort. Unsuccessful on release it has apparently become a cult classic. His movie is obviously a dream sequence or nightmare. Nothing is real. This indicated by the hero’s name of Walker. He has only one name, no first. No one even knows what his first name could be. The name seemed significant to me but I hadn’t a clue as to what it could mean. Well, you know, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. While writing this piece I was also reading Denis Machail’s 1941 biography of J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. There on page 190 was the explanation of Walker. Barrie had written a play titled Walker, London. That was a telegraphic address.  Quote:

Two impudent jokes in one, the second even more mysterious then as it is now. For the word ‘Walker’ is still in the dictionary- “interjection (slang) expressing incredulity and suspicion of being hoaxed” but when was it last used? Not during the present century, one would say; yet before that there was a time when it was the very crystalization of Cockney humor. “Walker!” you said, to show that you could never be caught with chaff. It was the standard answer to the attempted leg pull. It was also one of those blessed with with which any comedian could bring down the house.

So now the viewer knows he is being hoaxed and can suspend belief. The plot involves Lee Marvin as Walker who takes part in a heist then is shot by his partner who runs off with Walker’s share or 93,000 and adding insult to injury Walker’s wife. The rest of the story involves Walker trying to retrieve his money forget the wife. The story is told through a series of frustrations to a paranoid Walker. So, we have a dream study of a frustrated paranoid.

The opening and closing settings are the same; the walking or exercise area inside Alcatraz prison. The joke seemingly being that one walks around and around, never getting anywhere while returning to the same place. Cry “Walker” and then start laughing like a Cockney at the joke.

Alcatraz, the Rock, is of course a small island in the middle of San Francisco Bay between the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge. Established in 1934 it was closed in 1963, so the filming was done in a closed facility and before the Indians occupied the island claiming it as their heritage. The filming was done, then, in vacated premises.

As a dream story it concerns the psychic life of Walker. It’s all going on inside his head. The prison, castle or house represents the psychic the self so that Walker lives a bleak, barren, paranoid inner life.

A helicopter lands in the enclosure, picks up a package and leaves a bundle of money. Walker and his pal Mal (mal, French for bad) kill the messenger while robbing him. Walker is then examining an empty cell signifying his empty life when Mal with Walker’s wife looking on puts a couple bullets in him leaving him for dead while appropriating Walker’s share of the money and his wife. Thus we have some basic paranoia that, of course, might possibly be true. As his wife would say later, Walker just kind of left her cold.

Left for dead Walker somehow recovers while being compelled to take the only way off the island available to him- swim for it. Another grim joke as legend has it that no one who tried ever succeeded.

The rest of the story concerns surmounting the treachery and double crosses Walker encounters in trying to recover his money. He finds his wife, abandons her and takes up with her sister. While he seems a little obsessive-compulsive in the matter, the money in fact represents his lost identity, purpose in life or masculinity. The recovery of the money is central for his personality.

As in the Cockney joke whenever he shows up people exclaim “Walker!” If you’re in on the joke it might be funny. Angie Dickenson makes up the sex interest as Chris as there is no love interest. Just a four letter word in this movie. The three kingpins Walker must knock down are Carter, Brewster and Fairfax. Ironically Carter and Brewster are disposed of by their own team when Walker’s paranoia protects him while the others take the hit meant for him.

The actual climax takes place in Brewster’s house when Walker and Chris have spent the night together, the only consummated sex in the movie. As Walker is walking out the door Chris asks what her last name is. Walker doesn’t know and neither do we. Walker counters, seemingly weakly, does she know his first name. Either check mate or an uproarious joke to Cockneys. But as Walker in joke is a hoax or a put on then it doesn’t matter anyway. Dreams are like that, they follow a different logic than the waking mind.

The denouement returns to the opening at Alcatraz but now Walker is more canny staying out if sight. The drop is made, Brewster calls to him to come get the money. But, as when Walker was supposed to get the money from Carter, after he survived the assassination attempt, the bundle proved to be waste paper, Walker’s paranoia saves him again. A shot rings out and Brewster takes a long walk off a short pier never to return again. Now enter Fairfax who is the head man and the assassin who shot Carter and Brewster and would have shot Walker. Fairfax shouts Walker several times that in another century would have brought the house down.

Walker’s paranoia prevents him from taking what might be money in the bundle but is probably waste paper so that as the bundle of funny paper represents his ego he is left stranded in the haunted empty house of Alcatraz representing his mind for one presumes the rest of his life.

The movie was a box office failure, except for the few like Cammell but holds up well as a psychological thriller. That is what Cammell saw. So, now, he’s basing his own movie ‘Performance’ directly on Point Blank.

Performance

He gathers together essentially the ‘gang’ to make his movie. Even Deborah Dixon took part. He already knew and was friends with James Fox as was apparently Mick, cast as the criminal Chas. Cammell had known Anita Pallenberg in Paris where it is said she formed a brief menage a trois with Cammel and Deborah. Chrissie Gibbs was the set designer…Mick was an old friend, a few outsiders and Cammel had his movie.

Mick sent Marianne to Ireland for the duration. Keith who was shacking with Anita was so unhappy about Cammell’s pairing of Anita with Mick that he found it impossible to visit the set. Instead he brooded outside in his car sending Bob Fraser in to keep tabs until Cammell banned him from the set.

I can’t be sure that Cammell understood the Cockney meaning of Walker but he so admired the character that he based Mick’s role on Walker giving Mick the single name of Turner. No first name. Turner is also meant to be significant. A turner is a sort of acrobat. The word could also be used in the sense of changeling, or perhaps in the homosexual sense or turning a man gay. Turner does turn Chas. from a tough guy to a passive fairy, his sort of changeling. Turner changes the tough hoods into faggots. Probably then that is the meaning of the name. So maybe Cammell was in on the Walker joke.

As the movie is permeated by sex magic and sex as a sort of therapy the influence of Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Freud and especially Aleister Crowley is very apparent. Kenneth Anger was around at the time while being known to all the participants thus reinforcing the Crowley connection.

All the sex therapists were concerned with aberrant sexual practices that the movie concentrates on. Cammell elaborates the sexual implications of Boorman’s Point Blank, while the decaying mansion obviously represent Cammell’s mind. In the end the sex therapy or magick doesn’t seem to work as Turner turns suicidal obsessed with a death wish.

Boorman’s crime angle comes in through Chas. In order for Fox to appear authentic Cammell actually required him to live the criminal life under the tutelage of a mobster, even to the extent of taking part in actual crimes. Of course, madness is the theme of the movie but even madness can go too far.

Chas. has offended the criminal chief, based on the Kray Bros., who has commanded a man hunt to track Chas. down. When he is located he is summoned to his execution. Turner says: Don’t leave me, take me where you’re going. Chas. says ‘You don’t want to go where I’m going.’ Turner: ‘Yes I do.’  Chas. then blows Turner’s head off, gets into the car and the car drives off, as he looks out the window we see Turners face. Thus the turning or change is complete as each becomes the other.

The version now available for purchase or rental is apparently much different from the original. While even the available version is violent and pornographic the original must have anticipated the current pornographic output of Hollywood . While I wouldn’t call Performance tame almost every movie you see today is as or more explicit. At any rate the movie has no redeeming moral value. If you want porn plain and simple, there it is.

The legend has it that the movie changed the lives of the participants. Perhaps so, but perhaps not. Michele Breton was already a lost child and stayed lost. Anita, no stranger to drugs moved into intense familiarity. James Fox, who was criminally mistreated by Cammell, gave up movies for ten years but he says he was already fed up with the seedy side of movie making so perhaps Performance just capped it. Keith? God, what can you say? Who was going to keep him from drugs? If Cammell was already inclined toward suicide he topped himself off in 1996 finally taking Keith’s advice.

But, now, Mick and Marianne. Mick was advised to play himself but Marianne wisely overruled that advice perhaps saving Mick’s sanity but still leaving him off balance. Marianne advised him to adopt some of the fey characteristics of Brian Jones’ character along with some of Keith’s tough guy stance. Not too difficult as that is the way Mick already appeared but it permanently shifted his personality in that skew. Nevertheless Mick has always remained supremely functional.

As to Marianne, how did she relate to Mick’s rejection of her by sending her to Ireland and the subsequent miscarriage of her child. That is a lot of psychological battering. I think that it is certain that as 1968 progressed she was already in a depression and sinking rapidly. While she was able to hold on for another year or so, by 1969 she would be spinning out of control as further events tested the strength of her mind.

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.

A Review: II of II Wonderful Tonight by Pattie Boyd

A Review

Wonderful Tonight:

George Harrison, Eric Clapton. And Me

by

Pattie Boyd

Review by R.E. Prindle

Boyd, Pattie:  Wonderful Tonight: George Harrison, Eric Clapton, And Me.  Three Rivers Press, 2007

Good Morning Little Schoolgirl. The sixties fixation on young girls,

The darkest hour is just before dawn.

There’s one thing I want you to do

Especially for me.

And it’s something everybody needs…

Whisper a little prayer for me.

–Bass, Ralph. Pauling, Lawson

 

One needs a little encouragement in the black night of the soul.  One needs a little encouragement amidst the trials and tribulations of life.  The way is dark, the night is long and who knows what is waiting at the end of the road.  All the mythological heroes went through a period of madness.   Most likely at the mid-life crisis.  The greater the stresses the more difficult to avoid errors.  Why judge others so harshly when neither you nor I could have done better in the same circumstances.  If a person  is of good will and not ill why not be a little forgiving?  Especially if no crimes are committed.

As Pattie points out, when manager Brian Epstein died the Beatles were suddenly on their own.  To that time Brian had managed all the details, business as well as personal leaving the Beatles to do what they did best, write, record and perform songs.  The relationship had been perfect of its kind.  Given that the Beatles were now major successes rather than fledglings it would have been nearly impossible for them to put together a management team.

Of course, the Beatles were no businessmen.  In the attempt their musical skills were compromised while the business end could not prosper.  Cares such as they had not known descended on them.  Nor, did they understand that the smallest action or word of theirs would reverberate around the world.  They were no longer able to say or do what they pleased.  Millions of vulnerable young people and unstable adults hung on every word giving them whatever interpretation suited them best.  McCartney’s song Maxwell’s Silver Hammer did uncalculable damage.

When the Beatles closed their boutique waves of reaction crossed the world.  It was said they opened the doors and invited anyone to take what they wanted.  Away off in Keseyland on the West Coast of the US where I owned a record store a wave of kids descended on my store asking if everything was free.  These were zany times where everything was possible so, mystified, I asked why they would think that.   I was told the Beatles had just given away everything in their store and why wouldn’t I?  I became a bastard for not following the Beatles lead.

So, when Pattie noticed a change in George when they came back from India it was probably caused by business cares, a new reality that neither he nor the others knew exactly how to deal with, nor was there time to learn.  Those stresses, in the way of the human mind, are converted to sexual expressions.  In George’s case he began to mumble about having a lot of concubines.  A pretty normal reaction that he may never have acted upon.  I’m sure that when he showed up with Chris O’ Dell in tow it may have seemed like the first step. (See Chris O’ Dell’s auto for a fuller description.)  Chris became Pattie’s friend denying any relations with George, at least during her extended stay with the Harrisons, although after Pattie’s divorce the two came to terms.  But, for now she and Pattie became bosom buddies shopping and cavorting together.

What a wonderful time to have unlimited money and a huge mansion to furnish.

While the sixties are primarily thought of for the groups and records that was only one component of that truly wonderful and amazing time, at least looking at the bright side of  the penny.

P.F. Sloan, who penned Eve Of Destruction, titled one of his own LPs Raised On Records.  The title explained the generation.  Starting with perhaps Johnnie Ray leading on to Elvis the history of our generation was written by recording artists rather than novelists or even movies.  You might question starting with  Johnnie Ray but he was the first mind blowing departure from the norm.  Mind blowing explains the whole period.  Rock’s John the Baptist preceding the Jesus of Elvis.  A trail of great records led up to the British Invasion when the world tipped on its axis.  It was one mind blowing act after another.

First the Beatles upset the elders, long hair but clean  cut.  Then came the not so clean cut Rolling Stones with the weirdest thing you ever saw on stage, Brian Jones.  You couldn’t take your eyes off him.  Fantastic hair and the strangest clothes.  Mick probably had to get rid of the competition.   If the Stones weren’t bad enough they were followed by the appropriately named Animals.  The name said it all sending the old folks wild with gnashing teeth.  But backed up by Dylan and Peter, Paul And Mary the group mind was conditioned to move in the same direction in unison.

As Pattie says, she found the most wonderful art nouveau artefacts.  Indeed, Aubrey Beardsley, Alphone Mucha, Toulouse Lautrec, god, even the names, whoever heard of anyone named Aubrey?  The art focus shifted from that NY art junk.  Travel posters had been a staple for several years but now other posters began to augment them, Peter Max, East Totem West, the Fillmore and Avalon posters and the most spectacular of all- the giant personality posters.  Originally the posters were blown up real grainy so that if you stood close the picture wasn’t visible but stepping back and then back further the portrait emerged.  Drove the old folks wild, mytified the less hip; minds weren’t prepared.  Although by that time Telstar was old hat, and men had walked on the moon.  The impossible was no longer impossible, anything was possible and it kept happening.  Andy Warhol and his Campbell Soup can.  Good god.  Remember the Robert Indiana LOVE poster with the lopsided O?

Robert Indiana- Love

In the US the tax laws were such that you could make money on records and books without turning a profit.   Publishing exploded.  Nifty expensive art books of the strangest and most outre artists were available.  Virtual toys like the works of Victor Vaserelly.  It was incredible, it was magnificent, it was mind candy as never seen before.

I hope Pattie with all that coin took advantage of it.  There was a canchre in wonderland though.  Pattie didn’t keep her hand on the throttle but let her attention be diverted by sex.  Some reviewer said that Pattie wasn’t the brightest bulb.  Hmm.  I do wonder what she was thinking.

Now comes the part difficult of analysis.  Pattie, like all women portrays herself as an innocent, the helpless beauty in the clutches of two beasts who refuse to turn into princes when kissed.  I defend n o one but like a clear picture.  It was clear that Pattie is haunted by her parents relationships as she always mentions them at critical points.  She perceives her mother as a victim so it is possible that she was seeking revenge for her.

The time sequence Pattie presents is inadequate to follow the actual course of the relationship’s deterioration.  It is possible that Pattie decided to turn the tables and become polyandrous first.  She did conduct herself in that manner or, at least, try to.  The information is insufficient to determine the actual sequence of events.  She appears to always have been flirtatious with other men.  In reference to Clapton she says she allowed him to seduce her.  This implies volition and that she encouraged his attentions.  One might say she almost solicited the famous letter from Clapton she showed George.  It wouldn’t have taken a genius to figure out  the small e it was signed with referred to Clapton.  George was no dummy.  Pattie blithely passed it off as from an unknown fan.  Then she innocently expresses surprise when Clapton called that evening and asked if she had gotten his letter.  Oh please, Pattie.

George unable to take it anymore invites Clapton over, gives him one guitar, takes another engaging in a guitar duel with the prize being the fair lady.  Well, George found her, raised her up to where she was and then let Clapton take her.

Now, this is fairly reprehensible I think, Pattie left, but rather than seeking a divorce she lived with Clapton for two years while married to Harrison.  Affairs of the heart are beyond me so all I can say is that Harrison was too kind hearted, Pattie callous and cruel and Clapton a simple cad.  George always  did the honorable by Pattie and she should have done the same by him.

Forty Years Of Hard Travelin'. Lost innocence.

One questions Clapton’s motivations.  Clapton had a housefull of women when he professed his great love for Pattie; a nice girl I’m sure, but not to die for.  Pattie cagily put Clapton off so his threat was to become a heroin addict unless she came with him.  He was only snorting the heroin not shooting it.  Pattie let him, she says, for three years.

The only reason I can see for Clapton’s wanting her is emasculation games.  George was a Beatle with a guitar reputation therefore above him.  When  the two had their guitar duel, by consensus, George lost thereby losing status.  Clapton then took the woman thereby emasculationg the man he had made his rival.  But now he was stuck with this woman he didn’t really want.

In an interesting twist in the contest for supremacy both Clapton and Pattie were put down by the redoubtable Mick Jagger.  Pattie and Clapton had been married and threw a huge bash with mega fireworks, everything.

Mick Jagger came with Jerry Hall, who had been engaged to Brian Ferry but had left him for Mick.

So Jagger is leaving no stone unturned in his quest for supremacy even putting down a weak rival like Brian Ferry.

Jerry Hall and Mick

The party started in the afternoon and ended in the dawn.

By the time Eric and I went upstairs to bed it was daylight.  We were ready to drop- but Mick and Jerry were tucked up and fast asleep in our bed, with little Jade, his daughter with Bianca Jagger sleeping sweetly beside them.  Trust Mick to have found the best bed in the house.

So Jagger put down both Clapton and Pattie.  Childless herself she saw Mick’s child.  They could have turned Jagger out of the bed appearing boorish but if they had, dog tired, they would have had to change the sheets then crawling into a bed warmed by Jagger.  Mick aced them both demonstrating his supremacy.  Ah, those emasculation games.

Now, Pattie left George, supposedly because, or after, Clapton wrote Layla, but she didn’t divorce him for two years.  Thus as another man’s wife she was living as Clapton’s concubine.  Call me old fashioned but I can’t endorse such behavior.  Amazingly George didn’t press for a divorce letting Pattie divorce him on the grounds of lack of cohabitation for two years.

Perhaps she was avenging her mother’s treatment when her father carried on with the wife of an intimate friend for some time, perhaps two years, before divorcing the mother.  Obviously some psychological end is being served.

Clapton was no where near as generous monetarily as Harrison.  Pattie describes it as keeping her on a tight leash.  Nor did this man who professed to love his Layla so deeply then marry her.  No, they shambled along in his loose situation.

When they did marry it was under the most humiliating situation for Pattie.  We have only her side here but she says that Clapton and his manager had a bet that the manager couldn’t get a story about Clapton in the papers.  The manager without Clapton’s knowledge invented a story which was printed that Clapton would marry Pattie the next Tuesday.

Pattie had just walked out on Clapton and was in LA.  On the Friday before Clapton called her and said he needed an immediate answer.  Marry him by Tuesday or forget it.  Pattie folded.  After the I do-s Clapton left on an extended tour leaving Pattie to find her way home.

Amazingly she stayed with him for some time.  Even so she had not severed emotional ties with Harrison who remained unmarried.

Clapton was still playing money games with her.  One Christmas she went shopping running up a 5,000 pound tab at Harrod’s expecting to charge it to her Harrison account.  Surprise! The account had been closed.  Not having enough money in her checking account which Clapton apprently wouldn’t let her have she had the effrontery to ask Harrison who gave her a five thousand pound check.  Apparently Pattie misunderstood the meaning of the word divorce.

For whatever reason she showed the check to Clapton who, realizing he had been aced in the emasculation game, refused to let her cash it.

Now tiring of the games with Clapton Pattie sought a divorce.  More money games.

With Harrison, as a divorce settlement after abandoning him and cohabiting with another man, Pattie received 120,000 pounds.  In the circumstances I would see that as very generous.  She doesn’t say exactly what she received from Clapton but it was enough to provide her with a very sufficient investment income.

Not content with that  while apparently assuming divorce or no that Clapton owed her more she demanded he buy her a million pound house as he had spent that much on one for himself.  She was denied but it was agreed to buy her a 300,000 pound house although title would remain with Clapton.  She found one for approx. 350,000 pounds and was allowed to live in that.

Subseqently Clapton remarried.  The canny Pattie realizing that if Clapton died his wife would turn her out attempted some successful maneuvers.  She asked for 40,000 pounds for some remodeling.  Clapton refused but replying that he wasn’t aware that he was her landlord he deeded the house to her so she came out very well indeed.

During this time she was living with her third man named Rod.  He was nine years her junior.  Tiring of him she cruelly told him that his life as a ‘toy boy’ was up and to move on.

The inevitable conclusion is that Pattie viewed her mother’s relationships with men as she was growing up and came to some conclusions.  Although neither Harrison or Clapton were perfect men I am convinced that whatever their shortcomings Pattie was not an innocent victim.  She actively encouraged Clapton while married to Harrison, abandoning George for Clapton.  She knew Clapton’s attitude toward women and stimulants, both drugs and alcohol before she ‘allowed herself to be seduced’ so his addictions came as no surprise.  She has no complaint on that score.

Pattie made the remark in closing that if the right man came along she would snap him up in a minute.  Having lived every groupie’s dream of snaring a Beatle and Clapton the only eligible rock star to complete her trifecta would be the Man himself- Mick Jagger.

I would be interested to see that combination.  The odysseys of this simple Kenyan girl from Harrison to Clapton to Jagger would certainly equal the odyssey of her fellow Kenyan, Barack Obama.

Pattie today. Further down the road.

End.

 

https://idynamo.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/a-review-wonderful-tonight-by-pattie-boyd-i-of-ii-famous-groupies-of-the-sixties-series/

 

A Review: Faithfull by Marianne Faithful: Famous Groupies Of The Sixties

  

A Review

Famous Groupies Of The Sixties Series

Faithfull: An Autobiography

by

Marianne Faithfull

Marianne Faithfull

 

Review by R.E. Prindle

Season Of The Witch

 

All night, all day, Marianne

Down by the seaside sifting sand.

Even little children love Marianne,

Down by the seaside sifting sand.

-Terry Gilkyson And The Easy Riders

     Technically Marianne Faithfull wasn’t a groupie.  Her early years resembled one but in her later years she was sought after as a conquest by men of the groupie mentality.  I’m sure as everyone knows Marianne Faithfull began her career as a very successful pop singer.  Produced originally by Andrew Loog Oldham she was among the first of the new breed of Rock singers, as opposed to Rock n’ Roll.  She belongs to the new rather than the old school.

     Her first song was As Tears Go By.  Single and album were very successful, more or less establishing her reputation for all time- or at least until the generation passes away.

     My first knowledge of  Marianne Faithful was when the strains of As Tears Go By wafted into my study window.  They continued to waft all day long for weeks.  The girl in the apartment next door was fixated on the song.  A little fat girl.    So after the 7000th rendition  of As Tears Go By I had my first nervous breakdown.  Marianne Faithfull was a sour taste.

    

Mick Jagger

 Then as far as I’m concerned she dropped out of the pop scene.

     Her auto was first published in 1994, I just read the paperback the other day so the book is probably old hat to most of you but as I didn’t find any real reviews on the internet I decided to give it a try.  I don’t see any reason to do the whole book so I’ll concentrate on the three Bob Dylan incidents, aspects of her relationship with Mick Jagger and Donald Cammell and his movie, Performance.  The book is highly readable and entertaining until after her divorce form Jagger about two thirds of the way through the book when she falls into a drug stupor.  At that point it is necessary to avoid falling into Marianne’s own depression.  Too late for her to get over it now.

     Her career began when she was selected for her looks by Andrew Loog Oldham, producer of the Stones, who saw her at a party.  Asked if she could sing she said yes.  Next, there she was behind a microphone lisping As Tears Go By.  Thus she was an established big pop singer when she first met Dylan and later came under the thumb of Mick Jagger.  She brought something to the table, she didn’t come empty handed.  She was an equal.  To be treated as an appendage enraged her probably contributing to her drug addiction

     She met Dylan during his ’65 tour.  You can see her sitting in the corner in the movie Don’t Look Back.  She has some trenchant comments to make of the various prticipants in the Savoy Hotel debacle.  She’s very intelligent.  She was a young girl at the time, Dylan being five years older.  She was in awe of Dylan who she considered the hippest god on the planet.

     Dylan is supposed to be a master seducer.  It wasn’t that Marianne wasn’t ready and willing, she was.  In her mocking portrayal of the scene Dylan rather than complimenting her beauty and talent made an attempt to overawe she who was already overawed with his own wizardry.  In the process the seduction fell through.  Mazrianne skipped merrily away.

     Now, this is a girl who a year or two younger , while on tour with a review including Roy Orbison responded to him when he knocked on her door and said:  Hi.  I’m Roy Orbison.  I’m in room 602.  And Marianne skipped on down the hall.  How could Dylan have missed? 

     Later in the book, the year was 1979 when Dylan was going though his Jesus years, while Marianne had entered clinical depression doing heroin and sitting on her wall like Humpty-Dumpty all day, every day, Dylan arrived for another tour.   His dealer was a friend of Marianne’s and he asked if she knew where Marianne was.  Oh yes.  Demelza, the heroin dealer got Marianne to come over.  Dylan and Marianne’s second verse was worse than the first.  By this time depressed, enraged and seeking vengeance against the men in her life Marianne was far from compliant.  She had recently released Broken English, I’ve never heard the record so I can’t comment on the lyrics, so she mocked the Wise One by asking him if he understood her lyrics.  He couldn’t explain hers any better than she could his.  A little drip on the name of Bob, a little triumph for Marianne.  Dylan went away unfulfilled again.

     Oop, there is a third meeting.  Marianne now beyond depression walking down railway ties none of us will ever be able to see.   She overdosed on heroin, staggered and fell breaking her jaw.  Complications arose requiring serious surgery.  Pins were put in her jaw along with some contraption to hold the two parts together that apparently went

Keith Richards

through her cheek sticking out like a water spigot.  Had to sleep on one side.

     While Dylan was playing in Boston she presented herself backstage in this grotesque appearance.  Too weird for Dylan.  Three strikes and he was out.  Never spoke to him again, she says.  (To 1994 when the book went to press.

     After the first meeting Marianne hooked up with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones for whom we have to thank for As Tears Go By.

     In late 1966 the great Donovan included a song on Sunshine Superman called Season Of The Witch.  The song epitomized the era.  At the time the song made little sense to me but in reading Faithfull it all began to fall into place.  While the sixties were terrific they were also horrific.  Today the horrific impressions dominate my mind.  All standards, all morality disintegrated before our eyes.  It was the end of the world as it dissolved into stange and perplexing LSD fantasy.  Hell, I never even took LSD and I think I know the feeling perfectly.  I’m still getting flashbacks.

     Nothing was real, it was all an illusion.  You could turn yourself inside out right before everyone’s eyes and get no reaction.  Hey, everyone was living through their own movie.  Marianne captures this feeling perfectly in 300 pages but so did Donovan in three verses:

When I look out my window

Many sights to see.

When I look in my window

So many different people to be

That it’s strange, so strange,

Must be the season of the witch,

Must be the season of the witch.

     Marianne’s succession of people to be began in childhood.  She as well as all these musicians, singers and dancers came from humble backgrounds with low expectations  but grand hopes and dreams.  Picked for the size of her bust to be a rock star, piles of money were thrown at her.  Inevitably dissociation occurred as the possiblity to be anyone appeared possible only to be held back by that humble past of low expectations.  how to behave in these new circumstances, not so easy, not so easy.

The rabbits are running in the ditch

Beatniks are out to make it rich.

Sang Donovan.  Standards and barriers were down, libertines crawled out of the woodwork nd there stood Mick and Keith, two libertine beatniks who could actually wallow in money.

     Mick took a fancy to Marianne and moved her in.  Married in heart if not in law, but she was to lose her independence.   There was Swinging London or the tail end of it and swinging is what Mick and Marianne did.  However Marianne did not come to Mick as a nameless groupie.  She was a somebody that the fans admired and wanted to get close to also.  Marianne Faithfull, all in capitals.  All that was submerged into the personality of Mick Jagger.  At first her own money was coming in allowing her independence but as her catalog grew old her money had to come from Mick.  Her lost independence  made it impossible to function as a wife and expect a joint account where she didn’t have to ask for money, it was hers by right.  A conflict and contest arose.

When I look over my shoulder

What do you think I see?

Some other cat looking over

His shoulder at me.

And he’s strange, sure he’s strange.

Oh no, must be the season of the witch.

     And the witching got serious.  All kinds of users, abusers and losers followed the libertines out of the woodwork, masters of manipulation they knew how to easily hypnotize whacked out marijuana smokers, cokeheads and general druggies to get them to do various things, sex things, criminal acts, whatever to gratify their evil schemes.  People did things they never thought they would do and fortunately some or a lot them couldn’t remember doing them.  Such a character was waiting in the ether to snare Mick and Marianne.  The movies, ah, the movies, what a way to snare unwary souls.  Everyone wants to be a movie star.

     Donald Cammell, one such, had his nose to the wind and the wind brought the sexual antics of Mick and Marianne wafting his way.  Truly, it was the season of  the witch.

     Cammell had a novie he wanted to make;  Mick and Marianne and assorted friends were just the libertines to bring Performance to life.  Oh no, oh no, must be, must be the season of the witch.

     According to Marianne, Cammell replicated the sex scene the set had had as though he had been there. Uncanny?  Maybe or maybe it was such a far out thing participants talked and word got around and Cammell’s imagination was inflamed.

     According to Marianne the filming brought disaster into  the actor’s lives.  Cammell, the manipulator escaped, of course, as his kind always does.  The pleasure was all his, you may be sure.

     The filmwas a turning point in the relationship of Marianne and Mick.  Perhaps the film stirred memories of when she had been The  Marianne Faithfull, since submergeed into Mick’s identity.  She had been unable to adjust to the new circumstances.  Pentulantly she just walked away.  Immersed in drugs the downslide slow and pleasant became precipitous until she could be found sitting on her wall of the bombed out building not rebuilt as yet.

     Could it be that the remaining wall of that Marianne Faithfull of low expectations was bombed out by the force of a success undreamt of in her pleasant teenage dreaming?  Was that the fascination that kept her glued to the wall in pleasant heroin dreams?  Would Humpty Dumpty fall into the abyss or not?

     This was now the seventies.  Hard realities existed on every side.  It was’t fun anymore either.  The actual season of the witch had passed over.  This was hell.

     After Marianne left Mick drugs are the topic of her converstation.  What is more boring than a junkie talking drugs.  Shoot up and shut up.  Who wants to hear?

     But she did regain her identity,  she had shed Marianne of the little m and was Marianne Faithfull again.  Men sought her out.  Producers came around again, there was still money in that drug wracked carcassof Marianne.

When she walks along the shore,

People pause to greet,

While little birds fly round her,

Little fish come to her feet…Marianne.

     Somehow from that drug drenched state Marianne was able to cobble together enough strength and concentration to begin doing a Mick and Keith.  Maybe her time had not been wasted by the proximity to Mick and Keith.  While still with Mick she had written Siser Morphine, later recorded by the Stones.  She got no writing credit because of old contractual problems with discarded agents but she did receive a third of the royalities which were considerable. 

     And now she began to string words together to make songs.  The stuff was nothing I would ever listen to.  I mean, choice lyrics like ‘Every time I see your dick I imagine her cunt in my bed.’  Maybe that’s  why Dylan couldn’t understand the lyics.  I’m not going to try.  It worked for Marianne though.  Today she’s proudly known as the Edith Piaf of her generation.  I’m happy for her that things worked out for her after a fashion.  Her smile still photographs well but I’m not going to buy her records, CDs, whatever they’re called nowadays.  Time has gone by and I can’t get As Tears Go By out of my head. I’ll carry that tune to my grave.

All night, all day, Marianne,

Down by the seaside sifting sand.

Even little children love Marianne,

Down by the seaside sifting sand.

    

    

 

Bob Dylan