Cut Up

CUT UP...

issue 1 living is NOT being...

casting a spell with letters and colours and images and incantations... living is NOT being...

"When the truth gets buried deep, beneath a thousand years o f s l e e p , ti m e demands a turn around, and once again the truth is found" -----unused george harrison lyric -------living is NOT being...

billions now living will “be�... living is NOT being...

never

ABA RA* CA* DAB ARA living is NOT being...

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And what will the future look like if such groups actually exist and if they do combine and take over? An elitist world state very much along the lines laid down by the NAZIS. At the top would be a theocracy trained in PSYCHIC CONTROL TECHNIQUES IMPLEMENTED BY COMPUTERIZED ELECTRONIC DEVICES THAT WOULD RENDER OPPOSITION PSYCHOLOGICALLY AND PHYSIOLOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Entry to this privileged class would be permitted only to those whose dedication to the world state was absolute and unquestioning. In short, you don't get in by merit or ability but by being an ALL-AROUND 100 PERCENT CUNT. Under this ruling elite of power addicts would be an anonymous service collective of functionaries, managers and bureaucrats.

And below them the slave workers. There would be no place for dissent or independent research. The troublesome artist would be eliminated or absorbed. The elite lives happily ever after, at the top of a control state that makes 1984 seem cozy and nostalgic - Black Magic Mind War William Burroughs 1976

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ain’t nothing can’t be synchronized... dillinger died for your sins living is NOT being...

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“We are all only temporary curators of our present bodies, which will all decay, sooner or later. In a hundred years or so all the humans currently alive will have died. I take great comfort in knowing, with certainty, that thing that makes us special, able to enrich our own lives and those of others, will not cease when our bodies do but will be just starting a new and hopefully even better adventure ...� (Unkle Sleazy)

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mystery is the new black anonymity is the new rock n roll make like a bear and hide in plain sight

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I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.

A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessence's.

Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist!

When the eternal slavery of Women is destroyed, when she lives for herself and through herself, when man--up till now abominable--will have set her free, she will be a poet as well! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive, delightful; we will accept and understand them.

RIMBAUD’S SYSTEMATIC DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES

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The White Album... a Rock n' Roll Ulysses In a letter to Carlo Linati, James Joyce wrote, "Each adventure [in Ulysses]. . . should not only condition but even create its own technique" (Dettmar, from Joyce, 143).

Written nearly three decades before "long players" (phonograph record albums) were t o i nva d e t h e m a rke t p l a c e , U lys s e s stylistically resembles a pop album (or the other way around). Ulysses was composed of eighteen "adventures" that created their own technique. The same principle applies to pop albums, which contain separate and distinct tracks that musically reflect the lyrical content (or parody that content). One album t hat is as s tylis tically challenging to the conventions of pop music as Ulysses was to the novel is The Beatles' eponymous 1968 album (commonly referred to as The White Album).

Albums are generally composed of a group of songs from one recorded group of sessions (anywhere from

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one day to years) that carry separate narratives within each.

Across an entire album, the songs can change singers, styles, points of view (first, second and third person voices), and even include songs written by other songwriters. The first album to sell a million copies was Elvis Presley's self-titled debut album in 1956, over a decade after the end of World War II. In both date and concept, the album is a postmodern invention and artifact.

Many theorists assume postmodernism was initiated at the conclusion of World War II, after the introduction of the atomic bomb by the United States to the rest of world. Just as "the bomb" erased one hundred thousand living "narratives" with one plausibly fictive hot flash of light that was indeed real, postmodernism claims that "'history' and 'reality' [are] no longer possible, since both have been 'textualised'" (Selden and Widdowson, 174). Some of the stylistics of postmodernism include hybridity, non-linearity, the questioning of identity, selfreflexivity, excess, and the telling of the unspeakable.

These s tylis tic modes, however, are not exclusive to postmodernism, and combinations of some of these styles exist in numerous books written prior the end of the second World War. Notable texts before this period using "postmodern" techniques include Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1767), Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and Woolf's The Waves (1934). If James Joyce's Ulysses is viewed as the crowning achievement of "high modernism," yet contains some of the stylistics of postmodernism, then what exactly is modernism?

Before comparing a "masterwork" like Ulysses to any pop album, I will concede that the pop album (in most cases) does not carr y stylistic diversity or density, the philosophical and socio-political arguments, or the detailed characters that Ulysses does. There are instances where pop albums try to carry a storyline (these albums are known as concept albums). Famous examples include Tommy by the Who (1969) and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie (1972) (this title is often misapplied to the

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Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [1967]). Since the album is a time constrained unit (the average album lasting forty-five minutes), there is not enough time to fully convey the issues dealt with in a novel, particularly Ulysses.

But stylistically, The White Album is a rock n' roll Ulysses. Just li ke i ts noveli s ti c p re d e c e s s o r, T h e White Album expands on its prescribed genres, pop and rock n' roll, while simultaneously discarding established definitions of rock n' roll. What Ulysses and The White Album share in common as literature is their ability to tackle new genres, blend genres with ease, mock the genres they are appropriating, and advance their respective artforms by using (or abusing) the genres they handle using these tactics.

James Joyce's Ulysses is often acclaimed as a landmark text of "high modernism," as well it should be, with its exact and often brutally frank descriptions of internal thought and perception. A postmodern reading of the text (especially of the chapters that are written in Joyce's "secondary style") has been argued by some critics, but due to the novel's status as representing the peak of "high modernism" and its publication date of 1922, the postmodern reading has proven to be problematic.

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In order for a new artistic movement to begin, the norms of that particular field need to be questioned, embraced and simultaneously overthrown: so for modernism to transform into postmodernism, certain shifts had to occur. The intellectually elite leanings of modernism (for instance, Eliot's use of Greek in "The Waste Land") were eschewed for an embracement of pop culture (for instance, Ginsberg's allusions to the Beatles and Bob Dylan in his poetry). Critic R. B. Kershner states, "As the poet Andrei Codrescu put it, where the modernist Pound had commanded 'Make it New,' the postmodernist imperative is 'Get it Used'" (76). Ulysses inconveniently fits into both of these categories, with its NeoHomeric narrative and its continued references to street songs and the trashy novels of Charles Paul de Kock.

Despite Joyce's unintended premonition of postmodern writing techniques in Ulysses, prominent postmodern critic Linda Hutcheon neglects to mention Joyce once in her book The Politics of Postmodernism. Another postmodern critic, Brian McHale, once viewed Joyce "as strictly a modernist precursor of postmodern writing," according to Joyce scholar Kevin J.H. Dettmar (14). But in McHale's second book, Constructing Postmodernism, he reconsiders Ulysses' postmodern credentials,

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describing the second half of the book as a "discursive parallax" compared to the first half's "parallax of subjectivities" (52).

What McHale is referring to is the "two halves" of Ulysses. The first ten chapters of Ulysses (excluding "Aeolus") are often considered the first stylistic half of the novel. In the first half, most of the words accounted for emerge from the subjectivities of the various characters (predominantly Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom). Joyce's adherence to internal or external dialogue by distinct subjectivities is commonly referred to as his "initial style." One notable exceptions occurs at the end of "Scylla and Charybdis" (lines 9: 893-934), when the text is written in the format of a play to mirror the conversation of Stephen, Buck Mulligan and other intellectuals about Shakespeare.

The se c ond hal f of Ulysse s includes the "Aeolus" chapter, and the last eight chapters of the novel. The second half of the novel is best described by Brian McHale as a "parallax of discourses." In this half of the book, the action of the novel is shaped more by the discourse employed by Joyce than by the actual events in the narrative.

Each chapter in the second half of Ulysses represents a new style, "creating its own technique."

Critic Karen Lawrence says, "The resources of subliterature (journalism, magazine fiction, melodrama) and nonliterature (science) are plumbed by Joyce and used for his own purposes" (10-11), showing how Joyce could "make it new" and "get it used." Joyce's extracting and insertion of various types of discourse into the second half of Ulysses shows its postmodernity in its mixing of genres and its collapsing of the distinctions between high culture and pop

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culture. The modernist first half of the novel expands on the narrative tradition of the novel with its representation of the consciousness (of Dedalus and Bloom). In the postmodern second half, traditional novelistic conventions collapse, leaving Joyce with many more possibilities to expand on existing notions of the novel.

After reading the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses, it is entirely plausible to assume that Joyce had written professional scientific discourse. Joyce is essentially known as a creative writer (novelist, poet, playwright), but in "Ithaca," he duplicates the vernacular of the scientific: What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the agency of fire?

The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflute, ignition was communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral from the foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn derived their vegatative existence from the sun, primal source of heat (radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous ether. (550) Similarly, The Beatles, a rock n' roll band, recreate the sound of a flapper dance-band in "Honey Pie," and they create a piece of

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musique concrete a la Karlheinz Stockhausen in "Revolution 9."

On "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," the Beatles appropriate the beat and instrumentation of Jamaican ska music. Jean-Francois Lyotard wrote, "Modernity is constitutionally and ceaselessly pregnant w i t h i t s p o s t m o d e r n i t y " ( D e t t m a r, 4 8 ) . I n h e r e n t i n postmodernity is the ability to deconstruct history, particularly literary history. If modernism is the parent of postmodernism, then the latter's traits should be visible on the skin of modernity.

The way Joyce "exploited" genres in Ulysses and the way The Beatles do the same on The White Album are both excellent examples of Brian McHale's notion of "parallactic discourse."

McHale writes, "The parallax of discourses and the worlds they encode [are] not a characteristic structure of modernist poetics; but it is characteristic of postmodernism" (55).

The eighteen chapters of Ulysses and the thirty s o n g s o n T h e W h i te Album represent a vast array of styles. Despite the segmentation into chapters or songs on these works, Joyce and the Beatles do not hesitate in trying to represent more than one style in each "segment."

The most prominent chapters in Ulysses that apply stylistic hybridity are "Cyclops," "Oxen of the Sun" and "Nausicaa."

"Nausicaa" is separated into two parts, the first being about Gerty McDowell, the second about Leopold Bloom (starting at 13:771). The first part of the chapter is written in the tone of a B-

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romance novel. Her deodorizing of an outhouse is rendered by Joyce in an inflated style: Everyone thought the world of her for her gentle ways. It was Gerty who turned off the gas at the main every night and it was Gerty who tacked up on the wall of that place where she never forgot every fortnight the chlorate of lime Mr Tunney the grocer's christmas almanac, the picture of halcyon days where a young gentleman in the costume they used to wear then with a threecornered hat was offering a bunch of flowers to his ladylove with oldtime chivalry through her lattice window. (291) This romantic rendition of Gerty makes her trip to the outhouse seem heroic. The incongruity between the content and the form in this section of the "Nausicaa" chapter illustrates Joyce's experimentation within certain genres to achieve a new form of literary expression.

A similar incongruity occurs on The White Album in "Back in the

U.S.S.R." The music, particularly the background vocals during the middle eight, are reminiscent of the Beach Boys. The lyrics are a parody of Chuck Berry's "Back in the U.S.A." The funtime

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sentiment of Chuck Berry and the blissful California visions of the Beach Boys are mocked in the song. Paul McCartney sings, "All the way the paper bag was on my knees / Man I had a dreadful flight." Vomiting was not part of the vernacular of Berry or the

Beach Boys. Making reference to the Beach Boys' "California Girls," McCartney sings about Russian women from various locales. In the middle eight he sings, "Those Ukraine girls really knock me out / They leave the West behind / And Moscow girls make me sing and shout / And Georgia's always on mind."

Considering The White Album was released in 1968 during the Cold War, "Back in the U.S.S.R." is a bold parody on not only of American pop music icons, but of Western masculine notions of female beauty. With the sound of a jet, "Back in the U.S.S.R." turns into "Dear Prudence."

Even though the album contains thirty songs, there are five instances on the album where there is no empty space left to

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distinguish one track from another ("Back in the U.S.S.R." to "Dear Prudence, "Wild Honey Pie" to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "I'm So Tired" to "Piggies, "Rocky Raccoon" to "Don't Pass Me By," and "Cry Baby Cry to "Revolution 9"). Though it is easy to recognize the new tune, the songs are linked by sound effects or studio chatter, rather than by similar musical cadences (as on side two the Beatles' next album Abbey Road [1969]). The blurred transitionality between these tracks recalls the ending of the "Wandering Rocks" chapter of Ulysses, where Joyce introduces scenes and characters (Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce) to be explored in the next chapter, "Sirens," or the ending of the "Lestrygonians" chapter, where Bloom heads to the library, which is the setting of the next chapter, "Scylla and Charybdis."

These examples of blurred transitionality question the separation of novels or albums into discreet units and question the limitations of these units. By bringing together two or more separate units, be it chapters or songs, Joyce and the Beatles are experimenting with hybridity.

Hybridity is in abundance in the "Cyclops" chapter, where Joyce intertwines the main narrative of the chapter with thirty-three sections of parody (according to Joyce scholar Don Gifford). The nameless narrator of the chapter impacts the discourse in the chapter, representing a "one-eyed view" (like the Cyclops Polyphemous) that is exagerrated and vulgar. In the following passage, Joyce exaggerates a newspaper

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story

covering

a

large

public

event:

The delegation, present in full force, consisted of Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semiparalysed doyen of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a powerful steam crane), Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitepatant, the Grandjoke Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von SchwanzenbadH o d e n t h a l e r, Countess Marha Viraga Kisaszony Putrapesthi, Hiram Y. Bomboost, Count A t h a n a t o s Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh Rahat Lokum Effendi, Senor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria . . . (252) This passage (along with the thirty-two other parodic scenes) is juxtaposed with the narrative of the "Cyclops" chapter, in which the nameless narrator of chapter states about Bloom, "And then he starts with the jawbreakers a b o u t phenomenon . . ." (250). The nameless narrator criticizes Bloom for his wordiness. Joyce, the intrusive author, contradicts the nameless narrator by producing thirty-three burlesque sections of "jawbreakers" in the chapter. Joyce mocks nationalists (like

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the narrator) and numerous types of discourse in "Cyclops," ranging from legalese and sentimental fiction to spiritual pamphlets and history books.

The Beatles tackle the discourse of recorded sound in "Revolution 9." The track shows the Beatles going beyond rock n' roll for influence, as the song was heavily influenced by avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

"Revolution 9" begins with a snippet of a presumably abandoned folk song by McCartney ("Can You Take Me Back") and some inaudible studio chatter, followed by the repeated phrase, "number nine," which is taken from examination tapes for the Royal Academy of Music (MacDonald, 233). Among the sound effects included in " R e vo l u t i o n 9 " a r e S i b e l i u s ' Seventh Symphony, fragments of outtakes from previous Beatles' songs (such as "A Day in the Life" a n d " R e vo l u t i o n " ) , a u d i e n c e applause and laughter, football game chants, fire, gunshots, and the voices of John Lennon, Yoko Ono and George Harrison. This quite ambitious track does not h a ve a n y r e c o g n i z a b l e s o n g structure, and displays a hybridity of disarray.

Another example of hybridity on The White Album is the song "Happiness is a Warm Gun," a track with a structural complexity that can be compared to the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses. Both are "historical surveys," attempting to fuse together history (Rock n' roll and the English

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language respectively) and mix different elements from this history to recreate gestation, and both do so with large amounts of obscurity. John Lennon has said of the song, "It's sort of a history of rock and roll" (Robertson, 77). But the comparison between "Oxen" and "Happiness" is not wholly sound, because if Lennon's assertion is taken at face value, then it follows rocks conception inversely, from the future to the present to the past, unlike "Oxen," which starts at the beginning and heads towards the future.

"Oxen of the Sun" begins with the phrase "Deshil Holles Eamus" repeated three times, imitating the incantations of early Roman priests. As Joyce works his way through the chapter, the text progresses chronologically from one style to the next. The texts adherance to various styles problematizes plausibility. When Haines appears with "a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the other a phial marked Poison," can this be taken at face value? (336). The portfolio of literature is plausible because Haines' hobby is collecting Celtic literature. But does he really have a "phial of poison"? By chapters end, the language, according to Joyce in one of his letters, has "a frightful jumble of pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel" (Gifford, 441). Joyce, again, dips down into popular culture and inserts slang, to end the chapter on a prophetic postmodern note.

In the first part of "Happiness is a Warm Gun" (from 0:00-0:45), the music resembles what the Beatles would do eventually on Abbey Road (1969), so this part looks to the future.

The lyrics are quite obscure ("A soap impression of his wife which he ate / And donated to the National Trust"). The second part of the song (0:45-1:12) lyrically owes its debt to the drug influenced music of the psychedelic era ("I need a fix 'cause I'm going down"). The third part (1:12-1:34) is the most obscure musically, repeating "Mother Superior jump the gun" four times, possibly

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making musical references to James Brown, recalling the obscurity in certain passages of "Oxen of the Sun." Lennon called his girlfriend (soon-to-be wife Yoko Ono) "Mother Superior."

With that bit of knowledge, the lyric has sexual connotations, but otherwise remains obscure. The last part of the song (1:34-2:43) mostly resembles the early doo-wop songs of the mid to late fifties (like "Earth Angel") while lyrically paying homage to Chuck Berry and simultaneously parodying him, focusing on the warmth of a gun rather than the power of an automobile. Both "Oxen of the Sun" and "Happiness is a Warm Gun" consider historicized textuality in the creation of their "narratives," and both present historical surveys of the mediums within each are working.

The creation of "Happiness is a Warm Gun" resembles a famous incident involving James Joyce and Samuel Beckett during the writing of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Beatles publicist Derek Taylor said, "John [Lennon] said he had written half a song and wanted us to toss out phrases while Neil [Aspinall] wrote them down" (Turner, 157).

Lennon's acceptance of contingency in the creative process is a n o t h e r h a l l m a rk o f postmodernism, championed by William S. Burroughs, who "cutup" texts to create new ones. During the writing of Finnegans Wake, Joyce's eyesight was failing him, so he dictated parts of it

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to friend and writer Samuel Beckett. During one of the sessions, Joyce was reading and somebody knocked on the door. Joyce said, "Come in," so Beckett scribbled it down. Upon rereading, Joyce noticed that "Come in" was not supposed to be there, but as Richard Ellmann states, "[Joyce] was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator" (Dettmar, 169-70).

One source of parody for both Joyce and the Beatles is selfreflexivity. It is often assumed by readers that the world presented within the text is realistic. When the author undermines this assumed realism, the reader becomes hyperaware that s/he is reading/listening to a text.

In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus (who might or might not be Joyce's fictional doppelganger) makes a note to himself in "Scylla and Charybdis," to "See this. Remember" (158). Is it Dedalus who is writing Ulysses? In "Wandering Rocks," Mulligan says of Dedalus, "He is going to write something in ten years" (205). Since Ulysses takes place June 16, 1904 and Joyce started writing the text in 1914, the possible correlation between Dedalus and Joyce is given more evidence. In the "Penelope" chapter, Molly is disgusted with Joyce's punctuationless style, saying "O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh" (633). This is the funniest moment of self-reflexivity in the novel.

The Beatles make references to their own songs in two songs on The White Album, "Glass Onion" and "Savoy Truffle." In "Glass Onion," Lennon proposes to the listener to "look through a glass onion" rather than the "psychedelic" Beatles songs from the previous year. The song makes allusions to "Strawberry Fields Forever," "I am the Walrus," "Lady Madonna," "The Fool on the Hill" and "Fixing a Hole." By claiming "the walrus was Paul," Lennon makes reference to bandmate Paul McCartney and the rumors circulating at the time that McCartney was dead.

Harrison's "Savoy Truffle" makes reference to another song on The White Album, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da." By preferring the "Glass Onion" over the older songs, and by mentioning another on the album "we all know," the Beatles are, in a sense, using selfreflexivity to self-advertise, showing that a song is not just a song, but a piece of property that can make its owners money. If

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modernism finally allowed authorial presence into a text (known a s s e l f - re f l ex i v i t y ) t h ro u g h s t yl i s t i c i n t r u s i o n , t h e n postmodernism expanded on this notion by allowing the author to point out to the reader (or in this case, listener) that the reader is reading a book.

One complaint about The White Album by rock critic William Ruhlmann is that "the musical facility is amazing but also seems near-parodic" (AMG). Like any excellent example of postmodernity, The White Album redefines its genre with a half-serious half-tongue-in-cheek attitude. Kevin J.H. Dettmar claims that James Joyce takes this same attitude with his writing in the postmodern chapters of Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake. Dettmar refers to critic Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque to illustrate his point.

Bakhtin states, "Carnival discloses [certain] traits as the best preserved fragments of an immense, infinitely rich world" (Dettmar, 174). Since the fool is the star of the carnival, Dettmar says, "Of Joyce's two major works, the first takes place on the day when its hero is cuckolded . . . while the second is a 'funferal' based on the Irish wake or funeral merrymaking" (174).

Julia Kristeva's notion of postmodernism is that "modernism and postmodernism exist not as alternatives (modern/postmodern), but as the two ends of a continuum of writing (modern>postmodern)" (Dettmar, 217). The two works discussed in this paper, Ulysses and The White Album, show the timelessness of p o s t m o d e r n i s m , w h i l e r e ve a l i n g t h e

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constraints of such categorizations. Despite Kristeva's idealistic continuum, postmodernism is generally designated as a solitary era in the history of literature (1945-present). I think her notion can be extended prior to modernism to include works such as the aforementioned Tristram Shandy and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and given enough ambition, can be applied to the works of Homer and even the Bible.

Another breakthrough resulting from the influence of postmodernism was the broadening of the literary canon in the academy. A patriarchal reading list once dominated by the likes of Shakespeare, Pope, Henry James and even Joyce has expanded, now including everything from film to children's literature. This paper has shown how the album can be included into this canon as a piece of predominantly postmodern literature. Artists ranging from Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin to Nirvana and Bikini Kill provide lyrically and musically an immediate access to the cultures of their times, as well as to the period and genre known as postmodernism.

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stalin the warhol years

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THE JIMMY AND BILL SHOW by William Burroughs When I was first asked to write an article on the Led Zeppelin Group, to be based on attending a concert and talking with Jimmy Page, I was not sure I could do it, not being sufficiently knowledgable about music to attempt anything in the way of musical criticism or even evaluation. I decided simply to attend the concert and talk with Jimmy Page and let the article develop. If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

My first impression was of the audience. As we streamed through one security line after another--a river of youth looking curiously like a single organism: one well-behaved clean-looking middleclass kid. The security guards seemed to be cool and well-trained, ushering gate-crashers out with a minimum of fuss. We were

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channelled smoothly into our seats in the thirteenth row. Over a relaxed dinner before the concert, a Crawdaddy companion had said he had a feeling that something bad could happen at this concert. I pointed out that it always can when you get that many people together--like bullfights where you buy a straw hat at the door to protect you from bottles and other missiles. I was displacing possible danger to a Mexican border town where the matador barely excaped with his life and several spectators were killed. It's known as "clearing the path."

So there we sat, I decline earplugs; I am used to loud drum and horn music from Morocco, and it always has, if skillfully performed, an exhilarating and energizing effect on me. As the performance got underway I experienced this musical exhilaration, which was all the more pleasant for being easily controlled, and I knew then that nothing bad was going to happen. This was a safe and friendly area--but at the same time highly charged. There was a palpable interchange of energy between the performers and the audience which was never frantic or jagged. The special effects were handled well and not overdone.

A few special effects are much better than too many. I can see the laser beams cutting dry ice smoke, which drew an appreciative cheer from the audience. Jimmy Page's number with the broken guitar strings came across with a real impact, as did John Bonham's drum solo and the lyrics delivered with unfailing vitality by Robert Plant. The performers were doing their best, and it was very good.

The last number, "Stairway to Heaven", where the audience lit matches and there was a scattering of sparklers here and there, found the audience well-behaved and joyous, creating the atmosphere of a high school Christmas play. All in all a good show; neither low nor insipid. Leaving the concert hall was like getting off a jet plane.

I summarized my impressions after the concert in a few notes to serve as a basis for my talk with Jimmy Page. "The essential ingredient for any successful rock group is energy--the ability to give out energy, to receive energy from the audience and to give it back to the audience. A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy. Rock stars may be compared to priests, a theme that was treated in Peter Watkin's film 'Privilege'. In that film a rock star was manipulated by reactionary forces to set up a state religion; this scenario seems unlikely, I think

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a rock group singing political slogans would leave its audience at the door.

"The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose--that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts--music, painting and writing--is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous."

THE INTERVIEW I felt that these considerations could form the basis of my talk with Jimmy Page, which I hoped would not take the form of an interview.

There is something just basically WRONG about the whole interview format. Someone sticks a mike in your face and says, "Mr. Page, would you care to talk about your interest in occult practices?

Would you describe yourself as a believer in this sort of thing?"

Even an intelligent mike-in-the-face question tends to evoke a guarded mike-in-the-face answer. As soon as Jimmy Page walked into my loft downtown, I saw that it wasn't going to be that way.

We started talking over a cup of tea and found we have friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated Jimmy Page's purchase of the Aleister Crowley house on Loch Ness; John Michel, the flying saucer and pyramid expert; Donald Camel, who worked on 'Performance'; Kenneth Anger, and the Jaggers, Mick and Chris.

The subject of magic came up in connection with Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Anger's film 'Lucifer Rising', for which Jimmy Page did the sound track.

Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so- called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of 'will' as the primary moving force in this universe--the deep conviction that nothing happens unless

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somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self-evident. A chair does not move unless someone moves it. Neither does your physical body, which is composed of much the same materials, move unless you will it to move. Walking across the rooom is a magical operation. From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental.

There are no accidents in the world of magic. And will is another word for animate energy. Rock stars are juggling fissionable material that could blow up at any time... "The soccer scores are coming in from the Capital...one must pretend an interest," drawled the dandified Commandante, safe in the pages of my book; and as another rock star said to me, "YOU sit on your ass writing--_I_ could be torn to pieces by my fans, like Orpheus."

I found Jimmy Page equally aware of the risks involved in handling the fissionable material of the mass unconcious. I took on a valence I learned years ago from two 'Life-Time' reporters--one keeps telling you these horrific stories: "Now old Burns was dragged out of the truck and skinned alive by the mob, and when we got there with the cameras the bloody thing was still squirming there like a worm..." while the other half of the team is snapping pictures CLICK CLICK CLICK to record your reactions--so over dinner at Mexican Gardens I told Jimmy the story of the big soccer riot in Lima, Peru in 1964.

We are ushered into the arena as VIP's, in the style made famous by 'Triumph of the Will'. Martial music--long vistas--the statuesque police with their dogs on leads--the crowd surging in a sultry menacing electricity palpable in the air--grey clouds over Lima-people glance up uneasily... the last time it rained in Lima was the year of the great earthquake, when whole towns were swallowed by landslides. A cop is beating and kicking someone as he shoves him back towards the exit. Oh lucky man. The dogs growl ominously.

The game is tense. Tied until the end of the last quarter, and then the stunning decision: a goal that would have won the game for Peru is disqualified by the Uruguayan referee. A howl of rage from the crowd, and then a huge black known as La Bomba, who has started three previous soccer riots and already has twenty-three notches on his bomb, vaults down into the arena. A wave of fans follows The Bomb--the Uruguayan referee scrambles off with the agility of a rat or an evil spirit--the police release tear gas and unleash their snarling dogs, hysterical with fear and rage and maddened by the tear gas. And then a sound like falling mountains, as a few drops of rain begin to fall.

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"Yes, I've thought about that. We all have. The important thing is maintain a balance. The kids come to get far out with the music. It's our job to see they have a good time and no trouble."

And remember the rock group called Storm? Playing a dance hall in Switzerland...fire...exits locked...thirty-seven people dead including all the performers. Now any performer who has never thought about fire and panic just doesn't think. The best way to keep something bad from happening is to see it ahead of time, and you can't see it if you refuse to face the possibility. The bad vibes in that dance hall must have been really heavy. If the performers had been sensitive and alert, they would have checked to be sure the exits were unlocked.

Previously, over two fingers of whiskey in my Franklin Street digs, I had told Page about Major Bruce MacMannaway, a healer and psychic who lives in Scotland. The Major discovered his healing abilities in World War II when his regiment was cut off without medical supplies and the Major started laying on hands..."Well Major, I think it's a load of bollocks but I'll try anything." And it turns out the Major is a walking hypo. His psychic abilities were so highly regarded by the Admiralty that he was called in to locate sunken submarines, and he never once missed.

I attended a group meditation seminar with the Major. It turned out to be the Indian rope trick. Before the session the Major told us something of the potential power in group meditation. He had seen it lift a six-hundred-pound church organ five feet in the air. I had no reason to doubt this, since he was obviously incapable of falsification. In the session, after some preliminary excercises, the Major asked us to see a collumn of light in the center of the room and then took us up through the light to a plateau where we met nice friendly people: the stairway to heaven in fact. I mean we were really THERE. I turned to Jimmy Page: "Of course we are dealing here with meditation-- the deliberate induction of a trance state in a few people under the hands of an old master. This would seem on the surface to have a little in common with a rock concert, but the underlying force is the same: human energy and its potential concentration." I pointed out that the moment when the stairway to heaven becomes something actually POSSIBLE for the audience,

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would also be the moment of greatest danger. Jimmy expressed himself as well aware of the power in mass concentration, aware of the dangers involved, and of the skill and balance needed to avoid them...rather like driving a load of nitroglycerine.

"There IS a responsibility to the audience," he said. "We don't want anything bad to happen to these kids--we don't want to release anything we can't handle." We talked about magic and Aleister Crowley. Jimmy said that Crowley has been maligned as a black magician, whereas magic is neither white nor black, good nor bad-it is simply alive with what it is: the real thing, what people really feel and want and are. I pointed out that this "either/or" straitjacket had been imposed by Christianity when all magic became black magic; that scientists took over from the Church, and Western man has been stifled in a non-magical universe known as "the way things are." Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.

Jimmy told me that Aleister Crowley's house has very good vibes for anyone who is relaxed and receptive. At one time the house had also been the scene of a vast chicken swindle indirectly involving George Sanders, the movie actor, who was able to clear himself of any criminal charges, Sanders committed suicide in Barcelona, and we both remembered his farewell note to the world: "I leave you to this sweet cesspool."

I told Jimmy he was lucky too have that house with a monster in the front yard. What about the Loch Ness monster? Jimmy Page thinks it exists. I wondered if it could find enough to eat, and thought this unlikely--it's not the improbability but the upkeep on monsters that worries me. Did Aleister Crowley have opinions on the subject? He apparently had not expressed himself.

We talked about trance music. He had heard the Brian Jones record from recordings made at Joujouka. We discussed the possibility of synthesizing rock music with some of the older forms of trance music that have been developed over centuries to produce powerful, sometimes hypnotic effects on the audience. Such a synthesis would enable the older forms to escape from the mould of folk lore and provide new techniques to rock groups.

We talked about the special effects used in the concert. "Sure," he said, "lights, lasers, dry ice are fine--but you have to keep some

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balance. The show must carry itself and not rely too heavily on special effects, however spectacular," I brought up the subject of infra-sound, that is, sound pitched below 16 Hertz, the level of human hearing; as ultra-sound is above the level. Professer Gavreau of France developed infra-sound as a military weapon. A powerful infra-sound installation can, he claims, kill everyone in a five-mile radius, knock down walls and break windows. Infra-sound kills by setting up vibrations within the body so that, as Gavreau puts it, "You can feel all the organs in your body rubbing together." The plans for this device can be obtained from the French Patent Office, and infra-sound generators constructed from inexpensive materials.

Needless to say, one is not concerned with military applications however unlimited, but with more interesting and useful possibilities, reaching much further that five miles.

Infra-sound sets up vibrations in the body and nervous system.

Need these vibrations necessarily be harmful or unpleasant? All music played at any volume sets up vibrations in the body and nervous system of the listener. That's why people listen to it. Caruso as you wil remember could break a champagne glass across the room. Especially interesting is the possibility of rhythmic pulses of infra-sound; that is, MUSIC IN INFRA-SOUND. You can't hear it, but you can feel it.

Jimmy was interested, and I gave him a copy of a newspaper article on infra-sound. It seems that the most deadly rande is around 7 Hertz, and when this is turned on even at a low volume, anyone within range is affected. They feel anxious, ill, depressed, and finally exclaim with one voice, "I feel TERRIBLE!"...last thing you want at a rock concert. However, around the borders of infra-sound perhaps a safe range can be found. Buddhist mantras act by setting up vibrations in the body. Could this be done in a much more powerful yet safe manner by the use of infra-sound rhythms which could of course could be combined with audible music? Perhaps infra-sound could add a new dimension to rock music.

Could something be developed comparable to the sonar communication of dolphins, conveying an immediate sonar experience that requires no symbolic translation? I mentioned to Jimmy that I had talked with Dr. Truby, who worked with John Lilly recording dolphins. Dr. Truby is a specialist in inter-species communication, working on a grant from the government--so that when all our kids are born Venusians we will understand then when

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they start to talk. I suggested to him that ALL communication, as we know it, is actually inter-species communication, and that it is kept that way by the nature of verbal and symbolic communication, which must be indirect.

Do dolphins have a language? What is a language? I define a language as a communication system in which data are represented by verbal or written symbols--symbols that ARE NOT THE OBJECTS to which they refer. The word "chair" is not the object itself, the chair. So any such system of communication is always second-hand and symbolic, whereas we CAN conceive of a form of communication that would be immediate and direct, undercutting the need for symbols. And music certainly comes closer to such direct communication than language.

Could musical communication be rendered more precise with infrasound, thus bringing the whole of music a second radical step forward? The first step was made when music came out of the dance halls, roadhouses, and night clubs, into Madison Square Garden and Shea Stadium. Rock music appeals to a mass audience, instead of being the province of a relatively few aficionados. Can rock music make another step forward, or is it a self-limiting form, confirmed by the demands of a mass audience? How much that is radically new can a mass audience safely absorb? We came back to the question of balance. How much new material will be accepted by a mass audience? Can rock music go forward without leaving its fans behind?

We talked about Wilhelm Reich's orgone accumulator, and I showed him plans for making this device, which were passed along to me by Reich's daughter. Basically the device is very simple, consisting of iron or steel wool on the inside and organic material on the outside. I think this was highly important discovery. Recently a scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced an "electrical cell" theory of cancer that is almost identical to Reich's cancer theory put forth 25 years ago. He does not acknowledge any indebtedness to Reich. I showed Jimmy the orgone box I have here, and we agreed that orgone accumulators in pyramid form and/or using magnetized iron could be much more powerful.

We talked about the film 'Performance' and the use of cut-up techniques in this film. Now the cut-up method was applied to writing by Brion Gysin in 1959; he said that writing was fifty years

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behind painting, and applied the montage method to writing.

Actually, montage is much closer to the facts of perception thatn representational painting. If for example you walked through Times Square, and then put on canvas what you had seen, the result would be a montage...half a person cut in two by a car, reflections from shop windows, fragments of street signs. Antony Balch and I collaborated on a film called 'Cut-Ups', in which the film was cut into segments and rearranged at random. Nicholas Roeg and Donald Camel saw a screening of the film not long before they made 'Performance'.

Musical cut-ups have been used by Earl Browne and other modern composers. What distinguishes a cut-up from, say, an edited medley, is that the cut-up is at some point random. For example, if you made a medley by taking thirty seconds from a number of scores and assembling these arbitrary units--that would be a cut-up. Cut-ups often result in more succinct meanings, rather than nonsense. Here for example is a phrase taken from a cut-up of this article: "I can see the laser gate crashers with an appreciative cheer from the 13th row." (Actually a gate crasher was extricated by security from the row in front of us; an incident I had forgoten until I saw this cut-up.)

Over dinner at the Mexican Gardens, I was suprised to hear that Jimmy Page had never heard of Petrillo, who started the first musicians' union and perhaps did more than any other one man to improve the financial positioin of musicians by protecting copyrights. One wonders whether rock music could have gotten off the ground without Petrillo and the Union, which put musicians in the big money bracket, thereby attracting managers, publicity, and the mass audience.

Music, like all the arts, is magical and ceremonial in origin. Can rock music return to these ceremonial roots and take its fans with it?

Can rock music use older forms like Moroccan trance music? There is at present a wide interest among young people in the occult and all means of expanding consciousness. Can rock music appeal directly to this interest? In short, there are a number of disparate tendencies waiting to be synthesized. Can rock music serve as a vehicle for this synthesis?

The broken guitar strings, John Bonham's drum solo, vitality by Robert Plant--when you get that many people to get it, very good.

Buy a straw hat at the door--the audience all light matches. Cool

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well-trained laser beams channelled the audience smoothly. A scattering of sparklers. Danger to a Mexican border town. We start talking over a cup of the mass unconscious-- cut to a soccer riot photo in Lima. The Uruguayan referee as another rock star. Sound like falling mountains of the risks involved. It's our job to see trouble and plateau the center of the room--remember the stairway to Switzerland? Fire really there. You can't see it if you refuse-underlying force the same. I mean we were playing a dance hall in heaven at the moment when the stairway actually possible for the audience was unlocked.

WORD FOR WORD WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I really, really enjoyed the concert. I think it has quite a lot, really, in common with Moroccan trance music.

JIMMY PAGE: Yes, yes.

WB: I wondered if you consciously were using any of that....

JP: Well, yes, there is a little on that perticular track, "Kashmir"--a lead bass on that--even though none of us have been to Kashmir. It's just that we've all been very involved in that sort of music. I'm very involved in ethnic music from all over the world.

WB: Have you been to Morocco?

JP: No. I haven't, and it's a very sad admission to make. I've only been to, you know, India and Bangkok and places like that through the Southeast.

WB: Well, I've never been east of Athens.

JP: Because during the period when everybody was going through trips over to, you know, Morocco, going down, way down, making their own journeys too Istanbul, I was at art college during that period and then I eventually went straight into music. So I really missed out on all that sort of traveling. But I know musicians that have gone there and actually sat in with the Arabs and played with them.

WB: Yeah, well they think of music entirely in magical terms.

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JP: Yes. WB: And their music is definitely used for magical purposes. For example, the Gnaoua music is to drive out evil spirits and Joujouka music is invoking the God Pan. Musicians there are all magicians, quite consciously.

--------------------------------WB: I was thinking of the concentration of mass energy that you get in a pop concert, and if that were, say, channeled in some magical way...a stairway too heaven...it could become quite actual.

JP: Yes, I know. One is so aware of the energies that you are going for, and you could so easily....I mean, for instance, the other night we played in the Philadelphia Spectrum, which really is a black hole as a concert hall....The security there is the most ugly of anywhere in the States. I saw this incident happen and I was almost physically sick. In fact, if I hadn't been playing the guitar I was playing it would've been over somebody's head. It was a double-neck, which is irreplaceable, really, unless you wait another nine months for them to make another one at Gibson's.

What had happened, somebody came to the front of the stage to take a picture or something and obviously somebody said, "Be off with you." And he wouldn't go. And then one chap went over the barrier, and then another, and then another and then another, and they all piled on top of...you could see the fists coming out...on this one solitary person. And they dragged him by his hair and they were kicking him. It was just sickening. Now, what I'm saying is this....Our crowds, the people that come to see us are very orderly.

It's not the sort of Alice Cooper style, where you actually TRY to get them into a state where they've got to go like that, so that you can get reports of this, that and the other. And the wrong word said at that time could've just sparked off the whole thing.

WB: Yes, there's sort of a balance to be maintained there.

JP: Yeah, that's right.

WB: The audience the other night was very well behaved.

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---------------------------------WB: Have you used the lasers in all of the concerts?

JP: Over here, yes.

WB: Very effective.

JP: I think we should have more of them, don't you? About thirty of them! Do you know they bounced that one off the moon. But it's been condensed....it's the very one that they used for the moon. I was quite impressed by that.

WB: That isn't the kind of machine that would cause any damage....

JP: Uh, if you look straight into it, yes.

WB: Yes, but I mean...it doesn't burn a hole in...

JP: No....it's been taken right down. I'm just waiting for the day when you can get the holograms...get three-dimensional. The other thing I wanted to do was the Van de Graaff Generator. You used to see them in the old horror films....

WB: Oh yes...Frankenstein, and all that.

--------------------------------------JP: When we first came over here... when the draft was really hot and everything...if you stayed in the country for more than six months, you were eligible for it, they'd drag you straight into the draft.

WB: I didn't realize that.

JP: Yeah.

WB: Oh, I thought you had to be an American citizen.

JP: Noo. No no. We almost overstayed our welcome. I was producing and having to work in studios here, and the days coming up to the six month period were just about...it was just about neck and neck.

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And I still had a couple more days left and a couple more days to work on this lp.

WB: Were they right there with the papers?

JP: Well, not quite, I mean obviously it would have taken some time, but somebody would've been there...You know, they do keep an eye on people.

------------------------------------WB: Did you ever hear about something called infra-sound?

JP: Uh, carry on.

WB: Well, infra-sound is sound below the level of hearing. And it was developed by someone named Professor Gavreau in France as a military weapon. He had an infra-sound installation that he could turn on and kill everything within five miles. It can also knock down walls and break windows. But it kills by setting up vibrations within the body. Well, what I was wondering was, whether rhythmical music at sort of the borderline of infra-sound could be used to produce rhythms in the audience--because, of course, any music with volume will set up these vibrations. That is part of the way the effect is achieved.

JP: Hmm. WB: It's apparently...it's not complicated to build these infra-sound things.

JP: I've heard of this, actually but not in such a detailed explanation.

I've heard that certain frequencies can make you physically ill.

WB: Yes. Well, this can be fatal. That's not what you're looking for.

But it could be used just to set up vibrations....

JP: Ah hah...A death ray machine! Of course, when radio first came out they were picketing all the radio stations, weren't they, saying "We don't want these poisonous rays" [laughter]....Yes, well...certain notes can break glasses. I mean, opera singers can break glasses with sound, this is true?

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WB: That was one of Caruso's tricks.

JP: But it is true?

WB: Of course.

JP: I've never seen it done.

WB: I've never seen it done, but I know that you can do it.

JP: I want laser NOTES, that's what I'm after! Cut right through.

WB: Apparently you can make one of these things out of parts you can buy in a junk yard. It's not a complicated machine to make. And actually the patent...it's patented in France, and according to French law, you can obtain a copy of the patent. For a very small fee.

JP: Well, you see the thing is, it's hard to know just exactly what is going on, from the stage to the audience...You can only...I mean I've never seen the group play, obviously. Because I'm part of it....I can only see it on celluloid, or hear it. But I know what I see. And this thing about rhythms within the audience. I would say yes. Yes, definitely. And it is...Music which involves riffs, anyway, will have a trance-like effect, and it's really like a mantra....And we've been attacked for that.

WB: What a mantra does is set up certain vibrations within the body, and this, obviously does the same thing. Of course, it goes....it comes out too far. But I was wondering if on the borderline of infrasound that possibly some interesting things could be done.

JP: Ah. -----------------------------------------JP: Last year we were playing [sets] for three hours solid, and physically that was a real...I mean, when I came back from the last tour I didn't know where I was. I didn't even know where I was going. We ended up in New York and the only thing that I could relate to was the instrument onstage. I just couldn't....I was just totally and completely spaced out.

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WB: How long was that you played recently? That was two hours and a half.

JP: That was two and a half hours, yes. It used to go for three hours.

WB: I'd hate to give a three-hour reading....

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EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A STAR...

BUT SOME ARE DARKER THAN OTHERS

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UNTIL NEXT TIME DESIGN N IMAGES BY DEAN CAVANAGH deancavanaghneopop@gmail.com

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