ROCK & HOLY ROLLERS:

THE SPIRITUAL BELIEFS OF CHART-TOPPING ROCK STARS, IN THEIR LIVES AND LYRICS

by

Geoffrey D. Falk © 2006

CONTENTS

Introduction ....................................................................................................

Chapter

1 Across the Universe ......................................................... The Beatles

2 Beliefs, They Are A-Changin’ ............................................ Bob Dylan

3 Sympathy for the Devil .......................................... The Rolling Stones

4 White Light Fantasy ........................................................... The Kinks

5 Meher, Can You Hear Me? ................................................. The Who

6 Bad Vibrations ......................................................... The Beach Boys

7 White Rabbit Habit ................................................. Jefferson Airplane

8 A Saucerful of Sant Mat .................................................... Pink Floyd

9 Jerry and the Spinners ............................................ The Grateful Dead

10 Voodoo Child ................................................................. Jimi Hendrix

11 The Doors of Perception ................................................... The Doors

12 Astral Years ................................................................. Van Morrison

13 Timothy Leary’s Dead ............................................ The Moody Blues

14 Stairway to Heaven ....................................................... Led Zeppelin

15 Station to Station ........................................................... David Bowie

16 None More Black ....................................................... Black Sabbath

17 Welcome to My Sunday School .................................... Alice Cooper

18 The Crimson King ........................................................ King Crimson

19 Dances with God ............................................................... Jethro Tull

20 Topographic Shastras .................................................................. Yes

21 Tea for the Muslim .......................................................... Cat Stevens

22 You Make Cult Lovin’ Fun ........................................ Fleetwood Mac

23 Atlas Drummed .......................................................................... Rush

24 Wayward Son ........................................................................ Kansas

25 Route 666 ...................................................................... Iron Maiden

26 Prince of Light .......................................................................... Prince

27 One String, Two String, Red String.... .................................. Madonna

28 Cloudbusting ..................................................................... Kate Bush

29 In My Eyes .................................................................... Peter Gabriel

30 Trip Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee ........................................ Sting

31 Afternoons and Satan Worship ........................... Crash Test Dummies

32 Charles Monroe ........................................................ Marilyn Manson

33 Integral Pumpkins ......................................... Smashing Pumpkins, etc.

34 Rock On.... ........................................................................................

Endnotes ........................................................................................................

Bibliography ...................................................................................................

Permissions ....................................................................................................

About the Author ............................................................................................

INTRODUCTION

I grew up on the Canadian prairies, in a sprawling country house reverberating with the folk music of Gordon Lightfoot, Johnny Cash, and Simon & Garfunkel.

When I say “reverberating,” I am not exaggerating: Thanks to a father with a ham radio-operating background, nearly every room in the house had its own set of speaker boxes. Each of those contained four eight-inch cones. And, all boxes were wired in parallel, on the same circuit.

You can easily fill a sound-space with that sort of arrangement. Even without drums in the recordings.

Following many such country- and folk-filled years of rhythmic deprivation, a transfer of schools in junior high put me face to face with that bastard son of rhythm and blues: rock and roll.

I was quickly hooked on all the cock-rock which Spinal Tap later satirized so brilliantly. These were, after all, the glory days of the first wave of heavy metal: Ozzy was still fronting Black Sabbath, AC/DC shook you all night long, and if it had been possible to “run to the hills” with Iron Maiden, through wheat fields where you could literally see to the horizon in every direction, we would surely have tried.

With even more of an ear for melody and harmony, though, the first album I ever purchased was Boston’s debut, featuring what is still my all-time favorite song, “More Than a Feeling.” That piece of vinyl was obtained, if I recall correctly, one evening after I had grown bored with the presentation given by a spiritualist during a family outing in Winnipeg.

Displaying the item afterwards to my parents, I was immediately forbidden to ever buy another record—rock-music purchases being such an obvious waste of money.

A few high-school years later, with my driver’s license secured, I grossly violated that rule—long ago forgotten by everyone except me—in greedily accumulating Genesis’ and Peter Gabriel’s entire back-catalogues in a single springtime road trip to the nearest mall.

It was, as they say, the start of a beautiful friendship, even if much of the meaning held in the words to such popular and unpopular songs remained puzzling or obscure.

Curiously, though, it turns out that many of our most-admired rock stars have been deeply influenced by nontraditional religious ideas, and their associated sagely purveyors. Further, musicians who participate in the actual writing of the songs which they perform invariably bring their spiritual beliefs into their art, particularly in the crafting of lyrics.

To put it more bluntly: To encounter rock music is also to encounter spirituality in its many guises.

One can easily find biblical allusions in the songs of the one-time Catholic altar boy, Bruce Springsteen, and even in the lyrics of the equally religiously schooled but now “dust thou art” Elvis Costello. The same clearly holds true for something like Paul Simon’s gospel-influenced “Loves Me Like a Rock,” just as an obvious if vague spirituality runs through his Rhythm of the Saints. For that matter, Tina Turner is a practicing, chanting Buddhist, who believes in reincarnation and astrology. Michael Jackson, in turn, is a devout Jehovah’s Witness—without visibly bringing that faith into his music or his dealings with young boys and “Jesus juice.”

Weezer (Rivers Cuomo), for his own part, spent many of his early years in the Yogaville ashram of the “Woodstock Swami,” Satchidananda. He currently practices Buddhist vipassana meditation up to twelve hours a day, for weeks at a time, sequestered in closets and elsewhere. (Cuomo was re-introduced to that way of life by über-producer Rick Rubin, who himself has been interviewed on New Age philosopher Ken Wilber’s Integral Naked web forum.)

Similarly, the messianic Elvis Presley’s interests in both H. P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy and Paramahansa Yogananda’s “Church of All Religions” writings could easily have merited a chapter here, had those beliefs made their way into his lyrics—as they might well have, had the “King of the Jukeboxes” been a songwriter himself. So, too, could the explicit Christianity of U2 have been included in the text, were their religious orientation not already so well-known, and its influence not so obvious and literal in their music.

Unlike those performers, however, the artists covered here have all repeatedly incorporated their own spiritual beliefs into their music in detailed, and deliberately meaning-filled, but not necessarily obvious ways. That is, this book is focused on the little-known esoteric symbolisms hidden in chart-topping popular music. It is less concerned with cataloguing the more widely known and obvious exoteric symbols or quotes, borrowed from one or another traditional scripture (e.g., the Bible). (Bob Dylan is almost an exception to that rule ... except that, as we shall see, his spiritual interests did not begin and end with his 1979 conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, but have more recently embraced a purported Jewish Messiah. By contrast, Weezer wrote his own “Pardon Me” after attending a meditation retreat where the teacher told him to mentally repeat: “I seek pardon from all those who have harmed me in action, speech or thought.” But a single song merely inspired by such an instruction, with no other spiritual referent in its lyrics, would hardly fill out a chapter.)

So, one may or may not take seriously ideas such as meditation, yoga, astral travel, paganism, or the magick of Aleister Crowley. Nevertheless, a detailed understanding of those “spiritual paths” holds the key to a proper comprehension, not only of the private lives of our “guitar gods,” from Jimi Hendrix on down, but of the deeper meanings behind songs which we hear every day on the radio—from the Beatles to Zeppelin, from Marilyn Manson to Billy Corgan to System of a Down.

I have relied largely on documented influences and meanings for each relevant song covered here, rather than bringing my own interpretations to bear on the words. In some cases, that has meant attaching significance to other people’s interpretations; but in most, the meanings and influences are either provided by the artists themselves, or are simply obvious when one understands the belief system from within which the songs were written.

Spring, 2006 Geoffrey D. Falk

Toronto, Canada

CHAPTER 4

White Light Fantasy

THE KINKS

The introverted loner, songwriter, vocalist and rhythm guitarist, Ray Davies, and his extroverted lead-guitarist younger brother, Dave, released their first album as leaders of the Kinks in 1964.

The band took their name from “the kinky hats they wear on stage—the fashionable fat caps seen around—and their stylish boots.” Their cutting-edge guitar sound, by contrast, came via Dave’s application of a razor blade to his ten-watt Elpico amp, slashing the speaker cone (and then Sellotaping and sticking drawing-pins into it) to produce a degree of jagged distortion previously unheard-of.

Driven by power chords passed through that innovative “Fart Box,” the first of their classic pop songs, “You Really Got Me,” rose quickly to U.K. #1. It was soon followed to #2 by “All Day and All of the Night.”

A string of Top 40 singles issued from “England’s green and pleasant band” over the next three years, from “Tired of Waiting for You” to “Autumn Almanac.”

Ray’s “Big Sky,” from The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968), alluded to “the God of the village, who sees it all, good and bad, but seems somehow too occupied with other things to get involved.” (The same album’s “Wicked Annabella” concerned tales told about the village witch to get good children to go to sleep.) That, however, was more or less the extent of his involvement with, and tolerance for, spirituality.

Dave, by contrast, began studying astrology intensively soon after the birth of his first child in the autumn of 1967, to the point of casting horoscopes himself. In his soul-searching, he further dropped acid for the first time while touring America in support of 1969’s Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire). He was guided through the ensuing experience of the cosmic vistas by his “Captain”—“a being above my head,” later interpreted by a psychic as the voice of his “higher self.” Following that multi-dimensional journey to the heart of the universe, his latent interest in spiritualism and yoga came increasingly to the fore.

Thus, to 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Dave contributed “Strangers,” in which he suggested that “we are one.” The song was about “unconditional love” and “the realization that we all, at various times in our lives, have to give up a part of ourselves for the benefit of something greater to become part of a greater whole”—an idea which could certainly be read in metaphysical terms.

The same album’s co-title track, “Lola,” concerned a transvestite not unlike Andy Warhol’s “actress” friend Candy Darling, whom Ray Davies claimed to have briefly “dated.” (She was also the subject of the Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” and Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”) The song’s “advertisement” of Coca-Cola®, however, proved an issue for the non-profit BBC—they were not allowed to mention product names on air. Rather than forfeit that essential airplay, the band quickly overdubbed the offending phrase to “cherry cola” instead.

In a New York hotel in August of 1972, paranoid and suicidal, Dave found himself feeling as if he was “being devoured by a dark psychic swamp that was dragging [him] into its secret world in all its subtle and insidious power.” A fortuitous visit from an ex-girlfriend who was now a psychiatric nurse helped pull him out of those emotional depths, and set him on the path to higher consciousness:

“I know that I have been helped many times in my life, sometimes quite inexplicably.... I no longer believed in coincidence and from that day forward I started to believe in God.”

Dave consequently gave up drugs, became a vegetarian, and began reading books on Kabbalah, along with Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga—being sufficiently impressed by the latter “masterpiece” to quote directly and complimentarily from it in his autobiography.

In the midst of a string of sociological concept albums and increasing slides-and-costumes theatricality, 1974 saw the release of the Kinks’ two-part vaudevillian rock opera, Preservation. The same period found Dave studying “under a trance medium in north London who channeled information from an ancient Egyptian child king.”

Three years later, “Sleepwalker,” from the album of the same name, concerned Ray Davies’ problems with insomnia. Its talk of “creatures of the night” had the unforeseen effect, however, of convincing a spell-casting Massachusetts witch that Ray and Dave were actually vampires.

On the same tour, Dave and one of the female backing singers began practicing “a mental visualization technique where you draw energy into the body, fill it with light, and project it out again, as healing.” The in-concert performance of that activity was soon credited by them with bringing a half-full Seattle show’s audience to life, midway through the group’s set.

Nineteen seventy-eight’s Misfits spawned the classic song “Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy,” putting words and music to the inner life of every teenager and adult who “lives for rock.”

Following Low Budget, the band’s Give the People What They Want spent nine months on the Billboard charts, with the group filling Madison Square Garden at the end of 1981. The album’s song “Killer’s Eyes” was about the Turkish gunman who had attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in the spring of that year.

Dave’s first solo record, the barcode-titled AFLI-3603, featured “Imagination’s Real”—a song “about how if everything around us is a product of our imagination, we can imagine the world being whatever we want it to be.” A year later, “Eastern Eyes,” from another solo project, Glamour, was “a love song about finding enlightenment,” in a marriage of the material West with the spiritual East. The same album’s “Telepathy” predictably concerned the supposed ability of human beings to communicate via that power.

On January 13 of 1982, prior to the sound-check for a show in Richmond, Virginia, Dave Davies had an experience which was to forever alter his view of reality. Beginning with feelings of having an “invisible metal band” tightened around his head, he was soon hearing a total of five different internal voices, seemingly coming again from above his head.

“The intelligences took complete control of my being.... They told me that I was not to have sex, the reason being that part of what was happening to me was due to the fact that they were manipulating latent forces in my body....

“The intelligences also told me that certain spacecraft periodically orbit earth, and that they contain crystal computers that house information down to the minutest detail regarding all the thoughts and actions of every single person living or who has ever lived on earth....”

Later in the evening, at the concert itself, Dave recorded: “I could see in the surrounding ethers mischievous demon-like creatures impinging themselves on the auric bodies of the unsuspecting crowd, impressing them with negative images and thoughts. Confronted by this bad energy, the intelligences poured a brilliant beam of white light through my forehead and out to the crowd. The results were startling. The same people suddenly looked more pleasant.”

Immediately following that show, Dave “became acutely aware of the presence of Jesus,” at which point many unknown aspects of the savior and his teachings were revealed to him, in vision.

Most of the songs (in particular, “True Story”) on Dave’s 1983 solo release, Chosen People, were inspired by that January day’s spiritual experience. The title track itself, however, was based on the life story of the Lakota Indian medicine man, Black Elk, in his tribe’s prophecies of one day working in harmony with a “true white brother.”

In 1986, Dave purchased a camper van and telescope, and began “UFO-spotting” in North Wales and the surrounding area. Having spied a number of the shiny nighttime craft, he eagerly shared his findings in a letter to the Ministry of Defense, sadly receiving no reply.

All of that notwithstanding, the Kinks were inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. They performed together for the last time late in 1996.

Under the name Crystal Radio, Dave and his son released Purusha and the Spiritual Planet in 1998. (In Hindu theology, “Purusha” is the pure-consciousness Self which pervades the universe.) The mostly instrumental concept album told the story of a teenage boy “who collects ancient artifacts and comes across a strange pendant. His life then suddenly starts to change drastically taking him on an amazing adventure that changes his life forever!”

Ray—the “godfather of Britpop”—is currently working on a musical, Come Dancing, after the Kinks’ nostalgic 1983 hit song of the same name. In 2004, he was awarded a CBE—Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one notch below knighthood—by the queen herself, for his “services to music.”

Dave, by contrast, has yet to be properly heralded for his own unique contributions to the band’s light shows.

CHAPTER 8

A Saucerful of Sant Mat

PINK FLOYD

Several years before the Beatles’ visit to Rishikesh, guitarist Syd Barrett had already been deeply involved with the meditation-based Sant Mat path led by the guru Charan Singh. The hurtful rejection of his request for initiation as a “Sat Sanghi” in that astral-voyaging group, however, left him increasingly relying on LSD in his search for enlightenment.

Musically, Barrett had been joined in 1965 by bassist Roger Waters, keyboardist Rick Wright, and drummer Nick Mason—the “least neurotic” member of the band—to form Pink Floyd. Though ostensibly titled after blues legends Pink Anderson and Floyd “Dipper Boy” Council, Syd would later claim that the name “was transmitted to him from an overhead flying saucer while he was sitting on the ley line crossing Glastonbury Tor in Somerset.”

Of their first single, objections from the BBC led to “Let’s Roll Another One” being renamed as “Candy and a Currant Bun.” Its flip side, the story of the cross-dressing “Arnold Layne,” was banned altogether by the Radio London pirate station.

The title for the group’s debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, was of course taken from the seventh chapter of Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book, The Wind in the Willows—a favorite of Barrett’s—where it refers to the Greek god Pan. Piper’s galactic “Astronomy Domini” was actually billed in early mimeographed fliers as an “astral chant.” Syd’s obsession with the I Ching further provided the basis for the song “Chapter 24,” in the lyrical idea that “change returns success.”

From Richard Wilhelm’s translation of that ancient book’s twenty-fourth chapter, reproduced almost ver batim in Barrett’s lyrics: “All movements are accomplished in six stages, and the seventh brings return.... Therefore seven is the number of the young light, and it arises when six, the number of the great darkness, is increased by one.”

Syd himself was soon giving “every indication of having been launched into a permanent LSD orbit,” and accordingly failing to acceptably negotiate reality on a regular basis. At various times, he appeared on Top of the Pops dressed in rags; lip-synched not at all to “See Emily Play” on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand; responded to televised questions from Pat Boone with a vacant stare; and spent entire concerts playing only the middle-C note on his guitar. (One of his interviews was later played to the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, who reportedly concluded that Syd was “incurable” in his paranoia and catatonia.)

Thus, over Christmas in 1967, David Gilmour was brought in to initially complement, and—following Barrett’s disastrous final performance, at the Cambridge Corn Exchange—ultimately replace Syd on guitar and the majority of the lead vocals. The group’s next LP, A Saucerful of Secrets, consequently featured only a single, non-mystical Barrett composition (with Salvation Army band accompaniment), “Jugband Blues.” Among the album cover’s thirteen superimposed images, however, is a zodiac wheel, and a photo of an alchemist with his potion-filled bottles.

The marshlands outside of Cambridge, where Gilmour and other members of the band once lived, were legendarily haunted by “web-fingered mutants given to grunting uncouth phrases like ‘ummagumma.’” (The word was also a “slang expression for copulation.”) On the half-studio, half-live 1969 double album of the same name, Rick Wright’s interminable instrumental, “Sysyphus,” referenced the Greek legend of Sisyphus—a mortal trickster who was eventually condemned to an eternity of rolling a boulder uphill and then watching it roll back down again before he had reached the top.

As the years passed, Roger Waters increasingly took over the band’s songwriting, especially in terms of crafting the prototypical acid-rock band’s lyrics—in spite of having “only used psychedelics twice” in his life. The most neurotic of the Floyds, he was responsible for the vast majority of the wartime references in later albums—his soldier father having been killed in WWII.

Though Syd was gone from the band, he was not forgotten, being eulogized in the lunacy of Dark Side of the Moon—particularly in terms of his penchant for “playing different tunes” than the set-list ones anticipated by the rest of the band, in concert. Likewise for the album’s overall theme of a young man being pushed toward insanity by the various pressures on his life—e.g., time flying by, and the need for money, always being “on the run” to catch the next flight. (The record’s “Great Gig in the Sky”—originally a two-part “Mortality Sequence” and “Religious Theme”—of course dealt with death and the beyond.)

The title song from 1975’s Wish You Were Here was also evidently inspired by Syd. Both parts of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” similarly took the group’s former “piper” as “a symbol for all the extremes of absence some people have to indulge in because it’s the only way they can cope.” As far as spiritual references go, we find a few in the background of the sticker on the black shrink wrap concealing the artwork for the original release of the album. It was divided into elements of fire, air, water and earth, representing the four bandmembers’ astrological signs.

Syd even surfaced on The Wall—released in 1979 and originally inspired by an event on 1977’s Animals tour, in which Roger ended up spitting on a troublesome fan in Montreal. (The animal theme, birthing the group’s infamous forty-foot-long inflatable pig, was obliquely based on George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In Waters’ hands it segmented humankind into categories of dogs, pigs, and sheep—or capitalist businessmen, politicians/moralists such as Mary Whitehouse, and blind followers. “Sheep” also contained a twisted, vocoder version of the twenty-third Psalm—“The Lord is my shepherd”—incorporating lamb cutlets and karate.) In The Wall, the repeated stage-manager phrase “Time to go” in “Is There Anybody Out There?” was apparently based on a pre-gig catatonic trance evinced by the band’s then-leader at a 1967 show. The scene in the corresponding movie where Pink (Bob Geldof) shaves his head and eyebrows was likewise inspired by Syd’s appearance when he visited the band in studio, uninvited, during the mixing of Wish You Were Here. (Barrett followed that up by being mistaken for a Hare Krishna at Gilmour’s wedding reception later the same day.)

The absent Syd was actually later taken by one of his initiated friends to an early-’80s Sant Mat gathering, where he was immediately recognized, and consequently quickly fled the scene. He currently lives a quiet, non-musical life in Cambridge.

In 1985, following the tour for The Final Cut—consisting of songs which had been rejected by the band during the recording of The Wall—Roger disbanded the Floyd. The remaining band members nevertheless recorded A Momentary Lapse of Reason (1987) and The Division Bell (1994) without him, after winning a legal battle to continue using their established name. For the former disc, “Learning to Fly” began as an ode to David’s taking of flying lessons, and evolved into “a metaphor for a man’s attempt to take flight spiritually.” The tour for Division Bell included one show with science-fiction writer Douglas Adams on guitar, as a 42^nd birthday present from Gilmour. (The band’s lavish ear-splitting and fish-killing concerts had formed the basis for Adams’ fictional rock group Disaster Area, in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. While the Floyd made use of mere films of solar flares in their shows, Disaster Area employed real ones.)

Touring extensively in the late ’80s in support of Momentary Lapse, the band was met in Columbus, Ohio, by Christian picketers with placards reading “WORSHIP GOD NOT PINK FLOYD SINNERS” and “REPENT PINK FLOYD IDOLATORS.”

Resolved to sin no more, Waters rejoined Gilmour, Mason and Wright to perform four classic Floyd songs at the London Live 8 concert in July of 2005. Earlier in the year, he had completed an opera entitled Ça Ira, based on the heroes of the French Revolution.

Et à propos, lequel l’un est Rose?

CHAPTER 16

None More Black

BLACK SABBATH

They are the burly, long-haired men who nearly single-handedly invented the heavy metal genre. Their lead singer was branded a devil-worshiper, stalked by covens, and threatened by Satanists—all before he had even tried to strangle his wife, been sued for allegedly encouraging the suicides of his fans, pissed on the Alamo, or gratuitously bitten the heads off of an assortment of live, flying animals.

They are Black Sabbath.

The teenage John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne—dyslexic and suffering from attention deficit disorder—first met future Sab creative force Tony Iommi in high school in Birmingham, England, in the late 1960s. Osbourne had already been performing onstage in various Gilbert and Sullivan high-school operettas, including H.M.S. Pinafore and The Mikado.

Intensely disliking the Oz-brain’s “high and girly” voice, among other things, Iommi would regularly beat him up for transgressions as seemingly innocuous as happily singing the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to himself during morning recess.

Having dropped out of school at age fifteen, Ozzy went to work at a succession of menial jobs, including two years at an abattoir:

“I loved killing animals.... It was definitely my forte. I used to stick them, stab them, chop them, totally torture the fuckers to death. And if the pigs had worms I used to bite their heads off.”

From that outlet for his aggression he progressed to tuning car horns in a soundproof room, and eventually landed every metal-head’s dream gig: a week as an assistant at a mortuary.

A more profitable life seemed to beckon from the criminal world, but several Stooge-like attempts at petty theft soon landed the young Ozzy in jail. Making good use of his time in the “nick,” and having obtained a needle and pencil-lead, he emerged with his first monochromatic tattoos: “O-Z-Z-Y” on the knuckles of his left hand ... and soon after, smiling faces on each of his knees, so that he’d “get a little cheer every morning” when he woke up.

That month and a half in prison left the seventeen-year-old a changed man. Still hooked on the Beatles’ sound, and fancying a rock star’s life of “drinking beer, smoking dope and screwing chicks,” the aspiring singer soon formed a band with future Sabbath bass player Terence “Geezer” Butler.

Years earlier, at age seven, Butler had been awakened by “a floating orb that glowed from within.” Upon touching the bright object, it “filled his head with visions of his future and a better life” beyond Birmingham.

Ozzy and Geezer were quickly, if reluctantly, joined by former tormentor (now guitarist) Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward, to form what became the original lineup of Black Sabbath. The group’s name was taken from their favorite Boris Karloff horror film, playing at a theater down the road from their rehearsal space.

In those early days, Geezer Butler couldn’t afford an actual bass guitar. Thus, he simply restrung a six-string electric with four bass strings, and played it accordingly.

Tony Iommi’s challenges as a guitarist, by contrast, were more manual than instrumental. For, in his job at a sheet metal factory during the same period, in a misadventure with a guillotine, he had quite accidentally severed the tips of the ring and middle fingers on his right hand. He compensated for that loss via a combination of homemade prosthetics and a three-step downtuning of his left-handed guitar, to ease the strain on his tender fingers. Thus was born, in that lower register, a significant part of Sabbath’s groundbreaking “heavy” sound, often-imitated in metal circles in the years since.

The band’s maiden album, imaginatively titled Black Sabbath, was released on a Friday the 13^th in early 1970. The cover featured a controversial upside-down cross, and an apocalyptic poem written inside the jacket.

Their namesake song, “Black Sabbath,” has a smirking Satan manifesting to the narrator as a “black shape with eyes of fire.” That disturbing lyrical visitation was actually based on a real-life experience had by Geezer Butler:

“Having borrowed a sixteenth-century tome of black magic from [Ozzy] Osbourne one afternoon, Butler awoke that night to find a black shape staring balefully at him from the foot of his bed. After a few frightening moments, the figure slowly vanished into thin air.”

Geezer: “I told Ozzy about it. It stuck in his mind, and when we started playing ‘Black Sabbath,’ he just came out with those lyrics.... It had to come out, and it eventually did in that song—and then there was only one possible name for the band, really!”

From the same debut LP, “N.I.B.” has often been taken by fans as an acronym for “Nativity in Black.” The reality according to Ozzy, however, is far less demonic:

“We were all stoned in Hamburg and Bill used to have this really long, pointy beard and I said, ‘Hey Bill, you look like a pen nib.’ So when Geezer said, ‘What are we going to call this song?’ I said, ‘Oh, call it N.I.B.’” (The song is nevertheless about the devil himself falling in love.)

The drummer’s beard provided inspiration for the band at other times as well, once inducing Tony to set it on fire with his lighter:

“Bill was great ... he just breathed in this big cloud of fumes and said ‘Hmmmmm—a good smoke, that.’”

Ward’s attitude toward the source of the band’s musical inspiration is itself worthy of note:

“I’ve always considered that there was some way where we were able to channel energy, and that energy was able to be, from another source, if you like, like a higher power or something, that was actually doing the work. I’ve often thought of us just being actually just the earthly beings that played the music because it was uncanny. Some of this music came out extremely uncanny....

“A lot of the times we didn’t write the fucking songs at all. We showed up and something else wrote them for us. We were conduits.”

The group’s real and imagined interests in the occult and black magic soon resulted in them being asked to perform at the “Night of Satan” festival planned for Stonehenge by a local satanic cult. Declining that request, they found themselves on the wrong end of a threatened hex.

The Sab Four’s second effort, Paranoid, led off with the anti-Vietnam “War Pigs”—originally called “Walpurgis,” after the witches’-sabbath celebration of the arrival of spring. Use of the same title for the record itself had been vetoed by their record company, but too late to change the cover art. Thus, the jacket front displays a literal male “war pig” in pink leotards, armed with a sword and shield. Inside, the disc’s heavy-laden, drug-oriented “Hand of Doom” later formed the basis for the entire “Doom” sub-genre of metal music.

And so on to late 1971’s Master of Reality. Oddly, its second track, “After Forever,” could have easily passed for Christian rock, not least in its talk of soul-salvation, “seeing the light,” and the proselytizing assertion that “God is the only way to love.”

Reassuringly, “Lord of This World” was back to typical Sabbath fare, being written explicitly about “Old Nick.” It was sung by Ozzy from the perspective of that other Prince of Darkness to our earth’s greedy and prideful horde, who will know their sinful master even better after death.

The ensuing promotional tour found the walls of the band’s dressing room in Memphis covered in crosses drawn with animals’ blood, prior to their show. During the concert itself, an audience member wishing to sacrifice Tony Iommi’s soul to the devil accosted him onstage with a sacrificial knife.

Sab’s welcome to America also included being cheered by Charles Manson’s followers in Los Angeles. Not to be outdone, in San Francisco a parade was held in their honor by the Church of Satan and its High Priest, Anton LaVey.

Ozzy did his own part for the spread of evil during those months by regularly burning the Gideon’s Bibles found in the group’s hotel rooms.

The narrators for the songs on 1972’s Vol. 4 variously “got no religion” and “don’t want no preacher telling me about the god in the sky” or about the afterlife.

Rehearsals for the band’s fifth album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, took place in the dungeons of a haunted castle in Wales. Too frightened by the ghosts manifesting around the ancient building’s armory to sleep there overnight, the Masters of Evil chose to commute to work instead.

Studio work on the album did not lessen the supernatural component. For, while recording in Bel Air, one night in his bedroom Geezer “looked up to see several specters glaring at him from above with overpowering effect. Awash with fear, he immediately awakened Bill, Tony, and Ozzy to tell them what had happened. Geezer soon discovered that all of his fellow bandmates had experienced similar events.”

The front cover of the finished album shows a selection of demons possessing a man. Above a satanic “666,” a human skull beams. Within, “A National Acrobat” muses on reincarnation, saying: “Don’t believe the life you have will be the only one.”

Nineteen seventy-five’s Sabotage, arguably the “last great Sabbath album,” opened with the thunderous “Hole in the Sky.” The song was, in Iommi’s understanding of Geezer’s lyrics, “basically about the astral plane.”

“The Thrill of It All” called for help from “Mr. Jesus.” As well the Sabbath members might have needed, given the poor initial sales of the We Sold Our Soul for Rock ‘n’ Roll (U.S. #48) compilation follow-up, and the subsequent Technical Ecstasy studio album (U.S. #51). The latter was itself succeeded unsuccessfully by the use of a fifteen-piece horn section by the “founders of heavy metal” on 1978’s U.S. #69 record, Never Say Die!

One look at Geezer Butler’s drooping mustache and long black hair makes it obvious that he was a primary inspiration for the Derek Smalls bassist character in the brilliant mockumentary film, This is Spinal Tap. Tony Iommi himself opined that the movie was “about a lot of groups, but the main part of it is about Black Sabbath. The Stonehenge thing that they used in Spinal Tap we had, only ours went the other way. We drew on a piece of paper what we wanted as the Stonehenge set, and the company made it bigger than the real Stonehenge, so consequently we couldn’t fit it on the stage. Everything was too big; it was blown way out of proportion. We took it to America and we had to send it back; it wouldn’t fit. We couldn’t give it away. We tried to give it to America, in the desert where London Bridge went, and they wouldn’t have it.”

Or, in Ozzy Osbourne’s view: “I thought it was a documentary about Black Sabbath!.... I lived that life; it was just a real situation for me.”

Through a combination of musical differences, drug abuse, and regular unexcused absences, Ozzy was fired from the band in 1979. He was quickly replaced by the elf-like Ronnie James Dio, formerly of the group Rainbow.

Ozzy spent three or more months living in a hotel room in Hollywood with the drapes permanently shut, drinking heavily. With the aid of his future wife, Sharon, he eventually got together a band, consisting of former members of Quiet Riot, Uriah Heep, and Rainbow, to record his first solo album, 1981’s Blizzard of Ozz.

On that first step of his way back up to the top, he nevertheless found time to dis his former group:

“They’ll probably sound very much like Foreigner—that was the last album they were into!”

The solo band’s attempts at recording, however, were predictably complicated by the apparent presence of a poltergeist in the studio.

Ozzy: “Most days we would wake up and windows would be smashed, crockery shattered, doors were broken off their hinges and our clothes would be floating in the stream outside. The studio owner was insisting that it was us getting drunk every night and tearing up the studio, but we stuck by our story that it was always the poltergeist.”

The Evil Quotient for the album was upped by the inclusion of “Mr. Crowley”—with the magickal Antichrist lyrically riding the symbolic white horse from Revelation, as the first of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Spin magazine (April, 2002) has actually reported Osbourne to own a signed first edition of Crowley’s 1001 Notable Nativities, containing Aleister’s handwritten notes in the margins. From Ozzy’s own perspective:

“It was all hype when I started, but I really learned to believe in the devil. I dedicated The Blizzard of Ozz to Aleister Crowley.”

The album in question also featured the infamous “Suicide Solution.”

Ozzy regularly insisted that he had written the song as a warning against the dangers of alcohol, spurred by the fate of his late friend Bon Scott, the former lead singer of AC/DC, who choked to death on his own vomit. (“Solution” was to be taken as “liquid,” i.e., alcohol, not as a suggested way out of one’s problems.) His own bass player Bob Daisley, however, had a different take on the situation, claiming that he had written the lyrics, and that they were specifically about Ozzy’s problems with substance abuse.

Either way, the parents of a teenager who shot himself in 1984 while listening to the song sued Ozzy, alleging that their son had been made vulnerable to killing himself by hidden messages in the music. (Those purported communications were heard by some as “Why try, why try? Get the gun and try it. Shoot, shoot, shoot.” The First Amendment, freedom-of-speech case was dismissed in 1986.)

Well prior to those lawsuits, however, Ozzy and the band had put out their sophomore disc, Diary of a Madman. Named after Crowley’s autobiography, its “Over the Mountain” was a song about “life’s magic astral plane,” while “Little Dolls,” pricked by pins and needles, concerned voodoo.

The opening act for the ensuing tour was, somewhat surprisingly, none other than Foreigner.

Those busy months on the road were to further include the inhumane abuse of doves and bats, the parabolic flight of vast quantities of raw meat, and an indiscreet cross-dressing urination in Texas.

First, in the spring of 1981, in a boardroom meeting with top executives at CBS in L.A., Ozzy bit the head off a dove. The dove may or may not have already been dead; the Oz-man may or may not have been drunk at the time; it may or may not have all been a publicity stunt cooked up by Sharon. Either way, the world was soon minus one uncooked baby doveling, and had one more rocker banned from setting foot in the CBS building.

The Humane Society followed up on the sound and fury by campaigning to have Ozzy banned from performing in the U.S.

And then there was the bat. Thrown onto the stage by a fan in Des Moines, Iowa, in January of 1982. Ozzy might have thought it was just a harmless rubber toy. Either way, one small bite for Ozzy; a giant series of painful rabies shots for Ozzy’s behind.

And the look on the Humane Society’s face: priceless.

The relative normality of a live bat being thrown onstage becomes clearer when one realizes that, throughout the concert tour, in a throwback to Ozzy’s abattoir days, fans were invited to bring raw meat (e.g., dead cats, dogs, rats, snakes, lizards, and humongous swamp frogs) to the shows, to throw at the band. As a signal that the audience was to begin discharging their offal at him, Ozzy would first catapult a bucket full of rotting pigs’ intestines and calves’ livers at them.

Sharon: “We got attention as a result, but the stuff about sawing the legs off a Doberman and blowing up small animals was pure fabrication.”

The shows also featured the mock execution of a dwarf, coincidentally nicknamed “Ronnie.”

A mere month later, the traveling rock circus pulled into San Antonio. Home of the Alamo. Visited for a photo-op by a “drunk as a skunk” Ozzy one morning wearing his wife’s green evening dress.

A tumbled-down historical brick wall. Pissed on. Arrested and briefly jailed for. Banned from performing in the city for a decade afterwards.

The American leg of the tour for Osbourne’s 1982 live album, Speak of the Devil (outside the U.S., Talk of the Devil), was met with priest-led record burnings, and warnings from Deep South preachers that “the madman was coming!”

Oddly enough, all of that actually qualified as Ozzy getting his life and career finally back on track, following the depression he experienced after the split from Sabbath. Looking back in 1984 on his “wilder and crazier” early days, he reflected:

“I really wish I knew why I’ve done some of the things I’ve done over the years. Sometimes I think that I’m possessed by some outside spirit. A few years ago, I was convinced of that—I thought I truly was possessed by the devil. I remember sitting through The Exorcist a dozen times, saying to myself, ‘Yeah, I can relate to that.’”

The Dio-led Black Sabbath, meanwhile, released Heaven and Hell (with “Neon Knights” and “Children of the Sea”) in 1980. It was on the tour for that album that Ronnie James popularized the now-ubiquitous “devil horns” hand gesture, the intricacies of which should not be lost on the discerning fan:

“According to European mediaeval folklore, subtleties regarding the position of the thumb whilst holding this symbol are of paramount import. With the thumb held under the fingers it is the sign of the horned god Cernunnos, with the thumb above the fingers and the extended digits pointed towards a person it is a device for cursing an individual.”

Sabbath’s Mob Rules was released in 1981. The title of its instrumental “E5150” was a Roman-numeral representation of the word “evil.” (“5” = “V,” “50” = “L,” so “E5150” = “EV1L.”)

Two years later, the band recorded Born Again with Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan on lead vocals, in place of Dio. Following it, the band once again flirted with Christian rock, bringing future minister Jeff Fenholt in as their new singer, for what may or may not have been originally intended as a Tony Iommi solo project. (Fenholt had formerly played the lead role in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” as did Gillan at one time.)

Also in 1983, the title track of Ozzy’s Bark at the Moon was blamed for compelling another fan of the genre to stab a woman and her two sons to death on New Year’s Eve.

Jeff Fenholt was replaced by Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple before the final mix of Sabbath’s Seventh Star in 1986. The completed album’s “In for the Kill” nevertheless dealt not only with Vlad the Impaler [the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula] but also with “the accountability humanity will face in the Armageddon of Revelations.” The title song, for its own part, had a multitude of souls “waiting judgment from God’s hand.”

Ozzy’s The Ultimate Sin (1986, U.S. #1) led to No Rest for the Wicked in 1988. The latter’s “Miracle Man” hit back at hypocritical televangelists such as Jimmy Swaggart—rocker Jerry Lee Lewis’ scandalous cousin—for getting “busted with his pants down.” (The same theme was covered by Sabbath themselves four years later, on Tyr.)

On other occasions, no less than the former Archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O’Connor, had railed against Ozzy as purportedly being “hell’s own messenger.” Still, when Oral Roberts attempted to raise $7 million against the Heavenly Father’s unveiled threat to do him in should he fail to get the money on time, who was there to help out? None other than Ozzy, who donated a dollar, suggesting that it might go towards paying Roberts’ psychiatric bill.

On “Blood Bath in Paradise,” a song about the Manson murders, Ozzy’s previous troubles with alleged subliminal messages provoked him to include a real backward-masked phrase: “Your mother sells whelks in Hull.” His odd choice of words becomes more understandable when one relates it to the Exorcist quote, “Your mother sucks cocks in hell.” A whelk, for those keeping score, is an edible marine gastropod.

After Headless Cross in 1989, the reconstituted Black Sabbath let loose the next calendar year with Tyr—named after the Norse god of law and order. Though written with their heads in “Valhalla” and “Odin’s Court,” the band’s feet were still firmly planted on “The Sabbath Stones”—a song about the Ten Commandments.

Nineteen eighty-nine also found Ozzy charged with attempted murder for his furious, vodka-induced efforts at choking Sharon to death.

As she later said: “He was totally insane from all the drink and drugs he was doing, and well, these things happen.”

Two years later, Ozzy’s first sober album in decades, No More Tears, eventually brought him a Grammy for Best Metal Performance, for “I Don’t Want to Change the World.” It also, however, led to a brief retirement on his part, after being misdiagnosed as having Parkinson’s disease.

The process of writing forty new tunes with the brilliant guitarist Steve Vai enticed the Oz-brain back into the studio to record a new album for 1995, Ozzmosis. (Only one of their songs together, “My Little Man,” made it onto the final track listing.)

Of Vai himself, a friend and former roommate noted the intensity of his spiritual search: “One day he flat out told me that he was going to work really hard for ten years, make a lot of money, retire, and then go into the wilderness to meditate.”

More recently, after 2001’s Down to Earth, Osbourne has been trying his luck at writing a Broadway musical, taking as his subject the Russian mad monk, Rasputin. Fans of the idea that life imitates art will not fail to notice the parallel there with the musical based on the life of Jack the Ripper (Saucy Jack) that was planned by the fictional members of Spinal Tap a good two decades ago.

After all the hard living and accusations of Satan-worship, then, the Oz-man gave his once-over view on religion:

“I don’t believe in God as a physical thing sat somewhere on a cloud in heaven. I reckon heaven and hell are what we make of life right here on earth. I don’t believe in the afterlife, I think when you die you’re just simply like a piece of shit that needs flushing away.”

Ironically, then, Christmas Eve of 1995 found Ozzy and his family attending midnight mass at their local Catholic church.

Even more ironically, in discussing the meaning of “See You on the Other Side,” from Ozzmosis, the increasingly religious man stated:

“I absolutely adore my wife. The love that I have for her and the love she has for me will never die. I truly believe that if I pop off first or she goes, then we’ll meet up on the other side. I believe in life after death....”

In facing Sharon’s later battle with cancer, Osbourne further admitted that he had “done a lot of praying, believe it or not.”

At any rate, early 2002 and a guest appearance on the Howard Stern show found Ozzy disclosing a new addiction: Viagra. Indeed, he claimed to be swallowing up to fifteen of those pills daily. His use began innocently enough, after a month of being unable to perform with Sharon, but he apparently “enjoyed the taste so much that he couldn’t stop chewing them.”

By contrast, 2004 saw Ozzy receiving a New Musical Express award for “godlike genius.”

It is, as they say, a fine line between clever and stupid.

A very fine line.

CHAPTER 29

In My Eyes

PETER GABRIEL

There are surely many fans of Peter Gabriel’s music—both before and after his breakthrough hit, “Sledgehammer”—who would be surprised to learn that he and Phil Collins once played together in a rather famous old band. A once-relevant group whose best days were far behind them when Phil left to focus on his solo career in 1992. A band which many critics expected to be unable to carry on following Peter’s departure seventeen years earlier, after their final tour together in 1975. A prog rock band called Genesis, whose members incorporated religious and mythological references into their songs from their earliest days together.

The soul music-influenced Peter Gabriel met the classically trained keyboardist Tony Banks in 1963. At the time, they were thirteen-year-old students at the Charterhouse boys’ boarding school, located twenty miles southeast of London.

Gabriel and Banks’ band (The Garden Wall) soon merged with members of another local group (The Anon), including guitarist/bassist Mike Rutherford. Their original intention was to function as a songwriting co-operative, creating songs for others to perform.

Lack of interest in their (300+) still-amateurish lyrical offerings, however, plus a fortuitous visit by Charterhouse alumnus and pop wonder Jonathan King (“Everyone’s Gone to the Moon”), eventually led to King producing the still-unnamed group’s first album.

Replete with an attempt at imitating the Bee Gees’ style of writing (“The Silent Sun”), the pretentious overall theme of the acoustic-based album, as charged by King, was to be a history of the universe from the beginning of creation to the end of time, in song.

The group was christened “Genesis”—after “Gabriel’s Angels” had been rejected by all members of the band, save one. King was soon chagrined, however, to find that there was already a group in the U.S. performing under that name. Recovering quickly and intending to bill the group as Revelation, in America, the completed album was given the title From Genesis to Revelation, with the band’s name being indicated only via that label.

Packaged with Gothic gold foil lettering on a black background—with songs including “In the Beginning” and “The Serpent”—the “lesson in marketing” album was understandably quickly routed to the religious bin of the few record shops that even bothered to carry it. (In its initial 1969 issue, the disc sold only around a thousand copies, mostly to friends and acquaintances of the band.)

Soon permanently sans Mr. King and under new management, in 1970 the group released their follow-up—Trespass. It was highlighted by an “aggressive number about [a] revolutionary figure on a power trip.” Ironically, that seven-minute piece (“The Knife”) was actually inspired by “a book about the life of Gandhi,” rooted in the idea that revolutions brought about by violence will invariably end up with dictators in charge. (The lyrics were also partially about Peter “being a public schoolboy rebelling against [his] background.”)

The song in turn inspired Gabriel, in concert, to use his microphone like a sword, “attacking” the audience with it. It also led him to take a literal flying leap off a five-foot-high stage into the audience near the end of a June, 1971 show in Aylesbury, presaging his later solo crowd surfing ... and breaking his ankle, to the point of needing to have two metal screws inserted in his leg to set it.

Rehearsals for the group’s third offering, Nursery Cryme, took place in a spooky Tudor house formerly occupied by the likes of Leonard Cohen and the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith. As the band’s new drummer, Phil Collins, described the place: “I’m sure the house was haunted.... There were some weird vibes. There was a picture with eyes that followed you everywhere, and other strange things.”

Collins, in addition to his previous drumming for one album with Flaming Youth, had child-acted the part of the Artful Dodger in a West End stage production of the musical Oliver! That skill was later to serve him in good stead for a mid-’80s guest-star appearance (as “Phil the Shill”) on the second season of television’s Miami Vice. There, he delivered lines like “You must take me for a right wanker” with all due aplomb.

That third album also marked the addition of Steve Hackett to the group—functioning alternately as a searing lead guitarist and as a one-man “special effects department” within the band’s constraining arrangements.

Cryme opened with the ten-minute-long “Musical Box,” telling the story of a young boy (Henry) who had his head removed at the croquet mallet of a slightly older girl, Cynthia. He later returned, in spirit, as an aging crippled man. While a music box played, Henry attempted a seduction of the girl, his ghostly form calling out, “Touch me, now!” Hearing the disturbance, Cynthia’s nanny entered the room, throwing the musical box at the bearded spirit-child, thus destroying both.

In a similarly fantastic vein, lyrics for the album-closing “Fountain of Salmacis” were derived from the Greek mythological explanation for the origin of hermaphroditism (i.e., the presence of both male and female reproductive organs in flowers, animals or human beings). The myth involves the excessive union of the boy Hermaphroditus—offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite—with the water-nymph Salmacis, to no happy ending.

The record quickly rose to the #1 chart position ... in Belgium.

In the autumn of 1972 Peter began developing the visual aspect of the band’s live shows, acting out their songs’ characters via a wide array of theatrical costumes and face masks.

The most controversial of those was a shocking red dress (belonging to his wife, Jill) and fox’s head. That apparel had nothing to do with the music being played while it was worn, but nevertheless garnered some coveted media attention—quickly doubling the group’s concert fee. (The costume was later replaced by an “old man” latex mask, allowing Gabriel to act out the “Musical Box” story from Nursery Cryme.)

The “foxy lady” gag actually derived from the drawn cover of the band’s next unintentionally low-fidelity album, Foxtrot—their first album to chart in England.

The meaning of the various images on that cover was explained by the artist, Paul Whitehead, in Armando Gallo’s Genesis: I Know What I Like. Initially, the painting was conceived simply as a put-down on fox-hunting as an aristocratic sport—as an extension of the satirical croquet theme on the Nursery Cryme cover, the latter of which is itself reproduced in part in the background of the Foxtrot jacket. As Whitehead became familiar with the subject matter of the contained songs, however, he soon incorporated the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in that “fox-hunt”:

“The ice floating on water is like the soul floating in the human body. The fox [standing on the ice] is a passion, a violent aspect, but it has used its cunning and adopted a disguise and the ice to escape its pursuers [i.e., the four horsemen with their bloodhounds, assembled on the shore]. The cover is adopted into half land and half sea, and it shows that there is as much life in the sea as there is on the land. There is also death in the sea, as signified by Cynthia’s [croquet] mallet, the shark, the Hogweed [referring to another fantasial/botanical song on Cryme] and the nuclear submarine.”

The cyclist on the cover was Peter himself—apparently he once turned up for a meeting on a bike, but couldn’t ride particularly well. The hotel in the background was intended to be symbolic of all the road trips that the band would be taking in their coming years.

From that disc, side one’s “Watcher of the Skies” was written by Banks and Rutherford, inspired by a lifeless landscape of buildings and fields which presented itself to them as they gazed one day from their hotel in Naples. The inanimate scene below struck them as approximating what an alien being might see, in coming to the deserted planet after some catastrophe. (Davin Seay, writing from a Christian perspective in his Stairway to Heaven, would prefer for that “Watcher” to be God. He is, however, quite mistaken. Interestingly, the phrase “watcher of the skies” also occurs in John Keats’ poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” very possibly being borrowed by Tony and Mike from that source. In the poem, the experience of reading Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey is compared to the feeling which the Spanish explorer Cortez must have had in first seeing the Pacific Ocean.) Performed in concert as the set-opener, the piece found Gabriel sporting ultraviolet-illuminated day-glo eyes, batwings, and a floor-length cape to complement the song’s doom-laden Mellotron introduction.

Side two, however, is where the band, by their own testimony, began “sounding really good on records.” That plane of vinyl is given entirely over to a single, apocalyptic song: the episodic, biblically influenced tale of good and evil, “Supper’s Ready.”

Peter Gabriel himself confirmed the song’s religious basis: “I ended up reading Revelations in the Bible. This explains the apocalyptic bit at the end of ‘Supper’s Ready.’ I think it was one of the first times that I felt as if I was really singing from my soul—almost like singing for my life.”

The song’s title refers to Revelation 19, verse 9: “Then the angel said to me, ‘Write: “Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!”’”

The work itself consists of seven sections:

i Lover’s Leap

ii The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man

iii Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men

iv How Dare I Be So Beautiful?

v Willow Farm

vi Apocalypse in 9/8

vii As Sure as Eggs is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet)

The first movement, “Lover’s Leap,” where the narrator sees his lover’s “face change,” was based on an actual paranormal experience had by Peter and his wife Jill, one night in her parents’ apartment:

“I saw this very old face in Jill, there was this sense that it wasn’t her there....

“I tried calming her down and holding her, but nothing seemed to get through.... The window flew open, there was this horrible coldness and we got the shivers.... I made a cross with candlesticks, which helped, I don’t know why.”

At the height of that experience, Jill had been speaking in tongues, and reacting like a “wild animal.”

Peter further recorded: “I did feel that I saw figures outside, figures in white cloaks, and the lawn I saw them on wasn’t the lawn that was outside.” (Thus, “six saintly shrouded men,” led by a seventh carrying a cross, are included on the Foxtrot album cover.)

Part two, “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” concerns the head of a “highly disciplined scientific religion” who falsely claims to possess “a secret new ingredient capable of fighting fire.”

A number of twentieth-century guru-figures, including the Maharishi and Paramahansa Yogananda, have presented their techniques of meditation as being “scientific,” and even as (dubiously) having had their efficacy proved in controlled studies.

Further, the mantra “Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama” is one of two chants which are especially recommended in the Vedas for delivering one to “the realm beyond material existence”—the other such mantra being “Om.” (The Hare Krishnas themselves use a slightly modified version of the former chant.) Such chanting could be said to be the practice of a “supersonic mantric science.”

Further, when directed outwardly, the so-called kundalini energy is believed to give rise to sexual desire. (The kundalini “fire” is a subtle energy held to reside at the base of the spine; its coiled nature accounts for the bulk of extant scriptural references to “serpents.”) The Hare Krishnas, however, like many yogic groups, are supposed to be strictly celibate. That is, they and other groups with similar emphases on celibacy as a purported means toward spiritual enlightenment are “fighting fire,” in that regard.

The kundalini reference is further supported by the choir of schoolchildren singing softly, even against the claims of that “science”: “We will rock you, rock you, little snake.” (For the relevance of the views of children in the realm of spirituality, cf. Matthew 5:8—“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”)

The next section, “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men,” concerns an army summoned out of the ground at the Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man’s command, attacking all those who are not members in good standing of the religion.

Ikhnaton (1379 – 1362 BC) was an Egyptian king, husband of the legendarily beautiful Nefertiti, who developed the monotheistic solar cult of Aton. (Freud, interestingly, believed that Moses was a high-born priest of the same royal sun god, Aton, whose cult had been overthrown in a palace coup.)

Its-a-con has been read by some as referring to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness—ISKCON—popularly called the Hare Krishnas, and known for their bands of chanting, merry men. The organization has its U.K. headquarters at Bhaktivedanta Manor in northwest London.

Moving right along, in Genesis’ early days Jonathan King had been in the habit of looking into the mirror and exclaiming, “How dare I be so beautiful!” From that, Peter conceived the same description as applying to the egoic Narcissus, in part four here. Our narrator and his company join the mythological figure-turned-flower in staring into a pool, and “are pulled into their own reflections in the water.”

For the following “Willow Farm,” Gabriel donned his infamous “Flower” costume—modeled after a character he had seen in a children’s television show. Climbing out of the pool, then, the song’s witnesses “are once again in a different existence. They’re right in the middle of a myriad of bright colors, filled with all manner of objects, plants, animals and humans. Life flows freely and everything is mindlessly busy. At random, a whistle blows and every single thing is instantly changed into another,” losing the firm boundaries and rigid identification of consciousness with its prior forms.

“At one whistle the lovers become seeds in the soil, where they recognize other seeds to be people from the world in which they had originated. While they wait for spring, they are returned to their old world to see the Apocalypse of St. John in full progress.”

Thus, we arrive at the “Apocalypse in 9/8 (Co-Starring the Delicious Talents of Gabble Ratchet).”

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, under “Gabble Ratchet,” advises: “See GABRIEL’S HOUNDS.” From which: “Wild geese. The noise of geese in flight is like that of a pack of hounds in full cry. The legend is that they are the souls of unbaptized children wandering through the air till the Day of JUDGMENT.”

This segment, loosely based on Revelation’s Chapter 13, includes a reference to the “guards of Magog”—in biblical terms, people who are “recruited to be the evil army of Satan after he gets out of prison.”

Finally, we have the appropriately numbered seventh movement, “As Sure as Eggs is Eggs (Aching Mens’ Feet).” Seven trumpets—or, in the yogic interpretation, spinal chakras—blow the vibration of “sweet rock and roll” into the hero’s astral and causal bodies. The river of life energy in the spine joins the ocean of Cosmic Consciousness, freeing the soul from its mayic or Satanic (“666”) bondage.

As Paramahansa Yogananda explained, in his Autobiography of a Yogi: “Revelation contains the symbolic exposition of a