The Myth Of The Twenty-First Century The Red Octopus Vs. The Nazi Hydra

The Myth Of The Twenty-First Century

The Red Octopus vs. The Nazi Hydra

Multi-Culturists Seeking A Monoculture

by

R.E. Prindle

 

The agenda of the Octopus hasn’t changed since its inception in the French Revolution, nor have its methods.  Invoked in 1789 it faced entrenched cultural norms and mores that seemed unchangeable.  But the Unnamed Superiors attacked the problem with determination and ingenuity.  While there were always dissenting minorities in the grand manner European mores could be divided between Christian mores and Jewish mores.  This had been a societal problem in societies since Jewish mores had come into existence in 2000 BC during the transition from the Age of Taurus to the Age of Aries.  The problem was exacerbated during the transition from Aries to Pisces.  Jewish Taurian mores became even more antiquated and hence distinct thus always being in conflict with the societies they inhabited.

Largely suppressed in Europe during the Christian centuries while marginalized as a people the French Revolution emancipated both mores and people allowing them to compete on more favorable terms of which they took and have taken full advantage.  Without resources or population to seek a military solution the Jews chose to project a cultural war.  To augment their numbers and gain credibility they chose a ‘multi-cultural’ approach.  They evolved the tactic of combining with other minority groups against the dominant culture.

Led sometimes by brilliant figures such as Sigmund Freud and sometimes dogged battlers not quite so brilliant they sought to undermine the mores of the dominant culture.  Thus following the tutelage of Sigmund Freud they constantly ridiculed the dominant cultures mores while putting themselves forward as faultless paragons of virtue.

Of course as critics they never had to try the faultless abilities they said they possessed.  When their opportunity came with the founding of Israel in 1948 they came a-cropping on all accounts.

As the leading exponent of multi-culturalism the Jews have been immensely successful.  They are the engine that drives multi-culturalism.  For some reason the dominant culture refuses to acknowledge this monumental people’s contribution to history.  You can read multi-volume histories of the world that hardly mention Jewish contributions to fundamental changes in societies.  Even in our day Sigmund Freud has been discarded by the dominant culture as some kind of crank.  His tremendous influence goes unrecognized.

Of course, to exclude a whole people of such significance distorts that history out of recognition, especially, as I say, they are the engine, the heart of the Red Octopus.

The Octopus always takes the virtuous approach.  They always appear to mean good.  There is no direct assault on the dominant culture.  The effort is always to seize on a shortcoming of the culture and use that as a critical lever to separate the society into its component separate cultures.  The United States was tailor made for the process with its plethora of races and nationalities patched together and held in place by the dominant culture that constantly gave ground.

A very similar situation occurred in the Austrian Empire including the two semi-autonomous kingdoms of Hungary and Austria held together by a dominant German culture that disintegrated under the stress of two world wars in the twentieth century.  The Jews were the active solvent there too.

Russia also was an amalgamation of diverse cultures and nationalities that was actually conquered by a Jewish led revolution.

The Second World War escalated the dissolution of unity in the United States.  There was one attempt from 1870 to 1945 to meld all the various cultures into a melting pot of a single culture in the Aryan mold.  The method was wrong; the Jews devised a proper method possibly in the early years of the twentieth century under the tutelage of Sigmund Freud; dissolution from below rather than from above with a reintegration hopefully into one monoculture, one set of mores, and those Jewish.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century culture was unitary in approach on both continents, Europe and North America, under the direction of the dominant Aryan culture.  The transition from a monarchical  system to a democratic or bourgeois system opened society up to various social forces that were not possible under a monarchy.  Rather than a single directing head there were a multitude of competing heads.

Thus, as the US emerged from WWII in 1945 the Jews were the better organized to achieve their goals.  This semi-autonomous organized powerful self-sufficient people began the direction of the Red Octopus.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the media consisted of newspapers and magazines and word of mouth, rather poor means for the dissemination of propaganda compared to the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century invention of electrical media such as movies, radio, TV and phonographs records.  These were the means to quickly change mores and change the direction of society. It is no coincidence that in a democracy the Jews seized all them including old fashioned print.  With these in their control within a short fifty to sixty years they had dispensed with Aryan mores and set society on its head in preparation for the new Jewish monoculture.

Let us first consider the use of the phonographs record as a medium of change.

 

To be continued…

The Myth Of The Twenty-First Century

Red Octopus vs. The Nazi Hydra

 

Boring From Within

by

R.E. Prindle

The whole contest between the Red Octopus and The Nazi Hydra was framed on race.  The myth was that the evil White Man through no special talent of his own had seized the wealth of the world and subjected the colored peoples from who he stole.  Hence the White Man must be made to pay.  Pay with his life.

Thus all the colored peoples of the world are arrayed against the evil White Man.  IN the US the Democratic Liberal Party is home to the colored peoples and the sanctimonious White Liberal.  The next step in the myth was the White Man as the oppressor of Homosexuals and White Women.  The motto of the Octopus is Whiteness must disappear from the earth before justice can reign.  The plan of action is:  Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civilization has got to go.

The myth of the Devil White Man began to form in the wake of WWI and the revolutions and skirmishes that continued for several years.  WWII put paid to White Supremacy.  The Liberal Coalition that contained only a small minority of White men, and those mostly homosexual, began to organize and as a first attack selected the university system of the US.

The Red Octopus , regardless of their enormous crimes against humanity always considered themselves the virtuous Party.  The atrocities of two world wars cooled their ardor for violent action.  They chose to bore from within.  Always a tactic from WWI and before it now became more active.  The first all out assault was the so-called Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.  The Free Speech Movement was the first Occupy assault.  A small faction of revolutionaries managed to shut the University down by occupying Halls and preventing the school from functioning.

The action was called the Free Speech Movement because Free Speech in America is a prime virtue.  Thus the slogan or name made the assault defensible as a virtuous action.  Of course, within the Red Octopus free speech had no place.  One either hewed to the Party line or were disciplined or worse.

The Berkeley assault was entirely successful and free speech disappeared on campus.  The Movement soon spread across the country, Columbia University of New York being the prime example but the whole Ivy League succumbed immediately.  Moving from Free Speech to race the lack of Negroes attending universities was then included in the list of grievances.  Race is another virtue thus reinforcing the impregnable virtue of the Movement.

The remarkable thing about the Movement was the complete surrender of college presidents and faculties. It therefore follows that the college administrations were complicit; they were sleeper agents already in place.  The first capitulations set the tone for all that followed.  Of course having arrogated virtue to themselves any opposition therefore was vile, and being vile anyone holding other views was discreditable.  They automatically became racists, anti-Semites, opposed to Blacks and Browns.

Soon they began to lose their jobs often for something they may have said in private or may have said or only reported to have said decades before.  To be accused was to be found guilty; no proof was needed.

Once the universities were captured and cleansed and the curriculums appropriated all else followed.

By the 2016 presidential election the stage for the coup to what was euphemistically called the one party system was set.  The Red Octopus would be triumphant.

However the Hydra becoming alarmed managed to put forward an able candidate in Donald Trump who moved to disestablish the Octopus and put in place a Hydra agenda.

The stage has now been set for the Clash of the Titans:  a global contest for supremacy between the Red Octopus and the Hydra.

 

To be continued…

The Red Octopus vs. The Nazi Hydra

The Red Octopus vs. The Nazi Hydra

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Back in the Red fifties when the term the Red Octopus was first used to describe Red efforts to seize what was humorously described as the free world we anti-Communists, as yet unnamed, were subjected to all kinds of abuse.  ‘A Red under every bed.’  Communists behind the curtains, Communists everywhere, etc.  They even wrote songs belittling us, the Chad Mitchell Trio’s John Birch Society.  We were denounced as conspiratorial maniacs.

Well, the Reds have more or less succeeded in their revolution, it has happened here.  Yet the Reds got used to being victims, they see themselves as downtrodden victims.

Victims need bullies.  Hence bullyism is a hot topic of the day.  There are only two kinds of people according to the Octopus, the righteous Libs and we evil bullies.  I, Evil Bully.  The term bully is too great a generalization lacking the human touch. A certain personalization is missing.  Thus in the twenties and thirties in reaction to Communism Fascism and Nazism also known as Hitlerism arose.

One would think that WWII put paid to Nazism and Hitlerism not to mention Fascism.  NO!  They lived on in the Jewish imagination and the Jews gradually convinced all Europeans and White Americans that they were in fact Fascists and Nazis while individually all Little Hitlers, Ugly Americans.  The Libs denied this as they considered themselves virtuous so they passed the buck to the deplorable Conservatives who eventually become the Nazi Hydra.

For out of that milieu a great conspiracy had slowly been developing in the mind of the Red Octopus, that of the Nazi Hydra.  Thus all societies everywhere have bifurcated  into Red Octopi or the Nazi Hydras.  At this point the tentacles of the Red Octopus cover the globe but in between the tentacles of the Red Octopus the Nazi Hydra exists.  If you locate one branch and lop off the head, while the Octopus seeks out other cells of this pernicious hateful conspiracy, the head grows back again.  It’s like anti-Semitism the Hydra must exist to prove the virtue of the Octopus.

And then, just when the Red Octopus thought the Nazi Hydra was successfully contained a head was growing quietly in the disguise of a TV buffoon, the mighty Donald Trump.  Throwing off his disguise the Hydra chief unlawfully seized the presidency of the United States of American from the chosen Hillary Clinton.

What had been scheduled to be a contest between the Bush Dynasty and the Clinton Machine became a free for all between the Hydra and the Octopus.  Not much of a contest to all appearances.  Mobilizing the forces of the free press and free media; a ferocious campaign was conducted in which the Hydra Trump was belittled and the Octopus Clinton enlarged.  The polls said Clinton would win.  To the ballot boxes!  And when the dust had settled and the smoke had cleared there was the Hydra standing on Home Plate while the Octopus had tentacles covering third, second and first but 3+2+1 didn’t add up to a four bagger.  Trump was president and Clinton was strumming her guitar and singing the blues, out of tune.

The Hydra couldn’t have won fairly said the Octopus.  The Octopus didn’t know how the Hydra had cheated but he had to have, it was the only way he could have won.  But how?  Ah, the Russians, the Russians are coming they manipulated the election, it was the only way he could have won.  But what proof was there?

To be continued…

Some Current Developments In Leftist Ideology

Some Current Developments In Leftist Ideology

by

R.E. Prindle

Since Trump’s election the Left has had to make some rapid developments to its methods.  Trump has freed the Real Americans to be able to express their opinions without fear or favor.  Forced for the first time since, perhaps, 1945 to face an opposing freely expressed point of view the Left is definitely discombobulated.  There is a scramble to adjust.

To begin with I quote a passage from Sunday’s (7/2/17) NYT magazine by a John Herrman:

The American far right (now that’s the far right not just the right) has become remarkably adept at commandeering ideas from its enemies.  Now it’s pulling off its trickiest switch yet:  Billing itself as the new ‘alternative’ culture.  By John Herrman   (Tricky little bastards aren’t they?)

Counter Offensive

An always-useful thought experiment is to imagine seeing all the media around you for the first time- consciously, like a teenager freshly awakened to the existence of politics or an artificial intelligence that has just blinked across some humanoid threshold.  This is especially handy lately, in our strange moment of flux.  A wide-eyed observer of today’s political media wouldn’t just see different voices and outlets with contrasting tendencies.  It would see a disorienting game of rhetorical appropriation in which it is constantly unclear who stands for which principles and why.

An essential feature of the rise of Trumpism has been the brazen inversion, that trusty maneuver in which you wield your critics’ own values against them- say, borrowing the language of social justice to argue that the “oppressor” is actually oppressed or suddenly embracing progressive social causes in the service of criticizing Islam.  It’s a blunt but effective rhetorical confiscation, in which a battle-ready right relishes its ability to seize, inhabit and neutralize the arguments and vocabularies of its opponents, reveling in their continued inability to formulate any sort of answer to the trusty old “I know you are, but what am I.

As you can see, Mr. Herrman believes there is no excuse for Conservatives and whatever they do is wrong.  The very idea of challenging the Left’s point of view appalls Mr. Hermann, the filthy so and soes will actually stoop to ‘rhetorical appropriation’.!!!  The Negroes through their spokesman, or rather person, I too live in a gender neutral universe, Ice Cube have recently appropriated the word ‘nigger’ for their own exclusive use.  Only Negroes can use it; it is forbidden to others.  Thus Norman Mailer’s use of the term ‘White Nigger’  is now off limits.  Those books in which he used it must now be burned.

Here Mr. Hartman in his more than incoherent article seems to be suggesting that certain rhetorical usages, that encompass the whole dictionary, are off limits to Conservatives who are merely aping Liberals.  (Let’s see how those rhetorical confiscatory bastards get along without a language.)

In another interesting development some law professors from Harvard and Yale have revealed that if Hillary had been elected to continue Obama’s policies that Conservatives would have been treated worse than ‘we’ treated the Germans in the aftermath of WWII.  I’m telling ya this would have been worse than Sherman’s march through Georgia. The Left is always bloody minded.

 http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-like-nazis-after-1945-never-forget-the-bullet-we-dodged-when-hillary-was-defeated?content=the

While ‘alternatives’ appropriate a Leftist term, historians are finally revealing the horrors of how ‘we’ did treat the Germans, that have not yet trickled down to the general public it is clear that Trump by his election has, temporarily at least, saved the Conservatives from a terrible fate.  Thank God for the anti-third term law that prevented Obama from running again.

One can only say:  God bless Donald Trump.

One should bear in mind and take seriously the fact that both Negroes and Jews (see Noel Ignatiev) mean to perpetrate a genocide of the White populations.  Much of the elite also believe that the world is too populous and that about six billion should die.  As preposterous as it may seem it can easily be done.

Consider food as a weapon.  Communists in the Soviet Union during the twenties and thirties with the full compliance of Liberals throughout the world created an artificial famine in the Soviet Union during 1932-33-34 that claimed untold millions of lives through starvation while those that survived were crippled for the rest of their lives physically and mentally.  This crime was successfully suppressed throughout Europe and America.  If you’re in control of the media what gets out is only what you want to get out, hence, Pres. Trump’s war with the media.  Back him.

A similar ‘experiment’ along those lines may be happening in Venezuela today that may result in the deaths of millions.  The transfer of millions of people into Europe from the Middle East and Africa may result in a massive insurrection in which millions will die from warfare and more millions from the disruption of agriculture, starvation, and that within the next ten years.  Vatic I know, but still probable.

Such a conflict continually stoked from outside would prevent peace while tens or even hundreds of millions of people die.  Of course such a catastrophe would affect both Europeans and Moslems and Africans which would benefit who?

The conditions in Sweden now, today, is such that a Moslem insurrection could break out at any time.  Even Denmark has set up a border watch to prevent Moslem insurgents from entering from Sweden.  One on their Southern border with Germany wouldn’t hurt either.

Now, just as the Ivy League lawyers were ready to begin a massive elimination of Conservatives we must believe that these same people and their confederates are working to the same end in Europe and Canada as well as not having given up hope in the US.

Make no mistake, this is a do or die situation and must be taken seriously.  I believe England and Europe are already lost.  The time to tolerate Liberals and their policies is over.  It is no longer necessary to be covert.  Conservatives must stand up and say NO!

Book VI: Our Lady Of The Blues

Book VI

Our Lady Of The Blues

A Novel

The Shadow Knows

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Fighting his own battles far from San Diego another threat to Dewey’s wellbeing was going forward in the mind of Yehouda Yisraeli, Our Lady Of The Blues.

Many things had happened for Yisraeli in the five months the Teufelsdreck was overseas.  When the ship left he had his porn business and the Faux Playboy Club.  When it returned he had added two more sleazy bars- the Diamond Horseshoe and the Tropical Vista- as well as having laid the groundwork for his own record label- Michael Records.

Yehouda had no ear for popular music but his sidekick, Showbaby Zion did.  Showbaby, who was another Jewish ‘expatriate’ from reality, had come west from Baltimore.  On the way he dropped the name Irving Cohen in favor of Hoveve Zion.  Hoveve was an alternate spelling of Choveve and from that his moniker was corrupted to Showbaby.

He was a follower, quite content to play Robin to Yisraeli’s Batman.  Even though he was twice as intelligent as Yehouda and had all the ideas he couldn’t function without a leader.

It was he who suggested Yisraeli pick up the Diamond Horseshoe as a lead in to the record business.  The Horseshoe was northwest of Escondido in an unincorporated area.  It was one of those nondescript bars offering exotic dancers backed by a hot piano player.  In those far off days before Playboy, Hustler, the Sexual Revolution and the abolition of censorship had freed the base desires of man from all restrictions of expression the Horseshoe was a barely licit business catering to only the crudest elements of society.

The girls were not allowed to dance nude or to engage in the grossest ‘dance’ steps.  They had to wear bottoms if only a G-string and pasties over their nipples.  Most preferred long tassels dangling from the pasties.

These slightly less than topless bars were the successors of burlesque.  By 1958 the longstanding traditions of burlesque had been banished from society.  If the last burlesque house had not yet been closed its demise was only a few months away.  American had convinced itself that vice could be abolished by an act of will.  All the Red Light districts in the country had been abolished at the turn of the decade.  California’s most famous, the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, had been closed at that time.  The well meaning but not very bright moralists who demanded the closure of these districts had no idea that they were merely transforming American society into a pit of immorality by dispersing these illicit areas throughout the population.

In San Francisco the resident of the Barbary Coast merely moved a few blocks west up to lower Broadway and recreated the center of Sin City in that area.  Subsequently the whole of San Francisco has been corrupted.

Hank Williams commemorated the change in his song about how the displaced whores who still remained whores destroyed the decent girls when they brought their illicit mores to decent neighborhoods when they were expelled from the Red Light districts.

Thus we allow well meaning but stupid reformers to corrupt our lives in the name of decency.  The Horseshoe was one of many clubs that opened in formerly clean areas.  Men like Yisraeli who bore a grudge against society were thus given means to undermine the society they hated.

For Showbaby the main attraction of the Horseshoe was a Black pianist and singer name William Morris.  Zion had great hopes for the pianist but they were not to be realized as the player had been shorn of all will and hope.  Young, too, only twenty-eight.

Forced to turn elsewhere for talent for their fledgling label Showbaby was open minded enough to see the potential of the developing Surf Music groups.  At the time Surfboarding was brand new in California.  The excitement of the pastime gripped the imaginations of White youth.  Surfers were a wild party loving group.  They wanted something new and different in music.  Thus arose the style known as Surf Guitar.  Dick Dale and the Deltones would emerge as the premier Surf group.  Confined mainly to the Southland they were not especially well known outside Surf circles.

Showbaby latched onto a group known as Con Crete and the Rebars.  They were never to become that famous but they had a following and sold enough records in the Southland to form the basis of Yisraeli’s small but lucrative label.

For Yisraeli the label was merely another means to undermine society.  A man of some intellectual reach he realized the limitations of male porn to corrupt general morality.  The clubs were effective solvents also but their appeal was limited to an audience that was in search of such entertainment hence already corrupt.

Yehouda wanted something that would invade the entire space of his victims.  Their homes, their cars, their minds, the very air they breathed.  Records such as the salacious ‘Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box and Hank Ballard’s ‘Work With Me Annie’ and its sequel ‘Annie Had A Baby’ showed him the way to corrupt the very mind of the world.  The airwaves could used in a corrosive way.

‘Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box’ with its very suggestive title devolved into a clever denouement in which ‘Box’ was not the woman’s pudenda but her piano stayed within permissible lines but still got the corrosive point in.  The singer had essentially said over the radio ‘Baby, I want to fuck you’ which everyone got but still stayed within barely acceptable limits.  The same was true of ‘Work With Me Annie’ which described the sexual act also in ambiguous terms.

But the piece de resistance for Yisraeli would be the tune ‘My Boy Lollipop.’  Yehouda had an oral fixation.  ‘My Boy Lollipop’ for all of us not too dumb to see through its obvious meaning was a story of fellatio.  Even the chorus of ‘lol, lol, lollipop, lol, lol was the very simulation of the tongue movements of the act.  And the Girl Group got away with singing it to prepubescent girls over the radio.  Of course, the girls were Black to further camouflage objections.

At the same time there was a great horror of oral sex which inexplicably dissolved to become the accepted norm in a very few short years.  Perhaps Lenny Bruce helped.  ‘My Boy Lolllipop’ probably had its share in dissolving the horror.  The horror was so great at the time that the most celebrated criminal case of the era involved Caryl Chessman who had been given the death sentence for forcing women to suck him off while on dates.  At the time murderers were walking after serving a mere two or three years so the severity of Chessman’s death sentence demonstrates the detestation in which oral sex was held.

Yisraeli along with Lenny Bruce and other malcontents thus wanted to convert the US into a nation of cocksuckers.  Suffice it to say, they succeeded.  Thus, while his sidekick, Zion, was trying to produce successful records Yisraeli would seek out the most subversive lyrics.

In the name of social justice he would also seek to promote Black acts.  While appearing benevolent he was really trying to stick it to the goyim by making them do what they didn’t want to do.  Besides in racist America Blacks were indulged by letting them get away with indecencies that Whites weren’t.  No White artist could possibly have gotten away with a recording called ‘Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box’ but nobody was going to call a Black on it.  Thus, while appearing to be the progressive agent of change Yisraeli indulged his most criminal proclivities.  The role of the Negro in the record business was very much that of the hope of White entrepreneurs to leap frog over the backs of Blacks to fortune.

There was a certain type of beaten down White man whose only hope was to exploit someone more beaten down than he.  Thus, his natural prey was the Negro.  White women loved to sleep with Negroes because it was the ultimate in sinning.  It transgressed the ultimate taboo.

White people thought Blacks were mysterious, inexplicable, living in a mysterious uninhibited primitive consciousness that was the ultimate in freedom.  The White entrepreneurs who were as denied and repressed as the Blacks they exploited found excitement in robbing these people who while taboo like themselves were yet so free to express themselves.

Yisraeli was of this White school.  He both hated and loved the Black man but mostly he despised him.  In his own way William Morris exemplified the Black man to Yisraeli.  He was immensely talented yet so weak that he drowned himself in liquor.  He thus made himself despicable to Yisraeli’s immense satisfaction.  Yehouda was both disappointed and pleased that Morris failed him.

Then too, the record industry was inherently dishonest.  The record labels cheated the artists, stole from songwriters and generally refused to disburse any money they didn’t have to.  Blacks thought they were singled out but this was not true; the labels cheated everyone.  They viewed the artist as a resource for exploitation, something like a gold mine, to get the maximum return.  You didn’t share the revenues with the gold mine hence the artists were treated like dirt.

The labels believed that they did all the work from production to distribution to promotion.  The artist provided nothing but the inspiration which had cost him nothing.  They could see no reason why he should be paid.  If he wanted to make money then as they had made him famous for nothing he could cash in on his celebrity by getting up on the stage and shaking it around.  They really wanted a cut of the artists performance money too but they couldn’t figure out how to get it.  Oh well, the performances were free publicity for their records.

This aspect of being able to cheat and steal was very appealing to Yisraeli’s damaged psyche.  No artist was ever to get a dime in royalties out of Our Lady Of The Blues.

On this particular night Yehouda and Showbaby were sitting around the Horseshoe sipping their ginger ales, yes, ginger ales, both men were too astute to become drunks, talking over prospects when it occurred to Yisraeli that Trueman should be coming back soon.  This was in late February 1958 just before the payroll bomb burst on the Teufelsdreck.

‘He’ll be back soon.’  Yisraeli said moodily out of the blue.

‘Who?’  Zion said reflectively tossing peanuts in his mouth.

‘Who else?  Dewey Trueman.’  Was Yisraeli’s moody reply.

‘Oh, yeah.  Him.’ Zion said with just a hint of disgust.

‘I don’t know why you let that guy bother you so much.  Try to think about business.’

‘He killed my son.’

‘Umm.  I forgot.’  Zion said who, as many times as he had asked, could never get a satisfactory answer as to how Trueman had killed Michael.

‘Well, I haven’t.  That sort of thing has got to be punished.’  Yisraeli growled as he got up to make a toilet run.

‘The past is the past.’ Zion thought to himself as Yehouda walked away.  The he raised his eyes as the door opened and a man pushed through.  A big fellow.  Six-four with the girth of a two hundred eighty pounder.  Taking a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness of the sleazy bar the man saw William Morris at the piano, a slatternly white woman doing some ‘sensuous’ gyrations on the stage above the bartender and Zion sitting on a stool at the round of the bar.

‘Busy tonight.’  He jeered to himself.

Bert Torbric was a meeter and greeter.  He operated on the principle that the more people you knew the better the chances of latching onto something good.  He had had one such success several years previously, as he told it, when he had been at a session with a couple composers.  On that evening they had come up with ‘Melancholy Baby.’  Torbric had made a couple unwanted but accepted phrasing suggestions for which he demanded and received one third credit, although unacknowledged on the records, hence, even though his name didn’t appear, he considered himself a composer.

That was the extent of Torbric’s talent, however, never forgetting that success he was always on the alert for an opportunity in the music biz.

As his eyes focused he recognized Showbaby Zion sitting alone on his stool.  Sitting down beside him he joked:  Showbaby!  Out slumming?

Showbaby laughed good naturedly.  All the bar habitues humored each other.

‘This place is too good for slumming, I can show you places Bert.  What’s a high society type like you doing down here?’

‘Oh, you know.  I was in the neighborhood.’

Bert ordered a double Jack Daniels on the rocks and was swapping comments on the crusty old bird swinging her tassels in figure eights when a figure with the faint odor of the toilet swooped up ghostlike and silently slid onto the stool beside Torbric.

‘Mr. Show.’  He said around Torbric.

‘Hello, Yehouda.’  Showbaby said, getting the drift.  ‘By the way, this is a guy I know- Bert Torbric.’  His introduction and tone indicated Bert wasn’t to be taken seriously.

But, Yehouda Yisraeli was a crafty guy who always had his eyes out for the main chance.  As he put it:  ‘You never know when a guy might turn up useful.’  Still, he noted Showbaby’s opinion.

He gave Bert a warmer hello then the introduction warranted.  As it was, both Showbaby and Yehouda were right but for different reasons.  Yehouda, who always ferreted out as much information about an acquaintance as he could threw out a polite:  ‘How’s the wife and kids?’ 

Jackpot!

Bet didn’t wear the ring but he answered:  ‘Great.  Just great.  You know, my oldest son just got out of boot camp.  I’m pretty darn proud of him.  That kid’s going to have a great career in the Navy.

‘Just out of boot camp?  You don’t say.’

‘Yeh.  We aren’t losing him though; his ship is based down in San Diego so he’ll be home at least on most weekends.’

‘What did he get, one of those big carriers?’  Asked Yehouda who knew more about the ships of the fleet than the Secretary of the Navy.

No, he got one of the smaller ones, which is OK, they’re easier on a kid than the big ones, a Destroyer Escort, DE 666, the USS Teufelsdreck.  Strange name.’

Yehouda’s lip froze to his glass, his color rose, his temples throbbed as he recognized opportunity.  ‘Did you say the USS Teufelsdreck?’

‘Yeh, yeh.  My boy’ll be home for weekends.’

‘Well then, so will mine.’ Yehouda said to himself in a sarcastic undertone.  ‘The lord has delivered my enemy unto me and I will smite him hip and thigh.’

‘You didn’t ask me about my son.’  He interrupted Bert who was launching into his ‘Melancholy Baby’ story.

‘…had a hand…you have a son?  How is he?’

‘He’s dead.’ Yisraeli blurted out for dramatic effect but came across as a macabre comic.  ‘I had a son, past tense, I no longer do.  He was murdered by a pervert.’

‘You don’t say.  Sliced him up; shot him?’

‘No, worse than that.  He was forced off the road at high speed.  It was horrible.  His head was buried up the shoulders in the mud of the ditch.;

‘Oh, horrible.’

‘Yes.  He was the only son I had.’

‘Well, his killer is probably rotting in jail now.’

‘No.  It was a deserted road and the lousy cops said there wasn’t enough evidence to bring the son-of-a-bitch to justice but I know.

‘You know what?’

‘You mean who.  It was this dirty little pervert by the name of Dewey Trueman.’

‘You mean he was a pervert because he ran your son off the road?’

‘Oh, no, no.  No! This guy is bad seed all the way.  Insanity has been in his family for generations.  I’m sure.  His old man is rotting in the Michigan hospital for the criminally insane at this very moment.  I helped put him there.  Everybody knew Trueman was going to do something we just didn’t know what or when.  Kids from broken homes are all like that anyway.  They’re just bombs ticking away.  You will hardly believe how depraved he is.  He was caught in the act of giving a row of guys blow jobs outside a roller skating rink.’

Bert Torbric was horrified as he well should have been.

‘Umm, a monster and a pervert at the same time.  He should be put away, in an insane asylum, like his father.  I agree with you that stuff is hereditary.’

‘Yes.  He should be put away.’  Yisraeli said seizing on the idea.  Knowing his own mental anguish it would, the thought, be a great balm to his emotions if he could know that Trueman was serving his time as a surrogate.

‘You won’t believe this Bert.’  Yisraeli said in his most heartfelt tone.  ‘But, he’s not only in San Diego but your son will be contaminated by serving on the same ship he’s on.’

‘You can’t…the Teufelsdreck?...mean that!’

‘I can and I do.  There must be some way you could help me punish him and save your son from contamination at the same time, isn’t there?’

‘Gee, I don’t know what I could do…wait a minute…maybe there is something.’

‘What?’  Yisraeli’s eyes glistened with hope.

‘Well, a fellow I went to school with, Gerry Godwin, got a Ph.D in psychiatry.  He’s got the right job.  Asylum for the criminally insane at Atascadero…’

‘Oh, yes.’  The idea took Yisraeli’s breath away.  It would be better than killing Trueman.  He knew his own mental turmoil, felt his anguish every minute of every day, there might be considerable balm if he could put Dewey away in an insane asylum.  Just as Yisraeli was trapped in his own blighted mind and couldn’t get out, Trueman would be trapped in an insane asylum with dangerous maniacs unable to get out.  It would be a living hell…and…Yisraeli would know exactly where Trueman was every minute of every day and be able to dwell on it.  It was too perfect.

‘…but, even if you got him in, he would be AWOL and the Navy would just come and get him out.’

‘That’s not necessarily so.  Nobody need know where he is except for us.  He gets put in under a different name, maybe if he did come visit my family…’  Bert said, projecting a scenario, ‘but, he left, say on Saturday, never returned and we haven’t seen him since.  He’s just AWOL.  Who could ever find him?  They wouldn’t know where to look.’

‘Ohhh, yeah.  Yes.  That would be a perfect crime.’

‘Crime?  I thought you said he deserved it.’

‘That’s what I meant, the punishment would perfectly fit his crime.  Can I count on you to do that?’  Yisraeli asked eagerly.

Up to this point Bert Torbric had just been talking.  He now realized how serious Yisraeli was.  If there is money in it he thought, I’ve got a windfall worth more than ‘Melancholy Baby, ever was.

‘Sure.  It could be done, but there’s expenses involved, you know.  I can’t spend my own money for your benefit.

‘It would be for your son’s benefit too.  Well, listen.’  Yisraeli said trying to first get something for nothing.  ‘I’m starting a record company.  Showbaby will be with me and I could use a guy knowledgeable in music like you.  There might be a good paying job in it for a guy like you.’

‘Might be a job, but the expenses are certain, Yehuda.  I might be interested in helping you direct this record company that you might start but I would have to cover my expenses.’

‘How much do you think your expenses would be?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’  Torbric said studying Yisraeli’s potential.  ‘I would think two thousand dollars.’

‘Two thousand dollars?  What would you have to do other than drive up to Atascadero and back?’

‘Say! Listen, Yehouda, I got the contact, I got to ask for a big favor, maybe it’s a big favor, I don’t know.  Besides it takes planning for Chrissakes.  I can’t just collar this bozo, throw him in a car and take him up there.  That’s kidnapping.  He’s gotta volunteer.  I gotta involve my son.  Rome ain’t built in a day.’

‘Uh, huh, well, you know, I’m starting this record company on a shoestring.  How about a thousand?’

‘No.  I’ll need a thousand for me and five hundred for my boy.’

‘Oh geez.’  Yisraeli said, rocking back and forth on his stool in agony.  ‘You’ve got a point.  I don’t say you don’t have a point.  But gosh, how about twelve-fifty.  I don’t know how I can come up with more than that.  I don’t even know how I can come up with that much.’

Tory Torbric wasn’t going to get anything anyway so Bert assented.  Twelve hundred fifty dollars to put a man in an asylum for the criminally insane for life.  What a bargain.

The men shook hands as Bert studied Yisraeli in an effort to determine if he was for real.  Ascertaining that he was he sat back deciding to await the issue.

Yisraeli shortly after excused himself to drive home in an exaltation of pleasure to work out the details for Trueman’s incarceration.   He would be there on the pier when the Teufelsdreck was welcomed back to the States by the dependents.

A Review:

John Pearson's 

The Profession Of Violence

by

R.E. Prindle



John Pearson

Pearson, John:  The Profession of Violence, The inside story of the twin brothers who ruled the London underworld. 1973, The Saturday Review Press.

Let us say the inspiration for this essay is John Pearson’s 1973 book.  My struggle is trying to put the post war period together especially the contribution of England that so influenced the course of the Sixties in the US after 1964.  I think I can use Pearson’s The Profession of Violence as a base. 

The criminal Kray Twins are the subject of Pearson’s biography during the period 1956 to 1968.  No one in England, except for recent immigrants, will have to ask who the Krays were while the vast majority of Americans and Canadians as well as Mexicans will draw a blank.

David Bailey's Portrait of Ronnie (front) and Reggie Kray

Quite simply the Krays- Ronnie and Reggie- were the most fearsome villains in England of the period.  The English refer to their mobsters as villains and truly there was no English Mafia, just a collection of villains under the hegemony of the Krays.  Their notoriety was such that at the height of Swinging London the fashion photographer David Bailey issued a portfolio of photos of England’s scene makers which included the villains Ronnie and Reggie Kray.  David Bailey, who is the subject of Fellini’s movie Blow Up was more influential than one might suppose.  The Krays were, as Bailey recognized, in many ways the epitome of Swinging England; they were mixed into many things.  Their career coincided with the birth of the Sixties and ended in 1968 when they were returned to prison for life thus ending their spectacular career.

David Bailey was criticized for including mere villains in his portfolio, but in fact the Krays made themselves members of the scene as surely as Bailey, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Mary Quant, Twiggy and the rest.  The Krays were on their way to acquiring control of the whole record business when the law brought them down.

Really, then, the Krays are part of the generation that spent their youthful years during the Second World War under very harsh living conditions from the War’s end through the Fifties and still into, at least, the early part of the Sixties.

It is difficult to accurately recreate the effect of the destructive war years on post-war Europe and England.  France and England were mad to involve themselves in Hitler’s crusade against the Soviet Union except as enablers.  The crimes against humanity, the offences against sanity are indescribable.  The agony of Russia, horrible conditions of a Germany actually bombed flat and the genocide against them that followed, Northern France shredded by the march of armies more devastating than a sky filled with locusts, swatches of England bombed flat while the cream of their manhood left over from WWI was destroyed by WWII leaving nations with inferior human resources while hordes of women were condemned to live their lives without men.

And the youth, what desperation they faced growing up, what stunted bodies caused by the lack of nutrition, of nearly a full decade on short rations.  Strict rationing while a Black Market flourished creating  whole new social classes of semi-criminal spivs and wide boys.  And to add insult to injury a compulsive National Service of two years just as they were coming were coming into manhood.  Not a draft of the less fortunate men as in the US but the whole male population.

When National Service ended in 1960 that whole generation born in from 1938 to 1945 were released from the indignities suffered all their lives.  Is it any wonder that the early Sixties in England were characterized as the Swinging Sixties as exuberance burst out all over the place.  Release, release, release.

Even in the depths of their desperation a light crossed the ocean from the US in the character of Elvis Presley.  Hope in human form.  Just as Elvis gave hope to the same age cohort in the US the light of Elvis showed the way for English youth.  Music was the path for poor boys to follow to prosperity.  Naturally the results weren’t even but neither was the talent. 

Those that succeeded had parties where the Groaning Board was truly groaning with all the really good delicacies the earth provided.  Strangely the table was just for show.  To take vengeance on the deprivation of those early years that generation turned up their noses at all that food, refused to eat it, and it went into the garbage.  How many other neuroses and psychoses of those years have had their sources gone unrecognized.

So, the Krays coming into early manhood rose from their difficult conditions, not to mention their origins.  They were from the notorious East End, Bethnal Green, a desperate area since Victorian times.  It was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London.  Ronnie Kray was a certified lunatic, as psychotic as they come.  While twin Brother Reggie lived out his life in prison, Ronnie was in an asylum such as Colney Hatch.

Colney Hatch was a legendary asylum of the Victorian era.  Its name was legendary in my youth.  It was always pronounced Coney Hatch so while in England in 1976 I found myself driving on a street in London where upon looking right I saw a sign saying Colney Hatch.  There it was, the legendary insane asylum.  Colney, not Coney.  Ronnie wasn’t there he was somewhere else.

Thus Ronnie was nuts, his brain probably affected by a serious fever in his childhood, while he exerted a compelling influence over his twin dragging him into infamy as it is told.  The old generation of villains was on the way out by the mid-fifties, the Krays barging into the void to establish their hegemony.

Just as the cadre of 1942-43 wanted to indulge themselves so did the returning soldiers and those that stayed behind.  There was also a fluttering between socialism and Adam Smith economics, sometimes referred to as Capitalism, the name that is more a Communist smear that disguises its true nature.  And the rebuilding of thousands of London’s leveled areas.

It was a time.  Not the very worst of times, but not the best either.  It was depressing whatever the time was.  Is it a coincidence that British youth embraced the US Negro blues as their musical expression?  I don’t think so.

As David Bailey, the fashion photographer, recognized, the Krays were not mere villains.  They emerged from the underworld into the Twilight World between the Under and Overworld just Over world players like Lord Boothby descended into the Twilight world with the Krays.  Caught up into the Twilight World was the whole music industry.  It is bonding of these three worlds, the Under, Over and Twilight worlds that this essay is really about.

As might be expected this volatile mix was bound to explode and explode it did in 1963 in what was called the Profumo Affair.  If anything the Affair exposed the sexual underside of London society.  But not completely .  There was a homosexual underside involving the three worlds and ones of which the Krays or at least Ronnie was central.  And this homosexual underside extended almost universally into the music business.

A little more background.  Gambling had been illegal in England until that magic year of 1960.  In that magic year England legalized gambling.  This Act alone probably did more to create the Twilight World than any other.  Now clubs were established that brought the Under and Over Worlds together, shoulder to shoulder.  Now Ronnie and Reggie felt themselves to be elevated, rubbing shoulders with the Old Nobility, the Upper Crust, the cream of London society.

Lots of people gambled and gambled stupidly.  Prominent for this essay are gamblers like Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles and the premier art dealer of the period, Groovy Bob Fraser.  And binding the whole thing together like a taut rubber band, drugs.  Heroin, cocaine, pot and the whole pharmacopeia.  Uppers and downers.  Society had found the perfect brew to corrupt it completely.  Sex, drugs and gambling.  A soul destroying combination.  A descent into hell. And was this a coincidence?  What should appear at the same time but a nascent Satanism to give definition to the emerging Weltanschauung. 

Criminals always go where the money is, one place the money seemed to be was in the music and recording industry.  Rock and roll, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Donovan.  For younger readers the music world was a different place than today.  It was much smaller with minimal presence on TV and no videos. Hits were not instantaneous world wide but took weeks to get started in a key market like New York or LA and cross country.  London was a separate market just emerging on the larger global stage.  Much of the English repertoire originated in the US and was then recorded by British artists.

After the Beatles hit in the US in 1964 Swinging London furnished the world with its premier rock groups, those already mentioned, The Yardbirds, the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, on the list grows.  Many of these groups were clustered around single managers thus if you co-opted a manager a gaggle of groups came with him.

I wasn’t in the record business in the first surge of English rock but I was by the second from 1967 on.  I owned significant record stores in Eugene and Portland Oregon.  Not world centers but its not what you do but how you do it.  I did it.  It’s not what you see but how you see it.  I saw it.  I never left the Overworld and I never entered the Twilight World but I was positioned to see over the dividers.  I had to deal with Twilight Worlders and brushed against Underworlders.

John Pearson who only provides a base for the essay doesn’t touch on many activities of the Krays.  I’m not sure he wanted to deal with the Krays but as the saying goes, they made an offer….  At any rate Pearson soon realized that he was in deep dangerous waters.  He was learning things he didn’t want to know.  The Krays took  him on in 1967 as the first Sixties were in transition to the second Sixties.  In 1968 the Krays would be behind bars for good.  The Krays are said to have been calling the shots from prison still while Over/Twilight world characters such as the homosexuals Tom Driberg and Lord Boothby were still around and were not less dangerous than the Krays in their own way.  Pearson trimmed his wick accordingly.  Little is said of Boothby and nothing about the homosexual Twilight World.  That would be coming out later.

Homosexuality and Rock and Roll.  Did you ever see Mick Jagger prance or mount his forty foot inflatable penis on stage in front of tens of thousands people?  There’s story here.

2.

So, now, we’re going to have to take an excursion.  It is rather difficult to locate an entry point here but I’m going to select a much overlooked player by the name of Spanish Tony Sanchez.  Tony may not be an unfamiliar name to most, perhaps, while those that know the name may not know the man bearing it or are perhaps hostile because of Tony’s realistic if unflattering books about the Stones:  Up And Down With The Rolling Stones and I Was Keith Richard’s Drug Dealer.  The latter is a variation of the former adding material but not a different book.  Tony also had a relationship with the chanteuse Marianne Faithfull.  Altogether he is a unifying factor in the story.

Tony as a teenager was fascinated by the Underworld, so he decided to become a villain.  Naturally he took an entry level job at one of the clubs as a protégé of Albert Dimes, a villain from the old guard.  While sitting around a bar before work one day he struck up a conversation with the rising art dealer, Robert Fraser.  Known as Groovy Bob Fraser, he was more well known than Tony while also being an influential player.  Fraser apprenticed in the art world in the NYC of Andy Warhol.  For those not familiar with Warhol, and believe me, there are many, he was the foremost Pop artist of the Sixties and the most renowned of that group.  Fraser then joined the Pop movement introducing Pop art to England upon his return in 1962.

As he and Tony talked at the bar, conversation turned, as they did at that time, to drugs.  Seeing an opening Tony related that he had access to drugs, heroin being Fraser’s drug of choice, and could supply as much as was needed.  There is no friendship so fast as that between a dealer and his addict.  Tony and Bob became fast friends.

Groovy Bob Fraser ran a sort of musical salon.  His art dealings were an entrée into the rock scene.  He began to provide artworks to Paul McCartney of the Beatles.  Having established that connection while being able to supply drugs, at a profit of course, to his circle of rockers his circle of rockers grew.  When Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was drawn into his circle he tried to sell him art works too.  While Mick was wary of investing in art he and the Stones as a group were just coming on so Mick really didn’t have the money, but he did have money for drugs.  One doesn’t put off buying drugs just because the funds are low.  Groovy Bob had ins with the rock community.

He was not only an addict, but a homosexual and not only that but a gambler; three of the most potent human failures.

Now, in 1960 England legalized gambling.  The Krays were attracted to gambling as easy money.  Through a questionable chain of circumstances, they were criminals, an early period ramshackle gambling club called Esmeralda’s Barn found a way into the Krays’ hands.  If you see pictures of Esmeralda’s Barn it is less than appealing compared even to the Vegas of the time or London clubs as they became.  As shabby as it was it was the no. 1 club.

Of course, Groovy Bob could be found trying to find his groove at the tables.  I don’t know why they call it gambling because it is a sure bet that you lose.  Insuperable odds are against you.  Oh, sure the odds are that a player can have a hot streak and win but it is a certainty that if you begin with a certain amount it must diminish to nothing.

With Bob’s luck he ran in negative numbers hoping to make two negatives a positive as by some miracle they do on paper.  Bob wrote paper backed by nothing.  As was inevitable in those circumstances the Krays  were holding a lot of Bob’s worthless paper.  Now the circle enlarges.  Spanish Tony believing himself to be a villain of some worth offered to intercede for friend Bob with the notorious villains Ronnie and Reggie Kray.  Here’s why Pearson titles his book The Profession of Violence.  Ronnie was famous for the stunt of forcing a sword crosswise into the mouth of a man called David Litvinoff giving him a permanent rictus sardonicus.  They dangled men out windows of tall buildings by their ankles, unpredictable fellows, or predictable, depending on how you looked at it.

Tony entered this lion’s den, still an apprentice villain, and came out smiling believing he had worked out a deal.  The deal involved making a percentage of the checks good but that involved having money so the ever wily Groovy bob continued to be evasive.  No, no, don’t get up for a potty run this is just getting good.

Pearson probably had good reasons for leaving this sort of stuff out of the book.  On the one hand he may not have known about it and on the other he may not have thought it important. While as with the subject of Lord Boothby that we’ll leave for later, he may have thought it expedient to maintain a discreet silence.

One of the Krays many ‘business’ ventures was the protection racket that was working out pretty well for them.  They had a deal with the US Mafia that when Mob artists such as Judy Garland or Johnny Ray were visiting England the Kays provided protection for them.  The American mob had their claws into a large stable of entertainers.  They suggested that maybe the Krays might find that lucrative in England.  The Krays did think it would be lucrative  and acting on somewhat less than the spur of  the moment went about trying to take over the rock and roll scene.

The Krays could not operate above ground as they had felony convictions and so were unable to obtain licenses;  however, older brother Charlie Kray who had a clean record could.  So they kept Charlie clean and recruited an old Bethnal Green chum Laurie O’ Leary to run clubs.  They made their move.  As part of their move they conceived the notion of taking over the Beatles from Brian Epstein.

This may sound far fetched at first, but consider:  Epstein had all three knocks against him.  He was a homosexual, a druggie, and a gambler who played Esmeralda’s Barn.  He was fair game.  The Krays had been advised by wiser heads than theirs to forget attempting he Beatles.  There were numerous good reasons why it was ill advised but, knock, knock, knock, the Krays had all three against themselves too.

So, disregarding all the negatives the Krays went ahead.  First they called in Spanish Tony because they knew that Groovy Bob had an in with McCartney and that meant the Beatles.  They made a deal through Tony that Fraser’s debts would be forgiven if he could reel the Beatles in.

One objection that had been raised to them by the wisest criminal head in the British Isles was that above ground businesses were much more difficult businesses to run than knock ‘em on the head criminal businesses.  The devil was in the details.

Having Charlie and Laurie O’ Leary above ground Ronnie and Reggie thought they had that angle covered.

I think Groovy Bob was trying the delicate job of bringing the Beatles in but deciding the proper course of action was interpreted as procrastination by the Krays so they decided on more direct action.  They called Brian Epstein for a sit down to discuss transferring title to them.

Well, you know, things that seem so simple when you don’t have all the facts can get pretty complicated.  The truth of the matter is that Brian ‘Knock Three Times’ Epstein had bitten off more than he could chew.

It seems certain that neither Epstein or even anyone in the English record industry could have imagined that the Beatles would ever become the worldwide phenomenon that they did.  Heck, they were the first of the kind.  The Beatles opened the door but I doubt any group since has captured the hearts and minds of all but a few the way they did.  Their Sgt. Peppers album issued in the summer of 1967 became a core strut in the psyche of more than one generation that summer.  I would rate it as the most influential pop icon of all time.  Today they are even celebrating the fiftieth year since its release with all kinds of hoopla.

It is doubtful that Epstein even imagined success on an English scale of any magnitude.  In all likelihood he had a crush on John Lennon as Brian was a homosexual.  All the aspiring musicians wanted to have a record released, a record…the Holy Grail and not that hard to obtain.  Having met Lennon and learned that that was John’s grail Epstein signed the unheard of group from the English backwater town of Liverpool and then went to London to see if he could get a 45 rpm pressed.  Albums weren’t that big at that time.

Now, consider, the Beatles had no reputation outside Liverpool.  Was it wishful thinking, invincible hope, that Epstein actually thought he was going to get a record label to sign this bunch of boisterous unknowns to a contract?  It just isn’t that easy.  But Brian who ran the NEMS record store in Liverpool was a big account so maybe that opened the door.  You know, it’s not that big a deal to humor an account, do it, and then he’ll go away.

One imagines that Brian’s thinking was that John gets his record as a present and then Brian would proposition him.  There are reports that Brian was successful in this wish.  One can imagine his and the label’s eyes popping wide when the Beatles hit and big in England.  Recreating the push in the US seemed more than difficult, English groups and rockers had had no future in the US .  They just didn’t have it.  Tommy Steele, a big thing before the Beatles in England didn’t even make a sound when he flopped in the US.

When the Beatles were going to try the US it was a forgone conclusion that there was no hope that they would succeed.  Indeed, before their arrival in the US an album full of songs on Veejay, a nondescript label, was completely ignored.  The EMI subsidiary in the US, Capitol Records, had refused the album.  Nineteen sixty-four was apparently their destiny and the result was like tornadoes and a hurricane converging.  They owned the airwaves with the same songs that had been rejected on Veejay.

Epstein has been derided for not being adept enough to take full advantage of the situation.  Caught in the perfect storm in his little canoe, what could he do?  He had no experience outside Liverpool, a mere babe in the woods not only in London but the whole world.  How could he navigate without a compass?  Who was there that could guide him?  No one in the world was any more prepared than he.

The result was a tragi-comedy.  As fate would have it not only were the Beatles the performers of the century but Lennon and McCartney were the songwriters of the century.  They turned out songs by the ream.  Epstein signed a bunch of non-descript performers, supplied them with Lennon & McCartney songs and they all had hits.  Epstein seemed like a genius but he was only a lucky bum.

And what did it get him?  He was sitting across from the two biggest villains in England, murderers, demanding he give them the Beatles.

Well, they didn’t know what Epstein knew.  He had gambled away his own money as well as a large chunk of the Beatles.  His control would expire in a few months and he feared the Beatles wouldn’t resign at which point he would be in ruins.  Brian Epstein did not have an ace in the hole.

The Krays, their blood up, couldn’t understand that NO was a one syllable word.  They called Brian in for another tete a tete.  We don’t know what was said.  What we do know is that Brian drove straight home, locked himself in his room and was found dead the next morning.  Whatever was said in the face to face it prevented Brian from imagining a tomorrow.

-3-

How to get the context right?  In the course of their careers the Krays in a limited manner were integrated into the Twilight World between the Underworld and the Overworld.  The Profumo Affair, mentioned before was only a tip of the iceberg.  The whole iceberg might be represented by the rise of Satanism which by the early Sixties was slowly surfacing.  The basis of the Satanism was the former leader of the cult The Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley.  Crowley died in 1947.  His cult grew.

His cult was based on sex magic which aligned him with Freud and Freud’s acolyte the sex magician, Wilhelm Reich.  Thus during the Fifties and into Sixties this threesome exerted a powerful influence on sexual mores.  Thus, from about the year 1900 Crowley’s ideas and practices, joined by those of Freud and Reich, were slowly filtering into English society corroding the Godly morality into the Satanic.  The manipulation is represented in many ways.  A transition point from the Godly religion to the Satanic religion happened in 1966.  In that year Time magazine in the US published an issue with the cover asking the question, Is God Dead?  The answer of course was Yes.  This caused a short uproar from the Christians which was probably suppressed.  Unnoticed for what it was was a novel titled Rosemary’s Baby published in the same year followed by a movie version in the next year in which Rosemary gave birth to the Son of Satan, little Andy.  Thus, the symbolic transfer from the Godly to the Satanic was effected.  It is no coincidence that the Manson Affair took place in 1969 in Los Angeles. 

It may be a coincidence but the Sgt. Pepper’s LP of the Beatles was released in 1967 with its cover that amazed the world.  The cover has been a topic of conversation ever since, now fifty years later.  Now the instigator for the design of the cover was Groovy Bob Fraser who was at time under pressure from the Krays to deliver the Beatles to them.

The hard work was done by two other artists, Peter Blake and  Jill Haworth with possible input from McCartney.  The cover is open to interpretation and been interpreted in different ways, none very satisfactory.  I have little knowledge of a correct reading of the cover and offer this as a mere possibility, maybe unconscious on the part or the artists but this interpretation fits the social conditions of the times as well.

The official explanation is that it is an allegory for the Beatles’ transition from the Mop Tops to a serious R&R band.  This is certainly valid.  The cover shows the Beatles as dead and buried along with their ghosts looking on standing to the left of their reincarnation as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Still, as there is also a transition from the Godly to the Satanic the scene might also be read as the death of God, as the Beatles are in somber colors and the birth of Satan in the gaudy colors and bizarre outfits of Sgt. Pepper’s.  Remember the album was released in 1967 after the Time cover, the book Rosemary’s Baby and more or less simultaneously  with Roman Polansky’s movie version.

Filling the rest of the cover is a gallery of 70 historical figures.  While these are supposed to represent the Beatles’ close influences actually only 20 some were recommended by the Beatles while one of Lennon’s choices, Adolf Hitler, was rejected.  That means that the rest of the pictures were chosen by Groovy Bob and the artists Peter Blake and Jill Haworth, with possible input by others.  If one examines the carefully they make the major influences of the English mind of the generation with generous overlap to the US.

At the left top of the cover, overlooking the assemblage, is the dominating face of Aleister Crowley.  So, an immediate connection with Satanism is made.  Running through the photos and their portrayals a rather dark influence on the mind of the generation is indicated.

This is perhaps to be expected given the youthful experiences of the generation.  It comes clearer why the English musicians chose the Negro blues as their means of expressing their psyches.  Their psyches were borne down by the sorrows of the Forties and Fifties.  Remember the generation only began expressing itself at the end of the Fifties and the beginning of the Sixties.  Both the Fifties and the Sixties are sacred decades.

While the Beatles began as chirpers they rapidly turned dark and brooding.  And that in such a manner that Charles Manson is said by some to be their disciple.  Emerging just behind them were the Rolling Stones, a truly dark and nasty group that openly embraced Satanism.  They also passed through Groovy Bob’s Academy of Darkness.  Here they especially came into contact with avatars of darkness.

As noted Bob Fraser spent the first couple of years in NYC learning his trade.  He met another avatar of darkness there, Andy Warhol.  Into the group came the founder of the US Church of Satan, Anton La Vey from San Francisco.  Also inducted into Satanism in a serious way was the Angel of the Hipsters, Marianne Faithfull.  She would be a sort of guide for her paramour Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

Let us leave the Fraser crowd for a while and return to the Krays who would become involved with the Fraser set.  While the Twilight World of the hipster underground was becoming enmeshed in the toils of Satanism, the ideology also influenced the Overworld.  The Profumo Affair expressed the Overground political cadre mixed with the Twilight World, the Underworld and the Homosexual underground as epitomized by Lord Boothby.

The Homosexual underground was especially nasty while intimately involved with the Underworld of the Krays.  The homosexual influence in England during the Sixties is astounding.  This group, that included the politician Tom Driberg who was influential with Mick Jagger was especially enamored with young boys and men,  thus guilty of innumerable charges of statutory rape.  One of their sources for boys came through Ronnie Kray who had access to boys from orphanages.  The boys were checked out used and returned, something like a lending library.  On at least one occasion a boy was murdered, dismembered, stuffed into a suitcase and left by the side of the road.  There was an attempt to expose Boothby but he was able to publicly defy and chastise the newspaper that tried.

The matter came to a head when Ronnie Kray lost his.  By 1966-67 the Krays were riding high, open celebrities, seeming invulnerable to the law.  But then, in a fit of exuberance Ronnie thought himself superior to Boothby, threatening him and knocking him about.  Unrestrained violence was verboten in Boothby’s homosexual underground.  So, in beating Boothby Ronnie signed the Kray’s arrest warrant.  The good reason for arresting the Krays was the murder of a villain, Jack McVie, and the means for putting the Twins away for life.  The real reason, I maintain, is that when Ronnie used violence on Boothby, the latter realizing his danger turned the police loose on the gangsters to do their job.   As his procurer, Boothby may have been protecting Ronnie.

The Kray reign of terror, then, effectively came to an end in 1968 when they received life sentences.  In the meantime they had begun their takeover attempt of the music industry.  I am going to concentrate on only one thread, that of Robert Fraser along with Spanish Tony Sanchez.

Groovy Bob through Warhol was into Satanism.  He brought Kenneth Anger of LA over.  Anger was an all around weirdo and bore  L-U-C-I-F-E-R tattooed in big letters on his chest.  He fancied he was the Great Satan.  As a Satanist he was associated with Anton LaVey of SF.  Also a homosexual he made a series of short films that allowed him to bill himself as an underground filmmaker.  His films aren’t much but people who like that sort of thing think they’re great.

Through Fraser Anger became familiar with Marianne Faithfull and hence Mick Jagger.  Marianne especially became involved in Satanism on the one hand through the Satanic Process Church Of The Final Judgment and on the other being familiar with Satanic literature including ETA Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixir and Bulgakov’s The Master And Margarita.  She apparently really internalized the books.

It should be noted that when the Stones are mentioned here it really means the two principals Jagger and the guitarist Keith Richards.  The other three Stones are not involved in the first two’s escapades.  Of them, Keith became a total junkie with substantial needs.  There to fill those needs was Fraser’s heroin dealer Spanish Tony.  The Stones (read:  Jagger and Richards) gave him the nickname simply because he was Spanish.

Tony then became Keith’s main supplier and almost a member of the inner circle very closely connected.  As mentioned one of the titles of his books was I Was Keith Richards’ Drug Dealer.  Now, Keith put Tony on salary at 250 pounds a week or 18,000 pounds a year, an astonishingly high salary for the times.  Keith was not known for being that generous.  There must have been a reason.  Unable to get their hooks into the Beatles I’m speculating that they forced Tony on Keith’s payroll and were taking a substantial cut of Tony’s pay as a way to get a hook into the Stones or at least part of the take.  At any rate Tony became for all purposes a sixth stone while appropriating Mick’s castoff Marianne for his own.

At one time Tony set up a club with gang money provided either by Albert Dimes or the Krays called the Vesuvius.  As many key music figures attended the opening it may be assumed that whoever was behind Tony thought that it would become a real money maker.  It didn’t pan out.  Tony didn’t know how to manage it.

Eventually Tony’s presence wore thin while with the Kray’s in prison control became a little looser.  Conditions between Keith and Tony became strained and more distant.  Keith was living in Switzerland while Tony was in England.  Keith still needed his dope so he would have Tony fly to Switzerland with a supply.  Tony wasn’t a fool so he was appropriately suspicious of a set up.  He didn’t carry himself, he employed a mule for that.

He also feared for his life thinking, probably with good reason that Keith would have him killed.  Indeed, Ronnie died before Reggie and Reggie Kray died in 2000.  Tony immediately faked his death and disappeared.  So far no record of Tony’s death exists.  Keith, of course, is going along as merrily as ever.  Although, Anita Pallenberg’s recent demise was taken hard by Keith.  Our condolences.

-4-

It should be noted that nothing of this is reported by Pearson as he may not have been aware of portions of it while much of it occurred after 1973 when his book was published.  When he says that he was learning things he didn’t want to know perhaps the Boothby and Satanist aspects are what he is talking about or perhaps he knew little or nothing about either.  At present there is a fair amount of information about the homosexual network that revolved around Boothby while, so far as my researches have taken me there is not much about Robert Fraser and his Satanist influence on the scene.  I have seen nothing relating Satanism to the Sgt. Pepper’s cover although there is evidence that McCartney knew something about the Satanist scene as he should have from association with Fraser.

It is important to know that there are degrees of familiarity.  For instance, by the late Sixties, Satanism was in the air.  I, for instance, heard references but I found it incredible that anyone could believe in the existence of Satan at that late date.  I thought it was like an interest in the Rosicrucians or some such.  I know people who evidently were familiar with the Satanist Anton LaVey but I had never heard of him to that point while if I had I had no interest and if I had I wouldn’t have had the time or inclination to search further.

Yet, looking back, Satanism was quite strong.  As far as I was concerned the strong connection of Jimmy Page, the guitarist for Led Zeppelin was merely rumor.  As I was to learn, not so.  The Eagles’ Hotel California song refers to La Vey but it made no connection with me although many were in awe of it.  When I began to study the Beatles, Stones and British rock scene the Satanism became more real.

While one may think that it was only rock and roll the fact of the matter is that the rock groups and personnel were educating a generation or two and teaching them Satanic ways while disparaging God.  Drugs, sex, Satanism, revolutions and rock n’ roll, a neat package.  Massive stadium filled concerts.  Hypnotic rhythms, the madness of crowds, suggestive lyrics, wild hysteria in the stands, a perfect storm for implanting post hypnotic directions.  The Rolling Stones were probably the leaders.  The apex of the whole thing, from the English side, occurred in 1966-67.  That was really the end or the beginning of the end of Swinging London.  As the Stones sang:  It’s all over now.

Two key events were the Redlands bust that sent Jagger and Richards to jail, albeit for a very brief time while Groovy Bob Fraser was caught in the snare and did some real time.  He never recovered on his release in 1968 so as the lynch pin of that particular musical moment, things fell apart and English R&R entered a new and particularly potent phase that might be called The Sixties Part 2.

In the US where the Fifties style of R&R had been blown away by the British Invasion a recovery began in ’66-’67 that restored some balance while leaving Swinging England behind. The Hippie phase began that triumphed on both sides of the Atlantic.

To return to London.  Satanism had taken hold and a man named Donald Cammell decided to make a movie portraying the seedy side of London and R&R and did a bang up job of it.  He chose as his lead actor Mick Jagger and some of the Stones entourage.  Marianne Faithfull was slated to play the female lead but she contracted pregnancy and was replaced by Keith’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg.

Donald Cammell was a lost soul.  His father had been an intimate of the arch Satanist Aleister Crowley and had written a biography of him.  Donald Cammell had known Crowley.  One might say he was raised on Satanism.  At one time a successful portrait painter, he had grown weary of the discipline seeking another side of life out there on the wild side in the degenerate world of Bohemianism.

From painting he edged into movie making.  He was something of an auteur playing out his subconscious on the screen and not all so subconscious.  He was at the time married to Debra Dixon, a model of some taste.  Not much has been written about her, but she seems like a subject of some interest but perhaps few sales.

Cammell’s movie unites the most significant trends of the Sixties.  If you have the requisite background knowledge it makes for a better movie.  The Sixties had seen a Negro invasion of England mostly from the islands of the West Indies.  As was expected there was resentment and resistance to this invasion that was overruled by this what? evangelical religious notion of the brotherhood of man and White guilt for having conquered the world?  Who are these devious people who have infiltrated the power centers of the world in such a way that they can negate the will of the majority.  Who can force on the majority their Weltanschauung that defies all human nature?  It seems to be their will that as the West had conquered all peoples that those peoples will now invade the West and destroy its civilization.  Who are they?  What are their wellsprings of power?  Still, while Negroes kept on coming there was no place for them to live.  No Englishman wanted to rent to them.

The problem was solved, in part, by an enterprising Jew whose English name was Peter Rachman.  Rachman too had survived the war but was permanently ditso by it although according to his biographer Shirley Green (Rachman:  The Slum Landlord Whose Name Became A Byword For Evil) the people who knew him well spoke well of him, but the people who knew him well were sleazy people too.  He probably didn’t have much of a notion of how people perceived what he was doing.

He finagled decrepit properties which were well beyond the fixer upper stage of deterioration, well into the tear down stage, of which there appears to have been plethora in the Notting Hill area and rented them piecemeal to the Negroes.  As they had little money Rachman would rent out each room of each house, perhaps to two or three tenants, he would rent the toilet as a separate residence.  It was amazing how many people he could pack into a falling down house.  Much of the rental money came from government subsidization. 

The Negro men had no trouble finding White women to cohabit with them, then put out on the streets as prostitutes; in fact the two key women in the Profumo Affair came from this environment while pros Mandy Rice was Rachman’s mistress.  The house Cammell used in the film was one of Rachman’s located on Powis Square in Notting Hill.

  As a Bohemian Cammell was also interested in crime, as a Kray type criminal is a co-protagonist with the Jagger lead.  The actor James Fox was required to immerse himself in the gangster life style for months under the tutelage of David Litvinoff, he who had his mouth widened by Ronnie’s sword.  It was a devastating experience that sidelined him from acting for years.

Jagger plays Turner, a rock star whose career has entered the downhill slide.  His living in Notting Hill was proof enough of how far downhill he had slid.  So, in an amazing but degenerate, Satanic, way Cammell ties the whole period together.  The images are accurate portrayals of the ideals of the class on both sides of the Atlantic.  While the movie was filmed in 1967, production problems delayed its release until 1970, then heavily edited, even expurgated, by which time its impact was lost.

The second key event was the Redlands bust that took place at Keith’s Redlands house in Sussex.  The reporting of this event usually reflects amazement that the police would arrest drug users.  Drugs were illegal.  Everyone in the US who used marijuana lived in fear of being arrested.  The sentences were draconian.  Paranoia was one of the most used words of the decade.  People got incredibly long sentences for possessing one joint.  Murderers were released during the Sixties after serving perhaps only three years put a pot smoker could disappear for decades.

Anyone as high profile as the Rolling Stones who were synonymous with heroin and drug use in general, rather exaggerated or not, ought to have been aware that they were under surveillance.  There are murky circumstances surrounding their bust but then there may be murky circumstances surrounding any bust.  A couple of people are sitting smoking on a rock in the middle of a forest when a policeman strolls up?  Well, right.

In the case of the Stones’ bust they were in Keith’s isolated house making no disturbance when a couple dozen cops burst in.  Yes, somebody must have notified the police.  It is not my intention to go into the details of the bust as they are well described in several books.  In fact, Simon Wells wrote a 300 pager about it:  Butterfly On A Wheel, The Great Rolling Stones Drug Bust.  A good demystifying account can be found in Simon Spence’s history of Andrew Oldham’s Immediate Records label in the chapter It’s All Over Now.

What is important for this essay is Mick Jagger’s reaction to the bust.

-5-

The difficulty here is not what happened but the underlying psychology.  The world as it existed before WWII had disappeared by war’s end.  The generations that spanned WWI and II enduring the extreme economic uncertainties of the thirties had left their mark on those generations.  The Generation from 1938 to 1945 that became aware in the fifties knew nothing of what their fathers and mothers experienced while they reacted to the world that existed to their senses, thus there was no gradual transition through generations.  The interconnectedness had been cut off cleanly and sharply as the post-war world began.

The old forms, especially musical forms died away while the post-war musical forms gradually shaped into the music of rock and roll. That musuc was alien to the war and pre-war generations, which had stopped evolving under the stresses of memories of the Depression and WWII.  Thus, there were not only the normal generational differences but youth was virtually a different species, indeed, the name teenagers first came into use at this time.  The older generations did not want to share power with a generation they couldn’t understand and actually despised so the up and coming young were shunned by the older generations who couldn’t understand what the younger generation ‘wanted.’

This was made clear to us when Jagger fresh from jail after the bust was summoned to a meeting, delivered by helicopter, with the people who were basically persecuting him and demanded that Jagger tell them, the older generation, exactly and specifically what his generation wanted so they could give it and understand what was going on so the conflict could be ended.  Of course, Jagger was no spokesman for the generation, he was just a singer in a rock and roll band.  I’m sure he hadn’t a clue about what was puzzling them while he obviously had no answers.

My understanding of it was that the generation didn’t want anything out of the ordinary, we just wanted to live our lives in the manner we chose.  There wasn’t anything to understand.

The world as presented to the generation was just different than the pre-war and war that the older generations were trying to replicate in this different world.  While they had their Depression of which we knew nothing, we were growing up in the shadow of Hiroshima.  The A-bomb and instant annihilation was an ever present threat.  So they mocked Jagger for not being the spokesman of the generation and derogatively dismissed him.  While he arrived stylishly on a helicopter they now showed him the back door to exit and find his own way home.   It really was enough to piss Jagger off especially as he had just gotten out of jail.

Now, Jagger and the generation had become aware about 1954-55, after a childhood of desperation and deprivation.  Having endured that they were faced with their eighteenth and nineteenth years in the enforced servitude of the armed forces, putting their lives on the line.  That was a bleak way to begin life.  Who needed it?

Perhaps the more sensitive turned inward into the world of music, sex and drugs and, more importantly, revolution.  When, in the movie The Wild Ones, the actor Marlon Brando was asked what he was revolting against, he replied, Whaddya got?  While that line got a laugh it was probably the truest answer Brando’s character could give.  We wanted a way out but we couldn’t find the door.

When the National Service ended in 1960 the generation was freed from an odious obligation.  Jagger and Richards were freed from that servitude.  They joined the band that Brian Jones was forming.  It appears that Jagger was the only member who was political and he was Communist/Socialist.  He attended the London School of Economics, the LSE, a Communist college while the band was developing in 1963.  There is an anomaly in Jagger’s behavior at this time that needs explaining.

David Bailey, the Vogue fashion photographer, was also a revolutionist, I’m not aware of his politics otherwise, or, at least a spectacular hell raiser.  In 1962 Anthony Burgess published his novel, A Clockwork Orange.  The book was made into the movie of the same name in 1971.  The book sold well but the movie was a real game changer.  It is perhaps the most Satanic movie ever made and if not most, right up there in the top tier.  The 1971 movie, directed by Stanley Kubrick was pure evil.

I have read the book but I found it dull and sentimental.  It may be said, I didn’t get it.  The wild boys did, David Bailey did.  He, in conjunction with Jagger bought the movie rights from Burgess.  Further, Bailey had a plan to make a movie.  He went to New York, perhaps to shop the book around and raise money but ended up selling the rights to the artist Andy Warhol, hell raiser deluxe.  Andy was just getting into making his special vision of movies.

Bailey took Jagger along.  Where Jagger got the money to buy in isn’t clear.  And why Bailey chose Jagger to join in is mysterious too.  It is true that at the time Bailey was dating the model Jean Shrimpton and Jagger was dating her sister Chrissie but Bailey was very successful and worldly while Jagger was a college student and a fledgling unknown singer in an amateurish rock and roll band.  One wonders what Bailey saw in Jagger that turned out to be justified.  Perhaps there is something involved in the London School of Economics that we don’t know about.

At any rate, unless Jagger had funds that we don’t know about, Bailey paid Jagger’s way to NYC for whatever reasons we don’t know about where the duo sold the rights to A Clockwork Orange to Andy Warhol.  All three, Bailey, Jagger and Warhol become fairly close the rest of their lives until Andy died for real in 1987.

Warhol did make a movie said to be based on the book but you couldn’t tell it by watching the movie.  The rights eventually ended up in Kubrick’s hands who made the commercial film.  Bailey and Jagger returned to England.  At any rate Jagger had connected solidly with Warhol and that would payoff when the Stones arrived in the US in 1964.

Upon Jagger’s return to England, the career of the Rolling Stones began.  The first period was from 1963 to 1966 at which time according to Keith he and Mick and run out steam, completely exhausted.  A short three years before neither Jagger nor Richards had written a song; by 1966 after a spectacular series of hits they had written themselves out, not unlike Dylan whose first phase also ended in ’66.  Thus, as the First Sixties ended the Beatles, Stones and Dylan, the three most important artists of the First Sixties and, indeed, perpetually from then on, were in disarray.  All three had to reinvent themselves just as the establishment of Satanism took place.  What a coincidence, hey?

Still, for Jagger and Richards ’66 and ’67 would be transformative years, the transformation made urgent their arrest for possession of drugs.  By 1966 the Stones as a group and Jagger and Richards specifically were thought to be heavily into drugs.  They may or may not have been but if so it as mainly LSD.  LSD was only made illegal in 1966 so that in 1967 it was kind of edgy in my opinion to prosecute for it as any hippie used pre-1967 may not have known it had been made illegal. 

The drug charges were extremely flimsy.  Jagger, for instance, was convicted on the basis of having four tabs of prescription amphetamines.  Amphetamines also had been legal over the counter until 1964 when retail sales were stopped but prescriptions were still legal so Jagger’s defense was still valid.  Perhaps that is what so enraged him, the charge was not only trumped up but invalid.

Richard’s charge also was very questionable.  He was charged with keeping a house for pot smoking.  Absurd on the face of it, although he and his friends did smoke marijuana.  But, there is justification for both to believe that they were singled out as high profile examples.

The effect on Jagger’s psyche was devastating.  Depending on how serious his Satanic investigations were before his arrest he definitely turned Satanic after.   Marianne Faithfull herself was deeply into Satanism bringing such texts as Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixir and Bulgakov’s The Master And Margarita to his attention.  The devil’s brew began working on his mind.  The first manifestation was the disc Their Satanic Majesties Request in which Jagger sings in the title song:  Let me introduce myself… and the introduction was to Satan.  At that point, then, Jagger was beginning to assume his role as the Great Satan.  He opposed himself to God on the one hand and to the British government on the other as British passports began with Her Britannic Majesty…Requests….

As this mood or fantasy was developing Donald Cammell the movie maker showed up to offer Jagger his role in Cammell’s movie Performance which began filming in July of 1968.  This film role was to have an even more devastating role on Jagger’s psyche as it defined his character.  Marianne who was close to Jagger at that time said that he began as one person and came out another and never left the role again.

Indeed, the notion of being Satan fermented in his mind probably accentuated by the Satanist Kenneth Anger with whom Jagger collaborated in Anger’s film projects into 1972.  Having finished filming Performance Jagger concluded he too could make a film expressing his own anger.  That film was made at the end of ’68 titled Rock And Roll Circus.  British intelligence was nicknamed The Circus so once again Jagger voiced his resentment of the government.

The film is an alright Rock and Roll film while as a first effort is not all that bad.  As with all Rock and Roll films music is front and center.  The invited audience are all dressed in yellow and orange Munchkin outfits for some reason, colorful enough.  The message of the film is saved for last as the band plays Sympathy For The Devil.  During a long instrumental Jagger gets down on his knees and grovels about with what, I suppose, is meant to be a Satanic leer; then he slowly pulls off his shirt, standing up to reveal a tattoo, or inking I hope, on his chest spelling out L-U-C-I-F-E-R identical to the tattoo on Kenneth Anger’s chest.  Thus, one is led to believe, the metamorphosis is complete and Jagger has become Satan.  One toke over the line.

Then in 1969 Jagger collaborated with Anger in his short film, Invocation To My Demon Brother.  The movie represents a Black Mass in which Jagger is credited with a part, or appearance, but I couldn’t pick him out.  He did however perform what purports to be a sound track on the synthesizer, one atonal riff repeated throughout the eleven minute film.

Then, to cap the period, on December 6^th, 1969 came the Altamont disaster for Jagger and the Stones.  The concert was ill conceived and poorly executed.  The choice of location was abominable.  The Altamont Pass from the Bay Area into California’s Great Valley in December is cold and very windy, strong breezes.  The so-called race track they performed on was just a big barren field, a kind of natural bowl.  The track had last served as a Demolition Derby so a few old wrecked hulks were strewn across it.  A very unpleasant place to sit for a few hours waiting for a concert.  Put anybody in a bad mood.

This was not 1965 when some fresh faced kids were trying out marijuana it was now almost 1970 and the audience was battle hardened have been blowing their minds out for at least five years and they looked it; a fairly depressing scene.  Of course the Hell’s Angel Motorcycle Club was providing security.  These guys were some of the most objectionable people in the Bay Area. But don’t say I said it.

So, in this scene from a frigid hell Mick Jagger in the heights of his Satanic glory, dressed as God only knows what, pranced on stage and launched into Sympathy For The Devil.  The scene should have scripted by Charles Manson.  There was a killing?  What else would you expect?

True, there had been changes of sites each spiraling downward but then events reach their natural levels, don’t they?  The Sixties had hit rock bottom and then they were no more.  Where was there to go from there?

Fresh troops were arriving.  Leading the Satanic corps was Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin.  Mick and the Stones who were having management problems with the equally Satanic Allen Klein changed over to the more gentlemanly Prince (no kidding) Rupert Loewenstein who reorganized the group’s concert methods and put them on the road with stadium concerts to make money as Klein had confiscated their intellectual properties to all the pre-1970 material.

Continuing with Clockwork Orange themes Mick put on some of the raunchiest shows ever seen, not only stretching the envelope but makeing a new much larger one.  Corruption of youth was Mick’s business.  But that’s another story; this one ends here.