Rock-Holy-Rollers
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ROCK & HOLY ROLLERS: THE SPIRITUAL BELIEFS OF CHART-TOPPING ROCK STARS, IN THEIR LIVES AND LYRICS by Geoffrey D. Falk © 2006 Rock & Holy Rollers CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................... Chapter 1 Across the Universe ...................................................... The Beatles 2 Beliefs, They Are A-Changin’ ....................................... Bob Dylan 3 Sympathy for the Devil ..................................... The Rolling Stones 4 White Light Fantasy ........................................................ The Kinks 5 Meher, Can You Hear Me? ............................................... The Who 6 Bad Vibrations ...................................................... The Beach Boys 7 White Rabbit Habit ............................................ Jefferson Airplane 8 A Saucerful of Sant Mat ................................................ Pink Floyd 9 Jerry and the Spinners ........................................ The Grateful Dead 10 Voodoo Child .............................................................. Jimi Hendrix 11 The Doors of Perception ................................................. The Doors 12 Astral Years .............................................................. Van Morrison 13 Timothy Leary’s Dead ........................................ The Moody Blues 14 Stairway to Heaven .................................................... Led Zeppelin 15 Station to Station ........................................................ David Bowie Rock & Holy Rollers 16 None More Black ..................................................... Black Sabbath 17 Welcome to My Sunday School ................................ Alice Cooper 18 The Crimson King ..................................................... King Crimson 19 Dances with God ............................................................ Jethro Tull 20 Topographic Shastras ................................................................ Yes 21 Tea for the Muslim ........................................................ Cat Stevens 22 You Make Cult Lovin’ Fun ..................................... Fleetwood Mac 23 Atlas Drummed ....................................................................... Rush 24 Wayward Son ....................................................................... Kansas 25 Route 666 ..................................................................... Iron Maiden 26 Prince of Light ...................................................................... Prince 27 One String, Two String, Red String.... ............................. Madonna 28 Cloudbusting ................................................................... Kate Bush 29 In My Eyes ................................................................. Peter Gabriel 30 Trip Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee .................................. Sting 31 Afternoons and Satan Worship ...................... Crash Test Dummies 32 Charles Monroe ..................................................... Marilyn Manson 33 Integral Pumpkins ................................... Smashing Pumpkins, etc. 34 Rock On.... ........................................................................................ Endnotes ........................................................................................................ Bibliography ................................................................................................. Permissions ................................................................................................... About the Author .......................................................................................... Rock & Holy Rollers INTRODUCTION I grew up on the Canadian prairies, in a sprawling country house reverber- ating with the folk music of Gordon Lightfoot, Johnny Cash, and Simon & Garfunkel. When I say “reverberating,” I am not exaggerating: Thanks to a father with a ham radio-operating background, nearly every room in the house had its own set of speaker boxes. Each of those contained four eight-inch cones. And, all boxes were wired in parallel, on the same circuit. You can easily fill a sound-space with that sort of arrangement. Even without drums in the recordings. Following many such country- and folk-filled years of rhythmic dep- rivation, a transfer of schools in junior high put me face to face with that bastard son of rhythm and blues: rock and roll. I was quickly hooked on all the cock-rock which Spinal Tap later sati- rized so brilliantly. These were, after all, the glory days of the first wave of heavy metal: Ozzy was still fronting Black Sabbath, AC/DC shook you all night long, and if it had been possible to “run to the hills” with Iron Maiden, through wheat fields where you could literally see to the horizon in every direction, we would surely have tried. Rock & Holy Rollers With even more of an ear for melody and harmony, though, the first album I ever purchased was Boston’s debut, featuring what is still my all- time favorite song, “More Than a Feeling.” That piece of vinyl was ob- tained, if I recall correctly, one evening after I had grown bored with the presentation given by a spiritualist during a family outing in Winnipeg. Displaying the item afterwards to my parents, I was immediately for- bidden to ever buy another record—rock-music purchases being such an obvious waste of money. A few high-school years later, with my driver’s license secured, I grossly violated that rule—long ago forgotten by everyone except me—in greedily accumulating Genesis’ and Peter Gabriel’s entire back-catalogues in a single springtime road trip to the nearest mall. It was, as they say, the start of a beautiful friendship, even if much of the meaning held in the words to such popular and unpopular songs re- mained puzzling or obscure. Curiously, though, it turns out that many of our most-admired rock stars have been deeply influenced by nontraditional religious ideas, and their associated sagely purveyors. Further, musicians who participate in the actual writing of the songs which they perform invariably bring their spiritual beliefs into their art, particularly in the crafting of lyrics. To put it more bluntly: To encounter rock music is also to encounter spirituality in its many guises. One can easily find biblical allusions in the songs of the one-time Catholic altar boy, Bruce Springsteen, and even in the lyrics of the equally religiously schooled but now “dust thou art” Elvis Costello. The same clearly holds true for something like Paul Simon’s gospel-influenced “Loves Me Like a Rock,” just as an obvious if vague spirituality runs through his Rhythm of the Saints. For that matter, Tina Turner is a practic- ing, chanting Buddhist, who believes in reincarnation and astrology. Mi- chael Jackson, in turn, is a devout Jehovah’s Witness—without visibly bringing that faith into his music or his dealings with young boys and “Je- sus juice.” Weezer (Rivers Cuomo), for his own part, spent many of his early years in the Yogaville ashram of the “Woodstock Swami,” Satchidananda. He currently practices Buddhist vipassana meditation up to twelve hours a day, for weeks at a time, sequestered in closets and elsewhere. (Cuomo was re-introduced to that way of life by über-producer Rick Rubin, who Rock & Holy Rollers himself has been interviewed on New Age philosopher Ken Wilber’s Inte- gral Naked web forum.) Similarly, the messianic Elvis Presley’s interests in both H. P. Blavat- sky’s Theosophy and Paramahansa Yogananda’s “Church of All Relig- ions” writings could easily have merited a chapter here, had those beliefs made their way into his lyrics—as they might well have, had the “King of the Jukeboxes” been a songwriter himself. So, too, could the explicit Christianity of U2 have been included in the text, were their religious ori- entation not already so well-known, and its influence not so obvious and literal in their music. Unlike those performers, however, the artists covered here have all repeatedly incorporated their own spiritual beliefs into their music in de- tailed, and deliberately meaning-filled, but not necessarily obvious ways. That is, this book is focused on the little-known esoteric symbolisms hid- den in chart-topping popular music. It is less concerned with cataloguing the more widely known and obvious exoteric symbols or quotes, borrowed from one or another traditional scripture (e.g., the Bible). (Bob Dylan is almost an exception to that rule ... except that, as we shall see, his spiritual interests did not begin and end with his 1979 conversion to Pentecostal Christianity, but have more recently embraced a purported Jewish Mes- siah. By contrast, Weezer wrote his own “Pardon Me” after attending a meditation retreat where the teacher told him to mentally repeat: “I seek pardon from all those who have harmed me in action, speech or thought.” But a single song merely inspired by such an instruction, with no other spiritual referent in its lyrics, would hardly fill out a chapter.) So, one may or may not take seriously ideas such as meditation, yoga, astral travel, paganism, or the magick of Aleister Crowley. Nevertheless, a detailed understanding of those “spiritual paths” holds the key to a proper comprehension, not only of the private lives of our “guitar gods,” from Jimi Hendrix on down, but of the deeper meanings behind songs which we hear every day on the radio—from the Beatles to Zeppelin, from Marilyn Manson to Billy Corgan to System of a Down. I have relied largely