[Excerpt] Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, And a search for the elusive Stairway to Heaven
by William Burroughs, Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975.
“I summarized my impressions after the concert in a few notes to serve as a basis for my talk with Jimmy Page.
“The essential ingredient for any successful rock group is energy–the ability to give out energy, to receive energy from the audience and to give it back to the audience. A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy.”
The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose–that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts–music, painting and writing–is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.”
I felt that these considerations
could form the basis of my talk with Jimmy Page, which I hoped would not take
the form of an interview. There is something just basically WRONG about the
whole interview format. Someone sticks a mike in your face and says, “Mr. Page,
would you care to talk about your interest in occult practices? Would you
describe yourself as a believer in this sort of thing?” Even an intelligent mike-in-the-face
question tends to evoke a guarded mike-in-the-face answer. As soon as Jimmy
Page walked into my loft downtown, I saw that it wasn’t going to be that way.
We started talking over a cup of tea
and found we have friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated Jimmy
Page’s purchase of the Aleister Crowley house on Loch Ness; John Michel, the
flying saucer and pyramid expert; Donald Camel, who worked on ‘Performance’;
Kenneth Anger, and the Jaggers, Mick and Chris. The subject of magic came up in
connection with Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Anger’s film ‘Lucifer Rising’, for
which Jimmy Page did the sound track.
Since the word “magic” tends to
cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by “magic” and
the magical interpretation of so-called reality. The underlying assumption of
magic is the assertion of ‘will’ as the primary moving force in this
universe–the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being
wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self-evident. A chair does not
move unless someone moves it. Neither does your physical body, which is
composed of much the same materials, move unless you will it to move. Walking
across the rooom is a magical operation. From the viewpoint of magic, no death,
no illness, no misfortune, accident, war or riot is accidental. There are no
accidents in the world of magic. And will is another word for animate energy.
Rock stars are juggling fissionable material that could blow up at any time…
“The soccer scores are coming in from the Capital…one must pretend an
interest,” drawled the dandified Commandante, safe in the pages of my book; and
as another rock star said to me, “YOU sit on your ass writing–I could be
torn to pieces by my fans, like Orpheus.”
I found Jimmy Page equally aware of
the risks involved in handling the fissionable material of the mass unconcious.
I took on a valence I learned years ago from two ‘Life-Time’ reporters–one
keeps telling you these horrific stories: “Now old Burns was dragged out of the
truck and skinned alive by the mob, and when we got there with the cameras the
bloody thing was still squirming there like a worm…” while the other half of
the team is snapping pictures CLICK CLICK CLICK to record your reactions–so
over dinner at Mexican Gardens I told Jimmy the story of the big soccer riot in
Lima, Peru in 1964.
We are ushered into the arena as
VIPs, in the style made famous by ‘Triumph of the Will’. Martial music–long
vistas–the statuesque police with their dogs on leads–the crowd surging in a
sultry menacing electricity palpable in the air–grey clouds over Lima–people
glance up uneasily… the last time it rained in Lima was the year of the great
earthquake, when whole towns were swallowed by landslides. A cop is beating and
kicking someone as he shoves him back towards the exit. Oh lucky man. The dogs
growl ominously. The game is tense. Tied until the end of the last quarter, and
then the stunning decision: a goal that would have won the game for Peru is
disqualified by the Uruguayan referee. A howl of rage from the crowd, and then
a huge black known as La Bomba, who has started three previous soccer riots and
already has twenty-three notches on his bomb, vaults down into the arena. A
wave of fans follows The Bomb–the Uruguayan referee scrambles off with the
agility of a rat or an evil spirit–the police release tear gas and unleash
their snarling dogs, hysterical with fear and rage and maddened by the tear
gas. And then a sound like falling mountains, as a few drops of rain begin to fall.
“Yes, I’ve thought about that. We
all have. The important thing is maintain a balance. The kids come to get far
out with the music. It’s our job to see they have a good time and no trouble.”
And remember the rock group called
Storm? Playing a dance hall in Switzerland…fire…exits locked…thirty-seven
people dead including all the performers. Now any performer who has never
thought about fire and panic just doesn’t think. The best way to keep something
bad from happening is to see it ahead of time, and you can’t see it if you
refuse to face the possibility. The bad vibes in that dance hall must have been
really heavy. If the performers had been sensitive and alert, they would have
checked to be sure the exits were unlocked.
Previously, over two fingers of
whiskey in my Franklin Street digs, I had told Page about Major Bruce
MacMannaway, a healer and psychic who lives in Scotland. The Major discovered
his healing abilities in World War II when his regiment was cut off without
medical supplies and the Major started laying on hands…”Well Major, I think
it’s a load of bollocks but I’ll try anything.” And it turns out the Major is a
walking hypo. His psychic abilities were so highly regarded by the Admiralty
that he was called in to locate sunken submarines, and he never once missed.
I attended a group meditation
seminar with the Major. It turned out to be the Indian rope trick. Before the
session the Major told us something of the potential power in group meditation.
He had seen it lift a six-hundred-pound church organ five feet in the air. I
had no reason to doubt this, since he was obviously incapable of falsification.
In the session, after some preliminary excercises, the Major asked us to see a
column of light in the center of the room and then took us up through the light
to a plateau where we met nice friendly people: the stairway to heaven in fact.
I mean we were really THERE.
I turned to Jimmy Page: “Of course
we are dealing here with meditation– the deliberate induction of a trance state
in a few people under the hands of an old master. This would seem on the
surface to have a little in common with a rock concert, but the underlying
force is the same: human energy and its potential concentration.” I pointed out
that the moment when the stairway to heaven becomes something actually POSSIBLE
for the audience, would also be the moment of greatest danger. Jimmy expressed
himself as well aware of the power in mass concentration, aware of the dangers
involved, and of the skill and balance needed to avoid them…rather like driving
a load of nitroglycerine.
“There IS a responsibility to the
audience,” he said. “We don’t want anything bad to happen to these kids–we
don’t want to release anything we can’t handle.” We talked about magic and
Aleister Crowley. Jimmy said that Crowley has been maligned as a black
magician, whereas magic is neither white nor black, good nor bad–it is simply
alive with what it is: the real thing, what people really feel and want and
are. I pointed out that this “either/or” straitjacket had been imposed by
Christianity when all magic became black magic; that scientists took over from
the Church, and Western man has been stifled in a non-magical universe known as
“the way things are.” Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of
this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic.
Jimmy told me that Aleister
Crowley’s house has very good vibes for anyone who is relaxed and receptive. At
one time the house had also been the scene of a vast chicken swindle indirectly
involving George Sanders, the movie actor, who was able to clear himself of any
criminal charges, Sanders committed suicide in Barcelona, and we both
remembered his farewell note to the world: “I leave you to this sweet
cesspool.”
I told Jimmy he was lucky too have that
house with a monster in the front yard. What about the Loch Ness monster? Jimmy
Page thinks it exists. I wondered if it could find enough to eat, and thought
this unlikely–it’s not the improbability but the upkeep on monsters that
worries me. Did Aleister Crowley have opinions on the subject? He apparently
had not expressed himself.
‘There is something just basically WRONG about the whole interview format. Someone sticks a mike in your face and says, “Mr. Page, would you care to talk about your interest in occult practices? Would you describe yourself as a believer in this sort of thing?” Even an intelligent mike-in-the-face question tends to evoke a guarded mike-in-the-face answer. As soon as Jimmy Page walked into my loft downtown, I saw that it wasn’t going to be that way.’ – William Burroughs about his “interview” with Jimmy Page
Occult Aspects 