Psychedelia, page 19
4A fact that may interest psychedelicists is that the name of T S Eliot's clairvoyant woman, Mme Sosostris, comes from an early novel by Aldous Huxley. Eliot was not a great fan of his early poetry but expressed respect for young Huxley's learning and taste. In his Notes to The Waste Land, Eliot also managed to reference another young, promising author whose works would become a cornerstone in the psychedelic library; Hermann Hesse.
5 Eliot's familiarity with Colin Still's book on The Tempest has been observed by literary critic Grover Smith, among others.
6 Although it's probably coincidental, a curious detail worth mentioning in the context of the Fisher King myth and The Tempest, is the fact that the shipwrecked men who first meet Caliban on Prospero's island repeatedly compare Caliban's outward appearance to a fish. This is hard to visualize and does not really fit well with the other impressions of Caliban, who is human enough to speak and perform various manual chores, and comes off more like a sort of primate, or simply a deformed human. It is another mysterious detail in The Tempest.
7 In interviews, Coppola has explicitly mentioned the Fisher King saga and how he considered various mythical roles of the returning or sacrificed king for the fate of Colonel Kurtz; see for instance his appearance on James Lipton's Inside The Actor's Studio (2001).
8 The concept of mythopoeic thinking was introduced by Henri and Antonia Frankfort in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1946). The mythopoeic mode of thought is described as archaic and pre-philosophic; it takes each individual event at face value. When a river fails to rise one year, mythopoeic thought doesn't try to accommodate this into a natural law and its different outcomes. Instead, the river has 'refused' to rise this year, perhaps because the river god is angry. Thus, mythopoeic thought ends up viewing the entire world as personal: each event is an act of will. Another perspective on the same animistic process is found in Chapter XXIII.
9 According to Daniel M. Perrine (Visions of the Night - Western Medicine Meets Peyote 1887-1899, 2001) two Americans and a Norwegian each independently 'discovered' peyote and became interested enough in the plant to sample it themselves. Chronologically, the first was a Texas physician, John Raleigh Briggs (1851-1907), who experimented with peyote in 1886. The second was Carl Lumholtz (1851-1922), a Norwegian with a passion for exploration who lived with the Tarahumara and Huichol of northwest Mexico, where in 1892 he first became aquainted with and sampled h'kuli, as these natives call peyote. The third was James Mooney, an Irish-American with a lifelong interest in and sympathy for Indian history and culture. Perrine's article quotes several 'trip reports' which are, in fact, the earliest hallucinogen experiences logged by any Westerners.
'Everything we do is music'
VI
EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN
1
With its effective blend of Shakespearean magic and Freudian psychology, MGM's Forbidden Planet (1956) stands as one of pop culture's most noteworthy milestones on the path towards Psychedelia. Like other intelligent science fiction movies from the era, such as The Day The Earth Stood Still, it uses a genre hitherto dominated by simplistic us-against-them movies to raise questions of man's true nature and future evolution. Forbidden Planet seems to signal a small shift in the Western zeitgeist, as the primitive fear and paranoia of the early 1950s gives way to something more complex and enigmatic, not rarely with sexual connotations. Many popular works of the time reflect a strong ambivalence towards the unknown and exotic; a profound attraction held back by profound caution. Already in its title, Forbidden Planet telegraphs the lure of the 'taboo', another charged catchphrase of the mid-century. The magnetic tension, strengthened further by censorship codes that restricted movies, radio content and comic books, offered a creative challenge for the pop culture artist who wished to deal with serious topics. The limited range of behavior and emotion considered acceptable bred ingenuity in the use of parables, but it also became a stylistic mould that produced precise, neo-classical forms with a minimum of ornament.
Like Shakespeare's' The Tempest, which setting it closely mimics, Forbidden Planet deals with dreams and power, and like The Tempest, it leaves some thematic threads mysteriously dangling after what looks like an emphatic closure. As outlined in Chapter IV, the unexplained element in Shakespeare seemed linked to the psychedelic initiations at Eleusis, and the possibility that the entire play was someone's dream or vision. In Forbidden Planet, the theme of mind expansion and domination is explicated in full, but the sub-theme concerning the sexual awakening of the young Altaira remains only partly told. The rapid developments in the last reel upset the balance of the movie; a moderate pace that previously had allowed two parallel themes (Morbius' secret mind expansion; his daughter Altaira's naive sexuality) to unfold in a believable way is abandoned for a fast-paced last 10 minutes devoted to the former theme at the expense of the latter. Perhaps the scissors of moral censorship left Altaira's evolvement into a woman on the cutting room floor, but then again, Shakespeare often did away with reconciliation scenes and happy endings as fast as he could. The classic psycho-analytic props invoked in the Altaira theme, such as her suddenly enraged pet tiger, the androgynous robot, and her dream of a raging monster, suffice to draw outlines of a libidinal sub-theme which unfortunately is never integrated with the main plot, the way Prospero's magic revenge is integrated with his arrangements for Miranda's wedding to Prince Ferdinand.
Instead, Forbidden Planet emphasizes the theme of Morbius' mind expansion and the evolutionary implications thereof, and the end result is as delightfully proto-psychedelic as The Tempest:
MORBIUS: I have come to the unalterable conclusion that man is unfit as of yet to receive such knowledge.
DR OSTROW: Whereas Morbius, with his artificially expanded intellect, is now ideally suited to administer this power for the whole human race?
MORBIUS: Precisely.
In a surprising and bold turn of the plot, Dr Ostrow then secretly uses the brain expansion machine (which Morbius had inherited from an extinct alien race) on himself, and with his massively increased intelligence he manages to see not only what Morbius saw, but also the imminent danger of Morbius' current experiments.
COMMANDER ADAMS: So you took the brain boost, huh?
DR OSTROW: You ought to see my new mind. It's up there in lights' bigger than his now.
ADAMS: Now easy, Doc.
OSTROW: Morbius was too close to the problem. The Krell had completed the project. No instrumentalities... true creation. But the Krell forgot one thing. Monsters, monsters from the Id.
ADAMS: The Id? What's that?
The writers of Forbidden Planet went beyond both Freud and Jung in their discussions of the dark, repressed subconscious, suggesting that not only was it an inaccessible, uncontrollable region of the mind, but in fact a residual from an earlier, more primitive stage of evolution – among humans as well as the alien Krells. The cinematic representation of the monster from the Id reflects the same shrewd logic as most other aspects of the movie; logic in that the emanation from the hidden subconscious must be invisible to human eyes, shrewd in the sense that this removed the need for the film-makers to create a huge, believable monster. It is no wonder that Forbidden Planet came to exercise such great influence on later science fiction works; Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series in particular owes volumes to the 1956 movie in themes and style, as Roddenberry himself acknowledged. A much later film like Lawnmower Man (1992) also shows distinct traces of Forbidden Planet.
Yet some might argue that Forbidden Planet's influence on psychedelic pop culture was even stronger in another field, that of underground music. The movie soundtrack is one of the earliest instances of completely electronic music, and the film's popularity brought this music a fame usually out of reach for the avant-garde circles from which it came.1 The credits refer to the electronic music as 'tonalities' to avoid interference from the musicians' union, but the way the soundtrack stretches the idea of what music can be, that cautious label seems appropriate. Composed by the ma rried couple Louis and Bebe Barron, the Forbidden Planet score was the outcome of several years of cutting edge work on the modern art music scene in New York City. Mentored by John Cage, the Barrons experimented with sound generators, tape manipulation and 'found sounds', with the French music concréte artists their only fellow voyagers. Louis Barron was inspired in his sound engineering ideas by the new scientific field of cybernetics, where much research was financed by the Josiah Macy Foundation – the same CIA-connected think-tank that played a significant role in LSD research in the 1950s. Drawing on the work of pioneer Norbert Wiener, Louis Barron built unique sound circuits that integrated such key cybernetic concepts as feedback and self- modification. Much time, meaning years, was also spent by Louis and Bebe sampling, archiving and editing tape recordings of everything from factory whistles to laughter. When an open-minded Hollywood producer offered the avant-garde couple the chance to create their first major film score, they were fully up to the task.
The Barrons' Forbidden Planet soundtrack is skillfully integrated with the movie in a way that not only opened a path for electronic avant-garde music into pop culture, but also pointed towards the concept of ambient music, which would not surface in full for another 20 years. During the opening scenes of the movie, the viewer takes the alien, arrhythmic, yet controlled bleeps and noises as an atmospheric backdrop for the remote quadrants of space where the action takes place. But only moments later the same, or very similar, electronic noises appear as sound effects coming from a high-tech machine aboard the space craft. This subtle trick is repeated later at Morbius' compound: we hear the atmospheric alien soundtrack playing in the background, but in a little while this 'music' becomes noises made by the advanced contraptions the Krell have left behind. A third perspective on the skeletal electronica is introduced when Morbius turns on a futuristic tape recorder and tells his visitors from Earth that what they're hearing is ancient Krell music. On top of the radically new aural experience , these shifting applications of the same avant-garde music deepens the Forbidden Planet's theme of uncertainty before the unknown. This proto-ambient transition between immediate levels and meta-levels may too be derived from The Tempest, where music, both dreamed, remembered and directly heard, affects the different characters.
The Barrons continued to work in the field of experimental music, but left surprisingly little behind in terms of compositions and recordings in their own name.2 They maintained ties to pop culture via various projects, such as the minor cult LP Seduction Through Witchcraft by the 'official witch of Los Angeles', Louise Huebner (1969). From a psychedelic perspective it's interesting to note that they collaborated with both Aldous Huxley and Anais Nin during the 1950s. Around this time Nin was an enthusiastic supporter of Betty Eisner's psycho-analytic LSD research, and she wrote extensively about psychedelic therapy sessions in her famous diary. A modern interview with Bebe Barron gives no indication of whether the couple themselves engaged in hallucinogenic experiments, but it's clear that they moved in the early circles of such activity and were undoubtedly aware of it.
Beyond the Barrons, the mid-century electronic music pioneers appear surprisingly short on proto-psychedelic thinking. Much of the attention seems to lie with technical and formal issues; the precise design of a sound generator, the mathematics of new tonal scales. The visual or visionary experience of these alien sounds that the Forbidden Planet score explored seems somehow of less concern. While the literary underground gathered under the 1950s 'beat' banner was immersed in both narcotic and hallucinogenic drug experiments, parallel instances within the music avant-garde are difficult to spot. John Cage, who criticized his former disciples' work around the time they scored Forbidden Planet as 'disgustingly orchestral and musical', showed an equal lack of understanding for psychedelic inspiration. Despite being an avid mycologist, he renounced the potential of the Psilocybe and Amanita mushrooms without ever trying them, declaring that 'the visions I hear about do not interest me'.
It's therefore curious to find Cage crossing paths with early exponents of psychedelic culture, such as his collaboration with film-maker Oskar Fischinger, who was responsible for the Bach segment in Disney's accidental (or not) mescaline trip classic Fantasia (1940).3 In a 1957 lecture, Cage described music as 'a purposeless play' which makes it 'an affirmation of life'; the exact same notions can be found in the philosophy of psychedelic phenomenology discussed in Chapter II. Alan Watts, who found 'purposeless play' the ultimate goal of existence during the height of his experiments with LSD in the early '60s, may in fact have picked the phrase up from Cage. The idea of 'play' as the truest expression and affirmation of life is found with the German phenomenologist Max Fink, who formulated his philosophy around the same time as Cage and Watts. Although John Cage, for reasons known only to himself, rejected the hallucinogenic journey, his philosophic-aesthetic orientation brought him to a proto-psychedelic neighborhood. His famous declaration that 'everything we do is music' is likely to strike a responsive chord in experienced psychedelicists.
2
While the main thrust of modern art music in the 1950s-60s was theoretical and formal, there were exceptions where composers strove not only to stretch the tonal and rhythmic palette, but to explore the otherworldly spaces from a conventional listener's perspective. An obvious approach was to do to like the Barrons and place the music in a futuristic, celestial context. A pioneering work in this category was Otto Leuning's Fantasy In Space, a short but charming piece of electronically manipulated flute sounds. From 1952, it features elements and moods that would recur with the later works of space age electronica, and it is arguably the very first work of this kind. The 2.5- minute piece raised enough interest for Leuning to appear on national television, and he later collaborated with Vladimir Ussachevsky on the influential Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. While more formally experimental than truly escapist, Ussachvesky's Sonic Contours (1952) delivers some of the alien flavor of other works discussed here, and is worth searching out. The French music concréte school launched by Pierre Schaeffer was primarily concerned with aspects of the creative process itself, but its major exponent Pierre Henry composed something fairly close to proto-psychedelic fantasy electronica on his movie soundtrack Astrologie (1953). Henry, who was one of the few contemporary artists the Barrons felt a kinship with in the early '50s, would release his most influential LP in the midst of the psychedelic pop culture explosion of 1967, Messe Pour Le Temps Présent. The same year saw the release of Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples Of The Moon, an important work in the development of electronic music that may communicate well with some psychedelicists, even if the minimalist form is essentially counter-psychedelic.
Although it was never a 'movement' per se, a number of recordings in the proto-psychedelic fantasy electronica style appeared during the 1950s-60s. With the use of suggestive track titles and record cover artwork, the listener was encouraged to listen closely to this new and different music and let his inner imagination wander into the future and out into the universe. Even with an inclination towards reaching a popular audience, these record releases generally remained obscure until their proto-psychedelic qualities were discovered by later generations of music-lovers. A vital name here is Dutchman Tom Dissevelt, who recorded a handful of works that combined avant electronics with suggestive outer space themes. Dissevelt's 1957 Song Of The Second Moon (a collaboration with engineer Kid Baltan) is a pioneering classic, while the later Fantasy In Orbit (1963) features an evocative, profoundly arresting series of audio-visual snapshots of imaginary space travel. When re-packaging the album for the US market in 1965, this theme was emphasized with the new sub-title 'An Astronaut's Impressions While Orbiting The Earth'. Even that most cerebral of avant composers Karl-Heinz Stockhausen was subject to outer space conceptualization, via the thematic sleeve designs of his Mikrofonie works (1965-67).
Directly linked to mankind's ideas about the future is the wondrously atmospheric Man In Space With Sounds by Attilio Mineo, released on LP in conjunction with the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle. Mineo's compositions, originally recorded in the 1950s, were used to illustrate the 'World Of Tomorrow' tour at the World's Fair, with brief spoken segments outlining the utopian scenes that visitors encountered. Mixing electronics with eerie string arrangements, the evocative moods may recall Bela Bartok at his most experimental and formless, but Mineo's futuristic program music brings the listener into uncharted, cinematic spaces that have no real precedents. The visionary - escapist element is a defining quality of a proto-psychedelic work such as Man In Space With Sounds; its atmosphere will strike a familiar chord with psychedelic connoisseurs. To illustrate the special nature of Mineo's creation, one might compare the listening experience to the experimental choral works by Gy'rgy Ligeti as used by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. When heard in combination with Kubrick's awe-inspiring images of the mysteries of space, Ligeti's music seems strongly visually loaded, but when listening to the musical score alone, without the movie images, Ligeti's music loses much of its visionary quality. Conversely, putting Mineo's visually rich soundscapes into 2001 would probably have disturbed the balance that Kubrick attained between his overwhelming images and the corresponding soundtrack.
Seven years after the Seattle World's Fair, in the midst of a radical expansion and intellectualization of youth culture, there appeared what could be described as a pop music variant on Attilio Mineo's World's Fair production. The classically trained rock group The Aggregation used their residency at Disneyland's 'Tomorrow-Land' section to create a conceptual double exposure in which a futuristic theme park ride becomes a metaphor for an LSD trip, or vice versa. Their Mind Odyssey LP (1969) was commercially unsuccessful at the time (as Mineo's had been), but in retrospect stands as one of the most successful psychedelic concept albums. Marked by an aesthetic awareness and internal logic atypical for '60s rock albums, the Mind Odyssey expands its multi- layered nature by invoking older, retro-nostalgic atmospheres, summoning up a mood that reaches back to the 1950s and its curious, cautious views of the future. Seven years after the Aggregation, German electronica pioneers Kraftwerk integrated similar futuristic-utopian 1950s elements into the album that more than any other of their works presented a total artistic statement, The Man Machine, in which the masterful 'Spacelab' is in a sense a high tech upgrade of Joe Meek's 1962 production 'Telstar' (curiously, another old Meek/Tornados track was 'Robot'). Moving even further ahead, the ambient techno and psychedelic trance music of the 1990s frequently used sampled dialogue from old '50s science fiction movies like Forbidden Planet. This lingering retro- futuristic facet of Western pop culture may reflect a yearning for the unguarded, blemish-free dreams of future times and future worlds that, in American terms, arose after the death of McCarthyism, and disappeared after the assassination of John F Kennedy.
