The Rolling Stones one may be the best but it’s not embeddable.

Jeff Mangum talks about “I love you Jesus Christ.”

I was in a Merge band that toured with Neutral Milk Hotel once (”On Avery Island” tour). People I was with made fun of them because they were “awkward.” It was kind of a bummer, but I bought the record as soon as I got back. This song really does sound like he’s channeling the pain and the joy of the kids who have gone to Jesus camps:

JM: I can’t honestly say that I 100% know what that song means. Do you have a minute? ‘Cause this is going to take a little while to really explain this.

Pitchfork: Sure.

JM: For a lot of these songs, I was able to lock myself in a room and allow my mind to completely let out anything it wanted without me worrying too much about what anybody was gonna think. And I think that a song about God was inevitable, because of my upbringing, of the intense experiences I had growing up– going to these crazy Church camps where everything was very open. We talked about sexuality freely, we talked about…

Pitchfork: And how old were you at the time?

JM: From 11 to 17.

Pitchfork: Where were the camps?

JM: In central Louisiana, out in the boonies.

Pitchfork: Is this the hippie influence on Christianity?

JM: It wasn’t even really hippie, it was just weird– where like you could just spill your guts all over the place, people were like laying around or like leaping and freaking out. But it wasn’t so much that it was a God trip as much as it was an emotional, human trip. Even if you were an Atheist and your parents shipped you down there, you could talk about it. You could talk openly about your Atheist beliefs and there would be debates about it. And being an Atheist was just as beautiful as anything else.

The thing about me singing about Christ; I’m not saying “I love you Christianity.” I’m not saying “I love all the fucked-up terrible shit that people have done in the name of God.” And I’m not preaching belief in Christ. It’s just expression. I’m just expressing something I might not even understand. It’s a song of confusion, it’s a song of hope, it’s a song that says this whole world is a big dream– and who knows what’s gonna happen.

(via)

Early in life, Bowie had established his interest in all matters extraterrestrial. As a Brit teenager, David had helped edit a flying saucer newsletter. He admitted to me that he loved science fiction and was fascinated with life in space and the possibility that quite a few cosmic visitors had ended up on our earthly shores.

During a conversation, Bowie had gone out on a limb revealing that he had once had a close encounter. In the book Laugh Gnostic, author Peter Koening paraphrases what Bowie said: “A friend and I were traveling in the English countryside when we both noticed a strange object hovering above a field. From then on I have come to take this phenomena seriously. I believe that what I saw was not the actual object, but a projection of my own mind trying to make sense of this quantum topological doorway into dimensions beyond our own. It’s as if our dimension is but one among an infinite number of others.”

This is perhaps the most striking anecdote from the seventies – when he was consuming mountains of drugs, but also piles of books about esoterica.

Feeling demonic forces moving in, David felt strongly that he needed an exorcism and asked that his new found friend white witch Walli Elmlark be called upon to lend her assistance to remove the evil from his surroundings….

“There’s no easy or elegant way to say this, so I’ll just say it straight. At a certain point in the ritual, the pool began to bubble. It bubbled vigorously (perhaps “thrashed” is a better term) in a manner inconsistent with any explanation involving air filters or the like.”

The rock and roll couple watched in amazement. Angie says she tried to be flippant – “‘Well, dear, aren’t you clever? It seems to be working. Something’s making a move, don’t you think?’ – but I couldn’t keep it up. It was very, very strange; even after my recent experiences I was having trouble accepting what my eyes were seeing.”

Angie insists that she would peak through the glass doors which lead to the pool every so often and was dumb founded by what she saw.

“On the bottom of the pool was a large shadow, or stain, which had not been there before the ritual began. It was in the shape of a beast of the underworld; it reminded me of those twisted, tormented gargoyles screaming silently from the spires of medieval cathedrals. It was ugly, shocking, malevolent; it frightened me.

“I backed away from it feeling very strange, went through the doorway, and told David what I’d seen, trying to be nonchalant but not doing very well. He turned white but eventually became revived enough to spend the rest of the night doing coke. He wouldn’t go near the pool, though.

Here’s more about Bowie and the occult.  I sort of feel like I’m novelizing some of Bowie’s lyrical ideas – I mention “Five Years” in TABOTD – but there’s also “Oh, You Pretty Things” and the notion of Homo Superior, which people think has to do with homosexuality.  Well, yeah, but also evolution:

Look at your children
See their faces in golden rays
Don’t kid yourself they belong to you
They’re the start of a coming race
The earth is a bitch
We’ve finished our news
Homo sapiens have outgrown their use
All the strangers came today
And it looks as though they’re here to stay

Immensely good live version:

In related news, apparently my novel is now with Bowie’s son Duncan Jones, director of the excellent “Moon.”  The editor of his next movie is a friend of the family.

Original

Some of my favorite lyrics ever:

Now if I had the courage
I’d pour into your jar
All the things that I have heard you whisper in the dark
And when that jar was heavy
With your honeyed confidence
I’d put it to my lips and drink its meaning and its sense
Its meaning and its sense

It has no end so let’s pretend it’s
Now
Let’s get started
Now

Rest of the lyrics.

It’s Catching Up
Dark Ages
The Tower
Bonus: Victims Family – George Benson (with crappy sound)

Thanks to Jesus Angel Garcia who got me investigating again after a Facebook post.

I was never much of a Grateful Dead fan.  In my high school, Dead fans were the beautiful people – surfers and their girlfriends, where I never fit in.  I’ve never been good with frolicking, which I write about.  At 15, I was smoking a lot of pot with my friend Aeon (as in aeons of time) who’s crazy mom let us smoke pot in her living room, with her.  But we were listening to Black Sabbath.  As much as I’m interested in psychedelics and their implications, I’d make a pretty crappy hippie.  Too bitter – though if I bombarded my brain with Ayahuasca maybe that’d change. Instead, I bombard my brain with books about Ayahuasca.

But then I started listening to “American Beauty” and got it.  Great songwriting, even if it makes me feel like I’m melting.

Still, I’ve always been more partial to The Band. Compare this, the first track from “Music from Big Pink.” My favorite record to get drunk to.  Not “Box of Rain” but “Tears of Rage.”

It’s like the Grateful Dead for depressives.

Got some good work done this weekend on TABOTD Part II. Will start posting soon, need to read it on paper and revise it. Writing while listening to:

Actually, fell asleep on the couch for most of that. But watch. Also-

Hear a sample:

The American Book of the Dead