The place is disturbing. We’re not in Jim Jones territory (the politics are closer to the Moonies’); the teenagers are there on a temporary basis, but the underlying principle is still Fascism Lite. On the Rev’s radio and TV programs, some of the kids looked downright robotic, or plain scared...perhaps the excitement of being on TV, the bright lights in their faces? You’d think that after a few weeks in The Village they’re used to bright lights; it’s a classic reprogramming tool. Sample quote: “Some people think I’ve been brainwashed here. What I say is that if you could have seen my brain before I came here, you would have thought it needed washing!!”

Why bring this up at all? Well, in the mid-80s we had a president who’d fall asleep in the middle of cabinet meetings, and whenever he woke up another of his friends was being hauled off to jail. In order for the remainder to pick our pockets most effectively, it was necessary to distract as much of the populace as possible. This called for a round of bread and circuses--the government began a saturation media campaign, making big noises about the Threat to Our Way of Life posed by such evils as “pornography” or “drugs,” so people wouldn’t notice what was being done to their standard of living. It got to where “grassroots” movements sprang up--a bunch of Washington wives lobbied Congress to force the music industry to put warning labels on “indecent” rock and roll records.

So what’s one more depressing story of Life In The 80s? Hey, I’ve got a million of ’em. What’s remarkable is that people are going out of their way to be nostalgic. Me, I remember vividly the stoke of midnight, Jan. 1, 1990--I’d triumphed. The Decade of Ugliness was no more; I had outlived it. Little did I know that only three or four years would transpire before all the “alternative” clubs began programming “80s Retro Night,” replete with DJs spinning all those horrid CDs that nobody will pay even $5.99 for in the bargain bin. What the hell is up with that? There’s supposed to be a twenty-year nostalgia cycle, and 70s nostalgia lasted all of eight months. I feel cheated, robbed; my boyhood was ephemeral enough the first time around.

Speaking of misplaced childhood: this preacher-dude was in his glory. This was the culmination of all his dreams; his entire life had been leading up to this very moment. He’d been preaching the Evils of Rock Music for a good 15 years and the world was finally catching up with him. So he printed up a bunch of petitions, inserting them in every mailing next to the self-addressed non-stamped envelope (in which the faithful are expected to enclose their monthly tithings, all for the privilege of staying on his mailing list).

I wish I’d saved a copy--let’s just say that an entry for “subtlety” was nowhere to be found in his Book of Virtues. He wouldn’t even call the stuff “rock and roll,” or differentiate between hard rock, punk rock, soft rock, acid rock, disco, new wave, rap, country, heavy metal--to him, it was all one thing: “Murder Music!!!!” All of that month’s literature referred to it thusly (kind of like when MTV was blackmailed into referring to Michael Jackson only as “The King Of Pop”), and the petitions demanded that your local congressperson vote to ban this “Murder Music!!!!” altogether.

Yeah, I used to listen regularly. I was on an even tighter budget then than now, and cheap entertainment was always welcome. This guy had a knack for keeping you guessing, too. All the greats do; the more intelligent listeners tune in as much for hints on their relative sincerity (their relative sanity even) as for the snicker quota endemic to all such programming. He could be spooky when he wanted to. I was young and foolish and not taping these things, but I still remember the show when he claimed to have psychic powers. Only he didn’t call it that, because those are supposed to be from the devil, whereas of course his were of God. He called it “the gift of discernment” or something, even if he did hint that it probably came from his heathen Cherokee ancestors. “I’ll be sitting in my office and someone’s talking to me, and out of nowhere I’ll hear a voice in my ear: LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. LIAR.” Silly boy, he probably does have psychic ability. It’s not the voice of God in his ear, it’s leakage from the head of the person talking to him. Seriously now--how long would you be able carry on a conversation with this guy before the neon LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. LIAR. began to flash within your own head?

It all ended in tears--a year later it turned out a satanic cult was operating under his very discerning nose, among some of the staff at The Village. (Unless it was another fundraising ploy? It’s hard to say. What isn’t?) They were apparently having unsupervised sex and drugs and rock and roll out in the woods, when they were supposed to be on K.P. duty or pulling a graveyard shift at the chapel. The only hint of trouble to come was a vague rumbling on one of the programs about how “I think a couple of you people even here on the staff aren’t setting the best possible example for the kids,” and then the bombshell a night or two after. They were fired--because (God bless ’em!) they had completely hacked, trashed and deleted the database and all backup copies of his all-hallowed mailing list!!!! In a cruelly delicious irony that escapes the Rev to this day, the kids had held a little “record burning” ceremony all their own.

I’ve long felt that God (whatever that might be) has a very special sense of humor; don’t you? Even “Pastor Bedfellow” has that, whether he knows it or not. He’s never been blessed with an overabundance of shame--“humility” is a footnote in his Book of Virtues, if it’s mentioned at all. How else to explain the stunt he pulled as Desert Shield was degenerating into Desert Storm? He wrote a letter to Saddam Hussein, complaining that the heating bill at The Village had gotten drastically out of hand, and since it was all Saddam’s fault, Saddam should pay up. There was no response from the Iraqi government, which is a pity. Somebody should have asked him why he felt he deserved welfare and foreign aid from the taxpayers of another country, while he felt perfectly comfortable denouncing these things in his own--and they could have told him to put some solar panels up on the roof while he was at it, and maybe a windmill out by the barn.

Silly me, taking him at his word. He didn’t really expect a welfare check from Saddam Hussein; he didn’t even want one--it would have taken all the fun out of the war. He just needed a hook for that month’s mailing, to keep The Village firmly in the black. The more intelligent among his listeners were well aware that people who really need help with their winter heating bill go to their own government if they can, or dip into their savings. They take a second or third job perhaps, if they’re able to work. People in the real world haven’t the time to send crank letters to Saddam Hussein, nor to quote the contents of them in press releases and mass mailings and on their very own nationally syndicated radio show.

By this point the missionary man had mostly dropped his anti-rock crusade (though he still has the brainwashing camp), but for a while he cranked his books and brochures faster than the length of most 80s bands’ careers. (Whitesnake? Poison?) Of course I acquired as many copies as he was willing to mail me for free. We’re talking laugh-a-minute here--from the polaroids of album covers hastily (illegally?) taken at the record store, to the facts inside (“the money Michael Jackson made from you went to the Jehovah’s Witnesses! How do you feel about that?”), the mind boggles, and yet again...

I’ll give the preacher his due. He had no ability to comprehend the culture he was reading about but had rummaged undaunted through years and years of Rolling Stone and Hit Parader and Circus, looking for the juiciest of quotes. He had a source (American Photographer, I believe) and a date for that quote from Gene Simmons, “KISS stands for Kids In Satan’s Service.” He had an even better quote from Linda Ronstadt, from Rolling Stone circa 1975: “I sing better with a shot of heroin in each arm.” (Linda! We hardly knew ye! I’d love to track that down some day; better to hear Linda bragging about her exploits than Courtney Love claiming, 20 years later in the same mag, that she doesn’t do it anymore “because when I do I turn into a real bitch.”)

What was most fun for me was how lame were the examples given. Metal Church? Stevie Nicks? Pleeeeeze...if only I could have sat the Rev down with some vintage Roky Erickson. (“I Think of Demons,” “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer,” perhaps. Of the two of them, Roky has probably been an ordained minister longer.) If only I could’ve force-fed him The Fugs. (Sample lyric: “Hanging out by the schoolyard gate/Communist literature in my hand/Handing out reefers and porn and pills/I’m a dirty old man!” Year? 1965!) If only he could have been made to experience the splendour of...Satan & His Deciples!! (sic)

No mere studio aggregation, this was a working bar band, playing the debbil’s music to insensible tourists in the groggiest saloons of New Orleans. They were a house band until they were replaced by Black Oak Arkansas (who would go on to be themselves accused of planting backwards-satanic vocals on a live album. It takes talent.). This humiliation of being jilted for the likes of Jim Dandy Mangrum is the only mention of Satan & His Deciples that I’ve ever seen in the rock press, and there’s no word what their live sets were like. All that remains to us is their sole LP, Underground, recorded in the depths of the Louisiana swamp back in 1968. (Louisiana is pretty exotic to the rest of us--there’s a guy down there who claimed to be Jim Morrison and even published a book under that name, The Bank of America of Louisiana. Maybe this band is how he amused himself back when our Jimbo was still alive.) The album was hidden in a barn and finally surfaced on the collectors’ market 20 years later. I don’t know whether the band finally unleashed it or some swamp poacher simply liberated it. How romantic to suppose that perhaps it just appeared in that barn, untouched by human hands...but the odds are against it. Some copies have water damage (possible alien organisms growing inside); sealed LPs went for $250 apiece, and worth every penny. A friend of mine bought one, and I have the tape.

It’s a pity, isn’t it? So many of the things I enjoy writing about the most are ridiculously hard to obtain. All I can say is that it’s not my fault they’re rare! It’s the fault of all the people with such bad taste. (I saw a great quote in a chat site once, “I come from that alternate universe where people like Cabaret Voltaire were superstars, and Brian Eno was Elvis.” Exactly.) A friend of a friend once said that “rock and roll is supposed to be in the air and populist,” therefore I should be writing about what’s on the radio if I’m going to write about rock at all. What I told him is that half the reason I do it is that I write things that I personally would want to read. I have nothing whatsoever to say about the Spice Girls.

They’re all over the internet, and that’s all fine by me; I don’t live in England where they’re on the front page of every paper, so I can ignore them at will. Nowadays I can even ignore Madonna at will, most of the time. Meanwhile, the entire world (or at least the entire internet) has seen fit to ignore bands like Phluph, The Purple Gang, Kalacakra, and The Golden Dawn. I’m writing for the person who on a whim decides to do a websearch on that weird little album they picked up in the bargain bin one day. The cover was all ratty, the vinyl was half-shot and it was recorded by a band nobody ever heard of, but it’s been a comfort to him ever since. It’s been a comfort to me too, so I’m here to tell you what I know of it, what I think of it, what I think about however it may relate to the Big Picture as I perceive it, and if you care to poke around you’ll read about other things you’ll want to keep an eye out for, or at least find their presentation entertaining for its own sake. I’m not a fetishist collector--some people need to own the artifact, I just want to hear the music; so long as I have a tape I’m perfectly happy, and feel I “have” the album. (Oh, well I guess it is fun owning a tape of something that grown men will cheerfully pay $450 to have--I get to hear the same thing for $3. Victory for the little guy.) For me, reviews of such albums are like travelogues. I’ll probably never visit Paraguay either, but I can read about what it’s like there.

OK, so the album was recorded (on the Goldband label, if that helps), mixed, pressed, sealed, stashed, and all but forgotten. It was our loss. In the 20 years that Satan’s Underground album was hidden away, American civilization went seriously downhill. It got to where there were serious efforts underway to remove that kind of music (if not everything this side of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) from the marketplace entirely, all in the name of God and patriotic duty--spearheaded by exactly the sort of cockroaches the Founding Fathers had all left Europe to rid themselves of in the first place. At the time I found it hilarious--lots of these marginal heavy metal bands received serious national publicity when otherwise they would have withered on the vine. Deicide, for one. They were in danger of being dropped by their label until they got into the habit of calling Bob Larson Ministries on the air (a different preacher entirely--there’s lots of great stuff about him all over the net!) pretending to be possessed by demons. Larson would fall for it every time, and try to exorcise them (live! on the air!) and couldn’t figure out why nothing worked. He’d read and reread the manual, gave all the secret passwords their correct pronunciation, and yet the “demons” continued to laugh in tongues and puke pea soup. Kids all over the country demanded Deicide CDs at their local retailer, and the band played on.

So we’re faced with the spectre of an album purportedly recorded by the Prince O’ Darkness himself, and here I am enthused about the thing. What’s wrong with this picture? I’m well aware. I know, I know I’ve said elsewhere that religion and rock don’t mix. A black album cover of shadowy humans menacing a burning skull? *yawn* Still, what is religion anyway but some fellow-human proclaiming to you “what God says,” and the audacity of their trying to make you live accordingly? Here was “Pastor Bedfellow” with his printouts on the Evils of Rock Music, and here I was with a collection of stuff that had been done 20 years previous that without exception put the contemporary “scourge” to shame...the topper being an album operating from a different conceit entirely. I remember telling a friend about it at the time...being a bit dense (turned out to have fundamentalist leanings of his own, until he saw a documentary on his “church” on CBS, exposing it as a cult. He must have nodded off during the sermon on The Evil Liberal Media. I can’t recall if this was before or after the time he plugged a speaker cable into a wall socket and blamed it on the fact he hadn’t smoked hash in a while) he said something scornful about “so a bunch of guys recorded an album about the devil--” when in fact bands that did that were a dime a dozen.

What’s interesting here is that--long before it got to be trendy, these guys had already taken all that beyond its logical conclusion into something far more interesting--an album supposedly by the devil. This has to be the biggest concept since Paradise Lost--that the lead singer is, in fact, Satan; and that just for once in this stinkin’ life Satan would like to be able to give you his side of the story. Directly. And just for fun, he’ll do it in a recording studio in 1968 while fronting a rock and roll band. Indeed he does--the initial track, “Satan’s First Theme,” is all about who he is, how he got here, and what’s in it for you. The final one (“Book of Alpha”) is his rewrite of the creation myth, and promises a “Book of Zion” on the next album, for which the world is waiting still.

What can be said? The devil is the original rapper. The opening cut is eight minutes of spoken word, the band relentless in a swamp groove rather like a Cajun Creedence on amphetamines, and the first thing you hear is “Hah hah hah...haha hah hah. A-hahhuh; ha haha ha ha HAAAAA!” Print cannot possibly convey the weirdness of that belly laugh--it’s forced, with a certain joylessness to it even, a charisma all its own. His laughter is syncopated against the backbeat in a way that...well, a human wouldn’t do it like that. There’s something weirdly mechanical about the band, too, that always reminds me of Roky Erickson’s fabulous definition of heavy metal, i.e., the Yardbirds as performed by robots. There are times when they might as well be a tape loop--the musicians aren’t playing so much as they are being played. (“The Bible says the eyes are windows of the soul. Look into Gene Simmons’ eyes--nobody home!!!!!”)

The message? The standard stuff--Satan got a raw deal way back when, and he can offer a better one now. *yawn* (There are better deals available than any of the used cars in the Yahweh/Satan franchise, but that’s another issue entirely.) It’s not that I don’t think the lyrics are good, because they’re often brilliant, as far as they go--it’s the theme that’s hackneyed. One would hope they wouldn’t have been quite so party-line about things, but the message is the same as I’ve read elsewhere and that doesn’t impress me. Unfortunately, it’s necessary to make mention of the fact for the same reason that a lot of the early reviews of Henry Miller that weren’t utterly scandalized tended to damn with faint praise--these guys knew he’d written a great book but were paranoid to simply shout that from the rooftops, for fear of appearing “impressed by pornography.” Still--I gave the preacher man his due, so now I have to give the devil his. If there was ever an album specifically intended to make a satanist out of me, it’s nothing by Ozzy. This is it.

And it didn’t work. But I still play it from time to time, and enjoy it immensely. There’s one dog track on it (“Why The Seas Are Salty,” exactly the sort of tune that folksinger was crooning in Animal House before Belushi shattered his guitar--although “tears made the river/the river made the sea” is uncommonly pretty), and a couple of more lightweight ones (would you believe a little Cajun accordion ditty where he bemoans his status as a “Black Sheep?”), and the whole thing is too short (25 minutes), but I do like it, both musically and lyrically. I admire the sheer gall of them, and the singer is more than a little convincing for minutes at a time.

Mick Jagger, attempting the same trick, that same year, wasn’t able to sustain it for more than a few seconds. Had Mick been an unknown singer in Louisiana he would have done better, but it’s like when you see Robin Williams in a film--he’s always going to be Robin Williams playing somebody. Free of the trappings of media, sequestered and mouldering away in a barn, the three or four killer tracks on Underground are better than almost anything I’ve heard from Bob Dylan after Street-Legal. Satan’s a master of phrasing, and there’s a secret to that first song: the first time you hear it, after a minute or so you know what he’s going to say next a second or two before he actually says it. The only other time that’s happened for me was when I first heard Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. (“Abe said, where you want this killing done?/God said: out on Highway 61...”) It may be the devil or it may be the Lord...