Over the weekend I was stoked to find out that a new biography of Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page, had recently hit the book shelves. According to a review in The London Times the book is a no-holds-barred excavation of Page’s debauchery and excess with a particular emphasis on the musician’s associations with the occult and especially with Aleister Crowley. Here’s a bit from the review…

“In 1970, Jimmy Page bought Boleskine House, an 18th-century lodge on the banks of Loch Ness. The monster that drew Led Zeppelin’s guitarist there was not Nessie, but Aleister Crowley, the late ‘great beast’ of British occultism who had bought the house in 1899. Boleskine, built on the site of a 10th-century church that burnt down with its congregation inside, had allegedly been left brimming with demons after Crowley was called away mid-ritual, which was all part of its appeal to the 26-year-old Page, who had been in thrall to Crowley’s ideas since adolescence.

“For a generation of long- haired rock fans, ownership of Boleskine House confirmed Page’s apparently close alignment with supernatural forces. ”

Read the full review here, and check out this great video that traces the connections between the magus and rocker…

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The premiere episode of Trust begins with a scene of John Paul Getty III running through a sunflower field in a panic. The scene cuts to a Hollywood party at the Getty mansion in 1973 where a band is playing Pink Floyd’s “Money” before George Getty kills himself with a barbecue fork to the chest in the middle of a dark garage. George was high on a deadly mix of uppers downers and alcohol. This new anthology series on FX tells the sex drugs and rock ‘n’ roll story of one of America’s richest families, and the scandal that rocked their oil empire at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.

Created by Simon Beaufoy and directed by Danny Boyle — the team that brought us 127 Hours and Slumdog Millionaire — Trust offers a peek at American royalty through the lens of a central storyline about a teenage JP Getty III getting perpetually wasted and laid before being kidnapped by Roman Mafiosi and testing the mettle, love, and resources of his extended family including his tight-assed grandfather and namesake, John Paul Getty I.

The big attraction here is the casting of Donald Sutherland as JPG I and Brendan Frasier as a cowboy hat-wearing family problem fixer named Fletcher Chase. I’m planning to cover the series’ episodes here on Insomnia because of the countercultural milieu that JPG III wades through with his bell bottom jeans and long red locks. JPG III is played by Harris Dickinson, and his performance along with those of Sutherland and Frasier form a triumvirate of hubris and humor at the center of this true crime drama that revels in the lifestyles of the decadent and infamous. Sutherland is particularly effective as the family’s parasitic patriarch, and the script serves him especially well in a soliloquy on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean where he explains how the family’s oil-shipping-refinery-gas station-hotel businesses avoid paying any taxes by operating at a loss on paper. JPG III likens the arrangement to a spider’s web while Sutherland laughs through a leer.

In the first episode JPG III appears at his grandfather’s English estate which he shares with a harem of girlfriends. He befriends the old man through their mutual appreciation of art and JPG III gains his namesake’s trust before the publication of a European sex magazine reveals that the boy has fallen for the same sex and drugs vices that killed his uncle and debilitated his father — JPG II befriended the Rolling Stones and partied with them in Morocco. After his grandfather reneges on paying his debts to the Italian toughs, JPG III returns to Rome in hopes of outrunning his family name and his personal troubles.

One of the most effective ways the series evokes its period milieu is through its killer soundtrack which includes tunes by Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Argent’s “Hold Your Head Up” which pulses through the first episode’s closing scene when gangsters catch up with JPG III.

I’ve been looking forward to this series for months now and this first episode did not disappoint. More on the next episode next week.

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This June 29 we will mark 40 years since the murder of Hogan’s Heroes television star, Bob Crane. Crane was a successful leading man on the small screen, and the conservative head of his small town, American family. The only thing that seemed odd about the Crane clan was that dad was famous for making people laugh on television. No harm there.

But Bob Crane lived a double life: TV star/family man in the public eye, and sex addict/amateur pornographer away from the set and his family. I might post more about Crane at the official anniversary of his death this summer, but I’m posting about Crane’s dark life today because his son has just released a new book illuminating his father’s long shadows and attempting to cast some light on Crane’s still-unsolved murder. Here’s the word from the Daily Mail…

‘The red light was always on in my dad’s makeshift film processing lab,’ writes Robert Crane in his riveting account of his father’s very secret and sordid lifestyle in Crane: Sex, Celebrity and My Father’s Unsolved Murder, published by University Press of Kentucky…

He spent his ‘off-duty’ time developing hundreds of photographs of the actresses and Playboy Playmates who were always stopping by the set. Word was out that the Hogan’s set was the place to market your wares if you were young, shapely, and of the female persuasion.

All the kink ended on June 29, 1978, when Victoria Berry, Crane’s co-star on Beginner’s Luck, ran screaming from the TV star’s apartment, unit 132A of the Winfield Apartments in Scottsdale. Crane’s body was found lying on its right side atop a queen-sized bed, clad only in boxer shorts and wearing a wrist watch.

An electrical cord was fastened tightly around his neck and a pillow stood vertically at the top of his head.

Two parallel gashes were above and behind the left side of his head that left a fan of blood across the ceiling, the wall behind the top of the bed and the nightstand lamp. Human tissue was on the wall; the bed sheet and pillowcase were soaked with blood.

Watch the documentary Murder in Scottsdale for a deep dive into Crane’s dark side, and the investigation of his still unsolved murder…

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After recent posts about The Doors and Easy Rider, I’m on a bit of a hippy jag, and the fact that 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love means that I’ll likely linger on the longhairs for a lot of posts during these warm weather months. It’s always fun to celebrate the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll generation, but what about the darker side of that cultural revolution? What if the flower children were actually grown by the military industrial complex in order to undermine opposition to the Vietnam War? And what if Laurel Canyon was the hothouse where this strange strain was synthesized?

Meet writer Dave McGowan, author of Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon…

David McGowan was born and raised in Torrance, California, just twenty miles south of Laurel Canyon. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in psychology and has, since 1990, run a small business in the greater Los Angeles area. Currently single, he is the proud father of three daughters. He is also a lifelong music fan who still frequently keeps his radio tuned to classic rock stations. McGowan’s previous books include Programmed to Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder, and Understanding the F-Word: American Fascism and the Politics of Illusion.

How did an uncanny amount of rock superstars emerge from the rustic Laurel Canyon scene of the mid 60s when the primary music centers of the US at that time were NYC, Nashville, and Detroit? Why were many of these future stars sons and daughters of the military/intelligence complex and extreme privilege who just happened to all arrive in LA at the same time? From the Lizard King Jim Morrison to Frank Zappa, the Mamas and Papas, the Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, even the Monkees, they all had conspicuous family heritages that did not exactly jive with what would become the free love, anti war soundtrack of a generation. Meanwhile, looming behind these musicians was a dark underbelly of Hollywood stars, young turks, the mob, shadowy intelligence assets, and charmers like little Charlie Manson who everyone liked at first.. How and why did this all happen? And what about that covert military installation on Lookout Mountain? Are you ready to have your rock and roll fantasies challenged? You may never listen to this music the same way ever again.

Here’s The Antidote interview with McGowan…

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This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967. During that auspicious season about 100,000 young Americans traveled west to the Fog City to twist in the gyre of a countercultural hurricane while similar youth movements blossomed in Canada an across Europe. Suspicious of government oppression, aligned against the Vietnam War and consumerist values, the hippies seeking out the Summer of Love embraced sex, art, music, meditation, and the expanded consciousness that could be accessed through drugs and meditation. From this scene a radical value system based on communal values, community care, cultural transformation, and freedom from bourgeois hypocrisy and political tyranny came to light. They were weird, wild, wacked-out, and their impact on the culture has been permanent and lasting despite their many critics and naysayers. Here’s the story of the Summer of Love from PBS’s “American Experience…”

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Props out to Ezra Buckley for hooking up a recent story about the death of Wilhelm Reich at Remnants. According to the Freud Quotes site the good doctor was…

Wilhelm Reich, psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies and prophet of the sexual revolution died 59 years ago, on November 3, 1957.

Here’s their word on his controversial career…

Author of several influential books – most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936) – Reich became known as one of the most radical practitioners of psychiatry.

Reich’s idea of “muscular armour” – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – influenced innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he invented the phrase “the sexual revolution”. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police.

Reich’s theories are fascinating as were his colorful life, his pioneering of the sexual revolution, his persecution and imprisonment by the U.S. government, and his controversial death. Read the whole story at the Feud Quotes site, and watch W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism – a confoundingly poetic celebration of Reich and his ideas. Here’s a bit from Roger Ebert’s review of the film…

In a real way, Makavejev is his films. Like Andrei Tarkovsky, Guy Maddin, Russ Meyer or Alejandro Jodorowsky, he cannot help but make the films he makes, and no others. In his early career in Yugoslavia, in movies like “Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator” (1967), he delighted in sneaking political parallels past the censors; he was not anti-communist but anti-authority. The man in charge of film funding in Yugoslavia was an old classmate of Makavejev’s. Faced with one of his scripts, the man sighed: “Dusan, Dusan, Dusan! I know what you are really saying in this screenplay, and you know what you are really saying. Now go home and revise it so only the audience knows…”

“WR,” for example, begins as a documentary about the Austrian analyst Wilhelm Reich, once Freud’s first assistant, later a communist, later an anti-communist, eventually an American, who believed the orgasm was the key to freedom and happiness, and possibly a cure for disease. His Orgone Accumulator was a box the size of a phone booth, wood on the outside, lined with metal, which he believed concentrated orgasmic energy within anyone sitting inside of it. Reich’s science was condemned by the FDA, his books were burned by the U.S. government, and he died in prison. You see how dangerous sex is.

Here’s the film…

Stay Awake!

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This year we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Among other ideas this study of sex in the West posited that the notion that every person possessed their own unique sexuality was a relatively new one. Of course it’s a notion that couldn’t be more timely four decades later, and this anniversary is the perfect opportunity for revisiting Foucault’s ideas. Here’s a short documentary that offers a fun, sexy take on Foucault’s philosophizing on fornication…

Stay Awake!

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