There was a group called Eddie and the Hotrods right? And on their album, for some reason they chose to put a picture of Aleister Crowley wearing a Mickey Mouse hat...
Well, this EP had this picture of Crowley with this Mickey Mouse hat on. I couldn't think of why. Jimmy Page saw this, right, and he rang the band up and said, "I'm putting a curse on you all."
And after that, their album went away, just like that.I thought I'd look into the matter a little more deeply and found an interview with a member of the band:
"Do Anything You Wanna Do" was the summer hit. And you could barely turn a radio on without it blasting out ...whilst the single reached the top 5, it wasn't long afterwards that what was to be known as the Curse of the Hotrods struck.
In retrospect it wasn't the best of ideas to mess about with Aleister Crowley.
The single cover featured the image above featuring Crowley's face with a pair of Mickey Mouse ears, a play on Crowley's mantra - "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law."
It wasn't long before the letters started coming from his followers, saying we were playing with fire and threatening dire retributions on us all. At the time it was unnetrving and we tried to laugh it off, but uncannily enough we suffered more than our fair share of tragedies soon after.
In no particular order one of the guys responsible for the cover commited suicide, our manager died of a drugs overdose and all sorts of other troubles befell band members that I won't go into here.Now, rock n' roll is a rough business and the kinds of problems to Rods ran into are by no means uncommon. But by the same token this all ties into something I've believed very strongly for quite some time now- you have to be very careful what kinds of symbols you choose to play around with.
A suicide and an overdose are both self-inflicted tragedies, which speaks to the power of suggestion sociologists have described with voodoo; manifesting the 'curse' in one's own subconscious.
But another strange notion occurred to me- would the same thing happen today? Belief itself is a poorly understood phenomenon, and may very well have a power in and of itself we can't quantify. Back in the 70s there was a small but motivated group of individuals who were fascinated by the Crowley mystique. People took these sorts of things much more seriously than they do today- would that kind of focused intensity of belief create its own manifestations, such as what the band member describes?
Does the power of suggestion explain it away, or are there more subtle forces at work?
To answer that in the context of this story, I'd have to hear what other problems the band experienced. But a lot of us have had personal experience with a variety of anomalous weirdness that seems to operate above and beyond any possible type of suggestion.
guess 'the adams family' got off scot free eh
ReplyDeleteAs some of the readers may already know, "Do What Thou Wilt" is *not* the same thing as "Do what you wanna do." So, with that said, I can see where Jimmy "The Crowley Apostle" Page may have taken umbrage to seeing that along with the mockery around the Crowley picture with The Mouse ears. Going back to 1977, this was not a good year for the Zeppelin and probably not the best of headspaces for anyone in the band. Robert Plant's kid had just died and their recent tour was about as shitty an experience as they come for everyone involved. The wedge between Plant and Page was becoming a real issue, with Page taking Crowley's path into heroin addiction a little too seriously.
ReplyDeleteThe Hot Rods were standing on the edge of the emerging punk scene, having rivaled the Sex Pistols in a neck-in-neck race for popularity out of the pub rock, meth-fueled, intensity also around this time. As far as Crowley was concerned, the Hot Rods lead singer, Barrie Masters, didn't even know who he was other than that dude in the back of the line on The Beatles "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover who had kicked the bucket back in 1947 and was some perceived pre-Hippie that dabbled in hocus-pocus magical shite.
Whether you can take the stand that Jimmy Page's alleged curse on the Hot Rods was for-reals or just an unhappy coincidence of bad events already in play in the life of that band, I am sure it can be argued either way. For as you point out often enough, there are no coincidences. Maybe Page, in his pseudo drug-induced states with half-understood magical knowledge swirling around his big curly head, had the wherewithal to invoke the right domino at the right moment in time and space to usher in the downfall of the Hot Rods. Or maybe the tapestry of events is more detailed than the telling of these stories by any of our efforts to recollect them in some kind of order?
Whatever the case, I can't help but admire what the Hot Rods were trying to be about at that time. They had the makings of something really inspiring, with Barrie Masters already taking a step in the right direction by literally slapping Johnny Rotten right off the stage as the two fought for their moment in the sun. I can't help but love them for that spirit of punk that we all felt, and still do as rock--the real rock--refuses to die from generation to generation. As they stated in their song,"Do what you wanna do," I can't help but be stoked by their intention as small town kids who wanted nothing but to be better than what they were and who just felt pissed about where they were at that time:
"Gonna break out of the city
Leave the people here behind
Searching for adventure
It's the type of life to find
Tired of doing day jobs
With no thanks for what I do
I'm sure I must be someone
Now I'm gonna find out who
Why don't you ask them what they expect from you?
Why don't you tell them what you're gonna do?
You'll get so lonely, maybe it's better that way
It' ain't you only, you got something to say
Do anything you wanna do
Do anything you wanna do"
Cursed? Maybe. Sometimes the ones who wield curses are themselves cursed in the process of wielding curses. Be careful what thou wilt or thy wilt will wilt.
The "power of suggestion?" Do you mean that shit where millions, if not billions, of people gobble anti-depressants, piss them out into the water supply and make Pharma companies rich beyond the dreams of avarice while they stupidly believe those drugs will "cure" their depression?
ReplyDeleteThat "power of suggestion?"
I suppose that your next statement will involve something horrendous like Pharma lies for profit or some such nonsense.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2328700-no-link-between-depression-and-serotonin-finds-major-analysis/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
-Moncrieff’s team found that there was no evidence that low serotonin activity or amounts cause depression.
“The implication of our paper is that we do not know what [SSRI] antidepressants are doing,” says Moncrieff. One possibility is that they are working through a placebo effect, she says.-
Or, and I'm spitballing here, the huge amounts of people who are on drugs with no known use is the reason that huge amounts of people appear to have wandered into BugFuckLandia.
Also spitballing...I'm willing to bet that the majority of wokesters gobble SSRI's like the squirrel in my yard gobbles down bird feed.
Of course it's all innocent and healthy like mandated vaccines on demand, face masks and endless lockdowns.
So, what are you, a conspiracy theorist?
Not me, I eat my Prozac, self vaccinate & live in a fucking closet, so no conspiracy theorizing here, no-sir-ee-bob..nah uh...