Free Season of the Witch : How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll (9780698143722) by Peter Bebergal Page B

almost every poster for the UFO Club, and were a revival of the nineteenth-century ideal that art could change the spiritual condition of the world.
    The bands of the UFO Club—the Soft Machine, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Pink Floyd—played against a backdrop of projection created by the art collective known as the Boyle Family (Mark Boyle and Joan Hills). In earlier performances, Boyle and Hills projected bodily fluids, including blood, sperm, and vomit, onto screens. During UFO shows, acid was poured onto zinc slides and the destruction was projected. Colored liquids were also used, and sometimes entire evenings would center around one color, with colored fabric, paint, and confetti thrown around during the performances. The writer David Thompson described Boyle’s work as a kind of mysticism: “[Mysticism] is the only serious word that adequately covers the aim and the activity. The aim is not to ‘create’ something, to communicate, to demonstrate, to define or to discover. It is to isolate for examination.” It is, according to Thompson, a romantic conception of art that is not interested in dividing up the world into categories but rather is seeking unity. Combining these projections withthe music, all of it fueled by copious amounts of LSD, pushed at the edges of culture, creating a counterculture that the mainstream would ultimately embrace, if only in a commercial sense.
    It would be impossible to catalogue every instance of the rock poster art influence on British and American advertising, but there are standout examples that either cynically ripped off the most noncommercial art form next to graffiti or simply had to give over to a psychic transformation that was so powerful, the counterculture alone could not contain it. A 7UP television commercial by the artist Peter Max, whose work is reminiscent of the Beatles’
Yellow Submarine
film, features a flared-panted character walking on clouds, imagining prizes, each presented in a highly colorful quasi-mystical setting. There are even hints of the ubiquitous LSD “trails.” A Brim commercial for its then new decaffeinated coffee suggests the drink contains another special ingredient. Each person who drinks it is shown going wide-eyed as colorful animated thoughts swirl from the top of their heads, as if their crown chakras have been awakened, revealing Mucha-like swirls and flowers, and there’s even a figure vocalizing the word
Love
as it exits his throat on a rainbow. In the print advertising world, a 1969 Pepsi ad features the iconic bottle surrounded by floral mandalas and haloed by a rainbow-colored sun, as if a divine presence has descended into our midst.
    Change was not only in the air, it was in the very look and sound of the time, but there was often tension about whether the revolution was social, political, or spiritual. Sometimes even other hippies found the effort to change one’s mind, instead of the system, to be a dangerous and often futile effort, especially for the more politically motivated freaks. Even in
IT
, one namelesseditor opens the 1967 issue with an angry stream-of-consciousness rant to not let the mystically inclined acidheads derail the true project of the revolution. American readers had been writing, asking where all the LSD-inspired mandalas were. The editors responded that they were worried a focus on drugs and other high weirdness would undermine their mission by not only making them more suspect in the eyes of the law, but causing the drug quest to become its own kind of fundamentalism: “This is the drag about LSD: it’s a tease. We must not get hung up on some drug scene. Finally, the only scene is where you are with yourself ‘spiritually.’ The human soul, the inner-vision, call it what [
sic
] you like, transcends everything, including the psychedelic experience—which is not the only way nor necessarily the best to explore eternal/mystical/Zen/Schizoid