Unexpurgated Séance Transcript

Exclusive to The Radical Elite Review. By Ian F Svenonius

There’s been a lot of talk about my book SUPERNATURAL STRATEGIES FOR MAKING A ROCK ‘n’ ROLL GROUP, not just about its radical approach pointers which upend decades of rock thinking, but also about the séance depicted therein, the event from which the book’s advice emanated.

People have sometimes questioned the veracity of the event which is understandable; while séances are not unusual and nearly everyone rubs a ouija board on occasion, our luck in contacting ghosts was quite remarkable. Also, these particular ghosts’ extraordinary loquacity was unusual to put it mildly. A séance is typically a murky affair with very little material information imparted where one is left with just a jumble of feelings, emotions, and what are called “vibrations.”

Of course, for those utilizing this book SUPERNATURAL STRATEGIES FOR MAKING A ROCK ‘N’ ROLL GROUP, trust is absolutely paramount. The reader needs to know that they’re putting their destiny in the hands of a reliable handbook. And indeed we can assure you, they are.

As far as the ghosts being unusually talkative with us, well I suppose it might be because we weren’t there with the usual mission of asking them to stop haunting our house or asking where they put the car keys before they died or something. No, we came to ask them about their experiences and whether they could help. And I think, after being shamed—and evicted from their old haunts —by mediums for so long, they appreciated a little respect and also the camaraderie which we enjoyed together. The best way to talk to a celebrity is to be nonchalant and normal so as to not make them feel awkward or self conscious. They will love you for it. Ghosts are the same.

Here is the transcript of the séance that comprises SUPERNATURAL STRATEGIES FOR MAKING A ROCK ‘n’ ROLL as it began. Of course, there was much, much more which required lots of editing but this provides a sort of taste of the repartee we enjoyed with these oftentimes playful sprites from the afterlife.

There were four of us plus the medium. For shorthand, the seancists are simply referred to as “persons 1 through 4.”

TRANSCRIPT OF SÉANCE— Exclusive to The Radical Elite Review

Principle characters: Person 1, Person 2, Person 3, Person 4, MEDIUM

P1: So, we are gathered here today in an attempt to contact members of the deceased rock ‘n’ roll community. We are hoping that perhaps they can give us the secrets to making our own rock groups.

P2: Yes! The doors to the elite club of rock ‘n’ roll groups must be smashed open, so that everyone can feed from the trough of expression!!!

P3: Dead rock stars? Like who? I only listen to trendy contemporary groups I hear of on internet sites. I don’t think they are dead …

P2. Well, the people we are trying to contact in the spirit world are music legends who may have died in their prime, and whose music is renowned. I think they’ll be uniquely qualified to give us pointers on making groups of our own.

P3. YES. I wonder how the stars of yesteryear made such great records. If only we could ask them.

P2: Oh that would be fabulous. Jim. Jimi. Janis. Sid Vicious.

P1: Think of the great songs they were working on when they died. There must be some unfinished masterpieces.

P4: It’s got to be a goldmine!

P2: We could make a record of posthumously written music by the great dead stars of yesteryear.

P1. Or we could just steal the publishing and say we wrote the songs

P3. OK well how do we begin? I’ve never been to a séance before.

P1. According to the internet, first, we must link hands and ask the spirit world if there’s anyone there.

P2. We can’t choose who we’re looking for?

P4. It’s based on availability.

P1. We begin by joining hands. Then we invite them.

HELLO SPIRITS–WE WANT TO MAKE CONTACT. PREFERABLY WITH FAMOUS DEAD MUSICIANS.

MOVE AMONG US …

SEND US A SIGN …

P2. Hey I feel a chill! There’s a spirit among us!

Paul McCartney: OH HELLO. THIS IS PAUL MCCARTNEY

P4. Paul! Whoa!

P1. So you really were dead all this time!

PM: Maybe ... or perhaps I’m just roaming the spirit dimension to keep the whole “death hoax” alive.

P2. Oh, OK. Well Paul, we are here for a reason. We are interested in forming our own rock ‘n’ roll groups. We want to know what kind of tips you could give us to help.

P3. The establishment figures, like Lou Reed, Jay-Z, and Jon Bon Jovi, are loathe to give up the tricks of their trade because they fear some Young Turk unseating them from their position of primacy. But we think it’s not fair.

PM. You’re quite right. They are terrified of losing their privileged status. And it IS unfair. It’s time for YOU to storm the castle gates!

P4. Well tell us Paul, how did you guys – a bunch of Britishers – become the biggest rock ‘n’ roll group ever?

PM: Well, when rock ‘n’ roll started, the American middle-class, obsessed with the “brain gap” against the Soviets, had shunned it as primitive and pornographic; just another example of trash culture; the anti-intellectualism and degeneration of the American child’s brain.

When British groups, such as my group, “The Beatles,” re-introduced it to Americans as something “good,” it created mass hysteria and confusion, called “mania” or sometimes “Beatle-mania,” which expressed itself in convulsive weeping, screaming, and public remonstration.

P1: Why?

PM: Because we were British! They found it confusing ... paradoxical. There is nothing an American loves and respects more than an Englishman.

P2: So, The American middle-class could only accept rock ‘n’ roll when it was replicated and re-packaged by British performers?

PM. Yes. Though the music had existed in their midst, white Americans for the most part felt unable to partake in it. They were hung up by their racial prejudice, their class system, their stultifying social roles, and the American obsession with authenticity.

P3: So, to start a successful group one should be British?

PM: It would certainly help. Oh dear ... I’m running late; cheerio!

P4: Hello?

P1: Where did he go?

LITTLE RICHARD: He had to go to a meeting at Apple enterprises. He’s quite busy. They’re launching a “Beatles” satellite to ensure a future market presence in faraway galaxies.

P3: Who is that???

LR: I’m Richard Wayne Penniman a.k.a. “Little Richard.” Arguably, the inventor of rock ‘n’ roll. I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.

P2. But you’re not dead either¹.

LR. No. I’m in an internet chat room. The internet often overlaps and intrudes into the mediumistic spirit world.

P3. Oh cool. I’ve never heard of you. I mostly listen to new groups from blogs.

P4. So all we got from McCartney was that crap about British people. He didn’t tell us anything useful.

P1. Yeah! What did that have to do with rock ‘n’ roll?

P2. What a jerk.

LR: Well ... when one is constructing one’s group, the musings of a Beatle could be useful; The Beatles are really unparalleled in influence.

P2: Yes, but why exactly?

LR: Because they knew the key to making a group with lasting impact is to appeal to the very young. I did it too, with “Tutti Frutti.”

P3: But very young people aren’t critics … they don’t write for music blogs ...

LR: True. But if one appeals to the sensibilities of the VERY young, one avoids the critical acumen and the cynical posturing of the teenage and adult years. The very young are accepting; “wide eyed.”

Later, when the young attain some agedness, their favorite group from their youth is a nostalgic memory, central to their identity, and considered with a kind of irrational devotion, like Catholicism for Catholics.

P4. How does a group appeal to children? By pretending to be young?

LR: Certainly NOT. Children don’t like other children. The very young are like dogs on the street or tourists in foreign countries; when confronted by something which threatens their imagined singularity, they react with growling or crying.

P1: How does a group appeal to children then?

LR: By being a scary adult. Children are fascinated by grotesque or scary things. Strange facial hair, grimacing, shouting, costumes. Dressing up like a walrus.

P2. So a group is actually attempting to manufacture nostalgia?

LR: Yes. Nostalgia is the most potent of all emotions.

Humanity’s most fervent inclination is to maintain a “status quo.” When something new is introduced, it’s typically treated with derision by a population resistant to change – think of the ridicule which met The Eiffel Tower, the cell phone, or the Segway.

However, the dark system of capitalism insists on shocking, cataclysmic, and traumatic change on a constant basis. Why, almost every day another delightful candy wrapper with fond associations from one’s childhood is transformed by its manufacturers into something garish, dumb, and embarrassing to look at.

Beautiful old buildings are demolished. Species are exterminated. Classic, beloved films are remade – usually by Tim Burton – as tedious filth or unintelligible drivel.

These incessant transmogrifications are designed expressly by the ruling class to create nostalgia paradigms through which to control history and manipulate the population.

P3. So wow, the group is well advised to manufacture some nostalgia of its own!

P4. Yes! So as to control people!

P1. OK, so what are some tips on achieving that, Mr. Richard?

P2. Hello? Mr. Richard?

P3. He’s not online anymore.

P4. Damn it! He logged off.

P2: Or maybe his computer crashed.

P3. How selfish.

P1. Well, let’s try for someone else ... HELLO SPIRIT WORLD … DECEASED FAMOUS MUSICIAN ... MOVE AMONG US ... DON’T BE SHY ...

Brian Jones: Woooooo … woooooooo …

P1: Who’s that??

P2. I hear a ghost!

BJ: YES – I am the ghost of BRIAN JONES!!!

P3. Who’s “Brian Jones”?

Brian Jones: I was the founder of the Rolling Stones. But I died mysteriously in a swimming pool accident shortly after I was expelled from the group.

P3. Who are “The Rolling Stones”?

Brian Jones: You’ve never heard of us? Sometimes we were called “The Stones” for short.

P3. Doesn’t ring a bell. I mostly listen to new bands I hear on blogs.

Brian Jones: Oh ... very well. So, I know why you’re here. You want some advice on starting a group.

P4. Yes, can you help us?

BJ: Well, it’s quite easy. The first step to making a group is “The Initial Disgrace.”

P1. Disgrace?

BJ. Yes. Human artistic endeavors are typically borne from a deep sense of shame. Only fear of disgrace will entice a human to leave their place of security, and risk his or her social standing. Therefore, the first step to getting started with one’s group is to perform in an unready state. Or release an awful record with a hideous cover. Anything at all, just to create a humiliating object or event which must be transcended in an attempt to obliterate it from the public consciousness.

P2. Really?

BJ. Yes. Human’s vanity leads them to imagine that their irrelevant endeavors loom enormously in the collective imagination. Therefore, suppose a group makes a bad record; self loathing now consumes the group. They want to eradicate every copy. However, that’s typically impossible. The only way for them to effect their awful legacy is to create something which alters it somehow, either by confusing the public perception of the previous failure, or by overshadowing it with success. Otherwise, the loathsome thing floats alone in a void, conspicuous by its singularity.

Since no one’s imagined ideal can ever be achieved, each recording or performance is another kind of failure, a response to the last humiliation. After awhile of doing this, one will have created a “body of work.”

P2. Well you are a LEGEND ... any tips on becoming a LEGEND?

BJ: The only way to make a stolid, enduring myth is to create a moment or thing which is frozen, perfect; the “fly in amber” effect.

Death is the most surefire method of attaining such a state of “perfection” ...

P3. How does one achieve perfection WITHOUT dying?

BJ: Faking one’s death is an obvious route, and is often accomplished, in a metaphorical sense, by creating a record which is sensationally acclaimed and then dramatically exploding the group at its career apex. Guessing the nadir of a group’s career is the risky part, a high-stakes roulette game, because if the dramatic termination of the group occurs during a downward spiral, the intended effect is nullified.

P1. Brian, please, give an example of this strategy

BJ. “My Bloody Valentine,” “The Sex Pistols” and “The Specials” all successfully used the virtual death technique to enshrine a perfect legacy, as did David Bowie when he fired his group “The Spiders of Mars” onstage, while their concert was being filmed for theatrical release. By the time of said concert, Bowie was a cultivated student of rock ‘n’ roll group methodology; the “Ziggy” persona being his third attempt at renown.

P4. So breaking up the band, as a kind of faked death, is the best way to achieve status, success, wealth, and power?

BJ. Yes, but while this kind of symbolic “death” reaps fantastic rewards for a musician’s former group, it wreaks havoc for future projects; the fan has great difficulty accepting the existence of the “ghost” as it attempts to move in the world of the living and – as with reincarnation – each new temporal husk is cluttered with the karmic baggage and world weariness of the old soul’s past lives.

P1. What if the break-up doesn’t work?

BJ: Well, failure has its own allure. To be the eternally wounded wash-up or also-ran is a staple of Hollywood and heroic legend, and it can be a satisfying career path in and of itself. It can make you a star on a local level particularly without bumming your friends out too much.

P2. But isn’t the “also-ran” actually a failure?

BJ. Actually, the should-have-been often seems cooler than those groups which do have success. After all, the successful groups are known quantities – frail, flawed, and fatally exposed – while the one that could-have-been-a-contender is a promise and a fantasy, always superior to that goofball onstage, whom he or she can gaze upon with bemused contempt.

P3. Yes. An also-ran is like Bobby Kennedy, Trotsky’s USSR, the post-Mecca Malcolm X; an irresistible riddle, a choose-your-own-adventure paperback. Conversely the group which enjoys success is boring, predictable, and conceives even more boring predictability.

B4. The flush of success, after all, breeds conservatism born of fear; everyone famous sees their inevitable obscurity haunting them like a wraith and they fight to stave it off, with the main tactic being trench warfare, digging in deep.

P1. What if one chooses to have their band stay together?

BJ: Then your group will be expected to show a narrative arc, or development. The group is supposed to begin in a primitive, unreconstructed state – like the Stones with “Englands Newest Hitmakers” – develop more musical skill and conceptual ambition – as on “Their Satanic Majesties Request” – and then, chastened by failure begat by inevitable overreach, retreat to rediscover simplicity via rock ‘n’ roll “roots” – a la “Let It Bleed”.

P1. Then what?

BJ: Ultimately the group must be formed with an eye to its demise. Just as the debauched “Mardis Gras” festival disintegrates predictably into the austere penitence and self-flagellating introversion of “Lent.” But I have to go. I am going to go haunt Keith Richards ...

P2. You’re still mad at him?

BJ: You know what they say ... “I can’t get no satisfaction ...

P1. Yes, but can’t you wait? ... we have more questions.

P2. He’s gone.

P3. Wow. So bitter. He should really get over it.

P4. We gotta get another one fast. We only have this room for 10 more minutes.

P1: Hello?? HEY SPIRITS! ... “MOVE AMONG US”, and all that jazz.

P3. I feel a chill! I think it’s working!

JM. Oh hey guys. This is the ghost of Jim Morrison, from ‘The Doors.’

P2. Perfect! The “Lizard King”

JM: Have you guys seen Oliver Stone? He used to hang out with me in here all the time ... until he finished that script.

P3. No. Sorry. Who’s “Oliver Stone”?

P4. If I see him, I will tell him you are looking for him. But Jim – can you give us pointers on starting a group? We are desperate ...the other ghosts we’re talking to are so cynical and pedantic.

JM. I’d say the most important thing is your record cover.

P1: But aren’t record covers obsolete?

JM: Once, when Rock ‘n’ roll was considered to be meaningful, record covers, liner notes, and lyric sheets were studied by the impressionable tot for long hours instead of his or her homework.

These record covers, designed to lure prospective buyers, served to give a sense of profundity, gravitas, and importance to the groups, singers and the songs. The big photograph on the front, the lofty liner notes, the sheer size, weight, and physicality. The object is what gave the records their aura of meaning! Because they seemed meaningful, the groups took on the responsibility of BEING meaningful ... This unintended consequence of commercial packaging resulted in subcultural movements based around styles and ideology . . . UNTIL THE INTERNET WAS DEVISED BY THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX TO DESTROY THIS VERY PHENOMENON.

Now that group’s music is carried on digital files called “mp3s,” groups are stripped of their packaging, robbed of identity, and reduced to being a few squeals leaking from an earbud. Meaning has therefore been diminished; NOT due to the fact that the bands have nothing to say, but because their kiosk, their pageants, and their costumes have been taken away. This is a conspiracy by the resentful fascist elite to demolish one of the last tolerated forms of expression in the country.

P3: Can we make a record cover without a record? It woul be cheaper.

JM: You need a record for simple scientific reasons. A record is a disc. On this disc, the grooves become smaller as the record progresses. Toward the middle of the disc, the frequency range changes and the information gets more compressed. Therefore, the end of a record, as the song is reaching it’s orgasmic culmination, sounds more shrill, more confused, more “EXCITING” to the listener, which enhances the experience of the listener. Therefore, for your group to sound “exciting,” use records.

P2. What about sex? You are a sex symbol.

JM: Rock ‘n’ roll is actually not sex, but a REPLACEMENT for erotic conquest. Good performers must abstain entirely from the sex act if they are to maintain their “CHI” energy on stage and in the recording studio. The relative ease of sexual conquest in modernity is the culprit for contemporary music being so revoltingly mediocre.

Eros must be saved for the audience, who must be the sole recipient of the otherwise chaste rocker’s affection. The erotic interplay between performer and spectator must be pantomimed and alluded to as inevitable, but CANNOT be actualized. If the performer’s carnal predations extend into reality, and implicate an actual congregate member, the rest of the fan base is betrayed and cuckolded.

P3. What about practice?

JM - Practice is important. My group, “The Doors” practiced often. HOWEVER, practicing your instrument and songs is only one part of your struggle. The reason that the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet-Cong were able to prevail over the US Army was because of their ideological training. Political education took up to four hours of every day for the Viet-Cong guerilla. Target practice or drill was a only a fraction of that.

P4: So, The communist guerilla prevailed over his American counterpart because his sense of what he was fighting for was lucid and clear, while his opponent – though he possessed better weaponry and could invoke massive firepower – was politically confused?

JM: Yes … AND THE SAME GOES FOR THE GROUPS!

P1: But Jim ... groups aren’t revolutionary guerrillas. Groups are art!

JM: In a certain sense the groups DID replace the modernist art movements like the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. But the modernists were struggling over ideology, for the very soul of the world.

The rock ‘n’ roll group, being a creation of capitalism, has been forbidden explicit ideology beyond an institutionalized nihilism or a vague contrariness, and lives in a semi-conscious fog. They meander and shuffle about like dim-wits, with an inherited and wholly misplaced air of elitism.

They despise the squares they endure each day, but WHY? What is it about rock ‘n’ roll – which seems to have failed utterly in its promise to deliver humanity from bourgeois hypocrisy and tedium – that affords them this conceit?

P2. No one knows anymore.

P3: And yet they intuitively sense it’s larger meaning, its vast potential.

JM: Yes! Even the most incurious, the biggest dum dums ... hey – even YOU guys understand that rock ‘n’ roll is different than simply “music.”

P4: Different than music?

JM: The group is not unlike a religious cult. It is forever evangelizing, looking for followers. In the past, the musician was a pianist who sat in the corner of a pub. They would certainly not expect fealty from their listeners. In fact, such an expectation would have been thought of as either misguided, blasphemous, or INSANE. But nonetheless, this is what the modern group – even the most inconsequential one – DEMANDS.

P1: The group makes DEMANDS? Like a terrorist?

JM: The group demands total loyalty. They see rock ‘n’ roll as a zero sum game, wherein someone enjoying another group’s music detracts from enjoyment of their own group. They affect the myopic jealousy of an insecure lover.

P2. But Jim – why does the group demand such loyalty?

JM. Because they are insecure.

P3: What about the music?

JM: Well (Singing:) “When the music’s over ... turn out the light”

P1 . Well, gee ... thanks Jim; I think that answers all our questions

P3. Yeah, thanks … I guess

JM: Hey guys, anytime. I had fun. I hope it was helpful. See you later, AND GOOD LUCK IN FORMING YOUR GROUPS!!

SUPERNATURAL STRATEGIES FOR MAKING A ROCK ‘n’ ROLL GROUP is back in print and is available here.

1. At the time of this transcribed séance, Little Richard was still with us.