by Mick Wall
Now seventy-eight, Dr Anger lives alone in his Hollywood apartment block, currently too ill to respond to requests for interviews, although he continues to talk of new film and book projects. He is also renowned, says d’Arch Smith, for a volatile temperament and ‘for putting curses’ on anyone who crosses him. However, behind the popular image of an almost Nosferatu-like character lies a clearly visionary thinker, bitter perhaps at so consistently being misinterpreted and misunderstood but whose work, lying so determinedly outside the mainstream, ranks amongst the most innovative in cinematic history.
Born Kenneth Wilbur Anglemyer, in Santa Monica, California, in 1930, Anger began his career as a child actor, starring alongside Mickey Rooney as the changeling prince in the 1934 Max Reinhardt production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (also featuring James Cagney as Puck). His own career as a filmmaker began in 1947 with Fireworks, a bizarre short featuring sailors with lit candles for penises, and continued in 1954 with Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, a gloriously ecstatic exposition of Crowleyan ritual, followed in 1963 by Scorpio Rising, a homosexual fantasy about leather-clad bikers intercut with images of Christ, Hitler and the Devil, and a soundtrack comprised of thirteen pop songs – an innovation that prefigured future cine-icons such as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in their use of ‘found’ music for their films. Serious critics placed Anger’s work in the same surrealist category as Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet; works that expanded the language of film. Most mainstream cinemagoers, however, remain utterly oblivious of his place in the canon. Instead, he became better known for his Hollywood Babylon books, a trio of tomes published over a forty-five-year period filled to bursting with scurrilous anecdotes concerning the sex and drug thrills of golden-era movieland stars such as Fatty Arbuckle, Gloria Swanson and James Dean, to name just a few.
The late Sixties found Anger in London, where he began a close association with the Rolling Stones, a period which saw the release of the Their Satanic Majesties Request album followed by the song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, which Anger boasted was inspired by his conversations with Mick Jagger. He also became close to Keith Richards, who was now shacked up with Brian Jones’ former girlfriend, the occult-curious Anita Pallenberg. ‘Kenneth had a huge and very conscious influence on the Stones,’ Marianne Faithfull told Mick Brown, explaining that Anger had initially considered Jagger for the title role in Lucifer Rising with Keith as Beelzebub, and how his kinship with the Stones soon led to ‘a veritable witches’ coven of decadent Illuminati, rock princelings and hip nobility’. But the Stones quickly began disassociating themselves from him after he freaked Keith and Anita out by somehow arranging for their front door to be painted gold one night while they slept upstairs, in preparation for a Pagan marriage ceremony they had agreed for him to preside over on Hampstead Heath, so upsetting them they backed out of the wedding.
Anger claimed that showing his films were magickal ceremonies in themselves, describing them as ‘spells and invocations’ specifically designed to exert control over people’s minds. He often revised and updated his movies – he had been working on and off on Lucifer Rising for years before he met Jimmy – adding soundtracks by famous rock stars to some – as with Jagger’s synthesiser contribution to Invocation of My Demon Brother in 1969 – and ELO to a later print of Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.
Shot in England, Germany and Egypt, Lucifer Rising was to be based on the story of the Fallen Angel of orthodox Christian mythology, restored to his Gnostic status as ‘the Bringer of Light’ – an implicit part of Crowley’s own teachings, as also depicted in Milton’s Paradise Lost, which ends with the angel, and his host, finding reconciliation with ‘the Beloved’ – and would include real-life Crowleyan occult rituals. As Page well knew, it’s only in recent history that the name Lucifer has become synonymous with that of ‘Satan’. In fact, Lucifer was originally a Latin word meaning ‘light-bearer’ a Roman astrological term for the ‘Morning Star’ and a direct translation of the Greek word eosphorus, meaning ‘dawn-bearer’, while in Romanian mythology, Lucifer (from the Romanian word Luceafãr) was used for the planet Venus.
Anger experienced numerous problems with his much-cherished project from the start, leading to whispers that the film was – literally – cursed. His first attempt at getting it off the ground in 1967 had failed when its original lead, a five-year-old boy – another representation of Crowley’s ‘little child’ perhaps – died in an accident before filming began. His place was initially taken by Bobby Beausoleil – aka Cupid, Jasper, Cherub, and other weird aliases – a former guitarist, briefly, with the group Love. Beausoleil had lived for a time with Anger in San Francisco, at a rambling old mansion on Fulton Street known locally as ‘the Russian Embassy’. They fell out, however, when Anger threw Beausoleil down the stairs after discovering he’d hidden a large parcel of marijuana in the basement. Aggrieved, Beausoleil made off with most of the early footage, burying it in California’s Death Valley. In revenge, Anger placed ‘the curse of the frog’ upon him, trapping a frog in a well. When, soon after, Beausoleil, now running with the Manson family, was arrested for the Tate-and La Bianca-related murder of music teacher Gary Hinman, he was sentenced to life imprisonment – trapped behind four walls, just like Anger’s cursed frog.
Using what little footage he had managed to salvage from the Beausoleil episode, Anger had made Invocation of My Demon Brother using Jagger’s soundtrack. But his intention had always been to return to what he felt would be his magnum opus, this time with Jagger as Lucifer, and Marianne Faithfull and Donald Cammell also in principal roles. When Jagger suddenly changed his mind, setting the production back yet again, Anger punished him by casting his younger brother Chris in the role. But the younger Jagger proved no less malleable and was dismissed after an on-set row. Eventually a Middlesbrough steel worker named Leslie Huggins was given the part, and filming finally began.
‘I was already aware of Anger as an avant-garde filmmaker,’ Page told Classic Rock writer Peter Makowski in 2007. ‘I remember seeing two of his films at a film society in Kent – Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother [and] I was already aware of Anger because I had read and researched Aleister Crowley…[That] made him somebody I would like to meet. Eventually he came to my house in Sussex and I went to his flat in London.’ It was during the visit to Anger’s London flat that ‘he outlined this idea for a film that became Lucifer Rising. It was then he asked me if I would like to take on the commission and do the music and I agreed to that.’ It was a decision that would, quite literally, come back to haunt him.
According to Anger, he and Page had a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ and never discussed money, as their collaboration was to be an ‘offering of love’. The two of them would split the profits from the film, with Page taking all proceeds that were earned from the soundtrack. In response, Page set about creating his aural equivalent of Anger’s film and with it the most imaginative, evocative, if ultimately lost, music of his career. It was, he said, ‘an honour’.
Page now claims he was given no final footage to work with, pointing out that Anger had commissioned the soundtracks for both Scorpio Rising and Invocation of My Demon Brother on a similar basis. All he knew, he told Makowski, was ‘that it was about the deities of Egypt’. And some of the characters: ‘You have Isis who would correlate to the early religions. Isis is the equivalent of man worshipping man, which is now where we have Buddha and Christ and all the rest of it, like the three ages. And then the child is Horus, which is the age of the child. Which is pretty much the New Age as it was seen.’
Back in 1976, however, he told Mick Houghton he’d been given a twenty-five minute opening sequence to work with. He was nervous, he said, because ‘the opening sequence is a dawning sequence which immediately brings comparisons with [Stanley Kubrick’s] 2001 to mind. The film was shot in Egypt and I wanted to create a timelessness, so by using a synthesiser I tried to change the actual sound of every
instrument so you couldn’t say immediately, “that’s a drum or a guitar”. I was juggling around with sounds in order to lose a recognisable identity as such.’
Encouraged by the knowledge that unlike Zeppelin records, which were designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, ‘This was going to be something which I knew was going to be shown in arts labs and underground cinemas and brotherhoods’, he allowed his imagination to run wild. As well as running his electric guitar through an ARP synthesiser, his used a mellotron, his 12-string acoustic guitar, various keyboards, plus tabla drums and a tempura (an Indian drone instrument), all of which he played himself. For the climax he created a synthesiser effect: ‘These great horns that sound like the horns of Gabriel. It was a good piece.’
The end result, as obtained from an extremely rare bootleg CD, is, as might be expected, an unsettling listening experience. Beginning with a loud, hypnotic drone which continues for several minutes, what few melodies there are – by turns portentous, forbidding, weirdly euphoric – meld into dissonant cadences that both repel and attract, like an electric current. About two-thirds of the way through, a thunderstorm erupts like a growling bowel movement into the aural mire, followed by Buddhist chants that sound like they might have been slowed down and corrupted, harmonic yet dense and ominous, at which point things appear to strive for some sort of staggered, juddering climax as another muted thunderclap is overheard in the distance. Ultimately, the feeling repeated plays imparts is one of disorientation. Not entirely morbid but a feeling nevertheless of being scattered, dizzy…unhinged. Having played it all the way through several times, I have not been tempted to listen to it much since. Or as the eminent American music critic Juli Le Compte wrote: ‘Haunting and disturbing, this piece is highly expressive of Page’s strain of morbidity.’
Meanwhile, back in the so-called real world, the band’s own movie was also still being shot. Enlarging on the original idea for a concert performance interspersed with interviews and offstage footage, Joe Massot – who found himself struggling to sequence the footage from the two shows he had shot – proposed they ditch the straightforward documentary idea and go for something more representative of who the band really were with each member, plus Grant, filmed in individual segments in which they would assume a character of their choice. Massot said: ‘We wanted to show them as individuals, but not in the traditional way with interviews. They wanted more symbolic representations of themselves. All the individual sequences were to be integrated into the band’s music and concerts.’
Not unlike the 1972 T. Rex movie Born To Boogie, which Marc Bolan pretentiously claimed was based on the dreamlike films of Fellini but had more in common with the self-consciously ‘wacky’ ideas first expressed in the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night – specifically Ringo Starr’s brief metamorphosis into a tramp – and although hampered by the fact that none of them could act or would come up with suitably coherent ideas to sustain five consistently interesting depictions, what became known as the ‘fantasy sequences’ would, however inadvertently, reveal much about each of them. Thus Plant’s incarnation in the finished film as a sword-bearing handsome prince, given to sailing, horse-riding and rescuing damsels-in-distress, relayed during the extended instrumental passage of ‘The Rain Song’. Seen sword-fighting on the cobblestone floor of the Great Tower of Raglan Castle (a fifteenth-century ruin that stands between Monmouth and Abergavenny, and built by Agincourt veteran Sir William ap Thomas, ‘the blue knight of Gwent’) it was, however cringe-making it looks now, an idea which nonetheless clearly mirrored his self-image as the gallant, peace-making knight of the group.
Similarly, Jones’ highwayman fantasy – played out during ‘No Quarter’ – of leading some subterranean mission through the impenetrable rigmarole of a weird cemetery scene, before whisking off his mask and returning in more familiar guise to his family – may have featured some of the most stultifying acting ever committed to the cinema but was also perfectly in keeping with his perceived role as the behind-the-scenes manic-mechanic of the group. While Bonzo’s metamorphosis during ‘Moby Dick’ from red tractor-driving farmer to drag-racing daredevil clearly reflected the split-personality of the lives he led on the road with Zeppelin (dangerous, speedy, haphazardly flame-throwing) and off it with his family (both wife Pat and son Jason in tenderly glimpsed scenes under the protection of the husband and father only they really knew). Even Peter Grant and Richard Cole are given their own sequence, filmed earlier in 1973 on the Hammerwood Park Estate in Sussex (which the group were then considering purchasing and turning into their own recording and rehearsal facility, an idea later abandoned), in which they become cigar-chomping, machine gun-toting gangsters, laughing loudly as their bullets strafe a roomful of money-counting adversaries – obvious metaphor for the faceless ‘suits’ who run the music business.
Naturally, the sequence that drew the most comment – as it continues to today – is the one in which Page is seen climbing the steep slopes of some dark, craggy mountain at night, a full moon smudged by thin clouds. At the peak, he encounters the cloaked figure of the ancient Hermit, who stands head bowed, holding aloft his lantern, the light to which Page, the apprentice adept, is purposefully ascending. His visage, when revealed, then retreats backwards in time to reveal Page’s own face through middle-age, adulthood, young man, teenager, child, baby and eventually embryo, forked by white lightning, before returning through the various stages back to that of the ancient Hermit – or Magus. The idea is given extra resonance when one knows that the mountain being climbed is actually Meall Fuarvounie, opposite Boleskine House – the same snow-capped peak Crowley liked to climb half a century before – and the fact that the sequence is intercut in the final version of the movie during Jimmy’s violin bow showcase in the middle of ‘Dazed And Confused’, the bow melding into one clearly occult image as the Hermit/Magus waves his bow/wand in a slow arc through the air, left to right, its colours showing eleven (Crowley’s ‘general number of magick’) shades of green, yellow, blue, red, gold and so on. It’s as if the ‘Barrington Coleby’ painting from the inner sleeve of the fourth Zeppelin album has been brought to life, its visual metaphor obvious: the journey to occult enlightenment.
‘I knew exactly what I wanted to do with that,’ Page told writer Mark Blake upon the re-release of the film on DVD in 2007. ‘I knew I wanted to do it at the house I had in Scotland, and I knew I wanted to be filmed climbing this escarpment, which I’d never actually climbed before.’ The shoot had taken place on the night of the first full moon in December. ‘I wanted the full moon to get a sort of luminescent quality,’ he had told me previously. ‘And I said it would be great if it snowed, too. And it did. Of course that meant it was freezing and when they asked me to do the climb again and again I did think, oh no, what have I let myself in for.’
The scene was intended as ‘an interpretation of the Hermit tarot card,’ he agreed. ‘The Hermit standing there with his beacon of truth, you know the light and everything. And the attainer [sic] or whatever climbing up to try and reach it. But the fact being that when he reaches the Hermit the face starts to change, and the message being that the truth can be attained at any point but you may not have received it and learned that you’ve received it or whatever.’ Elaborating with Blake, he added: ‘It comes from the Rider [-Waite] deck, but that particular interpretation has allusions to the work of [William] Holman-Hunt, a pre-Raphaelite painter…it was a statement about what was going on in my life.’
Earlier in the film, he is pictured cross-legged by the lake at his home in Plumpton, cranking out an ancient folk tune, ‘Autumn Lake’, on a wheezing old hurdy-gurdy. In the background can be seen some of the black swans he had populated the lake with. Then, as he looks up and his eyes meet the camera, they glow a luminous red, as if recalling the lines from ‘Black Dog’: ‘Eyes that shine burning red, dreams of you all through my head.’ Not that he would say exactly what it was supposed to mean, besides allowing for the generalisation of ‘My ey
es being mirrors to the soul, that sort of thing…’
When Massot presented a short rough-cut segment of the film at a special screening for the band in early 1974, it was a disaster. ‘They finally came to a preview theatre to see the “Stairway to Heaven” segment,’ he recalled, ‘and started to fight and yell when the film began. They thought it was my fault Robert Plant had such a big cock.’
With or without Bonzo you always knew you’d make it. You had the looks, had the voice, the right ideas. You knew it, everyone knew it. As well as Crawling King Snake there was also The Good Egg, The Tennessee Teens…the Teens were like The Who only better, or just as good, everyone said so. Earned good bread, too, whenever they landed a gig. When they changed their name to Listen and asked you to join full-time you thought you’d cracked it. Bye, bye Snake boys, hello big time! Then CBS came a-calling and you knew you’d cracked it. Only a one-off single deal but it was obvious it would turn into something else, once the world got wind of you. Still only seventeen, you had to get your mum and dad to countersign the contract. Or would have done if they’d got round to posting it to you. But that was all right. CBS was not the big deal it would become later, not in England anyway. Still a proper record label from London though, the Holy Grail…
