LUCIFER RISING

Part 4

If 1969 was a schizophrenic juncture in cultural and political history, rock music was the canary in the coalmine. Woodstock, the historic love and peace rock festival, occurred a week after the Manson murders. Three months later came the murder and mayhem of Altamont, headlined by rock’s dark princes: The Rolling Stones. All You Need Is Love and Let It Be had been buried by Sympathy for the Devil and Let It Bleed. 

“I’ll stick my knife right down your throat, baby. And it hurts!” sang Jagger in his Mansoneque Midnight Rambler for the crowd of 80,000.

“I shouted out, Who killed the Kennedys? When after all it was you and me!” he pouted and postured.  “Just call me Lucifer ‘cause I’m in need of some restraint.”

But for the Stones’ wired and wasted Hells Angels “securitymen,” as with Manson himself, there was no restraint

“When I think about that kid getting murdered at Altamont,” Sir Mick later said, “I think, It could have been me.” And indeed it nearly was. Blaming the Stones’ frontman for selling them out, the Angels put a contract out on his life. During his next tour, he surrounded himself with bodyguards and carried a loaded .38. At the end of the tour, echoing Lennon in ’66, he declared, “Don’t say I wasn’t scared, man. I was scared shitless.”  

But it was only rock and roll. And Mick liked it. Just as long as his fans (and, later, Alice Cooper’s, Ozzy Osbourne’s, Guns’n’Roses, et al.; and, later still, Psychorockers, Death Medalists, Horror Punks, etc.) didn’t forget that that his pioneering killer songs were just eye shadow and show business. 

But not all classic rock stars considered their murder anthems entertainment. “For me, it was never really an ‘act’, those so called performances. It was a life and death thing,” said Jim Morrison, famous for announcing to his audiences: “Nobody gets out of here alive!”

The Doors were celebrated as “America’s Rolling Stones.” But with a difference. “The Stones are for blowing your mind; the Doors are for afterward when your mind is already gone,” wrote LA Times critic, Gene Youngblood. Or as novelist, Tom Robbins, put it: “The Doors are musical carnivores in a land of musical vegetarians.”