Tin Shadows (or "Belaboring a Point")

It's hard to imagine a world without David Bowie, even though we've had to do without his company for almost two weeks now. When news of his death began to circulate, I came to the quick conclusion that any eulogies written for this site would ultimately be self serving. Sure, everything written here is self serving on one level or another ... the end goal for any website is to generate traffic, after all. But Bowie is so far afield from our regular content that it just felt exploitative to dogpile on his death.

My feelings on the subject haven't really changed, but my fascination with trivia refuses to let a few minor details pass. Bowie's influence on art was so far reaching that, yes, he even has a few tangential connections to DARK SHADOWS.

In 1977, Iggy Pop released "The Idiot," the first of his solo albums produced by Bowie. When Iggy went on tour to promote the record in March and April that year, Bowie tagged along as his keyboard player. Also part of the live band were Hunt and Tony Sales on drums and bass, respectively. The Sales brothers were the sons of television icon Soupy Sales and appeared on Iggy's next collaboration with Bowie, "Lust for Life."

(Note: "Sick of You," from Iggy Pop's 1975 demo album "Kill City," was featured in Tim Burton's DARK SHADOWS film. While the Sales brothers appeared on two tracks on the album, they actually don't perform on this song.)

A decade later, Bowie would feel the need to scratch a creative itch with the band Tin Machine. He recruited guitarist Reeves Gabrels and the Sales brothers for the controversial act, which continues to divide Bowie fans to this day (their first album is pretty great, in my opinion.) Gabrels would continue to work with Bowie after the dissolution of Tin Machine, eventually parting ways after the release of "Hours ..." in 1999.

In 2012, prompted by god only knows what, musician Jenna Vix released a song titled "In the House of Dark Shadows," featuring lyrics composed mostly of the great/goofy taglines used for 1970's HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS. "Come see how the vampires do it" is actually a lyric in this song.

Gabrels (who is apparently now a member of The Cure) plays guitar on the track. You can buy the song directly from Amazon HERE, though I can't really recommend it.

This seems like an awfully long way to walk for a minor piece of Bowie trivia, doesn't it?

Let's step backward in time to March 20, 1969. DARK SHADOWS cast members Jonathan Frid and David Henesy were guests that day on the short-lived game show THE GENERATION GAP. Frid and Henesy were among the first celebrities created by the series (as opposed to Joan Bennett, who was already a star) and the two made frequent appearances in teen mags in the late 1960s.

Also on the episode were Soupy Sales and his son ... Tony.

You can watch the entire episode streaming below.

THE HUNGER, 1983

By PATRICK McCRAY

When you mention David Bowie to me, I’m like any other man, really.  The first thing that occurs to me is “tasteful restraint.”

No, really.  I’m not making the ha-ha, either.

I have an amazing blind spot for music written after 1945 or so.  I just call it all “rock.”  This drives music fans crazy, but it’s always been (mostly) incomprehensible noise to me, and I’m forever grateful to Todd Loren for allowing me to write a treatise on the subject in ELVIS SHRUGGED. 

Music fans are usually split into three groups when I chat about this.  One third?  Driven into a gibbering rage, as if I’d wrapped a fetus in the flag and then burned it on a stack of Bibles.  The second?  They wave it all away with, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”  The third?  They just feel a strange pity.

Yeah, I’m missing out.  Yeah, I don’t know what I’m talking about.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I have one great advantage: when musicians make the transition to film, I carry no baggage.  (Or I’m relieved that I can finally understand what they’re saying.)  Sting?  He’ll always be Feyd.  Ringo?  There will never be a finer caveman.  KISS?  Will the mad Dr. Abner Devereaux ever face more cunning opponents?  And several years after he fell to Earth — but before he melded with Tammy Faye Baker to become the Goblin King — David Bowie was the Saddest Vampire in Town.

In 1983’s THE HUNGER, Bowie plays vampire, John Blalock, the companion to a much, um, Queenier vampire, Miriam (Catherine Deneuve).  I mean “Queen,” literally.  She’s an alpha, giving immortality to her chosen lover/companions.  Unfortunately, “immortal” and “ageless” are not synonymous in THE HUNGER.  John’s been around for a few centuries, but when he begins to age, the effect is voraciously rapid.  In a stark counterpoint to the pristine and sunlit (!) New York luxury in which they live, Bowie becomes an elderly mess in a matter of days, dwindling away so far that his hunting (done by both vampires with bladed ankhs rather than fangs) is reduced to victimizing those equally helpless. 

One surprise is that Bowie is in very little of the film.  That’s always a surprise, considering how much he was highlighted in the advertising.  The film pretty much starts moving when he discovers that the decades are catching up with him, and the storytelling moves deceptively briskly for a film that seems so stately.  Once his character reaches total enfeeblement, Miriam simply carts him upstairs and crates him away with an impressive collection of former lovers that stretches back thousands of years.  All are doomed to live, yet are too weak to feed or move… unless they are really, really, really motivated.  Which happens.

Before that: lesbians!

Okay, stand down.  Yellow alert.  No need to go to battle stations.  Don’t text the SJW’s of Tumblr on my tail quite yet.  I’ll be no more sensationalistic than was the film in 1983.

Back then, on-screen lesbians were few and far between.  They were rough and ready punchlines and never eroticized (to my recollection).  But gentle, elegant, feminine, lesbians having slow lesbianesque lesbianism with lots of white, billowy curtains and soft, haunting music caressing the ears? 

Nope.  Hadn’t had that.

My mom was always up for a good vampire movie, and I talked her into this one with promises of the classy cast and copious opera music.  But between the agreement to see the film and the actual viewing was a period of intense suspense.  If she got wind of the, ahem, other stuff, it would have been a massacre.  Dammit if I didn’t pull off the scheme.  After all, Catherine Deneuve was classy, right?  French.  See?  It’s art right there.  And Tony Scott (a vastly underrated director who had the tragic habit of usually picking terrible material) handled it with such classy finesse that it all qualified as not just art, but High Art.  Maybe too High?  It was so classy, in fact, that the film can only be seen as erotic by people so pretentious that sex is totally wasted on them. 

Thank goodness that Dan Hedaya is in the film.  The movie is so beautiful that Dan’s heavy mug is a welcomed reminder that real people exist in this world, too.  He plays the equivalent of THE EXORCIST’s Kinderman in the movie, and seeing him made me miss the days when it was okay to be frumpy. 

Okay, the story.  I guess now that David Bowie and the Great Lesbian Caper of 1983 are out of the way, I guess I should address the rest of the story.  Back before he got abducted, went crazy, and became the first spokesman for the Aneros, Whitley Strieber was a heckuva writer.  THE HUNGER comes from his imagination, and the resulting film really saves vampirism from its own cliches.  It’s much the way that he modernized the werewolf with the nearly forgotten gem, WOLFEN.

What are these vampires? Well, before the sequel books in which Strieber revealed them to be (sigh) aliens, they are “simply” blood-drinking immortals.  No fangs.  No bats.  No sleeping in coffins (until you’re too old to sleep in anything else).  With John out of the story, Miriam wastes no time in finding a replacement in gerontologist, Dr. Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon).  Sarah is obsessed with the concepts of aging and immortality, and she became familiar with the Blaylocks when John sought her help — to no avail.  Clouding the bliss is Sarah’s boyfriend, Tom.  I primarily mention him because he was played by Cliff De Young, who played the twin brothers Brad Majors and Farley Flavors in ROCKY HORROR’s savvy sequel, SHOCK TREATMENT.  Seeing him alongside Susan Sarandon, the original Janet Weiss, makes it feel like it should be called CRISIS IN INFINITE DENTONS. 

Oh, yeah, she kills him and drinks his blood, too.

As the film ends, Sarah’s conscience defeats Miriam’s wiles.  Using Miriam’s own blade, Sarah stabs herself and forces Miriam to drink her blood.  Somehow, this sacrifice/poisoning awakens her ex-lovers, who attack Miriam.  Sarah has inherited the mantle of Queen as the film ends.

How?  I don’t know.  How do these creatures live forever?  What am I, Kreskin?  The ending — like the rest of the film — is so gorgeous (while never ponderous) that it works despite the ambiguities.  

It had been a long, long time since I’d seen THE HUNGER.  I was afraid that it would be pretentious, overblown, and obsessed with its own beauty.  Hardly, although it’s about the tragedy of people who are pretentious, overblown, and obsessed with their own beauty.  As a vehicle for that story, it is like Bowie, himself.  The cinematic Bowie, anyway.  It’s intelligent, nimble, dignified, and well aware of the easy traps of vanity. 

For a lot of the music fans I know, David Bowie’s movie appearances get treated like some sort of weird, in-the-know punchlines.  For me?  He’s simply one of my favorite actors.  I’d like to keep it that way.  And for the part of him that is a serious actor, I suspect that he would, as well. 

PATRICK McCRAY is a well known comic book author who resides in Knoxville, Tenn., where he's been a drama coach and general nuisance since 1997. He has a MFA in Directing and worked at Revolutionary Comics and on the early days of BABYLON 5, and is a frequent contributor to The Collinsport Historical Society. You can find him at The Collins Foundation.

Q&A;: Peter Bebergal discusses SEASON OF THE WITCH

Author Peter Bebergal’s new book, SEASON OF THE WITCH: HOW THE OCCULT SAVED ROCK AND ROLL, takes a look at the marriage of mysticism and popular music, and how that union helped to shape the world at large. It's a book I've been looking forward to since first hearing about it during the summer. It was released last month (just in time for Halloween!) and Bebergal kindly agreed to discuss some the the book's topics with the Collinsport Historical Society. Below is a quick Q&A with the author, conducted via e-mail.

Interview with the Vampire: Barnabas meets Bozo.

As far as entertainment goes, it could be argued that the 1960s began without a consciousness. Songs, movies and television shows were generally without subtext. When The Beatles sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” they meant just that. 

By the end of the decade, though, things had changed significantly: Black Sabbath made rock and roll safe for overt occult references; witches, vampires and other assorted monsters had casually infiltrated popular media; and suddenly the occult was big business. No pun intended, but what the hell was happening?

Peter Bebergal: Despite the troubles of the 1960s by way of the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism (to name a few) the counterculture was hopeful that political action and an alternative spiritual consciousness could change the world. The new spiritual identity was heavily molded by the LSD experience, Eastern mysticism, and a romantic paganism. By the end of the decade, this hope had shifted. The war had not ended, LSD mysticism bore dark fruit like Charles Manson, and the overall promise of a new political and spiritual ideal fell far short. The paisley mystic of the 1960s gave way to the paranormal, the devil, UFOS, and bigfoot.

Monsters and aliens were better vehicles for our fears and anxieties than an abstract idea of “oneness.”

What was it about rock music that made it such fertile ground for occult interests?

PB: Rock and roll is, at its roots, the sound of agitation and rebellion.  For centuries, the occult and related practices were seen as heterodox, heretical, and demonic. But this did not stop people from seeking out ways to feel like they had some modicum of control over their own spiritual lives, often at great risk. This risk is something that was exciting to artists and composers, particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, where the occult became a method and inspiration for pushing up against the mainstream, particularly for those in the avant garde.  It only made sense that rock musicians who also believed they were on the vanguard of cultural change would look to non-traditional ideas about religion to make sense of their own rebellious instincts.

On the other side, many in the public saw rock as dangerous, as being to closely associated with black culture, which many believed was already suspect and barbaric. Rock’s sexual swagger and its blatant disregard for “taste” labeled it as the worst kind of secular pastime, and add dancing to the mix and you have a hormonal stew that many believed would destroy teenage innocence (as if there ever was such a thing). Rock musicians eagerly embraced the status as wreckers of morals, and often willingly embraced rumors of devilish intent.

These two things planted deep roots in that soil, and we are still eating the fruit of what grew there.

David Bowie channels Aleister Crowley.

By the end of the 1970s, most of the bands that had embraced it (either literally or fashionably) had pretty much jettisoned mysticism from their images. What was the tipping point for the occult in rock and roll?

PB: Bands like Black Sabbath started to channel this new darker awareness, and were not afraid to expose it. It was also quite fun. Images of devils and monsters added a mystique to rock and roll that evoked all kind of rumors and speculations.  I think the whole decade of the 1970s is really the locus; from Led Zeppelin to David Bowie, from King Crimson to Yes, and the early goth of Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Seventies rock has it all: Satan, aliens, lost worlds, vampires, swords and sorcery, even a cross-dressing Frankenstein in Rocky Horror.

From Jack Chick's notorious "Dark Dungeons" pamphlet.

Most of the acts persecuted by the PMRC in the 1980s had a juvenile understanding of the occult that was copied and pasted from old Universal Monster movies. Why did it take so long for there to be a cultural backlash against the occult in rock and roll? And why THOSE bands?

PB: I think there was always a cultural backlash, but by the time of the PMRC, there was the phenomenon of the Satanic Panic, a fear that anyone could be a Satanist, not unlike people seeing Communists everywhere in the 1950s. There were these terrible accusations about child molestation and abuse as part of underground satanic cults, and along with Dungeons and Dragons and teenagers looking more and more like emissaries of the devil, it all came to a head in the PMRC. The focus there really was on sex and drugs, but the occult was seen as a part of the overall moral decay.  Mercyful Fate and Venom were the two bands picked out as having this particularly egregious occult sensibility. The song lyrics are pretty ridiculous, and they only perpetuate the false idea that the occult is about worshiping Satan. But I can’t think of a single occult ritual where drinking a priest’s vomit is a requirement. Both the PMRC and the bands were in a mutual dance of shock and response. It might have helped sell records and to keep the occult mythos alive and well in rock and roll, but give me Led Zeppelin singing about Mordor any day.

Peter Bebergal writes widely on music and books, with special emphasis on the speculative and slightly fringe. His recent essays and reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Quietus, BoingBoing, and The Believer. Find him online at http://mysterytheater.blogspot.com.