KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money Page 4

  The strange thing was, though, that Thornley and friends weren't writing all these letters themselves. Whilst many could be attributed to their small core of Discordian colleagues, there were many others which appeared to be from complete strangers. Or were they? This was a problem with Operation Mindfuck, for you couldn't trust your friends to be honest about their activities. But still, judging by factors such as the postmarks on letters and unknown handwriting, there appeared to be many conspiratorial letters arriving from people that they didn't know. The Discordian ideas, which Thornley had been spreading in printed handbills and, eventually, in the Principia Discordia, were starting to spread. They were spreading to people who liked to write letters to Playboy.

  Wilson and Shea did their best to make sense of what was going on. The concept we now call 'conspiracy theory' was emerging, fully formed, just a few brief years after the flaws in the Warren Commission report into the JFK assassination had become evident. People were now openly accusing sections of the US Government of being involved in Kennedy's death, an idea that would have been unthinkable to the average American when the murder occurred in 1963. To Wilson and Shea, as they waded through all the different accusations, it started to look like everyone had killed Kennedy. Some blamed the CIA, others the Mafia. Some claimed that it was Castro, while others pointed to anti-Castro forces. As they joked to each other, what if every conspiracy was true? From all this came the idea for the trilogy of novels that they wrote together between 1969 and 1971, the award winning Illuminatus! trilogy, which they dedicated to Hill and Thornley.

  The wilfully complicated plot of the book boils down to a struggle between order and chaos. It features an organisation of enlightened beings called the Illuminati, who secretly rule the world for their own evil ends. The Illuminati was a real organisation which had been founded in Bavaria in 1776 with the aim of exploring and spreading Enlightenment ideals. Shea and Wilson claimed that the organisation has existed in secrecy ever since, and indeed for centuries beforehand, although most historians insist that it only lasted for about ten years.

  In the book, the Illuminati are opposed only by small groups of Discordians, who have to prevent the Illuminati from bringing about the end of the world. The Discordians, in true Discordian fashion, go under many names, such as the ELF (the Erisian Liberation Front), the LDD (The League of Dynamic Discord, also known as Little Deluded Dopes) and The Justified Ancients of Mummu, otherwise known as the JAMs. The JAMs had helped organise the assassination of JFK. They were "at least as old as the Illuminati and represent the primeval power of Chaos." They had once been part of the Illuminati, but they had rebelled in a similar way that Satan rebelled in Heaven and had either left, or been kicked out. As a side line, they had set up a record company to create some decent music. The rest of the music industry was controlled by the Illuminati, the book explained, which was how they were able to incorporate the anti-JAMs slogan "Kick out the Jams, motherfuckers!" into MC5 records.

  Or at least, that's a typical interpretation of the plot. In true Discordian style, these things are fluid and open to interpretation. The book likes to play tricks with its narrative, happy to contradict itself in order to generate confusion and paranoia in the reader. Nevertheless, the idea that the Justified Ancients of Mummu represent chaos, and are at war with order or control, is a core idea that most take away from the book.

  Needless to say, publishers were baffled by the whole thing. Eventually, after four years of effort, the first volume was published in 1975. It has remained in print ever since, won awards and inspired conspiracy fiction from Foucault's Pendulum to The Da Vinci Code, as well as countless video games and comic books. It planted the idea of the Illuminati as an organisation who are currently active, and who secretly run the world, into modern culture. This idea was intended as no more than a joke or a 'mindfuck.' Nevertheless, there are now countless conspiracy theorists around the world who believe that it is true. Imaginary ideas have a way of being just as influential, it seems, as more grounded ones.

  Ken Campbell was paying for a stack of books in Compendium, an independent esoteric bookshop in Camden, London, when he noticed a copy of Illuminatus! on display by the till. He was searching for some science fiction that might be suitable to adapt into his next project because, following a pleasant evening drinking with the sci-fi author Brian Aldiss, he had decided that he quite liked the company of science fiction people. So it was that in 1976 Campbell and the writer and actor Chris Langham formed the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, with the intention of creating a play to stage at Aunt Twackies. All he had to do now was find some science fiction.

  His eye was drawn to this one book because it had a yellow submarine on the cover, which has obvious connections to Liverpool. The book itself was not science fiction, but booksellers had not known what to make of it and had placed it on the science fiction shelves for want of anywhere better. This, it seemed, was good enough for the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool.

  Of all the books that he had bought, it was Illuminatus! that grabbed Campbell. It grabbed him in a way that none of the other ones did. Reading it was an eye-opener. It made him see the world differently. What had previously appeared to be hierarchical, ordered and neatly categorised now appeared as random connections of chance and ignorance. This effect was not just limited to the world in the book. The real world itself was changed, or at least how he perceived it. Illuminatus! made him simultaneously wiser and more baffled. It was good stuff.

  Campbell decided to turn the entire trilogy into a cycle of five plays, lasting a total of eight and a half hours. There would be 23 actors playing over three hundred distinct parts. This epic tale of global domination would be told on a small stage at the back of a warehouse café. Most people would not consider this to be a plausible goal, but Campbell went ahead and did it anyway. As he saw it, things were only really worth doing if they were impossible. To quote the actor Chris Langham, who co-wrote the play with Campbell, "if it's possible it will end up as some mediocre, grant-subsidised bit of well-intentioned bourgeois bollocks. But if it's impossible, then it will assume an energy of its own, despite everything we do or don't do."

  The cast and crew were recruited, often in ways as strange and disorientating as Wilson and Shea's writing. Bill Nighy, for example, was flat-sitting in London when he came across a copy of Illuminatus! After spending a day reading it, he turned on the TV and was confronted by a different image of something from the book every time he changed the channel, such as the bank robber John Dillinger or an American dollar bill (the symbolism of which the book discusses at length). Disturbed, he decided to turn to the TV off and go to the pub. He took the book along with him, only to be approached by a strangely dressed bloke with bushy eyebrows. It was Ken Campbell. When Nighy told Campbell that he was an actor, he was hired on the spot.

  Other cast members included David Rappaport, Jim Broadbent and Prunella Gee, who played the Goddess Eris and later had a daughter with Campbell named Daisy Eris. Bill Drummond also came into Campbell's orbit. The pair spent a day down by the Mersey and by the end of it Drummond had been recruited to produce the sets for the show.

  It was never going to be easy. Campbell's key piece of direction to the cast and crew was, when thinking about the tone of what they were doing, to keep asking the question 'Is it heroic?' Drummond went back to the table in the back room that doubled as his workshop and painted the phrase 'Is it heroic?' on the wall in white paint. He then got to work.

  "...And fuck me, did he deliver!", to quote Bill Nighy. Drummond's solution was to build the sets in strange scales, utilising tricks such as foreshortening and strange angles, all of which perfectly suited the disorienting style of the play. Tables or beds were stood upwards and stuck to the rear wall, giving the audience the impression that they were looking down on the action from the ceiling. Given the seemingly contradictory scales of the story and the café stage, Drummond took Campbell's advice, assumed that the impossible would be pos
sible, and just knuckled down and did it. And why not? Everyone was achieving things previously unimaginable. Jim Broadbent recalled the production of Illuminatus! working on a "genius level... It's wasn't that Ken was being a genius... it was the whole creation of doing the greatest show yet done on Planet World... his creative imagination was just stunning."

  The success of the play led to a move south, and a sold-out run at the National Theatre in London began in March 1977. It now featured a pre-recorded prologue performed by John Gielgud, who played a computer called the First Universal Cybernetic Kinetic Ultramicro Programmer, or FUCKUP ("The best anarchist joke ever perpetrated at the heart of the National," in the view of Campbell's biographer Michael Coveney.) It also featured Robert Anton Wilson himself, who was given a role that involved lying naked on the stage shouting Aleister Crowley's maxim, "Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law!"

  Wilson also brought a large amount of acid with him, which he offered to the cast. Bill Nighy recalls that "everyone went very quiet and then... 'Yeah, why not, thanks,' and we all dived in. So we were all tripping. It's a terrible idea if you want to act, but there you are..." Nighy's position was made more difficult because he had a scene with Neil Cunningham where they had to 'act' tripping. "How do we act tripping as we already are anyway?" Nighy asked. Cunningham suggested that they just stood there and held hands. So the pair of them stood on the stage, and held hands.

  For many in the audience of the National Theatre run, this was their first exposure to Discordian ideas. Among them was a young artist called Jimmy Cauty. Cauty, originally from Liverpool and then aged 22, had already had some success painting best-selling Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit posters for Athena (they were bought, he said, "mainly by student nurses".) He did not, however, meet Bill Drummond at this performance. Drummond had disappeared from the project back in Liverpool. After the sets were completed and as the premiere of the play grew nearer, Drummond announced that he was just popping out to get some glue and never returned. It was the late Seventies and punk was starting to rumble. As radical as the book and play was, the spirit of the age was not emerging in the form of eight and a half hour plays. Together with Ian Broudie, then a young guitarist whom Campbell had recruited to perform music for the play, Drummond formed the band Big In Japan.

  Campbell had shown Drummond that the impossible was only impossible if you did not stand up and do it. It did not matter how big the practical problems were, or how crazy the enterprise may seem. This was an important lesson in Drummond's education. He took that attitude, got a bass guitar, and went off to make music.

  3: SIRIUS AND SYNCHRONICITY

  In October 1966, Jim Garrison sat down to read the Warren Commission Report and tried to make sense of the assassination of the President. The Commission had published 26 volumes of hearings and evidence. This was a lot of data, but Garrison was an experienced District Attorney and he was used to working with large and complicated sets of information. Methodically, he read through every witness statement and examined every photograph. With all the evidence mentally spread in front of him, he began to analyse. He saw connections and contradictions emerging from this web of data, and by linking these key facts he began to weave a narrative. This narrative, if he did his job properly, would provide clarity about what really happened. He was attempting to tease out the one story that was true.

  It did not take him long to dismiss the Commission's findings. Their narrative claimed that President Kennedy had been shot for unknown reasons by an ex-marine named Lee Harvey Oswald, and that Oswald had acted alone, without the assistance of any other individuals or groups, either foreign or domestic. Garrison could see how they had pulled this story from the mass of data, but he also saw too many errors in their analysis. Too much contradictory information had been ignored, and too many omissions had not been followed through. The Commission's conclusions did not, to his mind, tell the story of what really happened. If anything, it told the story of what people wanted to have happened. It had chosen the most palatable narrative, rather than the true one.

  And it was important to know what had happened. Murder is serious and human life is valuable, but JFK's murder had another dimension above and beyond the loss of one man's life. His murder hit people on a symbolic level. Kennedy was not then as universally popular as he is now remembered, but he was young, virile, and the figurehead of the nation. The beheading of a King is an ancient archetype, and when the second bullet removed much of Kennedy's head, that archetype played out in the psyche of the country. The American people, collectively, went into a kind of shock. Like the events of 9/11 and the death of Princess Diana, it was a tragedy whose impact on the subconscious was greater than anything a rational assessment of the death toll would suggest. The killer shot at one man, but millions were hit. And whoever was responsible, or so it appeared to Garrison, was getting away with it.

  Oswald had spent time in New Orleans, so that gave Garrison an excuse to investigate further. If the true narrative couldn't be identified in the mass of data in front of the Warren Commission, then he would have to get more data. With more and more information, more and more connections would become visible, causing the number of potential narratives to increase exponentially. With enough data, it seemed sensible to assume, the true narrative would eventually emerge. So he began to ask questions.

  One individual who soon took his interest was Kerry Thornley. Garrison did not know about Thornley's ideas of Discordianism, or indeed that his key writing had been reproduced on Garrison's own office photocopier. What he did know was that Thornley had enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1959, after graduating from High School with Greg Hill, and had met and became close with Lee Harvey Oswald. "You might say that I was [Oswald's] best buddy," he had told the Warren Commission, "but I don't think he had any close friends. I was a close acquaintance." Thornley was close with Oswald for just a few months before Thornley was posted to Japan and separated from him. It was while in Japan that Thornley heard that Oswald had entered the American Embassy in Moscow, handed over his passport, denounced his American citizenship, and defected to the Russians.

  After leaving the military, Thornley had supported himself by washing dishes in New Orleans while he worked on a novel, The Idle Warriors, which featured a main character whom he based on Oswald. During this time Oswald returned from Russia, moved to New Orleans, and began hanging out in the same places and with the same people as Thornley. Garrison also knew that Thornley, who at the time was interested in extreme Libertarian politics, had been seen celebrating after JFK's death and was connected to a number of other people he considered suspicious. Garrison had witnesses who claimed to have seen Thornley with Oswald in New Orleans. It was no surprise that Garrison would be interested in Thornley.

  The problem was that Thornley had not known that Oswald was in New Orleans. He had not seen him since his marine days, and was at a loss to explain why Garrison's witnesses claimed otherwise. Unless Thornley was genuinely involved in the JFK assassination, which hardly anyone believes, then some strange coincidences were at play. Clearly it must have been a case of mistaken identity, but the accounts which showed that Oswald frequented many of Thornley's hangouts and knew similar people seemed too suspicious to ignore - even to Thornley. As Garrison’s investigator Andrew Sciambra told him before Thornley's grand jury testimony, "If it checks out on the lie detector that you are telling the truth about having no prior knowledge of the Kennedy assassination, you can write another book: because if you aren't lying – and I personally don't think you are – you're a victim of the most fantastic chain of coincidences ever. This is just fantastic!"

  He was right, it was fantastic. It was so fantastic that Thornley became fixated on trying to understand just what the truth about those days was. He had to somehow marry his memory of events with the testimonies of others, but try as he might he couldn't find any version of events that could be held up as credible and believable. In time he started to question his own memory,
and began seriously entertaining the idea that he was a victim of false memories or mind control. These ideas would eventually lead to the confused and frightening world of paranoid schizophrenia, a fate that would prove to be not unusual for those who immersed themselves in Discordianism. He may have been the first Discordian to start hearing voices in his head, but he would not be the last.

  For Garrison, however, there was the slow realisation that much of the information he was working with was contradictory. Someone somewhere was lying, in other words, and he didn't know who to trust. It was almost as if disinformation was being deliberately manufactured. Clearly some of the facts that he was analysing were wrong, but which ones were they?

  In Garrison's narrative Oswald had been a 'patsy', a person set up to appear guilty to allow the real villains to go undetected, just as Oswald had himself claimed in custody before he was killed. Conflicting eyewitness reports claimed that Oswald had been in different places at the same time, so Garrison began to theorise that there had been Oswald impersonators planting fake evidence of communist or anti-American activities. Thornley himself was at one point considered to be a possible "second Oswald". Once Garrison's theory started entertaining ideas like this, there was little hope that it would produce a narrative of certainty and objective clarity.

  Garrison uncovered a lot more information than the Warren Commission had, but this created less clarity, not more. This increased amount of data now suggested many different and contradictory narratives. The list of possible conspirators grew, coming over time to include the Mafia, anti-Castro rebels, Fidel Castro, the FBI, the CIA, the Russians, the American Government and Lyndon B. Johnson - and this was before crazy people started adding fictional groups such as The Justified Ancients of Mummu to the list. The number of possible truths increased exponentially, each adding to the atmosphere of confusion and paranoia. Garrison did tease his own preferred narrative out of the chaos, and he eventually tried a local businessman named Clay Shaw for conspiracy to murder the President. Shaw was found not guilty, and the narrative Garrison chose has not convinced many others. Over time the amount of information surrounding the crime has continued to increase, and the real account of what happened in Dallas has long since disappeared under an ever-churning sea of fact and fiction. Confusion has grown as research has accumulated, and there are few who believe that the one true narrative, the only honest account of the assassination, will ever be found.