The Instrument And The Formula

“...The young scholar stumbles his way along and unsuspecting, falls into the deva maze. Unseen hands support him as, in a daze, he wanders further and deeper within. Wild and unknown flora reclaim their territory and overhead, the Monsoon thunders and heavy tropical rain crashes down in a deluge everywhere in the outside world.”

Having from a very early age encountered great masters in different fields and quickly having realised that they were nothing at all like the simplistic public facades and images presented that were mostly the ways they were known to the majority of the public – it is now not something I find all that unusual for me personally, that is, to accept an uncommon juxtaposition of certain things otherwise taken for granted, as I am about to expound on for you here now.

(Pic: Iggy Pop performing Johhny O'Keefe's 'Wild One.')

It is a fact, that on the two separate occasions I attended lectures given by Johnny O'Keefe (a globally-influential rock and roll star of the Fifties and Sixties) it was he, in fact, who introduced names such as Truman Capote and Frederick Matthias Alexander to me. He spoke of those people in connection with a movement centered in California - which included followers such as Aldous Huxley - that taught various techniques and ideas enabling artists and performers to project themselves to a large audience. He never stressed personal self-expression that much, rather, his claim was that it was all a question of using physical energy and connecting that energy up through the crowd via rhythm and music. I clearly recall him saying that his American agent, Lee Gordon, challenged him to build his (eventual) famous audience high energy level, initially from a few hundred working class people, tired and worn out from a long week, and unlikely naturally to have anything left to give to 'audience participation' of any positive nature. It is worth some passing note that a Prime Minister of Australia – Paul Keating – was also a music performers' agent in the same Balmain streets at one time slightly later on...

A relative of Johnny O'Keefe's, Andrew O'Keefe, is today a very successful and well-known Australian television and media personality who sometimes is called upon to relate what his impression of the great 'JOK' is or was. And he is retiring in the way he speaks of him and understandably for modern audiences underscores the 'fast life' aspect that is also one of the downsides of the particular kind of fame that JOK had.

If you look at a Youtube video clip of JOK performing something like 'Shout' and observe the girls and women screaming and the incredibly intense performance from O'Keefe, whichever way you look at it, it is hardly something highly intellectual. Mistake. O'Keefe was an erudite, highly-intelligent, and very self-analytical person whose performances were all strictly 'by design.' He knew what he was doing. There would be very few people alive in the world today who actually knew back then or know even now that about Johnny O'Keefe. To inspire cycnical, sceptical, tired, working people to give up so much energy is a scientific feat of no small proportion.

There is so much available on every subject today via the internet, but to me it seems not merely 'only' commentary, but mostly superficial coverage passed off on many occasions as 'the actual essence of the thing itself.'

In the next upload, I intend to render an example of something I learned from other musical masters, this time from India and the Far East, and something quite esoteric and also rather ancient. It will not be just commentary, but a practical functioning exercise and understanding of a 'mantra' or 'magical' formula. Well let's not say magical, but rather, mysterious. And, it will produce an effect. I don't think I can explain adequately via a website everything Johnny O'Keefe explained in person about the real and actual mechanisms behind engaging a large rock and roll audience, but I think I will be able to communicate more tangibly the nature of the next subject, which exposes and juxtaposes the genuine underlying hidden aspects of what is generally only superficially known, even to the mass audiences of the actual culture and location from which it comes – that is, specifically in terms of location at least, from Rajasthan, in North India.