?>{"id":409,"date":"2012-01-16T09:39:05","date_gmt":"2012-01-16T17:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/?p=409"},"modified":"2012-01-16T18:47:18","modified_gmt":"2012-01-17T02:47:18","slug":"process-fade-the-rebellion-of-rock-music-as-the-spirit-of-the-process-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.late2theparty.com\/?p=409","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: The Process Church"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you love Kent’s writing here, and you should, his blog \u2013 The Pirate George Letters<\/a> \u2013 is a must-read. His essays are fascinating, warm, funny and thoughtful. I can’t wait for the day when we can watch “The Kids Are Alright” after a few drinks. Who better to write the first guest post on Late to the Party, I ask you? <\/em><\/p>\n

Rock and roll gained its foothold in the Fifties by rebelling against concepts both racist and Puritanical;\u00a0 the more records burned by adults, the more teens jumping into the fire like horny, possessed moths.<\/p>\n

In the Sixties, however, rock and roll found itself creating counter cultures instead of rebellion. Part of this new cultural outlook produced a spinoff from the Church of Scientology, called the Process Church of Final Judgment, which held in their beliefs that God (Jehovah), Jesus, Satan, and Lucifer had squashed their beef and were just waiting around for the end of time, where God would be the judge and Satan the executioner. The Church held good and evil in the same spiritual regard and worshipped God and The Devil as equals. Putting a Processian priest in a tux and making him sing to a hound dog was not going to fix this for the Concerned Parents of America; we\u2019re talking worshipping The Devil for real<\/em>. Then an association with Charlie Manson famously killed the good-time vibes of the Church. But before Manson harshed that mellow, many rock and rollers found themselves attracted to the counter-culture and anti-Puritan aspects of the Process.\u00a0 Among them\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026George Clinton of Parliament, Funkadelic, and Parliament-Funkadelic.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure(and so was Bootsy Collins, according to interviews) that the 20-some-odd members of Clinton\u2019s funk army were too busy taking James Brown\u2019s soul baby into the outer space of weed and syncopated coochie pops to notice that not only was Clinton constantly reading essays and listening to sermons from Processians, but he also littered the liners of their first albums with quotes from the Church\u2019s philosophies. Once Charles Manson was labeled the Process Church poster boy though, Clinton allowed Pedro Bill to take the album art in a new direction. Pedro, who loved \u201cfreaks\u201d like Blue Cheer, Zappa, and Sun Ra, brought about the birth of the familiar characters we know and love from the funk mothership.\u00a0 Also\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys? To an extent. Wilson really bought into what Manson stood for musically, and according to some reports, philosophically. It\u2019s Manson\u2019s connection with the Process Church that carries over into the history arc of Wilson because, well,\u00a0 Manson and Wilson lived together and stuff. Oops! Eventually Wilson, learning that Manson was a real monster, just moved out and let him have the place. Not before, unfortunately, introducing him to the person who owned the house being rented by Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, the site of the eventual Tate\/LaBianca murders.\u00a0 Double oops!<\/p>\n

Part Two: The Eighties, Tha Dogg Pound<\/strong><\/p>\n

About that \u201cCharles Manson as the Process Church poster boy\u201d thing; it\u2019s totally groundless. Given, Manson wanted to start a race war that would bring about the end of the world, but whether or not he was trying to trigger the Jehovah\/Lucifer tag-team that the Processians believed is doubtful. Manson was a former Scientologist (a prime requisite for sexually-repressed Hollywood types, I guess) and lived near the Church\u2019s brief California home for a bit, but neither Manson nor his more lucent followers had a real connection with the Process Church, save for a brief essay Manson had published in their Death<\/em> newsletter. A tenuous connection, at best.<\/p>\n

Not that the Eighties cared. These were my formative rock and roll years, and I was living the dream and the ire of a full-on Renaissance of people giving a shit about how subversive rock music was. The Devil was having his day in court again, and his jester, Charlie Manson, put on his pointy hat and did his thing. His ludicrous and fascinating interview with Geraldo Rivera in 1981 was the beginning, but not the end;\u00a0 as the new-found \u201csatanic cult\u201d fervor swept through the Religious Right and its PMRC assault on people like Judas Priest, W.A.S.P., and John Denver, 1987 saw the release of Maury Terry\u2019s The Ultimate Evil<\/em>, a book that was successful in branding the Process Church as \u201csatanic\u201d and elaborately, albeit suspiciously, \u00a0marking them the true perpetrators of the Son Of Sam murders (full disclosure: I own both versions of The Ultimate Evil<\/em>, and I also own an first-release copy of The Family<\/em> by Ed Sanders, a book about Manson that had all the Process Church-connection conspiracies removed by a court of law). In 1992, Nineties rap hero of calculated subversion, Dr. Dre, released a video in which he pointed to the cover of Funkadelic\u2019s Maggot Brain<\/em> with both fingers and exclaimed, \u201cHell yeah!\u201d, forcing millions of white teens to discover the Church\u2019s \u201cFear\u201d essay within the album\u2019s inner liner. In 1993, Nineties rock heroes of self-subversion, Guns N\u2019 Roses, let Fat Axel release a Charles Manson song, \u201cLook At Your Game Girl\u201d; we already thought they were assholes for \u201cNovember Rain\u201d, so this just made it worse.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Part Three: The Twenty-Teens, The Literal Dog Pound<\/strong><\/p>\n

The foil\/muse of subversion and Puritanical rebellion for rock music is gone now, and rock and roll has never felt less \u201cdangerous\u201d.\u00a0 Now, in a time closer to 2050 than 1950, the aural record will show albums of pretty-but-not-pensive, aggressive-but-not-threatening, with-emotion-but-not-with-abandon music.\u00a0 Some good music, really! But our gods have shrunk, and the devils are only attractive to us when they\u2019re the underdogs. In The Sixties, the Church of Bob Tebow would be viewed as it truly is: a splinter of Christianity as dangerous as Jim Jones\u2019. In The Eighties, the band Animals As Leaders would be considered Satanic, even though there are no lyrics to their songs. And the Process Church of today? They have turned to, seriously, the Best Friends Animal Society, who run the biggest no-kill sanctuary for domesticated animals in the United States. No one is even accusing them of using the dogs and cats for sacrifices. Too bad for us; the soundtrack would be killer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"