Star Fire

Star Fire, by Ingo Swann

May, 1978  Dell Books

I recently discovered this obscure paperback original at a Half Price Bookstore…and they only wanted 99 cents for it; a rarity these days. Dell Books, always one of my favorite publishers, pulled out all the stops for this one, with an embossed title and green tipping (or whatever it’s called – where the edges of the pages are all colored green). It’s a shame books look so bland today; Star Fire essentially jumped off the shelf, surrounded by a few recent thrillers, proving once again that those paperback publishers of yore knew what they were doing. 

They also had great copy editors back in the day, because once again we have a book where the back cover copy promises something other than what is delivered. Same goes for the first-page preview, which in pure “1970s trashy potboiler style” lists off a few characters, loglining their quirks and sexual peculiarities, really hyping up a lurid vibe that doesn’t quite exist in the book itself. I’ve said it before, but I love how ‘70s paperback publishers hyped up the sexual content of their books – it was like the top selling feature. 

Anyway Star Fire purports to be about “the first psychic war,” and the back cover and first page make you think you’re going to get a suspense-thriller with kinky overtones…instead, Star Fire is essentially a political thriller, filled with scenes of Washington bigwigs talking and talking and talking. Then they talk some more. The kinky stuff barely exists, and again all respect to the employee at Dell who sifted through the book and found the stuff to hype. 

There’s only a little info provided about the author, Ingo Swann, mainly that his own psychic abilities had been documented. Looking him up, I see that he coined the term “remote viewing” and did all sorts of other psychic experiments in the era, so it’s curious he is little known these days; you’d think he would’ve at least attained the pop-culture level of Uri Geller. But I guess remote viewing doesn’t draw in crowds like bending spoons. 

But back to that back cover copy – well, it states that a famous rock star named Daniel Merriweather (which of course made me think of Neal Merryweather, of Space Rangers and Kryptonite*) discovers his psychic talent and uses it to stop US-USSR psychic weaponry from being devised. Standing in that Half Price books, I imagined a sort of Rock Novel crossed with an upmarket The Mind Masters. 

Unfortunately, what I actually got was a talky political thriller that indulges in exposition and tedium for the majority of its runtime, with occasional slaps in the face where the author shows us that he could have delivered something better…creepy stuff like corpses in a top-secret DC lab that are “neuromorts,” undead psychics hooked up to computers and used by the government for ESP spying and whatnot…or a minor female character with sadomasochistic impulses (indeed, even necrophiliac impulses, as demonstrated in the last pages of the novel!), or the fact that the main character/villain is a popular rock singer… 

No, all of this stuff is passed over so that Swann can focus on a small group of DC and military figures who talk and talk and talk. Our nominal protagonist is forty-something General Harrah Judd, tasked with heading up the army’s psychic research arena, and the main female character is Dr. Bethany Coogan, a paranormal researcher who becomes Judd’s girlfriend…their blossoming romance is also glossed over. But it does give a whiff of that refreshing ‘70s attitude when, after meeting and working on the case a bit, Judd asks Coogan (Swann has a habit of referring to all of his characters by their surnames, male or female) what she wants for dinner, and Swann relates that it’s all innuendo for “sex being proposed and agreed upon,” like a business proposal…and then he completely skips over the actual sex stuff, and just has the two as an item! 

An author can’t really bother with plot and character development when his goal is to exposit about psychic research, and in this manner Star Fire is indeed quite similar to The Mind Masters. But at least John Rossmann/Ian Ross was sure to include sleazy Black Masses and women pleasuring themselves on gear shifts and other such lurid a-doings; Swann brushes all this stuff beneath the narratorial carpet and focuses solely on talking. 

It’s even one of those books where the President of the US is a character…and he too just talks all the time. It just goes on and on…and what makes it worse is that the main focus of the incessant talking is who is behind the psychic warfare that’s being waged against the US and USSR…and we readers already know who it is! So the entire novel is Judd, Coogan, the President, various senators, various government functionaries, various diplomats, various USSR characters, a gun-runner, and other assorted one-off characters, trying to figure out who has suddenly uncovered that both the US and USSR are engaged in top-secret psychic warfare research…and we readers know from the first pages that it is none other than rock mega-star Daniel Merriweather. 

Oh and his being a rocker has no bearing at all on the book. He could’ve been a postal employee, for all the plot is concerned. The trappings of the rockstar life are not dwelt on whatsoever; when we meet him, Merriweather has already decided to dispense with his megastardom and focus only on his psychic abilities – mainly, to stop the US and USSR from their respective warfare programs, which could destroy humanity. Late, late in the novel we find out he’s a Bob Dylan type (oh, those ‘70s authors and their penchant for only giving us “Bob Dylan-style” rock stars!) who quickly rose to fame, but then got “respectable,” and then one day he sang to a flower and the flower sang back, and that’s when he discovered he had psychic powers. 

Or, as he’s referred to later in the book when the army and everyone else in the world is trying to figure out who he is, Merriweather is a “megapsychic,” capable of such feats as burning all the documents in Coogan’s office while speaking to her on the phone. This is early on the book, when it seems like Merriweather is going to become the villain who taunts Judd and Coogan…but then Merriweather disappears from the novel, in hiding, and as I’ve mentioned frequently, the gist of the book features various characters trying to figure out who he is and where he is. 

If I wore a hat, I’d take it off to the employee at Dell who hyped up the salacious stuff on the back cover; it means he (or she!) actually read the book and sifted out the few bits and pieces that could be hyped. But really there is a kinky, mean book lurking beneath the bland exposition…like Shirley Paars, the aforementioned s&m chick with a late-developing taste for necrophilia, who hates men but sleeps with them to get info for her employer, the also-abovementioned gun-runner. She is only seldom featured in the book, and we never even see her in action, so to speak, save for the off-hand mention of her sleeping with Judd’s assistant…and even here the focus is on Paars trying to get information from the guy about, you guessed it, the mysterious “megapsychic.” 

Actually, it takes a few hundred pages for all these characters to even realize it is a megapsychic. The first half of Star Fire is focused on Judd and Coogan and all these others just trying to figure out what’s going on, and as mentioned, we readers already know, and then once they’ve finally admitted to themselves that a psychic is behind the attacks, they spend just as much time questioning the reality of it all. 

I forgot to mention, but the novel appears to occur in a near-future 1980s, but Swann doesn’t give many topical details, and doesn’t really bring the world to life – except in the case of the Washington politics aspect. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff about various government administration roles and whatnot, and it’s just not the book I wanted to read. It’s certainly not the book promised on the back cover. 

The crazy stuff only exists on the periphery, but to Swann’s credit he ramps up this aspect as the novel progresses…at least a little. The neuromort corpse-psychic things begin to factor into the narrative, and also the top-secret US and USSR psychic warfare projects are enacted, resulting in the deaths of thousands in both countries. But curiously all of this is related in charts of death and destruction; I forgot to mention, but a lot of graphs and tables are inserted in the narrative, which only furthers the dry, clinical tone of the novel. 

This rampant death sort of goes against the grain of Daniel Merriweather’s entire plot to save humanity, which is something that’s at least addressed in the final pages of the novel. But Swann has spent so much time on psychic exposition and “who is really behind these attacks?” that the finale is upon us before we realize it – major characters are dispensed with in an offhand fashion and Judd and Coogan are suddenly reformatted as vassals of a new psychic era, one founded by the almost godlike Daniel Merriweather. 

I believe this was the only novel Ingo Swann published, but I could be wrong. Given his adventures in the psychic realm, I would have expected a bit more escapism, but Star Fire is curiously grounded for the majority of its 318 pages of small print…only occasionally, from the few scenes in Daniel Merriweather’s perspective, do we get flashes of a psychic at work, and these scenes are by far the highlight of the novel. That said, there’s a great, creepy scene where a neuromort comes to life and the humorless lesbian in charge of the government project (how prescient!!) refuses to accept its resurrection, insisting it is dead as she takes up a scapel. But such scenes are few and far between. 

But then, if I had written Star Fire, I would’ve made the hotstuff sadomasochistic chick with necrophiliac tendencies the star of the book.

*In one of those synchronicities I love so much, this past weekend I came across Neal Merryweather’s 1969 2LP “superstar jam album” Word Of Mouth...for a measley five bucks!  In mint condition, to boot!

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

Chaos, by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring

June, 2019  Little, Brown and Company

I thought I was done with Manson Family books, but the other week I was asking Gemini to seek out books that were written by former Rolling Stone reporters, particularly books that hewed to the old New Journalism style, and Gemini included Chaos in its list, saying that even though it was recent it came off like a lost piece of 1970s Rolling Stone journalism. 

Well, it sort of does. I guess Chaos is “New Journalism,” or perhaps “Gonzo” in the Hunter Thompson sense in that author Tom O’Neill inserts himself into the narrative. But otherwise we do not get the excessive word painting that most draws me to vintage New Journalism; interestingly, this is how Chaos pales in comparison to the book it is trying to attack, Vincent Bugliosi’s major bestseller Helter Skelter. 

While O’Neill spends 500+ pages excessively detailing how Bugliosi hid evidence, prodded witnesses to lie on the stand, and also beat his mistress half to death(!?), never once does he achieve the mise en scene that Bugliosi and co-writer Curt Gentry brought to Helter Skelter. O’Neill even seems to be aware of this, directly quoting the effective opening line of Helter Skelter; there are no equally-quotable lines in Chaos. And I doubt it will still be in print 50 years from now, like Helter Skelter still is. 

Granted, the difference between the two books is that Bugliosi and Gentry were writing back then, back in the era where it was all happening – when the Family was still out there, with the dangling threat that more murders might ensue, a la the plot of Manson cash-in novel The Cult Of Killers. O’Neill is writing decades later, after Manson himself is dead, not to mention Bugliosi, Gentry, Susan “Sadie Glutz” Atkins, Linda Kasabian, etc, etc. Thus his book is more of a history piece, about picking up the pieces of a puzzle many decades later. 

But then Chaos isn’t as much about the Manson mystery as it is about how hard it was for Tom O’Neill to write the book. Folks, I kid you not. A large majority of the text is comrpised of O’Neill telling us of his many and futile attempts to write about his findings over the course of twenty years. Yes, twenty years: Chaos started life as a magazine article O’Neill was assigned to write for Premiere magazine in 1999, but he kept jumping from one new revelation to the next...so many revelations that he couldn’t figure out how to write the article, which was so big it eventually had to be a book. 

And friends the funniest part is…he never does figure out how to write the book! You patitently read Chaos, pondering over the glaring inconsistencies O’Neill reveals about the entire “Helter Skelter” case and Vincent Bugliosi’s methods to prosecute Manson et al, and you keep waiting for this big moment where O’Neill ties it all togeter. That moment never comes. That moment never comes! O’Neill refuses to tie his many loose ends together, refuses to make a daring claim – instead, he presents his findings, and then at great length tells us it’s all supposition on his part, given the glut of circumstantial evidence, and ends the book by telling us he’s “still looking.” Twenty years on the job, and he’s still looking. 

Back when I was really into this Manson stuff I recall reading a lot of theories online, many of them more compellingly-presented than O’Neill’s own; for example, there is zero here about a compelling theory that the murders were really masterminded by Family members Tex Watson and Linda Kasabian, as revenge on a drug burn…O’Neill does not mention this theory, nor does he talk about the character Paul Krassner claimed without question was behind the murders in a 1975 Rolling Stone article (Charles Winans), after which Rolling Stone was sued and Krassner was forbidden from writing more about the subject. This is especially curious because Krassner’s suspect Charles Winans was a former military man who got involved with the counterculture movement, which aligns exactly with the theory O’Neill concocts in Chaos. I’ve even come across a theory that Winans was the “Candyman” Tex Watkins mentioned in his testimony. 

But you will find nothing like this in Chaos. Tom O’Neill has spent so long researching his book that anonymous blog runners and site runners have beaten him to the punch – and have given us more juicy storylines in the process. But what’s crazy is that O’Neill actually meets with Paul Krassner in the course of his research, but the Winans theory is never mentioned; instead, Krassner merely warns O’Neill that the Manson thing can “take over your life.” 

And yeah, chasing one red herring after another for twenty years would certainly constitute taking over one’s life. Now, I don’t want to say that Tom O’Neill has wasted his life on a twenty-year quest that brought up no concrete evidence; I mean, surely it wouldn’t be much more of a waste than being married to one’s worst enemy for twenty-plus years. (Just speaking theoretically, of course!) Still though, the helluva it is that many others have trod the same twisted path as O’Neill, but many of them have come up with more believable theories. 

For you win a no-prize if you guessed that O’Neill brings in that hoariest of hoary conspiracy theories: MK-Ultra. To his credit, he doesn’t jump right into it, and builds his case…but then it took him ten years of real-time research to get there. It was only after he hit one brick wall after another with the LAPD and the LASO (sheriff’s office). And the threads connecting are tenuous at best; there were shady individuals hanging around at the time, in particular one guy who claimed to be at the Tate house the night of the murders and might have been an undercover CIA agent (or, just as likely, he might have been a bullshit artist), and O’Neill follows the trail to Dr. Jolly, a CIA-funded shrink who was doing LSD research for the Agency in the Haight just when Manson happened to be there, in 1967. 

The only problem is, O’Neill can never find anything that ties all of these people together…as if the Agency has a book somewhere titled “How We Used LSD To Brainwash a Group of Hippies Into Killers.” Which, of course, would be placed right next to their book “How We Killed The Kennedys.” 

The thing about these alternate Manson theories is that they are no less believable than the Helter Skelter theory. I mean, you can’t claim that it’s unbelievable that Manson’s drug-fueled cult would kill innocents as a way to start a race war, all of it inspired by a Beatles tune…and then come up with an alternate theory involving government spooks and mind control and say that’s more believable. 

This is why I say Bugliosi ensured in Helter Skelter that all challengers would immediately be deposed, with the statement that Manson had claimed “No sense makes sense.” Like Frank Barone said on Everybody Loves Raymond, “You can’t argue with a crazy person.” And, to build on that, you can’t expect a crazy person to make sense. This is the problem with O’Neill and the other “myth-busters” of today…they are looking for an explanation for why lunatics hopped up on LSD and God knows what else would randomly butcher people. I mean, it’s kind of like when a Muslim guy runs his truck into people while yelling about “Allah” and the media wonders what his “motive” was. 

Then again, that’s the difference between Bugliosi’s day and our modern day. We’re a lot dumber now. 

O’Neill does keep the reader’s interest for the majority of the text, in particular in the first half, before Chaos deep dives into arbitrary digressions on MK-Ultra, LSD research, and Federal anti-leftism initiatives (we need to bring those back!!). Just as Bugliosi documented in his own book, there were many mistakes on the part of law enforcement…but O’Neill expands on this by focusing on Bugliosi’s mistakes, many of which appeared to be intentional. 

Getting access to police documents that had not been seen since Bugliosi’s day, O’Neill discovers discrepencies thatwould have undermined the entire “Helter Skelter” conceit. Chief among them would be a note in Bugliosi’s own hand from a deposition with biker Danny DeCarlo, who claimed that producer Terry Melcher – the guy who once lived in the Tate home, and thus per the Helter Skelter theory was the guy Manson was trying to send a message to with the Tate killings – visited Manson in the desert after the killings. And indeed even fell to his knees and begged forgiveness. This, clearly, would disprove the Helter Skelter theory…why would Melcher still be visiting (and begging) Manson if the Tate murders had really been meant as a message to him? What makes it all the more curious to O’Neill was that Bugliosi scratched out this statement of DeCarlo’s in his notepad…and never spoke about it with his co-prosecutor, or with the defense team, or indeed ever mentioned it at all. 

But here’s the thing…what if DeCarlo was wrong?? I mean folks, we’re talking about a drug-taking biker who hung out with a friggin’ cult, and we’re expecting him to know the exact dates things happened. Hell, we’re expecting him to even be believable! Never once does it occur to O’Neill that DeCarlo might’ve walked back his own statement, realizing he had his dates wrong or hell even had the wrong guy and that it wasn’t even Melcher he saw – hence Bugliosi scratching out the statement. 

No, O’Neill at this point has heard that Bugliosi is a “bad guy” and he immediately jumps to the conclusion that the DeCarlo statement is totally valid and Bugliosi didn’t introduce it to the court due to bad intentions. To make it all the more insane, only late in the book does O’Neill have another face-to-face with his “enemy,” Bugliosi…and is deflated when Bugliosi claims he does not even remember this statement, and certainly would have shared it. Again, the impression is he discarded the statement back in the early ‘70s, at the time DeCarlo was giving the statement, and scratched it out in real-time as DeCarlo realized his own story was wrong. “Sorry, man, I think I got the people and the dates wrong, you can scratch that. Hey, you got anymore beer around here?” 

O’Neill mainly takes issue with how Charles Manson, a convict with a federal rap, was able to get by with so many crimes – up to and including threatening cops with violence and being caught with underaged girls – but was let go time after time. O’Neill presses the surviving cops and deputies on this (many of whom have died in the time it took O’Neill to write the book), and none of them can give a valid reason…then also there’s Manson’s parole officer, a guy who studied drugs and whatnot and who gave Manson much freer rein than one might expect. 

Then there’s the big question, always brushed over in most Manson Family books, of how exactly Charles Manson was able to “brainwash” a group of drug-using losers into murderous psychos. We’re told that the CIA was not able to use LSD to brainwash people, but thanks to his industrious research, O’Neill discovers in the papers of dead Agency contractor Dr. Jolly that the good doctor did indeed succeed in implanting a false memory in someone with LSD and other head-shrink tactics. 

But the thing is…O’Neil’s never able to connect all the dots, because he wants concrete evidence. So the reader must infer from the incessant lead-chasing that the government, in order to quash the leftist counterculture movement, implanted CIA-trained doctors in the Haight and other counterculture areas, studied the effects of drugs on people, figured out via field testing how to brainwash them (ie, MK-Ultra), and then used Manson’s groups as guinea pigs, which explains why Manson was able to evade arrest for so long: higher-ups were telling law enforcement that Manson was untouchable. As one of O’Neill’s interviewees states, the Manson scenario was a case of “MK-Ultra gone right.” 

All of which, of course, is much more believable than some story about a madman going even more mad after too much LSD and binging the White Album and then sending his loyal followers out to kill randomly, so as to start a race war. 

Like so many others have written, “Helter Skelter” does just as good a job of answering all the mysteries as any other theory does. And as for the leniency Manson was given; the parole office himself states that it was “a different time” in the ‘60s, with a lot more leeway than situations would be given today. Indeed, one might suspect that it was due to Manson himself that such safeguards were even put in place. 

Perhaps Paul Krassner should’ve been more direct with Tom O’Neill. It isn’t that the Manson thing can take over your life, it’s more so that you have to keep your common sense about you. If you go around with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. My contention is that it isn’t so much “vast conspiracy” as it is people who did a lot of drugs and thus did not operate in what the rest of us construe as “reality.” I mean, go live in the desert for several months and do a bunch of Orange Sunshine every day and you too will probably start to believe that the song “Helter Skelter” is commanding you to start a race war. No sense makes sense. 

As for the cops and their various mistakes? Again, read Helter Skelter. Bugliosi makes the law enforcement agencies look like fools, complaining about the very mistakes O’Neill writes about here…but in O’Neill’s opinion, Bugliosi is just as guilty, and we’re often told how the cops disliked him so much. Gee, I wonder why? 

Speaking of cops, O’Neill often reminds us that none of the cops who worked on the Tate-LaBianca killings believed in Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter theory. Tellingly, O’Neill never states that any of these cops believe the CIA was behind it, either! 

The fact is, we never are given a theory on why the murders happened. This truly is the most frustrating thing about reading Chaos. As mentioned, we make our way through the book waiting for a big revelation, or an explanation of why it all happened…and nothing ever comes of it. We’re even told of a guy who might have been a later victim of the Family, but even that is inconclusive. 

To quote a certain failed presidential candidate, “What, at this point, does it even matter?” This is how I felt as I read Chaos, and it’s the same thing Bugliosi even asks O’Neill toward the end of the book. Does it matter if the Family butchered people because they were brainwashed by Manson, or because they were brainwashed by CIA spooks? Did it matter to the victims? Which, by the way, Bugliosi shows much more compassion for; O’Neill even informs us that he “made a mistake” when interviewing a reticent Paul Tate, and in desperation to get the man to speak, O’Neill said, “Think of the victims!” To the father of one of the victims! 

I had a similar experience when I read Sticky Fingers; I started to sympathize with the person the author was attacking. In the case of that book it was Jann Werner; here it’s Vincent Bugliosi…that is, until the end of the book, when O’Neill reveals all the many skeletons in Bugliosi’s closet, from stalking a man he suspected of having an affair with his wife to beating up a woman Bugliosi was having an affair with. Certainly not an indication of the man’s quality as a human being, but not really relevant to his abilities as a prosecutor. I mean it’s like saying that just because a guy once made a demeaning, off-hand remark about women, he couldn’t go on to become the greatest president in US history. Right, friends?! 

But on that note, O’Neill also catches Bugliosi on another blunder; there’s a confrontation between the two at the start of the book, where Bugliosi slips on something…and by the time (years later) that O’Neill realizes this, he and Bugliosi are enemies and thus he can’t just ask him about the slip. But basically, Bugliosi makes a casual statement about having knowledge of the Manson Family activities at a certain point before they were even arrested, but O’Neill later realizes that Bugliosi is admitting to being aware of Manson et al before he was assigned the prosecution case, which goes against what Bugliosi wrote in Helter Skelter. 

And since O’Neill never strings together his unified theory, it goes like this: the CIA used LSD to brainwash people and implant false memories, a project called MK-Ultra; Manson was one of the test subjects, likely being practiced on by Dr. Jolly in the Haight in 1967; the cops were told by the Feds to look the other way; Bugliosi contrived and suppressed evidence to create the hoax “Helter Skelter” storyline to dissuade people from finding out the truth. 

And yet these shadowy spooks are the same ones who couldn’t even keep the Iran-Contra deal a secret ten years later. And also, the MK-Ultra angle still doesn’t explain why Sharon Tate and friends, why Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca. O’Neill successfully argues that the Tate hit wasn’t to send a message to Terry Melcher, as Bugliosi claimed, given the wealth of evidence that Manson was well aware that Melcher no longer lived in that house. So then, why? Again, “Helter Skelter” does just as good a job of explaining why. Even better, in fact! 

The major undoing of Chaos is that Tom O’Neill took so long to write it, the book seems behind the times. Given his relentless investigative work, O’Neill tells us, the original 1999 magazine article was dropped, with a book planned for 2009…but he missed that deadline, too. If it had actually come out in 2009 it might have seemed more relevant. As it is, there are a wealth of blogs and sites and Reddit threads about Manson these days that are much more interesting than anything here – the link I gave above, for example, about The Candyman, is more interesting than the entirety of Chaos. But then, those blog runners don’t have to worry about a legal team clearing everything for publication, something which Tom O’Neill definitely had to endure…hence the lack of mention of Charles Winans, I’d imagine. 

Speaking of lawsuits, the cynic in me suspects that O’Neill waited twenty years to publish the book because he’s was waiting the clock until many of these people died, and could no longer sue him. I know this sounds callous, but I think it’s very plausible, especially given that Bugliosi straight-up promises O’Neill that he will sue him if he (O’Neill) publishes any of his “lies” about Bugliosi. Well, Bugliosi is gone, now, as are Terry Melcher, Rudy Altobelli, and many of the cops and other figures O’Neill interviewed over the years. No worries about lawsuits now. 

O’Neill seems aware that his book has arrived late; he tells us his frustation at seeing many documentaries and books that came out over the years, many of them featuring Bugliosi or even former Family members. This to me was one of the biggest “WTF?” moments in Chaos; given the comprehensive nature of O’Neill’s interviews, tracking down practically everyone he could…it never seems to occur to him to contact the Family members in prison! “Say, Tex, do you remember when Charlie started using MK-Ultra tactics on you in the desert? You don’t?” 

But then, shockingly enough, we are told (in the epilogue!!) that O’Neill interviewed Manson himself, I mean the main guy behind it all, but we’re only told in passing at the very end of the book that the interview, conducted long-distance by prison phone, went nowhere due to Manson’s ramblings. And the fact that someone later told O’Neill that Manson didn’t trust him, and would no longer speak to him. But wow…I mean this is how far into the weeds O’Neill got, folks. He didn’t even think to tell us about the whole Manson interview until the book was nearly over. 

Well, speaking of “over,” I’ve gone on way too long. Hell, my review is probably the length of the article O’Neill was originally supposed to write for Premiere! And I wrote mine in a few hours, never mind twenty years!! Man, I got the impression from this book that a reporter job must be the next easiest thing to a government job. (Pre-DOGE, of course!)

Random Record Reviews: Volume 9

It’s a Satanic drug thing, Part 1: 

Monster Magnet: 25…Tab 

Glitterhouse Records, 1991 

My copy: Napalm Records, 2017 

I wasn’t into Monster Magnet in the early to mid ‘90s, and I don’t recall knowing anyone who was into them, either. By the time Monster Magnet got big in the late ‘90s, I had already moved away from “modern music,” so long story short – I was never a Monster Magnet fan. Until now! Within the past few months I have belatedly discovered this New Jersey band, formed in the late ‘80s by a group of psych explorers who seemed to have walked out of the early ‘70s. In particular, I am only interested in the earliest era of Monster Magnet, which is to say the first few releases (specifically: one album and two Eps), which featured John McBain on guitar. 

This, 25…Tab, is one of those Eps, with the caveat that the EP is actually longer than most LPs! The track “Tab” alone is over 30 minutes long, putting the limits of analog technology to the test; happily, this 2017 repress on 180 gram vinyl sounds great, save for the fact that it’s pressed a little quietly. The ideal LP side length is around 20 minutes; any more “data” on the side and something has to suffer in quality, usually either the bass level or the volume level. While the bass is nice and loud on the repress, you really have to crank the sucker up – but then, your only other option on vinyl is the original German release from 1993, and I doubt that sounds any better. 

I’m getting ahead of myself. This EP is great! It sounds so much like Hawkwind at times that you could be fooled into thinking it had been released 20 years earlier. This is what really appeals to me about Monster Magnet; they did heavy psych rock with vintage equipment. I don’t know much about what Monster Magnet did after, but their self-titled 1990 EP (inexplicably only released in Germany…and to this day not reissued in the US!), this Tab EP, and finally their debut album Spine Of God, are all pretty damn great. 

Not “heavy metal” per se, Monster Magnet is more heavy rock in the vein of the early 1970s, with lots of space rock and psych touches. It’s pretty awesome, and these guys were in for the whole trip – the subtitle of this Random Record Review, “It’s a Satanic Drug Thing,” comes from the back cover of Spine Of God: “It’s a Satanic drug thing…you wouldn’t understand.” 

The entirety of Side 1 is taken up with “Tab,” a 30-minute headtrip of sonic effects and various rants from “lead singer” Dave Wyndoff, all of it anchored by the mantra-like bass of John McBain (who does not play his customary electric guitar on this track). I’ve played this song a lot and you really can get lost in it; I once saw it compared to the freak-out psych section in the middle of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” just taken to an epic length, and that’s actually pretty accurate. Just imagine that going on for about 30 minutes. 

Side 2 gets into more “standard” song forms, starting off with the other title track, “25,” which is more Hawkwind than Hawkwind: 

This one features McBain on guitar and boy does it rip – probably one of my favorite Monster Magnet songs. This track cuts hard into the following number, “Longhair,” which is an instrumental with a strutting, freak-flag-flying sort of vibe, and then the EP ends – or at least the original release ended – with “Longhair,” a mellow track with overdubbed McBain guitar that is the closest thing to a “normal” song on the EP. This 2017 vinyl reissue tags on a live take of “Spine of God,” presumably from 1990 – the track isn’t even mentioned on the LP jacket – and it’s so bootleg you can hear the people in the audience talking about it, one of them even saying, “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were recording!” 

Overall, a great “EP” that is really more so an LP, and the cover art must also be mentioned – an appropriation of a vintage science illustration, with Monster Magnet’s mascot the Bulldog added to it. The print job of the LP sleeve is great; the colors really pop, and also they made it a gatefold, but the inside is just a blurry photo of Monster Magnet on stage. Check it out, just be sure to crank up the volume. 

Acid Reich: Mistress Of The Perpetual Harvest 

Cool Beans, 1989 (original cassette release) 

My copy: Mental Experience/Galactic Archives, 2021 

Speaking of Monster Magnet…man, I like this obscure release a lot more than I probably should. And also I consider myself fortunate to have a copy; per the label, this will never be reissued. So what we have here is a late ‘80s recording by the proto-Monster Magnet – Dave Wyndorf, John McBain, and Tim Cronin – augmented with two additional musicians from the underground New Jersey scene. According to an insigtful interview printed on a flyer that is placed inside the sleeve – an inverview conduced by psych musician The Plastic Crimewave – this material was recorded during downtime in a home studio in between working at local record and comic book stores. 

I find myself fascinated by this late ‘80s New Jersey scene that Monster Magnet was part of; it’s just super cool to think of these longhaired dudes in their 20s coming home from a day selling comics and then breaking out their vintage guitars and Orange amps and hitting record on the 4-track…playing music that was entirely out of fashion in the late ‘80s. 

The origin of Acid Reich is it was just another “band” these guys would record as, usually releasing stuff on cassette tape on a “label” run by Cronin. Plastic Crimewave got hold of the original tape and it was used as the source for this vinyl LP release…which sounds a lot better than you’d expect, but be aware this is certainly lo-fi: the drums are a pounding tribal din and the guitars are more scrappy than heavy. But man it is heavy acid rock of the highest order, sounding more like an underground heavy rock bootleg from 1971 than anything from 1989, and of course I mean that as a compliment. 

They also don’t short-change you on material: the LP runs around 40 minutes, the perfect LP length, but there are only 5 songs on it! Side 1 features the awesome “Black Sun,” which features echo-treated Tim Cronin endlessly shouting “Black sun…in my head!” like a madman over a lo-fi metal jam, and then unexpectedly we have an epic-length cover of Pink Floyd’s “Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun,” always one of my favorite Floyd songs. But man, Waters and company even at their most “far-out 1969 Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” never got this far out; it starts off somewhat similar to the Floyd original before heading into the outer reaches of heavy lo-fi psych metal. 

Side 2 is more of the same – there’s an Acid Reich “Theme,” which is along the lines of “Black Sun,” and a heavy instrumental psych-metal-fest called “Revenge of Tim Boo Ba,” before things close out with a sarcastic take on “Amazing Grace,” which seems to feature Wyndorf on vocals. Oh and I should mention, as with “Tab,” John McBain plays bass throughout the entirety of Mistress Of The Perpetual Harvest (a local rocker named Shaune Kelley plays guitar on the LP), which is a shame, as McBain’s guitar tone was phenomenal – I mean, just check out “Nod Scene” from Spine Of God. 

As mentioned, I contacted Guerssen, the parent label of Mental Experience, to see if they were going to repress this LP, and they responded that they were not going to. So, I went on a hunt, determined to get my own phsyical copy for an affordable price. I was lucky enough to, but given how obscure the album is, you might have to resort to the digital release on the Acid Reich Bandcamp page. 

Spiral Shades: Hypnosis Sessions 

RidingEasy Records, 2014 

A little over twenty years ago I became a hardcore Black Sabbath fan, Ozzy-era only of course, mostly due to the awesome reviews by The Seth Man on Unsung. I bought the Black Sabbath CD box set when it came out in 2004, and still have it, and over the years I’ve gotten a few of their albums on vinyl, but prices have always been too high. And besides, the music is what matters, and Ozzy-era Sabbath is still some of my favorite music. 

But while the first four albums are generally the most loved by fans, I’ve always been a fan of Sabotage, Sabbath’s 1975 LP that saw them retaining their sound while bringing in progressive elements…not to mention a lot of sonic trickery. I mean “Megalomania” is by far my favorite Black Sabbath song, a 9-minute track that starts off dreamy before going off the deep end into sonic FX-ridden riff heaven (or hell), not to mention some serious cowbell action. Why this track is not better known than “War Pigs” is a mystery for the ages, but whatever – 1975 Sabbath was the best. 

Instead of continnuing in this pace, Sabbath unfortunately delivered Technical Ecstasy the following year, a muddled album that retained the progressive rock vibe but ruined everything with a generic “rock” approach. (And yes, that review I linked to is one I wrote for Unsung over twenty years ago!) But man, this 2014 album, produced by two guys – who weren’t even together in the same country when they recorded the album! – is the true followup to Sabotage that Black Sabbath never gave us. 

With a guy named Filip Petersen, in Norway, handling all the guitars, and a guy named Kuhshal Bhadra, in India(!), handling the vocals and drums, Spiral Shades is a studio group if ever there was one…and that’s fine with me. I’ve never been a fan of live albums. I like to hear the studio technology taken to its limits, and like Monster Magnet, Spiral Shades has done the same thing – taken a vintage metal sound to its limits. This album truly sounds like it could have been recorded and released in 1975, and again that is a compliment. 

And I haven’t even mentioned Bhadra’s vocals. There is a whole scene that’s developed in the past several years of Sabbath-worshipping “doom” metallers who have their own ersatz Ozzie on vocals…but folks, Kuhshal Bhadra is more Ozzy than Ozzy. This dude has Osbourne’s sound and delivery down pat, and there are tracks here you could play to someone who isn’t even really gullible and fool them into thinking it’s actually a Black Sabbath song. It’s truly incredible. 

And not only that, but the songs themselves have the Sabbath sound, while not coming off like ripoffs or repeats of what Sabbath did; Hypnosis Sessions really does sound like a true followup to Sabotage, the riff centering all the songs in true Iommi fashion, with the band sometimes going for slow-build epics and other times going for head-banging riffathons. So far as the latter go, my favorite track on the album would be one of those short head-bangers, “Wizardry,” which features some cool fx on the guitar:

Coming in at nearly an hour, Hypnosis Sessions was released as a double album, meaning it’s the opposite scenario as with Monster Magnet’s 25…Tab vinyl release. Since each side comes in at around 12 to 14 minutes, there are no issues with lack of bass or volume. The album sounds great, and vinyl would be the ideal medium to play it in, but it does bum me that RidingEasy got cheap and didn’t release it as a gatefold. This means that both LPs are jammed into a standard jacket, thus ensuring that some day the seams will split. 

Spiral Shades took nearly ten years to record a followup, the digital-only Revival; I’ve only listened to it once, but it is very much along the lines of Hypnosis Sessions, and it’s a damn mystery why RidingEasy didn’t keep them on the roster and release this one on vinyl as well. 

Saltpig: Saltpig 

Heavy Psych Sounds, 2024 

My favorite release on this list, Saltpig came out via the wonderfully-named Heavy Psych Sounds, a Rome-based label that focuses on, you’ll be shocked to know, heavy psych rock, metal, doom metal, and etc. There are a ton of artists on this label and I highly recommend you check them out. Also they do quality vinyl releases, and it was in this fashion that I discovered Saltpig’s debut LP…which turned out to be my best music discovery of 2025, and certainly the best “new release” I’ve heard in perhaps decades. 

I’m always buying music and listening to music, but it’s all old stuff, if you know what I mean. I realized a few months ago that there had to be new music out there that was worth listening to, and further I realized it was we hardcore rock junkies who were doing a disservice to these new groups – we’re so busy buying “Very Good Plus” copies of old records on Discogs that we are oblivious to new music that might be just as good. 

And Saltpig is certainly a case in point. These guys are awesome, coming off like an unholy mix of Black Sabbath and The Stooges...maybe after the two had sat through a triple-feature of horror movies at the local drive-in. Like Spiral Shades, we have here a two-man group: Mitch Davis on vocals, guitars, and production, and Fabio Alessandrini on drums. Man, these guys are phenomenal: this album is so great that I’ve played it constantly since I got it. Usually I play records only a few times and then move on to the next new thing, but I’ve played Saltpig over and over. In fact I’m playing it again right now! 

On the label page I linked to above, Saltpig’s music is described as a direction early 1970s proto-metal might have gone if it had not evolved “towards greater precision, bigger drums and more robust production.” I read this after listening to the album a few times, and I have to say, this description really sums up their sound. One can easily imagine that this would be the direction heavy music went in the early ‘70s. There is a sort of lo-fi murk to Saltpig, yet at the same time the production is phenominal, with a lot of buried effects; it’s a headphone album as well as a “blast on your stereo” album. 

Side 1 is comprised of 5 tracks, each in the 3-5 minute span, centered around a Sabbath approach but offering a lot of variety. Oh and I forgot to mention, but a key to Saltpig’s success is Mitch Davis’s vocals; his is not an Ozzy wail, or a death metal grunt…his vocals are top-notch. The dude actually sings, which is what brings me back to the Stooges comparison…I mean, Iggy Pop/Stooge had one of the greatest rock voices ever, and Davis seems to have taken his inspiration from that area instead of a more traditional “doom metal” approach. 

That said, Davis’s vocals are usually buried beneath FX and other trickery; as mentioned there is a very cool murk to Saltpig, lending to its “occult” vibe. But this is a drive-in monsterama kind of occult (ie the best kind), with side 1’s subjects ranging from demons to burning witches. Starting off with “Satan’s War,” Saltpig hits the ground running, and the way the 5 songs blend into one another, side 1 almost comes off like a continnuous piece. “Satan’s War” promptly displays their penchant for buried effects, with lots of sound effects buried beneath the music – even after listening to the album so many times, I still am surprised by the errant noises when listening on my headphones. “Demon” and “Burning Water” are aggressive, riffing numbers, and “When You Were Dead,” with its grungier, more lo-fi metal-punk vibe, is a harbinger of Side 2. “Burn The Witch” opens with a horror movie sample and almost sounds like ‘80s goth metal in the chorus. 

Flip it over to side 2 and it’s another story entirely...one single track, “1950” (the title is actually the length of the track!), a mind-blower of blown-out amps and screamed, fx-ridden vocals, where Saltpig just rides a riff into infinity. It sounds like James Williamson-era Stooges looking into the future and doing a shorter, slightly faster take on Sleep’s “Dopesmoker.” Speaking (again) of the Stooges, if you are a fan of that band, then you’ve gone down the murky roads of bootlegs and unofficial releases, and it’s incredible how Saltpig has exactly replicated that sound with “1950;” it sounds like some track lifted off Heavy Liquid or Rough Power or one of the innumerable other Stooges boots. 

For nearly twenty minutes we have this RIFF, which rolls upon itself over and over, before slowing down a bit for (what passes for) the chorus, and throughout it all Mitch Davis’s voice is lost in the sonic din. Man, it’s incredible! “1950” is my favorite new song in years and years and years. The track is so great that Saltpig even made a music video for it!

I was so blown away by Saltpig that I actually contacted the band throught their website, telling them how much I enjoyed the album. I was nearly as blown away when I received a response…in which they told me that they are putting “the finishing touches” on their followup album! Folks, I can’t tell you how amped up I am to hear another Saltpig album. I mean, think of it. This is the first time I’ve been excited to hear a new album since…when? Maybe not since the ‘90s! 

Highly, highly recommended – I got the basic black vinyl pressing, but Heavy Psych Sounds offers various pressings at various prices, plus digital as well, so take your pick – just so long as you check it out. And while the vinyl is likely pressed from digital, which is how it is done these days, I suspect the album itself was recorded in analog, as it has that vintage sound, which adds to the vibe. Just a perfect album, and one I will continue to listen to again and again.

Bloodsong: Season Of The Dead - Halloween '25 

Digital release, 2025 

Rounding out this review with a special mention of a new single release from Bloodsong, who I have raved about before – first about their Initium Meets Earth A.D. release, and their later Season Of The Dead. The other day I got an email notice that Bloodsong had just put up a new song on Bandcamp, and I went over there immediately to check it out. 

Coming in at 2 tracks, Season Of The Dead – Halloween ‘25 features remakes of earlier songs, and what’s notable is that this one-man band has now become a two-man band. (Two-man bands could almost be a theme of this post!) Main man I, Misanthrope has been joined by the awesomely-named “Dr. Anthony Fulci” on lead guitar, and the good doctor shreds it up on new mixes of “Season Of The Dead” and “I Want Your Blood.” 

While both of these songs were great in their previous mixes, it must be said that Dr. Fulci brings something new to the table, in particular “I Want Your Blood,” which is here transformed into the greatest song Bloodsong has yet done. Like I said before, if you’ve worn out your Misfits and Samhain records, you need to look into Bloodsong; absolutely no band comes as close to capturing that mid-‘80s Samhain sound, while still offering something new and uniquely their own. 

I think the only thing missing is a physical release of Bloodsong’s material…I’d love to have some of this stuff on vinyl. Hopefully I, Misanthrope and Dr. Anthony Fulci will continue to join forces and bring us a full album of heavy horror punk, but in the meantime this two-track single is perfect Halloween listening, so head over to Bandcamp and check it out!

Doomsday Warrior #19: America’s Final Defense

Doomsday Warrior #19: America’s Final Defense, by Ryder Stacy

July, 1991  Zebra Books

Well friends, this is a bittersweet moment – it’s the final volume of Doomsday Warrior! I can’t believe it’s finally come to the end; this series has been part of my life for 14 years, now, and it’s hard to believe I’ve finally read the entire thing. 

Of course, it only took Ryder Syvertsen seven years to write the series, which is half the time it took me to read it, but honesty – as I’ve documented here again and again in the reviews – Syvertsen lost interest in Doomsday Warrior long before it ended. I’m happy to say that he drummed up his enthusiasm for America’s Final Defense; none of the “I’m sick of this” vibe is evident in this last book, and for once Syvertsen doesn’t rip off most recent volumes…instead, he gives a sort of microcosm of the series entire, serving up all the staples of previous installments in this final volume. 

Before writing this review, I went back and read my pedantic, overly-comprehensive reviews of the previous books in the series. And abruptly I remembered why I’d made them so comprehensive in the first place: because I knew the day would come when I got to this last volume of Doomsday Warrior, and I’d no doubt want to refresh my memory on the series before I wrote my review. The prophecy has been fulfilled! 

Seriously though, Ryder Syvertsen clearly intended this to be the finale, as he was gearing up for it in the final pages of the previous volume. Syvertsen has always played fast and loose with the chronology of the series; I see in my reviews that “2089 AD” was frequently mentioned as the date in the earliest books, and then later we were told that “2096 AD” was the date. We’re told in this final volume that the year is now “2099 AD,” and Ted “Doomsday Warrior” Rockson and his comrades often reflect on things that happened “ten years ago.” 

What’s curious is that Syvertsen frequently refers to those earliest books, but jettisons most all references to recent things – for example, in the previous volume we were told that Detroit Green was the official representative to the USSR, and Schertantsky had returned to live in the USSR. Also, Archer had retired to live in the countryside. All of that stuff is never mentioned once in America’s Final Defense; the “series reset” that ran through the series is here, too; when the novel starts, the entire Rock team is operating out of Century City, same as they were way back in the the first volume. No mention is made of Detroit having been a rep, or Archer having been retired. In other words, nothing has changed – even though everything changed in the most recent volumes. 

Well, one thing has stayed the same – Syvertsen, around the ninth volume, decided he was sick of the “USSR invading the USA” storyline of the earliest books and decided to focus on other things. Reading my reviews of the earliest volumes, I was surprised to see how many subplots were dropped as the series progressed, like for example the political stuff between Zhabnov, the depraved ruler of the conquered US, and Killov, the KGB personification of evil. All that stuff was brushed aside, as were the frequent cutovers to Russia where we could read about supreme ruler Vassily and his Ethiopian manservant/best friend. 

Another thing, which I copiously noted in my reviews, was the removal of all the goofy, purple-prosed (but exceedingly explicit) sexual material. The earliest Doomsday Warrior novels were ultra-detailed on both the sex and the violence fronts, but gradually both of these factors withered away…for reasons I’d love to know. I wonder if Syvertsen realized that kids were reading his series and purposely decided to make the books less explicit; or maybe he himself had a kid and didn’t want junior to start reading them and think his dad was a psychotic pervert. Or maybe the sex and violence had been forced on Syvertsen by the publisher and later on they had an editorial change…who knows. 

Whatever the reason, the removal of the dirty stuff is one of the things that remains consistent with this final volume; in other words, Syvertsen did not pay true hommage to his own series in that regard, as he did with practically every other aspect – seriously, America’s Final Defense is essentially every volume of Doomsday Warrior rolled into one, save for the lack of XXX sex, gory violence, and appearances by any Russian villains other than Killov. 

It also features a big return of the psychedelic aspect of the series; indeed, this is the most psychedelic volume since #3: The Last American, which I believe was my favorite volume of the series. As with that early volume, there are parts of America’s Final Defense that are like a blacklight poster in literary form – one can only imagine the incredible illustrations gifted modern-day artist Alexis Ziritt could do with this material. 

Another thing I noticed in my pendantic reviews is my frequent declaration that Doomsday Warrior was essentially an R-rated Saturday morning cartoon. Again, this is entirely true for America’s Final Defense, which brushes reality to the side with the same eagerness that previous volumes did. I mean folks in this one Rockson and team go up to space, again, and end up fighting ancient alien gods that have lurched out of Erich von Daniken, during the course of which Ted Rockson is imbued with ancient wisdom that makes him “a million times smarter than before.” 

As mentioned, Syvertsen only picks up a few things from the finale of the previous book – despite which we learn, fairly late in the game, that all this is occurring one year after the events of American Dream Machine. Otherwise the series reset is in full force, and after an incongruous prologue, in which the setting for the series is established for us – as if we haven’t been reading the previous 18 damn books – we have an action opening in which Rockson and his forces try to finally take out Killov in a running battle.  Another interesting thing is that Syvertsen describes all of the main characters, for the first time in who knows how long; topical details on what Rockson looks like, and etc.  Again, quite strange, given that this is the 19th volume! 

A lot of important series stuff is mentioned in passing – like how America has worked out an agreement with Vassilly in the USSR which sees both countries destroying all of their nuclear warhead stashes(!). In other words, the entire impetus of the series is over and done with, and Syvertsen didn’t even cover any of it in the narrative, which indicates how little invested he was in Doomsday Warrior at this point. Indeed, one gets the impression that he was more into his concurrent series Mystic Rebel (which I collected years ago but held off on reading until I finished this series), what with the focus on New Agey concepts. Oh and speaking of which, there are all these random asides in America’s Last Defense, like how shunning fat in your diet could have health implications, and also a big part of the finale involves Rockson’s understanding that both science and mysticism should be embraced – very, very New Age stuff, and I’m assuming the Mystic Rebel series is rife with that sort of thing. 

Rockson is nearly killed in this opening, and Killov wasn’t there anyway (it was an imposter!), and Rockson is flown back to Century City’s hospital…where Syvertsen introduces an entirely new character to the series, for some reason: Charity Birdell, a “buxom beautiful nurse” in Century City who hero-worships Rockson and sees this as her opportunity to screw him. We get a refreshing return of that ‘60s vibe, gone for so many volumes, when Charity has Rockson smoke a “chi-stick” as part of his healing process. Indeed, Rockson is instructed to take “two tokes twice a day!” 

But brace yourself: the Charity-Rockson conjugation happens off-page, despite Syvertsen dropping kinky details before it occurs, like for example “[Charity] nearly came in her panties” when Rockson smiles at her, and whatnot. (Also we get the goofy tidbit that Charity has tattoos of “all forty-six presidents” on her body, with one of them hidden, and of course Rockson finds it…!) Actually, Syvertsen was doing this in the most recent volumes, too, so it appears that he was fine with writing ribald dialog and such, but when it came to the actual tomfoolery he decided to cut to black…a decided change from the early books, which left nothing unexplored. 

This is especially strange as, again just like in the most recent books, Rockson gets laid a lot in America’s Final Defense. Shortly after being with Charity, Rockson hooks up with his “girlfriend” Rona, the statuesque mutant redhead babe who was the main female character in this series once upon a time, before being shunted off into the narrative woodwork. I think the last volume she actually featured in was #6: American Rebellion, where she was worshiped as a post-nuke Eva Braun, a sequence that is actually mentioned here in America’s Final Defense; again, Syvertsen (and his characters) frequently reminisce about previous volumes, all the sign you could need that the author intended this to be the final story of the saga. 

But ever since then, Rona has been shunted aside, only given a line or two of dialog and having off-page sex with Rockson…and the same is true, here. Rona has more off-page lovin’ with Rockson, then the two are dancing to Judas Priest in her room (we’re told a Judas Priest CD was “recently unearthed” and is now all the rage in Century City), but Dr. Schecter comes along to take Rockson away, and that’s all we see of Rona. 

As for Rockson’s other “girlfriend,” Kim, she doesn’t appear at all in America’s Final Defense. This is especially galling, as my fellow sleazebags will recall the awesome premise upon which previous volume American Dream Machine ended: Kim and Rona had agreed to “settle their petty jealous differences” and, just as the novel friggin’ ended, they went together to Rockson’s room to double-team him(!). Well, fellow sleazebags, this little incident is not mentioned at all in America’s Final Defense, and we are told that Kim is off in some other city, handling business for her father, the newly-elected president of the (Re)United States (and he doesn’t appear in this volume, either). 

I’ve long suspected that Syvertsen had no interest in Kim – perhaps she was a creation of Jan Stacy, Syvertsen’s writing partner on the first four volumes – and her lack of appearance in this book would indicate that. Looking back on my reviews, I see that, even in Kim’s infrequent appearances, she’s barely had any dialog and has not contributed much to the overall storyline. But at least she’s mentioned this time around. 

That’s it for Rockson’s love life – at least in Century City. As America’s Final Defense continues, he has sex with many other women, from an Amazonian queen (a recurring series staple character) to a French space-babe. This is all standard for the series; I only mention it so as to confirm that there is no resolution whatsoever to the Rockson-Rona-Kim love triangle, which was so important to the storyline many volumes ago. Again, Syvertsen has moved on and lost interest, so reading this 19-volume series in one go would no doubt make for a bumpy ride. 

Not to mention a repetitive one; it’s been clear for a long time that Syvertsen is totally aware that his books all follow a template, and by god he’s sticking to that template, and he does so here again in this final volume. So we have the inciting incident: Schecter informs Rockson that a massive asteroid was just discovered, and it’s headed right for Earth and will destroy Earth in three weeks…headed right into Earth’s orbit due to Earth’s orbit being affected by the nuke blasts a century before. 

There follows that annoying mainstay of Doomsday Warrior: the interminable “democracy in action” bit as the Century City council argues for and against Rockson and team going out to save the day. It’s all just so time-wasting, but Syvertsen goes on and on with it regardless, leading to the inevitable conclusion in which the vote is “No” (due to political infighting reasons), but Rockson goes off anyway. From there to the other staple: surviving the mutated flaura and fauna of this post-nuke world. 

It’s just as juvenile as previous volumes: there’s an unused spaceship not too far from Century City, so Rockson and his usual team plus a few redshirts are to go there, fly it into space, and then blast the asteroid so that its path is changed. So like I’ve said in every previous review, total cartoon type of stuff. And meanwhile Killov, in the Inca ruins where he’s worshipped as a god, comes across ancient documentation of this very asteroid, which once upon a time visited earth and imparted some of its alien knowledge here – there was a high-tech city on the asteroid – and he plans to go into space himself and get this ancient alien technology. All so he can kill Rockson, of course. 

The only loose ends Syvertsen is bothered with tying up concern the Glowers, those superbeings who have infrequently appeared in the series, most notably in the third volume. Rockson eventually learns that the “main” Glower, Turquoise Spectrum, has died, and after a very psychedelic “astral commune” bit, Rockson teams up with a new Glower pal, not to mention an “interdimensional being” named Pruzac Ephedrine, a “full-figured” and beautiful half human/half Glower hybrid. She features in a lot of very out-there, psychedelic stuff in the novel, particularly the finale. 

Rockson and team suffer one setback after another, with Syvertsen clearly just winging it as he goes along – I mean, the old NASA spaceship is surrounded by Amazons, who insist on the Rock team banging five women each in one night, but Rockson himself is chosen by the beautiful, green-haired Queen – cue more off-page sex. (“The green-head was hellfire in bed,” and etc.) But the spaceship is in poor state and can’t fly; no problem, because the Glowers whip up a new spaceship for Rockson, and with it they head into space! 

Syvertsen here really ties back to #14: American Death Orbit, with Rockson again hooking up with the “space Frenchies” he met in that earlier volume. And once again we get a lot of mention of those “space Nazis,” without actually seeing any of them. Rockson here gets laid again, courtesy a French space girl “barely out of her teens;” this is Rockson’s last conjugation in the entire series, and again Syvertsen leaves the sleaze vague: “[they] made passionate, gravity-free love” being the extent of it. 

The asteroid is called Karrak by Schecter, and Rockson lands on it in the finale, propelled by visions he’s been given by Turqoise Spectrum, who appears Obi-Wan Kenobi-style to Rockson when Rockson needs him. But Killov is here, too, leading to a bizarre bit where both Rockson and Killov deal with ancient alien technology, one of them to save Earth, the other to destroy it. In the process Killov transforms himself into a nine foot tall, three-eyed ancient alien warrior called Mu-Temm, and he also has an ancient alien device that allows him to “think away” any weapons that are used against him. 

There follows an endless battle between Rockson and “Mu-Temm” that just goes on and on, like the Rockson-Chrome battle back in volume #9. But Rockson gets the shit beaten out of him by this transformed Killov, to the point that Rockson actually weeps in frustration. It’s all very much in a Biblical motif, with Rockson the slingshot-baring David getting the better of Killov’s Goliath.  But it is clear again that Ryder Syvertsen was a fan of Total Recall; previous volumes indicated that he was inspired by the Schwarzenegger film, but this one really brings it home.  From visions involving a pyramid on an alien planet to even the image of Killov’s eyes bulging from their sockets due to the pressure of space, it is clear that Syvertsen was influenced by that movie. 

Then we get the most psychedelic sequence yet in the series, with Rockson going into an ancient pyramid, again following Glower visions, and being imparted with all that knowledge – his memory now even “going back billions of years.” When he comes out of it, he starts talking in mystical phrases that are so profound that Chen insists on recording them. It’s all kind of cool but just totally unlike what one might have expected this series to conclude on. SPOILER ALERT, but the finale of Doomsday Warrior sees Rockson, recovering from his sudden knowledge and intelligence increase, telling the others to leave the dead Killov on the asteroid (Rockson having strangled Killov to death)…and that’s it. We are not told of the voyage home; the story – and series – ends right there, with Rockson declaring that the asteroid is a dead place for dead things. 

Actually, it sort of ends there. We are treated to an epilogue in which Syvertsen strives for a sort of quasi-metaphysical vibe, but it instead comes off as vacuous. It’s a thousand years in the future and a nameless woman attempts to become one with an apple tree, then there’s some gibberish about “the man from the sea,” and the gist seems to be that the two characters are reborn, immortal enemies. It has nothing to do with anything that came in the series before, but then it’s possible I just missed the profundities Syvertsen was trying to bestow. 

And that, folks, is that – the 19-volume saga of Doomsday Warrior comes to a close. What a weird trip it was, too. To be honest, I’d forgotten most of the earlier volumes, so I’m glad my reviews were so pedantic. I can’t say I’ll ever read these books again, but you never know. In the end, I will think of this series in a positive light; it’s just too goofy – and the earliest volumes so outrageously violent and explicit – that you can’t help but like it. Yet at the same time, Ryder Syvertsen’s disinterest in the series was very pronounced in the later books, and one gets the feeling he should’ve ended it many volumes ago.  But clearly he realized that more effort was needed for this final volume; I particularly appreciated how he gave each member of the Rock Team a moment to shine. 

Next I need to get back to the C.A.D.S. series, another post-nuke pulp Syvertsen was writing at the same time. And also I’ll now get to his Mystic Rebel books, which judging from these final volumes of Doomsday Warrior, with their focus on New Age concepts, was probably more the sort of thing Syvertsen wanted to be writing. So maybe he was a little more invested in that series than he was in Doomsday Warrior.

No One Here Gets Out Alive

No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman

April, 1981  Warner Books

The Doors are one of those groups that go through phases in popularity. Huge in their day, then forgotten, then rediscovered due to the publication of this book, then again super famous in 1990 with Oliver Stone’s film hagiography of Jim Morrison; I still remember how the rock chicks at my high school traded out their Motley Crue shirts for Doors shirts when that movie came out. I also recall seeing this very paperback a lot around school. It seems that today we might be in one of those phases where it’s more common to see the Doors put down, their impact on the era minimized, and the poetry of their lyrics ridiculed. 

So, just to put all my cards on the table, I think the Doors were one of the greatest rock groups of the ‘60s (which is to say ever), I think Jim Morrison had the greatest voice in rock, and I’d rather listen to them than the The Beatles or The Rolling Stones any day of the week. 

So it’s strange it’s taken me so long to get around to reading No One Here Gets Out Alive. First published in trade paperback in 1980, the book essentially relaunched the Doors as one of the most popular rock acts ever; the previous year saw “The End” on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which probably gave the band’s popularity just as much of a boost. Plus the version in the movie was uncensored, with Morrison dropping some f-bombs that were cut from the original record release; man I spent forever searching for a release with this version (it wasn’t on the soundtrack), but it wasn’t officially released until 1999, when it came out on one of the Doors remasters. 

At nearly 400 pages of smallish print, there’s more to No One Here Gets Out Alive than I assumed there’d be. Danny Sugerman was a young fan of the group who eventually handled their fan mail; for some reason he appears in this book as “Denny Sullivan,” and not under his real name. Jerry Hopkins was a reporter who did the big inteview with Morrison for Rolling Stone, and it’s my understanding Hopkins had wanted to do a bio of Morrison for some time, not finding any interest from publishers until Sugerman came on board – I guess the “sell” being that Sugerman would add a lot of behind-the-scenes info about the band. 

But then…boy, the other Doors are supporting characters at best in No One Here Gets Out Alive. This really is a bio of Jim Morrison, with the caveat that Morrison was such a chameleon – particularly, a chameleon who drank a whole helluva lot – that you come out of the book with no greater understanding of him than you had before you read it. Essentially the book is comprised of Jim Morrison doing this or that other insane thing while drunk off his ass. Big events, like recording albums or giving concerts or whatever, aren’t much dwelt upon, and indeed in most cases they just happen in the narrative. If you are looking for any sort of peek into the creative process, forget about it. And if you’re really into the Doors and want to know about their two post-Morrison albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, you can totally forget about them (if you haven’t already); they aren’t even mentioned. Even the posthumous Morrison collaboration An American Prayer isn’t mentioned. 

Another thing to note is that No One Here Gets Out Alive, despite being the impetus for a Doors renaissance (up to and including Stone’s film, which largely was inspired by the book), is now itself ignored by Doors fans – it has been put forth that the book is mostly fan fiction with little bearing on the real Jim Morrison, and in particular that Sugerman tarnished Jerry Hopkins’s actual research with a lot of b.s. Morrison idolization. See this 1981 interview with Doors producer Paul Rotchchild for a telling condemnation of the book…particularly given how Rothchild’s comments to Hopkins were changed by Sugerman prior to the book’s publication. 

That said, the book reads just fine as a sensationalistic rock expose. I knew I was in for a good time when I saw that, on the very first page, Danny Sugerman in his Foreword wrote “This book neither propels nor dispels the Morrison myth,” and then, in the very next paragraph, wrote, “My personal belief is that Jim Morrison was a god.” And this friends is pretty much the vibe No One Here Gets Out Alive maintains throughout, alternately informative and idolatrous. 

We certainly aren’t talking about a fantastic piece of word-painting like Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child Of The Aquarian Age, still the best rock bio I’ve ever read. Hopkins and Sugerman do occasionally go into literary flourishes to describe Doors music, but for the most part their focus is on the lyrics. Even then their criticism is not on the level of Paul Williams or the like, but more along the lines of a fanzine. We don’t even get much in the way of the behind-the-scenes material Sugerman supposedly would’ve value-added, at least insofar as the music goes, other than occasional rundowns of how such and such a song sounds. 

What we do get is the rambling, exhaustive account of a very gifted but very troubled artist. I have to say, I got very sick of Jim Morrison over the course of No One Here Gets Out Alive, just tired of his constant drunken escapades, but at the same time it was a refreshing reminder of how rock stars were once so casually self-destructive. I mean the flyweight “rockers” of today are too busy hawking merchandise or posing for social media; Jim Morrison would get blitzed and hang from a balcony ten floors up. But man, it isn’t this sort of shit that makes a legend – I mean I’m 49, so I was born after Morrison was dead and wasn’t around at the time…but I’ve known about the Doors since I was a little kid, and I never knew much about Morrison’s personal life. It was the music I knew and responded to, and doubtless that will continue for future generations. 

And Morrison surely was the key to the Doors’s success, even though he himself was uncomfortable with that notion. If you need any indication, just play the albums Other Voices or Full Circle, laughingly credited to “The Doors,” even though Jim Morrison isn’t on either of them. In fact, play “Ships With Sails,” one of the better tracks off Other Voices, with Ray Manzarek on lead vocals, and you might think it’s okay, even if it doesn’t really sound like the Doors. But then…then play the same track with an AI Jim Morrison, and suddenly…suddenly that same track sounds like the Doors. With two songs you can prove who the key to “the Doors sound” was, if for some reason you ever questioned that. 

One thing I’ve forgotten to mention is that the authors also have a tendency to recreate conversations, giving the book the feel of fiction, sort of like Dakota Days. So we’ll periodically have parts wher Morrison is talking to this or that person, and it’s relayed as dialog between two characters, so clearly it is fiction, given that neither writer was there to hear what was actually said. In some ways, No One Here Gets Out Alive is essentially a rock novel; it certainly has the “drugs” part down – though Morrison became more of a heavy drinker than a drug user – and there’s even a bit of sex at times, though Morrison’s conquests are not thoroughly detailed. We do get the random mention, however, that Jim at one point “butt-fucked” a girl…with the quotation marks around it and everything. 

Surprisingly I found myself really enjoying the pre-fame stuff. Usually with these books I don’t care too much about the background, but in Jim Morrison’s case I enjoyed it – particularly the cerebral essays he would secretly write for his younger brother’s school assignments. There’s also lots of stuff about Morrison and his issues with his father, a career Navy officer who was the youngest admiral onboard a ship, or somesuch. Great insight here on young Jim’s part when we’re told how he would see his dad on his ship, bossing around all the men…but then his dad would go home and take out the garbage when his wife told him to. This kernel, while just a quick humorous note in the narrative, actually serves to explain Jim Morrison’s personality more than practically anything in the ensuing 300+ pages; he was never to be bossed around by any woman. 

I also appreciated how the formation of the band was essentially a casual thing that just happened to fall perfectly together. Speaking of the book’s length, the long page count undermines how briefly the group was even together; they were only around for four years, and fame came to them rather quickly. It’s no wonder Jim Morrison, who was the focus of 99% of the attention, struggled with his newfound fame. The book makes it clear that alcohol was the drug he turned to; indeed, No One Here Gets Out Alive is more a document of a (barely) functioning alcoholic than it is an expose on a rock band. For that matter, “rock stuff” is minimal, with minor asides about this or that concert, or this or that personality – I mean we’re told in passing how Morrison got drunk and puked in a bar while hanging out with Jimi Hendrix, with no further detail…meanwhile, I’ve had a shitty bootleg CD for decades that features Morrison and Hendrix performing together on a small New York stage sometime in 1969 or thereabouts. Sounds like the greatest thing in rock history, true, but in reality it’s barely listenable due to poor fidelity and Morrison is drunk as hell, wailing “fuck my baby in the ass” intermittently. Wow, that’s two references to anal sex in the same Doors review! 

I might be an anomaly in that I prefer the later Doors material; I’d rather hear “Five To One” than “Light My Fire.” And the title track of The Soft Parade is one of my favorite Doors songs of all, and I think their last album, L.A. Woman, is their best. But still, it would have been nice to have just a little more info on the sessions that produced the albums. There’s almost this weird sort of inevitability to the narrative, as if the band was just following some pre-ordained trajectory: we’re told “it was time to record the new album” and such, with no topical detail on how they’d worked up the material or whatever. But again this is also a reminder of how labels drove their acts so mercilessly back in the day. One must argue that the methods of the labels did produce results: I mean here we are still listening to music recorded over 50 years ago. In 1969, who was listening to 78s recorded in 1919? 

But it’s less about the music than it is about Jim Morrison getting drunk, with stuff about his “cosmic mate” Pamela often in tow. There’s also a Wiccan rock critic named Patricia, but the merits of the book could be judged on the fact that the authors consistently misspell her last name: they have Patricia Kennely, but it’s actually Patricia Kennealy. Humorously, we’re often given minor asides like how Morrison flies somewhere to see the Stones, or how he went to see Canned Heat, or etc, but the book very much gives the impression that Jim Morrison had no interest in rock music. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but I did get a chuckle out of the part where the Danny Sugerman character asks Morrison if he can get “Denny” tickets to a sold-out Rolling Stones show, and Morrison, giving him a hard time, replies, “What do you need Mick Jagger for when you have me?” Indeed! 

And do not go into the book hoping for interesting tidbits about forgotten Doors lore. Even standard fan stuff like “The Celebration Of The Lizard” is given short shrift, the authors merely leaving it that the band was unable to record it to their liking. And there’s no mention at all of “Rock Is Dead,” that bizarre hour-plus “song” recorded during the Soft Parade sessions that was bootlegged over the years, before officially being released some years ago. Actually that track explains much of what Morrison was doing at the infamous Miami concert, which happened right around the same time as “Rock Is Dead” was recorded. The authors quote some of Jim’s onstage antics during that show, and the lines he is quoted as saying to the audience – “I want to see some dancing,” “I want to have a good time,” etc – are taken directly from what he says on “Rock Is Dead.” So it seems clear that the authors are correct and that Morrison was indeed doing a sort of performance piece at Miami, and it wasn’t just a drunken tirade. 

I’d only read the barest of details about Miami, but the book makes it clear that the charges were trumped-up by biased prosecutors and judges who had an eye on the political field and were looking for votes. Boy, how times have changed. I also got a post-ironic chuckle of how the FBI even got involved in it, further persecuting Morrison. But according to the book, Morrison was inspired by a confrontational play he’d seen in New York and was looking to do something similar on stage, and was only going to strip down to his boxers. What I hadn’t realized was how this Miami debacle essentially killed the Doors, at least as a performing group, given how they were blacklisted in so many places. 

Otherwise the book moves at a good clip, documenting all the high notes in the brief timeline of the Doors, without getting too much in the weeds. We’re also told a little about Morrison’s pursuits in writing and filmmaking, with MGM at one point trying to get him as an actor. But with his wanton drinking and self-endangerment, it’s clear that, subconsiously or not, Jim Morrison didn’t plan on sticking around long. This again is a narrative conceit of the book, which often brings up the destructive bent of the poets Morrison admired. The problem is, Jim Morrison isn’t the most relatable of protagonists, and reading the book one does not understand how people could be drawn to him – we are told nothing of any kindness on his part, or much of a sense of humor other than mean practical jokes. So even as someone who knew next to nothing about the Doors, other than their music, even I could detect that something was missing in this presentation of Jim Morrison. 

But I’m glad I finally got around to reading it. It’s curious that No One Here Gets Out Alive is the book that made the Doors popular again, but I guess it’s an indication of how if something comes out at just the right time, it will resonate. Perhaps in the post-punk, bland New Wave early ‘80s a book about a drunk and disorderly rock star from the ‘60s was just what people needed. But man…in today’s emasculated era, where Supreme Court justices can’t even define what a woman is, we need a rock star like Jim Morrison more than ever. And speaking of which – color me shocked that Morrison was “politically conservative,” at least according to this book! Man…if he’d lived, he could’ve sang at a Trump rally! Come on, people, just imagine an old Jim Morrison singing “Peace Frog” to a packed Trump audience! I can see the incensed CNN reporter now: “They were singing about ‘blood in the streets’ at a MAGA rally!!” 

Seriously though, I wouldn’t say this was the best rock bio I’ve read, not by a long shot, but I did enjoy a lot of it. It also made me decide to read that Doors bio by Mike Jahn I picked up many years ago, which seems to be scarce these days.