I am a member of a local author's group, and we meet once a month to showcase our work. and discuss the whys and wherefores of the literary world. We also set ourselves a task to bring along a 500-word piece to a pre-agreed theme. Yesterday's theme, darkly serendipitous given the raging bush fires plaguing two States, was 'fire'.
I could have gone down the 'Fire is the result of exothermic chemical process of combustion...' and all that jazz, but the first thing that went through the vagaries of my mind was Fire by The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Arthur is not a name traditionally associated with rock-and-roll, but there is a reason this song was the first association in those vagaries, that float and appear like options in a Magic 8-Ball.
What can I say about this song, aside from the fact that it's the most demented, brainsick, and totally bananas arrangement ever recorded? If you doubt what I say, check it out on You Tube, particularly a black and white clip from Top of the Pops in 1968. I don't know who did the most LSD here: Brown, the backing band, the engineers, the art director, or the set designer. You are greeted by guy in some kind of apocalyptic makeup, flaming horns on his head, who roars by way of introduction: 'I am the God of Hellfire!' I daresay when this was aired, Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper, then both likely young men aged approximately eighteen and twenty respectively, sat in their respective loungerooms, gazing at the television and sighing, 'I wanna be HIM!' Seriously, pause the song when there is a close-up of Brown, hold a black-and-white photograph of Alice Cooper beside the screen, and I defy you to tell the difference.
This pyromaniacal maelstrom of a song continues in a series of psychedelic scrambling arpeggios whilst Brown does his best to freak the snot out of everybody. He coos what sounds like veiled threats in a deceptively gentle bridge, and then rips off his robes and, bare-chested, starts pogoing about. Around this point another young up-and-coming musician caught this performance on television and thought, 'Yeah, that could work! And Iggy Pop would be a superb name, numerologically speaking.'
Finished with the pogoing, Brown completely blows a spring and goes into full unhinged mode, warning over and over: You gonna burn! Burn! Burn! Burn!, like the most hysterical fundamentalist preacher to ever take the pulpit.
Listening to, and viewing the performance of, this song is akin to being hit by a truck, or maybe fighting a raging conflagration. It will leave you dazed. The only song more exhausting than this is Jim Carroll's People Who Died.
They say if you remember the Sixties, then you weren't there. Thank goodness for YouTube, which enables us to, er, experience numbers like this.
You know something else? I happen to really like this disturbed, dippy, and utterly crackers number.
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