Very Different Tonight: The Contagious Nightmares of Wilhelm Reich
This is a story about slippage between things that are objectively real and things that are unknowable, about how one man's memories of a unique and troubled childhood get filtered out through dreams and anesthetic hallucinations into a memoir, are sideswiped by an important avant-garde film and adapted into two hauntingly lovely pop songs, before coming to rest this room and out of it again in each of you.
"His father died and left him a little farm in New England."
So begins Patti Smith's "Birdland" on her first album, Horses (from 1975).
Although this is a plain declarative sentence rooted in truthful non-fiction narrative, pretty much nothing is as simple as it appears.
"He" is the child Peter Reich, who will grow up to write the acclaimed 1973 memoir "Book of Dreams" - a book which would have been among the final season of titles that the young Patricia Lee Smith, Manhattan bookstore clerk, shelved before leaving the world of everyday employment for pop stardom.
His "father" was Wilhelm Reich, the radical psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who did in fact pass from the world of the living on November 3, 1957, supposedly from a heart attack, while serving a sentence in the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
The "little farm in New England" was not, in fact, left to Peter, nor was it a farm. Most of the woodsy land in Rangeley, Maine which was known during the elder Reich's lifetime as Orgonon was left in trust to the people of the future in order to preserve Reich's scholarly work and protect it from misinterpretation. Peter Reich inherited a small cabin on the property.
The protection of his scientific legacy was paramount in Reich's mind when he made his will, because for the past decade he had been subject to threats both real and mind-forged, culminating in his incarceration on charges perfectly suited to ensnare a paranoid genius hooked on martyrdom.
The anxiety that was born out of Reich's troubles with the U.S. government would spawn a story which dispersed widely in the decades after his death, contributing to the shaping of new mythologies and inspiring artists in varied genres to produce powerful, highly personal works.
Most notably for our purposes, two important female pop artists would use Reich's fantasies, as filtered through his son's memoir, as a path to inhabit a male identity -- in the process creating signature performances.
This talk is just one more manifestation of how contagious Wilhelm Reich's nightmares remain.
His troubles began in April 1947, when freelance writer Mildred Edie Brady included a sustained smear of the scientist in an article in Harpers entitled "Sex and Anarchy."
Mrs. Brady, who Reich came to believe was a Soviet agent, may just as likely have been a bluenose slumming amidst Northern California's burgeoning neo-bohemian culture. Whether with Soviet aid or by her own wits, she sold in quick succession two widely-read articles in which Reich played the role of cultural bogeyman: peripherally in Harpers ("Even at the poetry-reading sessions you are likely to find someone carrying a volume of his turgid and pretentious prose"), and a month later, with a full frontal attack in The New Republic ("The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich: the man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal").
The author visited Reich under false pretenses, and penned a vicious and alarming portrait that reached about 100,000 readers, among them high-ranking American government officials. Adaptations and reprints brought the readership into the millions, and did lasting damage to Reich's reputation. To many in post-war America, Wilhelm Reich was a sex-mad nut selling a crank cancer cure -- the orgone box -- to credulous loons. They cared less about his cloudbusting precipitation experiments. Something had to be done. The Federal Trade Commission stepped in, alerted the FDA, and the years of investigations began.
Had Reich been a native-born American scientist without a history of traumatic interference from hostile government agencies, it all might have been different. But this man had fled Germany in 1933, when his writings on youthful sexuality were attacked by a Nazi newspaper. In Denmark and Norway, where he sought shelter, Reich and his work were again derided. In America, where he had time to stop long enough to catch his breath, amass followers and get some work done, Reich's contempt for authority figures would combine with paranoia and a rigid idealism that left him very few options.
Under assault from those he considered unenlightened trolls, Reich pulled his true believers close, and preached of a black and white war: science and the future versus authority, darkness and the old ways. Given the opportunity to defend himself in court, he went symbolically silent, pissing off the judge and backing himself into the corner he'd die in.
His son Peter would grow up believing himself a cosmic cowboy with telepathic abilities, able to tap all-too-intermittently into his own will in order to protect his father from powerful, debasing forces.
Elsewhere in 1947, a new American mythology was springing up surrounding a phenomenon which had been recorded for centuries: mysterious lights in the night sky. On June 24, 1947, private pilot Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine incredibly fleet silver disks flying past Mount Rainier; he followed and timed them at traveling faster the sound barrier. The national media picked up the story, which was widely reported as the first of a summer of "flying saucer" accounts. Included among these was the supposed UFO crash and recovery of alien corpses outside Roswell, New Mexico.
In his 1973 memoir A Book of Dreams, Peter Reich writes touchingly about the strange world that father and son shared, how he struggled with guilt over having failed to magically protect his father from enormous forces, and the slow process by which he came to terms with his childhood's pleasures and agonies.
Not all of the dreams of the title are born of sleep. Injured in a European hospital as a young man, the narrator sinks into successive anesthetic fugue states which stir lost memories; thrilled, he dives back in to retrieve more details. Later, he returns to his childhood home with a group of friends and the Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan Makavejev. There, despite efforts to reveal himself and explain his father's work, Peter shuts down emotionally, incapable of breaching the old traumas.
Makavejev's 1971 film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism will be considered an icon of the avant-garde, but for Peter Reich its existence was a confusing and exploitative disappointment that missed a point he could not yet actually articulate to anyone.
Peter Reich's was one of a babble of voices emerging from the shell-shocked Reichian community in the early 1970s, including memoirs by his mother and by the actor Orson Bean. Published by a mainstream press (Harper & Row) and well-reviewed, A Book of Dreams insinuated itself into the common consciousness and soon appeared as ripples in others' minds.
The poet Patti Smith released her first album, Horses in 1975. Her androgynous persona extended from Robert Mapplethorpe's cover portrait in schoolboy drag to the sexual fluidity of the characters she inhabits within. The album begins with a cover of "Gloria," which can be read as an anthem of lesbian lust, or as an inversion of itself and of Van Morrison's original, G-L-O-R-I-A no earthly female, but the glory that is god. Next is "Redondo Beach," a song to a suicided female lover.
Track 3 is a semi-improvisational 9 minute piece called "Birdland," which is directly inspired by the scene in Book of Dreams where Peter Reich, at the Oakwood Friends boarding school in Poughkeepsie where he was sent to wait out his father's prison sentence and remained after his death, becomes convinced that a phalanx of flying saucers is skimming over the lacrosse field to reunite father and son.
Patti Smith's "Birdland" (excerpt)
"It was if someone had spread butter on all the fine points of the stars
'Cause when he looked up they started to slip.
Then he put his head in the crux of his arms
And he started to drift, drift to the belly of a ship,
Let the ship slide open, and he went inside of it
And saw his daddy 'hind the control boards
streamin' beads of light,
He saw his daddy 'hind the control board,
And he was very different tonight
'Cause he was not human, he was not human."
Inside one of the craft, his father, no longer a vulnerable man who can be imprisoned or die alone, desperately tries to make contact. Peter runs alone onto the field, willing to flee the earth if the saucers will only pick him up. Telepathic communications between father and son hint at fresh possibilities for evolution outside Earthly norms, outside rigid American culture. But U.S. Air Force jets arrive and chase the extraterrestrials away. Although in the book Peter wakes sobbing from anesthesia to understand he must remain on and of the earth, and find his own way without his daddy, in the song Patti-as-Peter erupts in conjuror's glossolalia, invoking a mad swirl of iconography that ultimately puts the boy inside the belly of the ship, inhuman and above it all, and calmly intoning:
"Sha da do wop, da shaman do way / We like birdland."
A decade later, another young female musician would draw heavily on A Book of Dreams, using different imagery—the radioactive glowing yo-yo that Peter's father makes him bury wrapped in banana skins, the long dark cars of the government men, the making of rain with mysterious new technologies.
But in this age of MTV, Kate Bush, with "Cloudbusting" would ensure that her source material was not overlooked. The music video, filmed in the English countryside, starred a shaggy Donald Sutherland as the misunderstood Reich, Bush herself as an eager-to-please bewigged son Peter, a vast steampunk cloudbuster conceptualized by Terry Gilliam and a time-traveling copy of A Book of Dreams which Kate-as-Peter briefly pulls out of daddy's pocket.
Patti Smith's use of A Book of Dreams was cool, stealth. Poets often borrow, rarely telegraph the loan. Kate Bush gave credit where due, and the result is that affordable copies of A Book of Dreams have become exceedingly rare, even allowing for a 1980s reprint with a "Cloudbusting" still on the jacket. But as with interesting music that slips out of print, the internet can help: a PDF scan of the 1973 edition of A Book of Dreams is easily found on file-sharing networks.
But let's get back to flying saucers for a moment.
Confession: I'm not actually a rock and roll writer anymore. Since 2005, my focus has been forgotten Los Angeles social history, told through the 1947project time travel blogs and true crime bus tours.
1947 is my beat, so I'm interested that the year was ground zero for UFO sightings. In looking for possible origins for this saucer mania, my radar pinged on the activities of a local spiritual organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis (or O.T.O.).
In January 1946, in the desert outside Los Angeles, rocket researcher and occultist John Whiteside Parsons collaborated with his then-friend, pulp author L. Ron Hubbard, on a series of magical rituals meant to open a portal to other dimensions and manifest a divine feminine archetype. This was called The Babalon Working.
Parsons and Hubbard were inspired in their practice by the writings of Aleister Crowley, who in 1918 performed an interdimensional sex magic ritual that invoked a creature he called LAM. In Crowley's contemporaneous drawing, LAM bears a striking resemblance to the typical "gray" space alien of more recent sighting lore.
And as long as we're talking about UFO stereotypes, the men in black from the government who menaced Reich have themselves become a clichéd alien meme.
Some occultists hold that the Babalon Working merely finished the process of ushering in begun by Crowley decades earlier in his Amalantrah Working. Parsons ceased these specific experiments soon after a willing woman named Marjorie Cameron appeared at the door of his Pasadena home, the same home where that March, she would observe a flying "war machine" in the skies above.
Somewhere on the earth that spring, Parsons believed that a magical female child, named Babalon, had been conceived though his actions.
And on the last day of 1946, Patti Smith WAS born in Chicago.
Which might just be a coincidence, but as manifestations of elemental female energies go, I figure it's close enough for rock and roll.
Kim Cooper was for many years the editrix of Scram, a journal of unpopular culture. With David Smay, she co-edited the anthologies Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth: The Dark History of Prepubescent Pop from the Banana Splits to Britney Spears and Lost in the Grooves: Scram's Capricious Guide to the Music You Missed, and is the author of a 33 1/3 series entry on Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. With her husband Richard Schave, she runs Esotouric, a cultural history tour company in Los Angeles, and curates the time travel blogs 1947project, On Bunker Hill and In SRO Land. She is currently working on a memoir with her 94-year-old grandmother, internet advice maven Cutie.