Wednesday, May 14, 2008

(part 69) TABOO LYRICS - DON'T QUESTION ANYTHING

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Either you have no opinion about the subject matter, or you do, and are offended, or possibly angered, or disappointed by it. Good! My intention when I wrote things like "HOLY HOLY HOLY" and others was to get your attention. The purpose was to mix positive and negative subjects into one single picture, and to draw a parallel to what I saw going on around me, and still see going on around me.

Good people doing bad things. Honest people being dishonest, and my favorite: spiritual people being hypocritical. I was a walking target for the hypocrisy of many, and remain so to this day. If you remember the beginning parts of this story, I had to endure the likes of Tony Alamo, one of the world's great con men, who became a so-called born again believer. He used his new found transformation to become an even bigger con man.

Presidents who lied to get us deeper into war, like Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam. The practice of mixing religion, patriotism, and morality to hide the treachery of the so-called good and decent people. Much like today, the same mixture of Jesus and America, or God and country, was intermingled by some to pressure the rest to go along with the great big lie, Iraq.

I was fighting this shit in 1967-68. The beginning of the "Jesus Movement" started in the late 60's. In 1967 I ran into Tony Alamo at Canters Deli on Fairfax Ave., a big hippie, and street people gathering place. He was out rounding up hippies for the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation.

He saw me about the same time I noticed him, and when we got close enough to each other he gave me the famous Tony Alamo stare and yelled, "There's only one Jesus and you're not him." This immediately brought back memories of the day Tony told someone that I was Jesus Christ.

The point is that the subject of Jesus and Bobby Jameson had a history that hasn't gone away. I liked Jesus Christ, but I don't like Christianity. Jesus, was a prophet in my way of thinking, not the head of some man made religion that twists everything into a state of mental illness, which is then used to back up every piss poor idea we as a country came up with, or continue to come up with.

Remember! George Bush was an alcoholic, born again christian, who used his beliefs to do more Goddamn damage then anyone I have ever seen in a long time. Conversely, the opposition has it's religious beliefs doing the same dance of death from the opposite end of the spectrum.

Again, the point is that beliefs, because they are beliefs, are dangerous. They allow people who believe in something, to justify behavior that is completely destructive and probably a state of mass nationalistic mental illness. I took the subject of Jesus and/or religion, and placed them in the most unlikely places I could think of for the purpose of examining the absurdity of what we do all the time.

Because we believe in God, we are right. Bob Dylan's "With God On Our Side." But if you place God, or religion, in a setting where you do not expect to find them, everything changes. If we could look with an objective point of view at what we do, as a result of what we believe, we might well be horrified at what we see.

The trouble is that all of this is a taboo subject. No one wants to talk about certain things, like priests who molested children, so it just continued on for decades. My use of taboo lyrics was an attempt to break open the box. I don't really think God is threatened by me, but people certainly were, and probably still are.

It is the easiest thing in the world to dismiss differences by suggesting that the subject is without merit, and or purpose, in your or someone's opinion. I attempted to write an entire album of this kind of material that would have knocked your fucking head off, but I was systematically prevented from doing so by the powers that be at the time.

The fact that there was a market for this kind of material was made clear after one incomplete play of "Holy HoIy Holy" on a San Francisco radio station.



This is just one of many demos I made in the 1967-68 time frame. I will post others from this period as well since there are so many....