Wednesday, November 9, 2011

THE POET AND THE PENDULUM (Part Two)

Part Two

AFTER POEY LEFT we sat around some more drinking coffee and discussing David’s predisposition towards priestliness. I intimated that the Amen priesthood was still very much at large - some might even say in charge - cleverly camouflaged as big bureaucracy. But the idea was too debilitating to dwell upon. David’s appetite for mystical adventures, alas, proved insatiable:

“Have you ever fooled around with a ouija board?”

Oh well, one time or another... just for the hell of it... but I couldn’t recall anything worth recording ever emerging from the few sessions I’d witnessed as a kid.

“If you have a piece of cardboard...” David’s enthusiasm was infectious, that’s for sure. In half-an-hour we had rigged up a workable board with the alphabet felt-penned clockwise around it. An old coffee jar lid served as our marker.

“Let’s do this with the proper ceremony,” David insisted. “Is there some incense around the house? And a candle would be a nice touch.”

I found an antediluvian packet of Lotus Feet incense tucked away among my paperbacks. The candle posed no problem at all. Soon the four of us - David, Mary, Suganthi, and myself - were seated round the ouija board with our index fingers resting lightly on the coffee jar lid.

A minute tiptoed by without a snigger.

Two minutes minuetted under the moonlight to the musical hum of my philharmonic mosquitoes. In another moment three otherwise intelligent adults would be glaring at David in befuddled annoyance...

The lid began to slide across the cardboard surface. It traced a determined path around the letters, as though memorizing the alphabet. Then it glided back to the center and waited.

We exchanged glances, each wondering whether the other knew what to do next. David took the initiative: “We welcome you to the circle. How shall we address you?”

The lid slid slowly and sinisterly over the letters T, A, R, I, Q.

“Tariq? Is that your name?”

There were two extra circles on the board, one marked YES and the other NO. ‘Tariq’ headed directly to the YES circle.

“Er... Tariq... we’re happy to meet you. Can you tell us where you come from?”

P, A, K, I, S, T A, N.

At least that’s what David read. I admit to having lost track of the message after the first four letters.

“Do you have a message for us, Tariq?” That was Mary, retired Tarot reader and terminal fruitcake.

YES.

We waited with, as they say, bated breath. No movement... then a random meander at variable speed.

“Er... Tariq? We asked if you had a message for us?”

YES... I, A, M, T, R, A, P, P, E, D.

“Trapped.”

Mary: “Where are you trapped?”

I, N, E, T, E, R, N, I, T, Y.

“In eternity! Wow! Who trapped you there, Tariq?”

N, 0, N, E, T, 0, B, L, A, M, E, B, U, T, M, Y, S, E, L, F.

“Tariq... can we help you in any way?”

NO.

“How long have you been trapped?”

A, N, E, T, E, R, N, I, T, Y.

I was beginning to enjoy this. Mary, bless her soul, sounded concerned: “But are you happy, Tariq?”

W, H, A, T, I, S, H, A, P, P, I, N, E, S, S?

Very profound spirit, possibly. But I could tell we weren’t going to have much to converse with Tariq about; he seemed totally wrapped up in his predicament. As we racked our brains for a way to continue the dialogue, the lid began moving again:

N, 0, F, E, M, A, L, E, S.

“No females? What do you mean, no females?” demanded Mary the usually reasonable feminist.

D, A, V, I, D, K, N, 0, W, S, W, H, Y.

“Do you, David?”

David suggested that the girls remove their fingers from the lid for a while. Within seconds, with only David and me as conductors, the coffee jar lid was zipping about demonically. But it wasn’t making any sense.

“I’m not sure I like what’s going on,” Mary mumbled.

David the diplomat interceded: “Tariq... would you explain why you object to the females?”

M, A, Y, B, E, L, A, T, E, R.

We got nothing coherent from Tariq for a long while. Just a lot of kinetic discharge. I decided to put an end to it: “Er... Tariq... we thank you for being with us. We wish you all the best. Now please return to eternity. Goodbye.”

Everyone was glad Tariq was gone. Mary yawned: “Time for me to call a cab.”

“No need for that. I’m taking Suganthi home. I’ll drop you off where there are latenight cabs.” It was coming up five in the morning.

Driving back with David later, I couldn’t help mulling over Tariq’s ominous pronouncement: NO FEMALES. What a horrible concept. Or was it Tariq’s complaint? Trapped in eternity with no feminine company. God! Supposing a character like Khomeini came through on the ouija board... ah, but we could always shoo him away with incantations from my Salman Rushdie novels.

David left the next day to rejoin his family in another town. I didn’t have much time to bask in my solitude. Mary burst in, bubbling with excitement.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research with the pendulum,” she announced. “Do you know, I’ve always been male. This is my first attempt at womanhood!”

“You’re not doing too badly,” I reassured her.

“But that explains why I’ve had such difficulties with my menstrual cycle. All these years, I’ve never been pregnant - not once! I suspected I was incapable of conceiving!”

“I have an idea!” I said. “Let me try and stimulate your biomagnetic field with my pendulum.”

“Oooh, sounds like fun,” she responded, jumping out of her clothes.

It seemed to have some positive effects. However, it’s a little too soon to tell if the pendulum also works as an aid to natural healing. I have no doubt that within certain limits it can be used to diagnose: unhealthy or injured organs tend to produce a null field which can be readily detected by the pendulum. End of medical digression.

“I’ve been doing a fair bit of probing myself,” I confessed. “I hate to tell you this, but I appear to have enjoyed a ridiculously illustrious past.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Mary without sarcasm. Another wonderful thing about her. “Well... are you going to tell?”

“I may also have been David Livingstone and Emanuel Schikaneder.”

“Livingstone I’ve heard of, the lost explorer, right? But who’s the other chap? You don’t mean Chicken Little?”

“No, Schikaneder. Mozart’s librettist on The Magic Flute.”

“Oh... at least you aren’t claiming to have been Wolfgang himself.”

I chuckled and said: “Ah, but I’ve discovered that Mozart’s wife Constanze is still around. In fact, she’s residing in Kenny Hill.”

“You don’t mean that pretty pianist friend of yours, Ms Chan?”

“Nein, Constanze is now a man - and he plays the ‘cello.”

“What, Hans Solltenich, of the Goethe Institute?”

We giggled a bit about it. Reincarnational research can be a barrel of laughs. Mary’s eyes were ablaze with irrepressible affection:

“Guess what, I managed to track down fifteen incarnations in which we’ve known each other. In eight of those you were my brother.”

“Really?”

“And you were my kid sister once - in Ireland in the early 9th Century. We had an incestuous relationship. Later I married Alan.”

“You turned gay?”

“No, Alan was female then.”

I roared with mirth: “Too much!” This inspired me to pick up the pendulum once more and we spent the entire day engaged in esoteric research. I was particularly keen to find out what really happened in Palestine during the Roman occupation government of Herod Antipas. Strangely, the pendulum seemed unable to help us at first. Some invisible power held it down so that it couldn’t move.

“I think some depraved mentalists have installed a psychic seal on the Palestinian mystery,” I said, relishing the flavor of conspiracy and paranoia. “Some entities apparently thrive on official secrets.”

Mary managed to break through at last. She discovered that visualizing the color purple had the effect of nullifying the blocks. And thus we proceeded step by step to try and unravel the mystery of the Piscean initiation. Once in a while, when Mary got tired of sneaking past the psychic seals, she’d resort to bullying, and it worked. “Don’t give me this bullshit! I know what your silly little game is, so don’t mess with me! Now... did some sneaky slimy creep put a seal on this?” The pendulum would sheepishly begin to spin... and soon we’d be getting some straight answers.

“I forgot to mention,” Mary boasted, “that more than a few of my incarnations were of a warlike nature. In the 9th Century we were royal twins somewhere in India. You were the scholar and I stormed off to battle, only to get myself killed.”

“Makes sense to me,” I smiled. By now my living room was cluttered with reference works. It certainly helps to have a few names, dates, and places to juggle with. But the problem is all the juicy stuff is tightly locked from honest sight in the Vatican vaults. Someday… soon!

We went out and had a good feed. Both of us felt very alive and elated. Our electrical fields were fully charged. Time had dilated around us and the immediate reality was a lot less relevant than it normally seems. In this perfect state of mind we drove home to my secret laboratory and put the kettle on for perhaps the fifth time that day.

As I served tea, Mary was busy lighting a candle. “Let’s work the board again,” she suggested. I had no particular objection. Nor was I particularly keen. The results we’d had thus far weren’t too impressive. The ouija phenomenon was evidently related to the unconscious telekinetic power of the participants’ minds. Still, the ouija could be a fun way to sharpen telepathic affinities. I was convinced, too, that the board worked like a primitive tuner which we could use to receive mental frequencies not normally accessible to us. The ritual itself surely helped to generate an atmosphere of higher receptivity - an essential factor in the various fields of psychic research.

The first spirit visitor that arrived was our old friend Tariq.

“Hello, Tariq,” I said a bit warily.

I, W, A, N, T, T, 0, H, E, L, P.

“Thank you, Tariq. How can you help us?”

I, A, M, A, J, I, N, N.

“He’s a what?” Mary asked, whispering.

“Jinn,” I said. “A genie, you know, the Arabian nights?”

Mary found it very amusing: “Now I see... he’s our message in a bottle.”

Tariq didn’t seem to be offended by our levity. Instead he dragged our fingers about the board with startling energy, a couple of times with such vigor that the coffee jar lid fell right off the board. As soon as we replaced it, the movement would recommence. There was no stopping this jinn. Suddenly, after a full minute or two of this frenetic activity, Tariq became coherent again. He spelled out:

I, G, 0, N, 0, W.

And Tariq was gone. The lid stayed motionless beneath our fingers. But only for a few moments; a discernible surge of energy now reanimated it. The lid sailed fluently over the letters:

B, 0, B, 0.

“Bob?” I enquired. “Is your name Bob?”

A brief pause - then the lid moved with a certain deliberate dignity:

R, 0, B, E, R, T.

“We bid you welcome, Robert,” I began. “What are you... er, are you a person?”

YES ... S, A, M, E, A, S, Y, 0, U.

“Well, then, do you have a surname?”

G, R, A, V, E, S.

“Robert Graves!” Mary said, surprised.

“The poet, of course.” I assumed that much.

YES.

“Delighted to meet you, Robert,” I said, feeling a tinge of unbidden skepticism. Unfortunately, I am ignorant enough about poets for almost any impostor to fool me. But so what, I thought...

H, E, L, L, 0, M, A, R, Y.

“Why, hello, Robert,” said Mary inanely.

W, H, 0, I, S, Y, 0, U, R, F, R, I, E, N, D?

“Oh.” Mary proceeded to introduce me to Robert.

“Do you two know each other from somewhere?” I asked Mary.

Robert answered my question:

I, K, N, E, W, H, E, R, A, S, E, D, D, I, E.

“Eddie? Was that her last incarnation?”

YES.

“Have you come to see me for a special reason, Robert?” Mary asked.

A, L, L, S, 0, U, L, S, T, U, E, S, D, A, Y.

“All Souls’ Tuesday!” Mary exclaimed. “Nobody I know observes All Souls’ Tuesday anymore - but three days ago I was arguing with my colleague about it!”

L, 0, 0, K, E, D, F, 0, R, Y, 0, U, A, T, L, U, N, C, H …

The lid was skimming very smoothly and swiftly around the board now…

A, N, D, Y, 0, U, W, E, R, E, N, T, T, H, E, R, E.

“Did Eddie kill himself?”

YES.

I looked at Mary and she looked right back.

“I need a cigarette,” she said. “Robert, could you hang on while I light a cigarette?”

0, F, C, 0, U, R, S, E.

I took the chance to light one up myself. “Robert, do you remember when you... er... passed on?”

E, I, G, H, T, Y, F, I, V, E.

“1885?” I really had no idea whatsoever when Robert Graves lived and died. He might have been a touch offended because he didn’t bother correcting me. We looked up some books later and learned that he, in fact, died in 1985 at the age of ninety.

I tried another tack: “Robert... could you describe Eddie to us?”

H, E, W, A, S, R, A, V, I, S, H, I, N, G.

Mary was extremely pleased. “I still am, Robert,” she chirped.

I, N, D, E, E, D.

Just then I had an inspiration: “Robert, now that you’ve contacted Eddie... I mean Mary... do you think we could communicate with pen and paper instead of this clumsy old board?”

W, E, C, A, N, T, R, Y.

And so we did. Mary wasn’t at all confident that she could receive initially. I put a pen in her hand and suggested that she relax completely. I was quite sure somehow that Robert would come through. A few moments later Mary’s pen hand trembled a little - and she started transcribing. I peered over her shoulder, feeling a bit uneasy that I might be intruding (but Robert insisted he didn’t mind at all):

I’M SO HAPPY I FOUND YOU AGAIN. THERE WERE SO MANY THINGS I WANTED TO TRY AND EXPLAIN TO YOU BUT YOU COULD NOT UNDERSTAND AND I DIDN’T HAVE THE TIME TO KEEP ON TRYING TO MAKE YOU SEE THAT THE LOVE I HAD FOR YOU WAS ONE OF THE PUREST THINGS I EVER FELT. IT WAS THE SOURCE OF ENDLESS INSPIRATION TO ME. FOR YEARS AFTER YOU CLOSED THE DOOR FOREVER I TRIED TO FEEL WHAT YOU MUST HAVE EXPERIENCED AS THE GREEN WATERS ENFOLDED YOU. TRY AS I COULD I NEVER FELT ANY TERROR; JUST A SILENT RESIGNATION. YOU ALWAYS WERE SO STRONG-WILLED.

I AM COMFORTED TO KNOW THAT THE EXPERIENCE DID NOT IMPAIR YOUR ZEST FOR LIFE. I REJOICE THAT YOU ARE HAPPY AND THAT THE LOVE YOU HAD FOR ME OUTLIVED THE GRAVE. FOR MY PART YOU STILL ARE AND ALWAYS WILL BE MY DESDEMONA.

I decided to excuse myself by making another round of tea. “Mary, ask Robert if he'd like a cuppa, too.” When I returned with three steaming cups (“This is Robert’s. Milk, no sugar.”) - Mary paused to show me what she’d just transcribed:

I HAVEN’T BEEN OFFERED A DECENT CUP OF TEA SINCE MY DEMISE. SORRY I CAN’T DRINK IT BUT KNOWING YOU DID MAKE ONE FOR ME IS WONDERFUL. SOMETIMES I WONDER IF I STILL EXIST TOO. YOU’VE CONFIRMED FOR ME THAT, YES, I DO STILL EXIST.

We became firm friends, the three of us. Mary and I kept remarking that it had been some time since we’d been in such good spirits. Every day Mary would happily serve as secretary while we conducted highly spirited three-way conversations. It was sort of like an on-going dialogue between the 3rd and 5th dimensions. Mary had a greater sensitivity to Robert’s frequency. She was able to carry on chatty little exchanges with him all day. Occasionally, I’d try beaming my thoughts to Robert telepathically while Mary stood by to write down his replies. It didn’t work every time but often enough to convince me it was only a question of attunement and practice. One afternoon, in the middle of a session with Robert, my phone rang. It was a friend who had just seen a Peter Weir film called The Dead Poets’ Society - she wanted to know if I had seen it. I suppose Mary and I had become life members of that society, whether we liked it or not. And we liked it very much.

I MUST CONFESS, DEAREST EDDIE, THAT I’VE NOT REALLY WANTED TO (RETURN TO PHYSICAL EXISTENCE). I’VE BEEN UP TO MY OLD TRICKS MUSING A LOT AND GENERALLY WASTING TIME. I’VE STARTED SO MANY PROJECTS BUT HAVEN’T COMPLETED ANY OF THEM SO FAR. I EVEN TRIED TO WRITE A SHORT DRAMA - A SORT OF OUTLINE OF MY LIFE’S WORK WITH ASPIRATIONS AND HOPES. BUT I COULDN’T QUITE GET IT RIGHT. THE PROBLEM IS THERE IS NO ONE TO DISCUSS THESE THINGS WITH. MOST OTHER FORMS I ENCOUNTER ARE BUSY FULFILLING THEIR OWN LITTLE PETTINESSES. NO ONE WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH AN OLD MUSE LIKE ME.

Cronos battling Zeus

Robert proved to be a Muse of many moods - and a vital, labyrinthine mind capable of fresh inputs. He hadn’t only written poetry, of course. His best known work was historical fiction (I, Claudius and Claudius the God) and scholarly expositions of ancient Hebrew and Greek myths. We managed to get him interested in pendulum research and before long discovered our complex reincarnational links. He may well have been Nefertiti’s father Ay - but his genetic memory certainly linked his experience with mine in the most epic and mythical ways imaginable. I was Cronos and he had deposed me as Zeus. We were Remus and Romulus - but he had a city named for him and I didn't! Together we had played out every role in the universal pantheons and were now reborn as friends. Friends beyond time.

“Bobo,” Mary told me one day. “That’s what Eddie used to call Robert.”

“That’s how he first announced himself, remember?”

Robert seemed particularly obsessed with the unseen causes of the First World War in which he had lost a great many of his best friends. In fact, he was convinced that the entire exercise had been engineered by evil profiteers out to make a killing in the armaments market - and that the whole gruesome deal had been carried through with the connivance of various prominent politicians.

It was no surprise to me, for I had recently read about the ugly business scams conducted in the name of the Vatican by a conspiracy of control-freak elitists and the Mafia. They wouldn’t stop at murder. The pillage and plunder of our precious planet was all they lived and died for. But that was little comfort to Robert’s wounded soul. He had been permanently scarred by his belated discovery that the world was not quite what it could or ought to be. That the world was - at least on the physical plane - really a raging battlefield of light and dark forces: one faction committed to waking up the sleepers and the other committed to keeping the unawake asleep. There were times when Robert felt ready to fight.

But who do we fight if not ourselves? I began to nudge Robert’s thoughts away from pessimism and passivity - and towards the realization that there were perhaps higher levels of awareness to which he could aspire. We had already established that Robert existed as pure thought on Level Five - the mental plane. Now if he could just open his heart to the higher frequencies...

It happened in the wee hours of the 20th of November, 1989. Twelve hours earlier Robert had been in an exultant mood, hallelujaing about planetary redemption through the universal attainment of Christ consciousness. Then he exhausted his emotional energies and fell into a sense of gloom and self-doubt. He rambled on maudlinly about the utter helplessness of his situation. He couldn’t go higher. And he couldn’t enjoy the simple pleasures of the the physical senses the way we earthbound beings could. In any case, he felt he'd had enough of all that. An idea flashed into my mind:

“Mary, let’s work the board once more.”

This time I emptied my thoughts and concentrated on pure cosmic love - Level Six. The lid began to move...

Our visitor announced itself as LOVE.

“Were you once known as Bob Marley?” I enquired. (For some reason Marley's image had momentarily flashed across my mind just then....)

I, D, 0, N, T, R, E, M, E, M, B, E, R.

“Do you mind if I call you Bob?”

N, A, M, E, N, 0, T, I, M, P, 0, R, T, A, N, T.

“We need your help. We are in contact with a Level Five entity. His name is Robert Graves. Can you locate his frequency?”

D, 0, Y, 0, U, H, A, V, E, P, E, N, A, N, D, P, A, P, E, R?

I took the pen from Mary and poised myself, ready to receive. At this juncture I must explain that I had been practising with Robert - learning to attune my brainwaves with his - with acceptable results. The Level Six transmission was non-conversational - almost telegraphic - but it was clear.

GREETINGS, BROTHER & SISTER. YOU CALLED ME OVER. IS THERE A PROBLEM I CAN HELP YOU WITH?

I felt that vocalizing the message would reinforce my beam: “Yes. We have a friend on Level Five who needs assistance. His name is Robert Graves.”

AM LOCATING... ROBERT GRAVES... FOUND HIM! HELLO, ROBERT GRAVES. I AM FROM SIX... YES ... YOU ARE A PART OF MY LARGER EXISTENCE. WE NEED TO REINTEGRATE OUR EXPERIENCES BEFORE WE CAN BE A FUNCTIONAL ENTITY.

Meanwhile, Mary had been picking up Robert’s communication with the Level Six entity. He was trying to explain why he was in dalliance with a couple of Level Three entities (Mary and myself):

WE HAVE BEEN HELPING EACH OTHER TO GROW. WE HAVE A BOND OF COSMIC ENERGY BETWEEN US.

There was no contact for several minutes. Mary experienced a wave of depression and went off to the bathroom, I waited in silence. Ah... there it was, the subtle buzz in the mid-brain that indicated Robert’s mental frequency. I picked up the pen again:

THE LEVEL SIX ENTITY YOU CONTACTED WAS MOST HELPFUL. IT IDENTIFIED ITSELF AS PURE COSMIC LOVE AND INSTANTLY I WAS FULFILLED. THAT WAS THE ONLY EXPERIENCE I HAD NEVER HAD UP TILL THIS POINT. THE TOTALLY OVERWHELMING EXPERIENCE OF UNIVERSE-ENCOMPASSING LOVE. INDEED THE WORD ‘LOVE’ HARDLY EXPRESSES THE SENSE OF ABSOLUTE JOY I’M FEELING. THERE IS NO FURTHER NEED TO BE MAUDLIN... WHERE’S MARY? (Just then Mary reappeared at my side) THERE IS SO MUCH... I CANNOT PUT IT INTO WORDS. BUT THE EUPHORIA I FELT EARLIER IS NOTHING COMPARED TO THIS ... HEAVEN! HEAVEN IS...

And I heard, as if from an incomprehensible distance and yet within my very own being, a strangely familiar celestial music. It was grand, gloriously festive, a wedding celebration. Over the music I thought I heard Robert again: MUSIC! THE MUSIC IS THE MUSE ON LEVEL SIX!

It took Mary and me more than a few days to get readjusted to the routine business of Level Three living. The world of laundry, landlords, and screaming lorries.

We hardly missed Robert, of course. Robert was the delicious tirgling, the electrifying blissfulness emanating from our mid-brains right down to our toes. We only had to think of Robert - and there Robert was. Whenever we dangled our orbs - as Robert puts it - we only had to ask: “Robert, are you with us?”

And the pendulum would spin round weightlessly: YES! YES! YES!

But, of course, we missed Robert Graves the poet and his lyrical eloquence. We missed his snide asides on Wordsworth:

HOW COULD A CLOUD POSSIBLY FEEL LONELINESS? THIS IS A CONDITION SPECIFICALLY APPLIED TO THE HUMAN SPECIES BECAUSE THEY REFUSE TO ACCEPT ANYTHING OTHER THAN THEMSELVES AS HAVING RELEVANCE. WW OBVIOUSLY CONSIDERED HIMSELF TO BE THE CENTER OF HIS UNIVERSE. NO WONDER HE WAS LONELY.

No matter. The verbal Robert lives on between covers. We only need to dip into any of his books, though we may prefer to linger, to savor that divinely inspired aspect of his erstwhile being.

30 November 1989



Tuesday, November 8, 2011

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen ~ George Monbiot

Illustration by Daniel Pudle
The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. 

Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.


Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.

It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.


[Read the whole illuminating essay here!]


Sunday, November 6, 2011

Photographer Ken Regan offers a private glimpse of public figures in his new book...

A smoking Bob Dylan during his Rolling Thunder Revue, 1975.
Jim Morrison and The Doors at the Westbury Music Fair, January 1970.
People magazine cover shoot with Madonna, February 1985.
Bruce Springsteen on location for the “Streets of Philadelphia” video, December 1993.
John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr in Central Park, February 1964.
Rolling Thunder Revue tour, fall 1975 - Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg
at the grave of writer Jack Kerouac.
Janis Joplin at the Fillmore East, March 1968.
Keith Richards with his first daughter, Theodora Dupree Richards, in 1985.
Stones Tour Party, 1972 - Mick Jagger at Michael Butler’s house.
Jimi Hendrix at the Fillmore East, March 1968.
Keith Richards cooking breakfast in Montauk, 1975.


Text & Captions by Jakob Schiller/WIRED magazine

Ken Regan tells the story like this. It’s 1974, he’s on assignment for Time magazine and is photographing Bob Dylan in Chicago. It’s the first time he’s photographed Dylan (who is notoriously private) and doesn’t want to screw it up.

While standing in one of the stage wings he turns his camera on the audience.

“In the second row was this woman, she’s probably in her sixties, gray hair, surrounded by all these teenagers,” says Regan. “And she was standing up and she was clapping and she was cheering and it was such a good photograph because of the contrast between her and all the kids.”

The same woman is in the audience the next night so Regan mentions it to his friend Bill Graham, the famous music promoter, who originally got him in the door with Dylan. Graham immediately tells Regan he can never use the photos. Turns out the older woman is Dylan’s mom, and Graham knows Dylan doesn’t want those photos published.

Time magazine runs three pages of photos but Regan never lets on about Dylan’s mom.

Fast forward to 1975. It’s 2 a.m. and Regan gets a call from Bob Dylan and his promoters. They’re excitedly putting together a plan for Dylan’s upcoming Rolling Thunder tour. Dylan had found out about the photos of his mom and knows he can trust Regan. He wants Regan on the tour and tells him he’ll have full and unprecedented access.

Regan ends up following the entire tour and comes back with 13,750 frames, including several of the most intimate and personal photos ever made of Dylan.

“I’m saying to myself this is like a dream, having this access to Bob Dylan which no one has really had before,” Regan says. “He kind of came out of his reclusive shell on the whole tour.”

The story is just one of many Regan can recount after more than five decades of photographing the world’s most famous rock musicians. He’s got photos of, and anecdotes about, everyone from the Rolling Stones to Madonna and for the first time has published them all in one place — his aptly titled music anthology, All Access.

The book, which is nearly 300 pages long, is an exhaustive look at one of the world’s most important recent cultural movements and provides proof of what happens when you spend years developing relationships with people who are notorious for hiding their personal lives.

[Read the rest here.]

Ken Regan was born and grew up in the Bronx. He studied journalism at Columbia and attended New York University's Film School. His early photography career began in the sports arena where he covered the World Series, Super Bowls, the Olympics, heavyweight championship fights, Hockey, Basketball, Tennis, Auto Racing and other professional sports for Time, Sports Illustrated, Life, and Newsweek.

In the 70s, Ken founded Camera 5, his own photo agency which represented 15 photographers who covered riots and demonstrations in the United States and wars in Vietnam and later in the Persian Gulf and Bosnia. Photo essays about gold mining in Brazil, the Columbo family's involvement in the Mafia, poverty in Harlem, Vietnam Veterans, and a scientist on the Amazon are among his favorite assignments. He has also toured with some of the most renowned musicians in Rock'n'Roll history. In 1975, he did back to back tours with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. He covered the Band's Last Waltz, and George Harrison's benefit for Bangladesh amongst many other Rock festivals and events. He worked closely with renowned concert promoter Bill Graham and was the main photographer for his biggest events such as Amnesty International, Live Aid and others.

By the late Eighties, Ken had over 200 magazine covers to his credit, as well as numerous awards from the Missouri School of Journalism and World Press Photo to the New York Newspaper Guild.

Consumed with a passion for images, Ken continues his tireless pursuit of hard news, sports, and human interest stories for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Paris Match, Time, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, People, U.S. News and World Report, Good Housekeeping, and the Ladies Home Journal.

[Source: SNAP Galleries]