Satan's fingers
I've always been a little fascinated by Anton LaVey, founder of California's Church Of Satan in the 1960s. (The CoS was like the martini-swilling, well-connected Hollywood version of The Church of the SubGenius, which was formed in Dallas, TX in the 1970s, by a few guys smart enough to get the joke, but too poor to get out of Texas.)
Part performance art, part rebellion-for-the-hell-of-it, and (large) part an excuse to party like it was 1969, LaVey's "church" was Goth before Goth was suburban. And unlike a lot of "Goth culture" from the 1980s onward, LaVey wasn't afraid to laugh at his campy creation. If you doubt it, check out the music he would inflict on vistors to his home in San Francisco: bad organ music, played by the good Dr. himself.
Some people like to remember LaVey on Halloween, but I think it's more appropriate to remember him today... on April Fool's Day. :)
posted by Lee H. @ Friday, April 01, 2005
4 Comments:
This is an especially cool post, but-- HOW did this come up?? That's what I often wonder when I see posts/emails like this.
Oh. And just got around to sampling a few of those MP3's. Ha. They're ... terrible, but not Evil. :D
This came up when I was looking up the song "Satan's Little Fingers," to see if it was ASCAP and could be used for a project at work. (It's about Hammond organs, not infernal darkness. :D )
You know how distracting a good Google search can be... heh!
Heh, it's funny you posted that, because one of the engineers at work was telling me about that album and how he stumbled across it in an Olympia, WA record store and had to buy it. Though, IIRC, he's never actually listened to it yet -- it's more of a Thing To Have than an Thing To Listen To.
And that's a pretty amusing/apt description of the CotSG, although Stang finally escaped TX -- he's in Cleveland now. As to whether or not that's better...
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