WHEN I WAS a teenager, my dad used to let me borrow his tapes to listen to on my bus rides to school. He had one of those collections of greatest hits from the â60s and â70s that you could buy at a carwash or truck stop for $4.99 or less. There, tucked between standards like âMagic Carpet Rideâ and âIn-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,â I first heard the Crazy World of Arthur Brownâs âFireââa song that opens with Brownâs ghastly proclamation âI am the God of Hellfire!â followed by organ-driven pomp, shrieking banshee vocals, and unhinged mania.
Arthur Brown isnât exactly a household name, but with his mind-bending 1968 debut, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the God of Hellfire and his cohorts singlehandedly injected performance art into rock ânâ roll. Theatrical musicians that came after himâlike Alice Cooper, KISS, and George Clintonâowe everything to Brown and his wild stage shows.
On a recent phone call, the English-born singer reflected on his storied career, noting that when he started making music, he sensed that people were âmentally asleepâ and needed to be wakened.
âHow do you do that? Well, you do shocking things,â Brown says. âIn those days there wasnât the great theatrics and whatever else. So when it came out that I was wearing robes, flames out of my head, and corpse paint, it was quite shocking.âÂ
According to Brown, expanding minds in the late â60s was a dangerous business: âWe got a lot of responses where sometimes weâd have to run down the back stairs. One time I had to go onstage with an axe.â
Brown is classically trained, but his workâwhich draws from modern jazz, soul, R&B, rock ânâ roll, psychedelic poetry, and other spiritual musingsâis revelatory. He believes music is something that speaks straight to our innermost beings. Â
âIn the original societies we didnât have words as such, we had sounds,â he says. âThe first laws that were given to the tribes that became humans were sung. They had a basic effect on people. I think because of that, when music is played in a very primitive, basic way, it goes beneath our educated stuff that gets rammed in there, to a much deeper level.â Â
Brownâs appreciation for the power of music runs so deep that in the early â90s he got his masterâs degree in counseling and founded Healing Songs Therapyâa counseling process that involved his creation of âspontaneous, freeform songsâ which were given to clients âlike a doctor gives you a pill.â
âWe got a great response,â Brown says. âI got an article in [People] magazine that said, âFrom God of Hellfire to Singing Shrink.â We got testimonials from clinical psychiatrists, psychologists, Qigong masters, all kinds of people that said âYeah, it works.ââ
Since heâs the expert, I ask Brown how heâd explain music to someone who had never heard it. He laughs heartily, pauses for a few seconds, then breaks into a 15-second improvised piece of music thatâs a cross between a meditative Gregorian chant and Arielâs angelic tune from The Little Mermaid.
âJust like that?â I ask.
Plainly, he responds, âThatâs music.â