Alice Cooper is often credited with being the originator of “shock rock” but there were at least two rock provocateurs who preceded him: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and “God of Hellfire” Arthur Brown. While there were plenty of crazed novelty acts that fell into the “one hit wonders” category, Hawkins (who died in 2000) and Brown (still alive) have stood the test of time. In the case of both men, the “shock” aspect of their performances often transcended over-the-top theatrics to become a kind of pop culture ritual magic. Underneath the spook show surface, there was something genuinely unsettling but ultimately liberating in their art. When Hawkins put a spell on you there was a good reason to be concerned. The bone in his nose may have been for laughs, but there was the sound of the graveyard in his subterranean growl. And Arthur Brown put more than just a dram or two of mystical gasoline in his flaming crucible. His crazy world IS crazy. A showman, shaman and satirist, Brown can invoke powerful mojo with a wave of his spidery hand.
 

God Of Hellfire
 
In June of 1971, Arthur Brown performed at the Glastonbury Fair rock festival. A motley gathering of hippies, easy riders and suburban sadhus, the festival was a mini-Woodstock in renaissance fair drag. Swarming with enough body hair to carpet the moon and more mud-encrusted nude men than a mosh pit at Kumbh Mela. The gathering was a group grope of epic proportions where men seemed to outnumber women by at least two to one. Pink void meets the sausageful of secrets.
 

 
Fifteen years later events like these would inspire punks to declare “kill the hippies.”  So it is quite surprising that the filmed document of the festival,  Glastonbury Fayre, isn’t an acid reflux of The Summer Of Love but an engrossing slice of cinema. Despite puke-inducing scenes of flower power gone to seed, stoned freaks blathering cosmic gibberish and a cringe-inducing appearance by the slimy Maharaj Ji—the Justin Bieber of gurus—Glastonbury Fayre manages to capture something bordering on the magical. The festival took place a mere 50 miles from Stonehenge and the movie is appropriately stoned and unhinged.
 

 
With the exception of Arthur Brown’s performance, the music has little to do with what makes Glastonbury Fayre extraordinary. Director Nicolas Roeg and his crew’s beautiful 16mm cinematography and their resolute avoidance of commercial concert film cliches sets it far apart from conventional rock docs. Though Roeg left the shoot before its completion, his style informs almost every frame of the film. As I watched it it, I was reminded of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising and Invocation Of My Demon Brother. Roeg himself had explored similar paths of celluloid alchemy as Anger in Performance and would do so again in Don’t Look Now creating art that shattered the line between dream and cinema declaring them as one.

Crepuscular images seep into the celluloid. Moonlight becomes entangled in tree branches as ghost armies are silhouetted against dark blue hilltops. Burning crosses collapse into ash as dawn smears an orange line against the horizon and the day awakens. Gilded by sunlight, bodies tangle and dance to rock bands perched atop a giant pyramid. Everybody is high and the film captures the whole thing with an impressionistic lysergic sensitivity.
 

 
Overlooking a poorly recorded performance by Family and an absolutely dreadful one by Melanie, there are musical moments to savor in Glastonbury Fayre. A very young Terry Reid and Linda Lewis do a proto-jam band thing at the beginning of the film that still looks and sounds hip. Jack White must have seen the Reid footage because he appropriated Terry’s distinctive look wholesale. Fairport Convention and Traffic are solid but unspectacular.
 

Terry Reid
 
But it was the bands that didn’t make the cut, including David Bowie, Gong and Hawkwind, that are striking in their absence. Which begs the question of where the footage is and why it isn’t in the movie. It is alleged that the filmmakers slept through Bowie’s 4 a.m. set. That’s fucking unforgivable.

But we still have Arthur Brown!
 

Terry Reid
 
In this footage from Glastonbury Fayre, Arthur Brown and his band Kingdom Come unleash torrents of intense rock and roll voodoo in a shamanistic performance that doesn’t spare any of the ham in shaman. It’s the kind of grand hokum that suspends belief and lights up your chakras like a pinball machine. This is the kind of stuff that lives up to the notion of rock as the devil’s music. This is what we were warned about. This is why we left our homes and went absolutely medieval in those lost days when music could rattle your bones and split open your brain. This is shock and awe without death tolls. A kind of mutilation by music that scars you for life… in a good way.

I found Glastonbury Fayre pairs well with a bottle of Zinfandel. I watched it with the lights out while reclining on an overstuffed couch. Tibetan incense smoke suffused my living room. I imagined tribes were gathering outside my door. This is magic I thought. I don’t go to the movies anymore. They come to me… and they bring friends. 

Glastonbury Fayre is available on DVD and is currently streaming on the fabulous film site Fandor.