1960s

The 1960s occupy a turning point in the book’s history of music and rebellion: early rock’s limited challenge to the status quo gave way to a more deliberately transgressive culture, in which musical experimentation, drug use, occult interests, and Satanic imagery converged. The decade’s end is marked by the violence at Altamont, while its broader cultural legacy includes the revival of Aleister Crowley’s influence and a search for spiritual alternatives to inherited Christianity.

From Early Rock to a Darker Sound

Early rock, despite the power that Elvis Presley and the Beatles held over young audiences, is described as only mildly threatening to the social order. Its most antisocial associations came from delinquents drawn to rockabilly, whose behavior the book treats as unlikely to have depended on music alone. As the decade progressed, musical experimentation and drug use accompanied a darker turn.

The Rolling Stones cultivated a more overtly rebellious public identity than the Beatles. Their musical lineage reached back to Robert Johnson and Delta Blues, and their Satanic image was carefully fashioned through Devil masks in promotional photographs and album titles such as Their Satanic Majesties Request and Let it Bleed. Their lyrics approached subjects including addiction, rape, murder, and predation with deliberate ambiguity. In this account, the image was not incidental decoration: it made transgression part of the band’s public language.

Flower Power and the Occult Revival

Alongside the rise of the Rolling Stones, English rock groups brought more developed elements of occultism and black magic into popular culture. Flower Power is presented as a period of spiritual uncertainty for many young people in Britain and the United States. Rejecting the Christianity of earlier generations, some sought alternatives through Eastern mysticism and a proliferation of cults and sects. Occult interests, largely dormant since the early decades of the century, became more visible.

Aleister Crowley, whom the press had labeled the wickedest man in the world in the 1930s, gained new prominence near the end of the decade and into the early 1970s. The book traces part of this resurgence through the underground films of Kenneth Anger, whose work drew on Crowley. Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page both contributed soundtracks to Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother and Lucifer Rising, works whose titles signal their mystical concerns.

Jimmy Page and Crowley’s Legacy

The book distinguishes Page’s sustained interest in Crowley from the Rolling Stones’ more performative Satanic gestures. Page accumulated original Crowley books and manuscripts, held a financial share in London’s Equinox occult bookshop, and purchased Crowley’s former Scottish property, Boleskine Estate. The estate’s reputation for sinister events continued under later owners: stories associated caretakers with confinement in mental asylums or suicide. The account presents these reports as part of the property’s continuing reputation, rather than as evidence explaining Page’s interest.

In an interview, Page described his attraction to Machiavelli’s strong-arm philosophy and said that studying the supernatural required confronting evil rather than ignoring it. He also regarded Crowley as relevant to contemporary searches for truth and considered magic important. His remarks place the occult connection beyond album imagery: for Page, it involved an ongoing intellectual and spiritual interest.

Altamont and the Decade’s Fracture

The decade’s most starkly public collision between the Stones’ dark image and real-world disorder came at the Altamont Speedway outdoor festival on December 6, 1969. During the band’s performance of Sympathy for the Devil, fighting broke out between Hell’s Angels acting as security and members of the audience. Meredith Hunter, an armed Black man in the crowd, was fatally stabbed. The violence was captured in the documentary Gimme Shelter.

The book treats Altamont as a decisive emblem of the breakdown of the decade’s promise of peace and love at the threshold of a new one. In its larger account, the 1960s brought together a widening appetite for spiritual alternatives, the transformation of occult reference into popular imagery, and a music culture increasingly willing to make danger part of its identity. Altamont did not simply end that decade’s optimism; it made the distance between its rhetoric and its consequences impossible to ignore.