The Mysterious Jonathan Halper of Hollywood Babylon
on one of the best hippie ballads you've probably never heard about
A song that’s always stuck with me ever since I first heard it is the haunting folk rock song “Leaving My Old Life Behind/I Am a Hermit” by the virtually unknown Jonathan Halper. This song (or songs depending on if you see them as two separate tracks but I’m inclined to see it as one two-part track since the parts are so interconnected, lyrically and otherwise) actually serves as the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s short film, 1949’s Puce Moment (edited by Anger to include Halper’s song in 1966) and tragically never received any official release. It is the only song Jonathan Halper is ever known to have recorded.
I think the song gained some traction when Franz Ferdinand did a cover. However, all in all Halper’s singular track still remains criminally unknown and yet because of its association with the occultist Anger, it has an air of otherworldliness that makes it a unique folk rock gem.
Anyone who knows anything about Kenneth Anger knows that his films, collectively referred to as the Magick Lantern Cycle, are an homage to the teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley and the belief system Crowley developed called Thelema, inspired by Kabbalah, the Golden Dawn, and other, older and more ancient occult magical systems. Crowley’s teachings had somewhat of a revival in the 60s/70s hippie crowd where it seemed that everyone had their brush with the Great Beast 666. For most it was a fad but for Anger it has always been a way of life, and his films are intended to be magickal rituals invoking different aspects of Crowley’s teachings.
With this context in mind, Puce Moment casts an interesting light on interpreting Halper’s song, which seems to be documenting some sort of spiritual transformation:
Pt. 1: Leaving my Old Life Behind
I learned quite a lot
Shooting through my mind
Things I never guessed at before
And so I decided
To leave my old life behind
I don't need it anymore
I'm gonna learn to climb the clouds
I'm gonna learn to climb the wind
I wont stop til Ive understood the dark
I'm gonna learn to fly the clouds
I'm gonna understand the air
My mind will listen to the stars
To everyone else I appear quite the same
And I help them as much as I can
But they'll never know that my mind is in the air
O how could they ever understand
I'm gonna learn to climb the clouds
I'm gonna pull upon the rain
I'll learn what lies beneath the earth
I'm gonna learn to climb the clouds
I'm gonna understand the space
I'll even go back beyond birth
Pt. 2: I am a Hermit
I am a hermit
I am a hermit
Yes, I am a hermit
my mind is not the same
Yes, I am a hermit and
ecstasy’s my game
‘round by broken stream
here I make my home
there is no need for food
I can live off air alone
the birds bring me flowers
and put them by my side
I live in another world
and that is why I hide
Yes, I am a hermit
my mind is not the same
Yes, I am a hermit
and ecstasy’s my game
Yes, I am a hermit
and ecstasy’s my game
from the bottom of my heart
I pity all of you
chained to the world
and who don’t know what I do
Yes, I am a hermit
my mind is not the same
Yes, I am a hermit and
ecstasy’s my game
This song is at a level of psychedelic that many other artists from the 60s could only dream of because Halper is not singing about any of the superficial guises of esoterica other artists such as the Rolling Stones and Jimmy Page appropriated in their own work at the time (although Anger would probably disagree with me considering he cast Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful in his film Lucifer Rising and Page was actually supposed to do the soundtrack to the film before being replaced by ex-Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil).
What makes Halper’s song so truly effective is it’s just him and a guitar with some feedback, singing with a voice that sounds hauntingly detached, as if he knows something the listener will never know. The song’s rawness is what lends it its truly esoteric power over the listener. There is a sense that Halper is allowing the song to carry him, as the song ebbs and flows in urgency, tacking the listener along with Halper on his spiritual journey. The simplicity is what lends the song its charm.
In the comments section to one of the few versions of the song available on YouTube, there is a user who claims that her father is Jonathan Halper and that Halper had this to say about his brush with Kenneth Anger:
If this is indeed Halper then it seems that Anger simply heard the song and decided to use it for his film, with the two having no in-depth connection to one another. No doubt Anger too was moved by the song’s unpolished otherworldly aura (& also maybe had a bit of an unrequited crush on Halper!).
Regardless of Halper’s original intent with the song, undeniably Halper’s song will forever be interconnected with Anger’s Puce Moment and to be honest, the two work together beautifully. Puce Moment is about little more than a woman (played by Yvonne Marquis, her only film credit) styled as a 1920s flapper going about her day in her Old Hollywood mansion. The woman, perhaps ritualistically, gets dressed and goes about her morning toilette, and then seems to daydream the day away, seemingly going through some sort of inner journeying, before taking her dogs for a walk and that’s it. That’s the whole film.
What perhaps makes the film so moving is the Old Hollywood style of filming with technicolor paired with Halper’s 1960s psychedelic song as the soundtrack (a unique combination Anger utilized later on, using the Electric Light Orchestra’s 1974 Eldorado as the soundtrack to 1954’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome). The ingenious blurring of cultural cues and historical eras on the part of Anger makes the film timeless and seeming to exist in a time all its own outside of the workings of the external world.
While we will probably never know more about Jonathan Halper and what inspired him to write “Leaving My Old Life Behind/I Am a Hermit” at least we have record of his song, forever preserved amidst the magickal workings of Anger’s Hollywood Babylon.