Reviews: Page 65

of the Astrodome is the Astro-scoreboard, which says in big letters, "Blue Aquarius." Then the P.A. system announces: "And now, the dynamic Lord Bhole Ji and his 55-piece big band, Blue Aquarius!" In the spotlight waddles a fat kid dressed in a silver sequined suit. He begins wiggling his hips and waves his hands to lead the band, not always in time. They play a medley of 1960s tunes, in no way dynamic, and often flat. The audience loves it.

Bhole Ji is the second youngest of the Divine Family; he mouths the words to the songs (for example, "Satisfaction") into a dead microphone while a real singer, 20 feet to his right, belts out the lyrics. His pained expression is a grotesque parody of American pop culture. When he's not on stage he giggles a lot.

We asked one premie if she liked the band.

"Oh yeah," she said. "They were great."
"Did you ever meet another rock star?"
"I once met Mick Jagger."
"How did he compare?'
"Oh, they're about the same."

Excerpt from Guru Blisses Out on Synthetic Grass Crawdaddy Magazine, February 1974, page 62-65.

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They were using Scriptures because faith in the guru purportedly encompasses all religions: the universal all in one. They even had him sitting on a throne under what oddly resembled the white-flame-and-blue-dot Natural Gas emblem. The whole contraption was built on a platform that extended toward heaven, some 50 feet up in the air, very un-Eastern, very theatrical. Before the guru spoke, there was always a performance by the Blue Aquarius, an 80-piece band conducted by his brother Shri Bhole Ji, who was decked out in a blue-sequined Western suit a la Nudie's Rodeo Tailors. Aquarius played every kind of music imaginable--from country-and-western to Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze.

The third night, before the guru was to give his last words of wisdom to the waiting premies and converts, the Dome took on an atmosphere that would blow my mind and stay with me for a long time. By the evening, the premies were restless from waiting for their guru. They began to chant in unison, and repetitively. This night they weren't blissed out; they were making a long chain and marching to the Blue Aquarius's When the Saints Go Marching In. The chanting got louder and louder and the premies moved faster and faster. And the scoreboard was flashing Scriptures faster and faster, and right at the top of the board a mammoth profile of the guru heralded his entrance in lights. I was transfixed. The chant sounded exactly like Sieg Heil! and the crowd was all ready to be fed by its leader. At the very height of this chilling display, the scoreboard flashed, You WILL SIT IN YOUR ASSIGNED PLACES, PLEASE. And immediately the crowd sat down again, the Blue Aquarius rifled off into Black Magic Woman, and Maharaj Ji appeared. Excerpt from Who Was Maharaj Ji? OUI Magazine, May 1974 By Marjoe Gortner

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By this time it is becoming evident that the Millennium is something of a divine bore. The premies' Passion Play is unbelievably sophomoric ("Jesus, I'm looking for you, where aaaarrree you?"). The attendance is as bare as a Hare Krishna's pate. Blue Aquarius proves it can perform everything from Mantovani to the Rolling Stones-poorly. And the World Peace Corps (divine bodyguards) encircling the stage area become avenging angels: threatening, cajoling and generally pushing everyone around. (Credit must be given, though, to The Kid's superb sense of irony-appointing only British WPCers to secure the stage, he neatly turned the tables on the White Man's Burden; this time around the Indian conscripts the Tory.) Sensing the troubles, even the flying saucers stay away, severely disappointing the flock, some of whom earnestly awaited the chance to hitch a ride on a UFO and give satsang to the Venutians.

"Jesus!" says erstwhile child-evangelist Majoe Gortner, watching the whole show from the stadium floor. "The kid is so lame. If they had someone with some Charisma, someone who knew what they were doing ..." he winks slyly "someone like me, they'd bust this place wide open." I counter, that maybe if the DLM finds out he's out of work the premies will make him an offer. "They already have - don't print that."

The Kid exits and a gravel-voiced Mahatma approaches the microphone. In an eerie, high-decibel screetch he leads the devotees in five or six final war whoops. It is then that something snaps inside me. Scenes from the Nuremburg stadium flash a frightfully exact parallel: the martial chanting, the cult of total obedience, the arms flailing about, thousands of eyes weeping in blind adulation. Blue Aquarius starts up with another song, but the notes don't register.
Excerpt from Over the Hill at 16 Written by Ken Kelley, Ramparts, February 1974

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This leaves me with few alternatives, so I hurry over to catch the Guru's last show, which, as usual, opens with a set by his brother's rock band, Blue Aquarius. If the band is not exactly in Perfect Pitch, neither is its sound-an eclectic mixture of Thirties big band music, jazz and rock-half bad for a group organized only six months ago. Most of the musicians are English premies, and while the band includes professionals formerly with such rock groups as the Bee Gees, the Soul Survivors and the Foundations, even a few ex-members of the Royal Opera House orchestra, the majority are amateurs. And although the real creative force behind Blue Aquarius seems to be ex-Bee Gees drummer Geoff Bridgeford, the band's devotion to its leader, Bhole Ji, is touching (one night the band members took up a collection to buy him some Ray Charles records and a gift certificate to Baskin-Robbins), if a bit inexplicable. He comes out every night, a fat, walleyed fellow wearing a silver lame suit with matching shoes that look as though they have been pasted together from a thousand chewing gum wrappers, and flaps his arms around fiercely, resembling a grounded penguin learning to fly again, in a rhythm that seems to bear only the most tangential relation to the beat. "You have to understand," one band member tells me, "that Bhole Ji doesn't know music, he is music." Another claims that "Blue Aquarius plays the greatest music in the world because it comes from the Divine Harmony inside all of us," but admits that you have to be a devotee of the Guru to understand this-a kind of spiritual Catch-22 that crops up constantly in discussions with premies.

Blue Aquarius' finest moment comes during a kind of son-et-lumiere presentation of Sixties nostalgia. "These are some of the trips that brought us to the feet of Guru Maharaj Ji," announces Charles Cameron and the band plays a medley of songs by the Beatles, the Stones, the Grateful Dead, Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Supremes and other imperfect masters of music...

As the concert is about to wind up, Maharaj Ji makes his way down a ramp connecting the stage with one of the stadium's upper tiers, wearing a kind of red-velvet smoking jacket and gold pants. He takes his place on the circular blue throne, flanked by his mother and older brothers. The band strikes up a chorus of "Lord of the Universe" while mahatmas place floral leis around his neck and the Astrodome's electronic wizardry goes into full gear, lighting him with powerful spots and projecting his image on the two color video screens adjacent to the stage. The stadium scoreboard begins to peel off a hodgepodge of scriptural citations like a Times Square tickertape reporting the Second Coming. Maharaj Ji waits, an impervious Buddha, for the "Bolie Shri" cheers to die down and the pranaming 70 feet below him to stop, then begins his hour-long satsang, full of the American youth-culture slang he has recently acquired and spoken in a high-pitched voice that echoes irritatingly off the stadium's lucite dome.
Excerpt from Rock Me Maharaji The Little Guru Without A Prayer Written by Ken Kelley, Ramparts, February 1974

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