Brion Gysin interview with Terry Wilson, on Jojouka from Here to Go: Planet R-101 B: Your question . . . ?!

T: You found that your music was at Jajouka . . . The purpose of the Rites of Ja jouka is to preserve the balance of Male-Female forces, is that correct? B: Yes, in a very strange way I think it s a very pertinent question that you ask. Uh, when I met them finally, it took about a year to find them, and went up to the mountain village, I recognized very quickly that what they were performing w as the Roman Lupercal, and the Roman Lupercalia was a race run from one part of Rome, a cave under the Capitoline Hill, which Mussolini claimed to have discover ed, but is now generally conceded to be some 10 or 15 meters further down . . . and in this cave goats were killed and skinned and a young man of a certain trib e was sown up in them, and one of these young men was Mark Antony, and when in t he beginning of Julius Caesar, when they meet, he was actually running this race of Lupercalia through Rome on the 15.March, the Ides of March . . . and the poi nt was to go out to the gates of Rome and contact Pan, the God of the Forests, t he little Goat God, who was Sexuality itself, and to run back through the street s with the news that Pan was still out there fucking as he flailed the women in the crowds, which is why Julius Caesar asked him to be sure to hit Calpurnia, be cause his wife Calpurnia was barren . . . Forget not in thy haste, Antonius, to touch Calpurnia, for the Ancients say that in this holy course the barren are re ndered fruitful, or something like that, are the lines from Shakespeare on the s ubject . . . Shakespeare dug right away that s what it was, the point of the sexua l balance of nature which was in question . . . And up there on the mountain ano ther element is added, inasmuch as the women, who live apart from the men, whose private lives are apart from the men s lives to a point where even women s language isn t immediately understood by men-women can say things to each other in front o f men that men don ts understand, or care to be bothered with, it s just women s nonse nse, y see . . . and they sing sort of secret little songs enticing Bou Jeloud the Father of Skins, who is Pan, to come to the hills, saying that . . . We will gi ve you the prettiest girls in the village, we will give you Crosseyed Aisha, we will give you Humpbacked- . . . naming the names of the different types of undes irable non-beauties in the village, like that, and, uh, Pan is supposed to be so dumb that he falls for this, because he will fuck anything, and he comes up to the village where he meets the Woman-Force of teh village who is called Crazy Ai sha-Aisha Homolka . . . well Aisha is of course an Arab name, but it s derived fro m an earlier original, which would be Asherat, the name of Astarte or any one of these Venus-type lady sex-goddesses like that . . . And, uh, Bou Jeloud, the le ader of the festival, his role is to marry Aisha, but in actual fact women do no t dance in front of any but their own husbands, the women in Arab life, all bell y-dancing movies to the contrary, do not dance in public, or never did, and most certainly don t in villages, ever dance where they re seen by men any more than men dance in front of women . . . so that Crazy Aisha is danced by little boys who are dressed as girls, and because her spirit is so powerful(TAPE STOPS) T: Your restaurant . . . B: Oh the restaurant came about entirely becaue of them . . . (CHANT BECOMING OBVIOUS ON TAPE) I said, I would like to hear your music every day and, uh, they said, Well, why don t you just stick around and live in the village? And I said, No, that isn t possible, I have to go back and earn my living . . . and they said, Well, then why don t you

open a little cafe, a little joint, some place in Tangier, and we ll come down and make the music, and, uh, we ll split the money? And, uh, their idea was a very sim ple one, I think, which got blown up into . . . palatial size, because of the fa ct that I found a wing of a palace that belonged to some Moroccan friends of min e, where I set up the restaurant and, uh, it turned out to be a very expensive a nd very . . . as I had no previous experience in such matters, it turned out to be a very expensive venture (laughing) . . . I d always been at most a customer in such places, and to learn how to run it . . . I had many other things to do whi ch kept my mind off the musicians, although the rest of the staff were always co mplaining that the musicians were being favored, and I said yes, the restaurant existed entirely for the music, and it was literally true . . . A group of them came down from the mountain and stayed a period of time, living in the house with me, and so I heard them practising, I heard them teaching the younger children how to play, and learned more and more about the intricacies of the music . . . I found out various interesting things about them, first of all that they had a secret language, that they can talk through the music, they can direct a dancing boy, for example, to go from . . . they can give him all his i nstructions simply musically . . . but that they also have a language of which I really learned nothing, I didn t have the time to, but I think that at that point they would have been willing to teach me a great deal about it, even to start w riting a vocabulary to find out what it was, which language it was that they spe ak in private . . . but, uh, the restaurant folded with Moroccan Independence, a very difficult moment, when all of my clientele disappeared overnight, inasmuch as Tangier had been a small country of its own, with embassies, and ambassadors and their staffs and their visitors and everything connected with them, which w as the backbone of my clientele . . . and they all left, and Tangier lost its in dependence and became part of Morocco . . . so the restaurant folded up and they went back to their hills . . . And then I saw them later as friends, went back to the village several times for the festival, and, uh, then the Rolling Stones came to stay in Morocco, brought along Robert Frazer, who was an art dealer in London at that time, and he knew them and brought them to visit me and we made trips together through Morocco, an d Brian Jones later came back, he wanted very much to go up to the mountain, and although he never got there during the festival time he did bring a sound engin eer with him and recorded the music which appears on that record [Brian Jones Pr esents The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka, Rolling Stones Records, 1971.], which is no w out of print I m sure . . . about which there was an enormous amount of legal di fficulties over trying to get money to the musicians, for all of the usual recor ding company reasons, and naturally complicated by the fact that Brian had died and that the other Stones were not terribly interested in the record, probably b ecause it reminded them too much of things that they preferred to leave in the p ast, partly on the musical level, because Brian had wanted to take the Stone s mus ic rather more toward the openings that Moroccan music made possible, and, uh, w hich have appealed to other musicians since and I think will have even more and more effect in the future . . . but Mick was very determined to keep it right do wn to that R&B which they had ripped off the American Black music, which he foun d a perfectly good product to last for the next 20 years, and has lasted 10, at any rate . . . T: So a different type of relationship with the Jajouka musicians after the rest aurant folded? B: Well, I might say about it, from the beginning, uh, that I got to know them m uch better than most people ever would because of the fact that we were in busin ess together, whether we were first in business around the restaurant, or later around one or other records that they d made, uh, you really get to know people on ly when you do business with them, and we got to know each other very well, for good and for ill, for reasons of business . . .

T: There was some difficulty, wasn t there . . . B: Plenty . . . T: Involved you losing the restaurant . . . ? B: Plenty, yeah, plenty . . . hhmmm . . .