WHEN I WAS a teenager, my dad used to let me borrow his tapes to listen to on my bus rides to school. He had one of those collections of greatest hits from the ’60s and ’70s that you could buy at a carwash or truck stop for $4.99 or less. There, tucked between standards like “Magic Carpet Ride” and “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,” I first heard the Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s “Fire”—a song that opens with Brown’s ghastly proclamation “I am the God of Hellfire!” followed by organ-driven pomp, shrieking banshee vocals, and unhinged mania.
Arthur Brown isn’t exactly a household name, but with his mind-bending 1968 debut, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, the God of Hellfire and his cohorts singlehandedly injected performance art into rock ’n’ roll. Theatrical musicians that came after him—like Alice Cooper, KISS, and George Clinton—owe everything to Brown and his wild stage shows.
On a recent phone call, the English-born singer reflected on his storied career, noting that when he started making music, he sensed that people were “mentally asleep” and needed to be wakened.