Back in November I came across a video at CBC archives that I still haven't got over
I haven't figured out how to embed it but i captured a few stills (below) from the first few seconds of footage obviously intended as a subliminal message. Before I get into describing and analyzing what goes on in this very strange 2- minute clip, it might be worthwhile to mention what led me to it.
I'd been thinking about my father's role in shaping my teenaged years, including taste in music - not that he was part of the rock and roll scene of the early 60s - far from it - but as a teacher at Rosemount High School he had taught a young pianist named Oscar Peterson and probably many other talented future musicians. His taste veered towards Big Bands (he'd been a troop entertainer in WW2 playing piano in a jazz quintet) but in 1965 he was already two years into retirement, living quietly in the suburbs with my mother brother and me (twins, age 14).
But he was still connected to Air Force intelligence like his psychiatrist Dr Peter Roper who continued Dr. Cameron's depatterning treatments on patients including infamous Paige-Russell electroshock procedures, which had been done to my father while he was at the Allan as a patient in 1962, leaving him with a damaged memory and unable to remember our names when he came home in early January 1963.
Wikipedia tells us Dr Cameron had wide ranging interests, one of which was rock and roll which he believed was a useful vehicle for spreading mental illness. I kid you not. Despite his credentials as a healer, Cameron and his CIA masters were much more interested in creating psychosis as a psychological weapon than in curing it.
I'd been wondering about all that, and how my recently brainwashed dad must have felt about the new British bands like the Rolling Stones - and then I remembered the slogan circulating inthe media in 1965 when the Stones came to Montreal: "Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?"
So I googled it and was shocked by what I found, dated April 25, 1965: an interview done on the train to Toronto with the Stones who had just played Montreal and Ottawa.
You can watch the whole thing here.
Here are some stills from the first few seconds which take place in a hospital. This might be a doctor, entering a room.
Then a nurse arrives.
This seems to be the same doctor exiting.
These are the Stones on the CN train to Toronto on April 25, 1965
This is a young woman receiving electro shock treatment and being restrained by a second nurse.
Throughout this 2 or 3 second sequence we hear a loud drawn-out scream. And then the interview on the train begins with a question about "the screamies" who consistently ruin the Stones' concerts. Are the Stones responsible for the hysteria they create in female audiences?
Of course, the screaming and the question "Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?" were marketing gimmicks -
But what's with the girl in the hospital getting electroshocked? Where does she fit in?
It begins to make sense only when you know a bit about the MKULTRA program which had just been dismantled at McGill - or had it?