I just finished reading the 10th anniversary edition of John Higgs' The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds. This is the edition that has thousands of additional words of footnotes. So, confusingly, I don't know if this counts as reading it or re-reading it, a dilemma appropriate to such an oddball book, which purports to be a band biography but which seems to really be a book about Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus! and the effect the book had on the KLF. This may be my favorite Higgs book. I will likely do more than one blog post on the book.
This is a passage which struck me (boldface is mine), page 258:
The corporate music industry was perhaps no place for someone like Drummond, but it did allow him to meet Jimmy Cauty. Drummond and Cauty understood each other, even if nobody else understood them. Cauty was more deeply involved in the actual creation of music than Drummond was. He was also someone you could rely on to get things done. The pairing was a positive feedback loop. With each justifying the other, they would go further together than they would apart. Sometimes all you need is for someone to see what you are planning and not look bemused.
Compare that with what Robert Shea wrote (in a mailing comment to Robert Anton Wilson in his zine in The Golden APA on what happened when he and Robert Anton Wilson met at Playboy magazine:)
I was stunned by your comment [to] Kevin, wherein you say you brooded over why you couldn’t finish a long book and then, collaborating with me, finished one. You see, I’ve been going around telling people that I never completed a book project before writing Illuminatus! and it was my collaboration with you, and your example of joyful productivity that taught me how to write and finish novels. I never realized that Illuminatus! was a breakthrough book for both of us. I guess I sort of assumed that you had never before written a book simply because you hadn’t gotten around to it, whereas I, who had started a number of novels and never finished any, had a “problem.”
Of course, Illuminatus! helped launch two literary careers; almost every Wilson fiction book reads like the narrative in Illuminatus!, and every Wilson nonfiction book resembles the appendices. And the publication of Illuminatus! also helped Shea launch his novel-writing career.
Incidentally, in his book, John often attributes Illuminatus! simply to Robert Anton Wilson, rather than Wilson and Shea. There's a similar imbalance to the treatment of Drummond and Cauty; I learned a lot about Drummond reading the book, but there's little about Cauty.
