The Shamans of Rock and Roll

The word “shaman” comes to us from the Tun­gus lan­guage of Siberia and refers to a per­son who makes jour­neys to non-ordi­nary real­i­ty in an altered state of con­scious­ness. In their trances, shamans are able to com­mu­ni­cate with the spir­it world and jour­ney to the Upper­world and the Underworld.

The shaman’s goal is to dis­cov­er the truth and bring the mes­sage back to the tribe, and this is pre­cise­ly the role played by Bob Dylan, Jimi Hen­drix, David Bowie, and John Lennon in the 1960’s.  There was real mag­ic in their per­for­mances that can be traced back to shaman­ic heal­ing rit­u­als from our col­lec­tive past.

The “Shamans of Rock & Roll” trans­ports the audi­ence into a mag­i­cal world of sight and sound – using com­pelling music and visu­als to por­tray a sort of fan­ta­sia real­i­ty in high def­i­n­i­tion.  Inter­views with today’s top rock & roll artists, anthro­pol­o­gists, artists’ biog­ra­phers, and shaman­ic experts are inter­spersed through­out the film.

We explore how one becomes a shaman…starting with how one is iden­ti­fied as a shaman can­di­date.  This per­son is usu­al­ly, from a young age, a dream­er and has “out of the ordi­nary” per­cep­tions.  Dreams con­nect them to their pow­er. They also have suf­fered “shaman’s sick­ness” – which is some event or hard times such as fam­i­ly tragedy, ill­ness, or rejec­tion – which caus­es them to lose their soul.

Like the shaman can­di­date, each of our four artists were dream­ers who saw the world dif­fer­ent­ly than most peo­ple. In their ear­ly lives, they suf­fered great­ly from fam­i­ly crises, injuries, and oth­er extreme cir­cum­stances that set them apart from their peers. These expe­ri­ences set them off on a quest to heal them­selves and dis­cov­er who they real­ly were and what was hap­pen­ing in the world around them.  Their songs described their per­son­al jour­neys – how they con­vened with the spir­it world, sur­vived the ordeal and ulti­mate­ly got their act togeth­er – reveal­ing their truth.

Mil­lions of fans tuned in and were turned on by the music of our rock & roll shamans — because their music told them what was real­ly going on. The recog­ni­tion of this truth changed a gen­er­a­tion. But the real les­son pro­vid­ed by explor­ing the lives and music of these rock & rollers is not the par­tic­u­lar truths which they dis­cov­ered, but how the path they fol­lowed offers clues as to how each of us might under­take a shaman’s jour­ney of our very own.  It’s time to dis­cov­er and live our own truth.  Now more than ever…

For more infor­ma­tion about our doc­u­men­tary, please vis­it www.shamansofrock.com and join us on Face­book.