John Coltrane is a Bad Guy

December 26, 2022February 12, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

“John Coltrane is a bad guy,” they say. “He’ll be whoever you want him to be, when you talk to him, and all that, but the one thing that you should keep in the back of your mind is that he’s just a bad person.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” we say.

“If he’s not a bad guy,” they say, “Who is?”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s not complicated,” they say. “He steals money, because he wants more of it. He hurts people too. Some bad guys say they aren’t afraid to hurt anyone who stands in the way. It’s more than that for John Coltrane. He enjoys it, and he always has.”

“John Coltrane is a victim of circumstance,” we say. “Have you heard him talk about his childhood. His upbringing makes Oliver Twist read like a day at an amusement park, “and nobody ever talks about any of that,” he says. I think he’s right.”

“If he’s not outright lying about his circumstances,” they say. “He’s exaggerating. He’s not a victim of circumstance, unless we count the circumstances of his own making. He doesn’t steal, hurt people, and kill to support a cause, and he’s not poor or hungry, and he never has been. He’s not desperate to feed his children. He doesn’t have any. He tells us he has a son. He doesn’t have a son. He’s lying. That’s what bad guys do?”

“Why would anyone lie about something like that, something easily disproved?”

“That’s what bad guys do.”

“What does he gain?”

“He studies us,” they say. “He studies us a culture, and us individually. He tells us the tale we most want to hear. Has he ever prodded you? He prods me all the time, going deeper and deeper into an issue. I don’t think he prods to find weaknesses. I think that’s just what he does, but he uses the weaknesses he finds later. Finding our weaknesses is a byproduct of his constant prodding. The ‘I need to provide for my kid’ narrative is a powerful one, because it garners all types of empathy and sympathy from people like you.

“As for the more general search for truth,” they continue, “I don’t think he cares about what we call the truth, to be quite honest with you. I think he’s beyond caring about all that, or what we think the truth is. When we catch him fudging the truth, you know what he says? He says something along the lines of, “All right, all right, if it’s not that, what about this? Have you ever considered this?” How does someone do that when you catch him in a bold, irrefutable lie? He does it. He does it all the time. I’ve caught him lying so many times that I no longer believe him. Others do. They continue to believe him even though they know he’s lying to him, they have to know, but he’s so charismatic and convincing that they want to believe him, which says more about them than it does him.”

“That is fascinating,” we say. “I’m not saying I agree, because I don’t know him as well as you do, but it’s fascinating to think that even the modern bad guy learns that he has to change with the times. We all have figurative schemes of thought. When we create a vision of the future, for example, the audience expects some characteristics, flying cars, over population, and corporate monoliths constructed in a manner that makes them look creepy. We also expect some sort of corporate takeover of the planet that removes homes and anything green to feed the corporate monster. Ok, but who’s going to give the corporation money if it takes all the city blocks and drives out the innocent people, its consumer base. The answer obviously is, the corporate monster doesn’t need money in the future, and it doesn’t need people to run it anymore. It is now a self-serving monolith. This is supposed to be a horrifying view of the future, and the movie makers provide guidance for how to avoid this dystopian future, but it makes no sense to me. The same is true with the modern bad guy. The modern bad guy doesn’t do anything but sit around and be evil. He might look and act creepy, and he might promise to do evil things, but he doesn’t do any of them. Every time he appears, creepy music ensues, and we’re convinced he’s a bad guy, but he doesn’t actually do anything incredibly evil to them.

“Similarly Our definition of the modern bad guy requires that he follow all of the societal norms as best he can. The trope is that he can’t, because he doesn’t know any better, or he won’t, because he’s a bad guy, but the character adjusts to what the audience wants from a bad guy to fulfill their figurative schemes of thought. What the audience appears to want now is a bad guy who doesn’t do anything but sit there and be spooky. I was watching a fictional horror movie in which the bad guy kidnaps a kid, but he didn’t do anything to the kid, because that would’ve been too over the top for most audiences. So, he sat in another room with a weird mask on and acted spooky. We could probably say that everything, pro and con, boils down to John Coltrane’s youth,” we say. “You say he’s a liar, thief, and worse. I’ve known liars and thieves, and they, like Coltrane, often talk about how dumb and stupid they were. Coltrane often talks about how incredibly naïve he was, and how he found it so embarrassing.”

“Weren’t we all,” they say. “Didn’t we all stand at proverbial forks in the road. Didn’t we make decisions along the way that led us to where we are today? Didn’t we all have friends and family who point and counterpointed us to death? Did you ever have that guy, some guy you worked with at a dive restaurant, who told you everything you needed to know about the world from some deeply cynical and awful pocket of the world, his world? He told you that the world you were about to enter into was one big moral equivalence? Did you believe them, or did you see him as an embittered old man who got rolled over in life? Our lives are dotted with points and counterpoints from friends and family, and embittered dishwashers. Who takes advice from a forty-year-old who isn’t cut out for anything better in life than being a dishwasher. They have it all figured out, right? Some people, like John Coltrane, romanticize their notions so much that they begin to believe them. They think they’re cool and funny, and that they’ve unlocked some truths about life they’ve never heard before. If those who cared about him gave him counterpoints to correct the path he was headed down, he either didn’t hear them, or he decided not to abide them.”

“And you think John listened to them so much that he developed a life’s philosophy around them?” we ask.

“Philosophy is a stretch,” they say. “I don’t think John Coltrane ever developed a philosophy. I think he’s more of a code fella. Whether right or wrong, a philosophy involves a deeper understanding of complicated, almost literary grasp of the way the world works. People like John Coltrane don’t have philosophies, they have codes. It’s a fine distinction, I’ll admit, but a code might be, be nice to your mother, don’t poop where you eat, and don’t eat yellow snow. People like Coltrane prefer superficial, cinematic sophistry that everyone from your best friend to your aunt Donna says to get you to laugh. Deep, complicated, and conflicted bad guys with a philosophical understanding of human nature and the way the world works are a reflection on modern writers hoping readers see the same in them. Their bad guy chracters have vast amounts of knowledge that leads some of us to say, “If he’s so smart, why didn’t he land himself some sort of prosperous career?” No, most criminals are rejected by the greater digestive system of the world, until they fall out the rectum a professional dishwasher, or whatever job title John Coltrane gives himself.”

“I’ll admit I don’t know John Coltrane as well as you,” we say, “but he does have a deep philosophical take on life. I’ve heard it in the hours we’ve spent together. He has a good head on his shoulders, especially when it comes to self-importance. He asked me the other day, ‘who’s the most important person in your life?’ I gave him some answer I thought he wanted to hear. He said ‘Wrong, bongo, you should be the most important person in your life. Who is most affected by your decisions?’ I like that general thread, because it’s so unique in the modern era.”

“Hey, you’re not going to get me to say there’s something wrong with self-importance,” they say, “but at what point does it become delusional narcissism? We were all innocent and naïve at one point, and we were chiseled by the world around us. Some of us developed strong minds that could recognize the wrong read for what it was, and some of us didn’t. Some of us corrected our errors, and some of us developed excuses for who we are, but others just lash out at the world around them.”

“It’s the latter that really gets to me,” we say. “I don’t get the lashing out at the world in general. Let’s say you see an otherwise innocent bystander walking down the street by themselves. What prompts you, a relatively sound individual to rob him to rectify what everyone did to you as a kid? How would a John Coltrane square that?”

“Coltrane’s a big guy, tall, broad-shouldered, and all that, so my bet is no one would dare ask him that question,“ they say. “If they had, he’d have an answer. That answer might be meaningless to us as it is to him. It might deal with the general idea of innocence “Nobody is innocent,” is something his type often says. Here’s the most fundamental characteristic of John Coltrane that you need to know before you get to know him. The man always has an answer. If you asked him the question you just asked me, he’d give you an answer. He might give you an answer that strikes you as profound but strikes you as gibberish later, or vice versa. That answer would also be as meaningless to him as it is to him, and it might change if you ask him it a month later, or however long it takes for him to forget the first answer he gave you. Regardless the answer, he always has an answer. There’s always a quick, off the cuff answer that leads you to believe that he’s given this a lot of thought. He hasn’t. He just answers the question.

“The comedy comes into play when the question of morality arises,” they continue. “John Coltrane knows moral values. He has codes by which he thinks everyone should live, if they want their society and culture to advance. He might even have a long, engaging conversation with your paragon of virtue, your dad, and your dad might find him so pleasant and respectful, and right. The two of them might share so many principles and values, over that steaming bowl of soup, that a friendship could develop. The idea that he doesn’t display his own values doesn’t seem to faze him in the least. If you called him a hypocrite, he’d have an answer. He always has an answer. The most important thing to him in life is finding happiness, and he doesn’t care what he has to do to get it. He’s just a bad guy.”

The Rise and Fall of Billy Squier

December 9, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

“One day, everyone I knew had Billy Squier’s record Emotions in Motion, and the next day nobody mentioned his name.” It wasn’t that immediate, but it felt that way. Billy Squier had a long, relatively prosperous career, but there was a time, circa 1980-82, when the man had trajectory. Rock critics, corporate insiders, and his peers thought William Haislip Squier was the next big thing. At one point in his career, Billy Squier said, he was outselling Sinatra.

Emotions in Motion was one of the staple records of the era. Everyone I knew had Men at Work’s Business as Usual, Foreigner’s 4, Journey’s Escape, and Emotions in Motion. If someone didn’t have all of these albums, their collection just didn’t appear complete. All of these artists came out with other albums and had decent careers, but they would never achieve the peak of popularity they experienced during this 1981-1983 run. Our initial inclination is to feel sorry for these artists who experienced so much unimaginable success so early on in the careers when they were too young to appreciate it, but most artists never have such a run. The skilled, lucky, and timely ones do, and some have longer runs than others. Very, very few artists prove so popular that they can sustain a relatively high level of popularity throughout their career. Billy Squier’s run occurred early on in his career, but that run was so fruitful, with so many hit songs, that many predicted he would be one of the few to, at least, have a long, prosperous run. He was so huge that Andy Warhol agreed to design an album cover for him, and Jim Steinem agreed to produce one of his albums. Every run comes to an end, but the change in Billy Squier’s trajectory happened so quickly that many fans from the era still wonder what happened? “Of course I remember him,” many fans of 80’s music said, “Whatever happened to him?”

One look at his bio suggests a very simple answer, Billy Squier stopped writing chart-topping songs. He wrote chart-topping songs for the first few years of his career, and then he didn’t. No matter what happened in 1984, if Squier continued to write chart-topping singles, he would’ve overcome “the video”. Numerous others, including Billy Squier, say, “No, it was the video.” They say that his trajectory altered dramatically after “the video”. That just seems utterly impossible to those of us on the outside looking in. How could one video bring such a high-profile artist’s career down?

Well, “the video” was a bad. Even viewed in hindsight, alongside all of the horribly embarrassing videos made in artists’ names in the era, Billy Squier’s video for Rock me Tonite stands out as the worst videos made in the era, and according to the authors of the 2011 book I Want My MTV, it was the worst video ever made. “The authors of this book interviewed over 400 people, primarily artists, managers, filmmakers, record company executives and MTV employees. They said that none [of them] could agree on the best video, but all agreed that “Rock Me Tonite” was the worst.” The authors devoted an entire chapter to describe how and why this video was so bad, and how and why it diminished one of the biggest rock stars of the era.

The counterpoint to the claim that a poorly conceived video can irreparably damage a recording artists career is Dancing in the Streets. Dancing in the Streets is arguably one of the top-five worst videos ever made with equally awkward dance moves and embarrassment for the artists involved. Yet, that equally bad, career-killing video that did little to tarnish the career and legacy of David Bowie and Mick Jagger. Those two artists, however, had stronger careers before their embarrassing video, and they created music after “their video” that they helped us forget their egregious misstep.

Rudolph Schenker of the Scorpions said, “I liked [Billy Squier] very much … then I saw him do the video in a very terrible way, and I couldn’t take his music seriously anymore.”

***

Right around the time of Billy Squier’s Emotions in Motion, I had my own money. I had a job, and I never had a job before. I also had disposable income that was not subject to my dad’s approval, and I wanted music. I didn’t know anything about who music magazines declared “who’s hot and who’s not”. I just knew that when I heard either Everybody Wants You and Emotions in Motion, I dropped on the floor and skated at my local Skateland, and every else I knew did too. I also saw Quiet Riot’s Metal Health cassette on the store shelves, and those two albums were the only ones I knew that catered to my need for hard charging guitars. My musical tastes were based on the influence of friends, what local, Top-40 radio Disc Jockeys decided to play, and what my neighborhood Skateland decided to play to try to get me on the floor. In these arenas, Billy Squier sat atop my Mount Rushmore, but so did Quiet Riot. I had the income, and I had the need. I purchased both.

I thought the Quiet Riot singles Come on Feel the Noise and Metal Health (Bang your Head) hit all the bullet points a young man and woman had, I was wrong. In one of the first lessons I learned about the difference between genders, the reaction to those songs was divided among the boys and girls circling the no-go zone in the middle of the skating room floor. The singles Everybody Wants You and Emotions in Motion, however, put everyone on the floor. The opening guitar riff from Everybody Wants You caused girls to shriek and guys to pump their fists as they rounded the floor. The speed skating and broad smiles that resulted were infectious. Bill Squier’s musical creations were so ubiquitous that everyone who was anyone wanted his songs in their home. So, what happened?

***

Some critics suggest that Billy Squier’s move away from guitar-based rock to keyboards and synthesized rhythms, on 1984’s Signs of Life, alienated many in his fan base. Others say that while that album had some guitars, they were mostly used as an afterthought to appease his fans. The Signs of Life album appeared to be Squier’s attempt to transition from heavy, hard-charging guitar-based music to keyboards and synthesized rhythms to stay up with the times, while trying to appease his guitar-driven fan base at the same time. He tried to appease all the people all of the time, in other words. The primary critiques I found of Billy Squier is that he tried so hard to keep it going after Emotions in Motion that he probably tried too hard, and he ended up becoming a parody of himself. (We should note that Signs of Life went platinum, which kind of surprised me when I read that, because Billy Squier was persona non grata in my social circles after Emotions in Motion.)

Anyone who studies any form of art knows that most artists are prone to become parodies of themselves at one point or another. Few artists in music, in particular, are able to reinvent themselves just about every time out, I cite David Bowie and Bob Dylan as two such exceptions to the rule. For the rest of the world, there is the Thelonius Monk quote, “A genius is the one most like himself.”

How does an artist stay true to themselves and their fans, while trying to reach out and broaden their fan base? Billy Squier had an idea. Rock historians and critics now call it “the video”. Prior to the short shelf life the video for Rock me Tonite experienced on MTV, the 1984 album Signs of Life was flying up the charts. It charted high on Billboard’s top selling charts, but it stalled and eventually fell after the video for the song Rock me Tonite premiered on MTV. Some, including Billy Squier, say the video ruined his career.

Why was it so bad? Watch it. There’s nothing anyone can say to describe how bad something is than to say, ‘just watch it for yourself.’ Wikipedia provides the most succinct description of the video, “It shows Squier waking up in a bed with satiny, pastel-colored sheets, then prancing around the bed as he gets dressed, ultimately putting on a pink tank top over a white shirt. At the conclusion he leaves the room with a pink guitar to join his band in performing the song.” The song also shows Squier putting on a shirt, then ripping it off in an apparent display of lust that just happens to reveal his “good-looking sexy chest.” There’s also the requisite sprawl on the ground in which the sexy beast pulls themselves forward on the ground to evocatively display the character’s primal lust. I don’t know which video director displayed this first, but it became a staple in 80’s videos.

There is some debate regarding why the video was so bad. Some, including Squier, suggest he appeared too feminine in the video, but we could say that that characteristic didn’t alter David Bowie’s trajectory, Marc Bolan’s, Twisted Sister’s, or even to a lesser degree Alice Cooper’s (Cooper was more about shock value and makeup than he was femininity). Others say it was more about Billy Squier’s ill-conceived dance moves. Were the dance moves feminine? Yes, but anyone who watches “the video” knows that its problems do not begin and end with “being too feminine”. The video is just awkward, and so weird, and so out of the artist’s personae. Even those of us who didn’t know the persona he had before the video can watch it and know he probably shouldn’t be doing that in public. “But,” the defenders of Squier said, “These were the same dance moves he did in concert every night on tour.” We’ve all been to those concerts, and we’ve all cheered any dance moves the lead singer engages in. It’s almost as if we’re starved for entertainment, and a dance move here and there, regardless the quality of the moves, is met with ecstatic approval as it adds to the collective energy we can feel from the speakers. Even ill-considered, poorly choreographed dance moves seem more in context, in an auditorium, than they do from the perspective of watching them on TV. If Saturday Night Live tried to do a spoof on all of the awkward staples of 80’s videos, they couldn’t have done much better than Billy Squier did in this video. The video reminds us of the conversations the fellas had at the high school dance, seeing all the beautiful girls on the other side of the floor, wishing we could dance. “I can dance,” one of our friends said, and he showed us something he probably practiced a million times in the mirror with no objective criticism to inform him how hilariously bad his moves are. We can only imagine that Squier watched all of the hot, risqué videos of the era, from Madonna and Prince, and thought, “Hell, I can do that.”

As Squier said, “I was a good-looking sexy guy.” The video appears to be Squier’s attempt to show the world how good-looking and sexy he could be, to use his natural assets to make it to the next-level. Perhaps, he thought this video would help him make the leap from rock icon to sex symbol. We can only guess that Squier designed Rock me Tonite to elicit comments like “steamy” and “too-hot-for-TV” comments to attract the prized female demographic. The use of pink, as the predominant color in the video, reinforces that guess.

After the fantastic success of Emotions in Motion, we can only imagine that record company executives sat Billy Squier down in a boardroom to discuss his future. In this boardroom, Public Relations advisors entered with charts and graphs detailing Billy Squier’s popularity from 1980 to 1982, with comparative lines listing his male-centric base against a projective arrow of what his numbers could be with some kind of paean to the female demo. Whether Squier saw the trends and tried to up his game, or he received some bad advice, his gambit failed miserably.

The fallout from the video was so immediate that Squier claims he went from packed stadiums before the video to half-filled auditoriums almost overnight. He fired both of his managers within a month of the video’s airing, and he tried to put all the blame the video on director Kenny Ortega.

“If anything, I tried to toughen the image he was projecting,” [Kenny Ortega] told the author of a 1986 book about the record industry. He claims he and the video’s editor had their names taken out of the credits when they got frustrated over their lack of creative input. “Let there be no doubt, ‘Rock Me Tonite’ was a Billy Squier video in every sense. If it has damaged his career, he has no one to blame but himself.”

Research shows that the video for Rock Me Tonite didn’t kill Billy Squier’s career, as the album Signs of Life went platinum, and the next two albums both sold 300,000 a piece. How many artists would kill to sell 300,000 albums? The video did appear to alter the trajectory of his career that peaked with the multi-platnium album Emotions in Motion, but it’s entirely possible that his run just ended, as most runs do. The most imperfect way to solve the dilemma that appeared to haunt Billy Squire to his dying day is what would’ve happened to Billy Squire’s career if he never made “the video”. While I understand that rappers use his samples in their songs, his legacy and overall influence just isn’t as strong as a Marc Bolan’s is. Both artists experienced massive success early in their careers, roughly ten years apart, and their sales numbers leveled off after a couple albums. Comparatively speaking, they both experienced decent runs and comparatively long careers in an otherwise unforgiving industry. Neither of them were one-hit wonders, in other words, as they both ended up having about ten chart-topping singles. At some point in their careers, they both got lost in the shuffle, and their runs somehow ended. When we write somehow, Billy Squier might correct us, if he were alive today, saying it was “the video”. Yet, if he came out with another chart-topping song or album, he could’ve put the ill-advised, poorly timed, and utterly embarrassing video behind him, but he never did.

Grigori Rasputin V: Sorcerer or Charlatan?

November 5, 2022October 1, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“Was Gregori Rasputin really an occult mystic who used treacherous sorcery to ingratiate himself to Tsar Nicholas II by performing miracles on and curing the pain of the Tsar’s son? Or was he, no less impressively, a most gifted Counter-Agent who disarmed his country’s most powerful rulers through sheer charisma and manipulative charm?” –asks Adam Lehrer in the Safety Propoganda.

“No!” say some historians. “Rasputin wasn’t any of those things. He was nothing more than a right time, right place charlatan.” Anytime one accuses another of absolute fraud, deceit or corruption, their first responsibility is to prove that the provocateur knowingly deceived. We can all read the conditions of the Russian empire at the time and see that they were susceptible and vulnerable to a charlatan. We can read through the health conditions of Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, and know that the Romanovs were desperate for a miracle worker to spare him the pain and possible death of hemophilia. We can take one look at Rasputin, the ill-educated peasant from nowhere, Russia and know that if he didn’t do something spectacular, he was doomed to a life of anonymity, but there is ample evidence to suggest that Rasputin believed he had an ability, if not the otherworldly powers, to cure the Tsar’s son. To believe otherwise is to suggest that Rasputin knowingly deceived his family since birth, and the friends and neighbors who surrounded him in the early part of his life. There’s an old line on subterfuge that it’s not really a lie if you believe it. When we say this, we usually do so tongue in cheek, but Rasputin’s bio suggests that he truly believed he had God-like powers? “Christ in miniature,” Rasputin often said when asked to characterize himself. Was he a deceptive person? Did he attempt to deceive the Empress Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich’s mother, to weave a way into the empire, or did he attempt to prove to himself as “The Chosen One!”

At the moment of his birth, Rasputin’s mother believed he was the chosen one, and we can guess that she told him as much on a daily basis throughout his youth. We might cut her some slack for this fantastical notion, seeing as how Rasputin may have been her only child of seven, or eight, to survive childhood. (Evidence suggests she had a daughter who may have also survived for a time.) Anytime a mother has a child, they consider that child special, but in Rasputin’s Serbian village of Polrovskove death among children was so common that the miracle we know as childbirth was increased tenfold in that world of peasants. The idea that Rasputin was special may have grown in her mind as he did, until she was convinced that Grigori was a gift from God, and she eventually made a crossover to the idea that her son was the chosen one.

What would we think if our mother told us we were God’s messenger throughout our youth? What if she bolstered her claim by telling us that at the moment we were born a rare celestial event occurred to mark the occasion of our birth. “A shooting star of such magnitude that had always been taken by the God-fearing muzhiks as an omen of some momentous event,” she said.

What if everyone we knew and loved growing up believed, as our mother did, that we were gifted with the ability to read minds, and/or “see things that others could not”. Rasputin grew up in a climate where everyone he encountered on a daily basis, and presumably throughout his life, believed he had divine powers. If we marinated in the thoughts of our own divine nature throughout our youth, how many of us would end our believing it? Our parents are powerful influences on our lives, and how we think, but as we age, we begin to see the errors of their ways. If Rasputin went through this natural course of maturation, his friends and neighbors in Polrovskove only bolstered his mother’s claims. Rasputin was also involved in a death-defying accident that took the life of his cousin. He spent years wondering aloud why he was spared and his cousin wasn’t. His conclusion, one which we can assume that his friends and family encouraged, was that divine intervention spare him, so he could go out and spread God’s message.

When historians say Rasputin fell into a right place, right time era, they’re talking about an era that followed executions for anyone who attempted the heretical notions Rasputin espoused to a time when minds were just beginning to open up to the idea that man could manipulate his surroundings for the purpose of massive technological advancement. Those from the era also learned, mostly secondhand, of some of the advancements made in medicine that suggested man could wield God-like powers over life and death in a manner deemed heretical in previous eras. The early 20^th century Russian citizen was likely more amenable than ever before to the belief that man could now manipulate the bridge between life and death, and generally make life better for his fellow man without necessarily being a heretic. Based on that, we could say that Rasputin was a right time, right place charlatan, or we could say he, more than any other, took advantage of this window in time. Those who call him a charlatan, however, must still address the notion that Rasputin knew he wasn’t the chosen one, and that he was lying to the vulnerable, desperate Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse) to convince her that he was.

How did Rasputin discover that Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich was sick? The Russian empire, in the era of the Romanovs rule, was a vault. No state secrets, or leaks, found their way out, and the illness of the Tsarevich was one of the most guarded secrets. The Romanovs had nothing to gain by announcing their only male heir’s illness and everything to lose. Through the connections he made, as a man “known to possess the ability to heal through prayer” Rasputin was called upon to heal the Tsarevich by Anna Vyrubova, the empress’s best friend. Did Rasputin struggle with this newfound information, did he consider it his patriotic duty to try to save the young heir to the throne, or did he see this as an opportunity to finally prove himself to himself? If he failed to convince his family, friends and neighbors of his special powers, there was nothing lost. If he was a fraud, and he knew it, he would surely have a list of excuses he could use to explain it. If he failed the Empress, the embarrassment of trusting the health of her only begotten son to a lowly peasant could lead the Empire to try to silence any fallout by imprisoning Rasputin or executing him, and needless to say, this empire had no moral qualms executing peasants. Failing the empire, at the very least, would ultimately reveal to Rasputin and everyone else in the empire that he was a fraud and a charlatan. This presumed struggle goes to the heart of this article, because Rasputin eagerly accepted the invitation to try to heal Alexei.

The arguments about what Rasputin did to eventually calm the conditions of Alexei Nikolaevich are wide and varied, but most historians agree that Alexei was never cured of his case of hemophilia, because there is no cure. To this date, modern medicine has yet to find a cure. Alexei had hemophilia the day he was born, and he had it when he was murdered, a month before his fourteenth birthday. The very idea that he almost made it to fourteen, and he could’ve lived well beyond that, had he not been murdered, was viewed as one of a series of Rasputin’s miracles. The fact that Alexei was relieved of his pain, and many of the symptoms of hemophilia, was also viewed as one of Rasputins’ miracles.

Some argue that Rasputin may have been so familiar with hemophilia that he knew certain techniques he could use to help calm the Tsarevich down, and thus give the illusion that he was cured. We still consider it something of a miracle that our body often manages to heal itself. Some call it the power of the mind, others call it the power of prayer, and still others call it the mysterious power of the miraculous machines in the human body to heal itself. No matter what we believe, it appears that in some cases, if our mind believes we are being cured, it can go a long way to encouraging us that we are.

No matter the arguments, details, and conclusions, Rasputin did it. Rasputin did what the most brilliant minds of medicine in Russia, in the early 20th century, could not, and when he advised Alexandra on how to maintain Alexei’s health, and that advice proved successful, Alexandra fell under Rasputin’s spell. She thought he, more than any of the other men of medicine in the empire, could cure her son of a malady to which her side of the family was genetically susceptible. The idea that she believed Rasputin could cure her son, led her to convince her son of it, and that presumably led Alexei calming to the point that his hemophilia was not as debilitating as it would’ve been otherwise. So, Rasputin did help provide what Alexandra considered a miracle, but our modern understanding of the relationship between body and mind suggests that it was not as mystical or unprecedented as Alexandra and those who love the narrative want us to believe.

The interesting nugget here, and the import of this story, is that Alexandra may have followed Rasputin’s advice on how to cure her son so often that she may have also followed his other advice on greater matters of the Russian Empire, and she may have whispered that same advice into Tsar Nicholas II’s ear as if it were her own.

“What was he?” “Who was he?” “What exactly did he do to spare the life of the Tsarevich?” “Was he the most gifted sorcerer the world has ever known?” How great was his influence over Alexandra? Reports suggest he had no influence over Nicholas II, but Alexandra did. Did Rasputin whisper things in Alexandra’s ear that she whispered into Nicholas II’s, as if they were her own ideas. British intelligence believed this, and some suggest that the Britain commissioned Rasputin’s murder, because they feared his influence in the Romanov Empire might prevent Russian entry into World War I?

We’ll probably never know the truth of any of this, because the Romanovs had a situation in their empire where they were able to control their narrative. They had very little in the way of leaks, and no one from the empire wrote a tell-all after the empire collapsed to detail what really happened within the confines of its walls. It was a situation modern politicians would salivate over, but historians, not so much. As a result of the tight Romanov ship, most of the literature written about this Russian era and the relationship between Rasputin and the Romanovs involves a great deal speculation. That’s the fun part for the rest of us, because we can use the base details of what happened and submit our own subjective beliefs into the story for fantastic and fantastical conclusions. One of us can speculate that Grigori Rasputin was a sorcerer with otherworldly powers, another can say he was an absolute charlatan, and the rest of us can say that the man landed in the perfect time and place for nature of his actions are almost impossible to prove or disprove. The one thing we can state without fear of too much refutation, is if we took all of these ingredients and threw them into a big stew of rhetorical discussion, is that Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was one of the most enigmatic figures in world history.