The Civic Monster

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Nineteen sixties rock band in Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, a science fiction series published in 1979 consisting of The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons.

It's fronted by Rhoda Chief, who became a rock singer in 1958 at the age of 17.

The subject selected to have the trial run on the new reincarnated ACE was a Ms. Rhoda Chief, vocalist with a rock group called the Civic Monster. Known to critics as the best heavy rock singer since Janis Joplin, Rhoda was originally renowned back in the sixties for her own curious mutation of old-fashioned Dixieland "scat singing"; what few realized was that her riffs were not mere Jabberwocky but actually fragments of the Enochian Keys used by Dr. John Dee, Mr. Aleister Crowley, and other magicians. People who came out of Civic Monster concerts seeing auras, hearing strange voices, catching odd fugitive glimpses into fairyland and Oz, or seeing the djinns gathered about the throne of Allah, attributed this to the heavy marijuana fumes always circulating in the air at rock concerts. What Rhoda herself saw during those moments was a secret between herself and her occasional lover in that decade, the controversial stage magician Cagliostro the Great.

In Wilson's previous Illuminatus! Trilogy, Chief fronted a different band, The Heads of Easter Island, although The Civic Monster was also mentioned in that work. This is because parts of the Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy take place in alternate universes.

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