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Backstage with "Bob"; is the Church of the SubGenius the ultimate cult? - J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs

Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986 by Jay Kinney

Backstage with "BOB" It's 9:30 or so, backstage at the Stone, a nightclub on Broadway in San Francisco. Guy Deuel, the ex-cattle rancher from Bolivia with the artificial septum, is fondling an Uzi, the Israeli automatic weapon favored by death squads in Central America. The Uzi -- like the ridge between Deuel's nostils -- is plastic. Deuel, who is an imposing fortyish figure in a tan trenchcoat, looks uncannily like G. Gordon Liddy and has the air of a man who is no stranger to life and death situations. Deuel is a SubGenius.

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Out from on stage, Janor Hypercleats is stalking back and forth across the stage delivering a hell-raising sermon to an audience of several hundred souls. Janor mows lawns for a living in Little Rock, Arkansas, and cuts an odd figure in his garish orange and green pants, looking like the penultimate hick come to the big city. It is not totally clear just what Janor is raving about in his Little Rock twang -- something to do with "Launching the Head," golfing, "BOB," Heaven, and his sex life or lack thereof. But that hardly seems to matter. Janor is a SubGenius.

What has brought both Guy and Janor to San Francisco in the damp chill of November, 1985, is the chance to participate in the SubGenius Devival, a one-night-only extravaganza offered to both the general public and to devoted members of the Church of the SubGenius. There are bands from San Francisco, singers and preachers from Dallas, an intense character in shades from back East who calls himself "the Pope of All New York" and a smattering of artists, go-fers, and borderline basketcases.

In an era of designer jeans, designer drugs, and designer cigarettes, it was probably inevitable that someone would establish a designer Cult -- in this case one whose members keep redesigning its contours on an almost daily basis. SubGenii may be brainwashed -- one need only listen to an hour of droll-flecked conversation about X-ists and "BOB" and Wotan to arrive at that conclusion -- but contrary to every other cult on the horizon the SubGenii are busily washing their own brains. If there is a "Mister Big" pulling strings from behind the scenes he stays very well hidden indeed. Of course, there is the nagging question of cult-founder J.R. "BOB" Dobbs -- a shadowy figure in the tradition of L. Ron Hubbard and Howard Hughes -- but Dobbs' death in early 1985 brought a halt to any efforts to centralize control of cultmembers within a rigid hierarchy.

What remains may be scary or at least nauseating -- the best estimates of SubGenius membership place the cult at approximately the same size as the forces of Lyndon LaRouche -- but it is a decentralized phenomenon. As police departments around the country have learned, the threat that the average SubGenius represents is the danger of the lone berserker run amok, not the threat of lockstep fascism.

SubGenii are not interested in selling you flowers at airports. That is not SubGenius style. They are far more likely to sidle up to you in a public lavatory and pee on your shoes. That is SubGenius style.

The origins of the Church of the SubGenius are hazy at best. The earliest known nationally circulated Church literature bears copyrights dating no eafrlier than the late 1970s. But Church old-timers like Rev. Ivan Stang of Dallas date their involvement in the cult back to the late 50s. At that time the Church was a local Dallas-based group numbering no more than a couple of dozen members. Like other obscure fringe groups of that era such as the Science of Mentalphysics group in Yucca Valley, California, or the Mark-Age saucer-contactee bunch in Florida, the SubGenius Foundation, as it was then known, was a self-perpetuating organization clustered around a charismatic J.R. Dobbs (usually referred to as "BOB" by cult-members) founded the group following a speckled career as a bit-actor in C-movies and an extended stint as an aluminum siding salesman. Dobbs' success as a salesman enabled him to build up a sizeable nest-egg and put him on sure footing for convincing others of his sincerity. When Dobbs began to hear voices in the mid-1950s -- voices he identified alternately as aliens (X-ists) and as a so-called Space God (Jehovah-1) -- he wasted little time in developing a small but devoted following.

According to Stang, early SubGenius emphasis was on self-development (hence the group's name) and on Dobbs' eccentric political philosophy, which share many elements with the far right ideology of Robert Welch's John Birch Society. Things might have stayed that way -- just another small fringe group in a western state -- except for a few unexpected twists in the SubGenius path. The first twist was Dobbs' serious extended love affair with LSD in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period the Foundation evolved into a Church and Dobbs' cluster of SubGenii went through an unsavory spell where experimentation with sex and drugs was di riguer. The second twist was the arrival of Dr. Philo Drummond in the late 1970s.

Backstage with "Bob"; is the Church of the SubGenius the ultimate cult? - J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs

Whole Earth Review, Autumn, 1986 by Jay Kinney

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