When someone's Saturn is on your Sun
by Ray Grasse
Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Jim (‘Roger’) McGuinn of The Byrds and others: their Saturns on his Sun did him few favours in personal encounters…
Mick Taylor in 1969
Source: Dina Regine, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
In the fall of 1969, when I was 17, I went to a Rolling Stones concert in Chicago with my close friend Rick Andresen. His father owned some upscale camera equipment, and Rick enlisted me to use his dad’s 16-millimetre movie camera to film the group in concert. I’d been playing with 8-mm cameras since I was about 12, so Rick figured that I would be the right person for the job. In exchange, he offered to pay for my ticket (which in those days cost less than buying a drink at a concert now, incredibly). I could hardly refuse.
As it turned out, the three-hour concert began with two opening acts: Terry Reid and Chuck Berry. It was held at the International Amphitheater down in the city, and we found ourselves situated in the back section of the venue that night. But over the course of those first two hours, I managed to gradually weasel my way up through the standing-only crowd until I got to the edge of the stage. There was little security in those days to prevent anyone from getting that close, so you could do that sort of thing then – assuming you had the gumption to try (and having the camera in my hands gave me just enough of that, despite my discomfort around crowds back then).
This was what some called the Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ tour, when they were in their peak Jagger-dressed-in-black-flipping-a-red-sash days, dishing out songs like ‘Street Fighting Man’, ‘Gimme Shelter’, and of course ‘Satisfaction’. Brian Jones had recently died, and Mick Taylor had just taken his place. The infamous tragedy of their performance at the Altamont Speedway in California was still three weeks away. They were all very young and seemed to be excited about performing in the city whose music meant so much to them.
Rolling Stone magazine eventually listed this tour among ‘The Fifty Greatest Concerts of the Last Fifty Years’, and for a teenager, it was thrilling stuff, gotta say. I’ve never thought the Stones were a particularly great live band, particularly in the larger venues, since it always seemed to me like they were playing to the back row, as they say, with every gesture and musical phrase exaggerated, all nuances washed away. But this was a good night for them. Standing at the edge of the stage, I was close enough to field spittle from Jagger’s freakishly oversized lips at one point. Which I would find completely disgusting now, of course, but at the time was kind of exciting in an idolising adolescent sort of way.
Most exciting of all was the prospect of getting such potentially great footage of Jagger at close range, since he was practically standing over me at times. That meant a lot to me from an artistic standpoint.
Or at least I thought I was getting such great footage. When the film came back from the camera store that next week, I discovered I had used all of it up to shoot scenes of the two opening acts, Terry Reid and Chuck Berry – all of it, that is, except for just one frame of Jagger. One frame. I had no idea beforehand how little film the camera actually stored, and the noise of the concert drowned out the change in customary clickety-clack noises those old movie cameras normally made when they ran out of film.
As a result, whatever joy I felt having attended the concert was summarily dashed. This wasn’t an earthshaking tragedy, of course, but for an artistically-minded, music-loving kid like me, it was deflating in the extreme. And just to make sure I didn’t forget about that miscalculation of mine, Rick was careful to remind me about it every few months those next few years.
Decades later, when I became involved with astrology, it occurred to me to look at Jagger’s horoscope to see if something might shed light on that early disappointment. By that time, I’d had enough experience with synastry – the study of planetary chemistry between two or more horoscopes – to know that even fleeting encounters between people reflect the alchemy of their combined planets, and this applies as much to interactions with celebrities as anyone else. This seemed like a good case for putting that idea to the test.
I discovered that Jagger’s natal Saturn in Gemini wasn’t all that far from the Sun in my horoscope. That explained quite a bit, I thought, because Saturn/Sun connections between charts can often result in frustration, especially for the person on the receiving end of the other person’s Saturn.
But it got me thinking about two other disappointing encounters I had in my teens with well-known musical celebrities I admired. I wanted to see if there might be a similar dynamic at work with those as well, specifically involving strong Saturn interactions. If it held true for me and Jagger, might it also apply to these other cases too?
For example, a few years before my experience at the Stones concert, the brilliant folk-rock group The Byrds did a promotional tour for their first album, Mr. Tambourine Man, and that included a string of personal appearances throughout the Chicagoland area at various Sears department stores, of all places. I was a huge fan of the group’s music, which had just reached number one on the musical charts, with their cover of Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’; but I especially admired the group’s founder and lead singer, Jim (later ‘Roger’) McGuinn. The nearest Sears store at the corner of Harlem and North Avenues was only a few blocks away from where my family lived, so I excitedly looked forward to riding my bike over there and seeing them in person that coming Saturday morning.
But as fate would have it, our family dog decided to run away early that day, inconsiderate mutt that he was, and I spent the better part of that morning looking for him. By the time I found him and rushed over to the store, the band members were getting into their limousines and driving away, leaving me feeling incredibly disappointed. It didn’t help any to hear the other young fans lingering outside saying how cool it was seeing and hearing the band up close and personal like that.
Here as well, I decided to look back with the benefit of astro-hindsight decades later and discovered that McGuinn’s Saturn not only landed near my Sun but was smack-dab on top of my Venus and Mercury as well. So far, so good – or bad, I should say.
An even bigger disappointment awaited me two years later, when I read in the teen music magazines about an up-and-coming guitarist named Jimi Hendrix who had (quite literally) burned up the stage at the Monterey Pop Festival shortly before. He had no records out yet, but the word of mouth on him had already reached a fever-pitch. Having just started playing guitar the year before myself, I was eager to hear what this buzzed-about musician could do.
As a result, when I learned that Jimi was scheduled to be the opening act for The Monkees on their first national tour, I enlisted my friend Rick to join me in catching the show. But when the concert began, instead of Jimi coming out, some very mediocre band (whose name I’ve long since forgotten) opened for The Monkees. We were mystified, and terribly disappointed. Months later, we learned he’d been dropped from the tour shortly before Chicago, when his act proved just a bit too wild for the hordes of young girls in the audience (and their disapproving parents).
But that wasn’t the real let-down. That was yet to come.
That came two years later when Jimi roared into town and visited one of our local radio stations. As was customary for many rock performers on their promotional tours, he agreed to take phone calls from listeners. I’d taken advantage of those opportunities before and had been lucky enough to get through and speak with various band members occasionally, including John Entwistle of The Who and Chris Hillman of – well, what do you know – The Byrds. Funny how that one played out.
Anyway, the phone lines were completely tied up with callers trying to get through to Jimi, since he was a big star by this point. I heard nothing but busy signals for almost thirty minutes.
Finally, to my surprise, the busy signals stopped, and I heard the unmistakable sound of my call going through. ‘Wow! This could be it’, I thought as I gulped hard and waited. I then heard the sound of someone picking up the phone – at which point I heard the disc jockey say, ‘Well, Jimi, I know you’ve got to be on your way, so I just want to thank you for coming down and speaking with us and the listeners’—followed by the click of the phone hanging up.
Jimi Hendrix in 1968
Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
When I looked up Jimi Hendrix’s horoscope decades later, I again discovered that Jimi’s Saturn was indeed on my Sun, Mercury and Venus. Bingo.
To be sure, these experiences with near-misses aren’t exactly typical of what might happen when someone else’s Saturn is on your Sun, but they certainly convey some of the flavour. Sometimes it can be very double-edged – on the one hand, granting you some great worldly thing, like my teenage self getting just a few feet away from the Stones in concert while simultaneously denying you something important, like my failing to capture them on film. Or like my missing those other connections with The Byrds and then Hendrix.
Saturn can be like that, whether in birth charts or in synastry between charts. It both gives and denies simultaneously. Sometimes, that denial can be dealt by someone very intentionally, such as when a prospective lover rejects you or a boss reprimands you for your performance. The element of respect is usually a big issue in those cases.
But sometimes the heavy hand of Saturn can be just the impersonal hand of fate at work, as with my client who fell madly in love with a soldier whose Saturn was on her Sun and then was shipped off to fight in Iraq; or the actress I knew who was thrilled to audition for a world-famous director whose Saturn was likewise on her Sun, only to learn that the film project was cancelled at the last minute. (At least she was able to brag that she’d met the fellow, so there’s that.) In that same vein, Jagger didn’t personally do anything to me, of course, he simply acted as the unwitting messenger of fate, the agent of Saturn’s double-edged influence.
The ringed lord giveth, the ringed lord taketh away. Sometimes it even giveth back later on, unexpectedly, as happened for me with The Byrds and bass player Chris Hillman. (Notice, by the way, it wasn’t McGuinn who resurfaced for me but his second-in- command. That’s a bit Saturnian too.)
Make no mistake: there are times when one person’s Saturn on another person’s Sun can be an extremely productive force, as with a dance instructor training a young student, or a drill instructor putting a new inductee through the steps. Francis Ford Coppola’s Saturn was on Marlon Brando’s Sun, and he helped shape Brando’s persona in ways that led to bravura performances in both The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.
But Saturn being Saturn, even these circumstances are never particularly easy, and certainly don’t seem to make for warm and fuzzy relationships. Just ask Brando and Coppola. (Well, Coppola anyway, since Brando’s since moved onto greener pastures.) After all, Saturn didn’t acquire its reputation as the planetary taskmaster for nothing. It can lead to big rewards – presuming you’re patient and willing to carry that extra weight.
Note: This article is an excerpt from Ray Grasse’s latest book, When the Stars Align: Reflections on Astrology, Life, Death, And Other Mysteries.
Published by: The Astrological Journal, May/Jun 2022
Author:
Ray Grasse has been associate editor of The Mountain Astrologer for over 20 years, and is author of several books, including The Waking Dream, Signs of the Times, and Under a Sacred Sky.
His websites are raygrasse.com and raygrassephotography.com
© Ray Grasse, 2022
