Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Despite conservatives labeling them as such, rockers were not inherently anti-American. In fact, many American musicians framed their protest as a call to return the nation to its “roots,” not lurch toward communism. Some were overtly patriotic. Brian Wilson’s lyricist on “Heroes and Villains,” Van Dyke Parks, had a brother in the State Department who died while on assignment in West Germany. Parks recalled, “I was dead set on centering my life on the patriotic Ideal. I was a son of the American revolution. . . .”29 In retrospective mythology, rock became the “voice” of a protest generation. But the reality was somewhat different. Rare Earth singer and drummer Peter Rivera recalled, “We didn’t get into politics.”30 One of the band’s hits, “Hey, Big Brother” (1971), featured lyrics laced with antigovernment paranoia (“Take a closer look at the people . . . and notice the fear in their eye”), but as Rivera noted, the band just took songs that sounded good. “We were criticized for not having political views,” he pointed out, “for not leading a crusade. But we were just a good-time band.”31 Leftist writer Peter Doggett complained that although rockers dabbled in revolution, and briefly spouted incendiary rhetoric, in short order they “plunged into rampant egotism, self-enlightenment, drug abuse, religious cults, Hollywood celebrity status, anything that would protect their fame and leave them free of political responsibility.”32 Doggett’s leftist perspective led him to conclude that “revolutionary rock . . . and its idealistic ideology . . . was compromised and sold in the very instant it was made” by the villains in the “music business.” This allowed rock stars to “pose as radicals, and radicals as rock stars, compromising their idealism but feeding off each other’s cultural power.”33 While it’s an appealing interpretation, it fails, time and again—as Doggett’s own examples show—not because rock was taken over or compromised by the evil music industry, but because rock and roll’s own revolutionary impetus toward freedom could never cohabit with the radical leftist inclination toward unlimited state power for very long.

  When rock musicians actually interacted with leftist extremists in person, worlds collided and Marxism received a quick body blow. Al Kooper, founder of Blood, Sweat & Tears, had volunteered to form a band for Abbie Hoffman’s Chicago protests in 1968. He left a classic Fender guitar in a dressing room and it was stolen, whereupon Kooper confronted Hoffman: “Hey, my f——ing guitar got ripped off. What are you going to do about it?” Hoffman replied, “Nothing. F——k you. So what, if your guitar was ripped off?” Kooper noted, “That was the sum total of my political career. . . . I never did another benefit like that.”34 Similar reality descended on a plethora of rockers who quickly distanced themselves from Hoffmanesque violence and rhetoric. Mick Jagger, no supporter of the Vietnam War, scoffed at the demonstrators in Grosvenor Square. “For what?” he asked. “There is no alternative society. . . . You can have a left-wing revolution . . . but they’re just the same.”35 A few, such as protest regulars Country Joe and the Fish, regurgitated the most radical punch-lines (“We’re in a revolution right now,” he said in Chicago, “a lot of people are going to get hurt”), but Mick Jagger put things in better perspective: “It’s stupid to think that you can start a revolution with a record.”36

  Many musicians paid a heavy price among the critics for their lack of enthusiasm for anti-American and anticapitalist movements. Ramparts critic Michael Lydon whined that the Jefferson Airplane exuded “Theatricality [with] Harmless words and grand gestures rather than truly radical action,” Jagger was derided by the anarchist magazine Black Dwarf as a “home counties Tory,” poet Adrian Mitchell said of the Beatles, “Many people hope that their courage increases,” and Village Voice reviewer Robert Christgau lamented that the moptops’ lukewarm response to revolution has taken “much of the pleasure out of their music for me.”37

  When it came to the Vietnam War, music in general lagged rather than led as a medium of social protest. One study of antiwar music came to the surprising conclusion that the music industry did not produce any top antiwar songs until mid-1969, when public opinion polls had shifted decidedly against the war. John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” recorded in June 1969, and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” recorded three months later (about David Eisenhower’s status in the Navy Reserve), were among the first true rock criticisms of the Vietnam War.

  Rather than leading an antiwar parade, musicians were in the rear. As late as 1965, the number one song in the country was “The Ballad of the Green Berets” by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.38

  Specifically when it came to the subject of the Vietnam War, “rock music and its musicians were noticeably silent.”39 Antiwar songs made up less than 1.5 percent of the one thousand singles on the top 100 chart from 1965 through 1974.40 Even one of the anthems of the protest movement, Buffalo Springfield front man Stephen Stills’s “For What It’s Worth,” was about a local crackdown on Sunset Boulevard, not the war. Nevertheless, early on, pundits from both Left and Right credited music with shaping public opinion about the war. David Noebel, in Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution, claimed that pro-Communist musicians sparked the antiwar movement, and Jerome Rodnitzky, while dismissing the specific impact on the war, nevertheless praised Noebel’s perceptions about “the persuasive power of the musical idiom.”41 Another study of teens and the importance of lyrics showed that only a quarter of all listeners liked a song primarily because of its lyrics.42 Even one of the earliest and most famous antimilitary songs, Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”—which warned that nationalism and religious hatred would soon destroy the world—was misunderstood by over 40 percent of listeners.43 The oft-misunderstood fact is that rock was revolutionary in how it changed emotions and attitudes, but not nearly as political as many fondly remembered.44 Or, as Doggett complained, “pop music, in the revolutionary sense, was a non-starter, a fake revolt.”45

  Barry Friedman, a publicist commenting on the career of Buffalo Springfield, noted the cynicism and materialism behind the protest façade: “I was believing all this peace and love shit. [Unfortunately] they were young guys who wanted immediate success. Promise them a Maserati, they’ll follow you anywhere.”46 The name of the game was to be “authentic,” and with authenticity as a social critic came the insulation from the critics necessary to have a top-40 hit. Jon Landau, one of Bruce Springsteen’s advisers, pushed him to “acquire a more explicitly political and social voice.”47 Put another way, if an artist wasn’t inherently Left, sufficiently activist, and socially aware, he could practice the tune until it came naturally. Authenticity cut both ways, though. Lennon once noted “there’s a lot of uptight maniacs going around wearing f__king peace symbols.”48

  Whatever their political views, artists did not cotton to activists commandeering their stage. Abbie Hoffman’s attempted political diatribe at Woodstock was not the first time radicals attempted to seize the stage from the musicians. At a 1968 Mothers of Invention concert in West Berlin, students tried to harangue Frank Zappa into leading a march on NATO headquarters, only to be told by the iconoclastic rocker, “You have bad mental health.” When one student leaped on stage during the concert to deliver an address, Zappa instructed the keyboard player to run the organ through a fuzztone and lean on the keys—“that’s an ugly f—ing sound,” he noted.49 Nor did radicals like it when their heroes seemed too comfortable with their capitalist surroundings: the radical MC5 sparked a riot in 1969 when fans saw them getting out of a plush limousine.

  The most important point to note is that rock (and country music, too, which proliferated its own brand of revolution) was spontaneously generated, without a whit of government support! Indeed, to the extent that rock is, and has always been, “countercultural,” it has been so precisely because it has not been beholden to government in any way. The fact that America’s greatest contributions to music—jazz, rock, country and western, blues—were all entirely homegrown, private-sector phenomena should give pause to any liberal who wants to support the arts by soaking taxpayers thr
ough government funding.

  Supposedly the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair would kick off a new “Age of Aquarius.” The event was touted as “a new stage in the psychic evolution of the world, a mass celebration of what the 1960s was all about,” wrote one left-wing critic, David Dalton of Gadfly magazine.50 But Woodstsock was much different in reality from the sanitized film version. Moochers and freeloaders broke down the chain-link fences and scrambled inside by the thousands for a free concert, turning the festival into “an undeclared disaster area, beset by the shortages of food, water, shelter, and sanitation commonly associated with floods and earthquakes.”51 Woodstock concluded with Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as masses of zonked-out kids lay in mud and filth. It was a symbolic scene in so many ways. Only a year after the curtain came down, Hendrix would die from a self-induced drug overdose. (He would be joined by Janis Joplin, who also performed at Woodstock, a month later, and Jim Morrison the following year.)

  Even as Hendrix’s “truly apocalyptic” rendition of the national anthem blasted over a “battlefield, [with] zombies crawling over a field littered with paper cups, plastic wrappers, and half-eaten food, gnawing on corn husks, slobbering over ketchup- and mustard-smeared half-eaten hot dog rolls, sprinkled with ants,” the loose bond of political revolution and rock had already permanently unraveled.52 Reporter and Hoffman confidante Ellen Sander discovered this when she found herself caught up in the music and ignoring the revolution. She wrote Hoffman a few days later, chiding him for being so “enraptured with the vision of yourself as the latter-day Che . . . that you’ll make anything and anyone your enemy. . . . [The] age of politics is over,” she advised. “Get it on, dance to the music. . . . Everyone else loved it at Woodstock. The only unhappy people there were the political crazies.”53 None other than Joan Baez, the queen diva of protest songs, delivered a pragmatic assessment of the event: “it wasn’t any f__king revolution. It was a three-day period during which people were decent to each other because . . . if they weren’t, they’d all go hungry.”54 Woodstock (the film) captured a stoned Stephen Stills admiring the tenacity of the crowd: “You people have got to be the strongest people I ever saw. Three days, man, three days.” In moments, however, Stills leaped onto a waiting helicopter to hoist him back to a luxury hotel, a detail not overlooked by Hoffman, who sneered, “There’s no morality here. . . . The helicopters bring in champagne for Janis Joplin’s band, and people are sick in the field. . . .”55

  Instead of sparking a revolution, Woodstock constituted the peteringout of a movement. Over the next few years, critic Peter Doggett complained, artists “swapped their revolutionary idealism for self-obsession.”56 An election night party in 1972, the year Richard Nixon crushed George McGovern, displayed the utter collapse of the music/revolution nexus when Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and John Lennon alternately wept, screamed at each other, and “sprawled helplessly on the floor,” culminating in Lennon’s tirade about “middle-class Jews” and drunkenly bellowing “Up the revolution.”57 Having previously been suspected of being a CIA plant himself, Lennon now viewed Rubin as working for the Agency! Dejectedly, Doggett described the guests as slipping away, embarrassed to be around the “midwife of the revolution, [who] had mutated into its decomposing corpse.”58 As if to heap dung onto the ashes, the year’s top song was the bland “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack, and the top ten contained such watered-down wonders as Harry Nilsson’s “Without You,” “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me” by Mac Davis, “Alone Again (Naturally)” by Gilbert O’Sullivan, and entries by two Sinatra-era artists, Sammy Davis, Jr. (“The Candy Man”), and Wayne Newton (“Daddy Don’t You Walk So Fast”). American heavy rock remained a powerful influence—one of many—but it was temporarily displaced at the top by a new phenomenon, disco. By 1977, when John Travolta took to the cinematic dance floor in his white suit as the Bee Gees sang in falsetto, the message was clear. Forget protesting: “You Should Be Dancing.”

  And yet the real revolution was still at the door. The Beatles had done their job by revitalizing an American institution, rock and roll, which then ricocheted off into a totally unpredicted direction. At the very time American rock was losing some of its revolutionary bite, dividing into numerous substreams, including punk, soul, metal, pop, and so on, the power of Western music had already shot out of the West like alien transmissions from deep space, and it was headed straight for the Iron Curtain. At the same time the samizdat writers were battling for freedom, prodding with their verbal bayonets, rock and roll was using music as a rallying cry. In the form of 45 or 33 rpm vinyl records, Western rock found its way into the hands of Communist youths. When the original records weren’t available, young people listened to Western music secondhand, with records “distributed on discarded X-ray plates—plastic photographs of bones imprinted with record grooves.”59

  Following the student-led Hungarian revolt in 1956 over the quashing of pro-freedom reforms, the new government, led by János Kádár, sought to neutralize the simmering revolution by allowing hundreds of Wurlitzer jukeboxes to enter the country. (As a result, Hungarians would come to refer to all jukeboxes as “Wurlitzers.”) Budapest became a hotbed of bloc-rock, as did Sopot, Poland, where an aspiring journalist and club owner, Franciszek Walicki, packed his Non-Stop Club with Polish cover bands playing Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Elvis. He even created the first true Polish rock act in 1958, ultimately named the Reds and the Blacks. A second band he formed, the Blues and the Blacks, featured a singer named Czesław Niemen, who eventually performed in Paris and sang the first Polish rock and roll hit songs. In Romania, officials decried the music, which they said aroused “animal instincts” and developed the youths’ “cruelty, contempt, and destructive urges.”60 NATO strategists took notice, observing in the journal Revue militaire generale that the obsession with rock and roll took attention away from Marx and Lenin. Elvis’s arrival as a new private in Germany terrified the Communists, who saw him as a new weapon in the Cold War.

  East Germany cracked down on rock in 1958, mandating that 60 percent of any music performed had to come from the “people’s democracies.” But when American folk/protest singer Pete Seeger toured the Iron Curtain countries, the Soviets saw an opportunity to enlist an American artist in the revolutionary cause. Seeger made twenty-eight appearances in the USSR, in addition to concert dates in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Yet at his Moscow concert, when Seeger led the audience in the gospel hymns “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” and “We Shall Overcome,” he demonstrated that by its very nature, revolutionary music was always positioned against “the establishment.” What did the Soviet listeners have to overcome but communism?

  While in the West, “protest” music criticized the democracies, behind the Iron Curtain, the music condemned the Communist governments as “the Man.” A clear example of this contrast can be seen in the German Wolf Biermann, who left Hamburg for East Berlin to build a new Communist world, then proceeded to criticize the German Communist state. Biermann ridiculed Stalin—an act that, only a few years before, would have earned him a bullet from the secret police—and even after he was imprisoned, he continued to record songs that bashed the government. By 1965, Party functionaries denounced his music as “toilet-stall poetry” and “pornography.”61 Within the USSR itself, protest songs were gaining popularity. In the 1950s, Russian singer-songwriter Alexander Galich criticized Stalin, even if he did so somewhat subtly.

  Then came the Beatles, whose songs, images, and paraphernalia traveled everywhere from Leipzig to Leningrad. Young people sported moptop haircuts and Beatles buttons sent to them by relatives in the West. Indeed, the Fab Four became counterculture role models—young, funny, and full of energy—in stark contrast to the aging gargoyles of the Communist elites. Riots occurred in Czechoslovakia after local Beatles look-alike bands performed. One reporter, horrified, wrote of the fan behavior, “They wriggled, they fell off the platform and crawled back onto
it. . . . I expected them to bite each other at any minute.”62

  Instantly, a host of copycat Iron Curtain bands appeared, including the Illes in Hungary, Bundaratsite in Bulgaria, the Red Guitars in Poland, Olympic in Czechoslovakia, and Time Machine (formed when the father of the guitar player smuggled home a copy of A Hard Day’s Night) in the USSR. Before the “Prague Spring,” Czechoslovakia even had a rock music magazine, Melodie. The freest of the Soviet bloc countries, Czechoslovakia produced hundreds of bands with names such as Strangers, Buttons, and Hell’s Devils—all, of course, registered with the state. But Beatlemania crossed all borders. When the film A Hard Day’s Night opened in Poland in 1965, many young people skipped school and rushed to the cinemas as the bitels conquered Warsaw.63 Czech schools responded to the absenteeism by offering a six-part series on modern music, which included studies of Elvis and Bill Haley and the Comets. The first Iron Curtain hippies were likely Czechs known as the “little Marys” (manicky), but the phenomenon spread throughout the Soviet bloc. One of East Germany’s leading musicians, Horst Krüger, completely abandoned classical and jazz to play rock and roll, and when a popular Leipzig band, the Butlers, was forcibly broken up for “damaging art,” troops had to use water cannons to disperse protests at the high schools.