Witness to the Revolution
Page 49
GREIL MARCUS (Rolling Stone music critic)
Janis was really intense. When she sang “Ball and Chain” it was just so wrenching. It was such an adventure, such an epic struggle. You really felt as if you had been dragged across a battlefield; you’d been wounded, the battle is still going on, someone is dragging you to safety, and there’s no real expectation you’re going to be alive when you get to safety.
She had moments where she was a great, great artist. She had the sensibility of understanding what a song was, and what it meant to get everything out of it, and put everything of yourself into it. I don’t think she was appreciated maybe ever, because she was also completely fucked-up. She was a junkie. She would let people take advantage of her. She let Columbia Records make her into a big star, which was not a good idea. And she died at twenty-seven. It was a horrible waste.
HOWARD WOLF (rock music promoter)
By ’69, ’70, the music scene was imploding. It was just imploding, period. And factions had started. It just wasn’t the same. People got greedy; people were out for themselves. Let me tell you, the drugs got a little bit weird starting ’69, ’70, and I said to Chet Helms, “Chet, we’re in trouble here. It’s not the same. I think it’s time we just shut down the Fillmore West.” He wouldn’t do it.
There were a lot of uppers, and it wasn’t cool. People just got weird. I’m not a drug taker. I could see it, and they didn’t notice it, because they were doing it. Then in like a six-month period Alan Wilson of Canned Heat dies [September 3, 1970], then Jimi [September 18], then Janis goes [October 4],*17 and Jim Morrison [July 3, 1971]. I said, “You know what? There’s something wrong.” I said, “I’m burned out. I just can’t handle this—I have got to leave.”
JOHN HARTMANN
There was a great sadness when Jimi Hendrix died, like there was when John Lennon died, or Jim Morrison, or Janis, or any of these people. They were our leaders, and our leaders were brought down by something we totally understood—abuse of dangerous drugs. Even though some of us would try it, you wouldn’t necessarily do it every day; you just knew what it was. Well, some people liked it too much and stayed too long, and those people died. There were many others who were less famous who died of the same thing.
What happens is you ride up the drug scale. You try acid, well, I get what that was. You try mescaline, oh, I get what that is. Then, there are more exotic things like DMT, STP—they’re very powerful drugs that are dangerous, the most significant being one called PCP, also known as angel dust. That drug stripped away your ability to discern between right and wrong, so you better be looking in the right direction or you’re going to go to hell. So that drug then led to cocaine and heroin, cocaine being the most dangerous drug and the one that destroyed these people. Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, many others died because of cocaine and its influence to take heroin to come down from the cocaine, what’s called a speedball; when you get into that now you’re starting to lose it, and then you get severely addicted. I mean, most rock stars either died or burned out their septum from snorting cocaine. I don’t want to name some of those people, but I observed it.
What happened that destroyed so many of these great artists was drugs.*18 Drugs were not only the catalyst for the rise of it, but they were the catalyst for its destruction because the government lied to us about pot. “This will kill you.” Well, anybody who ever smoked pot knows it ain’t gonna kill you, right? Well, maybe they were lying about all the other drugs. It was part of the hippie ethic that you had to try every drug, you didn’t have to continue with it, but you had to know what it was. So, every new drug that came along, everybody did it.
* * *
*1 Quoted in Sheila Weller, “Suddenly That Summer,” Vanity Fair, July 2012.
*2 Quoted in Time, December 28, 1970.
*3 Psychedelic chemists Tim Scully and Nick Sand first manufactured Orange Sunshine in a lab in Sonoma County, California, in 1968.
*4 The Diggers, a hippie countercultural group that performed improv guerrilla theater, lived by a nonmaterialistic, communal standard. Between 1966 and 1969 they operated a free store, medical clinic, and soup kitchen in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
*5 Charlie Company, or C Company, was the U.S. Army regiment in Vietnam that committed the My Lai massacre.
*6 Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss was first published in 1939, has sold more than five million copies, and is an important guide to herbs, natural diet, lifestyle, and holistic health. It is credited with helping create the natural foods industry. The other bible of the communards was Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a magazine and catalog published between 1968 and 1972, and less frequently until 1998, that focused on self-sufficiency and do-it-yourself skills and products.
*7 Peter Coyote also spent time at the Black Bear commune, which was founded in 1968 on the property of a deserted mining town in a remote part of Northern California. Black Bear’s slogan is “free land for free people,” and it still operates as a communal/intentional community.
*8 The Farm is a commune in Tennessee that was founded in 1971 by Stephen Gaskin and 420 hippies from San Francisco. It still operates today.
*9 Carol gave birth to one of her four children in a teepee at the Ranch with the help of her girlfriends.
*10 THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the psychoactive chemical found in cannabis.
*11 Albert Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who first discovered/invented LSD in 1943.
*12 Anstalts are holding companies that foreigners can set up in Liechtenstein.
*13 Augustus Owsley Stanley III, or “Bear,” was often called the “King of Acid,” because he was the first individual to manufacture LSD in America. Besides being the Grateful Dead’s sound technician, Owsley supplied acid for Ken Kesey’s famous acid tests in the mid-sixties, where the Dead often played.
*14 In the fall of 1966, Timothy Leary was convicted of a violation of the Marihuana Tax Act and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Released pending appeal, he took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 19, 1969, the Supreme Court concurred with Leary in Leary v. United States and declared the Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutional; the Court overturned his 1965 conviction in Laredo, Texas, where he was busted with three ounces of pot. Congress responded by repealing the Marihuana Tax Act and passing the federal Controlled Substances Act in 1970, under which LSD, marijuana, and other hallucinogenic drugs were classified as the most harmful of all drugs and rated Schedule I (out of five) along with heroin. Schedule I drugs were “deemed to have a high potential for abuse, and no legitimate medical use.”
*15 Abbie Hoffman was arrested after selling cocaine to an undercover police officer in 1973, jumped bail, and lived underground until he surrendered to authorities in 1980. He committed suicide in 1989.
*16 Emmett Grogan (1943–78), one of the founders of the Diggers, was described by The Times of London as a “Superman of the Underground.”
*17 Janis Joplin died of an accidental heroin overdose in a Hollywood hotel on October 4, 1970. She left $2,500 in her will, “so my friends can have a party after I’m gone.” An all-night bash was held in her memory in San Anselmo, California, where the Grateful Dead played to two hundred friends. Four months after Joplin’s death, her album Pearl was released and became her biggest-ever commercial success.
*18 Nineteen seventy was called “the year of the middle-class junkie,” and heroin flooded the youth market for the first time. Psychedelic movement leaders, including Michael Randall, distinguished between “death drugs” (heroin, speed, cocaine, alcohol) and “people drugs” (marijuana and LSD).
CHAPTER 23
COMING HOME
(May–August 1970)
Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock-and-roll veterans. The Sixties had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse. The war primed you for lame years while rock and roll turned more lu
rid and dangerous than bullfighting, rock stars started falling like second lieutenants; ecstasy and death and (of course and for sure) life, but it didn’t seem so then. What I’d thought of as two obsessions were really only one.
—MICHAEL HERR, Dispatches
Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, which reduced American ground troops and increased the air war against North Vietnam, had an unintended consequence. Between 1968 and 1970, 200,000 Vietnam vets, many wounded, shell-shocked, and disillusioned with the war, came home to a country in turmoil and transition. Their war stories exposed the futility of the conflict and the grisly truth of what was really happening on the ground in Vietnam. As they began to meet, rap, and organize, the vets brought new vitality and credibility to the peace movement. Images of vets at antiwar rallies in their tattered army jackets, or in wheelchairs with long hair holding signs saying “End the War in Vietnam” and “We Won’t Fight Another Rich Man’s War,” terrified the Nixon administration. Realizing the power of their message, the FBI targeted the vets for infiltration, surveillance, and disruption. FBI files on the activities of Vietnam Veterans Against the War covered 19,978 pages.
WAYNE SMITH (Vietnam veteran)
I got orders to go home. The next day, I was going to get on the plane, and this son of a bitch in the bunker next to me, that had these thin plywood walls, played what has become one of my favorite songs about America and Vietnam: Steppenwolf’s “Monster.” He played it over and over all night. The song sums up, in more ways than I can ever describe, my reality near the end of Vietnam and my understanding of this country. It is that powerful.*1
The cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin’ the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can’t understand
We don’t know how to mind our own business
’Cause the whole world’s got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who’s the winner we can’t pay the cost
’Cause there’s a monster on the loose
It’s got our heads into the noose
And it just sits there watchin’
America, where are you now
Don’t you care about your sons and daughters
Don’t you know we need you now
We can’t fight alone against the monster
I had known Steppenwolf, of course, but this was the first time I had ever heard this song. At the time, I had this yearning to try to understand how I could have gotten it so wrong. How could I have believed in this country, when I swore to defend and protect the United States?
We flew out on a private carrier from Long Binh. There were American stewardesses on board who were trying to be gracious, but guys were hooting and being ugly Americans. I just zoned out. I didn’t know anybody. I couldn’t find words. I was aware of the Vietnamese we killed, the buddies that I had who died—these really beautiful guys.
We were broken. I had so much anger and pain. I was crushed. I felt like I had blood on my hands. I resisted calling the Vietnamese gooks and dinks, but near the end of it I found those vulgar words would come out of my mouth several times; I had contempt for myself. How could I have been so stupid and foolish to believe this country? How could I have been so foolish to think that I could really save lives as a medic? How could I really make a difference in the face of so many catastrophic injuries?
I don’t think I really spoke much on that flight, at all. I had contempt for the guys I was with because they were doing stupid American shit, like, “We’re number one,” and slapping fives. “We’re going to screw everything that moves.” But I wasn’t alone; there were also some other folks who just weren’t in that space. It was more nods and recognition, rather than engagement.
BOBBY MULLER
(spokesman, organizer, Vietnam Veterans Against the War)
I was shot April 29, 1969. It took a while to get back to the States. I wound up at a naval hospital on Long Island, and then I got transferred from the naval hospital to the veterans hospital up in the Bronx. I spent a year there as an inpatient, and started on an outpatient basis, probably around July, August of ’70. So that’s where I was parked.
My first day in the veterans hospital, the chief of the service walks by. He looks at my three-by-five card and he says, “Well, son, I hope you realize you’re going to be hopelessly paralyzed for the rest of your life.” The fucking first words out of the chief of the service’s mouth off of a three-by-five card. I didn’t respond.
Later on a shrink says, “You look like you might want to talk. Come see me.” I go roll in. It’s a woman. The first thing out of her mouth was “What are you going to do now?” I said, “I think I’m going to become a political assassin and kill the sons of bitches responsible for this bullshit war. Okay?” We wound up with her wanting to know about my relationship with my mother, until I finally said, “Look, this is not about my mother. Okay?” They didn’t know how to handle it.
WAYNE SMITH
Landing in Seattle, Washington, there was an announcement: “Anyone that was injured, or if you have problems of any kind, get in that long line over there. Anyone who doesn’t have any problems, go there to get on the bus to take you to the airport, to take you home.” I was really pretty bad off, but I wasn’t going to get in any long line.
I went into the airport men’s room and there were all of these khaki uniforms bulging out of the trash bin, where people had taken off their uniforms and thrown them away as soon as they could. It was unbelievable. When I got on the plane home, there were guys who were wearing long-hair wigs. I don’t even know how they got them, but they were obviously wigs. It was absolutely amazing. The uniform thing was big, not wanting people to know you were in the military.
When I saw the uniforms in the men’s room trash bin, I was like, Whoa…Welcome home! Walking through the airport in uniform, people didn’t make a lot of eye contact. I was trying to find friendly faces, and I was just not getting any connection. I thought, Okay, America, you motherfuckers. I’m home. I’m going to deal with you. I’m going to get through this bullshit. You know, Fuck you. It was like getting my false combat face on; in some ways I was thinking I was in a different style of war. I felt like it was a hostile environment. It didn’t feel friendly. It didn’t feel like home. I didn’t believe in America anymore. I couldn’t tell if it was me that changed, or the country that had changed. I guess that was the question for a lot of us.
BOBBY MULLER
The notable thing that happened was that one of the guys on my ward at Kingsbridge VA hospital in the Bronx, a fellow by the name of Mark Dumpert, became the centerpiece of a cover story that Life magazine put out, May 22, 1970. It was the Walter Reed scandal of our times. The cover of Life had two photos. The top one was a color photo of some wounded American soldiers riding on the top of an armored personnel carrier. And below that was a black-and-white picture of this guy, Mark, who was a quadriplegic, meaning no use of his legs or his arms, sitting in the shower at the VA hospital, with a towel draped over him. The article inside had a lot more photos—again, a lot of them on my ward—depicting the overcrowding and filth. Overall, the article described the place as a medical slum. It turned out to be the second-largest-selling issue Life magazine ever put out. It created an uproar.
JAN BARRY (cofounder, Vietnam Veterans Against the War)
I happened to be in upstate New York when the invasion of Cambodia took place. I was on Syracuse University’s campus. The invasion of Cambodia happens. This university closes down. The students refuse to go to class. I was initially looking for student veterans and trying to have the conversation about war crimes testimony, and I discovered there were something like five hundred student veterans on campus and they were outraged by what had happened at Kent State. A couple of these vets said, “Come with me,” to a house they rented just off campus, and they were turning it into a center for organizing vets. T
hey even imported a whole bunch of phones and made all kinds of phone calls, and they were going to have their own march. They needed a professional organizer, but in the end, they organized it themselves. They had vets coming in from campuses across the whole of upstate New York, and it was a big story in New York State.
They put out the word that if the police even thought about coming onto the Syracuse University campus, they were going to have to wade through a line of vets. A group of them decided they were going to have a protest at a veterans memorial in downtown Syracuse. They were mainly conservative veterans and they wanted to protest the war as veterans at this setting. There were a couple police cars in the vicinity, and all of a sudden the police cars disappear, and some other cars come roaring up, and these American Legion types jump out, and they’re going to attack this group of hippies who are protesting the war and beat them up. But all of a sudden they’re confronted by veterans, one of whom takes a flagpole and aims it at them. He’s going to charge them with the flagpole and he says, “Get the fuck out of here! We’re vets!” They didn’t know what to do with that, because they had been told it was a bunch of hippies that they could beat up. They were going to do a mob scene and beat up some hippies, and that further fueled other vets hearing about this: “I’m going to come and march through the streets of Syracuse and tell these people what I think of them.” And that’s what they did. The police, of course, treated them with great care.