The album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s made two large statements. Firstly, the Beatles were deconstructing their own mythology, which would be an increasing focus of the members of the band (particularly John Lennon and George Harrison) over the next few years. The cover was the concept of British artist Sir Peter Blake and his wife Jann Haworth, but the band weighed in on every creative detail, including the wax versions of their younger selves wearing dark suits, juxtaposed with their 1967 personas with longer hair and colorful mock-military uniforms. The eight Beatles and the dozens of other figures stood in front of an arrangement of flowers that spelled Beatles and appeared to be a grave.
The other big idea was that the Beatles were depicting themselves as part of a much wider cosmic community that included members of the counterculture like Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, Terry Southern, and Aldous Huxley, as well as movie stars past and present such as W.C. Fields, Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Tom Mix, Tyrone Power, Marilyn Monroe, Laurel & Hardy, Johnny Weissmuller, Tony Curtis, Shirley Temple, and Mae West (who initially refused permission but was persuaded to change her mind after receiving letters from all four Beatles). George Harrison insisted on the inclusion of the author of Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, as well as his guru Sri Yukteswar, his satguru Lahiri Mahasaya, and Mahavatar Babaji, “the deathless master.” The band wanted to include Mahatma Gandhi but their label refused because it was considered disrespectful in India and would adversely affect record sales there.
Other cultural luminaries portrayed were Carl Jung, Aleister Crowley, Dylan Thomas, Edgar Allen Poe, H.G. Wells, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, T.E. Lawrence, James Joyce, Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, and avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.
McCartney’s “She’s Leaving Home” was the definitive song about hippie runaways, written from the idealistic point of view of a teenage girl looking for life’s meaning. “With a Little Help from My Friends” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” were widely viewed as having psychedelic references although the Beatles coyly denied it. When Time did a cover story on the band in September of 1967, it addressed the last line of Lennon’s closing song, “A Day in the Life”: “It’s been a long way from ‘I want to hold your hand,’ to ‘I’d love to turn you on.’”
In the throes of a level of productivity that future artists would marvel at, the Beatles also released three singles in 1967 that were not included on Sgt. Pepper’s: “Penny Lane” (backed by “Strawberry Fields Forever”), “Hello Goodbye” (backed by “I Am the Walrus”), and “All You Need Is Love” (backed by “Baby, You’re a Rich Man”).
“All You Need Is Love” was performed live on a worldwide TV satellite broadcast called Our World on June 25, 1967, less than a month after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s. On the broadcast, which featured different segments from all around the world, the band was surrounded by friends and acquaintances seated on the floor, including Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Graham Nash, and various girlfriends and family members, who sang along with the refrain during the fade-out. The single was released commercially the next week and was, of course, instantly number one around the world. The lyrics had an almost evangelical intensity about them, and not long afterward, the Beatles would make a global impact, especially among hippies, in another sphere altogether.
Black Music and the Counterculture
There was no black equivalent to the underground rock stations like KMPX. The radio stations with the biggest black audiences played R&B hit singles and it was a time of enormous creativity in the genre. Motown was having one of its many peaks, Aretha Franklin and James Brown were making their most memorable records, and Otis Redding was ascendant until he died tragically in a plane crash in December. Most white rock and roll fans had one or more of their records, but stations that played black music were primarily in the same business as other broadcasters—selling advertising spots. Between racist social/political patterns in America and economic inequalities, black and white radio audiences were largely segregated. The Temptations weren’t played on underground rock stations and psychedelic rock was not played on black radio, not even Jimi Hendrix. The one band whose music was played on R&B, pop, and underground rock stations was Sly & the Family Stone.
The Beatles and Rolling Stones had been influenced enormously by R&B and had done cover versions of songs by Marvin Gaye, Solomon Burke, the Isley Brothers, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Chuck Berry on their early albums. When the Stones first came to New York they immediately went to the Apollo Theater to see James Brown. The early history of rock and roll contributed to integration if for no other reason than the fact that black and white teenagers were dancing to the same music, sometimes together. This triggered a racist backlash that resulted in a lot of R&B hits by black artists like Fats Domino being “covered” by white artists like Pat Boone, a dynamic that engendered a lot of bitterness among black artists who were effectively blocked from white audiences.
By 1967, some of the best R&B labels, particularly Motown and Atlantic, had finally created the capacity to “cross over” many big R&B hits by artists like the Supremes and Aretha Franklin onto the Top 40 radio stations and The Ed Sullivan Show. But the very fact of their pop success made playing a lot of those songs off-putting to most underground rock deejays, who tended to focus on the popular music of the previous generation of African Americans: the blues.
The folk scene had always included a lot of blues artists. Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Josh White were fixtures at folk festivals, and Odetta was a star. The Rolling Stones took their name from a Muddy Waters lyric, and the Grateful Dead covered Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” on their first album. In Chicago, guitarist Mike Bloomfield and pianist Barry Goldberg started showing up at blues clubs with overwhelmingly black audiences. The older blues masters—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and others—mentored them and welcomed them onto their stages. Bloomfield and Goldberg would be in the backup band for Bob Dylan when he went electric and later formed the Electric Flag, who played the Monterey Pop Festival and got signed there to Columbia Records. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s album East-West, featuring Bloomfield on guitar, was a fixture in thousands of dorm rooms. When I was a teenager, one of the best ways of determining how much substance a new acquaintance had was checking out how many blues albums were included in his or her record collection.
American blues was even more popular in England. Guitar heroes Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton all started as blues players. When Clapton was in the Yardbirds, the band backed up Sonny Boy Williamson on a British tour; a live album of the tour was later released. Clapton’s band Cream, one of the most ubiquitous in hippie living rooms, was essentially a psychedelic blues band. Of course, Jimi Hendrix could play the blues—he could play anything.
When Bill Graham opened the Fillmore, he sought advice from Jefferson Airplane members Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady about who to book. They turned him on to many black artists, including B.B. King, Miles Davis, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and Muddy Waters, who Graham would package with white rock acts.
In Berkeley, one of the most popular blues bands was led by vocalist and harmonica player Junior Wells and featured guitarist Buddy Guy. Enough of their audience was white that Wells rewrote the lyrics to the old eight-bar blues song “It Hurts Me Too” and called the new version “The Hippies Are Trying.” Wells earnestly sings, “We need more flower children / And more lovers too . . .” In the last two minutes of the song, however, he suddenly switches to a classic blues theme: “Somebody tell me—I just gotta know, how can you be so mean?”
Outside of the world of the relatively civilized flower power and rock and roll, that question loomed large for many African Americans in 1967.
CHAPTER 5
black power
In his 1968 book Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! Julius Lester wrote, “As early as 1962 black SNCC staff members would have parties wheneve
r they gathered in Atlanta and these parties were open only to black people . . . They had an experience, which was practically impossible for a white to have because black people exist separately in America while having to deal with America. A black knows two worlds, while the white knows only one.”
No white liberal, radical, or hippie wanted to be like the guy Lenny Bruce made fun of in his bit “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties,” the one who’d say things like, “You know that Joe Louis was a hell of a fighter, a credit to his race,” or, “Here’s to Paul Robeson.”
In the late sixties, in the balance between politics, culture, and consciousness, politics was an even bigger deal in most black communities than in the white world. The draft affected millions of white men, but if you had money you could drag out your college deferment or find the right psychiatrist. If you were black, regardless of your age or gender or economic status, you couldn’t avoid the realities derived from hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow subjugation. Elections and laws had extra impact on African Americans. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained, “They say you can’t legislate morality, and that’s true, but you can regulate behavior. A law cannot make a man love me, but it can prevent him from lynching me and I think that’s pretty important also.”
1967 was four years after Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, three years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and two years after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. In November 1966, Edward Brooke, a moderate Republican from Massachusetts, became the first African American ever elected by popular vote to the United States Senate. Yet millions of black Americans were still treated as second-class citizens and many had run out of patience. At great cost, including the death of many civil rights workers (and four young schoolgirls), there had been integration of lunch counters and buses, and voter registration of African Americans had begun in the South, but patterns of discrimination in housing, employment, banking, and the criminal justice system persisted in both the North and the South, and the wounds of generations of racist orthodoxy festered.
These and other factors that no white person could completely understand created the context in which Gil Scott-Heron, who could have gotten a scholarship to an Ivy League school, decided to attend Lincoln University, a historically black college where Langston Hughes, one of Gil’s idols, had gone. It turned out to be the perfect place for Gil to transform his musical and poetic brilliance into the contemporary culture of the time. It was there that he first heard the Last Poets, who gave him a model for how to integrate a political sensibility into jazz and R&B, and it’s also where he met Brian Jackson, who would become a longtime collaborator and bandmate.
Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman were among many in the white counterculture who had gone south to work in the civil rights movement earlier in the decade. Several whites, including Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and Viola Liuzzo, had been murdered by racists.
The moral power of the civil rights movement reverberated in the part of white America I grew up in through writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Claude Brown, whose Manchild in the Promised Land deeply moved me as a teenager. There was a renaissance of black comedy exemplified by older, subversive “blue” comics like Redd Foxx and Moms Mabley, and civil rights pioneers Dick Gregory and Bill Cosby—who had both black and white fans.
In San Francisco, the predominantly black Fillmore district bordered the Haight, and Roy Ballard, inspired by the Diggers, created Black Man’s Free Store. Peter Coyote recalls, “When we found supermarkets resistant to long-haired freaks, we could always send a white woman with a baby there to get the cast-off food we would then give away. Blacks couldn’t get the same result, so we’d send our people to get food for their project as well.” Efforts like these were meaningful on a micro level, but on a mass scale the consequences of generations of cultural segregation and racist oppression loomed quite large.
Stokely Carmichael
Malcolm X’s influence grew even greater after his death. Not long before he was killed, he had said that blacks shouldn’t let whites into their organizations because regardless of how noble the intent, eventually whites would get a disproportionate amount of control through the influence of money. In January 1966, Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the organization changed from an interracial, integrationist, nonviolent civil rights group into one embodying a secular version of Malcom’s philosophy. This dynamic also took hold at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been formed in 1960 and quickly became one of the most effective grassroots organizations in the South. By 1967, whites had been expelled from most of its chapters and boards, and the charismatic twenty-five-year-old Stokely Carmichael had been elected president, replacing John Lewis—the last president of the organization who believed in nonviolence.
Carmichael had graduated from Howard University as a philosophy major, but inspired by the civil rights movement, he went south and led voter registration efforts for SNCC in Lowndes County, Alabama. He was arrested dozens of times and was horrified by the cruel brutality of the white Southern cops. (He served forty-nine days at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm prison.)
The first thing Carmichael did in his new role was to withdraw SNCC from an upcoming White House Conference on Civil Rights. He wanted to immediately differentiate the new iteration of SNCC from its past, and shortly thereafter he found an ideal rhetorical way to do so with the slogan “Black Power,” which was also the name of a book that Carmichael would coauthor in 1967. The phrase had appeared in Richard Wright’s 1954 book of the same name and had recently been adapted by SNCC’s Willie Ricks. However, it was Carmichael who injected “Black Power” into the national conversation in a widely covered speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, following the March Against Fear, at which civil rights hero James Meredith had been shot. Carmichael, who had the looks of a movie star, was a mesmerizing speaker: “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain’t going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!”
In the summer of 1966, Carmichael was one of the first black leaders to oppose the war in Vietnam, and in a speech at Berkeley, he popularized the chant, “Hell no, we won’t go!” And it was Carmichael who first said, “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”
Because of his affinity for the mass media, some in the movement mocked him as “Starmichael,” but it was that media savvy that took radical views into the living rooms of Middle America. On the CBS news show Face the Nation, Carmichael, dressed in a conservative suit and tie, flashed a Dennis the Menace smile as he calmly refused to rule out violence if injustice to African Americans persisted. He called for black soldiers serving in Vietnam to return and instead fight for voting rights at home. (“Are you calling for desertion?” CBS’s Martin Agronsky asked incredulously.)
For a time, Carmichael made a point of criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. When King asked for a suspension of picketing outside the White House for the wedding of President Johnson’s daughter Luci, Carmichael sent King a telegram: “You have displayed more backbone in defending Luci than you have shown for the colored people of Vietnam being napalmed by Luci’s father.” Carmichael proudly asserted that “LBJ could stand in front of Congress and say, We shall overcome, but he will never say, We want Black Power.” At some protests, SNCC signs read, Save Us from Our Black Leaders, referred to King as an Uncle Tom, and mocked him as Black Jesus.
Yet, as Dick Gregory pointed out in his memoir Callus on My Soul, “As militantly as the White press portrayed Stokely, he only got into one fight during the entire Movement. As much as he and Dr. King differed, the only physical altercation Stokely ever had was when somebody pushed Dr. King during a demonstration.” When King gave a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta reiterating opposition to the Vietnam War, he invited Carmichael to attend and
the SNCC leader applauded respectfully from a pew in the first row.
For his part, King refused to lend SCLC’s name to a New York Times ad signed by seven other mainstream civil rights groups repudiating Black Power. He understood that Stokely Carmichael had a different constituency than he did. He explained to Andrew Young, “If Stokely is saying the same thing I am saying, he becomes like my assistant.”
Carmichael saw the freedom movement of American blacks in the context of what he viewed as an international struggle for justice. In July 1967, he traveled to Cuba and was seated as a delegate at a convention held by the Organization of Latin American Solidarity. Later that year, he visited Communist China and North Vietnam. Even so, Carmichael was disappointed by the dogmatism and authoritarianism of Communist regimes. In February of 1968 he said that communism and socialism were not ideologies “suited for black people.” He advocated an African ideology “which speaks to our blackness. Nothing else.”
Carmichael became an immediate target of the political establishment. A week before he was elected governor of California, Ronald Reagan sent a posturing telegram to Carmichael asking him to cancel all of his speeches in California, as if the mere presence of the SNCC leader would lead to public catastrophe.
Carmichael only served as president of SNCC for one year. He was succeeded by the equally radical H. Rap Brown, who soon became known for the quote, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” In 1968, Carmichael married South African singer Miriam Makeba, and in 1969 he renamed himself Kwame Ture and moved to Guinea. Until the end of his life, Ture remained a thought leader among African Americans. He often answered the phone by asking, “Ready for the revolution?”
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 14
