A New Nation?
By Bob Young
Bath Festival Program, June 1970
Most people at Bath will be aware of the spiritual and political hopes which were inspired by Woodstock and will have some sense of the importance of rock music in the American protest movement. In Britain we have had rock and student protest and festivals, but these aspects of the Underground (culture of young people) have not come together with anything like the coherence and intensity of the American scene.
We have asked Bob Young to spell out the history of pop music and its relations with protest and festivals in order to provide a perspective on our own experience.
'I came upon a child of God./ He was walking along the road,/ and I asked him where are you going,/ and this he told me./ I'm goin on down to Yasgur's farm;/ I'm gonna join in a rock and roll band;/ I'm gonna camp out on the land;/ I'm gonna try and get my soul free./ We are staggers, we are fallin,/ and we got to get ourselves back to the Garden./
'By the time we got to Woodstock we were half a million strong,/ And everywhere there was song and celebration./ And I dreamed I saw the bombers ridin' shotgun in the sky,/ And they were turnin into butterflies above our Nation./ We are staggers (million year old carbon), we are golden (caught in the Devil's bargain)./ And we got to get ourselves back to the Garden.'
– Joni Mitchell, 'Woodstock'. Ladies of the Canyon (Reprise RSLP 6376)
Childlike innocence, back to the Garden (of Eden), rock & roll, and a dream of bombers turning into butterflies – all centred on Max Yasgur's dairy farm at Woodstock, New York. A new faith, even a new Nation. Do they really hang together, and if so, how? Of course they do, but the connections have to be shown and the risks known. Let's look first at the relationship between popular music and social change and then at the role of festivals. Anyone who thinks history and long arguments are mystifying can stop reading after two sentences from Jerry Rubin: 'The New Left sprang a predestined pissed-off child, from Elvis' gyrating pelvis .... Yippies believe that there can be no social revolution without a head revolution and no head revolution without a social revolution.' (Do it! pp.17,84).
THE ROOTS OF ROCK
If we look behind Elvis we find that various kinds of popular and folk music played an important part in bringing alienated people together to keep up their spirits or to produce social change. Modern rock music grew out of a fusion of several traditions, and each of them provided a kind of strength in resignation and solidarity: black music, country & western, and folk-protest. Field hollers did it for slaves and prisoners working on plantations, in chain gangs, and in levee camps. Spirituals and gospel music did it for black people gathering in country churches and urban ghettoes. The blues were a secular transformation of this music, expressing individual laments, while jazz conveyed a more exuberant feeling as it was played in brothels and especially in the celebrations at funerals. It was music by the exploited, and its language was necessarily veiled and symbolic. Black men could talk about justice, comfort, and a fair share of wealth in another life, not this one. They could tell individual stories of lost loves, fecklessness, bad luck, and sheer meanness as long as the real causes of their misery were not mentioned. The protest was implicit and was felt in the soul of the music. And when the white man imitated and commercialized jazz, the black made it even more inaccessible by creating the private language of Be-bop, which became modern jazz.
The poor white man may have had the consolation of having something between him and the bottom of society – the black man – but his social and economic woes were nearly as bad. White share-croppers and railroad workers also had the blues, and they learned to sing them from the blacks, but they expressed them in a different language. They married the blues to the traditional mountain ballads which they developed from songs they had brought with them from Britain. As they moved further west in search of land and jobs, they created country & western music. The first white blues were also about poverty, sickness, hard work in the fields, bewilderment in the cities, and longing for a simple country life that probably never existed. 'The outcries of a poor farmer against the landlord or the credit system, or of a labourer against the lords of capital, have been few indeed. Instead, the southern rural white has more often directed his protest against other factors in society, usually individual personal misfortunes. The sorrows of this world, fatalistically explained as the fruits of individual error or as divine payments for past sins, are expressed through songs of self-pity or of yearning for solace through heaveraly reward. But the system that produced these sorrows is seldom attacked.' (Bill Malone, Country Music, U.S.A., p.134)
The first large-scale commercial recordings in the 1920's were of black blues and jazz and of white country & western music. They sold fantastically well, because they reflected the woes and hopes of people who couldn't do much else about their lot except sing. Of course, the record companies knew how to exploit the 'race' and 'country' markets. You might say that they 'met' a real need: no matter how bad the Depression got in the 1930's, poor people still bought radios and discs. There were country radio stations, nationwide country shows; and country music on the juke boxes (of which there were 300,000 by the late '30s). There were also low-powered 'race' stations broadcasting to every black urban ghetto and plenty of commercial recordings for them. Thus, black music goes in a direct line from slave ships to gospel and spirituals to rural and then urban blues, to rhythm & blues and on to Soul and Tamala Motown.
But none of this music called explicitly for social and political change. It reflected oppression, exploitation, and alienation but didn't dare to call for action. It lamented the results but couldn't name the causes, much less attack them. It's impossible to understand rock and its revolutionary potential without having some sense of how much frustration and passion was had to come out in thee music of the black blues and of the white country and western music. The words mattered, but the real message was poured into the soul of the sound. That's why the appeal of the music extends beyond cultural and language barriers. This is why we don't find it as strange – and even offensive and presumptious – as we might that there are plenty of white blues groups who perform in a black style, right down to the accents. This tradition has been carried forward by an increasing number of white blues bands, especially Paul Butterfield, The Blues Project, Bloomfield & Kooper (in various groups), Canned Heat, John Mayall, and his groups' amazing progeny: Clapton, Peter Green, Keef Hartley. Others, less traditional but still in the blues idiom, are experimenting and deepening the style: Procul Harum, Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Velvet Underground. As a recent British record jacket said, 'The Blues is the alpha and omega of pop music, to which nearly all our talented young musicians return in search of themselves.' (Anthology of British Blues Immediate IMAL 03/04)
MY GENERATION
I KNOW that this is a long way from Woodstock, Joni Mitchell and Jerry Rubin, but we're getting there. Don't forget that Bill Haley and Elvis were originally country & western artists; their genius lay in a fusion of country & western with the beat and intenslty of black rhythm & blues. Lonnie Donegan's 'Rock Island Line', which launched the skittle craze, was an old Leadbelly number. The Everly Brothers were the sons of an old-time country guitarist from Kentucky. Buddy Holly developed his style from country & western beginnings in Texas. Carl Perkins, the son of a farmer from Tennessee, was a country & western star who wrote 'Blue Suede Shoes' and sold a million copies of it. The greatest country & western singer of the period just before rock & roll happened was Hank Williams, whose records were very popular on Merseyside. If you look at the earlier incarnation of the Beatles – the Quarrymen of 1956 – you'll see them dressed in western outfits. Finally, the Rolling Stones based their music on (and made their early hits by doing cover versions of) the black urban blues of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley. So, if we want to understand why rock & roll turned us on, we'd better have some idea of what went into the music which influenced early rock – and continues to do so in various revivals.
Some of the best rock music of the '50s and early '60s captured the symptoms of the alienation of teenagers from the values, the culture and the society of their elders. They were explicit about sex, about what a drag straight achievement is, about school, and about their generation's alienation. Haley said just 'Rock Around the Clock'; Elvis said he cared more about his 'Blue Suede Shoes' than anything else; Chuck Berry crossed over successfully into the white market by putting down school and advocating real living by dancing : 'Hail, hail, rock & roll; deliver me from the days of old.' ('School Days') Almost all of the early white hits were cover versions of black music. They had some of the soul; they had the beat. But it can't be said that they were any more explicit about changing society than their sources had been in pure black blues and country & western. The vibrations were right, the preoccupations were honest and accurate, but the content was often irrelevant. What did the 'Rock Island Line' mean to American – much less to British – kids? What was the message of 'Sh-Boom', 'Tutti Frutti', or 'Be-Bop-a-Lula'? Surely it was to 'Shake, Rattle and Roll', 'Rock Around the Clock', 'Roll Over Beethoven', and 'Twist and Shout'. It could and did produce a head revolution and eventually some very clear expressions of the alienation of young people, especially in Britain: 'My Generation' and 'Satisfaction' were explicit enough.
FOLK AND PROTEST
BUT HOW can we connect this with a real social revolution? Again, there's a short answer and a longer one. The short one is Bob Dylan. The longer one takes us from Dylan to the history of folk and protest music and moves by way of the history of the American Left to the CND and civil rights movements to the Viet Nam war and the New left. Then we have to go to Liverpool, to San Francisco, to Chicago, and finally to Woodstock.
One could not really expect real protest or a call for fundamental change from country & western or from black music. Racial discrimination helped the poor white man to feel that his lot was better than the black man's, and ignorance kept him from seeing his real plight. Black-men were probably much more sophisticated about their situation, but they knew better than to try to do anything about it. 'Both share-cropper and tenant-farmer had to "stay in good" with their White overlords, and in that period of strain during the twenties no Negro dared raise his voice aloud in protest or assert his rights when he was the victim of racial discrimination.' (Paul Oliver, The Meaning of the Blues, p.43) Anyone who did protest was a 'crazy nigger' and was simply killed. So, in order to see how pop developed its current ambiguous commitment to a head revolution and a socio-political revolution, we have to add the dimension of folk-protest music and look a long way behind Dylan to some people who were in a position to take greater risks than the poor blacks and whites in the South .
JOE HILL
Go back to 1915 when the government of Utah shot Joe Hill. The white Left in America – especially in the North and Northwest – did sing the protests which the blacks and the country & western singers only reflected and implied. I said a long way back that country music, gospel and blues contained symbolic protest. Joe Hill had a genius for translating these songs into explicit protest to lend solidarity to the trades union movement (The Industrial Workers of the World – the 'Wobblies') in the Pacific Northwest. For example, he transformed a traditional railroad song about 'Casey Jones', a 'brave' train driver, into 'Casey Jones, a Union Scab', whose train crashed because it had not been repaired by the corrupt company – and he went on driving it while his brothers were on strike. Similarly, Hill took an old Salvation Army hymn about 'The Sweet Bye and Bye' in heaven and re-wrote the chorus to say, 'You will eat bye and bye/ In that glorious land above the sky./ Work and pray, live on hay./ You'll get pie in the sky when you die.' Joe Hill was shot by a firing squad in Utah for allegedly murdering a shopkeeper, although many believed the charges to be trumped up, and in spite of a world-wide campaign to save him. (Philip Foner, The Case of Joe Hill)
WOODY GUTHRIE
Joe Hill was an inspiration to a lot of union people to write and sing their own protest songs, and by the 1930s the trades union movement had taken up country & western, folk, and hymns in a big way, substituting new verses to old tunes, verses about bosses, jobs, and capitalism which were used in the fight for union organization and rights. The most notable troubadour of this movement was Woody Guthrie, who wandered from his home in Oklahoma to California and then all over the country: 'Hard Travellin' and singing. Woody learned the blues from the terrible conditions and from worse family luck in Oklahoma, and went on to write and sing songs wherever he was. He was a romantic; he loved America and held simple, personal values. He didn't love capitalism, but he cared more about people than politics, and he thought they could be separated. His perspective was a lot like that of many people in the movement now. Indeed, he was the main inspiration for many of the best folk composers, who share his view that it's more to do with people than politics. No well worked-out structural critique of the system was called for, just a change of spirit and more sharing.
Here's a view Woody quotes in his autobiography about the Depression period: 'All of this talking about what's up in the sky, or down in hell, for that matter, isn't half as important as what's right here, right now, right in front of your eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids hungry. Sick. Everything. And people have just got to have more faith in one another, believe in each other. There's a spirit of some kind we've all got. That's got to draw us all together.' (Bound for Glory, p.305) Later he quotes another young man on the political side: 'That's what "social" means, me and you working on something together and owning it together. What the hell's wong with this, anybody – speak up! If Jesus Christ was sitting here right now, he'd say this very same damn thing. You just ask Jesus how the hell come a couple of thousand of us living out here in this jungle camp like a bunch of wild animals. You just ask Jesus how many millions of other folks are living the same way? Sharecroppers down South, big city people that work in factories and live like rats in slimy slums. You know what Jesus'll say back to you? He'll tell you we all just mortally got to work together, build things together, fix up old things together, clean out old filth together, put up new buildings, schools and churches, banks and factories together, and own everything together. Sure, they'll call it a bad ism. Jesus don't care if you call it socialism or communism, or just me and you.' (pp. 333-4)
ARLO
It seems remote and a bit quaint, but it's not as distant as you may think. Just about forty years later Woody's son, Arlo Guthrie, came to Britain for the opening of the film based on his song, 'Alice's Restaurant' and said this in an interview in the International Times: I'm not really involved with any organised movement. Because I don't think that political organisations are the things that cause problems. I mean I don't see the difference between Russia and the US in the alienation of its youth, of its people. All people – it's the same. I can't say about China, because I don't know. China's not so industrialised. But I don't think it's a political thing. The reason that people are dropping out man, is not because of political pressures but because of alienation, and I don't see that another political movement is going to help it. So I'm not involved politically, because I don't think that's where the problem lies – I think the problem is personal.
... We've all got to get hip. The world's going to have to get it all together, because this wreck is universal. I'm not interested in saving America from the American industrial complex, we've all got to pull it off together – like Cubans, Americans, Brazilians, and the Tibetan guys; and the – all at the same time. And I don't think we should actually DO anything as a movement until we have this connection. It can't rise up like a skyline with one building this high, and another that high – it's got to flow over evenly, like paint. I don't think it's possible to do something that large, politically. I think we can only do it spiritually.' (IT/74) It would be difficult to claim that either father or son had a well worked-out political programme. Neither thought that was the point.
UNIONS AND CIVIL RIGHTS
The protest on behalf of the migrant workers and unions was a transformation of the traditional songs into explicit terms, but its political aims were not concerned with fundamental structural change. At one extreme it called for adjustments and at the other it was pretty vague. It was long on hopes and utopian beliefs and short on plans and programmes for actually bringing about anything. Although their sympathies and beliefs were left wing (and often alleged to be communist), their programmes were pretty naive. After a few years travelling around and singing, Woody teamed up with Pete Seeger, a Harvard dropout, to form the Almanac Singers, the troubadours of the union organization movement in the 1940s. Here's the sort of thing they sang: 'I don't want your millions, mister,/ I don't want your diamond rings./ All I want is the right to live, mister./ Give me back my job again.
'We worked to build this country, mister,/ While you enjoyed a life of ease./ You've stolen all that we built, mister./ Now our children starve and freeze. 'Think me dumb if you wish, mister./ Call me green or blue or red./ This one thing I sure know, mister/ My hungry babies must be fed.
'Take the two old parties, mister,/ No difference in them I can see./ But with a Farmer-Labor Party/ We could set the people free.' ('All I Want', Talking Union, Folkways FH 5285)
The lineal descendants of the Almanac Singers were The Weavers (Pete Seeger and Lee Hays were in both groups), and they succeeded in bringing some watered-down folk music to the Hit Parade. Most of their songs were traditional folk or rather vague protest, but they were the public expression of a very wide folk movement which kept the student Left and their old-line elders alive in the dark days of McCarthyism in America. Singing folk songs at Hootenannies in the early '50s was a pale shadow of political action, but the style and mood of the gatherings was very like the spirit of more recent folk and pop festivals. The folkniks were the political wing of the growing sense of alienation and solidarity which rock & roll was just beginning to express for a wider public on the Hit Parade. The Hoots were the only place where the politically blacklisted victims of the anti-communist witchhunts and their svmpathizers ('fellow travellers') could get together and keep their spirits up. Seeger and other left wing folk singers were very effectively persecuted by the McCarthyites. He left the Weavers and was banned from television and much of radio. He was also tried for not being willing to speak of his friends' private confidences. (Holding that personal value was called 'taking the Fifth Amendment' and led to prosecution and being charged with contempt.) He had a long struggle but was free to play a part in the civil rights movement.
Beginning in 1956 with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and leading on to the civil struggles of the late '50s and to the first student sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, black student apathy resignation were coming to an end. As the sit-ins spread, the participants sang, but they didn't have their own songs. They fell back on 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' and moved on to set new verses to current Hit Parade songs. When the first students got out of jail, they began going to workshops where the white singers from the old Left taught them new verses to 'We Shall Overcome'. Other workshops followed, where the inspiration of Woody Guthrie and the presence of Pete Seeger led the protesters to write their own songs and change others as they liked. By 1965 the civil rights movement was singing predominantly old Afro-American songs with new protest verses. The implicit hopes in the original songs for freedom were transformed (often only a word or two was needed) into demands for rights now. A wider public – especially students – drew strength from these songs of protest. They also attended festivals which had grown from jazz and folk to pop, and the participants became increasingly self-conscious. Not only did they share a taste for certain kinds of music but, increasingly, a way of life and a distaste – soon to grow into nausea – over society as they found it. (In case all this history has destroyed anyone's sense of dates, it may be worth recalling that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in the Summer of 1964 and empowered LBJ to take 'all steps necessary' to curb 'communist aggression' in Southeast Asia.)
DYLAN
The bridge from the folk and civil rights movements to rock and protest in the current manner is Dylan. He drew his inspiration from all of the main traditions: the country & western styles of Jimmie Rodgers, Merle Travis and Hank Williams; the black rural and urban blues of Leadoelly, Sonny Terry and Muddy Waters; and; above all, the folk and protest music of Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. He made a pilgrimage to Woody's bedside when he went East and dedicated a song on his first album to Woody, Cisco, Sonny, and Leadbelly. Dylan had travelled around the country like Woody, and he sang like Woody – harsh, nasal, straight. At that time he was very much a part of the folk movement and published some of his best songs in the folk magazine Broadside, as did Phil Ochs (who modelled his music on the styles of Hank Williams and Woody) and Tom Paxton (who had grown up in Guthrie country in Oklahoma). The Weavers, Pete Seeger, and Joan Baez (with whom Dylan toured in the early days) had paved the way from the relative isolation of the folk movement to the mainstream of pop music, and the Kingston Trio made a fortune singing pseudo-plastic folk on the Hit Parade. Dylan's first LP consisted of ten traditional tunes and two (non-political) songs written by him. But when Peter, Paul and Mary (a slick commercial folk group) introduced Dylan's 'Blowin' on the Wind' at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and went on to sell over a million copies, CBS saw something analogous to what the record companies had seen in the '30s: there's plenty of good money to be made by selling protesters with the tools and fantasies of the trade. So they turned Dylan loose on the record market to sing 'Freewheelin', and pop has never been the same since.
Dylan's influence on the content of pop has been greater than that of anyone else in bringing explicit social and political comment into the movement. However he may feel about it his views and the changes in his style have again and again led the way. His ballads prevent us from forgetting Hattie Carroll and Hollis Brown, the pawns in their game. The anti-war songs – 'A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall' and especially 'With God on Our Side' – gave expression to a generation whose alienation from militarism extended from the spirit of CND to the present war. 'Blowin' In the Wind' defined the spirit of the movement in its early days just as 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', written only two years later, provided a line which was interpreted by the most activist group of the American new left as an inspiration for urban guerilla warfare: 'You don't have to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.' Time and again, through successive changes of style and content, he has captured the spirit of young people's feelings. His songs form a history of the hopes and disillusionments of the movement: 'The Times They Are a Changin', 'Gates of Eden', 'It's All Over Now, Baby Blue', 'Desolation Row'. In 'Ballad of a Thin Man' he gave us the line which speaks straight to the straights: 'Something is happenin' and you don't know what it is, do you Mr Jones?' In 'As I Went Out One Morning' he conveys his – and many others' final disillusionment with the Liberal Establishment. And (in my opinion) best of all, 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)' says it all. (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper seem to agree, since they chose part of it for the climax of 'Easy Rider')
'A question in your nerves is lit,
Yet you know there is no answer
fit
To satisfy and assure you not to quit,
To keep it in your mind
and not forget
That it's not he or she or them or it
That you belong
to.
'Though the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the
fools,
I've got nothing, Ma, to live up to.
'For them that must
obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree,
Who despise
their jobs, their destiny,
Speak jealously of them that are free,
Do what they do just to be nothing more
Than something they invest
in.'
Dylan increasingly turned away from explicit politics. 'All at once Dylan is somewhere beneath the rationalizing cerebrum of social discourse, probing the nightmare deeps, trying to get at the tangled roots of conduct and opinion. At this point the project which the beats of the early fifties had taken up – the task of remodelling themselves, their way of life, their perceptions and sensitivities – rapidly takes precedence over the public task of changing institutions or policies'. (Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, p.63) From folk to protest to folk-rock to drugs, then back to folk and the revived simplicity of country & western. (It is reported that his forthcoming double album takes nostalgia even further – to traditional Hit Parade songs.) 'Lay, Lady, Lay', 'Tell Me that It Isn't True', 'Tonight I'll be Staying Here with You' – these songs, sung in a sweet and pure country & western style, take us all the way back into the head with nostalgia for a simple life in the country, on the land, where problems are purely personal and the world has no institutions. It may mean that he, and the many people who have followed the country & western revival, have come the long way home – through protest to innocence. Perhaps it's the point of Joni Mitchell's 'Woodstock', Matthews Southern Comfort's 'Please be my Friend' and 'Commercial Proposition' ('Everybody knows that all you have to do is dance and sing. Everything's alright.'). Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young say the same in 'Teach Your Children'. No Dylan, no 'Woodstock'.
But Woodstock was somehow supposed to unite simplicity and innocence with real hopes of political and social change. The solidarity of Woodstock Nation is supposed to be both innocent and politically effective, leading to fundamental social change. The music of the urban folk artists and of the union and civil rights movement (like that of CND in Britain) was calling for peace and piecemeal social reform, not for fundamental structural change and certainly not for revolution. The followers of the movement were also fragmented and had no coherent scene and no issue on which they could really unite on a large scale. The road to a union of the music with politics and a mass consciousness leads to California via Liverpool and WILL LEAD US TO CHICAGO AND WOODSTOCK.
THE CALIFORNIAN SCENE
IN THE period 1963-66 everything was happening. The Beatles happened; Lee Harvey Oswald happened; American soldiers in Viet Nam stopped pretending to be advisors. And somehow the movement began to take form in Califronia. Berkeley became the centre of student protest with the Free Speech Movement – a big bust, bringing together the issues of the war, the aims of education, the values of young people, and their conflict with the society which engendered that war and the impersonal educational system. For the first time in their own society (as opposed to altruistically doing it for the blacks), the students were prepared to lay it on the line and freak for peace and freedom.
BYRDS AND BEACH BOYS
New things were also happening besides the Beatles and Dylan. The Byrds happened. Ex-cowboys and ex-folksingers joined an ex-member of the Chad Mitchell Trio to sing Dylan as folk-rock (Mr Tambourine Man'; 'Turn, Turn, Turn') and took it to Los Angeles. They went right on in the heady California atmosphere into acid-rock ('Eight Miles High') and then went the whole way to pioneer the country & western revival (Sweetheart of the Rodeo) and then to produce the pure dulcet of 'The Ballad of Easy Rider'. Their sound was and is a rock rendering of traditional styles, just as Lovin' Spoonful had commercialized a purer country sound well before the revival.
When all this started to have an impact on the California scene, the reigning group was the Beach Boys. They had a great sound and the genius of Brian Wilson's composing, but the content of their music was a teen version of pure Middle America. It was new in that it was not a transformation of black music, as most of rock & roll had been. It was about the preoccupations of upper middle class high school kids: everybody could afford to surf all day; everyone had a very fancy hot rod and his own phone; they all went to summer camp and had plenty of money to spend at the amusement parks. Parents weren't very nice and might even become vindictive enough to take away one's Ford Thunderbird. Not a whisper about the basis for the lavish life or a hint that anyone might be missing out on it. Some say that the Beach Boys began fading for personal and musical reasons, but it's just as likely that after the musical triumphs of Summer Days and Pet Sounds (19661, it just wasn't on to sing that way about those things any longer, unless you did it as Frank Zappa or the Fugs did.
FRANK ZAPPA
The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out also happened in 1966, and its sheer brilliance and total mastery of modern music, coupled with its celebration of sick, just seemed more appropriate to the times than the Beach Boys. The Mothers were as freaky as the Beach Boys were clean. No one could mistake Frank Zappa for Brian Wilson. Absolutely Free followed with 'Plastic People' and songs on the meaningful relationships with vegetables which must have made the Beach Boys want to buy up every copy of their Smiley Smile so no one could possibly juxtapose Zappa's tracks with their 'Vegetables'. Whether or not the contrast was intentional, it was clear that the Beach Boys no longer 'spoke to the condition' of American kids, except on the Hit Parade.
The scene had dramatically shifted to San Francisco, and Zappa's 'Who Needs the Peace Corps' (appropriately revived to illustrate life in trendy Chicago in 'Medium Cool') can serve as one perspective on the hippie thing: 'What's there to live for? Who needs the Peace Corps? I think I'll just drop out. I'll go too Frisco, buy a wig and sleep on Owsley's (the Acid King) floor. Walked past the wig store; danced at the Fillmore. I'm completely stoned. I'm hippie and I'm trippy and a gypsy on my own. I'll stay a week and get the crabs and take a bus back home. I'm really just a phony, but forgive me 'cause I'm stoned. Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet – psychedelic dungeons popping up on every street. Go to San Francisco. How I love you, how I love you, Frisco ... Oh, my hair's getting good in the back. First I'll buy some beads and then a leather band to go around my head, some feathers and bells and a book of Indian lore. I will ask the Chamber of Commerce how to get to Haight Street and smoke an awful lot of dope. I will wander around barefoot. I will have a psychedelic gleam in my eye at all times. I will love everybody. I will love the police as they kick the shit out of me on the street. I will sleep. I will go to a house where there is a rock & roll band, 'cause the groups all live together, and I will join a rock & roll band. I will be their road manager, and I will stay there, and I will get the crabs. But I won't care.' (We're Only in It for the Money. Verve V/V6-5045)
THE SAN FRANCISCO SCENE
In spite of the validity of Zappa's put down, and a lot of phony and plastic things about the San Francisco hippie scene, it is still true that the latter played a crucial part in the development of the music and the life styles of young people in America (and even cast a pale shadow to Middle Earth at the Roundhouse in London). There's no point in trying to write much about it: it's been done very well. Ralph Gleason has reported the musical scene in The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound, along with excellent interviews with the members of the Airplane and with Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe connects the music of the Dead with the way of life of Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and Hell's Angels. With Kesey and the Pranksters freaking everyone out and trying to turn on the whole countryside and the Family Dog trying to create a scene – to make San Francisco 'the American Liverpool' – it all happened. (The presence of Neal Cassady in the Pranksters even provided a direct link with the Beat Generation of Kerouac, and Alan Ginsberg also made both scenes.)
San Francisco created a way of life around rock music and drugs. It was the headiest music yet. The basis was blues, but the experience was transformed by light shows, the gatherings in old auditoriums (especially the Fillmore), the parks, the beaches. Add pot and acid and turn up the volume to produce sheer AMPS. And play. Elvis and the Beatles and the Stones moved people; the San Francisco sound blew their minds. It grew out of folk, blues, county & western and rock, but it grew so loud and heavy that nothing mattered but the sheer physical experience. The first generation of San Francisco groups was The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Quicksilver Messenger Service. Then there was Moby Grape and Country Joe and the Fish. By the so-catted 'third generation' Creedence Clearwater Revival (who had been around a long time) were reviving a purer rock & roll sound and are now hitting it big, but you can recognise the San Francisco base by the amps. Elsewhere in California there were the Byrds, the Mothers, and Captain Beefheart. I'm not saying more about Zappa or anything about Beefheart, because all you need to do is listen and see them. Its both futile and sacrilegious to try to explain them (OK, Frank, you can put that down, too.)
The people on the San Francisco scene were against the war and increasingly against the whole structure of the society, but many of its devotees were mostly concerned with finding their own way of life rather than with cluttering up their newly purified minds with political hassles.
So the sense of a real scene was created in San Francisco, but it was almost a pure head scene – an island of Dionysiac revelry, centred on mystical mind expansion. Each dance was a total environment of psychedelic light and sound, shutting out society, shutting out the war. It was difficult to imagine this scene being carried over into really changing society. Kesey had tried that in an apolitical way and got hounded out of the country and into a paranoid trip to Mexico for his troubles.
COUNTRY JOE
Country Joe MacDonald's hate was a tiny bit more controlled and therefore more effective. It comes through best on 'Superbird', 'The Streets of Your Town', 'The Harlem Song'. There are also some great vignettes: 'Please don't drop that H bomb on me – go drop it on yourself.' 'Now if you're tired and a bit run down – can't seem to get your feet off the ground – maybe you ought to try a little bit of LSD. Only if you want to shake your head and rattle your brain – maybe act just a little insane – give your psychic energy to me. Eat flowers and kiss babies. LSD for you and me.' And, of course, there's the 'Fish Cheer'. But most of all, they have given us one of the very few songs which can rank with the best of the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan and The Who: 'I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-to-Die-Rag'. What Joan Littlewood tried to do in the whole of 'Oh, What a Lovely War', Joe did in just over three minutes. The ricky-ticky zaniness, the beat which makes you dance, and the lyrics which have to be shouted with pure ironic hate, say it all. If everyone could get his mind around that song and get that song around his mind, and then act, we'd be there.
CHECAGO
After Kesey, the Fugs, and Country Joe, the other Marx Brothers are Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. They all have a marvellous and deadly sense of whimsy. I haven't read Hoffman's books, so I'll stick to Rubin's Do it! Scenarios of the Revolution. Read it and you'll see that it is not absurd for him to have merged his Berkeley political experience with the hippie scene to form (with Hoffman) the Youth International Party – the Yippies. Nor, as events have shown, was it absurd to go to Czechago in 1968. Here's how Rubin tried to get it together: 'Yippies are revolutionaries. We have merged New Left politics with a psychedelic life-style. Our life-style – acid, long hair, freaky clothes, pot, rock music – is the Revolution. Our very existence mocks America. The old order is dying. The Democratic Party is dying. While it dies we will celebrate the Festival of Life. Come to Chicago! We are the politics of the future!' (Rolling Stone 55, where the best reporting on the Chicago trial appears) Mayor Daley did just what they'd hoped. He took their absurd exaggerations seriously. There was a riot – a police riot according to an independent inquiry – and the Convention Delegates and the news media saw it all. Indeed; many of them were victims of it, and all Amerika saw it on television. Then, as if they hadn't played enough into the protesters' hands, Nixon ordered them all charged with intending to riot. Having shown the reality of American police and political power, the Establishment went right on to put the judicial system on trial. Bobby Seale kept asking for his constitutional right to represent himself. Gag him, ordered Judge Julius the Just. Give him jail for contempt of court. Lots of jail, lost of contempt – enough for ever body. Give Seale four years; give lawyer Kunstler even more, and give the others from two months to two years. Rock and protest music was at the heart of the convention and the trial. One of the (disallowed) questions the defence wanted to use to help identify prospective jurors who might be sympathetic was, 'Do you know who the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, Phil Ochs, or the Fugs are?' At the trial they allowed Pete Seeger to recite 'Wasn't That a Time', a '50s song about the history of Americans fighting for freedom. Arlo Guthrie recited 'Alice's Restaurant'. Country Joe started to sing 'I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-to-Die-Rag', but singing wasn't okay, and the judge ordered a cop to put a hand over Joe's mouth.
It's easy to see that Czechago was a festival which united the music and the life style with real impact on the structure of American politics. A lot of very gentle, nice people got busted, and a lot more were radicalized. As we turn from it to other festivals, the connection isn't so clear. Monterey, Toronto, and lots of others. Altamont taught us something – that there's no magic in just saying we'll hold a festival.
WOODSTOCK
NOW let's go back to Woodstock and to Joni Mitchell's dream. I hope it has been established that various forms of pop music have made a difference and have helped to produce some piecemeal social and political change. It is also the one unifying element in the Underground and the counter culture. It is plausible to claim, as Andrew Chester and Richard Merton did, that rock music 'provides a complex structure of values of a new order to match the revolutionary changes in social relations that are on the agenda in the advanced capitalist countries.' (New Left Review 59).
Here are some of the things Rolling Stone reporters said about Woodstock: A half a million kids got together for fun and music and had nothing but fun and music. While they were there they sloughed away a life style that wasn't theirs and groped for one that is. No one in America has seen a society 'so free of repression'. Woodstock was seen as the 'model of how good we will all feel after the revolution.' 'This is not to say that repression has vanished overnight, or vanished at all, but rather that the festival created and provided a place of freedom.' But, as someone said, 'The system didn't change, it just accommodated the freaks for a weekend.'
GETTING IT TOGETHER
This raises the question I have been posing in different forms throughout this article. How much has the music really freed people from oppression and repression, and how much is it a subtle accommodation with them? Gospel and blues, country & western, even folk and protest were consolations. They gave strength, they even helped to produce some changes in the real world, but they always led, in the end, away from total commitment to the kinds of integrated social and political and personal changes that people dream of when they invoke the word 'Revolution'. I don't know the elements of the structural critique that is required to achieve those changes, nor can I specify the role of rock and festivals in it. But I do know that we should be aware of an alternative interpretation of the function of rock and festivals, an interpretation which shows that we may very well be in danger diverting our energies from achieving and implementing that critique. I'm not suggesting that we must choose between the music and the festivals on the one hand and hard-headed politics on the other. If we lose the spirit of the music, we lose the political and social and personal integration as well. But if we think the head revolution is enough on its own, we are leading ourselves into the same blind alley that earlier manifestations of the music have done.
Some people are delighted with single-minded concentration on the head scene and are even prepared to tolerate a few 'peaceful' demonstrations, believing that to encourage these activities dissipates a threat to their power and drains off essential energies into marginal self-gratification.
There was some pretty convincing evidence of this in the Washington demonstration over the invasion of Cambodia and the killing of the Kent State students. In the middle of the night before the demonstration Nixon went to the Lincoln Memorial and talked to some students. When he discovered some were from California he is reported to have talked about surfing and wished them a pleasant stay in Washington. The next day, at a press conference, he referred to the protest of hundreds of thousands of young people gathered before the White House as a 'safety valve' a guarantee against revolutionary change.
The demonstrators were outraged by the dismissive description of their coming together and their heartfelt singing of John Lennon's mantra, 'Give Peace a Chance', as a 'safety valve valve'. But it was a safety valve, as witnessed by the fact that nothing exploded, and the American troops are still in Cambodia, while the South Vietnamese are likely to remain there. It's not enough to sing to ourselves or even to the President. It is necessary to bring into being the truth of the songs. No one denies that tolerating legitimate dissent is good, but it shoufd also be noticed that this toleration can often produce a more subtle form of repression, the repression that comes from tolerance which pays no heed to the protest.
REPRESSIVE TOLERANCE
It was said of Woodstock that mass politics can't yet be organized around the nausea over society as we find it. 'Political radicals have to see the cultural revolution as a sea in which they can swim, like the black militants in 'black culture'. But the urges are roaming, and when the dope freaks and nude swimmers and loveniks and ecological cultists and music groovers find out that they have to fight for love, all fucking hell will break loose.' (Rolling Stone 42). As long as we are tolerated and tolerable, we are only living in the interstices of the system. If that's where we want to live, as they did in San Francisco and as they do in hippie communes, then that's a decision to be made. If we make that decision, we have to stop cheapening the meaning of the idea of revolution. At the moment, 'the revolution' is big business for record companies, film makers (from this point of view 'The Strawberry Statement' is worth seeing as an object lesson), publishers, and the manufacturers of the paraphernalia of hippiedom. We can buy the books and the records and the clothes and go to the festivals and have our little hiding places in the society as it now is. We can do it on weekends and in private. But if that's what we are going to do, then let's call the fantasies fantasies and leave it at that.
FANTASIES
Some of the fantasies are quite attractive, and they seem to make people feel nice and even important. Mick Jagger said, 'I'm interested in the idea of an alternative society growing out of what's happened in the last few years. Not a specific hippie thing or even drugs thing, but just a general re-evaluation of things that a lot of people are getting into, which is beginning to threaten a lot of barriers that old-style society has put up. I think it will mean the ending of one society and the starting up of another rather than a natural flow of just changing the old society into the new one.' (IT/31 ). More recently he announced that 'We live in the days before the apocalypse. So it's honest for the music to reflect that.' (Rolling Stone 54). People sit back and wait for an apocalypse. It's not going to just happen one day all by itself, Mick.
The Beatles aren't trying to produce any sort of structural change: they made a choice: 'You say you'll change the Constitution./ Well, you know, we all want to change your head./ You tell me it's the institution./ Well, you know, you'd better free your mind instead.' ('Revolution'). Why do we have to choose? John and Yoko say, 'Everybody's talking about revolution, evolution, masturbation, castration, United Nations, meditation, copulation, alienation. All we are saying is give peace a chance.' ('Give Peace a Chance'.) Peace is today not something you can ask for, or recommend, or just hope for. It's something that you have to struggle actively to win.
The Jefferson Airplane have moved from pure head music to protest. Volunteers is full of protest and obscenity and calls for solidarity, but (as Ramparts pointed out) a few songs and a few swear words tolerated by RCA don't make a revolution. John Mayall reminds us of the martyrdom of Lenny Bruce and sings 'The Laws Must Change', but once again somebody has to make it happen.
It's not as though we haven't been given help in thinking about the relationship between real and illusory freedom. Tommy is all about the real and the illusory in the vibrations and the mystical and religious aspects of pop, and 'Easy Rider' is a morality play about illusions of freedom, brilliantly illustrated with tracks from Steppenwolf, the Byrds, the Band, Jimi Hendrix, and Dylan, among others.
BEWARE
I'm not saying that these developments in the music and the views of pop stars are useless. Their exhortations have fused the soul ot the music with content that can begin to make a difference, but that is only a beginning. Jerry Rubin makes the point nicely. 'Beware of the longhair who says he's more "revolutionary than thou" because he's "beyond politics". Beware the guru who thinks that his thing – be it scientology, astrology, meditation, vegetarianism, rock music or pacifism – will make the revolution all by itself.' (Do it! p.235).
If we confuse a symbol of a fantasv with the reality, we'll never bring about the reality. Herbert Marcuse was right about this. All of the repression in society is not, as Freud tended to think, essential to the development of civilization. Much of it is a result of a particular historical system (and I don't just mean capitalism: read The First Circle and remember Czechoslovakia), whose rulers create surplus repression for their own ends, which, in fact, run contrary to the needs of human liberation. Much of what Freud considered to be necessary for the maintenance of civilization, can be seen as an extra component of repression which might be removed in a different society. Similarly, much of what is called 'being realistic' is somebody else's idea of how you should perform in order to abide by his rules. These conceptions are an antidote to cultural conservatism and pessimism.
On the other hand, there is an equal and opposite danger that what we may think of as the removal of repression and the achievement of freedom may turn out to be a more or less subtle pseudo-freedom. Playboy ia not real sex; it's repressive desublimation. Similarly, drug experiences, freaky clothes, and moving to rock can serve as a way of binding us further to the system by giving the illusion of freedom from it. This need not be, but that's the danger. Marcuse has shown the strengths and the the weaknesses of music in Negations. 'To be sure , the sinister spell can be broken: by the power of the poet and singer, even before the historical, the real break with deception and exploitation has occurred. But the poet and singer can give to such words a new and revolutionary connotation only if his speech and song subvert the established meaning not merely symbolically but also literally, that is to say, if he cancels this meaning by translating the impossible into the possible, the mystical absurd into the real absurd, the metaphysical utopia into the historical utopia, the second into the first coming, redemption into liberation liberation.' (p.239) .
HAVE A NICE TIME AT BATH
NOW let's go back to Chicago and Woodstock. Gene Marine sums up the issue nicely. 'While Woodstock Nation is a lovely and hopeful conception, it wasn't Woodstock but Chicago. The others don't count, really – the ones who wear the hair and the clothes and listen to the music and smoke the dope but sh shrug off the politics and the war and just stay inside their clouds. They lose either way ... Thank you Richard J. Daley, and your pigs too ... A lot of us thought that choosing a lifestyle need not le a political thing – until Chicago.' (Rolling Stone 55.)
One more point. This has been an almost wholly American story. Britain is not America. In some ways it is more repressive and in some ways more genuinely tolerant. We imported rock & roll in the '50s and re-exported a much better music ten years later. Now we are importing the dream of Woodstock Nation. Like the early rock & roll, its basis is not perfectly suited to our condition, but at a deeper level its promise is very moving. As we take it in and begin to make our contribution to it, perhaps we can find a way of retaining the values of the music and integrating it with a fundamental structural critique, which – in theory and practice – can provide a real hope of a cultural, social and political revolution.
(You can get a reading list on pop, the Underground, and related political issues by sending an S.A.E. to The Pop Scene, BBC London W1A 1AA).
BOB YOUNG is an American who has lived in Britain for the last ten years. He does research in Cambridge on social, scientific and political theory. He is also Graduate Tutor at Kings College, where he runs a programme in avant-garde art and music. He has been broadcasting on the history and significance of pop in the BBC Radio Three series 'The Pop Scene'. He is from Dallas, Texas, and grew up in the midst of the music which led to rock and roll and the politics which led to Cambodia. He came to Britain just before the Liverpool scene began.
Note. Read more about the author of this article, Robert M. Young, and his works: Revolutions in the head: Darwin, Malthus and Robert M. Young.