1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (21 page)

On March 2, Johnson ordered the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign, and on March 8 the first combat troops, thirty-five hundred marines, landed at China Beach to protect the air base in Da Nang. There were already twenty-three thousand American military advisers training the South Vietnamese. Gen. William Westmoreland’s strategy was attrition: kill as many Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops as possible until they give up.

Operation Rolling Thunder’s mission was to bomb the North Vietnamese until they stopped sending men, weapons, and supplies to the Viet Cong in South Vietnam. It meant destroying their factories and their ability to transport aid to the south. But the North Vietnamese split their factories into smaller buildings and hid them in caves and villages. Some villages moved into tunnels up to a hundred feet underground, complete with kitchens, medical stations, wells, and rooms for families.
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Small supply trains or truck convoys drove at night along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was covered by jungle foliage and not visible to bombers. Often, young girls helped conduct the traffic. When trucks were not available, men pushed supplies in wheelbarrows, with more strapped to their backs. When bridges were blown up, they were replaced with ferries or bamboo planks bound together, or pontoons made of boats tied to each other and camouflaged, or underwater bridges. During the first year of Rolling Thunder, ninety-seven thousand North Vietnamese volunteered to repair the destruction inflicted; a half million more citizens helped part time.
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The U.S. Air Force had designed its supersonic fighters and trained its pilots to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, so they were unprepared for dogfights when the North Vietnamese ambushed them with elderly subsonic Soviet fighter jets.
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Often the Americans were forced to drop their bomb loads earlier than intended. (The Americans’ need for a new air battle strategy eventually resulted in the Topgun and other pilot training programs.)
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Meanwhile, the Soviet Union and China supplied North Vietnam with antiaircraft weapons; 80 percent of American air losses came from these.
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On July 28, Johnson increased the number of troops from 75,000 to 125,000, which nearly doubled the men drafted per month, from 17,000 to 35,000. Within two years, the United States would have 500,000 men in South Vietnam, roughly the population of Fresno, California, today. Ultimately, the war would result in 58,286 American deaths. Estimates of Vietnamese deaths from the war from 1965 to 1975 range from 791,000 to 1,141,000.

*   *   *

On March 16,
an eighty-two-year-old peace activist named Alice Herz immolated herself in Detroit to protest American involvement in the war.

Eight days later, on March 24 and 25, at the nearby University of Michigan, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held the first large-scale “teach-in” about the Vietnam War, with talks, films, debates, and music about the conflict, drawing thirty-five hundred attendees. Two months later, on the other side of the country, at Berkeley, a thirty-six-hour teach-in attracted ten thousand to thirty thousand people on May 21–23. Pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, Buddhist Alan Watts, comedian Dick Gregory, novelist Norman Mailer, and folk singer Phil Ochs were among the speakers and performers. President Johnson was hanged in effigy, and draft cards were burned. “Burn yourselves, not your cards,” pro-war demonstrators retorted.
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During the Berkeley teach-in, socialist Paul Montauk and Jerry Rubin formed the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC). Rubin was a graduate student at Berkeley when the Free Speech Movement shut down the campus the year before, to fight for the right to fund-raise for the civil rights movement. That year he also joined a group of eighty-four students who visited Cuba illegally, later recalling, “As [Castro’s second-in-command] Che [Guevara] rapped on for four hours, we fantasized taking up rifles. Growing beards. Going into the hills as guerrillas. Joining Che to create revolutions throughout Latin America. None of us looked forward to returning home to the political bullshit in the United States.”
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But he had returned, and now he announced that the VDC’s “purpose was to create theatrical, disruptive events to make Vietnam an issue in people’s lives.”
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In the early 1950s, the so-called Silent Generation that preceded the baby boomers grimly acceded to the Korean draft. And during the early days of the Vietnam War, a vast majority of younger Americans showed support for military intervention. Thus, the rapid growth of the antiwar movement shocked even its own organizers. On April 17, fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand demonstrated in Washington, DC, against the air campaign that had already dropped a thousand tons of bombs. By August 31, Johnson made burning draft cards a crime punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a thousand-dollar fine, though the first card burner arrested, David Miller, got twenty-two months for his act of defiance. On October 15 and 16, protestors demonstrated in forty American cities and in international cities including London and Rome. On November 2, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison immolated himself under the window of secretary of defense Robert McNamara’s office at the Pentagon. On November 27, thirty-five thousand marched on the White House, chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” SDS membership quadrupled by the end of the year, to forty-three hundred. In December, high school students in Des Moines wore black armbands to class to protest the war, and were suspended. Their case,
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District
, went all the way to the Supreme Court. (The students won in 1968.)

The Vietnam War occurred at a time when an unprecedented number of young people could afford to go to college and felt informed enough to question the government’s decisions. And like the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement benefited from a new era in television coverage.

On August 5,
CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
aired a report by journalist Morley Safer in which he showed a search-and-destroy operation by American soldiers in the village of Cam Ne, believed to be a Viet Cong stronghold. As the cameras rolled, soldiers dragged women and children out of their ancestral huts and then set the structures on fire with Zippo lighters or flamethrowers. Elderly peasants begged for their homes to be spared, but 120 to 150 were leveled as women and children huddled together wailing. The report showed that the destruction of the village resulted in the capture of four men. Safer didn’t mention that there had been marines killed in the village the previous month, or that at least one of the huts was connected to Viet Cong tunnels.
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An enraged Johnson called CBS president Frank Stanton in the middle of the night. “Frank, are you trying to fuck me? Frank, this is your president and yesterday your boys shat on the American flag.”
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Johnson ordered a security check to see if Safer was a Communist; he wasn’t, though he was Canadian.

A week later, on August 12, at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. gave his first statement on Vietnam. He called the conflict complex and ambiguous, and advised against looking backward to affix blame. He said war itself was the true enemy, and both sides were trapped in its vortex. To end the torment of the Vietnamese, he called on the United States to halt its bombings of the North and on Ho Chi Minh to stop demanding the withdrawal of American forces from the south. He said the first step toward peace would be rebuilding some of the villages that had been destroyed. His words went unheeded.

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Folk-Rock Explosion, Part One

“I Got You Babe” is released on July 9, and “Eve of Destruction” gets leaked mid-July; the Byrds go on tour and Love takes over for them at Ciro’s; and the Lovin’ Spoonful debut with “Do You Believe in Magic” on July 20.

Salvatore Phillip “Sonny” Bono
(born 1935) started out writing for Sam Cooke and served as Phil Spector’s assistant. In the studio, he absorbed how Spector produced records and then promoted them to disc jockeys. He wrote “Needles and Pins” with Jack Nitzsche, and the cover by the Merseyside band the Searchers, with two heavily echoed six-string guitars, was a precursor to the folk-rock jangle.

Born 1946, Cherilyn “Cher” Sarkisian’s parents married and divorced each other three times. Once, she was placed in an orphanage for several weeks because her mother was too destitute to care for her. She dropped out of school at sixteen to become a go-go dancer on the Sunset Strip, and lost her virginity to Warren Beatty after he cut her off in traffic one day.
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Also when she was sixteen, she met Bono in a coffeehouse. Bono liked her friend, but her friend didn’t dance, so Bono ended up dancing with Cher all night. He moved into an apartment next to the two girls, and became friends with Cher. When Cher lost her job, he said, “Well, you can live in my place and cook and clean.”

“He had twin beds, and I lied to him about my age. I was a pretty fair housekeeper, but I couldn’t cook at all. I was also real sickly, so Sonny ended up taking care of me all the time. I remember girls coming in and out of that house, like, by the thousands. The girls would say, ‘Who’s that?’ And he’d go, ‘Oh, that’s just Cher.’ We were just friends.”
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Cher sang backup on some of Spector’s hits, including “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” then lead on a novelty song Spector cowrote called “Ringo, I Love You.” It flopped because her deep voice led people to think a man was singing it. Then Bono was fired after he offered his boss some well-meant advice. After a deejay told Bono that Spector’s latest Ronettes tune was out of fashion in the era of the British Invasion, Bono told Spector gently over the phone, “Phil, I think we need to change the sound.” There was silence from the other end, and Bono realized he had inadvertently excommunicated himself.
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Now he had no choice but to make it, and he started to see Cher as the ticket. “I was like raw, aimless, untamed energy, and he saw a way to give it direction. He molded me. His dream was to push me into being a huge star.”
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He started writing songs for her, such as “Baby Don’t Go,” about a poor girl who leaves her hometown for the city to escape her sad past and become a lady. “Where Do You Go” returned to the theme of a lonely girl lost on the Sunset Strip.

Cher wanted Bono to perform onstage with her, to help with her stage fright. The Byrds were the hottest thing on the Strip, so Bono sneaked in a tape recorder to one of their gigs at Ciro’s and then tried to beat them to the marketplace with Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do,” complete with Byrds-style guitar. The two versions went head to head in May. Cher beat the Byrds in the United States (No. 15 to No. 40), though in the United Kingdom, the Byrds won (No. 4 to No. 9). The Byrds’ McGuinn said, “What really got me most was Dylan coming up to me and saying, ‘They beat you man,’ and he lost faith in me. He was shattered. His material had been bastardized. There we were, the defenders and protectors of his music, and we’d let Sonny and Cher get away with it.”
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Another song of Dylan’s that was popular as a cover was the antilove song “It Ain’t Me Babe.” Bono turned it on its head, making it into a waltz for young hippie couples everywhere called “I Got You Babe.” He and Cher recorded it backed by the Wrecking Crew, with producer Bono using everything he’d learned from Spector. After its release on July 9, it was No. 1 by August 14. The first folk-rock couple told everyone they had married in Tijuana in 1964, though they wouldn’t officially wed until the birth of their daughter in 1969.

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Per rock critic Richie Unterberger,
the earliest-known use of the term
folk-rock
was in a
Billboard
cover story on June 12, “Folkswinging Wave On—Courtesy of Rock Groups,” by Eliot Tiegel, who used the term to describe the Byrds, Sonny and Cher, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Rising Sons, Jackie DeShannon, and Billy J. Kramer.
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It was around that time that Dunhill Records owner Lou Adler gave a copy of Dylan’s
Bringing It All Back Home
to one of his songwriters, P. F. Sloan, and told him to come up with a Dylanesque protest single for the Byrds. Between midnight and dawn, “Eve of Destruction” came to Sloan in a torrent.

He was nineteen, old enough to be sent to Vietnam but not old enough to vote yet (the voting age was twenty-one in all but four states), the same injustice Eddie Cochran sang about in 1958 in “Summertime Blues,” except now there was a war on. Sloan was still haunted by the pounding martial drums from President Kennedy’s funeral and worked those in, along with fears of nuclear apocalypse. He decried the hypocrisy of calling the Communists hateful while the Klan murdered in the South and congressmen dithered.

The Byrds rejected the song, though, so Sloan pitched it to Byrds imitators the Tyrtles (later, simply, Turtles) backstage at the Sunset Strip club the Crescendo (later the Trip). Howard Kaylan recalled, “Our jaws hit the ground. We all knew that it would be a monster hit, it was that powerful. But we also knew that whoever recorded this song was doomed to have only one record in their/his career. You couldn’t make a statement like that and ever work again.”
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But a growly singer named Barry McGuire was looking for work after leaving the New Christy Minstrels in January. Byrd Gene Clark had once been in the Christys, so he invited McGuire to come watch them play at Ciro’s. After the Byrds’ performance, McGuire led a conga line into the street. Dunhill’s Lou Adler was there, and the two started talking about working together.

On Thursday, July 15, McGuire went into the studio with Sloan on six-string and harp, alongside two of LA’s top session men, drummer Hal Blaine and bassist Larry Knechtel of the Wrecking Crew. McGuire recorded Sloan’s “What Exactly’s the Matter with Me” and needed a B side. They had ten minutes of studio time left, just enough to lay down one take of “Eve of Destruction.” McGuire read the lyrics off the wrinkly paper on which Sloan had written them, building to a rage for the climax in which he bitterly reminds Selma, Alabama, not to forget to say grace while they bury their murdered black neighbors.