American Experiment (362 page)

Gradually Ellsberg fell in with people who had been remote from his world—a nonviolent activist from India who said that “for me, the concept of enemy doesn’t exist”; war resisters who defied the popular image of them as “guilt-ridden, fanatic extremists”; a Quaker activist, about to be locked up for refusing induction; and Kehler, who said he looked forward to joining David Harris and other friends in jail and had no remorse or fear, because he knew, he told a war resisters’ conference, that “lots of people around the world like you will carry on.” Later Ellsberg thought: these were “our best, our very best, and we’re sending them to prison, more important, we’re in a world where they feel they just had to go to prison.”

It was Kehler who provided the spark. Now Ellsberg knew that he would have to join the war resisters even if it meant jail. With the help of his children he xeroxed his top-secret volumes of the Pentagon report, and after fruitless efforts to involve prominent Senate doves, he turned the history over to
The New York Times.
When the Pentagon Papers appeared a month later the Justice Department won injunctions against further publication in the
Times
and the
Post,
a “prior restraint” on press freedom that was overturned by the Supreme Court.

With his mind on reelection in 1972, Nixon saw the Pentagon Papers flap as an opportunity to create another Alger Hiss, who had served his earlier ambitions so well. By painting Ellsberg as the symbol of the extreme left, the Administration could tar with the same brush both the New Left and antiwar Democrats. As a political functionary named Charles Colson reported to the White House, moreover, the Pentagon Papers were “a tailor-made issue for causing deep and lasting divisions within the Democratic-ranks.” The Democratic party hardly needed GOP help on divisiveness. Already carrying their heritage of disunity, they were busy seeking to recruit blacks, students, war resisters, and women, all of whom had plenty of divisions of their own.

When they’d finally all arrived they were, they sang, half a million strong—probably an exaggeration by a hundred thousand or so, but the Woodstock festival appeared so grandiose, in scope of music, attendance, media coverage, and social significance, that hyperbole seemed the only
way to communicate its bigness. Attendance reached twice the anticipated 50,000 per day before dusk the first evening—and the organizers were forced to declare the concert free to all who had made the trek that August 1969 weekend to Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York. A participant called it “three days of mud, drugs, and music.” And how it rained, defiantly, on the greatest assemblage of rock ’n’ roll and folk talent of the decade: Richie Havens; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Joe Cocker; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Santana; the Jefferson Airplane; Sly and the Family Stone; Jimi Hendrix; and the Who.

For three days music blasted from the amplifiers scattered around the eighty acres of natural bowl. But the music was secondary. Though Woodstock came “as a logical consequence of all the be-ins, love-ins, pop festivals, and tribal convocations that preceded it,” wrote Bruce Cook, it was more than all of these, giving “to an entire generation not so much a sense of who they are, but (much more important) who they would like to be.… The first Eucharistic Congress of a new rock religion.” And
Life
wrote: “Woodstock was less a music festival than a total experience, a phenomenon, a happening, high adventure, a near disaster and, in a small way, a struggle for survival.”

The roots of rock ’n’ roll—so named by a white Cleveland disc jockey who wanted to avoid the racial stigma carried by rhythm and blues—lie embedded in the early years of blues and country music. Before the 1950s whites had recorded “white music” while blacks recorded “black,” and though their listeners crossed color lines, musically and thematically country and rhythm and blues remained equal but separate.

In the mid-1950s, when white groups began recording black songs, rhythm and blues gained hold and rock took off. “To make R &B acceptable,” wrote composer and performer Frank Zappa, “the big shots of the record industry hired a bunch of little men with cigars and green visors, to synthesize and imitate the work of the Negroes. The visor men cranked out phony white rock.” But whatever the commercially imposed limitations of the music, it was an infusion of energy into popular culture. Rock ’n’ roll fans drove the new songs to the top of the charts. Opposition from the black artists whose works were being pilfered, from a Congress responding to industry pressure, and from the AM radio stations who recognized the exploitation for what it was, were all insufficient to halt the infestation of “phony white rock.”

The music called “black” had faced all the usual objections from the conventional, but rock ’n’ roll encountered a new and unique brand of opposition. Many adults found rock loud, often incomprehensible, and intolerably sexual. “If we cannot stem the tide of rock ’n’ roll,” warned a
Columbia University professor, “with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances.” Boston Catholic leaders demanded the banning of rock. The San Antonio city council banished it from municipal swimming pool jukeboxes because it “attracted undesirable elements given to practicing their spastic gyrations in abbreviated bathing suits.” Parents shuddered at such insinuating lyrics as “I need it / When the moon is bright / I need it / When you hold me tight / I need it / In the middle of the night” and their blood curdled when Little Richard yowled, “Wop-bop-a-loo-bop / A-wop-bam-boom!”

But that was part of the idea—the more adults deplored rock, the more it meant to the young. Rock burst in on a generation that, Nik Cohn noted, felt it had no music of its own, no clothes or clubs, no tribal identity. “Everything had to be shared with adults.” The music began to generate its own social significance, at first vaguely and immaturely, but nevertheless giving a “divided people a sense that they may have something in common.”

“The culturally alienated went in for cool jazz, and folk music was the vehicle for the politically active minority,” wrote Jeff Greenfield. Folk had its origins in depression-era, vagabond protest music, but it was only infrequently available on commercial releases, and usually heard by the already converted until the voices and vibrancy of Joan Baez; the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Phil Ochs; Pete Seeger; and, above all, Bob Dylan introduced a larger, if still selective, audience to the true music of protest and disaffection.

Dylan was “discovered” in a Greenwich Village club in 1961, where, upon entering, he had been asked for proof of age. His roots were middle-class, middle-American, but his voice was coarse, his music was of the road, his style was that of “the hungry, restless, freedom-loving friend and comrade of the oppressed.” He rambled into New York from Minnesota with dreams of emulating Woody Guthrie—“the greatest holiest godliest one in the world.” After his “discovery” he made his first album, playing alone with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar. The record cost Columbia Records just $402 to produce.

Dylan was not the popularizer of his greatest hit, “Blowing in the Wind.” He performed the song on tour and the mimeographed magazine
Broadside
published the lyrics, but not until the popular folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary heard and recorded it did it sell a million copies.

How many roads must a man walk down

before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail

before she sleeps in the sand?

How many times must the cannonballs fly

before they’re forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,

the answer is blowing in the wind.

That recording single-handedly “established topical song as the most important development of the folk revival,” and Dylan as its premier artist.

Though he was never to dominate the music industry as the Beatles would, Dylan earned a commitment from his fans perhaps even deeper than the loyalty the Beatles enjoyed. Yet his followers’ expectations of him as the “musical great white hope of the Left” proved a burden. When, on the last night of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan stepped onto the stage carrying an electric guitar and launched into a rocking version of “Maggie’s Farm,” the audience for a moment sat in stunned silence, then heckled him off the stage with shrill cries of “Play folk music! … Sell out! … This is a folk festival!”

If Dylan’s folk fans felt betrayed by his electrification, he saw it as evolution and synthesis.
Village Voice
critic Jack Newfield commented, “If Whitman were alive today, he too would be playing an electric guitar.” Dylan had succeeded in bringing the feeling of folk—modern, protest folk—to the masses of rock. Proof of his success came in one month of 1965, when no fewer than forty-eight Dylan originals were recorded and released to a rapturous public.

They were four scruffy lads from the run-down port city of Liverpool playing seedy clubs in Britain and Germany until a shrewd manager repackaged them as waggish, cuddly moptops. The Beatles’ first success was sudden and phenomenal. In the annus mirabilis of 1963, their music became “one of the most persistent noises heard over England since the air-raid sirens were dismantled.” They sold more than two and a half million records that year, performed for royalty on the same bill with Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich, and needed squads of bobbies to protect them from screeching, scratching, fainting Beatlemaniacs.

The Beatles commenced their personal conquest of the United States when, on February 7, 1964, ten thousand teenagers gave them a hysterical
welcome at Kennedy Airport in New York. Airport officials were incredulous—they had seen nothing like it, “not even for kings and queens!” 73 million people watched the Beatles perform on Ed Sullivan’s television show. They played at Carnegie Hall in New York, and one fifteen-year-old fan from New Hampshire who was there with 6,000 others described the essential Beatlemaniacal delusion: “You really do believe they can see you, just you alone, when they’re up on the stage. That’s why you scream, so they’ll notice you. I always felt John could see me. It was like a dream. Just me and John together and no one else.”

With such albums as
Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles,
and
Abbey Road,
the Beatles revolutionized rock and opened it to new possibilities. They spearheaded a British invasion that, as Ellen Willis noted, proved “that the mainstream of mass culture could produce folk music—that is, antiestablishment music.” Most antiestablishment and jolting to American sensibilities were Mick Jagger’s Rolling Stones, with their “twentieth century working-class songs.” As Jerry Hopkins put it, the “Beatles asked teenaged American females for their hands; the Stones asked for their pants.” Their music harked back to rock’s gritty, jarring, erotic origins in the blues, and in appearance the Stones cultivated ugliness and overt sexuality. They exuded contempt—and earned millions.

Groups inspired by the Beatles, such as the Beach Boys, and duos, such as Simon and Garfunkel, carried a sound even President Reagan would, years later, admit appreciating. But still newer sounds—more moody, less accessible, more personal—emerged from San Francisco bands, and they shifted the center of avant-garde rock from Britain to California.

Late in 1965 two benefit concerts were held in San Francisco, the first featuring the music of the Jefferson Airplane, with Allen Ginsberg leading three thousand in the chanting of mantras, and the second in the Fillmore Auditorium with the Grateful Dead. On the heels of these successes and at the urging of author Ken Kesey, came the seminal San Francisco “Trips Festival,” “a three-day mixed-media attempt to recreate an LSD experience without the LSD.” The Festival marked the beginning of the Haighl-Ashbury era with its psychedelia, mind-bending drugs, sandalwood, body painting, tribal Love-Ins and Human Be-ins.

San Francisco also produced Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Country Joe and the Fish (originally called Country Mao and the Fish, after a saying of the Chairman’s, “Every fish in the sea is a potential convert”). The Dead challenged their audiences to fly on LSD, Joplin seduced hers, and Country Joe sang “ 1-2-3 What are we fightin’ for / Don’t ask me—I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam / And it’s
5-6-7 / Open up the pearly gates / Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why / Whoopee! / We’re all gonna die.”

Country Joe sang his “Fixin’ to Die Rag” at Woodstock, but that “first Eucharistic Congress” illustrated the tensions between the rock and counterculture and the New Left and antiwar movement. “Rock and Roll, Rock culture, hip, pop, and youth culture,” wrote radical Tom Smucker, “all spring out of middle-class reality, and spring out of capitalism, and all spring out of affluence.” While rock took overtly political forms and served up songs of social significance, typically it described freedom as the road to individual happiness, to personal self-fulfillment—a road that often had the contours of hedonism. Asked what was her “philosophy of life,” Janis Joplin replied, “Getting stoned, staying happy, and having a good time.” The point of drug use, wrote Todd Gitlin, was “to open a new space, an
inner
space, so that we could
space out,
live for the sheer exultant point of living.” Though the counterculture assumed that its hedonism was intrinsically anticapitalist, it reflected the established culture’s materialism, with, as William L. O’Neill noted, motorcycles, stereos, and electric guitars taking the place of big cars and ranch houses. Entrepreneurs trafficked in countercultural commodities, pushing strobe lights, Nehru jackets, surplus army clothes, incense, beads and bangles, posters, drugs, and, of course, records. By 1968 records were selling at a rate of nearly a billion dollars a year, and
Forbes
was counseling “Dad” not to dismiss rock as noise: “Try to dig it … it’s the sound of money.”

The counterculture’s political vision was of a Utopia from which politics was excluded, a pastoral Arcadia whose currency was amour. “All you need is love,” sang the Beatles. “Love is all you need.” The Jefferson Airplane urged, “Hey people now / Smile on your brother / Let me see you get together / Love one another right now.” SUPERZAP THEM ALL WITH THE LOVE, exhorted a sign in a Los Angeles commune. The counterculture was out to save America with a “cultural and spiritual revolution which the young themselves will lead,” but its approach to political action was antipolitical: the young were not to engage the established society but to disengage themselves from it, to drop out, to do their own thing. Social change was to be the outcome of individual self-realization. “We want the world and we want it now!” Jim Morrison snarled, but his vehicle of revolution was what he called “sexual politics.” At a Doors concert, he said, “The sex starts with me, then moves out to include the charmed circle of musicians on stage,” and then the audience. The audience went home,
interacted “with the rest of reality, then I get it all back by interacting with that reality, so the whole sex thing works out to be one big ball of fire.” “The idea of leadership is a false god,” said Beatle John Lennon. “Following is not what it’s all about, but leaving messages of ‘This is what’s happening to us. Hey, what’s happening to you?’ ” The Vietnam war was over, he sang, when you wanted it to be.