The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (10 page)

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Authors: Daniel J. Levitin

BOOK: The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature
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Music was there, songs, to bind together the resistance. I first learned “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a seven-year-old at a summer camp in the California mountains. A twenty-two-year-old camp counselor brought his guitar to campfire and taught all ninety of us these two protest songs, and we sang them every night for three weeks. As the war escalated, more songs appeared on the radio: “War (What Is It Good For?),” “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “Universal Soldier,” “Eve of Destruction,” and “Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam).” Then there was “Give Peace a Chance,” written and performed by John Lennon without the other Beatles. It didn’t sound like a Beatles song, but there was that familiar voice, the familiar acoustic guitar rhythms, making the call for an end to the war. Lennon’s song was far from the first or even the most popular protest song, but it exploded with musical power and with the raw simplicity of its message. My friends and I memorized even the somewhat tricky lyrics of the verses and sang them in the backseats of station wagons as our parents drove us to Little League practice, Scouts, and to Sunday school. Lennon was on board—he’d step to the head of the line and help lead the antiwar effort. With his charisma and intelligence, maybe now people would listen. This might be the song to do it!
We saw college kids protesting, singing, everywhere. UC Berkeley was just over the hill from where we lived, and the free speech movement, the protests, women’s lib, and improved race relations were all bound up into one big cause, into us against them. The songs seemed to hold wisdom, encouragement, and motivation. They were something to play back in your head to remind you that the movement was more than just a thought in your own head, or in the heads of a small group of people you could see. Just
knowing
that there were other people like you throughout the country, hundreds of thousands or millions of protesters, singing the same songs, chanting the same slogans, all with the same goal: The songs provided a strong sense of solidarity.
Then came Kent State, the shooting of four student protesters. This was all we were talking about in my junior high school, going over and over the story in disbelief: The National Guard, the agency formed to protect American citizens in the event of a national emergency, had shot and killed four antiwar activists
just like us.
We had just held our own walk-out the week before, congregating on the football field of our California school, refusing to attend class. For an hour we stood in silence, as did hundreds of thousands of other students throughout the country at the appointed time and place.
What if the National Guard shot us too?
I was infatuated with the Chicago Seven, whom I considered role models, especially after Graham Nash wrote a song about them, “Chicago.”
We all knew the music of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Stills (with his band Buffalo Springfield, which also included Neil Young) had sung his antiwar song, “For What It’s Worth,” a few years before:
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
We gotta stop hey watch that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
 
Writing a review of a documentary about the sixties (broadcast in 2007),
New York Times
critic Neil Genzlinger said, “That astonishing song came to encapsulate ’60s turmoil so perfectly that resorting to it is a subconscious admission by a documentarian: ‘I have nothing to say that Stephen Stills didn’t say better in 2 minutes 41 seconds.’ Its instantly recognizable two-note opening rings like an alarm bell.”
Right after the Kent State murders in 1970, CS&N were in the recording studio with Neil Young. “Teach Your Children” was climbing up the charts and headed for number one. Neil had just written “Ohio” in reaction to the shooting of four student protesters. “Graham suggested that we release the song right away,” Neil Young recalled. “It was his call, because it was his song that was climbing the charts, and we knew that we might not be able to have two songs on the charts at the same time. But he felt it was important to get the song out, and so he sacrificed ‘Teach Your Children’ for ‘Ohio.’ That was really something.” Nash added, “I had left my group The Hollies over disagreements over which songs to release—I wasn’t going to do to Neil what they had done to me.” “Ohio” became one of the most moving antiwar anthems; David Crosby can be heard crying at the end of the recording. Many people who grew up in the fifties, sixties, and seventies regarded the leaders of the antiwar movement—whether political leaders or musical leaders—as heroes, taking a courageous stand with the minority, speaking their conscience.
My friends and I spent hours reading everything we could about the assassinations; about James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan; about Kent State. I came to realize that the disagreements about the war were splitting my own house—my own parents, who seemed synchronized on every other aspect of life. Over all this, and the death of my grandfather who had explained everything to me and kindled my young interest in science, I was devastated. But at eleven I could not find a tear for Grandpa Joe, for Dr. King or Senator Kennedy, for the sixty thousand U.S. boys killed, or the three hundred thousand wounded, or for those young college students in Ohio, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder. I wanted to cry for them, for all of us. But I was not yet ready.
 
It eventually became politically untenable to fight the war. It was clear that the United States could not meet any of its objectives. How much of this was due to the music, the antiwar soundtrack to the protests? It is difficult to say, but music was present at almost every march and rally, in the background of nearly every organizational meeting. At the minimum, it’s clear that people at the time at least thought music was helping. But
how
can songs create such changes?
“The arts have power owing to their form and structures,” Pete Seeger says. “As I said earlier, good music can leap over language boundaries, over barriers of religion and politics and hit someone’s heartstrings somehow. That opens up their hearts to ideas that they might not have entertained if brought in through regular speech.”
“I believe in songs, of course,” Sting confided to me, “but it’s very difficult to imagine that a song would change anything overnight. What you
can
do is to plant a seed in someone’s brain, as seeds were planted in
mine
to make me the political animal I am. I think you can sing an idea to a young mind and that young mind may become a political person or a person in power one day and that seed will have borne fruit. Seeger has planted a few seeds that may have borne fruit forty or fifty years later in a subsequent generation.”
After visiting Guatemalan refugee camps in the early 1980s, Bruce Cockburn wrote an antiwar song, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.” “Aside from airing my own experience,” Cockburn explains, “which is where the songs always start, if we’re ever going to find a solution for this ongoing passion for wasting each other, we have to start with the rage that knows no impediments, an uncivilized rage that says it’s okay to go out and shoot someone. . . . The idea was to reach a different audience than the politicians by having us go and observe, using the relative visibility that we have to educate the Canadian public to what we had seen and to raise money for projects that OXFAM has in the region.”
Here comes the helicopter—second time today
Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away
How many kids they’ve murdered only God can say
If I had a rocket launcher . . . I’d make somebody pay
 
 
I don’t believe in guarded borders and I don’t believe in hate
I don’t believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher . . . I would retaliate
 
On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation or some less humane fate
Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate
If I had a rocket launcher . . . I would not hesitate
 
I want to raise every voice—at least I’ve got to try
Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.
Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry
If I had a rocket launcher . . . Some son of a bitch would die
Willie Nelson, writer of 2,500 songs including the classic “Crazy” (made famous by Patsy Cline) wrote “Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?” for Christmas 2003 to protest the Iraq War. “I hope that there is some controversy,” he said. “If you write something like this and nobody says anything, then you probably haven’t struck a nerve.”
There’s so many things going on in the world, babies dying, mothers crying
How much oil is one human life worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth
 
The protest music of the sixties and seventies was often accompanied by marijuana, cocaine, LSD, mescaline, peyote, opium, heroin, plus various amphetamines and barbiturates. To my parents’ generation, all of these were “drugs,” and they made no distinction between their wildly different effects. Although there were drug addicts on the fringe of society then, as there are now, and people who used drugs primarily to escape problems or responsibilities, or simply to feel good, there were also many people using drugs as a means of self-exploration, gaining insight into their thought processes, or awakening spiritual feelings during a time when organized religion was rapidly waning. Stuck with real spiritual needs and a desire to make sense of the political and social chaos around them, and sensing that the traditional religious institutions had nothing relevant to teach them, they turned to yoga, Buddhism, Ayn Rand, Dylan, Baez, Lennon and McCartney, the Jefferson Airplane, and sometimes to drugs. I never knew anyone who turned to amphetamines or heroin for enlightenment; rather, these were just available as part of the culture. Many figureheads, including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Ram Dass, and John Lennon had used drugs and told of their ability to clarify things, to expand thought, to reveal mysteries about the world and about one’s own mind.
The combination of music and drugs proved to be potent, and scientific research has yet to explain it. Each drug acts differently on the brain, and so each has its own particular effects on the musical experience. Some, like cocaine and speed, don’t substantially alter consciousness, or the way that music sounds. The hallucinogens, however, change neural firing patterns in ways that can facilitate associations and memories, and fuel imagination. With LSD or peyote, for example, hallucinations may alternate with actual perception, the latter enhanced by connections to new ideas that can be imaginative, insightful, and poetic. Many people have concluded a drug-induced experience by feeling they gained a better understanding of themselves, of their modes of relating to the world and to others; many have said that they felt a strengthened bond with nature. Paul Kantner told me that when the Jefferson Airplane told everyone to take LSD and contemplate nature, “we imagined people like us sitting in a beautiful park (such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park), surrounded by like-minded free spirits and an atmosphere of love and goodwill. We didn’t stop to think that people would be dropping acid in the projects in the inner city, surrounded by filth, crime, and poverty. The drugs had a very different effect on people in those environments.”
Clearly whatever effects different drugs had on the brain, there were interactions with the environment, and with differences in each individual’s neurochemistry. Brains vary widely from one another in their architecture (that is, the physical size and layout of key structures), the pathways that are available, and their baseline levels of the different chemicals that allow neurons to communicate with each other and ultimately to form thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, and beliefs. As a neuroscientist acquainted with more than one hundred LSD users, I’ve come to believe that this particular drug is the most dependent on unobservable factors in each individual’s mental makeup. Some people can take hundreds of acid trips and suffer no ill consequences; others take only three or four and are never the same again. Many of these so-called acid casualties have settled on the California coast and I’ve encountered them in cities like Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, unable to keep their brains functioning properly.
Music combined with marijuana tends to produce feelings of euphoria and connectedness to the music and the musicians. Δ
9
-THC, the active ingredient, is known to stimulate the brain’s natural pleasure centers, while also disrupting short-term memory. The disruption of short-term memory thrusts listeners into the moment of the music as it unfolds; unable to explicitly keep in mind what has just been played, or to think ahead to what might be played, people stoned on pot tend to hear music from note to note. Subconsciously all of the usual processes of expectation formation are still occurring (as I outlined in my book
This Is Your Brain on Music),
but consciously, the music creates what many people describe as a time-standing-still phenomenon. They live for each note, completely in the moment.

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