Yesterday, I had the pleasure of addressing Dr. Mark Naison's class on the '60s at Fordham. Since I spoke from a couple of scribbled notes, I'm not really sure what I said, but rather than try and reconstruct it, I'm taking the low road here and posting the notes for a CD I burned for them to listen to as homework before my stint in Bronx.
The idea was to convey to a buncha 18 and 19-year-olds the role music played in our lives back in the day and how the anti-war movement influenced rock and roll and was influenced by it, as well as to suggest the trajectory that we took from protest to resistance to (for many of us, revolution. The songs aren't in exact chronological order but group around themes I wanted to talk about.
So what, FotM reader, would you have included that I missed, and why?
I started by playing a couple of minutes of Paul Hardcastle's "19" to get them thinking about how the kids humping the boonies (and the NLF fighters seeking to liberate their homeland) were the same age as they were.
Here's the annotated playlist:
1. Baby Boom Che—-John Trudell
Trudell is a Santee Sioux who helped found and build the American Indian Movement in the ‘70s. He has since become a writer, actor and spoken word artist.
2. Masters Of War—-Bob Dylan
It’s hard today to grasp all the changes Bob Dylan sent rippling through pop music, including the raggedy-ass, intense quality of his vocals, which opened the door for half the vocalists working in rock today…
*3. Times They Are A’Changin’—-The Beach Boys
Listen hard: 50% of Dr. Naison’s class is in the grooves of this single cut.
4. Vietnam Blues—-J. B. Lenoir
J.B. Lenoir was a great bluesman in Chicago in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He had already cut “Korea Blues” and “Eisenhower Blues” in the ‘50s, though his record company, Parrot, changed the name of the latter to “Tax-Paying Blues.”
*5. Eve Of Destruction—-Barry McGuire
1965. The first protest song to hit number one on the charts. But is it a folk song? And what is it protesting?
6. Ballad Of The Green Berets—-Sgt. Barry Sadler
This little ditty was the number one song in the US for the year of 1966.
7. 2+2=?—-The Bob Seger System
Bob Seger was a working class kid out of the Detroit area, whose father bailed on the family when he was ten. One of his first recordings was a takeoff, “Ballad of the Yellow Beret,” mocking draft dodgers. This come out a couple years later. People changed fast in those days.
8. The “Fish” Cheer / I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die Rag—-Country Joe & The Fish
The band played this at Woodstock, if you do YouTube, it’s here. Watch us rise to our feet starting at about 2:15.
9. War-–Edwin Starr
Starr uses blunt contempt where Country Joe & The Fish use blunt sarcasm to deal with an increasingly insane-seeming war.
10. We Gotta Get Out Of This Place—-The Animals
Written by Brill Building aces Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil in NYC and intended for the Righteous Brothers, it was bought by British manager Mickie Most for one of his best bands, The Animals. It became the theme song of the grunts in Vietnam.
*11. Talkin’ Vietnam Potluck Blues—Tom Paxton
A ‘50s peacetime vet, Paxton was part of the early folk scene in Greenwich Village. This talking blues (a pre-hiphop spoken song form) highlights the absurdity of the war.
12. Sam Stone--Swamp Dogg
The other side of the previous song. This is best known in the version by its author, singer-songwriter John Prine, but I threw this one in because the southern soul version lends a little variety to this CD and to put in a plug for the weird and wonderful Swamp Dogg, who made Dick Nixon’s personal enemies list and authored romantic songs like “If I Ever Kiss It (He Can Kiss It Goodbye).”
13. Four Days Gone—-Buffalo Springfield
Buffalo Springfield was one the California-based groups that transformed rock and roll in the late ‘60s. Their first hit was a protest song--“For What It’s Worth.” (Know what hiphop cuts this was sampled on?) This one could be about a draft dodger or someone who went AWOL, as tens of thousands did.
14. White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land—-Phil Ochs
Phil Ochs was one of the great protest singers and his buoyant “Draft Dodger Rag” (But one thing you gotta see/That someone’s gotta go over there/And that someone isn’t me) was an anti-war movement anthem. This came a few years later.
*15. Bring The Boys Home—-Freda Payne
Even in the presence of these other tunes. I hold that this is one of the two best songs to come out of the movement against the Vietnam War.
Freda Payne was a jazz singer who was trying to make a soul breakthrough and was brought by Holland-Dozier-Holland to their new Invictus label after they broke away from Berry Gordy at Motown.
*16. Honorable Peace-—B.J. Thomas
This is the other of the two best tunes of the anti-war era.
A bit of background: B.J. Thomas was a kinda soft rock guy, best known for his 1970 #1, “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” He had studio time booked in late December 1972, when Nixon launched the murderous “Christmas Bombings”–4000 bomber sorties that pounded North Vietnamese cities day and night over 12 days. Gerry Goffin, who with his ex-wife Carole King, had written some of the Brill Building’s greatest songs, cranked this out in a fit of rage and persuaded Thomas to record it on Christmas Eve. The pick-up band at the recording session included two guys who had been in the blue-eyed soul group, The Rascals.
17. Ohio--Steve Earle & Marah
Neil Young wrote this just days after the National Guard opened fire and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio during the largest campus upsurge this country has ever seen, in May, 1970. I include this version because I think the rawer, grindier sound is more appropriate than the CSNY original. Sue me. [A blog post I wrote about “Ohio” as part of a series on the May 1970 events is here at FotM.]
18. What’s Goin’ On?—-Marvin Gaye
“I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.”
*19. What About Me?—-Quicksilver Messenger Service
A San Francisco band from the same scene as Dr. Naison’s beloved Janis Joplin. Even more than in the Marvin Gaye tune, deceptively mellow music masks a deadly serious view of the world.
*The songs with an asterix are the ones I played during the actual class.
March 26, 2011
Teaching The Anti-Vietnam War Movement Via Music
May 20, 2010
May '70: 16. The Other Side Of The Chasm
40 years ago today, around 100,000 people marched down Broadway in Manhattan. With thousands of safety helmet-wearing members of various construction unions in the lead and American flags everywhere, it was perhaps the largest single demonstration in support of the war during the whole Vietnam era.
As the march traversed the Wall Street area, it was greeted by cheers from crowds on the sidewalks and showered, from the upper floor offices of bankers, stockbrokers and lawyers, with spirals of tape from stock tickers.
Naturally the media gave the march intense play, contrasting it with the campus protests, by that point near the end of the third week of the national strike. And this hooray-for-war rally was in fact a direct outgrowth of the campus explosion. Specifically, it was the culmination of two weeks of orchestrated actions in NYC aimed at pushing the idea that the working class of the US supported the war and hated the protesters, starting with the intensely violent “Hard Hat riot” attacks on peaceful protesters which I wrote about on May 8, forty years after the event.
Two subsequent demos, on May 11 and May 16, targeted the city administration, especially the anti-war mayor John Lindsay (a Republican), with protesters calling him a “commie faggot.”
All were more or less openly organized from the top by Peter J Brennan, the president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York and vice president of the city’s Central Labor Council, and it was he who pulled together the May 20th march. As with the May 8 riot, workers continued to be mobilized by their unions and to receive paid time off from the large construction companies to take part.
These demonstrations were localized in NYC and didn’t spread like wildfire, the way the student protests had after the invasion of Cambodia, That’s a phenomenon which requires a little comment, especially for those who weren’t around at the time.
In the first article in this series, I wrote of how deep the split was that the Vietnam War had produced in US society. Those of us who militantly fought to end the war remained a distinct minority, but through our work (building on the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people to liberate their country), a lot of people had gotten pretty sick of the war.
Still, in a Gallup poll commissioned by Newsweek Magazine very shortly after the killings at Kent State, 58% said that the students were primarily at fault. Only 11% blamed the National Guard. Maybe the numbers were exaggerated, the methodology was flawed, etc, but enough of us came from small cities, from towns, from rural areas--hell, from families--where this was the conventional wisdom to know that Newsweek wasn’t way, way off either.
There was an question of privilege here. The draft was the only way the ruling class could maintain upwards of 500,000 troops at a time in Vietnam and college students had had the best set of options for avoiding or postponing having to show up for the fateful physical. Those who had served in previous wars, and those of our own generation who didn’t have that chance, mainly for reasons of class, had plenty of motive to resent those who did.
Beyond the war, the poll reflected a backlash against the whole new role that young folks were playing in society. We were setting the social norms--in politics, in sexual behavior, in clothing, in music, in every aspect of society, and we were rejecting, wholesale, the values and practices that our elders had lived their lives under and tried to inculcate in us.
In fact, one big reason that the New York City stuff wasn’t a nationwide phenomenon was the legacy of the ‘50s, with its suburbanization, conformity and red-baiting: quite simply, Good Americans (white ones) didn’t demonstrate. Period. It was us, the black sheep, the outcasts, the unAmericans who did.
Click here to read this series from the beginning.
Click here to read the next installment.
December 22, 2006
Take Five--Reasons for the Fall-off in Anti-war Demos After '69
It's Friday, and time for Take Five. Last week's inaugural list was five lefty mysteries.
This time, it's a little more free-form. In a discussion about the student movement of today on another blog, a commenter nmed lawyerDan raised the following question:
One of the things I always wondered about was why there were those huge demonstrations of maybe 2 million people in the fall of 1969 and then, even as the war became even less popular, there were never such big marches again. It was like the Vietnam Moratorium ended the war, but it took 6 years to process the paperwork.
What say you, dear readers?I agree that the high point of mass demos was 1967-69. In the remarkable "Honorable Peace," one of the finest and most savage protest songs of the Vietnam era, Gerry Goffin writes of the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi ordered by Nixon and Kissinger:
I know the tide of protest has passed us by somehow,
But when will you speak out, if you don't speak out now?(This puppy was recorded on Christmas Eve 1972 as the bombing intensified by, believe it or not, B.J. Thomas, Mr. "Rainsdrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," and almost universally forbidden radio play by station managers fearful of its blunt condemnation of Nixon.)
Five short points in partial explanation:
1. Fatigue with what some of us had taken to calling "Peace Crawls" and saw as ineffective and toothless, especially as media coverage dwindled.
2. A broad radicalization in the student movement which led to the eruption in May, 1970 (Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State, national shutdown of campuses, the partial or complete destruction of 33 ROTC buildings around the country, etc.). This advance was undercut even as it was happening by the 1969 collapse of SDS, depriving the student movement of organizational leadership.
3. The perception that the war was in fact ending with negotiations with North Vietanm and the NLF underway, the drawdown of US troops under "Vietnamization" to fewer than 200,000 by Fall, 1971, and the erosion of the US military.
4. The institution in 1969 of the draft lottery which let a majority of draft age males know whether or not they would likely be facing conscription, thus limiting the insecurity previously felt by an entire age cohort. This was followed by the end of the draft overall in 1973.
5. The fact that despite the shellacking of "peace candidate" George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, more and more Senators and Congressmen were belatedly taking stands for ending the war.
