WEST COAST ROCK AND THE COUNTERCULTURE MOVEMENT
Diplomarbeit
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Magistra der Philosophie
an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
vorgelegt von Christina DREIER
am Institut für Anglistik Begutachter: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Hugo Keiper
Graz, 2012
An dieser Stelle möchte ich mich bei meinem Betreuer Prof. Dr. Hugo Keiper für seine Unterstützung auf meinem Weg von der Idee bis zur Fertigstellung der Arbeit herzlich bedanken. Seine Ideen, Anregungen und Hinweise, sowie sein umfangreiches musikalisches, kulturelles und literarisches Wissen waren mir eine große Hilfe. Des Weiteren gilt mein Dank meinem Onkel Patrick, der die Arbeit Korrektur gelesen und mir dadurch sehr geholfen hat. Natürlich möchte ich mich auch von ganzem Herzen bei all jenen bedanken, die mich während meiner gesamten Studienzeit tatkräftig unterstützt haben. Danke Mama, Papa, Oma, Opa, Lisa, Eva, Markus, Gabi, Erwin
UND DANKE JÜRGEN!
.
Table of Contents
0. Timeline ...... 1 1. Introduction ...... 2 2. Socio-Historical Background ...... 4 2.1. Political Issues ...... 5 2.2. Social Issues ...... 11 3. The Counterculture of the 1960s ...... 14 3.1. The Anti-War Movement ...... 15 Country Joe and The Fish – “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag” ...... 18 3.2. The Civil Rights Movement ...... 19 Bob Dylan – “Only a Pawn in their Game” ...... 21 3.3. The Hippie and Youth Movement ...... 22 Eric Burdon and The Animals – “San Franciscan Nights” ...... 28 3.4. Other Counterculture Movements ...... 29 4. West Coast Rock ...... 31 4.1. From Folk Music and Bob Dylan to West Coast Rock ...... 33 Bob Dylan – “Blowin’ in the Wind” ...... 37 4.2. West Coast Music of Vietnam ...... 39 Buffalo Springfield – “For What It’s Worth” ...... 43 4.3. Psychedelic West Coast Rock ...... 45 The Byrds – “Eight Miles High” ...... 47 4.4. West Coast Festivals – Music as Collective Experience ...... 49 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – “Woodstock” ...... 51 4.5. The Sound of San Francisco ...... 52 Jefferson Airplane – “We Can Be Together/Volunteers” ...... 55 The Grateful Dead – “Dark Star” ...... 59 4.6. The Sound of Los Angeles ...... 60 The Doors – “When The Music’s Over” ...... 62 5. Legacy ...... 64 6. Conclusion ...... 66 7. Works Cited ...... 68 8. Appendix: Lyrics To Songs Mentioned or Cited ...... 79
0. Timeline
YEAR POLITICS SOCIAL ACTIVISM 1960 - Presidential debate broadcasted for - First student sit-in at Woolworth the first time store in Greensboro, North Carolina - John F. Kennedy wins presidential election - Civil Rights Act of 1960 1961 - Initiation of New Frontier policy, - Establishment of the Student Non- including The Housing Act and The violent Coordinating Committee Minimum Wage Act (SNCC) - Establishment of the Peace Corps - First Freedom Ride - Bay of Pigs Invasion
1962 - Cuban Missile Crisis - Founding of Students for a Demo- cratic Society (SDS) - James Meredith becomes first black student at an American University 1963 - Assassination of JFK by Lee Har- - March on Washington, where Mar- vey Oswald on November 22 tin Luther King Jr. holds his famous - Lyndon B. Johnson becomes presi- „I Have A Dream“ speech dent and starts domestic policy - Assassination of NAACP leader known as the Great Society Medgar Evers - Higher Education Facilities Act
1964 - Passage of Civil Rights Act and - Martin Luther King Jr. wins Nobel Economic Opportunity Act Peace Price - Gulf of Tonkin Resolution - Starting date of Free Speech Movement
1965 - Passage of Voting Rights Act, Ele- - Assassination of Malcolm X, lead- mentary and Secondary Education ing figure in the fight for African Act as well as Higher Education Act American rights - Operation Rolling Thunder - Anti-war teach-ins on University campuses - Watts Riots in Los Angeles 1966 - Initiation of Miranda Rights - Founding of the Black Panthers - National Organization for Women (NOW) formed - Beginning of Sunset Strip Riots 1967 - Interracial marriage declared legal - Summer of Love - Human Be-In, Monterey Pop Festi- val, and Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival 1968 - Launching of the Tet Offensive - Assassination of Martin Luther - My Lai Massacre King Jr. - Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy - Riots at Democratic National Con- vention in Chicago 1969 - Richard Nixon takes over the presi- - Stonewall Riots dency - Woodstock Festival - Bombings of Cambodia (1970) - Kent State Shootings
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1. Introduction
The 1960s in the USA were one of the most turbulent, revolutionary and eventful periods in the country’s history. It was a time of unrest and violence. Due to a number of infamous incidents, most prominently America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the younger generation started calling for change and reform. This gave rise to a cultural revolution and resulted in the establishment of a larger counterculture. In this respect, the era provided an adequate basis for the flourishing of music that criticizes and challenges the political and social status quo, and raises public awareness for social wrongs. Although music is quite often used as a means to reflect on society, American music of the 1960s was particularly subversive, rebellious and highly political, responding to the prevalent chaos of the era that primarily manifested itself in warfare, racism and the ever-decreasing popularity of the American leadership. West Coast Rock used to be a prominent musical movement that developed from the larger counterculture and responded to social and political issues of the time. In doing so, it supported and helped to achieve the primary goals of the community. The aim of this paper is to investigate the West Coast Rock movement, its origins, principles and major artists. To fully understand West Coast Rock it is, however, necessary to understand the counterculture and the historical background that led to the emergence of that counterculture, since these areas constitute “the primary context in which the music’s meaning was articulated” (Storey 1988: 185). Therefore, I will start with an account of America’s social and political situation at that time, followed by a closer analysis of the counterculture, including its primary goals and a detailed discussion of the different movements of which it is composed, such as the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement and the hippie movement. The major part of the paper, however, will be dedicated to the music of the counterculture era, particularly the rock music (and musicians) of the American West Coast, and its relation to and influence on 1960s American society. In this respect, it is important to note that my approach will be interdisciplinary, connecting the fields of cultural, intermedial and literary studies; that is why the accounts will not only provide theoretical or general facts but rather these facts will be illustrated with the aid of song examples. Although in a discussion about West Coast Rock the music of the songs should not (and will not) be ignored, closer attention will be paid to the songs’ lyrics. Song lyrics are in fact nothing more than conventional poems intended to be sung. Lyrics feature many of the characteristics of poems such as relative brevity, subjectivity and frequent usage of figurative language and rhetorical devices (e.g. metaphor, simile, irony…); furthermore both types are written in verse or stanza form (sometimes rhyming) and feature a speaker (or lyrical “I”). Nevertheless, the most obvious difference between lyrics and poems remains: lyrics are accompanied by music. Harold F. Mosher Jr. therefore tellingly 2 describes song lyrics as a new form of poetry: Almost most rock songs have been admired for their music, many of them have lyrics with remarkable poetic qualities. Their form is generally loose, often to accommodate the music. Nevertheless, their drama, irony, ambiguity and symbolism put them in the tradition of “serious” poetry, and they have something interesting and important to say about the restrictions of modern life and the ways of gaining freedom from these restrictions. What is more, they use their traditional poetic devices to present their themes in imaginative, original, and sometimes quite extravagant forms. In the best of them, one never gets the impression that they are written for the sake of either technique or content alone; their techniques, no matter how unusual, seem organically suited to their themes. The judgment of the lasting value of rock poetry depends […] on their ability to put established poetic methods in the service of songs about contemporary problems. Time and time again in these songs one finds beneath a disarmingly simple and entertaining surface a studied art and considered thought organically unified to create something worthy of the name of “new poetry”. 1
In this respect, the lyrics to the songs chosen to illustrate the accounts can (and will) be interpreted in the same way as conventional poetry.
1 Quoted in Werner Faulstich (1978). Rock – Pop – Beat – Folk: Grundlagen der Textmusik- Analyse . p. 69f. 3
2. Socio-Historical Background
The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough – more than enough – of war, hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. John F. Kennedy 2
We see the hope of tomorrow in the youth of today. I know America's youth. I believe in them. We can be proud that they are better educated, more committed, more passionately driven by conscience than any generation in our history. Richard Nixon 3
The term ‘1960s’, in its most basic sense, refers to the historical period that started on January 1, 1960 and ended on December 31, 1969. The Sixties were a turbulent decade of change and revolution, best remembered for the generation's free-spirited hippie attitude, including extensive drug abuse, long hair and promiscuity. However, these images reflect the era only superficially. In truth, the Sixties offered a much more wide-ranging number of important events and trends – not only in the cultural area but also in terms of politics, economy and ideology – that had an immense impact on people's way of thinking and living. The sixties were the age of youth, as 70 million children from the post-war baby boom became teenagers and young adults. The movement away from the conservative fifties continued and eventually resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking and real change in the cultural fabric of American life. No longer content to be images of the generation ahead of them, young people wanted change. The changes affected education, values, lifestyles, laws, and entertainment. Many revolutionary ideas which began in the sixties are continuing to evolve today. (Goodwin & Bradley 1999, online)
With the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, the 1960s actually began as a decade of hope and anticipation, since the election of such a young president seemed to indicate a shift away from the conservative fifties. However, the country soon experienced disillusionment, paranoia and violence sparked by an immensely unpopular war, namely the Vietnam War, and resulting in violent and nonviolent anti-war and civil rights movements. Violence reached its peak in numerous assassinations, including those of president JFK and civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. These incidents further worsened society's already shaken commitment to and trust in governmental authorities. Furthermore, these events, among other things, led people, especially young adults and students, to search for alternative ways of living and thinking, far away from mainstream society.
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Many of them became so-called ‘drop outs’ and adopted the well-known “sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll” philosophy, celebrating their newfound freedom at numerous rock festivals such as Woodstock and the like. Others not only questioned authority, but also started to fight against it, primarily using nonviolent methods such as sit-ins, freedom rides and marches. They challenged traditional values and lifestyles and protested against war, materialism and consumerism. In doing so, these young people created what became known as ‘The Counterculture of the 1960s’. Nevertheless, the Sixties had their upsides too. Although charged with paranoia and violence, the era led to important improvements in the social sector. As already mentioned, the 1960s saw a number of changes and reforms, mainly in the fields of politics, economy and thus also society, where politicians launched a substantial number of campaigns to eliminate poverty, make education accessible to all ages etc. In other words, they started to address and try to solve the problems of the poor and underprivileged. Additionally, many legal acts were passed to modify the workings of the government, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as well as crucial social programs such as Medicare and Medicaid (cf. shmoop “The 1960s”, online). All these happenings, positive as well as negative ones, and many others shaped the era and marked it as one of the most significant periods in the history of the United States. Due to the 1960s' enormous diversity of events, the following in-depth narrative will mainly focus on those events that were most contributory to the emergence of the counterculture and consequently also to the emergence of West Coast Rock as part of that counterculture.
2.1. Political Issues
In terms of politics, the emergence of a larger counterculture in the 1960s was primarily influenced by the period’s most debated and problematic political event, America's involvement in the Vietnam War. But other political and economical events and people also contributed their share, for example the election of John F. Kennedy and his New Frontier policy, Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society as well as Richard Nixon's brutal military campaigns.
The Vietnam War
Beginning in 1955 (although its start date cannot be exactly specified) and ending not until 20 years later in 1975, the Vietnam War was one of the longest and most controversial wars in world history. It started out as a conflict between parts of Vietnam and the colonial powers (first China, then France) that had gained control of the country in the late 19 th century. Nationalist movements emerged to demand independence, ultimately resulting in Vietnam's division into the communist 5
North and the colonial South that stayed loyal to France (cf. Sparknotes “The Vietnam War”, online). Under the pretence of fighting communism and thereby protecting democracy, the United States entered the Vietnam War in the course of the so called Cold War that was being fought between the U.S. and the communist Soviet Union ever since the end of World War II. For Americans the postwar period promised a vindication of their nation's values and institutions that they were sure other people wanted to emulate and adopt. It was an article of faith that non-Americans desired the things the United States represented and that the values of America were universal. (Schmitz 2005: 1)
That was one of the reasons why the U.S. wanted to become (and, in their opinion, they were even chosen to become) culturally, politically and ideologically most powerful on a global scale. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union had the same goal and thus both needed to stop the other superpower from gaining too much control. Vietnam as part of South Asia was highly interesting for both of them. When they entered the war, Vietnam was already divided into North (which fell to communism in 1954) and South Vietnam, the northern part with its communist regime being supported by the Soviet Union as well as China, and the southern part by the USA, whose primary goal was to battle the spread of communism and consequently those in favor of communism (cf. Sparknotes “The Vietnam War”, online). At the time America's foreign policy in Vietnam was highly influenced by the Domino Theory, which basically states that if one country falls prey to communism, the surrounding countries will follow sooner or later. Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower already referred to this theory in 1954, when he declared during a news conference: Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences. 4
For the USA this was reason enough to actively start fighting communism in North Vietnam, because they feared that its spread would lead to the fall of all of South Asia. At first, the United States' support of South Vietnam was solely evidenced by their provision of weapons, raw materials and other relief supplies, but after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, a battle between North Vietnamese torpedo boats and U.S. aircrafts, the U.S. government led by Lyndon B. Johnson felt justified to station troops in Vietnam. The passing of the so called Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 gave them the right to do so “without a formal declaration of war by Congress”
4 Quoted in David F. Schmitz (2005). The Tet Offensive: Politics, War and Public Opinion. p.16. 6
(Wikipedia “1960s”, online). After the Resolution became effective, thousands of American soldiers were sent overseas to actively fight communism. However, the war resulted in a disaster for both sides, with thousands of American as well as Vietnamese soldiers (not to forget the civilians) being killed and the country destroyed by continued bombings. America's involvement in the war reached its peak in 1968 with the launching of the Tet Offensive and the following My Lai Massacre. The Tet Offensive was a confrontation that took place between the North Vietnamese Army and military forces of the Republic Army of South Vietnam together with their allies, including the United States. “The purpose of the offensive was to utilize the element of surprise and strike military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam, during a period when no attacks were supposed to take place” (Wikipedia “Tet Offensive”, online), namely during the month of Tet, the most important Vietnamese holiday. The attacks were launched by the National Liberation Front or NLF, a guerilla group in South Vietnam that fought against the U.S. And even though it turned out to be a military failure for the NFL it had profound effects on how people in America and all over the world viewed the Vietnam War, because it effectively demonstrated the strike capability of the North Vietnamese (cf. Wikipedia “Tet Offensive”, online). The My Lai Massacre further decreased American society’s commitment to the war, since it involved the mass murder of several hundreds of unarmed civilians by U.S. troops. After these infamous incidents, American people came to realize that the Vietnam War was a war not to be won and criticism of the war grew ever louder. As a result, the U.S. government gradually started to withdraw their military forces from Vietnam. However, it was not until 1973 when the so called Case-Church Amendment was passed by Congress that America's military involvement finally ended. The Amendment strictly prohibited further military actions in South Asia by the US (cf. Wikipedia “Case-Church Amendment”, online). Two years later, i.e. in 1975, the Vietnam War was officially over after 20 years of fighting. As already indicated, for the American population the war constituted a moral conflict; on the one hand, they feared for their country due to the imminent spread of communism, on the other hand they approached the violence and cruelties as well as the fact that the war claimed much too many victims with utter skepticism. The strong rejection of the war was highly influenced by the role the mass media played during that time. In fact, it was the first time a war was ever being broadcast on television. As a result, what was said and shown on TV shaped public opinion about the war. And “what the nation was seeing in the 6:30 news shows did not correspond to the generally optimistic picture that was being drawn of the war by an administration that had staked its reputation on a military victory in South Vietnam” (Stern 1978: 8). Since the press depicted the war as an unjust war that was fought against an enemy who did not really threaten the U.S. and that, 7 moreover, claimed the lives of thousands of young soldiers, the majority of American society soon became anti-war (cf. Sparknotes “The Vietnam War”, online). Another factor that contributed decisively to what Laurence Stern (1978: 6) called society's “sagging confidence” in the war was the financial one. Even those people who were at first enthusiastic about the war and its potential outcome soon felt that government was wasting a large amount of the taxes they paid on a war where victory seemed highly improbable after some time. As a result, public confidence into America's political leadership decreased and protest was growing ever louder, leading some staunch proponents to form anti-war movements that were part of the larger 1960s counterculture.
From John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon
When John Fitzgerald Kennedy (or simply JFK) was elected President of the United States of America in 1960, many people had the feeling that a new era was about to begin. Kennedy being the youngest of all presidents so far, his administration reflected the generation's wish for the breaking with traditional values, norms and lifestyles. In other words, the election of a “youthful president seemed to symbolize the transfer of power to a new generation” (Gair 2007: 122). Already in his Inaugural Address, held in 1961, it appeared that JFK was different, truly reflecting the idealism of the younger generation and anticipating their need for change and reform: “We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom – symbolizing an end as well as a beginning – signifying renewal as well as change” and further inviting the American population to “ask not what America will do for you – ask what you can do for your country” 5. In reality, however, Kennedy's short presidency was marked by a number of infamous events, one of those being his responsibility for the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Inheriting the Cold War policy of his predecessors Truman and Eisenhower, Kennedy was committed to stop the spread of communism. The event that largely contributed to his determination was the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the Cuban government led by Fidel Castro. After the invasion, Kennedy feared that another failure in the United States' attempt to battle communism would ruin their credibility; thus, he wanted to achieve a victory in Vietnam at any cost (cf. Wikipedia “Vietnam War”, online). The second political action for which Kennedy is most remembered is his brinkmanship in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Supported by America's number one Cold War-enemy, the Soviet Union, Castro and his followers secretly began to build missile bases in Cuba that gave them the ability to
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When he took office, the Peace Corps became at first a trial and then a permanent program. According to Gair (123), “the Peace Corps offered the opportunity to demonstrate the ‘benevolence’ of the United States and strengthen its position vis-á-vis the Soviet Union; [that is why the program] can be seen as a shrewd effort to strengthen the nation’s standing with potential allies.” In all, Kennedy was still the president that had the greatest impact on 1960s society. His election was a symbol of hope and his assassination in 1963 had an even more profound effect on public opinion. According to Fredric Jameson (1998: 183), JFK's sudden death marked “the decisive end of the well-known passing of the torch to a younger generation of leadership, as well as the dramatic defeat of some new spirit of public or civic idealism”. As a result, Kennedy's successors were unable to put an end to the disillusionment that spread among society after the assassination and so the event further contributed to the emergence of the radicalized counterculture of the 60s. After John F. Kennedy's death, Vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson (or LBJ) assumed the office of President of the United States earlier than expected. His presidency lasted from 1963 to 1969, which makes him the longest-serving president of the 1960s, despite the fact that Kennedy and the myth and mystique surrounding him tend to be most strongly associated with the decade's politics. Johnson was particularly remarkable for his domestic policy known as the ‘Great Society’,
9 which was basically a continuation of Kennedy's programs, whom the latter was unable to complete or enact. For Johnson the ‘Great Society’ represented “a country in which poverty, disease, and racial injustice would be eliminated through government reforms” (CliffNotes “Johnson and the Great Society”, online). During his time in office, LBJ was able to enact a number of programs intended to improve American society, e.g. the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which was part of his ‘War on Poverty’ legislation and intended to secure employment in cities. Other programs included Medicare (providing the elderly with health insurance), Medicaid (providing money for poor people who cannot afford medical insurance) and many more. Furthermore, Johnson achieved remarkable results in the fields of education and civil rights, attempting to make education accessible to all and abolish racial segregation. Among his greatest achievements were the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (providing federal funds for school districts with a special emphasis on those which had large amounts of poor students), the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (prohibiting racial segregation in public places) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (allowing black people to vote for the first time). However, Lyndon B. Johnson's outstanding domestic policy was again overshadowed by America's unpopular involvement in Vietnam, which lost Johnson much public support and generated a larger anti-war movement in the mid-60s. As already mentioned, LBJ was responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was the event that officially indicated the escalation of America's war in Vietnam. He also ordered the infamous operation known as ‘Rolling Thunder’ in early 1965, which refers to an air raid of North Vietnam with the goal of stopping the transmission of soldiers and material goods to the south (cf. CliffNotes “Johnson and the Great Society”, online). The operation continued until 1968, making Johnson even more unpopular among the American population and resulting in his decision to end his bid for reelection. One year later Richard Nixon became Johnson's successor. For the sake of completeness he must be mentioned as well, even though he is mainly located in the 1970s. Nevertheless, Nixon played an important part in the further progression of the Vietnam War and its final outcome. At first, he continued Johnson's brutal foreign policy with the approval of secret bombings of Cambodia in 1969, but Nixon started peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese soon after. The withdrawal of U.S. troops followed and the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 finally put an end to America's involvement in Vietnam (cf. Wikipedia “Richard Nixon”, online).
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2.2. Social Issues
The Vietnam War was arguably the number one factor that generated the countercultural movement in the 1960s. However, there are also a number of significant cultural and sociological issues that contributed to the phenomenon and that should not be underestimated. Some of these issues will be briefly dealt with in the following discussion.
Post-war Baby Boom
After World War II (1939-1945) the number of newborns increased dramatically in many countries, which had a huge impact on American society and economy in the 1960s. The reason for this development is quite simple: when the war ended, many veterans were coming back home. In order to make integration easier for them the G.I. Bill of Rights was passed. It primarily included the provision of money to start a new life by building a business or attending schools and colleges and the like (cf. Wikipedia “G.I. Bill”, online). With their financial lives secured, life was simple and many of these veterans dedicated themselves to relationships and marriage. The result was a high birth rate, which in turn triggered a boom in consumerism as well as in the construction of houses and schools. This led to the rise of the middle class and the emergence of urbanization and suburbanization. People were financially better-off and could provide their children with good education. In the 1960s, those born during the baby-boom years hit their teens and started to rebel against their parents' conservative norms and values (cf. Yesterday TV, online). The so called baby boom generation wanted to give American society a new direction; that is why they started criticizing American institutions and traditions. Rusty L. Monhollon (2010: xiii) describes this new generation as a “unique youth culture” that turned out to be a “cultural and economic force”, since it was also the baby boom generation that instigated the radicalized social movements of the 1960s.
Racial Segregation
Racial Segregation is the practice of restricting people to certain circumscribed areas of residence or to separate institutions (e.g. schools, churches) and facilities (parks, playgrounds, restaurants, restrooms) on the basis of race or alleged race. Racial segregation provides a means of maintaining the economic advantage and superior social status of the politically dominant group, and in recent times it has been employed primarily by white populations to maintain their ascendancy over other groups by means of legal and social color bars. (Britannica, online)
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Even though politicians such as Lyndon B. Johnson started to work against it, racial segregation and discrimination was still a prominent issue in the 1960s. Originally the US Constitution had been developed to guarantee all American citizens (that includes all ethnic and minority groups!) the same rights but in the ‘60s (and, of course, already in prior decades and centuries) many states illegally denied just these rights to black people. The doctrine “separate but equal” was still predominant, meaning that the black population was entitled to the same public services and facilities as the white population but that these services and facilities had to be distinct for each race. In reality, those offered to blacks were of lower standard and by no means equal. Furthermore, black people were denied voting rights and many people still regarded them as inferior human beings and treated them accordingly. Activists and freedom fighters therefore began to claim civil rights for the African American population during the 1960s. As a result, the situation of black Americans was gradually improving but it was still a long and sometimes violent road to success.
Other Social Factors Contributing to the Emergence of a Counterculture
Besides the post-war baby boom and the issue of racial segregation, another issue that is related to the emergence of the counterculture of the 1960s is poverty. In many American cities, especially in bigger ones, poverty was still a big problem, leading some activists to dedicate their time to the funding of anti-poverty programs. Housing, education and medical health care were some of the things that were demanded for the poor and needy. Since higher education was improving through initiatives such as Kennedy's Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 and Johnson's Higher Education Act of 1965, making this kind of education more widely accessible, the number of college students exploded in the mid-60s. The growing body of students also played a crucial role in the period's countercultural movements. Student protests, demonstrations, marches and the like that were inspired by the civil rights struggles soon began to spread among American campuses. As a result of urbanization, industrialization and pollution, the 1960s were also the time of the rise of environmentalism in the United States. The work of American marine biologist and author Rachel Carson is particularly notable in this respect. Her book Silent Spring , which was published in 1962, “documented detrimental effects of pesticides on the environment, particularly on birds”. Furthermore, “Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation and public officials of accepting industry claims uncritically” (Wikipedia “Silent Spring”, online). Through her writing, Carson brought the transience of nature and the need to protect it to public awareness and caused some people to actively start fighting for the environment.
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As already indicated, the emergence of the new media, especially the emergence of television, also contributed decisively to a new kind of thinking. People's opinion about what was going on in the United States politically as well as socially was no longer solely shaped by government information but by news coverage of contemporary events, since pictures of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement etc. were brought directly into the population's living rooms. The information provided on TV often contrasted sharply with what the political leaders of the country wanted people to believe, which in turn led to frustration and discontentment among society. One last factor contributing to the formation of a rebellious movement was the discrimination of minority groups other than African Americans. Since the countercultural generation wanted to break with traditional norms, values and opinions, they also started to fight for the rights of underprivileged groupings such as women and homosexuals. In doing so, they attempted to create a more tolerant, inclusive society (cf. Wikipedia “Counterculture of the 1960s”, online).
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3. The Counterculture of the 1960s
One generation got old One generation got soul This generation got no destination to hold Pick up the cry Hey now it's time for you and me Got a revolution (Jefferson Airplane “Volunteers”, 1969)
It is tempting to start this section with a clear definition of the term 'counterculture'. In its most basic sense the noun 'counterculture' denotes “values and norms of behavior of a cultural group, or subculture, that run counter to those of the social mainstream of the day” (Wikipedia “Counterculture”, online) or, in other words, “a way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm” (WordReference, online). This literal explanation seems to be quite obvious; however, when it comes to a more inclusive definition of the term, describing the counterculture of the 1960s in terms of its origins, members and timeframe, things get more complicated. There is no event that clearly indicates the starting point of the countercultural movement; there is also little agreement on what kind of movements the term 'counterculture of the 1960s' has to include. In fact, the counterculture movement of the 1960s is not only one movement that can be clearly defined; it is a variety of political and social movements that developed for a variety of reasons at different points in time. On the one hand, the term obviously includes political movements such as the anti-war movement, which most certainly developed as a reaction to America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement, whose primary goal was to establish equal rights for African Americans, as well as other important movements such as the Free Speech Movement, Feminism and the Gay Liberation Movement. On the other hand, there are also social and cultural movements which can be regarded as part of that counterculture, such as the hippie movement, the sexual revolution as well as particular revolutionary trends in all kinds of arts, especially in music (of which West Coast Rock is an important part and will be discussed in detail in the next chapter), literature and film. All of these movements, which in their entirety constitute the counterculture of the 1960s, developed as responses to particular social and political trends and events that have been the focus of the previous chapter. According to Micah L. Issitt (2009: xi), the divisions are, however, often “largely arbitrary, as each group blended and mixed with the others”. What is certain is that the younger (or baby boom) generation was responsible for the emergence of the counterculture, because they started to criticize American traditions, values, norms and institutions in an attempt to
14 fulfill their utopian vision of a better world. As a result, the movement, greeted with enormous publicity and popular interest, contributed to changes in American culture. A willingness to challenge authority, greater social tolerance, the sense that politics is personal, environmental awareness, and changes in attitudes about gender roles, marriage and child rearing are legacies of the era. (Hoffman, online)
3.1. The Anti-War Movement
Opposition to America's war in Vietnam was growing steadily in the course of the 1960s and remained powerful until the end of the conflict in 1973. It had a great impact on U.S. foreign policy and, furthermore, played an important part in stopping the country's interference in South Asia. Like the whole counterculture movement, the anti-war movement also consisted of a variety of independent movements and members that were united only in their rejection of warfare while often using totally different strategies to reach their goals. In fact, the movement attracted members from all classes and professional branches. Opponents of the war were thus ordinary people such as mothers, workers, hippies and the like but also academics, journalists, members of the government, lawyers, veterans and, above all, students (cf. Wikipedia “Opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War”, online). Among the most pertinent reasons for the emergence of the anti-war movement was, of course, the moral factor, since many people felt that the war was unjust and claimed much too many victims, soldiers and civilians alike. But there were also legal and pragmatic reasons such as the government's wasting of tax money and violation of the U.S. Constitution. Another prominent factor that caused a storm of protest was the introduction of the draft, i.e. the “compulsory enrollment in the armed forces” (The Free Dictionary, online), also called conscription, which could come upon anyone. Since the draft mainly threatened young men of the baby boom generation, it was also them who mobilized a greater movement of resistance. They felt that the system of conscription was unfairly administered and threatening their future lives. As a result and also as an act of defiance, some people began to burn their draft cards in 1964, while others even fled to Canada through railroads built by anti-war supporters. In this respect, “draft resistance acted as another fetter in the government's ability to wage a war in Vietnam, and brought the war home in a very personal way for a generation of young men” (Kindig 2008, online). Furthermore, “with no clear sign of victory in Vietnam, the media images of American casualties helped to stimulate the opposition of the war in Americans” (Wikipedia “Opposition to the U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War”, online).
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As already mentioned, the post-World War II baby boom resulted in the emergence of a large youth generation in the 1960s. Due to a relatively prosperous economic situation in the USA, many of these young people were attending colleges (the number of students was extremely high in the 60s). When America's involvement in Vietnam began, a large student protest movement aimed at stopping the war was rising. Opposition to the war thus began on college campuses with the burning of the draft cards being one of the first anti-war actions to be made. Students all over the country soon started to hold so called ‘teach-ins’, i.e. public demonstrations where issues concerning the Vietnam War were discussed. The first teach-in took place at the University of Michigan in 1965 and involved a discussion of the Vietnam War draft. It was organized by the activist movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which was part of the larger New Left movement whose aim was to bring about a number of social and political reforms. Similar teach-ins were then held on American campuses all over the country with thousands of participants. Obviously, these protests captured public as well as the government's attention. They even resulted in President Johnson's decision to hold a speech on the Vietnam issue at Johns Hopkins University in 1965, where he was trying to once again justify America's Vietnam policy, without much success: Vietnam is far away from this quiet campus. We have no territory there, nor do we seek any. The war is dirty and brutal and difficult. And some 400 young men, born into an America that is bursting with opportunity and promise, have ended their lives on Viet-Nam's steaming soil. Why must we take this painful road? Why must this Nation hazard its ease, and its interest, and its power for the sake of a people so far away? We fight because we must fight if we are to live in a world where every country can shape its own destiny. And only in such a world will our own freedom be finally secure. 6
However, the student teach-ins were soon joined by other anti-war activities such as protest marches, the first of which was happening in Washington in April 1965 with 25,000 participants, demonstrations, strikes, boycotts and sit-ins. Protest thus spread all over the country and attracted more and more supporters, making it ever harder for the country's political leadership to ignore it. One of the activist groups, the Inter-University Committee for a Public Hearing on Vietnam, even launched a teach-in that was supposed to be conducted on television as well as on the radio all over the country. The program featured debates between members of the anti-war movement and members of the government. With the national teach-in, the anti-war movement made an important contribution to the resignations of a number of politicians, including National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, who was also involved in the escalation of America's war in Vietnam. After such successful achievements at home, the anti-war movement began to spread directly to Vietnam. As visible acts of defiance, soldiers began wearing peace signs and using
6
7
War”, online).
Country Joe and the Fish – “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag”
In terms of anti-war music, Country Joe and the Fish's “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag” (1967) is one of the most iconic songs, since it accurately describes the absurdity of America's war in Vietnam. Country Joe employs literary and rhetorical devices such as irony and hyperbole to convey his message. Interestingly, the song features a cheerful melody that further adds to its cynical overtone. In the opening verse of the song, the speaker sarcastically invites young men to join the war so as to support their country, using the all-American symbol of Uncle Sam (the personification of the American government) to strengthen the argument. In doing so, “the war effort is presented as an extension of the American dream” (Storey 187): Well, come on all of you big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. He's got himself in a terrible jam Way down yonder in Vietnam. So put down your books and pick up a gun, We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.8
Additionally, the verse makes reference to the fact that it was mainly young students who were threatened by the draft, ordering them in line five to replace their books with weapons. In verse two, the strategy of raising awareness via the use of cutting irony is continued when the speaker reminds the American Wall Street (the typical flagship of America's financial sector) of how much money they would be able to make by supplying the Vietnamese with material and weapons. Verse three goes on with an invitation of American generals to hurry up and use their chance of killing as many of “those reds”, i.e. the communists, as possible because “the only good commie is the one that's dead”. The song reaches its culmination in the last part, since verse four is even more macabre than its predecessors. Here the speaker invites mothers and fathers throughout the country to send their sons to Vietnam immediately, so that they can be the first ones in their neighborhood who will be accorded the questionable honor of having “your boy come home in a box”, meaning dead. All of this is topped off with the recurring signature chorus that consists of two parts. The first one goes: “And it's one, two, three/What are we fighting for?/Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,/Next stop is Vietnam.”, again stressing the fact that the Vietnam War was an unjust war fought without an actual threat or reason. Part two purports: “And it's five, six, seven/Open up the pearly gates/Well there ain't no time to wonder why,/Whoopee, we're all gonna die.” By using
8 For the complete lyrics to all songs cited or mentioned throughout this paper please check the appendix 18 excessive exaggeration, the section once more emphasizes the fact that the war was absurd, claiming far too many victims without a successful outcome, which caused people to wonder why this was even happening. The most prominent version of the song is Country Joe MacDonald’s solo performance live at Woodstock, where he appealed to the audience to sing along with him. However, he was not satisfied with their amount of enthusiasm, so he interrupted his performance, shouting: “Listen people, I don’t know how you expect to ever to stop the war if you can’t sing any better than that. There’s about 300,000 of you fuckers out there. I want you to start singing. Come on!” Country Joe certainly did not expect that a crowd of people singing aloud would actually stop the war, but what he wanted to achieve was more commitment, his message being: it is not enough to just be there, listen to some music and silently support others in their attempt to end the fighting. If you really want the war to stop, you need to get active.
3.2. The Civil Rights Movement
Although the war was without a doubt the number one factor that shaped people's consciousness in the 1960s, there were also other relevant sociological issues that encouraged the development of a larger counterculture. One of those issues was racial segregation and discrimination; that is why the American Civil Rights movement aimed at abolishing discrimination and segregation and restoring equal rights for the African American population, which had been guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, was formed. Members of this movement were opponents to the existing inequalities and were using nonviolent measures similar to those of the anti-war movement, such as sit-ins, boycotts, marches and the like with the goal of raising public awareness. The movement existed, of course, already in the decades prior to the 60s, including important events such as the Brown vs. Board of Education cases in 1954 and Rosa Park's Montgomery Bus Boycotts in 1955/56. But it experienced an enormous revival and intensification during the 1960s. A prominent 1960s technique to draw people’s attention to racial issues were so called ‘sit- ins’. Among the most important actions of protest and civil disobedience in the sixties was the student sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960, where four students from an all- black college sat down at the segregated lunch counter of a Woolworth store to protest Woolworth's policy of denying serving African Americans (cf. Wikipedia “African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)”, online). As a result, students all over the country started to organize similar sit-ins in order to make people aware of the issue of racial segregation, which ultimately resulted in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
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Among other things, the SNCC further initiated another form of civil disobedience called freedom rides. Freedom riders were both black and white people who participated in organized bus tours to the South to test federal laws that were supposed to end racial segregation. The first freedom ride started from Washington in May, 1961 and reached its destination, New Orleans, after a fortnight. In the following years, activists travelled all over the country, trying to desegregate not only seating arrangements in buses but also restrooms, water fountains and the like on bus terminals. Their mission, however, proved to be a very dangerous one. Buses were bombed and the activists themselves were often attacked and severely injured by opponents of the freedom riders' cause or even sent to jail (cf. Wikipedia “African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)”, online). Besides sit-ins and freedom rides, many other actions were taken by civil rights activists and supporters to end racial segregation and discrimination during the 1960s. In doing so, the movement gained more and more public and media attention. The most remarkable event in this connection is certainly the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 with its almost 300,000 participants. The march had six official goals (cf. Alexander & Rucker 2010: 883): • the passage of reasonable/rational civil rights laws • a federal works program • equal employment, • adequate housing, • voting rights, • and decent education for black citizens. Furthermore, it included the famous “I Have a Dream”-speech of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Since King used to be a clergyman, the speech resembles a sermon. It includes numerous allusions to the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, the U.S. Constitution and even Shakespeare's “Richard III” (“[...] this sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn [...]”) (cf. Wikipedia “I Have A Dream”, online). To further strengthen his arguments, King repeatedly employs the rhetorical device called 'anaphora', i.e. the repetition of a word or a sequence of words at the beginning of successive sentences, most famously occurring in the passage where he describes his utopian vision of a more tolerant and integrated American society where no racial inequalities and discriminations exist: I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
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I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today! 9
The speech, held in front of the Lincoln Memorial, had an enormous impact and constituted a defining moment in the American Civil Rights Movement. After the march, King and other leading figures of the movement met with Kennedy at the White House. Although Kennedy was assassinated before he could pass a bill, many of the activists' demands were granted during Johnson's presidency (e.g. Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965) (cf. Wikipedia “African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)”, online). However, apart from the achievement of such milestones in the fight for the rights of the black population, the movement also suffered heavy setbacks during the 1960s, especially in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, who functioned as the ultimate bearer of hope for African Americans, and of other prominent freedom fighters such as Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. Nevertheless, activists have not stopped their fight and the situation of black people has been gradually improving, being nowadays almost on an equal level with the white population. Unfortunately, they were not able to abolish racism as a whole.
Bob Dylan – “Only a Pawn in their Game”
Like the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement was not only marked by the presence of activists but also by the presence of artists who supported the movement through their work. A very prominent figure in this connection was singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, who was most remarkable for his protest music. In 1963, Dylan was one of the participants at the March on Washington where he also performed one of his political songs called “Only a Pawn in their Game”. The song is part of his most iconic album titled The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964) and deals with the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Evers was a WWII veteran, who took a stand for the abolition of racial segregation at the University of Mississippi, partly due to the fact that his own application there was rejected. He committed his life to working for change, since he himself – like many others – was a victim of the existing racial injustices. For example, Evers was not allowed to vote in elections and was furthermore even attacked by white men (cf. Doyle 2008, online). His murder inspired the works of numerous artists, including writers, directors and poets. And Dylan was one of them.
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The opening verse of the song “Only a Pawn in their Game” features a description of Evers' assassination. At the age of 37, Evers was shot in the back when he returned home from a meeting at New Jerusalem Baptist Church. The final lines of the verse are most remarkable, since they suggest that the murderer (his name was Byron de la Beckwith) “can't be blamed/He's only a pawn in their game”, i.e. he is not solely responsible for his actions “but rather that he was an instrument of a racist mindset that was prevalent at that time” (Wikipedia “Only A Pawn in Their Game”, online). These lines mark the song as an iconic example of civil rights music, since it deals with an event that importantly influenced the movement and criticizes racism in general. In verse two Dylan names (southern) American politicians as those responsible for the existing injustices. They and their primitive speeches about the superiority of white men set the white population against “negroes”. Beckwith is therefore only a puppet – or “a pawn in their game”, as the title of the song already suggests – controlled by the government's ideology, which they try to ram into everyone's minds. The lines “And the poor white remains/On the caboose of the train” further strengthen the secondary role of the murderer, 'caboose' being “the last car on a freight train, having cooking and sleeping facilities for the crew” (Wiktionary, online) that would not drive on its own. In slang, the term even refers to someone's “buttocks”, which makes it even more derogatory. The following verses, more precisely verses three and four, give further examples of how white leading figures (police, soldiers, governors etc.) use the population as tools to achieve their ends. From their school days onwards, white men are taught that they have the right to oppress black men. In doing so, they are not able to develop their own way of thinking; instead the white man is trained to float with the current “to protect his white skin” and “keep up his hate”. Dylan appropriately compares this type of person to “a dog on a chain”. The final verse of the song makes reference to the circumstances surrounding Medgar Evers' funeral. Evers was buried at Arlington National Cemetery receiving full military honor (“they lowered him down as a king”). In contrast, the murderer will receive no such attention upon his death, which Dylan euphemistically circumscribes as “the shadowy sun”. He will not be remembered, since he was only a nameless, faceless figure, led by the ideologies of the establishment that were imposed upon him.
3.3. The Hippie and Youth Movement
The hippie movement constitutes another major branch of the larger counterculture. But what is a hippie? When trying to provide an answer to this question, there are at least two distinct definitions that need to be considered: a scholarly and a popular one. Scholars and historians tend to treat the 22 hippie culture as a legitimate social movement that emerged in the 1960s as part of the larger counterculture. This is mainly due to the fact that the hippies were to be found in all areas of countercultural society. They supported the causes of the anti-Vietnam movement and the civil rights movement as well as they took a stand for feminism, gay rights and freedom of speech. However, this definition is partly insufficient, since it does not actually describe the hippie movement in terms of its own distinctive characteristics but rather as a phenomenon that mixes and blends with every other counterculture movement, which is true, in fact, but does not capture the whole picture (cf. Issitt 58). In contrast, the second and more popular definition argues that the hippies also form a movement of their own, with their own beliefs and their distinctive looks that set them apart from other members of the counterculture. Etymologically, the term 'hippie' stems from the word 'hipster'. In their Hipster Handbook , Robert Lanham et al. (2003: book blurb) describe the hipster as one who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term “cool”; a Hipster would instead say “deck”.) The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2 % body fat.
They further continue with a list comprising characteristics of a typical hipster such as unwashed hair, the engagement in same-sex relationships or the necessity of having a Republican friend and being a member of vegetarianism. Admittedly, this is a very modern and satirical way of describing a hipster and it undoubtedly stretches the truth to a certain extent; nevertheless, it is not all wrong. Coming up during a time when society was changing and people began to criticize existing social orders, the hippies were, in fact, a cultural group that celebrated personal freedom in the extreme. Hippies rejected everything that was part of mainstream society and they expressed their rejection through their attitudes, actions and fashion. Excessive usage of recreational drugs, peculiar fashion trends and the celebration of the sexual revolution are therefore some of their most representative features. In fact, both definitions need to be considered when trying to understand what the hippies were like, since they were as much a social movement as they were people who called for freedom while wearing strange clothes. However, in reality it is almost impossible to find an adequate definition that fully captures the diversity of the hippie phenomenon, since “the idea of the 'hippie' was created from outside the culture itself and served primarily to pigeonhole a diverse group of young people who took part in the counterculture” (Issitt 58).
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From the Beat Generation to the Hippie Movement
The hippies are often described as successors of the Beat Generation. This Beat Generation started out as a small but influential group of post-world war II writers and poets, and soon developed into a large movement including all kinds of artists. The name ‘Beat Generation’ was coined by the movement's most famous writer Jack Kerouac. He used the phrase to denote an underground youth movement that emerged in New York in the late 1940s and was particularly notable for its non- conformist lifestyle. However, it was not until 1952 that the phrase was introduced to the public when John Clellon Holmes took up Kerouac's ideas and published his seminal article “This is the Beat Generation” in The New York Times Magazine . In his article, Holmes closely examines the meaning of being a member of this generation: More than a mere weariness, it [the term “beat”] implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth. Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. […] The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, behop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later. 10
However, after the publication of “This Is The Beat Generation” it still took several years until the writers of the generation were able to publish their own works. Besides Kerouac and Holmes, the original core of the movement also included Allan Ginsberg, whom they met at Columbia University in the late 1940s. The group was soon joined by many other artists such as Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs, and when they migrated to San Francisco they also met Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. When this first wave of so called “classic beats” finally became famous, a second wave followed, including writers and poets such as Bob Kaufman, Ed Sanders, Diane DiPrima and Ted Joans (cf. Asher 1994, online). And even then the movement continued to gradually evolve and attract a considerable number of other writers, poets and other artists. The writings of the Beat generation were heavily influenced by Romanticism, Surrealism and Modernism as well as the early American literature of Transcendentalists such as Henry David
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Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Core elements of Beat literature include spontaneity of feeling and expression, social protest, and drug experimentation as a tool to expand their mind and consciousness and heighten their senses in order to improve creativity. Compared to earlier literary styles, their writings were also much more bold and straightforward with unusual verse and prose rhythms (which were inspired by Harlem be-bop jazz). Due to the Beats’ unconventional and liberal style of writing and choice of topics (particularly regarding sexuality), some of their work was charged with being pornography and therefore subject to censorship. Nevertheless, the writers of the Beat generation produced some of the most influential texts in the history of American literature. Besides Kerouac's On the Road and Burroughs' Naked Lunch , Ginsberg's famous long-poem “Howl”, which was published in 1956, also marks a turning point in the history of Beat (and American) literature. The poem is remarkable in both the usage of literary devices and the choice of themes. Ginsberg borrowed form and meter of the poem from his predecessor Walt Whitman. It consists of three parts with 112 long lines written in free verse. Furthermore, the poem was intended to be read aloud, which was also quite unusual for the time in which it was written. The speaker tells us stories about apparently everything he saw, moving thereby from one setting to the other (New York City is the place that is mostly mentioned). However, the poem's most controversial features are definitely the themes it discusses. Besides drugs, war, religion and politics, it makes explicit reference to sexuality, a particularly shocking feature for the prudish society of the time. And there is lots of sexuality in this poem (not only heterosexuality, but also homosexuality and paraphilia), which resulted in the U.S. government's decision to declare it obscene (cf. Shmoop “Howl”, online). The primary focus of the trial were lines 36ff: who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, […] 11
In this respect, the poem is a good example of the principal elements of Beat culture. These include, for instance, drug experimentation, a permissive attitude towards all kinds of sexualities (thereby questioning the prudery of the older generation), a rejection of materialism and consumerism and a newfound interest in other religions (especially Eastern ones). By questioning and breaking the
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Core elements of the Hippie Counterculture
Even though the previous discussion has already shown that it is difficult to pinpoint the exact features of the hippie culture, there are still some elements that most members of this group have in common. To most people, hippies are readily identifiable due to their unmistakable way of dressing and styling. Long, undone hair, batik shirts, bell-bottom pants, vests and skirts in bright colors, headbands, round sunglasses and sandals (many did not wear shoes at all) are typical fashion trends of the hippie culture. Additionally, men often wore beards and women little makeup and no bras. Due to their rejection of materialism and consumerism, many of the clothes were self-made or bought second-hand (cf. Wikipedia “Hippie”, online). However, hippie fashion was only a small part of their ideology. Being a hippie meant much more than wearing particular clothes, for instance the rejection of mainstream society with all its restrictions and taboos. Hippies were usually young people approximately between 15 and 25 years old (that is why the hippie culture can also be described as a youth movement), who decided to run away from home and drop out of mainstream society. Such teenage runaways were typical of the sixties, since young people were encouraged by leaders of the counterculture movement to abandon all social restrictions and bonds, including education and employment. One of the most influential figures in this respect was counterculture leader Timothy Leary with his “turn on, tune in, drop out” philosophy. Many teenagers therefore headed for San Francisco, which was the center of the Flower Power movement, in search for the ultimate freedom. Another huge part of the anti-mainstream attitude of hippies was the usage of recreational drugs. LSD, marijuana, mescaline and other hallucinogens were most commonly used as means to escape oppressive society and “drop out” in a different way. Furthermore, the community believed that the psychoactive drug use “enhanced both the individual’s quality of life and his artistic creativity” (Friedlander 1996: 191). Again this trend was strongly promoted by leading figures of the counterculture such as Timothy Leary (“Expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within” 12 ) and Ken Kesey, who thought of himself as a linking figure between the Beat Generation and the hippie movement (“I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie” 13 ). Kesey was particularly famous for conducting so called “Acid Tests”, “centered entirely
12 Quoted in Timothy Leary (1998). The Politics of Ecstasy . p. 135. 13
Politically, all hippies had one thing in common: the promotion of their utopian vision of world peace. In this respect, another popular hippie slogan appeared, saying “Make love, not war” (the slogan and the iconic peace symbol became the hallmarks of the movement). Hippies were particularly active in supporting the anti-war and civil rights movements (but they were also strong promoters of other social movements such as feminism and gay rights). Being mainly pacifists, members of the hippie movement used non-violent measures such as demonstrations, marches, sit- ins and, of course, musical shows to express their opinions. Almost all hippies were politically involved to a certain degree, but most politically active were the so called Yippies, a radicalized sub-group of the hippie movement. In the 2007 Los Angeles Times' article “60s live again, minus the LSD” by Paul Krassner and Anita Hoffman, the term came up for the first time “as a label for a phenomenon that already existed, an organic coalition of psychedelic hippies and political
27 activists” 14 . The Yippies mainly used the street theater as a means to criticize mainstream society, often in a very scornful way (e.g. offering a pig as presidential candidate). The hippies also play a crucial role when it comes to the phenomenon of West Coast Rock (or rather music in general), since many hippies used to be musicians and vice versa. Music for them served as a means to express their feelings, opinions, ideologies etc. Furthermore, the hippies were responsible for some of the most important concerts and festivals of the era (e.g. Woodstock) and these festivals also used to be the places where the West Coast Rock counterculture came together. However, the following song example is only meant to provide a first insight into how hippie culture and music went together and influenced each other. The larger field of hippie music (in particular, of course, West Coast hippie music) as well as the most iconic festivals will be incorporated in the discussion of West Coast Rock, which will be the focus of the next main chapter.
Eric Burdon and The Animals – “San Franciscan Nights”
Originally formed in Britain, the rock group Eric Burdon and The Animals decided to move to California in the mid-60s to become renowned for their psychedelic sound. Their efforts resulted in the iconic album Winds of Change (1967), a major contribution to the revolutionary music of the American West Coast. One of the most successful songs on the album is “San Franciscan Nights”, a song that celebrates the countercultural lifestyle of the hippie generation and in particular the lifestyle of San Francisco and its people. The San Franciscan district called Haight-Ashbury used to be the place where the multitude of hippies resided; it was famous for its rising drug and rock 'n' roll scene. However, according to John Storey, the song does even more than this, since it “not only generates the counter culture's politics, it also displays its cultural practices, the 'psychedelic' and 'innovative sounds' which had partly attracted Burdon to the West Coast”. Furthermore, Storey argues that the song's “lyrics celebrate the counterculture, while its musical structure displays the culture's concern with drug experimentation” (181f). The psychedelic quality of the song, however, is mostly expressed in its lyrics. In terms of music, it is less spectacular; nevertheless, the song has a psychedelic overtone, since the instruments used produce a dreamy, floating rhythm that attempts to reproduce the sensory impressions during a hallucinogenic drug experience. Interestingly, the song opens with a parody of the “Dragnet” theme, opening the popular 1960s police series of the same name, followed by a spoken dedication by Eric Burdon that invites the European youth to come to San Francisco, the centre of Flower Power, apparently the best place
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The following lyrics of the actual song then describe a warm San Franciscan night in the opening verse. This first verse is filled with psychedelic images of a “strobe light's beam” that creates dreams, while not only walls but also minds move, angels sing and everyone feels alright; certainly an allusion to the hippie's common practice of escaping the real world and entering their own peaceful realm through the use of recreational drugs such as LSD and marijuana, far away from the troubles of the outside world. The middle section of the song simply states “I wasn't born there perhaps I'll die there/there's no place left to go, San Franciscan”. It seems to be the speaker's (in this case probably all members of the band) personal experience and opinion about the city. Born in Britain, he still intends to stay in San Francisco for the rest of his life, since there is no other place comparable in lifestyle. The second verse contrasts with the first one in its more negative tone. The opening line “Cop's face is filled with hate” refers to the ongoing brutality of the police towards members of anti-mainstream society (ironically the cop stands “on a street called love”). The speaker then appeals to the “old cop and young cop” to just “feel alright” like everyone else. The song concludes with a reference to racial discrimination, arguing that the “American Dream includes Indians too”, i.e. that everyone should be treated equally. In this respect, the song incorporates lots of 1960s issues and celebrates hippie culture. Eric Burdon (1986: 161) summarized the overall message of the song as follows: “If you weren't for peace and love then you were a part of the outside world, the place beyond Haight Ashbury, which stood for Vietnam, police brutality, racial hatred, multinational rip offs and a bent Government”.
3.4. Other Countercultural Movements
Besides the three main movements of the counterculture that we discussed in the previous sub- chapters, i.e. the anti-war, the civil rights and the hippie movements, there are some other countercultural movements that received less attention in the 1960s. Nevertheless, they should be briefly discussed, since their impact on American society was also considerable and they created long-lasting effects. These movements are, in particular, feminism, the gay rights movement, and the free speech movement. Their impact on West Coast Rock is, however, comparably small, since 29 the musical movement was mainly influenced by those events that most strongly affected 1960s’ society, such as the war in Vietnam. When it comes to women, people in the 1960s began to question the traditional role of women as being solely responsible for housework and child-rearing, thereby neglecting education and career advancement. The starting point of the feminist movement is said to be the publication of Betty Friedan's nonfiction book The Feminine Mystique in 1963, a book that discusses “the problem that has no name”, i.e. the unhappiness of women and its causes. The feminist movement of the 1960s is also known as second-wave feminism, since unlike first-wave feminism it focused not only on legal issues (e.g. voting and property rights) but included a broad range of other issues such as sexuality, working conditions and reproductive rights. Among the most important achievements of the movement were “marital rape laws, establishment of rape crisis and battered women's shelters, significant changes in custody and divorce law, and widespread integration of women into sports activities and the workplace” (Wikipedia “Second-wave Feminism”, online) as well as the foundation of the United States' largest feminist organization in 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW). However, not only women but also other minority groups such as homosexuals began to criticize traditional norms during the 1960s. The events that mark the beginning of the American gay rights movement are the Stonewall Riots of 1969, a series of violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in Greenwich Village, New York. It was the first time gay people fought back against the government's persecution of sexual minority groups. As a result, gay rights organizations were founded all over the world, which still fight against the oppressiveness of heteronormativity. Another notable movement of the sixties is the free speech movement (FSM). Starting in 1964 at Berkeley University, California, the movement was inspired by the larger civil rights movement. It was initially a reaction to the university administration's decision to put a ban on any form of political activism on the campus. Students felt that they were deprived of their fundamental rights and called for their right to free speech and academic freedom by demonstrations, sit-ins and similar measures. The movement sparked a wave of large-scale student activism, particularly regarding Vietnam War opposition. It even led to the founding of the Vietnam Day Committee, which played an important role in the organization of anti-war activities (cf. Wikipedia “The Counterculture of the 1960s”, online).
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4. West Coast Rock
By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, And everywhere was song and celebration. And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes riding shotgun in the sky, Turning into butterflies above our nation. (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young “Woodstock”, 1970)
As the previous discussion has shown, the counterculture movement of the 1960s was not only supported and influenced by radical students, hippies, yippies and other activists, “who between 1965 and 1970 attempted to establish a non-competitive, non-belligerent ‘alternative’ society” (Storey 186); the arts were also of extreme significance in supporting this attempt. Many countercultural issues, particularly issues regarding Vietnam and racial discrimination, were incorporated into films, paintings, writings and poems and thus made accessible to the larger public. The role of artists was particularly important, since their presence was “a significant force in creating mass protests” (Gair 128). This basically means that artists fulfill a role model function in society with many people tending to follow their example. In this respect, it is of utmost importance that they make use of their popularity and draw people's attention to social and political issues of the time. The biggest contribution to the counterculture, however, came from music. In fact music was part of every aspect of this counterculture, playing important roles in the lives of probably every young person who was part of “the movement”. Protest songs were sung at anti-war rallies, songs made overt or obfuscated references to drugs, music was used when people used recreational drugs, the development of “back-to-the-land” communes coincided with a resurgence of traditional folk and country musical styles, and so forth. (Perone 2003: 7)
On many occasions, music has been influential when it comes to shaping society's ideas and beliefs towards the establishment. But particularly in the 1960s (mainly due to the Civil Rights and Anti- war Movements, which provided an adequate basis for the flourishing of political music), many musicians began to use their medium as a means to propagate their political and social opinions. The incorporation of these issues into song lyrics thus became a popular method to make individual and communal statements and call upon society to fight against existing injustices. According to music journalist Piero Scaruffi, “the fusion of music and politics that occurred in the early 1960s had lasting effects on the very nature and purpose of rock music. Rock music became a primary vehicle for expressing dissent within the Establishment, and therefore one of the most relevant aspects of the ‘counterculture’” (2007: 32).
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The music of the counterculture of the American West coast was no exception here. West Coast Rock, as the name already suggests, refers to a group of revolutionary rock musicians that were active on the West Coast of the United States, particularly in the state of California, during the 1960s. Most of these bands originated in (or at least migrated to) Los Angeles or San Francisco, which can therefore be regarded as the musical centers of West Coast Rock. Following the tradition of folk musicians such as Bob Dylan, all major bands of the American West Coast, including Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Country Joe & The Fish, Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young), The Doors, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Big Brother and The Holding Company, and some others, used music as a means of social and political protest. Their music basically expressed the attitudes and values of the larger counterculture movement. The fact that these musicians were of approximately the same age, class and race (i.e. members of the white middle-class under 25) further strengthened their connection to the counterculture. Moreover, West coast artists regarded their audience as equal members of an anti- mainstream society rather than mere consumers of their music. West Coast Rock is therefore what John Storey called “a music that developed from the ‘bottom’ up, and not a music imposed from the ‘top’ down” (190). In other words, it was a collective experience intended to weld together all people that supported the ideologies of the counterculture movement and helped to spread their beliefs. Besides typical revolutionary devices such as demonstrations, marches and sit-ins, rock festivals used to be the major events where representatives of the west coast counterculture came together. The Monterey Pop Festival, the Human Be-In, and Woodstock are among the most prominent festivals of the 1960s. At these festivals the West coast musicians and their audience were able to celebrate their alternative lifestyle and address important social and political issues. The primary goal of the West Coast musicians was obviously a transformation of American society. Like other members of the counterculture, they rejected consumerism, capitalism and materialism, longed for a more tolerant and peaceful society and frequently used recreational drugs as a means to escape from the constraints of reality. In this connection, their central concern was opposition to the war in Vietnam. In fact West Coast Rock cannot be seen outside the context of Vietnam, since every West Coast musician commented on the war to a greater or lesser extent, mainly of course by means of anti-war songs. Their utopian visions were, however, not as easy to put into practice as they hoped. Nevertheless, musicians of the West coast made a big contribution to the improvement of American society by stressing real problems, making people aware of these problems and encouraging them to rebel against a real war. The following discussion will provide a more detailed account of the origins of West Coast Rock, which decidedly lie in folk music, focusing especially on the influence of Bob Dylan and his protest music. Furthermore, it will highlight the two most important types of West Coast Rock 32 music, which used to be anti-Vietnam War songs, on the one hand, and psychedelic songs, on the other hand. The major West Coast Festivals and their significance will be the focus of the next subchapter, whereas the concluding chapters will concentrate on the particular sounds of the centers of West Coast Rock, i.e. Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as the most important bands of the two cities.
4.1. From Folk Music and Bob Dylan to West Coast Rock
West Coast Rock has its origins in folk music; (traditional) folk music, that is (in its most basic sense) the music of the “folk” or the people, has always been a crucial part of American musical history. Early American settlers already sang topical songs, i.e. songs including “personal stories linked to current political and cultural events” (Friedlander 134), in praise of the American Revolution; and abolitionists sang sad songs about slavery and the Civil War (cf. Friedlander 134). In other words, the tradition of folk songs pervades American history from its very beginnings. In the 1960s, folk music underwent a revival when folk singers started to write their own material and incorporated contemporary social and political issues into their lyrics. In doing so, they attracted larger audiences, especially young people. The folk music movement of the 1960s is also known as the American folk music revival. Nevertheless, folk music, like rock music in general, still used to be an underground phenomenon in the 1960s. But it was also exactly the kind of music the disillusioned members of the baby boom generation (and, as we know, there were a lot of them) were waiting for. In a time when the youth of America was searching for an identity of their own, underground music provided several ways to reach that goal. By favoring what was not mainstream and not publicized by the media, fans of this kind of music developed an alternative system of communication, “alternative” to the system of the mass media, alternative in the sense that it dealt with and promoted those phenomena that were ignored by the mass media. Being a minority became something to be proud of, not something to be ashamed of. They, discriminated against by the adult society, sympathized with all discriminated groups (blacks, foreigners) and considered them their peers. All of these attitudes had political overtones, which in some cases became explicit, and thus bridged alternative music and left-wing politics. (Scaruffi 32)
In this respect, folk music played an important role in the developmental process of the baby boomers, since it encouraged them to start questioning authority and think for themselves. The single most influential folk musician of the 1960s (and, of course, of the subsequent decades as well, since he has not abandoned his artistic career so far), who used music and lyrics as
33 a form of alternative mass communication, was, without a doubt, Bob Dylan. In fact Dylan managed to turn the conventions of folk and rock music upside down. Both his live performances and his individual way of songwriting strongly affected the music of the 1960s. That is why he can be regarded as the leading countercultural artist who managed to remain influential throughout the sixties as well as the decades that were still to follow. Furthermore, Dylan was a pioneer in writing songs that commented on a variety of political, social and philosophical issues. In doing so, he is considered to be the founder of a new genre that came to be known as ‘protest music’. Through his music Dylan galvanized the whole baby boom generation and many of his songs became anthems of the counterculture movement. However, in the course of an imposing career, Dylan’s music began to stretch across almost every musical genre, thereby defying to get pigeonholed. Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, Dylan grew up in the Jewish middle-class neighborhood of Duluth, Minnesota. Being something of a maverick from an early age on, Dylan spent most of his childhood in his room, where he also discovered his interest in the arts. He devoted most of his time to reading, writing poetry and lyrics and teaching himself the piano and later also the guitar. At the age of fifteen, Dylan founded his first rock band, the Teen Chords. However, the intolerant attitude of authorities towards this musical genre (during the performance at their high school talent show, the vice principal even pulled the plug, explaining that the music was too loud), soon prompted Bob to turn to American folk music instead (cf. Friedlander 136f). As Dylan later explained, this was not the only reason for his newly found interest in folk music: The thing about rock 'n' roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings. 15
After graduating from high school, Dylan moved to Minneapolis, where he enrolled at the local state university. But he soon discovered that his love of music was much stronger than his academic aspirations and he decided to drop out and move to New York. Nevertheless, Dylan’s time in Minneapolis was not completely wasted, since there he was introduced to the Dinkytown (Minneapolis’ bohemian section) folk scene and was even allowed to perform at folk clubs. During his Dinkytown days, Dylan also exchanged his birth name “Robert Allen Zimmerman” for “Bob Dylan”. The choice of “Dylan” as his last name is most likely an homage to writer and poet Dylan Thomas, whose works served as an inspiration for Bob Dylan (cf. Friedlander 137). Dylan himself commented on his legal name change in 2004 in the following way: “You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself.
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This is the land of the free” 16 . Interestingly, Zimmerman completed his transformation into “Bob Dylan” by building a fictional life-history as well. In this context, the Bob Dylan who came to New York was different from the one living in Minnesota in every respect. In New York, Dylan hoped to meet his idol Woody Guthrie, who, among other topical folk singers such as Pete Seeger, or the blues singer Robert Johnson, strongly influenced Dylan’s early music. Guthrie is most famous for his political songs such as “This Land Is Your Land” and “Roll on, Columbia”. According to Paul Friedlander (135), Guthrie had “a talent for attaching topical lyrics to traditional folk and religious melodies”. Dylan later even claimed that his aspiration was to become Guthrie’s “greatest disciple”. Success finally came to Bob Dylan in 1961, mainly due to Robert Shelton’s praise of one of Dylan’s performances in The New York Times . In this article, Shelton describes Dylan as “a bright new face in folk music” 17 . The same day, Dylan signed his first record deal with Columbia Records. His debut album, simply named Bob Dylan (1962), had comparatively little impact but it already hinted at his musical brilliance. The album featured mainly traditional blues and folk songs and only two original songs written by Dylan himself (“Song to Woody” and “Talkin’ New York”). However, already Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963), revealed the full range of his genius as a songwriter. The album marked the beginning of Dylan’s protest music, since many of the songs on the album were protest songs in the tradition of Guthrie and Seeger and earned Dylan the sobriquet “poet-prophet”. Thematically, the album addressed a number of social and political issues such as civil rights and racial segregation (e.g. “Oxford Town”) and (nuclear) warfare (e.g. “Masters of War”), balanced by some love songs and humoristic blues material. Most famous and influential was certainly the album’s opening track, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, which was to become the anthem of the counterculture movement and will therefore be discussed in more detail at the end of this subchapter. Over the next few years, Dylan produced a considerable number of further albums, all of which used to be revolutionary in some way. For instance, in his third album, The Times They Are a- Changin’ (1963), real life events, mainly concerning social injustice and racial issues, served as inspirations for his lyrics in songs such as “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”, which deals with the true story about a farmer who murdered his family and then committed suicide for fear of losing his farm and starving to death; “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, recounting the circumstances surrounding the death of a black servant who was killed by a rich tobacco farmer, or the aforementioned “Only a Pawn in the Game”. In doing so, Dylan not only highlighted the necessity of change but he also advanced to the status of spokesperson of the civil rights movement (cf.
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Friedlander 140). In late 1964, Dylan began to change his musical style rapidly, turning more and more towards rock - a trend that is already evident in Another Side of Bob Dylan , which was released the same year. However, the release of his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home , is usually considered to be the peak of his transition from a political folk singer to a modern rock musician. Many people were shocked upon hearing the album, which for the first time featured electric instrumentation on side one (side two once again featured acoustic songs). Also in terms of its lyrics the album was very different from Dylan’s previous material, since in it Dylan distanced himself from protest music and topical songs and turned to more personalized and surreal song texts instead. Nevertheless, Bringing It All Back Home contained some of Dylan’s best material, for instance the album’s opening track “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, which is a remarkable mixture of stream- of-consciousness lyrics (inspired by the earlier Beat poetry) and energetic rock and roll music. But the acoustic songs on side two have also found recognition, especially the epic “Mr. Tambourine Man”, which even became one of Dylan’s most famous songs. The four-verse song tells the abstract story “of a weary, disillusioned, and smoke-blurred existence, pleading for escape and a new morning” (Friedlander 141). In order to escape this surreal world, the speaker of the song calls on the “Tambourine Man” to play a song for him, in the chorus (with which the song unusually begins). Due to its abstract lyrics and surreal imagery, the song has also been interpreted as a paean to recreational drugs, thereby helping to initiate the era of psychedelic rock. Interestingly, “Mr. Tambourine Man” has been covered by many artists (e.g. Judy Collins and William Shatner). The most successful and influential version, however, came from the West Coast rock band The Byrds who released it as their debut single in 1965, reaching the top of the UK and the US charts. They also used the song as the title track of their initial album. Moreover, The Byrds’ version led to the emergence of a new musical genre called folk rock, “a frantic accompaniment of electric guitars to a catchy folk melody (which was often sung in the multi-part harmony style of the Beach Boys)” (Scaruffi 36). Bob Dylan’s other 1960 albums - Highway 61 Revisited (1965), including the six-minutes- long “Like a Rolling Stone” that overturned the convention that pop songs were not to exceed three minutes; Blonde on Blonde (1966); John Wesley Harding (1967); and Nashville Skyline (1969) - ultimately convinced even the toughest of his critics that he was (and still is) a musical and poetic genius, leading them “to argue that rock music could be regarded as ‘true art’”; furthermore, Dylan’s work “destroyed any residual notion that pop music was always ephemeral” (Gair 169). However, Dylan’s repeated decisions to change his style, especially his switch to the electric guitar, were not always welcomed. On July 25, 1965 Dylan performed at the Newport Folk Festival backed by a rock band with electric instrumentation, which caused the so called “Electric Dylan 36
Controversy”. Many of his fans, particularly members of the folk movement, felt that moving away from political and social protest music towards primitive rock and roll was a step backwards. Some of them even booed his performance (cf. Wikipedia “Electric Dylan Controversy”, online). Dylan, however, anticipated the commercial potential of electric rock music that had already been proven by the success of British rock bands such as The Beatles. Furthermore, all of Dylan’s stylistic innovations, be it criticizing the political and social status quo with the aid of protest lyrics, turning towards electric rock music, or trying to recreate drug experiences by means of psychedelic music and lyrics, had a profound effect on many young musicians of the 1960s, including West Coast rock bands such as Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, The Doors, The Byrds, Credence Clearwater Revival or Buffalo Springfield, who followed his example. Among the numerous West Coast bands influenced by Dylan’s music, the one that can be described as Dylan’s West coast counterpart used to be Country Joe MacDonald, lead singer and songwriter of the aforementioned rock band Country Joe and the Fish. Like Dylan, Country Joe and his band were most famous for their protest music, particularly regarding the Vietnam War (see “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag”, p. 18), as well as for their pioneering work in the field of electric psychedelic rock. Scaruffi (34) described Country Joe’s style as follows: “Leading what was fundamentally an electric jug-band, he soon discovered San Francisco’s hippies and LSD and managed to wed his political stance to acid-rock’s visionary format”. However, other West Coast bands as well successfully managed to carry on Dylan’s artistic tradition. In this respect, it is not surprising that the West Coast Rock movement came to be strongly associated with anti-Vietnam music (in the tradition of Dylan’s protest songs), usage of electric instrumentation and the emergence of psychedelic rock.
Bob Dylan – “Blowin’ in the Wind”
Critic Andy Gill (1999: 23) tellingly described “Blowin’ in the Wind” as “the song with which Dylan's name is most inextricably linked, and safeguarded his reputation as a civil libertarian through any number of changes in style and attitude”. Fully capturing the spirit of the era, the song became the epitome of the counterculture. Dylan once again demonstrated his outstanding songwriting abilities in “Blowin’ in the Wind”. He managed to successfully combine a traditional folk melody (parts of the song’s melody derived from the old slave song “No More Auction Block”) with meaningful lyrics that incorporate modern literary and rhetorical devices such as allusions, metaphors and imagery in impressive new ways. Additionally, the song is also remarkable when it comes to its form: it features three verses, each of which consists of three ambiguous rhetorical questions that address contemporary issues concerning warfare, oppression, and other social 37 injustices. The answers to these questions can be found in the concluding lines of each verse which also function as the chorus; it is always the same phrase, namely “blowin’ in the wind”. Mick Gold described this answer as “impenetrably ambiguous: either the answer is so obvious it is right in your face, or the answer is as intangible as the wind” 18 . By providing such a vague answer, Dylan invites or rather challenges his audience to draw their own conclusions. The song’s opening lines already pose the ultimate question: “How many roads must a man walk down/Before you call him a man?”; it is an equivocal question to a certain extent, since it could either simply mean how much a person has to suffer and experience before he or she becomes an accepted, and established member of society, or, in the context of the counterculture movement, it could also be interpreted as a reference to the activists’ numerous protest marches, with which they also wanted to achieve equal rights and respect for all men. Some even argue that the line was merely an allusion to a song by Big Bill Broonzy called “When Will I Get to be Called a Man?” (cf. Wikipedia “Blowin’ in the Wind”). The second question of the first verse includes the metaphors of the “white dove”, clearly symbolizing peace (white being the color of purity and the dove a popular symbol of peace), and “sleep in the sand”, possibly a reference to death but rather indicating peaceful rest. In this respect, Dylan might ask: How long will it take until there will be peace on earth? The opening verse concludes with the question of “How many years must the cannonballs fly/Before they’re forever banned?” The meaning of this question is quite obvious: Dylan refers to the ongoing fighting (particularly the Vietnam War) and wants to know when it will finally be over. In contrast, the second verse is mainly dedicated to the issue of racism, which becomes particularly obvious in the second question “How many years can some people exist/Before they’re allowed to be free?”, a question that hints at the plight of black people in the time of slavery. This is followed by a reference to people’s blindness and ignorance towards such important issues. To establish a smooth transition, the theme of ignorance is taken up by the questions of the final verse: How many times must a man look up Before he can see the sky? How many ears must one man have Before he can hear people cry? How many deaths will it take till he knows That too many people have died?
Dylan wants to know how long it will take until people finally stop conniving at all the violence and fighting that is going on around them. But again the answers to these questions are “blowin’ in the wind”.
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4.2. West Coast Music of Vietnam
[…] Counter-cultural rock posed an alternative way of ‘reading’ America’s war in Vietnam. It reinterpreted what it meant to be American, to be threatened with the draft, to be a soldier, to be a student, but above all, to be young and a member of an ‘alternative’ society in Johnson-Nixon America. (Storey 185)
Although we have seen that the music of the American West Coast certainly responded to other sociological and political circumstances of the era such as the Civil Rights movement and the emerging hippie culture as well, the number one factor that influenced the West Coast Rock movement was undoubtedly America’s infamous involvement in the Vietnam War. It is safe to say that all West Coast rock music of the 1960s was about Vietnam in one way or another. Like students, hippies and other freedom fighters, West Coast musicians could not ignore the ongoing injustices; that is why they participated in all kinds of protest activities. But their primary vehicle or, as John Storey (185) called it, their “principal ideological weapon” for expressing their opinions about the war was obviously their music, more precisely their lyrics. However, there used to be more than one way in which the inextricable connection between music and America’s war in Vietnam could be communicated. We are not just talking about music that made explicit reference to the war, although this was in fact the most obvious way. Music could also be implicitly used to attack the war. The latter group includes, for instance, music that played an important role in the lives of American soldiers in Vietnam. Vietnam War correspondent Michael Herr, who wrote a memoir called Dispatches about his time there, argued that rock music was central to the lives of conscripted men: “Certain rock and roll would come in mixed with rapid fire and men screaming” (1978: 202). In this case, it was usually not music that explicitly referred to the war or events related to the war, but rather music that corresponded to the situation of the soldiers. In other words, it was the context that marked this music as music of Vietnam. For example, the British invasion band The Animals effectively expressed what all enlisted men were thinking with their song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (1965). Originally it was not intended to be an anti-war song. It was merely a song about “the hopelessness of growing up in the black ghetto” (Andresen 2003: 191). However, the verse lyrics were simply ignored (except for the line “You’ll be dead before your time is due”, since this seemed to be the soldiers’ imminent fate); it was the song’s chorus that captured the soldier’s attention, since it summarized the troops’ collective mood all too perfectly:
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We gotta get out of this place If it’s the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place Girl, there’s a better life for me and you.
Other songs came to be associated with Vietnam due to their appearance in movies about the Vietnam War. Two famous West Coast examples in this respect would be “The End” by The Doors and “Who’ll Stop the Rain” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. “The End” featured in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 war film Apocalypse Now . Asked about the actual meaning of the song, Jim Morrison explained in 1969: Everytime I hear that song, it means something else to me. It started out as a simple good-bye song.... Probably just to a girl, but I see how it could be a goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don't know. I think it's sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be. 19
However, when people saw the film and heard Morrison singing “This is the end” while images of the burning jungle, attack helicopters and soldiers were running in front of them, the war meaning attached itself to the music and lyrics of the song (cf. Storey 183). In contrast, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain” was used in Karel Reisz’s 1978 film adaptation of Robert Stone’s Vietnam War novel Dog Soldiers . In the US the film was even re-titled after the song, so some know it simply under the name Who’ll Stop the Rain (cf. Wikipedia “Who’ll Stop the Rain”, online). As lead singer John Fogerty later explained, the song was not about Vietnam but about Woodstock. During the band’s performance there, it started raining and the crowd got muddy and took their clothes off. This scene inspired Fogerty to write the song, which also becomes obvious when reading (or listening to) the words of the third verse: Heard the singer’s playin’, how we cheered for more. The crowd had rushed together tryin’ to keep warm. Still the rain kept pourin’, fallin’ on my ears And I wonder, still I wonder who’ll stop the rain.
But when people saw Dog Soldiers , “Who’ll Stop the Rain” was reinterpreted to refer to the war in Vietnam. In this context, the “rain” would be a metaphor for dropping bombs. However, when talking about the music of Vietnam, most people naturally think about music that directly responded to the war, either by attacking it or by incorporating domestic and foreign events (and people) related to it. And there are quite of a lot of those songs due to the fact that “American musicians have written and sung about the war from a variety of perspectives, in a variety of different styles: folk, country, blues, soul and jazz” (Storey 183). The very first song that
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The song is even more remarkable in terms of its music. It starts with faraway, mysterious organ sounds to accentuate the mystery of the “Unknown Soldier”. During the middle section we can hear soldiers marching, Jim Morrison’s voice calling “Present! Arms!” and a military drum cadence played by John Densmore as well as the sound of rifles before the band returns to the actual song (cf. Marcus 2011: 93). Most interesting, however, is the song’s ending, which effectively identifies “The Unknown Soldier” as an anti-war song. It features celebratory bells ringing, accompanied by a cheering crowd and a voice that announces that “The war is over”, which it was not in 1968 as a matter of fact. Storey (188) describes this strategy as “education of desire”, meaning “the depiction of an imagined situation in order to produce the desire for such a situation in actuality”. In other words, what they wanted to achieve with the song’s utopian ending was a universal desire for peace.
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The Doors’ song “Five to One” (1968), which appeared on the same album, was also said to be about Vietnam, “five to one” referring to the number of Viet Cong troops in proportion to American troops in Vietnam. This interpretation seems quite likely due to passages such as “Five to one, baby/One in five/No one here gets out alive, now”. However, Morrison denied any political meaning of the song’s lyrics. Other anti-war songs concentrated on American domestic politics. Besides the epic “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag”, the aforementioned Californian rock band Country Joe and the Fish released another anti-war song called “Superbird”, which appeared on their 1967 debut album Electric Music for the Mind and Body . The lyrics of the song are again very ironic and hyperbolical, criticizing President Lyndon B[ird] Johnson (to whom the title “superbird” refers; most likely a joky allusion to his wife Lady Bird Johnson) and his controversial foreign policy, which already becomes clear in the opening lines of the song: Look, up yonder in the sky, now what is it that I pray? It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a man insane, it’s my president LBJ He’s flying high way up in the sky just like Superman, But I have got a little piece of kryptonite, Yes, I’ll bring him back to land. Said come out Lyndon with your hands held high, Drop your guns, baby, and reach for the sky. I’ve got you surrounded and you ain’t got a chance, Gonna send you back to Texas, make you work on your ranch
Even the draft and draft resistance was incorporated into song lyrics. For instance, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son” (1969) denounces the draft system as an unfair system which excludes the sons of rich people. The speaker of the song complains that he is not one of those “fortunate sons” able to dodge the draft: It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no senator’s son, son. It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I ain’t no fortunate one, no.
Other songs that included a reference to the draft were “Draft Morning” (1967) by The Byrds, a song that “interrogates the draft both lyrically and musically. It poses the question: ‘Why should it happen?’ within a musical structure which plays the cacophony of war against the peace and tranquility of a West Coast morning” (Storey 190); and “Draft Resister” (1969) by Steppenwolf. The latter was dedicated to all those who courageously refused to fight: Here’s to all the draft resisters who will fight for sanity When they march them off to prison in this land of liberty … Don’t forget the draft resisters and their silent, lonely plea When they march them off to prison, they will go for you and me
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Furthermore, domestic political events related to the war served as an inspiration for many songwriters. For instance, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young recorded two songs that responded to such events, namely the protest songs “Chicago” and “Ohio” (both 1970). “Chicago” referred to the 1968 riots at the Democratic National Convention (where a new democratic presidential candidate was to be nominated after Johnson’s resignation) in Chicago as well as the following trial of the so called Chicago Eight, a group of protesters that were charged with intent to incite a riot during the convention. The song’s opening line “So your brother’s bound and gagged, and they’ve chained him to a chair” was a reference to one of the defendants, namely Bobby Seale, who was tied up to a chair due to his outbursts in the courtroom (cf. Wikipedia “Chicago 1970 song”, online). “Ohio”, on the other hand, was a reaction to the Kent State shootings that took place in May, 1970. At the shootings, members of the Ohio National Guard (the “tin soldiers”) fired at unarmed student protesters (protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia), killing four of them. Neil Young, who wrote the lyrics to the song, named President Nixon as the person responsible for the massacre: Tin Soldiers and Nixon’s comin’ We’re finally on our own This summer I hear the drummin’ Four dead in Ohio
Although there have been a number of other notable war songs such as “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” (Creedence Clearwater Revival), “Monster” (Steppenwolf), “War Movie” (Jefferson Airplane), “Sky Pilot” (The Animals) and “Wooden Ships” (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young & Jefferson Airplane), there is only one more song that shall be dealt with in more detail, namely Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”, the band’s most famous recording and a song that has become widely acknowledged as one of the best protest songs of the era.
Buffalo Springfield – “For What It’s Worth”
“For What It’s Worth” was released in 1967 and appeared on Buffalo Springfield’s self-titled first album, Buffalo Springfield . Contrary to common belief, the song is not about the Kent State Shootings (which is in fact a ridiculous assumption, since the shootings happened three years after the song’s release) but about increasing tensions between the police and young members of the counterculture on Sunset Strip, California, also known as the Sunset Strip Riots. The event that triggered the riots was the imminent closure of a much-frequented club called Pandora’s Box on Sunset Strip. Residents and business owners complained about heavy traffic caused by the numerous club-goers. As a result, the county made efforts to enforce curfew and loitering laws. The
43 kids, however, felt that this was a violation of their civil rights and arranged a peaceful demonstration. Unrest grew when a car accident erupted into violence. As a result of this, protesters began to throw rocks and bottles and the police had to step in. The riots continued for quite a long time (cf. Rasmussen 2007, online). These incidents inspired band member Stephen Stills to write “For What It’s Worth”. Many fans understood the song as an anti-war anthem but Stills argued that it was the result of different influences: “It was really four different things intertwined, including the war and the absurdity of what was happening on the Strip. But I knew I had to skedaddle and headed back to Topanga, where I wrote my song in about 15 minutes. For me, there was no riot. It was basically a cop dance.” Another interesting fact is that the song’s title appears nowhere in its lyrics. The name rather came about spontaneously when Stills presented the song to Buffalo Springfield’s record company, saying “I have this song here, for what it’s worth, if you want” (cf. Wikipedia “For What It’s Worth”, online). In terms of its lyrics, the song begins with Stills’ soft voice giving an account of an unspecified incident, accompanied by quiet, slowly played music. The first two lines of the song already intend to create suspense, stating that “something is happening here”, but it is not yet clear what it is. In the next two lines, “a man with a gun” appears, most likely a policeman, threatening the speaker. In the following chorus the speaker then warns the “children” to stop what they are doing and be careful too. The term “children” here seems to be a reference to the many young countercultural activists. By calling them “children”, the speaker emphasizes their innocent nature. The second verse is more specific and is obviously an allusion to the counterculture’s doings and their ongoing conflict with the authorities (see lines 3-4: “Young people speaking their minds/Getting so much resistance from behind”). In the chorus, the speaker again suggests that the children should pause for a moment and rethink their actions. After the second verse, Neil Young plays an electric guitar break, which adds more intensity to the otherwise still calm music, indicating that there is really something happening, something that is of significance. Verse three gets more explicit when it comes to the counterculture’s protest techniques, including references to marches (“a thousand people in the street”), “singing songs and carrying signs”. Interesting is also the usage of the word “heat” in the first line, which could refer to the high temperature in Los Angeles or the emotional intensity of the protesters. But it is also a slang term for “pistol” and “police”. Musically, background vocals now accompany Stills’ voice, further intensifying the lyrics (cf. Bowie, online). In the final verse, the speaker warns the “children” about the consequences of protest. “The man” mentioned in the verse’s concluding line is this time obviously referring to the police:
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Paranoia strikes deep: Into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid. You step out of line, the man come and take you away.
In sum, the song can be interpreted in two different ways. In a more narrow sense, it is a warning about the possible consequences that members of the counterculture were frequently confronted with. In this respect, the song’s title “For What It’s Worth” takes on a new meaning, implying the question of whether the counterculture’s efforts will pay off or whether their defensive, anti- mainstream attitudes “might threaten the very freedom, attitudes and life styles they are seeking to protect” (Bowie, online). But in a wider sense, “it has come to symbolize worldwide turbulence and confrontational feelings arising from events during the 1960s (particularly the Vietnam War)” (see Wikipedia “For What It’s Worth”, online).
4.3. Psychedelic West Coast Rock
Besides opposing America’s war in Vietnam, the West Coast Rock movement was also heavily involved in the emergence and success of psychedelic rock. Some of the best psychedelic rock of the era was produced by bands of the American West Coast, including Jefferson Airplane and The Byrds, who can also be regarded as pioneers of this musical genre. However, before discussing their music in more detail, it is important to start with a definition of the term ‘psychedelic rock’ for the purpose of a better understanding: Psychedelic music was fed by many sources. The desire to emulate the state of mind-altering drugs is its most sensational feature. But the musicians who pioneered psychedelia were equally driven by a hunger to expand rock’s boundaries and enhance its eclecticism by incorporating influences from middle eastern music and improvisational jazz. This went hand-in-hand with exploring the frontiers of amplified sound and instrumental textures (primarily on the electric guitar), as well as lyrics that addressed the burning social and psychological issues of the day. (Unterberger in Bogdanov et al. 2002: 1322)
In the USA, psychedelic rock music grew out of the psychedelic culture that developed during the 1960s. This culture was mainly located in California, particularly in the San Franciscan district of Haight-Ashbury, where a large bohemian community had been living for a couple of years. ‘Bohemian’ is a very general term for someone who engages in an unconventional lifestyle, often expressed through anti-mainstream attitudes concerning political and social ideologies, the practice of free love and even voluntary poverty (cf. Wikipedia “Bohemianism”, online). Given this definition, the bohemian community of the 1960s can be put on an equal footing with the
45 counterculture, especially the hippie and youth movement, whose members also chose Haight- Ashbury as their main residence. As mentioned previously, the use of psychedelic drugs, i.e. drugs which induce mind-altering experiences, was widespread among members of the hippie counterculture. It is therefore not surprising that the rising psychedelic drug and rock and roll scenes of Haight-Ashbury began to react on each other, ultimately leading to the emergence of psychedelic rock. The form of psychedelic rock that developed in San Francisco is also known as Acid Rock, ‘acid’ simply being a synonym for LSD. Unlike psychedelic rock, which generally focused on the effects of psychedelic drugs, acid rock, as its name implies, specifically focused on the effects of LSD. According to Scaruffi (42), “the original idea was that of providing a soundtrack to the LSD parties, a soundtrack that would reflect as closely as possible the effects of an LSD ‘trip’”. Inspired by the poetry of the Beat Generation, acid rock was further characterized by a loose structure, putting more emphasis on improvisation than composition and the invention of the “jam”, that is an improvised musical performance without much preparation (cf. Scaruffi 43). Acid rock being the loudest variant of psychedelic rock, the electric guitar also played a crucial part in acid rock songs, which also featured long instrumental solos and psychedelic but few lyrics. However, the terms psychedelic and acid rock are also often used interchangeably without making any distinction. Among the most important representatives of San Francisco Acid Rock were Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother & The Holding Company. Besides notable songs such as “Dark Star” (The Grateful Dead; see p. 59), the 12-minute recording of “The Fool” (Quicksilver Messenger Service) or “Light Is Faster Than Sound” (Big Brother & The Holding Company), one of the best known and most influential psychedelic songs of the San Francisco Bay Area was certainly Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (1967) from their second album Surrealistic Pillow . The song is particularly remarkable for its vivid and colorful imagery. The lyrics of the song, written by Grace Slick, picture an irrational, dreamlike wonderland, including numerous references to Lewis Carroll’s fantasy works Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). The “white rabbit”, “Alice”, the “hookah smoking caterpillar”, the “White Knight”, the “Red Queen” and the “Dormouse” mentioned throughout the song are all characters derived from these works. However, other references inspired by Carroll’s stories, such as the taking of pills or the eating of mushrooms that change your size (Verse 1, lines 1-2: “One pill makes you larger/And one pill makes you small”; Verse 3, lines 3-4: “And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom/And your mind is moving slow”) are easily identifiable as allusions to the sensory distortions people experience when taking hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. This effect is yet intensified by the dreamy, floating rhythm of the accompanying music (cf. Wikipedia “White Rabbit”, online). 46
However, psychedelia also hit other parts of the West Coast, including Los Angeles, where bands such as The Doors and The Byrds made some of the finest psychedelic rock available at the time. For instance, The Doors produced a considerable number of psychedelic songs, including “Break On Through” (1967) from their debut album, The Doors . Parts of the song, especially the line “she gets high” which is repeated several times in the middle section, were interpreted to make reference to the use of hallucinogens. One of The Doors’ most psychedelic records was their second album Strange Days , released in 1967. The album was one of the first to use the Moog synthesizer (for instance, Morrison’s voice was filtered through the Moog for the title track “Strange Days”). “New instruments like the mellotron, unusual instruments like the sitar, and new effects like feedback, distortion, phasing and echo were all part of the psychedelic exploration” (Pinch 2002: 120). In this respect, the psychedelic dimension of the Doors’ songs was often very subtle and most commonly reflected in their music and not so much in their lyrics. The band rather experimented with electric instruments, studio effects, song structures etc. and combined the outcome with highly poetic and sometimes political lyrics. While The Doors may have been the most creative West Coast band, The Byrds were clearly THE undisputed pioneers of psychedelic rock in Los Angeles, at least since the release of their third album, Fifth Dimension , in 1966. Interestingly, it was their first record that did not feature any Bob Dylan songs. And what is more, the album constituted the peak of their new psychedelic sound with songs such as “5D (Fifth Dimension)”, “Mr. Spaceman” and, of course, the epic “Eight Miles High”, which is even considered “the first full-blown psychedelic rock recording by critics” (Wikipedia “The Byrds”, online) and thus deserves closer attention.
The Byrds – “Eight Miles High”
The Byrds, who were formed in 1964, are considered to be one of the most influential rock bands of the 1960s, even though their success was only short-dated in comparison to other bands of the era. The years 1965 and 1966 constituted the zenith of their career, partly because the original five-men formation, consisting of such notable names as Jim McGuinn, Gene Clark, David Crosby (future member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke, persisted no longer. Beginning with Clark in early 1966, one member after the other quit the band so that by 1968 only McGuinn and Hillman were left. Nevertheless, the Byrds managed to make a major contribution to the development of the 1960s rock music scene, mainly due to the fact that they pioneered the musical genres of folk rock and psychedelic rock. When it comes to the latter, the song “Eight Miles High” can be described as the band’s masterpiece.
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“Eight Miles High” was written by Gene Clark, who was mainly responsible for its lyrics, as well as David Crosby and Jim McGuinn. It was the last track Clark would ever record with the group. Interestingly, the song was totally different than anything the Byrds had ever done before. It did not only introduce their new psychedelic sound, it also featured a much darker and sinister tone than the band’s previous material. Furthermore, it was highly remarkable in terms of its music, since it reflected their newly found interest in Indian music, especially the music of Ravi Shankar, and the jazz sound of John Coltrane, from whose track “India” McGuinn borrowed the song’s central four- note guitar riff. Furthermore, McGuinn and Crosby’s stratospheric guitar work made good on McGuinn’s stated desire of playing guitar the way Coltrane played saxophone. Hillman and Clarke drove the track with a force and dexterity that belied their status as relative neophytes on their respective instruments. (Schinder & Schwartz 2007: 266)
Unusual was also the song’s structure, not displaying the traditional verse-chorus form but rather consisting of verses only (cf. Schinder & Schwartz 2007: 266). In each verse, Clark employs the literary technique of run-on lines (or enjambment), meaning “the continuation of a sentence or clause over a line-break” (The Poetry Archive, online). When it comes to the song’s apparently psychedelic lyrics, Clark clarified that “Eight Miles High” was actually inspired by the mixed feelings he had during the band’s first flight to England in 1965 and upon their subsequent arrival in London (to which the first lines of verse four, “rain grey town/known for its sound”, refer), the song’s title and opening line, “eight miles high”, thereby being a reference to the flight level of an airplane. By using vivid imagery, Clark describes in the following verses the band’s experiences during their England tour, including the hostile reaction of the local media and the British band The Birds, who were not amused about the resemblance of their band names: “Nowhere is/There warmth to be found/Among those afraid/Of losing their ground” (Verse 2, lines 1-2). Additionally, the lyrics also include references to fan hysteria (something Clark was unable to cope with), especially in the song’s concluding verses. The lines of the penultimate verse refer to waiting and screaming fans outside the band’s hotels, whereas the last verse indicates the crowds of people that surrounded the band’s car when passing by: Round the squares Huddled in storms Some laughing Some just shapeless forms
Sidewalk scenes And black limousines Some living Some standing alone
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However, in later years the Byrds’ members admitted that the lyrics of “Eight Miles High” were at least partly influenced by their own use of recreational drugs. Due to Clark’s colorful and elaborate imagery, the song’s lyrics sound indeed like the descriptions of someone whose vision is blurred and perception distorted while coming down from a drug trip, being at first “eight miles high and when you touch down” everything is “stranger than known”. This interpretation also led the song to be accused of encouraging a permissive attitude towards psychedelic drugs and consequently to its radio ban. In addition, the song’s extraordinary musical composition as described above added to its psychedelic quality.
4.4. West Coast Rock Festivals – Music as Collective Experience
The concept of the rock festival, that is an outdoor festival lasting for several days with multiple acts performing, came into being in the late 1960s. The counterculture movement contributed substantially to this development, since it attracted huge crowds of young people. Though not all of them used to be firm activists, they still wanted to take part in countercultural activities and run a chance to interact with other like-minded people. That is why members of the counterculture began to hold gatherings in parks, for instance, which can be described as the forerunners of the rock festival. The significance of such gatherings was that they would attract several hundred people, giving visitors, samplers and observers of all kinds a growing sense of comfort and belonging, a chance to mix with each other, and a little bit more courage to dress and act however they pleased. The sensation of strength-in- numbers could be exhilarating. For individuals from far-flung high schools who otherwise felt like – or were treated like – they were weirdoes, freaks or outcasts, it was a relief to have a place where they could let their guards down and ‘do their own thing’. Authority figures were few and far between, and incense and pot smoke wafted on the breeze to enhance the sensory experience and give things an extra edge of rebellion. (Mankin 2012, online) An interesting fact about those gatherings was that they were always accompanied by musical performances of some unknown artist or garage band, which often played songs full of countercultural messages. So from the very beginning, music was of the utmost importance in this connection. According to Bill Mankin (2012, online), “it [music] alone seemed to have the power to act as a common, galvanizing thread, weaving together disparate individuals, groups, interests and intentions”. In doing so, it helped the counterculture, its values and beliefs “to spread and coalesce”. Furthermore, this new kind of music fascinated thousands of youngsters, who were eager to buy records and attend concerts of their idols. That is why many of the counterculture bands began to tour the country. A more powerful and lively opportunity of experiencing their rebellious music
49 was, however, provided by the newly emerging rock festival, which “gave crowds of music lovers and would-be (and actual) hippies several days in a row in which to commune both with each other and with an impressive line-up of the superstars and soon-to-be superstars of the new, fast-evolving musical universe” (Mankin 2012, online). Also on the West Coast, rock festivals played a crucial role, since even there they used to be the places where members of the counterculture came together and celebrated their common values, beliefs and lifestyle. As previously mentioned, a guiding principle of the West Coast Rock movement was that it regarded its audience as members, who shared their ideologies, rather than mere consumers, thereby challenging what Paul Friedlander (191) called the common “music- industry notion of elite star-versus-commoner relationship with the audience”. Just like their fans, a considerable number of West Coast musicians lived in community centers like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, “drawing their support and cultural and political attitudes from their immediate environment. […] Immersing themselves in the counterculture, they grew their hair long, adopted appropriate modes of dress, played music, and took psychoactive drugs” (Friedlander 191). In other words, there was virtually no distance between the musicians and their fans, a fact that became even more obvious at the groups’ concerts, dances and later at their festivals. At the first West Coast event that came very close to the concept of the rock festival, namely the ‘A Tribute to Doctor Strange’ dance that featured bands such as Jefferson Airplane and The Great Society and was held in San Francisco in 1965, Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane described the event with the following remark: It was like a party. The audience often far overshadowed any of the bands, and the distance between the two was not that great. Grace [i.e. Grace Slick who was still a member of The Great Society at that time] used to say that the stage was just the least crowded place to stand. 20
The Grateful Dead member, Jerry Garcia, shared the same view: I think that the more important thing than just the music is the whole attitude, the dance thing, the whole fact that there are lots of people getting together. […] ‘Cause we never grew up in where there were like dances or things like that. It was pretty isolated and you did some other, like smaller, more intimate stuff. And now suddenly there are large groups of people getting together. And that seems like the more significant point sociologically. 21
In this respect, rock festivals provided a great opportunity for experiencing this collective kind of music advocated by West Coast rock. The festival that initiated the rock festival summer of 1967 was the Human Be-In held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The event was the counterculture’s
20 Quoted in Gene Sculatti and David Seay (1985). San Franciscan Nights: The Psychedelic Music Trip, 1965-1968 . p. 48. 21 Quoted in Ralph J. Gleason (2002). “Jerry Garcia, the Guru”. p.33. 50 response to a law that prohibited further usage of the psychedelic drug LSD. Musical accompaniment was provided by some West Coast bands, including Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead. However, the events that actually came to be acknowledged as the earliest (West Coast) rock festivals were the Fantasy Fair & Magic Mountain Music Festival, featuring West Coast bands such as Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Byrds and Country Joe & The Fish, and the Monterey International Pop Festival, also featuring Jefferson Airplane, both of which took place on the West Coast, more precisely in California, in 1967. These two festivals are also considered to be the starting points of the ‘Summer of Love’, during which hundreds of thousands of young people flocked to San Francisco, the nucleus of the hippie culture, in search of an alternative lifestyle. Two years later, the iconic Woodstock Festival with its 500,000 participants took place on August 15, 1969, which is often referred to as “the greatest achievement of the counter-culture” (Storey 192). Although it was not held on the West Coast, it still featured major West Coast bands, including Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Country Joe & The Fish and some others; furthermore, Woodstock stood for the same values and objectives as the West Coast Rock movement and the counterculture in general, their common and principal goal being peace. A song that fully captured the spirit of the festival was Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Woodstock”.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – “Woodstock”
Originally written and recorded by Joni Mitchell in 1969, the song “Woodstock” was successfully covered by West Coast rockers Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young a year later. Interestingly, Joni Mitchell used to be Graham Nash’s girlfriend at that time and she wrote the song in response to his accounts of the festival, since she had not managed to attend it herself (cf. Wikipedia “Woodstock (song)”, online). However, the song not only commemorated the event, it fully captured its spirit and the values of the hippie movement. “Woodstock” consists of three verses, partly written in the form of a conversation between the speaker of the song and a young hippie, whom he meets on the streets. Verse one describes their first encounter. The usage of the phrase “child of God” seems to be a reference to spirituality and religion as core elements of the hippie culture. Hippies shared the view that every human being was equal, since we are all God’s children. When the speaker asks the stranger where he/she is going, he/she answers “I’m going down to Yasgur’s Farm”, the scene of the Woodstock Festival. The stranger’s concluding remark “got to get back to the land and set my soul free” suggests the purity of the land as compared to the corruptness of the cities, where it is not possible to find personal freedom. 51
In the opening line of verse two the speaker bluntly asks whether he can walk beside the stranger, thereby indicating the openness of hippies towards other people. By declaring that he “has come to lose the smog”, the speaker further seems to refer to the problem of pollution in the cities, environmentalism being also an important issue to the counterculture. In the concluding line, the speaker asserts that he has not yet found his place in life and still needs to discover his true self, a common problem of many young people of the era. The song’s last verse expresses the optimism that pervaded the Woodstock Festival and its participants. It alludes to the Vietnam War with its “bomber jet planes riding shotgun in the sky” and the counterculture’s utopian vision of the end of war and the spreading of peace (as symbolized by the “butterflies”). Like the other verses, this one is followed by the two-line chorus “We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon/And we got to get ourselves back to the garden”. The first line indicates that we are one with the universe, just another part of nature, and should therefore not act as if we stood above it. In the final chorus the lyrics are slightly changed. “We are billion year old carbon” is replaced by “we are caught in the devil’s bargain”. Being clearly an allusion to the concept of the Original Sin, the phrase indicates that we are all natural sinners and need to find a way back into the Garden of Eden, preferably by creating a world of peace, justice and equality, which was the central concern of the counterculture movement.
4.5. The Sound of San Francisco
San Francisco was not only the hippie center but also the musical center of the 1960s West Coast rock and roll scene. Between 1965 and 1970, numerous rock bands were formed in the Bay Area that achieved considerable success and whose music was and has been widely influential ever since. The San Francisco Sound, as the music of those San Francisco-based rock bands of the 1960s was called, was in fact composed of a large variety of musical and lyrical influences; therefore each band had its distinctive sound. But there were also some generic features that they all had in common. For example, the San Francisco Sound reflected common musical trends of the era such as “the two-guitar ensemble and the two-plus-four rhythmic emphasis of classic rock and early Beatles music; […] and an emotive, earnest vocal style reflective of the ongoing folk-rock boom” (Friedlander 191). Being strongly associated with the counterculture community (San Francisco having a vibrant countercultural scene itself), the musicians’ output also strongly reflected countercultural issues with the aid of lyrics containing countercultural messages critical of the political and social status quo or referring to experiences of altered consciousness as induced by psychedelic drug ingestion.
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Nevertheless, San Francisco-area rock was revolutionary, departing from popular musical styles of the era in many respects. One example of a newly invented Bay Area style would be the aforementioned San Francisco acid rock with its lengthy and distorted musical improvisations during live performances, heavy usage of electric instruments and experimentation with unusual and exotic instruments. In other words, the sound of San Francisco tested and often exceeded existing musical boundaries. Lyrics were also not simply countercultural in terms of content but also emotional and highly poetic (undoubtedly influenced by the Beat Generation), proving the writers’ intelligence and skillfulness. Even though they referenced countercultural issues quite often, the Bay Area songs covered a much wider subject area than most people think. Some incorporated ordinary topics such as love, romance and sex (e.g. “Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane) as well as the search for peace, freedom, wisdom and harmony; others explored more unusual topics such as metaphysics and esotericism (e.g. “Dark Star” by The Grateful Dead) (cf. Friedlander 192). The San Francisco Sound began to emerge in the city’s underground music scene. Clubs such as The Matrix or The Fillmore used to be the venues were at that particular time still unknown West Coast bands began their careers in 1965 and 1966. In fact, all major Bay Area bands, including Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Country Joe & The Fish, Creedence Clearwater Revival and others, performed at these clubs before they rose to national prominence. However, the following subchapters will only focus upon two of the Bay Area’s most popular bands, namely Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead, since the region’s music scene produced far too many notable artists, which makes it impossible to cover them all.
Jefferson Airplane
Jefferson Airplane was one of the defining and most influential San Francisco rock bands of the era. They were not only pioneers in the field of psychedelic rock, notable for their improvisational and adventurous live performances, but also the first Bay Area band to sign a record deal with a major label (namely RCA Records) and get the opportunity to tour across the USA and Europe. In doing so, Jefferson Airplane became widely acknowledged and achieved commercial and critical success. Additionally, the group made a large contribution to the counterculture’s cause with songs that challenged prevailing conservative ideologies and called for social and political change. According to William Ruhlmann (2012, online), Jefferson Airplane “epitomized the drug-taking hippie ethos as well as the left-wing, antiwar political movement of their time, and their history was one of controversy along with hit records”. During their active years (1965-1972) they were remarkably productive, producing numerous extraordinary albums, touring regularly and performing at all major festivals of the 1960s. Interestingly, the band never officially broke up but rather merged into 53 other formations, including Hot Tuna and Jefferson Starship, which happened partly due to the members’ increasingly diverging viewpoints. Jefferson Airplane was founded by vocalist Marty Balin (originally called Martin Buchwald) in 1965. With the help of three investors, 23-year-old Balin opened a club, namely the Matrix, at that time and intended to form a folk-rock group that would become the club’s house band. For his project, he recruited guitarists Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen, bassist Jack Cassidy, drummer Skip Spence (who used to be a guitarist as well but Balin ordered him to start practicing drums) and female folk vocalist Signe Anderson. The formation adopted the name Jefferson Airplane. There are many myths surrounding the origin of the band’s unusual name; most likely seems Kaukonen’s explanation. He claimed that his friend Steve Talbot dubbed him “Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane”, which was intended to be a joky allusion to blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson (see Wikipedia “Jefferson Airplane”, online). The lineup of the group being completed, Jefferson Airplane began to perform regularly at the Matrix. It was not long before people, the media and, most importantly, several record labels took notice of them. And already in November 1965 they signed to RCA Records. After the release of their first single “It’s No Secret” and their moderately successful debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off in August 1966, the original line-up of the band was considerably changed. Becoming more and more addicted to drugs, Spence was replaced by more experienced drummer Spencer Dryden, and, after Anderson had a baby and decided to become a fulltime mother, she was replaced by Grace Slick, former member of the Great Society. In this context, the better known “classic” personnel of the band came into being. The charismatic Grace Slick turned out to be of particular value for the band’s musical development. Together with Big Brother & The Holding Company’s lead singer Janis Joplin, she used to be one of the few female artists that enjoyed an equally popular status in San Francisco’s music scene as their male counterparts. Furthermore, Slick contributed considerably to the success of Jefferson Airplane’s second album Surrealistic Pillow (1967) – which Scaruffi (43) identified as “a manifesto of the hippy generation” – by bringing with her two of the record’s most remarkable songs, namely “Somebody to Love” (written by her brother-in-law Darby Slick, guitarist of the Great Society) and her own composition, the psychedelic masterpiece “White Rabbit”, both of which became Top Ten hits. After Surrealistic Pillow , the band produced a number of further studio and live records, all of which used to be groundbreaking in one way or another. After Bathing At Baxter’s (1967), for instance, was one of Jefferson Airplane’s most creative outputs. An uncompromising psychedelic manifesto, its songs were clustered into five “suites” that ran for up to twelve minutes. The inspired songwriting, most of it by
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Paul Kantner, captured the agitated yet utopian sensibility of San Francisco in the late Sixties, best expressed in this line from “Wild Tyme”: “I’m doing things that haven’t got a name yet.” The group worked on the album from June through October of 1967, defying record company demands and deadlines. In so doing, they helped trigger a shift in sensibility that placed creative control in the hands of musicians. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame “Jefferson Airplane Biography”, online)
The album was followed by not less important works such as Crown of Creation (1968), which already hinted at the band’s political tendencies, and Volunteers (1969). The latter was their most controversial album. It was overtly political and featured a number of anti-war and pro- counterculture songs, most notably the title track “Volunteers” and its B-Side “We Can Be Together”.
Jefferson Airplane – “We Can Be Together/Volunteers”
“We Can Be Together” (music and lyrics written by Paul Kantner) and “Volunteers” (lyrics by Marty Balin and music by Kantner) were chosen as the opening and final tracks of the Volunteers album. In fact the two songs were best suited to do so, since they expressed the album’s overall message most powerfully. Through their thematic and musical similarities, the songs also provided a beautiful balance for the album as a whole. In this respect, “We Can Be Together” introduces the album’s anti-war/anti-establishment sentiment. While the opening lines come across as still harmless, apparently being about an ordinary romance between a man and a woman, the following verse is much more meaningful, revealing the ugly truth about what it meant to be a member of the counterculture and how these members where viewed by mainstream society: We are all outlaws in the eyes of America. In order to survive, we steal, Cheat, lie, forge, fuck, hide, and deal. We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent… and young
The next verse calls the revolutionaries to action. It is similar to the opening verse. This time, however, the lyrics include not only “you and me”, but are expanded to include a whole generation, namely “all you people standing around”. In the following verses, the counterculture (to which the “we” refers) is identified as the authorities’ enemy. The listener/reader is, however, assured that “everything they [the authorities] say we are, we are…” and that this is something they are “very proud of”, since they obviously do the right thing. The light mood and feeling of unity conveyed by the song’s first part is then, however, contrasted with the darker mood of the second part, in which it is argued that conflict is inevitable 55 in order to stop the fighting. Up against the wall. Up against the wall, motherfucker. Tear down the walls. Tear down the walls.
Avram Mednick (2000: 116) describes the juxtaposition of “up against the wall” vs. “tear down the walls” as a “dichotomy of revolting against the establishment while needing to establish meaningful communities”. In other words, we need to confront the authorities and tear down the walls between us in order to finally achieve the counterculture’s ultimate goal of a peaceful, tolerant society. The song continues by alternating between the two moods, constantly contrasting the community’s unity and togetherness with the need for conflict and rebellion. At first, confident hope is expressed, especially through the lines “We can be together/We will be”, but then the song returns to the exhortation to “tear down the walls”, intensified by the line “come on now, getting higher and higher…” and ultimately ends with another call to action: “Won’t you try.” According to Herb Bowie (2010, online), the music adds another whole dimension to the song, giving it depth and bringing it alive. The track begins with a stirring, almost martial, rhythm, with drums, bass, guitar and piano all in sync, almost physically lifting the listener and propelling them into movement. Kaukonen’s lead guitar enters on a strident, keening note, a seeming call to action. The song then breaks into a softer, more lyrical rhythm and melody, resolving all conflicts into a sweet, transcendent unity. The rest of the song alternates between these two moods, with both words and music, creating a powerful tension between feelings and action, togetherness and conflict, unity and discord. It is as if the band first paints a picture of the promised land, of together- ness and unity, but then says, “Ah… if you want this, you’ll have to fight for it.”
In terms of its music and themes, “Volunteers” can be described as the opening track’s counterpart. “Volunteers” concludes the album by once again stressing the need for a revolution and celebrating the fact that there are already crowds of rebellious people revolting in the streets against the war and the establishment: Look what's happening out in the streets Got a revolution Got to revolution Hey I'm dancing down the streets Got a revolution Got to revolution Ain't it amazing all the people I meet Got a revolution Got to revolution
Furthermore, the song names the “volunteers of America” as those responsible for this revolution in its concluding lines:
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Who will take it from you We will and who are we We are volunteers of America
On the one hand, the phrase “volunteers of America” might be interpreted as a reference to the people being drafted; the noun “volunteer” was originally used in a military sense, denoting “one who offers himself for military service” (Wikipedia “Volunteering”, online) . However, given the song’s anti-war message, it rather refers to all those who serve their country in a different, more peaceful way, i.e. the revolutionaries, the members of the counterculture that fight against war and those responsible for America’s involvement in the war. By favoring the pronoun “we” and the adverb “together”, the songs particularly stress the importance of togetherness among the counterculture community. The message seems to be obvious: only if we stick together, we will be able to achieve our goals. In this respect, the two songs perfectly illustrated West Coast Rock’s ideal “that music should be a collective event” (Storey 189).
The Grateful Dead
Like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead were formed in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965. But they managed to remain successful for almost 30 years. Its founding and core members (i.e. those members which stayed together through all of the band’s history, except for McKernan due to his early death in 1973) were Jerry Garcia (guitar, vocals), Bob Weir (guitar, vocals), Ron McKernan (keyboards, harmonica, vocals), Phil Lesh (bass, vocals) and Bill Kreutzmann (drums). The constantly changing supporting personnel of the band included Tom Constanten, Donna and Keith Godchaux, Mickey Hart and many more. The band was originally called the Warlocks but the name only lasted for a few months before it was changed into The Grateful Dead. Phil Lesh explained that they came across the phrase “grateful dead” in a dictionary, where it was defined as referring to “those deceased who were required to return to earth and perform a good deed before being allowed to rest in peace – and thus become the eternally grateful dead” (Friedlander 196). Given this definition, the band’s “good deed” was certainly their significant contribution to the development of rock music. Together with Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead defined the San Francisco Sound of the 1960s with their revolutionary musical style. In his 1970 Rolling Stone review of the Grateful Dead’s album Live/Dead (1969), Lenny Kaye even argues that “their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists” 22 . In this respect, the group’s unconventional style is best described in the following way:
22
Heavily steeped in Americana, the group had its roots in blues and bluegrass. From the jazz world, the Grateful Dead learned to approach music from an impro- visational perspective. From the culture of psychedelia – specifically Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, of which they were a part - the Dead became aware of the infinite pos- sibilities for expression when imagination was given free reign. Led by Garcia’s guitar, the Dead would delve into blues, folk, jazz, R&B and avant-garde realms for hours on end. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame “Grateful Dead Biography”, online)
However, in the 1960s the group’s musical style was primarily located in the genres of folk rock and, of course, psychedelic rock. When it comes to the latter, the Dead’s greatest inventions were the typical lengthy and improvisational jam sessions that became a hallmark of psychedelic rock, more precisely acid rock, and were intended to provide a soundtrack for LSD trips. All band members openly confessed that they consumed recreational drugs themselves, partly because they believed that the effects of those drugs would enhance their creativity. Asked about their drug use and LSD’s effect, Jerry Garcia responded: “It was like another release, yet another opening. The first one was a hip teacher when I was in the third grade; and the next one marijuana and the next one was music and the next one was LSD. It was like a series of continually opening doors.” (Garcia et al. 2003: 19). By representing the ideology of the 1960s counterculture community all too perfectly, the Grateful Dead managed to build up a massive network of enthusiastic fans that followed the band everywhere. These people were known as “deadheads”. In the course of the sixties, the band recorded a number of artistic masterpieces, including Anthem of the Sun (1968), Aoxomoxoa (1969) and Live/Dead (1969). Anthem of the Sun was particularly remarkable since it defied all conventions of record making. The band used the studio as a “working tool”, testing (and often exceeding) all possible recording techniques and effects. The songs on the album were primarily intended to musically reproduce an LSD trip; that is why they were quite often distorted in terms of structure and musical arrangements: Drums beat obsessive tempos to reproduce the pulsations of an LSD trip; electronics painted nightmarish and ecstatic soundscapes; keyboards moaned gloomy and mysterious, like ghosts imprisoned in catacombs; guitars pierced minds and released their dreams into the sky; voices floated serene over the maelstrom. Arrangements overflew with tidbits of harpsichord, trumpet, celeste, etc. (Scaruffi 44)
In comparison, the Dead’s following album Aoxomoxoa (the title being an invented palindrome) was more conventional, featuring traditional song structures. Live/Dead , on the other hand, was their first live album, emphasizing the band’s skillfulness when it comes to improvisational jams as demonstrated during their numerous live performances. Furthermore, the album included the most prominent live version of the band’s classic “Dark Star”, another well-known example of 58 psychedelic rock.
The Grateful Dead – “Dark Star”
Written by Robert Hunter (lyrics) and Jerry Garcia (music), “Dark Star” was one of the Grateful Dead’s artistically most outstanding and creative numbers. Although the studio version of the song, which was released as a single in 1968, barely lasted three minutes, the improvisational live recording on Live/Dead runs for more than 23 minutes, with thirteen minutes consisting of a guitar solo played by Jerry Garcia (cf. Wikipedia “Dark Star”, online). In this respect, the song “served as a foundation for their [The Grateful Dead’s] most extended and experimental jamming”. Furthermore, “they performed this epic more than 200 times and never the same way twice, with Garcia’s modal guitar spearheading their explorations into uncharted territory” (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame “Grateful Dead Biography”, online). The lyrics of the song are filled with surreal psychedelic images. The opening lines already evoke a sense of cosmic chaos and disaster, blurring the boundaries of imagery, hallucination and reality. In doing so, the song attempts to recreate an LSD experience. Furthermore, the lines are full of oppositions: in the opening verse and in the title image itself (“dark star”) light is opposed to darkness, order is opposed to chaos and implicitly even life to death; all of this apparently refers to the discrepancy between “a volatile, drug-induced internal reality, on the one hand, and a more stable, mundane, outer-world reality, on the other” (Boone 1997: 184). The impression that the speaker’s visions developed under the influence of hallucinogens is further intensified by the line “reason tatters”, the supposed loss of certainty and stability being a typical side effect of LSD. The “searchlight casting for faults” in what the speaker calls “the clouds of delusion” may be another reference to the search for meaning in a delusional world, a meaning that is only perceptible when looking behind the surface of outer-world reality. In the following chorus the speaker addresses an unspecified “you”, which might be his lover, a friend or even the listener. By proposing going forth “while we can”, it is implied that the psychedelic experience will not last forever; the world they are experiencing now is transient, only accessible while the mind is still open to the unknown. In other words, only while their consciousness is enhanced by the drug, they are able to experience something as beautiful as “the transitive nightfall of diamonds”. The image of the diamond is significant here, since it may well be that the diamond’s purity symbolizes the state of altered consciousness. Purity or rather clarity of the mind is also said to be an effect of psychedelic drugs, since they allow their users to explore not only the conscious but also the subconscious mind. The images of the following verses keep up the sense of loss and uncertainty established in the first part of the song: 59
Mirror shatters in formless reflections of matter
Glass hand dissolving to ice petal flowers revolving
At the end, another person, the “lady in velvet” (and perhaps also the “you” addressed in the chorus), disappears into the night, making us think that she is most probably just another hallucination created by LSD. And as the speaker slowly leaves his drug-induced, internal reality, he finds himself alone again.
4.6. The Sound of Los Angeles
There is no gainsaying the fact that San Francisco became most strongly associated with the Summer of Love and the lifestyle of the counterculture community; furthermore, it constituted the center of West Coast countercultural rock. However, this does not mean that all major musicians of the 1960s originated or migrated there. According to Christopher Gair (174), “there is no doubt that Los Angeles emerged as a major alternative to San Francisco as home to what was fast becoming a major rock industry”. The city produced dozens of significant bands as well and thus developed a flourishing and vibrant music scene of its own that contributed substantially to the development of rock music in the 1960s, especially when it comes to psychedelic rock. Major LA bands included Buffalo Springfield (whose members Stephen Stills and Neil Young became part of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young after the band’s split-up), The Byrds and The Doors. All of them regularly played at clubs such as the London Fog and the more prestigious Whisky-a-Go-Go on Sunset Strip; the Doors even used to be the house band of both clubs for a while. In doing so, the bands attracted large numbers of young people to LA. Additionally, the Laurel Canyon district boasted a rising hippie and drug culture similar to that in Haight-Ashbury, ultimately leading to the growing tensions between police and counterculture referred to in Buffalo Springfield’s aforementioned hit single “For What It’s Worth” (cf. Gair 175). The sound of Los Angeles is probably best exemplified by The Doors, the most prominent and commercially successful of the region’s countercultural groups. It is, however, important to note that their sound (as well as the sound of any other LA band) was unique and its features cannot generally be applied to other groups of the region, at least not all of them.
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The Doors
In spite of the band’s relatively brief history (1965-1971), the Doors’ impact on the development of rock music was immense and remains unmatched, mainly due to lead singer Jim Morrison’s extraordinary musical and poetic genius. According to Scaruffi (50), “he is the one who defined the rock vocalist as an artist, not just a singer.” Furthermore, Scaruffi argues that whether it was him [Morrison], Bobbie Krieger, Ray Manzarek or all of them, their songs have a unique quality that has never been repeated. They are metaphysical while being psychological and while being physical (erotic and violent). They are the closest thing rock music has produced to William Shakespeare. Partly Freudian psychodrama and partly shamanic/messianic invocation, Doors songs were always more than “songs”. […] They represented suicidal self-inflicted agonies and continuously referenced death: sex, drugs and death made up the Doors’ triune reality. Each one was ecstasy and annihilation. The supernatural quality of their hymns was not gothic, but rather imbued with the fatalism of the French symbolists. (50)
The music of the Doors was a combination of numerous genres. They borrowed elements from classical music, jazz and blues, for instance. Additionally, they (as well as their regional peers of The Byrds) pioneered the genre of psychedelic rock. However, due to Morrison’s ever-worsening drug and alcohol addiction that culminated in his untimely passing at the age of 27, the band’s brilliant career came to an abrupt end in 1971. Although the remaining members continued to perform, they could not live up to the earlier success and finally broke up in 1973. Vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboard player Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robert Krieger and drummer John Densmore met in Los Angeles in 1965. Due to their common interest in music, they decided to form a band called The Doors. Already demonstrating his passion for literature and poetry, Morrison derived the name of the band from a passage in William Blake’s work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell : “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”. This passage also inspired the title of Aldous Huxley’s novel The Doors of Perception . Interestingly, the book was about Huxley’s experiences under the influence of psychedelic drugs (cf. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame “The Doors Biography”, online). Numerous gigs at night clubs in Los Angeles later, the Doors landed a record deal with Elektra Records in August, 1966. And after the release of their self-titled debut album in early 1967, they finally rose from local to national prominence. Given the fact that the album The Doors included numerous artistic masterpieces such as “Light My Fire”, “Break On Through” or “The End”, the success and critical acclaim that followed were striking but unsurprising. Its follow-up, Strange Days (1967), further displayed the band’s musical genius. In the recording process, the band experimented with all possible recording techniques. Furthermore, the album fully captured
61 the zeitgeist of the era. “If any album ever captured the disorienting aura of those conflicted times, steeped in violence-, political- and drug-induced paranoia, it was Strange Days ” (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame “The Doors Biography”, online). A number of further impressive albums followed, including Waiting For The Sun (1968), but none of them could repeat the feat of the first two records.
The Doors – “When The Music’s Over”
“When The Music’s Over”, written by Jim Morrison, appeared as the closing track on the iconic Strange Days album. Running for almost eleven minutes, it is one of the Doors’ longest recordings. Interestingly, the song is one of the first rock songs ever to take up the issue of environmental destruction and exploitation. In doing so, it can be seen as a direct response to the upcoming environmentalism, which, as we know, aroused the concern of many countercultural activists. The overall message of the song seems to be: “Wake up people! And look what you have done to our beautiful earth!” It is a wake-up call so to speak, trying to draw people’s attention to such serious problems as pollution. However, it is important to note that the Doors’ lyrics are generally quite complex and universal, open to a variety of interpretations. In this respect, the following discussion provides only one possible way of interpreting the song. The lyrics of the song are full of repetitions. During the song’s first lines it is not easy to identify Morrison’s intended meaning. He simply repeats the lines “when the music’s over” and “turn out the lights” several times in a row. That “When The Music’s Over” is really about the destruction of nature (and consequently about man’s self-destruction too) becomes more obvious during the following verse, although the imagery used is still quite ambiguous and its underlying meaning only evident from context: Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection Send my credentials to the House of Detention I got some friends inside
Disappointed by what people are doing to the earth and to nature, Morrison does not want to be part of the Resurrection anymore, i.e. he does not want to live in a world like this; however, he also argues that some of his friends are already in “the House of Detention”, meaning that they have to atone for their sins. The most significant and revealing part of the song, however, is the following: What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister? Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn And tied her with fences and dragged her down
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Following the shamanic tradition, Morrison describes the earth as a woman, more precisely as “our fair sister” (unusually, not as our mother). The following lines give details about how cruelly and recklessly she has been exploited and destroyed by “them”, i.e. by mankind. To emphasize Morrison’s anger, this passage is accompanied by occasional drum bursts played by Densmore. Afterwards, the music becomes very subdued when all band members vehemently announce “We want the world and we want it now”. “A drum roll crescendo then begins, and the song abruptly kicks into gear again as Morrison screams out the rest of the lyrics” (Wikipedia “When The Music’s Over”, online). In fact, the whole song might be interpreted as an example of the ‘shamanic rock’ genre. As already indicated, Morrison’s lyrics often exhibited a shamanic or messianic quality; the latter can be seen in the previous verse about the Resurrection as well as in Morrison’s frantic exclamation “Save us!/Jesus!/Save us!” or the lines “a feast of friends/’Alive!’ she cried”. However, other lines that might be influenced by shamanism include “Dance on fire as it intends”, fire dances being a crucial part of the rituals of virtually any native tribe, or “I want to hear/The scream of the butterfly” before “sink[ing] into the big sleep”, the butterfly being not only a shamanic symbol of the transformation of the human soul upon death but also a messianic symbol of the Resurrection; in this context, the “big sleep” is obviously a metaphor or euphemism for death (cf. Collmer in Gerstenmayer 2001: 63f). But what is the significance of the song’s title? Music can be seen as an integral part of society. In this respect, the message Morrison’s lyrics convey might be that “when the music’s over” the exploitation of the earth and nature has reached its climax and it is time to “turn out the lights” like it is done at the end of a performance. More dramatically spoken, the end of music is representing the end of the world.
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5. Legacy
Almost cut my hair It happened just the other day It's gettin' kind of long I could've said it was in my way But I didn’t and I wonder why I want to let my freak flag fly And I feel like I owe it to someone (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young “Almost Cut My Hair”, 1970)
By the end of the 1960s the West Coast rock scene or more precisely the whole counterculture movement was in crisis. The initial optimism and utopian vision of an improved society began to fade, mainly due to external factors that resulted in the disillusionment of countercultural activists. One such factor was the introduction of the draft lottery in 1969. In Uncovering the sixties (1985: 200) Abe Peck describes the immediate results of the introduction: “Many of those who’d protested because war wasn’t worth their lives now held numbers keyed to their birthdates that were high enough to keep them civilians, and many now said goodbye to the Movement”. However, what hurt the counterculture the most was the ever-increasing violence. In the U.S. the sixties had already begun as a decade of violence and turbulence with the growing involvement in the Vietnam War; moreover, violence continued throughout the decade, culminating in numerous assassinations. And although members of the counterculture actively fought against the ongoing outbreaks of violence and brutality, the end of the 1960s (and the beginning of the 70s) was still marked by numerous similar and even worse incidents. The Kent State Shootings, the violence surrounding the Democratic Convention in Chicago and the fact that the war in Vietnam had not yet come to a halt were just three prominent examples contributing to the counterculture’s breakup. An example more specific to West Coast Rock and the countercultural music scene was the murder of Meredith Hunter in December, 1969. During the performance of the Rolling Stones at the Altamont Free Concert festival, the 18-year-old African-American teenager was stabbed (shockingly, he had sixteen stab wounds!) and beaten to death by members of the Hell’s Angels. And as if that were not enough, Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin was beaten unconscious as he came to Hunter’s assistance. In this respect, Altamont stands not only in contrast with the optimism and ideals of Woodstock, but became synonymous with the end of the 1960s and the counterculture movement. Consequently, many youngsters who had become part of the counterculture, i.e. those who had dropped out of mainstream society, now began considering the possibility of dropping back in. This development is also incorporated in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s song Almost Cut My Hair (1970), in which they sing about being caught between “loyalty to the counterculture” and
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“the temptation to cut and run” (Storey 193). Another factor that specifically contributed to the downfall of West Coast Rock was the fact that countercultural rock music was not immune to commercialization. Rock music more and more became big business; the result was the mounting distance between artists and audience. Where once The Grateful Dead had been able to establish a commune in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury district, millionaire stars like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young made more and more outlandish demands from promoters, played in increasingly large venues rather than small clubs and halls and, at the end of their tours, headed off to their yachts and ranches. Although countercultural musicians had rarely been averse to making money, there was no longer any attempt to hide what now appeared to be shameless greed. (Gair 177)
Furthermore, with the end of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973, the West Coast Rock musicians lost their primary source of input, ultimately leading to the collapse of the movement. Nevertheless, the counterculture movement of the 1960s highly influenced and shaped American society. Even though they were not able to wholly achieve their ambitious goal of establishing a utopian society, the community’s efforts led to many significant improvements. The rise of feminism, for instance, changed to role of women, who were no longer confined to motherhood and household but began working outside of their homes. The counterculture’s advocating of free love and sex led to a looser and more tolerant attitude towards sex, non- normative sexualities and birth control, i.e. sex was and still is no longer a taboo issue in American society. The Civil Rights Movement paved the way for the equal treatment of minority groups, particularly African-Americans. As a result of the activists’ doings, laws against racism, segregation and discrimination were passed. Despite the fact that they were not able to stop the war and fight violence immediately, the counterculture made a big contribution to the decreasing popularity of the war, which was at least partly responsible for its ending (cf. Carter 2010, online). In terms of music, the practices and ideologies of West Coast Rock have also left their marks. Even though America’s situation has changed, many musicians have followed their example and called attention to contemporary political and social issues. In the 1980s, it even came to a revival of Vietnam music due to two contradictory impulses. According to Storey (194), these impulses were: (1) the new political climate making Vietnam something of which to be ‘proud’, rather than ‘ashamed’, and (2) the view that US policy in Central America is laying the basis for a new Vietnam.
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6. Conclusion
This paper has shown that the Sixties were a chaotic and rebellious era that brought about significant changes in American society. Starting with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, the country experienced numerous ups and downs during this time, whereas the downs often outweighed the ups. Violence and fighting were daily fare and many people could not ignore this fact; they actively started to fight against the prevailing social injustices. In doing so, they created the era’s most powerful revolutionary force, namely the counterculture of the 1960s. This counterculture consisted of a variety of movements from the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement and the hippie movement to feminism, the gay rights movement and the free speech movement. The event that had the greatest impact on the American counterculture of the 1960s was the Vietnam War, more precisely America’s involvement in the war. Due to the fact that the war was fought without a solid reason (as is rarely the case when it comes to warfare) and claimed a considerable number of victims, more and more people vehemently opposed the fighting in Vietnam. As a result, an anti-war movement emerged, attempting to stop the violence and fighting. Opposition to the war started on U.S. college campuses, but the movement was soon joined by members of all classes and races. Numerous teach-ins, sit-ins and protest marches were held to bring their concerns to public awareness, with the result that neither other members of society nor the authorities could ignore the growing civil unrest. However, other factors also contributed to the emergence of a larger counterculture. Since racism was still an issue in the 1960s, a civil rights movement was brought into being. Using strategies similar to the anti-war movement, the primary goal of civil rights activists was the establishment of racial equality. Among the movement’s greatest achievements were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, these accomplishments were overshadowed by increasing violence towards African-Americans, which reached its peak in the assassinations of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. Due to the post-World War II baby boom, America had a large youth culture in the 1960s. Dissatisfied with the country’s leadership, especially with Johnson and Nixon’s foreign policy and the ever-increasing violence, many young people decided to drop out of mainstream society, attempting to find alternative ways of living. Since their search for an identity of their own coincided with the emergence of the hippie movement, many members of the baby boom generation became hippies themselves. Being a hippie meant defying mainstream attitudes and ideologies. Following the tradition of the Beat generation, they expressed their non-conformist attitudes as well as their desire for personal freedom primarily by means of their own fashion trends and heavy use 66 of recreational drugs; additionally, they sparked off a sexual revolution. The main concern of this paper, however, was to demonstrate how significant the role of arts and artists was when it comes to the counterculture and the achievement of its primary goals, i.e. the stopping of the war and violence in general. As we have seen, music was particularly important in this respect, since many musicians of the era, especially those of the West Coast Rock movement, incorporated contemporary social and political issues into their songs, thereby trying to influence and change public opinion. In other words, they used music as a means to call upon society to fight against the establishment and existing social injustices. Bob Dylan was the first one who wrote protest songs, most prominently the countercultural anthem “Blowin’ In The Wind”. West Coast bands such as Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, The Doors and The Byrds soon followed his example and released numerous songs in response to the Vietnam War, attempting to convince society that the war and the circumstances surrounding it were unjust. Additionally, the West Coast Rock movement helped to bring the genre of psychedelic rock and rock festivals into prominence, the latter providing an adequate opportunity to bring crowds of people together, celebrating the countercultural lifestyle and raising society’s awareness for issues such as the war. Of course, music alone could not stop the war. But it certainly helped to spread the counterculture’s beliefs. In this respect, the greatest achievement of West Coast musicians was that many people began to rethink their attitudes and ideologies towards the war and other social injustices as a result of their protest songs. This made it all the more difficult for the American leadership to justify their involvement in the Vietnam War and at least partly contributed to the ultimate withdrawal of American troops. Moreover, following the tradition of folk and West Coast musicians, numerous artists have continued to deploy their respective artistic mediums as a means to challenge and criticize the political and social status quo. In this respect, the counterculture movement has proven that a few people can make a difference, that a few people can even change the world to a certain extent.
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DISCOGRAPHY
Big Brother & the Holding Company (1967). Big Brother & the Holding Company . Mainstream.
Bob Dylan (1962). Bob Dylan . Columbia.
Bob Dylan (1963). The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan . Columbia.
Bob Dylan (1964). The Times They Are A-Changin’ . Columbia.
Bob Dylan (1964). Another Side of Bob Dylan . Columbia.
Bob Dylan (1965). Bringing It All Back Home . Columbia.
Bob Dylan (1965). Highway 61 Revisited . Columbia
Bob Dylan (1966). Blonde On Blonde . Columbia.
Bob Dylan (1967). John Wesley Harding . Columbia.
Bob Dylan (1969). Nashville Sky . Columbia.
Buffalo Springfield (1967). Buffalo Springfield . Atco.
Country Joe and The Fish (1967). Electric Music For The Mind And Body . Vanguard.
Country Joe and The Fish (1967). I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die . Vanguard.
Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969). Willy and the Poor Boys . Fantasy.
Creedence Clearwater Revival (1970). Cosmo’s Factory . Fantasy.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1970). Déjà Vu . Atlantic.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (1971). 4 Way Street . Atlantic.
Eric Burdon & The Animals (1967). Winds of Change . MGM.
Jefferson Airplane (1966). Jefferson Airplane Takes Off . RCA Records.
Jefferson Airplane (1967). Surrealistic Pillow . RCA Records.
Jefferson Airplane (1967). After Bathing At Baxter’s . RCA Records
Jefferson Airplane (1968). Crown of Creation . RCA Records.
Jefferson Airplane (1969). Volunteers . RCA Records.
Quicksilver Messenger Service (1968). Quicksilver Messenger Service . Capitol Records.
The Animals (1965). Animal Tracks . MGM.
71
The Byrds (1965). Mr. Tambourine Man . Columbia.
The Byrds (1966). Fifth Dimension . Columbia.
The Byrds (1968). The Notorious Byrd Brothers . Columbia.
The Doors (1967). The Doors . Elektra.
The Doors (1967). Strange Days . Elektra.
The Doors (1968). Waiting For The Sun . Elektra.
The Grateful Dead (1967). The Grateful Dead . Warner Bros.
The Grateful Dead (1968). Anthem of the Sun . Warner Bros.
The Grateful Dead (1969). Aoxomoxoa . Warner Bros.
The Grateful Dead (1969). Live/Dead . Warner Bros.
Steppenwolf (1969). Monster . ABC Dunhill.
72
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8. Appendix: Lyrics to Songs Mentioned or Cited (in order of appearance in main text)
I FEEL LIKE I'M FIXIN' TO DIE RAG (Country Joe & the Fish)
Source: http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/i/ifeellikeimfixintodierag.shtml
Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men, Uncle Sam needs your help again. He's got himself in a terrible jam Way down yonder in Vietnam So put down your books and pick up a gun, We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.
And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam; And it's five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Well, come on generals, let's move fast; Your big chance has come at last. Gotta go out and get those reds — The only good commie is the one who's dead And you know that peace can only be won When we've blown 'em all to kingdom come.
And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam; And it's five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain't no time to wonder why Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
Well, come on Wall Street, don't move slow, Why man, this is war au-go-go. There's plenty good money to be made By supplying the Army with the tools of the trade, Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb, They drop it on the Viet Cong.
And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam. And it's five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain't no time to wonder why Whoopee! we're all gonna die.
79
Well, come on mothers throughout the land, Pack your boys off to Vietnam. Come on fathers, don't hesitate, Send 'em off before it's too late. Be the first one on your block To have your boy come home in a box.
And it's one, two, three What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, Next stop is Vietnam. And it's five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates, Well there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee! we're all gonna die
ONLY A PAWN IN THEIR GAME (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/onlyapawnintheirgame.html
A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood A finger fired the trigger to his name A handle hid out in the dark A hand set the spark Two eyes took the aim Behind a man's brain But he can't be blamed He's only a pawn in their game.
A South politician preaches to the poor white man "You got more than blacks, don't complain You're better than them, you been born with white skin" they explain And the Negro's name Is used it is plain For the politician's gain As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train But it ain't him to blame He's only a pawn in their game.
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid And the marshals and cops get the same But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool He's taught in his school From the start by the rule That the laws are with him To protect his white skin To keep up his hate So he never thinks straight 'Bout the shape that he's in But it ain't him to blame He's only a pawn in their game.
From the powerty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks And the hoof beats pound in his brain 80
And he's taught how to walk in a pack Shoot in the back With his fist in a clinch To hang and to lynch To hide 'neath the hood To kill with no pain Like a dog on a chain He ain't got no name But it ain't him to blame He's only a pawn in their game.
Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught They lowered him down as a king But when the shadowy sun sets on the one That fired the gun He'll see by his grave On the stone that remains Carved next to his name His epitaph plain: Only a pawn in their game.
SAN FRANCISCAN NIGHTS (Eric Burdon & The Animals)
Source: http://www.golyr.de/the-animals/songtext-san-franciscan-nights-301739.html
This following program is dedicated to the city and people of San Francisco, who may not know it but they are beautiful and so is their city this is a very personal song, so if the viewer cannot understand it particularly those of you who are European residents save up all your bread and fly trans love airways to San Francisco U.S.A., then maybe you'll understand the song, it will be worth it, if not for the sake of this song but for the sake of your own peace of mind.
Strobe lights beam creates dreams walls move minds to do on a warm San Franciscan night old child young child feel alright on a warm San Franciscan night angels sing leather wings jeans of blue Harley Davisons too on a warm San Franciscan night old angels young angels feel alright on a warm San Franciscan night.
I wasn't born there perhaps I'll die there there's no place left to go, San Francisco.
Cop's face is filled with hate heavens above he's on a street called love when will they ever learn old cop young cop feel alright on a warm San Franciscan night the children are cool they don't raise fools it's an American dream 81 includes Indians too
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND (Woody Guthrie)
Source: http://www.magistrix.de/lyrics/Woody%20Guthrie/This-Land-Is-Your-Land-134483.html
This Land is your Land, This Land is my Land, From California, To the New York Island From the redwood forest, To the gulf-stream waters, This land was made for you and me.
As i went walking That ribbon of highway I saw above me That endless skyway I saw below me That golden valley This land was made for you and me.
I roamed and rambled And I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands Of her diamond deserts. All around me A voice was sounding This was made for you and me.
When the sun comes shining And is was strolling The wheat fields waving The dust clouds rolling A voice was chanting And a fog was lifting This land was made for you and me.
This Land is your Land, This Land is my Land, From California, To the New York Island From the redwood forest, To the gulf-stream waters, This land was made for you and me.
When the sun comes shining And is was strolling The wheat fields waving The dust clouds rolling A voice comes chanting And a fog was lifting This land was made for you and me.
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ROLL ON, COLUMBIA (Woody Guthrie)
Source: http://mysongbook.de/msb/songs/r/rollonco.html
Roll on, Columbia, roll on, roll on, Columbia, roll on Your power is turning our darkness to dawn Roll on, Columbia, roll on
Green Douglas fir where the water cuts through Down her wild canyons and mountains she flew Canadian Northwest to the ocean so blue It's roll on, Columbia, roll on
Other great rivers add power to you Yakima, Snake, and the Klickitat, too Sandy, Williamette, and Hood River, too It's roll on, Columbia, roll on
At Bonneville now there are ships in the locks The water has risen and cleared all the rocks Soon shiploads of plenty will sail through your docks So roll on, Columbia, roll on
On up the river is Grand Coulee Dam The mightiest thing ever built by a man To run the great factories and water our land It's roll on, Columbia, roll on
These mighty men labored by day and by night Matching their strength 'gainst the river's wild flight Through rapids and falls they won the hard fight Roll on, Columbia, roll on
SONG TO WOODY (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/songtowoody.html
I'm out here a thousand miles from my home Walking a road other men have gone down I'm seeing a new world of people and things Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.
Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song About a funny old world that's coming along Seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn It looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born.
Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know All the things that I'm saying and a many times more I'm singing you the song but I can't you sing enough 'Cause there's not many men that've done the things that you've done.
Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too And to all the good people that travelled with you 83
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
I'm leaving tomorrow but I could leave today Somewhere down the road someday The very last thing that I'd want to do Is to say I've been hitting some hard travelling too.
TALKIN’ NEW YORK (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/talkinnewyork.html
Rambling out of the Wild West Leaving the towns I love best Thought I'd seen some ups and down 'Till I come into New York town People going down to the ground Building going up to the sky.
Wintertime in New York town The wind blowing snow around Walk around with nowhere to go Somebody could freeze right to the bone I froze right to the bone New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years I didn't feel so cold then.
I swung on to my old guitar Grabbed hold of a subway car And after a rocking, reeling, rolling ride I landed up on the downtown side: Greenwich Village.
I walked down there and ended up In one of them coffee-houses on the block Got on the stage to sing and play Man there said, Come back some other day You sound like a hillbilly We want folksingers here.
Well, I got a harmonica job begun to play Blowing my lungs out for a dollar a day I blowed inside out and upside down The man there said he loved my sound He was raving about he loved my sound Dollar a day's worth.
After weeks and weeks of hanging around I finally got a job in New York town In a bigger place, bigger money too Even joined the Union and paid my dues.
Now, a very great man once said That some people rob you with a fountain pen It don't take too long to find out Just what he was talking about 84
A lot of people don't have much food on their table But they got a lot of forks and knives And they gotta cut something.
So one morning when the sun was warm I rambled out of New York town Pulled my cap down over my eyes And heated out for the western skies So long New York Howdy, East Orange.
OXFORD TOWN (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/oxfordtown.html
Oxford Town, Oxford Town Ev'rybody's got their hats bowed down The sun don't shine above the ground Ain't a-goin' down to Oxford Town.
He went down to Oxford Town Guns and clubs followed him down All because his face was brown Better get away from Oxford Town.
Oxford Town around the bend He comes to the door, he couln't get in All because of the color of his skin What do you think about that, my frien' ?
Me and my gal, my gal's son We got met with a tear gas bomb I don't even know why we come Goin' back where we come from.
Oxford Town in the afternoon Ev'rybody singin' a sorrowful tune Two men died 'neath the Mississippi moon Somebody better investigate soon.
MASTERS OF WAR (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/mastersofwar.html
Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks.
You that never done nothin' But build to destroy 85
You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly.
Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain.
You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion' As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud.
You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins.
How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do.
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul.
And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered 86
Down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.
BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/blowininthewind.html
How many roads most a man walk down Before you call him a man ? How many seas must a white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand ? Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly Before they're forever banned ? The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind The answer is blowin' in the wind.
Yes, how many years can a mountain exist Before it's washed to the sea ? Yes, how many years can some people exist Before they're allowed to be free ? Yes, how many times can a man turn his head Pretending he just doesn't see ? The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind The answer is blowin' in the wind.
Yes, how many times must a man look up Before he can see the sky ? Yes, how many ears must one man have Before he can hear people cry ? Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows That too many people have died ? The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind The answer is blowin' in the wind.
THE BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/balladofhollisbrown.html
Hollis Brown He lived on the outside of town Hollis Brown He lived on the outside of town With his wife and five children And his cabin brokin' down.
You looked for work and money And you walked a rugged mile You looked for work and money And you walked a rugged mile Your children are so hungry That they don't know how to smile.
Your baby's eyes look crazy They're a-tuggin' at your sleeve 87
Your baby's eyes look crazy They're a-tuggin' at your sleeve You walk the floor and wonder why With every breath you breathe.
The rats have got your flour Bad blood it got your mare The rats have got your flour Bad blood it got your mare If there's anyone that knows Is there anyone that cares ?
You prayed to the Lord above Oh please send you a friend You prayed to the Lord above Oh please send you a friend Your empty pocket tell you That you ain't a-got no friend.
Your babies are crying louder now It's pounding on your brain Your babies are crying louder now It's pounding on your brain Your wife's screams are stabbin' you Like the dirty drivin' rain.
Your grass is turning black There's no water in your well Your grass is turning black There's no water in your well Your spent your last lone dollar On seven shotgun shels.
Way out in the wilderness A cold coyote calls Way out in the wilderness A cold coyote calls Your eyes fix on the shortgun That's hangin' on the wall.
Your brain is a-bleedin' And your legs can't seem to stand Your brain is a-bleedin' And your legs can't seem to stand Your eyes fix on the shortgun That you're holdin' in your hand.
There's seven breezes a-blowin' All around the cabin door There's seven breezes a-blowin' All around the cabin door Seven shots ring out Like the ocean's pounding roar.
There's seven people dead On a south Dakota farm There's seven people dead 88
On a south Dakota farm Somewhere in the distance There's seven new people born.
THE LONESOME DEATH OF HATTIE CARROLL (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/thelonesomedeathofhattiecarroll.html
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin' And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him As they rode him in custody down to the station And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears Take the rag away from your face Now ain't the time for your tears.
William Zanzinger who at twenty-four years Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him And high office relations in the politics of Maryland Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders And swear words and sneering and his tongue it was snarling In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears Take the rag away from your face Now ain't the time for your tears.
Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage And never sat once at the head of the table And didn't even talk to the people at the table Who just cleaned up all the food from the table And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane That sailed through the air and came down through the room Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger And you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears Take the rag away from your face Now ain't the time for your tears.
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded And that even the nobles get properly handled Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em And that ladder of law has no top and no bottom Stared at the person who killed for no reason Who just happened to be feelin' that way witout warnin' And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fearsv 89
Bury the rag deep in your face For now's the time for your tears.
MR. TAMBOURINE MAN (Bob Dylan, The Byrds)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/mrtambourineman.html
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you. Though I know that evenin's empire has returned into sand Vanished from my hand Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet I have no one to meet And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming.
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin' ship My senses have been stripped, my hands can't feel to grip My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels To be wanderin' I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way I promise to go under it.
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.
Though you might hear laughin', spinnin' swingin' madly across the sun It's not aimed at anyone, it's just escapin' on the run And but for the sky there are no fences facin' And if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're Seein' that he's chasing.
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.
Then take me disappearin' through the smoke rings of my mind Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves 90
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to Hey ! Mr Tambourine Man, play a song for me In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.
LIKE A ROLLING STONE (Bob Dylan)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/likearollingstone.html
Once upon a time you dressed so fine You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you ? People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall" You thought they were all kiddin' you You used to laugh about Everybody that was hangin' out Now you don't talk so loud Now you don't seem so proud About having to be scrounging for your next meal.
How does it feel How does it feel To be without a home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone ?
You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely But you know you only used to get juiced in it And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it You said you'd never compromise With the mystery tramp, but know you realize He's not selling any alibis As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes And say do you want to make a deal?
How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone ? You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns When they all come down and did tricks for you You never understood that it ain't no good You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat Ain't it hard when you discover that He really wasn't where it's at After he took from you everything he could steal.
How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own 91
With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone ?
Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made Exchanging all precious gifts But you'd better take your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe You used to be so amused At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.
How does it feel How does it feel To be on your own With no direction home Like a complete unknown Like a rolling stone ?
WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE (The Animals)
Source: http://www.bluesforpeace.com/lyrics/get-out-place.htm
In this dirty old part of the city Where the sun refused to shine People tell me there ain't no use in tryin'
Now my girl you're so young and pretty And one thing I know is true You'll be dead before your time is due, I know
Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin' Watched his hair been turnin' grey He's been workin' and slavin' his life away Oh yes I know it
He's been workin' so hard, yeah I've been workin' too, baby, yeah Every night and day, yeah
We gotta get out of this place If it's the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place Cause girl, there's a better life for me and you
Now my girl you're so young and pretty And one thing I know is true, yeah You'll be dead before your time is due, I know it
Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin' Watched his hair been turnin' grey, yeah He's been workin' and slavin' his life away I know he's been workin' so hard 92
I've been workin' too, baby, yeah Every day baby, yeah Wow, yeah...
We gotta get out of this place If it's the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place Girl, there's a better life for me and you Somewhere baby, somehow I know it
We gotta get out of this place If it's the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place Girl, there's a better life for me and you
Believe me baby, I know it baby You know it too
THE END (The Doors)
Source: http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/the_doors/the_end.html
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end Of everything that stands, the end No safety or surprise, the end I'll never look into your eyes...again
Can you picture what will be So limitless and free Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand In a...desperate land
Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain And all the children are insane All the children are insane Waiting for the summer rain, yeah
There's danger on the edge of town Ride the King's highway, baby Weird scenes inside the gold mine Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake To the lake, the ancient lake, baby The snake is long, seven miles Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold
93
The west is the best The west is the best Get here, and we'll do the rest
The blue bus is callin' us The blue bus is callin' us Driver, where you taken' us
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on He took a face from the ancient gallery And he walked on down the hall He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he Paid a visit to his brother, and then he He walked on down the hall, and And he came to a door...and he looked inside Father, yes son, I want to kill you Mother...I want to...fuck you
C'mon baby, take a chance with us C'mon baby, take a chance with us C'mon baby, take a chance with us And meet me at the back of the blue bus Doin' a blue rock On a blue bus Doin' a blue rock C'mon, yeah
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill
This is the end Beautiful friend This is the end My only friend, the end
It hurts to set you free But you'll never follow me The end of laughter and soft lies The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end
WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/creedence-clearwater-revival/wholl-stop-the-rain-23d1ec63.html
Long as I remember, The rain been comin' down. Clouds of myst'ry pourin' Confusion on the ground. Good men through the ages Tryin' to find the sun. And I wonder, Still I wonder Who'll stop the rain.
94
I went down Virginia, Seekin' shelter from the storm. Caught up in the fable, I watched the tower grow. Five-year plans and new deals Wrapped in golden chains. And I wonder, Still I wonder Who'll stop the rain.
Heard the singers playin', How we cheered for more? The crowd had rushed together Tryin' to keep warm. Still the rain kept pourin', Fallin' on my ears. And I wonder, Still I wonder Who'll stop the rain.
TALKIN’ VIETNAM (Phil Ochs)
Source: http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/109666/
Sailing over to Vietnam Southeast Asian Birmingham Well, training is the word we use Nice word to have in case we lose Training a million Vietnamese To fight for the wrong government and the American way
Well, they put me in a barracks house Just across the way from Laos They said, "you're pretty safe when the troops deploy But don't turn your back on your house boy When they ring the gong, watch out for the Viet-Cong."
Well, the sergeant said it's time to train So I climbed aboard my helicopter plane We flew above the battle ground A sniper tried to shoot us down He must have forgotten, we're only trainees Them Commies never fight fair
Friends, the very next day we trained some more We burned some villages down to the floor Yes, we burned out the jungles far and wide Made sure those red apes had no place left to hide Threw all the people in relocation camps Under lock and key, made damn sure they're free
Well, I walked through the jungle and around the bend Who should I meet but President Diem Said, you're fighting to keep Vietnam free For good old de-em-moc-ra-cy (Diem-ocracy) That means rule by one family 95
And fifteen thousand American troops, give or take a few Thousand American Troops
He said: "I was a fine old Christian man Ruling this backward Buddhist land Well, it ain't much but what the heck It sure beats hell out of Chiang Kai-shek I'm the power elite, me and the 7th fleet."
He said: "meet my sister, Madam Nhu The sweetheart of Dien Bien Phu." He said: "Meet my brothers, meet my aunts With the government that doesn't take a chance Families that slay together, stay together."
Said: "If you want to stay, you'll have to pay Over a million dollars a day But it's worth it all, don't you see? If you lose the country you'll still have me Me and Syngman Rhee, Chiang Kai-shek, Madam Nhu Like I said on "Meet the Press" 'I regret that I have but one country to give for my life.'"
Well, now old Diem is gone and dead All the new leaders are anti-Red Yes, they're pro-American, freedom sensations Against Red China, the United Nations Now all the news commentators and the CIA Are saying, "Thank God for coincidence."
UNKNOWN SOLDIER (The Doors)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/the-doors/the-unknown-soldier-63d5ee13.html
Wait until the war is over And we're both a little older The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read Television children fed Unborn living, living, dead Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And it's all over For the unknown soldier It's all over For the unknown soldier
Hut Hut Hut ho hee up Hut Hut Hut ho hee up 96
Hut Hut Hut ho hee up Comp'nee Halt Preeee-zent! Arms!
Make a grave for the unknown soldier Nestled in your hollow shoulder The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read Television children fed Bullet strikes the helmet's head
And, it's all over The war is over It's all over The war is over Well, all over, baby All over, baby Oh, over, yeah All over, baby Wooooo, hah-hah All over All over, baby Oh, woa-yeah All over All over Heeeeyyyy
FIVE TO ONE (The Doors)
Source: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/doors/five+to+one_20042584.html
Yeah, c'mon Love my girl She lookin' good C'mon One more
Five to one, baby One in five No one here gets out alive, now You get yours, baby I'll get mine Gonna make it, baby If we try
The old get old And the young get stronger May take a week And it may take longer They got the guns But we got the numbers 97
Gonna win, yeah We're takin' over Come on!
Yeah! Your ballroom days are over, baby Night is drawing near Shadows of the evening crawl across the years Ya walk across the floor with a flower in your hand Trying to tell me no one understands Trade in your hours for a handful dimes Gonna' make it, baby, in our prime
Come together one more time Get together one more time Get together one more time Get together, aha Get together one more time! Get together one more time! Get together one more time Get together one more time Get together, gotta, get together
Ohhhhhhhh!
Hey, c'mon, honey You won't have along wait for me, baby I'll be there in just a little while You see, I gotta go out in this car with these people and...
Get together one more time Get together one more time Get together, got to Get together, got to Get together, got to Take you up in my room and... Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah Love my girl She lookin' good, lookin' real good Love ya, c'mon
SUPERBIRD (Country Joe & The Fish)
Source: http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/c/countryjoeandthefish6021/superbird236842.html
Look, up yonder in the sky, now, what is that I pray ? It's a bird it's a plane, it's a man insane, it's my President LBJ He's flying high way up in the sky just like Superman, But I have got a little piece of kryptonite, Yes, I'll bring him back to land. Said come out Lyndon with your hands held high, Drop your guns, baby, and reach for the sky. I've got you surrounded and you ain't got a chance, Gonna send you back to Texas, make you work on your ranch, Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.
98
He can call Super Woman and his Super Dogs, But it sure won't do him no good, Yeah, I found out why from a Russian spy That he ain't nothing but a comic book.
We'll pull him off the stands and clean up the land, Yes, we'll have us a brand new day. What is more I got the Fantastic Four And Doctor Strange to help him on his way.
Said come out Lyndon with your hands held high, Drop your guns, baby, and reach for the sky. We got you surrounded and you ain't got a chance, Gonna send you back to Texas make you work on your ranch, Yeah yeah, oh yeah.
Yeah, gonna make him eat flowers. Yeah, make him drop some acid ...
FORTUNATE SON (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/creedence-clearwater-revival/fortunate-son-23d1ec6f.html
Some folks are born Made to wave the flag Ooh, they're red, white and blue And when the band plays "Hail to the Chief" Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord
It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no senator's son, son It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate one, no
Some folks are born Silver spoon in hand Lord, don't they help themselves? Yoh! But when the taxman Comes to the door Lord, the house look a like a rummage sale, yeah
It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no millionaire's son, no, no It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate one, no
Yeah, some folks inherit Star-spangled eyes Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord And when you ask 'em "How much should we give?" Ooh, they only answer, "More, more, more" yoh!
It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no military son, son 99
It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate one, one
It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate one, no, no, no It ain't me, it ain't me I ain't no fortunate son, no, no, no
DRAFT MORNING (The Byrds)
Source: http://www.golyr.de/the-byrds/songtext-draft-morning-189523.html
Sun warm on my face, I hear you down below movin´ slow and it´s morning
Take my time this morning, no hurry to learn to kill and take the will from unknown faces
Today was the day for action Leave my bed to kill instead Why should it happen?
DRAFT RESISTER (Steppenwolf)
Source: http://www.golyr.de/steppenwolf/songtext-draft-register-653784.html
He was talkin' 'bout the army while he passed his pipe around An American deserter who found peace on Swedish ground He had joined to seek adventure and to prove himself a man But they tried to crush his spirit 'til his conscience ruined their plans And we thought of those who suffer for the sake of honesty All those who refuse to follow traitors to humanity
Here's to all the draft resisters who will fight for sanity When they march them off to prison in this land of liberty
Heed the threat and awesome power of the mighty Pentagon Which is wasting precious millions on the toys of Washington
Don't forget the Draft Resisters and their silent, lonely plea When they march them off to prison, they will go for you and me
Shame, disgrace and all dishonor, wrongly placed upon their heads Will not rob them of the courage which betrays the innocent
CHICAGO (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/crosby-stills-nash-and-young/chicago-7bd4ced4.html
So your brother's bound and gagged And they've chained him to a chair Won't you please come to Chicago 100
Just to sing
In a land that's known as freedom How can such a thing be fair Won't you please come to Chicago For the help that we can bring
We can change the world Re-arrange the world It's dying ... to get better
Politicians sit yourselves down There's nothing for you here Won't you please come to Chicago For a ride
Don't ask Jack to help you 'Cause he'll turn the other ear
Won't you please come to Chicago Or else join the other side
We can change the world Re-arrange the world It's dying ... if you believe in justice It's dying ... and if you believe in freedom It's dying ... let a man live his own life It's dying ... rules and regulations, who needs them Throw them out the door Somehow people must be free I hope the day comes soon Won't you please come to Chicago Show your face
From the bottum of the ocean To the mountains on the moon Won't you please come to Chicago No one else can take your place
Yes, we can change the world Re-arrange the world It's dying ... if you believe in justice It's dying ... and if you believe in freedom It's dying ... let a man live his own life It's dying ... rules and regulations, who needs them Throw them out the door
OHIO (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/crosby-stills-nash-and-young/ohio-7bd4cecc.html
Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin' We're finally on our own This summer I hear the drummin' 101
Four dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it Soldiers are gunning us down Should have been done long ago What if you knew her and Found her dead on the ground? How can you run when you know?
Na na-na-na, na-na na-na Na na-na-na, na-na na Na na-na-na, na-na na-na Na na-na-na, na-na na
Gotta get down to it Soldiers are cutting us down Should have been done long ago What if you knew her and Found her dead on the ground? How can you run when you know?
Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin' We're finally on our own This summer I hear the drummin' Four dead in Ohio Four dead in Ohio (Four dead) Four dead in Ohio (Four) Four dead in Ohio (How many?) Four dead in Ohio (How many more?) Four dead in Ohio (Why?) Four dead in Ohio (Oh!) Four dead in Ohio (Four) Four dead in Ohio (Why?) Four dead in Ohio (Why?)
HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE RAIN (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/creedence-clearwater-revival/have-you-ever-seen-the-rain- 2bd1ec66.html
Someone told me long ago There's a calm before the storm, I know! It's been comin' for sometime. When it's over, so they say, It'll rain on a sunny day, I know! Shining down like water.
I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain? I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain Comin' down on a sunny day?
Yesterday and days before, Sun is cold and rain is hard, I know! 102
Been that way for all my time. Till forever on it goes Thru the circle fast and slow, I know! It can't stop, I wonder.
I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain? I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain Comin' down on a sunny day?
Yeah!
I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain? I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain Comin' down on a sunny day?
MONSTER (Steppenwolf)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/steppenwolf/monster-73d476c5.html
Once the religious, the hunted and weary Chasing the promise of freedom and hope Came to this country to build a new vision Far from the reaches of kingdom and pope Like good Christians, some would burn the witches Later some got slaves to gather riches
But still from near and far to seek America They came by thousands to court the wild But she just patiently smiled and bore a child To be their spirit and guiding light
And once the ties with the crown had been broken Westward in saddle and wagon it went And 'til the railroad linked ocean to ocean Many the lives which had come to an end While we bullied, stole and bought our a homeland We began the slaughter of the red man
But still from near and far to seek America They came by thousands to court the wild But she just patiently smiled and bore a child To be their spirit and guiding light
The blue and gray they stomped it They kicked it just like a dog And when the war was over They stuffed it just like a hog
And though the past has it's share of injustice Kind was the spirit in many a way But it's protectors and friends have been sleeping Now it's a monster and will not obey
The spirit was freedom and justice And it's keepers seem friendly and kind 103
It's leaders were supposed to serve the country But now they won't pay it no mind
'Cause the people got fat and grew lazy Now their vote is like a meaningless joke You know they talk about law, about order But it's all just an echo of what they've been told
'Cause there's a monster on the loose It's got our heads into a noose And it just sits there watchin'
Our cities have turned into jungles And corruption is stranglin' the land The police force is watching the people And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own business 'Cause the whole worlds got to be just like us Now we are fighting a war over there No matter who wins, you know we can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose It's got our heads into the noose And it just sits there watching
America where are you now? Don't you care about your sons and daughters? Don't you know we need you now We can't fight alone against the monster
America where are you now? Don't you care about your sons and daughters? Don't you know we need you now We can't fight alone against the monster
America where are you now? Don't you care about your sons and daughters? Don't you know we need you now We can't fight alone against the monster
America where are you now? Don't you care about your sons and daughters? Don't you know we need you now We can't fight alone against the monster America
WAR MOVIE (Jefferson Airplane)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/jefferson-airplane/war-movie-3d34157.html
In nineteen hundred and seventy-five, All the people rose from the countryside, Locked together hand in hand all through this unsteady land, To move against you government man do ya' understand, Gonna roll roll roll the rock around roll roll roll the rock 104
Around lift the rock out of the ground
At the Battle of Forever Plains, All my people hand in hand in hand in the rain, The laser way won the day without one single living soul going down. The government troops were circled in the sun gun found themselves on the Run... from our nation, the rock is raised no need to hide from The other side now... transformation
Call high to the constellation headquarters call high to the Most high directors send out the transporting systems and Send out the sun finders Thirteen battalion of mind raiders three hundred master Computer killers from great platforms in the mountains Twenty mile lasers & great giant trackers... twenty miles South now in 1975 all my people rose from the countryside until we Meet again and touch our hands together in another land Until we meet again & see each others minds we Three have met again and touched our hands talking of Napoleon in the garden we will muffle the drums tomorrow Mornin gonna roll roll roll the rock around gonna roll roll Roll the rock around lift the rock out of the ground
SKY PILOT (The Animals)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/the-animals/sky-pilot-53d61b05.html
He blesses the boys as they stand in line The smell of gun grease and the bayonets they shine He's there to help them all that he can To make them feel wanted he's a good holy man Sky pilot... sky pilot How high can you fly You'll never, never, never reach the sky He smiles at the young soldiers
Tells them its all right He knows of their fear in the forthcoming fight Soon there'll be blood and many will die Mothers and fathers back home they will cry
Sky pilot... sky pilot How high can you fly You'll never, never, never reach the sky He mumbles a prayer and it ends with a smile
The order is given They move down the line But he's still behind and he'll meditate But it won't stop the bleeding or ease the hate
As the young men move out into the battle zone He feels good, with God you're never alone He feels tired and he lays on his bed Hopes the men will find courage in the words that he said Sky pilot... sky Pilot 105
How high can you fly You'll never, never, never reach the sky You're soldiers of God you must understand
The fate of your country is in your young hands May God give you strength Do your job real well If it all was worth it
Only time it will tell In the morning they return With tears in their eyes The stench of death drifts up to the skies
A soldier so ill looks at the sky pilot Remembers the words "Thou shalt not kill" Sky pilot... sky pilot
How high can you fly You never, never, never reach the sky
WOODEN SHIPS (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young + Jefferson Airplane)
Source: http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/90836/
If you smile at me I will understand 'Cause that is something Everybody everywhere does in the same language
I can see by your coat, my friend You're from the other side There's just one thing I've got to know Can you tell me please, who won
Say, can I have some of your purple berries Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now Haven't got sick once Prob'ly keep us both alive
Wooden ships on the water, very free, and easy Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be Silver people on the shoreline let us be Talk'n 'bout very free, and easy
Horror grips us as we watch you die All we can do is echo your anguished cries Stare as all human feelings die We are leaving, you don't need us
Go take a sister, then, by the hand Lead her away from this foreign land Far away, where we might laugh again We are leaving, you don't need us And it's a fair wind 106
Blowin' warm out of the south over my shoulder Guess I'll set a course and go
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH (Buffalo Springfield)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/buffalo-springfield/for-what-its-worth-13d4c975.html
There's something happening here But what it is ain't exactly clear There's a man with a gun over there Telling me I got to beware
I think it's time we stop Children, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down?
There's battle lines being drawn Nobody's right if everybody's wrong Young people speaking their minds Getting so much resistance from behind
It's time we stop Hey, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down? What a field day for the heat A thousand people in the street Singing songs and carrying signs Mostly saying, "Hooray for our side"
It's time we stop Hey, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down?
Paranoia strikes deep Into your life it will creep It starts when you're always afraid Step out of line, the men come and take you away
We better stop Hey, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down?
Stop Hey, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down?
Stop Now, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down?
Stop Children, what's that sound? Everybody look, what's going down?
107
DARK STAR (The Grateful Dead)
Source: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/gratefuldead/darkstar.html
Dark star crashes pouring its light into ashes
Reason tatters the forces tear loose from the axis
Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion shall we go, you and I While we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds
Mirror shatters in formless reflections of matter
Glass hand dissolving to ice petal flowers revolving
Lady in velvet recedes in the nights of goodbye
Shall we go, you and I While we can? Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds
THE FOOL (Quicksilver Messenger Service)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/quicksilver-messenger-service/the-fool-63cfdab7.html
Can you hear it in the morning, it sings the golden song,
I saw his moving ever on the run, from and to the sound of one
Turning in, turning out, spirals high, never down, Wonder, wonder wanders, loving, loving lovers,
Freefall, tumbling walls, one world, one one truth,
108
If if it's above life is low, life is slow,
Love is life, it's love, love
LIGHT IS FASTER THAN SOUND (Big Brother & The Holding Company)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/big-brother-and-the-holding-company/light-is-faster-than-sound- 63db7e77.html
Light is faster than sound My head to the ground Mind going round Faster than sound.
What goes up must go down World goes around Sun shines around Faster than sound.
Suddenly I see your face Faster than sound Through the emptiness of space. Faster than sound You're turning my mind all around Faster than sound 'cause life is faster than sound. Faster than sound Faster than sound
Light is faster than sound My head to the ground Mind going round Faster than sound.
What goes up must go down World goes around Sun shines around Faster than sound.
Whoa, suddenly I see your face Faster than sound Through the emptiness of space. Faster than sound You're turning my mind all around, Faster than sound 'cause life is faster than sound. Faster than sound Faster than sound
WHITE RABBIT (Jefferson Airplane)
Source: http://www.elyrics.net/read/j/jefferson-airplane-lyrics/white-rabbit-lyrics.html
One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small 109
And the ones that mother gives you Don't do anything at all Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you're going to fall Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Has given you the call To call Alice, when she was just small
When the men on the chessboard get up And tell you where to go And you've just had some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving low Go ask Alice, I think she'll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead And the white knight is talking backwards And the red queen's off with her head Remember what the dormouse said ?Feed your head, feed your head?
BREAK ON THROUGH (The Doors)
Source: http://www.magistrix.de/lyrics/The%20Doors/Break-On-Through-804.html
You know the day destroys the night Night divides the day Tried to run Tried to hide Break on through to the other side Break on through to the other side Break on through to the other side, yeah
We chased our pleasures here Dug our treasures there But can you still recall The time we cried Break on through to the other side Break on through to the other side
Yeah! C'mon, yeah
Everybody loves my baby Everybody loves my baby She get She get She get She get high
I found an island in your arms Country in your eyes Arms that chain us Eyes that lie 110
Break on through to the other side Break on through to the other side Break on through, oww! Oh, yeah!
Made the scene Week to week Day to day Hour to hour The gate is straight Deep and wide Break on through to the other side Break on through to the other side Break on through Break on through Break on through Break on through Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
STRANGE DAYS (The Doors)
Source: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/doors/strange+days_20042641.html
Strange days have found us Strange days have tracked us down They're going to destroy Our casual joys We shall go on playing Or find a new town
Yeah!
Strange eyes fill strange rooms Voices will signal their tired end The hostess is grinning Her guests sleep from sinning Hear me talk of sin And you know this is it
Yeah!
Strange days have found us And through their strange hours We linger alone Bodies confused Memories misused As we run from the day To a strange night of stone
111
5D (FIFTH DIMENSION) (The Byrds)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/the-byrds/5d-fifth-dimension-1bd5e9e0.html
Oh how is it That I could come out to you And be still floatin' And never hit bottom But keep falling through Just relaxing and paying attention
All my two-dimensional Boundaries were gone I had lost to them badly I saw that world crumble And thought I was dead But I found my senses still working
And as I continued To drop through the hole I found all surrounding To show me that joy innocently is Just be quiet and feel it around you
And I opened my heart To the whole universe And I found it was loving And I saw the great blunder My teachers had made Scientific delerium madness
I will keep falling as long as I live Ah, without ending And I will remember The place that is now That has ended Before the beginning
Oh how is it That I could come out to you And be still floatin' And never hit bottom But keep falling through Just relaxing and paying attention
MR. SPACEMAN (The Byrds)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/the-byrds/mr-spaceman-3d5e9e7.html
Woke up this morning with light in my eyes And then realized it was still dark outside It was a light coming down from the sky I don't know who or why
Must be those strangers that come every night 112
Those saucer shaped lights put people uptight Leave blue green footprints that glow in the dark I hope they get home all right
Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along I won't do anything wrong Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along for a ride
Woke up this morning, I was feeling quite weird Had flies in my beard, my toothpaste was smeared Over my window, they'd written my name Said, So long, we'll see you again
Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along I won't do anything wrong Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along for a ride
Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along I won't do anything wrong Hey, Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along for a ride
EIGHT MILES HIGH (The Byrds)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/the-byrds/eight-miles-high-1bd5e90c.html
Eight miles high And when you touch down You'll find that it's Stranger than known
Signs in the street That say where you're goin' Are somewhere Just being their own
Nowhere is There warmth to be found Among those afraid Of losing their ground Rain gray town Known for its sound In places Small faces unbound
Round the squares Huddled in storms Some laughing Some just shapeless forms
Sidewalk scenes 113
And black limousines Some living Some standing alone
WOODSTOCK (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/crosby-stills-nash-and-young/woodstock-73d4ced9.html
Well, I came upon a child of God He was walking along the road And I asked him, "tell me, where are you going?" This he told me
Said, "I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm Gonna join in a rock and roll band Got to get back to the land And set my soul free"
We are stardust, we are golden We are billion-year-old carbon And we've got to get ourselves Back to the garden
Well, then can I walk beside you? I have come to lose the smog And I feel myself a cog In somethin' turning
And maybe it's the time of year Yes, and maybe it's the time of man And I don't know who I am But life is for learning
We are stardust, we are golden We are billion-year-old carbon And we got to get ourselves Back to the garden
We are stardust, we are golden We are billion-year-old carbon 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 was a song And a celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes Riding shotgun in the sky Turning into butterflies Above our nation
We are stardust, we are golden We are caught in the devil's bargain And we got to get ourselves 114
Back to the garden
SOMEBODY TO LOVE (Jefferson Airplane)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/jefferson-airplane/somebody-to-love-63d346ef.html
When the truth is called to be lies And all the joy within you dies Don't you want somebody to love Don't you need somebody to love Wouldn't you love somebody to love You better find somebody to love
Don't take no for an answer
When the garden flowers, They are dead, yes And your mind, your mind, Is so full of dread, yeah
Don't you want somebody to love Don't you need somebody to love I'd really like somebody to love But it's hard to find somebody to love
Your eyes, I say your eyes may look asleep Yeah, but in your head baby I'm afraid you don't know where it is
Don't you want somebody to love Don't don't don't don't you need somebody to love Wouldn't you love somebody to love You better find somebody to love
Don't take the green acid, That's for the base player Sh D-dow Sh D-dow... Ha ha ha! Yeeeaaaahhh!
Tears are running, they're running down your breast, And your friends baby they treat you like a guest, yeah
Don't you want somebody to love Don't you need somebody to love I would really like somebody to love But it's hard to find somebody to love
We just had a baby born in the left side of the party, Ladies and Gentlemen, We need an ambulance near the scaffolding! Oh, my little baby, Hey get off the stage, get off the stage man! Allright! Unless you have a pass, you are an audience member, You do not have access to this area. Wow! That guy just got stabbed, Do you see that? I think we're gettin' a little outta hand here Wow! Who hired the security on this gig, man? 115
They are a motorcycle gang! C'mon!
WILD TYME (Jefferson Airplane)
Source: http://www.lyricstime.com/jefferson-airplane-wild-tyme-lyrics.html
It's a wild time! I see people all around me changing faces! It's a wild time! I see love all the time! I'm doing things that haven't got a name yet; I need love, your love. It don't matter if it's rain or shine. I'm here for you anv old time stay here, play here. Make a place for yourself here. I want to be with you, no matter what I do, what doesn't change is the way I feel for you today. Times just seem so good. I do know that I should be here with you this way, and it's new, so new. I see changes, changes all around me are changes.
WE CAN BE TOGETHER (Jefferson Airplane)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/jefferson-airplane/we-can-be-together-73d346c5.html
We can be together Ah you and me We should be together
We are all outlaws in the eyes of America In order to survive we steal cheat lie forge fred hide and deal We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young But we should be together Come on all you people standing around Our life's too fine to let it die and We can be together
All your private property is Target for your enemy And your enemy is We We are forces of chaos and anarchy Everything they say we are we are And we are very Proud of ourselves
Up against the wall Up against the wall fred (motherfucker) Tear down the walls Tear down the walls
Come on now together 116
Get it on together Everybody together We should be together We should be together my friends We can be together We will be
We must begin here and now A new continent of earth and fire Come on now gettin higher and higher Tear down the walls Tear down the walls Tear down the walls Won't you try
VOLUNTEERS (Jefferson Airplane)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/jefferson-airplane/volunteers-6bd346c6.html
Look what 's happening out in the streets Got a revolution Got to revolution
Hey I'm dancing down the streets Got a revolution Got to revolution
Ain't it amazing all the people I meet Got a revolution Got to revolution
One generation got old One generation got soul This generation got no destination to hold Pick up the cry
Hey now it's time for you and me Got a revolution Got to revolution
Come on now we're marching to the sea Got a revolution Got to revolution
Who will take it from you We will and who are we
We are Volunteers of America Volunteers of America Volunteers of America Volunteers of America (Got a revolution) (Got a revolution)
Look what's happening out in the streets Got a revolution Got to revolution Hey I'm dancing down the streets Got a revolution Got to revolution Ain't it amazing all the people I meet Got a revolution Got to revolution
117
We're Volunteers of America We're Volunteers of America We're Volunteers of America Volunteers of America Volunteers of America Volunteers of America ...
LIGHT MY FIRE (The Doors)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/the-doors/light-my-fire-7bd5ee28.html
You know that it would be untrue You know that I would be a liar If I was to say to you Girl, we couldn't get much higher
Come on baby light my fire Come on baby light my fire Try to set the night on, fire
The time to hesitate is through No time to wallow in the mire Try now we can only lose And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on baby light my fire Come on baby light my fire Try to set the night on, fire yeah
The time to hesitate is through No time to wallow in the mire Try now we can only lose And our love become a funeral pyre
Come on baby light my fire Come on baby light my fire Try to set the night on, fire yeah
You know that it would be untrue You know that I would be a liar If I was to say to you Girl, we couldn't get much higher
Come on baby light my fire Come on baby light my fire Try to set the night on fire Try to set the night on fire Try to set the night on fire Try to set the night on fire
118
WHEN THE MUSIC’S OVER (The Doors)
Source: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/When-The-Music%27s-Over-lyrics-The- Doors/67609A72555BA86E482568970034DF04
Yeah, c'mon
When the music's over When the music's over, yeah When the music's over Turn out the lights Turn out the lights Turn out the lights, yeah
When the music's over When the music's over When the music's over Turn out the lights Turn out the lights Turn out the lights
For the music is your special friend Dance on fire as it intends Music is your only friend Until the end Until the end Until the end
Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection Send my credentials to the House of Detention I got some friends inside
The face in the mirror won't stop The girl in the window won't drop A feast of friends "Alive!" she cried Waitin' for me Outside!
Before I sink Into the big sleep I want to hear I want to hear The scream of the butterfly
Come back, baby Back into my arm We're gettin' tired of hangin' around Waitin' around with our heads to the ground I hear a very gentle sound Very near yet very far Very soft, yeah, very clear Come today, come today
What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister? 119
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn And tied her with fences and dragged her down
I hear a very gentle sound With your ear down to the ground We want the world and we want it... We want the world and we want it... Now Now? Now!
Persian night, babe See the light, babe Save us! Jesus! Save us!
So when the music's over When the music's over, yeah When the music's over Turn out the lights Turn out the lights Turn out the lights
Well the music is your special friend Dance on fire as it intends Music is your only friend Until the end Until the end Until the end!
ALMOST CUT MY HAIR (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
Source: http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/crosby-stills-nash-and-young/almost-cut-my-hair-6bd4cede.html
Almost cut my hair It happened just the other day It's gettin' kind of long I could've said it was in my way
But I didn't and I wonder why I feel like letting my freak flag fly Almost cut my hair It happened just the other day It's gettin' kind of long I could've said it was in my way
But I didn't and I wonder why I feel like letting my freak flag fly And I feel like I owe it, ... someone
Must be because I had the flu for Christmas And I'm not feeling up to par It increases my paranoia 120
Like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car
Well I'm not giving in an inch to fear çause I've promised myself this year I feel like I owe it, ... someone
When I finally get myself together I'm gonna get down in that sunny southern weather
And I'm goin' to find a space inside to laugh, Separate the wheat from the chaff I feel ... Like I owe it, ... someone, yeah
121