Effigies in the Static: PHIL OCHS, CREEDENCE and the Vietnam War

(MS) 

In 1975, like metal insects fleeing a burning hive, the last helicopters clawed skyward from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. I was 7 years old. I saw some of it on the news. People clinging to landing skids, the sky thick with smoke. And then a little later, when the milk bottle-top campaign came urging we children to raise funds for the “Boat People”, I robotically knocked on the neighbours doors like a Bonfire night rehearsal. I look back and reflect on the suffocating irony of the nation asking its innocents to mend the colonial wounds it had covertly helped inflict.

The news doesn’t just repeat, it haunts. It loops in grotesque cycles: reportage, commentary, prediction, reflection… toothpaste ads… and back again. A Sisyphean broadcast of despair. It doesn’t knock politely. It kicks down the door and sits at the dinner table, whispering through the television, humming in the background. The Vietnam war was famously the first and last to be televised live in unfiltered “living color”. Henceforth we learned to look away. And it opened a cultural fault line. A seismic rupture that split generations, ideologies, and identities. It also neatly collided with the golden age of popular music so its impact has been winningly immortalised. Oil barons fed the war machine; Tin Pan Alley fed the charts.

The music didn’t merely reflect the war—it bled from it. From the early ’60s, songs became weapons, shields, elegies. Hawks and doves clashed not only in jungles and on campuses, but in recording studios and radio stations. Jingoistic country and kitsch exploitation discs offered feverish support to “our boys” with sharp kicks to those in dissent. The music of black America offered stoic resignation,

with combatants unsure whether the war was overseas or on the streets of Detroit. Post-war beatnik culture injected irony into the mix whilst the growing horde of pop groups tested their evolving beat, rock, and psychedelic credentials with political sound bites, naïve or otherwise. The result: a sonic civil war—an echo chamber of rage, satire, grief, and defiance. Buffy St Marie sang about the unending futility of the “Universal Soldier”, Jan & Dean responded with the “Universal Coward”. Barry McGuire offered the “Eve of Destruction”, The Spokesmen answered with the “The Dawn of Correction”.

Though outnumbered the folk tradition prevailed with the revolutionary charge. Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Ewan MacColl, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, or more accurately, “the young Bobby Dylan,” as quipped by Phil Ochs in the live intro to “The Ringing of Revolution”. The war was soon becoming a catalyst for bigger issues and the songs began to reflect this. In this one the peasants rise with burning torches encircling the cornered bourgeois. Ochs inspiration may have been the climax of Frankenstein but his ideas for a film version are pure Bunuel. The mob resembles Lee Marvin, Frank Sinatra plays Castro, and to great mirth, “John Wayne plays Lyndon Johnson… and Lyndon Johnson plays God!”

Ochs met his audience with humour, but his songs cut deep;  razor blades wrapped in melody. His inclusion of Wayne is telling. For all his firebrand fury, Ochs was a man of contradictions: a nationalist, if not patriot, who idolised Wayne and Gary Cooper through a childhood steeped in cinema. His song "Love Me I'm a Liberal" might have been a self-deprecating joke, but by the end of the decade, his ego was so consumed by despair, he began taking world events as a personal affront. By 1969 the pre-amble to “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” makes it crystal clear, I ain’t joking anymore.

But 1969 was the year of Creedence Clearwater Revival. A California band with a bible-belt fetish, whose alchemy turned swamp rock into gold. At Woodstock, they headlined, though you may not know it. They took the stage after midnight, following an exhausting Grateful Dead set that drained the energy from the multitudes. Creedence blocked their appearance in the film as a result. The subsequent release of their Woodstock set bears witness to their power: studio precision fused with blistering acid rock abandon, a band demonstrating they could extend their repertoire as ably as any of their peers if required.

Over time, Creedence became indelibly linked to Vietnam via the medium of film. Coppola led the charge in Apocalypse Now, featuring a Creedence-style version of “Suzie Q” whilst Playboy bunnies foreshadowed a Saigon-esque stage exit under the cover of Bill Graham’s smoke bombs. But their connection to the conflict was more than their soundtrack omnipotence.

Last night
I saw the fire spreadin' to

The palace door.
Silent majority
Weren't keepin' quiet
Anymore.

Who is burnin'?
Who is burnin'?
Effigy.
Who is burnin'?
Who is burnin'?
Effigy.

“Effigy”, the final track on Willie and the Poor Boys, closed that album like a funeral dirge. It echoes Ochs in its wider summary of where things were heading but bereft of his irony, save a deceptive opening chord progression that’s almost baroque. It’s like a bar-room philosopher’s weary end of night rant, tossed off in a crushing minor key, each bass note like racked-up shots of bourbon, dragging the listener deeper into the mire. The song’s structure mirrored its lyric and the extended frenzied guitar solo burns like the wildfire spreading outwards from the White House lawn. It deliberately takes its time to fade, the flames engulfing Maryland…Pennsylvania…the Carolina’s…Georgia…Apocalypse now indeed:

Songwriter, John Fogerty has said the song was written in response to the President’s glib admission to watching the baseball on TV while anti-war protests raged just beyond the Oval Office. But the lyrics suggest something deeper. The reference to Nixon’s appeal to a “silent majority”, may be a reference to the very audience that fuelled CCR’s success rather than the distant middle-classes. The band’s working-man image - blue-collar, checked shirt “look” appropriated later by Neil Young and Springsteen - was central to their appeal. “Wrote a Song for Everyone,” he sang on an earlier album, and here he may be mourning a nation unravelling toward unthinkable anarchy, a view at odds with the cataclysmic Yippies and Panthers.

Fogerty’s lyrics are cryptic, evasive, as if unwilling to name the monster outright. Whatever the intent, the performance is a jarring counterpoint to the band’s usual upbeat paeans to soulful back-wood life. File next to “Gimme Shelter’” in the list of sermons evoking society on the brink.

As if to emphasise the not un-coincidental impact of the war on culture, Michael Herr, war correspondent for Esquire noted;

“Out on the street I couldn’t tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans. The sixties had made so many casualties, its war and music had run power off the same circuit for so long they didn’t even have to fuse.”

As the returning grunts made their perilous odyssey “back in the world”, Creedence Clearwater Revival tore themselves apart in a bitter financial civil war. John Fogerty became crippled by a predatory record contract, that dragged him into a years-long, soul-crushing legal battle that ultimately drove him to bankruptcy. In 1975 as those helicopters exited Saigon there was no solace in the hollow echo of war’s end. At a Central Park victory concert, the fragile facade was palpable. Folk veterans like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez played to a crowd weary and scarred by the conflict. Their voices, once full of youthful protest, now carried the heavy weight of a nation’s exhaustion. In this void stood Phil Ochs, a man already a casualty of the era’s dark undercurrents. A brutal mugging, rumoured to be the work of a deeper, more sinister (central) intelligence, had shattered his spirit and damaged his vocal chords. Ochs, a ghost of his former self, had lost his fire. A year later the final curtain dropped, and he took his own life, a sombre footnote to a war that had devoured so many.

And the cycle contines and the News continues to haunt. Kabul echoes Saigon: departing imperialists abandon the desperate. The President remains mired in scandal, the corruption leaks. The proxy wars proliferate and nations divert funds to the military. The sides are forming. The protesters are arrested, the children are bombed, the politicians are jailed…or shot… The helicopters rise again, but this time, the world turns its back on the refugees in the small boats. And in South East Asia fire engulfs a parliament building.

The effigies still burn.

(PS)

They do say that adversity promotes creativity. It’s perhaps no co-incidence that the mid-60s to early 70s was both the era of the Great American Protest Song and for many, the golden age of popular music.

There were different sides to this: for the pseudo-intellectuals and draft card burners, there was the snarky, off-beat humour of Arlo Guthrie or the flat-out, right-on hectoring of Jefferson Airplane. Creedence Clearwater Revival were something different though: they seemed to hold up a mirror for the working man, the ones on the front line, and speak to them directly about their situation.

They mixed it up with lighter moments too, though: so for every Fortunate Son, there’s a Down on the Corner; for every Run Through the Jungle, there’s a Lookin’ Out My Back Door. Almost like they’re saying “yeah things are really shit, but we make the best of it, don’t we?”. Grounded, matter-of-fact, broad-shouldered acceptance, but celebrating the tough characters with the grit and determination needed to weather such storms without crumbling in the face of adversity.

Ramble Tamble is a stark picture of blue collar America, framed as a country rock diatribe – as if Johnny Cash played a Les Paul through a Marshall stack. It’s as grim a view as you could want, with all the ‘roach in the cellar/bugs in the sugar’ references. There’s little political commentary or judgement there, it’s just telling it how it is… which for those who didn’t have the will or capacity to engage politically, allowed the band to connect with its audience and let them feel as if someone was speaking for them, in their language and on their terms.

There is a hint at a political jab, with the line ‘Actors in the White House’… naturally before an actual actor shuffled in there, I think we can safely take this to mean ‘liars/dissemblers’… jeepers boys, wait until Watergate. But despite the hopeless feel of the lyrics it’s all major key, upbeat, ‘hey what are you gonna do?’ stoicism. Even the incredible, brooding middle section only has an A minor as its tonic, but the C, G & D are all major… almost willing its listeners to breathe deeply and trudge on regardless.

Effigy is darker though. The violent imagery in the lyrics harks back to America’s shameful past with its pre-civil rights lynchings, but is mirrored in the horrific contemporary news clips of Vietnam villages being put to the torch. It’s warning about othering, either at home or abroad, and how easily it can creep into society.

It hints at an insidious fear, a hatred lurking in the underbelly of the population, just waiting to bubble over. It seems to start at the top, with the ‘fire burning on the palace lawn’, but it soon seeps down to infect the working classes. Eventually the whole nation is engulfed and there’s little remaining of what the country used to be… ‘few were left to watch the ashes die’.

Pretty chilling stuff… if only there were some parallels we could draw nowadays, on either side of the Atlantic.

(LK)

Oh what a lovely war!

We all know the scene by now; the camera pans across a South - East Asia village hidden away in the jungle, a river flowing placidly at the edge of the shot when, so very faintly at first, as if at the very extent of your hearing, you hear the opening bars of…

Well you can insert the song of your choice at this point, as long as it is era appropriate of course. Many will be thinking of songs concerning the decision to paint doors a chosen colour, or perhaps the possible dispensation of favour in regard to offspring, but let’s not limit ourselves by the imagination of others. Regardless of the music chosen, the place of the Vietnam war in popular culture is due almost entirely to the portrayal seen in films and music plays a large part in that portrayal.

The Vietnam war was unique at the time, never before had a war been featured so heavily on television, whilst at the same time raising huge objections within the general populace. For a country so steeped in patriotism, it was a shock to the system of a nation to see death and destruction on TV and thousands of dead bodies returning. At the same time there was a growing disaffection with government and major changes in society in general. Along with the ability of the media that allowed these images into every household, there was also the ability that allowed people to send their messages across the airwaves. Small radio stations across America were popping up and playing music that was being created in homes, schools and garages by a generation that was no longer sure that the old rules applied to them. A generation that would soon find themselves being shipped off to a country they probably couldn’t find on a map to fight people they knew nothing about.

Teenagers were having to face the idea that they could be the next one coming home in a bodybag and they were very pissed off about it. So what do people who have no power or influence do when faced with the horror of destruction? They shout about it as loudly as they possibly can, by protesting in the streets an protesting on vinyl, even if much of the music that has become associated with the Vietnam War is not concerned with the war itself. The music that has become associated with it, at least in the minds of the general public, is the music of the counter culture which, almost by definition, is not the most popular music of the time. It is almost as if what people think of the music linked to the conflict has been filtered through a cultural obsession with the social eruptions throughout the 1960s.

To say that America has an obsession with the Vietnam War is one hell of an understatement. Since the war ended they have been making films about it, about the people who fought in it and films which feature it in some way; it’s almost like a box of chocolates with a dark heart and every one of them makes music one of the strongest features. The music is rarely diegetic in nature, though apparently, if we were to believe what we see in films, the American military makes an exception for German opera, but tends toward music from the period which helps to situate the action in time, or possibly just preferred by the director to try and help with the story and it is this, more than how popular the featured music had actually been, that lives on in the minds of the people watching the movies.

The Vietnam war has had a significant effect on popular culture, but rather indirectly as it is not the actual war which has had the effect, but rather the portrayal of the war after the fact. What has been seen on screen, that also comes with a healthy helping of music from the period, is what lives on in the minds of those who see it and, with the great renown many of these films possess, each generation discovers these films and music that they might never have heard of otherwise