“I am sentimental about my childhood - not my own
particular childhood, but the civilisation which I grew up in and which is now,
I suppose, just about at its last kick”
“Coming Up For Air,” George Orwell
This is a quietly bitter record. Ray Davies put this
together at the tender age of 25 whilst battling with the insecurity of his
role as breadwinner for both family and band. He was recovering from a
breakdown, adapting to fatherhood and in career limbo due to an American
touring ban, which had The Kinks reduced to playing the Northern cabaret circuit.
The songs bear witness to the psychological unravelling of a British subject, mirroring the decline of the Empire itself with Davies drawing on his own family
for inspiration. But somewhere along the line, the archetypal affection for his
subject matter got lost. In fact the sweet hummable tunes and chipper delivery
make the lyrical desperation at the heart of it, all the more harrowing. The
political stance is ambiguous but as a summary of the first 69 years of the 20th
century, it stands as an eviscerating portrait of working-class servility. And it makes me think about my own family.
From a childhood smothered in the fag-end “Land of hope
and gloria, land of my Victoria”, Arthur miscomprehends his future.“I
was born lucky me, in a land that I loved”. Job, family, methodism for the
straight and narrow, “Scenes from the Afghan War” ‘tween skits at the Pally for
entertainment. But in a heart-beat, the military drums of “Yes Sir No Sir” establish
a life routine exercised on the shiny wet parade ground of school and barrack. “Stop
your dreaming and your idle wishing, you’re outside and there ain’t no
admission to our play”. An angry and pivotal song, it reads like a
manifesto of oppression. I think of my Dad’s Dad and his first trip from home in 1915.
Train from Oldham Mumps to Milton Haven, vomit filled boat to Channel fort , training
in weapons of mass destruction, application in Flanders mud and blood. “Give the scum a gun and make the bugger
fight and be sure to have deserters shot on sight, if he dies we’ll send a
medal to his wife.”My Grandad was buried alive on the Western Front but
dug himself out in time to witness the Canadian’s amphetamine charge at Vimy
Ridge. “Some Mother’s Son”, recounts heartbreaking sacrifice. “One soldier
glances up to see the sun and dreams of games he played when he was young”One
minute it’s cowboys and Indians in the rhododendron bushes of Alexandra Park, “…a
second later he is dead”.
Moving on into the post-war, we’re in the bread and circuses
of consumerism, courting in a rented jalopy, “Drivin’” to adventure, in…
Potters Bar. Forget, forget, forget. Like a thunderbolt “Brainwashed” deviates
from any semblance of the universal to directly address the condition of our
eponymous hero, punning on his genuflecting, carpet fitter profession. “Look
like a real human being but you don’t have a mind of your own. Yeah, you can
talk, you can breathe, you can work, you can stich, you can sew but you’re
brainwashed. Yes you are, yes you are. Get down on your knees!”.
In 1934 my Grandad was on his knees, convalescing on the
dole and my 4 year old Dad went with mother to visit the cotton mills of
Massachusetts. This was no holiday, it was reconnaissance for escape. It didn’t
happen. Arthur contemplates a similar still-born fantasy in “Australia” where “nobody
has to be, any better than what they want to be”, where “nobody has a
chip on their shoulder”, where “…everyone walks around with a perpetual
smile across their face”. The song starts in playful style like the Terry Gilliam-esque
artwork on the sleeve, but the aboriginal sounds and tooting jazz soon turn it into
an end of pier nightmare. There is no crock of gold. The crumpled Thomas Cook
pamphlets, salvaged and smoothed out on Whitehall desks, selecting Australia as
test site for the Bomb. A future destination for the airmen sent like lab-rats into
the atomic clouds billowing over the vaporized atolls.
Arthur reaches the summit in an alternative “Shangri-La”
somewhere in one of those suburbs that spread like gravy over the Nation’s
tablecloth. “Put on your slippers and sit by the fire, you’ve reached your
top and you just can’t get any higher”. It’s the emotional and musical peak,
with urgent strummed guitars, tinkling harpsichords and lyrics hammered out
like last rites. “You need not worry you need not care, you can’t go
anywhere”. You can’t go anywhere!
In short fashion the Second World War breaks out and as “Mr
Churchill Says”, “ gotta fight the bloody battle to the very end”, withthe conflicterupting in a surreal barrage of raga-rock. Post-war
austerity follows and the raucous pantomime of “She Bought a Hat Like Princess
Marina” parades working class pride in the face of adversity. In the interval, Palestine
and Mau-Mau on the newsreels, for the main feature, “The Dambusters”. Then coming
up for air Arthur reflects on his “Young and Innocent Days” indulging in a
nostalgia, that seems not what it used to be.
In “Nothing to Say”, the albums grinds towards it’s close
with a glimpse of the isolation of age. I think of Dad and his Dad, I think of
us all watching the football, their shared Unionism, their local pride and their
stoicism but I also think of their strangely distant and jarring communication.
For Arthur, his son is on his own aspirational path. “I’ll have to go soon cos
I’m getting bored, I gotta be home early to see a good play”, and I think of my Dad’s transcendence of both his parents and his class.
By 1969 Britain had effectively become an archaic vessel in receipt of American culture, so it is strangely appropriate that the title track concludes as a
country-style hoe-down. Davies had been commissioned to write the album for a
Granada TV play, but it never got off the ground due to funding issues. The album
was thus delayed and on release unfavourably compared to the heavy sounds of the day. “Shangri-La”
was issued as a single but found no takers. Like the country The Kinks were suddenly out of time. But the lifting of the American touring ban opened up new horizons
and like my Dad's speculative journey in 1934, The Kinks set sail in search of a new land of “hope
and glory-ia”.
Only a generation after it was at war with nearly everyone,
Germany was evidently at war with itself. The nation, divided by political
ideology, was culturally and physically separated: one half apparently in
colour, with all the trappings of modern life; the other almost in shades of
grey, one eye cautiously looking over the wall at how the Other Half lived, the
other eye frantically looking around for Stasi informants.
For the capitalist Westerners, life was grand. The middle
classes were doing just fine and apparently extremely comfortable with the
situation as it was… apart from a spirited proportion of the youth. Outraged
that the older generations weren’t suitably ashamed of the atrocities they had
taken part in - or at best, placidly gone along with – and railing against the
traditional middle class system, they mobilised into movements, communes, to
shake the Olds out of their cossetted armchairs and shock them into actually
thinking.
Amon Düül II rose out of the ashes of the original Amon Düül
commune (with band members who could actually play their instruments this
time), whose mission was to play music which was diametrically opposed to the
bland, saccharine, mindless Schlager pap that was infesting the nation at the
time, a cultural manifestation of the unthinking sleepwalk their elders were
stumbling through.
By 1970 it arguably reached its zenith with the
astounding Yeti. Nothing about this album is comforting: the cover is an
ominous, shady character with a scythe - presumably eyeing up Heino, or some
other egregious middle-of-the-roader - and the music is gloriously brutal,
unsettling, cacophonous and dissonant. This is not an LP to have on while you
do the dishes, it’s one to start raging fires to.
The opener Soap Shop Rock is a kind of
expressionist mini-opera, played out in a fever dream of interweaving vocals
and stabbed guitar lines… it’s phenomenal, even if I have zero idea what it’s
going on about, and lines like ‘SMOKE… COMING OUT OF THEIR EYES’ have etched
themselves into dark recesses of my brain, to resurface when I wake, blinking
and confused at 3am.
It’s an LP full of collisions: She Came Through the
Chimney starts out as a calm, lilting guitar arpeggio, until jarring
strings collide to make it feel like a bad acid trip. Archangels
Thunderbird is almost mainstream with its crunching guitar riff, and at
the same time unconventional due to the 6/4 rhythm and Renata Knaup’s unhinged
vocals which barely manage to stay in tune. The Return of
Rübezahl sounds like an eastern-tinged heavy prog version of
Spirit’s Fresh Garbage, but it only lasts for a couple of
minutes. Eye Shaking King sounds like the name suggests: it’s a slow,
twisted, assault on the senses which occasionally adheres to harmonic and
rhythmic structures, but possibly only by accident.
It’s a remarkable LP, about as far away from comfort,
contentment and consonancy as it is possible to get; as a reaction to the
societal norms of the time, it’s as stark and as jarring as they come.
The late 1970s in the UK, as in much of the world, were a
time of turmoil politically, socially and economically. The Vietnam War had
ended in abject failure for the USA, countries in South America had overthrown
elected governments and wars started in Angola, Lebanon and the Cold War was at
a high point. The enthusiasm and sense of hope that people had felt throughout
the 60s was fading as the entire world seemed to be heading toward depression.
Throughout the 70s there was a growth in what would become
the dominant form of music, at least in the singles charts, club scene and
amongst the young and racially and sexually mixed younger generation of the
time. The hedonistic and borderline solipsistic influence of disco presaged the
direction the world would take in the coming decade, but in the 70s it was the
abandonment of the dominant morals of the time, even if all it amounted to was
people dancing and drinking on the deck of a sinking ship; but coming over the
horizon were a bunch of bad tempered, ill-mannered buccaneers keen on tearing
everything apart.
Punk arrived like a boot to the crotch of society and a lot
of people with a vested interest in the status quo felt the pain. Punk shared
some elements of the approach to society of disco, and even the hippy movement
that went before that, in that it was inclusive, non-discriminatory and wanted
to change the society in which it was created, but that was where the common
threads ended. Punk lacked the hedonistic sense of the previous sub-culture,
chose confrontation rather than peace and an aesthetic of the used, cheap and
torn over designer labels and glamour, and few bands would ever express this
attitude more than X-Ray Spex.
X-Ray Spex were a political statement as a band, regardless
of the music that they would produce. Five teenagers possessing various levels
of musical ability fronted by the gloriously named Poly Styrene, a mixed race
woman with very obvious braces on her teeth, as a collective they looked like
the kids who had become friends because there was no-one else who would be
friends with them, possibly because they had something to say and they were
damn well going to say it.
The first song that brought the band to the attention of the
public was the provocatively titled “ Oh Bondage, Up Yours! ” which started
with Poly Styrene speaking the line “Some people think little girls should be
seen and not heard but I think; oh bondage up yours!”, with the name of the
song yelled into the microphone. This was not a reference to the style of
clothing that would become associated with the punk movement, but more to do
with a sexual practice favoured by right wing members of parliament; it was
also the statement of a rejection of the restrictions placed on women and their
place in society. Curiously this track would not feature on their debut album
“Germfree Adolescents” but the tone of their debut single would continue
throughout.
From the opening track “Art-i-ficial”, with its themes of
consumerism and identity, through the final track “The Day the World Turned
Day-Glo”, with its imagery of fake products and waste, there is a continuous
focus on consumerism, misogyny, authoritarianism and the mental states these
factors can induce. “Obsessed With You” turns the normal focus of obsession on
its head, foreshadowing the tracking of digital identity across multiple
platforms, with the notion that it is those in control who are obsessed with
the commercial activities of individuals, an idea that is extended in “Plastic
Bag” to the ubiquity of advertising affecting the way people think and see
themselves, once again an idea that we would be all too familiar with today.
“Identity” expands on these ideas, drawing on representation in media and how
that reflects back on those who consume it, often resulting in people adopting
false personas in the hope of fitting in or impressing others, as alluded to in
“Warrior in Woolworths” and “I Am A Poseur”, the latter being possibly the most
self-explanatory of all their titles.
Several tracks on the album, though still dealing with the
notions of identity and consumerism, take a darker turn. "Germ Free
Adolescents" is about the repressive effects of obeying societal norms,
but also reads like a description of OCD, while "I Live Off You" is
quite blunt about the way modern society needs to exploit people for gain. “I
Can’t Do Anything” speaks of someone who is stuck, unable to progress, with a
suggestion of attempted suicide; a description that today would be easily
recognised as depression, while “Let’s Submerge” employs imagery of hell, as an
allusion to night life and the underground, that would not be out of place in
Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy. “Genetic Engineering” has a strong
dystopian, Brave New World influenced feel, but the way the song starts, with
Poly Styrene counting to four in German, suggests that there may be a different
meaning to a song about science creating “a perfect race”.
“Germfree Adolescents” would be the only album that X-Ray
Spex would release, the group breaking up due to the negative attention that
fame, however minor, would bring, yet this album would go on to influence bands
in the years that followed; not least of which was the Riot Grrrl movement over
a decade later, though how much it was an influence is open to debate. They
were a different voice in the early punk movement, not as aggressive or
confrontational as The Sex Pistols or extremely political as Crass, with much
wider musical influences than most punk bands of the time, but what they had to
say is still very much relevant to this day
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 some sort of rehearsal for our Halloween/Bonfire night. 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 thefolk 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 1969was 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 - 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 continues 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
Oh the after-tram-ride quiet, when we heard a mile
beyond,
Silver music from the bandstand, barking dogs by Highgate Pond
"Parliament Fields" JOHN BETJEMAN
I had a strange moment on the lavatory recently. I was absent-mindedly
surfing the net on my phone when I discovered an old fan review of a gig by the
Jefferson Airplane that had taken place in London back in 1968. On a wet
Wednesday the Airplane supported by the Sandy Denny line-up of Fairport
Convention, played to 200-odd people for Camden Council’s first free festival
on the slopes of Parliament Hill.
Playing dare with the blinds that largely
protect my modesty from the dog walkers and joggers traipsing down this very
Hill, I considered this as I rose to flush. “Wow what a line-up!”, I enthused to
myself. Then peering out through the window towards the mist gathering round
the distant bandstand, I realised - like a thunderbolt -that the account of the
gig I was reading about… had actually taken place right in front of my field of
vision. Trousers hastily gathered around my mid-rift I urgently ventured out into
the drizzle and mud, driven by a need to pay immediate homage to this event. As
I stood under the bandstand in Grace Slick’s very footsteps, listening to the
rain drumming against the roof, I smiled to myself about the band’s reported plea
to the crowd to go home because of the shit weather.
A year later The Airplane were the featured guests on the Dick
Cavett Show, a day after they had played a much larger free gig to 400,000
people at the Woodstock festival. Everyone’s seen the famous concert movie,
Richie Havens strumming away, Joe Cocker, “The Star-Spangled Banner”...the freaks, the bad acid...all
that.
Even Charlton Heston saw it, chilling in his own personal theatre during
mutant-slaughter downtime in “The Omega Man”. Forming part of a future-shock triptych with "Soylent Green" and "Beneath the Planet of the Apes", the scene was added to the narrative to illustrate the
symbolical yearning for a recent time when the earth was FREE. The film was
made in 1971 and if they were fondly looking back to 1969 I guess they were
basically saying the apocalypse came down just after Woodstock. This runs through
my mind when I watch this TV Show.
Beneath the genial hip-uncle bit, Cavett’s ringmaster seems
to be straining to fill this ABC showcase with the freak-show that you just knew
middle America was craving for. As a crash course in the counter-culture there’s
a bit too much traffic colliding here; there’s anarchy in the air but it’s
oddly stage managed with all the participants pursuing their own unacknowledged
agenda, The knowing discarded neckerchief schtick in the intro, shorn like a Woolworths
“genuine hippy wig”, signifies something REAL is coming but the temperature
never really rises beyond the petulant kick Paul Kantner aims at one of the
fireside poufs.
Noted critc Robert Cristgau prematurely dismissed the JeffersonAirplane’s first recordings as an “electrified Peter, Paul & Mary”, but the
progression through folk-rock into full blown psychedelia established them as
the highest grossing West Coast act, with a RCA record contract that guaranteed
expansive studio time and a lavish communal mansion in San Francisco. With the
recent addition of session man star Nicky Hopkins, their contemporary
“Volunteers” album also featured some of the most successful studio work of
their entire career with political and sci-fi themes rubbing shoulders with fearsome song-jams like “Eskimo Blue Day”
and “Hey Frederick”. The title track is worth comparing to the song “St Stephen”
by fellow travellers The Grateful Dead to get a sense of the difference between
these two West Coast giants. Both songs appropriate the same old bluegrass reel
for the opening guitar riff, but where the Airplane sound is tightly driven
with propulsive bursts of guitar, the Dead meander their way across the
soundscape with semi-audible lyrics over a largely acoustic backing. The studio
version appearing on the Dead’s “Aoxomoxoa” LP, a definitive study in acid-folk
and one in sharp contrast to the way Jefferson Airplane sounded in 1969.
Thus the most immediately shocking aspect of this TV show may
be the ragged opening song from the Airplane who were then at their musical
apex. Days before, their 8am set at Woodstock had been one of their very best
with the preceding energy of The Who pushing the band to a wonderfully wild hour
and a half blow-out. It is alleged they only missed out appearing in the original
movie due to Slick’s misgivings about her stage outfit. But this opening salvo
does them no favours. It reminds us that as a live act, beneath the thunderous
bass and urgent acid guitar lines there was always a lot of risk-taking in
their combined and disparate talent that threatened to crash them. The
competitive antagonism between Grace Slick and Marty Balin did not help the
“harmony” of their massed vocals, with the latter’s exposed histrionics at
times verging on the caterwauling. Here they seem cold in the lights and so self-consciously
focused on getting over their message that they forget to “get it together”,
which is somewhat ironic as the song performed is “We Can Be Together”. The
lyrics of this anthem boast the first expletives ever aired on live US TV no
less, which was probably less a random shock tactic and more a pre-determined act
of symbolic subversion designed to aid all assembled parties. Cavett in fact
underlines this point, helpfully alluding to the song’s impending controversy
to his audience who in truth may have missed the “Motherfucker” amidst all the
noise.
The band had been pushing for a while. Take a step back to December
’68 and the Airplane’s appearance on CBS rivals The Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour. It’s unclear exactly why, as she has since claimed she simply took
advantage of the extensive backstage make-up, but Grace Slick appears in
blackface for the band’s musical segment. At the climax of “Crown of Creation”
she throws in a Black Power salute and hey presto! An obscure political
statement is preserved. (In case you missed it she followed it up with a
magazine cover a little later-LEFT). The incident contributed to the growing concern
in the carpeted exec suite at CBS towers that the show’s increasingly
subversive direction was heading the corporation into dangerous waters. This culminated
in the cancellation of the show in mid-run during April 1969. In light of this it
may well be that CBS’s loss became ABC’s gain, with the Woodstock special
designed to exploit the times to the widest audience imaginable.
Cavett was a genuinely engaging interrogator too, as easy with a
Truman Capote as he was with a Janis Joplin but here he assembles his guests
like a School panto with the photogenic girls sat either side of him and the
hairy boys sat with their back to the parents. The deeply-tanned and dangerously
knowing Slick is counter-balanced by the pale and sweet Joni Mitchell, whose
exposure on this show was so important to her management she wasn’t actually
allowed to attend Woodstock. She delivers a couple of faultless songs, preaches
“Trudeaumania” and basically sits smiling with the hope that no one thinks she’s
the one smelling of Acapulco Gold. Then on comes Stephen Stills, like a ponchoed
Daniel Craig impersonator looking for a dentist and Mitchell’s old amour
David Crosby. “Don’t you think he looks like a Lion?” she tweets. Yeah like the
cat in the Wizard of Oz that’s been laying out in the Wicked Witches
poppy-field a little too long. It is impolite to speak ill of the recently
deceased but on this showing Crosby must have been insufferable to be around for
too long. Sensing the fakery of the occasion he rushes in to steal every
awkward moment, filling the vacuum with the inane, masquerading as the
profound. (Or is it the profound masquerading as the inane?) Even Slick looks
baffled at times, perhaps more comfortable with the flirtatious Cavett who
teases her about her life at an elite finishing School.
So elite in fact
Patricia Nixon attended her year group and invited her to a White House
gathering the following year. Slick took along Abbie Hoffman to ensure she was
barred entry and made sure the cameras captured it for posterity. A little
later she appeared on stage at the Fillmore East in New York hamming it up as Adolf
Hitler next to actor Rip Torn as Richard Nixon. By the end of the 70’s she was
sacked from the band for berating a hostile Hamburg audience with a volley of “Hey
remember who won the fucking war!”
Slick may have had the biggest balls of them all, but the
advert breaks display the truth about where America really saw where it’s female
population was at. I think the ads have been retrospectively compiled for
effect here but it serves as a delicious counterpoint to the studio proceedings
(Watch out for Max Bialystock’s Swedish “toy” in the first one). Thankfully the
band finish strongly with the rhythm section dominating versions of “Somebody
to Love” and an unnamed signature jaaaaam. The latter prompting much control room
confusion and an outbreak of freak dancing from some break-out straights. Look
at the moves from the hip stockbroker at 41.48 and 43.33. He’s pushing 60 at
35. The camera settles in on the light show and the final shot is of a cop nervously
appearing from behind a curtain, tapping his feet in time with Jack Cassady’s monstrous
deep bass.
The band ended the year at the Altamont concert with Marty
Balin being punched out by Hell’s Angels ("It doesn't seem right man") and Slick being forced to attempt
crowd control in the only way possible with the immortal plea, ”You’ve got
to keep your bodies off each other unless you intend LOVE”.
Back in London the Camden Council free festivals continued with
the likes of Pink Floyd, Roy Harper, Procol Harum, Soft Machine, Pete Brown and
John Fahey all gracing that bandstand. By the end of the decade the gigs had
moved indoors to The Roundhouse. The last hurrah came when a bunch of skinheads
ran down the Hill and disrupted a Fleetwood Mac concert. Mick Fleetwood was hit
by a beer bottle and Peter Green’s dad released the following statement to the
music press:
" My son travels all over the country playing to
different audiencespractically every night and last Friday was one of his
nights off. But instead of taking advantage and resting, he offered his
services to play for free at an open-air concert along with other artists. Everything
would have gone off fine , when along came a small group of hoodlums - not I
may add , long haired freaks ,
as is their usual description -but a gang of
crew-cut young thugs who seemed to delight in spoiling a night out for the vast
majority of people who were there to enjoy themselves. After many nasty
incidents the concert had to be abandoned, much to the disgust of the
organizers who went to a great deal of trouble to arrange it. It is time
sterner measures were taken by the law and stiffer sentences imposed on these
so-called citizens of the future. "
(PS)
Although my knowledge
of Dick Cavett is limited, I think I kind of like the cut of his jib. He seemed
completely at ease with whichever guest he had on the show and seemed to
straddle generations with his wide range of interviewees, from establishment
pillars to counter-culture weirdos.
That he devoted an entire programme to a bunch of
smelly hippies who had come straight from Woodstock - I’m guessing there wasn’t
much time to shower on the way to the studio - and indulge them for who knows
how long (the extended jam that played out the last 5 minutes of the show was
heavily edited and may’ve actually gone on for several days), shows how much
empathy and affection he held for the youth movement of the time. Even so, I loved Grace Slick’s wariness of Cavett’s
genuine compliment, “You were wonderful”, and the cod eye she subsequently
gives him – maybe she was still coming down from a trip, certainly sleep
deprived - but I can’t help thinking that her default response to any praise
received from a guy in straight clothes should be that of suspicion, such was
the fierce divide between youth and establishment at the time.
I also loved the adverts, brilliantly left in by the
uploader, which speak volumes about where social mores were at the time in
Amerika: men should essentially be James Bond and women should bend over backwards
in their efforts to be attractive to them, if they’re not serving them coffee
or cleaning up after them at that precise moment, that is. Subtle, not so
much.
From a musical point of view, the driving force of the
show for me is the Airplane drummer, Spencer Dryden. Joni Mitchell was a drippy
pain in the arse and tolerated far too much for my liking; Stephen
Stills’s 4+20 was decent enough; but for sheer power,
tightness and visceral energy the Airplane really were streets ahead here. This
was a band at the peak of their powers, and Dryden was the behatted heartbeat
at the centre of it all, cigarette permanently pinched between his lips,
looking like Lee Van Cleef’s harder brother.
Bonus sweary points must go to Slick, who managed to
get her “Up against the wall, motherfuckers” line in We Can Be Together in
uncut, even if it’s not quite as prominent as, say, the MC5’s Kick Out
The Jams (edited on subsequent re-releases of the LP to “Kick out the
jams, Brothers and Sisters!”).
The opening two songs both signpost the rising
tensions between generations and it’s a brave call from Cavett to allow these
to open the show. Following on from their doom-laden Crown of Creation the
previous year, (complete with cover photo of the band in front of the Hiroshima
mushroom cloud and sleeve credits reading “courtesy USAF”, nicely done) the
Airplane had just recorded their angriest and most cynical LP Volunteers,
which would be released a few months later in the November of 69. I think that
‘tude comes across loud and clear in their commanding performance on this show,
they really look like they mean it.
A month after the LP’s release, the sixties died (both
literally and figuratively) along with Meredith Hunter at Altamont and both
Dryden and Marty Balin soon quit the band; the seventies would turn out to be
no less tumultuous for the US than the previous decade.
