Seven Events That Made America America (22 page)

It didn’t hurt that the Beatles had already grafted Motown onto their act: on their second album,
With the Beatles
, Lennon sang Gordy’s 1959 song “Money (That’s What I Want)” and the Smokey Robinson hit “You Really Got a Hold on Me” as well as the Marvelettes’ “Please Mister Postman.” This led Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver to boast that they were “injecting Negritude by the ton into the whites. . . . soul by proxy,” even as other radical blacks such as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) complained that the Beatles were “stealing music . . . stealing lives.”
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Either way, when the Beatles were booked on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, it was in many ways a homecoming for a moribund American rock music industry, and in other ways, a revival. More than 70 million viewers tuned in to watch, including Rev. Billy Graham, who broke his rule about never watching television on Sunday to see the moptops. “They’ve got their own groups,” mused McCartney. “What are we going to give them that they don’t already have?”
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In reality the Beatles were giving back rock and roll to the nation that invented it, reminding Americans of who they were.
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Britain had another gift for America, though it arrived too late to keep the Beatles touring. In late 1965, Jim Marshall and his son, Terry, were selling Fender amps and other musical equipment from their store in London. Rock legends such as Pete Townshend and Ritchie Blackmore frequented the shop and complained that Marshall needed more guitar equipment, whereupon Jim began modifying the Fender amps in his store by adding larger speakers and more power. Townshend was impressed, but hardly satisfied, with the first iteration of the “Bluesbreaker” amp, named for British blues legend John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. Mayall’s band featured a young guitarist named Eric Clapton, who first used the Marshall sound on the group’s
Beano
album. Already, however, Townshend was pushing Marshall for more power. By 1966, further modifications impressed an American guitarist residing in London, Jimi Hendrix, who so loved the Marshall sound that he offered to buy two of the amplifiers immediately. (Someone had already discovered that two of the Marshall speakers could be linked to a single power head, yielding the famous Marshall “stack” that would become a common feature on stage.)

Americans responded immediately to this brave new electrified world. Bob Dylan was booed offstage when he first went electric at the 1965 New-port Folk Festival. “People were horrified,” said Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary. “It was as if it was a capitulation to the enemy—as if all of a sudden you saw Martin Luther King, Jr., doing a cigarette ad.”
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“Where’s Ringo,” some shouted from the audience. Nevertheless, Dylan’s 1965 song “Like a Rolling Stone” changed the genre forever, moving radio songs from 2.5-minute cookie-cutter molds to a stunning six minutes of nasally, whiney, angst-ridden depth that once and for all merged folk and rock. With the door opened, English bands swarmed into America by the dozens in the famed “British invasion.” The Kinks, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Rolling Stones, and others arrived either physically or on vinyl. Ray Manzarek of the Doors called the invasion an “irresistible force” and “a juggernaut,” adding, “we were all in awe of their success, if not their musical accomplishments.”

Immediately American musicians “saw the headlines” about the Beatles and the other groups and “drooled. . . . My mind did a cartwheel at the possibilities,” Manzarek wrote.
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The “invasion” sparked immediate American responses. One of the first was the Byrds covering a Dylan song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and a soulful New York group, the Young Rascals, turning out hits like “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore” and “Good Lovin’.” The bubble-gum, feel-good music was ever-present on the
Billboard
top 40 hits of 1965 (“Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat” by Herman’s Hermits, “Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders, and “This Diamond Ring,” by Gary Lewis & the Playboys) along with a heavy influence of Motown (“My Girl,” by the Temptations, “I Can’t Help Myself [Sugar Pie Honey Bunch],” by the Four Tops, and “Stop! In the Name of Love,” by the Supremes).

There is no question that the most radical directions of the Beatles’ musical careers were still ahead of them with
Revolver
, the White Album,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, and
Abbey Road
, or that their musical genius did much to define rock during the ensuing six years. However, they were also drifting into the drug culture that had in many ways already swirled past them. Long before the flower children of San Francisco began toking, before Hunter S. Thompson went “gonzo,” and before Timothy Leary urged his disciples to “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” English author Aldous Huxley dabbled in psychedelic drugs (in his case, mescaline).
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Imbibing in only low doses, Huxley tried LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), also nicknamed “acid.” But Huxley had a “good trip,” and pronounced such drugs harmless and even useful, in that they could turn anything ordinary into something of universal import—oatmeal became the substance of the cosmos, bird droppings were Hindu death-wheels. As Huxley described acid’s power, “Eternity in a flower. Infinity in four chair legs, and the Absolute in the fold of a pair of flannel trousers!”
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Or, more realistically, madness in a chemical flake the size of a booger—but no one at the time was concerned with the evil effects of mind alteration when saving Western consciousness was at stake.

The Beatles had made drug use acceptable for the middle class, being the first celebrities to make reference to drug use in their lyrics and public comments. Most of them dropped acid in 1966. Four years later, John Lennon spoke of his first trip: “I did some drawings at the time. . . . I’ve got them somewhere—of four faces saying, ‘We all agree with you.’”
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Lennon and George Harrison, especially, saw the expressive power of drugs, but for different reasons. The mystically attuned Harrison sought nirvana; Lennon sought only himself, seeking to reach a sort of genuine autobiographical plane. “I was suddenly struck by great visions when I first took acid,” he recalled, labeling the view he had from the other worlds “real life in cinemascope.”
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It was also noteworthy that at the very time the Beatles discovered drugs they also began to discover taxes, or the impoverishing effects of them. On the
Revolver
album (1966), George Harrison first discovered “even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes. It was and still is typical.”
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His song “Taxman” constituted the group’s first real foray into political criticism. Over the next decade, numerous English rockers would relocate to France, Switzerland, or the United States to escape Britain’s high tax rates, even while continuing to champion “social justice” and welfare programs they claimed to favor.

“Taxman” wouldn’t be the last political statement the Beatles made, with the White Album of 1968 featuring one of the most famous calls to revolution ever, aptly named “Revolution.” A John Lennon-written song, “Revolution” was recorded in two versions on the album—one “straight” for top 40 radio, and one psychedelic, indulging every electronic gimmick Lennon and George Martin could throw in. “Revolution” asked, “You say you want a revolution/ Well, you know/ We all want to change the world,” then warned “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.” In two lines, Lennon distanced himself from both the “Establishment” and the icons of the counterculture, the Communists.
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Every artist now had a new, “invisible” partner in production, the recording studio. Increasingly, albums such as the Beach Boys’
Pet Sounds
and the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper
demonstrated the production capabilities suddenly available to artists as the technologies spread like wildfire. Jimi Hendrix capitalized on the sounds in his 1967 album
Axis: Bold as Love
, then, less than a year later, followed up with one of the greatest albums of all time,
Electric Ladyland
, which in sheer mastery of the knobs surpassed anything the Beatles had done, only to be matched by Cream’s
Disraeli Gears
, which combined psychedelic-fantasy lyrics (“tiny purple fishes run laughing through her fingers,” how their “naked ears were tortured by the sirens sweetly singing”) with Eric Clapton’s innovative guitar wah-wah pedals.

At the same time, the San Francisco sound, led by groups such as Jefferson Airplane, and shortly thereafter, Moby Grape, brought a completely different approach to the psychedelic music scene.
Surrealistic Pillow
, released in 1967 during the “summer of love,” featured equally bizarre lyrics (“one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small”) mixed with a new approach to studio musicianship that called for elevating rawness and energy over precision and accuracy. Guitars were occasionally out of tune, vocalists went flat and sharp, with lead singer Grace Slick trailing off whenever she couldn’t sustain a note, but it was all fresh and innovative. Indeed, it was precisely what musicians on drugs would be playing! Like many other rockers, however, the Airplane admitted “we didn’t give a shit about politics. . . . We wanted the freedom to make our own choices.”
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In 1968, Bob Dylan stunned an interviewer who had derided him about one of his pro-war friends when he said, “People just have their views. . . . Anyway, how do you know I’m not, as you say,
for
the war?”
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Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys observed, “You can always write about social issues but who gives a damn. I want to write about something these kids feel is their whole world.”
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Indeed, while somewhat left in their leanings, few of the top musicians allowed themselves to be drawn into the maelstrom of radical politics. Hendrix, in particular, refused to be pigeonholed as an anti-American political voice. After being arrested for riding in stolen cars, he was given a choice of jail or the army, and he enlisted in May 1961, completed boot camp, and was assigned to the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. His friends and officers remembered him as a poor soldier, who habitually missed bed checks and thought about little except playing a guitar.
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He later reminisced about his parachute training (“once you get out there everything is so quiet, all you hear is breezes”) and told Dick Cavett only that he had been stationed at Fort Campbell. But on other occasions his comments were mixed. In 1962, he took pride in being in the 101st, saying “I’m in the best division: the 101st Airborne. That’s the sharpest outfit in the world.”
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He met Billy Cox, who would be his bass player in Band of Gypsys, at the post recreation center, and the two formed a band called the King Casuals.
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In interviews with
Melody Maker
magazine, where he mentioned his military experience, he claimed to dislike the army. Yet in 1969, the same year, in his second
Melody Maker
interview, Hendrix was pressed by European reporters to comment on the Vietnam War, and he shocked them by comparing Vietnam to D-Day: “Did you send the Americans away when they landed in Normandy? . . . No, but then that was concerning your own skin. The Americans are fighting in Vietnam for the complete free world. . . .”
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In 1969, when asked about racial issues in the United States, Hendrix insisted, “Music is stronger than politics. I feel sorry for the minorities, but I don’t feel part of one.”
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Despite conservatives labeling them as such, rockers were not inherently anti-American. In fact, many American musicians framed their protest as a call to return the nation to its “roots,” not lurch toward communism. Some were overtly patriotic. Brian Wilson’s lyricist on “Heroes and Villains,” Van Dyke Parks, had a brother in the State Department who died while on assignment in West Germany. Parks recalled, “I was dead set on centering my life on the patriotic Ideal. I was a son of the American revolution. . . .”
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In retrospective mythology, rock became the “voice” of a protest generation. But the reality was somewhat different. Rare Earth singer and drummer Peter Rivera recalled, “We didn’t get into politics.”
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One of the band’s hits, “Hey, Big Brother” (1971), featured lyrics laced with antigovernment paranoia (“Take a closer look at the people . . . and notice the fear in their eye”), but as Rivera noted, the band just took songs that sounded good. “We were criticized for not having political views,” he pointed out, “for not leading a crusade. But we were just a good-time band.”
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Leftist writer Peter Doggett complained that although rockers dabbled in revolution, and briefly spouted incendiary rhetoric, in short order they “plunged into rampant egotism, self-enlightenment, drug abuse, religious cults, Hollywood celebrity status, anything that would protect their fame and leave them free of political responsibility.”
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Doggett’s leftist perspective led him to conclude that “revolutionary rock . . . and its idealistic ideology . . . was compromised and sold in the very instant it was made” by the villains in the “music business.” This allowed rock stars to “pose as radicals, and radicals as rock stars, compromising their idealism but feeding off each other’s cultural power.”
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While it’s an appealing interpretation, it fails, time and again—as Doggett’s own examples show—not because rock was taken over or compromised by the evil music industry, but because rock and roll’s own revolutionary impetus toward freedom could never cohabit with the radical leftist inclination toward unlimited state power for very long
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When rock musicians actually interacted with leftist extremists in person, worlds collided and Marxism received a quick body blow. Al Kooper, founder of Blood, Sweat & Tears, had volunteered to form a band for Abbie Hoffman’s Chicago protests in 1968. He left a classic Fender guitar in a dressing room and it was stolen, whereupon Kooper confronted Hoffman: “Hey, my f——ing guitar got ripped off. What are you going to do about it?” Hoffman replied, “Nothing. F——k you. So what, if your guitar was ripped off?” Kooper noted, “That was the sum total of my political career. . . . I never did another benefit like that.”
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Similar reality descended on a plethora of rockers who quickly distanced themselves from Hoffmanesque violence and rhetoric. Mick Jagger, no supporter of the Vietnam War, scoffed at the demonstrators in Grosvenor Square. “For what?” he asked. “There is no alternative society. . . . You can have a left-wing revolution . . . but they’re just the same.”
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A few, such as protest regulars Country Joe and the Fish, regurgitated the most radical punch-lines (“We’re in a revolution right now,” he said in Chicago, “a lot of people are going to get hurt”), but Mick Jagger put things in better perspective: “It’s stupid to think that you can start a revolution with a record.”
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