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 October 15, 2008 Revolution Rock "I think that the time when music could change the world is past. I think it would be very naive to think that in this day and age." -- Neil Young, February 2008 The July 10, 2008 issue of Rolling Stone contained a lengthy interview with Barack Obama, during which the interviewer, founder-editor-publisher Jann Wenner, asked the candidate about his favorite music. Shortly after the interview appeared in print, Wenner appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to argue that Obama’s taste in music tells us something deep about him and his aspirations for the country. I’m not sure about that, and Wenner didn’t make his case convincingly (though someone like Greil Marcus or Dave Marsh probably would have). I do think that Obama’s discussion of the music he likes revealed that he has interests outside of politics and that he isn’t afraid to talk about them. Most politicians are afraid to name even their favorite sports teams, for fear of alienating voters. As I read Obama’s comments about Bob Dylan’s "Maggie’s Farm," I remembered that when Wenner asked John Kerry about his favorite rock’n’roll music, Kerry punted. Kerry wasn’t the only recent presidential candidate who spoke about the music of his generation with little conviction. Neither Al Gore nor Bill Clinton had much of substance to say about rock music, or their taste in it suggested that they were out of it during the 1960s. For a "favorite tune," Clinton chose Judy Collins’ version of "Chelsea Morning," not Joni Mitchell’s or even Fairport Convention’s. And when he showed VH1 his record collection, the toughest thing he owned was Joe Cocker’s With a Little Help from My Friends -- a great album, to be sure, but not exactly Out of Our Heads or Who’s Next. These three men grew up in the ’60s and were politically active during that time, yet they seem to have had no connection to the era’s single most important cultural phenomenon. It may have been that they wanted to keep their distance from something that, in its time, seemed at the center of radical politics.
Doggett begins his history with a prologue that looks at America’s struggles in 1965 with civil rights and the beginnings of the antiwar movement. He introduces some of the dramatis personae whose stories thread through the book: political activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman; poet and radical political theoretician Leroi Jones (aka Ameer Baraka); Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, and Huey Newton, all of whom would be prominent in the Black Panther Party; and musicians Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon. Many other musicians and activists help fill out the saga.
Soon, there were at least some activists who tapped into rock music’s popularity in order to become, by association, rock stars themselves, Hoffman and Rubin being the primary examples. Hoffman famously tried to commandeer a microphone onstage at Woodstock, only to have a guitar swung at him by Pete Townsend. Rock singers themselves began to pretend that they were in the vanguard of the revolution. "If there’s a list, I’m on it," Doggett quotes Stephen Stills as saying at one concert, as if singing a few protest songs and making statements were the same as organizing protests and manning the barricades. The concept of radical change became so commodified that even Grand Funk Railroad, a band that couldn’t remotely be confused with its Michigan neighbors the MC5, sang on its third album, "You say we need a revolution? / It seems to be the only solution." Whether rock was politically successful is open to debate -- five of the seven presidents since 1968 have been Republican -- but culturally, its influence was pervasive. A generation’s attitudes towards race, sexuality, drug use, and the war in Vietnam were formed, in part, by rock’n’roll and soul music. Other media may have helped, but it was pop music that set the tone. It also gave its fans the sense that, in order to be valid, pop music had to constantly move forward. The experimentation in filmmaking during the same time period was made possible, in part, by the willingness of young moviegoers to accept innovation. They had grown to embrace it in music, and then to demand it.
There’s a Riot Going On chronicles the naïveté and good intentions of the protest movements of the 1960s, along with their excesses and follies. Doggett is critical of radical leaders, publishers of underground newspapers, and rock stars for ignoring feminist issues, but he is fair in his often critical assessments of the activists and artists of the time, and sympathetic to many of their goals. In his forward, he describes Bono as "the hand in glove darling of the global political establishment," and Bruce Springsteen as "the personification of cozy liberalism." There are still plenty of rock bands that inject politics into their work, but it seems to be something that’s expected of their social class rather than the result of bedrock convictions. Doggett closes his book with the claim that, in the 1960s, "musicians were prepared to endanger their careers, even their lives, in the cause of political freedom." Actually, he gives plenty of examples of musicians and activists who were reckless, ego-driven, and less than discerning in their choices and actions. Musicians often mouthed socialist platitudes as they climbed into limousines and earned fortunes that would have been the envy of kings. But their work mattered deeply to themselves and to their generation, and the result was exhilarating. . . . Joseph Taylor
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I’m not so much interested in
the content of that politics as in the fact that rock music could play such a defining and
popularizing role in it. Rock’n’roll and soul music transformed society in
matters of fashion, outlook, and attitude in ways that no longer seem possible. Peter
Doggett’s There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars, and
the Rise and Fall of ’60s Counter Culture (published in November 2007 in the UK,
and in September 2008 in the US) describes the political movements of the mid-’60s to
early ’70s, gives thumbnail biographies of the major political activists and their
actions, and chronicles the extent to which rock musicians gave themselves over to the
spirit of the times. As Doggett notes, "it’s time to be reminded of an era when
artists were prepared to court unpopularity (or worse) for their ideals."
Doggett’s clearest example of this level of commitment is John Lennon, whose
radicalism -- its early awakening, full flowering, and later cooling -- mirrored the
experiences of many of his generation.
In the next few years, as
rock’n’roll was cross-pollinated with soul music, radical politics, and cultural
strands such as the sexual revolution and the rise of the drug culture, rock and soul
music became culturally influential to an astonishing degree. In part, the pervasiveness
of the phenomenon was a result of demographics, as a PBS documentary broadcast earlier
this year, Summer of Love, explained: "Never before had so many
Americans been under 25. There were over 90 million of them, nearly half the
population." Rock and soul musicians in the ’60s carried political and cultural
messages into the mainstream in a way that simply wouldn’t have occurred to earlier
pop musicians. Some musicians, such as the MC5, took radicalism as their primary message.
Others, including the Beatles (with "Revolution") and the Rolling Stones (with
"Street Fighting Man"), took on politics only occasionally and ambivalently.
Rock’n’roll and
soul music defined the ‘60s generation. Pop music today is such a grab bag of styles
that it doesn’t set young people apart in the same way. When a young man in the late
’60s or early ’70s came home from college in long hair and jeans, it meant he
had turned his back on what his parents had worked so hard for. When young women,
similarly attired, spoke of wanting equality, their parents were sure they’d lost
them to a cult. Today, young people can choose from a wardrobe of attitudes and attire,
from hippie bohemianism to punk, post-punk, and hip-hop, only to discover that their
parents have already been there -- they can’t shake them up. Unless you want to
subscribe to National Review and start wearing tweed, there’s no
counterculture.