2 Age of Dissent

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”

– William Faulkner

When we discuss the evolution of music with a social message, we should also define the critical areas it covers. This type of music casts a long shadow, but there seem to be two key topics that may best define it. While CSNY’s “Ohio” expresses outrage over the killings and the politics of that era and without question ranks as a milestone of that musical style, there’s also a more subtle approach stressing the fatigue with the status quo and offering options. John Lennon was undoubtedly a pacifist as well as a musical activist, and while some thought he gave mixed signals stressing in the song “Revolution” that you could count him out of any plan that included destruction he was also friendly with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and members of the Chicago Seven. Hoffman and Rubin’s Youth International Party described itself as political theater, however it also embraced certain politicized groups and individuals that used violence and intimidation as tools of their trade. Lennon may have sympathized with some of their more benign intentions, but it was extremely unlikely that he would have joined public rallies for the Yippies or the White Panther Party which was against racism but had a record of violent demonstrations.

It should also be pointed out that Lennon also stated his own initial uncertainties in his 1972 interview with Rolling Stone magazine saying that he also considered singing “count me in” but realizing that violence was not the answer he wanted to endorse. By 1969, the Lennons decided it was time for a media campaign. Their product? Peace. “We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, you know, and sell it like people sell soap or soft drinks,” Lennon said on the The David Frost Show in ’69. “And it’s the only way to get people aware that peace is possible, and it isn’t just inevitable to have violence. Not just war – all forms of violence.” Even today, the concept of peace confuses and frustrates. Of all things, how can peace possibly be attained? It’s easy to pile up questions and arguments that lean on the side of “it’s not possible.” But to Lennon, to sell it, like you would a soda, just give it a simple message paired with a simple slogan. He knew then, just like he did when he wrote “All You Need is Love” with his fab four pals, that if you package a message correctly, it could change the world.

“All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

The idea was to get peace embedded in the consciousness of the country and the world. If you believe it, it must be. The couple would continue to invest in their marketing campaign for peace by using their own money to have billboards and posters put up around the world with the message “War is over if you want it.”

“Give Peace a Chance” wasn’t only Lennon’s first hit sans Beatles, it was also quickly adopted by activists and fervently chanted at anti-war rallies. The 1960s certainly did not end with the same spirit of utopia that it had revved up to, but Lennon’s words weren’t just an optimistic thought. The power of his anthem is remembered and echoes on today with a simple suggestion: “Whatever you do, do it for peace.”

The 1960’s had graciously given the world a new breed of youth. A surplus of rebel hippies, with dirt on their feet, hair to their shoulders and flowers in their hands, they dared to believe that peace and love were the only answers they needed. But May 4, 1970 raised a sobering question, would this country ever actually give peace a chance? Many feel the spirit of Sixties truly ended on May 4th.

At any rate, the greatest musical voices of rock’s early days, Lennon and Bob Dylan among them, spoke to a receptive audience that saw their comments as a call to action. The audience that found meaningful analysis in the words of Crawdaddy’s Paul Williams, Al Aronowitz with the New York Post, Ralph Gleason at the San Francisco Chronicle and several other key writers were quick to embrace the opinion and insight found in the lyrics of key artists, and it didn’t stop with their music. Entertainers have long used their notoriety to call attention to political thought, sometimes blatantly such as comedian Bob Hope’s patriotic trips to battle zones and sometimes in a more reserved but equally poignant manner. An example of that could be seen in April 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred Marian Anderson from the stage of Washington DC’s Constitution Hall because she was Black. However, she gained an even larger stage and voice against racism when the NAACP’s Walter White and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt…who publicly resigned from the DAR…arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of 75,000, many times larger than the 4000 seats offered at Constitution Hall.

If CSNY expressed outrage Lennon’s songs offered reflection and hope and that came through pointing out the obvious. As Lennon told Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner, “I thought it was time we fuckin’ spoke about it, the same as I thought it was about time we stopped not answering about the Vietnamese War when we were on tour with Brian Epstein and had to tell him, ‘We’re going to talk about the war this time and we’re not going to just waffle.’ I wanted to say what I thought about revolution.” What might have been declared more clearly in the article, and certainly was in Lennon’s recorded work, was that a social revolution would provide the greatest benefit.

We mentioned that Lennon offered options. While “Ohio” stresses anger in its call for action, the Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” (which stands the test of time as strongly as CSNY’s song) stresses peace as an obvious choice and it didn’t just extend to armed conflict.  Another point to consider, Lennon’s songs also stress personal changes guiding a social movement along with political ideology. Joan Baez is no stranger to calls for action and for lack of a better term has suffered for her art. She was vilified by ultra-right-wing poster child Al Capp, the creator of “Lil’ Abner” who targeted Baez as “Joanie Phoanie” and satirized college age protestors as the group SWINE (“Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything”). Capp even traveled to Montreal to arrogantly confront Lennon and Yoko Ono about their political leanings, so Baez was in good company. She cited Lennon’s “Imagine” as one of her top five protest songs along with “We Shall Overcome” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”   While these songs stress a need to deal with social injustice, “Imagine” calls for self-reflection and changing from within as the path to a greater goal.

Let’s also take pause for a moment and look at the various forms of humor that carry a particular message. Before digital changed everything, newspapers were a primary source of updates and information as well as humor with the long tradition of comic strips. By the 1950s, as dissent was taking form in the media, cartoonists started to reflect their own views of society.  That wasn’t really anything new. Chic Young’s “Blondie” reflected on class distinction with the title character as a 1930s flapper considered less than worthy of her future husband, Dagwood, who came from money. Harold Gray’s “Little Orphan Annie” examined Depression era poverty, and even earlier than that Frank Gray’s “Gasoline Alley” had a narrative that looked at daily life in post-World War I America and beyond. But the popularity of comic strips as daily entertainment, and a strong revenue engine for newspapers, opened new opportunities for cartoonists to offer social commentary in a thinly veiled satirical manner.

Perhaps the strip that spoke out the loudest and was closely examined and embraced by the protest community was Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” which at its peak was carried, and sometimes censored, in as many as 450 newspapers nationwide. It was an interesting concept. Drawn in the “funny animal” style usually seen in comic books, Pogo was a possum in a striped shirt who lived in the Okefenokee swamp, but offered a liberal view of world events and figures. Few controversial issues of the day escaped his scrutiny draped in satire including presidents, demagogues and yes, even the John Birch Society. Pogo and his friends were adopted by the beatnik / hippie communities and his statement, “We have met the enemy and he is us” became a rallying cry for the counterculture. The strip reflected Kelly’s own liberal views and laid the groundwork for a number of equally deserving strips in years to come including Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Then…there he is again…there was Al Capp.

Claiming to have been a liberal, Capp took a swing to the far right and was quick to antagonize those who opposed his somewhat narrow point of view. Merle Pollis was a young journalist at WJAS-Am in Pittsburgh and, while his own political sense had him leaning to the left, he presented his news in the impartial manner expected of responsible Sixties era news people.  Pollis’ broadcast interview with Capp in September 1966 is an example of his style, though he does provoke some response from Capp when he admits he would be interviewing Capp’s polar opposite, Pete Seeger, in the coming weeks. It was like pouring gasoline on a fire.

Pollis was no stranger to Capp’s work admitting that his mother read “Lil’ Abner” to him before he started elementary school. Capp was a host of NBC radio’s “Monitor” which was heard on WJAS, and he told Pollis that in 1966 public figures who were satirized in his comic strip were now happy to see themselves (or a parody of themselves) in print. Joan Baez might have voiced a strong objection to that claim when Capp labeled her “Joanie Phoanie” and mocked her considerable income while she decried capitalism. It didn’t help that Ms. Baez stood for just about every political issue that Capp opposed. Baez asked Capp for a retraction, but he denied the character was based on her. Baez would also admit years later in her memoir that Capp’s criticism about her income stung badly.

Capp went on to say that public figures who were “disemboweled” in “Abner” were thrilled at the recognition, claiming it was a left-handed compliment because he only used celebrities who were recognized by the strip’s world-wide audience. He went on to say that he felt liberalism at that time had deserted him and claimed to have once subscribed to every liberal goal. “A guy who said he was a liberal could borrow any amount of money from me!” according to Capp but claimed most were content to borrow rather than earn. By 1966, Capp told Pollis if someone identified himself as a liberal, he wanted to know “whose children whose income and whose neighborhood he’s being liberal with?” Keep in mind that conservatism was still in charge at newspaper syndicates and networks making conservatism of that time a popular stand.

Venom? It was satire according to Capp and by the time he took aim at college protestors he came at them in his strip with both barrels. He claimed it was not “the unsanitariness of their attire that I mock, it’s the interior sloppiness! The sloppiness of their thinking. You give me an eighteen-year old who wants to run the world and I’ll give you a jerk!” To suggest Capp was a liberal in any way at this point would be absurd. Pollis countered by saying Capp targeted his anger at students who knew little about anything, but he also put most of them in that category.  “I think”, Capp replied, “that college students should express opinions on subjects they are authorities on such as puberty and hubcaps and nothing else! Really, a college student is a subhuman who society hopes will grow into something useful…if his father’s checks hold out and the patience of the police hold out. Now, during this pulpy useless stage, it would seem to me that the college student who wants to evolve from that useless condition into something useful should shut up and find out enough about the world to know what he’s talking about five years later. I won’t listen to the opinion of anybody who hasn’t, for ten years at least, earned his own living and proven himself a useful member of society.” It’s worth pointing out that while attitudes were changing rapidly, there was a large core of society that felt exactly the way Al Capp did….and Capp had his strip and radio show as podiums.

Capp continued to rail on saying, “Everyone who earns his own living isn’t costing society a fortune in welfare checks! I was enraged when I found out that the newspaper in New York had done the unforgivable crime of sending a photographer around to employment bureaus in New York and found them deserted and thousands of jobs for unskilled inexperienced people running salaries from $75 to $100 a week were going begging in a city where 560,000 people are on welfare!” (Remember that this was a living wage in the mid-1960s.)

To Pollis’ credit, he countered by asking, “Because you have the God given gift of drawing a picture, what gives you an authority, just as they could criticize me or anyone else who offers opinions?” and Capp shot back, “Certainly, if Arthur Schlesinger Jr., my neighbor and beloved friend, is an authority on military strategy, then I’m an authority on anything. If Joan Baez and Pete Seeger can give us advice on foreign affairs on their records, then I am the world’s leading architect or polo player.” And speaking of Seeger, knowing he was a scheduled guest in the coming weeks, Capp asked that Pollis play him a recorded message stating, “Mr. Seeger?  I have no objection at all, and I’m quoting Ho Chi Minh! I’m sure he’ll do the ‘Ballad of Al Capp’, this poor lost soul who approves of shooting back at Communists. A blood crazed monster!”

Let that sink in for a moment.

Pollis respectfully asked if when he targets a group or individual if he is aiding or abetting them, offering groups with the same beliefs some comfort. Capp gleefully replied, “I hope so. I am offering comfort to the one group that no one is paying any attention to. This is the group that works for a living, that fights out wars, that is perfectly willing to go along with democratically elected leaders and who shuts up and are decent law-abiding citizens. People that nobody has any contempt for. I don’t want everybody to shut up, but I don’t want a mob storming a neighborhood, or a house, or an institution demanding that their point of view be accepted as opposed to the democratically chosen point of view of the majority.” And his advice for a younger generation?

“I expect nothing of children except that they treat their parents as equals.”

In a word…wow!  Equals? As Capp treated others? Once again, we have to keep in mind that in a mid-Sixties America that many saw as racist, sexist, anti-Semitic and more, Capp held a lot of influence over a wide audience.  An indication of that was a handful of protestors picketing Seeger’s appearance at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall that October. Pollis caught up with the singer at the airport after the show suggesting Seeger was better known for his political views than his music. Seeger’s immediate response was, “My feeling is that music and all art is really a part of life and nothing is without politics. Not love, sex, babies, homes, one’s taste in food or clothing, skin coloring or religion and language. All these things are political in a sense. One reason I got interested in old folk songs is because the words were more ‘frank.’ They seem to have more bite in reality than the average pop song one heard on the airwaves. Back when I was a teenager, I used to play in the school jazz band. In those days every pop song was “moon, June, croon, spoon.” I just got kind of bored with it. Then I ran into folk songs like ‘John Henry’, ‘Steel Drivin’ Man’ or ‘Jesse James, the Train Robber.’ Funny songs and tragic songs that seemed like the meat of human life.” And about those comments from Al Capp? “I don’t bother replying to these lies or half-truths, because I could deny until I was blue in the face and it wouldn’t mean a doggone thing. The only defense I can make is my songs. I can say, ‘Sure, I’ve made mistakes’, but I can tell you one thing, they’ve all been my own mistakes. I was convicted and sentenced to a year in jail, not because I’m a communist or anything, but I declined to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. A lot of other people have refused to cooperate. I was indicted for contempt of Congress along with Dr. Otto Nathan, the friend of Albert Einstein. The scientist and the executor of Einstein’s will. He and I and Arthur Miller the playwright were all cited for contempt of Congress that same day. We were all acquitted. The reason we were indicted is because we declined to use the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that ‘you have no right to ask me this question.’ I and Arthur Miller and the others in effect said, ‘You have no right to ask any American citizen this kind of question. This was a much broader attack on what this committee was doing, so after lengthy litigation I was sentenced to a year in jail. One year later I was completely acquitted by a unanimous verdict of the court of appeals. So, I think legally and morally one could say I was not convicted because my conviction was overturned which the (John) Birchers fail to mention.”

The John Birch Society! A flash point in mid-Sixties culture. Pollis was quick to ask Seeger’s opinion of a group that had frequently targeted him and others who held his views.  Surprisingly, Seeger told Pollis, “Many of them are the most well-meaning people you could imagine. But it shows how it’s not enough to just be well-meaning in this world. Carl Sandburg once told me, ‘There should be an eleventh commandment that states, ‘Thou shalt not commit nincompoopery.’ I sometimes think the bull Birchers are doing just that. They start off with one or two false assumptions and then they carry it to a conclusion. Well, what happens when you start off with a false assumption? If you know anything about geometry or mathematics, you know that if you start off with an incorrect postulate it leads to an incorrect conclusion. That’s all there is to it, and the poor Birchers have led themselves right into a trap where they are saying things and doing things which… the people would be most horrified by them would be the very people who founded our country: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.  These people stood for liberty and freedom and the Birchers who claim to be such great Americans are saying and doing things that would just raise the hair on the head of poor old Tom Jefferson.” Pollis countered that Capp and his followers were avowed enemies of the so-called New Left, the SDS, the WEBD Boy’s Clubs. What would the fighters of freedom from so long ago say of them?

“From what I’ve seen of it,” Seeger replied, “these various little radical groups are much more democratic. The Birchers, you know, take this from one man and if you disagree with him you get out of the organization. Absolutely. Positively. Definitely. If you want to hear arguing you ought to get around some of these radical groups. They will argue all night long and there is no ‘high priest’ that I’ve ever found among them.” And those that picketed Seeger’s performances? “I guess I should be flattered that they think I’m important enough to go out in the rain and walk up and down.  I guess I really should be. What I really regret is that I can’t persuade them to come in and listen, because I think if they could come in and listen, they’d have their ears opened. Most of these people have never actually heard me. They’ve been told, ‘This guy Seeger is a communist and you’ve got to go picket him!’ Why shucks. They should come in and listen to these songs. Of course, I shouldn’t talk like I know everything about them. I’m as ignorant as the next man. I’ve got opinions, sure, and I vote. I think every citizen in a democracy ought to vote and ought to try to inform himself as well as he can. But I’m no pundit. I’m no authority. About the only thing I’m a halfway authority on is my five-string banjo.” Still, Pollis said there were plenty who agreed Seeger should leave for a Communist country including a very vocal female listener of his program. His response?

Seeger didn’t hesitate, saying, “I’d tell her I love this country and if she listened to any one of my recordings or concerts, she would know it. She wouldn’t have to ask again. My ancestors came over here two and three hundred years ago. I should confess the name Seeger is a German name. A fellow came over during Jefferson’s administration. He was an enthusiastic member of Jefferson’s republican party who went around giving speeches for him. He was a German doctor. He married into a bunch of New England families and most of the rest of my background is New England. Some Pennsylvania Quaker. I feel that nothing I’ve ever said or done would be in any sense letting down the struggles of these people. You know these people did tremendously courageous things in those days. They crossed an ocean in little teeny sailing boats never knowing whether they would be drowned or not. When they got here, they faced a cold and hostile environment and they chopped down trees and pulled stones out of fields. They built homes for their families to live in and they tried to build up a political system which would be better than the one they left. What was the one they left? It was one where in most every country you’d get thrown in jail if you had the wrong religion or the wrong politics. Or you were circumscribed in your job or something like that. They wanted to have a country where people could speak their mind whether they were right or wrong. After all, what does freedom of speech mean other than the right to be wrong? The verse I sing that gets the biggest cheer is ‘I may be right, I may be wrong, but I have the right to sing this song.” There were lots of opportunities to express opinion in song, including the emerging rock and roll scene. In Seeger’s case, he stressed tradition.

“I think everyone has a right to listen to what they like. Of course, my one objection is having to go into restaurants and airports and having music coming out of a speaker that I don’t want to listen to, and you can’t escape it.  Let me add that I like all kinds of music. I love Johann Sebastian Bach. I love good jazz and I like some rock and roll. I must confess my favorite is still the old-fashioned kind of music which people sometimes call folk songs.”

The common link would seem to be resolution rather than revolution, though in many ways we are going full circle with today’s angry street protests regarding racism, gun violence and a wide range of perceived social injustice calling back to the most infamous demonstrations of the Sixties. While Lennon’s music often suggested the listening public take a step back and reflect on the most viable path ala Martin Luther King, there were artists calling for more decisive action. Sometimes that call was misinterpreted.

The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” would seem at first blush to be a song promoting just that, fighting in the streets, but a close listen to the lyrics would seem to examine the futility of that type of protest. You also have to admit that the beat hardly suggests the listener sit down for a good think. That same year of 1968 saw the MC5 out of Detroit roaring across the US touring with Cream and Big Brother and the Holding Company and linked with radical far left groups and even carrying unloaded rifles as props in their stage act. Two differing messages but both born out of frustration.

Did the age of dissent ever end, or did it evolve to a form that we may not recognize?   Christopher Ingraham posed that question in the Washington Post when he compared recent protests to events more than fifty years ago. He wisely points out that we lived in a different world in the Sixties with less media (internet, cable TV, etc.) and a “generation gap” with many parents who saw World War II eerily suggesting violence against protestors would be perfectly acceptable. Ingraham quotes one observer of that time suggesting, “the  national guard should just come in with machine guns and ‘mow down all the hippies and n*****s”, while others have suggested “we probably don’t have to kill all of them, just the agitators.” Have we changed that much since then? Consider this. When was the last time you visited a rural flea market? One stop at an outdoor market at Columbiana County, Ohio, between Youngstown and Pittsburgh saw a vendor doing a booming business, peddling t-shirts promoting LGBT rights…but those initials stood for Liquor Guns Bullets and Trump.

The argument can be made that the “defining” of protest from the mid-Sixties to the end of the Vietnam War was driven by the differences between a generation that responded to a call of duty after the attack on Pearl Harbor and its descendants who were being drafted for a war they didn’t understand or see a reason to be involved in. The greatest generation vs. the Baby Boomers with a different sense of patriotism, and much of the music of that younger generation reflected that. Wars continued without a military draft, and the U.S. mainland was even targeted with the attacks of 9/11. There were questions about invading Iraq and the continuing (and dangerous) presence in Afghanistan, but without a mandatory draft and a musical bond the protests against the overseas conflicts have been less effective. Plus, in the political climate of the early 21st century the aggressors have often cut out the middleman (National Guard, police, etc.) to take out their frustrations firsthand. This is evident in school and church shootings, vehicles driven into crowds, bombings and other violent acts. It can be argued that the wide range of media may actually be working against getting out “music with a message.” More on that coming up.

Ingraham makes another point regarding the critical role Viet Nam played in all aspects of media including television as well as radio. WWII was a different time, and a different war with a much different attitude. While initially hesitant to join the overseas conflict, the public was for the most part very much behind the war effort after the attack on Pearl Harbor. With radio the most accessible news and entertainment source and patriotic fervor seen in every available media, it was not likely you heard protest music over the airwaves. However, with the rising popularity of television in the early 1950s radio evolved as a source primarily for musical entertainment aimed at the new youth culture that emerged after the end of WWII. This was a culture that had its own clothing, movies, music, had expendable cash and was mobile and not likely to stay at home watching TV.  Radio programmers saw an opportunity and as the old guard of studio musicians and entertainers moved to video the radio evolved into a medium for a younger generation.  However, TV would help light the fire under artists searching for an audience.

Let’s call it what it was. Blatant post war racism was painfully evident with Ingraham accurately depicting the mood of much of the country at that time as “mainstream and acceptable bigotry.” There was widespread distrust of Blacks, Jews, Catholics…hey, if you were a young White Protestant male the world was at your feet. Other than that, you were on your own. Plus, despite the era of rampant prejudice, post war America was looking for some thing or cause to unite the country as it was in the 1940s. For White America the rise of Black music, specifically the kind of rhythm and blues that was being marketed to kids, was a convenient hook. The lyrics were suggestive, the beat infectious and many of the tunes were a crash course in Black culture.  Elvis Presley thrust his hips on stage and sounded Black, Chuck Berry sounded White on record, and the generation that defeated the Axis now had a common enemy that didn’t come knocking on your door, it was in your kid’s bedroom and riding with them on dates. Combine that with adolescent rebellion and the forbidden fruit became that much sweeter. He said that popular music became an obvious concern in an era that took Joseph McCarthy / Roy Cohn style intimidation to new heights.

Mainstream media did its job. Chuck Berry went to jail for violating the Mann Act, Little Richard Penniman went to the ministry, Elvis went to Germany with the army, Jerry Lee Lewis’ career was derailed by scandal and tragedies claimed the lives of many of the rest. Payola claimed the careers of some top radio names, and ended jocks programming their own shows.    It also resulted in Alan Freed becoming the poster boy for “under the console” pay offs, but that was a facade. Freed was fined a few hundred dollars for income tax evasion and banished to smaller stations, but on reflection you find the real reason for his downfall was racism. This was a disc jockey who insisted on playing the original R & B sides instead of sanitized covers and told a Boston theater audience to disregard racial barriers so everyone could dance together.  Payola was a convenient excuse for Freed’s downward spiral. He was done in by his own integrity. It also limited gun shy radio programmers for years until the British Invasion of the early to mid-Sixties reintroduced America to its own forgotten culture. But there was a segment of society that didn’t forget.

The college folk scene was sowing the seeds of dissent as young people rediscovered the music of the Weavers, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and others played in intimate coffee houses and dorm rooms. That was happening at the same time television was showcasing the civil rights movement and the war in Southeast Asia, and the aftermath of violence both in the streets of America and the battlefields of Vietnam. The “devil” that parents feared was corrupting their kids through transistor radios hidden under pillows had taken a new form and was now on nightly display on living room TVs. The generation that was “protected” from the sounds of Satan was now old enough to be drafted and face an even greater horror overseas. Parents who had worried about a radio station’s Top Ten in the Fifties were now faced with a different number, a nightly body count on network news. The generation that was denied its music would soon use it as a tool to express its anger and dissent, fueled by the steady input of battlefield casualties. As it turned out, TV…the shining symbol of post war prosperity…was the spark that helped divide rather than unite the generations and ignited a flame of insurrection that drastically altered the course of U.S. history. Remember that TV coverage of assassinations, riots, and civil disobedience made for great pictures and that was the lifeblood of the medium.  If sex sold on radio, bloody images and violence had a growing audience on television and that helped fan the flames of protest. The folk scene was portable.  All you needed was a guitar a voice and a message to take your concerns to the streets. Plenty of people did just that and the wars at home and abroad were a familiar theme.