1 Protest in the Air

“Any healthy country, like any healthy individual,
should be in perpetual revolution.” 

– Jane Fonda

Because of the creative process involved in writing a great song or a hilarious joke, music and comedy can easily be defined as art forms. When both are performed successfully, the outcome is often a vital contribution to our culture. Both artforms are moments of escapism into sound, one with musical notes and lyrics and the other with punchy wit and clever observations delivered with the ease of humor. More eloquently, as stated by Robert  Lynch, the president of Americans for the Arts, “The arts empower. The arts give a voice to the voiceless. The arts help transform American communities and, as I often say, the result can be a better child, a better town, a better nation and certainly a better world.”

So, what about the role of radio?

In that defining age of the Sixties and early Seventies, the message songs were rarely heard on television and even had limited radio exposure. While proven stars like Bob Dylan had an audience on AM radio, those formats were usually limited to Top 40 hits and the songs were usually mixed in with other artists and musical genres including easy listening, country, Motown and even comedy records. Message songs found a TV audience, but they were often linked to their novelty. Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” regarding wars and civil disobedience reached the top of the charts as did Sgt. Barry Sadler’s pro-military “Ballad of the Green Berets.”  Both were near spoken word deliveries with TV appearances showing McGuire performing while walking through a junk yard and Sadler delivering his song standing at rigid attention. It’s likely that those with opposing views had a laugh at the artist’s expense. Radio was expected to take an important new role.

While many in the years since the Kent State tragedy tend to see CSNY’s “Ohio” as the high water mark for protest in song, especially among the post-baby boom generation, it should be stressed that a great deal of very insightful music with a message was, of course, produced before and after the events of May 1970. However, as memorable and historically significant as so much of that music is even today, it was access that often defined how well it was remembered. Keep in mind that FM radio did not become the dominant radio format until receivers started becoming standard features in cars in the mid-Seventies. Rush hour drive times meant a captive audience that type of music found a home on a variety of formats. Prior to that, it fell on the ears of a very select audience, one that looked for alternative entertainment that reflected their ideals and goals.  By the mid-Seventies, radio consultants were starting to flex their muscle with programmers to give their listeners what they wanted, and they saw that as “the hits”.  By the middle of the decade there were more FM radios, yet in many ways their influence had started to wane.  That wasn’t the case when FM was first starting to make its mark on the social conscience of the counterculture.

Despite the small percentage of the radio audience they received in the mid to late Sixties into the 1970s, early FM programmers in major markets across the country including San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York freely reached out to listeners concerned about social issues and particularly the war in Vietnam. The music of musicians mostly based in the folk / coffeehouse tradition could be heard in specially themed programs interspersed with eye-witness testimony of activists, and even soldiers who opposed U.S, involvement in southeast Asia.

A prime example of this type of programming originated just a few miles from the site of the Kent State tragedy at Cleveland radio station WNCR-FM. Along with college stations and brokered programs on the ethnic stations, early FM rock in Northeast Ohio included commercial stations WMMS and on weekends after midnight special programming on classical outlet WCLV. It was hosted by one of the most respected classical hosts in the Midwest, Martin Perlich, who welcomed a wide variety of musical forms at an hour the typical WCLV listener was unlikely to tune in. He introduced the greater Cleveland radio landscape to Pink Floyd, Ultimate Spinach, Lothar and the Hand People and many others alongside deep tracks from the Beatles, Stones and Who, but Perlich also stressed the importance of artists such as Judy Collins and Tom Paxton. All important names, and let’s pause for a moment and hear what Mr. Paxton has to say now about the movement he helped define. In short, he still believes the message in the music remains as important today in shaping social movements as it was during the 1960s.

Paxton doesn’t hold back and still sees a vital role for music in protest along with other media.  Speaking of a lesson he believes we learned the hard way during the Trump administration, Paxton states, “I think that we need every form of communication we can possibly use. I think the country is in an emergency; in a crisis. I think the country is in actual danger because of this… horrible man. It’s a travesty and it’s a very dangerous travesty. I think we need all the songs we can get. I think that the songwriters write these kinds of songs these days are too far under the radar and I have no answer for that. The only thing that can be done is to write the best songs we can write and put them out there. Back in the Sixties, it was possible to do this and actually have a career of some kind. I don’t see that now. I don’t see any kind of an even remotely commercial avenue for someone writing these kinds of songs. It’s very much a very selfless act I think for people to do it.”

But Paxton also points to a major difference from the time Perlich and other groundbreaking FM pioneers played his music to the current political situation. Sadly, he sees many artists and radio programmers in the same situation. For many it’s a matter of survival. “I realize what we’re asking of someone,” Paxton continued. “In the atmosphere today for a young artist to deliberately strike a path that is going to alienate as many people as it attracts doesn’t make much career sense. So, I don’t really look to professionals or aspiring professionals to do this kind of work. I think this is for people who wanna write for the love of writing and have another source of income because they’re not gonna make any money doing this. As a matter of fact, they will cut off possible sources of revenue as well. I think it’s kind of a selfless sort of thing that needs to be done by people, as I just said, who have another source of income.”

The Sixties were a different time with a different political atmosphere. Vietnam was fueled by a mandatory military draft, and that threat made opponents highly vocal in their call for an end to the war in Southeast Asia. Paxton recalls the words of Samuel Johnson, the old English philosopher poet who once said, “’The threat of being hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully.’ We don’t have that emergency on a youth level. I know guys that were drafted and spent a year in the jungle fighting for their lives. Now it’s simply voluntary. You can do that if you want to, but you don’t have to. We also had a very volatile civil rights movement going on. We had a civil rights movement that’s hard to remember how important it was. That created just hundreds of songs. People made up songs literally sitting in jail cells to keep up their courage. They sang these songs while firehoses were hitting them, and we don’t have that now. Nobody is in that immediate societal danger. Once again, I think a sociologist could explain this much better than I can. You just have to take a look around and see it ain’t the way it was.” Again, we look back at the important voices of college and FM radio during Vietnam. But today’s digital media offers even more opportunities to get music with a message to the masses. Paxton believes that advantage works…in theory. Live performance remains an effective means of communication, that is, if you can hear it.

“I was remembering the way it was on McDougal Street. The Gaslight and the coffeehouses. We were a block and a half from the NYU campus and college kids were in the coffeehouses, perhaps more than they ought to have been. But the coffee houses across the country had acoustic/folk music all the time. It was that kind of music that spread that kind of message, pro-civil rights, anti-war message and later the ecological message was being played every night in the coffeehouses and the college kids were in the coffeehouses, haunting them. Without them, we wouldn’t have had an audience. That had a tremendous effect. It’s hard to find a place now people could get up and play songs acoustically. I do probably sound like an old fogie when I say it, but I’ll say it ‘til I die; as soon as you plug in, basically there go the lyrics, because the music is loud. It’s loud and people can’t hear, can’t really hear the lyrics.”

To emphasize that point, Paxton quotes Yip Harburg, probably best known as the lyricist for the film The Wizard of Oz. “He said, ‘a lyric makes you think a thought. A melody makes you feel a feeling, a song makes you feel a thought.’ I think it just says it all. That’s why songs are so important. A song to really be effective needs to be heard!” Paxton isn’t happy with the way radio evolved, but he does see a similarity with some of the artists he saw emerge during the initial years of protest music. To quote Martin Luther King, it hinges on a dream., and Paxton says, “They’re not without their dreams of something happening and everything but in today’s market, I don’t see much of that possible. But they are doing it because like people from all eternity, they have an urge. The urge to create, the urge to share, it’s as old as we are.”  At the same time, he stresses, “I’m not gonna judge them. I’m not where they are. What do I know about what they’re going through, what their lives are like? I can’t judge them. But I just approve when they do but I guess I understand why they don’t.” Even so, could we see a resurgence of pure protest music?

Paxton says that trend may very well belong to a generation that passed. He’ll tell you, “I don’t see it. I’m very, very grateful that I was young when I was young. It was a hell of a time to be young. The life that my friends and I lived was a very stimulating one. It was an anxious one, but it was an amazing time to be alive. Things mattered and it was very, very clear that things mattered. That huge issues were in play and at the same time, down on our level, on our street, in the background at the Gaslight, playing songs for one another, was a lot of fun. We laughed a lot. That’s the only thing I missed from what I thought was a really good movie, Inside Llewyn Davis. Good movie except I missed the laughter. We laughed all the time. It was a lot of fun. It was very stimulating to write new songs, hear new songs, hang out with all the songwriters and performers and slowly feel one’s talent beginning to find itself and find a direction. All of that was really stimulating. I look around now and see that our counterparts nowadays are having a really hard time breaking through, finding an audience. We had all these coffeehouses, where, God knows, you didn’t make any money maybe a little money, where you could scrap things together. But now those coffeehouses are basically gone. There was a scene and I don’t see that scene now.”  But there are so many new ways to deliver the music and the message. Is that to suggest that the talent may be lacking? Not according to Paxton, but the ease and availability of technology may be working against aspiring artists.

“You know, that would be to dip into all fogeyism like ‘Ah, kids today.’ I think kids today are just as talented as we were,” he says. “I think they’re in many ways, they’re far further along at this age. But take recording for one thing. In those days, you only recorded when you got signed to a label. There were a certain number of folk music labels and you had to sign with one of them before you could make a record. Nowadays, you take your laptop and a microphone, and you got yourself a CD. The problem with that in 99% of the cases, you have a CD before you’re really ready to do one. Put it this way, I had been in New York, performing for four years before I did my first album. So, to put it mildly, I was ready. If I had done an album the first year, which with today’s technology I could have easily done, I would have presented a half-baked version of myself. So, you have a lot of albums done prematurely and it’s because the technology is there. If the technology had been there, I would have done it. Of course, it’s only human nature. The way the system worked was really for our own good although it was difficult to see it that way. I was beginning to think I was never gonna get a contract. And now I’ve done like 60 albums or something like that. So that’s one big difference I see. That people with just human nature, they’re using the tech to get into the marketplace prematurely.”

The way we deliver music of any type has obviously evolved, but Paxton says one major thing that has not changed is the healing power of music. “No question about it. Yes, I think music definitely can be healing. To know that when the word came to Washington in 1865 that we had surrendered, a crowd gathered outside the White House, and Lincoln came out on the balcony and spoke to them. And you know what he said to them? He said, ‘Let the band play Dixie. A wonderful song. Let it bind us again.’ I mean, he went right to music to start the healing. Isn’t that interesting?” Paxton also wrote about another president’s methods back when the FM radio band was the voice of the counterculture segueing one song into another to form a distinct cohesive message.

An example on the “Perlich Project” show was Paxton’s 1966 ballad “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation” describing the administration easing fears of escalating the war while sending out draft notices proclaiming to recipients, “This is your lucky day!” It would be followed by Bob Dylan singing that war mongers felt they were right saying they had “God on Our Side” leading into an interview with the mother of a POW who feared she would be labeled a communist or revolutionary for opposing a war she said was tearing apart the nation. She described how she prayed for his welfare and even sent packages of vitamins every other month, and the frustration she and her husband faced, like “battering their heads against a stone wall” when dealing with certain elected officials, often being ignored and fearing harassment if their protests went too far. She claimed the safe bet was with parents who sided with the war or kept quiet about their concerns.

You might hear Malvina Reynold’s “We Hate to See Them Go” dreaming that bankers and diplomats be sent off to the wars they planned while the usual targets of conscription stayed behind to keep the ladies company. While the songs had a strong message, they would segue way to interviews that underlined the complexity and urgency of the horrors overseas. The vet who was with the 11th Brigade describing his orders to use extreme interrogation of prisoners and even civilians but never in front of witnesses. He was ordered to use any means to get information and that included beating them with a speedometer cable, electric shocks and even burning flesh. He spoke of keeping prisoners baking in the hot sun and force-fed peanut butter and salt crackers from C ration kits to make them thirsty. There were even reports of a group of elderly women who suffered broken bones, a fractured skull and were raped. Even though he admitted that military police were at many of the interrogations as required by the Geneva Convention, he also called some of the MPs “sadistic” and tortured prisoners who were usually women and sometimes even children. He went into detail how the beatings would often result in loss of consciousness and sometime even death. One incident saw a North Vietnamese soldier brought to a hospital seriously wounded and in shock from loss of blood. The interrogation team aggressively questioned the prisoner by shoving handfuls of smelling salts into his face to keep him awake so he could talk. When that didn’t work, they poked at his wounds in front of military police, a doctor who was also a captain and other interrogators. No steps were taken to stop the abuse of the prisoner who was badly wounded and in desperate need of treatment.

That same vet spoke of official training sessions that were ended after just thirty minutes and then turned over to returning vets who did interrogations and commented on their observations and the most effective methods including torture. He noted that on occasion mothers and daughters would both be held. They would be separated with the mother being told the daughter would be raped unless she told the interrogators everything which proved to be a very effective method. These graphic descriptions were followed by Donovan’s “Universal Soldier” that spoke of soldiers of every cloth who decided who lived and died but never seeing the greater picture or “the writing on the wall.”

That same program was followed by comments from John Van Dyke, a former State Department employee who moved on to a teaching career but had a cold hard look at the US campaign to fuel support for the campaign in Vietnam. He commented on government propaganda efforts covering everything from postage stamps to the Steve Canyon comic strip and expressed deep concerns they were aimed at generating hatred toward an enemy that no one was certain they should hate.  Music provided a moment to reflect on what was being said by the participants.

Tim Buckley’s “No Man Can Find the War” asked if the war was inside our heads, and the out of control mentality that led to the My Lai killings in the similarly themed “Talkin’ Ben Tre” by Pete Seeger with officers telling their command to “blow ‘em all to hell.” In a very unsettling way, it was a combination of terror and entertainment, but with the intent of stressing the theme that war, especially the war in Vietnam, could not be tolerated. Keep in mind this was still a relatively small audience, but one that knew where to get the specific programming that was relevant to them.

Let’s also stress that music with a positive message was also aired. Glass Harp, like the James Gang, was a power trio that drew hundreds every week to Kent’s vibrant bar scene, and their first albums reflected their belief in the power of prayer and faith in God. They drew wide praise from New York to San Francisco, but it was hard to promote a message that centered on faith when nightly TV news showed the daily body count.
Perhaps one of the oddest examples of a media meeting between the generations took place in February 1972 when former Beatle John Lennon took his brief dalliance with far left politics to America’s TV audience. Lennon had been a long-time promoter of peace, but as he noted “flower power” had plenty of lofty goals and no way to reasonably attain them.  He issued a double album, Sometime in New York City, that covered a wide range of issues from the riots at Attica, John Sinclair’s marijuana sentence, women’s’ rights and racial equality. It was not a typical Lennon album, and in an attempt to reach the home audience he and Yoko Ono guest co-hosted the Philadelphia based Mike Douglas Show.

Lennon was a great fan of American television and ate up the publicity during his visit to the “city of brotherly love.” He did local TV weather reports, hosted radio shows and even had photos with fans who donated socks to a local drive, but it was his time on the Douglas show that drew the most attention. Now, for the album he was promoting, it should be stressed that while Lennon did not write specifically about the Kent State shootings, he was obviously aware of them. When he co-hosted the Douglas Show, Lennon provided a list of suggested guests and sat in on the interview with Yippie leader Jerry Rubin who mentioned the May 4th shootings. Rubin, in full Yippie regalia, told Douglas about Richard Nixon, stating, “What he’s really done is automate the war in Viet Nam so that it’s machines killing people. Create a situation where 43 people can be murdered at Attica. Create a situation where four kids can be killed at Kent State and people are afraid to…” Douglas quickly questioned that line of thinking, asking, “You really believe he created that situation?” Rubin coldly responded with Lennon looking on with interest, “It’s the atmosphere in the country. It’s one of death.” In that same interview, Rubin called for people to attend both the Democratic and Republican national conventions that year to demonstrate, saying, “We shouldn’t vote for any candidate that doesn’t automatically withdraw everything from Vietnam, and we ought to go to both conventions in Miami and San Diego and non-violently make our presence felt and stand on the issues.”

The scars of the 1968 Chicago riots were still very fresh and Lennon quickly stressed, “Non-violently.” Rubin agreed saying, “Non-violently, because any other way we’ll be killed! It’s the kind of country we live in.” A stunned Mike Douglas asked, “You don’t really believe…” and Rubin started to chant, “Kent State! Kent State!” Perhaps equally surprised at Rubin’s frank assessment, Lennon added, “Everyone is entitled to an opinion…” Keep in mind that Lennon was also at the beginning of a long, expensive and emotional battle to stay in the U.S. after President Richard Nixon and his administration feared his ability to mobilize young audiences.  Considering that Sometime in New York City was getting limited airplay, the Mike Douglas appearance got the word out to a much wider and diverse audience but may have cost Lennon as a result.

But as we point out elsewhere in this book, once the U.S. involvement in Vietnam drew to a close in the mid-seventies, there was less opportunity to hear the type of songs inspired by “Ohio,” though it stayed with many of the artists. A prime example is Joe Walsh, the guitar virtuoso who along with the James Gang helped define the sound of Kent State in bars and clubs during that time.  Walsh was also a KSU student in 1970, knew several of the victims, and told the WTF Podcast with Marc Maron that Kent State was a cultural hub that died after the shootings. Walsh was actually living in Kent in 1970 and told the host, “When the shooting happened, they closed the university because the FBI was investigating. Everybody went home and all the places to play closed. And the townspeople didn’t like us anymore, and Ohio didn’t like us anymore because Nixon represented us as dirty, hippie, communists who were a danger to America. We weren’t. We were just kids. So, there was nothing there. Literally, Kent died.”  While the shootings didn’t spur Walsh to activism in the traditional sense, it did compel him to bring up the incident even during promotional tours for the James Gang telling a French TV journalist about Kent State, “Don’t know what you’re hearing,” he said. “Lot of things happening in America. A lot of things changing.”  Walsh also paid tribute to the victims with his songs “Turn to Stone” and “Decades,” and there were plenty of other songs commemorating that event as well.

Drummer Jim Fox can add to that discussion. He lived in Kent at the time of the May 4th shootings when the James Gang was emerging as one of the top progressive bands in the country. He looks at today’s music scene and says, “I feel horrible about what is going on in music today. I don’t recognize it anymore. Music has gone from melody to rhythm, and as a drummer I see there’s nothing wrong with rhythm, but I revere melody. I revere lyrics. In order for that to happen I have to understand them, and I have to relate to them. Right now, there is nothing, absolutely nothing that I can relate to. Maybe it’s my age but I don’t think it is. I think it’s my musical training. It’s very hard for me to find something that interests me and that’s been going on for a lot of years.” And on the topic of protest music, Fox will tell you that while the James Gang wasn’t known for that style of music, they were all deeply affected and did not shy away from commenting on what was happening in America. Today, Fox recalls heading to Kent that evening and being stopped by the guard and denied entry after the declaration of martial law.

Fox can also speak with authority about that form of music, and is quick to point out examples by artists like Les McCann’s “Compared to What?” He also gives a nod to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records whom he describes as “one of a kind, and he was behind a lot of that stuff, and not necessarily on the surface but underneath. He struck me as leaning quite a bit to the left. Who else would produce (Bob Dylan’s) “You Got to Serve Somebody”? He’s quick to add that there’s another movement underway that disturbs him. “There is mass apathy! I think a lot of people have just stopped caring! If you look at the political situation in this country…end of story. People who fail to see that are certainly not the people who care about protest music. It’s a different subset. It’s either apathy or defeatist and I’m not sure what it is. I suspect it more of the former. We don’t have a grip on what happened especially over the last few years, but the historians will have to sort that out in a hundred years or so…if there’s a planet!”

Author Dana Spiardi has pointed out at least 30 artists produced songs about May 4th, including the Steve Miller Band’s “Jackson-Kent Blues,” the Beach Boys’ “Student Demonstration Time,” Dave Brubeck’s “Truth is  Fallen” and an unreleased song from Bruce Springsteen, “Where was Jesus in Ohio.” Even British bands including Genesis and Yes wrote about the tragedy, but when radio airplay is limited and a war weary public fails to search for that type of content its initial impact is also limited and, sadly, becomes a footnote in music history. In this sense, radio programmers and a fickle public may have driven the first nail in suppressing the availability of “music with a message” and its evolution.