Teaching The Anti-Vietnam War Movement Via Music

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of addressing Dr. Mark Naison's class on the '60s at Fordham. Since I spoke from a couple of scribbled notes, I'm not really sure what I said, but rather than try and reconstruct it, I'm taking the low road here and posting the notes for a CD I burned for them to listen to as homework before my stint in Bronx.

The idea was to convey to a buncha 18 and 19-year-olds the role music played in our lives back in the day and how the anti-war movement influenced rock and roll and was influenced by it, as well as to suggest the trajectory that we took from protest to resistance to (for many of us, revolution. The songs aren't in exact chronological order but group around themes I wanted to talk about.

So what, FotM reader, would you have included that I missed, and why?

I started by playing a couple of minutes of Paul Hardcastle's "19" to get them thinking about how the kids humping the boonies (and the NLF fighters seeking to liberate their homeland) were the same age as they were.

Here's the annotated playlist:


1. Baby Boom Che—-John Trudell
Trudell is a Santee Sioux who helped found and build the American Indian Movement in the ‘70s. He has since become a writer, actor and spoken word artist.

2. Masters Of War—-Bob Dylan
It’s hard today to grasp all the changes Bob Dylan sent rippling through pop music, including the raggedy-ass, intense quality of his vocals, which opened the door for half the vocalists working in rock today…

*3. Times They Are A’Changin’—-The Beach Boys
Listen hard: 50% of Dr. Naison’s class is in the grooves of this single cut.

4. Vietnam Blues—-J. B. Lenoir
J.B. Lenoir was a great bluesman in Chicago in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He had already cut “Korea Blues” and “Eisenhower Blues” in the ‘50s, though his record company, Parrot, changed the name of the latter to “Tax-Paying Blues.”

*5. Eve Of Destruction—-Barry McGuire
1965. The first protest song to hit number one on the charts. But is it a folk song? And what is it protesting?

6. Ballad Of The Green Berets—-Sgt. Barry Sadler
This little ditty was the number one song in the US for the year of 1966.

7. 2+2=?—-The Bob Seger System
Bob Seger was a working class kid out of the Detroit area, whose father bailed on the family when he was ten. One of his first recordings was a takeoff, “Ballad of the Yellow Beret,” mocking draft dodgers. This come out a couple years later. People changed fast in those days.

8. The “Fish” Cheer / I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixing-To-Die Rag—-Country Joe & The Fish
The band played this at Woodstock, if you do YouTube, it’s here. Watch us rise to our feet starting at about 2:15.

9. War-–Edwin Starr
Starr uses blunt contempt where Country Joe & The Fish use blunt sarcasm to deal with an increasingly insane-seeming war.

10. We Gotta Get Out Of This Place—-The Animals
Written by Brill Building aces Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil in NYC and intended for the Righteous Brothers, it was bought by British manager Mickie Most for one of his best bands, The Animals. It became the theme song of the grunts in Vietnam.

*11. Talkin’ Vietnam Potluck Blues—Tom Paxton
A ‘50s peacetime vet, Paxton was part of the early folk scene in Greenwich Village. This talking blues (a pre-hiphop spoken song form) highlights the absurdity of the war.

12. Sam Stone--Swamp Dogg
The other side of the previous song. This is best known in the version by its author, singer-songwriter John Prine, but I threw this one in because the southern soul version lends a little variety to this CD and to put in a plug for the weird and wonderful Swamp Dogg, who made Dick Nixon’s personal enemies list and authored romantic songs like “If I Ever Kiss It (He Can Kiss It Goodbye).”

13. Four Days Gone—-Buffalo Springfield
Buffalo Springfield was one the California-based groups that transformed rock and roll in the late ‘60s. Their first hit was a protest song--“For What It’s Worth.” (Know what hiphop cuts this was sampled on?) This one could be about a draft dodger or someone who went AWOL, as tens of thousands did.

14. White Boots Marching In A Yellow Land—-Phil Ochs
Phil Ochs was one of the great protest singers and his buoyant “Draft Dodger Rag” (But one thing you gotta see/That someone’s gotta go over there/And that someone isn’t me) was an anti-war movement anthem. This came a few years later.

*15. Bring The Boys Home—-Freda Payne
Even in the presence of these other tunes. I hold that this is one of the two best songs to come out of the movement against the Vietnam War.

Freda Payne was a jazz singer who was trying to make a soul breakthrough and was brought by Holland-Dozier-Holland to their new Invictus label after they broke away from Berry Gordy at Motown.

*16. Honorable Peace-—B.J. Thomas
This is the other of the two best tunes of the anti-war era.

A bit of background: B.J. Thomas was a kinda soft rock guy, best known for his 1970 #1, “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.” He had studio time booked in late December 1972, when Nixon launched the murderous “Christmas Bombings”–4000 bomber sorties that pounded North Vietnamese cities day and night over 12 days. Gerry Goffin, who with his ex-wife Carole King, had written some of the Brill Building’s greatest songs, cranked this out in a fit of rage and persuaded Thomas to record it on Christmas Eve. The pick-up band at the recording session included two guys who had been in the blue-eyed soul group, The Rascals.

17. Ohio--Steve Earle & Marah
Neil Young wrote this just days after the National Guard opened fire and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio during the largest campus upsurge this country has ever seen, in May, 1970. I include this version because I think the rawer, grindier sound is more appropriate than the CSNY original. Sue me. [A blog post I wrote about “Ohio” as part of a series on the May 1970 events is here at FotM.]

18. What’s Goin’ On?—-Marvin Gaye
“I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.”

*19. What About Me?—-Quicksilver Messenger Service
A San Francisco band from the same scene as Dr. Naison’s beloved Janis Joplin. Even more than in the Marvin Gaye tune, deceptively mellow music masks a deadly serious view of the world.

*The songs with an asterix are the ones I played during the actual class.

Read more!

Triangle Remembered: "IMAGINING THE HORSE"

Today being the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, I am going to push the limits of fair use by reprinting a second poem from Chris Llewellyn's magnificent Fragments from the Fire, a poetic reflection on the tragedy, first published in 1987 and now regrettably out of print. I urge FotM readers in the strongest possible terms to track a used copy down on the Internet. These two poems (the first is here) give only a taste of the power of the whole.


IMAGINING THE HORSE

Captain Meehan's Horse, Yale,
was the first to arrive on the scene.

My name is Yale. At first:
Hail of cinders.
Glass. Fire bells.
Falling bales and
timbers. Blood-smell.

Then:
Tarp-covered mounds.
Waterfalls from windows.
Hoses tangled in bundles.
Gutters red to fetlocks.

Night:
Searchlight.
Block and tackle.
Gray men in lines.
Stacks on wagons.

Journey:
Slow pull up Broadway
to Fourteenth to Fourth Avenue to
Twenty-third. Clanging. Wailing.
Twenty-sixth pier.

Dawn:
The Sun has dropped
her mares and foals.
Plentiful as flies.
Wrapped in rows.

Read more!

Triangle Remembered: "SCRAPS"

Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and a great deal is being made of it. This is a fine development, and the culmination of a revival of interest which has been growing for years. My main regret is that it has not led to the re-publication of Fragments From The Fire, a superb meditation on the Fire in poetic form by a woman named Chris Llewellyn.

I read the slim volume when it first came out (and won the Walt Whitman Award), in 1987, and promptly ordered a few dozen of them for sale on Freedom Road literature tables. My own being long gone, early this year I replaced it online from a used book dealer. I heartily recommend that you do the same.

Since the book is out of print, I do not feel at all guilty about sharing a poem from it here in the blogosphere and hope doing so by doing so might contribute in some small way to stirring enough interest to lead to its reprinting.

SCRAPS

Lena Goldman Speaks of Sonya

Garment workers from Triangle always came to my cafe.
Each Saturday the boys and girls in groups, arm in arm
and laughing. You'd think after fourteen hours packing
and sewing they'd be ready to drop! But not on payday

Sometimes Sonya sat alone, scribbled on scraps.
With such hours at Triangle, five brothers at home,
where else to write? Her poems weren't Moon-June or
like that. At first she only wanted to make us laugh.

There was a cruel boss named Asch
who preferred his potatas mashed.
When the women talked union he was thrashin
and stewin. Soft-in-the-head, Joseph Asch.

Oh, she was a bright one! Serious poems too:
Tonight all over the world
garment girls are looking out
looking up at stars . . .

Fourteen years old and writing English!
Well after the Fire, her father came in crying.
"Like losing her twice," he kept saying--
since Sonya's notebook burned up too.

He can't afford to educate his sons.
Yet even in better times, a daughter
wasn't sent to the House of Studies.
"But in America," Sonya said, "I will find my way."

Read more!

The Thrill Of Open Ears: Listening To Top Forty

Hey, fellow old people!

Hey, fellow music geeks among the young!

Here is the best single piece on how and why to listen to today's top forty pop music that I have read anywhere, and it's a very brief semi-pome the author calls a "wordstream" which she wrote earlier today.

Starting this introduction, I was stunned to realize that I have been on the Have_Moicy email list, dedicated to the music of the Holy Modal Rounders, Michael Hurley and whatever else suddenly gets some list regular's drawers all damp, for maybe 15 years now. One such list regular is a woman named Jane Gilday, a creative sort--paints, various stringed instruments, songwriting, poetry and lorry nose what else--who wrote this puppy. I post, of course, with her persimmons.

beat madness

my current obsession
started maybe 2 years ago,
but got waylaid here and there
until i got injured in january,
nothing to do but rest, SO:

began listening like a pre-teen
to contemporary top 40
POP MUSIC
my transistor radio is on 24/7

the pop of right now
has become vunderbar again

EVERY previous genre/style is being
savaged/exploited/used/utilised

BUT leaving out all the crap-stuff-drear-overdone from each previous hoopla-era
(such as: NO PENTATONIC-SCALE BORING B'LUESY' GUITAR SOLOS--super yay!...and ditch the melisma-diva ballad schmootz and ditch the bad-boy rap bravado etc.)

PLUS there's lotsa new stuff happening
impossible heretofore
or heretofore unimaginable

i almost don't even wanna write about this
for fear of somehow jinxing its insane vitality
still i'm obsessively thinking about
all this wondrous noise i'm ear-glued-to

what comes to mind, often, is the friggin anthology
like: "these people have no set patterns,
they're re-inventing everything from mistakes,
misconstrual, naivety, haste, greed, delusions,
devil-may-care', technical shortcomings etc

aka 'wrong is right' on a widespread NON SELF CONSCIOUS,
non-ARTSY-FARTSY scale.

also it's relentlessly beat-driven...
fuck lofty poetics, gimme groove every time

every era, some significant changes happen...small shifts
often about which instrument or voice keys and/or exemplifies the overall geist-zit:

this new stuff? it's all about the kick drum.
snare's been done to death,
let's take it deeper all-anon
below the belly button wet ooze thumpin'

and who says ya cant use
some crappy sample of a tambourine,
pitch-shifted down a coupla octaves
as our kick drum? huh?

odd, unexpected influences in lots of this stuff:
--the police
--afro-pop (not just south africa--the west-coast of africa stuff etc too)
--plus bollywood schmooze
--lotsa arabic/mideast...muzzein. muzzein, snakecharmin' etc.
--youngsters come of age cobbling noise via garageband progs on their macs n' similar.

anyhow, it feels like the same kinda fun it was when i was 12-13, and EVERY song on WABC-am was some kinda rush, my brain on fire trying to figger out what all this insane noise was and how could one join the fray

or: just go watch pink's video for 'raise your glass' wearing the best phones ya got with the volume at 12 and
try to do so while imagining you'd NEVER HEARD MUSIC BEFORE, because boomer-R-us baggage has its drawbacks, same as any & all other baggage ya know?

dat surfing bird spirit dun phoenixed again into bengal-paki-beasty-boys-zz-memphis (the nile version) war wooping.

xoxo
stunned anonce in this dotage

Read more!

Gov. Walker: About That National Guard Thing...

I was greatly jazzed to read the new statement from Iraq Veterans Against the War which declares: “We Are Public Workers Too!” and opens:

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) calls on all U.S. military service members to refuse and resist any mobilization against workers organizing to protect their basic rights. IVAW stands in solidarity with the multitude gathered in Madison, Wisconsin and many other cities to defend their unions. IVAW members across the Midwest are mobilizing to take part in the mass demonstration in Madison on Saturday in defense of unions and the right of public sector workers to collective bargaining.

It is, of course, Governor Scott Walker’s threat to deploy the Wisconsin National Guard to quell the storm of protest against his union-busting drive that makes the IVAW stance so important.

Those who thought this was probably idle bluster are probably reconsidering in light of the declaration today by the head of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association that the union supports the demonstrators and opposes any attempt to clear the Capitol building of its peaceful occupiers. Union executive director Jim Palmer added a call to members to join the occupation:

Law enforcement officers know the difference between right and wrong, and Governor Walker’s attempt to eliminate the collective voice of Wisconsin’s devoted public employees is wrong. That is why we have stood with our fellow employees each day and why we will be sleeping among them tonight.

The Wisconsin National Guard has been mobilized for strikebreaking duty in the past, notably in the bitter 1934 strike at the Kohler Company, one of the state’s largest industrial firms. 400 gunthugs were hired to break an AFL strike for union recognition and when their initial attacks killed two workers and injured scores more, they were met by militant and sometimes armed self-defense. As a former governor of Wisconsin, company president Walter J. Kohler, Sr. had no trouble getting a National Guard company deployed to “restore order”--resulting in the strike’s defeat.

But, as a retired postal worker, let me counter that bit of history with a more recent clash that Walker should contemplate before he makes good on his threat.

In 1970, employees of the United States Post Office Department were among the country’s poorer workers, paid so little that in large cities postal workers with families often applied for, and got, welfare to survive. Their unions were little more than fraternal organizations, with no right to bargain collectively or sign contracts.

At 12:01 on March 19 of that year, members of the Letter Carriers, following a vote in their local which rolled over objections from the longtime leadership, set up picket lines at facilities in the Bronx and Manhattan. Within a couple of days the strike had spread to other crafts, notably the clerks and mailhandlers, and to other major hubs, especially in the Northeast. The nation’s postal system started to grind to a halt.

In those pre-Internet, pre-direct deposit days, this had a massive impact on the economy. President Nixon got on teevee and ordered the strikers back to work. Some obeyed. Others walked out for the first time.

On March 25, Nixon took to the airwaves again to announce that he was mobilizing 25,000 National Guard (and even some elements of the Army and Marine Corps) in Operation Graphic Hand to get the mail flowing again. This turned out to be a massive failure.

In NYC, the epicenter of the strike, young troops--many deeply opposed to the war and part of the ‘60s “youthquake” (as Fortune Magazine termed it)--did show up at the designated postal facilities. Some of those mobilized were postal workers themselves, and they told the strikers what was going on inside--almost nothing. Better yet, when some officer came around to try and squeeze some work out of the Guardsmen, a sack of mail destined for, say, Huntsville, Alabama, would get a Juneau, Alaska destination tag slipped in its metal clip and be sent on its merry way.

Within days, things were even more fucked up than before. The government caved, and the US Postal Service was set up under the Postal Reorganization Act which recognized postal unions and permitted collective bargaining about wages, benefits, working conditions, health and safety and so on.

These are different times than 1970, to be sure, but Governor Walker might do well to reflect on the old saying: Be careful what you wish for--you just might get it!

Read more!

Two, three, many Wisconsins

What a week it's been! And it's not even over. I've had people asking me whether I feel vindicated about my post of two weeks ago, where I said that the fight over public budgets was going to be the key front in the class struggle in the United States this year. I can't say that I feel especially insightful; it took no genius to see the significance of these fights. But I am pleased -- pleased, that is, to see that in this struggle, our side is now fighting back.

The mass action in Wisconsin has dealt a severe blow to Scott Walker's attempt to out-Christie Chris Christie. As of this writing, State Senate Democrats, responding as all wily bourgeois politicians are wont to do in the face of unexpected levels of mass pressure, are denying the Republicans a quorum by hiding out of state. All of this could change for the better or worse tomorrow. Everything depends on the ability of workers to maximize the disruption of business as usual in the state: keep the Capitol shut down, keep as many schools as possible closed and teachers and sympathetic students at the Capitol or in the streets, etc. The rest of the country is watching, and the activists among us are wondering if we'll be able to reproduce this level of constructive anger in response to the attacks that we face.

The fight is never identical from one place to the next, but the possibility of having a good example is encouraging for the rest of us. Why has Wisconsin risen up? I'm happy to report that they were able to start in a place where I suggested we not start: with a militant defense of the rights of public-sector workers. Economic hard times, I wrote, mean that this is a bad place to start, because so much of the public resents public-sector workers who have benefits that they do not have. Better to defend public-sector workers only in the context of a broader fight against service cuts, I said, and then we need to put the demand to make the rich pay at front-and-center, lest we lose too many people to capital's mystifications about taxes. I still think a lot of this holds true going forward, but I also think I underestimated the catalytic potential of public-sector workers. After all, their unions are still the big battalions of the fight to defend public services. And perhaps more crucially, no matter where you are, everyone knows a teacher. Everyone knows a city trash collector or state worker. Everyone knows a firefighter; they were exempt from Walker's direct attack, but they know the meaning of solidarity, and are aware that their own bargaining positions will be weakened if other unions are weakened, so they showed up at the Capitol in some strength. And yes, everyone knows a cop: they were also exempt from Walker's attacks, but reports indicate that plenty of them showed up to support the other unions as well -- out of uniform, of course, but thereby marking the first time you were ever grateful to see a plainclothes policeman at a demonstration. (If you're having a hard time dealing with contradictions, you're going to have to get used to it.)

So part of the explanation for why Wisconsin has exploded is that Walker miscalculated: he assaulted the unions frontally in an aggressive manner, and as the South Africans said in another context, he struck a rock. When the public-sector workers moved, others began to move as well, including the University of Wisconsin students, and the fight has at least partially taken on the character of a fight to defend services, even if the immediate issue of public-sector workers' rights is still at the center.

But if a belligerent attack on public-sector workers is the explanation, why isn't John Kasich getting the Scott Walker treatment? Today's union-led gathering in Columbus, Ohio, did have an affect at the capitol, but was much smaller than what Wisconsin was able to pull off: 1,800 people by some reports, or maybe 2,000, and they all had to face off against the teabaggers. And Columbus, like Madison, also has a large state university. OSU is no UW-Madison, but still . . .

Some may put the Wisconsin successes down to the relaxed atmosphere of Madison itself. There is something to this. Over the years I've talked to people who attended demonstrations in Madison after having been activists in other parts of the country, and they bewilder the Madisonians by expressing shock at protest tactics that would get people arrested just about anywhere else; in Madison, though, you will see police blocking traffic to let unpermitted marches to pass through the streets. But let's be clear: these are cosmetic differences, and they don't explain anything. Our job is to reproduce the successes of Wisconsin everywhere else, in our own conditions.

So I would submit that plenty of people are watching to see if this thing actually succeeds. Then, and only then, will it look like a viable option elsewhere in the country. So Wisconsin has ended up in the vanguard, to which the rest of us say: congratulations, and now you still have a big job to do.

We should note another aspect of all of this that is impossible to deny: the Wisconsin resistance has been inspired by the militant spirit of the Arab revolt. It's not just a few leftist students from UW-Madison carrying signs; you have Democratic state senators making the comparison, saying of Walker's attacks: "The story around the world is the rush to democracy. The story in Wisconsin is the end of the democratic process."

This kind of thing is enough to make any old proletarian internationalist all dewy-eyed, and in a real rather than a sentimental way. Year after year we could bang our heads against the wall for international solidarity: end US military aid to Colombia; allow Aristide to return to Haiti; end US military aid to Israel and Egypt; and so on. Our efforts were worthy, but we could get nowhere until now because of the iron law -- true no matter how much we fight to change it -- that people only begin to see the need for international solidarity when they see how the liberation of others is bound up with theirs. The democratic enthusiasm accompanying the budding revolutions in the Arab countries is so infectious that you didn't even need to watch Al-Jazeera: the plain truth of it all began to come through even on CNN, or even on the snippets of news that most people watch.

Most dazzling of all, after 10 years of the most vile racial demonization of Arabs and Muslims in the United States -- including, lest we forget, an especially ugly episode of national prominence at so-called "Ground Zero" just last summer, as the Republicans prepared for the fall elections -- the ordinary people of Egypt were able to touch something among the ordinary people of the United States. It is why Glenn Beck's racist insanity has lately become even more shrill than usual, as his tribe of Klan-like followers declines in number: democratic revolutions in the Arab world and the broader Middle East do not only mean trouble for US imperialist interests there. They really do present the threat of a good example right here in the United States, as millions of people start to question the myth that "we" are exemplars of freedom for the rest of the world, and start to realize that in fact we are laggards with a lot to learn from freedom fighters elsewhere.

Tough as our own struggles are -- and most of them are still very much uphill -- it is hard to avoid the feeling, unthinkable as recently as a month ago, that we live in a time of revolutionary inspiration. In fact I am reminded of the words of one of the most overrated poets in the English language: William Wordsworth, whose reputation has unfairly overshadowed a more talented contemporary because his rival was a revolutionary and Wordsworth a sycophant. Ironically enough, Wordsworth is relevant in a discussion of public budgets, because in his snarling dotage (which lasted a long time), he lost some money on some Pennsylvania bonds after the Panic of 1837, and in response he actually wrote a poem -- an extremely bad one -- denouncing Pennsylvania for not paying off coupon-clippers like himself. But even Wordsworth could look back on his own brief period of revolutionary optimism, inspired by that revolution that is still the greatest of them all: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!"

We shouldn't get carried away, of course. We are still in a world of trouble. Worthy as the Wisconsin resistance is, it is still a defensive struggle, and the eventual compromise solution will still look pretty bad unless the mass activity takes some truly unusual large-scale turn. And while the demonstrations in Wisconsin are winning sympathy from many residents of the state, getting to the overwhelming majority needed to stop budget cuts will still require a clear answer to the confusion many people have about public-sector workers who have decent benefits while so many tax-paying workers do not. Therefore, I think that my call for aggressive make-the-rich pay initiatives is still a valid one, for Wisconsin and everywhere else.

This is not policy wonkery. I think that it is good to have some concrete tax proposals, but also to raise the issue generally: throw a spotlight on some of the worst bad actors, corporations that get through tax loopholes, wealthy individuals who pay the same sales taxes as poor people -- whatever works. We should begin to go on the offensive everywhere with the message that there is no real budget crisis, only an unwillingness of the rich to contribute what they ought to contribute.

We should not shy away from militant support of proposals that are already on the table, either. In Minnesota, Democratic Governor Mark Dayton wants to raise income taxes on the wealthiest taxpayers; his assistant commissioner of revenue uses the same kinds of arguments about the regressiveness of state and local taxes that were in the ITEP report I cited in my post two weeks ago. If the governor's proposals were to pass, the tax increases would hit only the wealthiest 5.5% of taxpayers, and would mean that all taxpayers would contribute roughly the same proportion of their income -- a flat tax structure, not a progressive one, though at least not a regressive one either. Mild as this is, and in spite of the fact that Dayton is also proposing severe spending cuts, his initiative deserves mass support on its merits, and it will need it if it is to have any prayer of passing the Republican legislature.

The preponderance of state budget proposals out there now remains awful and is getting worse as each governor lays out plans. In Michican, Republican Governor Rick Snyder proposes changes to business taxes that would actually raise $1 billion less in revenue, even as he hints at a new $900 million tax on pensions (!) and calls for the end of the state earned-income tax credit.

The struggle continues. And while Scott Walker has led the way in anti-people aggression, Wisconsin's workers have led the way in militant resistance. And it is in this latter sense that we should fight to make two, three, many Wisconsins.

Read more!

Wisconsin State Representative Mark Pocan: Walker’s Trojan Horse

Wisconsin State Representative Mark Pocan: Walker’s Trojan Horse

===This is the beginning of the post. It serves as the summary/teaser of the post. Put anything you want behind a "Read More" link after the HTML right here - Here is the rest of the post. It will remain hidden until someone clicks the Read More link.

Read more!