THE CIVICS OF ROCK: SIXTIES COUNTERCULTURAL MUSIC AND THE

TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE

by
Michael Jacob Kramer

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of History.

Chapel Hill
2006

Approved by

Advisor: John F. Kasson

Reader: Robert Cantwell

Reader: Peter Filene

Reader: Lawrence Grossberg

Reader: Jacquelyn Hall

 © 2006
Michael Jacob Kramer
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

ii
 ABSTRACT

MICHAEL KRAMER: The Civics of Rock: Sixties Countercultural Music and the
Transformation of the Public Sphere
(Under the direction of Professor John F. Kasson)

For the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, rock music was not only mass

entertainment, but also a form of public life. While many scholars have argued that rock was

incompatible with civic participation, this book claims that in music scenes such as San

Francisco, in poster art and dancing, on the radio and in print publications, rock served as a

flash point for dilemmas of citizenship and civil society. As frequently as it deteriorated into

escapism and hedonism, rock also created an atmosphere of inquiry in which the young

might listen, think, move, and feel their way through issues of public and civic interaction,

such as identity, belonging, power, and democracy. Even when exported by the American

military to Vietnam or when circulating to youth movements worldwide, far from eclipsing

public life, rock music transformed it into a mass-mediated mode of association that

prefigured the civics of global society.

iii
 To all my teachers,

beginning with my mother, Judith Clayman Kramer, 1946-2005

iv
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express gratitude to my dissertation committee: John Kasson's unfailing

support and continually incisive comments as an advisor; Peter Filene's commitment to a

series of directed reading courses on the history of the 1960s; Robert Cantwell's long

conversations over many a breakfast at Weaver Street Market; Jacquelyn Hall's attention to

argument and writing style; and Lawrence Grossberg's willingness to engage with a history

project from the perspective of cultural studies. Countless other faculty members and fellow

students at the University of North Carolina helped shape the project from its earliest

inception, for which I am deeply thankful. Also, without funding from the University of

North Carolina History Department and Graduate School, including a Doris G. Quinn

Dissertation Fellowship, Off-Campus Research Fellowship, Mowry Grant, Waddell

Fellowship, and Latane Interdisciplinary Study Summer Grant, I could not have completed

this dissertation.

Librarians at various institutions greatly assisted me. The librarians at the University

of North Carolina and Northwestern University were always helpful. Thanks also to: Jan

McGee and Bryan Cornell at the Library Of Congress's Recorded Sound Division; Richard

Boylan and Susan Francis-Haughton at the National Archives II; Matt Wrbican at the Andy

Warhol Museum; and the expert librarians at Bowling Green State University's Music

Library, Columbia University's Oral History Project and Special Collections, the Bentley

v
Library at the University of Michigan, the California Historical Society, the Bancroft Library

at the University of California - Berkeley, the Special Collections Division at the University

of California - Davis, the San Francisco Public Library's History Center, and the New York

Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Panels at annual meetings of the American Studies Association, the Organization of

American Historians, and the American Historical Association sharpened various parts of

the dissertation. Comments from Professors Barry Shank, Charles McGovern, Lisa

Gitelman, Howard Brick, and Alice Echols proved invaluable. The "Youth, Popular Culture,

and Everyday Life" Conference at Bowling Green State University and two meetings of the

Experience Music Project's "Pop Music Conference" provoked further developments in the

project. Audiences at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library's Urban History

Workshop pushed me to sharpen the dissertation's focus and argument. In addition, parts of

chapter two appeared in the Michigan Historical Review, whose editor, Professor David

Macleod, and staff member, Mary Graham, both provided many useful suggestions.

I would also like to thank those whose patient readings of drafts, thoughtful

conversations, long email correspondences and phone calls, and many intellectual insights

helped me along the way. I want to express my gratitude to my dear friends Joshua Shannon,

Ben Strong, and Devorah Heitner as well as to various colleagues and heroes, including Paul

Anderson, Robert Allen, Charles Auringer, Richard Candida-Smith, Dominick Cavallo,

Roberta Cruger, Norman Davis, Raechel Donahue, Katy Fenn, Bill Ferris, Lydia Fish,

Steven Hart, Rick Holen, Michael Hunt, Geoffrey Jacques, Jerma Jackson, Ann Kelsey,

Richard Kohn, Lloyd Kramer, Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Louise Meintjes, Bob Morecook,

Gail Radford, Richard Riegel, Tony Reay, Lisa Rubens, Dave Sanjek, Richard Siegel,

vi
Barbara Tischler, Jaan Uhelszki, Steve Waksman, Lindsay Waters, and Paul Williams. I owe

special thanks to my high school American history teacher, Michael Flamm, now a professor

of history at Ohio-Wesleyan University, for his inspiration. Of course, I take full

responsibility for the entirety of this manuscript's contents.

My family was supportive throughout, and I could not have completed the project

without Kenneth and Judith Kramer, Caren Kramer and Eric Elias, James Kramer, Amy and

Mark Feingold, Pearl and Samuel Clayman, Matthew Pearson and Margie Jolles, and P.

David and Mary Alyce Pearson. At home, faithful dogs Lucas and Kyrie and purring cats

Emma and Pippen provided endless affection. Finally, my deepest love for my colleague,

partner, and heroine Susan Pearson.

vii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

List of Figures............................................................................................................ ix

Introduction - The Civics of Rock..............................................................................1

Prologue - Broadcasting Rock: Radio and the Soundscape

of the Counterculture................................................................................................. 40

Part One - Dancing Around Rock: The San Francisco Scene

and the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere............................................81

Part Two - Writing On Rock: The Critical-Public

of the Countercultural Music Press............................................................................178

Part Three - Fighting With Rock: Representing

Countercultural Civics in Vietnam............................................................................ 270

Epilogue - Circulating Through Rock: The Global Electronic

Civics of Countercultural Music................................................................................337

Bibliography.............................................................................................................. 362

viii
 LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 0.1. The Trips Festival, Longshoreman's Hall,

San Francisco, January 1966......................................................................................2

Figure 0.2. "But The Man Can't Bust Our Music" advertisement,
Rolling Stone, 7 December 1968............................................................................... 20

Figure 0.3. Tom Donahue in 1968............................................................................. 42

Figure 0.4. Tom and Raechel Donahue, early 1970s.................................................44

Figure 0.5. An advertisement for KSAN forerunner KMPX, circa 1969.................. 50

Figure 0.6. "We Have Come For Your Daughters": Tom Donahue
in England, 1970........................................................................................................ 61

Figure 0.7. Tom Donahue with his own daughter, Buzzy,

in the KSAN radio booth, early 1970s.......................................................................65

Figure 1.1. Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium,

October 9, 1966; from Time magazine, June 23, 1967.............................................. 82

Figure 1.2. The Trips Festival, January 22, 1966...................................................... 89

Figure 1.3. Poster for the "Dance of Death" Costume Ball,

California Hall, October 31, 1966..............................................................................92

Figure 1.4. Handbill for the First Appeal Benefit for the
San Francisco Mime Troupe, November 6, 1965...................................................... 107

Figure 1.5. Poster for the Second S.F. Mime Troupe Appeal
Benefit Concert, December 10, 1965.........................................................................111

Figure 1.6. Handbill for The Family Dog's first rock dance and
concert, "A Tribute to Dr. Strange," October 16, 1965............................................. 122

Figure 1.7. Handbill for The Family Dog's second rock dance and
concert, "A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty," October 24, 1965........................................ 125

ix
Figure 1.8. Handbill for The Family Dog's third rock dance and
concert, "A Tribute to Ming the Merciless," November 6, 1965...............................128

Figure 1.9. A poster announcing the third Family Dog event, "A Tribute
to Ming the Merciless! in the form of a wham-bang wide open stoned
dance flicking on at dusk," November 6, 1965..........................................................129

Figure 1.10. "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" handbill, Muir Beach Acid
Test, December 17, 1965........................................................................................... 134

Figure 1.11. "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" Uncle Sam Handbill........................... 140

Figure 1.12. Top of the flier for the Pico Acid Test, March 19, 1966....................... 142

Figure 1.13. Trips poster, Longshoreman's Hall, April 23-24, 1966,

with question mark for the year................................................................................. 144

Figure 1.14. Acid Test Graduation poster, October 31, 1966, planned for
Winterland Ballroom, the event took place at the Calliope Company's
Warehouse..................................................................................................................146

Figure 1.15. Acid Test Graduation Diploma, October 31, 1966................................147

Figure 1.16. Poster for a Straight Theater "Dance Class,"

registration fee: $2.50, September 29-30, 1967.........................................................152

Figure 1.17. From couple to group dancing at the Straight Theater on

Haight Street, probably 1968..................................................................................... 160

Figure 1.18. A woman dancing at the Straight Theater, probably 1967....................161

Figure 1.19. Another woman dancing at the Straight Theater, probably 1967..........162

Figure 1.20. Redefining gender and the public sphere on the psychedelic
dance floor, at the Trips Festival................................................................................163

Figure 1.21. Redefining gender and the public sphere on the psychedelic
dance floor, at the Fillmore Auditorium, 1966.......................................................... 163

Figure 1.22. Poster for Fillmore Auditorium Concert, September 2-5, 1966............166

Figure 1.23. "The Sound," Fillmore Auditorium and Winterland Ballroom

Concerts, September 23-October 2, 1966.................................................................. 167

Figure 1.24. Standard Poster for Otis Redding at the Fillmore Auditorium,
December 20-22, 1966...............................................................................................170

x
Figure 1.25. Psychedelic Poster for Otis Redding at the Fillmore
Auditorium, December 20-22, 1966.......................................................................... 170

Figure 1.26. The Grateful Dead performing at the Love Pageant Rally
in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle. October 6, 1966............................................... 176

Figure 2.1. "I can't put it into words": Gathering around the "séance table"
of the rock music press, Creem magazine, 1972....................................................... 178

Figure 2.2. Fan as editor: Paul Williams, 1967..........................................................188

Figure 2.3. Not a trade paper, not a fanzine: Crawdaddy!'s first cover,
7 February 1966......................................................................................................... 191

Figure 2.4. The "Magazine of Rock and Roll": Crawdaddy!, 14 February 1966......198

Figure 2.5. The "Magazine of Rock": Crawdaddy!, March 1967............................. 198

Figure 2.6. Civics in the circuitry: "Change Is Now," Crawdaddy!, May 1968........200

Figure 2.7. Making meaning in the mass-produced flow: Byrds cover,

Crawdaddy!, August 1968......................................................................................... 201

Figure 2.8. Commerce and community in the "sound": Columbia Records

advertisement, Crawdaddy!, August 1968.................................................................206

Figure 2.9. Can you feel it?: Sunn Who advertisement, Crawdaddy!,
September 1968........................................................................................................ 208

Figure 2.10. Psychedelic commerce in a Sunn amplifier kaleidoscope

advertisement in Crawdaddy!, March 1968...............................................................210

Figure 2.11. Psychedelic civics in a Crawdaddy! graphic, September 1968.............210

Figure 2.12. Countercultural sincerity: "The Fool at Zero," Creem, March 1969.....227

Figure 2.13. Barry Kramer, Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, and peering
through the window, Roberta "Robbie" Cruger, in front of Creem's
Cass Avenue Loft, 1971.............................................................................................230

Figure 2.14. The Detroit "scene": Creem's countercultural Detroit map,

Creem, March 1969................................................................................................... 231

Figure 2.15. The dawn of irreverence: R. Crumb's "Mr. Dream Whip" cover,
Creem, March 1969................................................................................................... 233

xi
Figure 2.16. "Creem Magazine Is Detroit": March 1969...........................................237

Figure 2.17. "Michigan's Music Magazine": September 1969.................................. 237

Figure 2.18. "The Midwest's Music Magazine": March 1970................................... 237

Figure 2.19. "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine": August 1972......................237

Figure 2.20. Electrified irreverence: Electro-Harmonix advertisement,

Creem, June 1971.......................................................................................................243

Figure 2.21. Irreverent sincerity: "Sex and Violence!" subscription

advertisement, Creem, November, 1973................................................................... 245

Figure 2.22. Bittersweet hometown blues: "Let's Go To Detroit" spoof,

Creem, February 1976............................................................................................... 259

Figure 2.23. A new folk of pop: "Woody" cartoon, Creem, November 1973........... 262

Figure 3.1. Recreation of a collage in U.S. Airman's Saigon apartment,

as described in Dispatches by Michael Herr..............................................................271

Figure 3.2. MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, Detroit, U.S.A., 1969.............................272

Figure 3.3. Soldier in Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1968....................................................... 272

Figure 3.4. Rock in Vietnam: Jimmy and the Everyday People publicity
poster, 1971................................................................................................................274

Figure 3.5. Chart: Music between the home front and the war zone......................... 276

Figure 3.6. "Welcome to Entertainment Vietnam": Entertainment Branch

scrapbook................................................................................................................... 279

Figure 3.7. Entrance to U.S. Army Entertainment Branch Headquarters, Saigon.... 280

Figure 3.8. Map of U.S. Army Entertainment Branch Headquarters, Saigon........... 282

Figure 3.9. Cartoon, Army Times, 1969: "And my sergeant will be

in the lead ship. He makes the final decision to land or not, okay?"......................... 283

Figure 3.10. In costume: The Highland Sounds, December 1968............................ 286

Figure 3.11. Out of uniform: Page Six drummer, summer 1970............................... 286

xii
Figure 3.12. In uniform: CMTS band Fixed Water, exit interview
photograph, November 1969..................................................................................... 287

Figure 3.13. Fixed Water, psychedelic band: A CMTS publicity poster...................288

Figure 3.14. In-country radio program popularity, including

"Sgt. Pepper Show," from AFVN survey, 1970........................................................ 293

Figure 3.15. U.S. radio program popularity (produced by AFRTS),

from AFVN survey, 1970.......................................................................................... 295

Figure 3.16. Music popularity scale, including Acid Rock and Soul,
AFVN survey, 1970................................................................................................... 295

Figure 3.17. Technologies of war: Chopper, guitars, and microphones,

The New Society, A CMTS band, February 1970.....................................................302

Figure 3.18. Memorializing war through music:

Jimmy and the Everyday People, CMTS band, 1971................................................ 305

Figure 3.19. The contradictions of vernacular troop culture: bullets and

peace sign, Vietnam, 1968......................................................................................... 308

Figure 3.20. Alternative civitas: The Local Board publicity poster,

Vietnam, 1969............................................................................................................315

Figure 3.21. Detail of The Local Board poster.......................................................... 316

Figure 3.22. Detail of The Local Board poster.......................................................... 316

Figure 3.23. Jimmy and the Everyday People publicity photo,

Vietnam, 1971............................................................................................................319

Figure 3.24. Soldiers performing at the Cam Ranh Bay Music

Happening, 1970........................................................................................................ 322

Figure 3.25. Mai, performer in a commercial band that toured

South Vietnam, 1971................................................................................................. 326

Figure 3.26. Covering rock in Vietnam: a still from Navy Hospital

film footage, Care for Casualities, 1968................................................................... 326

Figure 3.27. The Saigon International Rock Festival: a performer, 1971................. 328

xiii
Figure 3.28. The continuing sound of guns and guitars: The First Army
Infantry Division rock band, performing at the "Summer Jam,"
Baghdad, Iraq, July 2003........................................................................................... 335

Figure 3.29. The continuing sound of guns and guitars: Shanti,

an Iranian rock band, rehearsing in Tehran, 2003......................................................335

Figure 4.1. Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes, and Johnny Danduran at the

International Song Festival on Brazil's TV Globo.....................................................341

Figure 4.2. The Mexican flag's eagle and serpent replaced by a peace symbol,
Avándaro Rock Festival, Mexico, 1971.....................................................................349

Figure 4.3. Dancing with the American flag, reframing imperial

American mass culture at Avándaro.......................................................................... 350

Figure 4.4. Malick Sidibé, Fou de disque, 1973........................................................353

Figure 4.5. A poster for one of Prague's late 1960s psychedelic bands,
The Primitives............................................................................................................356

Figure 4.6. The Plastic People of the Universe perform at Prague's

F-Club in 1969........................................................................................................... 358

xiv
 Introduction - The Civics of Rock

The musicologists of tomorrow will find rock's history somewhat

bewildering...it is fast and sensual, ill-suited for a chronicle. - Mark Crispin
Miller1

So much of the ecstasy and urgency of the 60s arose from this need to take
the private experience of breakthrough and go public with it. - Nick Bromell2

We can no sooner imagine all the uses the average citizen might find for a
song than we can imagine what he or she might do with an empty coffee can.
- Mark Slobin3

They gathered around stages, letting the sound waves wash over their bodies. In

abandoned vaudeville theaters, in old union halls, in deindustrialized warehouses, in parks,

on streets, and in trendy clubs, they circulated into and out of crowds. The thundering

vibrations of electronically-amplified noise, the sea of colored lights and flickering strobes,

the smells of bodies and incense and smoke, perhaps the first puffs of marijuana or licked

tabs of lysergic acid -- these made the world porous for them, turning their insides out and

bringing the outside in. Many felt frightened by these experiences. Others were baffled by

the mixture of the profound and the banal. Still others felt a sense of wonder at the energies -

1
Mark Crispin Miller, "Where All the Flowers Went," New York Review of Books (3 February 1977),
31.
2
Nick Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 92.
3
Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, NH: University Press of New
England/Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 76.
- electric, sonic, and social -- unleashed in and around them. They felt transported to new

time zones and new communicative spaces (see figure 0.1).

Figure 0.1. Gathering around the stage at the Trips Festival, Longshoreman's Hall, San
Francisco, January 1966 (Photograph by Rod Mann)

Many felt summoned to these spaces by songs heard in the privacy of a bedroom, on

a radio broadcast coming in over the hum of a car engine, or on a record circling the spindle

of a phonograph machine in a friend's basement. Or they had read about these new sounds in

grainy, mimeographed fanzines or in the slicker, glossy magazines available at the corner

newspaper stand. They saw glimpses on television sets, in films at the local movie palace,

and among the bins at the local record shop. They eyed ornate posters on telephone poles or

on the walls of college dormitory rooms. Fliers appeared around campus, in the school

parking lot, or on downtown street corners. A number of these listeners fiddled with electric

guitars or drum kits themselves -- in garages after school or at a local teen club on a Friday

2
night. After attending a concert, they often returned again, not only to the concert hall, but

also to this multifaceted world of circulating sounds.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, rock music provided a mediated realm for the strange

social phenomenon known as the counterculture -- a phenomenon whose exact nature

continues to evade settled historical explanation. Rock music's listeners, whether alone in a

bedroom with the radio or surrounded by hundreds of sweaty bodies on the dance floor,

found themselves altered to various degrees by the sounds they encountered. "Week after

week we go inside the music," rock critic Sandy Darlington wrote of attending concerts in

San Francisco's psychedelic ballrooms during 1967 and 1968. "As they play and we listen

and dance, the questions and ideas slowly germinate in our minds like seeds: This is our

school, our summit conference." For Darlington, rock music was "more than entertainment";

it was a means of entry into a new realm of inquiry.

For Darlington, the music occupied space. One could literally "go inside the music."

According to Darlington, rock concerts were "clearing grounds" and each performance

resembled an "immigrant processing and indoctrination center" for the counterculture. A

rock concert was "our school, our summit conference." It was a gathering of representatives

from a larger network of people. And it was a space of representation. Darlington insisted

that live music was but one aspect of a larger "Community" that was "defining itself through

all its activities put together." Rock concerts were gatherings that linked individuals to a

larger public life beyond the concert hall.4

4
Sandy Darlington, "Creem at Winterland," Rock and Roll Will Stand, ed. Greil Marcus (Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 1969), 76, 80, originally published in The San Francisco Express-Times in 1968.

3
Rock's "Community" as a Transformed Public Sphere

How do we understand this collectivity -- this "Community" -- that took shape

through experiences of rock music? Participants such as Darlington and other observers saw

rock and the counterculture in a positive, even utopian, light. Alongside the civil rights

movement, growing student unrest on college and university campuses, the antiwar

movement, and a general rejection of Cold War American values, many assigned rock a

fixed ideological meaning that paralleled the radical political movements of the day.5

To these participants and observers, rock was part of an impending revolution even

though it was part of "the system" of American capitalism. "Rock is per se revolutionary,"

Chester Anderson insisted in 1967. "Its apparent domestication by record companies & Top-

40 DJs can't counteract its political effects."6 To commentators such as Anderson, rock's

5
See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society
and Its Youthful Opposition (1968; Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The history of
rock in the 1960s has often conflated the ideologies of the most famous countercultural leaders, such as
Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and John Sinclair, with the larger social phenomenon itself. To
be sure, these figures shaped the counterculture, but this project views their ideological positions as voices in a
larger public life created by aesthetic entities such as rock music and political experiences such as the Vietnam
War. For more on the voices of these figures, see: Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (New York: Putnam,
1968); Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968), Woodstock Nation: A Talk-
Rock Album (New York: Vintage, 1969); and Steal This Book (New York: Grove Press, 1971); Jerry Rubin, Do
It! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) and We Are Everywhere (New York: Harper and Row, 1971); John
Sinclair, Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings (New York: Douglas Books, 1972). For an intriguing
study of how leaders such as Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies forged a media politics, see David Joselit,
"Yippie Pop: Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Sixties Media Politics," Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): 62-79.
There are dozens of books on the famous rock events of the 1960s; see, for example, Carl Francese and Richard
S. Sorrell, From Tupelo to Woodstock: Youth, Race, and Rock-And-Roll in America, 1954-1969 (New York:
Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1998). Many of these books argue that rock marked a cultural revolution:
see David Pichaske, A Generation in Motion: Popular Music and Culture in the Sixties (New York: Schirmer
Books, 1979); Bruce Pollack, When the Music Mattered: Rock in the 1960s (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1983); Herbert I. London, Closing the Circle: A Cultural History of the Rock Revolution (Chicago:
Nelson-Hall, 1984); and Robert Pielke, You Say You Want a Revolution: Rock Music In American Culture
(Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1986).
6
Chester Anderson, "Notes for the New Geology," Crawdaddy! 20 (November-December 1968): 3.

4
important events were as significant as protest marches and assassinations, elections and

foreign negotiations. These events included the Beatles touring the United States during the

mid-1960s and the release of their album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hears Club Band, in

1967. The crossover of Bob Dylan from folk music to rock in 1965 was another key

moment. The appearances of Otis Redding, the Mamas and the Papas, Jimi Hendrix, the

Who, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin and other newly-minted pop

stars at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 provided another crucial marker. The Woodstock

Arts and Music Festival in Bethel, New York, which took place during August of 1969, was

perhaps the most crucial event of all. Six months later, in December of 1969, the Rolling

Stones headlined the violent festival at the Altamont Motor Speedway, outside of San

Francisco. These mile markers in rock history were (and continue to be) invoked to tell a

story of rock music as cultural revolution.

Indeed, to many in the counterculture, rock not only fomented a radical

transformation in American life, but also in the very foundations of Western civilization.

"Rock music was born of a revolt against the sham of Western culture," the editor Jonathan

Eisen announced in his 1969 collection of essays about the music. "Rock is definitely a

music of revolt...it is profoundly involved with the search for new categories of thought and

action." To the activist John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and leader of the White Panther

Party in Detroit, Michigan, rock "made the leap from the mechanical to the electronic age in

the space of three minutes, forty-five revolutions per minute, crystallizing all the new energy

generated by the clash between these two monstrous technologies and squeezing it into the

most compact possible form, the most explosive (and implosive!) form possible." To

Sinclair, rock music "shot that energy out through the radio into every corner of Amerika

5
[sic] to retribalize its children and transform them into something essentially and

substantially different from the race which had brought them into the world." For observers

such as Eisen or activists such as Sinclair, rock outblasted its own means of production,

subverting regimes of power and producing radically new modes of identity, subjectivity,

and technology. "To talk of destroying the media is not even the point," Sinclair insisted.

"The communications media are just an energy form which can be transformed by

revolutionary content into revolutionary media."7

Almost immediately after rock's arrival as a genre, however, both participants and

observers challenged this view of rock as revolution. The counterculture seemed

suspiciously unable to escape the grip of the dominant culture. "The za-za world of rock is

almost entirely an uptown plastic dome," Abbie Hoffman claimed about his experience

behind the scenes at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. "It meant being hustled under guard to a

secluded pavilion to join the other aristocrats who run the ROCK EMPIRE." In one version

of this critique, mainstream forces -- especially corporations, but also religious institutions

and even the United States government -- coopted entities such as rock music. Certain

countercultural writers lambasted bands such as the Jefferson Airplane for recording music

for Levi's Jeans television commercials. Liberal churches created rock music liturgies. And

as we shall see, the United States military imported rock music to American troops fighting

in Vietnam.8

7
Jonathan Eisen, "Introduction" to The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, ed.
Jonathan Eisen (New York: Vintage, 1969), xv. Sinclair, Guitar Army, 8, 141.
8
Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation, 5. On the Jefferson Airplane Levi's jeans commercials, see Larry
Miller's comments in Michael Keith, Voices in the Purple Haze: Underground Radio and the Sixties (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 1997), 96: "As early as 1968, Jefferson Airplane did some Levi spots, which resulted in it being
accused by the underground press as having sold out. It was a ticklish time." On the use of rock in churches,

6
 But this one-directional notion of an authentic rock music coopted by larger forces

was not the only view of how the music related to a counterculture. Others were suspicious

of the notion of rock as revolution because the music seemed corrupt from the start, already

produced by the mechanisms of Cold War consensus liberalism and consumer capitalism.

"Where is there a more commercial scene than the recording and button business?" Peter

Stafford asked in a 1968 article entitled "Rock as Politics." This more critical view of rock

music and the counterculture has been developed in more recent histories such as Thomas

Frank's The Conquest of Cool, a study of the business culture of the 1960s.9

Many other historians and social scientists have since concluded that rock was both a

commodity and a creator of collective engagement. Writing in the early 1980s, British

sociologist Simon Frith argued that, "Rock is a mass-produced music that carries a critique

of its own means of production, it is mass-consumed music that constructs its own 'authentic'

audience." Similarly, the American studies scholar George Lipsitz identifies an "authentic"

counterculture that, through rock, "intersected and overlapped" with a commercial version.

Examining the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, the historian Alice Echols

likewise offers a, "story of hope and hype.... Everyone knows about the peace, love, grass,

and groovy music, but the counterculture was always more complicated -- edgier, darker,

see N.A., "'An Amplified Guitar Is God' to' Some Rock Music Worshipers," New York Times 11 December
1969, 61.
9
Peter Stafford, "Rock as Politics," Crawdaddy! 19 (October 1968): 33. Thomas Frank, The Conquest
of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1997). For one of the most damning contemporaneous critiques of the counterculture see Joan Didion,
Slouching Toward Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968). Both Tom Wolfe's The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968; reprint, New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1999) and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (New York: Random
House, 1972) must be read not only as both engagements with, but also as critiques of the counterculture's
impure status within American Cold War mass consumerism.

7
and more tied to the dominant culture -- than most anyone at the time could see." These

historians of rock deepen our understanding of how a participant such as Sandy Darlington

could hear rock both as "entertainment" and "our school, our summit conference."10

Even a historian-memoirist such as Nick Bromell, who wants to rescue rock's

political effects from latter-day dismissals, registers the music's mixed status as both a

commercial and a public entity. To Bromell, rock was a leisure product with civic capacities.

"Rock was fun, but it was also a vital and spontaneous public philosophizing," he suggests,

"a medium through which important questions were raised and rehearsed, and sometimes

focused, and sometimes (rarely) answered." Bromell noticed that rock circulated a sensibility

of public engagement to a larger audience. But it did so at a cost. "By publicizing our values

in the marketplace," Bromell wrote of rock groups such as the Beatles and the Band, "they

risked losing whatever force rock's critique of capitalism carried." As the cultural studies

scholar Lawrence Grossberg posits, "Rock's politics were firmly located within the

commitment to mobility and consumerism, perhaps not as ends in themselves but as the

necessary conditions for a life of fun." To Grossberg, who wants to grasp how the emotional

experiences of rock fans could tap into illiberal impulses, "Rock sought to open culture to

the needs and experiences of its own audiences, not to deny or overturn the consensual and

institutional structures that had made those experiences, and rock's existence, possible."

10
Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll (New York: Pantheon,
1981), 11. George Lipsitz, "Who'll Stop the Rain?: Youth Culture, Rock 'n' Roll, and Social Crises," in The
Sixties: From Memory to History, ed. David Farber, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994),
213. Though he criticizes Frith's less historicized, more formalistic approach, Lipsitz largely agrees with Frith's
interpretation of rock's relationship to consumerism; see George Lipsitz, "Against the Wind: Dialogic Aspects
of Rock and Roll," in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 103-107. Alice Echols, "Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury," in
Shaky Ground: The '60s and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 19. Darlington,
"Creem at Winterland," 76.

8
Writing from very different perspectives, Bromell and Grossberg both locate rock within the

historical context of Cold War mass consumerism.11

By identifying rock music's embeddedness within the larger political economy and

cultural framework of late twentieth-century commodity capitalism, studies by Grossberg,

Bromell, Echols, Lipsitz, and Frith reject simplistic conceptualizations of "authenticity" or

"rebellion."12 Rock was not a pure or transcendent political, aesthetic, or emotional force that

completely rejected or opposed the supposed corruption of the marketplace.13 Instead, rock

11
Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows, 16, 120. Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself:
Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 91, 93.
12
Though they differ from his bleak perspective on the matter, these interpretations -- like mine -- owe
much to Daniel Bell's thesis that the contradictions of capitalism push people toward hedonism and immediate
gratification even as they increasingly rationalize and systematize market processes and experiences. See
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Additional histories
of the 1960s that draw upon Bell's thesis include David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America In the
1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Howard Brick, The Age of Contradiction: Social Thought and
Culture in 1960s America (1998; reprint, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); and, to some extent,
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987).
13
These studies of rock draw upon, and largely revise, both the Frankfort and Birmingham School
approaches to popular culture. They suggest that the music neither transcended capitalist production in a pure
manner, as Frankfort School theorists thought avant-garde art might, nor quite so clearly maintained subcultural
resistance, as Birmingham School thinkers hoped. For the Frankfort School approach, see Theodor Adorno,
The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 1991) and
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York:
Herder and Herder, 1972) as classic Frankfurt School analyses. Also see Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional
Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), which insisted that
negation could be contained by dominant technocratic forces. On the Birmingham School approach see Stuart
Hall, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, eds., Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain
(1975; reprint, New York: Routledge, 1995). Also see Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'" in
People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (New York: Routledge, 1981). A useful
compendium of excerpts from the Birmingham School can be found in Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton, eds.,
The Subcultures Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997). Authenticity haunts much work on rock music. For
recent examples of the continued preoccupation with authenticity and its problems, see: Kevin J.H. Dettmar
and William Richey, eds., Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999) and Mark Mazullo, "Authenticity in Rock Music Culture" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 1999).

9
demonstrates the intermingled nature of rock and consumerism, of counterculture and mass

culture.14

Nonetheless, as Peter Stafford first noticed in his 1968 essay "Rock as Politics," the

effects of rock music in the countercultural moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s

continue to elude precise explanation. "In all that I have said about rock music," Stafford

wrote, "at no point have I been able to put my finger down squarely and say: this is why I
14
Rock's chroniclers make use of many theorists of culture to investigate the music, including Barthes'
semiotics, Bahktin's dialogic carnivalesque, Bourdieu's intellectual fields, Attali's prefigurative noise, and
Deleuze and Guattari's deterritorialization. Perhaps most famously, Dick Hebdige employs Roland Barthes's
ideas about semiotics; see Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). For
Barthes' own writing on music, see texts such as "The Grain of the Voice," in Image, Music, Text, essays
selected and translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978) and "Listening," in The
Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1991). George Lipsitz employs Bahktin's ideas of the "dialogic" in works such as
"Against the Wind: Dialogic Aspects of Rock and Roll," Time Passages: Collective Memory and American
Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). For the use of Bourdieu, see Sarah
Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Hanover, NH/Middletown, CT: University
of New England Press/Wesleyan University Press, 1996). Jacques Attali's explorations of music's relationship
to political orders can be found in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Foreword by
Frederic Jameson, Afterword by Susan McClary (1977; English trans., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996). For the use of Attali, see Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the
Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). For uses of Deleuze and
Guattari, see Ian Buchanan, "Deleuze and Popular Music, Or, Why Is There So Much 80s Music on Radio
Today?", in Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), originally published
in Social Semiotics 7, 2 (August 1997): 175-188; the art historian Branden Joseph also uses Deleuze and
Guattari to examine Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable in "'My Mind Split Open': Andy Warhol's
Exploding Plastic Inevitable," Grey Room (Summer 2002): 80-107, reprinted in Christoph Grunenberg and
Jonathan Harris, eds., Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis, and Counterculture in the 1960s
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press - Tate Liverpool Critical Forum, 2005); see also, Lawrence Grossberg,
We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge,
1992). For Deleuze and Guattari's own work, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987). Musicologists focus on rock music itself; see, for example, Sheila Whiteley, The Space
Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992) and Michael Hicks, Sixties
Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999). Two additional
models for understanding how music communicates more generally can be found in Christopher Small,
Musicking: The Meanings Of Performing And Listening (Hanover, NH/Middletown, CT: University Press of
New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1998) and John Shepherd and Peter Wicke, Music and Cultural
Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997). Ethnomusicology incorporates anthropological and ethnographic
concerns into the analysis of popular music. See, for instance, Steven Feld and Charles Keil, Music Grooves:
Essays and Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Philosophers of politics and aesthetics
bring classical and Western philosophy to bear on rock music: see, for instance, Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and
Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) and I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music
and the Politics of Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001) as well as Carson Holloway, All
Shook Up: Music, Passion, Politics (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2001).

10
think it is important. I can point to the parts, but where is the whole?" Placing rock at the

center of a larger "psychedelic revolution," Stafford concluded that, "The reason I can't more

neatly sum up the effects of psychedelics and rock seems to me in the nature of what's going

down. The most important quality of the psychedelic revolution -- if that's what it is -- is

possibly its elusiveness, its essential imperceptibility."15

This project links what Stafford calls the "elusiveness" and "essential

imperceptibility" of the "psychedelic revolution" to the formation of a public sphere. What

Sandy Darlington described as a "Community" came into being through rock music. But

participants in rock, even Darlington himself, did not exclusively link the music to specific,

face-to-face gatherings. Rock also circulated beyond particular individuals to a vast

population that was categorized as "the people." Many commentators explicitly made this

link between music and the masses. Robert Levin, for example, argued that, "music and

musicians are important in the widest sense, as they reflect and likewise shape the

consciousness of the people out of whom they emerge to make the music." In these

interpretations, rock music represented the feelings and ideas -- the "consciousness" -- of a

large group of participants. Rock was the music of a "people," or, we might even say, of a

public.16

However, as Walter Lippmann pointed out in the 1920s, in complex, modern

societies, the category of "the people" is a fiction. It is a "phantom public" invoked to signal

a body of citizens in consensus or agreement. Public opinion, the vox populi, can, in fact,

15
Stafford, "Rock as Politics," 31.
16
Robert Levin, "Rock and Regression: The Responsibility of the Artist," in Music and Politics, ed.
Robert Levin and John Sinclair (New York: World Publishing Company, 1972), 24.

11
never be precisely measured. It can only be approximated. It can never include the sum total

of all individual perspectives. The vast diversity of beliefs, values, ideas, opinions,

positionalities, and subjectivities cannot be truly captured by one totalizing, collective entity.

Instead, "the people" (or "the community" for that matter) provides a conceptual metaphor

through which to imagine a public. The problem is one of representation, both in terms of

political participation and in terms of symbolism. There is a larger whole -- a publicus or

civitas -- yet the link between its component parts and their assembly into an entirety cannot

be absolutely established.17

What kind of problematic collectivity of "the people," then, did rock music foster and

sustain in the late 1960s and early 1970s? By studying not only rock music, but also the web

of responses to rock that arose in the countercultural moment of those years, this project

understands the counterculture's "community" neither as collectives of passive consumers,

nor as a coherent political movement, but rather as a new kind of public sphere. Drawing

upon the political and social theories of Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and other

theorists, I contend that the counterculture marked a "transformation of the public sphere" in

the late 1960s and early 1970s.18

17
Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925) for his analysis of this
concept and its problems. Debates about "popular culture" similarly revolve around the fictive category of "the
people," which has often been invoked by scholars in relation to definitions of popular or folk culture.
18
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1962; English trans.,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); see also, Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),
" trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique 1 (Fall 1974): 49-55; also reprinted in Stephen
Eric Bronner, and Douglas Kellner, eds., Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1989).
Habermas has revised and elaborated upon the public sphere concept himself many times since his 1962 study. See,
for instance, the two volumes of The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 1984-1987). See, also, Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary
Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Barbara Fultner (1984; trans., Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2001) and Jürgen Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Habermas and the Public
Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

12
 In the public sphere theories of Habermas or Arendt, mass society invades and

corrupts ideal versions of the public. For Habermas, the idea of the "public sphere" meant,

"first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be

formed."19 The closest realization of this realm, for Habermas, was the Enlightenment space

of "rational-critical debate" in which economic or political status did not influence debate,

differences of identity were left behind, and the best argument won out. The actions of

individuals as citoyen took place in the public sphere, which mitigated against the forces of

the market and the state. For Arendt, by contrast, the ideal public sphere was found among

the Romans of antiquity, for whom the public arose after each household's material well-

being and status had been secured; only then could debate and competition among equals

without difference exist.

In both of these theories, the public sphere is largely a static entity, existing

separately from (though structurally related to) private life, economic activities, and the

actual governance by state institutions. The public sphere takes shape as civil society -- a

realm of interaction that flourishes in a space between the household, the market, and the

state. With the onslaught of commodification and political manipulation in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, mass culture increasingly pressed in upon

and destroyed the public sphere. To Habermas, newspapers shifted from entities of "rational-

critical" debate to vehicles for advertising. To Arendt, the demands of securing material

security, previously confined to the private sphere, infiltrated the public realm. Mass

commodification, mediation, and manipulation corroded civil society, reducing it to a

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

19
Habermas, "The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964)," 49.

13
contorted, skeletal ghost of its previous, vibrant, lively condition.

In recent years, though, theorists have challenged declensionist interpretations of

mass culture's effects on public life and civil society. These theorists, from Alexander Kluge

and Oskar Negt in Germany to Michael Warner in the United States, believe that a public

sphere might still exist within the mediation of mass culture. Unlike Habermas and Arendt,

they place greater weight upon differences of identities rather than the achievement of

sameness. They consider interactions among participants for whom differences in identity do

not necessarily lead to inequalities in the public arena. Moreover, not only "rational-critical"

debate, but also more complicated interactions between the emotions and reason are valid to

these theorists.20

Drawing upon these revisions of public sphere theory, I argue that in the

counterculture and rock, we glimpse (and hear) not the decline of civil society in the face of

mass culture's expansions, but rather a transmogrified civil society. Rock, and the

counterculture that it helped to publicize, was part of mass culture's globally expanding

electronic circuitry. But rock and the counterculture flowed uneasily within this mass

culture. For its listeners, rock was more than just consumerism. It helped constitute a social

body -- one that was strangely disembodied by mass media, but nonetheless strongly felt.

This, I contend, is because responses to rock generated what Bruno Latour has playfully

called not a public sphere, but an "atmosphere of democracy."21 This "atmosphere of

20
Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the
Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, foreword by Miriam Hansen, trans. Peter Labanyi, Owen Daniel,
and Assenka Oksiloff (1972; English trans., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Michael
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
21
Bruno Latour, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2005). Though the project explores the problems of rock and the counterculture's publicness, my argument

14
democracy" demands closer inquiry. In radio broadcasts and print publications, in San

Francisco and as far away as the war zone in Vietnam or youth movements around the globe,

responses to rock reveal the shifting patterns of mass culture's transformation of the public

sphere. Reactions to the music by countercultural participants demonstrate the persistence of

civil society even in a new context of mediation and consumerism.

Bruno Latour is not the only theorist to argue that the public sphere did not vanish in

mass culture. Bruce Robbins names a similar entity when, borrowing from Walter

Lippmann, he writes of a "phantom public sphere" that fluctuated into existence like a ghost

in the machine of mass culture. Arjun Appadurai calls the world of mass culture a

"mediascape," a space in which a public sphere might take shape among the contested

interactions of a globalizing capitalist economic structure. Using a slightly different

nomenclature, Michael Warner describes oppositional forces and alternative challenges that

exist within the mediascape as "counterpublics." Dropping the "subaltern" from Nancy

Fraser's concept of "subaltern counterpublics," Warner moves away from the notion of

subculture. Instead, he understands a "counterpublic" to be, "a horizon of opinion and

exchange; its exchanges remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to

power; its extent is in principle indefinite, because it is not based on a precise demography

but mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and the like."22 What

contests the bleak position taken by many commentators in the 1970s. See, for instance, Richard Sennett, The
Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977).
22
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 56. Also see: Bruce Robbins, "Introduction," in The Phantom
Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Arjun Appadurai,
Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996). Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, 109-142; and Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power,
Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Also see: Richard Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); W. J. T.

15
rock's performance halls, light shows, dance styles, clothing, poster art, criticism, cartoons,

graffiti, and spoken language all suggest is that a new kind of public life arose in the

counterculture. This project explores how rock music sustained many of the qualities of

public life that Habermas's revisionists have outlined. Most of all, responses to rock in the

late 1960s and early 1970s manifested a civics that did not get eclipsed by the waves of mass

mediation or the pleasures of mass consumerism.23

Rock's Transformed Public Sphere and the Cold War "Consumers' Republic"

A close examination of the "community" that Sandy Darlington noticed in rock

music during the late 1960s and early 1970s contributes to a larger history of the culture of

democracy in the United States during the last half of the twentieth century. Noting its many

problems as well as its possibilities, Lizabeth Cohen has called this culture of democracy a

"Consumers' Republic."24 But, while she focuses on political culture, my project understands

civic culture and civil society as worthy of consideration as well. As public sphere theorists

have argued, the political and the civic are separate, though related, entities. Narrowly

Mitchell, ed., Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Maurizio Passerin
d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on
the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions:
Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Mike Hill and Warren Montag, eds., Masses,
Classes and the Public Sphere (New York: Verso, 2000); and Nick Crossley and John Michael Roberts, eds.,
After Habermas: New Perspectives on the Public Sphere (Boston, MA: Blackwell, 2004).
23
My project joins Aniko Bodroghkozy in revising Todd Gitlin's arguments about the distortion and,
ultimately, the cooptation of progressive movements by corporately-controlled mass media in the 1960s. But
while Bodroghozy stays firmly within a Gramcian framework of cultural hegemony to study television, I draw
upon public sphere theory to recast the relationship between counterculture and mass culture in terms of
popular music. See Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2001) and Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making
and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
24
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
(New York: Knopf, 2003).

16
defined, politics consists of policies, elections, laws, and struggles over governmental power.

Civics, by contrast, consists of the broader social life of personal associations, anonymous

interactions, and public engagements in which politics is embedded. Civic culture informs

politics (and vice-versa), but the two are not identical. Nor, crucially, is civic culture

synonymous with commercial culture. As I argue in this project, civic, political, and

commercial culture intersected with each other in curious and confounding ways during the

late 1960s and early 1970s, but they were never all one and the same.

Instead, civic culture can be understood as a conduit. It is a conductor of publicness

that mediates between politics and commerce as well as between the massiveness of mass

society and the minutiae of intimate, personal experiences.25 Civic culture is the very stuff of

civil society and the public sphere. It consists of the ideas, sounds, writings, images,

gestures, and emotions that float between the state, the family, and the marketplace without

25
For more on the difference between political and civil society, see Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato,
Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). The collapse of the civic into the
political dominates scholarship on the 1960s. Historians have probed radical, liberal, and conservative
movements in detail, but tend to view cultural and intellectual phenomena only through the lens of politics
narrowly-conceived. What follows is that issues of ideology and political outcomes trump questions of
aesthetic expression and interaction. This project does not dismiss politics, but investigates what occurred in
the broader world of mass-mediated and mass consumer cultural experience. In this sense, my investigation
contributes to the growing historical focus on 1960s "movement cultures," but it does so not by moving from
the realm of discrete political orientations to civil society. Rather, I view political positions arising from a
broader set of aesthetic and social experiences. For a good overview of the history of civil society, see John
Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999). For
scholarship on the politics of the 1960s viewed as "movement culture," see Wini Breines, Community and
Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968 (1982; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989);
Alice Echols, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Notes Toward a Remapping of the Sixties," in Shaky Ground:
The '60s and Its Aftershocks, 61-74, originally published in Socialist Review 22 (Spring 1992): 11-33; Rebecca
Klatch, "The Counterculture, the New Left, and the New Right," in Cultural Politics and Social Movements,
eds. Marcy Darnovksy, Barbara Epstein, and Richard Flacks (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995),
originally published in Qualitative Sociology 17, 3 (Fall 1994): 199-214; Terry H. Anderson, The Movement
and the Sixties: Protest in America From Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995); and Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) and "'The Revolution Is About Our Lives': The New Left's
Counterculture," in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, eds. Peter Braunstein
and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002).

17
solidifying into any one of these structuring institutions. Civic culture's modes of

communication and interaction move invisibly. Like the air, they permeate the market in

which commodities are bought and sold; they interact with state infrastructures; and they

flow into and out of family structures. Civic culture allows people to breathe. It offers what

Harry Boyte and Sara Evans call "free spaces."26 But it can also gather more ominous forces.

Manipulated in the name of power, civic culture can suddenly unleash a deadly storm. And if

manipulated in devious ways, civic culture can injure individuals and societies through

subtle methods, carrying the equivalents of pollutants or infectious diseases into a civic

population.

What responses to rock suggest is that in the context of mass culture's expansions, the

one thing that did not happen to civil society was that it vanished. As rock music permeated

the personal realm of family life, the economic domain of consumer processes, and the

political activities of the state, it did not simply disappear into these other institutions of

society. Instead, rock music fostered a mobile space for engagement, interaction, critique,

and awareness. Rock was a crucial, but invisible, resource, like oxygen, that circulated to

enliven a civic body in the Cold War American environment of mass mediation and mass

consumerism.

Rock's Transformed Public Sphere and the Counterculture

By examining responses to rock, we can better perceive how rock functioned as civic

culture, giving birth to the entity known, confusingly, as the counterculture. The

26
Harry Boyte and Sara Evans, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America (New
York: Harper & Row, 1986).

18
"counterculture" is a confusing term because it suggests that the transformed public sphere

of rock promised an escape from mass culture. However, more often than not, rock did not

provide escape. Rather, it provided an arena in which participants could consider the

dilemmas of mass culture from within mass cultural life. To borrow from the parlance of the

times, rock music provoked an "awakening of consciousness." This awakening was often

ineffable, but also, in its moment, essential for the formation of the counterculture as civic

culture.

An awakening of consciousness was not the same as an achievement of revolution.

Though the word "counterculture" bears the weight of utopian, revolutionary hopes, in

retrospect it might best be understood only as a set of swirling "counterflows," swells and

gusts in the atmosphere of a larger mass culture. During the decades after World War II,

mass culture spread across the globe. Simultaneously, it penetrated deeply into intimate

lives. What responses to rock indicate is that mass culture raised new problems about how

democracy would function. Participants in rock music confronted these dilemmas of

democracy. Through their debate, interaction, and inquiry, they helped generate the

counterculture as a new, transformed public sphere. Civil society and civic culture lived on --

the associational life of Darlington's "Community" continued to breathe -- even behind the

institutional masks of politics, commerce, or intimate experience.

In making this argument, I both build upon and revise the latest interpretations of the

counterculture's complicity in commerce. Thomas Frank's 1997 investigation of the

American corporate advertising industry, The Conquest of Cool, contended that the

counterculture arose not only as a political and social movement on the margins of Cold War

American life, but also in the proverbial "belly of the beast." Neither only Beat poets and

19
African-American rock and rollers, nor only New Left political activists and hippies, but also

advertising agencies on Madison Avenue and giant, transnational corporations sought to sell

a more hedonistic, rebellious mass culture in the 1960s. They did not "co-opt" the

counterculture so much as help to create it, as Frank demonstrates.

Figure 0.2. Columbia Records sells rebellion: "But The Man Can't Bust Our Music"
advertisement, Rolling Stone, 7 December 1968

To make his case with regard to rock music, Frank cites the infamous 1968 Columbia

Records advertisement "But The Man Can't Bust Our Music," which appeared in rock

publications such as Rolling Stone, as an example of how the counterculture was a product

of the culture industries (see figure 0.2). For anyone who doubts the authenticity of rock's

rebellious stance, or who believes that consumerism and politics are mutually exclusive, this

advertisement seems to be a smoking gun. Here, the political energies of the 1960s were

20
produced, packaged, and sold by a corporate giant; here is style falsely masquerading as

substance.27

Frank's study, however, neglects the printed materials that appeared around these

advertisements. A look beyond corporate intentions to a wider range of responses to rock

music reveals a growing cognizance of the ironies of the counterculture's relationship to

mass culture. This recognition emerged not from a rigidly ideological oppositional political

movement, but from a sphere of inquiry that rock music helped to sustain. Outside the space

of the advertisement, civic culture thrived. Writing in a Creem magazine record review in

1970, for instance, one critic remarked, "Remember Columbia's 'the man can't bust our

music' ads? Guess who 'busts' more music than anyone else, often for periods of time longer

than the usual grass or draft sentence? Sure, it's the record companies."28 As this quotation

suggests, the audience to which these ads were actually directed was quite conscious that

rock music was caught up in, and corrupted by, the processes of corporate capitalism. In fact,

perhaps the only people who took these advertisements seriously as a form of authentic

political subversion were agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Columbia Records'

27
Frank, The Conquest of Cool, 7-9. Many business histories of rock music argue this position as well:
see, for instance, Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-
On Collision of Rock and Commerce (New York: Times Books, 1997); Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo,
Rock 'n' Roll Is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977); and
R. Serge Denisoff, Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1975).
For an overview of business history approaches see David Sanjek, "Funkentelechy vs. the Stockholm
Syndrome: The Place of Industrial Analysis in Popular Music Studies," Popular Music and Society 21, 1
(1997): 77-98.
28
Richard Mangelsdorff, Review of Jimi and Otis and the Yardbirds, Creem 2, 16 (September 1970):
38.

21
advertisements were canceled after an FBI memo claimed they were aiding and abetting the

enemy.29

Far from being passive recipients of advertising, rock fans were often quite sensitive

both to the music's complicity in capitalism and to record companies' desires to exploit youth

culture. Rock, then, wound up being neither pure commercial product nor pure political

revolution. Instead, rock listeners considered the ways in which the counterculture might

reshape mass society through the formation of a new public collectivity -- or as Sandy

Darlington phrased it, through a new "Community." Civic culture rather than political

dissent became the crucial realm in which these participants engaged with issues of

democracy, representation, justice, and equality.

In this sense, many participants in the counterculture of the late 1960s and early

1970s themselves offer a starting point for the stance that Thomas Frank pursues

retrospectively in his business history of the counterculture. By uncovering the civic

dimensions of responses to rock, this project does not reject Thomas Frank's key insights

into the role of American business in shaping the counterculture. Instead, it answers his call

for, "a more critical perspective on the phenomenon of co-optation, as well as on the value of

certain strategies of cultural confrontation, and, ultimately, on the historical meaning of the

counterculture." It is this consideration of co-optation, cultural confrontation, and the ironies

of the counterculture that participants themselves began to confront through civic interaction

in the heyday of rock music itself.30

29
Mike Marqusee notes this in Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art (New York: New
Press, 2003), 252.
30
Frank, Conquest of Cool, 9.

22
Rock's Transformed Public Sphere and the American National Imaginary

Responses to rock reveal how participants in the counterculture were often as aware

of the counterculture's impure commercial status as Thomas Frank is in retrospect. But,

participants in rock also perceived the music's civic capacities. In particular, rock musicians

and their audiences sought to appropriate and resignify nationalistic symbols. They listened

to rock versions of patriotic music such as Jimi Hendrix's famous reinterpretation of the

"Star-Spangled Banner." They appropriated iconography such as flags, Uncle Sam, and other

images of the United States to question conceptualizations of the American nation-state. And

by arranging themselves into tribes, collectives, bands, communes, and homes marked by

fictional rather than biological kinship, rock's participants experimented with associational

formations beyond the dominant American structures of the nuclear family, the municipal

government, or the corporation.31

As participants experimented with a transformed mass cultural public life, rock

music provided a way to communicate and interact. Even as it circulated as a commodity

form, rock linked participants together as a collectivity whose possibilities hinted at more

than just the exchange of goods. The processes of appropriation and awareness that

responses to rock entailed continually provoked participants in this collectivity to ask

whether the larger economic and political system could be refashioned for better purposes.

So even though the counterculture was embedded within Cold War mass consumerism, it

possessed critical capacities, especially when it came to reconceptualizing the American

31
In this sense, responses to rock fit with Benedict Anderson's analyses of how culture helps to
formulate -- and potentially reformulate -- national identity. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).

23
nation as what Abbie Hoffman called the counterculture's "Woodstock Nation" or what the

historians Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle have recently called the

counterculture's "Imagine Nation."32

There is also a deeper history to the dilemmas of mass culture that countercultural

participants faced. John Dewey first noticed the new difficulties that mass culture posed for

American society decades earlier. As Dewey wrote in The Public and Its Problems (1927),

the modernization and industrialization of the United States posed difficulties for an ideal

public life. Gone was the direct, face-to-face "Community" of small-town nineteenth century

life that Dewey and other Progressives idealized (how ideal that life had been was another

matter). Yet, the urge to sustain a public life lingered. Responding to fellow Progressive

Walter Lippmann's analysis of the "phantom public" that had arisen in complex, modern,

industrial, mass society, Dewey argued that new strategies in civic education and public

communication might foster a transformed public suitable for twentieth-century America.

The legacy of Dewey, Lippmann, and other Progressives set the stage for Cold War

struggles concerning the culture of democracy in the "Consumers' Republic."33

Rock's Transformed Public Sphere, Seizures of Feeling, and the Ambiguous "New

Working Class"

Through rock music, participants in the counterculture explored the conundrum of

creating a civil society -- a public life -- in the changing technological context of mass media

32
Hoffman, Woodstock Nation. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation.
33
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Macmillan, 1927). Lippmann, The Phantom
Public. For more on this earlier era, see Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

24
and mass consumerism. Their confrontations sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed. In

both cases, they helped generate a "transformed" public sphere that fluctuated into existence

whenever participants engaged with dilemmas of democratic practice through musical

experience. This public has been difficult to recognize because rock did not reflect or

produce a "structure of feeling," in Raymond Williams's famous and quite useful phrase.

Instead, the music sparked what can be more accurately called seizures of feeling.34

The notion of seizures of feeling rather than "structures of feeling" captures more

precisely how the transformed public sphere of the counterculture moved within the flow of

mass culture. Rather than forming a transcendent region of social life outside of personal,

economic, or political activities, rock allowed an immanent public life to emerge within

larger structural forces of the family, the market, and politics. Inequalities in this public

sphere did not vanish. Rock did not make for an ideal, utopian reality: the hierarchies of the

family, the market, and the government did not melt away and a new definition of the self

did not emerge wholesale from rock's public life. Nonetheless, this public provided a way for

critical collective interaction, debate, and deliberation to take place.

But what were the structural underpinnings of this new public? The new modes of

collectivity that rock music inspired appeared in a particular historical moment in America:

the final flowering of the corporate-liberal New Deal consensus before the rise of neo-

34
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 128-136.
I employ the word seizures in the two senses of the word: as sudden spasms of collective energy but also as a
take over -- if only temporarily, then often movingly and sometimes quite subversively -- of the channels of
circulation that were emerging in the larger system of mass culture. My argument about seizures of feeling is
indebted to Lawrence Grossberg's notion of "affective alliances." See Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing In Spite of
Myself; "Another Boring Day in Paradise: Rock and Roll and the Empowerment of Everyday Life," Popular
Music 4 (1984): 225-258; "The Political Status of Youth and Youth Culture," in Adolescents and Their Music:
If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old, ed. Jonathan Epstein (New York: Garland, 1994), and "Rock and Roll in
Search of an Audience," in Popular Music and Communication, ed. James Lull (Newbury Park: Sage
Publications, 1991).

25
conservatism. The rapprochement of labor unions and corporations gave many working

Americans access to the middle-class. The limited but real triumphs of the Civil Rights

movement suggested that this middle-class might eventually include many non-whites as

well as white Americans. The stirrings of a women's movement indicated that the patriarchal

gender roles at the center of the suburban vision of middle-class life might shift as well.

What Daniel Belgrad calls the corporate liberalism of Cold War America was deeply

problematic, but, in the late 1960s, its possibilities for improvement remained alive.35

Grappling with this corporate-liberal order, certain New Left political activists

argued that a "New Working Class" was emerging. As Students for a Democratic Society

(S.D.S.) rapidly expanded between 1966 and 1968, precisely the years when rock music also

exploded into national and international consciousness as a genre, the "New Working Class"

theory identified commonalities between middle-class students and blue-collar workers. As

wage laborers, the theory went, these groups shared an alienation from the means of

production. The "New Working Class" of the post-industrial order -- the white-collar

workers -- might join in common cause with blue-collar laborers to create a progressive

coalition in Cold War America. In opposition to corporations that were consolidating power

with the help of state apparatuses, changing class formations suggested a possible, though

nascent, political movement. At its core, the "New Working Class" theory linked

transformations in class to the military-industrial complex: alienation from the means of

production hinted at shared structural positions between elements of the middle and working

35
At the center of the corporate liberal order was an image of the "American Way of Life" defined by,
"a complementary combination of scientifically managed work with mass leisure and consumption." See
Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 5. Belgrad draws on Warren Susman, "Toward a History of the Culture of Abundance," in Culture as
History: The Transformations of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

26
classes.36

In the United States, the "New Working Class" theory served a particular purpose in

the political culture of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but, in retrospect, it also

offers a way of understanding a larger civic culture.37 The "New Working Class" theory

suggested that as the dematerialization of both labor and commodities increased in a post-

industrial society dominated by mass communications technologies, the realm of culture

took on a growing importance. A new kind of collectivity developed -- a civic culture

embedded within the flow of mass consumer culture. This immanent public was elusive, but

36
For more on "New Working Class" theory, see Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity, 184, 193-
205, 304-305. Also see: Breines, Community and Organization, 96-114; and Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad:
Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 38-41. Crucial
articulations of the "New Working Class" theory among New Left political activists in the United States
include: Carl Davidson, "The Multiversity: Crucible of the New Working Class," in The University Crisis
Reader, Vol. 1, eds. Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr (New York: Vintage, 1971); Robert Gottlieb, Gerald
Tenney, and David Gilbert, "The Port Authority Statement," New Left Notes, 13 February 1967; Greg Calvert,
"In White America: Radical Consciousness and Social Change," in The New Left: A Documentary History, ed.
Massimo Teodori (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 412-418; and John and Margaret Rowntree, "Youth as a
Class," Our Generation 1-2 (May-June-July, 1968). The intellectual roots of the theory can be found in, among
other sources, the writing of C. Wright Mills. French academics were also exploring the concept of a "New
Working Class" in relation to the student and worker uprisings in France during the late 1960s; see Serge
Mallet, Essays on the New Working Class, ed. and trans. by Dick Howard (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975); Andre
Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). Howard was a link between the French and American
theorists. In the United States, the "New Working Class" might also be conceptualized as the petit bourgeoisie -
- generally understood to be a crucial class fraction in American history. See Barbara and John Ehrenreich,
"The Professional-Managerial Class," Radical America (1977), in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker
(Boston: South End Press, 1979), and Barbara Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class Revisited," in
Intellectuals, Aesthetics, Politics, Academics, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1990). Also see: Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society In Industrializing America: Essays in American
Working-Class and Social History (New York: Vintage, 1977) and Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle
Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
37
For political activists, the "New Working Class" idea had strategic value. It provided a tool for
organizing the massive influx of students into the organization by positioning them as revolutionary agents
themselves. Simultaneously, the "New Working Class" thesis provided a response to the Black Power
movement, which, by 1966 and 1967, increasingly urged white radicals to organize in their own communities
rather than among African-Americans. These are the political dimensions of the theory. The New Working
Class theory represented quite a leap from the Old Left's traditional Marxist focus on the industrial proletariat,
and Old Left activists let the New Left theorists know it at various S.D.S. meetings in 1967 and 1968. See
Rossinow, 193-205; Echols, 38-41; Breines, 96-114.

27
quite powerful. And rock music resonated at its center.38

Historians of rock have noticed this link between class and music, but never in terms

of transformations of public life. What I am getting at here is not a simplistic assignment of

rock music to a static class position, but rather the idea that the music arose in relation to a

class that was itself crucial to the new postindustrial economy, yet also fundamentally in

transition and possessing ambiguous boundaries. If structural changes in economic

production gave rise to a "New Working Class" whose members included, potentially, a

combination of working and middle class youth from a variety of backgrounds, then rock

provided one resource for the forging of the subjectivity and collectivity around which this

class existed.39

Rock generated a network of interaction and circulation that wired together dispersed

modes of experimentation. This is one reason why rock, in the late 1960s and early 1970s,

was such a highly unstable genre. Later, it would coalesce into "classic rock" for nostalgic

baby boomers. But, when it appeared in the late 1960s, rock lacked consolidation. Not all

38
With its flickering presence within, yet not entirely of, mass consumer commodities and the
technologies of mass communication, rock's embedded public life appeared at precisely the moment when the
economy shifted from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of production and from modernist to postmodernist
cultural practices. For more on post-Fordism and postmodernism, see Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); David Harvey, The
Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
1990). For a full treatment of the 1960s and postmodernity, see Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The
Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Also see Brent
Whelan, "'Further': Reflections on the Counter-Culture and the Postmodern," Cultural Critique (Winter 1988-
89): 63-86.
39
See Negt and Kluge's observations about the student movement of the 1960s as an example of the
"proletarian public sphere" that sprang up in response to new relations of production and class: "The students
strove for a fulfillment of the substantive content of a bourgeois-liberal idea of a public sphere by
demonstratively forcing discussions. They wanted to bring experience, contexts of living, the historical present
(Vietnam, the liberation movements in the Third World, their real experience as students) into a context of
public discussion that was blocked by the formal public sphere." To Negt and Kluge, the student movement
was a "mediation between the situation in the workplace (including reflection on the meaning of subsequent
employment) and the present global context." The Proletarian Public Sphere, 84, 86.

28
rock sounded the same; not all originated in the same ways; and not all was consumed by the

same populations for the same purposes. This was partially because so many entrepreneurs

and corporations sought to market diverse commodities under the rubric of rock -- to cash in

on the genre. But rock's instability also stemmed from the ways in which participants used

music to forge a tentative public collectivity that did not rest in any one place, socio-

economic location, racial identity, or gender position.40

The network that participants in rock created can be understood as a collective or a

public, but only if we update and contextualize those terms. Just as Habermas located the

rise of an eighteenth-century public sphere in shifting class structures that marked the

emergence of the bourgeoisie and its capacity for "rational-critical debate," so, too, shifting

class structures made possible the emergence of a "New Working Class" and its capacity for

seizures of feeling and a transformed public sphere. The public sphere that arose from rock

was not the same as Habermas's "rational-critical" public of the eighteenth-century

bourgeoisie. This was a public life that arose in its own historical moment.

The corporate-liberal consensus that had emerged from the New Deal and World War

II began to collapse in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many factors contributed to this

collapse, including the resurgence of a conservative political movement heralded by the

election of Ronald Reagan to the California governorship in 1966. But, the most prominent

factor was the Vietnam War. The bureaucratic approach to waging the Vietnam War called
40
As both Simon Frith and Alice Echols note, students in training for the professional-managerial
class interacted with working class adolescents through rock (sometimes, participants occupied both these class
positions simultaneously). See Simon Frith, "'The Magic That Can Set You Free': The Ideology of Folk and the
Myth of the Rock Community," Popular Music 1 (1981): 159-168; Alice Echols, "Hope and Hype." Moreover,
as George Lipsitz has explained, rock itself was rooted in post-World War II working class life. The music's
aesthetic forms and social uses contained multiple traces of working class existence. As a site of popular
memory, rock mediated between experiences of class in the past and changing circumstances in the present.
See Lipsitz, "Against the Wind."

29
rationality itself to question. The Cold War logics of "mutual assured destruction" and the

"domino theory" undermined claims that those in political and economic power in fact acted

rationally. Simultaneously, the Cold War seemed linked to a corporate economy that, as the

"New Working Class" proponents pointed out, provided alienating, unrewarding, dead-end

jobs -- many of which were crucial, at the same time, to the manpower needs of the

corporate-liberal order and the military-industrial complex.41 Because "rationality" itself

came into question, participants in rock and the counterculture dismissed the strictures of a

narrowly-defined public sphere.

In place of Habermas's "rational-critical" public or Arendt's nostalgic publicus of

antiquity, listeners to rock sought out multiple pathways to collective and individual

understanding: feeling as well as thought, spirituality as well as rationality, the body as well

as the mind. Though rock musicians and audiences flirted with madness and danger in

response to their times, most participants did not reject rationality. What I want to emphasize

is that responses to rock reveal a broadening, a reconceptualizing, of rationality in response

both to aesthetic forms of expression -- music, clothing, poster art, dancing, even, one might

argue, psychedelic drugs -- as well as to the larger historical context -- the Vietnam War, the

incompleteness of the civil rights movements, and other crises of Cold War American

capitalism as it shifted toward deindustrialized postmodernism.

Because the strange public life that participants forged through rock music itself

arose from a class formation -- the "New Working Class" -- that was transitional and nascent

during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the public sphere of rock was not limited to one
41
For example, see Peter Henig, "Selective Service System: or, The Manpower Channelers," New Left
Notes, 20 January 1967. Kirkpatrick Sale remarks that this article made a crucial intellectual intervention,
drawing many to the anti-Vietnam War movement; see Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Vintage, 1973).

30
spectrum of behavior.42 Rather, the public life that rock fostered sprang up whenever and

wherever participants circulated an expressive culture that questioned the status quo, posed

tentative alternatives, and enabled a process of heightened self-awareness. This does not

mean that rock solved ongoing inequalities and injustices. Rock's audiences did not uncover

perfect solutions or enact utopias. Indeed, this was not even the point. Instead, the expressive

creations of these participants in rock music -- the kaleidoscope of radio broadcasts, posters,

dance styles, clothing, critical writing, and vernacular culture -- repeatedly emphasized the

cultural construction of identity. This could lead to oversimplistic solutions to thorny

structural problems, but it also led to new possibilities for self-understanding and collective

connection in which difference might play a role in the public sphere alongside dreams of

unity and equality.43 Responders to rock began, tentatively, to rethink gender, to alter the

public presence of women, to seek both imaginative and actual spaces for figures such as the

"black hippie," and to explore more democratic visions of economic life on local, national,

and even international levels.44

42
For a critique of totalizing models of the public sphere, see Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions.
43
In making this argument about difference, my project builds especially on the insights of Michael
Warner into the mass cultural public sphere. Warner views mass culture as creating a "counterutopia" in which
difference and equality might be achieved simultaneously. See Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the
Mass Subject," in The Phantom Public Sphere, 234-256, also published in Habermas and the Public Sphere,
377-401. Also see Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. For a useful explanation of Warner's ideas, see Jason
Loviglio, "Vox Pop: Network Radio and the Voice of the People," in The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural
History of Radio, eds. Michelle Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (New York: Routledge, 2001).
44
My project joins recent work on gender, race, class, rock, and the counterculture. The dominant
argument about rock and roll's passage to the genre of rock concerns its move from black to white and,
simultaneously, from working-class to middle-class, youth. Almost all of this occurred within a misogynist, or
at the very least, masculinist context. There is much truth in this analysis, but responses to rock also reveal an
unstable genre formation in which participants sought to recognize -- and even challenge -- cultural and
economic inequalities as well as reassert them. The most powerful arguments for rock as an appropriation of
working-class and black forms of musical practice can be found in: Simon Frith, "'The Magic That Can Set
You Free'"; George Lipsitz, "Who'll Stop the Rain?"; Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock
and Roll (1970; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1996); and Philip H. Ennis, The Seventh Stream: The

31
 Yet rock's public life -- Sandy Darlington's "Community" -- never managed to turn

experiments and inquiries into permanent structural improvements in equality, justice, or

democracy. This is because, as a collective entity, the public sphere of rock and of the

counterculture posed a deep irony. It could never be constituted in its entirety, even at an

event such as Woodstock. Nonetheless, participants sensed that they were linked into a

powerful collective structure of some sort. The irony was that their sense of collectivity

arose precisely through the mass-communications technologies and mass-consumer

commodities that rock's listeners ostensibly opposed as alienating forces. Faced with this

situation, participants in rock music and the counterculture did not overthrow the larger mass

cultural system, but rather sought to redirect that system's energies by constituting a transient

assemblage of critique and engagement from within. Their seizures of feeling never became

structures, but they did leave a lasting legacy by seeking out modes of public life suitable for

addressing the possibilities and problems of modern, mass society. What the historian Alice

Echols calls the aftershocks of the 1960s continue to resonate in this phantom public, this

atmosphere of democracy, which floats through the contemporary age of digital, hyper-

globalized capitalism.45

Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music (Hanover, NH/Middletown, CT: University of New
England/Wesleyan University Press, 1992). While recognizing the misogynistic, racist, and classist dimensions
of rock, recent studies have also noticed that the music provided spaces and ways for contesting gender, racial,
and even class norms. On gender and women's roles in rock, see Lisa Rhodes, Electric Ladyland: Women and
Rock Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Kathyrn Kerr Fenn, "Daughters of the
Revolution, Mothers of the Counterculture: Rock and Roll Groupies In the 1960s," (Ph.D. diss., Duke
University, 2002); Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity, and Subjectivity (New
York: Routledge, 2000); Sheila Whiteley, ed., Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (New York:
Routledge, 1997); and Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n' Roll
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). On race, see Kandia Crazy Horse, ed., Rip It Up: The Black
Experience in Rock 'n' Roll (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Lauren Onkey, "Jimi Hendrix and the
Politics of Race in the Sixties," in Imagine Nation, 189-214.
45
Alice Echols, Shaky Ground: The '60s and Its Aftershocks.

32
Chapter Overview

To understand the history of rock's transformed public sphere and its civic culture,

this project maps out the responses of participants in rock music during the late 1960s and

early 1970s. The prologue explores an aircheck on San Francisco's free-form FM rock radio,

KSAN, made by the disc jockey Tom Donahue, in order to examine how rock's sounds

circulated on the air itself. By paying close attention to the music on the program, as well as

its mediated context, the prologue provides a framework for considering the kinds of

responses that rock generated.

Focusing on one aircheck allows for attention to the details of rock's sounds

themselves, and how they sparked responses in listeners in the new radio format of "free-

form" programming. However, rock on Tom Donahue's KSAN aircheck was but one

example of how rock circulated far and wide, not only on San Francisco's new free-form FM

station, but also on AM frequencies across the nation, on radio waves across the world, and

even on broadcasts of Armed Forces Radio in Vietnam. As Susan Douglas has argued, in

these different contexts, radio broadcasts modeled ways of listening. Whether in the sound

fidelity of stereo engineering on FM frequencies, or in the relationship between songs and

advertisements, or in the personae of the disc jockeys, radio created an "imagined

community" that was at once invisible and ever-present.

As rock migrated and mutated throughout different sites and locations via radio, it

established a sonic civitas -- what Greil Marcus calls, in another context, an "invisible

republic" of the mass-mediated air. The prologue shows how, on one particular show, rock's

sounds enabled a social imaginary. But it is worth noting that Tom Donahue's show

33
originated in one of the most crucial regions for rock and the counterculture: the San

Francisco Bay area. It is to San Francisco that part one of the project turns.46

In part one, the performance spaces of San Francisco serve as a case study for

examining how rock music's participants transformed the public sphere in response to

American mass culture. The civics of rock took shape in these performance venues not

against, but rather through, consumer market processes that also affected conceptualizations

of the family and relationships to the state. At once embodied and electronically-mediated,

San Francisco's rock music scene provided an arena in which participants confronted the

structural dimensions of what Michael Warner calls "the mass public and the mass

subject."47 Concerts became town halls for the emergent public sphere of the counterculture.

In ballrooms, dancehalls, and outdoor spaces, a dance took place: not only of bodies,

but also of amplified music, electronic light shows, and poster-art iconographies. Both

literally and metaphorically, this dance fostered a sphere of competing ideologies, contested

gender identities, and various positions on the nature of collective consciousness. The result

of "dancing around rock" was a fluid world of involvement and engagement in which

participants turned the mechanisms of mass culture toward potentially more democratic,

egalitarian modes of citizenship even as they confronted stubborn problems of

authoritarianism and inequity.

46
Susan Douglas, Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004); Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (New York: Henry
Holt, 1997). See also: Anderson, Imagined Communities; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of
Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (1975; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); and Charles Taylor,
Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
47
Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject."

34
 Part two details how the music press fostered a critical-public in print, rather than in

particular locations such as San Francisco. Though responding to a different historical

moment, these publications resembled the newspapers crucial to Jürgen Habermas's

bourgeois "rational-critical" public. However, the rock press also displayed interest in the

emotions, the body, and experience. Publications diverged from a narrow construction of the

rational. With little regard for the difference between mainstream and underground venues,

participants such as critics, reporters, photographers, graphics artists, letter writers, and

readers pondered and debated the nature of life in mass society, generating a vibrant public

sphere of opinion-making, deliberation, disagreement, and self-critical awareness.

Most histories of the rock press focus exclusively on Rolling Stone magazine,

founded in San Francisco by a young journalist, Jann Wenner, in 1967. But to understand the

more diverse critical-public of the rock press -- the larger arena from which Rolling Stone

emerged -- I examine two other significant publications. The first is Crawdaddy!, founded

by a young writer, folk music aficionado, and science-fiction fan named Paul Williams in

1965. Crawdaddy! was perhaps the first magazine of rock criticism. The second is Creem, a

Detroit publication that by the early 1970s had became one of Rolling Stone's main

competitors in the rock press.

At Crawdaddy! and Creem, which chronologically bookended the rise of the more

famous Rolling Stone, topics of engagement included the nature of art and popular culture,

the utopian possibilities of electronic technologies, the dilemmas of identity politics, the

workings of capitalism, the meanings of authenticity, and the prospects for individual and

collective freedom in a global mass society. Even as the high-water mark of the

35
counterculture passed, print publications such as Creem offered a place in the 1970s to

reconsider and refashion the relationship between counterculture and mass culture.

If parts one and two focus on the national context, part three turns to the international

situation. In part three, I explore just how far rock's civic culture and public sphere could

travel by tracing how American fighters in Vietnam related to rock music. During the

Vietnam War, rock music appeared in Southeast Asia through both commercial and military

channels, completing a circuit between home front and war zone. The music did not stop the

war in any direct sense. One could even interpret rock as part of a larger American cultural

imperialism during the Cold War. But within the violent, often surreal environment of the

Vietnam War, rock music also helped spark a struggle for civics.

The music did so in Vietnam on radio broadcasts, tape recorders, phonograph

records, jukeboxes, and through performances by soldier-musicians as well as by

Vietnamese and other Asian bands. At times, rock reinforced moods of orderly soldierly

commitment. In other moments, it served as the soundtrack for violent frustration, rage, and

disorder. The music also generated a space for alternative citizen-soldier identities,

challenges to military order, and new conceptualizations of the global. Tolerated by the

military because it "brought a taste of home" and raised troop morale, rock also gave rise to a

public life of critique, debate, and engagement deep within the war zone.

In the epilogue, I move from Vietnam to what might be called the global

countercultural moment. Bringing together new secondary literature about rock's worldwide

impact in places as disparate as Brazil, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and Nigeria, the epilogue

explores how rock provided an aesthetic and social framework through which young people

could challenge the structures and mentalities of their respective societies. Listeners outside

36
the United States did not merely hear rock as the soundtrack for American commercial

imperialism. Rather, in countries that were often dominated by authoritarian governmental

control, the sounds of rock provided spaces for associational relationships outside of state

apparatuses. In the global response to rock, we hear hints of an emergent transnational rock

civitas. This global civics of rock arose through the mechanisms of American Cold War

consumer culture, yet rock's dissonance also posed alternatives to dominant modes of state

and corporate power, regardless of whether that power emanated from the United States or

existed in a particular nation -- even a communist one.

"You're Just a Young American Citizen in the Twentieth Century"

Reflecting back on the Woodstock Festival as a symbol of the 1960s, Grateful Dead

guitarist Jerry Garcia articulated how much participants felt as if they were living in a time

of heightened historical importance. "You could feel the presence of invisible time travelers

from the future who had come back to see it," Garcia remarked, "a swollen historicity – a

truly pregnant moment." Now, as travelers from that future, we can further assess the

"historicity" of Garcia's moment. Like the logbook of one of Garcia's invisible time travelers,

this project returns to the late 1960s and early 1970s to explore the circulatory systems of

rock music and the kinds of public life, civic culture, collectivity, and "Community" they

could sustain.48

As the singer Country Joe McDonald asserted to a fan in 1968, "You're no

revolutionary, you're just a young American citizen in the twentieth century." In the midst of

48
Jerry Garcia, quoted in Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful
Dead (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 335.

37
this tumultuous year of assassinations, generational tensions, and political unrest, this

particular rock star did not believe rock music was at the vanguard of the new society. Never

mind that his band's name, Country Joe and the Fish, was taken from a quotation from

Chairman Mao: "The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea."

Never mind that the group's career had taken off as part of the 1965 anti-Vietnam War

protests in Berkeley and Oakland, when it had begun as a one-off group for a cut-out

phonograph record inserted into an antiwar magazine. Never mind that Country Joe himself

was a "red-diaper baby," the child of parents who had been active in the Communist Party.

By 1968, at least to this rocker, music and politics had parted ways.49

Yet, Country Joe's use of the word "citizen" signaled a lurking assumption that rock

was more than just a passive leisure activity or a purely aesthetic experience. The fan might

not be a political revolutionary, but he was also not a mere consumer either. Perhaps Country

Joe turned to the word "citizen" to try to encapsulate his sense of rock music's uncertain

place between politics and entertainment. At once inside and outside the mainstream cultural

life of the United States, the unstable position of his fans, not to mention Country Joe

himself, could be best understood through the categories of civic culture and citizenship.

Thinking of rock as civic and its participants as citizens begins to explain how rock

could seem to whisper so many secrets in the roar of its electrified power chords. For

participants, a whole new public life and a whole new role for the individual seemed to

beckon. To the most idealistic among them, rock howled for political change, movement,

and transformation. To the most passive, rock was merely a form of consumption,
49
Richard Goldstein, "C.J. Fish on Saturday," in Reporting the Counterculture (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1989), 147-148. Originally published in the Village Voice. For more on Country Joe and the Fish, see
Joel Selvin, Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Times in the Wild
West (New York: Dutton, 1994).

38
pleasurable and fun but nothing more. For many more participants between these two

extremes, rock most of all provided a medium for engaging with the terms of existence in a

mass consumer society. The civics of rock operated at a threshold. It hinted at the vibrations

of a new public life in which the culture of democracy might thrive. Simultaneously, rock

marked the limits of democracy's perfectibility through civic culture alone.

39
 Prologue -
Broadcasting Rock: Radio and the Soundscape of the Counterculture

Oh at last again the radio opens / blue Invitations! / Angelic Dylan singing
across the nation / ...Language, language, and sweet music too - Allen
Ginsberg1

They use the radio as a background, the aural prop for whatever kind of life
they want to imagine they're leading. - Tom Wolfe2

Where auditory experience is dominant...singular, perspectival gives way to

plural, permeated space. The self defined in terms of hearing rather than sight
is a self imaged not as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a
channel through which voices, noises, and musics, travel. - Steven Connor3

"This is Tom Donahue and I'm here to play phonograph records." The statement is

straightforward enough, but the tone has a wry edge, as if the mere act of playing

phonograph records on the radio might involve something far more subversive. The Beatles

have just finished their insistent request that we, "come together, right now." The next song

starts immediately after Donahue introduces himself. A cry -- "Yeah!" -- can be heard in the

background. Electric piano and distorted electric guitar erupt into minor-key harmonies. The

rhythm grows -- an insistent march over a steady four-four meter of cowbell and tambourine

1
Allen Ginsberg, "Wichita Vortex Sutra," in Collected Poems, 1947-1980 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1984), 409; originally published in The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971 (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1971).
2
Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Steamline Baby (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1965), 40.
3
Steven Connor, "Sound and the Self," in Hearing History: A Reader, ed. Mark M. Smith (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2004), 57.
that climaxes in a drum roll before proceeding forward again on its piano-guitar riff. The

music beckons. It is a fanfare, inviting us to step forth into the song's sonic imaginary. What

world are we entering?

To consider responses to rock, we need, first, to listen to the sounds that sparked

those responses. Radio provides a sonic window back to the rock music of the late 1960s and

early 1970s. Although histories of rock tend to focus on the careers of particular artists (the

Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin), studies of radio most often concentrate on

behind-the-scenes accounts of the music business. Tuning in to the broadcasts themselves

and listening in detail to their aural environments, however, offers access to fragments of the

lived, everyday experiences of participants in the counterculture. What echoes are preserved

in these crystallized fossils of sound? What was in the air during the counterculture years?4

4
The artist-based histories of rock are too many to list, but an example of a historically-focused study
that uses particular musicians to chronicle the 1960s is Nick Bromell, Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and
Psychedelics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Radio histories of the 1960s include:
Susan Krieger, Hip Capitalism (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979); Peter Fornatale and Joshua Mills,
Radio in the Television Age (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1980); Michael C. Keith, Voices in the Purple
Haze: Underground Radio and the Sixties (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air: An
Alternative History of Radio in America (New York: New York University Press, 2001); and Richard Neer,
FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio (New York: Villard, 2001). For the related history of radio and the civil
rights movement, see; Brian Ward, Radio and the Struggle for Civil Rights in the South (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2004); and William Barlow, Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio (Philadelphia,
PA: Temple University Press, 1998). Additional radio histories include: Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio: The
Commercialization of American Broadcasting, 1920-1934 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1996); Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004); Susan Merrill Squier, ed., Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio
Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Michelle Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, eds., Radio Reader:
Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (New York: Routledge, 2001); Andrew Crisell, Understanding Radio
(New York: Routledge, 1994); and Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound,
Radio, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). As with so much literature of the 1960s,
there are a number of excellent historically-oriented memoirs as well: Steve Post, Playing In the FM Band: A
Personal Account of Fee Radio, foreword by Julius Lester; illustrated by Ira Epstein (New York, Viking
Press, 1974); Bruce Morrow, Cousin Brucie: My Life in Rock and Roll Radio (New York: Beech Tree Books,
1987); and Jim Ladd, Radio Waves: Life and Revolution on the FM Dial (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).
One of the best approaches to radio as aural soundscape can be found in Susan Douglas, Listening in: Radio
and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

41
 Figure 0.3. Tom Donahue in 1968 (photograph: Jim Marshall)

The "Community Voice" of Radio and the Soundscape of the Counterculture

The song continues on. It is just after six o'clock in the evening in the San Francisco

Bay Area on a Saturday night in the late 1960s or early 1970s.5 Tom Donahue, one of the

founders of free-form rock radio on the FM frequency, has settled his three-hundred-pound-

plus frame behind the turntables at KSAN, the "Jive 95," broadcasting at 94.9 megahertz.

Developed by DJs such as Donahue, Larry Miller, John Leonard, Bob Fass, Steve Post, and

Vin Scelsa, free-form radio marked a departure from the careful programming of mainstream

5
Tom Donahue, Aircheck, KSAN-FM, San Francisco, 1971, archived at http://www.jive95.com. The
exact date of this aircheck remains somewhat unclear. The tape that the www.jive95.com webmaster, Norman
Davis, possesses is labeled "Tom Donahue on a Saturday night in 1968," however the aircheck contains songs,
concert announcements, promotional advertisements, and a news segment that place it mostly in 1971. The tape
could possibly be a compendium of Tom Donahue airchecks assembled for KSAN's tenth anniversary in 1978.
Norman Davis email correspondence with author, 24 March 2006. Regardless of whether the aircheck comes
from one night or a number of broadcasts by Donahue, it does provide direct sonic access to what participants
in the counterculture heard on the radio during the counterculture's heyday of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

42
popular radio on the AM dial, which moved rapidly between hit songs and advertisements.

Instead, free-form DJs slowed their pace down, and moved from one genre of music to

another based on their mood and the surprising resonances they could find between radically

different tracks. They often played long sets of music, interspersed only by advertisements

and the news delivered in a relaxed, often humorous manner. More adventurous than

commercial AM radio, free-form FM radio would eventually turn into a format known as

"progressive" in the mid-1970s. Progressive was a more cautious approach that overtook

free-form as rock grew to dominate the popular music business.

But, when Donahue started his free-form broadcasts in 1967, the format was still

quite eclectic and experimental. Donahue started at KMPX, an ethnic program station

located at the upper limits of the FM dial. In 1969, however, he brought his staff with him to

a new station, KSAN. A labor strike between the disc jockeys and the company that owned

KMPX concerning who would control the music and tone of broadcasts led to the split.

Donahue's new home, KSAN, was no anti-capitalist media outlet, though. Unlike non-

commercial stations such as Berkeley's KPFA, started by the pacifist Lewis Hill in the

1940s, KSAN was owned by a corporation, Metromedia. This company welcomed the new

free-form approach to radio as a means to gain a foothold in the emerging consumer

marketplace of rock music and the counterculture.6

Donahue never bothers to identify the song with which he started his program, but

many listeners might have known it. The tune is "Fresh Garbage" by the Southern California

6
See Kreiger, Keith, and Neer for more on the KMPX strike. For the history of KPFA, see Matthew
Lasar, Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999).

43
band Spirit. The song was released in 1968 and became a staple of FM radio.7 "Fresh

Garbage" was one in a wide-ranging set of songs Donahue would play over the next six

hours. The aircheck of his broadcast only contains a sampling of a typical evening's

broadcast, but even within its fragments, a sense of the diversity of the free-form approach

emerges. The African-American group the Chambers Brothers performed the urgent

psychedelic-funk of "Time Has Come Today"; the British singer Joe Cocker sang the ersatz-

soul song, "Delta Lady"; the band Ten Years After declared "I'd Love to Change the World";

a San Francisco group, Quicksilver Messenger Service, asked, "What About Me?"; and the

Byrds offered advice in the song "So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star." As befit an

approach to radio known as free-form, Donahue's broadcast incorporated a far-flung range of

sounds and styles, moods and tones, information and emotion.

Figure 0.4. Tom and Raechel Donahue, early 1970s (photograph: unknown, source:
www.jive95.com)

7
Spirit, "Fresh Garbage," Spirit (Epic, 1968).

44
 Between the music, Donahue offered occasional commentary in a quiet, friendly

voice. A few homemade-sounding advertisements, often filled with adolescent humor,

giggles, and references to sex, gave listeners information about local record and clothing

shops. Donahue announced a set of weekend concerts headlined by the Youngbloods at the

Family Dog on the Great Highway. A montage of sounds that combined Borsht Belt

comedians and Indian guru mystics introduced a short, irreverent newscast about a banned

Miami concert by the Doors and Richard Nixon's secret peace talks for the Vietnam War.

Listened to in detail, Donahue's aircheck hints at the civic interaction that rock on the

radio helped circulate. This is the soundscape of the counterculture. R. Murray Schafer

coined the term soundscape to broaden the focus of musicology beyond formal composition.

He included the entire aural environment as a proper subject for analysis. As Mark M. Smith

notes, Schafer came to believe that shifting from music narrowly conceived to sound as a

phenomenon raised new questions about the nature of human hearing. Schafer argued that,

"hearing is a way of touching at a distance." Douglas Kahn, drawing upon a similar idea that

John Cage once articulated, also emphasizes that hearing is a quintessentially public sense --

one with the ability to make contact across space.8

Radio, then, presents the soundscape of the counterculture as a public sphere that

existed within as much as outside or against mass culture. Radio provided a possible

commons of the air -- what Greil Marcus calls, in another context, an "invisible republic."9

8
R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977) and The Thinking Ear:
Complete Writings on Music Education (Toronto: Arcana Editions, 1988). Quoted in Mark M. Smith,
"Introduction: Onward to Audible Pasts," Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2004), xi and xiii. See also: Douglas Kahn, "Art and Sound," in Hearing History, 36-53, and Douglas Kahn,
Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
9
Greil Marcus, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).

45
This shared space was widely available for Tom Donahue's audience, since all listeners had

to do was dial in his station. Yet, simultaneously, the exact nature of radio's public commons

was elusive. The commons were sonically embedded -- hidden and concealed -- in the larger

circulation of mass consumer culture.

We might think of rock on the radio as an amorphous atmosphere of public energies

that spread across metropolises, nations, and the entire world on commercial airwaves.10

Like lightning bolts from suddenly unpredictable configurations of larger weather patterns,

seizures of feeling could leap out from the radio. Rock on the radio might take over the

emotional experiences of listeners for brief moments, providing participants in rock with

forces to absorb. Listeners might respond to these charges of energy in many ways, from

dancing to critical reflection to sharing the music with others to engaging in political

activities. In flashes of power and in seizures of feeling, rock music on the radio fostered

more than just the passive reception of consumer goods.

But more often than not, rock on the radio was just there, humming in the ether. It

provided a kind of semi-permanent, mobile, shape-shifting structure in which participants

might invent, encounter, critique, and respond to new modes of individual identity and

shared collectivity. Tom Donahue's broadcasts did not dictate a monolithic ideology. They

did not even generate a unified space. Broadcast across the diverse communities of the San

Francisco Bay Area, and rebroadcast in the even more varied Los Angeles region, Donahue's

shows constituted an aural form that contained multitudes. On the radio, the presentation of

rock in the free-form format provided a shared aesthetic realm that, if it had an ideological

10
See Bruno Latour, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2005).

46
program at all, only raised dilemmas and issues -- as well as pleasures -- to consciousness. It

did not assert so much as question. The rock music on Donahue's programs did not issue

propagandistic messages, but, rather, offered listeners a process and method for intellectual

and emotional engagement with the larger context of the times.

Participants in the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s believed that

rock's presence on the radio was significant. "In the air, another major change," the young

rock critic Paul Williams wrote after visiting San Francisco in 1967 and hearing KMPX for

the first time, "not just radio for heads but rock radio for rock heads, a station that totally

ignores the Top 20." To Williams, KMPX was, "like a college radio station…they're human,

and they like the music -- and that's what's been missing in radio till now." For Williams,

writing at the dawn of the Summer of Love in 1967, rock on the radio signaled a shift in

popular culture from the cold, automated approach of AM formats focused on counting

down the hits and selling products. On FM radio, by contrast, to Williams, a more direct

communication occurred between disc jockeys and listeners. Rather than following the

trends of hit songs, Williams liked how disc jockeys on KMPX forged communities of

listeners through their own tastes. He appreciated the creation of what he heard as a more

"human" sonic environment broadcast over the technology of FM radio. Williams used the

moniker "rock heads" to describe the new kind of common identity that rock on the radio

began to establish.

Williams was eager to hear solidarity in the new sounds on the FM airwaves as the

much-anticipated Summer of Love began in San Francisco. But even two years later,

listeners developed a less monolithic understanding of the new kinds of identity and

collectivity that rock on the radio seem fostered. For instance, the political activist Michael

47
Rossman only heard the Bay Area's free-form station as a start on the creation of a shared

public life. Writing about the strike that moved Donahue's KMPX staff to KSAN in 1969,

Rossman believed that, "The station's changes were somehow linked to the changes of an

emerging community trying to find and shape its identity." To Rossman, KMPX's evolution

did not assert a rigid ideological position, but rather served as a sonic representation of the

search for solutions to collectively-perceived social problems. The radio station provided a

public forum in which the "emerging community" of the counterculture attempted to

discover its identity. As an aural space in which participants were able to confront and

explore the nature of this nascent public life, "KMPX began to serve many as a community

Voice," according to Rossman.11

A crucial aspect of this process and method by which KMPX, and then KSAN,

became a "community voice" was by ignoring typical boundaries between the political and

the personal. As radio broadcast rock music far and wide, the sounds of rock on the radio

also penetrated to the most private recesses of the self. The public airwaves, in other words,

entered the most private areas of intimate life. As the media scholar Susan Douglas argues,

"radio has worked most powerfully inside our heads, helping us create internal maps of the

world and our place in it, urging us to construct imagined communities to which we do, or

do not, belong."12 Rock on stations such as KMPX and KSAN did not did not constitute a

public sphere in one place or insist on homogeneity in the identities of its listeners. What

rock on the radio did do was establish a network of participants.

11
Paul Williams, "The Golden Road: A Report on San Francisco," Crawdaddy! 10 (July-August
1967): 7. Michael Rossman, "KMPX On Strike," San Francisco Express Times (21 March 1968): 3.
12
Douglas, 5.

48
 In this network, listeners interacted with the same aesthetic forms -- the same

broadcasts and songs -- but they tuned in from a multitude of different vantage points,

experiences, perspectives, and positions. They shared an object of scrutiny and experience

when listening to rock on the radio. But both the object of their listening and the experiences

that listening ensured were heterogeneous. Even Donahue's one radio show comprised a

messy complex of meaningful and whimsical allusions, emotional and semantic possibilities,

multiple forms and singular expressions for constructing the self and imagining a larger

collectivity.

"Fresh Garbage": The Soundscape of the Counterculture's Mass Cultural Context

Paying close attention to the aesthetic forms of rock on the radio, as well as the larger

historical context in which rock's aesthetic forms emerged and reverberated, provides a

starting point for considering responses to rock music and their relationship to public life.

Broadcasts such as Tom Donahue's KSAN show most of all presented a powerful mediating

form between larger collectivities and each individual listener. The whole construction of the

relationship between the mass and the self in mass culture manifested itself in rock on the

radio. Donahue's show offered a set of dialectic experiences for listeners as they

simultaneously investigated their own identities and considered the assembly of listeners

through the radio as a whole. Even as radio's "invisible republic," embedded within mass

consumer culture, offered a sense of belonging, of presence, it also allowed individuals to

feel invisible, simply part of the larger network of sounds.

The self could gain definition from rock on the radio, or could vanish into the

frequencies of the broadcast. At an emotional level, participants could engage with feelings

49
of presence -- of mattering as part of a collectivity of listeners. For instance, the songs and

presentation on Donahue's show consistently addressed the social and political problems of

the time. Rock on the radio encouraged intellectual and emotional engagement with

dilemmas of consumerism, war, conflict, freedom, and democracy. Yet Donahue's program

did so through an escape into the aesthetics of musical and aural experience.

Figure 0.5. The self and the mediated collective in the soundscape of the counterculture: An
advertisement for KSAN forerunner KMPX, circa 1969 (source: www.jive95.com)

Rock on the radio may have made a listener feel present in a mass-mediated

collectivity engaged with the larger issues of the day, but it also registered feelings of

absence. The self disappeared into the pleasures of stereo sound or into the overwhelming

and sublime vastness of mass culture's communications infrastructure. The self and the

collective possessed an odd relationship to one another with rock on the radio. Perhaps

Steven Connor is correct in arguing that, "Where auditory experience is dominant... singular,

perspectival gives way to plural, permeated space. The self defined in terms of hearing rather

50
than sight is a self imaged not as a point, but as a membrane; not as a picture, but as a

channel through which voices, noises, and musics, travel."13

If, when auditory experience dominated, the self became a channel, what was the

larger entity in which individuals existed when listening to rock on the radio? Songs such as

Spirit's "Fresh Garbage" expressed how, through rock, participants in the counterculture also

became channels -- membranes -- within mass culture. Particularly in the decades after

World War II, as mass culture emerged from a corporate-liberal system of mass

consumerism, radio linked the counterculture to a larger mass cultural context.14

What came to be called mass culture involved dramatic transformations in economic

and structural forces.15 Statistics provide a broad picture of what this "mass culture" was.

Between 1950 and the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, for example, rising real income yielded

even working-class Americans an unparalleled amount of discretionary income.16 By 1971,

the value of the American leisure market alone was estimated at over one-hundred-fifty

billion dollars a year (overshadowed by an even larger military budget, but still a substantial

13
Connor, "Sound and the Self," in Hearing History, 57.
14
Among the many useful books on the emergence of mass consumerism in the United States, see
Gary S. Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000); Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of
Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).
15
"Mass culture" was not just an actually, existing economic or structural entity, of course, but also an
intellectual label, used by critics to articulate fears about modern, industrial society -- and to mount critiques.
See, among others, Dwight Macdonald, "Masscult and Midcult," in Against the American Grain (New York:
Random House, 1962); David Riesman, with Nathan Glaser and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (1953;
reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1956); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957) and The
Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and the Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your
Community, Your Future (New York: D. McKay, 1959); and John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society
(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
16
Allen J. Matusow makes this point in The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the
1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), xiii.

51
element of America's trillion-dollar 1970 economy). During the 1950s, the consumer use of

electricity had almost tripled, while money spent on advertising more than doubled. By the

mid-1960s, ninety-eight percent of American households had electric refrigerators; ninety-

four percent of American homes had at least one television set. Air surpassed rail travel as

the main means of commercial passenger transport.17 Powerful new technological links

bound Americans to each other -- and to the world -- in consumption communities of

circulating people, goods, images, and sounds.18

Adolescents were a crucial part of this leisure-oriented mass consumer market. While

Paula Fass and many others have documented a youth culture dating back to the 1920s, if not

earlier, the notion of a "youth culture" emerged in full force after World War II.19 In 1963,

the baby-boom generation of teenagers, whose annual birth rate in the late 1940s and 1950s

averaged four million a year (keeping the United States apace with India in population

growth for a time), spent approximately twenty-two billion dollars. Adolescents purchased

over half the soft drinks and movies in the country, and one-fifth of America's high school

seniors owned a car by the mid-1960s. By 1968, youth under twenty-five spent over one

billion dollars per year just on music recordings alone. This spending was directly connected

to the commercial rise of rock music since a year earlier, in 1967, music marketed as "rock"

17
Statistics from William E. Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast: American Society Since 1945 (Boston,
MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1973), 37-69. Leuchtenburg makes the point that the military budget dwarfed even
the leisure economy. He also notes that the trillion-dollar mark was reached partially through inflation.
Nonetheless, as Allen J. Matusow emphasizes, substantial real growth in both the overall economy and the
leisure economy did occur in the postwar boom.
18
For more on the term "consumption communities," see Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The
Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), 89-90.
19
Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977).

52
had overtaken that sold as pop. By 1970, sales of music records and tapes passed the two

billion mark. Later in the 1970s, rock would constitute eighty percent of all recorded

music.20

A song such as Spirit's "Fresh Garbage" registered the material abundance in the

United States during the Cold War era. Moreover, in its aesthetic form, the song allowed

listeners to explore the ways in which the new consumer processes of Cold War America

both created problems and provided fantasies of escape. The music combined flamenco-

flavored sonorities with a heavy-metal thud. At first, we seem to be entering a fantastical

past. We're in a castle, surrounded by tapestries, knights, kings, and queens. But the first

words of the song quickly interrupt that mood. "Frrr-eeeh-sh ga-arrr-baggge," a voice sings.

Fresh garbage -- are these the right lyrics to match the mystical, medieval music? Repulsed

yet fascinated, the singer urges his listeners to, "Look beneath your lids one morning / See

the things you didn't quite consume / Your fresh garbage." Why would the song travel, in

under thirty seconds, from an escape into fantasy in the introductory music to a focus on the

stink of the present?

The members of the group Spirit, including the guitarist Randy California -- who had

gained prior expertise in Jimi Hendrix's mid-1960s New York City band, Jimmy James and

the Flames -- had written the song "Fresh Garbage" during a Southern California sanitation-

worker strike. With its mixture of jazzy exploration and ecological observations, Spirit

invited listeners to consider the absurdity of modern life even as their music provided a

20
Statistics taken from Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the
1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12; Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast, 65; Bromell,
Tomorrow Never Knows, 45; Paul C. Light, Baby Boomers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988); George Lipsitz,
"Who'll Stop the Rain," 212. Philip H. Ennis, The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rock 'n' Roll in American
Popular Music (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 286, 345.

53
fantastical escape from that very same existence. The lyrics noted the problems of over-

abundance in a mass consumer society, yet the music -- especially electronic pianist John

Locke's (yes, that was his name) extended solo in the middle of the song -- seemed to soar

above the detritus.

The lyrics were also a double entendre, since the lids that listeners should look under

in the morning were not only the garbage cans outside their homes, but also their own

eyelids. The things you did not quite consume could also be your own dreams, your deepest

hopes and fantasies. These scraps of vision, sound, and feeling were so elusive that they

remained unconsumed. Their irreducibility was ridiculous -- they were just the latest garbage

your subconscious had produced. And yet, they also might provide hints and clues to a better

life, a better world, if one explored their dream-logic more fully. In this pun on "lids," Spirit

incongruously, but provocatively, linked the problems of material abundance in consumer

society to the spiritual quest of many in the counterculture.

The dilemmas of consumer abundance and its ecological ramifications were brought

up right alongside the spiritual quests of counterculturalists to unlock the unconscious. Spirit

did not provide a programmatic answer or solution for either materialism or spiritual

longing, but like a concentration of fluctuating atmospheric energies, their song brought

these issues into the same aesthetic space for listeners to experience and consider. Spirit's

"Fresh Garbage" fostered a method of critical intellectual and emotional inquiry for listeners,

who could absorb and reflect upon the strange connections between consumer abundance

and spiritual dissatisfaction at which the song hinted.21

21
Although scholars such as T. J. Jackson Lears and Thomas Frank have noticed the ways in which
consumerism harnessed the desire for spiritual fulfillment merely to sell goods, they do not address the ways in
which rock music also provided channels for an awareness of consumerism and its tricky relationship to

54
 The song "Fresh Garbage" ends. Donahue returns to the microphone on the aircheck.

"This program is brought to you by Leopold's," he explained, "who are urging donations to

the Berkeley Free Clinic. I think it's wonderful that they sponsor the show and that they are

being light on the rap. I hope that a lot of you are going to put out some money for the Free

Clinic before this night is over." Donahue's acknowledged that advertisers paid for KSAN's

existence, but he emphasized that Leopold's, a phonograph shop in Berkeley, was taking a

different tack toward its customers. The store wanted to turn a profit -- it was capitalist -- but

Leopold's also positioned itself as part of a larger community.

Later in the aircheck, this sense of civic interaction occurring within commercial

processes emerged again. Donahue played a pre-recorded message from Leopold's. The

speaker in the message explained that Leopold's puts money back into community projects,

such as the Free Clinic, a health center in Berkeley. Another advertising "spot," as they were

called, from Leopold's alerted listeners to the controversy around misappropriated funds

from George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh. The advertisements did not call for

revolution. They suggested an acceptance -- even an embrace -- of consumerism. But they

also expressed civic concerns. The goods of the marketplace and the good of the larger

society intertwined on Donahue's airchecks.

spiritual hunger. See T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1994); Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and
the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

55
"Time Has Come Today": The "Psychedelicized" Soul and the Transformed Public

Sphere

Just one song at the start of one broadcast, but Spirit's "Fresh Garbage" provides an

access point to the sonic imagination of the counterculture. Issues of consumerism and

spirituality, presence and absence, counterculture and mass culture, were among a larger set

of concerns and pleasures that the radio made available for listeners. Rock on the radio also

raised questions. For example: Could the personal gratification of mass consumerism -- of

purchasing records at Leopold's or listening to rock songs on KSAN -- harmonize with the

demands of building a caring collectivity, one that addressed the needs and problems of the

civitas? What kinds of individual attitudes and self-identities could accomplish this difficult

feat?

Without introduction, we hear the tick-tock of a clock. No, it is a cowbell. A man's

voice whispers, "Cuckoo, Cuckoo." A drum roll and electric guitar enter in another fanfare,

another announcement. The guitar trills suspended fourth and second notes on a classic folk-

rock open D chord. The band builds up steam and then the lead voice enters. It is a bullfrog

of a male voice whose growl is coded ambiguously in terms of race. It sounds like a younger

British white rocker imitating an older African-American soul singer imitating a younger

British rocker. "The time has come today!" the voice shouts.

Once again, Donahue does not bother to tell us what the song is called, or who

performs it. Although one might feel for a moment that one is not "in the know," not a

member of this sonic community, the pulse of the song charges ahead. Maybe it matters less

what the song is called exactly, or whom it is by, than just listening to it -- seized by the

feelings of its rhythm and energy. Lines leap out from the vocalist's growl. "My soul's been

56
psychedelicized," he explains at one point, almost sounding as if he is realizing this himself

as it happens. "There are things to realize," he intones, almost as a question. Then you can

almost hear him clench his brow in determination as the chorus rolls around again: "The time

has come today!" "Hey!" the band responds to the singer, affirming his declaration.

The song is a thoroughly psychedelic-rock number. Before its ten-plus minutes are

up, the band will launch into an extended instrumental section of exploratory guitar, a

decelerating beat, and ominous, reverb-soaked, evil laughter. Time ticks down. Then, after

coming to a standstill at the middle of the song, the verse and chorus return, triumphantly.

The time has come today, the song insists. But for whom? "Time Has Come Today," in fact,

was not by a younger, white, rock band. The song was a hit for the Chambers Brothers, a

group consisting of three African-American brothers from Mississippi and a white drummer,

along with a number of other band members.22

Their song -- "Time Has Come Today" -- hinted at rock's loosening boundaries of

identity. The singer's racial identity is never explicitly acknowledged. Nor is the song's status

as a part of the "soul" or the "rock" genre. Instead, as the singer notes, his "soul's been

psychedelicized." The song indeed sounds like soul, mostly due to the vocal stylings of

growls and screams, the way the singer hangs behind the beat in his phrasing, and the call-

and-response of the lead voice and the band. But, the music also sounds like rock. It chugs

along in a quintessential rock chord progression, dropping from the tonic to the flatted

seventh to the subdominant chord, at a mid-tempo meter. Moreover, the various effects

22
The Chambers Brothers, "Time Has Come Today," Time Has Come Today (Columbia, 1967).

57
placed on the instruments -- fuzzed-out distortion on the guitar, echo effects on the tick-

tocking cowbell -- evokes a psychedelic mood. As a genre, is this "rock" or "soul"?

Perhaps in the soundscape of the counterculture, the question about "Time Has Come

Today" was more about the links and overlaps between rock and soul. If the singer's "soul's

been pyschedelicized," as the lyrics claim, by implication the "time has come today," for a

number of things. Perhaps the time has come for genres of music to liberate themselves from

market constraints based on race. Perhaps the time has come for the African-American civil

rights movement, linked to soul as a musical genre, to assert its triumph over longstanding

systems of injustice and inequality. Perhaps, for this one individual -- a new citizen speaking

forth in the public soundscape of rock -- the time has come to assert his own personal

liberation.

The point here is not that the Chambers Brothers' hit song provided a fully-developed

political program for addressing ongoing inequality and discrimination. It did not. Instead, it

provided an escape into the pleasures of connecting rock and soul musical aesthetics through

the bridge of psychedelia. Nonetheless, "Time Has Come Today" did help constitute rock's

public atmosphere -- the sonic imaginary or soundscape in which participants might consider

political issues. For instance, in the exploratory instrumental section in the middle of the

song, the guitarist makes a possible allusion to the Vietnam War by playing the melody of

"One Tin Soldier." The lyrics never mention Vietnam, but the musical reference hints at one

reason why the "time has come today" for the singer to take action. Indeed, as part three of

this project explores, the small reference to Vietnam in "Time Has Come Today" was part of

a larger circuit that rock music completed between the culture of the home front and the war

zone during the war in Southeast Asia.

58
 Both musically and lyrically -- in fact, in the very interplay between music and lyrics

-- rock's audiences could join the Chambers Brothers in asserting that change was in the air.

Rather than simply name problems, the Chambers Brothers perform a process of public

discourse -- one that we might understand as crucial to the civics of rock. The singer

combines self-inquiry with confident public statement. He does this through the movement

from inquisitive lyrics in the verses, sung with a kind of question mark at the end of each

phrase -- "Now the time has come? There are things to realize?" -- to the exploding chorus,

in which he answers the uncertainty of the verses with a triumphant declaration, "The time

has come come today," and is met with the voices of others when the band responds, "Hey!"

With "Time Has Come Today," the Chambers Brothers circulated a countercultural ethos of

inquiry and action -- a journey both rational and emotional through issues of agency, self-

doubt, and collective connection.

"So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star": Celebrity Culture, Gender, and the

Soundscape of the Counterculture

So was the solution for listeners to become rock and roll stars too in order to assert

that their time had come today as well? Following the Chambers Brothers on the aircheck,

we hear a song by the group the Byrds: "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star."23 The

song dated from early 1967, at the dawn of the media hype about San Francisco, hippies, the

counterculture, and the Summer of Love. Once again the song arrives with no introduction.

Unlike the long, exploratory journeys of Spirit's "Fresh Garbage" and the Chambers

23
The Byrds, "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star," Younger Than Yesterday (Columbia, 1967).

59
Brothers' "Time Has Come Today," this song is quite short. But as with Spirit and the

Chambers Brothers, the Byrds offer a performance of self-critique and inquiry.

Like the sonic equivalent of an Andy Warhol silkscreen, the lyrics both glamorize the

life of a celebrity rock star and deconstruct the supposed authenticity realized by mass

cultural success. This is a typical pop song -- two minutes of condensed energy over a fairly

simple chord progression. It is a Campbell's soup can label or a Marilyn Monroe photograph,

seen so many times it has become an iconic landmark, part of the mass-mediated terrain of

everyday life. But just as Warhol's art distorted and transformed celebrity icons through odd

choices of color and the mutations of the silkscreen process, closer listening reveals an

oddness to the conventional pop song, "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star." A strange

mélange of sounds tumbles over the electric guitar riff that starts off the tune. A twelve-

string electric guitar chimes in with a vaguely sitar-like melody, a guiro scraper sets the

rhythm over a muted drum set, and a horn peels a "Sketches of Spain"-type bolero melody

(played by the South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela). This may be a pop song, but if

so, it is a strange one. Through incongruous sounds brought together, the music signals that

something is off, something is not quite right.

"So you want to be a rock and roll star, then listen now to what I say," the Byrds sing

in harmony. "Just get an electric guitar and take some time and learn how to play." Then the

group explains how all one needs to do is look stylish, wear your pants tightly, and "sell your

soul to the company who are waiting there to sell plasticware." The rest, the band claims, is

easy: "If you make the charts, the girls will tear you apart." The Beatlemaniac screaming of

girls explodes above the band's instruments, sounding both alluring and threatening. The

screams are recordings of the audiences on the Byrds' first British tour in 1965. On the one

60
hand, these screams reveal the newfound power of young female audiences, whose screams

of desire were one stream that fed into the women's liberation movement.24 On the other

hand, the screaming girls in the Byrds' "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" suggest

that rock radio mostly produced a soundscape from the perspective of males who might want

to be screamed at by girls.

Figure 0.6. "We Have Come For Your Daughters": Tom Donahue in England, 1970
(photograph: unknown, source: www.jive95.com)

As Susan Douglas argues, the high-fidelity sound of FM linked in particular to a re-

fashioning of masculinity in the aftermath of World War II's violence and destruction. FM

burst on the scene from the world of obsessed hobbyists as a new way of paying attention to

the sensuousness of sound itself. It marked a redirection of the technologies of

communication not for rationalized warfare or masculinst aggression, but rather for modes of

being usually coded as feminine: reception, sensitivity, meditation. Disc jockeys such as

24
See Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, "Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have
Fun," in The Adoring Audience, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1992); reprinted in The Subcultures
Reader, eds. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (New York: Routledge, 1997).

61
Tom Donahue abandoned the adrenaline-rush chatter of AM radio, adopting quiet,

meditative, or quietly sardonic personas. They urged a more passive, receptive, open

relationship to sound.

But, even as FM adopted a more "feminine" stance, Douglas claims that it also

limited access for women themselves. With its links to the power of new hi-fi audio systems,

often primary advertisers on FM stations, and its focus on virtuosity in rock music,

especially male guitar players, shows such as Donahue's were the province of men. To

Douglas, FM radio helped forge an alternative to the classic Cold War masculinity, but it did

not necessarily do the same for Cold War femininity. Tom Donahue's on-air persona, for

instance, provided a social type for male listeners to imitate. Donahue was friendly and

welcoming, but his broadcast also assumed an insider's knowledge about bands, concerts,

and jokes. Donahue signaled that he was hip through the slang he employed, the position he

took toward the commercial spots that he read, and his opinion about the sound quality of

certain tracks, such as the Youngbloods' song, "Darkness, Darkness."

Susan Douglas's interpretation, which makes note of Donahue's persona and

comments, begins to unpack the way that gender roles were raised up for scrutiny in rock

radio broadcasts. Donahue's show participated in reiminagings of masculinity that were at

once challenges to dominant modes of gender and, also, reinscriptions of gender inequalities.

Donahue's wife, Raechel Donahue, is there in the studio, helping to create the broadcast, but

we only hear from her briefly, off-microphone. She is behind-the-scenes, not equal to

Donahue as a voice on the show.

Intriguingly, however, and in partial contrast to Douglas's argument, Raechel

Donahue, Dusty Street, and a number of the other women disc jockeys at KSAN also hosted

62
a separate women's show on Sundays. According to Dusty Street, who worked as an

engineer and on-air host at the station, "I really got a lot of support from the guys. I find that

there is a lot more suppression of women today than there was in the late 1960s and early

1970s. All of the guys that I worked with just related to me like I was one of the team. I was

just one of the gang, and they were all there to help me. There was no male chauvinism, and

there was equal pay for equal work." Though the music and station were certainly dominated

by a male perspective, rock radio was, as Street suggests, ahead of other American

institutions in its access for women.25

FM radio broadcasts such as Tom Donahue's show did not overturn gender

inequalities, but as Susan Douglas suggests, they did reorient the type of masculinity that

dominated the larger society. In offering male listeners a more traditionally "feminine"

perspective by appreciating sensuous sound and its use of technologies for ends other than

aggressive control or warfare, rock music also seems to have loosened the static definition of

"femininity" and "masculinity" for women as well. As we shall see in both the San Francisco

scene and the rock press (parts one and two of this project, respectively), rock music did not

come up with a solution to gender inequalities in America, but it did provide aesthetic

experiences in which gender could be registered, addressed, explored, and investigated.

The ecstatic screams of the female audiences on the Byrds' "So You Want to Be a

Rock and Roll Star" remind us that rock music was capable of raising the issue of gender up

for consideration. But the screams did not issue forth an ideological program of any explicit

25
Dusty Street, "Foreword," Voices in the Purple Haze, x-xi.

63
sort. What they did was contribute to a song that explored the conundrums of democratic

identity and community in mass culture.

After the female screams grow and fade, the message of "So You Want to Be a Rock and

Roll Star" turns darker, hinting at the lack of happiness and fulfillment that the thrills of

mass cultural celebrity might bring. "What you paid for your riches and fame / Was it all a

strange game? You're a little insane / The money that came and the public acclaim / Don't

forget what you are, you're a rock and roll star."

Now the promise of power that rock stardom seemed to hold has been limited. Not

only money, but also public acclaim has made it impossible for the rock star to do anything

but "sell plasticware." If the Byrds wanted to bring other ideas, perspectives, and voices to

the public, the process of commercial fame has prevented their articulation. All the band can

do is sing "la, la, la, la, la" before their time is up and the pop song single fades out to as the

female audience screams once again.

The lyrics themselves are crucial to the inquiry that the Byrds make into the nature of

personhood in mass culture, of course, but this song is not a written text. The song is a

performance. The voices of Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman, and the other

Byrds sing in harmony, but their individual voices are also overdubbed countless times. This

causes the singing to take on an unearthly, angelic quality -- a kind of sonic sparkle -- that is

also oddly artificial, cold, disturbing, and even claustrophobic. The ever-so-slight variations

in pitch between the many unison tracks of McGuinn or Crosby's voices create this

emotional mood.

64
 Figure 0.7. Tom Donahue with his own daughter, Buzzy, in the KSAN radio booth, early
1970s (photograph: unknown, source: www.jive95.com)

One effect of this recording technique is to render subjectivity itself unclear. Who

exactly is the "you" who wants to become a rock and roll star? Are the voices meant to be

ringing in our heads -- subconscious utterances? Are the Byrds thinking back bitterly over

their own rise to stardom? Or are they singing about other groups, such as the Monkees, who

had risen to fame as more overtly commercial and manufactured responses to the Beatles by

the American entertainment industry? In the final verse, the voices break apart, echoing each

other, creating a dizzying effect, a rush of call-and-response that reinforces the ambiguity of

rock stardom conveyed by the lyrics. This stardom is at once tantalizing and stifling, hollow

and glamorous. Throughout the song, beneath the lyrics and other instruments, Chris

Hillman's electric bass guitar pushes on implacably, its timbre slightly distorted as it climbs

up and down chordal and chromatic arpeggios repeatedly, like a conveyor belt. The bass

guitar reinforces the lyrics. Once you decide you want to be a rock and roll star, you will not

be able to disintangle yourself from the wheels and gears of mass culture.

65
 This critique of mass culture's affect on public life and personal subjectivity is sharp

and stinging in "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star." Celebrity status, the limits of

commercial forms of art, the concert setting of scream girls who can only "tear apart" the

star in a ritual sacrifice rather than distinguish their individual voices or even form some sort

of collective identity other than a mass audience -- these all come under scrutiny in the

Byrds' song. Yet, the song joined the very process that it sought to critique. "So You Want to

Be a Rock and Roll Star" was a top twenty hit for the Byrds in 1967. Its energy and power

came from the very forces the song satirized and critiqued.

One might interpret "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star," then, as an attempt

to have one's celebrity cake and eat it too -- to enjoy pop stardom while disowning its

corruptions of purity and authenticity. But, heard on FM, the song might also have been

understood as a kind of reminder -- a public service announcement -- for listeners to keep in

mind the difficulty of seeking out a more libratory public life and personhood in the setting

of mass culture. "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" raises the complexities of mass

culture to awareness. The Byrds present a performance of the problems of public life and

individual autonomy from within the system of mass culture.

The music and lyrics together set out a mood of self-critique -- the Byrds are caught

up in the star-making machinery even as they try to escape it. Anyone who identifies with

them or finds the pleasures they describe alluring may also get caught up in the music

industry's wheels and gears. But, they can also participate in the song's consciousness of the

conditions of mass culture, in which freedom and power are at once available, yet full

individual or collective liberation is limited and contained. "So You Want to Be a Rock and

Roll Star" is an immanent critique, articulated from within mass culture and attracted to the

66
energy of mass culture, yet also harkening to an awareness of mass culture's shortcomings

and fallacies.

"Get Together": Linking the Soundscape of the Counterculture to Gathering Places

What kind of alternatives might one seek out in this context? As the Byrds' "So You

Want to Be A Rock and Roll Star" fades out to the soft stereo silence of FM radio waves,

Tom Donahue comes on the microphone. This portion of the aircheck seems to have been

recorded in May of 1971. "Well, folks, the Family Dog has got another big weekend of

entertainment for you," he explains. "If you've been waiting to see the Youngbloods,

tonight's the night. The Family Dog on the Great Highway is the place to go. They will be

there tonight and tomorrow night." In his announcement for the performance, Donahue links

the radio soundscape of rock music to an actual place of assembly -- the gathering site of the

Family Dog on the Great Highway. The linkage is crucial, establishing continuity between

mass-mediated collectivities and bodily gatherings.

Donahue's announcement connected the sonic imaginary to actual locations through

his advertisement for the concert. "Colored lights will be supplied by Temporary Optics,"

Donahue explains in his concert announcement. "Advanced sale tickets are three-fifty for

Friday and Saturday, only three dollars for Sunday. They may be purchased at all Roger

Calkins music stores, Music Odyssey on Geary Street, or just get yourself on out there

tonight. The Family Dog on the Great Highway, between Playland and the Cliff House,

across the street from the Pacific Ocean. Didn't that look beautiful today? Again, that's the

Youngbloods, Commander Cody, and Jeffrey Cain at the Dog, where you get yourself all

kinds of good times and good friends."

67
 Donahue does not attempt to hide the fact that the concert is a commercial venture.

But his commentary suggests that it is not merely a commercial experience. The concert

setting he describes reinforced a larger world beyond the band itself. Donahue not only

mentions the amusement park Playland and a reminder of San Francisco's Gold Rush

history, the Cliff House, but also the natural world: the Pacific Ocean. Moreover, Donahue

hints at how the concert can also allow audiences to establish new social connections. At the

Family Dog, attendees could discover "all kinds of good times and good friends," he notes.

The Family Dog at the Great Highway was, in fact, one of the more adventurous

ballrooms (see part one on the San Francisco scene). Run by Chet Helms, the performance

space ran all kinds of community events and artistic shows as well as featuring touring rock

bands. At such a site, the commercial and the civic overlapped. Commerce may have

compromised certain aspects of civic life. After all, one might listen to FM radio or attend

the Youngbloods' performance at the Family Dog without making any meaningful social

connections outside of purchasing a concert ticket. But, as radio broadcasts and performance

spaces of rock entwined in a continual dialectic of mass-mediated broadcasts, amplified

concerts, and audience gatherings, the marketplace also enabled a continual engagement

with a larger public and one's place in it.

After the concert announcement, Donahue plays the Youngbloods' hit song, "Get

Together." Previously recorded by the Jefferson Airplane, "Get Together" was written by

Dino Valenti, not a member of the either the Jefferson Airplane or the Youngbloods, but of

the San Francisco band Quicksilver Messenger Service, and prior to that a folksinger in the

Greenwich Village scene in New York. "Get Together" as performed by the Youngbloods

became a generational anthem for the counterculture only after it was re-released in 1969,

68
having appeared in a television public service announcement for the National Council of

Christians and Jews. The song was also on the soundtrack to the film Easy Rider that year.26

"Get Together," however, was anything but classically anthemic. Musically, it was a

modal dirge. The lyrics did not assert triumph, but rather posed the puzzle of locating

individual liberation within a collective context, much as the Byrds' "So You Want to Be a

Rock and Roll Star" had. The song's harmonic structure moved hypnotically back and forth

between a suspended A chord and a G major seven. The tentative twelve-string electric

guitar notes wound their arpeggiated tentacles around a snaking bass line over a dragging

half-time drum beat that -- in the chorus -- tumbled into a classic subdominant-dominant-

tonic folk-rock harmonic progression filled with major-chord hope. A second electric guitar

produced fluttering obbiglato between the singer's relaxed, almost-crooning tenor. The

instrumentation was reminiscent of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride." The sound also resonated

with the guitar style of the Byrds. The modal chord pattern and exploratory guitar solo was a

simplified pop form of Miles Davis's explorations in jazz songs such as "So What." The

music also resembled the Indian sitar raga style that many in the counterculture associated

with a renewed focus on spiritualism.

The song's production qualities were professional, orchestral even -- one could

picture the band recording in a cavernous, modern recording studio. The band has carefully

and thoughtfully arranged the composition, subtly altering the instrumentation in each verse

and chorus. The song is well-organized and full of space rather than chaotic and messy.

There is a sense of vulnerability to the music -- a sadness kept at bay, even a kind of blues

26
The Youngbloods, "Get Together," originally released on The Youngbloods (RCA Victor, 1967).

69
feel to the duet harmony singing. These two voices form a performative community of the

song's smiling brothers, especially in the last chorus, when the harmonizing singer emerges

from his notes below the lead singer, leaping to the fore with the exultation, "I said!" The

drums pick up speed with quarter-note cymbal crashes in a repetition of the chorus, and then

the song ends suddenly on the tonic chord, but with suspended notes leaving it unresolved.

Will people in fact be able to "get together"? The Youngbloods hope so, but the

music only poses the question. Similarly, the lyrics only present the puzzle of achieving

collective or individual liberation. They plead and urge the listener onward in confronting

this puzzle, but they do not propose a clear solution. Unlike a number of other

countercultural anthems, the lyrics do not even indicate that the solution is easy to discover.

"You hold the key to love and fear all in your trembling hand," lead singer Jesse Colin

Young sings, "Just one key unlocks them both, it's there at your command." This is a song

about the possible choices an individual makes in response to the emotional experiences of a

scary, mysterious world. Befitting an atomic age, there is a millennialism to the lyrics:

"When the one that left us here, returns for us at last." Death hovers throughout the song, and

mortality. "Some will come and some will go, we will surely pass." Once again, as with so

many rock songs, "Get Together" invites the listener to engage in a performance of self-

awareness and collective connection -- inquiry and choice in response to larger forces and

structures.

Other songs in Donahue's aircheck followed in this spirit of emotional and

intellectual investigation, maintaining the soundscape of the counterculture as a space in

which listeners moved fluidly between the private investigation of subjectivity and the

public possibilities of collective connection and embodied gathering locations. For instance,

70
songs such as Donovan's "Atlantis" imagined utopian worlds to which the counterculture

might imaginatively journey. Focusing on the confusing difficulties of contemporary times,

Ten Years After raised the problems of mass cultural society up for investigation in the

group's song, "I'd Love to Change the World."27 These songs maintained a countercultural

ethos of inquiry within the channels of mass culture.

"On the Road Again": The Soundscape of the Counterculture and Racial

Masquerading

Other selections by Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, and Canned Heat hinted at the

complex racial and class origins of rock as a genre.28 Canned Heat's "On the Road Again," in

particular, marked a countercultural attempt to connect disparate sounds in an unstable

mixture. Two self-styled blues scholars in Los Angeles, Alan Wilson and Bob Hite, formed

Canned Heat in 1965. Their biggest hit, "On the Road Again," merged the classic twelve-bar

blues form with a droning sitar, a harmonica, an electric guitar shimmering with a tremelo

effect, and Wilson's hauntingly high falsetto, itself patterned on the singing of the blues

musician Skip James.29

The lyrics and sound of "On the Road Again" alluded to rock's roots in African-

American music. But, as Nicholas Bromell argues, the song connected this appropriated

27
Donovan, "Atlantis," Barabajagal (Epic, 1969). Ten Years After, "I'd Love to Change the World,"
A Space in Time (Chrysalis, 1971).
28
For more on these origins, see, among the many histories of rock and roll, George Lipsitz, "Against
the Wind: Dialogic Aspects of Rock and Roll," in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
29
Canned Heat, "On the Road Again," Boogie With Canned Heat (Liberty, 1968). See Lipsitz,
"Against the Wind," for an analysis of the chronological links that rock provided to forms such as the blues.

71
tradition to the contemporary concerns of young Americans on the brink of adulthood.30

Even though the lyrics referred to the blues, with lines about setting out on the road alone in

some mythical American landscape of railroad tracks and hoboes, they were also filled with

a mood of uncertainty about leaving the security of one's family behind. The music is both

an escape to an imaginary world of adventure and an entrance into the anxieties of adjusting

to the world of adult America. "My dear mother left when I was quite young," Wilson sings.

"She said 'Lord, have mercy on my wicked son'." Here is a lyric filled with a combination of

abandonment, anger, and determination. The words are a classic blues trope, but also might

resonate with a young American man facing the threat of conscription to fight a war in

Vietnam that he might not necessarily support.

And the singer's identity as "wicked son" is most definitely male. However, because

of Wilson's high falsetto, the male protagonist of the song takes on a strange, uneasy gender

identity. Wilson sings about not having a, "woman just to call my special friend," and how if,

"I can't carry you, baby, gonna carry somebody else." But the voice offers a more ambiguous

performance of identity. Wilson's vocal performance raised questions about simplistic

definitions of masculinity and manliness. The voice performed -- and made available -- a

consciousness of its own posturing, an awareness of the mimetic nature of a young white

man attempting to sing the blues. If Wilson performs a kind of authenticity in "On the Road

Again," it is not direct, but rather layered in the performance itself with an awareness of its

30
Nicholas Bromell in particular suggests that the blues, an expressive form rooted in the disruptions
of African-American life by modernity in the first decades of the twentieth century, resembled the structure of
feeling that many middle-class, white adolescents felt in the 1950s and 1960s. See Bromell, Tomorrow Never
Knows, especially chapter two and appendix two.

72
own leaps across sonic markers of identity, skin color, and gender roles. Unloosed on the

airwaves of mass culture, this protagonist is a shape shifter.31

As Barry Shank argues about Bob Dylan's vocal appropriations of the African-

American blues singer "Blind" Lemon Jefferson, Wilson participated in a long-running

aesthetic practice that, simultaneously, emphasized the similarities and the differences

between markers of white and black musical authenticity. Canned Heat's "On the Road

Again," in other words, offered a performance rooted in the blackface minstrel tradition.

This performance tradition revolved around race, but incorporated other masquerades as

well, such as female impersonation. In blackface minstrelsy, the masks of race and gender

marked a process of what Eric Lott has famously called the "love and theft" of African-

American culture by a largely white, male, working-class culture.32

Despite its reassertions of power inequalities and essentialist stereotypes, this

tradition also includes a strong antifoundationalist tendency. By extending the use of racial

or gender masks to absurdist extremes, the blackface minstrel tradition not only reasserted

hierarchies of power based on one's identity, but also maintained a capacity to undermine

31
For more on issues of authenticity, see Kevin J.H. Dettmar and William Richey, eds., Reading Rock
and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and Mark
Mazullo, "Authenticity in Rock Music Culture" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 1999).
32
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995). For more on the blackface minstrel show and American culture, see Robert
Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977); Alexander Saxton, "Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology," American Quarterly 27 (1975): 3-
28; Robert Cantwell, "Tambo and Bones: Blackface Minstrelsy, the Opry, and Bill Monroe," in Bluegrass
Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984);
Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork: Early Blackface
Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998);
Annemarie Bean, Brooks McNamara, and James V. Hatch, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in
Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan
University Press, 1996).

73
stable demarcations of identity. The pleasures of pretending to be another -- and an other --

have subversive as well as coercive possibilities. As Shank explains, the blackface minstrel

tradition is complex enough, and central enough to popular and political culture in the

United States, to serve as an interpretive framework for everything from rock music to the

white participation in the civil rights movement.

On radio broadcasts such as Tom Donahue's show, the racial masquerade allowed

performers such Canned Heat's Alan Wilson -- as well as his listeners -- to revel in the

construction of artificial authenticities. To Shank, these constructed identities, if recognized

as simultaneously artificial and compelling, allow participants to recognize that identity is

neither entirely free, nor hopelessly essentialist. Instead, they allow us to perceive identity as

shaped both by large structures and individual struggles. Within the soundscape of the

counterculture, Wilson and Canned Heat's masquerading performance in the song "On the

Road Again" provided possible experience of the antifoundationalist as well as the dominant

power dimensions of racial and gender identity permutations.33

Echoing across the radio airwaves, the oddness of Wilson's high falsetto voice in

Canned Heat's "On the Road Again" -- which was echoed in tone and timbre by the sitar,

harmonica, and tremelo guitar -- opened up identity for consideration in an atmosphere of

both personal and public scrutiny. The fluttering of notes created an aesthetic form of

uncertainty. As the notes never quite resolved into stable tones, neither did the song's mood.

The sitar's endless drone built tension. Wilson's vocals, the harmonica, and the electric guitar

33
Barry Shank, "'That Wild Mercury Sound': Bob Dylan and the Illusion of America Culture,"
Boundary 2, 29 (Spring 2002): 97-123. For more on Shank's argument concerning autonomy, agency, and
authenticity, see Barry Shank, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Field of Cultural History," Intellectual History
Newsletter 23 (2001).

74
bent notes gently around the steady shuffle rhythm. The uncertainty of the music, combined

with the song's odd racial and gender masquerades, raised many questions: Was Wilson's

voice an old bluesman or a young imitator? Was the song's protagonist a confident, manly

tough guy or a lonely, vulnerable outsider? What era were we in when listening to this song?

To where did Wilson and Canned Heat's road lead?

As the sitar droned in the background and mingling notes with the harmonica, whole

continents were summoned into association with one another. The song sonically linked the

blues to the raga music of popular countercultural musicians such as Ravi Shankar, who

became celebrity symbols of alternate worldviews to dominant Cold War American

perspectives.34 Later in the aircheck, we hear a sitar again. This time it introduced a topical

public service announcement about the misappropriation of funds from George Harrison's

Concert for Bangladesh. Particular sounds on the radio, such as a sitar, could bring together

quite disparate elements.

On Tom Donahue's radio shows, the sitar became a sonic connector, a musical

marker of a larger public forum in which political matters might be raised for consideration.

As the sitar fluttered in the background, a representative from Leopold's Records asked

KSAN's listeners to write in protest about the lost charity funds from George Harrison's

concert, album, and film. Through the soundscape of the counterculture, then, the sitar

connected the feeling of the blues as expressed by Canned Heat in "On the Road Again" to

34
The counterculture's relationship to India and other parts of Asia in terms of questions of spirituality
and authenticity is highly problematic, of course, and worthy of close scrutiny. Among other explorations of
the topic, see Julie Stephens, "Consuming India," in Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and
Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Steve Waksman, "Heavy Music: Cock
Rock, Colonialism, and Led Zeppelin," in Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of
Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

75
the problematic politics of Bangladesh. Rock on the radio presented an atmosphere in which

the most intimate realms of life, such as one's feelings of being "on the road again," alone in

the world, might flow quickly into vast, complex histories of the blues and race, or into a

public event of world proportions, such as the relief effort for Bangladesh.

"On the Road Again," formed part of a countercultural soundscape -- a transformed

public sphere -- that mingled history with the present, the mythic South with a mythic

Orientalism with pressing political realities of the Third World. The song presented a

haunting voice and instrumental arrangement that was at once intimate and distant, a muted

whisper in the listener's ear that also faded into the distance, as Wilson and Canned Heat

travel out on the road without us, over the horizon at the edge of town.

Will we follow Wilson and Canned Heat "On the Road Again" or listen to them fade

into the air? The group's song only presented sonic associations for listeners to recognize,

assemble together, or, perhaps, reject on their own. As with other songs, "On the Road

Again" did not propose a program or a solution to issues of political or economic inequality

based on race or gender. It did not even reveal a solution to problems of cultural

appropriation. Instead, Canned Heat's song served as a resource. It was one formation in the

atmosphere of democracy generated by rock on the radio.

Songs such as "On the Road Again" sustained inquiry into the nature of identity.

Even if a listener was not familiar with the roots of rock in African-American expressive

culture, or with the spirituality of the exoticized East, he or she could enter into the journey

of "On the Road Again," and in the process could explore identity by utilizing the powerful

aesthetic innovations of the blues and raga as channeled through rock. Canned Heat's song

76
provided a shared forum that was intimate and collective simultaneously as it circulated on

the airwaves.

"What About Me?": The Soundscape of the Counterculture and State Power

By establishing an aesthetic form that bridges the private and the public, rock music

on the radio helped sustain the emotional and associational network that comprised the

soundscape of the counterculture. As I have been arguing, this was a soundscape that did not

offer clear solutions to contemporary dilemmas. Often, it even reinforced the larger

ideologies of the Cold War American mass consumerism in which it circulated. But just as

often, rock on the radio opened up spaces and processes for possible alternatives. This was

particularly true when Donahue's choice of music interacted with his spoken announcements

to maintain an atmosphere of inquiry.

For instance, toward the end of his show, Donahue announced that the Hog Farm, the

commune organized by Hugh "Wavy Gravy" Romney and others, would be holding a

political gathering that weekend to advocate for the legalization of marijuana in California.

The event, Donahue explained, would be held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Linking his announcement, and the actual political gathering, to the soundscape of rock on

the radio, Donahue sets up the announcement by playing the Dino Valeni-penned song

"What About Me," performed by Valenti and Quicksilver Messenger Service. The song once

again positions the individual within the setting of Cold War consumer America. However,

this time not only the marketplace, but also the state becomes part of the story. "I smoke

marijuana," Valenti sings in one part of the song, "But I can't get behind your wars / And

77
most of what I do believe is against most of your laws."35

The music's production quality is dreamy, distant, almost narcotic. But at the same

time, Valenti's voice leaps forth with urgency, even desperation. Over a simple harmonic

progression and steady mid-tempo beat layered with acoustic guitar, conga drums, and flute,

Valenti, who himself served time in prison for drug possession, sings of a world poisoned

and polluted by the powerful elites of American society. He sings of the need to take a stand

for what he believes, and seeks solidarity among those who the powerful also have started to

"shoot down," a reference perhaps to the Kent State student shootings by the National Guard

in Ohio during 1970, and other acts of violent repression against the participants in the

protest movements of the 1960s.

Like the songs on Marvin Gaye's masterpiece from the same era, What's Goin' On,

Valenti and Quicksilver Messenger Service's "What About Me" links rock music on the

radio to questions of political power and conflict -- even to revolution. "I live just like an

outlaw and I'm always on the run," Valenti sings. "And though you may be stronger now, my

time will come around / You keep adding to my numbers as you shoot my people down."

The song joins the public atmosphere of rock on the radio -- especially as it interacted with

other songs and public service announcements about the problems of mass society and

individual identity within consumer culture and a state apparatus that maintained a war in

Vietnam and repression on the home front in the face of growing unrest.

35
Quicksilver Messenger Service, "What About Me," What About Me (One Way, 1970).

78
Incorporated, But Still Critical: A Psychedelic Signoff

The public atmosphere of rock existed within the structures of commerce. Rock was

fundamentally a product of mass consumerism, as were the technologies of FM radio in the

late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet, rock on the radio also sustained -- even expanded -- a

mobile sphere of inquiry and debate. As Stuart Hall wrote in the late 1960s, "Hippies, who

are the heirs of the mass media revolution, have an intrinsic feel for the existence of these

channels, and are highly communications-conscious." To Hall, participants in the

counterculture, "have created a quite complex substructure of communications networks, in

radio stations which have been colonized, as well as in the host and variety of underground

newspapers and little magazines." Hall noted that, "news appears to travel by means of this

modern 'bush-telegraph' from one Hippie community to another, both across the country and

between continents." Analyzing this situation, Hall concluded that, "There is a sense, then, in

which the Hippie attempt to transcend the social controls exerted through official control of

the mass media is also an attempt to transcend, by incorporation, the technology and

infrastructure of a media-oriented society."36

Hall argues that the counterculture of hippies attempted to "transcend, by

incorporation" the larger mass-mediated and consumer culture of the late 1960s and 1970s.

But, rock on the radio proved unable to transcend its larger technological setting. Instead, it

possessed the capacity to generate a space of heightened consciousness and inquiry, as well

as feelings of fun and pleasure. As we shall see in the performance spaces of San Francisco,

the rock music press, and even in the war zone of Vietnam, participants in the mobile and

36
Stuart Hall, "The Hippies: an American Movement," in Student Power, ed. Julian Nagel (London:
Merlin Press, 1969), 180-181.

79
fluid soundscape of the counterculture used rock to negotiate the ambiguous overlaps

between the intimate and the collective, the civic and the commercial, the personal and

political.

Rock music as a form of mass culture generated these new responses and

interactions. In their responses, rock's listeners and participants tried to forge a civic culture

out of rock's sonic suggestiveness, out of its strange presence and absence in their everyday

lives. From its place within the flow of mass culture, rock created bubbles and ruptures of

alternative possibilities. These were elusive possibilities, crackles of disturbance in the larger

circuitry of mass culture rather than achievements of programmatic political change. Often,

the possibilities that rock music on the radio suggested were so odd as to be absurd. How

could a radically new public life take place within the alienating context of what many

participants in the counterculture referred to as the "plastic" of mass mediation and mass

consumption? And yet, in its very awareness, even its celebration of this absurd situation,

rock music on the radio also managed to foster an atmosphere of inquiry deep in mass

culture's crass processes.

Right in the belly of the beast of Cold War state repression, a vibrant public energy

crackled in the radio-filled air. Rock music linked the individual sonic experiences of

individuals to the most profound levels of political and spiritual collective liberation. Or, as

Tom Donahue put it at the end of his aircheck: "Well, that's all for tonight.... And that's the

way it was and that's the way it is and it's always changing and it's always the same." You

can almost hear his lips breaking into a smile through the microphone as he pauses, perhaps

turning to his wife Rachael in the booth to post the rhetorical question: "How's that for

psychedelic?"

80
 Part One -
Dancing Around Rock: The San Francisco Scene and the Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere

The heads were amazed at how big their own ranks had become -- and euphoric over
the fact that they could come out in the open... - Tom Wolfe1

How then to open the avenue of great debates, accessible to the majority, while yet
enriching the multiplicity and the quality of public discourses, of evaluating agencies,
of 'scenes' or places of visibility? - Jacques Derrida2

The sound is also a scene. - Time, June 23, 19673

In the June 23, 1967 issue of Time, a photograph allowed the magazine's readers to

peer into San Francisco's new rock music venue: the Fillmore Auditorium (see figure 1.1).

The Jefferson Airplane performed, a sea of bodies before them. In front of the stage,

audience members gazed up into the lights, perhaps high on marijuana or lysergic acid

diethylamide, better known as LSD, or simply as acid. Further away in the darkness, dancers

seemed to turn every which way, moving by themselves or with others. Most noticeably, the

light show dwarfed the musicians, the music equipment, and the audience. On large screens

behind the band, projections of color pulsated. Within these colorful swirls, images of the

Jefferson Airplane themselves appeared, leaking beyond the screens to cover the walls and

1
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968), 275.
2
Jacques Derrida, "La démocratie ajournée," L'Autre Cap (Paris: Minuit, 1991), 103, quoted in Bruce
Robbins, Introduction to The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), xii.
3
No author, "Show Business" column, Time, 23 June 1967, 54.
ceiling, bleeding over the audience and band. In psychedelic lettering, the band's name,

"Jefferson Airplane," floated ambiguously between light show and actual auditorium space.

Figure 1.1. Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium, October 9, 1966; this photograph
appeared in Time magazine, June 23, 1967 (photograph: George Hall)

"The Airplane is the anointed purveyor of the Sound Francisco Sound," the

accompanying article declared. But what was this "San Francisco Sound" exactly? Noting

that the "sound is also a scene," Time linked the rock music of the Jefferson Airplane to "a

heady mixture of blues, folk, and jazz that began as the private expression of the hippie

underground and only recently bubbled to the surface." With a group such as Jefferson

Airplane, Time suggested, rock had gone public. What had been a "private expression of the

hippie underground" had "bubbled to the surface." This occurred not only as a new

combination of musical genres, "a heady mixture of blues, folk, and jazz," but as a social

82
phenomenon, a "reflection of the defiant new bohemians, their art nouveau and madly mod

fashions."

"Now," the article continued, "in such cavernous San Francisco halls as the Fillmore

and the Avalon Ballroom, as well as in roller skating rinks, movie theaters, veterans' halls,

park bandstands, college gyms and roped-off streets from Pacific Heights to Butchertown,

300 bands are inviting the faithful to 'blow your mind' with the new sound." Through

musical performances, among other activities, the "hippie underground" seemed to be taking

over public spaces in San Francisco. In doing so, it drew attention from a larger circuit of

mass-mediated entities, such as Time, which were nationally and globally distributed. By the

end of 1967's famous Summer of Love, perhaps 75,000 countercultural participants had

settled in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood alone, with thousands more passing through San

Francisco.4 Still millions more participated vicariously through the publicity generated by

news reports, kitsch paraphernalia, and chart-topping pop songs such as Scott Mackenzie's

"San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)."5 The San Francisco sound and the

San Francisco scene interacted to make the city a foundational site of the counterculture and

a place where a new sort of public sphere crackled within the electronic flow of mass

cultural technologies.6

4
Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Rolling Stone/Random House Press,
1984), 245.
5
Scott MacKenzie, "San Francisco (Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)," Single released
by Epic/MCA Records, June 10, 1967. The song rose to number four on the Billboard chart in 1967. Written by
John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.
6
The puzzling relationship between sound and scene has been taken up by scholars examining more
recent settings. See Barry Shank, Dissonant Identities: The Rock 'n' Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1994) and Will Straw, "Systems of Articulation,
Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music," Cultural Studies 5, 3 (October 1991): 368-388;

83
 Almost forty years later, this Time photograph offers us another chance to peek into

the Fillmore Auditorium so that we can begin to perceive how this happened and what it

meant. In the photograph, we see machine-generated light, color, and sound surround the

audience. Bodies and electricity collide in the performance of rock music. Actual place and

representational culture intersect at a level of intensity perhaps never before experienced in

popular culture. As the typographical letters "Jefferson Airplane" appear to migrate between

light-show images of the group and the band performing live, the clear distinction between

embodiment and representation suddenly seems less certain.

The unsettling of this boundary between inhabited place and electronic mediation is

crucial to the transformation of the public sphere in the 1960s counterculture. By placing

embodiment and representation in a back-and-forth dialectic, rock music performance in San

Francisco generated a liminal space. "Once I saw the Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore

playing in front of a huge wall on which was projected a film of the Airplane playing at the

Fillmore on a previous occasion!" the journalist Ralph Gleason, Jr. exclaimed. For Gleason,

occasions such as this created, "the illusion of a total environment, a kind of rock 'n' roll

space capsule in which the lights on the walls (sometimes on three walls and ceiling) and on

the crowd on the floor give a totally unearthly impression to the proceedings."7 In Gleason's

"rock 'n' roll space capsule," participants simultaneously joined in the immediacy of a "total

environment" and found themselves lifted off into an "unearthly" setting of electronic

reprinted as "Communities and Scenes in Popular Music," in The Subcultures Reader, eds. Ken Gelder and
Sarah Thornton (New York: Routledge, 1997).
7
Ralph Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound (New York: Ballantine,
1969), 64.

84
mediation through sound and light. In venues such as the Fillmore Auditorium, they traveled

back and forth between embodiment and mediation.

Making music, listening, dancing, experiencing assaults of light and sound, creating

posters, remembering their entrances into the performative space of rock, participants were

able to address possibilities for -- and the problems of -- an embodied public life within the

disembodying technologies and structures of Cold War mass culture.8 As one person active

in San Francisco's music concerts noted, "young people today are torn between the insanity

and the advances of the electronic age."9 Rock concerts were leisure activities that, to this

participant, resonated with the tension between the frightening dilemmas and the utopian

promise of mass society.10

Arising in the interstices between family, market, and state, rock's performance

spaces helped constitute a new sort of postmodern public life. This public life had qualities

of what Michael Warner, elaborating on the theories of Jürgen Habermas, calls a

counterpublic: "A counterpublic enables a horizon of opinion and exchange; its exchanges

remain distinct from authority and can have a critical relation to power; its extent is in

principle indefinite, because it is not based on a precise demography but mediated by print,

8
For more on the concept of the liminal, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic
Action in Human Society (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975) and From Ritual to Theatre: The
Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).
9
Luria Castell, quoted in Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 3.
10
The dialectic of embodiment and mass-mediation was central to the ideas of Marshall McLuhan.
His optimistic opinion of the results of electronic connection was perhaps one reason why his work resonated
with many participants in the counterculture. See Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, co-ordinated by
Jerome Agel, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Random House, 1967) and War and Peace in the Global
Village: An inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More
Feedforward (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1968).

85
theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and the like."11 The nature of rock's

counterpublic in San Francisco could be alternately immediate and elusive: manifesting itself

palpably, then vanishing into the larger circulation of mass culture.

Because rock music performances moved so rapidly between embodiment and mass-

mediation in venues such as the Fillmore, we might also think of them as fostering a

"phantom public sphere," following Bruce Robbins's creative rethinking of Walter

Lippmann's seemingly bleak concept. In San Francisco, rock music generated what Robbins

describes as, "a concept of the public that would not be shielded from the unauthentic taint of

publicity...a concept of the public that might respond to the irreducible diversity (and the

new connectedness) of identity politics...a concept of the public that would be adequate to

the connectedness of power, the politically unpromising consumer of global capitalism."12

Conceiving of rock music performances in San Francisco as, simultaneously, a

"counterpublic" and a "phantom public sphere" begins to clarify the nature of the

counterculture in the 1960s as manifested around rock music. The strange appearance of a

sound that was also a scene in San Francisco casts the counterculture in a new light.

Observers have tended either to celebrate the counterculture as a radical break with the

mainstream mass culture of the Cold War era or they have critiqued it as a manifestation of

false consciousness that neither transcended mass consumerism, nor provided a sustainable

program for social change.13 What these opposing positions miss are the ways in which the

11
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 56.
12
Bruce Robbins, "Introduction" to The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1993). Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
13
For the foundational book of the pro-countercultural interpretation, see Theodore Roszak, The
Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1968;

86
counterculture marked an en-counter with the processes and technologies of mass society. In

San Francisco, participants faced the possibilities and the problems of what Michael Warner

calls "the mass public and the mass subject."14 In doing so, they constituted a counterculture

that was not a monolithic entity unified by one ideological position; instead, the radical swirl

of musical sounds, light show projections, dancing bodies, and a dizzying iconography of

historical, natural, and mystical symbols generated a fleeting public sphere.

In this ambiguous space at the edge of family, state, and market, a multiplicity of

perspectives arose. Not only in language, but in appropriations of electronics, religion,

psychoactive drugs, the rediscovered spaces of the deindustrializing city, the ephemera of

popular culture, poster-art iconography, and perhaps most importantly, in the erotics of

dancing bodies, participants engaged many issues key to public life: intimacy and

collectivity, immediacy and distance, community and otherness, the supposedly mundane

and the grand-historical. Their activities helped constitute a public sphere that seemed to

flicker in and out of existence, much like they themselves did in the strobe lights of the

psychedelic dance floor. This public sphere acquired a "phantom" quality, affected as it was

by the etherealization of mass-cultural, electronic technologies such as light shows,

psychoactive drugs, and the amplified music at the heart of the performance spaces. The

flickering public of the counterculture -- as created in and around San Francisco's sound and

scene -- became oddly secret and accessible all at once, a phenomenon that offered a special

reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For a more recent example of the critique of the
counterculture, see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of
Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
14
Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed.
Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); also in The Phantom Public Sphere, 234-256 (citation page
numbers are from this version of the essay). See also Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

87
kind of membership, easily acquired (especially in its more commodified forms) but always

capable at any moment of penetrating deep to the core of individual identity and shared

affiliation.

Photographs of San Francisco psychedelia hint at the public sphere that erupted

within the amplified sound waves of rock music: dancing bodies are simultaneously

illuminated and obscured as they move through the lights, colors, and sounds of the

psychedelic ballroom (see figure 1.2). Embodiment and mediation in San Francisco's

performance spaces created a liminal space that fostered a counterpublic. But this

counterpublic was also, in the Cold War era of mass culture, a phantasmagoric public.

Arising both in the interstices of family, market, and state and in the cross-currents of

electronic circulation, this public manifested the civics of rock: a process through which

participants utilized musical performance to raise and address questions of individual

identity and social interaction in their mass-mediated, mass consumer context.

The efforts of participants to forge a sense of engagement and interaction in the San

Francisco sound are worth reconsidering. They were neither the creation of a utopian, face-

to-face, monolithic community, nor a ruse of corporately-manipulated, mass-mediated

alienation. The lifeworld that gave rise to rock music and received its reverberations must be

studied outside of these distorting dichotomies. Behind the historical smoke screen of "you-

had-to-be-there" jokes about marijuana use, hiding within a tiresome kaleidoscope of fading

tie-dye, past the era's resultant casualties and failures that now, with hindsight, seem so

obviously avoidable, lurks the appearance of a new sort of public sphere worth

understanding better.

88
 Figure 1.2. The Trips Festival, January 22, 1966 (photograph: Rod Mann)

Happy Halloween, 1966

Around dinnertime on Monday, October 31, 1966 -- Halloween -- the San Francisco

Diggers began their "Full Moon Public Celebration" with a gathering at the corner of Haight

and Masonic Streets in San Francisco's burgeoning new Haight-Ashbury hippie district.

Taking the name of a group of seventeenth-century anti-property English radicals, the

Diggers had broken off from the already radical San Francisco Mime Troupe to pursue even

more edgy guerilla street theater and political activism. The Diggers, however, were not the

only ones up to something that Halloween night. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were

to hold their "Acid Test Graduation" at the Calliope Company Warehouse in a seedy

downtown warehouse in the skid row South of Market neighborhood. Meanwhile, the

Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Mimi Fariña were to perform at a

89
costume party that the Calliope Company itself had organized: the "Dance of Death" at

California Hall, one of San Francisco's moribund vaudeville era ballrooms recently revived

by rock dances. It was to be a busy night for hippies eager to dance, take drugs, mingle, and

explore what a number of commentators were calling a revolutionary new culture.15

At 5:30 p.m., following directions on leaflets handed out by the Diggers, "Public

Nonsense Nuisance Public Essence Newsense Public News," participants played the

"intersection game." They interrupted car traffic in what Haight-Ashbury resident and

historian Charles Perry called a "translation of the civil rights sit-in technique directed

against automobiles, and at the same time a terrific goof."16 When a police man approached

to break up the event, threatening arrest for creating a public nuisance, he chose to address

one of the Diggers' giant puppets, since noone else seemed to be in charge of the event. "I

declare myself the public," the puppet responded. "I am the public. The streets are public, the

streets are free." Thrown in a paddy wagon along with their puppet, the Diggers and various

participants in the "Full Moon Public Celebration" chanted "public, public" and sang the

Italian anarchist song "Avanti Populi" on their way to the police station house.17

Raising questions about property, ownership, and the rules of public space, the

Diggers moved ideas taken from avant-garde theater and art happenings to the streets,

practicing what the New York artist Allan Kaprow called "the blurring of art and life."18

Like the Diggers, Ken Kesey, the leader of the Merry Pranksters, drew upon a past in theater
15
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 102-105.
16
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 104.
17
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 104-105.
18
Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).

90
at the University of Oregon. Before he wrote his bestselling novel, One Flew Over the

Cuckoo's Nest, and before he and his friends took their private experiments with LSD public

in various "Acid Test" parties during 1965 and 1966, Kesey had traveled to Hollywood with

the idea of becoming an actor and movie star.19 He was also influenced by the happenings

staged in the early 1960s by George Stern, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, and others in

the North Beach bohemian neighborhood of San Francisco.20 The "Acid Test Graduation"

on Halloween night in 1966, which attracted plenty of mass media attention but only an

audience of roughly 200 participants, took on a theatrical air as Neal Cassady, Beat

Generation hero of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and driver of the Merry Pranksters'

psychedelic bus, known as Fuurther, transformed the age-old Commencement Exercise -- a

kind of civic event in of itself -- into a strange, absurd, psychedelic environment.21

We know more about these two events -- the Diggers' street theater and the

Pranksters' Acid Graduation -- than we do about the Calliope Company's Dance of Death

costume party, which also had an air of the theatrical according to participant and historian

Charles Perry. The dance advertised "six authentic witches," and during the Quicksilver

Messenger Service's performance of the song "Bo Diddley," a Giant Pumpkin wheeled a

character known as Death, dressed in a Louis XIV red brocade jacket, around California

Hall.22 But what is likely is that the Dance of Death wound up drawing the largest audience

among the Halloween events. If avant-garde theater and notions of the theatrical fostered by
19
Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 36.
20
Kesey mentions the North Beach happenings in Bill Graham and Robert Greenfield, Bill Graham
Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 138.
21
Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 389-430; Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 103.
22
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 102.

91
psychedelic drugs formed a foundational role in the formation of the "San Francisco Scene,"

the Dance of Death suggests that music concerts increasingly seemed to motor the scene's

growth.

Figure 1.3. Poster for the "Dance of Death" Costume Ball, California Hall, October 31, 1966
(artist: unknown, courtesy: www.wolfgangsvault.com)

The imagery of the "Dance of Death" hints at why rock music became a central

generator of the San Francisco sound that was also a scene. Musical performance helped

power and sustain a public sphere that arose from the ability to combine a dizzying range of

references into a single event. The rhythms of "Bo Diddley" -- a song of male braggadocio

and swampland mojo-mysticism set to an ancient African-American hambone rhythm but

channeled through a raw, electrified, 1950s clang, made famous by a rock and roll icon and

now played by a young, white group of musicians in the Quicksilver Messenger Service --

pulled participants into and out of the moment of the concert. The song was at once a cover

92
version of the past even as it cycled endlessly -- boom boom boom bomp-bomp! boom boom

boom bomp-bomp! -- toward the future.

Dressed in costumes to celebrate Halloween, a two-thousand year old pagan holiday

that had also become increasingly commodified by American mass culture, participants

created a festive atmosphere in which imagery from Mexican religious folklore mingled with

costuming from the height of the French monarchy.23 A gag as artificial yet joyous as the

presence of "six authentic witches" and the parade of the character "Death" in a Louis XIV

red brocade jacket seemed to signify the emergence of a new life in San Francisco. The

death of death, enacted symbolically at the "Dance of Death," was yet another symbolic

announcement by participants that San Francisco was becoming the locus and focus for the

publicizing of a new life.

Staged by the Calliope Company, a theatrical group named for a steam pipe organ

and referencing the Greek Muse of Eloquence, the "Dance of Death" transformed California

Hall into a temporary public sphere in which participants could experience the back-and-

forth between embodiment and disembodiment. The atmosphere of such dances emphasized

immediacy of time and place, but they also referenced a dizzying range of historical and

geographical narratives, symbols, and allegories. They provided a chance to enter into a

dance that dramatized the very real prospects for life and death in an era when the growing

violence of the Civil Rights movement and the emerging shadow of the Vietnam War were

increasingly and directly affecting the lives of young Americans.24 Simultaneously, rock

23
Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002).
24
For investigations of the urge to experience "real" life in the 1960s, see Alice Echols, "Hope and
Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury," in Shaky Ground: The '60s and Its Aftershocks (New York: Columbia

93
dance-concerts such as the "Dance of Death" distanced participants from "real" life,

generating moments of self-alienation through loud music, surreal rites, extensive watching

and being watched in public, psychoactive drug-taking, and an artsy version of the

erotically-charged gatherings that had become traditions among American teenagers since

the 1920s.25

This collapsing dialectic of embodiment and disembodiment echoes Michael

Warner's theory of the mass public sphere, where, because of the continual interplay between

actual engagement and mediated interaction, "a fundamental feature...is this double

movement of identification and alienation."26 Writing about more recent phenomena, Warner

roots this "double movement" in the unresolved contradictions of the bourgeois class's

uneasy place between egalitarian politics and status-driven market processes; he notes the

ways in which the public sphere has the ability to exclude as well as include people in a

social body. At the center of a countercultural public sphere in San Francisco, rock music

presaged many of Warner's observations. To understand what was at stake in the public life

generated at events such as the "Dance of Death" requires a deeper contextualization of the

locale and the music.

University Press, 2002); also see Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and
the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
25
Dances drew upon happenings and performance art in the avant-garde art world: see Sally Banes,
Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1993). For more on the urban culture of public display and watching, see Christine Stansell, American
Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000).
Among other works on the history of youth culture in the United States, see Paula Fass, The Damned and the
Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) and Lewis Erenberg,
Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
26
Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," 252.

94
Staging the Dance: Background on San Francisco and the Bay Area

The history of San Francisco made it a particularly potent location in which to

experience the electronic age's dissonances. As a port city and the terminus for cross-

continental railroad travel, San Francisco was at once linked to a worldwide circuit of people

and culture, yet many also perceived it as the end of the line. Both linked into global

networks and conceptualizing itself as a frontier outpost on the margins, San Francisco had,

since the nineteenth-century, been alternatively tolerant of Americans with experimental,

bohemian, eccentric leanings and a violent place of conflict and tension. In either mode, the

city had amassed a vibrant cross-section of cultures, ethnicities, and religions.27

By the mid-twentieth century, progressive labor unions were active, but often with

strongly anarchist, libertarian emphases.28 The Beat Generation of the 1950s had strong roots

in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood, and the famous Six Galleries poets reading of

1956 -- which featured Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and others, with

longtime Bay Area bohemian Kenneth Rexroth officiating the event and Jack Kerouac

cheering on the poets over a jug of red wine -- had taken place in San Francisco.29 Students

27
Gary Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of
California, 2001); Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San
Francisco, 1850-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy
and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987); Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld (1933;
reprint, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002).
28
David T. Wellman, The Union Makes Us Strong: Radical Unionism on the San Francisco
Waterfront (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
29
Richard Candida-Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995); Preston Whaley Jr., Blows Like a Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz, Style, and
Markets in the Transformation of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); James
Campbell, This Is the Beat Generation: New York-San Francisco-Paris (Berkeley: University of California

95
politics centered around the Civil Rights movement for African-Americans and issues of free

speech exploded in the Bay Area during the early 1960s in protests against hearings of the

House on Un-American Activities (HUAC) held in San Francisco in 1962, efforts to

desegregate the Sheraton Palace Hotel in 1964, and the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at

Berkeley in 1964.30

Equally significant, by the mid-1960s, was that the bohemian, progressive cultural

side of San Francisco had been lifted up and transformed by a massive economic infusion of

jobs, industry, and research into the Bay Area -- most of which was supported by the federal

government's Cold War expansions. A place of stunning beauty, with a Mediterranean

climate and a tradition of easy-going, tolerant attitudes among portions of its populace, the

Bay Area retained a well-honed anti-East Coast-Establishment mood, but it had increasingly

become a powerful node in the modern network of the Cold War's military-industrial and

military-academic complexes emanating from Washington, D.C.31

Popular music had its place in the San Francisco area too. Disc Jockey Tom

Donahue, who would go on to organize the first "underground" FM rock radio station,

organized large concerts at the Cow Palace. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and countless other

groups performed. The folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s had an active

Press, 2001); Ann Charters, Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? (New York: Penguin,
2001).
30
W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley At War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960); Robert
Cohen and Reginald E. Zelnik, eds., The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); David Lance Goines, The Free Speech Movement: Coming of
Age in the 1960s (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1993); Jo Freeman, At Berkeley in the 60s: The Education of an
Activist, 1961-1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
31
Roger Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San
Deigo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); Rebecca Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The
Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

96
outpost in the college towns of Berkeley and Palo Alto and in the bohemian San Francisco

neighborhood of North Beach -- coffeehouses brought musicians and listeners together;

Berkeley held an annual folk festival beginning in the mid-1950s; Joan Baez, first lady of

sorts in the folk revival, grew up in Palo Alto.

A network of bars and live music venues stretched across the Bay Area as well.

Musicians who would eventually become central figures in the psychedelic ballroom scene,

such as Jerry Garcia, floated through all of these worlds. Garcia's Grateful Dead was, in

earlier incarnations, a folksy jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, then

a raw blues bar band known as the Warlocks. Donahue went on to open a proto-psychedelic

club in the seedy strip club strip of North Beach called Mothers in 1965. Marty Balin of the

Jefferson Airplane opened a similar club called the Matrix in the Marina District that same

year.32

Staging the Music: The Sound of Acid-Rock

The music that arose in San Francisco would ultimately be labeled psychedelic-rock

or acid-rock. As musicologists Sheila Whiteley and Michael Hicks have noted, this style of

music did encompass certain common elements, which Whiteley outlines as manipulation of

timbres (blurred/bright/overlapping), upward movement (connoting "psychedelic flight"),

harmonies (oscillating/lurching), rhythms (regular/irregular), relationships

32
Among other sources on the history of popular music in San Francisco, see Joel Selvin, Summer of
Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love and High Times in the Wild West (New York: Dutton,
1994).

97
(foreground/background), and collages (compared to "normal" treatments).33 The sounds of

San Francisco bands actually varied quite widely: the lazy, strumming, jangling country-rock

of the Charlatans; the loopy folk of Country Joe and the Fish; Jefferson Airplane's loud,

rocket-like but well-crafted songs; Santana's Latin-inflected rock; Sly and the Family Stone's

hyperactive soul and funk; the Grateful Dead's rhythm and blues combined with flights of

improvisational strangeness. One might also include the many area bands that never gained

as much popularity: the Loading Zone, the Sopwith Camel, the Great Society, the Daily

Flash, the Anonymous Artists of America, to name a few.

What much of the music shared was a certain sonic quality shaped, in large part, by

the interaction of psychoactive drug use, improvisation rooted in the blues, country music,

and bluegrass, and experiments with electronic amplification. The music was for dancing,

but not for the precise, virtuosic movements of couple swing dancing; rather the music

meandered, full of dynamics that increased in intensity, then subsided, offering a setting for

new forms of dancing. Loud, exploratory, often producing surprising, strange electronic

sounds that hinted at either Arabic or Indian scales on the guitar or at space-age jet-engines,

but tending to return to the steady, insistent rock and roll beat in the rhythm sections,

psychedelic rock seemed to ask participants to reconsider relationships of the external and

internal, the foreign and the familiar, the transcendent and the bodily, the other and the self.

33
Sheila Whiteley, The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counter-Culture (New York:
Routledge, 1992); Michael Hicks, Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999). For more on psychedelic rock as a genre, see Jim Derogatis, Kaleidoscope
Eyes: Psychedelic Rock from the 60s to the 90s (New York: Carol, 1996); republished as Turn On Your Mind:
Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock (New York: Hal Leonard, 2003). Also see, Richtie Unterberger,
Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock (San Francisco: Backbeat Books,
2003).

98
 Rock critic Sandy Darlington, listening to the Grateful Dead at the Santa Clara

Fairgrounds in 1968, articulated the experience of psychedelic music in San Francisco quite

well: "Most bands hit a song fast, then stretch out for a while, ending up with a bang. The

Dead go into a song slowly, tentatively, and build up an atmosphere until everyone is inside

the music. Then they take off, exploring the figures over and over again with that super

rhythm section." Darlington noted that, "If you're outside it, it can be boring. But when they

get to you, it's incredible and hypnotic, as if the music was happening inside you."34

What is important to note about Darlington's comments is that they suggest the ways

in which the experience of psychedelic music in the San Francisco scene opened up a

channel between internal constructions of the self and perceptions of the external world:

especially the social world of other people. "When they get to you, it's incredible and

hypnotic, as if the music was happening inside you," Darlington declared. Darlington was

aware of how the music was "getting to him," yet he also felt it was "happening inside."

Darby Slick, guitarist for the Great Society, articulated a similar sense of psychedelic rock.

"When music is really happening, it creates a new world, or even a new universe. Time, in

the normal sense, seems to disappear, and the 'now' opens up and becomes all-pervasive.

Notes, riffs, chords, and rhythms become elements that make up the world."35 This sonic

world felt like it had transformative powers. Remembering a jam with guitarist Jerry Garcia

and drummer Bill Kreutzman of the Grateful Dead, Slick recalled that, "When it built to its

34
Sandy Darlington, "What'll You Boys Have? She Asked. Raw Meat, They Answered," in Rock and
Roll Will Stand, ed. Greil Marcus (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 71.
35
Darby Slick, Don't You Want Somebody To Love: Reflections on the San Francisco Sound
(Berkeley: SLG Books, 1991), 61.

99
huge crescendo, and then it was over, I felt like a different person than when I started; inner,

soul, values became more important, and outer, nervous matters, less."36

This transformative quality in psychedelic music -- the way it seemed to construct or

reveal a whole other mode of social experience, a new space or world or universe at once

external and internal, interacting with other people yet affecting deeply-rooted senses of the

self -- echoed the turn by avant-garde theater groups such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe

or experimental gangs such as Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters toward critiquing and

reworking both individual identity and collective affiliation. But as the 1960s progressed, the

music seemed increasingly to define a larger social world -- the sound was also a scene, as

Time put it -- while theater receded into the background. Why was this so?

Immersion and Aloneness: The Mass Public and the Mass Subject In the Psychedelic

Dance

As William Michael Doyle, Bradford Martin, and Charles Perry have noted, avant-

garde theater played a crucial underlying role in San Francisco.37 But music diverged from

the theatrical innovations of the Mime Troupe, Kesey, and others, even as it retained

residues of ideas first put forth in theatrical form. Popular music, as compared to avant-garde

theater, had a different relationship to the countercultural public sphere. While avant-garde

theater could mount aesthetic-political acts in particular spaces, popular music -- even when
36
Slick, Don't You Want Somebody, 62.
37
Michael William Doyle, "Staging the Revolution: Guerrilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice,
1965-1968," in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, eds. Peter Braunstein and
William Michael Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002); Bradford Martin, The Theater Is in the Street: Politics
and Performance in Sixties America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). One of the best
interpretations of what happened in San Francisco draws upon theories of the theatrical: see Charles Perry's
chapter, "What Was That?," in The Haight-Ashbury, 245-281.

100
performed in a particular place -- tended to summon up larger aesthetic and political

questions of intimacy and publicness in mass society as a whole. Theatrical groups such as

the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Living Theater, the Diggers, and others moved off the

stage and into audience interaction in attempts to recover -- or better said create -- a sense of

lost community; avant-garde theater sought to return audiences to small scale, face-to-face

interactions. Rock music retained the residue of this aesthetic politics, but its performance

spaces did not seek to recover face-to-face encounters; rather the music in performance

tended to turn toward aesthetic meditations on and encounters with the technological, the

mass, the new, the futuristic.

In short, if avant-garde theater in performance sought to recover a sense of the lost

idyllic village, then rock music in performance sought to confront and reimagine the modern

city. Theater brought participants into their bodies in particular places; rock music

transformed performance spaces into arenas that seemed to transcend place. Theater insisted

on the direct; rock music could be direct, but also was mediated by amplification and the

non-linguistic. If theater sought to transform passive audiences into a community, rock

music tended to foster situations in which audiences became hypersensitized strangers. This

is what made rock music's performance spaces peculiar sites of the civic in which

individuals and groups negotiated issues of the public and the intimate in an aesthetic

microcosm of mass society as a whole.

Rock's dance halls, often in deindustrialized lofts and factories or decaying

vaudeville theaters, marked the loss of the older forms of city life and the attempt to

understand, grapple with, confront, and even constitute new, postindustrial, postmodern

modes of mass interaction. So, too, the contested appearance of music in outdoor spaces --

101
parks, streets, and, ultimately, the large festivals such as Monterey, Woodstock, and

Altamont -- marked a confrontation of new forms of electronic social interaction with

massive public gatherings in ostensibly shared, common environments. Both these indoor

and outdoor spaces were shaped by the negotiations of publicness, intimacy, and electronic

mediation surrounding musical performance.

Beyond their constitution as a passive audience or a crowd, then, participants in rock

music performances became a counterpublic. In mass society, a counterpublic, as the theorist

Michael Warner argues, is marked by, "dependence on the co-presence of strangers in our

innermost activity." To Warner, "we continue to think of strangerhood and intimacy as

opposites," however, this "has at least some latent contradictions, many of which come to the

fore...in counterpublic forms that make expressive corporeality the material for the

elaboration of intimate life among publics of strangers."38 In rock music performances, the

discursive forms and technological tools of electricity, loud music, light shows, strobe lights,

costumes, poster art, and psychoactive drugs interacted with the "expressive corporeality" of

dancing bodies to emphasize the strange, the anonymous, the liminal, the temporary, the

impermanent, the deterritorialized, among participants in public.39 These participants

brought questions of intimacy and strangeness, selfhood and publicness, isolation and

togetherness, independence and relationship, citizen and mass society, to the "fore" around
38
Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 76.
39
For the notion of deterritorialization, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See also, Ian Buchanan,
"Deleuze and Popular Music, Or, Why Is There So Much 80s Music on Radio Today?", in Deleuzism: A
Metacommentary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Originally published in Social Semiotics 7, 2
(August 1997): 175-188. Branden Joseph, "'My Mind Split Open': Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic
Inevitable," in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis, and Counterculture in the 1960s, eds. Christoph
Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press - Tate Liverpool Critical Forum,
2005). Originally published in Grey Room (Summer 2002): 80-107.

102
musical performance.

After attending rock music performances at the Electric Circus, a club in New York

City that borrowed from the San Francisco ballrooms, the critic Albert Goldman described

his experiences in terms that resonate with Warner's theoretical descriptions. "Magnetized by

the crowd, impelled by the relentless pounding beat of the music, you are drawn out on the

floor. Here there is a feeling of total immersion: you are inside the mob, inside the skull,

inside the music.... Strangest of all, in the midst of this frantic activity, you soon feel

supremely alone; and this aloneness produces a giddy sense of freedom, even of exultation."

Goldman understood this experience as a tantalizing, mysterious mixture of intimacy and

publicness erupting in a new sort of social space: "At last you are free to move and act and

mime the secret motions of your mind. Everywhere about you are people focused deep

within themselves, working to bring to the surfaces of their bodies deep-seated erotic

fantasies."40

Like Goldman, San Francisco Chronicle columnist and music critic Ralph Gleason,

Jr., a slightly older participant and writer who defended the new rock gatherings in the face

of opposition by city governments, argued that events such as the Family Dog dances at

Longshoreman's Hall in the fall of 1965 and the Appeal Benefits for the San Francisco Mime

Troupe, first at the group's loft rehearsal space and then at the Fillmore Auditorium, were

important components of civic life. "If this city was run for the citizens," Gleason claimed of

these early rock shows in San Francisco, "such affairs would be commonplace and

conducted, say, once a month at the civic auditorium, where there used to be numerous
40
Albert Goldman, "The Emergence of Rock," in Freakshow: Misadventures in the Counterculture,
1959-1971 (1971; reprint, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001), 4. Essay originally published in New
American Review 3 (1968).

103
dances during the swing era."41 To Gleason, the central element of the rock shows was

dancing. For others, such as Ken Kesey, the central element was the use of psychoactive

drugs such as LSD. Both dancing and drug-taking hinted at the ways in which rock music

performance affected individual bodies placed in the hyper-electrified spaces of what many,

following the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, called, a “total environment” in

which the senses were overloaded with stimuli.42

What is crucial here is to catch the ways in which civic dimensions and mass

consumer processes were always intertwined to varying degrees in San Francisco's rock

performance spaces. Civics and consumerism were not opposites, though they were also not

one and the same. They were continuously intersecting elements pulsating through the

formation of a San Francisco sound that was also a scene. The civic component in San

Francisco's musical performance spaces had arisen from three main groups, each of which

operated at the interstices of the marketplace, the state, and the intimate, private sphere of the

family. To examine these three groups is to further reveal the civics of rock in San

Francisco, the ways in which a public arose around musical performance.

The first focus is on the series of benefits organized for the San Francisco Mime

Troupe. Second, we can investigate the Family Dog dances organized by students at San

Francisco State College (now California State University - San Francisco). And third, we can

explore the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. From these groups and their

events of 1965 and 1966, we can go on to explore the roles of dancing, drug use, light

shows, poster art, and labor disputes in the growing San Francisco music scene of the late
41
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 12.
42
McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage.

104
1960s and early 1970s.

"Instant Cousin-Ship": The Appeal Benefits

The Appeal Benefits to raise legal funds for the San Francisco Mime Troupe left a

legacy of questioning the nature of publicness at the inception of rock's psychedelic

ballrooms. The Mime Troupe, rooted in San Francisco's bohemian-political social world, had

its offices in the same skid row loft building as the San Francisco branch of Students for a

Democratic Society (SDS) -- the very same building, in fact, that the Calliope Company

would ultimately give to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters for their Acid Test

Graduation. The group, led by actor R. G. (Ronny) Davis, and including future members of

the Diggers such as Emmett Grogan, Peter Cohan (Coyote), and Peter Berg, among others,

had been arrested for performing in the public space of Golden Gate Park without a permit.

Managed by Bill Graham, a Holocaust survivor who had arrived in San Francisco after

toying with acting in New York City and working as a waiter in the resorts of the upstate

New York's Catskills Mountains, three benefit concerts took place for the Mime Troupe: the

first in the Mime Troupe's loft, the second and third in the Fillmore Auditorium. These

events led Bill Graham to eventually become a commercial music promoter.43

The first Appeal Benefit was held on Saturday, November 6th, 1965. A press release

for the event explained its purpose: "S.F. Mime Troupe Will Hold an 'Appeal' Party, 924

Howard Street (between 5th and 6th Sts.) Sat. Night - November 6 From 8 p.m. till

43
For more on the San Francisco Mime Troupe, see Doyle, "Staging the Revolution: Guerrilla Theater
as a Countercultural Practice, 1965-1968”; Martin, The Theater Is In the Street; and Perry, The Haight-
Ashbury.

105
dawn...Entertainment, Music, Refreshments! Engagement, Commitment & Fresh Air!"44 As

Chet Helms pointed out to the historian Alice Echols, the idea of an "appeal party" had roots

in the leisure gatherings that San Francisco's leftist political organizers would sponsor in the

evenings after day-long marches and rallies.45 But the Mime Troupe's "Appeal" had a

different edge to it than previous events. Mingling mass-mediated publicity with the event's

focus on public expression, Graham and members of the Mime Troupe, in costumes,

distributed fliers for the event in downtown San Francisco the Friday afternoon before it was

to take place, getting on the evening television news for riding around in a Cadillac

decorated with advertisements for the party.46 The press release brought the issue of public

space to the fore of the Appeal's purpose: "WHO OWNS THE PARKS? The people of San

Francisco. The parks are very large and there is room for us all -- room for any expression of

any idea." Referring to the Parks Commissioner, the press release argued, "Freedom of

speech and freedom of assembly do not stop where Mr. Haas's good taste begins."47

This orientation toward freedom of expression, which echoed the Free Speech

Movement at University of California at Berkeley the previous year, carried into the event

itself. Bill Graham recalls inviting all to participate in the event: "We also put the word out.

Anything you want to bring, bring. Any statement or artistic expression you want to make,

fine....People brought things to us and we hung them in the loft." Liquid projectionists --

drawing upon new techniques developed by a teacher at San Francisco State University --
44
Appeal Party Promo, Box 17, Folder 10, SF Mime Troupe Collection, Shields Library Department
of Special Collections, University of California - Davis.
45
Echols, "Hope and Hype in Sixties Haight-Ashbury," 28.
46
Bill Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 121.
47
Appeal Party Promo.

106
brought bed sheets and projectors. People brought film footage to project and bed sheets for

screens. About fifteen hundred people showed up, by Graham's account, "people who never

were interested before and didn't know what we were doing. Who were nonpolitical. A lot of

clean-cut kids from Marin County.... It was this cross section of people who had never come

together before. A mixed group."48

Figure 1.4. Handbill for the First Appeal Benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe,
November 6, 1965 (courtesy: www.wolfgangsvault.com)

Then there was the music and the powerful sense of connection it generated through

dance. Two folksy groups, The Fugs from New York City and the guitarist Sandy Bull, as

well as a jazz group led by John Handy and the Jefferson Airplane, performed. The music

48
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 122-123.

107
seemed to foster a feeling of sudden affiliation among strangers. "I saw things that were

firsts all night long," Graham remembered. "I saw people come in and instantly start dancing

with other people and only then did I realize that they didn't know each other. They just

started dancing." To Graham, the dancing transformed the loft into a coherent social body, a

place of fictive kinship among previously disconnected individuals, a space of heightened

theatrical intensity. "It was like instant cousin-ship. They became a one. It was like when

you look under a microscope at protoplasm. All the cells were touching and bubbling at

once. That night, they were all in the play. It was theater-in-the-round."49

This description demonstrates the heritage of avant-garde theater in the new rock

performance spaces. But something else was going on in those spaces too, something that

echoes architect and public theorist Vito Acconci's notion of "cluster-groups" that comprise a

non-authoritarian public space. "The words public space are deceptive," Acconci argues.

"When I hear the words, when I say the words, I'm forced to have an image of a physical

place I can point to and be in. I should be thinking only of a condition; but, instead, I

imagine an architectural type, and I think of a piazza, or a town square, or a city commons.

Public space, I assume, without thinking about it, a place where the public gathers." But,

Acconci notes, "To become a public arena, the piazza -- the model of an open public space --

gives up any claims of being a democratic space: it resigns itself and becomes an

authoritarian space."50

The public sphere, which Acconci wonderfully suggests we should think of not as a

49
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 123-124.
50
Vito Acconci, "Public Space in a Private Time," in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 159, 163, 166.

108
particular place but as a condition, only "remains democratic when people break up into

clusters....The cluster is small enough that it doesn't need a leader....Each cluster acts as if (at

least for the moment) the rest of the space isn't there; each cluster acts as if it doesn't need

the rest of the space. In fact, it doesn't want the rest of the space; the cluster-space exists as

democratic only as long as it keeps the rest of the space out." If it grows bigger, the cluster

becomes an organization; if it is to survive, according to Acconci, the cluster moves to

transient spaces. Music offers an ideal form for a public "on the run" from authoritarian

organization because, Acconci posits, music has "no place, so it doesn't keep its place, it fills

the air, and doesn't take up space. Its mode of existence is to be in the middle of things."51

Acconci's sense of music offering a new form of public life reminds one of Sandy

Darlington's comments about hearing the Grateful Dead's music as both external and

internal, outside the self and somehow emanating within. More powerfully, Acconci's notion

of the placelessness of the musical public echoes Darby Slick's sense of music evoking a

"new world," a new space, a new outside world in which, magically, interaction was altered

toward "inner, soul, values." Indeed, Slick's memory of these feelings came from jamming

with Jerry Garcia and Bill Kreutzman of the Grateful Dead during the first and second

Appeal Benefits.

The first Appeal Benefit was not only a charitable affair; it was also an

entrepreneurial event. This combination hinted at the ways in which its "cluster space" began

to turn toward a less anarchic, more organized mode of organization. But rock music was

also still "on the run," to continue with Acconci's language, in Graham's move to the

51
Acconci, "Public Space in a Private Time," 166, 169, 176.

109
Fillmore Auditorium. As Graham prepared for the second and third Appeal Benefits at the

larger venue of the Fillmore Auditorium, which took place on December 10, 1965 and

January 14, 1966 respectively, the promoter turned increasingly toward the business of

putting on dance-rock performances as commercial gatherings of what he termed "public

assemblage."52 He did not want to lose the larger civic dimensions of the Appeal Benefits,

but he also wanted to make money from them.

This led to conflict with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, thr group that Graham had

been working for as business manager. Troupe member Peter Berg remembered a

tempestuous meeting at which Graham declared that the protest-art of the Mime Troupe was

misguided; plays did not work as social weapons. A more promising avenue, Graham

argued, was to provide a venue for what seemed like an emergent new culture, one that was

more hierarchically-ordered, safer, and more predictable. Though concerts would lose their

spontaneity, Graham's position was that a market-based business of rock concerts could not

only generate revenue, but also propel the civic dimensions of the nascent San Francisco

scene more successfully than the charged political performances of the Mime Troupe.53

Whether he was right or wrong on this count, Graham's second and third Appeal

Benefits continued to foster a sound that was also a scene in San Francisco. The second

Appeal was given much publicity when Graham managed to get Bob Dylan to hold a flier

for the event and speak about it on the Bay Area's public television station, KQED, during an

interview.54 This generated the sort of mass-mediated affirmation of importance that would

52
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 135.
53
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 131-132.
54
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 129-130.

110
ultimately shape the formation of the San Francisco scene. But the actual space of the

Fillmore Auditorium itself fostered a different sense of publicness than the smaller loft of the

first Mime Troupe Appeal.

Figure 1.5. Poster for the Second S.F. Mime Troupe Appeal Benefit Concert, December 10,
1965 (courtesy: www.wolfgangsvault.com)

A photograph of the Fillmore Auditorium just before the start of the second Appeal

Benefit shows the new space in which this scene could take shape. The room looks both

historical and transformed, somehow beckoning from the legendary past while

simultaneously hinting at new possible futures. Officially holding roughly seven hundred

patrons, but often containing many more, the space was big enough to be grand but small

111
enough to seem manageable.55 "The first party, last month at the troupe's South of Market

loft studio, was so successful that hundreds of the troupe's friends were turned away because

there was no space for them," the flier for Appeal II explained. "This time, there is a larger

hall, dancing, and many of the same artists and entertainers will be there, as well as some

new ones. The place is huge and, like, it's there."56

Beneath the high ceiling, two balconies hang over a large dance floor and a raised

stage. On each side of the drum kit and amplifiers on the stage, two posters that read "Love"

in large letters hang beside two large Kandinsky-like abstract paintings. Balloons stand at the

ready. As a newspaper article by Ralph Gleason, a great supporter of the emergent new

scene in San Francisco, noticed, "At each end of the huge hall was a three foot high sign

saying LOVE. Over the bar was another saying 'No Booze,' while the volunteer bartenders

served soft drinks. Alongside the regular bar was a series of tables selling apples! The only

dance (outside of Halloween) I've ever been at where they sold apples. Craaaazy!"57 What

neither this, nor any other article mention is the unspoken dimension of the Appeal dances:

the use of LSD and marijuana. What Gleason and others did pay attention to was the more

overt and available manifestation of new kinds of civic interactions in the display of bodies

through dancing and costume.

Drugs, dance, and costume converged to offer a zone of experimentation in which

expressions of the self also affirmed communal bonds and commitments. Gleason made note
55
Appeal II photograph, 1965, Box 8, Folder 30, R. G. Davis Papers, Shields Library Department of
Special Collections, University of California - Davis.
56
Appeal II Flier, Box 8, Folder 30, R. G. Davis Papers, Shields Library Department of Special
Collections, University of California - Davis.
57
Ralph Gleason, Jr., "On the Town: Lesson for S.F. in The Mime Benefit," San Francisco Chronicle,
13 December 1965.

112
of both the individualistic and the communal nature of the event. "Inside a most remarkable

assemblage of humanity was leaping, jumping, dancing, frigging, fragging, and frugging on

the dance floor to the music of the half dozen rock bands -- The Mystery Trend, the Great

Society, the Jefferson Airplane, the VIPs, the Gentleman's Band, the Warlocks, and others."

Individual expression was valued at the dance: "The costumes were freedom Goodwill-cum-

Sherwood Forest. Slim young ladies with their faces painted a la Harper's Bazaar in cats-

and-dogs lines, granny dresses topped with huge feathers, white levis with decals of mystic

design; bell-bottoms split up the side! The combinations were seemingly limitless." At the

same time, Gleason portrayed the event as a self-regulated affair among equals. "There were

no guards inside. There was an absence of uniforms and there was no trouble. It was the kind

of crowd where over a dozen people stopped dancing, got down on their hands and knees to

help a girl find a contact lens that had popped out during a particularly dramatic movement.

They scrambled on the dance floor for a few minutes and found it. She cleaned it in her

mouth, popped it back in and the dancing continued."58

The police actually were there, outside at these events, applying continual pressure

on Bill Graham to cancel them, reduce the number of people admitted inside the Fillmore,

and alter the space to make it safe. But by turning from the Mime Troupe's direct

confrontations with state power to an entrepreneurial, market-based strategy that fit with the

sorts of economic practices of leisure and money-making that city governments traditionally

did not interfere in extensively, Graham was able to open up the temporary, liminal, but

powerful public space of what he and others were calling the "new culture" -- what Gleason's

58
Gleason, "On the Town: Lesson for S.F. in The Mime Benefit."

113
article about the Appeal Benefit called the "rock revolution." Despite all its fame for

tolerance, the city government of San Francisco often tried to block events such as the

Appeal Benefits. According to Gleason's review of the second Appeal, the police seemed to,

"regard mass proximity of the sexes to the sound of music as a hazard equal to a time bomb."

But, he argued, "the actual demand for dances is going to increase. The whole rock

revolution points to dancing, the music ineluctably moves one to move."59

Rooted in the San Francisco Mime Troupe's direct aesthetic-political confrontations

with the city government over utilizing the public space of the parks, the increasingly

commercial activities of promoter Bill Graham opened up a new sort of civic space by

abandoning head-on confrontation. In the more commodified arena of the rock concert and

dance, though still at this point a benefit show, participants were able to engage each other

outside of gathering in overt opposition to the state. They asked questions of individual self-

expression and collective responsibility using tools of style, fashion, and -- most

significantly -- bodily responses to music in dance.

The Appeal Benefits demonstrated how a counterpublic of rock music manifested

itself in the interstices of marketplace and state. The family also lurked on the margins of the

event. Ralph Gleason's review described how, "In a corner past the apple table was a baby in

a carriage, sound asleep with a bottle and a teddy bear clutched in his (her?) mouth."60 This

brief appearance of a child signals questions raised by rock music's counterpublic in San

Francisco. The allure of the innocent child appealed to many participants who, leaving

adolescence and entering young adulthood, drew upon their experiences with drugs and their
59
Gleason, "On the Town: Lesson for S.F. in The Mime Benefit."
60
Gleason, "On the Town: Lesson for S.F. in The Mime Benefit."

114
perception of an adult world rotten to the core in order to idealize a child's freedom and

possibility to escape the limitations of the electronic age. This articulation of childhood

manifested itself in a number of moments when rock music helped propel a public into

existence.

Perhaps more tantalizingly, and significantly, the baby in the carriage also hints at a

rejection of the limitations placed on women in the post-World War II cult of domesticity.61

Though the hyper-masculinization and misogyny of the counterculture is well-documented,

what is less understood are the ways in which young women utilized the ambiguities of this

new social space to bring questions of women's isolation from the public sphere into view.62

Many women who were crucial participants in the countercultural public simply refused to

stay at home with their children. They brought children into the public assemblage of the

rock concert.

Though many might view the presence of children in these environments as

problematic, they mark an important raising of the question of women's gendered labor and

roles in the private sphere as constructed in the post-World War II years.63 Though the

counterculture struggled to shape satisfactory answers or alternatives, the insistence on

bringing the politics of the family into the public sphere formed another important dimension

61
See Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement
(New York: Knopf, 1980); Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
62
Alice Echols begins to explore this topic in her biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise:
The Life and Times of Janis Joplin (New York: Metropolitan, 1999) and in her essay collection, Shaky Ground.
63
On Cold War gender roles, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the
Cold War Era (1988; revised edition, New York: Basic Books, 1999); Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins
at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
and Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

115
of the civics of rock.64 At a time when participants were attempting to reconstitute and

rearrange themselves into new social arrangements and commitments that they often referred

to as families, tribes, bands, or communes, rock music provided places of gathering in which

the dilemmas of kinship -- even fictive kinship -- became visible.

Decked out in costumes, their babies asleep past the apple table, women and other

participants in the Appeal Benefits danced to the music. The phenomenology of their

dancing is worth returning to, but the intriguing redirection of mass consumer culture toward

new ends was also at issue in the emergence of the San Francisco scene. The Family Dog

"Tribute" dances that occurred at Longshoreman's Hall in 1965 -- almost simultaneously to

the Appeal Benefits -- offer an opportunity to consider this reclamation and reuse of popular

culture more closely. Along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' Acid Tests, which

were the other formative events in the making of a San Francisco scene in 1965 and 1966,

the Family Dog dances also raised problems and possibilities for a public sphere in which

embodiment and representation fluctuated into and out of each other at the interstices of the

state, family, and especially the marketplace.

"Caught Up In the Energy": The Family Dog Tribute Dances

When Bill Graham heard about Family Dog, he thought they were a dog show

performance group.65 In fact, the group had acquired its name from its communal house in

the Haight-Ashbury district, where a number of students at San Francisco State University

64
Children and families appear often in accounts of Bay Area rock music performances, at times with
women, at times with men, and at times with couples. For other examples, see, for instance, Gleason, Jr., The
Jefferson Airplane, 50, 58.
65
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 124.

116
and drop-out bohemians lived communally with several pet dogs. Unbeknownst to Graham,

members of the Family Dog had spent the summer of 1965 taking acid, listening to rock

music, and pretending to be living in a Wild West film at the Red Dog Saloon, a venue

created by a group of San Franciscan beatnik-folkie hipsters in the Gold Rush ghost town of

Virginia City, Nevada. Drawing upon their experiences at the Red Dog, they now turned to

promoting new sorts of rock dance concerts in San Francisco.66

The Family Dog "Tribute" dances at Longshoreman's Hall in the fall of 1965

transformed mid-twentieth-century American popular culture into folklore in a way that

paralleled (one might dare say was part of) the Pop Art movement. They turned the

commodified, mass-disseminated culture of comic books, radio, film, and television shows

back into embodied performance, emphasizing the ability to reshape individual identity

through liminal, collective engagement with music, dancing, costumes, lights, and LSD and

to seek out new modes of collectivity through these activities. These dances, like the Appeal

Benefits, were fun events that also contained more serious dimensions. As gently satirical

"tributes" to comic book characters such as Dr. Strange, Sparkle Plenty, and Ming the

Merciless, the dances possessed a sense of the retrospective, consolidating new source

materials from popular culture for confronting the problems of the public in an electronic,

mass-mediated world as well as attempting to establish a counterpublic through rock music

performance. So, too, the "tribute" lent religious overtones, sacralizing the space and

activities in which this counterpublic might arise. The possibilities and limits of this

counterpublic appear in closer investigations of the Family Dog's tribute dance concerts.

66
Selvin, Summer of Love, 3-22; See also, The Life and Times of the Red Dog Saloon, a documentary
directed by Mary Works (Red Dog Enterprises, 1996).

117
 Organized by three students at San Francisco State University -- Luria Castell, Ellen

Harmon, and Alton Kelley -- the Family Dog dances were similar to Bill Graham's Appeal

Benefits: commerce and civics overlapped while new notions of the family took shape under

the uneasy, surveilling eye of the state. The name of the promoters' collective organization --

the Family Dog -- itself hinted at the communal arrangement in which they lived,

reconstituting a peer group as a new family unit. Their dances took place until the San

Francisco police intervened because the promoters did not possess the proper licenses. But

until that happened, the Family Dog events mingled commerce and civic interaction in

intriguing ways.

Ralph Gleason explained that the Family Dog promoters had grasped a new

arrangement of marketplace activity: "They believed in free enterprise, only they wanted to

define the style."67 Family Dog dances marked the appropriation and refashioning of popular

culture's commodified goods into resources for a new civic life. Luria Castell told Gleason:

"Basically we want to meet people and have a good time and not be dishonest and have a

profitable thing going on."68 Adding to this in retrospect, she added, "Not only did we want

to have a good time, we felt a potential, a positive change in the human condition."69 The

dances, to Castell and others, seemed capable of producing a new social order in which pent-

up energies were unleashed in positive ways and participants danced new modes of social

67
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 3.
68
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 3.
69
Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York:
Broadway Books, 2002), 96.

118
affiliation and self-expression into existence. As Castell put it: "We're going to be ourselves

and project as many aspects of our reactions on the public as we can."70

Unfortunately, the city government of San Francisco made the efforts of the Family

Dog to promote a dance concert difficult. As participant Elliot Sazer noticed at the first

concert, "When people tried to start dancing, the police would stop them. You're not allowed

to dance in San Francisco, unless you're in a hotel or the place has a special dance permit.

And for a very liberal town, this was the craziest law I'd ever heard of in my life."71 The

Family Dog Tribute dances occurred at the interstices of market ("a profitable thing going

on"), family (the communal "Family Dog" and the feeling of family that participants

described at the dances), and state (as Family Dog promoter Alton Kelley remembered, "We

threw six or seven dances before we even knew we had to have a permit. The city tried to

shut it down but once it was happening there was no shutting it down").72

In this civic space of the dance, a public among strangers emerged through the

embodiment of dance that took place in the disembodied, amplified roar of rock music. As

individuals and a collectivity, participants sought out both freedom of self-expression and

social connections with others in this space. Jefferson Airplane manager Bill Thompson

recalled the first Tribute dance: "I remember long lines of people, holding hands, dancing to

the music. I mean, 20, 30 people sometimes, going around in a circle. They'd get caught up

70
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 3.
71
Quoted at http://www.gotarevolution.com/longshoremans.htm, on Jeff Tamarkin's website of his
book Got A Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of the Jefferson Airplane (New York: Atria Books, 2003).
72
Quoted at http://www.gotarevolution.com/longshoremans.htm, on Jeff Tamarkin's website of his
book Got A Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of the Jefferson Airplane (New York: Atria Books, 2003).

119
in the energy of the music, and the excitement. There was so much freedom. This was not

like school dances -- that was a whole different story, everything was regulated."73

Bob Harvey, who would leave Jefferson Airplane soon after this performance, also

remembered, "Longshoreman's was the foreshadowing of the psychedelic dance concerts.

But it was more than just music and dance. It felt like belonging, like family."74 So, too,

Darby Slick, guitarist for the Great Society and brother-in-law of Great Society and then

Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick, remembered the festivity of wearing a costume to the

event as much more than just the fun of disguise: "The joy wasn't in the costumes we wore,

per say, but in the community that we built with them. It was as if we established a new race,

and ourselves as members of it."75 These comments, which reach for the right words to

describe the feeling that arose at the dances -- belonging, family, community, race, members

-- might be understood as efforts to describe the public that arose among strangers at the

Family Dog's rock and roll dance concerts.

As John Cipollina, guitarist for the Quicksilver Messenger Service, remembered, the

Tribute to Dr. Strange brought together "a roomful of freaks. More than a thousand

strangely-garbed, wild-eyed, like-minded malefactors who had crawled out of God knows

what woodwork." The Family Dog dances provided the venue in which "a subterranean

community was meeting itself for the first time. These people had been holed up, growing

their hair, getting dosed good and strange in the privacy of their own meager cells, without

73
Quoted at http://www.gotarevolution.com/longshoremans.htm, on Jeff Tamarkin's website of his
book Got A Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of the Jefferson Airplane (New York: Atria Books, 2003).
74
Quoted at http://www.gotarevolution.com/longshoremans.htm, on Jeff Tamarkin's website of his
book Got A Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of the Jefferson Airplane (New York: Atria Books, 2003).
75
Slick, Don't You Want Somebody, 56-57.

120
knowing that across the city, hundreds upon hundreds of others were doing the same thing

under the cover of their rooms."76

As with Bill Graham's Appeal Benefits, the interaction between a market orientation

and a civic impulse was especially crucial to fostering this new sort of public sphere. Though

he called Castell and Harmon "the first hippie entrepreneurs," guitarist Darby Slick noticed

that the first Tribute possessed an energy quite removed from the preexisting rock dance

concerts. At the "Tribute to Dr. Strange," according to Slick, "The atmosphere was so

completely different than at the commercial concerts put on by Big Daddy Tom Donahue at

the Cow Palace."77 The gathering transformed the detritus of popular culture, the

disembodied junk of mass consumerism, into half-sardonic icons and idols for a new civic

religion.

The idea of ritualistic "tributes" to comic book heroes and villains stood at the center

of this inventive use of popular culture as the seedbed for a new civics. A public emerged by

paying tribute to new legends and gods, by suggesting new myths and allegories. The names

of the cartoon characters were rich enough in themselves -- Dr. Strange, Sparkle Plenty,

Ming the Merciless all fit with the new spirit of costume-wearing, psychedelic drug

hallucinations, and a heightened sense of the larger world as full of life-and-death struggles

that were at once real (as in the growing conflict in Vietnam or the racial tensions erupting in

the urban United States during the mid-1960s) and -- especially for the young-adult students,

mostly white and middle-class -- fantastical, comical, distant, and mediated (thanks to the

booming consumer economy).

76
Selvin, Summer of Love, 27.
77
Slick, Don't You Want Somebody, 51, 56.

121
 Dr. Strange, Sparkle Plenty, and Ming the Merciless had more intriguing allegorical

meanings buried within their cartoonish figures. As comic book historian Bradford Wright

has pointed out in a history of comic books, Dr. Strange, a surgeon who loses his ability to

practice medicine in a car accident, descends into alcoholism, travels to the Orient, trains

with a guru named the Ancient One, then returns to Greenwich Village in New York to

become an aloof, mysterious superhero, "remarkably predicted the youth counterculture's

fascination with Eastern Mysticism and psychedelia." Appearing in the early 1960s with

some of Steve Ditko's "most surrealistic work" creating a "disorienting, hallucinogenic

quality," the comic drew upon the "mystical spells, trances, astral travel, and occult lore" of

"pulp-fiction magicians" as well as material from 1950s Beat culture.78

Figure 1.6. Handbill for The Family Dog's first rock dance and concert, "A Tribute to Dr.
Strange," October 16, 1965 (artist: Ami Magill, courtesy: www.chickenonaunicycle.com)
78
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 213.

122
 Sparkle Plenty, a female character, was the mysteriously beautiful baby boomer

offspring of two noir-ish Dick Tracy characters: the rowdy, smelly, crooked, but faithful-to-

Tracy B. O. Plenty and the reclusive gravel pit owner Gertie Gravel. A tribute to Sparkle

Plenty seemed implicitly to celebrate the arrival of the baby boomers themselves in the

public sphere -- Sparkle Plenty was the modernized, beautified girl arising from the stinking

pits (quite literally) of the hardscrabble Great Depression and World War II years. Ming the

Merciless offered a more mysterious flirtation with evil -- this Marvel comics villain, an

Oriental caricature who fought Flash Gordon, at times sprinkling the earth with a plague dust

that cast an LSD-like spell -- was exiled from Mongo when Flash Gordon becomes leader

there after defeating him.

The iconography of the handbills for the Family Dog Tributes moved these comic

book characters from popular culture to a vernacular setting. Unlike the super-stylized dance

concert posters and handbills that would follow in their wake, the Family Dog Tribute fliers

created by Ami Magill, who would go on to become a staff artist at the San Francisco

Oracle, look most of all like doodles on a high school notebook. But so, too, they presage

the more adventurous and advanced graphic developments of the later posters in that they are

rejections of the standard show flier. The "Tribute to Dr. Strange" handbill is far different

even from Bill Graham's Appeal Benefit announcements. In the place of clear lines,

organized boxes and evenly-spaced, standardized fonts are line drawings that spiral and

swirl, grow denser and more sparse in unpredictable, uneven ways, gather like moss around

the unbalanced bubble letters tumbling over each other to spell "The Family Dog Presents,"

then open up in blankness around the script that reads "Tribute."

123
 Magill replaced symbols and signifiers of professional distance and authority with

amateurish immediacy and intimacy, even with a kind of alluring beckoning to membership

in a new, secret society. The letters themselves are invaded by doodles and lines as abstract

flames, enlarging dots, and reptilian spires engulf the words. The handbill conveys a sense of

homemade intrigue and mystery. It is off the cuff and insistent all at once. As if the drawing

might have become utterly illegible and inscrutable if left in the hands of its maker any

longer, Magill's announcement seems to be in the process of disappearing -- or is it peeking

out alluringly from -- behind the tangled web of doodled iconography.

Part of the message is clear and familiar: the handbill announces a return to the teen-

age form of the "Rock n Roll Dance and Concert," hosted by a famous local radio disc

jockey, in this case Russ "The Moose" Syracuse, whose surreal nighttime show on the

station KYA featured bomb sound effects for bad songs and attracted a cult following among

Bay Area music fans. So, too, the venue, the Longshoreman's Hall at Fisherman's Wharf,

had housed dances for teenagers before, as well as jazz concerts. But, except to the initiated,

the bands were mostly unfamiliar. Moreover, their names were particularly odd and surreal,

quite different from the sensible names of most rock and roll groups: the Jefferson Airplane,

the Charlatans, the Marbles, and even a band named, bizarrely, perhaps sarcastically, after

President Lyndon Johnson's ambitious new governmental program to wipe out poverty, the

Great Society.

Finally, to add to the oddness of the handbill, the entire event was a tribute -- not to a

musician or even to a political or social cause -- but to a comic book character with a

particularly evocative moniker, Dr. Strange. The handbill seemed to herald some sort of

secret new order beckoning just beyond a familiar door. Fashioned in part out of the

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economic necessity of constructing a cheap poster with a limited budget, the announcement

for the Family Dog Tribute to Dr. Strange also manifested the relocation of material from

mass-produced culture into a new vernacular, civic realm.

Figure 1.7. Handbill for The Family Dog's second rock dance and concert, "A Tribute to
Sparkle Plenty," October 24, 1965 (artist: Ami Magill, courtesy:
www.chickenonaunicycle.com)

As the handbill suggested, the Family Dog events were not just tributes to comic

book characters; they were also tributes to the rock and roll dance concert itself. Rock and

roll dance-concerts themselves were rooted in an existing teen culture dating back to the

1950s, and before that to the jazz and swing dances of the 1920s and 1930s. Ralph Gleason

made the linkage explicit, explaining that the Family Dog Tributes were, "founded, of

125
course, on the basic teen-age dances."79 Continuing in the tradition of radio personality Big

Daddy Tom Donahue's concerts at the Cow Palace, the Family Dog events even had the

requisite commercial radio disc jockey in attendance: DJ Russ "The Moose" Syracuse. But

the Family Dog Tributes transformed the typical teen dance into something else.

In place of the awkward adolescent couple dancing, according to Gleason, something

more liberatory, ritualistic, and erotically-charged took place. "There were people who

simply leaped like campfire girls skipping 'round the maypole, all night long," Gleason

noticed.80 The open-ended combination of drug experimentation, music, dancing, and

costumes led to a festival atmosphere in which, observers such as Gleason believed, a new

morality was emerging. Centered around new modes of self-expression and group

interaction, it challenged dominant structures of self, family, marketplace, and even

government. To Gleason, the music and the dance drew upon the existing popular culture,

but transformed it to presage larger social transformations.

Luria Castell shared this hopeful, utopian interpretation. "There'll be no trouble when

they [the kids] can dance," she told Gleason. "Music is the most beautiful way to

communicate. It's the way we're going to change things," she decided.81 Light-hearted,

humorous farce and serious feelings of making history mingled at the Family Dog Tributes.

Luria Castell remembered it as, "Almost a religious kind of thing, but not dogma, unlocking

that tension and letting it come out in a positive way with the simple health of dancing and

79
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 7.
80
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 7.
81
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 3.

126
getting crazy once a month or so."82

Key to the religious impulse that Castell described was the unleashing of erotic

energy among gatherings of strangers.83 As Vito Acconci writes about urban public spheres:

"The public space of the city is the presence of other bodies: public space is an analogue for

sex." If "public space lives up to its name," according to Acconci, it "functions to bring sex

out into the open: you liberate yourself into public space.... Public space is the refusal of

monogamous relationships and the acceptance of sex that has no bonds and knows no

bounds."84 Describing the tradition of Family Dog dances that began with the Tributes and

continued at the Avalon Ballroom and other venues under the auspices of Chet Helms, one

observer commented that, "The people who have been forming the mass audience for the

Family Dog presentations are the psychedelic generation -- humans who have begun to wake

up, to seek release from the bonds of ego, to express their latent sensuality."85

Providing a space that, through the mediation of electronic music, transmuted the

trashy commodities of mass and popular culture -- comic book characters, cheap vintage

thrift-store costumes, high school teen-age rock and roll dance concerts -- into a new public

sphere, the Family Dog Tribute dances unleashed powerful erotic energies from previously

intimate spheres into a shared setting. As with the posting of the words "Love" in large

letters at each side of the stage at Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium Appeal Benefits, the

82
McNally, Long Strange Trip, 96.
83
For more on the concept of civic religion, see Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Macmillan, 1915) and
Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985; reprint, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996).
84
Acconci, 168.
85
Chester Anderson, "Next: Indo-Rock," P.O. Oracle 1, 1 (2 September 1966): 4.

127
Family Dog Tributes began to tease out the multiple meanings of this word -- from the ways

in which it signified more overt displays of sexuality to the manner in which it might provide

the emotional groundwork for the participants in a new civitas.

Figure 1.8. Handbill for The Family Dog's third rock dance and concert, "A Tribute to Ming
the Merciless," November 6, 1965 (artist: Ami Magill, courtesy:
www.chickenonaunicycle.com)

Love was in the air at the Family Dog Tributes, but so were other emotions that the

concert's wild, electronic romps brought to the surface. The third Family Dog dance -- a

"Tribute to Ming the Merciless," a villain in the Marvel Comic book series who opposed

Flash Gordon and other superheroes -- summoned into existence a public sphere that

manifested the strange interaction between embodiment and mass-mediation that marked the

civics of rock in the 1960s. So, too, this event demonstrated that the idealistic vision of this

128
public sphere could be interrupted by ignored and unconfronted problems of class and race,

exclusion and inclusion.

Taking place the same night as the first San Francisco Mime Troupe Appeal Benefit,

the Tribute to Ming the Merciless demonstrated vividly how the emerging form of the rock

music performance in San Francisco brought embodiment and mass-mediated representation

into a complex relationship with each other. A poster for the event explained that the tribute

was to be "in the form of a wham-bang wide open stoned dance flicking on at dusk."86 The

notion that the event would "flick on at dusk" like a television set hinted at a consciousness

of the ways in which the new spaces of this public sphere were at once embodied and

mediated.

Figure 1.9. A poster announcing the third Family Dog event, "A Tribute to Ming the
Merciless! in the form of a wham-bang wide open stoned dance flicking on at dusk,"
November 6, 1965 (artist: unknown, courtesy: www.chickenonaunicycle.com)

86
"A Tribute to Ming the Merciless" poster, 6 November 1965, http://www.chickenonaunicycle. com.

129
 Chet Helms, a participant who had become increasingly active in the Family Dog

since his arrival from Texas with friend Janis Joplin, articulated to Ralph Gleason the ways

in which he and others envisioned the civics of rock that could arise through events such as

the Family Dog dances: "We want to make our lives as rich and colorful as we can, like a

permanent color TV show going on all the time."87 The effort Helms conveyed involved an

attempt by the Family Dog to transform the forms of popular mass entertainment into new

modes of living. Through creative dancing, costume-wearing, electronic music, and

intensive interaction, participants could form the basis for a new order, a new civitas.

This was the dream. But it was rudely interrupted by the specter of violence at the

Tribute to Ming the Merciless. As if to fulfill the tribute to a villain eager to attract followers

for his evil plots of destruction, the dance, according to participant and historian Charles

Perry, attracted a huge quotient of hostile, curious teenagers. Grateful Dead historian Dennis

McNally notes that many of these newcomers to the Family Dog dance might have been

members of San Francisco teenage gangs. Fistfights broke out in the parking lot and on the

dance floor. One of the plate-glass doors that led into the hall was smashed. On stage, Frank

Zappa's Los Angeles group, the Mothers, performed improvised, sardonic songs about the

violence around them. Music historian Joel Selvin describes Luria Castell leaping in to break

up a fight by punching out one of the teenagers herself.88

The dance demonstrated that utopia was not so easily generated. Resentment, anger,

and conflict -- perhaps some of it the result of class tensions between working-class San

Francisco and Bay Area teenagers whose lived revolved around gangs, drinking, and turf
87
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 15.
88
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 33; McNally, Long Strange Trip, 99; Selvin, Summer of Love, 38.

130
battles and more affluent, slightly older college students, who had embraced flamboyant

public displays of weird costumes and free-form dancing as well as open expressions of

intimacy and personal identity sparked by hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD. This violence,

erupting in the "wham-bang wide open stoned" spaces generated and sustained by the new

forms of rock music performance in San Francisco, would continue to plague the oddly

embodied, yet unincorporated, public sphere that seemed to arise at the interstices of new,

tentative family formations, the expansion of new forms of commerce, and the ever-

watchful, concerned, potentially-repressive eye of the state. The reconstituted public sphere

made possible by events such as the Family Dog Tributes also raised the problems of

deciding how the contours and dimensions of this public sphere were to be filled, and who

could assert themselves as citizens in the new civics of rock.

The question, as Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters so playfully and profoundly

raised it, was whether participants could "pass the Acid Test" in order to sustain the public

sphere that "flicked on at dusk." Would participants be able to broadcast utopia in the

collapsing dialectic of embodiment and representation, or would they, just as often, air a

violence that reached out as cruelly as Ming the Merciless, punching out participants who

thought they were just appropriating the innocuous fodder of lowbrow mass culture?

"Can You Pass the Acid Test?": The Questioning Public Sphere of Ken Kesey and the

Merry Pranksters

Sayings from the Merry Pranksters: "Be in your own movie." "Leave no turn

unstoned." "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" Like the Appeal Benefit and the Family Dog

Tributes, the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters evolved into a public sphere

131
that arose in spaces that combined embodiment and mass-mediation at the interstices of

family, market, and state. With Kesey's literal family, and the Prankster's extended sense of

private gang at their center, with the profits from Kesey's novel The Cuckoo's Nest

supporting their massive expenditures on electronic, film, and audio-visual equipment, and

with the state's continual pressure on Kesey for his drug use, which forced him to flee to

Mexico and eventually serve a term in a work-farm jail, the Acid Tests most of all

illuminated the relationship between this new public sphere in the San Francisco area and the

presence of psycho-active drugs, especially LSD.89

The Acid Tests only gradually emerged from the private realm of Ken Kesey's

parties, which took place in the early 1960s, first among the bohemian writers and artists

connected to Stanford University and living on Perry Lane in Palo Alto, then in his house in

the more rural town of La Honda further south on the peninsula below San Francisco. The

first official Acid Test, in fact, was held in a private house outside Santa Cruz on November

27, 1965. On December 4th, another private house in San Jose served as the setting for a

larger Acid Test for four hundred people the night after a Rolling Stones concert at the Cow

Palace. On December 17, an Acid Test took place at a lodge by Muir Beach in Marin

County, north of San Francisco, when a similar event fell through at close-by Stinson Beach.

By January 8th, 1966, the Acid Test traveled to the Fillmore Auditorium, where over two

thousand four hundred participants attended. Various Acid Tests with audiences followed in

1966 at the Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall, San Francisco State University, and up

89
See Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

132
and down the West Coast in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles.90

A handbill created for the Muir Beach Acid Test hinted at this drive to rearrange self

and group, identity and collectivity through the onslaught of electricity -- with rock music as

a central component. The handbill is cluttered with information, including the famous phrase

"Can You Pass the Acid Test?" emerging from the drawings of various artsy looking

characters and (as with the Family Dog Tributes) comic book superheroes. At the center of

the handbill, a dotted line invites the recipient to rearrange the artwork as a long rectangular

strip that could be rolled up into a scroll rather than as a normal-sized piece of paper.

Instructions for this appear in miniscule, sideways type. "Happeners are likely to include,"

the drawing explains, groups such as The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg, the Grateful Dead, the

Merry Pranksters, a light show by Roy's Audioptics, and "huge rumbly" movies. Though a

small bubble at the bottom of the handbill offers "comfort," what the poster most represents

is the chaos that the event promises to unleash: the "huge rumbly" sights and sounds of the

Acid Test. "Bring heroes," the drawing warns.91

Most prominently, on the right side of the handbill, a giant thumbprint interrupts the

flow of color and lettering. "Now you can tell which one is us," a strip of writing explains

about the thumbprint. This thumbprint hints at the effort to renegotiate individual identity

and collective affiliation among strangers gathering at the Acid Tests. If part of passing the

test referred to taking LSD and surviving the experience, the other part of passing the test

seemed to involve this effort -- a detective story of sorts -- to measure the relationship

90
See Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; Perry, The Haight-Ashbury; Selvin, Summer of Love;
McNally, Long, Strange Trip for dates of Acid Tests.
91
Merry Prankster History Project, http://www.pranksterweb.org.

133
between individuality and collectivity by tracing out fingerprints, measurements of the

absolute uniqueness of each person, in relation to notions of "us," or collectivity. There is the

possibility of discovery here, of solving the mystery, but the isolated thumbprint more

powerfully suggests the loss of sure-handed identity. "Now you can tell which one is us,"

seems ironic; the point is that you cannot solve the mystery unless you enter into the process:

the securing of a kind of true, heroic individuality only lurks within a journey through the

swirls of identity and collectivity that the Acid Test promises to unleash. And even then the

answer might not make itself manifest.

Figure 1.10. "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" handbill, Muir Beach Acid Test, December 17,
1965 (artist: Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, courtesy: www.pranksterweb.org)

134
 Drug use and electricity formed a powerful combination at the Acid Tests. As

famously portrayed by the journalist Tom Wolfe, the Acid Tests featured the handing out of

cups of Kool Aid "dosed" with LSD. But Acid Tests were more than just drug parties. As

Kesey told Wolfe, they were, "forms of expression in which there would be no separation

between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened

wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch -- lightning."92 The Merry Pranksters utilized

enormous amounts of electronic equipment to shape and enhance the use of LSD, often

stressing the disorientation that manipulations of sound and light could produce for

individual identity and collective affiliation.

The Pranksters joined forces with the Grateful Dead for the sound component; at

times, both groups would perform on electronic guitars and sound equipment simultaneously

at opposite ends of the performance spaces. Between them, strobe lights flashed, blue lights

emphasized the Day-Glo colors painted on the electronic machines and on individual faces

and bodies. According to Kesey, the Acid Tests resulted from the fact that Saturday night

parties at his house in La Honda, "got bigger and bigger until finally La Honda couldn't hold

them and we started branching out with the Dead.... We would set it up with the Dead at one

end and the Pranksters at the other end and kind of rally back and forth with the sound. Each

of the scenes got bigger."93

Reminding us of how San Francisco's "sound is also a scene," the scenes of the Acid

Tests continually expanded to include more participants. The private affairs and parties

among friends and acquaintances grew into increasingly complex configurations of music,
92
Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 9.
93
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 138.

135
drugs, and electronics as they went public. To return to Vito Acconci's language, the Acid

Tests went from "clusters" to "organization." However, by combining hallucinogenic drug

use with seizures of mass mediation and mass communication, the Acid Tests also produced

a public sphere in which new forms of social engagement and interaction might come into

being "on the run," as Acconci puts it. "After we started doing the Acid Tests in La Honda,"

Ken Kesey remembered, "the thing that made them exciting was the fact that they were

entertaining but it wasn't a closed circle. We hadn't planned our entertainment to the point

that everybody knew for sure how it was going to end up."94

Electricity was a crucial component at the Acid Tests. Charles Perry remembered

how at the Fillmore event, "the Pranksters were able to wire the place up with microphones

and speakers in unexpected places, so you might be downstairs watching somebody make a

fool of himself on the closed-circuit TV and suddenly hear something you'd said upstairs a

few minutes ago broadcast all over the hall. The floor was littered with electronic boxes and

skeins of electrical cable. They had packed in so much electronic equipment the whole hall

had a low, dull buzzing sound."95 But, the focus on the public use of LSD was what most

distinguished the Acid Tests from similar multimedia affairs. "It had that acid edge to it,"

Ken Kesey claimed. "Which is, 'There is something that might count.' We might conjure up

some eighty-foot demon that roars around. As Stewart Brand said, there was always a whiff

of danger to it."96 Phil Lesh, bassist for the Grateful Dead, recalled that, "Nobody could have

94
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 138.
95
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 42.
96
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 138. Stewart Brand was a Bay Area cultural activist, artist, and
sometime Merry Prankster who organized the Trips Festival at Longshoreman's Hall in January 1967.

136
guessed that you could give thousands of people acid in one room and not have it blow up

from the psychic energy. My main visual image was the sea of people, with waves rippling

through it." In this space, as Lesh remembers it, "The energy and light of it, people became

light, the light solidified into people."97 What had begun as a private ritual with Kesey and

his friends grew increasingly public, bringing strangers together in a space that moved

individual identities between embodiment and mass-mediation, what Lesh saw as "people"

becoming "light" and "light" becoming "people," back and forth in a flow of energy,

constituting a "sea of people, with waves rippling through it."

Film footage made by the Pranksters of various Acid Tests hints at the powerful

public sphere that the events constituted out of people and light, embodiment and mass-

mediation. We see dancers frantically moving around the dance floor. Dressed in everything

from angel's wings to demonic face-painting to casual Beatnik attire to straight-laced button-

up shirts and pants, the dancers are loosely in couples, interactive pairs not much different

from the piston-pumping mechanical parts of swing-era jitterbuggers. But the dancers

increasingly break apart into a more ambiguous arrangement of group and individuals, nuclei

with electrons splitting off. It is as if they have moved from representing the piston engines

of the mechanical age to the nuclear power of the Cold War space age.98

The music mirrors this passage from one technological era to another. The Grateful

Dead perform electrified rhythm-and-blues songs such as "I'm a King Bee," with leather-

jacketed lead singer Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen, singing and playing harmonica as

97
Quoted in Hank Harrison, The Dead: A Social History of the Haight-Ashbury (1973; reprint, San
Francisco: Archives Press, 1991) and in McNally, Long Strange Trip, 125.
98
The Acid Test (Key-Z Productions, 1992).

137
Jerry Garcia provides classic blues licks on the guitar. As it did with the Quicksilver

Messenger Service at the Calliope Company's Dance of Death, the Grateful Dead's music

actually manages to root the strange proceedings in a semblance of order -- the steady

pulsations of the twelve-bar blues form. But, as Jerry Garcia noted years later in a television

documentary about rock music, "What we did was R&B plus a large amount of weirdness

inserted into it."99 Playing for extended periods of time, the band could quickly leave one of

the most familiar and steady forms of American popular music -- the rhythm and harmonies

breaking down into more free-form explorations that only turned the dancing in new, less

insistently repetitive directions.

As the Grateful Dead played or rested along with the dancers, Merry Pranksters such

as Neal Cassady, Ken Babbs, and Ken Kesey provided an ongoing, spontaneous narrative for

the event, combining references to LSD with the metaphor of the electronic age, space

travel, to give some shape to the questioning public sphere of the Acid Tests. "Did you know

that the inner space race is supposedly being raged furiously between other nations and us

although it's supposedly kept hush hush." "Soon this vast spaceship will be off the pad and

well on its way."

LSD appears in cups, the "rocket fuel needed to enter this new configuration." "The

engine room coming in loud and clear." "We've lost all power" ("power, power, power,"

echoes in the public address system). "I see that the electrician is running down now trying

to get things reestablished. We're into emergency power now, having to rely on the energy

which the passengers are able to create by donating everything they have." "Ain't no power

99
"Blues in Technocolor," Rock and Roll Episode 6 (WGBH/BBC Productions, 1995).

138
on the stage. No electricity on the stage. Fix it." "There are wires all around here plugged

into electricity, all around here." "Hey man, stop your babbling and fix these microphones."

"Power, power, Power." "We need the power." "Our best technicians are now on the

problem." "You got the power?" Pigpen sings. The crowd chants, "Power! Power!"

"Cassidy however will remain in his post in the projection booth in order to keep

driving this ship through whatever electrical and meteor shower we encounter. We'll keep all

the stations alive on the line and the old pointed-head will continue to monitor from his

post." The police arrive. "The cops seem to be turning everything off. And they have asked

everybody to be turned off. That's impossible. You know as well as I do that nobody is going

to be turned off. We're not machines after all. We're human beings." "He can try to turn me

off, but all my switches have been short-circuited."

Suddenly everyone is manically singing the "Star-Spangled Banner" as if it were the

most profound, yet the funniest, song ever created. Kesey or Cassady's voice appears on the

microphone: "Just as we have feared we are in a decaying orbit. But according to our latest

report from our chief engineer, we will achieve a soft, safe landing, so there's no cause for

alarm. The legal beagle has given the chief security officer the necessary power to take

command of the ship. And at any time he may shut down all electrical operation. Until then,

the captain assures me, we'll keep all lines open."100

A voice in the Prankster film footage jokingly refers to the Acid Test activities as

"orderly chaos." As the inventive, punning slogan, "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" implied,

these events were both trials of drug experimentation and attempts at social alchemy,

100
The Acid Test.

139
transmuting the lead of everyday life into grand-historical, utopian gold. At their center was

a question about the kinds of selfhood and collectivity that might be possible in the Vietnam-

era United States. In imagery created by the Merry Pranksters, the question mark holds a

place of prominence and honor. As Ken Kesey would later say, "The answer is never the

answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the

answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer-- they think

they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery.... The need

for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."101

Figure 1.11. "Can You Pass the Acid Test?" Uncle Sam Handbill (date and artist: unknown,
courtesy: www.pranksterweb.org)

At the Acid Tests themselves, the Pranksters often adopted the iconography of

American nationhood. Uncle Sam asked if you could pass the acid test on handbills. The

Pranksters utilized the American flag as decoration or cut-up into costumes, as if to raise the

question of the nation's true possibilities for individual and collective freedom, purpose, and

101
Ken Kesey interviewed by Robert Faggen in "The Art of Fiction," Paris Review 130 (Spring,
1994): 58-94.

140
social and political order. Rarely did the Acid Tests provide answers. But in an era when

Civil Rights, generational tensions, and especially the Vietnam War were propelling

questions and conflicts about the nature and meaning of the United States as a nation into

full view -- particularly through mass-mediated representations on television -- the Acid

Tests created a microcosmic space in which the stakes of Americanness might be explored

more fully. Recalling seeing the Grateful Dead perform during an Acid Test at San Francisco

State University, the artist Dan Wilson recollected, "The music they played was so full of

fun -- life! And I was worried already about the Army and the Vietnam War, and that was so

dreary -- it's death. And here was the Grateful Dead, just the opposite."102

Overall, through performances engaging LSD and electricity, the Acid Tests

produced a questioning public sphere whose central inquiries into the nature of individual

identity and collective organization invited participants to enter into a process of discovery.

"With the Acid Test," Chester Anderson wrote in a 1966 article, "where Ken Kesey played

an integral part, came strobe lights and fluid projections, the possibility of creating a total

environment with lights and sounds, amplified, electronic, guaranteed to blow your

mind....People who never danced before were cutting loose, making and wearing their own

costumes."103 By "blowing your mind," an ambiguous but key phrase that appears often, one

that combined the excitement of new possibilities with a hint of violence and destruction, the

Acid Tests fostered a questioning public sphere from which new modes and structures of

102
Carol Brightman, Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure (New York: Crown,
1998), 167. If Wilson saw the Grateful Dead at a San Francisco State University Acid Test and not elsewhere,
it was probably the Sound City Acid Test, 29 January 1966, or the Whatever It Is Festival, 2 October 1966. It is
also possible Wilson saw the band at another Acid Test around San Francisco.
103
Chester Anderson, "Next: Indo Rock," 4.

141
individuality and collectivity might emerge. Based on his experiences at the Acid Tests, for

instance, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia decided to have faith in the notion that,

"Formlessness and chaos leads to new forms. And new order. Closer to, probably, what the

real order is."104 He decided to follow the question mark wherever it led.

Figure 1.12. Top of the flier for the Pico Acid Test, March 19, 1966 (artist: unknown,
courtesy: www.pranksterweb.org)

This question mark at the center of the Acid Tests, a symbol of the "formlessness and

chaos" that might lead to "new forms" and "new order," seems linked to what the art

historian Rosalyn Deutsche, borrowing from the political philosopher Claude Lefort, has

called, "the question that gives rise to public space."105 Deutsche writes about public art in

contemporary America, but we might apply her theories of the public sphere to the Acid

Tests as performative public art from the 1960s. Out of the explosive combination of

psychoactive drugs, a theatrical orientation, and massive amounts of electronically-produced

sound and imagery, the Acid Tests sought to open up new spaces for social interaction.

This focus on opening up new spaces resonates with Deutsche's conceptualizations of

104
Charles Reich, and Jann Wenner, Garcia: A Signpost to New Space (1971; reprint, New York: Da
Capo Press, 2003), 101.
105
Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 280.

142
the democratic public sphere that public art might be able to foster by continually asking

questions rather than providing answers. "Linked to the image of an empty place," Deutsche

argues, "democracy is a concept capable of interrupting the dominant language of democracy

that engulfs us today. But democracy retains the capacity continually to question power and

put existing social orders into question only if we do not flee from the question -- the

unknowability of the social -- that generates the public space at democracy's heart.…But

when the question of democracy is replaced with a positive identity, when critics speak in

the name of absolute rather than contingent -- which is to say, political -- meanings of the

social, democracy can be mobilized to compel acquiescence in new forms of

subordination."106

The centrality of the question mark indicates the radical democratic impulses of the

Merry Pranksters, but their increased reliance on Kesey as guru points to the ways in which

hierarchical, authoritarian power always threatened to flood into the open spaces that this

radical democracy made available. The push and pull at the Acid Tests was between the

critical inquiry of the question mark and the chants of "power, power, power," echoing

through the mass-mediated technology of the "total environment." As Tom Wolfe chronicled

in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Pranksters depended on Kesey, who they called

"Chief," for guidance and direction. The Pranksters often shifted from open, democratic

interaction into a more hierarchical, almost militaristic organization. Part of this came from

the presence of Ken Babbs, a helicopter pilot just back from Vietnam, as a kind of second-

in-command to Kesey. But other participants in the San Francisco counterculture noticed an

106
Deutsche, 275.

143
authoritarianism interrupting the potentially more democratic public assemblage of the Acid

Tests.

Figure 1.13. Trips poster, Longshoreman's Hall, April 23-24, 1966, with question mark for
the year (artist: unknown, courtesy: www.chickenonaunicycle.com)

As Family Dog promoter Chet Helms recollected, part of this authoritarian creep

resulted from Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' willingness to engage groups and people,

such as the Hell's Angels, who tended to be automatically disqualified or excluded from any

sort of public sphere. "In fairness to Ken," Helms explained, "I think he had a lot of faith in

his abilities to transform people and in the ability of acid to transform them. He had some

illusions that he was going to transform them. He had some illusions that he was going to

transform the Hell's Angels. Which to some extent he did." But Helms also noticed that,

"there was a very military tone to Kesey's trips....It even extended over to their affection for

144
the Angels and wearing of colors and uniforms. A kind of militancy in collective action."107

The Acid Tests posed such a radical alternative, such a wide-open question mark, for

the public sphere that it faced enormous pressure, both externally from the state apparatus

chasing Kesey on various marijuana charges, and internally, as other participants in the San

Francisco counterculture felt threatened by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' unpredictable

slide from radically-open democracy into authoritarian power. In seeking to explore how far

the questioning public sphere might extend, the Acid Tests could only thunder mightily but

briefly. The "lightning" that Kesey hoped would occur in his conversation with Tom Wolfe,

flashed quickly, suddenly, powerfully -- but briefly. The final Acid Test was an "Acid Test

Graduation," held on Halloween, 1966. Pressured by the state to make public his opposition

to LSD use in return for a plea bargain on his marijuana possession charges, Kesey at first

planned to hold the event at Bill Graham's Winterland Ballroom. But Graham canceled the

event because he did not trust that Kesey and the Merry Pranksters would not prevent the

affair from turning dangerous. "Never trust a Prankster," Graham had learned from a Kesey-

coined aphorism.108

The "Acid Test Graduation" took place instead at the Calliope Company's warehouse

in San Francisco's skid row district. The Graduation utilized civic symbols to signify the

closing up of the liminal, temporary spaces -- the questioning public sphere -- it had created

out of electronics and LSD. Wearing flag costumes, Kesey and the Pranksters all received

diplomas handed out by Neal Cassady. As the poster for the event announced, "You passed,

107
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 170.
108
Wolfe, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 395.

145
you passed, you passed."109 Kesey remembered a feeling that the questioning public sphere

of the Acid Tests had lost its power. "By the time I came back to San Francisco in October

for the Acid Test at San Francisco State, things had changed," Kesey explained. "People had

begun to sum it up just the way the Mafia would divide parts of Chicago. It happened that

fast. We were planning to do this Acid Test Graduation with the Dead but people I had never

heard of were in change of the large halls. I had no intention of being a rock and roll

entrepreneur, ever...."110

Figure 1.14. Acid Test Graduation poster, October 31, 1966, planned for Winterland
Ballroom, the event took place at the Calliope Company's Warehouse (artist: unknown,
courtesy: www.pranksterweb.org)

109
Merry Prankster History Project, http://www.pranksterweb.org.
110
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 169.

146
 But even after Kesey removed himself and the Pranksters from promoting rock

shows in the San Francisco scene, rock music ballrooms, as well as rock concerts in the

outdoor spaces of San Francisco's parks and streets, retained something of the questioning

public sphere. As Kesey himself recognized when asked in a television interview in October

1966 what could replace acid after the Acid Test Graduation: "Jerry Garcia with his music

knows pieces of it."111 The pieces that Garcia's music contained were fragments of the Acid

Tests' original impulse toward fostering a radically democratic space through LSD and

electronics.

Figure 1.15. Acid Test Graduation Diploma, October 31, 1966 (artist: unknown, courtesy:
www.pranksterweb.org)

111
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 101.

147
 Though Kesey rejected an active role in this new world of rock promoters and

entrepreneurs, a world Garcia would ambivalently embrace, the novelist always sought to

preserve the spirit of the Acid Tests, where participants sought out the unknown in a space

both embodied and mediated, where public experimentation allowed participants to

investigate the possibilities and limits of individual freedom and collective transformation.

As he later revealed, Kesey had consulted the I Ching before the Acid Test Graduation;

following the coin toss verdict of the hexagram Fu, the lead Merry Prankster, according to

historian Charles Perry, noted that, "the commentary chapters of the book declared there

would be change, but not brought about by force, societies of people sharing the same views

would form publicly and in harmony with the time, so there would be neither separatism nor

any mistakes."112

Dancing in the Ballrooms, Dancing in the Streets, Dancing in the Public Sphere

The Appeal Benefits, Family Dog Tribute Dances, and Acid Tests left a legacy of

public life in San Francisco that continued throughout the late 1960s. Through rock music

especially, the sound that was also a scene expanded, established links to other locales,

incorporated a mass audience as participants flocked to the city, and acquired a mass-

mediated representation as the central site of the countercultural public sphere. Dancing

inside the psychedelic ballrooms and outside in the parks and streets of San Francisco

sustained this countercultural public sphere.

112
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 103.

148
 The dance -- in both its embodied forms and as represented on posters and in

photographs -- became a central mode of public interaction. Dancers sought to reimagine and

reestablish individual identity and collective affiliation in the new context of the mass public

and the mass subject. They did so in spaces that were at once immediate and distant,

materially-rooted in the interacting bodies yet mediated by floods of light shows and the

noise of amplified music. As participant and historian Charles Perry put it, "The dancers

were everything: creative but selfless, serious but high-spirited, exalted but down to earth.

...the dances were like religious rituals. There was a sense of confronting ultimate reality,

moving toward a breakthrough -- even perhaps on the political level, as when the musicians

sang songs touching on the prospect of nuclear war (Quicksilver's 'Pride of Man' or the

Grateful Dead's 'Morning Dew')."113

Drugs remained a crucial factor in the dances, but they increasingly fit into the larger

performative spaces of the psychedelic ballrooms such as Bill Graham's Fillmore

Auditorium, Chet Helms' Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom, and other venues such as the

band-owned Carousel Ballroom, California Hall, and the Straight Theater. "The mere fact of

being immersed in a sea of hundreds of like-minded heads produced an intoxication of its

own," Charles Perry explained. "San Francisco LSD users developed a special confidence

about what they were doing and a freedom from that reflex of trying to conceal one's

association with mind drugs that was typical of other psychedelic enthusiasts. They were

publicly outrageous. Nothing terrible happened when the public gatherings began, and the

proceedings had taken on an aura of destiny."114

113
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 56.
114
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 55.

149
 Bands sang about drug experiences, of course. Poster art grew wilder in an effort to

represent the psychedelic life. The light shows became more complex, inventive, and daring.

But drugs increasingly became a means to sustaining a public, not an end for this

countercultural public sphere. "We usually went to the Fillmore both Friday and Saturday

nights," photographer Suki King remembered, "to photograph, dance, listen to the fabulous

bands and just be where it was 'happening.' ...To dance in the midst of the light shows,

created by artists like Ben Van Meter, was a new and exciting experience. Our particular

group of chums was not particularly into drugs, we were thrilled with the whole new

ambiance."115

Though Bill Graham's events at the Fillmore Auditorium and Winterland Ballroom

grew increasingly into shows, moving from Family Dog-inspired tributes to cartoon

characters such as the Great Blondin' and Batman and Robin to presentations of emerging

international rock music stars such as the Butterfield Blues Band, Otis Redding, Cream, the

Who, and Jimi Hendrix, they retained a sense of participation by the audience. The looser

gatherings put together by Chet Helms at the Avalon Ballroom and by various bands at the

Carousel Ballroom particularly maintained this sprit. "The audience made its own

contribution to the event," Charles Perry noted of the dance hall scene in 1966 and 1967.

"Many individuals came in costume, painting their faces and carrying on more like a running

Beaux Arts Ball than a spectator show." Perry chronicled how, "People brought things to

share, such as food or Day-Glo paints with which to decorate each other's bodies or paint

designs on the floor (the dance halls soon set up ultraviolet lights at various places to make

115
Gayle Lemke and Jacaeber Kastor, Bill Graham Presents The Art of the Fillmore (Acid Test
Productions, 1997), 9.

150
the Day-Glo patterns fluoresce more brilliantly). Or little toys: soap bubble blowers, bells,

convex mirrors."116

These imaginative acts of engagement in the civics of rock took place in an

environment that continually brought embodiment and mass-mediation into an ongoing

dialectical relationship with each other. Carole Brightman noticed that many participants

remembered the halls most of all "via the senses." Quoting Joel Selvin, a San Francisco

Chronicle copy boy who went on after the 1960s to become the newspaper's chief pop music

critic, Brightman explained how the liquid light shows "weren't projected into screens; they

'covered the end of the room,' along with flashing strobes. The smell of incense was mixed

with pot, and with the odors of bodies twisting and bobbing to music that seemed very loud

at the time, and was. It was a case of 'sensory envelopment,' Selvin says, 'an overload.'"117

The dances continued to sustain a public sphere that, in miniature, engaged the

problems and possibilities of the mass public and the mass subject. Still confronting state

interference from San Francisco's city governments, participants made creative use of

seemingly civic associational activities to battle restrictions. Led by modern dancer Caitlin

Huggins and jazz dancer Annette Rice of the Straight Theater Dance Workshop, The Straight

held dance lessons in September of 1967 when the theater could not obtain a nightclub

license. Handing out 2000 "student body cards," the lessons featured a bit of calisthenics,

then Huggins and Rice invited their students to engage in improvisational dance to the music

116
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 55.
117
Brightman, Sweet Chaos, 91.

151
and words of additional instructors such as Jerry Garcia and Ron "Pig Pen" McKernan of the

Grateful Dead, along with Neal Cassady.

Figure 1.16. Poster for a Straight Theater "Dance Class," registration fee: $2.50, September
29-30, 1967 (artist: unknown, courtesy: www.chickenonaunicycle.com)

The poster for the event explained: "The Board of Permit Appeals presents...Dance

Your Misery Away. Professional dance lessons -- 5 hours for only $2.50. Instructors include

Jerome Garcia, Dr. P. Pen."118 Later, "environmental dance classes" were held, and Ann

Halprin of the San Francisco Dancer's Workshop and an originator of avant-garde art

happenings led still other variations on the dance lesson concerts.119 As with the Acid Test

118
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 241.
119
See the "Straight from the Haight" website, run by Reg. E. Gaines, who helped run the Straight
Theater, for more details on the dance lesson concerts: http://www.thestraight.com/dance.html.

152
graduation, an old civic activity was appropriated for purposes of sustaining the new public

sphere of the counterculture at the edge just beyond state intervention.

Charged with the erotics of bodies interacting, the dance halls also carried on a spirit

of civic religion that first appeared at the Family Dog Tribute dances and elsewhere. The

dances mingled embodiment with electronic mediation among strangers gathered together in

a public space. One dancer, Elizabeth Gips, recalled an event at the Avalon Ballroom: "For

me there was the ordinary-extraordinary light show and music and the extraordinary-

ordinary men and women flickering on and off under the strobes. The Grateful Dead were

playing. Suddenly some man, obviously having a weird trip on something, flipped out,

jumped on the stage and commandeered the microphone. After a shouting harangue, he

stripped off his clothes, yelling all the time, extremely disturbed."

With the event threatening to disintegrate into a dangerous chaos, the Haight-

Ashbury activist Stephen Gaskin, "got up on the podium in front of the Dead and started to

aum. Within seconds the entire room was auming. It began low, but these were seasoned

Haight Ashbury aum-ers. The sound expanded, expanded until it took over the room and

filled every synapse in every brain. People closed in together. Body was pressed against

body. The Dead played behind the aum. Minutes went by. The aum grew and grew. Hands

held, arms raised to heaven, it was ecstatic music of the angels. The room left the earth….

We were individuals melded in a great cosmic embrace. For that evening, we knew ourselves

for Who We Truly Are."120

120
Elizabeth Gips, "A Couple of Magical Events - The End," in Scrapbook of a Haight Ashbury
Pilgrim: Spirit, Sacraments and Sex in 1967/68 (Santa Cruz, CA: Changes Press, 1991), 219.

153
 Gips speaks in mystical, religious terms, but her comments point toward the ways in

which rock dances fostered a public space. The chanting, breathing, and dancing of bodies

interacted with the electric amplification of the Grateful Dead to produce a powerful arena

for grappling with the intimate, immediate roles of individuals and communities in the new

context of a mass culture. Even a "bad trip" on LSD might be overcome, or at least

confronted. To Gips, "individuals melded in a great cosmic embrace" and the possibilities of

the electronic age seemed to point toward a way to discover true selfhood, paradoxically, in

the temporary loss of selfhood, an experience not unlike Michael Warner's description of the

experience of subjectivity and identity in the mass public.

Rock dances continually raised questions of power, control, and freedom that arose

in the psychedelic ballroom dialectic between embodiment and mass-mediation. These were

not merely easy-going, utopian events; nor were they manipulative, distopian affairs. They

were complex engagements with the possibilities and problems of public life in mass culture.

An announcement written by countercultural activist Chester Anderson for a series of 1967

concerts at California Hall indicated how the urge to produce a profound transformation of

the self and the social through the engagement of electronic stimuli could veer between the

liberatory and the authoritarian. After listing various problems and disappointments with the

current performance styles, Anderson declared that he was helping to organize three

concerts: Bedrock One, Two, and Three. He explained that, "the first will be better than sex,

the second will be better than the first, and we expect to have to flee the city after the

third."121

121
Chester Anderson, "Bedrock One!," January 1967, Folder: Communication Company, San
Francisco, 1967, Box 6, Social Protest Collection, Counter Culture, Bancroft Library, University of California -
Berkeley.

154
 Anderson emphasized how the concerts, as a "genuine Art Form," could produce a

space for new forms of individual and collective transformation. "We feel that a rock dance

should change your life, & we intend to see that it does." Yet, he was unwilling to settle for

the possibility that participants might take responsibility for this transformation themselves.

The promoters had to direct and control the process. "We intend to evolve the art of the rock

dance to the point that we can get any audience HIGH, any kind of high we choose, without

the aid of narcotics or other chemical copouts." Referencing Marshall McLuhan and seeking

to make use of the electronic technologies so central to the dialectic of embodiment and

mass-mediation that defined the San Francisco rock performance space, Anderson argued

that the promoters would be able to shape the concert experience through a process of

feedback, by monitoring and responding to events on the dance floor. "During each dance,

we'll have crew members go on the floor with walkie-talkies to coordinate activities. We'll

be able to tune the audience like a guitar. In fact, we intend to play the audience like a guitar.

An electric guitar. Hard."

This startling comparison, in which the audience has become an electric guitar,

points to the potential for new forms of subjectivity and collectivity that countercultural

activists sensed in the civics of rock. The self might be reconstituted in the space of the rock

concert as audience members simultaneously lost and found themselves in the dance. Like

Elizabeth Gips, Anderson turned to religion as a means of trying to describe what sorts of

transformations might be possible: "Any rock dance that isn't a religious event is a stone

drag," he declared.

But with the potential for positive transformation through the assault of electricity

155
came the problems of authoritarian control. Anderson's description of the Bedrock concerts

also revealed an urge -- similar to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters -- to play the outlaw

figure, the vigilante who wields control of people outside the law, often through the threat of

danger or even violence. The promoters might have to flee after the concert and, "once we've

fled the city -- pursued by angry parents & officials -- we'll write a handbook for anyone else

who wants to throw a REAL rock dance. We may call it RAPE IS AN ACT OF LOVE."

This phrase, "RAPE IS AN ACT OF LOVE," hints at the toying with violence that Anderson

and other counterculturists explored through rock music performances. It certainly revealed

the masculinist and misogynist desires at work in rock music and the counterculture.

But, the phrase was not merely a sign of misogyny; other meanings lurked in the

collapse of rape and love in the imagining of Anderson's Bedrock concerts. This phrase, after

all, came from a person who, later in the spring of 1967, bemoaned that, "Rape is as common

as bullshit on Haight Street," in a bitterly self-critical broadsheet about the many failures of

the counterculture.122 "RAPE IS AN ACT OF LOVE" might be understood in this context as

a metaphor that encapsulated the frustrations as well as the dreams of countercultural uses of

multimedia rock performance. Anderson was not interested in literally raping anyone; what

he desired was the ability to insist that and force people to experience the religious-like

subjectivity and collectivity that Elizabeth Gips described when she felt that she and others

had become "individuals melded in a great cosmic embrace."123

122
Chester Anderson, "Uncle Tim'$ Children," April 1967, Chester Anderson papers, [ca. 1963-1980],
The Communication Company (San Francisco, Calif.), Bancroft Library, University of California - Berkeley.
123
To add another layer of complexity to the use of language that was sexually violent and ostensibly
misogynist, Anderson's own sexuality tilted toward the homosexual, as documents in the Chester Anderson
papers at the Bancroft Library at the University of California - Berkeley suggest. See the manuscript "Puppies,"
written under the pseudonym John Valentine.

156
 As metaphor, "RAPE IS AN ACT OF LOVE" raised central ethical dilemmas for the

public sphere that hyper-electrified, multimedia rock performances made possible: Who was

to control them and how? Who had agency and who did not? What was the balance between

assault and agency? Could the energies of the rock dance be generated and directed?

Anderson was not interested in destruction; he wanted to "tune the audience & make it

receptive to what's about to happen, make it spiritually ready to love, and then, at the close,

to prepare it for the outside world again." But his urge to force the audience in particular

directions, even with noble intentions, revealed the difficult stakes of public life in the

psychedelic dance. The use of a metaphor referring to sexual violence made visible the

powerful gender dynamics lurking in the charged erotic spaces of the dance halls and

performance spaces in San Francisco.

Anderson's document was, of course, a prediction for the experiences that might take

place within the psychedelic dance hall. Bob Chamberlain, a photographer and artist, offered

a rich description of what the dance actually was like when he published a stream-of-

consciousness account of a night at the Avalon Ballroom in the experimental magazine,

Aspen. Chamberlain's essay emphasized the erotic energies that emerged as strangers

gathered together in the dialectic of embodiment and electronic mediation; the space of the

dance floor that Chamberlain moved across was one in which an air of Chester Anderson's

"RAPE IS AN ACT OF LOVE" lurked. But it also could become a beneficent space in

which individual identities and group formations seemed to mutate temporarily, offering

possibilities for new senses of the self and society.

157
 Most intriguingly for a space in which someone might, even metaphorically, suggest

that rape could be an act of love, women were able to assert themselves in new ways, using

their bodies to assert their visibility and agency in public outside of older forms of leisure

interaction. While the psychedelic dance halls were not sites of a full-blown women's

liberation movement, the liminality of these spaces with respect to constructions of the self

and society perhaps provided one channel that fed into increased awareness about gender.124

Chamberlain's description emphasized the erotics among strangers gathered together

in the electronically-mediated space of the dance. The experimental form of Chamberlain's

essay, which resembles a similar prose style to Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid

Test, helps establish a mood of liminality and uncertainty, a mixture of hope and doubt,

utopian possibility for achieving true selfhood and also the lurking possibility of losing hold

on the self. The narrative circles between tentative observation and absorption into the

dance, back and forth between perceptions of others and gauging of how the stimuli of the

ballroom is affecting Chamberlain himself. As narrator caught between embodiment and

mediation, Chamberlain feels the dance reaching into him even as he looks out on it.

Approaching the dance hall, Chamberlain notices, "groovy little girls bouncing up

and down without really knowing bursting out with short little motions of sensual impatience

as waveless of electronic sound teasingly spill rolling down the stairs promising everything."

Then, entering the room, he declared, "this is it, this is San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom

where they used to come dance to 1930's swing bands... mirrors, carpeted lounges,

124
For another channel, slightly earlier in the 1960s, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and
Gloria Jacobs, "Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun," in The Adoring Audience, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (New
York: Routledge, 1992); reprinted in The Subcultures Reader, eds. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (New York:
Routledge, 1997).

158
chandeliers, draperies on the ceilings, and a dance floor on springs... buzzing buzzing

buzzing buzzing electric music buzzing through the airwaves, flickflickflickflickflickflick

strobe light flicking energy quanta into the dancers and bouncing back out of the mirrors,

ultraviolet tubes floating in space overhead making fuzzy double images when you look into

them, finally coming down to a focus somewhere back inside behind the retina, somewhere

you don't ordinarily see from, and at the far end the transistorized band of electric speakers

swimming in a protoplasmic swirling bath of colors that rolls and surges with the music and

spills over onto the floor and the spongelike listenwatchers...." 125

In Chamberlain's account, the electricity of light and sound, the "buzzing buzzing

buzzing buzzing electric music buzzing through the airwaves" and the

"flickflickflickflickflickflick strobe light flicking energy quanta," merged in and diverged

out of the dancers and "spongelike listenwatchers." He finds himself able to "weave

molecularly through the dancers." "As long as I keep moving with the music and the lights

there is no collision-danger, only a soft touching and rolling...because we are a part of what's

going on as much as the lights and dancing, just as we feel what is happening, so we are felt

by those above us and around us... just as we feel, so we are felt...."

The band urges the audience on, and suddenly Chamberlain finds himself joining

hands with those around him, as if to represent the joining of strangers into a public

assemblage in the presence of the loud electric sounds and the strobe lights. They create the

groundwork for a public sphere of equals who are vulnerable in the blare and flash of the

electronic age, but able to symbolically enact a recognition of collectivity and individuality

125
Bob Chamberlain, "The View from the Dance Floor," Aspen Magazine 3, 5 (December 1966).

159
through the dance. "The band starts out quiet and slow, '...it's so easy, all you have to do is

just reach out, just reach out in any direction, it doesn't make any difference...', people are

doing it, the band is picking it up, '...all you've gotta do is just re-e-a-ch o-u-t and t-a-k-e t-h-

e h-a-n-d t-h-a-t's c-l-o-s-e-s-t to y-o-u-rs, it doesn't make any difference whose it is, it

doesn't make a-n-y difference...'"

Figure 1.17. From couple to group dancing at the Straight Theater on Haight Street, probably
1968 (photograph: unknown, courtesy: www.thestraight.com)

Chamberlain realizes, "it's happening, people are doing it, other people are doing it,

joining up slowly, hesitating, long chains stretch out a hand to the uncertain as the sound

becomes music, 'just reach out and take that hand...', and it really is happening, the chains are

linking up everyone, everyone in the whole place into one giant skipping leaping dancing

snake whirling in and out through itself, surging, rushing, contracting, stretching, faster and

faster but never breaking, never colliding, hundreds of people together in an ecstatic

crescendo of whooping laughter..." The dance floor, now a space of "one giant skipping

leaping snake whirling in and out through itself" has become a bodily enactment of people

160
"never breaking, never colliding, hundreds of people together in an ecstatic crescendo of

whooping laughter."

Within this public sphere fostered out of the interaction between embodiment and

mass-mediation, Chamberlain becomes particularly aware of other dancers, particularly the

women on the dance floor. His comments represent the male gaze, but they also suggest the

ways in which women utilized the shift from older forms of couple dancing to the newer,

psychedelic openness of individual and group dancing to assert themselves in a public realm.

Entering the dance floor, Chamberlain notices how a "Mod teeenie-bopper is just wailing

away in the typical basic adolescent sex-machine mode but you can see that she's beginning

to feel herself, beginning to feel herself move and getting fascinated, fascinated by the fact

that she feels good to herself just moving, rolling a little at the end of the mechanical

movements, and the deep ache coming on from somewhere...."

Figure 1.18. A woman dancing at the Straight Theater, probably 1967 (photograph:
unknown, courtesy: www.thestraight.com)

161
 Chamberlain wanders deeper into the crowd, "and a little further in a thin blonde is

just pumping away as fast as she can, harder and harder, backbone arching, grit your teeth,

it's ok, squint your eyes, it's ok, shake your head, it's ok, scratch, bite, it's ok, it's all right, it's

all right, it's all right!... and a girl with long black hair from modern dance class working

through all the movements, pushing up against the limits of each one, testing, testing, what

will my body do, how will it move, where can it go that it has not yet been, how can it get

outside the control of learned movements...."

Figure 1.19. Another woman dancing at the Straight Theater, probably 1967 (photograph:
unknown, courtesy: www.thestraight.com)

These descriptions reveal the charged erotic space of the public sphere that was

created in the psychedelic dance hall, a space that easily led to gendered power for men

162
eager to gaze at women. But, Chamberlain's observations also hint at the power women

countered with when liberated from the couple formation of dancing. In the cacophonous

roar of the electronic music and the blinding lights, a kind of microcosm of larger urban

spaces of anonymity and estrangement, they could better ignore men who bothered them and

tend to issues of self-discovery and creation, utilizing their bodies to, as Chamberlain put it,

"get outside the control of learned movements."

Figure 1.20 and Figure 1.21. Redefining gender and the public sphere on the psychedelic
dance floor, at the Trips Festival (left, photograph: Rod Mann) and Fillmore Auditorium,
1966 (right, photograph: Gene Anthony)

Like Bob Chamberlain, journalist Ralph Gleason noticed how the dancing had

moved from the formal couple dancing of earlier decades to a new form of individual and

group dancing that was less directly linked to earlier, more formalized modes of heterosexual

courtship. Gleason recognized the lineage and genealogy of the dancing: "To begin with,

though this dancing is free-form in the sense that you do whatever you are inspired to do, its

basic step stems from the so-called 'bop' dancing of the mid-fifties, which in turn evolved

163
into the 'swim,' the 'twist,' the 'jerk,' and the rest of the teenage (or adult versions of teen-age)

dances."126 But the codes of partner dancing were giving way to new modes of interaction.

These new forms of dancing were less driven by courtship. Instead, they emphasized

erotic interactions among strangers improvising and projecting their subjectivity through

bodily movement while moving through the enveloping electronic mediation of light and

sound that the ballrooms contained. Though the dance floor had often allowed women to

assert their subjectivities in public in the past, in the San Francisco rock performance spaces,

women were able to assert themselves in public outside of the previous codes of

heterosexual leisure activity.127 For instance, Gleason described an encounter between a

young woman and man at the Fillmore Auditorium one night: "The young man...moves

directly in front of her line-of-sight and about three feet away and as soon as their eyes lock

and he is right in front of her, they both break into a wild rhythmic dancing, exactly as if the

current has been turned on. They continue throughout the number and at its end turn away

from one another and go their separate ways. They never spoke." To Gleason, young people

such as this temporarily connected couple were "dancing in a wild, free-form, abandoned

manner.... Urban America is producing an increasing body of people who want to dance. The

bomb and the pill and the New Youth combine (and intertwine) to motivate people to dance.

That's all."128

Gleason's argument was that the technologies of mass society had opened the dance

126
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 50.
127
Among others, Lewis Erenberg argues that swing dancing, by placing men and women on equal
footing helped create new gender relations in the 1930s and 1940s; see Erenberg, 251.
128
Gleason, Jr., The Jefferson Airplane, 22, 51.

164
floor to alternative possibilities. The strange combination of nuclear age anxiety and birth-

control pill pleasure -- both new realities in the Cold War years -- rendered the dance floor a

space to let loose and discover new paths to self-expression. By stepping into and helping to

create the new conditions of the psychedelic dance floor, women were able to make use of

this space. Between embodiment and electronic mediation, women danced their way toward

new roles in public. While their dancing linked them to subjectivities and identities that

remained firmly gendered and unequal, they did present new opportunities as well.

Poster art represented the significance of women in the dance of the psychedelic

ballrooms. As with Chamberlain's essay, these representations were by male artists, and

involved male desire, to be sure. But they also contained a kind of amazement and respect

for the efforts by women to explore new formations of the self -- and by extension to

reconstitute new versions of the collective public sphere produced at psychedelic rock

dances. Wes Wilson's poster for concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium on the weekend of

September 2-5, 1966 present the back of a naked woman whose strands of hair extend to

surround the names of the bands -- the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, the Quicksilver

Messenger Service, Country Joe and the Fish, and, importantly, the Motown act Martha and

the Vandellas -- as if to suggest that the meaning and significance, the very making, of the

dance is contained in the outstretched braids of the woman's head.129

Graphically, she assembles the concert within the grasp of her tresses. Her body turns

in a kind of discovery of the dance, tilted, her buttocks and one breast shaded to suggest

movement, one foot kicking up, her palm lifted as if to press against the limits of the poster,

129
Wes Wilson, BG 26-1, 2-5 September 1966, Poster/Handbill/Postcard, in Lemke, Art of the
Fillmore, 48.

165
her head tilted down in intense focus and self-concentration. The woman on the poster seems

to represent the embodied dancers that Bob Chamberlain describes. Once published, of

course, the poster also served to create a model for women. Out of the interaction of

embodiment and representation, female participants in the dance, of course, had to confront

the growing stereotypes of females in the hippie movement: -- the "wild chick," the "hippie

chick," the "Earth Mother." But they also were able to assert themselves as strangers in the

mass-mediated public sphere of the ballrooms in new, potentially libratory ways.

Figure 1.22. Poster for Fillmore Auditorium Concert, September 2-5, 1966 (artist: Wes
Wilson, courtesy: www.wolfgangsvault.com)

166
 Figure 1.23. "The Sound," Fillmore Auditorium and Winterland Ballroom Concerts,
September 23-October 2, 1966 (artist: Wes Wilson, courtesy: www.wolfgangsvault.com)

On a poster in September of 1966, Wes Wilson went so far as to equate women with

"the sound," suggesting that if the San Francisco "sound was also a scene," the women

liberated from the private realm but able to retain a charged sexuality and eroticism as a

stranger in public, were at the center of this new social world. Wilson presented a naked

woman, now facing the viewer with her body ecstatically moving beneath the words "The

Sound." The names of various bands are gathered around her hips. Her arms are raised up,

her hair waves back. Among the increasingly iconic rock stars, she is another cartoonish

167
archetype -- a new superhero to join Dr. Strange, the Great Blondin', Batman and Robin,

Ming the Merciless, and especially Sparkle Plenty. She represents how much "the sound" of

San Francisco, the "sound that is also a scene," the sound that sustained a public sphere

between embodiment and electronic mass-mediation, relied upon and was created by women

dancing in the psychedelic ballroom.130

But how inclusive could this public sphere be? The questions of race and ethnicity

were especially never far from the minds of many participants in the San Francisco

counterculture. As Chester Anderson wrote in a "Two Page Racial Rap": "Dear all by

brethren: we have a race problem. Along with all the other things we're developing, we have

developed new patterns of prejudice."131 The Fillmore Auditorium and the Haight-Ashbury

district were, after all, in San Francisco's mostly African-American neighborhoods. Conflicts

did arise, especially in the aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in 1968.132

But though the psychedelic ballrooms were part of a counterculture often dominated by

white, middle-class college students and post-college hipsters, this public also presented

opportunities for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, and others to

participate in a tentative, confusing, cross-cultural social space.

In tentative ways, the sounds and the scene sustained by the psychedelic ballrooms

provided possibilities for cross-racial connection and interaction. They never transcended the

larger problems of race in the United States during the 1960s. There were many conflicts and
130
Wes Wilson, BG 29-1b, 23 September-2 October 1966, Poster/Handbill/Postcard, in Lemke, Art of
the Fillmore, 50-51.
131
Chester Anderson, "Two Page Racial Rap," Communication Company Flier, 9 February 1967,
Communication Company Folder, Social Protest Collection, Counter Culture, Box 6, Bancroft Library,
University of California - Berkeley.
132
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 239-240.

168
sometimes violence between African-Americans and white hippies for instance. But in San

Francisco's sound that was also a scene, new cross-racial affiliations seemed potentially

possible, on the brink of coming into being. In somewhat stereotypical but appreciative

language, Bob Chamberlain mentions the presence of African-Americans and even an

African student dancing at the Avalon Ballroom.133 A CBS television news documentary

from 1967 focused on the dangers of LSD, but its images unwittingly directed the viewer's

attention repeatedly to the mixing of races going on in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, as

if this was really the thing mainstream America had to fear.134 Darby Slick remembered how

in the Fillmore District, "Many black people seemed somewhat bemused to see the hippie

hairstyles and clothes, although, there were, of course, many black hippies."135

The ballrooms provided a new market for African-American musicians who had

increasingly lost their market to the British Invasion of the mid-1960s. Promoters such as

Bill Graham made an effort to present creative bills that matched up young new psychedelic

bands with existing African-American artists: Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Albert King,

Martha and the Vandellas, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry performed, among many others.

Black hippies appeared on stage too: Love's Arthur Lee, Jimi Hendrix, and San Francisco's

own integrated band, Sly and the Family Stone.136

133
Chamberlain, "The View from the Dance Floor."
134
"The Hippie Temptation," A Report by Harry Reasoner, The Walter Cronkite Show, CBS-News,
1967.
135
Slick, Don't You Want Somebody, 65.
136
Graham, Bill Graham Presents; Lemke, Art of the Fillmore.

169
 Figure 1.24 and Figure 1.25. Two posters for Otis Redding at the Fillmore Auditorium,
December 20-22, 1966 (artist: Wes Wilson, courtesy: www.wolfgangsvault.com)

Two posters for the Fillmore Auditorium performances by Otis Redding suggest the

lengths that promoters went to appeal to the different audiences of African-Americans and

hippies in order to assemble them together in the performance spaces. Of course, these

efforts were driven by market forces to draw as large an audience as possible, but they had

civic effects as well. One poster was in the style of most concerts presented for African-

American audiences. The type was clearly presented, announcing a "dance concert." A

publicity photograph of Otis Redding appeared at the center of the poster, with plenty of

blank space around it. The other poster, created by Wes Wilson, placed a photograph of

Redding performing, microphone in hand, on an aqua-blue background, with his name in

bubbling red letters. Below the photograph, the letters, dates, place and price of the concerts

seemed to form the backs of women's heads watching Redding perform. Together, the

170
straight-ahead poster, aimed at the African-American audience for Redding's soul music, and

the psychedelic poster, directed toward the hippie crowd not only promised to bring these

audiences together in the name of commercial profit, but also in terms of new civic

associations. A consequence of Graham's economic calculations was that the dance of the

psychedelic ballroom might overcome racial divides.137

San Francisco's Secret Public, Out in the Open: Conclusion

Rock music in San Francisco stood at the center of a new sort of public sphere -- a

countercultural phantom public that crackled into existence in the flow between particular

and mass-mediated senses of self and collectivity. In the hyper-electronic spaces of the

psychedelic ballrooms, where dancers embodied participation in a landscape of sound and

light, a negotiation of the possibilities and problems of the mass public and the mass subject

took place. This experiment spilled into the streets of San Francisco as bands performed in

the Golden Gate Panhandle, on Haight Street itself, and in other outdoor locations.

In October 1966, at the "Love Pageant Rally" (and later at the news conference for

the Human Be-In to take place in January of 1967), Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen, two

editors at the Haight-Ashbury's Oracle newspaper, issued a decree that hinted at the sense of

a new civic life that rock music had helped foster in San Francisco. Called a "Prophesy of a

Declaration of Independence," the statement consciously echoed the founding document of

the United States. The document reflected the combination of embodiment in a particular

community in San Francisco, but continually stressed the openness to affiliation to others

137
Tilghman Press, BG 43 alternate, and Wes Wilson, 43-1, 20-22 December 1966,
Poster/Handbill/Postcard, in Lemke, Art of the Fillmore, 58.

171
around the world. "When in the flow of human events it becomes necessary for the people to

cease to recognize the obsolete social patterns which had isolated man from his

consciousness and to create with the youthful energies of the world revolutionary

communities to which the two-billion-year-old life process entitles them, a decent respect to

the opinions of mankind should declare the causes which impel them to this creation,"

Bowen and Cohen wrote.

They continued: "We hold these experiences to be self-evident, that all is equal, that

the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights, that among these are: the freedom of

the body, the pursuit of joy, and the expansion of consciousness, and that to secure these

rights, we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion for all conflicting hate-

carrying men and women of the world." The statement was a declaration of independence,

but it reaffirmed dependence as well. As "citizens of the earth," countercultural participants

could not merely turn their backs on a larger mass public; they had to, somehow, share their

sense of newfound subjectivity and collectivity while simultaneously declaring

independence. This mixture of spreading their ideas while also emphasizing their separation

from a larger system is what made San Francisco so crucial as a symbol of a countercultural

phantom public flickering into existence within larger mass structures and technologies. San

Francisco, and the Haight-Ashbury in particular, became a kind of strobe light beacon from

the city on a hill.

A Communications Company broadsheet from April 1967, titled "Hippies in Haight-

Ashbury," continued the linkage of the San Francisco scene to historically symbolic and

significant issues of civic life in the United States: "American society has been in motion

since the inception of the country, changing its structure for the benefit of all its citizens,

172
adapting to new personal and world responsibilities....The young people in Haight-Ashbury

are taking part in these sociological changes, not necessarily conforming to the mainstream

of the society, and individually rediscovering the concepts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness."138 Recognizing new structural factors of mass-mediation and global

interconnection but trying to explain how participants in the counterculture were joining

long-running historical traditions of civic engagement in the United States, this author

(possibly Chester Anderson, or a member of the Diggers) seconded the "Prophesy of a

Declaration of Independence" first put forth by Michael Bowen and Allen Cohen.

One way in which the spirit of this declaration continued to spread to a mass public

was through the psychedelic ballrooms, even as these venues faded in significance to their

original participants. By 1967, visiting rock critic Paul Williams could write that the

ballrooms themselves had "been turned into induction centers -- the teenyboppers, the

college students, the curious adults come down to the Fillmore to see what's going on, and

they do see, and pretty soon they're part of it."139 This curious phrasing -- induction center --

hinted at the impact of the Vietnam War on the San Francisco sound that was also a scene,

an impact we can explore further in chapter three. The counterculture had grown

increasingly separatist by 1967 and 1968, because as much what Detroit activist John

Sinclair called a "guitar army" as a public sphere.140 Yet, it retained a sense of openness, of

138
N.A., "Hippies in Haight-Ashbury," April 1967, Folder: Chester Anderson papers, [ca. 1963-1980],
The Communication Company (San Francisco, Calif.), Bancroft Library, University of California - Berkeley.
139
Paul Williams, "The Golden Road: A Report on San Francisco," Crawdaddy! 10 (July-August
1967): 6.
140
John Sinclair, Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings (New York: Douglas Books, 1972).

173
civic rather than militaristic life. "Pretty soon they're part of it," Williams noted of the

curiosity seekers attending concerts at the Fillmore and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the ongoing public experiment powered by rock music had spread into

the streets. "The Panhandle is the San Francisco Sound today; the music of the street, the

music of the people who live there," Williams claimed.141 But even as it expanding into the

open, into the air outside, away from the contained hyper-electronic and mass-mediated

spaces of the ballrooms, the music continued to gather people together around its amplified

sounds. As Eileen Law, part of the Grateful Dead's extended world put it, "When you saw

each other it was like you had this secret over everybody else."142

Journalist Michael Lydon explored the nature of this "secret" in a 1969 article about

the Grateful Dead. "San Francisco's secret was not the dancing, the light shows, the posters,

the long sets, or the complete lack of stage act," he argued, "but the idea that all of them

together were the creation and recreation of a community." To Lydon, "San Francisco said

that rock and roll could be making your own music for your friends -- folk music in a special

sense." But, in fact, "it didn't really work....The central reason is that rock is not folk music

in that special sense. The machine, with all its flashy fraudulences, is not a foreign growth on

rock, but its very essence."

Realizing the ways in which rock sustained the tensions between embodiment and

mass-mediation, a vernacular "folk" culture of community and a mass-mediated popular

culture of electricity and space-age technology, Lydon explained that in San Francisco,

"Rock and roll, rather some other art, became the prime expression of that community
141
Williams, "The Golden Road," 6.
142
Brightman, Sweet Chaos, 156.

174
because it was rock, machine and all, the miracle beauty of American mass production, a

mythic past, a global fantasy, an instantaneous communications network, and a maker of

super-heroes. There's no way to combine wanting that and wanting 'just folks' too. The

excitement of San Francisco was the attempt to synthesize these two contradictory

positions."143

As the late 1960s progressed, San Francisco's version of the rock music contradiction

spread worldwide, sending its civic negotiations and phantom public sphere into the Vietnam

war zone and into youth movements in many nations. Back in San Francisco, its growth as

an industry raised all sorts of conundrums about who should profit from the music, and

whether the music should produce profit at all. Despite great efforts by Chet Helms to

mediate through a kind of communal town meeting and open forum, labor disputes broke out

at the 1969 Wild West Festival, for instance, when light show artists demanded higher

wages. The Festival was eventually cancelled.144 The Diggers urged San Francisco's hippies

to transform the town into a "free city," where music was to be liberated from the

marketplace.145 The violence-free gatherings in the Panhandle, some sponsored by the Hell's

Angels, gave way to the killing of an African-American by the Hell's Angels, paid in beer to

provide security at the Altamont concert in December of 1969.146

143
Michael Lydon, "The Grateful Dead," Rolling Stone 40 (23 August 1969): 18.
144
Graham, Bill Graham Presents, 276-280.
145
The Digger Papers, August 1968, Reprint from The Realist, Diggers 3/67-69 and n.d. Folder,
Haight Street Diggers papers, 1966-1969, California Historical Society, 16-17.
146
The Hell's Angels sponsored and participated many events in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle,
including the "Love Pageant Rally," 6 October 1966 and a "New Year's Day Whale/Wail," 1 January 1967. See
Perry, The Haight-Ashbury, 96, 118. For more on Altamont, see the film Gimme Shelter, directed by Albert and
David Maysles (Maysles Films, 1970), and Stanley Booth, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (1985;
revised, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000).

175
 The strange secret of San Francisco's countercultural public nonetheless lingered,

creating a massive amount of nostalgia almost instantaneously, even by the end of the 1960s,

and certainly far into the next decades. The public interaction that the San Francisco scene

generated always threatened to reestablish itself in the interplay between embodiment and

mass-mediation. As Michael Lydon wrote of the San Francisco attempt to sustain the

contradiction of folk music face-to-face community and rock music's mass-electricity, "To

pull it off would have been a revolution; at best San Francisco made a reform. In the long

haul its creators, tired of fighting the paradox, chose modified rock over folk music....All

except the Grateful Dead, who've been battling it out with that mother of a paradox for years.

Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose."

Figure 1.26. The Grateful Dead performing at the Love Pageant Rally in the Golden Gate
Park Panhandle. October 6, 1966 (photograph: Gene Anthony)

176
 Which brings us to footage of the Grateful Dead performing one sunny afternoon in

Golden Gate Park's Panhandle during 1967's Summer of Love. "Come alive around the

world," the young, long-haired singer Bob Weir declared from the back of a flatbed truck,

instead of the original opening lyrics -- "calling out around the world" -- to Martha and the

Vandellas' hit song, "Dancing in the Streets." Looking out over the Panhandle section of

Golden Gate Park in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, perhaps Weir and his

bandmates noticed the gazes of an audience of young people, mostly white, with a few

people of color here and there. Most of the audience was relaxing in the sun, a few members

were dancing. All of them seem swept up in the secret feelings they were sharing together in

public -- a sense of joy and possibility that they could be part of a public "coming alive

around the world," but also, perhaps, an awareness of the challenge that faced them in

figuring out a way somehow to extend and sustain their sound that was also a scene in a

meaningful way.147

147
"The Hippie Temptation."

177
 Part Two -
Writing On Rock: The Critical-Public of the Countercultural Music Press

Figure 2.1. "I can't put it into words": Gathering around the "séance table" of the rock music
press, Creem magazine, 1972 (courtesy: Creem Media, Inc.)

What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people
involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them
has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The
weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of
people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see
the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each
other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each
other by anything tangible. - Hannah Arendt1

Two men sit at a table. One leans back, his cigarette (or is it a manrijuana joint?)

sending up wisps of smoke from an ashtray. The other stoops over a piece of paper,

scribbling away madly, crossing out words as fast as he can write them. "Shit...I can't put it

into words," the writer declares in the next panel of the comic strip. He gazes up at the

viewer, hands pressed on the table in exasperation, his mouth curled up in an upside-down

1
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52-53.
question mark. In the next panel, his friend leans in toward him, shoulders hunched over.

Smoke curls up between the two men at the table. "Must be a good album," the friend quips.2

Perhaps the two men in the comic strip knew of Hannah Arendt, if not of her ideas

about mass culture and public life. Though we can assume she was no fan of rock music (so

far as we know), Hannah Arendt herself might have agreed with the rock writer in the comic

strip who had such trouble finding a way to describe rock music. The political philosopher

and cultural critic continually bemoaned the difficulties of articulating precise, direct

meaning in mass society. Writing about individuals such as these two men, Arendt believed

that mass culture had, "lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate

them."3 Yet the two men oddly resemble her metaphor for mass society, in which, "the

weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people

gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from

their midst." Though the table never disappears, these men do seem to embody Arendt's

vision of, "two persons sitting opposite each other…no longer separated but also…entirely

unrelated to each other by anything tangible." The two men are able to establish a

communicative link through the very inability to communicative effectively about the power

of music. They are, to borrow from Arendt, brought together by a kind of magic trick: the

effort to articulate the ineffable, to render linguistically the intangible effects of music,

creates a spirit of humorous connection and perhaps even existential fellow-feeling and

comradeship.

2
Bob Wilson, "Must Be a Good Album" cartoon, Creem 4, 4 (September 1972): 52.
3
Arendt, The Human Condition, 52-53.

179
 Appearing in a 1972 issue of Creem magazine, this comic by Bob Wilson

compresses into three panels a larger story about print publications and music criticism in

the 1960s. Harkening back to the coffeehouse newspapers of Jürgen Habermas's eighteenth-

century Europe, but also responding to the new situation of a globalizing, mass-mediated

culture, magazines and newspapers became crucial components in the civics of rock.

Sparked by increased access to technologies such as mimeograph machines and buoyed

along by the flood of money invested into any venture related to youth culture, music

publications linked participants together around the intangibility of music and the séance

table of connection that a genre such as rock could sustain in the crackling currents of its

sound waves.

Although most historical investigations of rock music print culture concentrate on

Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone magazine, the sole focus on Wenner's creation has obscured the

wider context of music publications in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. In this

chapter, I focus on two magazines, Crawdaddy! and Creem, to broaden the story of music

criticism's role in fostering the public life of the counterculture. Crawdaddy! was perhaps the

first rock magazine. Founded in 1965, it preceded Rolling Stone by two years. Crawdaddy!

provided a far more wide-ranging, experimental approach to rock than Rolling Stone.

Founded in 1969, two years after Rolling Stone's inception, Creem emerged as one of

Rolling Stone's main competitors in covering music during the early 1970s. The magazine

provided an alternative space for grappling with the meaning of rock music and the

counterculture as the 1960s faded and Rolling Stone consolidated journalistic control over

the collective memory of the era.

180
 Other rock magazines and underground newspapers complicated assumptions about

the division between a "mainstream" and an "underground" press. From the direction of the

mainstream, more conventional publications such as Hit Parader, Cheetah, and even Ellen

Willis writing in the New Yorker actually circulated countercultural discussion as much as a

Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy!, or Creem did. From the other direction -- the supposed

countercurrent of the underground press, more marginal entities such as the San Francisco

Express Times, Seed, East Village Other, and the fanzine Who Put the Bomp? were not

monolithic mouthpieces for revolution, but rather provided sharp critiques of the

counterculture and psychedelic rock. Those who were writing deep within the counterculture

movement were often, in fact, its harshest critics.

In the music press, then, the civics of rock defied simplistic categorizations of

authentic or inauthentic, underground or mainstream. Instead, countercultural energies and

modes of engagement migrated between the overtly oppositional and the seemingly

commodified. In search of the elusive meaning of music, the producers and consumers of

rock publications gathered around Arendt's metaphorical séance table, discussing and

debating rock music, confronting the challenges of mass culture she identified. They not

only tried to put into words what made a good album, but also what might make a good life.

The stories of Crawdaddy!, Creem, and other rock music publications, then, suggest how the

creators and the readers of rock magazines pioneered a "new beat" by forging an innovative

form of cultural criticism. In this new form, a deliberative critical-public arose around the

possibilities and the problems of music as a generator of a more egalitarian, democratic, and

potentially libratory public life. Old forms of media in a new world of expanding mass-

media and communications, Crawdaddy! and Creem provide a glimpse into how responses

181
to rock registered a transformation of the relationship between the public sphere and mass

media.

The rock critic emerged as a crucial new persona -- a model citizen in this new public

sphere of rock music deliberation. Attempting to communicate rock's significance, critics

were not just once-removed commentators on music, but active shapers of its meaning;

sometimes they even acquired the status of prophets unveiling rock's glowing core of power,

inspiring others to "see the light" of rock's flashes and blasts of energy. Perceiving rock as a

vital generator and transmitter of cultural energy in a national (and global) setting

increasingly interconnected by the electronic pulses, images, sounds, and sensations of mass

media, rock critics attempted to map out in language how rock's intangible sound waves

were fostering a new, portable civic life. Rock critics took on the task of rendering popular

music's civic potential in explicit discursive form. The critic persona also became available

to readers, many of whom responded not only to the music itself, but to the ongoing

conversation that the rock music press sustained.

Completing a circuit between the private world of individual musical experience and

the shared realm of commercial, political, and -- most importantly -- civil interaction, rock

publications allowed rock listeners to generate what Jürgen Habermas famously described as

a "critical-public."4 Attempting to explain rock music's power and significance to themselves

and to others, the participants in the rock press sought out what the sociologist Craig

Calhoun calls, "the social conditions…for a rational-critical debate about public issues

4
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1962; English
translation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

182
conducted by private persons willing to let arguments and not statuses determine decisions."5

Using rock star celebrities and the commodities they produced as fodder for larger debates,

publications displayed a special interest in music's complicated relationship to issues of

individual autonomy and social connection in a mass consumer society. Diverging from

Habermas and Hannah Arendt, who bemoaned the loss of an authentic civics in this setting,

rock critics heard in rock music ways to grapple with both the realities and the potentially

transformative elements of their situation.6 Writers, illustrators, photographers, editors, even

readers who responded in letters, all became critics of a sort who explored how rock might

provide the means for reconfiguring the commodified, mass-mediated world in which they

lived.

To Paul Williams, the founding editor of Crawdaddy!, rock music provided the seeds

for conversations to bloom among listeners and fans. "The idea was 'Here's something that a

whole lot of people have in common that they're really passionate about," he reminisced in

1992. "By talking about what we have in common, we really form a link here.'"7 To

Williams, rock magazines such as Crawdaddy! were not meant to inscribe final judgment on

rock and its significance, but to provide forums for inky voices to converse across the

pressed pulp of mimeograph paper. As Steve Jones observes in a skillful survey of the

5
Craig Calhoun, "Introduction," Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992): 1.
6
Habermas locates the civic sphere in a particular historical moment and place, during the bourgeois
ascendancy of late-Enlightenment European society, in salons, coffeehouses, pamphlets, and newspapers; he
bemoans the loss of this sphere in modern, electronic, mass-consumer society. Reach further back to antiquity,
Hannah Arendt also views 20th-century mass society as bereft of the civic; see Hannah Arendt, The Human
Condition.
7
Interview with Fred Goodman, 9 July 1992. See Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan,
Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce (New York: Times Books,
1997), 12.

183
origins of rock criticism, "Popular music criticism can be understood as meaning-making, a

way of continuing the discourse of popular music on a non-musical plane."8

Joining a long history of jazz, folk, and popular arts criticism in the United States, the

rock press distinguished itself from its progenitors through its exploration of the social

dimensions of the emotions. Rock publications did not solely provide aesthetic criticism,

culture industry updates, or political advocacy.9 Rather, they housed responses to rock that

often examined the emotional experiences that linked art, commerce, and politics. In doing

so, they joined the New Journalism emerging during the 1960s.10 They also represented

efforts to enact the sort of critical response to art and culture that Susan Sontag called for in

her influential early-1960s essays: a sensitivity to sensation and emotion as well as. if not in

place of, interpretation and ideology.11 What the rock press reveals is an ongoing sphere of

debate about the relationship between individual and collective emotional lives as mediated

by music.

Of course, publications such as Crawdaddy! and Creem did not only provide spaces

for civic debate and deliberation about rock music. These magazines were also, of course,

economic products in their own right. Both magazines sought to succeed as commercial

8
Steve Jones, "Re-Viewing Rock Writing: Recurring Themes in Popular Music Criticism," American
Journalism (Spring/Summer 1992): 102.
9
For the history of popular music criticism, see Steve Jones, ed., Pop Music and the Press
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002). On jazz criticism, see John Gennari, Blowin' Hot and Cool:
Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
10
On the New Journalism, see Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973)
and Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New
Journalism Revolution (New York: Crown, 2005).
11
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966; reprint, New York: Anchor
Books/Doubleday, 1986).

184
entities in the mass marketplace. Like Rolling Stone, they came to depend on advertising

revenue that came almost exclusively from record companies and other music-related

corporations. So, too, they faced the difficult managerial problems of production and

distribution. These economic concerns intersected with the editorial shape of the

publications. But the intersection was not simply a process of cooption or "selling out."

Instead, these publications place us in this strange new, mass-mediated neighborhood

of countercultural civics, a placeless place whose architecture often consisted of little more

than evanescent feelings and emotions transmitted through sound. "The rock 'community'

refers not to an institution, to a set of people, but to a sensation," the sociologist (and rock

critic) Simon Frith argues.12 Yet these sensations paradoxically generated a sense of locality,

belonging, connection, and subtle civic bonds that flickered into existence through the

channels of mass culture. The rock music press provided discursive pathways for exploring

the nature of a counterculture that was not only literally embodied, but also mediated and

disembodied.

As the historian David Farber puts it, to many in the 1960s, the counterculture often

felt, "everywhere and nowhere, hard to define and thus difficult to stop." For the

counterculture's more active members, Farber claims, the phenomenon "was about space,

about taking over a few city blocks or a few acres of countryside and trying to make a world

out of it, a place where all the old rules were up for grabs and where, as the saying went, you

could take a trip without a ticket." But for many more members of the postwar youth

generation (and for some older Americans as well) the counterculture was not so much about

12
Simon Frith, '"The Magic That Can Set You Free': The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock
Community," Popular Music 1 (1981): 164.

185
literal places as it was about the shared imaginary landscape of the mass-media. What Arjun

Appadurai has called the "mediascape" raised new civic possibilities -- and raised new civic

problems.13

As Farber himself describes the relationship between mass culture and counterculture

in the 1960s: "Millions of kids, charmed by the pictures and the sounds flashed at them from

TV screens and concert halls...played with the possibilities."14 Rock publications such as

Crawdaddy! and Creem provided a critical-public in which these dual participants in the

counterculture and mass culture were able to contend with life among the wires and beams,

the vast power grids and global satellite broadcasts, the televisions, radios, and phonograph

hi-fis. Here, in the "mediascape," old-fashioned ink and paper provided one way to come

together -- not in agreement, but in exploration, critique, and engagement. Publications such

as Crawdaddy! and Creem reveal how the civics of rock not only echoed thunderously in

sound, but also silently in print.

Crawdaddy! Magazine's "Geography of Rock"

"I'm getting a little bored, at times, pretending to tell you about music," Paul

Williams wrote in the September 1968 issue of Crawdaddy!, the rock magazine he had

started in 1966 as a seventeen-year-old freshman at Swarthmore College, "and I'd like very

13
See Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture
2, 2 (1990): 1-24. Reprinted in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993). Also see, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
14
David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America In the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang/Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 1994), 168-69.

186
much to advance toward the stage where we all sort of tell each other."15 From the its first,

mimeographed issue in the winter of 1966 to Paul Williams's departure as editor in the fall of

1968, Crawdaddy!, the first publication devoted to serious discussion of rock music,

struggled to house a kind of civic interaction based on bringing the aesthetic experience of

rock and popular music into the form of printed communication among critical fans.

Attempting to create a community of fandom and consumption in which each voice,

each self, could flourish fully and yet cohere into a larger entity, Crawdaddy! revealed the

problems and the possibilities of a countercultural civics that sought to redirect the power of

mass consumerism toward the end of realizing private and public belonging for the young.

"Music is just a form of something, writing about music is just another form of that same

thing," Williams claimed. Chasing after this "something" -- "sensations, concepts, forms and

feelings…things to exchange with each other" -- Williams and his cohorts at Crawdaddy!

oscillated wildly between numerous contradictions.16 They wrote in a gap between art and

commerce, amateurism and professionalism, self and other, control and freedom, radical

humanism and apocalyptic nihilism, seeking to discover (or invent) new forms of selfhood

and community in the context of postwar American mass society.

Most of all, as a magazine that migrated in its first two years from Swarthmore,

Pennsylvania, to Boston, Massachusetts, to New York City as its young editor himself

hitchhiked and resettled, Crawdaddy! lacked a place in which to situate a collective identity

save for the ambiguous sense of imagined place created via mass-distributed popular music.

15
Paul Williams, "Kind Reader, I Have a Proposal," Crawdaddy! 18 (September 1968): 2.
16
Paul Williams, "The Way We Are Today: Earth Opera/Joni Mitchell," Crawdaddy! 17 (August
1968): 28.

187
For instance, in an article on the new "San Francisco Sound" of 1967 (a sound to which

Rolling Stone would harness its identity), Williams was deeply impressed by the "geography

of rock," the way that "San Francisco is different from New York musically." Yet, Williams

was inclined to broaden the sense of place created through rock beyond an "obvious

geographical limitation," connecting the "San Francisco" sound to "a feeling, an attitude"

more broadly.17

Figure 2.2. Fan as editor: Paul Williams, 1967 (photograph: James D. Wilson)

"Above all," Williams wrote, "the San Francisco Sound is the musical expression of

what's going down, a new attitude toward the world…which could…accurately be laid at the

feet of a non-subculture called People, earth people, all persons who have managed to

17
Paul Williams, "The Golden Road," 5, 14. Jann Wenner, inspired by Williams and Crawdaddy!,
began publishing Rolling Stone in October, 1967.

188
transcend the superstructures they live in."18 Seeking to constitute and sustain a "place" for

this attitude as expressed by "all persons," Williams and Crawdaddy! veered all over the

map of civic orientations concerning art, culture, commerce, race, gender, class, and a whole

host of categories; at times, writers in the magazine burst through in flashes of brilliance to

express the possibilities for a radically new utopian existence within the placeless

"geography of rock," but ultimately, Crawdaddy! proved unable to sustain a civic vision

outside of a sense of real place.

Though Crawdaddy! reemerged after 1968 as a Rolling Stone-like journalistic

publication unaffiliated with Paul Williams, its first two years of existence, occurring during

the first flush of countercultural activity in America, were inextricable entwined with the life

of its founding editor.19 Raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he had grown involved

with the world of science-fiction clubs, conventions, and "fanzines," Williams started

Crawdaddy! during the winter of 1966. He was only seventeen years old, a freshman at

Swarthmore College, the liberal arts college located in a suburb outside Philadelphia.20

Crawdaddy! was the first magazine devoted entirely to discussing rock and roll music as a

serious (though not an elitist) art form.21 The magazine began as a brief, mimeographed

18
Williams, "The Golden Road," 5, 14.
19
Historians of rock music, and the 1960s in general, trace the emergence of a "counterculture" to
figures and events in 1965 and 66, from Bob Dylan "going electric" to the "Acid Trips" of Ken Kesey and the
acid philosophizing of Timothy Leary to the growing sophistication of the Beatles's music on albums such as
Rubber Soul and Revolver.
20
Professional science fiction magazines often had advertisements for readers to start their own
"fanzines," often mimeographed, in which reactions to science fiction stories could lead to open discussions
about a variety of topics; Paul Williams, phone interview with author, 27 February 2001. See also Ed Ward,
"Let a Thousand Fanzines Bloom," Rolling Stone 72 (2 December 1970): 26; and John Cheng, "Amazing,
Astounding, Wonder: Popular Science, Culture, and the Emergence of Science Fiction in the United States,
1926-1939," Ph.D. diss., University of California - Berkeley, 1997.

189
collection of album reviews just by Williams, which he mailed for free to 500 friends and

record business contacts; by the time Williams left Crawdaddy! in the fall of 1968, the

"fanzine" had become something close to a professional publication, a photographed, off-set

magazine with a circulation of roughly 20,000 and a newsstand price of 60 cents.22 More

significantly, its reputation as a site of heated countercultural activity had grown through

profiles in mainstream magazines such as Newsweek.23

Crawdaddy!, as Williams originally conceived it, was to be neither a "trade paper"

directed toward reporting on the commercial success of the music, nor a "teen magazine"

filled with pin-up photographs and a focus on the persona of performers. Instead it was to be

"a magazine of rock and roll criticism" produced in the hopes that "someone in the United

States might be interested in what others have to say about the music they like."24 The very

title of Williams's magazine suggested his focus on discovering the self and forming

community via the world of exchange around rock 'n' roll: the listening, talking, gossiping,

dancing, looking, and thinking that seems to have been as important to him as the music

itself. The Crawdaddy Club was the London venue where British rock bands such as the

Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds first gained fame. The invocation of an actual space,

particularly a space connected to the emergence of a rock 'n' roll scene from the underground

21
Writers in the "underground press" had begun exploring rock music by 1966 (in the Los Angeles
Free Press for instance); Kennth Goldstein's columns on rock and popular music had appeared in Esquire in
1965; and Hit Parader, a commercial teen magazine under the editorship of Jim Delehant (who later published
in Crawdaddy!), had shifted toward a more serious perspective to some extent as well.
22
Circulation figures from Paul Williams, "A Brief History of Crawdaddy! (Even America Has
Samizdat)," The New Crawdaddy! 12 (Spring 1996): 2; and "Statement of Ownership, Management, and
Circulation," Crawdaddy! 12 (January 1968): 50.
23
Michael Lydon, "Crawdaddy!," Newsweek (11 December 1967): 114.
24
Paul Williams, "Get Off Of My Cloud!" Crawdaddy! 1 (7 February 1966): 2.

190
to a mass audience, presaged the kind of vision Williams had for Crawdaddy! magazine.

Despite the fact that Crawdaddy! began as a uni-directional print publication featuring only

Williams's voice, the young publisher soon wanted Crawdaddy! to be "for anyone with an

interest in discussing the most exciting and alive music in the world today."25

Figure 2.3. Not a trade paper, not a fanzine: Crawdaddy!'s first cover, 7 February 1966
(courtesy: Paul Williams)

The British influence appeared not only in the magazine's title, but also in a quotation

from a British music magazine that appeared as the sole item on the first Crawdaddy! cover

(see figure 2.3): "There is no musical paper scene out there like there is in England. The

trades are strictly for the business side of the business and the only things left are the fan

magazines that do mostly the 'what colour socks my idol wears' bit."26 In an imaginative act

25
Paul Williams, "Along Comes Maybe," Crawdaddy! 4 (August 1966): 22.
26
The quotation was taken from the band the Fortunes in the 29 January 1966 issue of the British
magazine Music Echo, Crawdaddy! 1 (7 February 1966): cover. The relationship between the "British
Invasion" and American rock music in the mid-1960s seems ripe for further study; Crawdaddy!, like the
emergence of Beatles-imitating garage bands in the United States, suggests that some kind of transatlantic
dialogue occurred between British and American youths.

191
suggestive of larger countercultural impulses, Williams seems to have envisioned

Crawdaddy! as a merging of rock-as-business with rock-as-fan-subject. There was no

illusion for Williams that his magazine was a commercial venture. "Most of all, naturally, we

need money," he wrote in the first issue. But, from its beginning, Crawdaddy! aspired to

something more. "If we could predict the exact amount of sales of each record we heard, it

would not interest us to do so," Williams noted in the same article.27

As a commercial entity, focused on a genre of music that was fundamentally

commercial, Crawdaddy! was no anti-capitalist propaganda pamphlet. It existed thoroughly

within the assumptions and worldview of a postwar, post-scarcity, capitalist "affluent

society."28 Yet from the magazine's inception, Paul Williams did imagine creating a kind of

alternative community-in-print out of the informal talk of fans discussing rock 'n' roll music

and its place in their lives. Furthermore, as the tumultuous events of the late 1960s unfolded,

Crawdaddy! increasingly promoted this alternative community as potentially oppositional to

postwar mass society even though the magazine and its subject of rock music existed

thoroughly within the tentacles of an economic culture based in mass consumption. This

quest for alternative visions lurking within mainstream society itself perhaps had its direct

origins in the science-fiction world of utopias, distopias, mysteries, and revelations that

Williams soaked up as a child.29 Reflecting on Crawdaddy!, Williams wrote, "The reason I

was so crazy as to think I could start a magazine by myself was that I had…discovered the

private world of amateur science fiction magazines, published in editions of 50 to 200

27
Paul Williams, "Get Off Of My Cloud," 2.
28
See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Cambridge, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1958).
29
Paul Williams, phone interview, 27 February 2001.

192
copies, by science fiction fans for other science fiction fans."30 Williams himself published a

science fiction "fanzine" as a high school student.31

His immersion in science fiction overlapped with a growing interest in folk music.

Surrounded by the vibrant early-60s folk music scene in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Williams grew fascinated by its sense of alternative community. Toward the end of his high

school years, Williams even wrote columns for a Cambridge folk music magazine called

Folkin' Around. In starting Crawdaddy!, he felt especially inspired by the folk music

magazine Boston Broadside, which he remembered as, "the weekly journal of the folk music

scene in the community where I lived, a lively, witty, intelligent publication that made me

feel like a part of something when I read it."32

His appreciation of folk music's communal impetus surfaced in early issues of

Crawdaddy! But Williams was also growing interested in the similarities and differences

between folk and pop as musical and commercial categories. Crucially, he was less

concerned about the commercialization, or "absorption," of folk music by the music business

then he was intrigued by the possible overlaps between the music "non-professionals" were

creating and the "national taste."33 This interest in the power for social messages delivered

through commercial music rather than against it remained a dominant part of Crawdaddy!

under Williams's editorship; indeed, it was a crucial aspect of rock criticism and rock

magazines in general, as the story of Creem in the early 1970s bears out.
30
Williams, "A Brief History," 1.
31
Williams published 3-5 issues of a science-fiction fanzine called "Within" in 1962, phone interview,
27 February 2001; Paul Williams, "A Brief History," 1.
32
Paul Williams, "A Brief History," 1.
33
Paul Williams, "Folk, Rock, & Other Four-Letter Words," Crawdaddy! 3 (28 March 1966): 3.

193
 There were, of course, many tensions and contradictions in Crawdaddy!'s attempt to

locate a kind of civic community within mass commercial culture. Most significantly,

Crawdaddy! sought to imagine a place were there wasn't any place, a "geography of rock"

whose terrain flowed in, but was not of, the larger mass culture. So, too, Crawdaddy!

attempted to embody a kind of modern, civic "folklife" for the age of mass society via rock

music. Also, Crawdaddy! sought to overcome the dominant postwar dichotomies between

professionalism and amateurism, work and play, labor and leisure, formal roles and casual

interaction. Finally, Crawdaddy! made an effort to negotiate an avant-garde approach to

mass culture. These tensions and contradictions were not simply present at Crawdaddy!,

they were central to the magazine's approach.

Sorting out musical genres at Crawdaddy! was a way of negotiating the presence of

oppositional forces within mass culture rather than against it. In one of his first extended

essays in Crawdaddy!, "Folk, Rock, and Other Four-Letter Words," Williams described folk

and rock as a contrast between the production and consumption of music. "The difference

between pop music (rock 'n' roll if you will) and folk music," he wrote, "if there is a

difference, is that folk music is what the folk feel like writing at a given time, and pop music

is what the folk (in general) feel like listening to." Williams declared that "if the two should

influence each other, rejoice at the occasion." But, he believed, the "American press" should

not "speak of folk and rock as though folk were something filed in the Library of Congress

or sleeping in Bob Dylan's breast, and rock a beast that cannot borrow from something

without devouring it. Folk is folk, rock is rock, and if the twain should meet and exchange

194
notes, fine."34 To Williams, the accidental collision of pop (rock 'n' roll) and folk was

exciting, though not necessarily permanent. Rock 'n' roll may have been a commercial

music, but it could also articulate, "what the folk feel like writing at a given time" without

becoming folk music; the happy overlap of commercial musical production and everyday

musical consumption was not troublesome. It was perhaps a meaningful accident, but not

cooptation or "selling out."

Here the perceived difference between "rock 'n' roll" and "rock" eventually became

crucial at Crawdaddy! and in the emerging counterculture as a whole. As Crawdaddy!

developed from Williams's voice alone to a range of critical voices, the belief in an

accidental but not compromising blending of "pop" and "folk" provided a launching ground

for an ideology of "rock" as an alternative civic order, an alternative community to mass

society's alienating structures, lurking paradoxically within mass culture itself. This shift

surfaced most prominently in a change in Crawdaddy!'s slogan. The magazine had been

called, "The magazine of rock 'n' roll" beginning with issue two (see figure 2.4), but in

March of 1967, it changed its slogan to "The magazine of rock" (see figure 2.5).35 What was

involved in this change? Paul Williams offered an explanation in his March, 1967 "What

Goes On?" column, which ostensibly began as a music news column but often mutated into a

venue for pontification on the sociological meaning of popular music. Williams wrote that

while a pop music audience of "subteens and housewives" simply wanted pop music "for

pleasure, not interaction…meanwhile rock has, through its growing goodness and through

the graces of the generation that stayed with it, built up a huge audience for quality rock,
34
Paul Williams, "Folk, Rock, & Other Four-Letter Words," 3.
35
Crawdaddy! 2 (14 February 1966): cover; Crawdaddy! 8 (March 1967): cover.

195
creative rock, people who'd rather hear a good ten-minute rock track than an easy-to-listen-

to, dull, catchy 2-minute thing."

To Williams, "We are moving towards mass market creativity and interaction, and

we're doing it in a context of media flexibility and a new awareness of man…if you find out

from the friendly record man that the Monkees have sold over five million albums, you just

buy the Doors lp anyway, and play it with a couple of friends in a dimly lit room, and turn

the transistor radio off…."36 Williams believed that "rock" as a genre seized upon the

possibilities of mass communications and mass markets, importing from within an

artistically and politically avant-garde understanding of "creativity and interaction" to foster

a new kind of music and consciousness of existence. His was an anarchist-like utopian vision

-- a "science fiction" perspective, as Crawdaddy! writers referred to this kind of idealism --

in which the self and its community "must interact as smoothly as possible." "Rock," to

Williams, criss-crossed the musical genres and ideologies of "folk" and "pop" to create a

new mode of being in which, "people have responded to the reality of the industrial

revolution by requiring that they run the system and benefit from it rather than be made part

of it…. Everything else -- concepts, objects, systems, machines -- must only be tools for me

and mankind to employ. If I or Man respect a system or a pattern more than ourselves, we

are in the wrong and must be set free."37

36
Paul Williams, "What Goes On?," Crawdaddy! 8 (March 1967): 23.

`37 Paul Williams, ""The Golden Road," 14. References to science fiction appear in Sandy Pearlman,
"Saucer Lands in Virginia," Crawdaddy! 11 (September-October 1967): 24; Wayne McGuire, "The Boston
Sound," Crawdaddy! 17 (August 1968): 44; and Chester Anderson, "Folk Rock is Coming" Crawdaddy! 19
(October 1968): 19. This "science fiction" perspective also resonates with thinkers and documents seemingly
far from "science fiction," including the work of C. Wright Mills and S.D.S.'s "Port Huron Statement," which
states, "we are aware of countering perhaps the dominant conceptions of man in he twentieth century: that he is
a thing to be manipulated…we oppose the depersonalization that reduces human beings to the status of things";

196
 Other Crawdaddy! writers contributed to this new perspective of "mass market

creativity and interaction" and "media flexibility," all perhaps influenced by Marshall

McLuhan's writings on media.38 These phrases were suggestive of a countercultural impulse

to imagine new notions of freedom for the individual "citizen" and for social relations

between "citizens" lurking within, and quite possibly amassing enough momentum

ultimately to supercede, corporate-liberalism and mass consumerism. This civic impulse

could traverse geographic boundaries via records. It could also find a "place" in the pages of

a magazine such as Crawdaddy! But even before other writers began to join in this collective

imagining of a countercultural "civic sphere," Williams's casual friendships and developing

professional connections fostered the notion of a "rock" musical genre and cultural

sensibility at once popular and subterranean, existing betwixt and between the folk and pop

("rock 'n' roll, if you will" as Williams put it) arenas of music.

Williams was always influenced by conversations with those around him, beginning

with high school friends and fellow science fiction fans in Cambridge, and continuing

through his involvement with the college radio station at Swarthmore.39 But crucially, the

initial positive response to Crawdaddy! magazine itself came from within the music

industry. "For the most part response to the new magazine was sparse and discouraging,"

appendix, James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987; reprint,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 332.
38
While many may not have read Marshall McLuhan himself (though some certainly did), references
to his phrases about media and communications surface in rock writing. McLuhan's ideas certainly seem to
have been "in the air" during the latter half of the 1960s. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); The Medium is the Massage, with Quentin Fiore, co-
ordinated by Jerome Agel (New York: Random House, 1967); and War and Peace in the Global Village: An
inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward (New
York, McGraw-Hill, 1968).
39
Paul Williams, phone interview, 27 February 2001; "A Brief History," 3.

197
Williams reflected twenty-five years later.40 However, there had been words of

encouragement from Jac Holzman, the owner of Elecktra Records, ever since Williams had

appeared in the company's offices asking for promotional records and soliciting advertising

in the winter of 1966.41 So, too, Dick Starr of WFUN, Miami, wrote, "Sheet is a gas! Keep it

coming!"42 Paul Simon called him to thank Williams for his energetic review of the Simon

and Garfunkel album, "Sounds of Silence," in the first issue. Bob Dylan requested that

Williams visit him before a performance in Philadelphia.43

Figure 2.4 and Figure 2.5. From the "Magazine of Rock and Roll": Crawdaddy!, 14 February
1966, to the "Magazine of Rock": Crawdaddy!, March 1967 (courtesy: Paul Williams)

40
Paul Williams, "A Brief History," 3.
41
Paul Williams, phone interview, 27 February 2001.
42
Paul Williams, "Listen People," Crawdaddy! 2 (14 February 1966): inside cover.
43
Paul Williams, "A Brief History," 3.

198
 But soon thereafter, new voices began to join Williams's in Crawdaddy! In issue

three, the musician and novelist Richard Fariña wrote of the shift from folk to rock when he

commented, "Just about every time you were learning to draw the classifying lines there

began a shift away from the open-road-protest-flatpick style into more Motown-Nashville-

Thameside, with the strong implication that some of us have been listening to the A.M. radio

for a number of years. And perhaps become so peculiarly irreverent as to carry a little Sony

transistor model on the march to Selma in order to catch the Supremes and Solomon Burke

before dealing with a sheriff called Clarke."44 By issue fifteen in May of 1968, this notion of

the energy of a more egalitarian and free civic order lurking within and surging through

mass-consumed, mass-mediated music dominated Crawdaddy!

The graphics of Sandy Pearlman's lead article, "Change Is Now," in the May 1968

issue are indicative of this new understanding of "rock" as an oppositional form produced

within mass culture. The article's layout consists of photographs of transistor circuitry flow

charts -- diagrams of the very knobs and coils and capacitors of mass culture through which

Crawdaddy!'s and rock's sense of community traveled, indeed where it seems to have been

generated (see figure 2.6). Similarly, the cover of issue fifteen hinted at Crawdaddy!'s sense

of rock as a civic alternative secretly created and conveyed via mass culture: the magazine

front simply consisted of the name of the band Pearlman reviewed, the "Byrds," in white

typeface against a black background, repeated over and over again like an Andy Warhol

silkscreen of a hundred Campbell's soup cans (see figure 2.7). The idea seemed to be that the

44
Richard Fariña, "Your Own True Name: Songwriting in the '60s," Crawdaddy! 3 (28 March 1966):
10.

199
reader might discern, indeed might even create, new forms, new meanings, fluctuating like

electric currents across the dizzying repetition of letters.

Figure 2.6. Civics in the circuitry: "Change Is Now," Crawdaddy!, May 1968 (courtesy: Paul
Williams)

Repeating himself from a previous review of the Byrds in the August, 1967,

Crawdaddy!, Pearlman wrote in an asterisked footnote, "When the Byrds got started

somebody (in Hit Parader, I think) said that their first album was very nice, but it all

sounded the same. Now we are up to taking that. It's become a virtue. What started out as a

folk-rock style on the first album has been turned, via repetition, into a form." Concluding

his review with an attempt to describe the leap from mass-mediated music to an alternative

borne from within mass culture itself, Pearlman declared that the segue from the penultimate

to the final song on the Byrds's new album, had its "own a-mechanical energy, aborting the

preceding weary mechanics, starting up 'Wasn't Born to Follow,' distorting the whole energy

200
flow chart. And a surge's born."45 For Pearlman, the Byrds harnessed the powers of mass

culture to generate an alternative from within its very circuitry. Indeed, the very title of his

article, "Change Is Now," suggested some kind of transformation in the works.

Figure 2.7. Making meaning in the mass-produced flow: Byrds cover, Crawdaddy!, August
1968 (courtesy: Paul Williams)

The distance from Fariña's Supremes-blaring transistor radio, irreverently smuggled

into the folk-inspired Civil Rights movement, to Pearlman's strange ideas about repetition,

form, surges and transformation was vast. How did Crawdaddy! itself change so much in

such a short time? The answer lies in part in the successes and failures of what might be

called Crawdaddy!'s lived civics, its actual as well as its imaginative existence as a

commercial and professional entity. This existence was significantly colored by the

45
Sandy Pearlman, "Beyond Andy Granatelli, The Byrds," Crawdaddy! 10 (August 1967): 48-9 and
"Change Is Now," Crawdaddy! 15 (May 1968): 3-6.

201
magazine's stance as a venue for more than simple commerce and labor, but for art and

leisure as well. Crawdaddy! was fast becoming a professional magazine, but it maintained a

sense of amateurism, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

If issue three in the spring of 1966 marked Crawdaddy!'s maturation beyond

featuring Williams's solitary voice, issue four marked the magazines acceleration toward

more widespread notice. With an offset-photo of Bob Dylan stolen from an advertisement on

the cover to aid them, Williams and two friends rapidly hawked 400 copies for 25 cents each

at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island.46 By the fall of 1966 Williams was back

in Cambridge, where he befriended Jon Landau, a Boston native and amateur rock musician

who split his time between college at Brandeis and work as a record store clerk in

Cambridge's Briggs & Briggs.47

While others had begun to contribute to Crawdaddy!, among them Peter Garulnick

(who would go on to a successful career as a rock and blues scholar-journalist), Landau

quickly became the second dominant voice in Crawdaddy!, writing in a common-sense tone

that stressed the development of artistic self-expression and creativity within rock. "At the

most elementary level," Landau claimed in a review of the Blues Project, "we can say that

any musical performance is trying to express a certain type of feeling. We call the

communication of that feeling the aesthetic basis for the piece: it constitutes the essence of

the music." Unlike Paul Williams, who turned to the social experience of rock, Jon Landau

concerned himself more with the way music was produced in the recording studio. But even

46
Williams, "A Brief History," 3.
47
Goodman, Mansion, 12; Landau would go on to edit Rolling Stone's record reviews section and
eventually manage Bruce Springsteen.

202
Landau sought to describe how rock focused on the music's communicative dimensions. The

"aesthetic basis" for a song had to do with how it communicated feeling.48

By issue four, Crawdaddy! still consisted primarily of record reviews. But this began

to change. Issues five and six featured the magazine's first interviews, with Howlin' Wolf

and John Lee Hooker, two famous electrified blues performers who had been performing

since the 1940s, as well as the Butterfield Blues Band, a second-generation Chicago blues

group of whites and blacks, and Eric Burdon, a British disciple of the blues who led the

group The Animals. Later issues would include interviews with personalities in rock music

and the counterculture, such as Paul Rothschild, producer for the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, and

Richard Meltzer's mock interview of himself by Andy Warhol.49

Richard Meltzer and his friend Sandy Pearlman, who had both studied with Allan

Kaprow, a peer of Warhol's and the Pop Art theorist of "happenings" that blurred art and the

everyday experience of life, brought a more postmodern, absurdist tone to Crawdaddy!

issues seven and eight. Meltzer's piece, "The Aesthetics of Rock," for instance, became a cult

classic. Rock fans debated whether its obscurant language was serious or a satire. Even

editor Paul Williams was not sure, introducing the article with a note that read, "I have hopes

that in Crawdaddy!, where the presentation of new ways of thinking really is part of our

daily work, [Meltzer] will find an audience receptive to his roundabout, highly amusing,

brilliantly perceptive presentation of the past and the present of rock."

48
Jon Landau, Review of The Blues Project, Projections (Verve Folkways 3008), Crawdaddy 8
(March 1967): 15.
49
Paul Williams, "Rothschild Speaks!," Crawdaddy! 3 (July-August 1967): 18-24; Michael
Rosenbaum, "Jimi Hendrix and Live Things," Crawdaddy! 15 (May 1968): 24-32; Richard Meltzer, "R.
Meltzer Interviewed," Crawdaddy! 14 (April 1968): 11-14.

203
 Using purposely strange, disorienting, possibly satirical language, Meltzer explored

rock through the lens of philosophy. He linked rock to the new kinds of fiction and art

emerging in the 1960s, from Andy Warhol to Thomas Pynchon. "Rock has implictly

operated on this infinitude of random, eclectic evolutionary pathways," he wrote at one

point, "something merely suggested by Thomas Pynchon in his V." Meltzer celebrated the

music's resonances at the collision point of modernist art's loftiest logics and popular

culture's trashiest pleasures. Eventually, he expanded his strange ramble of an essay into a

full-length book.50

Issue seven, published in January 1967, marked Williams's relocation to New York

City, where Crawdaddy! would finally settle for good.51 Already having abandoned his

attempt to publish the magazine weekly or biweekly, Crawdaddy! now came out roughly

every other month and cost thirty-five cents.52 First in an office at 319 Sixth Avenue in

Greenwich Village, and later at 383 Canal Street, Williams also began to assemble a staff.53

Here was a chance for Crawdaddy! to put its more egalitarian civic focus, articulated via

mass culture, into practice. Yet in the difficulties of balancing professionalism with

amateurism (the staff members, like Williams, were very young, around twenty years-old in

general) proved too much. Sexual affairs took place, part of an emerging ethic of "free love,"

50
Richard Meltzer, "The Aesthetics of Rock," Crawdaddy! 8 (March 1967): 11-14, 42-43, 47. Quote
from editor Paul Williams, 11; quote from Meltzer, 13. For the reception of Meltzer's book, see Greil Marcus,
"Introduction," in The Aesthetics of Rock, Richard Meltzer (1970; reprint, Da Capo, 1987). For more on
Kaprow, see Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1993).
51
Crawdaddy! 7 (January 1967): 2.
52
Crawdaddy! increased its price in issue five.
53
Issues seven through fifteen (January 1967-May 1968) were published from the Sixth Avenue
office; issues sixteen through nineteen (June-October 1968) were published from Canal Street.

204
but also causing disruptions and tensions to work on the magazine.54 One staff member, Ed

Ward, reportedly left a farewell note staked to an office door by a knife; it complained of

shabby treatment by Williams.55 For all its writerly idealism about a new civic sensibility

emerging from mass culture moorings, Crawdaddy! simply could not realize a more just and

harmonious civil order.

The inability of rock -- thought of as Williams's "mass market creativity and

interaction," Fariña's "shift away from the open-road-protest-flatpick style into more

Motown-Nashville-Thameside," and Pearlman's "a-mechanical energy, aborting the

preceding weary mechanics" -- to supercede the limiting structures of mass culture and mass

society can be discerned in the similar, though not precisely replicated, tone of the

advertisements in Crawdaddy! These advertisements did not, as Thomas Frank argues in his

insightful though sometimes oversimplified history of the 1960s advertising industry, seize

upon resistance as a selling technique.56 Rather, they tapped into the same interest in

overcoming the boundaries between mass culture and its opposition as articulated through

mass-consumed music. They sought to sell Paul Williams's concept of "media flexibility"

communicated through the sound and feeling of rock music. An advertisement from

Columbia Records in the August 1968 issue declared, "Underground...Overground. All that

matters is that you dig the sound.…The sound. On Columbia Records" (see figure 2.8). Also

locating their product within the countercultural rhetoric about the feeling, energy, and

54
Paul Williams, Heart of Gold (Englewood, CO: WCS Books, 1991), 120-125.
55
Robert Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History (New York: Doubleday, 1990),
89. Ward went on to edit the record reviews section of Rolling Stone, which operated more professionally.
56
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip
Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

205
sensations of rock music, another advertisement, this one from a music equipment company,

asked, "Ever felt the sound of the Who?" (see figure 2.9).57

Figure 2.8. Commerce and community in the "sound": Columbia Records advertisement,
Crawdaddy!, August 1968 (courtesy: Paul Williams)

Williams himself saw nothing particularly wrong with the overlap between the

commercial and editorial in Crawdaddy! In an article on "the responsibilities of mass

media," he pointed out that sometimes it was hard to tell the copy from the ads in his

magazine but "what's important is that our readers enjoyed this stuff. Maybe even got

something out of it, on a personal level."58 Significantly however, there were differences

between the advertisements and the copy. Because the advertisements sought to sell material
57
Columbia Records advertisement, Crawdaddy! 17 (August 1968): 2-3; "Ever felt the sound of the
Who?" Sunn advertisement, Crawdaddy! 18 (September 1968): 16.
58
Paul Williams, "Outlaw Blues," Crawdaddy! 13 (February 1968): 5.

206
objects, they tended to simplify the notions put forth by Williams and other Crawdaddy! 's

critics of more egalitarian civic connections emerging from within mass culture's circulation.

The ironies here were many, and not even Williams seemed to have been fully aware of

them. The advertisements, part of the mass culture that inspired the rock critics at

Crawdaddy!, only imitated, but did not manage to duplicate, the full sense of freedom that

the critics reached in flashes of more analytic and expressive exploration of mass consumer's

lurking possibilities for new civic interaction.

For instance, another advertisement from the music equipment company Sunn in the

March-April 1968 issue featured a "psychedelic" kaleidoscope graphic (see figure 2.10).

This ad echoed a Crawdaddy! drawing of the spiraling grooves of an amplifier speaker (see

figure 2.11). It also resonated with Paul Williams's comments about a Country Joe and the

Fish album from the previous year, in which Williams compared the recording by Country

Joe and his band to a kaleidoscope. "Like a kaleidoscope," Williams wrote, "it's easy not to

appreciate -- all you have to do is stare at the toy instead of into it."59 The Crawdaddy!

drawing appeared on the page as a form of communication instead of statement or assertion.

If you stared into the images in Crawdaddy! -- or stared into the recording by Country Joe

and the Fish -- it could begin to take on an interactive dimension. It could foster inquiry and

exploration rather than forcing the rock listener -- or the rock critic reader -- into only a

passive stance of reception.

59
"Electrifying Performance" Sunn advertisement, Crawdaddy! 14 (March-April 1968): 40; Graphic
of amplifier speaker, Crawdaddy! 18 (September 1968): 3; Williams, "The Golden Road," 11.

207
 Figure 2.9. Can you feel it?: Sunn Who advertisement, Crawdaddy!, September 1968
(courtesy: Paul Williams)

Unlike the advertisement for Sunn amplifiers, the graphic that accompanied

Williams's article in Crawdaddy! was not explicitly linked to a product. Rather its meaning

resonated with the iconography of the ad, but pushed this iconography toward something

more amorphous, mysterious, and magical. To what text or message is it connected? What

are the hands at its bottom counting with their fingers? So, too, Williams writing, in the first

person, stressed the strange agency of the consumer. But, Williams was not simply trying to

sell a particular product through expressing a countercultural comprehension of oppositional

"surges" within mass consumerism's circulation. Instead, in a far richer manner more

208
suggestive of an alternative sensibility than Sunn's advertisement, Williams wanted to spark

the reader into an imaginary conversation, one in which fluid selves might connect, merge,

entangle, and disentangle in social interaction via the invisible, space-defying, all-

surrounding ether of electrified sound.

Williams continued in his 1967 article, "If you do dig [Country Joe and the Fish's

album], you may suddenly find it very hard to decide which of the sliding multicolorous

worlds all around you is your own."60 The Sunn advertisement, slightly campy, overlapping

with Williams's sensibility, did not portray what Williams sought to articulate more fully as

rock music's profound challenges to accepted identities and social relations. Unlike the Sunn

ad, Williams sought to harness rock music's power to stir a listener out of assumed norms.

His writing sought to articulate and share new perceptions of rock's transformative powers.

These lurked within -- and burst forth from -- the electrified, commodified sounds of Sunn

amplifiers. And it resonated iconographically with advertisements for these electronic

devices. Yet, Williams's own writing took that economic, consumer energy in new

directions. His article was concerned with far more than selling a product.

As Williams's comments suggested, Crawdaddy!'s writers were concerned with civic

arrangements. The Crawdaddy! writers joined a larger intellectual migration after World

War II from analyzing economic conflict as the key element in American life to investigating

questions of civil society.61 This ideological shift in focus allowed Crawdaddy! to exist in an

60
Williams, "The Golden Road," 11.
61
Howard Brick makes the argument that postwar social critics, beginning with Talcott Parsons, and
including Kenneth Keniston, Erik Erikson, Paul Goodman, Jane Jacobs, Betty Friedan, Norman O. Brown, and
Herbert Marcuse, shifted from economic to civic questions divorced from market concerns; Howard Brick,
"Talcott Parsons 'Shift Away From Economics,' 1937-1946," Journal of American History 87, 2 (September
2000): 490-514.

209
ambiguous interstice between amateur, informal site of interaction and professional,

commercial entity. As Crawdaddy! rapidly grew between 1966 to 1968 from Williams's

original vision, it sought to transform his imagined rock-fan community into a kind of

alternative institution for a countercultural movement that was embedded within the larger

institutionalization of consumerism in postwar America.62

Figure 2.10 and Figure 2.11. Psychedelic commerce in a Sunn amplifier kaleidoscope
advertisement in Crawdaddy!, March 1968 (left) and psychedelic civics in a Crawdaddy!
graphic, September 1968 (right) (courtesy: Paul Williams)

The odd, difficult task of forging a countercultural civics within commercial

processes revolved around the shift of Crawdaddy!'s identity from a "fanzine," a homemade

project for dedicated fans that covertly circulated, to a "prozine," a professional magazine

distributed commercially to a mass audience. It also centered on Crawdaddy!'s attempt to

62
See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society
and Its Youthful Opposition (1968; Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2.

210
complete this shift while resisting a place-based identity, but rather seeking to root itself in

the chase after a rootless imagined place floating in the fragments and scraps left behind by

rock music's sonic blasts. As Ed Ward (who departed Crawdaddy! unhappily in 1967) noted

in a 1970 Rolling Stone article, "Probably the first rock fanzine was Crawdaddy! magazine."

But "By Crawdaddy! No. 4," Ward continued, "Crawdaddy! was on its way towards

becoming one of the first rock prozines."63 Yet, while Crawdaddy! moved from "fanzine" to

"prozine," Williams clung to his original interest in the informal exchange of ideas about

rock music and the community it seemed to constitute. He faced the problem of

professionalizing, in a sense formalizing, this casual community. While at Crawdaddy!,

Williams never resolved this tension between amateurism and professionalism, the conflict

between writing about music as a leisurely "fan" activity or as a job.

From its very inception, Crawdaddy! was, for Williams, "trying to appeal to people

interested in rock and roll, both professionally and casually." The magazine's attempt to

negotiate between these two poles of the professional and the casual resulted in the effort to

articulate a mode of social interaction and organization in which the magazine might operate

as a kind of rock-club-in-print, a dance hall, a meeting hall, a rock festival in the park,

constructed from words, drawings, paper, and staples. Within Crawdaddy!'s pages,

individual critics pontificated on personal experiences and political opinions like soapbox

preachers in a public square shadowed by billboard signs and poster advertisements. The

magazine as a whole sought to exist in a kind of liminal zone, commercial but not bound to

articulate a coherent market identity, professional but filled with the freedom and casualness

63
Ed Ward, "Let a Thousand Fanzines Bloom," 26.

211
of a fan publication. In this way, Crawdaddy! echoed its subject of rock music, which itself

oscillated between professional and leisure activity, producing sounds that spread

ambiguously through spaces from the record store to the bedroom, the car radio to the garage

practice space.

By resisting full professionalization, Crawdaddy! in some fashion resisted entering

the economic marketplace on its existing terms. How was this partial resistance to the market

articulated via commentary about rock, the incarnation of a commercialized and mass-

consumed commodity? Perhaps the answer lay in part with the quality of music to escape its

bounded market confines via its aesthetic powers.64 Certainly, the aesthetic experience of

music meant a tremendous deal to Crawdaddy! writers. But Williams's effort to create a

magazine that could capture the emotional textures of communal existence as they floated

along the wires of mass culture itself, his yearning to create a community in which

individuals would be free to express themselves fully, share their views, and imaginatively

interact by writing about their responses to rock, also seems linked to larger impulses we

might deem countercultural.

The myriad voices echoing through Crawdaddy! might even be viewed as a response

to a crisis in actual public space, from the stultifying strip malls and housing tracts

developing in the suburbs to the decay of vibrant urban districts. At a time when African-

American riots and "white flight" dominated the experience of public space, Crawdaddy!

sought to function as an imaginative civic zone for the young rock fan. Crawdaddy! seems to

64
This is a quality of rock music Lawrence Grossberg notes in "Another Boring Day in Paradise,"
226.

212
have attached itself to the promise for new, imagined forms of community and self-

exploration in mass society in response to the loss of tangible public spaces.65

This attempt at constituting a new, imaginative zone for community was not easy.

"We will need responses from you in the form of letters and publishable material in order to

believe that there is a purpose in continuing this project," Williams wrote in the first issue.66

"If you haven't responded (and chances are you haven't) we desperately need kind words,

material, new records, and money for advertisements and subscriptions," he wrote in the

second installment of Crawdaddy!67 "But apathetic participation was the least of the

problems that arose as Crawdaddy! expanded as a publication. Crawdaddy!'s exploration of

fluid senses of selfhood and community, spawned in thinking closely about consumer

activities, created profound unease as well as joyful potential: civic chaos as well as civic

possibilities.

For instance, Crawdaddy! writers, including the African-American poet David

Henderson and the female rock critic Kris Weintraub, sought to convene a civic order that

simultaneous sly celebrated and overcame race, gender, and class differences. At times they

succeeded, suggesting that these sources of crisis in postwar life could be overcome through

music and musical culture. But the stubborn markings of identity based on race, gender, and

class all too often reasserted themselves in Crawdaddy!, either as absurdly essentialized or

65
For more on suburbanization, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of
the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) and Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of
White Flight: Suburbanism in Postwar Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). For more
on the perceived crisis of urban America, see Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New
York: Random House, 1961). For the consumerist context of the postwar years, see Lizabeth Cohen, A
Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).
66
Williams, "Get Off My Cloud!" 2.
67
Williams, "Listen People," Crawdaddy! 2 (14 February 1966): 2.

213
too-easily dismissed elements. In terms of race, for example, Ken Greenberg wrote in an

article entitled "Mocha Blues" that, "I know I'm a white boy, and I know that traditionally

the blues is black music. But I also know that blues get right into my guts and heart. I know

I've felt sad and confused, and the blues tells me other people have too." Wrapped up in the

mass-culture possibilities for true civic community based on membership and affiliation

beyond race, Greenberg then asked, "And tradition, what is that? Things that happened

twenty years ago are ancient history these days. Something that began five years ago that has

continued this long, now that might be called a tradition."68

Greenberg effaced the long tradition of blues as an African-American expressive

form and brilliant aesthetic survival technique. Instead he poised the blues between its ability

to articulate universal themes and its authenticity as an African-American sound. "The

awakening of the black spirit is ever so desirable, and wanting to somehow be a part of it

seems to me beautiful and natural," Greenberg wrote, essentializing "blackness" in his effort

to explain why whites wanted to play the blues. At the same time, Greenberg was sincere in

his effort to overcome this essentialization of the blues as solely a black music. "Just as it's

too easy to put black down for not being a part of white," Greenberg wrote, "it's too easy to

put white down for not being a part of black. Instead let's get into the freedom of grasping at

some beginning point and developing from there."69

A similar process of essentializing gender while also seeking to overcome it through

the new mass-society civics of the counterculture occurred in Crawdaddy! Paul Williams

wrote of the female singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell that her "particular triumph is that girl
68
Ken Greenberg, "Mocha Blues: Butterfield and Big Brother," Crawdaddy! 19 (October 1968): 38.
69
Greenberg, "Mocha Blues," 38.

214
singers or girl artists of any kind who have really gotten at what it is to be a woman can be

counted on the fingers of one hand…and this record is a profound expression of I, a

woman." In thinking about Mitchell, he further commented that she was able to express how,

"most girls think and speak on a fairly simple level, but feel on a deeply complex one…."70

Williams's critique demonstrates Crawdaddy!'s essentialization of femininity, and yet so,

too, his grappling with Mitchell's songs suggests the beginnings of an attempt to break

through traditional gender roles by listening closely and responding to powerful artistic

statements about gender by Mitchell and others. Critically engaged with mass-produced

musical expression, Williams and others wound up raising questions about gender even as

they clumsily reinforced old stereotypes.

Class figured even more complexly in Crawdaddy! Most of the magazine's writers

came from middle-class backgrounds, and during boom times, they often simply effaced

differences in class background as articulated through music. When class did surface, it did

so in terms of race. Peter Knobler's 1968 article, "The Young Rascals," revealed this

complicated interaction.71 Reflecting on music during the past two years, Knobler noted that

during "Malcolm's heyday and the direction of thought…toward black universal

superiority…the Young Rascals were the white proletariat's answer to the cultural challenge

of rhythm and blues."

Yet the influence of rock's high-art-tinged "mass market creativity and interaction,"

as Paul Williams had put it, changed what Knobler termed "prole rock." Knobler wrote,

"There's a good chance that some of the nice things which were starting to go on in rock had
70
Paul Williams, "The Way We Are Today," 28.
71
Peter Knobler, "The Young Rascals," Crawdaddy! 19 (Octobert 1968): 46-7.

215
a sizeable effect on the proletariat which bore the Rascals, and so there was more room in the

Rascals' audience for better sounds and finer sentiments." To Knobler, in a rather remarkable

phrase, "Kids were growing up as flower children rather than grease monkeys and there was

all of a sudden the opportunity to disregard formulas and do what you wanted with your

music."

This description of white working-class culture at once patronized "prole rock" and

pointed out the porousness of identity in the context of mass culture. So, too, it essentialized

race even as it strove to describe white working-class agency in achieving authentic

expressive selfhood. Writing of the Rascals's song, "Groovin'," which projected a different

sound than the band's covers of black soul classics, Knobler commented that the band "no

longer strained for notes which were not theirs, and the futile screaming invocations sort of

slipped away, replaced by a kind of soft, easy wail and light chorus of sun-worshipping 'ahs!'

Theirs became a different kind of soul." Mixing his analysis of class with race, Knobler

dismissed the white and black working-class musical exchange and imitation that served as

the rock 'n' roll setting for the Rascals's innovations. Instead, he was more excited about the

fluidity of class identity and individuality within the new structures of mass culture. The

Rascals' "position as leaders of the pack of prole-rock has been snatched up" by other bands,

according to Knobler, but "the Rascals now are on their own."

As Greenberg, Williams, and Knobler suggested in their attempts to grapple with

race, gender, and class in Crawdaddy!'s pages, the free-floating countercultural civics of the

magazine, borne upon mass consumer circulation, proved too ephemeral, too evanescent, to

address successfully the intractable dilemmas of sameness and difference that race, class,

and gender provoked. Even when Crawdaddy! writers dealt with them, they seemed not to

216
deal with them. But, crucially, the rock critics in Crawdaddy! did begin to address the

complicated nature of identity as it appeared in popular music during the magazine's first

two years.

More alarmingly, by Crawdaddy!'s last issues under Williams's editorship, a number

of writers, faced with the diffuseness of Crawdaddy!'s civic terms, flirted with nihilism and

violence rather than communal communication and a sense of togetherness. This dark turn

must be viewed within the context of the assassinations, Vietnam War escalation, and

increasingly violent domestic anti-War protests that took place in 1968. An eschatological

attitude was in some sense a reasonable one to possess.72 Nonetheless, there remains

something disturbing about a number of Crawdaddy! articles that seemed to abandon the

pursuit of a countercultural civics for something more radically violent and destructive. One

writer, Wayne McGuire, adopted an anti-humanist, apocalyptic stance in direct opposition to

Crawdaddy!'s feel-good civic dimension. Spouting edgy nonsense, McGuire favored the

creation of a "universal electric theocracy" in which each young American would become, "a

child of the post-nihilistic era, a part of the emerging crystalline-like growth of humanity, in

short, a Crystal Person, faceless and rootless." In one of his articles, McGuire claimed, "this

is a review of the Velvet Underground, this is a review of the end of the world, this is a

72
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in April and June of 1968,
respectively. Protests and riots engulfed many American cities in the aftermath of King's death in particular.
The Tet offensive had struck America troops in South Vietnam earlier that winter. Students had taken over
Columbia University and other schools during the spring. The violent Democratic Convention in Chicago took
place in August. S.D.S. and other activist groups had begun to fracture, with more radical wings espousing
violent revolutionary tactics. A sense of worldwide chaos, instablility, and revolt also informed Crawdaddy!'s
sensibilities. For more on 1968, see John Hersey, "The Year of the Triphammer," Washington Post Magazine,
22 October 1978, 16. Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the
Shaping of a Generation (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988); David Farber, Chicago '68 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988); George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of
1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987); Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York:
Bantam, 1987), 285-304; Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, 221-240.

217
review of the Antichrist and Christ, this is a review of Life and Death, this is a review of

tomorrow and of ever and ever."73 McGuire was affiliated with the Boston folk singer and

cult leader Mel Lyman, under whose violent rhetoric and creepy spell Williams himself later

fell, supposedly at one point hitting Raeanne Rubenstein, an editor of Crawdaddy!, when she

refused to publish an interview Williams had conducted with Lyman.74

But even in Crawdaddy!'s last issues under Williams editorship, there were sane

voices brimming with ideas about the possibilities for a kind of countercultural civics -- new

forms of the self and society -- lurking within mass consumerism's circulation of goods and

images, sensations and feelings. Writers continued to explore the meaning of rock music,

seeking in its sounds new modes of hearing, feeling, and being. They followed Sandy

Pearlman's notion from the fall of 1967 that, "Rock's great world systems are sets of

alternative arrangements -- or at least visions -- of the world," he wrote. Pearlman heard rock

not as the imposition of a new domination, as Wayne McGuire did. Rather he emphasized,

with a bit of humor intended, that if rock had "great world systems," these were only

"alternative arrangements" and "visions." They were "sort of perfect," Pearlman insisted,

undercutting the notion that rock could in fact generate systems of any sort, "because they

don't matter."75 This tone, which can be called irreverent sincerity, would emerge fully at

Creem a few years later. The tone only appeared at times in Crawdaddy!, but when it did,

the style of writing posed a model for navigating rock's alternative civic interactions. One
73
Wayne McGuire, "The Boston Sound," 43; McGuire, " Universal Music Form," Crawdaddy! 19
(October 1968): 10-11.
74
For more on Williams and Mel Lyman, see David Felton, "The Lyman Family's Holy Siege of
America," in Mindfuckers: A Source Book on the Rise of Acid Fascism in America, ed. David Felton (San
Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972); originally published in Rolling Stone, 23 December 1971, 48-53.
75
Pearlman, "Saucers Land in Virginia," 23.

218
could, as Pearlman did, circulate large philosophical ideas surreptitiously, through the

seemingly inconsequential commercial recordings of rock. New notions of public life --

Pearlman's "great world systems" -- arrived through, of all things, record reviews.

Moreover, the collision of what Paul Williams called an "avant garde" with a music

of "mass appeal" left a legacy of taking rock seriously -- but not too seriously.76 In this

ambiguity of sincerity and irreverence, a mode of subversive discourse began to take shape.

A critical sensibility of alternative identity emerged. It served multiple purposes. For

individual writers and readers, this tone provided a way to differentiate oneself through

virtuosic performances of a style of writing. Irreverent sincerity also circulated double

meanings -- at once countercultural and mass cultural -- through the commercial processes of

the marketplace. One could seize upon secret meanings in rock, adopting the music to

struggle with the difficulties of attaining a meaningful sense of freedom and autonomy in

mass culture. Crawdaddy! critics endeavored to harness the possibilities of the new

structures of mass consumerism to emphasize the utopian and oppositional potential -- the

avant-garde energies -- lurking paradoxically within mass culture.

Crawdaddy!'s first incarnation stumbled to an end in 1968 and 1969. However, the

magazine's turn toward irreverent sincerity would burst forth fully at Creem magazine,

which adopted Crawdaddy!'s earnest appreciation of rock, but drew upon the magazine's

roots in Detroit to hone an even more sharply satirical edge. By mixing a sincere

appreciation for rock's countercultural possibilities with an ironic perspective on the

shortcomings of a countercultural civic life, Creem was able to sustain a spirit of

76
Lydon, "Crawdaddy!," 114.

219
countercultural inquiry and engagement beyond the heyday of the counterculture in the late

1960s. Long after the tie-dyes and flowing robes of hippies had turned into punk's torn t-

shirts and leather jackets, Creem was able to carry the civics of rock onward.

"Can't Forget the Motor City": Creem Magazine, Detroit Identity, and Irreverent

Sincerity

"It only could have come from Detroit," the rock critic Dave Marsh declared. He was

talking about the band the MC5, a controversial white rock group that emerged from the

Detroit area. But Marsh could also have been talking about the publication in which his

words appeared: Creem. Marsh made this observation to fellow Creem writer Nathaniel

"Deday" LaRene in a conversation published as a review in the February, 1970, issue. At this

date, Creem was still a local underground tabloid distributed solely in the Motor City. Marsh

described the MC5 as possessing a tough, working-class identity shaped by the group's

experiences growing up and performing in the Detroit metropolitan area. LaRene agreed, and

referred to Jon Landau, the Crawdaddy! writer who had produced the latest album by the

band, in order to express his excitement about the way in which the MC5 represented a local

Detroit countercultural scene. "Even when it meets with the Crawdaddy! intellectual,"

LaRene claimed, "that kind of consciousness has a certain…organic vitality."77

77
Dave Marsh and "Deday" LaRene, "MC5/Back in the USA," Creem 2, 10 (Feb 1970): 23. For more
on the MC5 (the MC stood for Motor City), see Michael DeWitt Cary, "The Rise and Fall of the MC5: Rock
Music and Counterculture Politics in the Sixties," Ph.D. diss., Lehigh University, 1985; Steve Waksman, "Kick
Out The Jams! The MC5 and the Politics of Noise," in Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the
Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Goodman, The
Mansion on the Hill, 152-182.

220
 If the MC5 came to stand for a certain Detroit style of rock, Creem eventually

symbolized a certain Detroit style of rock criticism. First published in March of 1969, Creem

eventually transformed itself into a national music magazine and one of the main

competitors with Rolling Stone in the 1970s. But even as Creem became a national entity,

the publication forged a style of writing grounded in a local perspective. The association

with Detroit allowed Creem to serve as a vehicle for a critical countercultural civics long

after the heyday of the counterculture had faded.

Founded by Barry Kramer, who had grown up in a working-class Detroit family

before becoming the owner in 1967 of a number of Michigan "head shop" stores in which

hippies could purchase psychedelic gear, Creem appeared on the scene just as Rolling Stone

was gaining national success.78 Rolling Stone had started in 1967. Jann Wenner, a student at

the University of California - Berkeley, began the magazine with the help of San Francisco

Chronicle music critic Ralph Gleason, Jr. Rolling Stone positioned itself as the exact

opposite of Crawdaddy! Instead of attempting to constitute a disembodied countercultural

civic community within its pages, Rolling Stone developed as a journalistic enterprise,

concentrating on straightforward record reviews, the news of the rock industry, and

investigative reports.79

The differences between Crawdaddy!'s legacy and Rolling Stone's dominance of rock

criticism would inform Creem from its inception. Crawdaddy!, according to Chet Flippo,

78
For more on Barry Kramer, see Jim DeRogatis, Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs,
America's Greatest Rock Critic (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), 68-73, 206; Richard C. Walls, "Twenty-
Five Years of Creem, Part Two: We Didn't Know What We Were Doing," Creem (March/April 1994): 39-42;
and Douglas Ilka, "Barry Kramer, Creem Publisher, Dies At 37," Detroit News, 30 January 1981, 1B-3B.
79
Draper, Rolling Stone Magazine.

221
who wrote a 1974 Master's Thesis on rock criticism, was, "the first true peer-group rock

publication." But Paul Williams's creation, "was a fanzine-inspired magazine of personal

essays with little lasting impact." By contrast, Flippo claimed that, "The most successful

rock publication…was Rolling Stone, which concerned itself mainly with competent

reportage." As Creem itself struggled to move from a local Detroit to a national market, the

magazine found itself betwixt and between, on the one hand, Crawdaddy!'s "fanzine"

approach and, on the other hand, Rolling Stone's "competent reportage."80

Based literally and symbolically in Detroit, Creem sought to confront what seemed

like an increasingly desperate time in the United States. As the 1970s progressed, the

optimism of the counterculture's late-1960s heyday faded. The disorder, chaos, and murder

at the Altamont rock concert in December, 1969, signaled how the counterculture could

easily be ripped asunder in its attempt to posit alternative civic assemblies from within the

mechanisms of mass culture.81 The murders committed by Charles Manson and his followers

emphasized the chillingly nihilistic side of the counterculture, especially when Manson's

relationship to the Los Angeles rock counterculture became known to the public.82 Less

directly terrifying, but just as frustrating, was the growing seriousness of the counterculture -

- a seriousness which, to Creem writers, seemed linked to its nihilistic turn. This serious turn

transformed rock into an "art." Musicians were now artists. They became royalty removed

80
Chester (Chet) Flippo, "Rock Journalism and Rolling Stone," Master's Thesis, School of Journalism,
University of Texas-Austin, 1974, vii.
81
Jonathan Eisen, Altamont: Death of Innocence in the Woodstock Nation (New York: Avon, 1970).
For an opposing interpretation, see Michael Frisch, "Woodstock and Altamont," in True Stories From the
American Past, Volume II: Since 1865, ed. William Graebner (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997).
82
See Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
(1974; reprint, New York: W.W. Norton, 1994); Ed Sanders, The Family: The Manson Group and Its
Aftermath (1971; revised, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002); and Felton, ed., Mindfuckers.

222
from the rabble of rock's fans. Rock had become antidemocratic, more about rising above

vulnerable encounters with other participants than joining in to a critical rock public life.

Creem's writers objected to this transformation of rock into serious art. But, they did

not insist that the opposite was true -- that the music was trash. Instead, Creem performed a

more complicated operation in response.83 Drawing upon a humorous, cartoonish skepticism

about any and all pretensions, Creem's staff wielded a sensibility of wit, satire, and

exaggeration. Crucially, they associated this stance with their Detroitness. Evoking a tone

that might be deemed irreverent sincerity, Creem harnessed its Detroit identity to balance

earnest feelings about rock's civic potential against suspicions about the growing elitism in

rock and the darker turn of the counterculture as a whole.

Detroit provided plenty of fodder out of which to fashion an identity of irreverent

sincerity. After World War II, as the historian Thomas Sugrue argues, Detroit and other

Midwestern cities served as "bellweathers of economic change."84 For the Creem writers,

Detroit also positioned its residents at the forefront of cultural transformations. The city's

rise and fall as an industrial center for automobiles and other goods made it a symbolic

national city, America's "arsenal of democracy" ultimately turned to rust. Detroit was also

riven by tensions of class and race. The long history of union-company conflicts informed

Creem writers' awareness of class identities. So, too, the protests by African-Americans in

the summer of 1967 (tellingly called a "race riot" by most outsiders, but known to many

83
Bernard Gendron calls Creem's approach "Popism" in his discourse study of rock criticism, which
appears in Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2002), 161-227.
84
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 6.

223
within Detroit's African-American community as "the Great Rebellion") left a lasting

impression on Creem's staff and critics.

Creem also drew upon a rich Detroit tradition of alternative publishing. During the

late 1960s, Detroit not only featured the white-owned, liberal-socialist underground weekly

The Fifth Estate, but also an African-American paper that sprung up in the aftermath of the

Great Rebellion, Inner City Voice, and the transformation of Wayne State University's

student newspaper, The South End, into a "worker's" paper edited by the black labor activist

John Watson, in 1969. There was even, earlier in the 1960s, an African-American-owned,

interracially-staffed paper, On The Town, that mixed entertainment listings with humor and

writing on music, theater, the arts, and politics and maintained a circulation of roughly

10,000 copies within Detroit's city center.85 African-Americans in Detroit had also managed

to sustain a range of arts activities, such as poet Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, which

published Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), Gwendolyn Brooks,

and others.86 Beyond publishing, there was also, of course, Motown Records, whose wild

success in popular music was rooted in its Detroit identity, right down to its very name.87

Not only did Detroit boast Motown, it included an active jazz scene, as well as an

interracial, Beat-inflected arts movement located in John Sinclair's Artists' Workshop, which

85
See Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying (1975; reprint, Cambridge, MA:
South End Press, 1998), 13-22, 51-68, 111.
86
See Georgakas and Surkin, Detroit, I Do Mind Dying, 111; and Julius Eric Thompson, Dudley
Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
1999).
87
For more on Motown's ambivalent oscillations between its commercial success and the African-
American activist community in Detroit, see Suzanne Smith, Dancing In the Street: Motown and the Cultural
Politics of Detroit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

224
began in a loft in the Wayne State University neighborhood during the fall of 1964.88

Sinclair, born to a middle-class family in Davidson, Michigan, went on to forge a radical

countercultural politics as the manager of the MC5, music journalist, activist, and mentor to

many of the Creem writers from Michigan. Through his writings in The Fifth Estate,

national magazines such as Jazz & Pop, and occasionally in Creem itself, Sinclair was the

first to develop an extended critique of the national counterculture from a distinctly Detroit

perspective, and a sense of Detroit's music scene in the context of the larger countercultural

movement. His ideas were tinged at times with a hyper-masculinized distortion of African-

American political activism and cultural expression. But Sinclair also picked up where

Crawdaddy! left off in its 1968 explorations of mass media.

In some ways, Sinclair developed a more sophisticated apparatus in which to

examine race, gender, and class identity by fusing political theories of Fanon, Mao, and

Lenin with hunches about the power of electronic rock music. But even as he surpassed the

Crawdaddy! critics in his ability to sermonize about the possibilities for a revolutionary

countercultural civics, he could not overcome the twin problem of either essentializing race,

gender, and class identities or dismissing too easily the distances and friction between people

based on these categories.89

By the early 1970s, as Creem moved to a national stage, Sinclair had faded in

influence since he was in prison on a trumped-up marijuana possession conviction.

However, the cunning but possibly compromising Detroit milieu that had been created by

88
See Cary, "The Rise and Fall of the MC5," 51.
89
For more on Sinclair, also see Robert Levin and John Sinclair, Music and Politics (New York: The
World Publishing Company, 1971); John Sinclair, Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings (New York:
Douglas Books, 1972); and Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill, 152-182.

225
Sinclair and others -- with its radical possibilities for a countercultural civics on the local

level despite the city's rapidly decaying economic and social condition -- made irreverent

sincerity seem like a sane yoking of opposing attitudes at Creem. This tonal approach

allowed the magazine to critique, even savage, rock music's inability to convey a more

egalitarian civic order without abandoning the possibility that the music might actually do so

one day.

Creem critics could maintain some hope in the counterculture's potential for social

renewal while acknowledging the movement's location in mass consumer culture and its

failure to become a coherent positive political force. Creem continued Crawdaddy!'s linking

of politics and art within, and not outside, mass commercial culture. Ultimately, irreverent

sincerity provided a key combination of distant irony and persistent optimism. It not only

provided Creem with a different commercial identity to Rolling Stone, it gave the magazine's

staff a way to shield a longing for a better world within an armor of droll sarcasm.

The details of Creem's founding suggest that the magazine only gradually grew into a

position of irreverent sincerity. Though publisher Barry Kramer later explained that the

magazine's title was, "just a meaningless, irreverent name" and "came from the attitude of

those of us who started it," at first, Creem was as earnest as most other countercultural

publications.90 Like Crawdaddy! and Rolling Stone, the magazine's title was probably

inspired by a fannish appreciation for British blues bands, in this case Eric Clapton's Cream.

Indeed, the man who supposedly chose the name was not even from Detroit; he was a British

90
Pat Shellenbarger, "Irreverence Fuels National Music Magazine," The Detroit News (January 1975).

226
native named Tony Reay, Creem's original editor-in-chief.91 Thus, Creem did not begin at all

as an irreverently sincere alternative. At first, the magazine possessed a tone that resembled

Paul Williams's earnestness in its straightforward hopes for the counterculture and rock

music. Only later did its full-blown irreverence develop. Nonetheless, Creem's

transformation from its optimistic origins in 1969 shows how it ultimately preserved

countercultural civics beyond the counterculture's late-1960s heyday.

Figure 2.12. Countercultural sincerity: "The Fool at Zero," Creem, March 1969 (courtesy:
Creem Media, Inc.)

The first cover of Creem, dated March 1-14, 1969, and the connected article inside,

captured the publication's sincere countercultural origins (see figure 2.12). From the gaping

mouth of a long-haired, androgynous, black-and-white figure, the word "Creem" curled

upward like a prayer or an unholy utterance, one could not quite tell. Empty space occupied

most of the newsprint tabloid cover. The issue number, "1," floated in the upper left corner.

91
For this telling of how Creem got its name, see Richard C. Walls, "Twenty-Five Years of Creem,
Part Two," 40.

227
The price, "25¢," sat in the upper right. The mysterious cover figure appeared again inside

the magazine, next to an article that identified it as a Tarot-card drawing of "The Fool at

Zero."

In a quintessentially earnest counterculture maneuver, this anonymous article

connected the "Fool" with notions of spirituality, artistic creativity, and the possibility for a

utopian post-scarcity society. "We have come to a spiritual awakening," the article claimed,

"that makes us not only aware of the science and technology at our disposal but the ability

and innate wisdom to use them through creative energy and beauty for a brotherhood of light

through universal love." The cover figure, according to the article, "symbolizes the warm,

colorful creative energy of universal cultural activities."92

Figure 2.13. Barry Kramer, Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, and peering through the window,
Roberta "Robbie" Cruger, in front of Creem's Cass Avenue Loft, 1971 (photograph: Charlie
Auringer)

92
Creem 1, 1 (1-14 March 1969): cover, 6. Creem editor Tony Reay explained that this figure and the
accompanying text were both lifted from a project organized by the Beatles' label, Apple Records. Email
correspondence with author, 24 January 2003.

228
 Like this cover figure, Creem magazine at first sought to express the creative energy

that a youth counterculture, revolving around rock music, might both harness and unleash.

Published from a loft on Cass Avenue (see figure 2.13), the magazine sought to embody a

sincere commitment to art in general. Creem featured original poetry, writing on jazz by

Richard C. Walls, and even a classical music column by Judy Adams. The local dominated

Creem's agenda. "Detroit is home to many creative artists," Barry Kramer wrote in an

editorial. "There are those who would like to exploit this market. Sell its soul. We won't let

this happen. Creem will help build a more cohesive community."93 Believing that other

vibrant local countercultural scenes such as San Francisco had been ruined by

commercialization by outside corporations, Kramer ostensibly sought to create a magazine

about Detroit without overexposing the city's counterculture.94

Creem even featured a map of countercultural Detroit, emphasizing the city's sense of

constituting a local scene (see figure 2.14).95 Nonetheless, Kramer also insisted that the

magazine was primarily about new forms of mediated creative expression. "This paper is

devoted to media with the emphasis on music and the people that live it -- you," he wrote.96

Detroiters were not isolated creators, but embedded in a larger mass culture of media,

especially rock music.

93
Barry Kramer, "Creem Is," Creem 1, 1 (1-14 March 1969): 26.
94
Dave Marsh claims that from the very beginning, Kramer was interested in expanding Creem into a
mass commercial entity like many "hip capitalists" were doing at the time; Dave Marsh, phone interview with
author, 21 July 2000 and email correspondence with author, 21 February 2001.
95
Map of countercultural Detroit, Creem 1, 1 (1-14 March 1969): 14-15.
96
Barry Kramer, "Creem Is," 26.

229
Figure 2.14. The Detroit "scene": Creem's countercultural Detroit map, Creem, March 1969
(courtesy: Creem Media, Inc.)

Even by the second issue, Creem was honing a cartoonish, irreverent demeanor

heavily influenced by non-Detroit visitors. In the place of the first issue's androgynous

Tarot-card "Fool at Zero" cover figure was a cartoon rendering by the underground comic

artist, Robert Crumb, who had been visiting Detroit in March of 1969 (see figure 2.15).97

This figure presented a sense of rock and the counterculture that was far from earnest. It was

far more in the satirical spirit of Mad magazine than the psychedelia of the San Francisco

Oracle. While associated with the San Francisco counterculture, Crumb in fact had already

developed a strong sense of the counterculture's vast failings.98 This second cover was full of

male-fantasized sexual innuendo. It featured a "Mr. Dream Whip" aerosol can smiling at the

viewer as he pleasured young ladies with "gloops" of whip cream. "Wow!," "Me Next, Mr.

97
Robert Crumb "Mr. Dream Whip" cartoon, Creem 1, 2 (15-31 March 1969): cover; this cover also
featured the first rendering of the Creem icon, a bottle of milk drawn by Crumb and declaring, "Boy Howdy!" -
- later it would appear in Creem as a beer can.
98
Steve Burgess, "Brilliant Careers: R. Crumb," Salon.com, 2 May 2000,
http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2000/05/02/crumb/index.html.

230
Dream Whip!" and "Whew!" they cried out as horrified parents looked on in disgust in the

background, save for one man lurking close to the ground, who giggled, "Tee hee." As silly

as it was offensive, the cover suggested that Creem might tap into a reservoir of satire, both

in relation to Detroit and to the larger counterculture movement.

Indeed, a year later, Creem's identity and outlook were changing, influenced by new

members of the magazine's staff, including the politically-minded Dave Marsh (who came to

Creem from the milieu of John Sinclair and The Fifth Estate, and before that from a

working-class family in Michigan) and the aesthetically-oriented "Deday" LaRene (Kramer's

cousin, and a beatnik-inspired law student from Toronto).99 Creem was moving toward

addressing a statewide and even a national audience with irreverent sincerity, even as it

narrowed its scope from the arts of the counterculture more broadly to rock music in

particular.

Figure 2.15. The dawn of irreverence: R. Crumb's "Mr. Dream Whip" cover, Creem, March
1969 (courtesy: Creem Media, Inc.)
99
Nathaniel "Deday" LaRene's nickname came from his birth date, 6 June 1944.

231
 By 1970, Creem had developed a clearer sense of what it meant for the magazine to

be from Detroit. "We're one of only five or six national magazines of the alternative culture,"

Barry Kramer, Marsh, and LaRene wrote in "The Michigan Scene Today," a March 1970

editorial, "and as such we have something to say about more than just what goes on in our

own neighborhood. Still, even within this broader framework we're a Detroit artifact. The

style of the Detroit scene is our style." To the triumvirate of editors who had come to shape

Creem's identity in its second year, the magazine's style came definitively from the Detroit

metropolitan region's rock-dominated youth culture of adventurous, anti-intellectual

teenagers.

Kramer, Marsh, and LaRene argued that, "It was rock and roll music which first drew

us out of out intellectual covens and suburban shells" because "life in Detroit is profoundly

anti-intellectual" since its "institutions are industrial and businesslike." But despite being far

from cultural centers, the editors claimed much for a Detroit counterculture that consisted of

rock-oriented youth: "What we've made ourselves is as real as the foul breath of the Ford

plant or the scum in the Detroit River," they insisted. Kramer, Marsh, and LaRene associated

the "rock and roll culture" from which Creem emerged with Detroit. They assumed that the

city and its environs gave shape to a "lifestyle" that "like the music, is naïve, crude,

adolescent, simple and simplistic."100

The issues of 1970 and 1971 honed this Detroit-inspired tone; Creem was on its way

toward its fully-fledged, distinctive merging of irreverence and sincerity. Dave Marsh, in

particular, developed Creem's tone and approach. In sharp-edged articles, reviews, and

100
Barry Kramer, Dave Marsh, "Deday" LaRene, "The Michigan Scene Today," Creem 2, 11 (March
1970): 10.

232
columns, Marsh repeatedly circled back to the political failures -- and to the lingering,

unfulfilled mission -- of the youth counterculture of the 1960s by investigating his own

experiences as a local Detroit youth. "Maybe it's that I cut my teeth on the MC5," he wrote in

a 1971 article on the MC5, "or that I am possessed by the peculiar Motor City aesthetic, but

I'd go see that [mid-1960s] brand of the MC5 even if the Rolling Stones were across the

street. Nothing I've ever experienced has been nearly comparable and it may be a long time

coming before we all have the collective spirit to do it again."101

Writing in 1985, Marsh explained how important the MC5 -- the quintessential

Detroit band for him -- were in shaping his sense of the utopian possibilities of the

counterculture locally. "So powerfully did the MC5's music unite its listeners that leaving

those 1968 and 1969 shows, one literally felt that anything, even that implausible set of

White Panther slogans, could come to pass," he noted. For Marsh:

In that sense, the MC5, with their Baccanalian orgy of high energy sound,
was a truer reflection of the positive spirit of the counterculture than the laid-
back Apollonians of Haight-Ashbury ever could have been. And from the
glimmerings of that confused babble, from the evidence of its hints of
success, one could begin to construct an aesthetic and perhaps even a program
that proposed how rock culture could fit into society as something more
significant than a diversion. You could say that the very idea is crazy, but not
if you were a part of those shows -- which weren't concerts or dances but
something more spectacular and fulfilling.102

In this quotation, Marsh placed Detroit and the MC5 against San Francisco's countercultural

scene. Marsh's own hometown, not the Bay Area, developed a "truer spirit of the

counterculture than the laid-back Apollonians of the Haight-Ashbury." As this view of the

101
Dave Marsh, "MC5 Back On Shakin' Street," Creem 3, 5 (October 1971): 37.
102
Dave Marsh, Fortunate Son: Criticism and Journalism by America's Best-Known Rock Writer
(New York: Random House, 1985), 204-205.

233
San Francisco scene suggests, Marsh drew upon his intense local experiences of rock music

to examine the counterculture as a national phenomenon. In doing so, Marsh critiqued the

counterculture far more than he praised it.

He became especially intrigued and troubled by what Rolling Stone writer David

Felton had termed the "psychedelic fascism" of religious cults and political ideologues such

as Charles Manson and Mel Lyman.103 In a 1972 column, Marsh wrote that the "human

principles on which [the counterculture] began are being avoided and shirked." As the 1970s

dawned, suddenly "everyone was aware that the alternative culture we had been building

was as sick as the culture it was supposedly an alternative to" [italics in original].104 But

while Felton and other writers associated with Rolling Stone rejected the counterculture in

the name of an older tradition of journalistic muckraking and investigative reporting, Marsh

clung to the idea that countercultural dreams were worthy, if compromised, ones.

Marsh argued that the absurdities of Detroit provided an especially provocative place

from which to gaze at the strengths and weaknesses of building an alternative youth culture.

As with the MC5, other bands of the area presented examples of this to Marsh. "To

understand and truly appreciate The Frut," he wrote in a 1971 article on one such group, "as

with any highly localized phenomenon, you've got to understand the nature of the region

from which they come -- Detroit and Ann Arbor and their environs." Having grown up there,

Marsh insisted, "It's all filthy. I grew up as far from Detroit (though due north) as the Frut,

and the foundry grit on the windowsills is my earliest memory. That foundry dust, vile as it

103
David Felton, ed., Mindfuckers.
104
Dave Marsh, "Looney Toons" column, Creem 3, 5 (October 1971): 24-25.

234
is, eats away at not only aluminum siding and automobile finishes but also at the very heart

of those who must live in it."105

To Marsh, surviving the Detroit-area's polluted and desperate environment

paradoxically liberated one to grasp hold and ride the energy of adopting an absurdist point

of view, a way of perceiving the world as capable of being turned upside down and hence

always up for grabs. In December 1970, writing in his column called "Looney Toons,"

Marsh articulated this view in terms of his own magazine, asking: "What if somebody asked

you what CREEM was?" Emphasizing the topsy-turvy sensibility Detroit could foster for

him, Marsh answered himself: "CREEM is the magazine of rock as high comedy and low art,

of bizarre as normalcy." But to Marsh, this approach "may not make much sense unless you

live up in Motown too."106

Writing whimsically -- but also seriously -- of bands such as The Frut, Marsh

claimed that they possessed a "Rockicrucian Spirit." This spirit, "had the power to liberate

the entire mental/physical complex (being) into a pinnacle of transcendent and

quintessentially aboriginal energy." Marsh felt that Detroit was an especially potent site of

this powerful force. This was because in Detroit, the music, "had to be hard and high energy,

too, because the very nature of the city was, and is, dead-set against the Rockicrucian Spirit,

and all its implications." For Marsh, the Motor City "was as anti-metaphysical as the cars

that are so aptly its symbol," but because of this gritty setting, it produced a sensibility that

105
Dave Marsh, "Will Success Spoil the Frut?" Creem 3, 2 (May 1971): 32.
106
Dave Marsh, "Looney Toons," Creem 2, 18 (December 1970): 22.

235
moved in a powerful manner between realism and idealism in the search for both

countercultural and commercial success.107

The rock music that resulted, then, was especially meaningful for considerations of

the successes and the shortcomings of the counterculture. "The Frut are a dream band,"

Marsh believed, "and their dream is in many ways our dream -- to cure it all by just rockin'

on out." But -- and this was a pivotal move on Marsh's part -- The Frut represented not just

the hopes of the counterculture, but the problems as well. There were "deficiencies of that

attitude, one that we’ve all held at one time or another," Marsh noted of The Frut's

"Rockicrucian" impulses. Marsh only began to outline how "rockin' on out" could "cure it

all," and what the precise "deficiencies of that attitude" were. Nonetheless, he did help to

position Creem as a publication that was not a cheerleader for simple countercultural

solutions to mainstream American social ills. Instead, Creem took shape as a self-critical

journal acutely cognizant of the tricky intertwining of countercultural desires and mass-

consumer experiences.108

By 1971, two years into its existence, Creem had transformed itself from a local,

newsprint tabloid to a prominent national, glossy magazine that soon claimed a circulation of

100,000.109 So, too, the publication shifted its identity. In its first issue, Barry Kramer

declared that "Creem Magazine is Detroit" (see figure 2.16). By the tenth issue, Creem was

107
Dave Marsh, "Will Success Spoil the Frut?", 31, 33.
108
Marsh, "Will Success Spoil the Frut?", 31-32.
109
The first glossy magazine version was Creem 3, 1 (March 1971); Creem circulation figure for
1973 in Flippo, "Rock Journalism and Rolling Stone," 40; Marco Trbovich quotes Barry Kramer as claiming
Creem's subscriber circulation was only 8,000 in 1972; Marco Trbovich "Where Creem Is At: Who Woulda
Believed America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine Is Out There in Walled Lake?" Detroit Free Press, 18
February 1973, 8. While newsstand copies would substantially increase the magazine's exact circulation
figures, one must grant that the extent of the magazine's readership cannot be precisely gauged.

236
"Michigan's Music Paper" (see figure 2.17). In its second year, Creem became "The

Midwest's Music Magazine" (see figure 2.18). Finally, in August of 1972, Creem declared

itself "America's Only Rock and Roll Magazine" (see figure 2.19).110 As its transformed

slogan suggested, Creem had become a publication with a much less direct local link by

1972. Yet its exaggeration of claiming to be "America's Only Rock and Roll Magazine,"

when Rolling Stone and so many others existed, transferred its sense of Detroitness to a tone

of irreverent sincerity.

Figure 2.16, Figure 2.17, Figure 2.18, and Figure 2.19. From "Creem Magazine Is Detroit" in
March 1969 to "Michigan's Music Magazine" in September 1969 to "The Midwest's Music
Magazine" in March 1970 to "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine" in August 1972
(courtesy: Creem Media, Inc.)

110
"Creem Magazine is Detroit," Creem 1, 1 (1-14 March 1969): 26; "Michigan's Music Paper," Creem
2, 5, (September/October 1969): 26; "The Midwest's Music Magazine," Creem 2, 11 (March 1970): 19;
"America's Only Rock and Roll Magazine," Creem 4, 3 (August 1972); a number of 1971 covers featured the
slogan, "A magazine of News Fiction Poetry Film Books TV Records."

237
 Creem's strong local identity was now a portable, transmittable energy that could be

commodified on a national level. Yet because it could fluidly move from irreverence to

sincerity, Creem could operate flexibly within America mass consumerism, critiquing the

current state of cultural and political affairs and smuggling in a sense of alternative

countercultural civic impulses rooted in its Detroitness. As Roberta "Robbie" Cruger, at first

Barry Kramer's secretary, and soon a columnist for the magazine, asked twenty-five years

later, "Were we selling out?" For Cruger, the answer was no: "Just because we went glossy

didn't mean we weren't irreverent anymore."111

Creem's editors viewed its maturation from local tabloid to national glossy not only

as a necessary economic step, but also as an effort to bring an irreverently sincere

perspective from Detroit to the national youth culture. "What would you do if you had to

compete with the two largest Rock Publications?" an editorial questioned potential

advertisers and record industry personnel in a sample issue mailed out during the winter of

1971, referring most of all to the leading rock journal, Rolling Stone, as well as another rock

magazine, probably Circus. Yet, economic concerns were not the only issue for going glossy

and national. Creem also had an important message to contribute. "Most of all," the editorial

declared, "we think that people read CREEM…because we have a sense of humor, because

we relate to serious things seriously but we still haven't lost our sense of proportion."112 A

sense of irreverence allowed Creem to sustain its "sense of proportion." But sincerity also

111
Roberta "Robbie" Cruger, "Twenty-Five Years of Creem, Part One: Flashbacks to Boy Howdy's
Pre-Pubescence," Creem, January/February 1994, 39.
112
Editorial, Creem sample issue, n.d., probably winter 1971, 3.

238
enabled the magazine to cling to the dream of a free, egalitarian countercultural civics -- one

that might be realized through the circulation of rock music in mass culture.

As Creem transformed itself into a national "slick," changes were afoot at the

publication, including a significant change of address. In the summer of 1971, publisher

Barry Kramer moved the offices of Creem to two old farmhouses in Walled Lake, Michigan,

roughly thirty miles north of its downtown location on Cass Avenue. As many participants in

the counterculture did, Kramer and his staff sought to enact a countercultural civics through

communal living in a more rural setting.113 Just as he had at the magazine's Cass Avenue

loft, Kramer gave each Creem staff member a stipend and free room and board.

The racial aspect of the move to the countryside, however, was troubling. The

migration to the countryside may have been caused in part by conflicts between a band

Kramer was managing (singer Mitch Ryder's group called, tellingly, Detroit) and African-

American gangs in the Wayne State neighborhood. Indeed, by moving from downtown

Detroit, Creem followed the auto industry, Motown, and countless other businesses in

severing its connections -- always tense but previously fruitful -- with Detroit's culturally-

rich but economically-deprived African-American culture. Dave Marsh, in fact, opposed the

move for this reason.114 Geoffrey Jacques, a young African-American writer at the time who

published in Creem, recalls Barry Kramer telling him that the magazine was moving to a less

113
For more on the commune movement of the 1960s, see Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes:
Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Laurence Veysey, The Communal
Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Cultures in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); and John
Case and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds., Co-ops, Communes, & Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the
1960s and 1970s (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
114
Dave Marsh, phone interview, 21 July 2000 and email correspondence, 21 February 2001.

239
urban location because "that's where the kids are," a comment that disarmed the teenage

Jacques.115

As with Crawdaddy!'s informal workplace in New York, conflicts arose at Creem's

isolated location. Kramer and Marsh continued to battle over editorial decisions. Soon new

staff member Lester Bangs joined the fray. With staff members living and working in the

same place, the civics of Creem's communal setting often grew quite uncivil.116 But despite

the magazine's office tensions, Creem continued to develop a rich space of opinion,

reportage, and communication in print.117 In particular, keeping its Detroit-inspired tone of

irreverent sincerity but freed from its local context by its move out of Detroit and its switch

to national distribution, Creem was able to incorporate voices from outside Detroit.

The arrival from the San Diego-area of Bangs as editor and writer in 1971, as well as

the additions of correspondents from both coasts, including Greil Marcus from San

Francisco, and Vince Aletti, Robert Christgau, Lisa Robinson, and others from New York,

connected Creem's Detroit-based irreverent sincerity to a wider range of talented writers and

editors. These rock critics were already sympathetic to Creem's emerging approach to rock

music and the counterculture. A number of them, Bangs and Marcus in particular, had

indeed left Rolling Stone because it would no longer publish their styles of criticism. With a

115
Geoffrey Jacques, conversation with author, American Studies Association conference, Detroit, MI,
12 November 2000.
116
Jim DeRogatis relates a number of tales of Marsh and Bangs's personal and professional (and
sometimes literal) sparring matches; DeRogatis, Let It Blurt, 71-75.
117
Cruger, "Twenty-Five Years of Creem, Part One," 40; DeRogatis, Let It Blurt, 71-75.

240
critical irreverence, these writers smuggled their hopes in the persistence of the

countercultural civics that rock might inspire.118

By expanding beyond Detroit's literal borders while persisting in a Detroit-derived

tone, Creem had become, within three years of its birth, both a literal and an imagined space

for encounters between an irreverently sincere critical outlook and the idea of a national

counterculture that still might be circulating through mass consumerism in the early 1970s.

Most obviously, more overt political activities on the left informed Creem. For instance, the

Winter Soldier Investigation, sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, took place in

Detroit in the winter of 1971. The conference, reported on by Ken Kelley in Creem, featured

testimony about war atrocities and crimes committed by the United States in the Vietnam

War.119 Dave Marsh reflected that this event further sharpened his sense of political outrage

and his need to shape some kind of response in his music criticism.120 But Creem not only

responded to these direct interactions with countercultural political activism; the magazine

also struggled with the countercultural effort to seek out the potential for civic

transformation within mass culture.

Creem sought to develop a sophisticated awareness of the counterculture's existence

within mass consumerism without giving up on the counterculture entirely. For instance, in

the first national, glossy issue, Craig Karpel wrote an article, "Das Hip Capital," that

carefully explored the relationship between the counterculture and mass culture. "A growing

118
See DeRogatis, Let It Blurt, 61-62.
119
For the transcript of the Winter Soldier Investigation, see
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html.
120
Marsh, email correspondence, 21 February 2001.

241
number of freaks are coming to understand that commercialization of the life-style erodes

it," Karpel explained. "But their analysis of the process is simplistic: Hip capitalists are

'ripoff artists' who 'steal our culture.' They talk with the animosity of a host for its parasite.

But freaks should understand that…the hip capitalists are symbiotes: the freaks supply the

life-style, the hip capitalist the life-accoutrement."121 Yet, like Crawdaddy!, Creem did not

seek to deny mass culture; instead, it worked against what Karpel identified as the dominant

ideology that rock music and the counterculture could somehow exist completely outside

mass consumerism.

Just as Crawdaddy! had, Creem searched for a countercultural civics that moved

within mass consumerism's electronic circulation. Once again, as with Crawdaddy!,

advertisements and actual copy shared certain themes, but the writing in Creem was able to

deepen notions of countercultural civic possibilities. As with the advertisement for Sunn

amplifiers in Crawdaddy! (see figure 2.10), an advertisement for the Electro-Harmonix

portable amplifier in Creem declared, "Free yourself from the bureaucratically dominated

sources of electricity!" (see figure 2.20).122

In the same issue, Dave Marsh reviewed an album called "Survival" by the band

Grand Funk Railroad, writing, "Rock 'n' roll is not ready to give us great technicians, for that

would surely stultify its incompetent spirit. It is willing to give us great technology, for that

can amplify its resounding power."123 While the advertisement suggested counterculturists

121
Craig Karpel, "Das Hip Capital," Creem 3, 1 (March 1971): 25.
122
Electro-Harmonix advertisement, Creem 3, 3 (June 1971): 93.
123
Dave Marsh, review of Grand Funk Railroad, Survival (Capitol ST 746), Creem 3, 3 (June 1971):
70.

242
could free themselves from mass culture and mass consumerism's entangling wires and

sources of electricity by buying an Electro-Harmonix portable amplifier, Marsh's review

examined a far more complex phenomenon: the way in which rock 'n' roll had clarified what

the counterculture was looking for in 1971 -- a way to survive while dealing "with the city."

Figure 2.20. Electrified irreverence: Electro-Harmonix advertisement, Creem, June 1971

(courtesy: Creem Media, Inc.)

For Marsh, writing about the city during the last days of Creem's time in Detroit,

"city" seems to have symbolized the struggles to articulate a countercultural alternative

within American mass culture and consumerism. Writing about the Grand Funk Railroad

song "Country Road" and perhaps thinking about Creem's impending move, Marsh decided

that the band, "can talk about going to the country, to look for sanctuary, to look for

comradeship and all those elusive, naïve, and intrinsically innocent virtues that, in the end,

rock is based upon" because it did so from the "city" perspective. Confronting mass-

243
mediated events such as the Kent State University murder of American youth by the

National Guard, rock music provided a way, according to Marsh, to explore alternative civic

situations that contained better ways of relating to each other: "comradeship and all those

elusive, naïve, and intrinsically innocent virtues that, in the end, rock is based upon."124

Thus, while Marsh's review shared with the Electro-Harmonix advertisement a general

attitude toward seizing the electricity of mass culture in pursuit of liberation from that

culture, his review developed a more nuanced interpretation of the possibilities and

limitations for a countercultural civics to emerge from this effort.

Marsh based his interpretation on rock music as a placeless phenomenon. But he also

pointed out in his review that Grand Funk was "Midwestern, AMERICAN rock 'n' roll." The

band emerged from the same context as Creem -- the crisis of the decaying Rust Belt.

Indeed, to the Creem critics, Detroit's economic troubles, and the Detroit adolescent's

response of seeking community and self-fulfillment within a landscape of dimming horizons,

seemed to herald larger problems, and the possible responses to those problems, for America

as a whole. Because of this, the Creem critics were able to position their magazine at the

vanguard of a persistent national counterculture that might be able to sustain -- through

irreverent sincerity -- a countercultural civics.

One embodiment of Creem's irreverent sincerity was a "Sex and Violence!"

subscription advertisement that ran in the autumn of 1973 (see figure 2.21). The ad's title,

particularly the idea of violence, resonated with the identity of a magazine associated with

Detroit, now known as "Murder City, U.S.A." But above all, the ad was a joke that

124
The Kent State killings took place on 4 May 1970; Creem moved from Detroit to Walled Lake later
in the summer of 1971.

244
positioned Creem in a national market as a magazine that was neither pretentious nor living

in fantasy, but rather possessed a refreshing, irreverent attitude even toward itself. Beneath

the over-enthusiastic title of the ad, a column of promotional copy announced, "That's what

CREEM offers with a subscription this month, along with sweet country pickin', sweeter

balladry, reborn rebop, and a plenitude of insanely bracing laughter." These descriptions

referred to record albums given away with a subscription, but they also can be read as rather

comical glosses on Creem itself. Adding to the sense of self-parody, the ad deemed Creem,

"the magazine of vex and silence."125

Figure 2.21. Irreverent sincerity: "Sex and Violence!" subscription advertisement,

Creem, November, 1973 (courtesy: Creem Media, Inc.)

125
"Sex and Violence" subscription advertisement, Creem 5, 6 (November 1973): 81; Dave Marsh is
fairly certain that Lester Bangs wrote the copy for this subscription advertisement; Dave Marsh, email
correspondence, 21 February 2001.

245
 Lester Bangs, who perhaps wrote the copy for this advertisement, emerged as the

best practitioner of irreverent sincerity.126 He conducted an exclusive interview from heaven

with a deceased Jimi Hendrix, confronted Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground in numerous

highly comical yet searching, serious interviews, and wrote many record reviews and

features in a rushing, bittersweet, Kerouac-inspired tone that mingled wisdom with

wisecracks and tenderness with vitriol.127 Though not a Detroit native, Bangs also

understood irreverent sincerity to be grounded in a Detroit identity.

Just as he joined Creem in 1971, Bangs published a piece in the rock fanzine Who

Put the Bomp? that gave a sense of his belief in the strange promise of Detroit. "The only

real hope is Detroit," Bangs wrote, "because it takes the intolerableness of Detroit life and

channels it into a form of strength and survival with humor and much of the energy

claimed."128 Indeed, irreverent sincerity did not mean surrendering completely the notion

that rock music could provoke a countercultural transformation in American life. Instead,

even Bangs -- especially Bangs -- who came to Detroit to work at Creem, drew upon his

sense of the city in order to argue that rock music, functioning within mass consumerism,

might possess revolutionary political energies.

For Bangs, this was because Detroit offered the best example of a musical culture

that had struggled with countercultural ambitions from within mass consumerism. In the

126
Roberta Cruger, phone conversation with author, 17 January 2002.
127
Lester Bangs, "Death May Be Your Santa Claus: An Exclusive Up-To-Date Interview with Jimi
Hendrix," by "Mort A. Credit as told to Lester Bangs," Creem 7, 2 (April 1976): 13-15. Among Bangs's many
Reed interviews are "Deaf Mute in a Phonebooth: A Perfect Day with Lou Reed," Creem 5, 3 (July 1972): 10-
13.
128
Lester Bangs, "James Taylor Marked For Death," in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung:
The Work of a Legendary Critic -- Rock 'n' Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'n' Roll, ed. Greil Marcus
(New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 69. Originally published in Who Put the Bomp? (Winter/Spring 1971).

246
Motor City, Bangs believed that, "the fatuity rate is incredibly low…as is the cosmic

vibration rate; people tend to have horse sense, which is refreshing, and know what's

important; even more than that they know what's absolutely crucial and what's a gaudy ball

of gauze."129 Building on this Detroit-derived vision of Creem as a magazine realistic about

contemporary American life, but unwilling to give up on "what's absolutely crucial," Bangs

unfolded his vision of a countercultural ethos that could arise out of rock music. His vision

positioned rock not as Art with a capital A, nor Politics with a capital P, but as a trashy

consumer commodity whose impermanent and derivative sounds could -- out of a seeming

superficiality -- make the kinetic, life-affirming, and joyful energies of creative expression

widely available for both individual and communal use.

Above all else, Bangs urged his readers to hear rock as a music with a serious

message: resist seriousness. Responding both to political radicals who dismissed all of rock

as utterly tainted by the workings of capitalism and to a consolidating record industry that

increasingly marketed certain rock musicians as high-brow artists and artistic geniuses,

Bangs argued that within the most shallow and seemingly foolish levels of mass consumer

culture a deep, enlivening sense of personal and collective power lurked. However, this

power for self and group liberation could only be grasped and enacted if appraised on the

sly, wrapped in a joke, with a cultural stance of irreverence. In articles and reviews, Bangs

laid out Creem's aesthetics and politics of trash, examining how within mass consumerism,

what seemed most foolish in fact held the key to social transformation while what seemed

129
Bangs, "James Taylor Marked For Death," 69.

247
most serious wound up passifying listeners, preventing them from grasping the tools

consumerism made available for their own countercultural transformations.

As a cultural critic, Bangs set out to explain how the trashiest corners of mass-

consumer culture -- rather than straightforward politics or serious-minded rock "art" -- could

yield important insights and revelations about the state of American life. First, he turned

away entirely from politics in the traditional sense. Punning, Bangs wrote of a "Party" that

most deserved his generation's membership not because it was the best political organization

but because it was a special kind of festive gathering. This "Party"'s "collective ambition was

simple," Bangs mused. "Jive and rave and kick 'em out cross the decades and only stop for

the final Bomb or some technological maelstrom of sonic bliss sucking the cities away at

last." For Bangs, this sort of "Party" provided the most meaningful program during a time of

bankrupt public institutions and the ongoing threat of annihilation by the technologies of the

Cold War, from the bomb to the massive amounts of electricity motoring the consumer

system.130

In his breathless, swerving, funny sentences that seemed to sweep a reader up in their

propulsive energy, Bangs explained how his "Party" presented the most viable politics for

young Americans coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s, "because the Party was the one

thing we had in our lives to grab onto." This "Party"'s platform -- to "jive and rave and kick

'em out cross the decades" -- was "the one thing we could truly believe in and depend on, a

loony tune fountain of youth and vitality that was keeping us alive as much as any medicine

we'd ever take or all the fresh air in Big Sur." Without breaking stride, Bangs theorized why

130
Bangs, "James Taylor Marked For Death," 64-65.

248
his "Party" offered the superior agenda to the "medicine" of mind-altering drugs or the back-

to-nature countercultural ideas associated with a location such as Big Sur. The "Party," for

Bangs, "sustained us without engulfing us and gave us a nexus of metaphor through which

we could refract less infinitely extensible concerns and learn a little bit about ourselves and

what was going on without even, incredibly enough, getting pretentious about it."131

This growing pretentiousness of the counterculture increasingly troubled Bangs. He

not only viewed more conventional forms of elective politics -- or even other kinds of anti-

consumerist countercultural politics put forth in the 1960s -- as flawed, he felt the sobriety

with which rock fans were taking the music was problematic. In the late 1960s, Bangs noted,

"American kids began in progressively larger numbers to take themselves with the utmost

seriousness, both as individuals and as a vaguely and mystically defined mass class" and in

the process began to make rock "the soundtrack for our personal and collective narcissistic

psychodramas."132 What had begun as rock's ability to spark revelations out of the tawdry

revelry of popular music had, for Bangs, become bogged down in attempts to treat rock as

high-minded philosophy, as a music bearing a serious message, as attempts to ignore the

music's existence as the fodder and detritus of everyday life in mass consumerism.

A central problem for Bangs was that a consolidating record industry was

increasingly marketing the seriousness of rock to America's youth culture. As a critic, Bangs

sought to counter this mass-marketing of the counterculture with irreverent, razor- sharp

observations whose barbs and jabs gave way, ultimately, to a sustained, sincere commitment

to the radical ethos of the counterculture itself. A 1973 review of an album by the Rowan
131
Bangs, "James Taylor Marked For Death," 65.
132
Bangs, "James Taylor Marked For Death," 65.

249
Brothers used one recording to make a larger point about the marketing of the counterculture

as a serious, but alarmingly passive way of living. "This record scares me," Bangs declared.

"What [the Rowan Brothers] do, by some means unknown to me, is to project a lifestyle.

And some lifestyle it is, too. Vegetarian, disengaged, 'spiritual,' and -- most importantly --

easy. It's a lifestyle that takes no effort to live, that contains no pain, demands nothing, and

returns everything. …Even death doesn't matter." For Bangs, the Rowan Brothers reflected

the larger threat of countercultural disengagement with everyday life in mass

consumerism.133

Bangs' goal as a critic was to suggest the alternative ways in which rock music in fact

engaged, enlivened, and even empowered the typical young American. Writing of the

Rowan Brothers' message of rock as "vegetarian, disengaged, 'spiritual,' and -- most

importantly -- easy," Bangs pointed out, "Of course it's a lie." To Bangs, it was, "the same

kind of lie -- adapted to the times, of course -- that brought…sixteen-year-olds to Haight

Street in 1967." Finally, Bangs concluded in his irreverent way, "Do an old codger a favor,

kids, and don't buy the Rowan Brothers' record. And do yourself a favor and don't buy what

the Rowan Brothers are selling." This was because, to Bangs, turning more sincere, "They

want you to think that they can sell it, when in fact they can't because it's free. You just have

to pay a little more for it than they did, but that's okay too, because you'll get to keep it long

after the Rowan Brothers have been forgotten."134

In this review, Bangs stressed that the utopian politics of the counterculture -- the

idea of revivifying American society based on more liberating, just, egalitarian, energizing
133
Lester Bangs, Review of The Rowan Brothers, Creem 4, 8 (January 1973): 74-75.
134
Bangs, Review of The Rowan Brothers, 75.

250
principles than what currently existed -- was not inherently bad. In fact, he suggested it was

quite worthwhile. But, for Bangs this was only so if young Americans grasped the energy of

rock as a "Party" happening in the belly of mass consumerism, not as a disengagement from

the dominant economic and social system of American life. Fortunately for Bangs, there

were rock bands whose music propelled this countercultural "Party" onward -- with all its

irreverent foolishness intact. In an extended 1970 essay with the tellingly absurd title, "Of

Pop and Pies and Fun, A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges Review, Or,

Who's the Fool?," Bangs explored the ways in which The Stooges -- a Detroit band

dismissed by many in the national counterculture for their seeming incompetence as

musicians and their wild, desperate, often self-destructive stage antics -- were the truth-

tellers the Rowan Brothers were not.

Bangs admired The Stooges, among other bands, as fools who leveled the difference

between rock stars and everyday rock fans, puncturing the manufactured myths of rock as

serious art-making and rock performers as artistic geniuses. The Stooges' lead singer Iggy

Pop (born James Osterberg) was simply, "a nice sensitive American boy growing up amid a

thicket of some of the worst personal, interpersonal, and national confusion we've seen."

Bangs did not precisely define this "thicket" of "confusion" in more detail, but he seems to

have viewed Iggy Pop as an individual caught up in the alienating desperation and absurdity

of a postwar America defined increasingly by a mass-consumer system that proffered mostly

meaningless goods and images to citizens stranded in suburban wastelands. Iggy was, Bangs

explained, "a pre-eminently American kid, singing songs about growing up in America,

251
about being hung up lotsa the time (as who hasn't been?), about confusion and doubt and

uncertainty, about inertia and boredom and suburban pubescent darkness."135

But responding in this mass-consumer context not to some great artistic calling or to

any fully-developed political agenda, but rather simply to the urge to feel alive and to matter,

Iggy Pop and The Stooges made a music that, for Bangs, took the energy and electricity that

powered the trashy, shallow, low sectors of mass-consumer life and transformed them into a

joyous, vital force. In doing so, the group represented to the Creem critic all the

countercultural problems -- and perhaps also the true countercultural solution -- to what

Bangs, writing in his irreverent tone, deemed the "absurdity and desperation of the times":

Well, a lot of changes have gone down since Hip first hit the heartland.
There's a new culture shaping up, and while it's certainly an improvement on
the repressive society now nervously aging, there is a strong element of
sickness in our new, amorphous institutions. The cure bears viruses of its
own. The Stooges carry a strong element of sickness in their music, a crazed,
quaking uncertainty, an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the
absurdity and desperation of the times, but I believe that they also carry a
strong element of cure, a post-derangement sanity. And I also believe that
their music is as important as the product of any rock group working today,
although you better never call it art or you may wind up with a deluxe pie in
the face. What it is, instead, is what rock and roll at hear is and always has
been, beneath the stylistic distortions the last few years have wrought. The
Stooges are not for the ages -- nothing created now is -- but they are most
implicitly for today and tomorrow and the traditions of two decades of
beautifully bopping, manic, simplistic jive.136

Bangs reference to these "traditions of two decades" requires some explanation: as

with Dave Marsh's notion of a "Rockicrucian Spirit," Bangs treated The Stooges as a band

carrying on a tradition of rock-and-roll music forged in response to the desperations of the

135
Lester Bangs, "Of Pop and Pies and Fun, A Program for Mass Liberation in the Form of a Stooges
Review, Or, Who's the Fool?", in Psychotic Reactions, 33. Originally published as in Creem 2, 15 (November
1970) and Part Two in Creem 2, 16 (December 1970).
136
Bangs, "Of Pops and Pies," 33.

252
post-World War II era. Bangs included The Stooges in the rock phenomenon he and others

termed "Third Generation," which included bands coming of age after the first roar of rock

and roll with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and others in the 1950s, and the

second wave of British Invasion and American garage-rock bands in the 1960s. For Bangs,

these "Third Generation" groups raised the specter of young Americans combining parody

and appreciation in one joyous fell swoop that resuscitated the counterculture's utopian

dreams from within the circuitry of mass-consumer society.

For rock's power, Bangs wrote, had "to do with growing up, perhaps absurd but with

all the pop and pap and creature comforts, in white suburbia, and responding to this situation

with as much frustration and vigor as our idiomatic ancestors got out of being physically,

visibly repressed." Rock bands of the "Third Generation" might be "about as original as a

Detroit compact car, but it makes no difference at all," Bangs declared, linking their

experiences metaphorically to Creem's Detroit locale.137

For Bangs, the music of bands such as The Stooges parlayed the trashy din of rock's

mass-consumable form at its most base into an insistence that lives embedded in the deepest

layers of America's commodity culture were worthwhile. In doing so, the group was a truer

incarnation of a 1960s countercultural movement than "the new social systems the Panthers

and Yips are cookin' up" or "the fact that I took acid four days ago and everything is smooth

with no hang-ups."138 In Bangs' writing, Creem echoed and amplified what he heard in The

Stooges' music. With telltale irreverent zeal, Bangs summed up this approach to the

counterculture's relationship with mass consumption, declaring that rock music was:
137
Lester Bangs, Review of REO Speedwagon and Bullangus, Creem 3, 12 (May 1972): 68.
138
Bangs, "Of Pop and Pies," 34.

253
 nothing but a Wham-O toy to bash around as you please in the nursery, it's
nothing but a goddam Bonusburger so just gobble the stupid thing and burp
and go for the next one tomorrow; and don't worry about the fact that it's a
joke and a mistake and a bunch of foolishness…because it's the strongest,
most resilient, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could possibly
destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, mistake,
foolishness.…What's truest is that you cannot enslave a fool.139

Lester Bangs played the fool himself through an exaggerated writing style that

combined spastic wit with heartfelt commitment. While doing so, he alerted readers to

particular examples of rock music that, to him, functioned like "Bonusburgers" burped up

from the depths of mass-consumer society. Rock songs were "invincible Superjokes" able to

overcome any and all efforts to depersonalize individuals or communities. These were the

musicians and songs of "The Party," which to Bangs provided, "one answer [for] how to

manage leisure in a society cannibalized by it."140

By both embodying and emphasizing rock as an irreverent force capable of

conveying countercultural dreams from the bottom of mass consumerism's garbage heap,

Bangs built on the self-fashioned Detroit identity writers such as Dave Marsh had created for

Creem, leading the magazine to what we might call a refined vision of unrefinement -- a

critique of both mass consumerism's alienations, and the rest of the counterculture's failure to

address them honestly and effectively. With his editorial encouragement to find their own

voices, many other Creem contributors followed Bangs' lead in seeking out meaning and

making things matter from within the experiences of rock as part of everyday life in mass

consumerism. Nowhere did Bangs' and Creem's peculiar countercultural vision emerge more

fully than in the magazine's letters column.

139
Bangs, "James Taylor Marked For Death," 74.
140
Bangs, "James Taylor Marked For Death," 74.

254
 This magazine's letters column became a place for readers either to affirm or refuse

Creem's position that rock music's status as disposable teenage pap was precisely what made

it a site for the pursuit of rock's countercultural civic possibilities. Creem suggested that the

inauthentic pop pap of teen culture, of which rock turned out to be a central example, might

perhaps serve as fodder for a critical-public. Indeed, we might think of Creem's letters

column as a kind of mass-consumer public sphere in which established critics and

commonplace readers interacted as equal citizens communicating about the problems and

possibilities that the trashiest kinds of rock music posed. In the depths of mass culture,

something resembling Habermas's literary public sphere appeared.141

Many readers wrote in to thank Creem for providing them with a magazine that

captured -- or helped them discover -- the secret power of rock-as-trash. "My brother found a

copy of Creem at the dump," wrote William Bridges of New Orleans, in an enthusiastic 1973

missive that Creem editors titled "Found Art." Perhaps joking about how Creem reached

him, but also quite appreciative of its trashy origins, Bridges continued: "So he brought it

home and gave it to me, and I read it, Man it was the groovest [sic] magazine I read in years.

Keep up the good work."142

Another letter-writer, Mike Corbett of Salinas, California, adopted Lester Bangs'

mixture of light-hearted mockery and earnest appreciation in a spoof of the famous tagline

for Playboy magazine, writing: "To Alan Niester, regarding his review of the Moody Blues:

What kind of man writes record reviews for CREEM? The kind that gets his education from

comic books, his bell-bottoms from Woolworth's, and his religion from Black Sabbath."
141
Habermas, Structural Transformation, 51-56.
142
William Bridges, "Found Art" Letter, Creem 5, 6 (November 1973): 8.

255
Even as he poked fun at Neister, Corbett seemed to playfully recognize the funny sort of

insight the critic had gleaned from the lowbrow world of unsophisticated, mass-consumed

products.143

If these two letters teased Creem and its writers even while explicitly or implicitly

acknowledging the magazine's value, a letter from Battiste Everett-Wells of Tumbleweed

Connection, Michigan, adopted Lester Bangs' exaggerated style to distinguish Creem from

other rock publications. Everett-Wells declared, somewhat facetiously but also quite

seriously: "In the end, someone said 'Let there be CREEM' and low and above, there

wallowing in the muck and ire of Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone and aforementioned charlatans

of yore, there appeared CREEM, brilliant as a new born hermaphrodite and without shame to

rule the land that was without and the places that were within each of us a little flower

grows." Both a satirical spoof and an earnest compliment, Everett-Wells' letter sought to join

with Bangs and others at Creem in relishing the silly but sincere joys of playing the fool.144

Other letters recognized the ways rock music could be vital, but raised questions

about the music's relationship both to countercultural ideals of egalitarianism and the evils of

mass consumerism as a whole. One remarkable letter examined rock by thinking about its

relationship to women and its implications for gender politics. That a letter like this could

appear alongside sillier comments and missives is a testament to the complex ways in which

Creem became a site for a public sphere that had room for both the humorous and the

serious. In her letter, Laura Liben of New York City commented:

143
Mike Corbett, Letter, Creem 5, 4 (September 1973): 10.
144
Battiste Everett-Wells, Letter, Creem 4, 9 (February 1973): 8.

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 The words and aspects of the music are forever "putting women in their
place," and that very energy is the power behind the message, sucking us in as
it oppresses us, much more completely than, say a Chanel perfume ad in
Vogue magazine would. How many times have I happily snapped my fingers
and danced along with hundreds of other women and men to "Look At That
Stupid Girl" or "You Better Shop Around?" Not that the Stones and Miracles
don't create beautiful music (they are two of my favorite groups, which is a
flip-out in a way) but who can deny how the put-downs to women have
affected us all? ...Even as the music brings us in touch with our own vitality
and life energy, at the same time it oppresses us…[with] a disease so deeply
imbedded in our society that rock music is going to have to go through many
changes before it can act as a truly revolutionary force to help change rather
than perpetuate this system.145

Liben's connection of gender in rock music to both a countercultural aim of putting

listeners "in touch with our own vitality and life energy" as well as the music's complicity

with a larger commercial "system" represented by Chanel perfume ads in Vogue was an

example of Creem's ability -- despite its own increasingly compromised position as a

national magazine vying for success in the economic marketplace -- to provide an

imaginative space for explorations of this thorny relationship between the counterculture and

mass consumerism. Neither Liben, nor Lester Bangs, nor Creem as a whole, had any

definitive answers, but they were eager to tackle this difficult problem.146

Still other letters criticized Creem outright, while recognizing its attempt to forge an

irreverent counter-countercultural aesthetic and politics. "Your October & November issues

showed up here in LA awhile ago and I found them a gassy contrast to some of the stuff

which has been going down in That Other magazine of late," wrote Len Bailes, referring to

145
Laura Liben, Letter, Creem 3, 2 (May 1971): 4.
146
In terms of gender, Creem could be as intimidating and sexist an organization as any in the rock
world, but it did offer professional opportunities to a number of female writers and editors: Jaan Uhelszki,
Roberta Cruger, Pam Brent, and Debbie Burr, among them.

257
Rolling Stone. "You guys seem to be mildly hung up on the r&r critic as artiste trip too, but

at least you've got a sense of humor about it."147 Another letter writer, David M. Lewark,

from San Francisco, but previously a "resident of Mishawka, Ind., 1949-1971," sarcastically

dismissed Creem for its Detroit-fashioned distrust of more idealistic, less-guarded wings of

the counterculture. "I feel you should be commended for the excellent way you portray and

promote the typically cynical, unenlightened attitude toward life that is so widespread in the

people of the Midwest," Lewark sneered.148

With comments ranging from the sympathetic to the jeering, Creem's letters section

offered a glimpse of the magazine's vision of a countercultural politics that made everyday

life matter even at the trashiest levels of mass-consumer society. For even before a reader got

to the profiles of preening rock stars, photographs of scantily-clad groupies, columns of

manufactured entertainment news items, silly cartoons, or flashy advertisements, they

encountered at the front of Creem a spirited, flourishing debate that used the detritus and

trash of popular culture for powerful ends: to present a wide range of self identities; to affirm

or contest various communal boundaries and definitions; to struggle with the problems of

equality; and to seek out meaningful senses of what it meant to live in the contemporary

world of 1960s and 1970s America.

Even as Creem developed a national audience, the magazine maintained both literal

and imaginative links to Detroit. In the fall of 1974, the publication started an insert called

"Extra Creem," which appeared in Detroit-area copies and focused on local bands and the

local rock scene. Two years later, "Extra Creem" featured a travel-magazine satire. It began,
147
Len Bailes, Letter, Creem 3, 2 (May 1971): 2, 6.
148
David M. Lewark, Letter, Creem 3, 12 (May 1972): 82.

258
"When's the last time you said, Let's Go To Detroit. It's not too late." Around photographs of

Detroit's urban blight, the parody included droll captions. "Sunny Detroit, the grapefruit of

the Midwest," one announced, "where you can bask in the sun and sulfur dioxide til your

heart's content." Another caption read, "In the 60s, 260,295 people died in Wayne County.

That means that somewhere in the county there's a funeral every 15 minutes. And you

complain there's nothing to do" (see figure 2.22).149 The piece was a literary form of the

blues, and it was perhaps the saddest, most bitter incarnation of Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs,

and Creem's irreverent cultural stance. The article desperately sought to cling to the original

idealistic goals of social transformation articulated by the counterculture in Detroit/ But it

was perched at the edge of despair. Irreverently celebrating -- and sincerely bemoaning -- the

misery of Detroit's horrible decline, the article smuggled a message of persistence within its

satire.

Figure 2.22. Bittersweet hometown blues: "Let's Go To Detroit" spoof, Creem, February
1976 (courtesy: Creem Media, Inc.)

149
Marty Fischkoff, "Let's Go To Detroit," Extra Creem, February 1976, 9-12.

259
 But as the 1980s loomed, Creem tilt toward sarcasm and satire alone, increasingly

abandoning any interest in rescuing the transformative and utopian dimensions of the 1960s

counterculture. Yet for much of the 1970s, Creem mediated between the extremes of bitter

humor and over-earnest sincerity in an effort to sustain the counterculture's mass cultural

civic ethos. In 1973, the Detroit journalist Marco Trbovich wrote an article that captured

Creem's sense of purpose: "What the magazine does with jerky starts and stops of success is

to deal with the aesthetics of the rock/pop culture in a way that both informs and entertains

in language that communicates to the urban teen," Trbovich explained.150 Creem remained

committed to delivering a serious countercultural message. But the key was that the

magazine would do so by parodying the serious message itself, lampooning it by pointing

out how it circulated through the frivolous delights of mass-consumed "pop" music, and how

this remarkably strengthened rather than weakened its deepest messages of potential

countercultural transformation.

Detroit continued to figure in the magazine's efforts to preserve the counterculture's

original impulses on the national level. Dave Marsh made a point of noting to Trbovich

Creem's "barbarically provincial" sensibility, which had emerged "because we were in

Detroit." But Lester Bangs explained what Creem was trying to do nationally: "All the

political things in the Sixties were like an inside joke. But now the whole world knows about

the inside joke. But those people who knew about it in the Sixties are still acting like it's a

big secret. What we want to do is just let it all lay out there." Creem writers such as Bangs

seemed to abandon the counterculture by not taking it seriously. But by rooting their

150
Marco Trbovich "Where Creem Is At," 7.

260
irreverence in the magazine's Detroit origins, Creem's staff in fact committed itself to

preserving the countercultural creation of an alternative public life.151

By paradoxically seeming to reject the counterculture of the 1960s while in fact

making the "big secret" of the counterculture's "inside joke" obvious and available to all who

would listen, Creem sought to just "lay it all out there," as Bangs put it. The magazine

would, Bangs hoped, expand a countercultural critical public. It would, he suggested, make

painfully obvious the naiveté, innocence, and shortcomings of the counterculture's effort to

create a liberated society. But at the same time, to "lay it all out there" also meant bringing

the rebellious, utopian energy of rock music up to its lampooned surface. "Rock and roll is

an attitude, not an art," Lester Bangs explained. "It's a stance, a ruse. And maybe that's what

we are in a sense, a ruse." For Creem, though, as Barry Kramer claimed to Trbovich, there

was "truth in jive"; there was an essential, serious message conveyed within the magazine's

rock-and-roll "ruse."152

Barry Kramer described this attempt at Creem to balance hope with despair as

"having an identity crisis every other day."153 This was a publication, after all, that absurdly

declared itself, "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine," despite the presence of Rolling

Stone and a half-dozen other rock journals. The slogan represented Creem's feeling that

while Rolling Stone and other magazines treated rock as a kind of art, Creem retained the

sense of rock as an utterly corrupted -- and yet possibly revolutionary --commodity. Critics

in magazines as lofty as the New Yorker noticed Creem's innovative perspective. "Unlike

151
Trbovich "Where Creem Is At," 9.
152
Trbovich "Where Creem Is At," 8-9.
153
Trbovich "Where Creem Is At," 7.

261
Rolling Stone, which is a bastion of San Francisco counter-culture rock-as-art orthodoxy,"

the critic Ellen Willis argued in her New Yorker column on rock music, "Creem is committed

to a pop aesthetic; it speaks to fans who consciously value rock as an expression of urban

teenage culture and identify with a tradition whose first law is novelty…."154

Figure 2.23. A new folk of pop: "Woody" cartoon, Creem, November 1973 (artist: Dave
Hereth, courtesy: Creem Media, Inc.)

154
Ellen Willis, "My Grand Funk Problem – And Ours," New Yorker, 26 February 1972, 79; also
quoted in Trbovich, "Where Creem Is At," 8; and DeRogatis, Let It Blurt, 75.

262
 Indeed, Creem articulated deep ironies about rock's authenticity and artifice, the

music's ambiguous definition as art, folk, or pop culture.155 A cartoon from the November

1973 issue of Creem indicated an acute awareness of these complexities (see figure 2.23).

The cartoon featured a man, possibly a musician, informing a woman that he was "greatly

influenced by Woody." The woman excitedly assumed that he was referring to Woody

Guthrie, the great folk icon and inspiration to many rock artists. However, the reader learned,

the man actually meant the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker. There are a number of

ways to interpret this cartoon, but in light of Creem's story itself, one might be that the man

was identifying himself not in the modes of folk authenticity, artistic seriousness, or even the

political dedication represented by Woody Guthrie, but by the gaffawing, light-hearted,

commercialized, pop, trickster figure of Woody Woodpecker.156

In this reading of the cartoon, one catches a glimpse of Creem's attempt to identify

and provide a space for an authentic culture carved out from the lowbrow pop detritus of

mass consumption. In the cartoon's silly delight lingered a serious proposition: Woody

Woodpecker could perhaps be a hero as much as Woody Guthrie. One might even picture

the man in this cartoon as Lester Bangs himself, caught up between sheepishness and

sarcasm in an aesthetic of rock's beautiful commercial trashiness and the lurking politics of

heightened self-awareness and surprising vitality that could be found within the music.

Indeed, later in his career, Bangs would crystallize this view on America's system of mass

155
For an exploration of rock's ambiguous position as art, folk, and pop, see Simon Frith and Howard
Horne, Art Into Pop (New York: Routledge, 1987); Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics
of Rock 'n' Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 3-57; and Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of
Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 75-95.
156
The cartoon was signed by Dave Hereth and appeared in Creem 5, 6 (November 1973), 73.

263
consumerism. Among previously unpublished notes that appeared in a collection after the

critic's death in 1981, Bangs wrote: "The whole point of American culture is to pick up any

old piece of trash and make it shine with more facets than the Hope Diamond."157 However

commercialized rock had become, and in fact had always been, in the Creem view the music

might still unleash transformative forces. It might still develop a countercultural civics -- a

meaningful public life -- even at, or perhaps especially from, the lowest depths of mass

culture.

In what we might then call Creem's uncompromising compromise with mass

consumerism, the magazine explored the countercultural possibilities that noisily

reverberated in rock without ignoring the music's commercial milieu. Rather than think of

the critics at Creem -- whether it be the magazine's writers, artists, or even its readers –

either as, on the one hand, utter "sell-outs" or, on the other, unrealistic countercultural

dreamers, we might conceive of Creem's community of participants as mass-consumer

versions of the "connected critics" that Michael Walzer identifies throughout twentieth-

century history. As "connected critics," the writers and artists at Creem did not ignore the

dominant systems and beliefs of America, but engaged them.158

As the rock critic Jim DeRogatis has written, at least for a time, "Creem fostered a

spirited dialogue with anyone who shared its enthusiasms, and for all its snotty attitude, it

never talked down to anyone. It could be stoopid, but it was always smart, and just because

157
Lester Bangs, "Notes for Review of Peter Garulnick's Lost Highway, 1980," in Psychotic
Reactions, 327.
158
Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

264
an article was a gas to read didn't mean that it lacked ideas."159 A consideration of Creem

suggests that the magazine -- from its imagined Detroit perspective -- attempted to develop a

viable and vital critical position that was countercultural in that it encountered the social and

cultural context of the day rather than simply countering it with a wholesale alternative. That

is, rather than "drop out" of society, to cite Timothy Leary's famous 1960s adage, Creem

attempted to let readers "tune in" and "turn on" to a critical public. With a stance of

irreverent sincerity that allowed young Americans to participate in critical inquiry, Creem

provided a means for a larger public collective to pursue a new society by wrestling with the

silly-putty inside the plastic shell of the old.

Conclusion: Etch-A-Sketching the "Critical-Public"

Crawdaddy! and Creem magazine, when placed in historical context, indicate not a

turning away from politics but the effort to organize a new sense of the public. This new

sense could exist translocally, glued together by viscous potions of affect, offering both a

fluid medium for varied articulations of the "self," that is the citizen, and a sense of

connection through social relations conveyed via the goods and images of economic culture.

The ironies of the counterculture and its related movements during the 1960s are oft-cited,

especially the ways in which the counterculture sought to become at once revolutionary and

commercial, anti-American and essentialized in new incarnations of American

exceptionalism.160 But perhaps Crawdaddy! and Creem should be read in a different light: as

159
DeRogatis, Let It Blurt, 75.
160
Thomas Frank makes the point about the counterculture's mixture of revolution and commerce,
calling it a "commodification of dissent" and presenting a version of its history in The Conquest of Cool. Both
Maurice Isserman and Mark Mazullo explore the contradictions of the counterculture's revolutionary

265
examples of the counterculture's attempt to address both the possibilities and the problems of

the strange new structures of mass consumerism and mass society.

Like other countercultural participants, the Crawdaddy! and Creem critics brought to

this new situation timeworn American concerns and questions -- about democracy,

citizenship, the self, community, the market -- that had assumed grave import due to the

Civil Rights movement, the War in Vietnam, the hydrogen bomb, and the memory of

fascism's atrocities in World War II. The rock critics explored the possibilities of forging

new, surprising, at times more inclusive forms of community in which the modern self could

flourish amid both the upheaval and repression occurring in mass society, where even as the

"global village" grew smaller and more connected, its intricate geography expanded in a

dizzying density. But problems emerged too, especially in the silences and lacunae found in

Crawdaddy! and Creem. While the rock critics and magazines occasionally and significantly

transcended, or at least confronted, stubborn problems of race, gender, and class division by

analyzing civic feeling via rock music, they were unable to solve these seemingly intractable

problems. Moreover, in the larger context of social turmoil and contestation concerning

inequity, the critics at Crawdaddy! and Creem sometimes unintentionally reasserted power

relations and hierarchies even as they struggled to overcome them.

Nonetheless, endeavoring to negotiate the problems and possibilities of postwar mass

society, the Crawdaddy! and Creem critics turned to rock music to explore issues of freedom

and stability in both the public life and the private lives of a supposedly democratic nation.

orientation and its appeals to American exceptionalism, but in very different contexts. Maurice Isserman does
so in a historiographical overview, "The Not-So-Dark and Bloody Ground: New Works on the 1960s,"
American Historical Review 94, 4 (October 1989): 1010; Mark Mazullo does so in an essay on the rock critic
Greil Marcus; see Mark Mazullo, "Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train As Rock 'n' Roll History,"
Musical Quarterly 81, 2 (Summer 1997): 162.

266
Listening to the alluring rhythm of what Mark Crispin Miller deemed rock music's

"ungovernable beat," they awkwardly felt their way toward possible answers to fundamental

questions of self and society. They clumsily but earnestly danced across the page, crafting

aesthetic responses to the crises and the opportunities posed by the governmental and

commercial structures of postwar mass society. Their situation seemed new, and yet, from a

broader perspective, its core issues of individual independence and communal connection --

of the civics of a democratic republic -- were eerily familiar, having haunted Americans for

two centuries.161

Could these "rags" of music criticism really do all that? "This album is just rock and

roll," the scribbler in Bob Wilson's Creem comic wrote. Yet, this cartoon rock critic crossed

out the phrase again and again. The implication of Wilson's comic strip was that rock was

"just" a genre of popular music and, at the same time, much more than that. Rock was so

significant, in fact, that language could not adequately convey how powerfully the music

affected a person. As a closer investigation of the rock press music indicates, rock music

mattered tremendously, even as it roared invisibly. In Wilson's comic, rock was able to

assemble two of its listeners together into a life of exchange that was more than just

commercial in nature. The circulation of words, images, ideas, and emotions through the

rock music press brought people into relation with one another so that they no longer felt

161
Mark Crispin Miller, "Where All the Flowers Went," New York Review of Books, 3 February 1977,
31. The history of republican civics in America is much debated, but certainly even those who question the
"republican synthesis" would admit that the history of the United States reveals a continual grappling with
questions of democratic equality, citizen participation, and the relationship between commerce, culture, and
politics. See Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: The Career of a Concept," Journal of American History 79
(June 1992); Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Harvey Mitchell,
America After Tocqueville: Democracy Against Difference (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
and Philip J. Ethington, "Hypothesis from Habermas: Notes on Reconstructing American Political and Social
History, 1890-1920," Intellectual History Newsletter 14 (1992): 21-40.

267
separated, though, as Hannah Arendt noticed, what connected them was a form of culture

that circulated intangibly, on sound waves. The negotiation between ineffable music and the

printed efforts to communicate its importance not only served commercial purposes, but also

generated a strange, new zone of mass-mediated civic engagement and interaction.

Crawdaddy!, Creem, and other publications do not present clear distinctions between

the counterculture as hedonistic consumer feast or a concerted attempt to oppose mass

consumerism. Instead, the rock press situated creators and consumers at the central twist of

an intertwined knot of consumer pleasures and ideological commitments. The rock critic

became a persona that countercultural participants might adopt in order to explore the

contradictions that comprised this complex crossroads of commercial and political

experience. The rock critic was an easy persona to condemn. An early historian of the

underground press, Laurence Leamer, wrote that, "The central intellectual personage of the

rock-culture magazines and of commercialized counter culture is the male rock critic -- the

interpreter, the noncreator…a male groupie, spinning theories out of such thin stuff as lyrics

and crowd reaction and nonverbal signs and symbols…he is the high prince of the

alienated."162 But the rock critics might be better understood as "connected critics." Those

who adopted the rock critic persona did not ignore the dominant systems and beliefs of

America, but, rather, engaged them.163

The civics of rock that critics helped to shape, articulate, and embody remained a

slippery, half-articulated set of impulses, hunches, and desires that arose in seizures rather

than structures of feeling. Perhaps this civics might be best understood through a metaphor,
162
Laurence Leamer, The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1972), 168.
163
Michael Walzer, The Company of Critics.

268
one that emerges from mass culture itself. Just as postwar adolescents created a kind of

homemade Pop Art by wielding the knobs of "Etch-A-Sketch" toys, so, too, rock critics at

publications such as Crawdaddy! and Creem circulated a countercultural civics that burst

forth from commodity forms deep within mass consumerism. Attempting to grapple with the

politics of culture from within the dominant society, the rock critics pulled and tugged

magnetized vectors -- the cultural and the political, the commercial and the critical, the

popular and the avant-garde, folk and pop, leisure and labor, consumption and production.

Participants in rock magazines attempted to draw a new kind of social order through critical

inquiry. This new organization of society, however, only emerged in imperfect moments --

seizures of feeling, brief flourishes of connection. It was fragile, impermanent, traced across

the transmission waves of mass culture. When shaken, the vectors fractured and vanished.

Even though the printed pages of rock magazines remained, the screen again returned to

blank.

Yet, before they disappeared into the ether, the vectors of rock's critical-public

intersected with strange, new spaces. Rock's participants wound up etch-a-sketching unusual,

surprising possibilities for countercultural civic life. As we shall see in the next section,

halfway around the world, the civics of rock turned up in the war zone of Southeast Asia

during the prolonged conflict between the United States and Vietnam.

269
 Part Three -
Fighting With Rock: Representing Countercultural Civics in Vietnam

What was hardly noticed at the time was that the music, the festivals and even
the love-ins were as much dependent on high technology as were the weapons
which were at that time being used in Vietnam. - Christopher Small1

One can review what was 'popular' -- the Top 100, Top 40, Top 10, number
one hits, gold and platinum records and albums, Top Country, and Top R&B
-- but to ask what affected whom and how is a much more complex question.
- Ray Pratt2

Guns and Guitars: Rock in Vietnam

"Burning monks, stacked Viet Cong dead, wounded Marines screaming and

weeping…Ronald Reagan, his face halved and separated by a stalk of cannabis; pictures of

John Lennon peering through wire-rimmed glasses, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Dylan…."

According to the journalist Michael Herr, these were among the images juxtaposed in a

collage made by a United States airman, who pasted them on the wall in his Saigon

apartment during the Vietnam War.3 The presence of rock music stars in this striking collage

suggests the importance of music in the Vietnam conflict.

1
Christopher Small, Music Of The Common Tongue: Survival And Celebration In Afro-American
Music (1987; reprint, New York: Riverrun Press, 1994), 378.
2
Ray Pratt, "'There Must Be Some Way Outta Here!': The Vietnam War in American Popular Music,"
in The Vietnam War: Its History, Literature, and Music, ed. Kenton J. Clymer (El Paso: Texas Western Press,
1998), 169.
3
Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Knopf, 1977), 176.
 Figure 3.1. Recreation of a collage in U.S. Airman's Saigon apartment, as described in
Dispatches by Michael Herr

But what could and what did rock represent in Vietnam more precisely? What kinds

of social forces could music embody or even produce? How did rock connect to concepts of

race, youth, dissent, peace, and violence? How did the music relate to the home front, to

American capitalism, even to notions of global identity? Did it provide for alternative or

oppositional social and political imaginaries against dominant American models, or was it

merely part of an expanding Pax Americana during the Cold War? In "a war where a lot of

people talked about Aretha's 'Satisfaction' the way other people speak of Brahms' Fourth,"

As Michael Herr put it, what were the relationships of rock to other musical genres, such as

271
soul music?4 To begin to address these difficult questions, I would like to add two additional

images to the airman's apartment wall.

Figure 3.2 and Figure 3.3. MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, Detroit, U.S.A., 1969 (photograph:
Leni Sinclair); soldier in Khe Sanh, Vietnam, 1968 (photograph: Tim Page)

These two photographs, one from the home front and one from the war zone, suggest

iconographic linkages between the domestic counterculture and Vietnam. On the left is

countercultural activist Leni Sinclair's 1969 portrait of the MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer. On

the right is photojournalist Tim Page's 1968 snapshot of a soldier in Khe Sanh, Vietnam. As

with the collision of home front and war zone images in Herr's airman collage, the

photographs by Sinclair and Page suggest that war and rock -- guns and guitars -- were

symbolically connected, both in the U.S. and in Vietnam. Yet, if we look more closely, the

ambiguities of the photographs raise many questions: Are the guns and guitars of each

photograph meant to be in collusion or opposition? Are they both instruments of assault or is

the gun a weapon for violence while the guitar represents an expressive tool for peace? Is

4
Herr, Dispatches, 181.

272
Wayne Kramer, the countercultural rocker on the left, assaulting the flag or saluting it? Is the

soldier on the right representing two sides of America -- peaceful and warlike -- or parallel

U.S. imperial incursions -- one cultural, the other violent -- into Southeast Asia? Does it

matter that the rocker's guitar is an electric and the soldier's an acoustic, or do the

instruments possess the same symbolic meaning? In their ambiguities, the photographs wind

up only whispering about what should be the loud topic of popular music and society. Taken

together, what they perhaps most suggest is that in the 1960s, American popular music

became a meaning-making and feeling-making sonic phenomena that resonated on the

interactive wavelengths between domestic American popular culture and the Vietnam War

experience.5

Both the official military and fighters themselves helped complete the circuit

between home front and war zone. Musical groups, such as Jimmy and the Everyday People,

were comprised of servicemen put together into performing bands by the Entertainment

Branch of the Army's Special Services division. Rock also arrived in Vietnam through the

official channels of Armed Forces Radio. Simultaneously, the music traveled through a vast

black market in pirated recordings, underground radio broadcasts, audio equipment, musical

instruments, and informal venues for musical consumption. Associated with drug

experimentation, the social upheavals and new styles of young Americans, and the anti-war

movement itself, rock resonated uneasily along mass-mediated wavelengths between home

5
I include soul as a separate but overlapping category to emphasize the ways in which these genres
were unstable in the late 1960s and early 1970s, at times diverging along strongly-articulated racial lines (rock
for white hippies; soul for African-Americans), but just as often interacting through musical "crossovers" of
sound, style, and sensibility. The popularity of musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Otis Redding, The
Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Temptations, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye, and others created a space in which
rock and soul, "hippies" and "brothers," came together -- never entirely cohesively but nonetheless in
substantive ways that require recognition.

273
front and war zone. To stay with Michael Herr's evocative understanding of the matter, when

he returned to the United States from Vietnam, he believed that, in his words, "the Sixties

had made so many casualties, its war and its music had run power off the same circuit for so

long they didn't even have to fuse. …What I'd thought of as two obsessions were really only

one."6

Figure 3.4. Rock in Vietnam: Jimmy and the Everyday People publicity poster, 1971
(courtesy: National Archives)

Herr sensed that rock and the Vietnam War somehow went together as part of what

defined "the Sixties." But how? Though linked to the domestic counterculture of hippies,

psychedelic drugs, youth culture, and antiwar sentiment, the music in fact rarely explicitly

6
Herr, Dispatches, 258.

274
articulated protest against the war.7 Rock was not frozen into any particular ideological or

even emotional position with regard to Vietnam. Rather, the music was a profoundly

ambiguous mode of representation, ill suited for simplistic interpretation. In Vietnam, after

all, "rocking and rolling" meant locking and loading one's automatic rifle as one prepared to

fight. Simultaneously, rock remained associated with dissent among the ranks of American

troops in Vietnam. Moreover, as a new and unstable genre of popular music, rock

overlapped with soul. As their publicity poster announces, Jimmy and the Everyday People,

an integrated band, performed "Rock 'n' Soul." The interaction of these two genres, both

significant musical forms of the 1960s, suggests that a complex story about race and

vernacular troop culture in Vietnam.

The photographs of MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer and the soldier in Khe Sanh,

Vietnam, link guitar and gun in a dueling symbolic dialogue. Though polysemic in meaning,

comprised of multifaceted emotional forces, and used for a range of activities by different

participants, rock's sounds continuously echoed between gun and guitar. At this criss-cross

of battle and musical instruments, we can begin to make some sense of the place of rock and

soul in the Vietnam conflict. As the chart (see figure 3.5) illustrates, rock served as a

dynamic emotional and ideological conduit between the United States home front and the

Vietnam war zone. In three broad, overlapping, sometimes contradictory dimensions of the

war -- official military culture, vernacular troop culture, and the decolonizing cultures of

Vietnam and Southeast Asia -- rock music reinforced an imperial American identity even as

glimpses of an alternative global electronic civics appeared on the horizon of possibility.

7
Kenneth Bindes and Craig Houston, "Takin' Care of Business: Rock Music, Vietnam, and the Protest
Myth," The Historian 52 (November, 1989): 1-23.

275
 Figure 3.5. Chart: Music between the home front and the war zone

Rock served as a resource for questioning what it meant to be American, especially

an American fighter. Simultaneously, rock seemed to blast beyond questions of American

identity alone, summoning into being from the depths of war a fleeting but palpable civic

life, a civitas or republic of rock for a globalizing society borne through -- but not entirely of

-- American consumer capitalism and military might. By considering how rock circulated

through the structures of the official military, resonated in a vernacular troop culture, and

even made its way to decolonizing Vietnamese and Southeast Asians, we can explore how

rock both affirmed and raised questions about American identity. So, too, we begin to grasp

the glimmer of alternative global configurations that were forged by sonically-inspired social

affiliations that challenged nation-state boundaries.

Both in its heyday, and even more so in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, rock has

become perhaps the sonic signifier of the war -- and all the ferment it generated. One need

276
only listen to the soundtrack of Hollywood films such as Apocalypse Now, Full Metal

Jacket, Platoon, and Good Morning, Vietnam to grasp how the music has been used to evoke

feelings about the war. Although these are fictional accounts of the Vietnam conflict, they

convey the ways in which rock has served as a memory device to unleash, re-live, and

grapple with past experiences.8 For those who lived through the war, the music and Vietnam

became almost synonymous. After Vietnam, Michael Herr describes Tim Page, who took the

famous photograph of the soldier with gun and guitar at Khe Sanh, "listening to the Mothers

[of Invention, Frank Zappa's group] and Jimi Hendrix, remembering compulsively, telling

war stories."9

Studies of the relationship between music and the Vietnam conflict have tended to

obsess as compulsively as Tim Page over the twin topics of music and memory.10 While this

inquiry examines the terrain of memory, it seeks out (and obsesses over) a different

dimension of the story. Rather than examine the cultural artifacts (films, novels, poetry) that

grew out of Vietnam, this chapter focuses on the crucial historical issues at stake in rock

music's role in Vietnam. It concentrates on questions of cultural and political representation

8
Among the many articles and books on Vietnam films, see Douglas W. Reitinger, "Paint It Black:
Rock Music and Vietnam War Film," Journal of American Culture 15, 3 (Fall 1992): 53-60; William Adams,
"War Stories: Movies, Memory, and the Vietnam War," Comparative Social Research 11 (January 1989): 165-
186; and Mark Taylor, The Vietnam War in History, Literature, and Film (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2003).
9
Herr, 245.
10
David James, "The Vietnam War and American Music," in The Vietnam War and American
Culture, eds. John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Ray Pratt,
"'There Must Be Some Way Outta Here!"; Lee Andreson, Battle Notes: Music from the Vietnam War (Superior,
WI: Savage Press, 2000); Chris Sabis, "Through the Soldiers' Ears: What Americans Fighting in Vietnam
Heard and Its Effects, A Study of Former AFVN Members and Rochester, New York Veterans," Senior Thesis,
University of Rochester, 2000 (available at Bob Morecook's AFVN History Website,
http://www.geocities.com/afvn/afvnhistory.html); Terry Anderson, "American Popular Music and the War in
Vietnam," Peace and Change 11 (July 1986): 51-65; Charlie Clark, "The Tracks of My Tears – When Rock
Went to War: Looking Back on Vietnam and Its Music," VVA Veteran, February 1986, 10-23.

277
in the war zone. Could rock represent the cultural experiences of war accurately for

participants? And through musical participation, could rock generate modes of coherent

collectivity that might lead to new forms of political representation? The first place in which

to explore these questions of rock and representation is official military culture.

"Welcome to Entertainment Vietnam!": Official Military Culture

"Welcome to Entertainment Vietnam," the frontispiece for a U.S. Army Special

Services Entertainment Branch scrapbook declared, accompanied by a very different collage

than Michael Herr's description of the United States airman's violent juxtaposition of images.

In the lower left of this collage, rock appeared as one among many forms of entertainment.

On the right, soul appears. Jazz, drama, and other forms of entertainment are also present.11

As this "official" collage indicates, for the most part, the military accepted rock music,

identifying it as but one part of a domestic popular culture that could bring respite to bored

and stressed troops. Morale was the paramount issue, and if rock helped maintain it, then the

music was permissible.

We might say that if antiwar protesters in the States sought to "Bring the war home,"

as a famous slogan put it, then the military tried to, "Bring home to the war." Attempting to

maintain troop morale, the United States military made a concerted effort to give soldiers a

taste of domestic American popular culture. By the late 1960s, this meant importing rock

music to Vietnam -- even when the music might be overtly or implicitly anti-war in content,

feeling, or symbolic association. The Entertainment Branch's Command Military Touring

11
"Entertainment Vietnam" Vol. 2, Tours 1967-68 Folder, Records of the United States Army in
Vietnam (USARV), Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, History Files, General
Historical Records, 1970-1972 through "Entertainment Vietnam" V.2 (March-April 1969) (RG 472), National
Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.

278
Service (CMTS) and the Armed Forces Vietnam Radio Network (AFVN) exemplify the

processes by which rock traveled from the United States domestic consumer culture to the

war zone of Vietnam through official channels. CMTS and AFVN help illuminate the ways

in which rock was part of a larger flow of domestic American consumer culture around the

world. As the United States military expanded its reach during the Cold War, so, too

American culture spread its tentacles globally.

Figure 3.6. "Welcome to Entertainment Vietnam": Entertainment Branch scrapbook

(courtesy: National Archives)

"WELCOME TO ENTERTAINMENT VIETNAM!" the Special Services

Entertainment Branch scrapbook announced, echoing its title page in all capital letters.

"Within the compound pictured below can be found the nerve center of one of the most

complex and important programs in Vietnam -- Entertainment. During the past three years

this program has endured a great growth. Turn the pages and view that which is the greatest

279
morale booster today!"12 The photograph of the Entertainment Branch compound in Saigon

reveals how entertainment was given its due, perhaps not necessarily as "one of the most

complex and important programs in Vietnam," but as a part of the larger bureaucratic

structures of the United States military.

Figure 3.7. Entrance to U.S. Army Entertainment Branch Headquarters, Saigon (courtesy:
National Archives)

Within this compound were the offices of the Entertainment Branch, as well as

rehearsal space for bands. The headquarters also included offices for an Arts and Crafts

program that the Special Services ran, which eventually included over thirty field shops

around Vietnam for metal enameling, model building, lapidary, photography, and painting.13

12
"Entertainment Vietnam" V. 1 Folder, Records of the United States Army in Vietnam (USARV),
Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, History Files, General Historical Records, 1970-
1972 through "Entertainment Vietnam" V. 2 (March-April 1969) (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II) -
College Park, Maryland.
13
Diagram of 1st Logistical Division, Special Services Division, Entertainment Branch headquarters,
General Historical Records Relating to the Entertainment Branch, 1970-1972 Folder, Records of the United

280
In addition to music and arts and crafts, the Entertainment Branch coordinated a drama

program and other recreational activities. But music seems to have been a large part of the

operation. The U.S.O. continued to organize professional performers from the United States

to tour Vietnam, and beginning in 1966, the Entertainment Branch helped coordinate

traveling shows of performers drawn from troops themselves. The first such shows, in the

autumn of 1966, consisted of Air Force and Army personnel, and were known as the "Black

Patches."

Bands first rehearsed for ten days, determining their own material. Most played cover

versions of popular songs, ranging from rock to soul to country and western. Using

equipment purchased by Special Services, they then traveled to a range of venues around

South Vietnam, from clubs at bases well in the rear to remote firebases. The groups

journeyed primarily by helicopter, though they often faced difficulty requisitioning the space

for themselves and their equipment. After their return, the participating musicians would

complete after-action reports, take part in exit interviews and return to their original

positions within the military. A number of musicians would be asked to join new bands

headed out to entertain other troops.14

States Army in Vietnam (USARV), Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, History
Files, General Historical Records, 1970-1972 through "Entertainment Vietnam" V.2 (March-April 1969) (RG
472), National Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.
14
Correspondence and Memoranda Pertaining to Command Military Touring Shows, 4 Jan 1970-12
Jan 1972 Folder, Records of the United States Army in Vietnam (USARV), Special Services Agency
(Provisional), Entertainment Branch, General Administrative Records, April 1966-April 1972 (RG 472),
National Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland; General Historical Records Relating to the
Entertainment Branch, 1970-1972 Folder, Records of the United States Army in Vietnam (USARV), Special
Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, History Files, General Historical Records, 1970-1972
through "Entertainment Vietnam" V.2 (March-April 1969) (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II) - College
Park, Maryland.

281
 Figure 3.8. Map of U.S. Army Entertainment Branch Headquarters, Saigon (courtesy:
National Archives)

The after-action reports of CMTS bands primarily chronicle the travails of traveling

around South Vietnam with eight-hundred or more pounds of electronic music equipment in

tow.15 An Army Times cartoon portrayed the dry humor with which troops went at this task.

A logistics soldier, loaded down with electronic music equipment, says, "And my sergeant

will be in the lead ship. He makes the final decision to land or not, okay?," Band members

mentioned the difficulty of obtaining helicopters despite possessing "Priority II" travel

privileges, which were supposed to grant them convenient transit. They also wrote often of

being denied access to the appropriate dining halls and "billeting" or lodging arrangements.

Though perhaps glamorous to a young military man compared to other tasks, life in a CMTS

15
Army Times Cartoon, "Entertainment Vietnam," V. 2, Jan-March 1969 Folder, Records of the
United States Army in Vietnam (USARV), Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch,
History Files, General Historical Records, 1970-1972 through "Entertainment Vietnam" V.2 (March-April
1969) (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II), College Park, Maryland.

282
band was not easy. Unlike rock music celebrity in the domestic United States, there were no

limousines to the shows, fancy meals backstage, or swank hotel rooms to trash afterward.

Figure 3.9. Cartoon, Army Times, 1969: "And my sergeant will be in the lead ship. He makes
the final decision to land or not, okay?" (courtesy: National Archives)

Nonetheless, the reports contain many comments of pride and excitement. These

comments suggest that, at the official level, rock music did maintain, and sometimes even

improved, troop morale. Bands wrote of audiences enthralled by their performances. When

the Electric Grunts played at Fire Station Base Jamie in April 1970, one-hundred-fifty troops

attended. "They seem to like our acid-rock numbers the best," the Electric Grunts reported.16

16
"'Electric Grunts' After-Action Report," April 1970, CMTS - The Electric Grunts (71) - April 30,
1970 Folder, Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United States Army

283
When the Inside Story performed at the Camp McDermott Officers' Club in November 1970,

they noted that it "was without reservation the best audience we had on the trip. They really

hung on the music and wouldn't let us leave. The screaming and yelling sent our egos

soaring and we played everything we knew twice."17 Even across the generations, rock

music could bring a sense of camaraderie. In its after-action report from December 1969, the

group The Local Board wrote of a performance in Danang: "After the show, LTC Shakleton

presented souvenir pens to the troupe, stating, …'They are great representatives of the

present young generation. People like all of you are that generation and because of that, I

deeply believe that the United States has nothing to worry about.' Back to the billets with

swelled heads, very proud."18

In an effort to continue to fine-tune their CMTS program, the Entertainment Branch

also collected evaluation forms from audiences and coordinators out in the field. Although

the comments on these vary widely, with many merely filled out with cursory information, a

number of them further indicate the ways in which rock music contributed to troop morale.

When the group Fixed Water performed at Chu Lai on September 27, 1969 for 150

attendees, SP4 WM Smith Jr., wrote on his evaluation form: "This performance was one of

Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours
In Vietnam January 1970-June 1970, Box 6 (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.
17
"'Inside Story' After-Action Report, 21 October 1970, CMTS Tours - Inside Story (82), Oct. 21,
1970, Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam
Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In
Vietnam, June 1970 - November 1970, Box 7 (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II) - College Park,
Maryland.
18
"'Local Board' After-Action Report," 28 January 1970, CMTS TOURS - The Local Board - 1st Cav
Touring Show (61) - Nov 21, 1969 Folder, Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV),
Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch,
After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In Vietnam September 1969 – November 1969, Box 5 (RG 472),
National Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.

284
their best here in Chu Lai and the type of music these men were producing was what the men

on this compound really enjoyed. The troops as well as the Staff Officers and NCO asked

that they come back again…. There are thousands of young men fighting over here that like

this type of music would give anything to be able to hear it played by four outstanding young

men who know it and how to play it."19 One respondent claimed that, "Personally, the

numbers used by the entertainers were more for the rock element, and too loud," but when

the Soul Patrol performed at an Enlisted Men's Club for the Navy, Thomas S. Barta in

Special Services wrote that it was a "full house" and that, "Overall I think it is a great morale

booster."20

A CMTS band completed its sixty-day tour with an exit interview and "a certificate

acknowledging the value of the performers' contribution to high morale."21 When bands

performed in the field, they often shed their official military uniforms. A number of groups

wore costumes. Others stripped down to t-shirts or no shirts at all, hinting at the vernacular

troop culture that lurked within official military channels. But when all CMTS bands
19
SP4 WM Smith Jr., Entertainment Evaluation Form, Chu Lai, 27 September 1969, CMTS Tours -
Fixed Water (52) – August 29, 1969 Folder, Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV),
Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch,
After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In Vietnam March – August 1969, Box 4 (RG 472), National Archives
(NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.
20
Colonel V. Bahr Wol., Entertainment Evaluation, Aust R and C Center, Vong Tou, 3 June 1969,
CMTS Tours – Soul Patrol (48) – 30 June 1969 Folder, Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV),
Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch,
After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In Vietnam March – August 1969, Box 4 (RG 472), National Archives
(NARA II) - College Park, Maryland; Thomas S Barta, Special Services, Entertainment Evaluation, EM Club,
USN, MCB-8, 3 August 1969, Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United
States Army Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re:
CMTS Tours In Vietnam March – August 1969, Box 4 (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II) - College
Park, Maryland.
21
Correspondence and Memoranda Pertaining to Command Military Touring Shows, 4 Jan 1970-12
Jan 1972 Folder, Records of the United States Army in Vietnam (USARV), Special Services Agency
(Provisional), Entertainment Branch, General Administrative Records, April 1966-April 1972 (RG 472),
National Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.

285
returned for their exit interviews, the Entertainment Branch photographed each their

members in uniform. These photographs demonstrate how rock music flowed through the

official channels of the United States military. The Entertainment Branch reasoned that if

rock was a part of domestic American popular culture, the music might raise troop morale by

bringing the sounds of the home front to the war zone. As such, rock was accepted as part of

the waging of the Vietnam War.

Figure 3.10. In costume: The Highland Sounds, December 1968 (courtesy: National
Archives)

Figure 3.11. Out of uniform: Page Six drummer, summer 1970 (courtesy: National Archives)

286
 Figure 3.12. In uniform: CMTS band Fixed Water, exit interview photograph, November
1969 (courtesy: National Archives)

One of the ways in which rock circulated through official military culture was in

publicity press releases written for each band. "CMTS is proud to present 'BUZZ'," one

announcement declared, "a rock group with 3 outstanding musicians who get it together in a

distinctive bag. …When 'Buzz' comes on stage and begins to play hard rock music, the walls

will shake, feet will stomp, and hands will clap!"22 When Fixed Water was sent out on tour,

their itinerary read: "USARV Special Services Entertainment Branch is proud to present the

mind-bending psychedelic sounds of the 'Fixed Water.'"23

22
Buzz Master Itinerary, CMTS TOURS - Buzz (111) - December 2, 1971 Folder, Records of the
United States Army Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam Special Services Agency
(Provisional), Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In Vietnam April – December
1971, Box 10 (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.
23
Itinerary, Fixed Water, 23 August 1969, CMTS Tours - Fixed Water (52) – August 29, 1969 Folder,
Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam Special
Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In Vietnam
March – August 1969, Box 4 (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.

287
 When the group reunited for a second tour, the Entertainment Branch announced:

"USARV Special Services is happy to announce the return of the 'Fixed Water.' The mind-

bending sounds come from the souls of SP4 Hugh Reid Smith III, SP4 John Desautels, SP4

Mike Hood, SP4 Kevin Kelly, and SP5 Chris Judge. Strong and heavy, the 'Fixed Water' is

the ultimate in psychedelic now-sounds. Prepare yourself!"24 Posters for bands such as Fixed

Water imitated the psychedelic iconography of posters advertising rock and soul performers

appearing at new venues such as the Fillmore Auditorium (see figure 3.13). Trying, and most

probably failing, to sound stylish and hip, the Entertainment Branch did demonstrate that

they were willing to encounter rock music as a new, possibly rebellious form. You would

have to "prepare yourself" for the "ultimate in pyschedelic now-sounds," but that did not

mean that CMTS was going to ban rock music.

Figure 3.13. Fixed Water, psychedelic band: A CMTS publicity poster (courtesy: National
Archives)
24
Itinerary, Fixed Water, 26 November 1969, CMTS Tours - Fixed Water No. II (62) - 26 November
1969 Folder, RG 472, Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United States
Army Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re: CMTS
Tours In Vietnam September 1969 – November 1969, Box 5, National Archives (NARA II) - College Park,
Maryland.

288
 Banning music is something for which AFVN, the Armed Forces Vietnam Radio

Network, remains famous. In films such as Good Morning, Vietnam, a fictional account

based on the life of DJ Adrian Cronauer, rock music symbolizes a forbidden culture of

dissent that bursts through from the vernacular level of troop culture into the official level.

Though veterans and historians debate the degree of censorship, what is clear is that rock

made its way onto the supervised, official airwaves. Both AFVN and the Los Angeles-based

Armed Forces Radio and Television Services (AFRTS) sent rock out to American military

bases around the world.25 Songs with intonations of Vietnam protest in their lyrics and

sound, such as Jimi Hendrix's version of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," were

heard on shows such as the October 1968 Stateside Top Thirty countdown.26

On worldwide AFRTS broadcasts produced and distributed by the military in Los

Angeles, even overtly antiwar music such as Country Joe and the Fish's "Feel Like I'm

Fixing to Die Rag" made it on to broadcasts.27 A number of veterans, such as Paul Kero,

who served as a disc jockey at Radio Saigon, remember that, "We could compare the music

on the discs we received with the 'Billboard Hot 100' and some were missing. There may

have been a pattern to it. They tended to stay away from the harder rock."28 However, it

25
See Lee W. Hauser, "A History of the American Forces Vietnam Network, 1962-1972," Master's
Thesis, Department of Radio, Television, and Movies, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, 1972; Sabis,
"Through the Soldiers' Ears"; and Andreson, Battle Notes. The debate about censorship on AFVN continues on
email discussion lists such as the AFVN Veterans' Discussion Board, http://www.geocities.com/afvn/join.html,
moderated by AFVN veteran Robert Morecook.
26
"Stateside Top Thirty Countdown - October 1968," hosted by SP4 Scott Manning,
www.geocities.com/afvn (because of copyright issues for the music, this broadcast is currently unavailable on
the internet).
27
"The Acid Test: Part Two," in the "Pop Chronicles" series, hosted by John Gilliland, Pop Chronicles
42 LPA 64289-64290, Radio Round-Up, Issue 1523, Radio Transcription Unit, RU 17-1, 28 October 1970,
Division of Recorded Sound, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
28
Andreson, Battle Notes, 150.

289
seems clear from evidence that, especially as the war continued through the late 1960s and

early 1970s, the official military bureaucracy made an effort to include rock in order to buoy

troop morale.

Similarly to CMTS, AFVN emphasized that entertainment such as music played a

crucial role in morale. To explain how important music was, an Armed Forces Radio news

release put it this way in 1969: "After the wounded have been evacuated and the perimeter of

defense set up, there is nothing to do but grab a smoke, maybe clean your weapon or just

stretch out in the mud or dust and catch a few winks. Boredom plays a larger part in frontline

Army life than most of us think." Eager to demonstrate how crucial Armed Forces Radio

could be to the war effort, the report painted a scene of transistor radios by soldiers' sides,

right alongside their canteens, food rations, and guns: "Someone remembers his transistor

radio, neatly wrapped in waterproof material and stuck into one of the big pockets of his

combat fatigues. He takes it out, turns it on and immediately is soothed by the aura of

relaxation and fine entertainment usually associated with life in the States." Emphasizing

their division's difficult but significant contribution, the report concluded: "The monumental

task of providing this daily contact with American culture falls to Armed Forces Vietnam

Network (AFVN)."29

Although the writer of this report may not have included rock music in the "aura of

relaxation and fine entertainment," AFVN did make an ongoing effort to be sure that it was

29
"'Field Force' Vietnam News Release, Prepared by Information Office, Long Bien Plantation, SSM
EC Bradley, 20 July 1969, 228-08/Org. History Files Folder, Records of the United States Forces in Southeast
Asia, Headquarters, Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), Information Office (MACIO), American
Forces Vietnam Network (AFVN), Organizational History, 1962 thru 1973, Box 1 (RG 472), National
Archives (NARA II) - College Park, Maryland.

290
transmitting whatever entertainment troops "associated with life in the States." The mission

was to bring domestic American popular culture to the troops, whatever that culture might

be. Started in 1962 with a small station in Saigon run by a five men crew and volunteers

using borrowed equipment, the Armed Forces Vietnam Network had grown much larger by

1970. Eight stations broadcast across South Vietnam on both the AM and FM bands. In

addition to radio, AFVN had begun a television station broadcasting local and domestic

programming for much of the country; but radio remained the more popular medium,

received by almost all troops.30 In 1968, forty-two percent of troops deemed radio their best

source of entertainment; by 1970, the percentage increased to fifty-eight percent; and in

1971, it grew to sixty-eight percent.31 In 1970, stations received all AM programming from

the Saigon detachment, save for three hours of local programming. With the exception of

three hours of live broadcasting and six hours of simultaneous broadcasting of the AM

signal, the FM stations at Saigon and Da Nang broadcast prerecorded shows from the Armed

Forces Radio and Television Services (AFRTS), which were produced in Los Angeles.

These were broadcast using computer-controlled tape machines. Pleiku, Nha Trang, and Qui

Nhon were not equipped with these devices, and broadcast transcriptions of AFRTS shows

as well as their own shows. Quang Tri, Toy Hun, and Chu Lai only possessed AM

capabilities.32 Whatever the details of each station's capacities, they represent the stretch of

30
Steve Wiltsie, Armed Forces Vietnam Network Audience Opinion Research & Analysis (1970), 1-5.
These reports are available at the AFVN website maintained by veteran and historian Robert Morecook,
http://www.geocities.com/afvn/surveys.html.
31
James Wentz, Armed Forces Vietnam Network Audience Opinion Research & Analysis (1968), 17;
Wiltsie, Audience Opinion Research & Analysis, 13; and Gunar Grubaums, Armed Forces Vietnam Network
Audience Opinion Research & Analysis (1971), 11.
32
Wiltsie, Audience Opinion Research & Analysis, 3.

291
America's electronic mass media over the war zone, from "the delta to the DMZ," as an

AFVN slogan put it.

Concerned with measuring troop opinion in order to serve them best, and most

probably also to justify the military expenditure on AFVN, the network conducted audience

surveys in 1968, 1970, and 1971. These surveys are rich with information about the official

military stance on music brought to the war zone. They indicate a willingness to bring any

music on the airwaves in the domestic United States to Vietnam. James Wentz wrote in the

1968 report, which was issued at the beginning of 1969, "The exclusion of any music from

military broadcasting outlets can be damaging to the credibility and reputation of the

network. This is not to say that absolutely no restrictions should be placed on music

forwarded to field activities. However, exceptional care must be taken when the matter of

exclusion is considered."33 To be sure, as Wentz's comments suggest, the military did not

ignore the antiwar dimensions of popular music on the home front. As Wentz himself noted,

somewhat vaguely, "The matter of music selection has become a more delicate issue in

today's environment of social and moral conflict."34 Overall, however, Wentz took the

position that since most of this music made it to Vietnam in other forms -- tapes and

phonograph records sent from home or pirated recordings purchased by servicemen and

women on R&R, "rest and relaxation," in various Southeast Asian cities -- the military was

better off including music save for the most ardently subversive.

In 1968, programming on AFVN included a special soul show, but rock only

appeared on the air as part of pop music broadcasts. By the 1970 AFVN survey, however,
33
Wentz, Audience Opinion Research & Analysis, 52.
34
Wentz, Audience Opinion Research & Analysis, 52.

292
AFVN programming had grown to include "Acid Rock." An in-country show featuring rock

was called the "Sgt. Pepper Show." Additionally, AFRTS shipped transcriptions of programs

from Los Angeles to Vietnam, including Barbara Randolph's rock and soul show; Gene

Weed's increasingly rock-oriented pop music program; and a rock-oriented, hippie-flavored

program, licensed from ABC radio and called "Love."35 Even Chris Noel, the most famous

radio host on Armed Forces Radio, began to include rock-oriented music on her light, easy-

going show "Date With Chris."36

Figure 3.14. In-country radio program popularity, including "Sgt. Pepper Show," from
AFVN survey, 1970 (courtesy: National Archives)

35
Wiltsie, Audience Opinion Research & Analysis, 18-19.
36
A perusal of AFRTS newsletters sent out weekly with transcriptions of shows (recorded on 33 1/3
phonograph records) reveals the increase of rock on shows such as Chris Noel's "Date with Chris." See issues
of Radio Roundup, 1967-1971, Armed Forces Radio and Television Services Archive, Division of Recorded
Sound, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

293
 The AFVN surveys mark the shift from a broad "pop" category to niche genres such

as "rock" and "soul" as the military responded to shifts in taste among troops. By 1970, "acid

rock" and "soul" had become niche market genres with a small but substantive presence on

AFVN airwaves. In 1968 and 1970, soul had consistently been approved of by roughly ten

percent of survey respondents, with a bit higher ranking among younger servicemen; by

1971, twenty two percent deemed soul their "most listened to" form of music. Acid Rock

grew from not existing as a category in 1968 to being the first or second choice of roughly

twenty percent of respondents in 1970 to thirty one percent deeming it their "most listened

to" form of music in 1971. The growth of these genres hints at the disproportionate effects of

the draft on the population that served in Vietnam. But, since musical taste and identity do

not always align perfectly, the increased presence of "rock" and "soul" on AFVN most of all

suggests the willingness of the military to import domestic American culture to the war zone,

regardless of the music's associations.37

Whether the inclusion of rock actually improved morale -- or, in some fashion,

undercut the war effort with antiwar messages and moods -- remains up for debate. What is

perhaps more intriguing is the manner in which rock was simultaneously "above ground"

and "underground" music in Vietnam. In his official 1971 AFVN survey, Gunar Grubaums

literally referred to Acid Rock as "underground" music, noting that the military had decided,

based on its survey, to increase the broadcast time of this music over the Armed Forces radio

network in Vietnam for a prime time hour on Saturday nights.38

37
Wentz, Audience Opinion Research & Analysis, 22-23; Wiltsie, Audience Opinion Research &
Analysis, 18; Grubaums, Opinion Research & Analysis, 18.
38
Grubaums, Audience Opinion Research & Analysis, 30.

294
Figure 3.15. U.S. radio program popularity (produced by AFRTS), from AFVN survey, 1970
(courtesy: National Archives)

Figure 3.16. Music popularity scale, including Acid Rock and Soul, AFVN survey, 1970
(courtesy: National Archives)

Heard one way, rock was mere entertainment from the home front intended to raise

troop morale. But, other messages lurked in the grooves as well. Perhaps this is why James

295
Wentz, writing the conclusion to the AFVN survey of 1968, had difficulty determining

precisely what "restrictions should be placed on music forwarded to field activities."39 At the

official level, knowing what crossed the line into subversion was next to impossible. This

was because rock broadcast alternative messages not from outside, but from within, the

structures and channels of the official military. Rather than a message from some utopian,

exterior culture, rock provided immanent critique from inside the circuitry of a globalizing

American consumer culture. The music's vernacular dimensions were complicit, but not

entirely absorbed into official culture. Not from outside or beneath the behemoth of a

globalizing United States military, but along the tentacles of its outstretched reach, rock

beckoned with a strange combination of entrapment and liberation, escape from the war zone

and entrance into it, a reeling and rocking into the everyday experiences of terror, pleasure,

engagement, and alienation in the war zone.

"Two Thousand Light Years From Home": Vernacular Troop Culture

We can return again to Michael Herr's book on Vietnam, Dispatches, to develop a

sense of rock's important position at the level of vernacular troop culture. Here, the music

resonated back and forth along the circuit between the domestic home front and the Vietnam

war zone. As such, it became a resource for Americans in Vietnam who were trying to make

sense of their experiences. Writing of life among press correspondents in Saigon during

1968, Herr remembered, "music, the Rolling Stones singing, 'It's so very lonely, You're two

thousand light years from home,' or 'Please come see me in your Citadel,' that word putting a

39
Wentz, Audience Opinion Research & Analysis, 52.

296
chill in the room." For Herr:

Whenever one of us came back from an R&R we'd bring records, sounds
were as precious as water: Hendrix, the Airplane, Frank Zappa and the
Mothers, all the things that hadn't even started when we'd left the States.
Wilson Pickett, Junior Walker, John Wesley Harding, one recording worn
thin and replaced within a month, the Grateful Dead (the name was enough),
the Doors, with their distant, icy sound. It seemed like such wintry music; you
could rest your forehead against the window where the air-conditioner had
cooled the glass, close your eyes and feel the heat pressing against you from
outside. Flares dropped over possible targets three blocks away, and all night
long, armed jeeps and massive convoys moved down Tu Do Street toward the
river.40

Though Herr writes of the experiences of press correspondents in Vietnam, other

sources from American fighters themselves parallel his perspective on rock. The music of

the Grateful Dead, The Doors, and Frank Zappa (not to mention the soul sounds of Wilson

Pickett and Junior Walker) emphasized the vast differences between home front and war

zone -- but also hinted at their linkages. These were sounds "as precious as water." Like

press correspondents, fighters used music to distance themselves from the war zone. But the

"heat pressing against you from the outside," the heat of war beyond the frosty, air-

conditioned panes of glass of Western-style hotels and military offices, could not be avoided

entirely. Even as rock served as a "wintry" escape, it increasingly also served as a way to

come to terms with the war experience itself.

On the vernacular level, by which I mean the culture that developed within the

structures of the official military culture in Vietnam, rock was the sonic equivalent of Herr's

hotel window: it mediated between the war zone and the home front. Heightening the

communicative and imaginative network between home and war, rock especially provided a

40
Herr, Dispatches, 233-234.

297
means to negotiate the fundamental contradictions of serving as a "citizen-soldier" in a

confusing war. This was especially the case for the vast number of young draftees forced to

serve in Vietnam, who cultivated a vernacular troop culture in which they used music to give

expression to the discontinuities of their lives. Rock served as a resource for negotiating the

identity and the civic commitments of the American fighter.41

We can begin to understand the details of vernacular troop culture by first

considering how the structures of the military changed as the United States escalated its

participation in the Vietnam War during the late 1960s. The structural dimensions of the

United States armed forces in Vietnam set the stage for a troubled military culture in which

vernacular expression diverged from the official script. As the historian Ronald Spector has

written, there developed a "peculiar military manpower system that fed the Vietnam War, a

system that by 1968 had become a distorted mirror, a monstrous caricature of American

short-sightedness, irresponsibility, phony patriotism, self-serving expediency, and political

cowardice."42 Spector, Christian Appy, and other historians have documented how, because

of both political pressures from the Johnson and Nixon administrations as well as from a

poorly-managed internal promotion system, the United States military in Vietnam developed

an unbalanced hierarchy between a small number of high-level, older "lifers" and a large

group of lower-level, younger "grunts."43

41
My use of the term "vernacular" owes much to the work of Lydia Fish and Les Cleveland. Fish uses
the term "informal" to describe the vernacular level. See Lydia Fish, "Informal Communication Systems in the
Vietnam War: A Case Study in Folklore, Technology and Popular Culture," unpublished manuscript, 2003; Les
Cleveland, Dark Laughter: War in Song and Popular Culture (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1994).
42
Ronald Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year In Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1993), 26.
43
Spector, After Tet, 26-35; Christian Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and
Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).

298
 Because of this imbalance, Vietnam exacerbated the generational divide already

present in domestic United States society. Captains were enlisted officers looking to advance

their military careers, while platoon sergeants were often quickly trained Vietnam non-

commissioned officers (NCOs) and the mass of soldiers were draftees. Spector notes that in

1969, eighty-eight percent of infantry riflemen in the Army were draftees, and of the

remaining twelve percent, only ten percent were first-term enlistees.44 The hierarchy of the

United States military mirrored the demography of the "generation gap" on the home front,

but it did so in the midst of a war zone. Along with these age-based hierarchies, a

bureaucracy-heavy military meant that a divide emerged between troops battling on the

frontlines and those providing support in the rear.45 Often the "grunts" in the field and the

support staff in the rear broke down along race and class lines, with fighters drawn

disproportionately from minorities and working-class Americans. Into this troubling mix,

popular music entered Vietnam.46

"What was nice about that was I got pop music," Jim Peachin, a helicopter gunner in

Vietnam recollected in a 1979 oral history interview about flying his daily missions in a

chopper:

and that's what made it so weird sometimes. Like, we would take off in the
morning and we'd be flying low level across these rice paddies, and I'd hear
Diana Ross singing, 'Everybody, I Love You,' and the sky is beautiful, the
sun's glistening off the waters. Rice paddies look like felt on a pool table,
from a certain altitude. I mean, it looks like you could jump into it. You just

44
Spector, After Tet, 35.
45
Spector, After Tet, 260-278.
46
See James E. Westheider, Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam War (New
York: New York University Press, 1997) for more on the African-American experience in Vietnam; Appy,
Working-Class War for an exploration of class in Vietnam.

299
 couldn't possibly get hurt. And then you hear this music, that is enjoyable at
the same time. And the whole thing is like -- I just used to sit and say, 'What a
trip! How could I ever describe this to anybody?' And three minutes later, you
might be shooting your gun at somebody. Or three minutes later you might be
going in to pick up some wounded soldiers. Or three minutes later you might
be landing in a place where people are shooting at you. And you compare that
with being over those rice paddies, feeling almost, you know, like Superman,
because you're moving so fast and you're flying along so well.47

Jim Peachin's memories of music in Vietnam are particularly vivid, but they reflect a

narrative pattern that repeatedly appears in Vietnam veteran's recollections of their war

experiences: time and time again, music enters their stories at moments when they are trying

to make sense of their confusion, when the disconcerting nature of everyday experience in

Vietnam makes itself known.48 Feeling at once invincible and at risk -- that he could do no

wrong and he was doing wrong -- Peachin's memories took him to music, in this case Diana

Ross and the Supremes singing, "Everybody, I Love You." The song formed part of a sonic

imaginary for re-living the contradictions of leisurely bliss and battle terror in Vietnam. In

doing so, it opens a window on the vernacular culture of American fighters during the

conflict.

Many issues are at stake in Jim Peachin's recollections: the link between masculinity

and technology in how flying in the chopper made him feel like "Superman"; the imperial

"bird's-eye view" of the helicopter; the postmodern fragmentation of guerilla warfare in

Vietnam when one could be in battle one moment and just going for a ride a few minutes

47
Jim Peachin, "Reminiscences of Jim Peachin" (1979), Vietnam Veterans Collection, Oral History
Research Office, Columbia University, New York, 38.
48
For additional examples, see, among other sources, other interviews in the Vietnam Veterans
Collection, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University or recollections in Lee Andresen, Battle Notes:
Music of the Vietnam War (Superior, WI: Savage Press, 2000).

300
later. Incorporating all these issues into an overall framework, we might say that Peachin

used music to mediate the contradiction of escaping from the war while, simultaneously,

waging it.

The "pop music" that Peachin and others continually refer to tended to be rock or

soul.49 The rock songs in particular arrived through the official military culture in an effort to

quell boredom and raise troop morale, but because they were linked to anti-war sensibilities,

the music also wound up serving other purposes. Rock allowed American fighters to feel the

tremendous and often terrifying contradictions of the "citizen-soldier" subject-position. We

might say that though it was imported to maintain spirits, rock opened up the complexities of

what constituted morale in a confusing war zone. The music served as a soundtrack to the

waging of war. Simultaneously, it provided an escape from the war zone to an imagined

space: the home front, a space of leisure, a drugged-out mindlessness, and sometimes, a

global psychedelic civic alternative to dominant conceptions of American national identity.

One could easily argue that rock's anti-war protest capacities were co-opted and

defused as music was incorporated into the war effort. Though mutinies, insurrections, and

"fragging" (the shooting of commanders) increased as the Vietnam War dragged on, rock

never directly stopped a soldier such as Jim Peachin from fighting.50 Noone simply laid

49
Once again, genre categories were quite fluid in Vietnam, as they were in the United States during
the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Pop," and even, as an AFVN survey notes, "Oldies But Goodies," became
quite contested depending on the subject-positions of particular listeners. See Wentz, 22, and Grubaums, 18, for
comments on the competing definitions of "oldies but goodies." "To the younger audience," Wentz wrote,
"oldies but goodies" stood for "up-tempo music that has survived and is still popular after the passage of
several years. To older audience, OBG is music in the popular standards category." Two competing
generational memories were at stake in what constituted "pop" and "oldies but goodies." Country-and-western
as a genre in Vietnam is worthy of a separate study. as it was associated primarily with troops from the South
and often with enlisted officers who were slightly older than most draftees.
50
Debates about the amount of "fragging" in Vietnam rage. See Richard Boyle, Flower of the Dragon
- The Breakdown of the US. Army in Vietnam (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1972), for an interpretation from

301
down his automatic rifle after hearing Country Joe and the Fish singing about Vietnam or

Jimi Hendrix singing Bob Dylan's lyrics about the terrors of life "All Along the Watchtower"

or Edwin Starr belting out "War, what's it good for? Absolutely nothing!" The problem here

is with the entire framework of authentic resistance compared to cooptation.

Figure 3.17. Technologies of war: Chopper, guitars, and microphones, The New Society, A
CMTS band, February 1970 (courtesy: National Archives)

The challenge for historians is to hear rock's place in vernacular troop culture below

the level of full articulation -- where it could serve multiple, often contradictory, but quite

meaningful, purposes as a mediation between home front and war zone. As John Imsdahl

remembered of life in his platoon of the 101st Airborne Division, stationed near Phu Bai:

"We listened to Janis Joplin and, you know home music -- you know. …So definitely, we

the time of Vietnam itself. Ron Spector and others continue to debate the extent and nature of insurrections
within the United States Armed Forces in Vietnam.

302
were -- we were anti-war. It's odd to say that."51 Imsdahl recalls listening to Janis Joplin in

order to examine the oddness of how he was at once anti-war but waging the war. His pauses

and hesitations hint at the complexity of rock's role in vernacular troop culture.

What rock seemed to do most of all in Vietnam, then, was provide an imaginative

space both for escaping from the war and fighting it. Most intriguingly, rock often went were

other modes of discourse or debate could not: the music became a means for American

troops to reflect upon and consider the nexus of violence, terror, boredom, and pleasure in

which they were enmeshed. Music such as rock affected the subject-position of American

fighters in relationship to their national identities, their experience of military life, their

perspectives on Vietnam, and their glimpses -- fleetingly -- of an alternative global civic

imaginary of a worldwide youth culture brought together through shared musical sounds.

Jim Peachin, John Imsdahl, and countless other veterans utilized music to manage

and negotiate memories of the disconcertingly surreal quality of the war in Vietnam. This

use of music opens a window on the vernacular experiences of American fighters in

Vietnam. In doing so, it also raises the question of the relationship of music to memory. In

Peachin's case, Diana Ross's song helped transport him back to Vietnam itself. Music

became a sonic trigger for an out-of-time experience. At the same time, the song allow

Peachin the distance to reflect on the meaning of his service. Imsdahl hears Janis Joplin's

music in a similar dynamic. Music becomes a sonic marker -- a memorial -- through which

memories could be measured against the present.

51
John Imsdahl, "Reminiscences of John Imsdahl" (1975), Vietnam Veterans Collection, Oral History
Research Office, Columbia University, 28.

303
 In these dual purposes, music parallels dream experience: it launches Peachin and

Imsdahl (and countless others) back in time to the immediacy of the war zone; but it also,

simultaneously, let them see themselves at a remove, in the way we can do when dreaming.

Perhaps we can think of music's two purposes in a dialectic relationship: music marked the

subject position of the American fighter by forcing him to see himself simultaneously from

within and from without. The music provided a resource for measuring the "oddness," as

Imsdahl phrases it, of being an American fighter ambivalent about the Vietnam War. That

the music could do so ten years after the fact is a testament to its power.

But there is evidence that music did this during the war itself: rock created instant

memorializations of the war experience through its disconcerting mediation of home front

and war zone. On their helmets, through nicknames for each other, by naming their guns and

platoons, American fighters utilized song lyrics to express their identities. The group Jimmy

and the Everyday People, for instance, posed for one of their publicity shots in front of a

tombstone. The music helped these and other American fighters both enter into and escape

from their roles as warriors. In this way, rock was a central mediator of confusions about the

war.

The dizzying quality of hearing music from home while in a war zone halfway

around the world seemed to affect many American fighters. Michael Herr writes of having a

helmet tossed to him on one of his first assignments to cover a battle. The helmet came from

a recently killed fighter. It read, ominously, "Time Is On My Side," the title of a Rolling

Stones song. This soldier used rock music to address the terrifying experience of fighting a

war. The song title pushed away the possibility of death even as it acknowledged that death

might come at any time. It insisted on an individual identity: time is on my side. But, looking

304
at the helmet and mentioning the use of the song by the Rolling Stones, Herr expresses his

own shock at the futility of the soldier's individual touch on the army-issued helmet. In

Vietnam, to Herr, time did not seem to be on this or any other soldiers' side.52

Figure 3.18. Memorializing war through music: Jimmy and the Everyday People, CMTS
band, 1971 (courtesy: National Archives)

In another example, Don Morrison, who played drums in an Australian band that

toured Vietnam bases, writes of a platoon thanking him profusely for performing a cover of

the Credence Clearwater Revival song, "Down on the Corner." The American fighters had

literally placed a sign in front of their large firebase gun naming it "Willie," after the main

character in the song. They themselves, borrowing from the lyrics to "Down on the Corner,"

52
Herr, Dispatches, 21.

305
were "the poor boys."53 "Willy is the name of our gun," the soldier explained to Morrison,

"and most of these guys here are the poor boys."54 Here we have a memorial created within

the war itself, out of the technology used to wage the war. Troops used a rock song that

described a peaceful street corner of domestic leisure and safety to rearticulate their identity.

"Over on the corner there's a happy noise," John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival

sings over a flopping bass and guitar riff that signals goofy, amateurish, relaxing good times,

"People come from all around just to watch the magic boys." Rather than professional

soldiers waging a war, this platoon had become a tranquil domestic community: "four kids

on the corner, trying to bring you up," as Fogerty sang.

On the one hand, in Morrison's story, the troops became a band of brothers whose

togetherness and power was signaled by a collectivity drawn from idealized images of the

home front in Credence Clearwater Revival's "Down on the Corner." On the other hand, they

were self-depricating "poor boys" who yielded their autonomy as citizens to their identities

as soldiers. After all, the leader of the "poor boys" was not their commanding officer, but

their gun, Willie, a technology that dominated their lives, endowing them with power yet the

only thing that stood between them and death. For the platoon, rock music helped

memorialize their gun and themselves in the war zone. Rock allowed them to give

expression to the absurdity of their situation. Though the gun potentially made them

powerful killers, they were, ultimately, powerless. They were mere pawns in a larger,

confusing conflict. They were far from home in a war whose precise purpose remained

53
Credence Clearwater Revival, "Down on the Corner," Willy and the Poor Boys (Fantasy Records,
1969).
54
Don Morrison, My Rock 'n' Roll War (Bracken Ridge, Australia: Dog-Tag Books, 2001), 121-123.

306
muddy. And in terms of survival, as the dead soldier's helmet informed journalist Michael

Herr, time was not necessarily on their side.

Rock continually marked the distance and alienation that the war produced in its

fighters at the vernacular level. Music often appears in memories of the war as a measure of

how far away from home fighters were. "I was totally out of touch," Drill Sergeant Steve

Hassna remarked in a 1970s interview, "I was totally out of touch with news, music, any

kind of culture, You know, I was -- I got back and I was like three years behind on all the

rock music." Hassna felt a tremendous difference between his identity and the identity of a

peer with a "Stateside nine to fiver job, that was all hip to the latest groups, you know, and

was hip to what was happening in Haight Ashbury and all this other bullshit -- where I was

totally alienated."55 In Hassna's memories, one senses a feeling of loss, of having missed out

on the home front's changes while he was in Vietnam.

But for others, rock went along with the war seamlessly. "It was like the beginning of

the whole acid rock thing, and it infiltrated the Army," nurse Betty Wilkinson remembers.

"They'd have, you know, the psychedelic posters on the walls of their barracks, and their

rooms."56 For still others, the music provided escape from the monotony of waging war.

John Imsdahl recalls adopting a moniker from a Jefferson Airplane song, "White Rabbit," to

broadcast music on unused radio frequencies that troops would use to entertain each other.

"We had one radio station where our friends would broadcast music and stuff. That was 99.9

on a PRC - 25. It was a band that no one used. And we had a lot of disc jockeys at night. I

55
Steve Hassna, "Reminiscences of Steve Hassna" (1975), Vietnam Veterans Collection, Oral History
Research Office, Columbia University, 99.
56
Betty Wilkinson, "Reminiscences of Betty Wilkinson" (1973), Vietnam Veterans Collection, Oral
History Research Office, Columbia University, 92-93.

307
was White Rabbit. You know, we'd find out that we were calling several miles away to

different people who had like access to electricity, like a lot of the artillery guys that were

waiting up all night, to fire, and stuff, had electricity on mortars, and they'd play music on

their tape decks, and make special requests and, you know, things like that."57

Figure 3.19. The contradictions of vernacular troop culture: bullets and peace sign, Vietnam,
1968 (photograph: Tim Page)

In all these different variations -- as symbol of missing out on the domestic scene, as

part of the everyday waging of war, or as an escape from the tedium of battle -- rock

emphasized the distance between home front and war zone. It provided means for exploring

the unstable subject-position of an individual caught up in a war beyond his or her control.

As Michael Herr evocatively wrote of this dynamic: "Maybe you couldn't love the war and

hate it inside the same instant, but sometimes those feelings alternated so rapidly that they

spun together in a strobic wheel rolling all the way up until you were literally High On War,

57
Imsdahl, "Reminiscences," 25.

308
like it said on all the helmet covers."58

We can catch a glimpse of what Herr calls the "strobic wheel" of vernacular troop

culture, in which participants at once embraced and were repulsed by the war, in the

amalgam of music that one CMTS band performed. The set list for the Soul Chordinators,

who toured U.S. bases and clubs in the summer of 1971, contained the following songs:

Cloud Nine
These Eyes
Slip Away
Something
You Keep Me Hanging On
Soul Finger
Song of My Father
25 Miles
Hey Joe
Grazin' in the Grass
Cold Sweat
Heard It Through the Grapevine
Going Out of My Head
Get Ready
Purple Haze
Fire
Coming Home Baby
You've Made Me So Very Happy
War

This mixture of soul and rock songs, including The Temptations' "Cloud Nine," a work of

social commentary about the decaying urban black ghetto, and rock songs such as the garage

band classic "Hey Joe," with its lyric about shooting someone, is remarkable for its swirl of

possible lyrical allegories for the Vietnam experience. Moreover, the music itself is both

58
Herr, Dispatches, 63.

309
violent and hopeful, a combination of electric howl and pleasurable power, as in the Jimi

Hendrix songs, such as "Purple Haze" and "Fire."59

More remarkable are the audience evaluation forms filled out by troops. They declare

the band's cover of the Edwin Starr hit, "War," with the famous chorus, "War! What is it

good for? Absolutely nothing!" as the best-received song of the performances.60 Here we

might get a sense of, at the very least, unease about the Vietnam conflict. But we might also

imagine American fighters hearing the song with a kind of sublime, grizzled-warrior

recognition, even glamorization, of war's calamities. Even a song as explicitly antiwar as

"War," could, in the context of the war zone, take on more complex emotional and

ideological capacities. Although in the domestic context, "War" was associated with the

peace movement, in Vietnam, music in the spirit of "War" revealed a vernacular troop

culture engaged with making meaning out of the everyday experiences of Vietnam. Not only

did "War" register the dispirited views of troops, the song also perhaps provided a bit of wry

pleasure that soldiers squeezed from the pain of war.

Whether emphasizing the distance from home, an escape from the war zone, or a

mere soundtrack for war, rock and soul certainly went along with the consumption of drugs

from alcohol to heroin, LSD, hashish, and especially marijuana. Australian drummer Don

Morrison remembers visiting a "hooch," or soldier hut, at a firebase called L.Z. English; two

soldiers had Jimi Hendrix and James Brown on the hi-fi stereo, John Lennon and Che

59
CMTS Tours - Soul Coordinators (78), Aug 10, 1971 Folder, Records of the United States Army
Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional),
Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In Vietnam, June 1970 – November 1970, Box 7
(RG 472).
60
CMTS Tours - Soul Coordinators (78), Aug 10, 1971.

310
Guevara posters on the wall, tie dye sheets on the beds, and plenty of marijuana in the air.61

W. D. Ehrhart also links his first use of marijuana to hearing music on an underground troop

radio show broadcast by a soldier nicknamed Dancin' Jack. "The Beatles crackled over the

radio: 'Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play; now it seems as though it's gone

away; oh, I believe in yesterday.' I took a puff. It was harsh, and made me start coughing."

Ehrhart continues:

The smoke had a sweet pungent taste and made me a little lightheaded. Otis
Redding was sitting on the dock of the bay, and I could see the tides rolling
away as the joints went around and around; the music played on into the
night…the music was playing and playing, and fingers popped in time, and
bodies swayed, and the laughter and the night and the smoke rolled on and on
like waves against a beach on a far-off tropical island inhabited by Dancin'
Jack. …The driving beat of the Rolling Stones came thumping through the
static. The whole bunker shouted in unison: '…I can't get no! Satisfaction'
Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap. 'Oh, no, no, no!!!'62

In these examples, rock and soul music -- the Beatles, the Stones, Otis Redding, and

other popular musicians -- went along with casual drug use to provide the means for troop

solidarity. One could say music improved morale by forging fighting units into bands of

brothers linked by the erotic and emotional commitments fostered by sharing musical

experiences together. But, drug use combined with rock and soul music generated other

social energies as well. In particular, the mixture of psychedelic-type drugs and rock music

opened up social spaces for rethinking identity and affiliation.

In a kind of alternative survey to AFVN's official study of troops' radio-listening

habits, Charles Perry distributed questionnaires to American fighters in Vietnam in the fall

61
Morrison, My Rock 'n' Roll War, 91.
62
W. D. Ehrhart, Vietnam-Perkasie: A Combat Marine Memoir (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press,
1983), 216-217.

311
of 1968. In the Rolling Stone magazine article he published using the responses, Perry wrote

that, "incredible numbers of enlisted men are smoking grass to 'get away,' and more than

that, to reinforce their feelings of solidarity with other unwilling conscripts."63 The responses

to Perry's questionnaire indicated that marijuana and rock music were doing far more than

bonding willing soldiers together. The combination was also fostering alternative

orientations at the level of vernacular, even underground, troop culture. "We smoke semi-

covertly," a private reported to Perry, "We work stoned. Music most of the time."64 This

"semi-covert" culture of drugs and music seemed to reorient certain fighters away from the

war and toward the possibilities of the counterculture on the home front. As a corporal in

Phu Bai wrote, "Guys have mustaches and long sideburns that the average citizen would

never believe they were soldiers. We are anxious to get back and grow wild hair and beards

without any restrictions. Beads and Peace symbols are worn with the uniform."65

By providing an emotional and reflective imaginary space for feeling and thinking

through the alienation of the Vietnam conflict, rock enlivened a consciousness and

consideration of the paradoxes of a war fought on the frontlines of American military and

cultural expansion during the Cold War. We might even hear rock music as a cultural form

that helped motivate the "citizen-soldier" identity in the Vietnam conflict. Rock helped shape

63
Charles Perry, "Is This Any Way to Run the Army? Stoned?" Rolling Stone (9 November 1968): 8.
64
Charles Perry, "Is This Any Way to Run the Army?", 8.
65
Charles Perry, "Is This Any Way to Run the Army?", 5.

312
feelings about an American fighter's civic responsibility. The music could spark questionings

of whether the Vietnam War was morally in line with the role of the "citizen-soldier."66

Veteran John Lindquist, for example, eventually decided that it was not. He rooted

his eventual involvement in the G.I. antiwar movement in his listening to rock songs with

fellow soldiers, explaining in reference to the famous British rock group of the day: "We'd

listen to Cream and talk about how the war was messed up…."67 Lindquist moved from rock

music to overt political action. But for other fighters in Vietnam, rock existed on the level of

vernacular troop culture as a means to experience, feel, and meditate on the confusing

situations in which the war positioned them, and from this, to begin to confront the issue of

their precise relationship to America. As veteran Michael Rodriquez remembered about a

famous song of the era: "Country Joe's 'I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag' became, for many

of us, the song for Vietnam. Bitter, sarcastic, angry at a government some of us felt we didn't

understand, the 'Rag' became the battle standard for too many Grunts in the Bush."68

Halfway around the world, "citizen-soldiers" of the United States could use rock to

separate their identities -- their subjectivities -- from the official military culture and its

dictates. As veteran Jim Heiden remarked about his experiences fighting in Vietnam, "you

realize that they lied to you in civics class."69 While this often led to a cultivation of a

violent, hyper-masculinized ethos of warrior brothers who could kill despite deep

66
For more on the citizen-soldier identity, see Richard Moser, The New Winter Soldiers: GI and
Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). Also see the
soon-to-be-published work of Meredith Lair.
67
Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 54.
68
Michael Rodriquez, "Vietnam and Rock 'n' Roll," http://www.vietvet.org/rockroll.htm.
69
Jim Heiden, "Reminiscences of Jim Heiden," Vietnam Veterans Collection, Columbia University
Oral History Research Office, 61.

313
dissatisfaction with the official military bureaucracy around them, rock music also divorced

soldiers from their assigned military roles, helping them to explore the relationship between

the citizen and soldier sides of the "citizen-soldier" binary.70 Caught between polarized

positions, troops turned to rock to try to make sense of their experiences.

Traveling back and forth between home front and war zone, rock music mediated

struggles to come to terms with -- and to transform -- both individual responsibilities and the

larger social communities in which fighters found themselves. A poster produced to

advertise performances by "The Local Board" represents the attempt not only to reorient the

individual identities of "citizen-soldiers" toward a new mode of citizenship, but to re-

imagine the civitas itself.71 The group's name is a sly reference to the draft boards through

which so many American fighters were funneled from home to Vietnam as well as a nice

pun on the "boredom" entertainment in Vietnam was supposed to alleviate.

Iconographically, the poster presents the vision of an alterative civitas that has sprung

up within the very cauldron of the war zone. With battle raging on the margins as a bomb

explodes in the hills beyond the city (in the upper right of the poster), the "Cav Touring

Show" places the viewer in a cosmopolitan city gone psychedelic. On the edges of a city,

next to a building that seems to be selling American flags, another advertises soup. At the

center of the poster, a paisley, flower, and heart decorated van has "Love" written on its

70
See Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
71
"The Local Board: A Cav Touring Show" Publicity Poster, Ent Viet V. 3 Tours, Jan-March 1970
Folder, Records of the United States Army in Vietnam (USARV), Special Services Agency (Provisional),
Entertainment Branch, History Files, "Entertainment Vietnam," V. 3, May 1969-December 1970 (RG 472),
National Archives (NARA II), College Park, Maryland.

314
cargo-hold. It is parked in front of an "Art Mart" store. A café sells "Pot Dogs." A hot air

balloon drops "Peace" fliers on the street and buildings.

Figure 3.20. Alternative civitas: The Local Board publicity poster, Vietnam, 1969 (courtesy:
National Archives)

On all corners, artists paint portraits, drawing on or carrying easels. A closer look

reveals that they are all smoking large sticks of marijuana (one could, slyly, insist that are

merely smoking tobacco cigarettes). Naked classical female statues appear throughout the

streetscape. A totem pole stands on the corner. More drug-punning signs read "Speed," "Go,"

and "120 MPH." This poster, merely a primitive line drawing advertising musical

entertainment that was meant to foster troop morale, brings us into the vernacular culture of

American troops in Vietnam. Though a wide range of beliefs, feelings, ideas, and energies

existed at the vernacular level, on The Local Board's poster we glimpse the effort to picture a

civitas, a collective space. This civitas transforms elements of the home front and the war

315
zone into something new. Incorporating elements of the domestic counterculture that was

burgeoning in American cities during the late 1960s while also including aspects of the war,

the poster repositions troops in an alternative civic imaginary in which psychedelically-

tinged art, peace, and love dominate instead of violence and battle.

Figure 3.21. Detail of The Local Board poster (courtesy: National Archives)

Figure 3.22. Detail of The Local Board poster (courtesy: National Archives)

316
 The Local Board poster offers a dramatic reconfiguring of the civic imaginary. More

often, rock music was only able to raise questions about war and civics. For instance,

responding to Charles Perry, a military policeman in Vietnam took note of a "Sky Pilot," a

song by Eric Burdon and the Animals that seemed to comment on the war: "For three weeks

in a row, 'Sky Pilot' was number one in Bien Hoa. I keep thinking of the line, 'A young

soldier so ill/Looks at the sky pilot, remembers the words, 'Thou Shalt Not Kill': Man, give

me some slack, huh. Thank God for the sense of sound."72 Rock gave fighters such as this

military policeman a means to feel their way through, to think about their ethical and moral

positions in the war effort. As this quotation suggests, the music did not directly cause

anyone to drop their arms, but it rendered the contradictions and pressures of the Vietnam

War apparent. At the level of vernacular troop culture, rock provided a powerful force both

for private, aesthetic experiences and the public consideration of the Vietnam War's

troublesome politics. A fighter could indeed be thankful for the sense of sound on this count.

"Rock 'n' Soul": Race and Popular Music in Vietnam

As the ambiguous overlapping between pop, rock, and soul music in Vietnam has

already suggested, the relationship between music and race in the war zone is worth closer

consideration. Most historians rightfully note that racial conflicts in Vietnam often revolved

around representations of soul music at military clubs and bases. Ron Spector cites a "Report

of Inquiry Concerning a Petition of Redress of Grievances by a Group of Soldiers of the 71st

Transportation Battalion One" to explain that, "a common cause of arguments was music,

72
Perry, "Is This Any Way to Run the Army?", 9.

317
with blacks frequently demanding that the clubs provide more soul music. One club at Cam

Ranh Bay that featured almost exclusively country and western music was the scene of a

near riot and 'threats to burn the club down.'"73 But music also provided the means for

alliances among counterculturally-minded whites and African-American soldiers. As much

as the music replicated racial divisions of the home front, it also provided the means for new

connection across racial boundaries.

Integrated CMTS bands symbolized these connections at both the official and

vernacular levels of military life in Vietnam. With its mix of rock and soul songs, the set list

for the Soul Chordinators hinted at the possibilities of musical integration. A closer look at

the poster for "Jimmy and the Everyday People" (see figure 3.4) also reveals an imaginative

space opening up between the white counterculture and black soul movements in the

Vietnam war zone. On the poster, we see the silhouette of a dancing woman -- her hair

whipping back from her movement, her face breaking into an ecstatic smile, and her racial

identity ambiguous. Below the woman, we read an announcement of the kind of music one

can expect to hear from "Jimmy and the Everyday People: "Rock 'n' soul."74

73
Spector, 273. "Report of Inquiry Concerning a Petition of Redress of Grievances by a Group of
Soldiers of the 71st Tranportation Battalion One," 23 May 1968, Copy in IG Files, USARV Records, National
Archives (NARA II), College Park, Maryland. For other studies of African-Americans, music, and Vietnam,
see: Mary Ellison, "Black Music and the Vietnam War," in Vietnam Images: War and Representation, eds.
Jeffrey Walsh and James Aulich (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989); James E. Westheider, Fighting on Two
Front; Herman Graham III, The Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003); and Katherine Kinney, Friendly Fire: American Images of the
Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
74
Jimmy and The Everyday People publicity poster, CMTS Tours - Jimmy and the Everyday People
(104) - 23 Aug 1971 folder, Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United
States Army Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re:
CMTS Tours In Vietnam April - August 1971, Box 9 (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II), College Park,
Maryland.

318
 Figure 3.23. Jimmy and the Everyday People publicity photo, Vietnam, 1971 (courtesy:
National Archives)

The band performed music associated with the countercultural movement, such as

Sly and the Family Stone's "(I Want to Take You) Higher." Jimmy and his group also drew

praise performing songs that could be interpreted as direct or indirect critiques of the war in

Vietnam, such as the Beatles "Let It Be." Bringing the sounds of home to the war, Jimmy

and the Everyday People provided respite to battle-weary troops. But they brought more than

just entertainment from a placid domestic American culture. Their sound transported the

effects of the war on United States society back to the war zone. Jimmy and the Everyday

People completed a global circuit of musical commentary, experience, and engagement.

They did so through a combination of rock and soul that hinted at countercultural energies

while providing appealing entertainment sanctioned by the official military bureaucracy of

the Entertainment Branch.

319
 An article in The Delta Dragon, a United States military newspaper, hinted at what

was at stake in the band's performances: "Competing with the realities of war, Jimmy and the

Everyday People brought hard hitting sounds and messages everywhere they played." Faced

with "the realities of war," Jimmy and the Everyday People replicated violence in the

aggressiveness of their "hard hitting sounds." But the group also generated a musical

alternative as they invited audiences to participate in their performance; they were

"competing with the realities of war" by delivering musical "messages" from stateside.

Sparking audience involvement in songs about getting higher and letting it be, Jimmy and

the Everyday People brought welcome relief from the tensions of combat, importations of

"messages" from the domestic counterculture, and direct glosses on the Vietnam experience.

"As the show progresses the intensity of their songs is easily felt," The Delta Dragon noted,

suggesting that Jimmy and his band fostered temporary but powerful forms of community

and identity through music.75

How do we understand a mixed-race band performing rock and soul together when

the genres are usually conceptualized as utterly separate, both domestically and in the

Vietnam experience? Despite the ways in which music reinforced racial divisions in the

military, rock and soul also provided the means for new kinds of affiliation. This is not to

ignore that the music played a role in manifesting difference. As the veteran Dave Cline,

who served in Delta Company, 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry, 25th Division during 1967,

remarked: "When you came in from the field, people generally tended to break down

75
No author, "Delta GIs Get 'High' On Group's Music," The Delta Dragon 1, 5 (25 August 1971). In
CMTS Tours - Jimmy and the Everyday People (104) - 23 Aug 1971 folder, Records of the United States Army
Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam Special Services Agency (Provisional),
Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In Vietnam April - August 1971, Box 9 (RG
472), National Archives (NARA II), College Park, Maryland.

320
culturally. It was culturally -- musically."76 But, music could function in the other direction,

too, not only dividing, but providing forces of cohesion, or at the very least of meeting

across the treacherous boundaries of race, which could be so difficult to negotiate within the

racisms of the military and the home front.

Referring to the links forged through music between white hippies in the military,

known as the "heads," and black troops, known as "brothers," Cline noted that rock and soul

in particular fostered connections across racial lines: "We used to like try… to have a pretty

good relationship between the heads and the brothers, even culturally" since at the time,

"rock music incorporated soul music in that period."77 As Cline's phrase suggests, rock and

soul were unstable musical genres during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As rock expanded

commercially, it increasingly overlapped with soul. Performers ranging from Otis Redding

to Sly Stone to The Temptations to Jimi Hendrix to Janis Joplin criss-crossed the genres,

merging them together in new ways. Rock and soul might, at times, symbolize or serve as

the motivating force for racial difference and racial tensions, but the musics were also

connected, providing a way for troops to forge connections and affiliations across social

boundaries.

Joel Davis, an African-American who served in Vietnam during 1967, remembered a

particularly vivid example of the ways in which music linked him to fellow fighters across

racial lines. On a transport ship in the South China Sea, he recollected, "Everybody was

sitting around with his feet dangling off the side of the ship, you know, playing music on the

76
Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 62-63.
77
Moser, The New Winter Soldiers, 62-63.

321
tape recorders, getting high, you know, smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol."78 His platoon

eventually inspired Davis to take his "R&R" in the white-dominated destination of Sydney,

Australia, instead of the Southeast Asian cities more favored by African-American troops. "I

went there to make my civil rights claim, as opposed to having a good time, but then I mixed

it all in together," Davis remarked of his trip to music clubs such as the Whiskey A-Go-Go

in the red-light and hippie district of Sydney.79 Rock and soul music was but one resource

for a fighter such as Joel Davis to seek out a racial, political end -- his "civil rights claim" --

through the pursuit of a private, aesthetic experience in the sphere of leisure.

Figure 3.24. Soldiers performing at the Cam Ranh Bay Music Happening, 1970 (courtesy:
National Archives)

Leaving aside the intriguing notion that David Cline raises of rock "incorporating"

soul during the Vietnam years, we might address how rock and soul together enlivened a

78
Joel Davis, "Reminiscences of Joel E. Davis" (1977), Vietnam Veterans Project, Oral History
Research Office, Columbia University, New York, 24-25.
79
Joel Davis, "Reminiscences of Joel E. Davis," 72-73.

322
consciousness and consideration of the paradoxes -- the "strobic wheel" as Michael Herr put

it -- of a war fought on the frontlines of American military and cultural expansion during the

Cold War. We might even hear rock and soul music as cultural forms that motivated and

shaped what Richard Moser deems the political significance of the "citizen-soldier" identity

in the Vietnam conflict.80 Circulating to spaces of the war zone where other modes of civil

discourse and debate usually could not, the overlapping sound waves of rock and soul

provided a medium for feeling and expressing notions of an American fighter's civic

responsibility in Vietnam. At the meeting point of gun and guitar, the music and the noise of

war blared together, sometimes deafening those around them to alternative civic

possibilities, but also fostering a space of negotiation. Within this space, not only Americans,

but also non-Americans listened to rock and soul, contributing their own responses to the

civic reverberations of popular music.

"Calling Out Around the World": Global Rock Citizenship

The confusing symbolism of gun and guitar was not only available for Americans;

Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians adopted rock music for economic survival, aesthetic

pleasure, and political expression. In the third space of rock in Vietnam -- the non-American

cultures of the region -- music served as a harbinger of the postmodern collision of Western

consumer capitalism with traditional cultures of the decolonizing world. Not merely the

avant-garde of a United States neo-imperialism, rock provided a complex soundscape and

80
Moser, The New Winter Soldiers.

323
cultural milieu. Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians worked out their relationship to the

expanding web of American economic and military power through responses to rock.

Many Vietnamese and Southeast Asians listened intently to American rock music.

The "Vietnamese rock scene will come as a surprise to those who imagine the Vietnamese

either in quaint foreign dress or reproachful rags," Charles Perry noted in his 1968 Rolling

Stone article. Ken Sams, publisher of the Grunt Free Press, an underground newspaper that

flourished in Vietnam for a time, recounts South Vietnamese students coming over to his

apartment in Saigon to listen and dance to the latest rock and soul records sent to Sams from

London. And at least from the perspective of American performers, audiences of Vietnamese

listeners also enjoyed hearing rock music in concert. "This was truly the greatest show I have

experienced since playing at block parties with my group in the States," a member of the

CMTS group Marshmallow Steamshovel wrote of his band's performance on May 11, 1971.

"We put on a show out in the middle of down-town Can Tho in front of over one thousand

Vietnamese people." Performing songs such as Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop

The Rain," this member noted in his band's After Action Report that he believed the

Vietnamese audience, "did appreciate us very much."81

Southeast Asians not only listened to American rock, they began performing the

music themselves. "Amid the confusion and concussion of the war, Vietnamese teenagers

are having a cultural revolution all their own," AFVN DJ Scott Manning wrote to Charles

Perry. "The most way-out fashions are found on the city's pop music groups, made up of

81
"After Action Report," CMTS Tours - Marshmallow Steamshovel #95 April 3, 1971 Folder,
Records of the United States Army Vietnam (USARV), Headquarters, United States Army Vietnam Special
Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, After Action Reports re: CMTS Tours In Vietnam,
December 1970-April 1971, Box 8 (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II), College Park, Maryland.

324
Japanese, Filipinos, Malaysians, and draft-deferred Vietnamese. …No set at Saigon's

Whiskey A-Go-Go would be complete without well-rehearsed versions of…'San Francisco

(Wear Flowers in Your Hair).'"82 As a striking photograph of a Vietnamese singer and

dancer indicates (see figure 3.25), music functioned within the war economy alongside other

booming industries such as prostitution, drinking, and drugs. Many Vietnamese, Filipino,

and Korean "floor shows," as they were known, toured U.S. bases to entertain Americans.83

Silent film footage from a "Care for Casualities" film shows a cover band performing for

recovering American troops at a Navy Hospital in 1968. The band moves in unison as they

play their electric instruments. The lead singer steps forward to dance and spin the

microphone, like a cross between James Brown and Mick Jagger.84

More fascinatingly, rock provided a means for South Vietnamese and other Southeast

Asians to grapple with the very meaning of Americanness. As a member of what was

perhaps the most famous South Vietnamese rock band, the CBC Band, told a Rolling Stone

reporter: "The United States must be the greatest paradox in the history of the world. It puts

out the best conceivable sounds in its music and the worst conceivable sounds in its

82
Perry, "Is This Any Way to Run the Army?", 7-8. Ken Sams, "Grunt Free Press," in Nam: The
Vietnam Experience, 1965-1975, eds. Tim Page and John Pimlott (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1995),
416.
83
"Subject: Approved Commercial Entertainment," 12 February 1972, General Correspondence and
Memoranda of Entertainment Branch, 1 January 1972-4 April 1972, Records of the United States Army in
Vietnam (USARV), Special Services Agency (Provisional), Entertainment Branch, General Administrative
Records, April 1966-April 1972 (RG 472), National Archives (NARA II), College Park, Maryland.
84
Care for Casualities (1314-X), Vietnam, 1968, Motion Picture Films and Video Recordings,
National Archives at College Park - Archives II.

325
weapons."85 With the CBC Band, we can hear rock resonating as part of the symbolic nexus

of gun and guitar.

Figure 3.25. Mai, performer in a commercial band that toured South Vietnam, 1971 (photo:
Don Morrison)

Figure 3.26. Covering rock in Vietnam: a still from Navy Hospital film footage, Care for
Casualities, 1968 (courtesy: National Archives)

85
Tom Marlow, "Yea, We're the CBC Band…," Rolling Stone, 24 November 1970, 28-29.

326
 For this and other young South Vietnamese, rock echoed between the sound of

violent American imperialism and sonic glimpses of an alternative civic configuration. A

member of the CBC explained: "Music is the only way we have of expressing ourselves.

Most GIs, before they hear us play, look at us as long-haired gooks. …But after they hear us

play, they don't look at us as gooks anymore. They realize that we are people." This

transformation from dehumanized other to a common humanity was mediated through

musical performance. When the members of the CBC sang, "Yea, we’re the CBC band, and

we'd like to turn you on / We got a little peace message, like, straight from Saigon," they

presented an alternative civic configuration within yet against the dominant modes of

American consumer and military imperial might. Music, commodified and transmitted

through the circuitry of a globalizing American mass culture, wound up opening up

surprising, new possibilities within its frequencies and wavelengths.86

The CBC Band had a "peace message" from deep in the war zone itself: "straight

from Saigon." Indeed, straight from Saigon -- in 1971, the alternative civics to which CBC

harkened in the smaller public spaces of musical performances at military and commercial

clubs appeared in a much larger fashion in the city of Saigon itself at a Woodstock-like

"international rock music festival." For five hours in a muddy stadium, rock bands from

Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia played. A New York

Times article estimated the audience at 7,000. Journalist Gloria Emerson wrote, "About 500

G.I.'s attended, many wearing headbands and antiwar or black-power jewelry." Emerson's

figure suggests that the bulk of the audience consisted of South Vietnamese youth. She

86
Marlow, "Yea, We're the CBC Band," 28.

327
reported that, "It seemed that many of them -- with their long sideburns, far-out sunglasses,

open skirts and flared trousers -- might want to be hippies but that life in South Vietnam did

not permit it." Emerson also noted that there were no conflicts between the American

soldiers and the South Vietnamese youth at the festival concert.87

Figure 3.27. The Saigon International Rock Festival: a performer, 1971 (photograph:
unkown, courtesy: New York Times)

With the Saigon International Rock Festival, we can hear rock music fostering an

alternative civic space within the war zone itself. At least for an afternoon, the concert

became a living embodiment of the Local Board's poster (see figures 3.20, 3.21, and 3.22).

While not explicitly or inherently political in our usual uses of that word, the festival

allowed South Vietnamese and Americans to assemble in a different stylistic and bodily

formation than the war demanded. Borrowing from countercultural markers that had reached

87
Gloria Emerson, "G.I.'s and Vietnamese Youth: Sharing at Rock Festival," New York Times, 30 May
1971, 3.

328
them through a globalizing American commercial culture as well as through the American

military, the performers and attendees at the Saigon festival temporarily rearranged the civic

dimensions of public space in a place where violence and warfare predominated.

Perhaps most remarkably, rock and soul music seems to have even reached young

North Vietnamese. Quoting a North Vietnamese party newspaper, a United States Army

intelligence officer wrote in 1969: "The North Vietnamese Government seems to be worried

by 'cultural and ideological sabotage' and signs of 'decadent' culture among youth."

According to the intelligence report, the party paper declared that, "Western-inspired music

and literature ha[s] taken a hold of 'bad elements.'"88 While it remains unclear precisely what

"Western-inspired music" made its way into North Vietnam, we do know that anti-war

activists in the U.S. were actually sending rock to the country at this time. Countercultural

icons such as Abbie Hoffman produced programs for a mock-station called "WPAX." "The

first show should go on the air in Hanoi on March 8th," DJ John Gabree told Rolling Stone

reporter Peter McCabe, "We'll be starting with Jimi Hendrix's version of 'The Star Spangled

Banner': don't you think that's appropriate?"89

The North Vietnamese themselves broadcast rock on a propaganda station known to

American troops as "Hanoi Hannah" for its female announcers. One soldier recalled, "Three

nights after I got there, Hanoi Hannah…dedicated 'Tonight's the Night' by the Shirelles to us.

'Will you still love me tomorrow?' that's the one. The little cunt face. But I liked listening to

88
"'Cultural Sabotage' in North Vietnam, 6/25/69," Douglas Pike Collection: Unit 06 - Democratic
Republic of Vietnam, The Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University.
89
Peter McCabe, "Radio Hanoi Goes Progressive Rock," Rolling Stone, 18 March 1971, 8.

329
her. She put on some good jams."90 Here, as with the CBC Band's observations of how

American G.I.'s treated them, we get a sense of the mixed feelings that rock music generated

-- on the one hand, it could inspire angry, sexist insults; on the other, it provided an entry

into the possibility of different relationships between Americans and their ostensible enemies

in North Vietnam.

Perhaps the American fighter and the North Vietnamese youth alike found in rock

music access to an alternative public zone in which both had a chance to refashion their self-

identities and larger social affiliations. Rock neither "defeated" globalizing American

consumer capitalism, nor overpowered the state-sponsored violence of American military

might. But it did provide other fleeting but palpable configurations of a global society

besides one dominated by the American nation-state. Traversing the world on electronic

wavelengths, carrying within the vessels of musical commodities a third way beyond

communist or capitalist ideologies, rock provided the wavelengths and wiring for a possible

cultural pathway out of war. The CBC band's "little peace message, yeah, straight from

Saigon" helped complete the circuit of a globalizing civics of rock.

90
Mark Baker, Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Soldiers Who Fought There (Berkeley
Books, 1983), 33. Quoted in Andreson, Battle Notes, 119. There has been a debate about the accuracy of
eyewitness accounts in Baker's book. See B. G. Burkett, Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was
Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History (Dallas, TX: Verity Press, 1998). There seem to be enough references to
the North Vietnamese broadcasting rock and soul music to support a quotation such as this one.

330
"Bringing It All Back Home": The "Battlespace" of Electronic Warfare and Electronic

Civics

In a lecture on "War in the Filigree of Peace," Michel Foucault emphasized the

importance of war to the defining of the civitas.91 Picking up on this insight, Chris Hables

Gray has written that the Vietnam War's ""'battlefield' is really a battlespace. It is...three-

dimensional and ranges beyond the atmosphere. It is on thousands of electronic wavelengths.

It is on the 'homefront' as much as the battlefront.""92 Gray's description of the "battlespace"

of Vietnam emerging on "thousands of electronic wavelengths," on the "'homefront' as much

as the battlefront," suggests that civics even lurked in musical experiences deep in the war

zone. So, too, as Gray points out, the war zone could penetrate deep into the civic life of the

home front. Back in the United States, rock carried the emotional and ideological

experiences of war back to the civics of the counterculture.

References to Vietnam in places such as San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, with its

burgeoning rock music scene, registered the circuit completed between war zone and home

front. For instance, inspired by the mystical mass-media theories of Marshall McLuhan, a

writer named Stephen Jensen circulated a flier in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury

neighborhood in 1967, insisting that, "McLuhan believes that the war in Vietnam will end

because people are getting sick of seeing dead bodies while eating dinner in front of

91
Michel Foucault, "War in the Filigree of Peace," Oxford Literary Review 4, 2 (1980): 15-18; also
published as "Two Lectures," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed.
Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Quoted in Michael Bibby, "The Post-Vietnam Condition," in The
Vietnam War and Postmodernity, ed. Michael Bibby (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 155.
92
Chris Hables Gray, "Postmodernism With a Vengeance: The Vietnam War," in Bibby, The Vietnam
War and Postmodernity, 178. See also Michael J. Arlen, Living Room War (New York: Viking, 1969).

331
Huntley-Brinkley."93 Though he did not mention music, Jensen focused on the electronic

media that, drawing on McLuhan, he believed was giving birth to an anti-war,

countercultural civic life. In an entirely different locale, in a different cultural domain,

Jensen seemed able to hear echoes of the CBC Band's "little peace message, yeah, straight

from Saigon."

Chester Anderson, who owned the machine on which Jensen's flier was printed,

explicitly made the link between McLuhan, music, and war. Anderson thought that key

components of McLuhan's " covertly projected spherical society" (which might be another

way of describing an alternative global electronic civics) were beginning to appear in entities

such as, "the Haight/Ashbury community, and especially what we'll keep on calling rock &

roll until we can find some more appropriate name for it."94 Informed by the ever-present

media representations of the Vietnam War, Anderson was hardly utopian about what he

heard and saw. The violence of Vietnam intruded too much.

In a flier on the decay of Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, Anderson observed that

while countercultural leaders such as "Hip Merchants" (including rock musicians) profited,

too many young people were being hurt by a runaway culture dominated by abusive drug

dealers and deceitful aggressors. In the Haight-Ashbury, Anderson decided, "Minds &

bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam."95 As Anderson's despair

suggested, Vietnam's energies returned to the home front with a vengeance, linking the war
93
Stephen Jensen, untitled flier, The Communication Company (San Francisco, Calif.) April 1967
Folder, Chester Anderson Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California - Berkeley.
94
Chester Anderson, "Notes For the New Geology," San Francisco Oracle 6 (1966): 1, 23.
95
Chester Anderson, "Uncle Tim'$ Children" flier, 17 April 1967, The Communication Company (San
Francisco, Calif.) April 1967 Folder, Chester Anderson Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California -
Berkeley.

332
to domestic life in the United States through what Chris Hables Grey describes as an

electronic "battlespace."

Conclusion: Guns and Guitars Today

Whether in relation to morale, boredom, terror, pleasure, or politics, rock music

provided sonic forms both for reasserting and challenging established definitions of self-

identity and public belonging associated with the United States. Rock influenced notions of

the American warrior, but also the American "citizen-soldier." It served as a tool in the

official military's attempts to foster an inclusive, integrationist fighting community, but it

also provided modes of expressing dissent and rebellion against military identity. In addition

to its evocations of, and challenges to, Americanness, rock also summoned into being the

possibility of an alternative global civics. Participants used rock to pursue more suitable and

meaningful modes of belonging in a world that mass communications systems increasingly

linked. Social membership in this emerging civitas increasingly trespassed the traditional

boundaries of the nation-state. As the harbinger of an alternative global civics, rock's sounds

were neither utopian fantasies, nor merely imperial tools. Rather, they emerged in and

through American mass culture, mediating its contradictions and providing means for

engagement and critique. In the pulsations of rock, everyone from hippies in the Haight to

Vietnam grunts in the jungle to a South Vietnamese guitar player, sought to make sense of

the impossible problems and provocative possibilities of the world around them.

"What are you going to do with all that energy?" the Vietnam veteran Peter Cameron

asked about the potentially destructive forces that would accumulate during a night of rock,

333
beer, boredom, and shell-shock in a military club.96 We might extend Cameron's question to

the Vietnam conflict as a whole. In its massive expenditures of humanity, technology,

intellect, and violence, Vietnam generated an enormous amount of energy. Rock music

helped channel some of this energy -- this electricity -- into sonic representation and social

production. Between gun and guitar, rock provided a space of expressivity to render the

war's energies intelligible emotionally and ideologically.

Perhaps if we better understand this energy of rock and Vietnam, we can not only

grapple with the legacy of that tragic affair, but confront the contemporary context, in which

American culture continues to expand to other parts of the world by both military and

commercial means, generating tremendous energies both terrifying and promising in the

process. Two photographs from 2003 raise the questions that Leni Sinclair and Tim Page's

portraits from the late 1960s raised thirty-odd years earlier.

In one photograph (see figure 3.28), we see the First Infantry Division rock band

performing in Baghdad on July 25, 2003. They stand onstage, in what look like the casual

version of army fatigues, playing guitars, horns, and drums instead of handling guns, tanks,

and bombs. In the other (see figure 3.29), the Iranian rock group Shanti rehearses in Tehran,

Iran.97 Within a nation strongly opposed to American imperial power, this rock group, too,

wields electric guitars. One member of Shanti even, incongruously, wears a Che Guevara t-

shirt.

96
Peter Cameron, "Reminiscences of Peter Cameron" (1976), Vietnam Veterans Collection, Oral
History Research Office, Columbia University, New York, 34.
97
U.S. Army Spc. Ryan Smith 372nd MPAD, "1st Armor Div. Band Performs in Baghdad," Defend
America: U.S. Department of Defense News About the War on Terrorism, 25 July 2003,
http://www.defendamerica.mil/articles/jul2003/a073003d.html. Scott Peterson, "You Say You Want a
Revolution? Iranian Bands Rock On," Christian Science Monitor, 1 October 2003,
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1001/p01s04-wome.html.

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 Figure 3.28 and Figure 3.29. The continuing sound of guns and guitars: The First Army
Infantry Division rock band, performing at the "Summer Jam," Baghdad, Iraq, July 2003
(photograph: Spc. Ryan Smith); Shanti, an Iranian rock band, rehearsing in Tehran, 2003
(photograph: Scott Peterson/Getty Images)

Just as the Vietnam photographs of Leni Sinclair and Tim Page seemed suggested

thirty years ago, these photographs from the Middle East ask now: Will the technologies of a

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global electronic society merely serve as the infrastructure for American imperialism, or can

the circuitry of mass culture foster more egalitarian global formations of society, culture,

identity, belonging, and human interaction? The possibilities and problems of music's role in

this quandary resonate silently in these photographs. The images suggest, above all else, that

we need to keep listening to the guitars as well as the guns to seek out answers.

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 Epilogue -
Circulating Through Rock: The Global Electronic Civics of Countercultural Music

The new types of publicity that have been proliferating over the past decade
or two, especially with the electronic media...force us to redefine the spatial,
territorial, and geopolitical parameters of the public sphere. - Miriam Hansen1

Long histories of avant-garde art and vanguard politics demonstrate the

overwhelming failure of efforts to transform society by imagining that we can
stand outside it, by seeking transcendent critiques untainted by dominant
ideologies and interests. The strategies that emerge from today's global
realities point to another path...to produce an imminent critique of
contemporary social relations, to work through the conduits of commercial
culture in order to illumine affinities, resemblances, and potentials for
alliances among a world population that now must be as dynamic and as
mobile as the forces of capital. - George Lipsitz2

People everywhere just got to be free. - The Rascals3

The band, called Os Mutantes (The Mutants), wore silver science-fiction tunics

straight from a B-grade space-fantasy film. Over their atonal eruption of electric guitars,

organ, and drums, a slender man with a mop of black hair stepped to the microphone. It was

the 1968 International Song Festival, broadcast on Globo television across the nation of

Brazil. The singer, Caetano Veloso, looked like an American hippie, a psychedelic rocker

1
Miriam Hansen, "Foreword," in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience:
Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Owen Daniel, and
Assenka Oksiloff (1972; English trans., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xiii.
2
George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place
(New York: Verso, 1994), 16.
3
The Rascals, "People Got to Be Free," single released in 1968, on the LP, Freedom Suite (Atlantic,
1969). Composed by Eddie Brigati and Felix Cavaliere.
imported from the United States, or perhaps from "swinging London." "My hair was very

long," Veloso would later explain, "and, left to its own rebellious curliness, seemed like a

cross between Hendrix and his British accompanists from the Experience." But Veloso was

very much a Brazilian, a popular bossa nova singer from Bahia who had, after his first

album, begun to experiment with merging the musical traditions of Brazil with the electrified

sounds of rock music.

Because of his use of American (and American-influenced British) mass culture, a

growing cloud of suspicion hovered above Veloso's rebellious curls. The conservative

government of Brazil saw him as a deviant, a "communist," a protest singer whipping up his

audiences into a revolutionary frenzy. The regime of Costa e Silva eventually threw Veloso

and fellow musician Gilberto Gil in prison because, as a military interrogator told Veloso,

his music's irreverence "undermined the structures" of Brazilian society.4 Veloso's

audiences, meanwhile, many of them students sympathetic to the left and opposed to Silva's

regime, saw the singer as a pawn of United States mass culture, an abandoner of Brazil's

indigenous, anti-imperialist, nationalist "folk" traditions. Indeed, as his critics perceived,

Veloso forged a new aesthetic in response to the globalizing culture of United States

consumerism during the Cold War. But to his mind, Veloso did so from a distinctly Brazilian

perspective. This fusion of Brazilian and U.S. popular culture was called the Tropicália

movement, and Veloso was one of its leaders. As the spotlight shone on Veloso at the 1968

festival, he began to sing his entry into the song contest, a composition titled "É proibido

proibir" (Prohibiting is prohibited).

4
Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 147. See also, Charles Perrone and Christopher Dunn,
eds., Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

338
 The song was inspired by the slogan, 'Forbidding is forbidden," graffiti written

around Paris during the student-worker uprising of 1968 in France. But Veloso's outfit was

neither that of a student, nor that of a worker. Nor was his appearance, in any clear sense,

precisely that of a citizen of the United States, or of Brazil. The place that Veloso seemed to

arrive from, the country he seemed to represent, was something new and strange, yet old and

archaic. His costume was even more outlandish than the science-fiction outfits of Os

Mutantes. "I wore plastic clothing in green and black," Veloso explained in his memoir, "my

chest covered with thick necklaces made of electrical wires with the plugs hanging at the

ends, and thick chains with animal teeth."5

Covered in plastic, with a necklace of electrical wires and thick chains, Veloso

signaled his entanglement in an electronically-circulated mass culture dominated by products

and images from the United States. Yet those animal teeth -- residual clichés of Amazonian

tribes as well as references to the ecological ideas of the counterculture and perhaps also to

the war-jewelry that United States fighters in Vietnam wore around their necks -- suggested

something else. They hinted that even if Veloso's body and his celebrity image were

complicit in larger, possibly destructive systems of cultural imperialism, Veloso also

retained a fierce sense of otherness. He was inside the wires of American mass culture, but

not in any simple, passive manner.

When the audience threw garbage at Veloso and Os Mutantes, the singer was ready.

He turned the performance into a Tropicalist happening. Veloso signaled an American

hippie who was living in Brazil, John Danduran, who was a tall, albino musician, to run

5
Caetano Veloso, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (1997; English trans.,
New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 187. Portions of this description also appear in Dunn, 135-136.

339
onstage in a hippie poncho and start screaming and yelling (see figure 4.1). Then Veloso

read a statement in which he lambasted the audience for its limited view of the political and

aesthetic possibilities of incorporating the mass culture of the United States and elsewhere

into Brazilian life. Like the 1920s Brazilian modernist writer, Oswald de Andrade, Veloso

wanted to "cannabalize" foreign cultures to create a powerful aesthetic statement within the

context of Brazil. "The idea of cultural cannibalism fits us, the tropicalists, like a glove,"

Veloso later explained. "We were 'eating' the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix."6 Those animal teeth

seemed ridiculous. They were even insulting. And yet they were a potent symbol of how a

figure such as Veloso, responding to rock music, might also be nourished by it. He might

even be able to rip right into the dangling electrical wires of American mass culture and

sever the thick chains around his neck.

As a leading member of the Tropicália movement in Brazil, Caetano Veloso

fashioned a response to rock music from the periphery of the United States's Cold War mass

culture. As the historian Christopher Dunn argues, "Tropicália was an exemplary instance of

cultural hybridity that dismantled binaries that maintained neat distinctions between high and

low, traditional and modern, national and international cultural production." To Dunn, "The

tropicalists proposed a far-reaching critique of Brazilian modernity that challenged dominant

constructions of national culture."

6
Dunn, 74.

340
 Figure 4.1. Caetano Veloso, Os Mutantes, and Johnny Danduran at the International Song
Festival on Brazil's TV Globo, 1968 (photograph: Abril Imagens)

In place of an abstract celebration of the "masses," the tropicalists concentrated on

the incongruous details of living in a "Third World" country where indigenous, premodern

practices mingled with the banal products and images of a First World consumer culture. By

accentuating this strange interaction, Dunn believes that, "the tropicalists would give impetus

to emerging countercultural attitudes, styles, and discourses concerning race, gender,

sexuality, and personal freedom." Though these, "were becoming increasingly salient in

countercultural movements in the United States and Europe," Dunn contends that they,

"were manifested in distinct ways in Brazil during the period of military rule."7

Dunn is correct to focus on the particularities of Tropicália in Brazil, yet the dynamic

he describes -- the youthful, quasi-political appropriation of Anglo-American rock -- was

part of a larger story. Around the world, young rock fans seized a form of mass culture

emanating from the United States, but they did not merely acquiesce to U.S. cultural

7
Dunn, 3-4.

341
imperialism. Instead, they refashioned sounds from afar for their own purposes. Though

historians have focused extensively on the transatlantic, Anglo-American exchange of rock,

only in recent years has a secondary literature emerged in which scholars have explored

rock's circulation to places as disparate as Brazil, Mexico, Mali, Nigeria, and even behind

the Iron Curtain in the communist bloc countries of Eastern Europe.8 This epilogue will

briefly survey examples from this growing secondary literature in order to suggest that the

civics of rock took on a global character in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Rock not only represented a form of cultural imperialism originating in the United

States, but also a counterflow of ideas, practices, and exchanges that can be thought of as a

global electronic civics. Not only within the United States, nor only in the circulation of

people and culture between the U.S. and the Southeast Asian war zone, but also worldwide,

rock sparked a mass-mediated atmosphere of democracy within the web of U.S. mass

culture. A psychedelic public sphere burst into existence in multiple locations. This public

made possible confrontations with issues of justice, freedom, democracy, and modernity.

8
See, for example, Reebee Garofalo, ed., Rockin' the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements
(Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992). Approaching music as subculture, Mark Slobin makes the point that
non-Americans have adopted rock into their own cultures as much as joining a circulating global culture.
"Even the little that we know indicates that despite the homogeneity of the product, the diversity of its
reception is striking. The local domestication of Anglo-American rock music by European regions, from
Slovenia (Barber-Kersovan 1989) and Italy (Fabbri 1989) and the German-speaking lands (Larkey 1989) to the
former Eastern bloc (Ryback 1990; Troitsky 1987) is an eye-opening, if uneven and disorganized, field of
research. A quick survey shows how localized the impact of the presumed rock juggernaut has been, as it
changes course to fit the local musical roadways and the traffic conditions of each society, including such
widely varied factors as the presence of well-entrenched regional styles that refuse to give way; the typecasting
of rock as the property of a certain subculture, political group, or generation; and the benign or hostile effects
of governmental interference, intervention, and control." See Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of
the West (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 62.

342
 From the totalizing perspective of certain schools of Marxist thinking, this

psychedelic public sphere merely masked the expansion of capitalism in the world.9 But,

another, non-totalizing interpretation might posit that rock music circulated a transformed

public sphere within the networks of global capitalism. Rather than picture rock as a sonic

mask of false consciousness, we can think of it as a resource -- like oxygen, wind, fuel -- that

enabled participants to mount critiques of, and explore alternatives to, the dominant modes

of economic, political, and social organization in the 1960s and thereafter. Rock served as a

resource for reimagining the world. It also provided an aesthetic and communicative link

between participants. Responders to rock around the world assembled -- though never all in

the same place, or at the same time -- in a nascent, alternative global citizenry.10

The ways in which global uses of rock music enabled a global public indicate that we

must draw upon, but also update, the explosion of community studies in histories of the

1960s. This scholarship has sought to correct a top-down tendency in the first wave of

research on the social movements of the 1960s. In powerful ways, recent community studies

reveal that many wrinkles exist in the once smooth and simplistic narrative of the 1960s.

Community studies illuminate the particularities of local struggles in the civil rights

movement, the New Left, and the counterculture. They show how the local is a crucial --

9
See, for example, Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). Christopher Dunn traces
interpretations about the Tropicália movement in Brazil divided between those who used the theories of Gregor
Lukacs to argue that the music masked capitalist class relations and those who, drawing upon the ideas of
Walter Benjamin, understood Tropicália as immanent, allegorical critique; see Dunn, 98-100.
10
This alternative global citizenry seems linked to Frederic Jameson's notion of a "Third Worldism"
that appeared on the left during the 1960s. See Frederic Jameson, "Periodizing the Sixties." In The 60s Without
Apology, ed. Sohyna Sayres, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Also see, Frederic
Jameson, "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65-88.

343
perhaps the most crucial -- site of history. However, rock music's global circulation suggests

that the relationship between the local, the national, and the global must always be kept in

mind. In the context of a globalizing mass culture during the late 1960s and early 1970s,

rock music forces us to update Tip O'Neill's famous dictum (reportedly said by his father)

that all politics is local. With mass culture, all politics is not only local, but also mass-

mediated and, therefore, circulatory.11

Because it was embedded within American mass culture, rock was deeply

problematic if conceptualized as an authentic, ideologically pure cultural form. But if

understood as impure and immanent, the music can be heard in a different manner. Rock was

very much part of American systems of capitalism and consumerism, but its circulation also

allowed listeners around the world to fashion alternative civic identities. Rock posed

possibilities for social organizations different than those offered by national governments,

the traditions passed down through families, or even the commercial marketing and

11
The community studies literature is vast. For examples of civil rights movement community studies, see
Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); John Dittmar, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in
Mississippi (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The
Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1997); Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) and Black Power Politics
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the
Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jeanne F. Theoharis and
Komozi Woodard, Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Community studies of the New Left include: Paul Buhle, ed., History and the New
Left: Madison, Wisconsin, 1950-1970 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Paul Lyons, The People
of This Generation: The Rise and Fall of the New Left in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003); David McBride, "On The Fault Line of Mass Culture and Counterculture: A Social
History of the Hippie Counterculture in 1960s Los Angeles," Ph.D. diss., University of California - Los
Angeles, 1998; Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in
America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), which focuses on Austin, Texas; Mary Ann Wynkoop,
Dissent in the Heartland: The Sixties at Indiana University (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). For
good examples of counterculture community studies, see: Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999) which focuses on sexual practices in Lawrence, Kansas; and Craig Cox,
Storefront Revolution: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1994), which focuses on Minneapolis, Minnesota.

344
advertising of international corporations. Often borrowing from these powerful social

institutions without entirely giving in to any one one of their logics and structures,

responders to rock around the world established a dispersed pattern of civic engagement.

Although quite diverse in their responses to local situations, these responses to rock can also

be taken together as the manifestation of a transformed public sphere -- a kind of global

electronic civil society sustained by the sounds of rock music.

Just south of the United States, rock became a dramatic symbol of modernization in

Mexico, as Eric Zolov powerfully documents in Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican

Counterculture. As in the Brazilian context of Tropicália, rock was interpreted in two ways

in Mexico. On the one hand, the music was rejected, Zolov explains, as an "imperialist

import from the United States." On the other hand, rock "appealed to...perceptions of what it

meant to be modern, to have access to global culture." As early as the 1950s, rock 'n' roll

became what Zolov calls, "an epitome of postwar consumerism." The music, "introduced a

questioning of the social order that reverberated throughout Mexican society in the so-called

rebeldes sin causa, a catch-all phrase lifted from the James Dean film (shown and later

banned) that heralded the new youth culture."12

This "questioning of the social order" hints at rock's circulation of a transformed

public sphere around the world. Both imported from the United States and Britain as well as

taken up by Mexican musicians, rock, "was associated with challenges to parental authority

and wanton individualism." This was no small matter in a one-party state whose rulers

employed the "Revolutionary Family" as its metaphor of patriarchal political organization.

12
Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 8.

345
At both the level of private life in families and public life in the Mexican nation-state, rock

interrupted dominant constructions of identity and collectivity -- and the music helped

participants to pose alternatives.13

In September 1971, for example, some two-hundred thousand participants gathered

for the Avándaro rock festival. Closely modeled after the 1969 Woodstock festival in Bethel,

New York, Avándaro was not merely imitative of the United States counterculture. The

festival drew youth from all class levels of Mexican society. It also drew women to the

event. A number of these female participants experienced the festival as a liberation from

gender constraints; others saw it as a difficult site for women to be comfortable. For almost

all who attended, according to Zolov, Avándaro became a space of inquiry. "It was in this

liberated space that Mexicans from all classes took stock of their numbers, exchanged

histories, encountered other histories similar and dissimilar to their own."14

In the aftermath of violent reprisals by the Mexican government against a growing

radical student movement, Avándaro's rock music was not so much an extension of an

overtly leftist (or rightist) politics as it was a reimagining of identity and collectivity. Rock

music and Avándaro, Zolov claims, "suggested the possibility of reorganizing national

consciousness among youth in such a way that the state was not only mocked but left out of

the picture altogether." In a quintessential counterculture turn toward the civic realm rather

than toward state power, the participants at Avándaro adopted an implicitly anarchistic rather

than a Marxist or socialist approach to problems of social organization.15

13
Zolov, 8.
14
Zolov, 204-206.
15
Zolov, 218.

346
 The festival was permitted by the government of Luis Echeverría, but it was met with

criticism by both the Mexican left and right, who bemoaned the influence of the United

States on Mexico's youth. What both sides seemed to miss was how responders to rock

music at Avándaro, and in the larger La Onda Chicana (the Mexican counterculture), took

up the possibilities of a global civics of rock. As Zolov explains, "Through a free association

of symbols and signs of the nation -- and of a universalized countercultural movement,

generally -- the youth culture actively sought to forge a new collective identity that rejected a

static nationalism while inventing a new national consciousness on its own terms."

Grounding their activities in the new transnational concept of Chicano identity, participants

in Avándaro distinguished nationalist culture from state power, according to Zolov. They

sought to rearticulate what it meant to be a citizen of Mexico and the world

simultaneously.16

Zolov documents this rearticulation in both the memories of participants and the use

of flags at the festival itself. As one attendee at Avándaro, José Enrique Pérez Cruz, told

Zolov: "I think, in a certain sense, we could say that [rock] fit the communist slogan,

'Workers of the world unite!' That is, 'Rockers of the world unite!'...Above all, [rock

represented] a repudiation of borders. That was the real function of the music, for even when

you didn't understand the lyrics, you still enjoyed the music. And that linked us [as

Mexicans] to England, Spain, Latin America. Yes, that's the function I see in the music."17

16
Zolov, 207.
17
Zolov, 207.

347
 Other participants supported Cruz's position. Humberto Rubalcaba, a member of the

rock band Tinta Blanca, wrote that he and others went to Avándaro, "to see what we are like

and how we act.... We went to get to know ourselves better, to know ourselves as being a

part of the others, as well as [to support] the others.... [At Avándaro], [w]e mutually

discovered that we exist." As in the United States, rock generated a kind of "invisible

republic" in which participants explored issues of freedom, sameness, and difference. An

American who attended the festival articulated this sense of rock's civic capacities to

generate a transformed public sphere that created surreptitious communicative links. "I

remember the next day or so wandering around Mexico City, flashing the peace sign at

others who were coated in mud," this participant told Eric Zolov. "'Avan-daró' you said, like

it was a secret signal that you had been there. Like it was something really important.

Somehow, because of the mud, you could just tell who had been there."18

The appropriation of national flags at Avándaro confirms this sense of civic

reimagining that the festival entailed. Both Mexican and United States flags were pervasive

at Avándaro. In a film of the concert, participants replaced the eagle and serpent at the center

of Mexico's flag with a peace symbol (see figure 4.2). In another sequence from the concert

film, participants danced around and with an American flag (see figure 4.3). Zolov explains

that, "Reinventions of one's national flag and the discovery of new symbolic value through

such reappropriation were common in countercultural movements worldwide. For example,

incorporating the flag as an article of clothing became a statement of freedom from the state

or the official meanings assigned to the flag (such as militarism in the United States)."19

18
Zolov, 207, 206.
19
Zolov, 207-208.

348
 Figure 4.2. The Mexican flag's eagle and serpent replaced by a peace symbol, Avándaro
Rock Festival, Mexico, 1971 (photograph: film still from Concierto de Avándaro (Dir.
Candiani, 1971), Filmoteca de la UNAM)

The powerful expressions of a nascent new identity and collectivity at Avándaro did

not last in Mexico. Viewed by conservatives as a possible political tool of revolutionaries,

and by revolutionary intellectuals as an imperialist agent from the United States, rock wound

up on the margins of Mexican society. The music only resurfaced later in the 1970s as the

punk rock in the lower-middle class and poor barrios of Mexico City.20 Though the memory

of Avándaro was suppressed in Mexico, the festival finds resonances with the experience of

rock in other nations around the world. In the newly decolonized nations of West Africa, for

instance, one discovers a similar use of rock music by a young generation balancing its

newfound national identity with the possibilities of a place in a modern, global network of

musical and countercultural participation.

20
See Zolov, 249-259.

349
 Figure 4.3. Dancing with the American flag, reframing imperial American mass culture at
Avándaro (photograph: film still from Concierto de Avándaro (Dir. Candiani, 1971),
Filmoteca de la UNAM)

Avándaro was not the only location were youth around the world staged their own

Woodstock rock festivals. When Manthia Diawara's friend Addy returned from Switzerland

to Mali with an album by the American rock supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, in

the early 1970s, he and his friends began to organize a Woodstock in Bamako, the capital of

Mali. Looking over Malick Sidibé's famous photographs of Malians from the 1960s in an

essay he wrote some thirty years later, Diawara noticed that the new nationalist government

of Mali, which won its independence from France in 1960, could not grasp the adoption of

imperialist music from the United States by its youth (see figure 4.4). "Malick Sidibé's

photographs enable us to revisit the youth culture of the 1960s and our teenage years in

Bamako," Diawara writes. "They show exactly how the young people in Bamako had

embraced rock and roll as a liberation movement, adopted the consumer habits of an

international youth culture, and developed a rebellious attitude toward all forms of

350
established authority. The black-and-white photographs reflect how far the youth in Bamako

had gone in their imitation of the worldview and dress style of popular music stars."21

As Diawara describes his teenage experiences in Mali, refracted through Sidibé's

photographs, he identifies a similar process to the kind of negotiations of identity and

collectivity that Zolov chronicles in Mexico. One noticeable difference, however, can be

found in the prominence of soul as well as rock music in the Malian context. Yet, Diawara

does not distinguish strongly between these two genres of American music. As in Vietnam,

soul and rock overlapped with each other without becoming indistinct. At times, the soul

music of James Brown and other African-American performers had strong salience as the

racialized sound of an international Black Power movement.

But, at other times, as Diawara remembers life in Bamako, soul and rock formed part

of the same international youth culture of rock, which provided a way for younger Malians

to break with their parental generation's insistence on establishing a national, anti-colonial

culture. To Diawara, "The photographs show that, in attempting to be like James Brown,

Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones," young music listeners in Bamako, "were

also revealing their impatience with the political teachings of the nationalist state and the

spirit of decolonization." Instead, "what the youth in Bamako wanted most in those days was

James Brown and the freedom and existential subjectivity that linked independence to the

universal youth movement of the 1960s."22

The photographs also hint at an invisible sonic circuit that linked Malians to a global

21
Manthia Diawara, "The 1960s in Bamako: Malick Sidibé and James Brown," in Everything But the
Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, ed. Greg Tate (New York: Harlem Moon, 2003),
165.
22
Diawara, 166.

351
public of responders to rock. Not only does Sidibé's work show Diawara how, "the desires of

youth are inscribed in most of the photos as a determined break with tradition," but the

photographs also illuminate how, "the youth had quickly internalized African culture,

collapsed the walls of binary opposition between colonizer and colonized, and made

connections beyond national frontiers with the Diaspora and international youth

movements." Bamako's students named their informal school clubs or Grins, after rock

groups. Grins were named the Rockers, the Temptations, the Rolling Stones, the Soul

Brothers, and the Beatles. These clubs became civic entities informed by mass culture. They

were semi-secret associational spaces for listening to records, dancing, tuning in shortwave

radio, and talking about popular culture -- all done under the eyes of Jimi Hendrix, the

Beatles, and James Brown, whose posters hung on the walls.23

What did Bamako's youth do in these associational spaces that linked them to a larger

global civitas? Diawara uses Bourdieu's concept of the habitus to describe how Bamako's

attendees at the Grins developed their sense of social being.24 These young Malians,

"acquired their habitus by carefully watching images of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, James

Dean, Angela Davis, Aretha Franklin, and Mick Jagger in glossy magazines and movies and

on album covers." The youth also took advantage of the freeing spaces of civil society that

arose in the Grins. They did not merely imitate Western stars, but also took stock of their

own lives in relation to the celebrities of music, movie, and radio. As Diawara explains,

23
Diawara, 166, 173.
24
See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Language and Symbolic
Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamsom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991).

352
"They debated the rock stars' stances against the war in Vietnam, racial discrimination in

America, the peace movement associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma

Gandhi, and Muhammad Ali as the world's heavyweight boxing champion."25

Figure 4.4. Malick Sidibé, Fou de disque, 1973 (courtesy: www.epo.de)

As with their peers in Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere, the rockers of Bamako sought

to balance the possibilities of a global youth culture, especially a Diasporic Pan-Africanism,

against their new national identity as Malians. James Brown figured prominently in the civic

negotiations that went on in the Grins. Certain dancers even posed for Sibidé with James

Brown's album Live at the Apollo. According to Diawara, "James Brown's music and other

rock and roll sounds of the sixties were...prefiguring the secular language that the youth of

25
Diawara, 186, 174.

353
Bamako was adapting as their new habitus and as expression of their independence." To

Diawara, "That the theory of decolonization could not recognize this at the time as anything

but mimicry and assimilation is an indication of its failure to grasp the full complexity of the

energies unleashed by independence."26

Instead, he claims, we need to grasp what young listeners in Mali were struggling

toward in the late 1960s and into the 1970s in Mali. They were engaged in, "a transformation

of the meaning of the decolonization movements of the 1960s into a rock and roll

revolution." This was a movement toward a global civic network of rock music that was

most often about the pleasures of experiencing modern conceptions of leisure. But it was not

only that. At times, it was a way of affirming transnational commitments to justice. Just as in

Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere, it even became a political act in the local and national setting

of Mali. As Diawara points out, "Not only did the youth in Bamako organize their own

Woodstock to listen to music in a public sphere and protest against apartheid in South

Africa, Ian Smith's regime in Rhodesia, and the imprisonment of George Jackson and

Hurricane Carter in the United States, but they also continued to resist the military

dictatorship in Mali until its overthrow by a mass movement in 1992."27

This interaction between American countercultural music such as rock and soul and

African political resistance was not restricted to Mali. In Nigeria, for instance, the musician

Fela Ransome-Kuti forged a style that merged James Brown's soul with colorations of

psychedelic rock, the West African popular music known as highlife, and his own

understandings of Yoruban musical traditions. Advocating a Pan-Africanism, Fela developed

26
Diawara, 166, 184, 171.
27
Diawara, 176, 174.

354
a sound that challenged the increasingly authoritarian and corrupt governments of his nation.

As Sola Olorunyomi argues in Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent, Fela's music took

on crucial political significance as the public sphere shrank in the face of coercive state

power in Nigeria.

Fela became a "bard of the public sphere," Olorunyomi explains, calling out citizens

of Nigeria to question the political and social order in which they lived through music. He

even went so far as to declare his home compound in Nigeria an independent republic from

the state of Nigeria, calling it the Kalakuta Republic. While formative experiences in Los

Angeles and London during the 1960s shaped Fela's music, he ultimately traveled away from

the global civics of rock to a position of Pan-African political and cultural essentialism.

Nonetheless, that Fela too participated in the nexus of countercultural music such as rock

and soul as it circulated through the channels of American mass culture points to the reach of

this dispersed network of civic energy.28

The transformed public sphere not only penetrated the so-called "Third World," but it

even reached countries behind the Iron Curtain. As in the newly decolonized countries of

South America and Africa, the state dominated social life in the nations of the Soviet Bloc.

Civil society -- that space of associational life between the marketplace and the government -

- was quite weak in nations such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Baltic

States. Rock music, when it circulated to the Warsaw Pact countries on American

propaganda radio or through records and reel-to-reel tapes smuggled across the border or

even, at times, through state-sanctioned channels, was not associated with American mass

28
Sola Olorunyomi, Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,
2003), 33-80.

355
culture so much as with the freedom of civil society outside the reach of state control.

Figure 4.5. A poster for one of Prague's late 1960s psychedelic bands, The Primitives
(courtesy: Paul Wilson)

Illegal rock clubs, hippie fashion styles, long hair, drug use, veiled references to

politics in lyrics -- these all formed efforts not to overthrow communist governments, but

rather to create a hidden civic realm of expression and interaction. As Goran Bregovic,

leader of the Sarajevo rock group White Button, told the historian Sabrina Petra Ramet in

1989, "Rock 'n' roll in communist countries has much more importance than rock 'n' roll in

the West. We can't have any alternative parties or any alternative organized politics. So there

are not too many places where you can gather large groups of people and communicate ideas

that are not official." For Bregovic, rock music helped generate two dimensions of civic life

that it also fostered in the West: it assembled participants together and it circulated ideas for

further inquiry and engagement. In doing so, Bregovic claims, "Rock 'n' roll is one of the

356
most important vehicles for helping people in communist countries to think in a different

way."29

Just as with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil's eventual confrontation with the

authoritarian regime of Brazil, responders to rock music in the Soviet Bloc could, at times,

run headlong into state repression. Rock's circulating sounds did play a role in outright

political resistance. For instance, according to journalist Ladislav Mnacko, in

Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring movement of 1968, hippies were, "in the forefront of the

passive resistance to the flood of steel" when Soviet tanks rolled in to control the reforms of

Czech leader Alexander Dubcek.30 Later in the 1970s, after this crackdown, an underground

culture of concerts by bands influenced by the American rock of the Velvet Underground,

Frank Zappa, and the Fugs continued. When members of the group the Plastic People of the

Universe were arrested, dissident writer (and later president) Vaclav Havel helped formed

the organization Charter 77, which emerged from the network of listeners who supported the

arrested rock musicians.31 Rock served as a resource for outright political activism through

the way that Czechs utilized the music. They did not draw upon rock as a political tool, but

rather as a sonic creator of associational spaces that continually slipped from the reach of

state power.

29
Sabrina Petra Ramet, "Rock: The Music of Revolution (and Political Conformity)," in Rocking the
State, Rock Music and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia, ed. Sabrina Petra Ramet (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1994), 5.
30
Timothy W. Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 78.
31
For an overview of rock's relationship to the dissident movement Charter 77, see Tomás Pospisil,
"Making Music as a Political Act: Or how the Velvet Underground Influenced the Velvet Revolution,"
http://angam.ang.univie.ac.at/EAASworkshop/pospisil.htm.

357
 Figure 4.6. The Plastic People of the Universe perform at Prague's F-Club, 1969 (courtesy:
Paul Wilson)

This slippery circulation of rock music even made its way to the Soviet Union itself.

After the publication of an article about hippie culture in 1968, Soviet youth adopted many

of the styles and practices of Western hippies. They grew their hair long, adopted hippie

fashion styles, and experimented with drugs. The hippi as they were called, gathered in

Moscow at the Hippodrome near Moscow University, and at the Nevsky Prospekt near the

Kazan Cathedral in Leningrad (Petersburg). In the summer, hippi traveled to rural areas of

the Soviet Union, where they, "bartered clothing, records, and other accoutrements of

Western-style youth culture." As Timothy Ryback explains in Rock Around the Bloc, "The

Soviet system, equipped to combat political dissent and ideological deviation, offered few

mechanisms for confronting the emerging Soviet hippie culture." Local level militias and the

druzhinniki (volunteer police) sometimes dragged in male hippi and cut their hair off, but

other than strong penalties for drug use, the rock culture of Soviet youth circulated as a semi-

358
secret civics rather than a fully-developed political movement.32

Long after the heyday of the 1960s counterculture passed in the United States and

Western Europe, it continued in the Soviet Union. "Thousands of hippi continued to litter

Soviet society long after their counterparts in the West had disappeared," Ryback notes. "As

late as 1978, Andrea Lee, an American living in Leningrad, reported that hundreds of Soviet

hippi still gathered to share experiences and wander the length and breadth of the Soviet

Union." As she wrote in her book Russian Journal, "It was strange for me to see and hear all

around me vestiges of the American drug culture of a decade ago -- the psychedelic

drawings, the fantastic clothes, Grace Slick wailing on a tape player."33

Grace Slick's "wail on a tape player," consigned to the memory chambers of nostalgia

in the United States by 1978, continued to echo around the world as a circulator of civic

possibilities in the face of state power. First resonating in the San Francisco "sound that is

also a scene" in the 1960s, when Slick performed with Jefferson Airplane, it now -- many

dubbed copies later -- kept civil society alive in the Soviet Union. What John Ehrenberg

calls the "intermediate zone" of civil society lived on in that recorded cry. Channeled

through the corporate consumer processes of American mass culture, broadcast on radio

frequencies, recorded surreptitiously on tape players and smuggled into diverse local

situations, rock allowed its listeners to enliven civic energies in dispersed environments.

John Ehrenberg posits that Eastern Europeans (we might add rock's listeners in

"Third World" nations such as Brazil, Mexico, Mali, and Nigeria as well) developed a theory

of the public sphere, "that would be independent of central authority." This alternative
32
Ryback, 111-113.
33
Ryback, 113. Andrea Lee, Russian Journal (New York: Random House, 1981), 96.

359
domain to state power, which rock music played a crucial role in sustaining, became a site in

which participants could investigate issues of freedom, possibilities for individual identity,

arrangements of collectivity, and dilemmas of democratic justice. But, Ehrenberg counters

that because entities such as rock music circulated through commodity capitalism, they left

former socialist and underdeveloped nations vulnerable to colonization by market relations.

They could not fend off the "danger that unrestrained market relations pose to intermediate

formations."34 The civics of rock, following Ehrenberg, might have been able to oppose state

power, but the music lacked effective means to resist capitalism.

The "corporatization" of rock in the 1970s certainly suggests that this is the case.35

However, we should not forget that participants in the transformed public sphere of the

counterculture were already keenly aware of precisely the conundrum that Ehrenberg

described. They realized that they were embedded within market forces. However, responses

to rock suggest that even within highly developed modes of commodity capitalism and mass

culture, aesthetic experiences possess the capacity for engendering the civil sphere.

Responses to rock kept alive a civics that did not disappear because of the character of the

commodity, indicating that popular music need not only serve as a decoy for capitalist

expansion. The space in which a non-coercive freedom might somehow be realized through

the processes of individual and collective inquiry survived. The associational spirit of civics

continued to resonate in a transformed public sphere.

34
John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University
Press, 1999), 238.
35
See Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-On
Collision of Rock and Commerce (New York: Times Books, 1997); Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, Rock
'n' Roll Is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977); and R.
Serge Denisoff, Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1975).

360
 Flowing around the world, moving within unpredictable channels, rock circulated an

ethos of immanent critique and inquiry. Though manipulated and bullied by state power,

eroded by capitalist incursions, and undermined by authoritarian family relations, the civics

of rock still whispered in the music's roar. Rock intimated that self and collective liberation

could emerge through the critical engagement of aesthetic experience. Through rock music

and its atmosphere of responses, listeners were able to examine underlying assumptions and

logics. The music allowed them to investigate what Habermas calls the "questions

concerning the grammar of forms of life."36 Listeners sought to distinguish the good from the

bad, the possible from the impossible, the meaningful from the nonsensical, the pleasurable

from the deadly. Asking questions, trying to speak new languages of living, seeking to

develop new codes for individual and collective existence, participants in rock music and the

counterculture did not change the world, but they did leave the imprint of their question

marks for others to notice and follow.

Today, even as "Woodstock Nation" fades from memory into history, we remain

static in the currents of a hegemonic American mass culture.37 But, we should not forget

that, under certain conditions, static interferes with the signals. Like Caetano Veloso in his

1968 performance, plastic uniforms now cover our bodies more than ever. Electrical cords

and thick chains dangle around our necks. Yet, like Veloso, we still have our animal teeth.

The possibility of a democratic, humanistic, and just civic order remains. And aesthetic

experience can still help illuminate its pathways, entrances, blockages, and pitfalls. Rockers

of the world, freedom beckons -- you have nothing left to lose.

36
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two - Lifeworld and System: A
Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (1981; trans., Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 392.
37
Abbie Hoffman, Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album (New York: Vintage, 1969).

361
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