“Whoopee! We’re all gonna die!”
Rock ’n’ Roll Goes to Vietnam
“WHAT’S ALMOST UNFATHOMABLE is the smallness of it,” says Country Joe McDonald, sitting in his living room in Berkeley, California. “It was just another song. It wasn’t much of anything.” He is talking about the September 1965 release of what would become his signature tune, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag.” When a few dozen copies of the record first appeared on the counter of a Berkeley bookshop, U.S. troops had officially been in Vietnam for just six months. The death toll had not yet passed one thousand, three in five Americans polled supported the intervention, and President Johnson’s approval rating was sky high. But by August 1969, when “Fixin’ to-Die” became one of the seminal moments of the Woodstock festival and the most famous antiwar song in the country, over forty thousand U.S. service personnel had died, public support for the war had halved, Johnson was gone, and America was a very different place.
It is an axiom of baby boomer mythology that rock artists were in the vanguard of the antiwar movement, but by the strictest measure, musical opposition to the war was feeble, tentative, and diffuse: it’s depressing to note that the biggest-selling Vietnam-themed hit of the era was Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler’s flag-waving “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” “There have always been a few hold-outs left over from the folk music period,” reflected Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau in January 1969, “but despite the mass media’s continually mistaken references to rock and roll as ‘protest music,’ rock musicians have done remarkably little protesting.”
But Vietnam was not just a war: it was the epicenter of the national conversation during the second half of the 1960s, an unparalleled magnet for dissent. To the ideologues of the New Left, it epitomized the evils of imperialism, the failure of liberalism, and the power of guerrilla resistance. To black radicals, it was yet another manifestation of establishment racism. To less doctrinaire young Americans, it embodied all the sins of their elders—the same people who told you to cut your hair, or threatened to jail you for smoking a joint, also wanted to ship you off to the jungle to die. It undid Johnson’s Great Society, wrecked his presidency, radicalized campuses, caused uproar in the streets, and divided the country more than at any time since the Civil War.
Ed Sanders of the avant-garde folk-rock group the Fugs compared making music during the Vietnam era to “that Dada poetry reading that Tristan Tzara gave in 1922 in Paris, with an alarm clock constantly ringing during the reading. The war was THE alarm clock of the late 1960s.”*
THE FIRST SONGWRITER TO SNIFF OUT inspiration in Indochina was Phil Ochs. As far back as October 1962, when the United States had only ten thousand military advisors stationed in South Vietnam, he published “Viet Nam” in Broadside. At that stage, Ochs was in a tiny minority of Americans who understood what their country was up to in Vietnam: propping up the corrupt and despotic South Vietnamese premier Ngo Dinh Diem and thwarting North Vietnamese dreams of reunification, for fear of other Asian countries falling like dominoes to the Communists.
After the increasingly despotic Diem was ousted and murdered in a Washington-endorsed military coup in late 1963, U.S. News & World Report still assured its readers that Vietnam was a “local war…Big war is not threatened.” But Diem’s replacement by even shabbier rulers meant that more direct action was called for. In August 1964, President Johnson used a wildly exaggerated naval skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin as a phony pretext for a dramatic escalation that was already in the cards. Despite annihilating Barry Goldwater in the November election by painting his opponent as a dangerous hawk, Johnson himself took a hard line on Vietnam. Following Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained bombing campaign over North Vietnam, the first U.S. ground troops set foot on Vietnamese soil on March 8, 1965, and thus the police action became a war.
The antiwar movement coalesced with impressive speed. Just six weeks later, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the first national demonstration in Washington, DC Recalled SDS member Todd Gitlin, “When we rolled into Washington I remember seeing great flocks of buses parked along the mall, scores of them…. I thought, we’re in business, we’re rolling.” The marchers numbered twenty-five thousand: roughly equal to the number of troops stationed in Vietnam. Entertainment came from Joan Baez, Judy Collins, the Freedom Singers, and Ochs, who ruffled a few feathers with the waspishly satirical “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” His second album, I Ain’t Marching Anymore, led with the pacifistic title track: “Call it peace or call it treason…but I ain’t marching anymore.” His efforts earned him a bulging file in the offices of the FBI. Around the time he chose to decorate the sleeve of a live album with eight poems by Mao Tse-tung and the question, “Is this the enemy?” he was officially classified as a “Security Matter.”
The likes of Ochs and Gitlin were very much ahead of the curve; most Americans backed the war, trusting in a speedy victory over the red menace. In private, however, Johnson was far from confident of success. When someone at the Saigon embassy talked about “light at the end of the tunnel,” the president barked: “Light at the end of the tunnel? Hell, we don’t even have a tunnel. We don’t even know where the tunnel is.”
WHEN JOE MCDONALD ARRIVED in Berkeley in the summer of 1965, it was the first time he had encountered like minds outside of his own home. Born in Washington, DC, and raised mostly in El Monte in southern California, he was used to feeling isolated in his beliefs. His mother, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, and his father, an Oklahoma farm boy, had both belonged to the Communist Party in the 1940s, an affiliation which had cost his father his job at the telephone company.
“I was twelve years old when my father lost his job. I grew up with Communist literature in the household, Woody Guthrie music, the People’s World newspaper,” says McDonald. He is a neat, serious man, a little remote at first, then increasingly animated. “We didn’t have many friends. Other progressive people didn’t come by the house. Occasionally we went to a Pete Seeger concert.”
At school, there was a whole aspect of Joe’s personality which he couldn’t share with his classmates—the part that fretted about racism and labor rights and the Holocaust. So his only outlet for these ideas was music: Guthrie and Seeger, of course, but also, unexpectedly, Gilbert and Sullivan. “They seem really lightweight these days but at the time they were feared by the establishment because they were satirical. They were political songwriters in a way.”
At the age of seventeen, McDonald joined the U.S. Navy for three years—so that “girls will really like me,” he explains with a shrugging smile. Returning home in 1962, he enrolled at college in Los Angeles, where he started writing songs, launched his own folk magazine, Et Tu, and joined some desgregation sit-ins. “We had fun. Me and my friends used to go to Pershing Square and play Woody Guthrie songs for the winos and the bums.”
Attracted by the prospect of playing on local radio station KPFA, he moved to Berkeley in 1965. “It was full of a lot of converted radicals and progressives. Most of them were solid, middle-class university people who discovered labor injustice, racial injustice, economic theory and became zealots. It was quite fun for me because I’d never encountered people like that before—a peer group who liked to say the word imperialism and stuff like that.”
The conflict in Vietnam was not yet dinner-table conversation across the fifty states, but if you were young in Berkeley in 1965, then the subject was hard to avoid. The University of California was already the most radical campus in the nation, the crucible of student activism. The previous December, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, led by a twenty-year-old New Yorker and Mississippi Freedom Summer veteran called Mario Savio, had occupied the university’s Sproul Hall to protest a ban on campus activism. The takeover ended with the arrest of around eight hundred students, the biggest such mass arrest in U.S. history, and made a national star of Savio, who called for students to throw their bodies on the gears of “the machine” until it was “prevented from working at all.”*
The ban was lifted in January 1965, designating the steps of Sproul Hall a site for political discussion. In May, thirty-five thousand people attended an epic antiwar protest, during which a coalition of activists led by twenty-six-year-old Berkeley dropout Jerry Rubin founded the Vietnam Day Committee. The VDC included two other figures who would, like Rubin, become national celebrities: Abbie Hoffman, a twenty-eight-year-old Berkeley graduate and SNCC member, and Stew Albert, a twenty-five-year-old welfare worker from New York. The demonstration’s musical director was Phil Ochs.
IN SEPTEMBER, the writer and director Nina Serrano asked Joe McDonald to write some music for Changeover, a play about Vietnam. Joe spent three days crafting a poignant lament called “Who Am I?” After finishing it, he kept strumming his guitar and the idea for “Fixin’-to-Die” popped into his head. Half an hour later, the song was finished. “I had to get it out,” he says. “I put it together and thought, this is cute.”
No other Vietnam song captures the confusion and gallows humor of the average soldier’s experience quite like this. Small wonder, as McDonald told historian Christian Appy, that many demonstrators saw it as “facetious and sacrilegious.” It possesses a reckless, almost amoral fatalism quite apart from any other antiwar composition. “It’s almost a union labor song,” he says. “The person singing the song is not apologizing for anything, he’s not saying anything about world peace, he’s not saying he feels bad about killing people. It’s sarcastic about killing people. And this was a time when people in the peace movement were blaming soldiers for the war.”*
Shortly after finishing “Fixin’-to-Die,” McDonald realized that he and his fellow editors of the small folk magazine Rag Baby were short of copy for the next issue and hit upon a solution: a “Talking Issue,” consisting of a seven-inch vinyl EP. With a fellow Berkeley folk musician, Barry Melton, he recorded the song in a jug-band style, along with another satirical new composition, “Superbird”: “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a man insane / It’s my President LBJ.” But he didn’t yet have a band name. Rag Baby colleague Ed Denson suggested Country Mao and the Fish, in reference to Mao’s famous statement that “revolutionaries move among the people like the fish through the sea.” McDonald thought that was stupid, but agreed to Denson’s second suggestion: not everyone would realize that “Country Joe” referred to Stalin.
As the Fish swapped acoustic instruments for electric ones and slowly mutated into a psychedelic folk-rock band, “Fixin’-to-Die” was by no means the highlight of their live shows—the real acid heads preferred spacier numbers like “Flying High”—but it became a fixture at local rallies and sit-ins. In October, the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam galvanized one hundred thousand protesters in forty cities across the country. In Berkeley, when demonstrators marched past Country Joe’s apartment, McDonald planted his speakers in the window and blasted the song into the street.
But “Fixin’-to-Die” would take a long time to permeate U.S. culture. Meanwhile, the biggest combat-themed hit of the Vietnam era was just around the corner, and it came from the last place that anyone expected.
TIME DESCRIBED TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler as “probably the closest-cropped, ruggedest (Black Belt in judo), and most musically illiterate performer on the pop charts.” A former Special Forces Green Beret who had been wounded by a Viet Cong punji stake, he returned home and sent his song, inspired by Robin Moore’s recent nonfiction best seller The Green Berets, to a music publisher. Released in January 1966, “The Ballad of the Green Berets” became RCA’s fastest-selling single since Elvis’ heyday, shifting two million copies in its first three months and ending up the biggest hit of the year. Life observed, “The folk-rock of anti-Vietnam-war ballads has been drowned out by a best-selling patriotic blood-churner.” It even inspired its own answer record—“Dawn of Correction” in reverse—in the form of the Beach Bums’ “The Ballad of the Yellow Beret,” the hero of which was a draft dodger. Bizarrely, Sadler was booked to play Boston’s Winterfest in March, on the same bill as Phil Ochs and Tom Paxton. One can only imagine the frosty response from the folk faithful.†
Sadler’s success was no fluke. As 1965 bled into 1966, the country charts featured Johnny Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” (about the need to “save freedom now, at any cost”) and “Keep the Flag Flying,” and Dave Dudley’s “What We’re Fighting For,” all written by Tom T. Hall to reassure scared and homesick soldiers that right was on their side. They were quickly followed by Loretta Lynn’s “Dear Uncle Sam,” Stonewall Jackson’s “The Minute Men (Are Turning in Their Graves),” Pat Boone’s venomously sarcastic “Wish You Were Here, Buddy,” and Nashville DJ Allen Peltier’s thick slice of patriotic ham, “Day of Decision.” Only Kris Kristofferson, who was recently out of the army himself, transcended bellicose sentimentality with his song for Dave Dudley, “Viet Nam Blues,” a deft, soldier’s-eye view of an encounter with a Ho Chi Minh–supporting protester: “I don’t like dyin’ either but man I ain’t gonna crawl.”‡
Kristofferson represented the rational wing of prowar sentiment: the belief, held by many soldiers, that it was a just conflict to save the South Vietnamese from Communist oppression. The far more poisonous, Red Scare tendency was epitomized by cartoonist Al Capp, creator of Lil’ Abner. His new character, Joanie Phoanie, was a rich hypocrite who wrote folk songs to foment revolt. In one strip she sang: “A Molotov cocktail or two / Will blow up the boys in blue.” Joan Baez demanded an apology. One was not forthcoming.
THE NATURE OF THE ANTIWAR MOVEMENT changed dramatically in February 1966, when the Selective Service System extended conscription to the campuses, decreeing that students with poor grades could now be inducted. The backlash produced the era’s first widespread student unrest and the birth of organized draft resistance in the form of campus “We Won’t Go” groups. Throughout 1966, the antiwar cause expanded far beyond its original kernel of clued-up activists. Four middle-class housewives, dubbed the “napalm ladies,” were arrested for blocking trucks laden with napalm in California; a trio of soldiers, the Fort Hood Three, were jailed for refusing to take part in “a war of extermination” Muhammad Ali rejected his draft notice and was promptly cast into the sporting wilderness.* These were not the usual suspects.
The dams broke in April 1967. At the beginning of the month, Martin Luther King, diplomatically mute for so long, admitted that “a time comes when silence is betrayal” and turned his rhetorical firepower on a government which was “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” Less than two weeks later, the Sheep Meadow in New York’s Central Park hosted a strikingly diverse demonstration in response to yet another expansion of the draft; it featured not just students, hippies, and Black Power advocates but housewives, businessmen, nuns, priests, and war veterans. Almost two hundred young men took part in the country’s first mass burning of draft cards. The rally, and a parallel event in San Francisco, both passed off peacefully, inspiring both the formation of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and plans for a “Vietnam Summer” of grassroots protest. Wrote Ed Sanders of the Fugs: “1967! Yes. It saw a swelling of hope in America.”
Sanders was a fascinating character who had been arrested in 1961 for attempting to disrupt the launch of a Polaris nuclear submarine and founded a Greenwich Village journal called Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts. The Fugs’ 1965 debut album had been drolly titled The Village Fugs: Ballads and Songs of Contemporary Protest, Points of View, and General Dissatisfaction. After being featured on the cover of Life, Sanders told The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson that he would only agree to appear if he could perform his blackly sarcastic “Kill for Peace” (1966): “The only gook an American can trust / Is a gook that’s got his yellow head bust.” The invitation was swiftly withdrawn.
This period of burgeoning protest emboldened songwriters. “The songs are sometimes satiric, sometimes sorrowful and sometimes indignant, but the tone is always negative,” reported the New York Times in October 1967. “Nobody ‘jabs’ at the administration these days; it’s more like a bomb for a bomb.” The songs came in many forms. Counterculture humor coursed through Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” (1967), an eighteen-minute quasi-autobiographical talking blues about being deemed unfit for the draft because of a conviction for littering, and Simon and Garfunkel’s “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission)” (1966), which included digs at the secretary of defense and Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler. But Simon and Garfunkel concluded that album on a somber note. “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” overlaid the Christmas carol with recent headlines, creating an eerie power that transcended the easy irony of the conceit. Solemn to a fault was Joan Baez’s “Saigon Bride,” with lyrics by Nina Duschek. Pete Seeger entered the fray with the compassionate “Bring Them Home” and the satirical parable “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” Seeger became obsessed with the war, attending marches, playing benefits, and anguishing over the news. He was devastated when radio stations shunned “Big Muddy.”
Some antiwar comments came from unexpected quarters. Sunshine-pop group the Association backed their biggest hit, “Never My Love,” with “Requiem for the Masses,” a plea for peace so florid that some of the lyrics were in Latin, while manufactured pop group the Monkees released “Last Train to Clarksville,” a veiled account of a draftee who wails, “I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.” “We couldn’t be too direct with the Monkees,” explained cowriter Bobby Hart. “We couldn’t really make a protest song out of it. We kind of snuck it in subtly.”
Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield wrote “For What It’s Worth” (1967) ostensibly about an event on his own doorstep: a battle between police and youths on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood after the imposition of a draconian curfew. But, he once explained, “It was really four different things intertwined, including the war.” Musically, it’s a stroke of genius. As protest, it’s pretty weak sauce, but that very vagueness (“There’s something happening here / What it is ain’t exactly clear”) allowed it to resonate far and wide. In the late 1960s, few developments were “exactly clear,” least of all Vietnam.
THE WAR’S MOST TIRELESS MUSICAL CRITIC remained Phil Ochs. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles in May 1967, he heard about plans for a massive demonstration—“A Human Be-In”—to take place in Cheviot Hills Park in the west of the city, and thence outside a fund-raiser for President Johnson at the Century Plaza Hotel. He was intrigued both by Allen Ginsberg’s goofy idea, expressed in the poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” that war was a semantic construct and could therefore be written out of existence, and the absurdist strategies favored by the likes of Abbie Hoffman. Putting them together, he came up with the “War Is Over” concept. He would declare the war over, celebrate this imagined armistice at Cheviot Hills Park and march to Century Plaza to congratulate the president on his achievement, holding up signs like “Johnson in ’68—the Peace President.”
Ochs agreed that it was “silly” but no sillier than the “suicidal farce” of the war itself. He scribbled down a manifesto for the rally and wrote a song for the occasion, “The War Is Over.” His hatred for military pageantry collided with compassion for “one-legged veterans” in a song that was somehow both caustic and humane. He called on “young Americans to face the responsibilities of an old America gone mad.”
June 23 came and the Human Be-In was met with both a restraining order and 1,300 members of the LAPD. Ochs barely had time to sing “The War Is Over” from a flatbed truck before the police moved in on the demonstrators, nightsticks swinging. Such brutality against the antiwar movement was unprecedented, and Ochs, who had woken up with high hopes for his playful street theater, was horrified. “Phil thought it was the beginning of something really big and really bad,” his friend Ron Cobb told Ochs’ biographer, Michael Schumacher. “It was like a movie to him, a Fellini movie.”
Ochs, however, clung to his “War Is Over” idea. Rallies were springing up across the country. In October, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, aka “the Mobe,” organized a nationwide Stop the Draft Week, bringing in the VDC’s Jerry Rubin from Berkeley to help with the organization. Rubin arrived at the first meeting fully hippified, with a plan (cooked up by Hoffman) to “exorcise” the Pentagon. Hoffman applied to the Pentagon for permission to levitate the building three hundred feet and pretended to have invented a new sprayable drug called Lace, which caused erotomania. This new prankish spirit was not to everyone’s taste. “Black people are not going to go anywhere to levitate the Pentagon, okay,” said the Mobe’s Gwen Patton. “We don’t find that cute.”
On October 15, around 150,000 marchers descended on Washington, DC, and about a third of that number, including Ochs, crossed the Potomac River towards the Pentagon. Surrounded by people chanting mantras and banging drums, the Fugs stood on a flatbed truck and ordered “the demons of the Pentagon to rid themselves of the cancerous tumors of the war generals.” Afterwards, Berkeley activist “Super Joel” Tornabene was photographed sliding a flower into a soldier’s gun barrel—an iconic image of the peace movement. The press, however, was more concerned with the violent clashes that went on late into the night. Compared to the triumphs of April, this new combination of mischief and violence did not sit well with many activists. But Ochs admired Hoffman and Rubin’s talent for witty, eye-catching political showmanship. They shared Allen Ginsberg’s belief that “national politics was theater on a vast scale, with scripts, timing, sound systems. Whose theater would attract the most customers, whose was a theater of ideas that could be gotten across?”*
Ochs promoted his new rally, held in New York’s Washington Square Park on November 25, as “an attack of mental disobedience on an obediently insane society.” It was a joyous success. Ochs, resplendent in replica Civil War uniform, sang “The War Is Over” and led two thousand people through downtown Manhattan in a protest that seemed more like a carnival. Rally members told passersby, “Did you hear? The war is over!” They hugged and kissed like it was VJ Day. All thoughts now turned to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the following August.
IN THE INTERVENING MONTHS, however, America, and the world, changed in ways that would once have seemed unimaginable. One seismic incident followed another with uncanny velocity. Hope seesawed with despair. Nobody, from the president of the United States down, seemed able to control events. It was all they could do just to keep up with them.
For the antiwar movement, the first major turning point came on January 30, 1968, when North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong guerrillas marked the Vietnamese New Year, known as Tet, by launching a concerted attack on dozens of towns and cities in South Vietnam. One small cadre of guerrillas even managed to breach the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon. By the time the attackers were repelled, they had killed just eight Americans but inflicted incalculable damage on the national psyche. Back in the States, TV viewers saw U.S. troops ducking for cover, or lying dead on the ground, right at the heart of what should have been the safest haven in Vietnam.
It was the same story across the country. The Tet Offensive failed to secure a single military objective, but scored a major propaganda coup. At the end of February, venerable CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite editorialized live from Khe Sanh province and told nine million viewers that “to say we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, though unsatisfactory conclusion.” President Johnson was shaken. The man saying the war was unwinnable was no draft-card-burning hippie but a national institution.
The president’s reelection campaign was already under threat from a grassroots Dump Johnson movement. On March 12, it hit a wall in the shape of Eugene McCarthy, the drily intellectual Minnesota senator who was standing on a pro-peace platform and whose many hippie supporters cut their hair and spruced up their outfits under the slogan “Get clean for Gene.” In the bellwether Democratic primary in New Hampshire, Johnson beat his challenger by a mere 230 votes: a victory so narrow that it was tantamount to defeat for the incumbent. Four days later, Bobby Kennedy ended months of speculation by agreeing to join the race. Johnson’s press secretary George Reedy had a scheme to woo the youth vote—“Organize one of those electric guitar ‘musical’ groups to travel around to meetings”—but the president’s approval rating was down to 35 percent and no rock band could change that. On March 30, he announced to the nation that he was withdrawing from the race. He also declared a partial halt in bombing North Vietnam and the appointment of a new peace negotiator, Averell Harriman.
To the antiwar movement, this seemed too good to be true. “When Johnson read his withdrawal statement, I did a backward somersault from a sitting position,” remembered Tom Hayden. Hayden, a former SDS president and prominent activist, had been present in Lake Villa, Illinois, the previous weekend, at a meeting convened by the Mobe to discuss plans for Chicago. Among the two hundred activists present had been Rubin, Hoffman, and Mobe leader David Dellinger: practically a Who’s Who of the New Left.
Negotiations were fraught. Moderate voices feared that the event would spoil the electoral chances of McCarthy and Kennedy and were suspicious of Rubin and Hoffman’s new Youth International Party (YIPPIE!), which planned a “Festival of Life” to counteract the “Convention of Death.” Upon hearing Rubin claim, “Radicalization involves smoking dope in the park and fighting the pigs in the street,” SDS member Greg Calvert muttered, “You’re crazy. You’re absolutely insane.”
Hayden also found his authority challenged from the far left. Having come of age during the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, he was now twenty-nine, too old for the draft, and suspect to a younger, angrier generation of campus radicals. Chief among them was Mark Rudd, a twenty-year-old SDS member from New Jersey, who had recently returned to Columbia University from a trip to Cuba with dreams of becoming an American Che Guevara and who led a week-long occupation of campus buildings. Hayden found him “committed to revolutionary destruction, sarcastic and smugly dogmatic,” with “an embryo of fanaticism.”
Hayden and Rudd’s mutual antipathy was one emblem of division in the New Left coalition. Another was a public debate between Phil Ochs and Jerry Rubin. Ochs wanted his next album to be “a comment on the spiritual decline of America,” with end-of-an-empire songs such as “The Harder They Fall” and “When in Rome,” but he still believed in the process, playing benefits for McCarthy and closely following Kennedy’s fortunes. To Ochs, America was “a beautiful shipwreck” which could still be salvaged. To Rubin, however, it was “the Death Society,” which needed to be dismantled. “The battle in America is not between Johnson and Kennedy, or Democrats and Republicans,” he declared, “but between children and the machine.”*
Country Joe McDonald was no fan of Rubin’s rhetoric. He had been invited to a meeting at New York’s Chelsea Hotel to discuss the musical program for Chicago—a more pragmatic alternative to Rubin’s original dream lineup of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan—and had not been impressed. “I didn’t like them,” he says flatly. “I thought they were dangerous. They didn’t seem to have an appreciation of the seriousness of what they were doing. I was thinking about the Haymarket riots in Chicago [in 1886] in which there was a union protest and the Chicago militia shot people dead in the streets. So I knew that the establishment in Chicago had the potential and the historical precedent of killing demonstrators. They wouldn’t think twice.”
IF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY had chosen a different venue for its convention, then catastrophe might have been averted. But Chicago was under the thumb of Mayor Richard J. Daley, a squat, ornery, old-fashioned boss politician. Prior to the convention he refused a demonstration permit, thwarting plans to march the several miles from Grant Park to the convention’s home at the International Amphitheatre, and blocked demonstrators from unfurling their sleeping bags in nearby Lincoln Park by imposing an 11 p.m. curfew. Thousands of would-be protesters, fearful of Daley’s brutish reputation, decided to stay home. Even the fledgling Rolling Stone magazine urged readers not to let these “left-over radical politicos…exploit the image and popularity of rock and roll.” Hoffman and Rubin predicted one hundred thousand people would turn up; only five thousand did.
Even on a reduced scale, though, it was a gathering of the New Left tribes: SDS organizers, McCarthy volunteers, hippie peaceniks, Yippie pranksters, Black Panthers, and wild-card provocateurs like the East Village Motherfuckers. Celebrities, too—most, including Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, and William Burroughs, in a journalistic capacity. This was a story big enough to bring out the literary big guns: an almost mythic clash of generations and ideologies. With twelve thousand policemen, and almost the same number of soldiers and National Guardsmen, standing by, violence was practically guaranteed.
The Mobe drew up a schedule involving nonviolent picketing, rallies, and a concert, while the Yippies advertised their own, more quixotic “Festival of Life.” More alarmist media outlets took some of the Yippies’ jokes, and several unfounded rumors, seriously: they planned to dose the water supply with LSD, poison the Amphitheatre’s air conditioning system, kidnap delegates. To Hoffman, whose whole raison d’être was manipulating the media, it might have been a lark, but it invited paranoid policing.
The omens were bad. On Wednesday, August 21, the TV news broadcast footage of Soviet tanks moving into Czechoslovakia, violently dashing the hopes of Prague Spring; Hoffman, always ready with a sound bite, nicknamed Daley’s city “Czechago.” That night, the police shot dead seventeen-year-old Dean Johnson in Lincoln Park, allegedly in self-defense.
Country Joe and the Fish, who had pulled out of the protest, arrived in Chicago on the weekend to perform two shows at the Electric Theater, and got a taste of the trouble to come. They returned to their hotel after the second concert on Saturday night, with Joe carrying a human skull, a gift from a fan. “I got into the elevator and this guy looked at me and said, ‘I fought in Vietnam for guys like you.’ And he hit me once in the face and broke my nose. I remember thinking, ‘Throw the skull at him!’ And then I thought, ‘No, it will break and I really like it.’”
McDonald left Chicago just in time. On Sunday afternoon, the Festival of Life began in vastly reduced circumstances, with Detroit’s MC5, the only band willing to play, performing a set Norman Mailer described as “a holocaust of decibels…the electro-mechanical climax of the age.” MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer experienced “a gnawing, creepy feeling, like an inescapable cloak of dread. We felt it coming and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it.” At midnight, the police filled the park with tear gas, then proceeded to club demonstrators and journalists alike.
It was the beginning of a nightly ritual. Inside the Amphitheatre, meanwhile, antiwar delegates were fighting a losing battle. Not only was Johnson’s vice president, the so-called Happy Warrior Hubert Humphrey, a shoo-in for the nomination, but he was conspiring with Southern Democrats to torpedo attempts to add a peace plank to his election platform.*
Tuesday was the president’s birthday, and the Mobe held an Unbirthday Party. Phil Ochs, who was in Chicago as a guest of the McCarthy campaign, sang to a crowd of bandaged, bruised, and embittered protesters. During “The War Is Over,” someone lit a draft card and held it in the air. Someone else did likewise. Soon there were hundreds of flames flickering in the air. “A candlelight chorus,” remembered Hayden, “everyone singing, crying, standing, raising fists, reaching delirium at the words, ‘Even treason might be worth a try / The country is too young to die.’” When Ochs left the stage, he told his friend Paul Krassner: “This is the highlight of my career.”
That night, the violence resumed, worse than before. The streets around Grant Park were a chaos of rocks, bottles, and nightsticks. By 3 a.m., the park was surrounded by gasmasked National Guardsmen, some of them driving jeeps bristling with barbed wire, nicknamed “Daley dozers.” Some protesters cried, “Chicago Is Prague!”
Inside the Hilton, where most of the delegates were billeted, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary heard a protester shout through a microphone, “Delegates, if you are with us, flash your lights!” He did so and heard a huge cheer. “I realized that the wall of this hotel looked like a Christmas tree,” he remembered. He and Mary Travers left the hotel to see rows of police and guardsmen training their rifles on the crowd. Someone thrust microphones in their direction and they began singing “If I Had a Hammer” and, somewhat bizarrely, “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”†
At midday on Wednesday, the convention resumed to the sound of Mahalia Jackson singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the spiritual “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” a prelude to the peace-plank debate that afternoon. Across town, a rally began in the Grant Park bandshell, featuring another performance by Ochs. After yet another flurry of police violence, Hayden urged the crowd to leave the park and march towards the Hilton. “Let us make sure that if our blood flows, it flows all over the city, and if we are gassed that they gas themselves. See you in the streets.”
As he left the park, Hayden heard the news from the Amphitheatre: the peace plank had been rejected by a 3:2 margin. Antiwar delegates began an impromptu protest right there on the convention floor. “We started singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and swaying,” remembered McGovern staffer Marty Oberman. “I think this went on for an hour…. We just took over the floor and, in defeat, stood there and sang this protest song.”
Meanwhile, as dusk descended on the city, five thousand protesters found their different ways out of the park and reconvened on Michigan Avenue where they were joined, to their delight, by a mule train led by Martin Luther King’s successor as head of the SCLC, Ralph Abernathy. They approached the Hilton, according to Hayden, “like a peasants’ army towards the castle of the emperors.” At the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balboa Drive, they all sat down and begin singing songs like “This Land Is Your Land.” Bathed in the glare of flashbulbs and TV cameras, one bright spark coined a chant that spread across the crowd: “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”
This was to be the final showdown: “Bloody Wednesday.” Amid clouds of tear gas, the police did not much care who they were beating and macing: reporters, medics, and dazed hippies got the same treatment as rock-throwing Motherfuckers. Even the Hilton was no longer safe; McCarthy volunteers turned their headquarters into an ad hoc hospital, shredding bedsheets to use as bandages, until the police broke in there as well. Back at the convention, Humphrey’s nomination finally took place at midnight. Depressed McCarthy delegates marched the ten miles back to the Hilton, some wearing black crepe armbands and holding candles, as if somebody had died.
Remarkably, nobody did die during convention week, but there were fatalities of another kind: faith in the Democratic Party, belief that the war would be over soon, the unity of the New Left coalition, and, for some, hope itself. Journalist John Schultz called Chicago “the Atlantis of the left.” Ochs, who narrowly escaped a clubbing himself, sank into the deepest depression of his life. “I’ve always tried to hang onto the idea of saving the country,” he told Izzy Young in Broadside, “but at this point I could be persuaded to destroy it.” The cover of his next album, the harsh, despairing Rehearsals for Retirement (1969), pictured a gravestone, on which was written: “PHIL OCHS (AMERICAN) BORN: EL PASO, TEXAS 1940 DIED: CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 1968.”
COUNTRY JOE MAY HAVE BEEN ONLY a bit player in Chicago, but during 1968 something strange happened to “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” and it happened largely because of one four-letter word.
The Vanguard label blocked the song from appearing on Country Joe and the Fish’s debut album, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, but allowed it to become the title track of their second. This new, fully electric version was preceded on the record by the “Fish Cheer,” a tongue-in-cheek chant of the kind favored by high-school sports teams: “Give me an F” and so on. In June, the band played a festival in New York’s Central Park sponsored by the beer brand Schaefer, and decided to replace “F-I-S-H” with “F-U-C-K.” News of the performance, which got them kicked out of the festival, traveled fast on the city’s counterculture grapevine. Simultaneously, a local radio station took to playing the “Rag” every day, like a theme tune. Intertwined, the cheer and the “Rag” became an underground anthem. “It’s an insane song,” he reflected at the time. “It’s really insane.”
But despite the efforts of McDonald and Ochs, there were not yet any new songs to seize demonstrators’ imaginations like “This Land Is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome” had done. “One thing that’s missing…is a song that could serve as a theme for the movement, a rallying cry,” noted the New York Times.* If the archetypal protest song required nothing more than a voice and an acoustic guitar, the better to sing along with, then the latest offerings were very much creatures of the studio. The Byrds’ “Draft Morning,” the Animals’ “Sky Pilot,” and the Doors’ “Unknown Soldier” all used sound effects to evoke the eerie clamor of combat.
For every song that really was about Vietnam there were a handful that sounded as if they might be. The British band the Zombies were flabbergasted when their U.S. label chose as a single “Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914),” their most somberly uncommercial song, because it was mistaken for a metaphor for Vietnam. California’s Creedence Clearwater Revival, meanwhile, found that “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” (about tensions within the band), “Run Through the Jungle” (about U.S. gun crime), and “Bad Moon Rising” (inspired by the 1941 movie The Devil and Daniel Webster) were taken as antiwar comments. But front man John Fogerty, who had narrowly avoided the draft himself by serving in the Army Reserve, did write one explicit song about Vietnam, arguably the best of its era. “Screaming inside” over privileged young men whose connections saved them from Vietnam—specifically David Eisenhower, grandson of Dwight and son-in-law of Richard Nixon—he wrote the blistering “Fortunate Son” in one twenty-minute burst. At a time when the White House was attempting to contrast honest, working-class soldiers with pampered, middle-class protesters, this was an unprecedentedly powerful howl of blue-collar rage at the war effort. In August 1969, Creedence, along with Country Joe, Joan Baez, and many more, were on their way to Woodstock.
THE FESTIVAL, the high-water mark of the Age of Aquarius, was to take place just outside the town of Bethel, New York. The organizers promised Bethel authorities that only fifty thousand people would attend; they privately anticipated two hundred thousand; in the end, almost half a million turned up, most of them without tickets.
Country Joe and the Fish were booked for Sunday night, but McDonald didn’t want to miss a thing and turned up on Friday afternoon in time for the first act, Richie Havens. When Havens left the stage, the promoters persuaded McDonald to fill a gap in the schedule. He reluctantly played a few songs to a muted response, then ran out of material because he didn’t want to preempt the Sunday performance by playing Fish songs. He asked his road manager, Bill Belmont, for advice. “He said, ‘Nobody’s paying any attention to you. What the hell difference does it make what you do?’ And I thought, yeah, he’s right, so I went back and yelled ‘Give me an F!’ And they stopped and shouted ‘F!’ And I thought, wow, that’s weird. And I just kept going. It was quite amazing because I wasn’t aware that many people knew the song.”
Several other protest songs were performed over the weekend, but none captured the gestalt quite like “Fixin’-to-Die.” Preserved and popularized by the following year’s hit documentary, it was one of Woodstock’s defining moments. Compared to the overcooked album version, with its circuslike feel and war-zone sound effects, this version’s gutsy simplicity, backed by an impromptu choir of thousands, could make your neck hairs prickle. “It would have been number one by 1970 if our country had been as free as it would like to be,” claimed Pete Seeger, who recorded his own, unreleased version. “It was on the lips of every young person in the country.”*
Another key performance was Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” without a doubt the most eloquent instrumental protest song rock has ever produced. Hendrix didn’t so much cover the national anthem as napalm it, but the wrenching eloquence of his playing made it into a sonic Rorschach blot, allowing each listener to decide what it represented. He was either putting to the torch the failed experiment of America or evoking the birth pangs of a new, less pernicious brand of patriotism: either the Death Society or the beautiful shipwreck.
Either way, Hendrix’s pyrotechnics were a far cry from the earnest humanism of the folk revival. Two years earlier, Ed Badeaux of Sing Out! had painted the children of psychedelia as the barbarians at the gate: “groups, electronically turned on LOUD to obscure the individual music, employing colored lights and film images to obscure the visual image. It is amplified. It is stoned. It is completely removed from life…. And it is a truly accurate reflection of the America of this moment.”
Apart from the fact that he made this allegedly nightmarish vision sound incredibly exciting, Badeaux’s mistake was to dismiss the need for music which absorbed and mirrored the madness of its times rather than stolidly denying it. “Protest singers in the past were most often ideologues who set pallid verse to semi-musical melodies,” argued Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau, a little too harshly. “The idea that it is the music that should convey the brunt of their meaning never occurred to them.” The war in Vietnam was noisy, mechanized, hallucinatory, and chaotic—qualities that Hendrix understood and Seeger did not. Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” (1970) derives its antiwar power not from its lyrics, but from the glorious frenzy of the noise it makes. In Vietnam itself, setting an M-16 machine gun to automatic fire was known as putting it on “rock and roll.”
THE FIRST TIME THE WAR correspondent Michael Herr heard Hendrix, he was with several GIs, crouching in a rice paddy, sheltering from enemy fire, while a black corporal with a tape deck blasted out the song “Fire.” “In a war where people talk about Aretha’s ‘Respect’ the way others speak of Mahler’s Fifth, it was more than just music,” he wrote. “It was Credentials…. That music meant a lot to them. I never once heard it played over the Armed Forces Radio Network.” In fact, the American Forces Vietnam Network playlist did play Hendrix, but protest songs were verboten and nobody relied on AFVN if they could help it.† One GI reported that “the true American status symbol here is the tape recorder—it parallels the car thing in the States.”
The listening tastes of troops in Vietnam were thus as heterogenous as the men themselves. Black soldiers played a lot of soul music; white Southerners preferred country. “We sometimes segregate ourselves from those white guys,” one black soldier joked to Newsweek. “We don’t like their hillbilly music.” There were songs about missing your lover (John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane”), songs of vague menace (the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black”), even out-and-out peacenik anthems—Herr observed a circle of GIs singing Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and heard others listening attentively to “For What It’s Worth.” But the quintessential Vietnam song was “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” written by New Yorkers Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, transposed to industrial Newcastle by the Animals, and remolded once again in Vietnam. “This was the Vietnam anthem,” noted war veteran Doug Bradley. “Every bad band that ever played in an armed forces club had to play this song.”*
By 1969 troop morale was wilting. That year saw the first “fraggings”: murders of abusive officers by their own men, using fragmentation grenades. Marijuana had always been part of the soldiers’ wind-down arsenal, but now heroin and opium began to replace amphetamines and barbiturates. It was into this environment that the suddenly famous “Fixin’-to-Die” emerged.
It would be several years before McDonald heard about the impact of his song in Vietnam. One ex-POW told him that Hanoi Hannah, the English-speaking North Vietnamese propagandist, used to play the song to residents of the prison nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton, in the belief that it would break their spirits. Instead, he said, “the prisoners would smile and hum along.” McDonald owns a recording of a GI singing it in Vietnam, two months before he was killed in action. Another soldier explained to the singer how his friend had bled to death in his arms, singing, “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die.”
“Those things are just chilling,” McDonald says quietly. “I never dreamed that would happen. But I like it. They said it provided them with a touchstone to keep them from going insane.”