Folk music is often described as the music of the people. It is also most often thought of as acoustic music, so much so that when the Paul Butterfield Blues Band played an amplified set at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965, veteran folk song collector Alan Lomax, a traditionalist who on field trips discovered Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and Muddy Waters (whom he turned against when Muddy went electric), insisted on introducing the band himself. He gave them a patronizing introduction that included a five-minute capsule history of the blues, emphasizing that it was an acoustic music. It was an intimate personal expression, he said, made by a musician and his instrument, generally a guitar or banjo. With all the condescension a member of royalty shows to a footman he claimed that the next group needed a “lot of hardware” to play the blues and that he would leave it up to the audience to decide whether they could really play the music or not.
When Lomax left the stage, the manager Albert Grossman, who was about to sign Butterfield as a client, called out Lomax for his comments. Lomax shoved him out of his way. Grossman shoved back and the audience was treated to an on-stage fistfight between the spokesman for the old folk music and the spokesman for the new.1 An hour or so later, Bob Dylan, inspired by what he’d seen in the Butterfield set, assembled an electric band to accompany him on stage for his own performance.
If folk music is the music of the people, by 1965 the people had changed and the music changed with them. Attitudes toward folk music were changing also. Eric Weisberg, the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, claimed that more authentic folk music was being created everyday by groups like the Drifters than by all of the folk revival musicians. The music Weisberg admired was, like that of Butterfield and Muddy Waters, electric. Soon most folk music was amplified. The music went electric for several reasons, all of which came about as a result of a natural evolution, a change in Americans as a people.
First, one must consider the fact that folk music was originally played on acoustic instruments because electric instruments simply did not exist. New technology always changes the landscape it enters. As the futurist Marshall McLuhan famously pointed out, it was not the content of the medium that changed things, it was the existence of the medium itself.2 Television programs did not change the leisure habits of Americans; the existence of TV sets did. McLuhan coined the famous phrase “the medium is the message” to explain this fact.3 Consider the effects recording had on the early singers and players. When the first Appalachian musicians heard themselves on primitive recording machines, they immediately became self-conscious and began paying more attention to their performance, making changes that never would have occurred to them had they not been able to hear themselves play. The same changes occurred when amplification became common. When musicians began using electric instruments it was because the whole society had become electrified.
It was only natural that musicians would take advantage of this development. Folk music is authentic and to do as Alan Lomax demanded meant to pretend to be living in a world where electricity does not exist. Such an attitude is inauthentic. If you have spent your entire life surrounded by electricity, you don’t know a world where there is none. Electricity is to our world what water is to a fish. As the music of the people, folk reflects the world in which we live—and we live in an electric environment.
Second, audiences had changed. Clubs, theaters and festival grounds got bigger and noisier. For any kind of performance, there is the problem of reaching people who are distant from the stage; to handle this, there has always been some sort of amplification. The Greek theater masks served as amplifiers, projecting the actors’ voices to the last rows of 15,000-seat amphitheaters. For most of its history theater depended on the actors’ ability to project, which resulted in an unnatural, exaggerated sound. The development of small condenser microphones that could be hidden in the costume allowed the actor to speak normally and still be heard. Acting styles changed as a result. What is true in drama is true in music. Muddy Waters switched to electric guitar so that he could be heard over the noise of crowded South Side Chicago clubs and bars. In so doing, he changed the nature of the blues forever, paving the way for Paul Butterfield and the others. Insisting that the music remain what it was in more primitive times is like insisting that we make only silent movies because that’s how motion pictures started out. In fact, folk music was amplified long before Bob Dylan went electric. Before electric pickups were built into acoustic guitars, musicians in coffeehouses played through a sound system that used two microphones: one at waist level to pick up the guitar and one at face level for the voice. So no performers were taken by surprise when Dylan and the Butterfield Blues Band went electric.
Third, and for our purposes, most important, it is obvious that folk music changed because the culture that produced folk music and folk musicians changed. It became chaotic. Electric music is much more capable of capturing chaos than acoustic music is. As the war grew more and more out of control and the draft became more of a death sentence for our young men (women were exempt from the draft) the music reflected the horror and confusion the youth of the nation were experiencing. The stated reason the government had always used to justify the peacetime draft was that all American men were required to serve their country for two years. The implication was that the men would be alive at the end of those two years. With the war in Vietnam the assumption that draftees would be alive at the end of their required service disappeared like fog when the sun comes out.
Veterans of the Freedom Riders and Freedom Summer had already discovered to their own satisfaction that the American federal government was either not capable or not interested in keeping its promises. After their work—after they had put their lives on the line, been beaten, jailed, and murdered, had their churches and schools burned down only to find the same conditions in place after their efforts—they felt they had little reason to trust their government. The nation had been at war for most of their lives: World War II, followed by Korea and, just as the nation was beginning to think of Korea as a memory, Vietnam.
No one could say why America was in Vietnam anyway. Our involvement began when Eisenhower, supporting our French allies, sent advisers and began quietly upping the ante, presenting in a 1954 speech what he called, and what the nation came to call, the Domino Theory:
He spent much of the speech explaining the significance of Vietnam to the United States. First was its economic importance, “the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs” (materials such as rubber, jute, and sulphur). There was also the “possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world.” Finally, the president noted, “You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle.” Eisenhower expanded on this thought, explaining, “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is a certainty that it will go over very quickly.” This would lead to disintegration in Southeast Asia, with the “loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following.” Eisenhower suggested that even Japan, which needed Southeast Asia for trade, would be in danger.4
When Kennedy replaced Eisenhower, a moment of optimism sprang up. The new president at least tried to contain the war, to keep American presence in Southeast Asia under control. His assassination threw everything into turmoil. Lyndon Johnson went for a win instead of a withdrawal and American entered into a period of insanity.
At first opposition to the war in Vietnam was led by Old Left intellectuals like Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), but these older activists were quickly joined by the student population, who had watched helplessly while the certainty of their lives was replaced by the chaos that springs from a sense of nihilism, of nothingness. The prime factor in their lives, the thing they had tried to escape by leaving their suburban upbringing behind, was that bewildering sense of nothingness. And that’s what caused the chaos—nothingness.
To understand nothingness, we have to go back to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose theory of nihilism paved the way. He thought of nihilism as the inescapable destiny of humankind, an inevitable condition that we will each arrive at independently, but which, whatever the timing, we will all come to. Sooner or later we will be forced to recognize that nihilism is our natural condition.
What exactly is nihilism? Nietzsche claims that it is an exhaustion of the spirit that comes from “seeking meaning too long and too ardently. It seems like a kind of death, an inertness, a paralysis … a desert-like emptiness. a malaise, an illness of the spirit and the stomach. One sees all too starkly the fraudulence of human arrangements. Every engagement seems so involved in half-truths, lies and unimportance that cause the will to believe and the will to act to collapse like ash.”5 We arrive at nihilism by waking up, which according to Nietzsche is a three-stage process: “Nihilism will be reached, first, when we have sought in all events a ‘meaning’ that is not there. We will recognize the waste of strength, the sense of shame that comes from the feeling of shame because we have deceived ourselves for so long. We wanted to achieve something but are forced to realize that “‘Becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.’”6 Secondly, we will be forced to recognize that the universal we have sought does not exist. There is no single force that organizes and unifies—no totality, no organization, no unity—in or beneath all events. If this is true, then obviously there is no whole that is superior to human beings. Hence, in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “God is dead.” To put your faith in a God is to continue to maintain a self-deception. Finally, nihilism will be achieved when, as a result of the first two qualities, we are trapped in a place where we can neither accept nor reject our world. This leads to periods of frantic action in an effort to change the reality in which we live, the reality that is actually a collective fantasy. These efforts are of course futile and we are forced to discover that we are alone in an indifferent universe.
Nihilism became the most prominent philosophy of the twentieth century, characterizing the lives of people who had never even heard the word. As political and social conditions worsened, as wars failed to bring peace, succeeding only in generating more wars, as we became suspicious and hostile toward anyone different from ourselves, as we postulated that other governing philosophies were hostile and out to destroy us, as we maintained a posture as good guys even as we participated in practices just as shady as the ones we publicly deplored, nihilism grew, but under its more current names of existentialism and nothingness.
In his The Experience of Nothingness, a 1970 book written about the plight of the young in the sixties, theologian and philosopher Michael Novak identifies five conditions that lead to nothingness. Boredom, he says, is the first stage. The word boredom in this sense goes far beyond its usual definition. When applied to nothingness, the word means that everything is the same, that no one activity, action, or decision is worth any more than any other. It is the result of the discovery that everything is the same, that nothing one does makes any difference, so that all decisions are equal. The mystery and suspense writer Lawrence Block once grew tired of the feeling that his books had become “the same, only different,” so he bought a Cadillac and spent five years driving almost randomly around the United States, visiting every town he could find that had the word Buffalo in its name. When asked why he was doing that, he shrugged and said that it was as good as anything else. That is a prime example of boredom.
In addition to boredom, there is the collapse of a strongly inculcated sense of values. The sensation of having been betrayed by their society was one of the biggest driving factors of the New Left. Their homes, where they had expected to discover meaning, contained none; their schools taught them that they were unimportant and did not count; their churches advocated for the status quo, maintaining a don’t-rock-the-boat attitude when the young sensed that the boat was already sinking; and the government, which they had counted on to free them, sent them overseas to be killed, ignored them if they survived and returned, and did nothing about the hatred and racism that permeated the culture.
These factors, of course, led to the third factor, a sense of helplessness, which Novak describes as the feeling that the young have no control over their own lives. They have no personal or political power and, worse, the people in power have no power either. They have no idea how to use the power their status has granted them; they don’t know what to do with it, except to protect it. The young were confident that if they did somehow attain power they would not know what to do with it, either.
Fourth, Novak says, we have the sense of betrayal by permissiveness, pragmatism and value-neutral discourse. The young rebels grew up in a society where no one said no to anything, where everything was relative and nothing was absolute. No one would say anything was right or wrong: do your own thing was the rule, even if your own thing was self-destructive or futile. Among the civil rights workers and the anti-war protestors, the prime rule was that whatever your trip is is fine, just don’t lay your trip on anyone else. Novak claims that as a result of this, the young are being robbed of a fundamental right: “To learn a way of discriminating right from wrong, the posed from the authentic, the excellent from the mediocre, the brilliant from the philistine, the shoddy from the workmanlike. When no one with experience bothers to insist—to insist—on such discrimination, they rightly get the idea that discernment is not important, that no one cares, that no one either about such things—or about them.”7
One of the main factors in bringing about the conditions that lead to nothingness arises from the fact that America built a society—a rational, efficient society—without contemplating the effect it would have on the people who had to live in it. The young, having no place in society to call their own, had to seek their own place, gave themselves over to drug experiences and unwanted intimacy, which manifests itself in mechanical relationships. As an example, consider the sexual revolution, brought on in the 1960s by changing social mores and the development of the birth control pill.
The sexual revolution led to more open and frank attitudes toward sex but also brought with it a series of mechanical relationships. Frequency and ease of sex did not necessarily lead to meaning and intimacy.
A person who suffers from the condition of nothingness is likely to come to prefer mechanical relationships. They are easier and closer to the surface, and one can escape troublesome emotions. There develops a tendency to substitute sex for love because sex is easier and less messy emotionally than love, even though it is actually empty. If, however, your entire life has been empty, then you expect nothing else. You also will probably not realize how empty and mechanical these relationships are. Nothingness is a chaotic state. We indulge in frantic activities to fill the void, to maintain the illusions that our lives are going somewhere; we spend energy trying to get energy, expend our power trying to get power, waste our time trying to make our time count. We bang our heads against the wall trying to tear down the wall.
The lives of young Americans by the time of the anti-war protests had become totally frenetic. Is it any wonder that folk music did too? When Dylan went electric, the old guard at Newport got it all wrong. He didn’t abandon folk music; he simply changed its presentation to suit the times. Much of the music he was writing no longer lent itself to the accompaniment of a single acoustic guitar. “Mr. Tambourine Man,” for instance, played acoustically loses much of its power and fails to capture the sense of disassociation and despair that the young saw as reality. When Roger McGuinn and the Byrds electrified it, they also electrified the young progressive audience, who, even if they remained unable to find a meaning in the lyrics, could feel the authenticity of the song, authenticity that was missing from their lives. They were not bothered by the fact that they could not make literal sense of the lyrics, because little in their world made sense anyway. The very ambiguity of the words Dylan wrote and McGuinn sang simply made them applicable to many situations. Listeners were invited to fill them in, to flesh them out in their minds.
The fact remains, though, that even if it was electric music, it was still folk music. Everything about it reeked of folk, including the backgrounds of Dylan and the Byrds, all of whom had been acoustic players and still included folk instruments, themes, chord structures, and patterns in their music.
Electric folk music became the norm. Eric Andersen released his second album, ’Bout Changes and Things, acoustically. For his third album, he re-recorded the second one, this time with electric instruments. Did that make the second recording rock or not folk music? No, it simply made it what he called it, ’Bout Changes and Things, Take Two. Lomax, Seeger, and the others at Newport who objected to electricity were against it for all the wrong reasons. They had forgotten that folk music, like the society that created it, is a growing, changing, living art form and that the ballads they sang as symbols of musical purity bore little relation to what they had originally sounded like. They also either ignored or forgot that they had changed and altered the presentation of the songs they discovered and sang. They lost sight of the fact that folk music is a process, not an object.
Folk music, as music of the people, reflects the people. When the people’s lives are on the brink, so will folk music be on the brink—and brinksmanship became the rule of the sixties.