Postfigurative parents had raised prefigurative children. As Mead wrote, in a prefigurative culture adults learn from the young. When the motto of an organization is, as it was with the Youth International Party (Yippies), “Never trust anyone over thirty,” then a prefigurative culture has come into existence. Phil Ochs once again caught the zeitgeist with his song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” which attacked the hypocrisy of the old-left liberals and announced that the youth were moving in another direction. This song did not take on the southern, conservative, white supremacists and others that Ochs usually attacked. Instead he drew a deadly bead on hypocritical liberals who were properly moved when black civil rights leaders such as Medgar Evers or white liberal icons like Robert Kennedy were shot but felt radical leaders such as Malcolm X did not deserve the same compassion.
Ochs’ song celebrates civil rights as long as that fight for justice remains on a safe level and avoids revolutionary change. The speaker in the song, Ochs’ portrait of a typical postfigurative liberal, is all in favor of minorities as long as they don’t live next door to him. In the concluding verse, the singer talks of his younger times when he attended leftist meetings and flirted with ideologies but now has become a turncoat, giving the names of his friends to congressional investigating committees.
The elders Ochs wrote about—in this case the Old Left—were not pleased. They had felt like Ochs had been one of them, a disciple, and now they discovered he had broken with the party line and looked upon them with contempt. Ochs had seen through their poses down to the hypocritical behaviors that rested, like nougat beneath the chocolate in a candy bar, beneath the artifice. To the old-left liberals Ochs had become a traitor. How could the young man who had written and sung songs that inspired them, songs that reflected what they believed they had taught him, turn against them like that? Ochs, though, had in reality done nothing more than satirize what he saw around him every day.
Bob Dylan also reflected on what he saw around him. “Chimes of Freedom,” the aforementioned “My Back Pages,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and “Paths of Victory” all give us a world in which the young and the parental generation might as well not live on the same planet so big is the breach between them. The young, no longer feeling they could learn anything from their elders, became determined to switch roles. They would become the teachers of the older generations. The New Left brought us what sociologist Carl Boggs called a prefigurative politics, which is characterized by different approaches to social and political relationships that, instead of reflecting the culture as it stands, reflects the culture the radical wants to bring into being. A prefigurative model turns the status quo upside down. Decision making, ways of viewing the culture, and human relationships all move from the powerful to the powerless. Practicing prefigurative politics means that the last shall be first.1
For these young white activists, who had been, in their eyes, unceremoniously kicked out of the civil rights movement, direct political action was still their mode of being. They simply turned from one cause to another, directing their attention to trying to stop a war. Until this time their movements had been led postfiguratively, by their elders. In fact, they had been led into the anti-war movement by the already-established American Society for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) an organization formed in 1957 by elder statesmen like magazine editor and writer Norman Cousins and the Quaker leader Clarence Pickett. One of SANE’s foremost members was Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose writings had taught mothers how to raise the members of the New Left. By 1965, however, the young had rejected SANE the way SNCC had rejected them. Now they would go it alone. They would create a prefigurative world in which they showed the previous generations how it should be done.
The catalyst for their action was Lyndon Johnson’s decision to begin bombing North Vietnam, a move seen as another betrayal, since SDS had supported Johnson in the election campaign against Barry Goldwater. In February of 1965, almost as soon as the bombing began, SDS organized protests, marching on the Oakland [California] Army Terminal, from which troops departed for Vietnam. They led another march on the terminal in March and then began a series of teach-ins on campuses around the country—designed to educate students who had not yet gotten involved—about American policies in Southeast Asia.
By this time, Joan Baez, who would say without irony that “somebody had to save the world. And obviously, I felt I was the one for the job,”2 had organized her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, where she served as a teacher’s aide to her own teacher and partner in the undertaking, Ira Sandperl. She and Sandperl showed up at demonstrations and teach-ins, where she sang and they both advocated and taught a civil disobedience guided by love and acceptance. The institute, headquartered in Carmel, California, was not greeted with shouts of joy from the local politicians, business leaders, and citizenry in general, who viewed it as a hotbed of subversion and did their best to close it down. Every time they succeeded in shutting its doors, though, Baez and Sandperl defiantly but lovingly managed to get them open again. The institute still exists as the Resource Center for Nonviolence.
Baez, Phil Ochs, and Peter, Paul and Mary became familiar faces at anti-war demonstrations and rallies. In March of 1965 SDS held its first anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., drawing an attendance of 25,000. Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins sang there. That May the action shifted back to the West Coast, where the Vietnam Day Committee organized the largest teach-in to date. Some 35,000 came out for a thirty-six–hour event. Speakers included Dr. Benjamin Spock, socialist leader Norman Thomas, political journalist I.F. Stone, Alan Watts, Dick Gregory, Freedom Summer organizer Bob Moses, and Mario Savio. Phil Ochs also showed up. Among the songs he sang was his recent composition “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore.”
Peter, Paul and Mary began to follow Joan Baez’s regimen of mixing benefits with concerts, spending 50 percent of their time playing rallies and protests, a move that did not please all the members of their audience. Once, as people crowded into a lecture room to attend a teach-in at Hunter College in New York City, the group was standing in the hall, singing for the entering crowd. A young man going in muttered to his friend, “I paid twelve dollars to see them last night. I could have just waited a day and seen them for free.” He was right; they had become ubiquitous, showing up wherever a crowd had gathered to either fight segregation or to end the war. The defection of a small number of their fans did not bother the trio; the cause, they figured, was important enough to place above their careers.
By this time, Bob Dylan’s withdrawal from public life had become more than a personal choice. A motorcycle wreck put him out of action for eighteen months, although in rejecting his role as spokesman for a generation and in his need to protect his privacy he probably would not have been involved in direct action anyway. Again, his feelings and sympathies were kept private. He intended to keep them that way. Still, just as they had for the civil rights movement, his songs helped propel the anti-war movement. As always, Dylan had his own take on the issue: “Masters of War” took on war profiteering, while “With God on Our Side” attacked the use of Christianity to justify mass slaughter throughout the centuries. His early foray into protest, the song he insisted was not a protest song, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” had posed questions without giving answers. Some were ambiguous, such as the number of roads that have to be traveled before a man is a man, while others—the number of cannonballs that will be fired before being “forever banned”—could not be more direct. Because the song gave no answers it remained relevant and easily transferred from the civil rights campaign to the anti-war movement. “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” describes a vision the speaker has had in which he has seen our world crumbling to pieces from war and destruction, and tells of guns and swords being used by children and a young woman whose body is burning, It is an apocalyptic song and only a part of it deals directly with war. The rest of the lyrics ring with Dylan’s characteristic ambiguity. In the liner notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Dylan himself said of the song, “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole song, but when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs, so I put all I could into this one.”3
Like good poetry, Dylan’s major protest songs suggest, rather than declare. Most topical songs were designed to get the audience to act, to do something. Phil Ochs’ songs were mainly designed to get his listeners out into the streets, actively protesting the war. Dylan wanted them to think, to try to figure out the conditions that brought these horrors into being; his songs suggest that these issues are much more complicated than people assume and that a simple song cannot adequately capture the essence. That song, though, can lead us to understand and, more important, to empathize. Then, like Dylan at “Maggie’s Farm,” we can quit being a part of it.
While Dylan retreated from direct activism, content to point out the problems, Phil Ochs continued to try to win converts to the peace movement. He wrote “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore,” which urged people to march in the streets instead of in uniform to war, and collaborated with Bob Gibson on “One More Parade,” which called on people to resist the temptation to march in the big parade. And, of course, there is the famous “Draft Dodger Rag,” which was about exactly what the title implied and was the single happiest song about dodging the draft ever written. In it, Ochs used satire to encourage people to resist the draft. That title, his 1963 song, “What Are You Fighting For?,” and “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” infuriated the Old Left. The two were, Ochs believed, the songs most responsible for his being investigated by the FBI. Even though he had written the patriotic hymn to everything that was great about America, “The Power and the Glory,” Ochs was looked upon as un-American and was spied on by the government the rest of his life.
Joan Baez also suffered from accusations that she was not a “good American.” A strong and confident woman always ready to act on her beliefs, she didn’t just form her institute, she toured the country leading workshops and teach-ins in its name, marched in the streets, got herself arrested and sent to jail, and even refused to pay that portion of her income tax that went to support the war, forcing the government to sue for the money. Not a prolific songwriter, she relied mostly on traditional songs and covers of other protest material, such as the songs of Dylan and Ochs. Her set lists almost always included a crowd sing-along on “We Shall Overcome” and the song Pete Seeger had made from an old Russian poem, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” To her, “Joe Hill,” a song about the legendary Wobbly organizer, was an all-purpose protest song. She also covered other artists’ songs. Her biggest hit single was a cover of Phil Ochs’ “There But for Fortune,” another all-purpose protest song that speaks against prisons, against our attitudes towards the poor and homeless, and against the war and discusses how fortunate the majority of us are to walk on this side of the thin line that separates us from those victims. Ochs recorded the song before Baez did; but his version is angry, an attack, while hers is sympathetic, refusing to cast emotional blame.
Peter, Paul and Mary also relied primarily on traditional songs and covers. With one foot in the commercial world, they could use their three-part harmonies and simple but imaginative arrangements to put these songs on the charts, as they did with Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind ” and “Don’t Think Twice” and Ochs’ “There But for Fortune,” as well as the Weavers’ anti-war classic, “Wasn’t That a Time.” Their versions of “If I Had a Hammer,” “If I Were Free,” “All My Trials,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and “We Shall Overcome” were familiar parts of the anti-war soundtrack, as was their own composition “The Great Mandala.” Other Dylan songs they were associated with were “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “When the Ship Comes In.”
The trio not only performed at anti-war rallies, they also organized them, a practice they’d begun with the 1963 Million Man March on Washington, which they helped arrange, and the march on Selma, Alabama, also one they helped put together. Their most dramatic contribution to the movement, though, came in 1968, when they decided to put to the test a comment Peter Yarrow had made offhandedly to a reporter that it was possible that they had enough clout to sway a presidential election by traveling with a candidate. When Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy had decided to challenge Lyndon Johnson for the nomination as a peace candidate, Peter, Paul and Mary signed onto his campaign and traveled the country with him, appearing at his rallies, singing and speaking to the crowds. McCarthy, for all his attractiveness to the young, was far too diffident to win the nomination. Whenever he was asked if he wanted to be president, he replied that he was willing to serve, an answer that indicated a certain lack of passion for his role in the political scheme of things. The major accomplishment of his candidacy was that he drove Lyndon Johnson into retirement, an action that threw the race for the nomination into a chaotic mess. The man who managed to climb out of the political tar pits to victory was Hubert Humphrey, and we will see the results of his presidential race in a later chapter.
In 1965, though, the year we were discussing, the most important topical song did not come from any members of our subtitle quartet. It was a protest song so different that the East Coast protest writers hated it, saying it was not truly folk music at all. Ironically, the very people who had changed the definition of folk music forever, who had widened it so that it included the work they were composing, were complaining that another composed song did not qualify, even though it was written by a man with solid folk credentials and sung by another.
In Los Angeles, 17-year-old P.F. Sloan wrote “Eve of Destruction.” Barry McGuire sang it, and the single, released in the summer of 1965, was by fall number one in the nation. The song begins with military drumming, then the guitars come in softly, and McGuire’s vocal, strong and convincing, his raspy voice sounding troubled and desperate, begins to sing a description of a litany of horrors that the speaker in the song sees all around. A Dylanesque harmonica gives the response to McGuire’s verses, as his gruff and strong vocal tone plays against the fear and uncertainty the narrator feels. The fact that the tone of the voice fit the song the way a glove fits a hand was a lucky accident. McGuire’s singing on the record was meant to be a reference vocal, designed to show roughly what the song sounded like. The plan was to do a smoother voice track later on. However, an employee of the record company leaked the single to radio disc jockeys, who got a great response from their listeners when they played it. So Dunhill Records, which released it, decided not to redo the vocal. It was evidently a wise decision. “Eve of Destruction” turned out to be the biggest hit of 1965.
Also in 1965, on the West Coast, Buffalo Springfield released a haunting song that captured the spirit of the times: “For What It’s Worth.” Specifically written about the riots on Sunset Strip that occurred when the police tried to stop teenagers from hanging out on the strip and attending the music clubs there, “For What It’s Worth” turned out to be an all-purpose protest song whose lyrics were ambiguous enough to apply to the anti-war movement as well as to kids on the Strip. Together, “Eve of Destruction” and “For What It’s Worth” created more of the same action they described, serving as anthems for activists.