By the end of the turning point year, conditions had changed for the most prominent folk musicians who were widely associated with the movement. Joan Baez was trying to build a marriage with anti-draft activist David Harris, who a year earlier had formed the Resistance, a group that tried to get young men to fight the draft by returning their draft cards, refusing to be inducted. Harris’s concentration was on attempting to end the war. As his efforts met with some degree of success, the federal law enforcement agencies began paying more attention to him. Baez at this time supported Harris’s actions and tried to meld a marriage with radical politics. Soon Harris was serving a prison sentence because of his political activities.
Bob Dylan, having been off the scene for eighteen months due to his motorcycle accident, returned with a new persona as a country crooner, issuing Nashville Skyline, which included a duet on “Girl from the North Country” with his friend Johnny Cash. He followed that up with John Wesley Harding, another country-themed album. Joan Baez recorded a song urging him to give the crooning up and return to protest writing and singing, a request Dylan ignored.
Peter, Paul and Mary, faced with declining record sales and having learned from their failed attempt to sway the nomination to McCarthy that their power was more an existential illusion than a real factor, broke up. Mary Travers did solo albums that avoided politics. Paul Stookey, who had over the years returned to his religion, formed a Christian band and recorded praise songs. Peter Yarrow married Eugene McCarthy’s daughter and remained a familiar sight at anti-war demonstrations, playing and singing without his partners.
Phil Ochs claimed not to be interested in topical songs any longer and moved from New York to Los Angeles, signing with A&M Records, which gave him an opportunity to pursue a goal he’d stated he’d made back in 1965: “I’m at the point in my songwriting where I give much more consideration to the art involved in my songs rather than the politics. I’m trying to weld sharper, more cogent, and more original use of language and music. The messages in my songs are now secondary to that part of my mind that creates.”1
The riots in Chicago, the trial of the Chicago Seven, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, and Richard Nixon’s election had worn Ochs out and made him despondent, convincing him that people no longer even listened to the type of protest songs he had specialized in. Ochs lost his political focus, moved to Los Angeles, and recorded Pleasures of the Harbor in 1967, following it with Tape from California in 1968. Both albums used a full orchestra and elements of folk rock to put across songs that were far more personal and private than his New York protest material. Ochs described the albums as “baroque-folk.”2 They neither sold well nor were well received critically. Critic Robert Christgau said Pleasures of the Harbor “epitomized the decadence that has infected pop since Sergeant Pepper. The gaudy musical settings inspire nostalgia for the three chord strum.”3 The commercial and critical failure of what he considered his most important work to date affected Ochs greatly. Creatively lost and precariously balanced mentally, he was drinking too much and his bipolar disorder was acting up. His lifestyle had packed the pounds on him and he was embarrassed by the weight he had gained, which caused him to retreat even more deeply into alcohol.
The movement was having as much trouble with its own identity as Phil Ochs was with his. In fact, it shattered like a dropped light bulb. SDS after Columbia split into factions. The more conservative members wanted to continue the protests, while the ones who identified with radicalism declared that protesting was a dead and ineffective policy and wanted to escalate. The two groups tried to coexist for a while but that strategy didn’t work. Soon the more radical of the factions dubbed themselves the Weather Underground, or the Weathermen—inspired by a line about a weatherman in Bob Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”—and started on a course of violent confrontations. In 1970 alone the Weather Underground and their followers detonated more than 330 bombs inside the United States.4 America’s own citizens were blowing up other Americans’ property. It was a long ride from peaceful protests to almost daily acts of terrorism. What had happened to cause young activists to board that train?
There is no single answer. A partial explanation can be found in the Nixon administration’s attitude toward protest groups, both black and white. In a 1994 interview John Erlichman, Nixon’s chief domestic affairs adviser, remembered the following:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.5
Not only did the administration know it was lying, but the movement knew it also. Nixon’s attitude was another betrayal. New Left paranoia increased; the people who had adopted as a mantra “never trust anyone over thirty” now lost the ability to trust anyone at all, including each other. As Todd Gitlin wrote, the Chicago convention had exposed the Democrats as Democrats; it had shown that the two-party system was frozen against reform and that the movement was essentially arguing with itself.6
Growing less, rather than more, popular, having failed in its attempt to radicalize the middle class, the people of the movement were, according to Gitlin, either blind to the negative effects they were having on the public at large or convinced that losing the support of the people was a good thing, proof of what Gitlin called “our revolutionary mettle.”7 The radicals decided, by some Orwellian logic, that failing was winning. By 1969 SDS, having been driven into the wilderness by the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, crumbled like stale cake. The members of the movement had been forced to watch helplessly as the Democrats, whom they had previously thought of as allies, sent forth Hubert Humphrey, a candidate who promptly turned against them until he needed them, using his candidacy to advocate for Lyndon Johnson’s policies. The two peace candidates, Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, both more friendly toward the young radicals, were ignored like the working class under Nixon. At the October 1968 SDS convention in Boulder, Colorado, John Jacobs argued for direct violent action, introducing a resolution entitled “The Elections Don’t Mean Shit—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is in the Street.”8 The resolution was adopted and the split of the organization into competing factions was now complete.
When Gitlin argued for organizing over mobilizing, Weatherman Mark Rudd, demonstrating characteristic impatience, declared that organizing was just another word for going slow. By the end of 1968 the fact that an action was dangerous became a badge of seriousness. “Chaos in the streets was an arguable strategy for the not-so-modest purpose of ending the war; now it was being touted as more: a prologue to revolution.”9 The idea that an armed resurrection against the government would succeed in overthrowing it and replacing it with a left-leaning regime was, of course, patently absurd. Yet the Weather Underground took it seriously, believing that the revolution was within reach and that just a few more firebombs were needed for it to come into existence. Those SDS people advocating direct action joined the Weathermen, and the few remaining members who stuck with organizing tried to coexist with the ones advocating immediate violent action. Like so much else with the New Left, the cooperation between the two factions ended in Chicago, this time in October of 1969.
The Black Power movement had given birth to the Black Panthers, a group given to wearing paramilitary uniforms, carrying firearms, and monitoring the activities of the police. At first the core activity of the Panthers was organizing programs to help African-American citizens. They were known for sponsoring free breakfasts for children and providing security in their neighborhoods. J. Edgar Hoover, though, could see nothing noble in the group and declared them to be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”10 He set out to destroy the party and, although the effort took him almost ten years, he succeeded. Meanwhile, though, the sight of armed uniformed black men patrolling the ghetto streets and holding rallies to teach the African-American poor armed self-defense created a sense of excitement in young white radicals, who by now had self-styled themselves as revolutionaries. They admired the Panthers and, like children looking up at their fathers, wanted to be just like them.
The Weathermen decided to bring Lyndon Johnson’s tactic home: they would end the war by escalating the war on our shores. They reasoned that only when America experienced what Vietnam had gone through and had seen their cities burning would they understand. Then they would not only stop the war, the middle class would also rise up and overthrow the government. To understand this reasoning it has to be understood that these men and women were young and had been taught in their colleges and universities—the site of most of their experiences—that ideas were primary. They could quote left-wing philosophers but had not learned the critical thinking necessary to see through empty abstract notions. Most of them were still, although they would not have been able to recognize the trait in themselves, believers in magical thinking.
The rallying cry of the Weather Underground became “bring Hanoi to America” and they began building and detonating bombs in banks, corporate headquarters, government buildings, and even private homes, thinking those actions would bring about their goal of creating a revolutionary party that would overthrow the United States government. In 1970 they officially declared themselves the Weather Underground Organization and issued a declaration of war against the United States. Their founding document described them as a white fighting force connected to the Black Liberation Movement and other radical movements with the goal of the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world communism.11 John Jacobs stated the goals of the weather underground this way: “Weathermen would shove the war down their dumb, fascist throats and show them, while we were at it, how much better we were than them, both tactically and strategically, as a people. In an all-out civil war over Vietnam and other fascist U.S. imperialism, we were going to bring the war home. ‘Turn the imperialists’ war into a civil war,’ in Lenin’s words. And we were going to kick ass.’12 They saw “the onset of a sustained armed struggle against the state as the best means of creating revolutionary consciousness among the mass of American people.”13
This group did not come about by accident or impulse. As noted, by 1969 the Weathermen, seeing SDS as ineffectual and unwilling to take direct action and beyond contempt, had split from them, going off on their own. Their first major action took them back to Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Earlier they had blown up the statue commemorating the policemen killed in the 1886 Haymarket Riots. At this point, the group had not gained much first-hand knowledge about explosives, and the blast was too big. In addition to destroying the statue, it blew out 100 windows, scattering debris from the statue onto the Kennedy Expressway.14 Declaring the action a success, the group decided to build upon it by bringing thousands of demonstrators back to Chicago in an effort to overwhelm the police and local officials.
As Burroughs reports, the gathering was a disaster. A disappointing crowd of 800 showed up, but 2,000 policemen attended. Badly outnumbered, the casual demonstrators promptly left. The next day the Weathermen’s crowd size was down to 300, while the law enforcement crew still numbered 2,000. Tom Hayden spoke, assuring the crowd that the Chicago Seven stood behind them, but Abbie Hoffman and John Froines, two other members of the Chicago Seven, showed up, viewed the situation and quietly disappeared. It was one of the few times Hoffman was able to resist a microphone and a crowd.
At ten-thirty at night, event organizer John Jacobs gave a signal and the crowd started toward their destination, the Drake Hotel, where Chicago Seven judge Julius Hoffman lived. The Weathermen flowed over the Gold Coast like baseball fans after the Cubs won the World Series. However, their purpose was not to celebrate but to destroy. They smashed car windows and shop windows, trashing the houses and businesses of the very people they wanted to radicalize and win to their side. The crowd hit the police barricades but by now they were so pumped with adrenaline that they didn’t even slow down. It was like the Charge of the Light Brigade. Three hundred protestors attacked 1,000 armed riot police and were wiped out. One contingent managed to reach the hotel, where they encountered unmarked cars of policemen who began firing into the crowd. The cops waded into the Weathermen and beat them with clubs. Within 30 minutes the riot had been put down. Twenty-four policemen were injured, six Weathermen were shot, and 68 were arrested. No one knows how many were beaten and injured.
When he got out of jail, John Jacobs said the night was a great victory. They didn’t have to win. Just the fact that they were willing to fight the police made it a success.15
At this point, 50 years later, the entire transformation from protesters to revolutionaries appears to be completely illogical and perhaps more rooted in fantasy than in politics. How could otherwise intelligent people buy into the pulp fiction cliché that the American people would rise up en masse against their government and overthrow it violently? It has to be understood that those were crazy times. The nation was fighting an illegal war, one that everyone knew was being lost although the government every day declared the nation to be within minutes of winning it. Che Guevara, who had helped Fidel Castro overthrow the Baptista regime in Cuba, was now in the mountains of South America leading armed revolts against other governments. He had become a role model for young American revolutionaries, their symbol of rebellion. When the Cuban revolution became successful, Guevara became a leader of the new government, establishing a program of land reform and a campaign to spread literacy among the peasants. His books The Motorcycle Diaries and Guerrilla Warfare became best sellers and were widely read by America’s New Left activists,
Guevara was a complicated man. During the Cuban revolution, he would read the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and the Spanish lyric poets to his men between firefights. When he discovered that 40 percent of the Cubans were illiterate, he began teaching literacy classes and the members of his army who could read taught the others. Yet he could also execute an enemy or an AWOL soldier without compunction.16 This man inspired the Weather Underground.
The emergence of the youth counterculture, which was in full bloom, also contributed to the move toward revolution. Strange and odd cults and religions were springing up everywhere. The Beatles became followers of Maharishi Yogi, founder of Transcendental Meditation. Gurus flocked to America, setting up ashrams throughout the country. Chicago Seven member Rennie Davis was a follower of Guru Raj, a fifteen-year-old boy, of whom he said during the trial, “All I want to do is lay my head on his foot for as long as he’ll let me. Sometimes he lets me.”17 Admired musicians such as Carlos Santana were joining ashrams.
LSD, peyote, and other hallucinogens were as common as seaweed in the ocean and everyone was convinced Richard Nixon was tapping their phone. On top of this, the Cold War was raging and John Lennon and his new wife Yoko Ono held a “bed-in” for peace, during which they lay in their bed for a couple of weeks, spending their honeymoon entertaining the press by trying to explain how occupying a bed in a hotel room in Canada could end the Vietnam War. While in that bed, they recorded “Give Peace a Chance.”18 It was a world gone mad, and in that context the actions of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen seemed almost normal.
The appearance of normality disappeared when the violence escalated from symbolic protest to crime. In September two members of the Weather Underground, Katherine Ann Power and William Saxe, joined two ex-convict Black Panthers, William Gilday and Robert Valerie, in robbing the State Street Bank and Trust in Newbury, Massachusetts. Emboldened by their success, they raided a national guard armory. They stole weapons and ammunition and set fire to the building, causing $125,000 in damages, then used their new weapons a few days later to rob another bank. This time, Gilday killed a policeman who tried to break up the robbery.19 In November members of the Weather Underground fired shots into a Cambridge police station but no one was injured in that attack.20 These actions were intended to win young people over to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO). They did not. Many of the attempts to win over the young, when they were not criminal, were childish and silly. Weathermen led what they called “jailbreaks” in which they invaded high schools and ran through the halls shouting anti-war slogans.21 They did this without any embarrassment or irony. When it wasn’t murderous, the movement was filled with look-at-me bravado. In many ways it was schizophrenic.
The times were too crazy to be summed up in song. The music reflected the craziness. King Crimson recorded “21st Century Schizoid Man,” while Steppenwolf celebrated the “Draft Resister.” The Rolling Stones protested the war with “Gimme Shelter” and cheered on the revolutionaries with “Street Fighting Man.” Even bluesman John Lee Hooker sang against the war in “I Don’t Wanna Go to Vietnam.” Poet Ed Sanders recognized that music had power that printed poetry did not, so he formed a band, the Fugs, who captured the Orwellian use of language that had crept into vogue with “Kill for Peace.” Avant garde rocker Lou Reed offered up “Kill Your Sons,” and Tom Paxton checked in with “Talkin’ Vietnam Pot Luck Blues.” Those songs pointed out the absurd side of Vietnam, saying we had reached a point where the truth could be grasped only through fantasy.
Yet, even while the music became more existential, the more traditional anti-war songs could still be heard, if from surprising sources. Melanie gave us “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” and “Peace Will Come (According to Plan).” Bobby Darin reached the sophisticated nightclub audience with “A Simple Song of Freedom.” The music, then, was all over the place—as fragmented and scattered as the movement was. Todd Gitlin laments the turn away from radicalism that he found in the music as the revolution went on, saying Bob Dylan had “slid over to Tin Pan Alley pieces (‘Love is all you need/it makes the world go round’) in the 1969 Nashville Skyline, including a duo with no less a mainstream idol than Johnny Cash. To partisans who remembered his acoustic heartfelt period, Dylan’s calm sounded smug, tranquilized. To settle his quarrel with the world, he had filed away his passions. Joan Baez also borrowed the sweet twang of country and western guitars; so did Arlo Guthrie, who by 1972 had removed himself from the no-man’s-land of ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ to the heartland ‘City of New Orleans.’”22
What happened to cause a shift from serious topical music, either electric or acoustic, to a more mundane style of rock to the rise of the singer-songwriter genre in the seventies? There is, of course, no single answer. Like the movement itself, it was the result of a confluence of events. However, looming high on the list was the British Invasion of the mid-sixties, which brought to the American airwaves and record shops acts like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Chad and Jeremy, Peter and Gordon, Manfred Mann, the Troggs, Donovan, the Kinks, and Wayne Fontana & the Mindbenders. Even though the members of most of these bands had begun as acoustic folk singers or, in England, skiffle artists, their emergence as self-contained rock bands who wrote, played, sang, and produced their own records severely damaged the acoustic movement in the States. It wasn’t really Bob Dylan who killed traditional unamplified folk music; it was the exciting new music from England.
Perhaps because the Vietnam War wasn’t as all-consuming in England, fewer items of anti-war protest material emerged from the British Invasion. British musicians were more likely to attack the class system that held so much power in Europe. The Animals’ “We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place,” about a young couple slowly being beaten down by the rough conditions of their lives, serves as an example. The psychedelic culture was dominant among the musicians and their working-class followers. As strong in England as it was here, the psychedelic culture created bands—like the Animals, the Who, Cream, and Pink Floyd—who became known for performing in that genre and kept the dead end going longer than it would have had it been just a domestic scene.
The British Invasion brought all of the elements that would become folk-rock to the forefront. Until their music crossed the Atlantic, rock was considered dead in America and folk flourished. The music of women played a minor role; they were confined by male producers to singing trivial songs about trivial events, like Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party (and I’ll Cry if I Want To)” and Connie Francis’s “Stupid Cupid.” Emboldened by the new and different sounds emanating from freeform FM radio, female artists fought to enlarge their musical palette. By 1969 they had established themselves as serious folk-rock singer-songwriters. Newsweek ran a feature called “The Girls—Letting Go,” which covered Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Lotti Golden, and Melanie, all of whom were writing and singing songs shrouded in private symbolism and mystery, songs with depth and meaning, all with one thing in common: they explored the artists’ heads as much as they did society at large. These songs were more internal than external.23 While the revolution took place in the streets, these songs took place in the heart.
When the psychedelic experiments led nowhere, the bands that had relied on the effects either broke up or changed their approach so that by the end of the decade, roots rock had taken hold. This genre blended rock, country, the blues, and folk music into a new whole, one that covered a wide range and spread in as many directions as the movement itself did.
Once again, Bob Dylan is credited with beginning it. He had gone to Nashville against his record company’s wishes and made Blonde on Blonde with that city’s best studio musicians, including Hargus “Pig” Robbins, Kenneth Buttrey, Charlie McCoy, Bill Aikens, and Joe South. Al Kooper, who played organ throughout the album, was the only musician brought down from New York. Dylan later told Playboy magazine that the songs on Blonde on Blonde were the closest he ever came to matching the sound he heard in his mind.24 Dylan’s songs were as private and mysterious as he once had been public and straightforward, exploring his mind and heart instead of commenting on issues. To show the degree of his influence, consider this. A few months before the album was released a member of a well-known New York band was asked what his group was up to. He responded that, just like everybody else, they were waiting to see what Dylan was going to do next.
One thing was for certain, what Dylan did next would have nothing to do with fighting the police in the streets, breaking car and shop widows, or blowing up buildings. Few strong artists wanted to be associated with activities like those. Not only had the movement lost the support of the American people, it had also lost the musicians who used to inspire it.
Neil Postman, in his book, Teaching as a Conservative Activity, claimed that in order to preserve homeostasis and stability in a culture “education tries to conserve tradition when the rest of the environment is innovative. Or it is innovative when the rest of the society is tradition-bound…. [T]he function of education is always to offer the counterargument, the other side of the picture…. Its aim at all times is to make visible the prevailing biases of a culture and then, by employing whatever philosophies of education are available, to oppose them.”25 His argument might be applied to art in general. Therefore, as the culture came apart, as the center refused to hold and chaos became the norm, as the movement grew more violent, the music became quieter, more introspective, as if it were rejecting the politics of the day and expressing the peaceful calm that was missing from society at large. The New England folk singer Tom Rush is credited with starting the singer-songwriter movement by releasing his album The Circle Game in 1968. On it, he recorded for the first time songs by Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and James Taylor, paving the way for those artists to be able to record their own first albums. The Circle Game became Rush’s most popular album and the interest it generated caused record companies to rush to sign folkies.
As usual, the Beatles were out in front. Having formed the Apple Corporation to handle their business affairs, as one of the first acts of their new company they issued the debut album by James Taylor, a calm and laid-back affair that consisted mostly of folk and countrified ballads such as “Carolina in My Mind,” a song about the singer’s longing to be back home, “Sunshine, Sunshine,” and “Something in the Way She Moves,” love songs both previously sung by Rush on The Circle Game, and “Rainy Day Man.” The Rolling Stone reviewer called the album “the coolest breath of fresh air I’ve inhaled in a long time. It knocks me out.”26 There was no way, though, that the album could have been considered a political statement.
Taylor’s friend Carole King, who had written songs protesting the nothingness of suburban life (“Pleasant Valley Sunday”) released Tapestry, an album of quiet, introspective material that contained songs like “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Where You Lead,” “So Far Away,” and “Beautiful,” as well as her own versions of songs she’d written for artists like Aretha Franklin (“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” and the Shirelles (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”). The only thing political about the album was its complete lack of politics, almost like a rejection. Tapestry won critical raves. Richard Goldstein called it an album that would, because of its lack of technical decorum, liberate female singers.27 It sold well from the beginning and has become one of the biggest sellers of all time, moving 25,000,000 copies to date.
By the late sixties and early seventies the resurgence of folk music was complete. Singer-songwriters dominated FM radio and the charts. Artists such as John Stewart, Cat Stevens, Carly Simon, Jesse Winchester, Hoyt Axton, Gene Clark, Nick Drake, Van Morrison, Laura Nyro, Neil Young, the Eagles, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Jim Croce, Linda Ronstadt, J.D. Souther, and Paul Simon all put out important and exciting records exploring contemporary life from a point of view that eschewed rigid and dogmatic political positions.