The Weathermen drove the SDS out of business exploiting the split they had created in the organization by claiming to be the genuine SDS. The Weather Underground pressured the larger group to turn to violent action, demanding that they become literal as well as cultural outlaws. Only by “bringing Hanoi to America”—that is, by blowing up American cities the way the military did Hanoi—could we end the war. The theory was that as they saw these acts of sabotage and violent resistance the Great American Middle Class, starting with the young, would become radicalized and rise up against the government, overthrowing it and establishing a utopia in its place.
Exactly how robbing banks, opening fire on police stations, blowing up government buildings and corporate headquarters, as well as rioting in the streets would lead to the middle class turning off their TVs and going out to overthrow the government was never explained. In philosophical terms, it was a priori, something that just had to be accepted as the starting point of the argument. The fact was, these young people were just that—young—and many of them came from privileged backgrounds. As noted earlier, most of them grew up in prosperous suburban homes and went directly from good high schools into colleges. All they had ever known was school. As Tom Rush once said, “We had to go out and make our own depression. But we always knew we could call home for money.”1 Living in a world of privilege and illusion and suffering from a feeling of nothingness make it easy to go over the line into delusion—even if its main effect and underlying, unspoken purpose is simply to make the person who went over the edge feel something.
The Weathermen, then, determined they would own the streets. They committed some daring acts, like breaking the LSD pioneer Timothy Leary out of prison.2 Leary, a psychologist who had begun conducting experiments with LSD at Harvard University before the substance was declared illegal, took the drug himself and experienced visions that caused him to develop a new personal philosophy of consciousness expansion and move from experimenter to advocate, coining the phrase, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” According to writer Jesse Walter, the phrase came from a conversation with another guru of the day: “What’s fascinating is Leary’s relationship to that panic. Leary has written that his best-known slogan—‘tune in, turn on, drop out’—was inspired by a lunch with the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who told him, ‘You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer. Fine. But the key to your work is advertising…. You must use the most current tactics for arousing consumer interest.’ According to Leary, McLuhan even broke into a jingle: ‘Lysergic acid hits the spot/Forty billion neurons, that’s a lot.’”3 Leary became a proselytizer for the drug, publicly advocating its use as both a consciousness-raising experience and a good high. Even after it was outlawed, he continued to advocate for it, lecturing on its benefits, and urging people to break the law, use acid, and voluntarily become outsiders.
Since the federal government was, at best, misinformed about the effects of marijuana and peyote and, at worst, as Nixon’s cabinet member John Erlichman admitted, deliberately lying about their dangers, few hippies, radicals, and other young people believed their warnings about LSD. Its use increased dramatically, with Leary at its center as spokesman. President Nixon declared him to be the most dangerous man in America,4 and due to his frequent arrests he served short periods of time in thirty-six different prisons.5 Leary made his living from LSD, not by selling it but by forming the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD) to promote the use of acid, and toured the country doing lectures and using light shows to replicate the LSD experience for his audiences, which were primarily made up of college students.6 He was arrested for smuggling marijuana from Mexico into the United States. The drug was found on his girlfriend but Leary took responsibility for it and was sentenced to ten years for that offense with another ten tacked on for a previous arrest.
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an acid-based group that claimed Leary as a leader, hired the Weathermen for $25,000 to break him out of jail. The arrangement was simplicity itself: Leary would climb the fence that surrounded his minimum security prison, then the Weather Underground would smuggle him out of the country. The plan succeeded. They picked Leary up after he’d made it over the fence and drove him away from the prison in a pickup truck. They then helped him and his girlfriend leave the country for Algiers.7
The Weather Underground considered action like freeing Leary as mere fundraising and would accept funds from whoever offered them—they even took money to cover their operations and training in guerrilla warfare from Fidel Castro’s government. Their real goal was bigger, though, suggested to them by North Vietnamese officials they met in Cuba. The North Vietnamese convinced them that armed action against the U.S. government would stop the war. The Weathermen were young and naive enough to believe them.8 John Jacobs stated the real goals of the group, as well as their level of political sophistication: “Weatherman would shove the war down their dumb, fascist throats and show them, while we were at it, how much better we were than them [the federal government], 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.”9
In his book, Days of Rage, historian Brian Burroughs traces the young radicals’ new fondness for firebombs. In February of 1970 members of the Weather Underground firebombed the Golden Gate Park precinct of the San Francisco Police Department, killing one officer and wounding several others. Later in the month, a group indulged in a Molotov cocktail rampage through Manhattan, tossing simple but deadly homemade explosives into the second floor of the Columbia University Law Library, at police cars parked at the Charles Street Precinct, and at military recruiting booths at Brooklyn College. All of this activity was leading up to the evening’s prime target, the home of New York Supreme Court justice John M. Murtagh, who was presiding over the trial of a group of Black Panthers. The Weathermen intended to send him a warning. Painting slogans like “Free the Panther Twenty-one” on the sidewalk outside his house, they tossed three firebombs at it, blowing out the front windows.
Two weeks later, the four Weathermen who bombed the judge’s house were at it again. They chose as a firebombing target a dance at the noncommissioned officer’s club at Fort Dix across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Deciding to escalate the results by using nail bombs—a type of shrapnel-throwing explosive that scatters nails over a large area—instead of Molotov cocktails, the group spent the afternoon of the dance building the bombs in their rented Greenwich Village townhouse. One of the bombs exploded, killing WUO members Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, and Diana Oughton. Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin made it safely out of the house. Actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, came home to find the house next to his blown to pieces and still on fire. He told the New York Times how odd it felt to see the carnage and to be interviewed by TV reporters who wore full makeup while the fire blazed behind them. The FBI claimed the group had enough explosives in their townhouse to blow up both sides of the street.
The explosion was the effective end of the organization. Their numbers decimated by deaths and desertions, the remaining handful of WUO members went truly underground to escape prosecution. Instead of simply hiding out, however, they continued their acts of domestic terrorism, only this time concentrating on symbolic bombings in which properties, rather than people, were to be the targets.10 Even as members were being indicted and arrested, the WUO continued its activities. The roundup by officers of the law had intensified. In April the FBI arrested fugitives Linda Sue Evans and Dianne Donghi. The numbers continued to dwindle, but those still on the run still robbed banks and other businesses and set off bombs. On June 9, 1970, the remnants of the group planted a bomb in the headquarters of the New York City Police Department at 240 Center Street. About six minutes before it went off the WUO issued a warning, and no one was injured. The WUO officially claimed responsibility.11
On Ho Chi Minh’s birthday the Weather Underground placed a bomb in the women’s bathroom in the Pentagon. The damage caused flooding that destroyed computer tapes holding classified information. Again, the WUO claimed credit. Bombing had become an everyday occurrence, a favorite tactic. As the war wound down and their level of violence rose, the Weather Underground lost the support of other leftist organizations and in a manifesto, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, they called for a violent overthrow of the federal government, which would be replaced with a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” It also called for renouncing other left-wing groups and operating as a self-contained underground group.12
By 1974 the war was over and the Weather Underground lost its main purpose, but that fact made no apparent difference to them. By then, their goals had changed. War or no war, they wanted the government overthrown. By then they had learned that going it alone was futile and self-defeating, so they reissued Prairie Fire in a revision that called for cooperation with other, above-ground groups. This move split them into two competing factions. The May 19th Communist Organization wanted to remain underground, while the Prairie Fire Collective wanted to come out of hiding and work on building a mass movement that included a wider range of American citizens.13 The Prairie Fire Collective members surfaced and surrendered to authorities. The May 19th group, however, refused to quit and continued its program of attacking American institutions.14
By 1977 the Weathermen were finished. Five members were arrested for attempting to plant a bomb in California state senator John Briggs’ office. They were convicted and sent to prison. That case was the tipping point. Weathermen began turning themselves in to the authorities and the movement was effectively ended. A few members remained underground, refusing to give up the fight. In 1981 former WUO members Kathy Boudin, Judith Alice Clark, and David Gilbert joined up with members of the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brinks truck in Nanuet, New York, that contained $1.6 million. The robbery went bad and three people were killed. The three WUO members were captured, convicted, and sentenced to long terms in prison. It was the dying gasp of the organization.15
Not only did the movement die, the music that had inspired it and pushed it along died also. Folk music entered one of its hard-to-find periods. It appeared that the long war had killed America’s ideals along with its fighting forces, and the music grew as cold and selfish as the movement had. As far back as 1970 a fragmentation in the songs America was listening to could be discerned: Simon & Garfunkel could sing of love and friendship and always being there in “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” but they soon afterward broke up due to internal dissension. The Beatles advocated a laid-back spiritual approach that urged listeners to “Let It Be,” but the Guess Who attacked the values this country showed in “American Woman,” a blistering attack on American hypocrisy. If there was a split, it was resolved during the seventies when escapism had become the staple of the music. Three Dog Night wished “Joy to the World,” and John Denver offered up “Rocky Mountain High.” The songs that weren’t sheer escapism were trivial, speaking of feelings without feeling them. The Bee Gees wondered “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” and Carole King claimed “It’s Too Late.” Folk no longer seemed to matter.
As Paul McCartney was fond of pointing out, by the seventies people wanted “Silly Love Songs.” Captain & Tennille had the number one song of 1975 with “Love Will Keep Us Together,” while Redbone urged us to “Come and Get Your Love.” Where these performers led, others followed. “Love’s Theme” was put on the charts by the Love Unlimited Orchestra and Frankie Valli charted with “My Eyes Adored You.” As far as the dying embers of folk music went, John Denver explored solipsism with “Sunshine on My Shoulders” and offered the ultimate escapism with “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” Denver’s success enabled other folk-country artists to make the pop charts, most prominently Glen Campbell, whose “Rhinestone Cowboy” was one of the biggest hits of the decade.
Many of these were good songs done by popular and respected artists who were simply reflecting the times they were living in, as folk music in all its manifestations had always done. America had just endured more than ten years of an unjust and unwinnable war. During the previous decade the country had been split down the middle like a pig on a spit, its government having lied to its own citizens about the war, made enemies of its own young, and ordered its policemen and national guardsmen to beat, shoot, and kill innocent college students who protested the war and racism. Alienation and a sense of nothingness had become as normal as television, and the country was sick at heart. People wanted to escape what they had been through, to be able to ignore what their lives had become and the conditions under which they had been living. Every war in our history had been followed by a period of escapism and this one was no exception. America’s citizens felt a psychic need to lighten up.
The music simply reflected this need, culminating in the ultimate escapism: disco. By the mid-seventies dance music had captured the hearts of America’s young as well as its charts. Among the earliest of disco records to seize the public need to bust a move on the dance floor was Van McCoy’s “The Hustle,” a song designed specifically for dancing. The Hustle was a dance invented in the early seventies by Puerto Rican teens in the South Bronx that spread as quickly as a virus. By 1976 it had been formalized into a six-step partner dance called the New York Hustle, which McCoy’s record popularized. Featured in the 1977 movie Saturday Night Fever, the Hustle became a national pastime and brought the disco form to the forefront.16 Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” became the next huge disco hit. Exactly what its title made it sound like, the song used a theme from Beethoven set to a dance beat. Revolutionary for the time, the record boosted the disco trend.17
In his book, Turn the Beat Around: The Rise and Fall of Disco, Peter Shapiro traces the growth of the form and relates how performers of all stripes felt compelled to issue disco recordings. Johnny Taylor contributed “Disco Lady.” Ron Stewart abandoned the blues-based rock he’d been doing and released “Do You Think I’m Sexy?” The Miracles did “Love Machine,” and Abba burst onto the scene with “Dancing Queen.” K.C. and the Sunshine Band had a steady stream of dance songs that hit including “Get Down Tonight.”
The Bee Gees, reading the tea leaves, saw a chance to raise their profile by turning their backs on the folk-rock that had made them famous and morphing into the kings of disco. It appeared that disco was going to become the exclusive music of America. The form dominated the airwaves the way the bands of the British Invasion had a decade earlier. It reached its apex in the late seventies when Chic offered up “Le Freak,” Gloria Gaynor recorded “I Will Survive,” and the Bee Gees’ younger brother Andy Gibb joined the family business by releasing “Shadow Dancing.” Even soul singer Lou Rawls was compelled to join the disco revolution, with songs like “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine” and “Let Me Be Good to You.”18
Its fans defended disco from its numerous attacks by rockers by saying that many of the lyrics might be trivial and meaningless but it was good to dance to. Few songs made this argument better than A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie” and the Village People’s “YMCA.” Like so many others in the genre, these songs were as devoid of content as a politician’s stump speech. The music, producer rather than artist driven,19 became mechanical and emphasized the dance rhythms over other values. Soon it took on an aura of satire, mocking itself, reducing itself to sheer silliness. Like psychedelic music before it, disco hit its inevitable dead end and had nowhere else to go.
Just as the New Left had done, disco eventually ran its course. It could not adapt to changing conditions, so it disappeared.