CHAPTER 2
Friendship
or “War (What Is It Good For?)”
I. It is the near twilight hour, the fog hanging thick, close to the ground like a heavy, leaden weight. Imagine that you’re an early human, sleeping with your villagers, huddled together on the ground, near the dying embers of the fire circle. First there is a feeling that disturbs your sleep—not all of your group is roused, but you notice that a few others were also disturbed—by a vibration more than a sound. And you wonder: Was it real or a dream? Rumbling, a boom-boom-ka-boom like distant thunder, like rocks tumbling. The earth shakes and then the sound comes closer, louder; your body is being assaulted. Drums are coming toward you, a purposeful, synchronized stampede, like fifty rhinoceroses, coordinated, all of one mind, as though they have devised a terrible, directed plan for attack and total destruction. It has to be real, you think, but it is a sound you’ve never heard before. What starts as a quiver of apprehension turns into collective fits of shaking as all of your family and friends wake and tremble with helplessness, all the gumption draining out of your bodies before you even know what is going on. The terrifying synchrony of it, the bone-shaking intensity of it, the sheer loudness. Do you run or prepare to fight? You sit frozen, in awe, paralyzed. What in the world is happening? As they crest the hill, you see them, and for a brief moment before the deafening sounds knock you senseless you see a band of warriors banging on drums in an eerie demonstration of coordinated, malevolent power.
Throughout history, tribes often attacked their enemies stealthily, in the dead of night while their opponents slept. Clever tribespeople, lucky recipients of a bit more cognitive capacity than their neighbors (thanks to random mutation), at some point recognized the power of drum music to incapacitate the enemy, to sap their resolve and simultaneously impassion their own warriors. Each drum tuned slightly differently, skins stretched over wooden stumps, sticks, and rocks knocked together; shells and beads banged, hit, struck, scraped, and shaken: the sound of a well-coordinated, well-practiced single mind. If these invaders could synchronize so tightly to something as nonvital as drumming, that same synchronization put into the service of killing would be so relentless and merciless as to crush even the most formidable resistance.
When Joshua fit de battle of Jericho, it was not melody that made the walls come tumbling down, according to one rabbinic midrash, it was the rhythms of the Hebrew army drum corps. And it was the terrified Jerichoans who themselves opened the walls to the invaders, realizing the futility of putting up a fight, hoping that their conciliatory gesture would eke out a trace of compassion. (It didn’t.) At the foot of Balin’s tomb in The Lord of the Rings, surrounded by dozens of skeletons, Gandalf reads the last entry from the watchman’s logbook: “The ground shakes. Drums … drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow lurks in the dark. We can not get out … they are coming.”
II. It is 7:45 A.M. on a November morning at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri, fifteen minutes before the first period bell rings. Out in back of the school, near the Dumpsters and an abandoned basketball court, a group of students smoke cigarettes. For some it’s the first of the day, for others their third. They are not the good students, the star athletes, members of the chess club, glee club, or drama club. They aren’t the worst students either, the ones who are being threatened with expulsion or who are being evaluated by a stream of head-scratching school psychologists. These are average students who would otherwise go completely unrecognized and unnoticed by the rest of the school except that they come here several times a day. Most have been in trouble with their teachers or the principal for breaking one rule or another, but nothing serious—being in the hall without a pass, tardiness, late homework—crimes of laxity and neglect, not of violence. The alley where the municipal garbage trucks come has been named Tobacco Road by generations of students at the school. The morning cigarette ritual is followed by the ten o’clock mid-morning recess, lunchtime, and afternoon recess cigarette breaks. They blow smoke rings; they spit. The boys talk about cars they know they’ll never own, and Bruce Lee movies they’ve memorized. The girls talk about older siblings who don’t come home at night, with mind-numbing jobs and boyfriends.
None of them has much money, and with the cost of cigarettes approaching fifty cents each, they share a daily concern about where the money for the next pack will come from. But they are generous to anyone who shows up without a cigarette, sharing among one another what they have. When a stranger asks to bum a cigarette, several of the teens offer the outsider the hospitality of a shared nicotine rush. The group are alternately chatty and reflective as the chemicals simultaneously rouse their frontal lobes and calm their limbic systems.
Most of them have beat-up iPods or early MP3 players, but when they’re smoking together, the earbuds hang at their sides, and they listen to a boom box or portable player with a speaker built in. “The fidelity is whack,” says one, “but least this way we can all hear it together.” They tap their feet to 50 Cent—some of them raising the back of their heel and pounding it down on the pavement in time with the bass drum. They sing along with all the words to Ludacris, and when Christina Aguilera comes on, the girls do some steps, cop some poses, as the boys try unsuccessfully to feign disinterest. But it’s when an old song from thirty-five years ago comes on that one of the girls cranks the volume. Soon the entire group is moving as one to “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” by Brownsville Station:
Smokin’ in the boy’s room
Smokin’ in the boy’s room
Teacher don’t you fill me up with your rules
’Cuz everybody knows that smokin’ ain’t allowed in school!
They are singing at the tops of their lung capacity, laughing, and a transformation has come over them. This is their song.
Two different scenarios, far removed in time and place. Music, or at least the rhythmic aspects of it, binds the first group together in fear. A seventies song with a distorted electric guitar binds the second group together in defiance. They are two very different types of bonding, but both with an important survival component. Both are bonds of cooperation.
The surprise, predawn attack was a gruesome innovation in prehistoric warfare.1 The attackers would wait until their opponents were in deep sleep and attack just an hour before dawn, sometimes in complete silence and sometimes with a fanfare of menacing instruments, creating as much noise and mayhem as they could to terrify their victims. By attacking at that hour, they had the element of surprise. By bringing their own torches, they controlled the source of light. By the time the sun came up, they could survey the destruction and collect the spoils.
This is a study of evolution and natural selection in situ. Those bands of early humans who were unable to develop a strategy for fending off such attacks were killed; their genes did not endure in the population. But a few clever humans did develop countertactics—no doubt as a direct consequence of the increased size of their prefrontal cortex, conferred as an advantage by random mutation. These countertactics may well have involved staying awake at night and singing as a way to broadcast, “We’re awake, and we’re here.”
Consider the Mekranoti people of the Brazilian Amazon. They are a small group of hunter-gatherers, indigenous to southern Pará, who have had relatively little contact with modern humans and thus are living their lives in ways that, anthropologists believe, have probably changed very little over the last several thousand years. One of the most remarkable things about the Mekranoti is the amount of time they spend singing—women sing for one or two hours every day and men sing for two hours or more each night. Given their subsistence lifestyle, this represents an enormous investment of time that might be more productively spent gathering food or sleeping. As David Huron writes:
The men sing every night starting typically around 4:30 in the morning. When singing, the Mekranoti men … swing their arms vigorously. The men endeavor to sing in their deepest bass voices, and heavily accent the first beats of a pervasive quadruple meter with glottal stops that make their stomachs convulse in rhythm. Anthropologist Dennis Werner (1984) describes their singing as a “masculine roar.” When gathering in the middle of the night, the men are obviously sleepy, and some men will linger in their lean-tos well after the singing has started. These malingerers are often taunted with shouted insults.
Werner reports that “Hounding the men still in their lean-tos [is] one of the favorite diversions of the singers. ‘Get out of bed! The Kreen Akrore Indians have already attacked and you’re still sleeping,’ they [shout] as loudly as they [can] …. Sometimes the harassment [is] personal as the singers [yell] out insults at specific men who rarely [show] up.” …
Like most native societies, the greatest danger facing the Mekranoti Indians is the possibility of being attacked by another human group. The best strategic time to attack is in the very early morning while people are asleep. Recall the insult shouted at men who continued to sleep in their lean-tos: “Get out of bed! The Kreen Akrore Indians have already attacked and you’re still sleeping.”
The implication is obvious. It appears that the nightly singing by the men constitutes a defensive vigil. The singing maintains arousal levels and keeps the men awake.
The Mekranoti are just one of many examples of people singing to ward off predators or attacking neighbors. It can be seen as the opposite side, a complementary behavior, of the aggressor’s use of music. Native Americans often sang and danced in preparation for launching an attack, as did the prehistoric aggressors in the fictional scenario #I above. The emotional and neurochemical excitement that resulted from this preparatory singing gave them the mettle and stamina to carry out their attacks. What may have begun as an unconscious, uncontrolled act—rushing their victims with singing and drumbeating in a vocal-motor frenzy—could have become a strategy as the victors saw firsthand the effect their actions had on those they were attacking. Although war dances risk warning an enemy of an impending attack, as Huron notes, the arousal and synchronizing benefits for the attackers may compensate for the loss of surprise. Combined with the sheer intimidation of witnessing such a spectacle, humans who sang, danced, and marched may have enjoyed a strong advantage on the battlefield. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century Germans feared no one more than the Scots—the bagpipes and drums were disturbing in their sheer loudness, and add to that the visual spectacle, the fearlessness of rank after rank of men wearing skirts. The Romans also feared the Scots in part because of their music—this fear culminated in Hadrian’s Wall. Like the Maori in New Zealand with their tattooed faces, open mouths, and outstretched tongues, music becomes a way of shouting at an intimidating a foe, a tactic already well known during Old Testament times, the beginning of recorded history: “Raise the war cry, you nations, and be shattered!” (Isaiah 8:9).
In our own time we have seen the power of such intimidation. Film footage of the marching Nazi army is terrifying to most people (even without knowing that they are Nazis). The synchronous, precise movements of the army suggest a level of discipline and instruction that is beyond the ken of our normal experience. Subconsciously, we realize that if they have mastered such precision in an activity as apparently useless as marching, how much more skilled they might be at the business of killing—hundreds or thousands of soldiers united in synchronous movements, choreographed for death and destruction. That is intimidation, and one of the reasons why patriotic parades often feature infantry marching down the main street of a town. Similarly, the sound of the Mekranoti collectively joined in a loud, middle-of-the-night song, signifies more than the fact that they are awake and vigilant—it indicates strong emotional bonds, coordinated effort among the singers-cum-fighters.
The physiology of singing, as opposed to simply speaking, allows the group to maintain loud voices for a longer period of time because singing uses different throat and diaphragm muscles than speaking. Through singing, especially in harmony, the Mekranoti can give the impression that their numbers are even greater than they actually are. The vocal synchrony further conveys that they are not simply acting as independent entities; its demands also indicate that they are aware and sensitive to the physical and mental states of each member of the group—an awareness that could create a formidable military defense if called to fight.
The primates that we Homo sapiens are descended from are manifestly social species. But there are unpleasant by-products of being intensely social and interested in the comings and goings of others: strong rivalries, jealousies, challenges to dominance hierarchies, competition for food, and sexual selection competition for those mates that are perceived to be the most desirable (remember high school?). These social tensions are the primary reason that nonhuman primates are rarely known to travel in groups larger than a few dozen—the social order simply cannot be maintained in larger assemblies.
But larger living groups, if they can be formed and maintained, confer several significant advantages. First, larger groups are likely to be more successful at repelling outside invaders. In a hunter-gatherer society, in which foodstuffs are often difficult to find and secure, the risks of any individual coming home empty-handed are diluted through the actions of many dozens or hundreds of hunter-gatherers; with cooperation, a given individual may come home empty-handed today, but full-armed tomorrow—in either case, the supplies are shared.
The genetic diversity of larger living groups (and the great range in choice of mates) provides a clear evolutionary advantage in that the population will be more resistant to disease and generally more flexible in responding to environmental change. These advantages apply as much to insects and bacteria as to people—but insects so far as I know don’t make music, so I’ll set them aside. (Bee and ant cities do display a complex social order and flexible roles for the members, but this is not the result of any form of consciousness like our own. Insects do display synchronous, rhythmic behavior which may be musiclike, but it is not really music.)
Humans certainly have overcome the sociobiological limitation on group size found in other primates, establishing living groups in the hundreds (at first, as the size of current hunter-gatherer societies attests), then tens of thousands, and now millions. The United States has nine cities with populations above one million, and China has fifty cities with populations above two million. Imperial Rome had a population of one million around 100 C.E. and ancient Athens a population of about half a million. The Old Testament (Exodus 12:37) refers to six hundred thousand men leaving Egypt during the Exodus (according to Josephus and other historians, dated at around 1500 B.C.E. plus or minus 150 years), and rabbinic teaching estimates the total number of the group that fled across the desert to be above one million. Human living groups in the hundreds of thousands have therefore been around for at least 3,500 years, and groups in the single-digit thousands must be much older.
How did we humans manage to relieve the social tensions that were necessary for the creation first of larger living groups—numbering in the hundreds—and ultimately of society and civilization?
I believe that synchronous, coordinated song and movement were what created the strongest bonds between early humans, or protohumans, and these allowed for the formation of larger living groups, and eventually of society as we know it. Throughout our evolutionary history, music and dance typically co-occurred. Rhythm in music provides the input to the human perceptual system that allows for the prediction and synchronization of different individuals’ behaviors.2 Sound has advantages over vision—it transmits in the dark, travels around corners, can reach people who are visually obscured by trees or caves. Music, as a highly structured form of sound communication, enabled the synchronization of movement even when group members couldn’t see each other. It allowed for distinctive vocal messages that could be transmitted across territories; for that matter, distinctive whistles and calls could have functioned much as the “secret clubhouse knock” allows identification of people we can’t see. Once hit upon, these behaviors would quickly spread, since groups that didn’t employ them would be at a competitive disadvantage. As Vernon Reid of the rock group Living Colour said, “In Africa, music is not an art form as much as it is a means of communication.” Singing together releases oxytocin, a neurochemical now known to be involved in establishing bonds of trust between people.3
In laboratory studies (both in my lab and the laboratory of Ian Cross at Cambridge) two individuals who are asked to synchronize their finger tapping on a desk synchronize more closely than when asked to synchronize with a metronome. This may seem counterintuitive, because the metronome is far steadier in its beat and therefore more predictable. But the studies show that humans accommodate one another’s performance, a situation of co-adaptation. They interact with one another, but not with the metronome, leading to a greater drive to coordinate. The evolutionary root of this behavior may well be in the coordination of movement, in general, because that serves to facilitate social interactions. If we’re walking together and communicating partly through vocalizations, partly through gesture, the interaction is greatly improved if our steps are aligned, if we’ve synchronized our gait—without it, one person’s head is always bobbing in and out of the other’s visual frame.
The wartime and hunting aspects are only part of the story. Synchronized movement also made collective tasks much easier to undertake, from hauling heavy objects to building structures to sowing seeds with human-driven plows. And when early humans were engaged in such heavy, manual tasks, looking at others in order to attain motor synchrony would not have always been an option. An aural signal for the synchronization—a repetitive, auditory call with accent structure indicating when certain key movements were to occur—would have made it possible to accomplish a great many physical tasks as a collective that would have been impossible individually. Historian William McNeill (author of The Rise of the West) highlights the importance of synchronized movement in manual labor:
Without rhythmical coordination of the muscular effort required to haul and pry heavy stones into place, the pyramids of Egypt and many other famous monuments could not have been built.4
Rowing crews on ships, in tight quarters, had to synchronize their movements to avoid injury. The same is true on the battle-field, as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War (fifth century B.C.E.); weapons used at close range could easily harm one’s own countrymen if movements were not properly coordinated. And I believe that the muscular coordination was facilitated, prompted, and motivated by song. Songs that were essentially ones of friendship, of social bonding. Where would civilization be without them? William McNeill continues:
Crops in Sumer depended on irrigation; large-scale irrigation required the construction and maintenance of canals and regulation of how the water was distributed to the fields …. To make such feats possible, the scale of human society had to expand far beyond older limits. Villages with no more than a few hundred inhabitants no longer sufficed. And the rich harvests that could be garnered from suitably irrigated alluvial flood plains made it possible to feed the necessary numbers and even to reserve additional labor and materials for the construction of monumental temples in a dozen or more interconnected cities. Cooperation and coordination of effort according to plan were needed to achieve these goals.
Although McNeill’s research focuses on the motoric aspects of synchronized movement, he too feels that music was the guiding and binding force behind organizing this cooperation. Work songs (“Whistle While You Work,” “Let’s Work Together,” “Hard Work”) do help to pass the time, and may well be a comfort to those singing them, but this is not their fundamental use—primarily, they exist to coordinate movement and cooperative undertakings, to imbue participants with a sense of shared purpose. Track lining songs are special cases of music that unified manual labor by their heavy rhythmic component (one-two-three-heave!).5 They combined the ancient uses of song with more modern, entertaining features, such as lyrics that often insulted things like the eyesight of the track liner or even the parentage of the crew foreman. Chain gang songs may also fall into this category (when the work being done required synchronous movement) or into the category of comfort, as they helped chained workers to pass the time and increase feelings of kinship with their fellow prisoners.
Synchronized singing and dancing did more than just facilitate the building of large-scale civic structures. They helped build political structures as well. Frictions within a group could be smoothed out by promoting feelings of togetherness. Without explicitly requiring the prelinguistic version of an apology, the strong emotional bonds created by synchronized music-dance allowed both parties to save face and to set their differences aside.
Evolution may have selected those individuals who could settle disputes in nonviolent ways such as music-dance. At a neural level, we now know that the hypothalamus, amygdala, motor cortex, and cerebellum are linked both to movement and to emotion. The basis for this linking goes to the heart of why our ancestors needed to move in the first place: to find food, to escape dangers, and to find mates. All three of these activities are necessary for life, and evolution created links between movement and motivation centers, as opposed to color vision or spatial cognition neural circuits, which are not as closely linked to motivation.
What we call emotions are nothing more than complex neurochemical states in the brain that motivate us to act. Emotion and motivation are thus intrinsically linked to each other, and to our motor centers. But the system can work in the other direction, because most neural pathways are bi-directional. In addition to emotions causing us to move, movement can make us feel emotional. To a neutral observer, synchronized dance appears to be the result of a close relationship between the participants. To the participants themselves, although it may not begin this way, it typically ends up engendering strong feelings of sympathy, caring, and affection. Petr Janata, a neuroscientist and musician, described the strength of these bonds this way: “There are times when I would rather make music and dance with my wife than make love with her—the former can be a more intimate or at least a different type of intimate connection.”
Those who march, either in military units or college marching bands, report exhilaration from the activity. Although to an outsider marching drills may seem repetitive and boring, the participants often experience a kind of Zen state of focused attention, readiness, and excitement combined with an almost paradoxical sense of calm—a state called flow by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.6 A principle of evolution is that in general, if something feels good, evolution must have made it so—evolution must have provided a reward mechanism for synchronized movement and music-making, in the same way that evolution provided mechanisms of reward when we eat and have sex.
William McNeill recalls his days in the infantry:
What I remember now, years afterwards, is that I rather liked strutting around, and so, I feel sure, did most of my fellows.7 Marching aimlessly about on the drill field, swaggering in conformity with prescribed military postures, conscious only of keeping in step so as to make the next move correctly and in time somehow felt good. Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.
In his insightful history of synchronized military drill, McNeill cites Maurice of Orange, Sun Tzu, Thucydides, and other sources about the effectiveness of marching and the sweeping changes it brought to the battlefield. Some evolutionary theorists might argue that these accounts are too recent (evolutionarily speaking) to be relevant to natural selection, for the good feelings that accompanied such exercises to have been shaped by natural selection. But where threats to life are concerned, natural selection can work its magic in just a few generations. Suppose there are some people who, by virtue of random mutation, enjoy eating dirt.8 An epidemic of a fatal virus sweeps the world, attacking hundreds of millions of people. It turns out that a particular compound, found only in dirt, kills the virus. Those people who eat dirt would survive and nearly everyone else could be wiped out within only one or two generations.
What we call instinct in humans and animals is often nothing more than the product of natural selection at work. Consider house cats. Cats kick dirt or sand or whatever is nearby over their excrement. But it is unlikely that they understand the germ theory of disease and are covering their excrement to minimize contagion. Instead, some ancestral cats had a genetic mutation that triggered the release of certain reinforcing neurochemicals (let’s call them “happy juice”) when they kicked after excreting. The cats with this mutation were less likely to get sick or to spread disease to their offspring, facilitating this mutation’s rapid spread through the genome.9
By extension, humans who enjoyed singing, dancing, and marching together so much that they were drawn to it, attracted to it, and practiced it for thousands of hours were those who were the victors in any battles in which such drill conferred an advantage.10 The strong emotional, even neurochemical plea sure that resulted from synchronized movement may well have had a prehistoric antecedent. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors may have danced around the campfire before and after the hunt. By rehearsing their movements, they gained precision in their actions and were thus more likely to succeed. And taking down a large swift mammal with handheld tools likely required the coordinated movement of many accomplices. Modern army drill is probably an extension of this prehistoric behavior. Music traditionally has been characterized not only by sound but by action, and by interaction among makers of music-dance.
Humans around the world report not just strong emotional bonding from synchronized, coordinated movement together, but feelings of a spiritual nature—a sense of there being a collective consciousness, the presence of a superior being, or an unseen world that is larger than what we immediately experience. The cognitive psychologist Jamshed Bharucha suggests an explanation for these feelings. The sense of group agency or collective consciousness that one feels when synchronized with others is more than an exhilarating feeling, he says. We feel this exhilaration, which comes from the neurochemical activity described above, and that leads the brain to seek a cause. Attribution—particularly causal attribution—is an automatic and compelling tendency of the brain. In fact, we can’t not attribute causes. As we sense a change in our emotional state, we look around to see what’s going on in the world that could explain our mood. In the case of group synchrony, we look around us and see all these other people dancing and singing with joy and excitement. In this way, the strange feeling (from the neurochemicals) becomes attributed to something beyond oneself. That’s why, in addition to the other advantages of group cohesion mentioned, religions make use of synchronization: It actually enhances the belief in a cause beyond oneself. So it’s more than just a good feeling; auditory and motor synchronization can lead to beliefs in forces that transcend the individual, such as societies.
Music and coordinated movement were thus a way of creating meaningful social bonds for these four activities just reviewed: waging war, defending against attack, hunting prey, and forming work crews. A fifth and crucial use of music was for easing tensions within the larger social groups that were forming—group cohesion. Here, music can be traced back even before the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens, to tens of thousands of years before with a common ancestor, Homo erectus. Around the time that Homo became bipedal and erect, they left the relatively safe cover of tree living to live on the savannah; the principal advantage was a greatly increased supply of food as Homo became hunters, but there were disadvantages as well to be weighed. As Mithen notes:
Away from the cover of trees, safety can only be found in numbers ….11 There is, however, a cost: social tensions leading to conflicts can arise when large numbers have to live continuously in close proximity to one another.
Easing these social tensions was not trivial. Among nonhuman primates, this is generally accomplished by grooming one another (picking nits and cleaning the hair of a friend); in fact, the closeness of a relationship between two primates can often be determined simply by the amount of time one spends grooming the other. But with the increased size of living groups—which was necessary for mutual protection—physical grooming of all one’s friends and allies becomes impossible. The Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed the vocal grooming hypothesis as the origin of vocal communication—the idea that hominids developed vocal communication (music or language) in order to indicate their cooperation and alliance with larger numbers of group members at once.
All over the world and in disparate cultures, human singing is present in two broad styles or forms: strict synchrony and alternation. In strict synchrony, the singers lock their vocalizations in with one another, such as we do in songs like “Happy Birthday” or most national anthems. This requires the ability to anticipate what is coming next in the song (combining cognitive operations of memory in the hippocampus and prediction in the frontal lobes), and then to create what neuroscientists call a motor action plan—a specific set of instructions sent to the motor cortex to enable one to sing, drum, or otherwise move the body in time with what others are doing. Part of the evidence that prediction processes are involved when we synchronize our singing, hand clapping, or other musical gestures to those of a group is in the small, microtiming errors people make in trying to synchronize: Far more often than not, they are early in matching others’ musical behavior. This tells us that they’re not waiting to hear the next beat before they try to play it; rather, they’re anticipating when it will come and preparing a response before it happens. The coordination of activity in these three brain regions (hippocampus, motor cortex, and predictive centers in frontal lobes) would be dependent on the larger prefrontal cortex (than other hominids) that humans evolved.
Alternation occurs when some members of the group deliberately don’t synchronize with others, singing either in a round (as when children sing “Row Row Row Your Boat” and some start at a different time than others) or when singing a “call and response” pattern such as in the children’s campfire song “Sippin’ Cider Through a Straw.” Call and response is often found in American gospel music, and is based on an ancient African tradition. Indeed, in sub-Saharan African cultures in particular, this style is considered emblematic of a demo cratic participation in the music. Call and response is also found in traditional Indian classical music (where it is called jugalbandi or sawaal-javaab in North Indian classical music), in Latin American music (where it is called coropregon), and in European classical music (antiphony). Alternation in particular requires perspective taking (the first of the three components of the musical brain), and can be seen as an exercise for or pre de ces sor to other more utilitarian cooperative activities. Those individuals who were better able to predict the behavior of others because they could “read their minds” would have had a competitive advantage within the group.12
But understanding why it is music and not something else that causes these strong feelings of social bonding remains partly a mystery. Dunbar (and others who followed, including Dean Falk) made the case for why aural bonding would be more efficient than one-on-one physical bonding through grooming behaviors (or through sexual activity as is done by bonobos to promote bonding). Recall that evolution doesn’t invent new features from scratch; it doesn’t design from whole cloth. Rather, evolution uses structures already in place. Communicative calls and signals were already ubiquitous among the repertoires of nonhuman primates—certain sounds indicated particular types of dangers, the presence of food, and so on. Making such sounds in synchrony would be a clear indication that the group members were paying attention to each other and had a common interest. Among such group vocalizers, those that happened upon a way to induce feelings of happiness, safety, and security in their group mates would have an advantage—these early politicians could cause others to cooperate more with them because they were the source of good feelings.
In a larger context, individuals with social skills would receive many benefits—they would know how and when to get help from others, whom to fight with, whom to trust, and whom to avoid. This emotional intelligence would have given them power over others. Today, in contemporary society, we regard music as a form of emotional communication—perhaps the best one we know. There is no reason to suspect that music functioned differently—although the music itself may have been very different—thousands of years ago. Early humans may have used music to broadcast their own emotional states to others, as well as for the (political) purposes of calming, energizing, organizing, and inspiring.
An important aspect of group cohesion as induced by music-dance is that with larger and larger human living groups, smaller subgroups may form of individuals who feel that their interests are not aligned with those of the larger, dominant group. They may feel as though they lack the power or resources to break out on their own, but that the larger group is not serving their needs. At the dawn of human culture, such a group may have been the el der ly, who felt that the social alliances of the young were displacing their own; or a small group of individuals who did not like the current leader and felt mistreated by him. Music has historically been one of the strongest forces binding together the disenfranchised, the alienated.
The high school smokers mentioned at the beginning of this chapter are just one of many such assemblies. In high schools across America there are cliques of “in” students and of “out” students—students who feel marginalized, taunted, or tormented by the stronger, richer, or more popular kids. A common musical interest can provide solidarity for these smaller splinter groups, just as “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” does for the smokers. Gay students may turn to gay anthems such as Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” The “we” that music binds together can refer to liberals (Nine Inch Nails’ “March of the Pigs”), conservatives (Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue”), the young (the Who’s “My Generation”), the average guy (Primus’s “Poetry and Prose”), or the working man (Springsteen’s “Working on the Highway”). The free love and sex philosophy of the late sixties and early seventies was celebrated in songs such as Stephen Stills’s “Love the One You’re With,” and those who rejected such notions might have turned to Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” and today might be galvanized by Whitney Houston (“Saving All My Love for You”) or Jill Scott (“Celibacy Blues”). Cherish the Ladies are a group whose musical mission is to preserve traditional Irish jig music, reels, and airs and provide solidarity for people of Irish descent, especially those far from home; the fact that they all are women positions them as role models for young female musicians.
My mathematics professor at M.I.T., Gian-Carlo Rota, also taught the graduate course in existentialism there in the 1970s and 1980s, and he used to give out buttons that read “De cadence Is Cozy.” The message is intriguing: People who do something together that is antisocial or somewhat off-center enjoy a bond. We hear it in the proto-punk classic “Dirty Water” by the Standells. “I’ll be down by the river Charles,” they sing, along with “lovers, buggers and thieves.” What they are saying is “They’re actually good people, these river-dwellers, people like us.” Much of heavy metal music speaks to people on the fringes of society, the disaffected. Heavy metal lyrics are often a call of togetherness: we (heavy metal fans) are all misfits, but we are bound together in that. A generation was inspired to take drugs, or at least if they were already taking them to feel good about it, by songs such as “White Rabbit” by the Jefferson Airplane, with its call to “feed your head.” (Non-drug-users found solace in Paul Revere & the Raiders’ “Kicks” or John Lennon’s “Cold Turkey.”)
The sociologist Tricia Rose points out the role that black women rappers play in binding together other young black women, to give a voice to a segment of society that often correctly feels that their unique concerns are not being addressed. The rappers, Rose writes, “interpret and articulate the fears, pleasures, and promises of young black women whose voices have been relegated to the margins of public discourse.”13
Patriotic songs—such as the fictional Kazakhstan national anthem that promises the best potassium supply—are a natural extension of the power that music has to define the we. This is our country, our region, our group, our common interest, our football team, even our potassium. Although religious leaders have harnessed the power of music to bolster feelings of group solidarity and unity within their sects, their use of music should not be confused with the use of music for ceremonial openings to games and other public events, which is wholly different. Football fight songs and national anthems are essentially songs of social bonding; religion songs have their own character that may include social bonding, but this is not their primary characteristic.
Another effective use of social bonding songs is in the po litical sphere. As I said above, music was used by some early humans to ease social tensions within the group—political schmoozing—and it was also used to allow subgroups, particularly the disenfranchised, to cohere. Protest songs use social bonding powerfully. Whether it’s Bob Marley singing “Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!” or Phil Ochs singing “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Moses Rabbeinu singing “Let My People Go,” or Pete Seeger singing “We Shall Overcome,” protest songs have an ability to inspire, motivate, bind, focus, and move people to action.
Countless musicians have sung protest songs, and if rock music has a single recurring theme, it is rebellion. One band, the Plastic People of the Universe (PPU), started with no political agenda but is widely regarded as having spurred a revolution in Czechoslovakia.14 The band started in 1968, the same year that Prague was invaded by Soviet tanks to shut down the liberalization known as the Prague Spring. The new Communist government suppressed free speech, imprisoning many musicians. The PPU were forbidden by the government on several occasions to play, not because of any inflammatory lyric content, but because of their long hair and emulation of capitalist bands like the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. (The band took their name from a Zappa song.) In 1970, the government revoked the PPU’s musician licenses, which made it impossible for them to get equipment or gigs; they had to play underground concerts to avoid government detection and arrest.
“We were workers,” Ivan Bierhanzl, their bassist, says. “For us it was important just to play and listen to our music, and absolutely not to be some heroes.” In 1974, the government raided one of their concerts; fans were chased by police with clubs, and some students were expelled, forever ending their academic careers. In 1976, twenty-seven people were arrested at a PPU concert simply for being there. The saxophonist and the lyricist were both imprisoned. Other band members were beaten. A Czech human rights movement emerged, culminating in the nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” ending Communist control of Czechoslovakia. (Tom Stoppard wrote a play about it, which premiered in 2007.)
The unusual thing about the PPU is that they themselves were apolitical and never considered themselves activists, protesto rs, or revolutionaries with respect to government policy—all they wanted to do was to play their music. But the Communists’ actions created a strong support group of activists around the band.
What has been far more common in our lifetime is that protest songs have directly, through their lyrics, addressed slavery, human rights, desegregation, economic injustice, legal injustice (“Hurricane,” Dylan’s ballad of Rubin Carter), and other social ills. In the past forty years, a particularly large number of protest songs have been antiwar songs, to such a degree that to many people, the phrase “protest song” is synonymous with antiwar songs. And for those of us who grew up in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, disagreements about war created a fissure that seemed sure to drive the country apart. For some people, the moral certainty of peace seemed innate, and protest music gave these people the courage to hold onto their convictions while others around them derided them.
I already had developed antiwar feelings when I was seven years old. I understood World War II—my grandfather had fought in that, and although the war was terrible, the reason for it was clear. A tyrant was trying to kill all the Jews; we were Jewish, and some countries came to our aid. That war made sense. But in 1965 the Vietnam War did not make sense. By October, the United States had sent nearly two hundred thousand marines to Vietnam. The leaves were starting to change color and we did a crafts project with them during art hour at school. Right after recess the teacher had shown us some news reports—young American boys dead on the battlefield. As soon as I got home, I told my mother that we needed to call the President of the United States on the phone and tell him to stop the war. “We can’t call the President,” my mother said, “he’s probably very busy. You know, like when your father is busy at work and we don’t call him there unless it is very, very important.”
“But this is important,” I insisted. “There is no reason that the killing should go on anymore, it can stop today!”
My mother picked up the receiver and called directory assistance to get the number, and then she called the White House. She spoke firmly but matter-of-factly to the receptionist, like calling the President was something she did every day. “My seven-year-old son wants to talk to the President,” my mother said, “about the war.” She was transferred several times. We got all the way up to the President’s chief of staff, W. Marvin Watson. My mother held the receiver against her shoulder. “He said that the President can’t talk to you now, he’s in a meeting. But he said that he’ll pass on the message if you tell it to him.” She handed me the phone. He introduced himself, then asked my name and where I lived, and what I knew about the war.
“That the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese are killing each other and we went over to help, and now they’re killing us. We heard in school about teenagers that went there with the army, and they came back dead. Please—tell the President that he has to talk to them. He has to tell them to stop killing each other. They’ll listen to him.”
He sighed and I remember hearing that eerie noise of long-distance connections in those days, the clicking and crackling static on the line. He took a deep breath. “We’ve tried that,” he said, his voice cracking. “They won’t listen to us. We don’t know what to do.”
“But tell them,” I said, “that we’re all just like brothers and sisters. We have to stop fighting!”
“I’ll tell the President,” he said. “I’ll tell him just what you said.”
That night I went to bed and heard my parents fighting after I had fallen asleep.
My father and his younger brother were spared both the Vietnam and the Korean wars. My grandfather had been drafted into the army medical corps at the age of thirty-nine, and was away from his sons during four years of World War II, part of that time in Okinawa, where he had engaged in hand-to-hand combat. As a doctor, he had seen the worst bodily destruction imaginable. When his own sons were old enough for military service, he confided to me when I was seven, he intervened—without their knowledge—to make sure that his physician colleagues on the selective Ser vice Board were alerted to medical conditions that may otherwise have gone undetected, and they were classified as 4F, ineligible for service. My father had wanted to serve his country, and had even tried to enlist a year earlier, but my grandfather hadn’t let him. My father never expressed remorse or guilt over not having been able to serve, but his principal hobby as long as I’ve known him has been reading books and watching films about World War II.
During the 1960s, everyone over the age of seventeen was assigned a draft number, but most people who were in college got deferments. By the time I was eleven, though, the war had escalated. Nixon had just won the White House and the army was starting to take college students, graduate students, medical students, anyone they could get—men in their thirties were being called up. On the nightly news we saw hundreds of flag-covered caskets being unloaded from big transport planes on an airfield in Texas. Now boys in the neighborhood were coming home dead—the older brothers of people we knew. That same year we had to collect butterflies in science class, kill them, and mount them on cardboard. I couldn’t do it and my mother had to write a note asking for an alternate assignment. As Vietnam filled the TV news reports every day, my mother saw how worried I was, and at the dinner table one night she said, “Of course if you’re drafted, you can say you don’t want to go, as a conscientious objector. Or if they don’t accept that reason, you can go to Canada.”
My father threw his fork down. “He’ll do no such thing! If he’s drafted, he’ll fight in the war. It’s his duty as an American citizen—his obligation. No son of mine is going to be a draft dodger!”
I had always thought of my father as my protector, that if anything serious ever happened, he would be there to shield me. My mother countered with “He will not fight in that war.” My parents argued about this all night, long after my little sister and I were sent to bed. Unlike other nights, when we usually fought and called each other names from bedroom to bedroom, this night we spoke softly so that they wouldn’t hear us.
“What did Daddy mean? Why was he so upset?” she asked.
“You’ve seen the war on television,” I whispered.
“Yes, between North and South Vietnam,” she said. “A civil war.” She was now seven herself.
“Daddy said that I might have to go there.”
“Nooo!” she said. “You could get killed! He wouldn’t say that!”
During the war in Vietnam it seemed as though everybody who was in a position of power or authority in the United States was in favor of it, and those who were most against it were powerless to stop it. This was different from the Gulf War and the Iraq War, in which there was vocal opposition in Washington and very public disagreement from the beginning. To a child, and an antiwar one at that, it gave the Vietnam resistance a kind of David-versus-Goliath feel. There were so many of us against the war, millions by some estimates, but we weren’t rich, we weren’t in positions of control. The odds seemed overwhelmingly against us. Two of the most important antiwar spokespersons had been assassinated that year, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. I had seen the Kennedy assassination on live television. My grandfather also died that same year. “We” had tried to take control of the Democratic Convention in 1968, I knew, but we had been held back. Those men, outcasts, rebels at the perimeters of society had tried to get the antiwar agenda heard.
Music was there, songs, to bind together the resistance. I first learned “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a seven-year-old at a summer camp in the California mountains. A twenty-two-year-old camp counselor brought his guitar to campfire and taught all ninety of us these two protest songs, and we sang them every night for three weeks. As the war escalated, more songs appeared on the radio: “War (What Is It Good For?),” “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “Universal Soldier,” “Eve of Destruction,” and “Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam).” Then there was “Give Peace a Chance,” written and performed by John Lennon without the other Beatles. It didn’t sound like a Beatles song, but there was that familiar voice, the familiar acoustic guitar rhythms, making the call for an end to the war. Lennon’s song was far from the first or even the most popular protest song, but it exploded with musical power and with the raw simplicity of its message. My friends and I memorized even the somewhat tricky lyrics of the verses and sang them in the backseats of station wagons as our parents drove us to Little League practice, Scouts, and to Sunday school. Lennon was on board—he’d step to the head of the line and help lead the antiwar effort. With his charisma and intelligence, maybe now people would listen. This might be the song to do it!
We saw college kids protesting, singing, everywhere. UC Berkeley was just over the hill from where we lived, and the free speech movement, the protests, women’s lib, and improved race relations were all bound up into one big cause, into us against them.15 The songs seemed to hold wisdom, encouragement, and motivation. They were something to play back in your head to remind you that the movement was more than just a thought in your own head, or in the heads of a small group of people you could see. Just knowing that there were other people like you throughout the country, hundreds of thousands or millions of protesters, singing the same songs, chanting the same slogans, all with the same goal: The songs provided a strong sense of solidarity.
Then came Kent State, the shooting of four student protesters. This was all we were talking about in my junior high school, going over and over the story in disbelief: The National Guard, the agency formed to protect American citizens in the event of a national emergency, had shot and killed four antiwar activists just like us. We had just held our own walk-out the week before, congregating on the football field of our California school, refusing to attend class. For an hour we stood in silence, as did hundreds of thousands of other students throughout the country at the appointed time and place. What if the National Guard shot us too?
I was infatuated with the Chicago Seven, whom I considered role models, especially after Graham Nash wrote a song about them, “Chicago.”
We all knew the music of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Stills (with his band Buffalo Springfield, which also included Neil Young) had sung his antiwar song, “For What It’s Worth,” a few years before:
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
We gotta stop hey watch that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Writing a review of a documentary about the sixties (broadcast in 2007), New York Times critic Neil Genzlinger said, “That astonishing song came to encapsulate ’60s turmoil so perfectly that resorting to it is a subconscious admission by a documentarian: ‘I have nothing to say that Stephen Stills didn’t say better in 2 minutes 41 seconds.’ Its instantly recognizable two-note opening rings like an alarm bell.”
Right after the Kent State murders in 1970, CS&N were in the recording studio with Neil Young. “Teach Your Children” was climbing up the charts and headed for number one. Neil had just written “Ohio” in reaction to the shooting of four student protesters. “Graham suggested that we release the song right away,” Neil Young recalled. “It was his call, because it was his song that was climbing the charts, and we knew that we might not be able to have two songs on the charts at the same time. But he felt it was important to get the song out, and so he sacrificed ‘Teach Your Children’ for ‘Ohio.’ That was really something.” Nash added, “I had left my group The Hollies over disagreements over which songs to release—I wasn’t going to do to Neil what they had done to me.” “Ohio” became one of the most moving antiwar anthems; David Crosby can be heard crying at the end of the recording. Many people who grew up in the fifties, sixties, and seventies regarded the leaders of the antiwar movement—whether political leaders or musical leaders—as heroes, taking a courageous stand with the minority, speaking their conscience.
My friends and I spent hours reading everything we could about the assassinations; about James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan; about Kent State. I came to realize that the disagreements about the war were splitting my own house—my own parents, who seemed synchronized on every other aspect of life. Over all this, and the death of my grandfather who had explained everything to me and kindled my young interest in science, I was devastated. But at eleven I could not find a tear for Grandpa Joe, for Dr. King or Senator Kennedy, for the sixty thousand U.S. boys killed, or the three hundred thousand wounded, or for those young college students in Ohio, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder. I wanted to cry for them, for all of us. But I was not yet ready.
It eventually became politically untenable to fight the war. It was clear that the United States could not meet any of its objectives. How much of this was due to the music, the antiwar soundtrack to the protests? It is difficult to say, but music was present at almost every march and rally, in the background of nearly every organizational meeting. At the minimum, it’s clear that people at the time at least thought music was helping. But how can songs create such changes?
“The arts have power owing to their form and structures,” Pete Seeger says. “As I said earlier, good music can leap over language boundaries, over barriers of religion and politics and hit someone’s heartstrings somehow.16 That opens up their hearts to ideas that they might not have entertained if brought in through regular speech.”
“I believe in songs, of course,” Sting confided to me, “but it’s very difficult to imagine that a song would change anything overnight. What you can do is to plant a seed in someone’s brain, as seeds were planted in mine to make me the political animal I am. I think you can sing an idea to a young mind and that young mind may become a political person or a person in power one day and that seed will have borne fruit. Seeger has planted a few seeds that may have borne fruit forty or fifty years later in a subsequent generation.”
After visiting Guatemalan refugee camps in the early 1980s, Bruce Cockburn wrote an antiwar song, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.”17 “Aside from airing my own experience,” Cockburn explains, “which is where the songs always start, if we’re ever going to find a solution for this ongoing passion for wasting each other, we have to start with the rage that knows no impediments, an uncivilized rage that says it’s okay to go out and shoot someone …. The idea was to reach a different audience than the politicians by having us go and observe, using the relative visibility that we have to educate the Canadian public to what we had seen and to raise money for projects that OXFAM has in the region.”
Here comes the helicopter—second time today
Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away
How many kids they’ve murdered only God can say
If I had a rocket launcher … I’d make somebody pay
I don’t believe in guarded borders and I don’t believe in hate
I don’t believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher … I would retaliate
On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation or some less humane fate
Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate
If I had a rocket launcher … I would not hesitate
I want to raise every voice—at least I’ve got to try
Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.
Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry
If I had a rocket launcher … Some son of a bitch would die
Willie Nelson, writer of 2,500 songs including the classic “Crazy” (made famous by Patsy Cline) wrote “Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?” for Christmas 2003 to protest the Iraq War. “I hope that there is some controversy,” he said. “If you write something like this and nobody says anything, then you probably haven’t struck a nerve.”
There’s so many things going on in the world, babies dying, mothers crying
How much oil is one human life worth
And whatever happened to peace on earth
The protest music of the sixties and seventies was often accompanied by marijuana, cocaine, LSD, mescaline, peyote, opium, heroin, plus various amphetamines and barbiturates. To my parents’ generation, all of these were “drugs,” and they made no distinction between their wildly different effects. Although there were drug addicts on the fringe of society then, as there are now, and people who used drugs primarily to escape problems or responsibilities, or simply to feel good, there were also many people using drugs as a means of self-exploration, gaining insight into their thought processes, or awakening spiritual feelings during a time when organized religion was rapidly waning. Stuck with real spiritual needs and a desire to make sense of the political and social chaos around them, and sensing that the traditional religious institutions had nothing relevant to teach them, they turned to yoga, Buddhism, Ayn Rand, Dylan, Baez, Lennon and McCartney, the Jefferson Airplane, and sometimes to drugs. I never knew anyone who turned to amphetamines or heroin for enlightenment; rather, these were just available as part of the culture. Many figureheads, including Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Ram Dass, and John Lennon had used drugs and told of their ability to clarify things, to expand thought, to reveal mysteries about the world and about one’s own mind.
The combination of music and drugs proved to be potent, and scientific research has yet to explain it. Each drug acts differently on the brain, and so each has its own particular effects on the musical experience. Some, like cocaine and speed, don’t substantially alter consciousness, or the way that music sounds. The hallucinogens, however, change neural firing patterns in ways that can facilitate associations and memories, and fuel imagination. With LSD or peyote, for example, hallucinations may alternate with actual perception, the latter enhanced by connections to new ideas that can be imaginative, insightful, and poetic. Many people have concluded a drug-induced experience by feeling they gained a better understanding of themselves, of their modes of relating to the world and to others; many have said that they felt a strengthened bond with nature. Paul Kantner told me that when the Jefferson Airplane told everyone to take LSD and contemplate nature, “we imagined people like us sitting in a beautiful park (such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park), surrounded by like-minded free spirits and an atmosphere of love and goodwill. We didn’t stop to think that people would be dropping acid in the projects in the inner city, surrounded by filth, crime, and poverty. The drugs had a very different effect on people in those environments.”
Clearly whatever effects different drugs had on the brain, there were interactions with the environment, and with differences in each individual’s neurochemistry. Brains vary widely from one another in their architecture (that is, the physical size and layout of key structures), the pathways that are available, and their baseline levels of the different chemicals that allow neurons to communicate with each other and ultimately to form thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, and beliefs. As a neuroscientist acquainted with more than one hundred LSD users, I’ve come to believe that this particular drug is the most dependent on unobservable factors in each individual’s mental makeup. Some people can take hundreds of acid trips and suffer no ill consequences; others take only three or four and are never the same again. Many of these so-called acid casualties have settled on the California coast and I’ve encountered them in cities like Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara, unable to keep their brains functioning properly.
Music combined with marijuana tends to produce feelings of euphoria and connectedness to the music and the musicians. Δ9-THC, the active ingredient, is known to stimulate the brain’s natural plea sure centers, while also disrupting short-term memory. The disruption of short-term memory thrusts listeners into the moment of the music as it unfolds; unable to explicitly keep in mind what has just been played, or to think ahead to what might be played, people stoned on pot tend to hear music from note to note. Subconsciously all of the usual processes of expectation formation are still occurring (as I outlined in my book This Is Your Brain on Music), but consciously, the music creates what many people describe as a time-standing-still phenomenon. They live for each note, completely in the moment.
The proper hallucinogenics, such as LSD, psilocybin, peyote, and mescaline, each have unique effects, but what is common is that they may add to this time-stopping quality a sort of merged sensation or synaesthetic experience: Input from the various sensory receptors seems to merge, and sounds can evoke flavors, smells can evoke touch, and so on. For reasons not entirely understood, but related to action on the seratonergic system of the brain, these drugs also create feelings of unity with those people and things around us. (Serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in the regulation of sleep, dreams, and moods—it is the chemical system on which Prozac acts.) The ultimate expression of these feelings of connectedness occurs when musicians take hallucinogenics together, tripping together, playing together, and experiencing ecstasy together. This shared neurochemical and spiritual experience has been a sacred foundation of Native American ritual (in both the northern and southern hemi spheres) for centuries. In our own lifetime, the Grateful Dead tapped into this and formed powerful connections with those members of their audience who also took LSD, leading to the perception of an intensely synchronized experience between artist and audience. LSD users listening to Grateful Dead music describe the experience using metaphors from electricity: “It feels like I’m plugged in to them”; “we’re on the same wavelength”; “I get an electric charge listening to Jerry solo.” Jam bands such as Phish and the Dave Matthews Band extended the tradition through the 1990s and 2000s.
As ubiquitous as drug taking seemed to be in the sixties and seventies, it really represented a counterculture movement, practiced by a minority of people, and by people who were either in the avant garde or at the fringes of the culture, depending on one’s perspective, pro-or anti-drug respectively. I was surprised, then, when my friend Oliver Sacks told me about some of his own drug-induced adventures when I last visited him in New York, adventures that took place in the Topanga Canyon region of Los Angeles in the 1960s. As a neurologist, he had been especially curious about the action of drugs on the nervous system, and wanted to see for himself what the phenomenal experience was like. “I once had a musical synaesthetic dream,” he started, “involving musical Pringles potato chips. In my dream, I was eating from a tube of Pringles, and as they crunched in my mouth they would play a symphony or a concerto, each Pringle playing a few bars. That was without drugs (although it may have been influenced by previous drug experiences of mine). But with drugs, I typically didn’t listen to music, I would sit outside and look at landscapes, or get on a motorbike and go for rides. On those occasions I’d listen to music, I would be sensuously enchanted but often miss the structure of the music.”
Oliver described a particular day at a friend’s home when the friend was out and music was involved. “I had ingested mescaline and probably some cannabis,” he began. “While waiting for the effects to take hold, I put on a phonograph in the living room of the apartment. I was enjoying the music enormously when I became aware of the first hint of the effects of the drugs, a slightly bitter taste in my mouth.” Oliver speaks with a British accent, and his voice has the lilting musical quality of a great storyteller. “Suddenly the music was coming from everywhere, not just the speakers, and it drowned out all my other thoughts. I felt at one with a four-hundred-year chain of music leading back to Monteverdi. I saw the most wonderful colors, and my thoughts were freed from their normal patterns. I saw colors I had never seen before, and I felt a great sense of peace. The world appeared to me to be older, more organized than I had previously considered it, and although I am an avowed atheist, I had a strong feeling of a benevolent presence—you might call it ‘Einstein’s God.’”
Not long after telling me this story, Oliver came to Montreal, where I live, to give a talk to a sold-out audience of eight hundred people in the same lecture hall where I give my cognitive psychology class every winter. He spoke about three of the twenty-nine chapters in his insightful book Musicophilia, tales of individuals with various brain disorders that affected their musical experience. The next morning I met him and his executive assistant and editor Kate Edgar at their hotel for a large buffet breakfast. Buffets with Oliver are … an experience. He takes small portions back to his seat, eats them, and then hurriedly darts back to the buffet with the bearing of a hunter, eyes squinted, hunched over, looking for some hidden trea sure. He is usually rewarded for these efforts, bringing back on this day morsels of herring, banana nut bread, or granola that had eluded Kate and me.
We were talking about musical hallucinations, when Oliver jumped up. He returned a few minutes later with a star fruit. Oliver takes nothing in life for granted, finding plea sure in myriad little moments of the day. He cut the star fruit perfectly in half with a brain surgeon’s precision, and carefully—admiringly—studied the stellate pattern inside. He then ate the fruit, core and all, while I told him about my own musical hallucinations, which usually occur just as I’m falling asleep (the technical term for these is hypnagogic). Oliver, the rebel drug taker, was particularly interested in a New York Times op-ed piece I had recently written, explaining the neurogenetic and neuroanatomical connections between music and movement. The article ended with a tongue-in-cheek call for Lincoln Center to rip out the seats so that people could do what we were programmed to do by evolution: dance to the music. Oliver rocked back and forth in his seat as we discussed the article. “Are you hearing music in your head right now?” I asked him. “I’m almost always hearing music in my head!” he answered.
Our breakfast was in the restaurant of the hotel they were staying in, the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth. Oliver mentioned, amusedly, that he had been assigned the John Lennon suite, although he had no knowledge of the history behind that room—that John had stayed there in 1969 as part of a very well-publicized war protest. I remember watching the coverage of Lennon’s residency at the Queen Elizabeth from my home in California. I’d lived in Montreal for eight years but never known that the room had been preserved, much less named for Lennon. After breakfast, Oliver—knowing me to be a Lennon fan—asked if I wanted to see the room, so we went up to Room 1742. As soon as we got out of the elevator, I froze in my steps. I recognized the hallway in front of 1742, the same hallway I had seen on The Huntley-Brinkley Report on the nightly NBC news.
Kate and I—who are about the same age—kept interrupting each other explaining to Oliver why the room was named the “John Lennon/Yoko Ono Suite.” That during the last week of May 1969, Lennon and his wife had staged an event to protest the Vietnam War. Lennon recognized that his celebrity caused reporters to follow his every move, and he wanted to use that for a higher purpose than simply gathering more publicity for himself. He and Yoko came up with the idea of a “bed-in,” the honeymoon equivalent of a “sit-in.” They would stay in bed for a week and talk to reporters about the war, about peace, and try to use that as a platform for their views. Many reporters mocked them. Some were disappointed, expecting to find the couple making love for the cameras. The couple swallowed their formidable impatience, and played host to a continuous stream of journalists, some prepared to cover a serious story, many more not.
Oliver opened the door and invited us in. My vision of the room took on a kind of split-screen quality, present reality mingled with vivid competing visions of the news reports from forty years ago. Huntley-Brinkley. Cronkite. Peter Jennings. On June 1, 1969, Lennon wrote and recorded “Give Peace a Chance” in this room with Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers, and others singing backgrounds. The room looks just like it did then, except the mattress has been replaced. The walls have pictures of John and Yoko in that very room during the bed-in. One of the photos, just next to the bed, is in full color, showing John’s auburn hair and bushy eyebrows, and the small mole between his eyes, what Yoko describes as one of three moles he had, seldom caught in photographs, this one giving him a Buddha-like third eye. He’s cradling his Gibson J-160—I’ve never seen a photograph of John “holding” a guitar, he always is cradling it as one would a child—and he’s drawn caricatures of himself and Yoko on the front with a Sharpie. The color photo is flanked by two black-and-white photos of the couple in bed, talking to reporters. Timothy Leary is in the foreground of one, Tommy Smothers in the other.
Oliver stood in a large sitting room off the bedroom, studying the framed manuscript of “Give Peace a Chance” and a gold record award for five million sales. More photographs of John and Yoko graced the walls in the room, along with a pair of Zen paintings and a still-life bowl of fruit. “I don’t know much about popular culture after about 1960,” Oliver said, his remark reminiscent in accent and tone of Seth McFarlane’s Stewie Griffin. But Kate and I grew up in all of this, and back then had felt that we could change the world just by wanting it to be so.
The two of us are in the bedroom, transfixed by the photographs. I’m standing right next to the bed where John and Yoko launched this protest, where they sang the song. I hear it playing in my head. It is anthemic, large, earnest, pleading and yearning for peace, for people to lay down their weapons. The song is recursive in that it refers to itself and to the media frenzy surrounding its recording. The verse is a poke at the reporters who were preoccupied with trying to come up with the right label for the event, with trying to characterize it, while patronizingly ignoring the message behind the song.
The words of the refrain, their vernacular quality, sum up the message: All we are saying is “give peace a chance.” We’ve tried everything else—bombing, shooting, napalm, hand-to-hand, air strikes, strafing. Why don’t we try not fighting for a while and see if that works any better? The message is so simple, from a heart that had managed to keep a sense of childlike wonder about the world even at the age of twenty-eight. He would only live another eleven years.
How can they talk about winning a war when so many people die? Who are the winners and what have they won—the right to have killed so many without repercussions?
I look at the photographs and then at the bed, then at the photographs, and at the radiator, trying to match up the elements of the pictures with the room I’m standing in. I walk to the window and look out—this is what John saw when he was here—the city skyline, the cars below, the buildings across the street. This room was where he wrote the song. As I move from the photographs to the room, studying them, I notice Kate start to tear up.
“I remember where I was when I first heard that song,” she says.
“It was full of so much hope,” I add. “Lennon believed he could change the world with a song—with that song—he believed that much in the power of music.” The song continues to play in my head, but not like an ear worm, stuck in an irritating twenty-second loop, but full, rich, vivid. I hear the percussiveness of his guitar (hastily miked, it sounds thin, more like sandpaper and sticks than the beautiful spectral instrument it is), the clapping of the twenty people in the room, the makeshift bass drum of people clomping their feet on the floor, sounding eerily like mortar fire.
My mind becomes flooded with thoughts I haven’t held there in years—the death of my grandfather, of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the dead war veterans, the Kent State students, Lennon’s own violent death. Standing in Room 1742, Lennon’s room, I find a tear for all their lives, and all that they stood for.