Rev Left Radio - Whole World in an Uproar: Music, Rebellion and Repression (1955-1972)

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Aaron J. Leonard returns to the show to discuss his newest book, "Whole World in an Uproar: Music, Rebellion and Repression". Throughout the interview, we play many of the artists and songs mentioned in the book and conversation (time stamps below). Together, Aaron and Breht discuss the history, social upheavals, cultural shifts, and the political context in which the music from this era emerged and the reaction it created from the mainstream culture. Topics include: the beatniks, the cultural context of the 50's in America, the civil rights movement, the 1960's, the Kent State Massacre, the introduction of psychedlic drugs, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Revolution, the shift from the old left to the new left, and much more!       Music included:   10:30 - People Are Strange by The Doors   28:05 - Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young   48:40 - Mississippi Goddamn by Nina Simone   59:00 - Santo Domingo by Phil Ochs   74:50 - White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane   87:00 - Luang Prabang by Dave Von Ronk     Outro music: "For What it's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield   Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode we have back on the show, Aaron Leonard, to talk about his newest book, Whole World in an Uproar, Music, Rebellion, and Repression from 1955 to 1972. So as always, Aaron is a wonderful sort of articulator of American history. And while he's ostensibly writing a book about, music in this period of time, he's always connecting it with deeper political, social, and economic issues and showing how they are, you know, in utter dialectical relationship with the cultural products that our society produces. And this is a wonderful addition to his

growing library of books that he's written. We've had him on to talk about heavy radicals. We've had him on to talk about the folk singers in the bureau, on to talk about Judas and the Black Messiah, the documentary a year or two ago about Fred Hamble. co-intel pro we've had him on many times and he's always a pleasure i always always learn something new from him um and yeah he's he's definitely one of my favorite guests and this episode is going to be wonderful because not only are we going to be talking about the book we are also going to be playing music from the artists and the bands that he mentions uh throughout the episode and for those that might not know or for those that enjoy rev left and like what we do here um it really means

a lot to us if you could go to patreon dot com forward slash rev left radio And for basically the cost of a cup of coffee a month, you can support the show and get access to three bonus episodes a month. And on the Patreon, I do different things than I do on the main feed. I try to cover more topics in the news headlines. I do readings. I feel the questions, et cetera. So if you like the show, you want to support it and you want to get bonus content, go over to patreon.com. We deeply, deeply appreciated it.

All right, so without further ado, here is my conversation with Aaron J. Leonard on his new book, Whole World in an Uproar, Music, Rebellion and Repression, 1955 to 1972. Enjoy. So I am Aaron Leonard. I'm an author living out in sunny Los Angeles. I've written several books, you know, mainly dealing with governmental repression and radicalism, but I've kind of extended that out into a more, societal repression and systemic forces. Yeah, absolutely. And longtime Rev. Left listeners will be familiar with you. You've been on the show many times. Every time you release a book, I am eager to have you back on the show to talk about it. And today we're talking about your newest book, Whole World and an Uproar,

Music, Rebellion and Repression from 1955 through 1972. So first and foremost, Aaron, can you talk about the book, kind of what it's about, and why you wanted to write it? yeah i i've been wanting to write this book for some time i had hoped it would be a book uh similar to my previous one uh the folk singers in the bureau which was you know mainly based on a lot of fbi files being released but with this book the challenge was a lot of the artist uh people like sam cook or nina simone uh and others you know didn't have extensive of FBI files or the Bureau said those files had existed, but they'd been destroyed.

So I needed to try to sort out, you know, was there a kind of a embedded repression aimed at people doing music that challenged the status quo that wasn't always coming from the FBI. So that's how the book evolved. And so it does base itself on a first. amount of FBI documentations, people like Phil Oaks and Miriam McKeeb, even I've got some things on Bob Dylan, but with others like the Grateful Dead or the Doors or Jefferson Airplane, you know, you have to look more toward these overall governmental forces or the media, you know,

the pundocracy, etc. So that's kind of how that book evolved. But I think the other thing is I wanted to write a book about the 60s that took a different skew than most conventional writing on it does. You know, a lot of the argumentation on the 60s, well, there was this good period. You had JFK, you had Martin Luther King, you had civil rights, and it was all, you know, making advances. And then, you know, Kennedy got killed and, you know, King was assassinated and it all descended into violence. And it was, you know, it's the 60s as a series of assassinations and disenchantment. I knew that wasn't true. You know, it was a lot more complicated than that.

Yes, these assassinations had profound impacts. But in fact, the world as a whole was in some pretty sharp transition between 1956 and 1972. And to understand that, you've got to look at the bigger geopolitical. political framework and, you know, the contending ideologies, you know, this socialism, communism, you know, in the Soviet Union and China and the United States, which is the biggest power in the world coming off of World War II. So what was going on in there that led to this societal tumult, you know, uprisings in, you know, among the black nation, as some people refer to it, the black population, as others do, this huge anti-war movement and resistance

against the war refusing to fight and die for the United States. And this cultural, counterculture ferment in which people rejected the consumerism of American society, which was supposed to be the panacea in the quintessence of no living. All of these things sprung out amid major geopolitical shifts. So it's a long way to get it. I wanted to write a book about the 60s, and I wanted it to be steeped, particularly in these cultural forces who had such a profound and enlivening effect. So that's somewhat how I decided to take this on. Yeah, and I think you definitely succeeded that. I love that it's ostensibly and on the surface about the music and the, you know, artistic output, cultural output of that time, but because it's you,

it's going to be tethered to the deeper historical, political, economic, you know, situations that are happening, and then that is reflected in the culture and the music. And so you're studying both kind of at the same time and tracing their connections, which I love. Now, this is also, as you say in the book, the period of time when you were coming of age. So is it even more personal than perhaps the Folk Singer book or other books that, I guess your heavy radicals was personal because you were involved directly in that as well. But just as you coming of age in this time, is it sort of a nostalgic period for you? How do you think back on it personally?

Yeah, well, no, I appreciate the question. I was just a little kid in 1968. I was 11 years old. I was a Boy Scout, you know, for crying out loud. I was working my way up. I was going to be an Eagle Scout. And we landed on the moon in 1969. I was a Boy Scout camp.

So I lived in one world, but then culturally, you know, I was, you know, I wanted to be cool because that's, you know, when you're 11, 12, 13, you want to be cool. And all the cool stuff was like Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead and the doors, you know, and a bunch of music I would discover later. So, yeah, I experienced, I watched the 1968 Democratic. convention with my parents, and it kind of turned my head around watching young people, you know, these people I looked up to getting the crap beat out of them by the Chicago police. And it vaulted me in a different direction. You know, within a few years, I was just on the whole other side of the divide. And I think this was true for a lot of people. You know, I'm kind of a younger person. I mean, boomers are kind of get cut into two sectors, early boomers, right after World War II, and then the later ones, you know, more in the late 50s, and that's kind of where I came in.

So, yeah, a lot of it was familiar, but it was looking back on it. Actually, the first 45 I ever bought was the Fifth Dimension, Let the Sunshine in, the Age of Aquarius, right, which was a pop version from the musical hair. But the musical hair is, like, really radical. Joseph Papp, who, you know, back in the 50s had been called in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Joseph Papp, who started Shakespeare in the Park in New York, he's the guy who was a real important catalyst to bringing here to Broadway, which was very controversial at the time. So you can see how this counterculture is weaving into the mainstream, and the fifth dimension, you know,

I give them props for what they are, but they, they were definitely pitched toward a much wider audience than hippies in San Francisco. You know, hippies themselves, by the time I was in high school, nobody called you. You weren't calling yourself a hippie. I think I might have mentioned this to you in previous conversation. You called yourself freaks as a kind of embracing, you know, a disparaging label. you know, freaks not fitting into the main of society. So, yeah, yeah, it was very familiar, but it's like anything, you look back on it

and you realize, oh, it was a lot different than what I thought. I was so much in the middle of it that, you know, it's impossible to understand. Any individual in the middle of something can't understand the wider import of things. You need to step out of it. Yeah, definitely. People are strange. When you're a stranger, faces look ugly. When you're alone

Women seem wicked When you're unwanted Streets are uneven When you're down When you're strange Faces come out of the rain When you're strange No one remembers your name

When you're strange When you're strange When you're strange People are strange When you're a stranger Faces look at length When you're alone Women seem wicked

When you're unwanted Streets are on evil When you're down When you're strange faces come out of the rain When you're strange No one remembers your name when you're strange when you're strange

when you're strange When you're strange Alright yeah When you're strange When you're strange Misses come out of the rain when you're strange No one remembers your name

When you're strange When you're strange When you're strange Well the book covers the period From 1955 to 1972 As I said And as we are alluding to It's an incredible and often tragic

Transitionary time in American history Rife with War, political assassinations, cultural revolutions, and more. Since this story begins in the 50s, though, can you discuss the cultural dynamics at that time with the new and emerging youth culture after World War II, the invention of rock and roll, the beatniks, and sort of how it was all received by the dominant

and much more conformist mainstream culture? Yeah, it was interesting to me because, you know, the 50s is, to the degree people understand it. You know, they think of, you know, the old situation comedy, happy days, or the film Greece, you know, kind of a halcyonic, innocent time. But, you know, Khrushchev gets up and denounces Stalin in 1956. And it causes a huge rift among, you know, communist worldwide. It also signals, you know, kind of the end of a certain type of the 50s. So, you know, around 55-56, you have this film, Blackboard Jungle, you know, about juvenile delinquents.

And it opens with Bill Haley in the Comets doing Rock Around the Clock. And kids are rioting, you know, when they hear this song. And, like, the media is going crazy, like, oh, we can't show this movie a year later, you know, because it's profitable. There's another movie, Rock Around the Clock, you know, itself. And again, people are, you know, marching in the streets, throwing rocks through windows, you know, having little scuffles with police. I mean, it's like a moral panic. And, you know, rock around the clock. I mean, by 1971, it'll be inserted into American graffiti as a kind of a calm down throwback song. But at the time, it's incendiary. You know, and you've got,

You've got Elvis who plays a certain role, but you've got little Richard, Eddie Cochran, you know, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, all these great people doing this music that makes you want to move in ways that are not amenable to a Puritan aesthetic. And then, you know, along with rock and roll, you've got some of these jazz artists like Max Roach, you know, doing songs in support of the emerging. Black Freedom Movement, which has kind of got going in 55 and 56 with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. You know, so you've got, and you've got the beat poets. People like Jack Quiroak, who love jazz, by the way, and, you know, it's all in on the road.

And they're kind of challenging the post-war, you know, normalcy, you know, the beat generation being, you know, You know, we're not, we're just a beat generation was Kerouac's thing. We're not the silent generation or this or that. We're just alienated, essentially. You know, that gets bastardized by a columnist out in San Francisco who calls them beatniks, kind of disparaging them, you know, and attaching them to the Sputnik, which had just gone up and kind of, you know, rattled the U.S. power structure. But the beats, you know, they represented a thing for the intelligentsia, which was outside of the mainstream.

And then you have this folk revival, you know, where you've got people like Odetta and Carolyn Hester and the Kingston Trio doing this music that had been kind of a tethered to left-wing politics. I mean, and they're taking it mainstream. So you've got all these cultural forces circulating in the late 50s. and they're going to have a huge impact on the music to come. And this is the 50s. There's a lot more going on there than you would expect. And it makes sense, you know. It's like a burning inferno doesn't just start all at once, you know, most of the time.

You know, it percolates and gestates. And that was what was happening in the late 50s. Yeah. When you said there was, there were disparagingally called the beat. nicks they referred to themselves as the beats and then they were called the beatnicks because of the connection to sputnik but the beats as far as i understand it weren't necessarily political or certainly weren't communistic what what was the idea behind trying to tie them to sputnik and the soviets was it just a they're they're bad just like the soviets are bad or what yeah well i mean

you know jesus they uh they didn't seem defensive about uh homosexuality they didn't seem defensive about, you know, now living a conventional middle class lifestyle. They didn't seem defensive about just getting on the road and trying to live life to its fullest versus accumulating a lot of stuff. No, they're not. You know, although Alan Ginsburg, I think it actually is pretty political and he is kind of at the center of a lot of the countercultural stuff that happens in the 60s. But now, I mean, as individuals, they're not particularly political people. But what they represent societally is, you know, they're like kind of a sliver in the organism. And the organism is, you know, rallying its resources to get rid of this thing that's causing it

trouble. You know, and that's kind of the, what I came to realize. It's not like you necessarily have to get up there and have a manifesto saying we need to eliminate private property to call forward the wrath of the ruling structure. You know, there's this quote I have at the end. Spiro Agnew was Richard Nixon's vice president. He was like Nixon's point person in the cultural wars. And he gives this speech, I think, around 1970 or so, where he says, I do not suggest for one moment that there is a

conspiracy among some songwriters, entertainers, and movie producers to subvert the unsuspecting listener. In my opinion, there isn't any. But the cumulative impact of some of their work advances the wrong cause. I just thought that was a really sharp articulation of how it actually goes, you know, some of these songs just, they just put forward, you know, they gave Aden comfort to the wrong cost, you know, whether deliberately, consciously or just because, you know, they thought that what they were saying, you know, needed to be said. And the authorities responded in kind. Yeah, I see. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff. Now, in your previous book on the folk singers in the bureau, you show us how the artist at that time were

targeted by the FBI, often because of their association with the Communist Party and the movement more broadly. In this book, however, as you said in the intro, the old left is being replaced by the new left. Can you talk about how the left in the U.S. was shifting at the time and how the locus of repression moved from the FBI proper to other more distributed cultural and social institutions throughout society? Yeah, it's, you know, it's complicated. I mean, so you've got the Soviet Union which throughout the 30s and 40s is a huge force in the world, and it's a huge model for a lot of the left, you know, not just in the United States, but globally. You know, I mean, a lot of the shortcomings of the Soviet Union and some of the outrageous stuff is either being denied

or just not known at that time, but it's, you know, it's coherent. And, you know, in the United States, There's a Communist Party that has tens of thousands of members. I mean, they're under assault from like 1949 on, but they are like, you know, formidable. I mean, there's others, there's socialists and other kind of leftists, but the Communist Party actually has a country that they point to and, you know, in a sense, in a model of how they want to transform the United States. But, you know, that is going to fall away. You know, in 56, there's this big crisis with Khrushchev, where he denounces Stalin. And then you got China, which had only gained independence in 1949 and set down the road toward, you know, its conception of socialism. And Mao doesn't like what Khrushchev does.

And this is a percolating controversy. So there's a split, you know, by the late 50s. to the 60s in what had been an international communist movement. And it means that there is no single left source, you know, cohering everybody. And in a lot of the stuff that Khrushchev had revealed, you know, leads a lot of people to not want to have too much to do with the Soviet Union, very apprehensive about China. Some people wanted to support China. But there's, there's a moment where the old order has been overthrown, you know, it's no longer the West versus, it's no longer the U.S. versus socialism worldwide.

It's the U.S. versus China, the U.S. versus the Soviet Union, and China versus the Soviet Union. So it's like a triple contention. And so the old order is overthrown, a new order isn't put in place. And this is where the new left comes. from, you know, and it's trying to find its way in a very fractured world, which, you know, it's both good and it also exerts some limitations and stuff. So the FBI, I mean, they're geared toward studying old line communists. You know, their big focus has been the Communist Party USA. So in the 60s, they're just racing to catch up, you know, especially with, you know,

groups like the Black Panther Party, they're targeting the nation of Islam, you know, what they call black hate groups. They're, you know, trying to get ahead of that amid, you know, major urban disturbances, you know, insurrections, rebellions, riots, whatever you want to call it. They're trying to get ahead of that. And then, you know, at the same time, they're trying to get ahead of an anti-Bietnam war movement that is growing increasingly contentious, you know, going from protest to resistance, you know. So like all of these things are swirling. I mean, this founder of sociology, Emil Durkheim, has this conception of anime, which, I mean, my simplistic definition is it's when the old rules have been put aside and new rules are not yet in place.

And that's kind of how I see the 60s. You know, it's like you've got the new left, you've got the old. left, you've got the counterculture, you've got black freedom, you've got anti-war, you've got people who want revolution, you want people who want fundamental reform, and it's all just kind of up in the air. And the ruling class, you know, I mean, they're fighting in Vietnam and they're losing, which is like huge. It's a huge historic impact. It's one thing to go to war and sacrifice. It's another thing to go to war and sacrifice and lose. So all of this stuff is getting thrown up. And it's in the music. I mean, this is part of what I came to appreciate much more deeply,

that these songs, you know, there's a reason you can't just sit down and write a song like Ohio, which is Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Young's song about the killing of students at Kent State. You can't just sit down today and write a song like that because, you know, you need to channel the actual human experience that goes into, you know, being able to create that. You know, that song, David Crosby, who just passed away, he was reading Life magazine in 1970, and they had a photo spread of these kids being shot dead by the National Guard at the Kent State campus after, you know, Nixon had made an incursion into Cambodia. The war was supposed to be ending, and it seemed like he was escalating it.

and four kids are killed, you know, students, college students, you know, some on their way to classes, you know. So Crosby's looking at this magazine spread, and he gives it to Neil Young. Neil Young goes away for a very short time, and he comes back with his single, Ohio. You know, Dorian Linsky, the journalist said it's probably one of the best topical songs ever written. And I tend to, you know, I mean, it's really, it really is a wonderful song, but it's a song paid for in blood. It's not just coming out of imagination. In any of these songs, you know, Dylan,

the times they are changing, you know, the doors, the end. You know, none of these songs are just coming from the, you know, disconnected genius of particular artists. They're coming from trying to grasp everything that's swirling in the ether and make some kind of sense of it, to have some kind of vision of it, you know,

to play the role of artists of being able to see maybe a little bit beyond the immediate times they're in or at least be able to synthesize it and stuff. So that's, you know, all this tumult, all this enemy, you know, is leading to wonderful things that are not possible in more, you know, for lack of a better word, ordinary times. Yeah, I mean, the images of Kent State, even though I was born, you know, many, many years, later, still seared in my head when you say Kent State, the image pops into my head that probably pops into most people's head of that young woman, you know, holding a dead body screaming and just brutal that the American state inflicted. I mean, such incredible violence on college students. It is absolutely contest. Yeah. And you listen to the opening notes of that song. I remember

just, I think I was probably 13, just hanging with my friends, you know, and it came on the radio, AM radio. And I think da da da da da da da da you know there was just something chilling about

the opening notes I don't know if it's Neil Young or Steven still is playing it but it's like you know where does this

this musical emotiveness come from it just really comes from very heavy stuff so you know garnered a much

deeper appreciation in writing this book of these things yeah Twin Soldiers and Nixon's coming. on our own. This summer I hear the drumming

Fort Dead in Ohio Gotta get down to it Soldiers are running us down Should have been done long ago What if you knew her And found her dead on the ground How can you run when we're Oh.

Gotta get down to it Soldiers are cutting us down Should have been done long ago What if you knew you had Founded dead on the ground How could you run when you know Jim, Soldiers and Nixon's coming, we'll finally on our own. This summer I hear the drumming, or dead in Ohio.

You said in Ohio, why, oh, daddy in Ohio, oh, oh, daddy in Ohio, why? Why, oh, daddy in Ohio, why? Why, oh, daddy. You said earlier that, you know, the 60s were a time when the old rules were sort of dying, but the new rules or whatever were not in place, the new norms, whatever, based on your obvious experience at that time, but more importantly, perhaps your research and study that went into a book like this, do you see today in the 20s, the 2020s as also a similar time where it seems that many of the things that held through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s and shaped our society are dying. They're being confronted from different ends, and we're sort of groping in the dark for what comes next. We're unsure.

Do you think we're living in a similar time in that respect? You know, that's a really pointed and important question. I kind of, you know, it sure feels that way, but I'm not going to say it is or it isn't. But it feels like I don't know what comes next. And I know things are very unsettled. I mean, not to end up, you know, not to get off track about what we're at. actually talking about, but I love actually trying to understand this. It's the United States that I grew up in is disappearing very rapidly. You know, this preeminent power in the world

is being rattled. I mean, the internal polarization is just stunning. But, you know, I just read this book by this Johns Hopkins professor called China's Long Game, and it talks about China has this view of in 2049, you know, the 100th anniversary of the revolution of playing a much bigger role globally. And you do kind of see that starting to play out. You know, how that actually develops is anybody's guess. But, you know, if the world order gets realigned, it is, there is some similarity. I can't say what the future is. I can say, though, in 1963, the world order was getting realigned. You know, in 1962, the U.S. came the closest that ever came to nuclear war when, you know, the Soviets attempting to get some kind of nuclear parity, put missiles in

Cuba, you know, in striking distance of Washington, D.C. And it almost came to blows. It almost came to a very bad end, and they were able to pull back from that. But, you know, 10 years later. So, you know, then that stopped. But then all these proxy wars happened, right? I mean, Cuba, the U.S. lost Cuba and they weren't going to lose Vietnam. The stakes were suddenly up. So, you know, these geopolitical shifts in maneuvering were having a profound effect. It got resolved because, you know, China basically had rapprochement with the United States. So by 72, 73, China and the U.S. are objectively allies. So the world order has been realigned, you know, and then you go into the last phase of the Cold War.

But before that happened, when you had China, the Soviets, and the U.S., all kind of contending, and, you know, nothing was, you know, fully settled. You know, you had a lot of things springing up. So are we in a similar situation today? Yeah, I really can't say for sure, but it does feel like things are. changing and you know change tends to when it finally does hit a critical mass it does come quickly so you know we will see meantime i know i'll just be plugging away trying to understand whatever it is within my purview that i can understand yeah yeah it reminds me of the i think it was the kierkegaard quote that says something like you know life must be lived forward but can only

be understood backwards and i think there is some time down the line where retrospection allows us to make sense of a period that when you were living in it, it was unclear which way it was going to break, and only in retrospect can you make full sense of it. So I think it probably in a similar situation, however this period of time goes, it will probably need some retrospect to fully make sense out of. But whether it's the neoliberal era or the technocratic expertise and the legitimacy of the technocracy, or the unipolarity, the unipolar moment that we live through in the 90s and

through the aughts, all those things seem in one way or another to be coming to an end from internal and external pressures. And so it's very interesting, but also a very chaotic time, as all times of transition are. Yeah, yeah, I think that's well stated. Well, another aspect of this story and of the political context at the time was, of course, the civil rights movement. This involved marches, riots, protests, movement building, assassinations, bitterly violent white reaction, and it was all given expression through the music at the time. Can you talk about the intersection of the civil rights struggle and the music of the time and the reaction to it from the white mainstream culture? Yeah, so, I mean, one thing I do here is, and one thing I guess

I discovered, and I think there really needs to be more, you know, I was talking to my friend Connor, and he was like, hey, man, why don't you write a book about the riots of the 60s, which, you know, I was looking around and there's, you know, you know, academic. they always want to kind of chop things up to be so specific. So, you know, rather than this big survey of the riot of the 60s, you'll see, you know, urban uprisings in eastern Pennsylvania in the 60s, and then I guess from there you're supposed to extrapolate the whole big picture. All that's by way of saying is what I can, you know,

I can't write that book as much as I, you know, might want to. what I came to discover is, you know, violence and black liberation went hand in hand. I kind of make a point that, well, I'll hold that for a second. So, you know, first off, why is the black freedom movement happening? And I think a lot of it, you know, nobody was ever, you know, it was always contentious. And, you know, black people and their supporters were always pushing against. the order, whether it had been slavery or, you know, the abandoning reconstruction or, you know, the Jim Crow order. But it did seem to hit a certain moment in the late 50s. You know,

you had Brown versus the Board of Education, which unleashed, you know, the civil rights movement where King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference played a major role. But it is tethered to the Cold War. You know, here's the United States saying, we have the model. Capitalism, Western capitalism, and freedom is the model, and we stand against the Soviets and, you know, what they call totalitarianism. And that model is bad. But yet here they had, you know, a huge section of their people living in these, you know, most oppressive conditions. So, you know, the Jim Crow order, you know, it was a matter of showing the world that the United States was better, and that order had to be dug up. And that kind of set things loose. So again,

you see it tied to geopolitics. But that order, you know, I have this quote, LBJ, the president Johnson, had this quote. I think he was talking after the Martin Luther King was killed and there was riots in nearly every major city in the U.S. Johnson said, well, you know, somebody said, well, why is this happening? And he's like, well, if you have your foot on the neck of a man and you hold him down for 300 years and you let him up, what do you think's going to happen? He's going to knock your block off. And that is actually what happened in the 60s. I mean, the narrative is, you know, civil rights was won through, you know, nonviolent Gandhi and peaceful resistance. But in fact, you know, as early as I think 62, there's riots in Alabama. Riots. are kind of the real thing that's going on. Even, even, you know, Bloody Sunday Selma is it's violence. You know, and the dirty secret about Gandhi and violence is it's not no violence. It's one-sided violence in which, you know, the oppressor attacks you and then, you know,

the whole world can see that you're righteous and they're not. I mean, that's the Gandian model. And in fact, most people can't tolerate. that. It takes an incredible amount of discipline. And yes, moral courage to be nonviolent in the face of that. But the reality is in the 60s, you know, starting in Alabama in the early 60s, Harlem in 1964, Watts in 1965, Newark, Detroit in 67 and 68. There's these huge conflagrations, you know, unorganized, spontaneous violence, which. unseen in the United States up to then. Up to then, a race riot was white people kicking the shit out of black people. In the 60s, a race riot became, you know, black people, you know, sometimes kicking the shit out of white people, right or wrong, you know,

just very, you know, just elements of rage and like, you know, we're not going to be treated this way anymore. So they have a profound impact. And it does make the FBI nuts. You know, I mean, they're trying to get informants everywhere and trying to get ahead of this. I mean, they've been watching Martin Luther King, you know, to whatever end. But they're also watching people like Stokely Carmichael, who, you know, later changed his name to Kwame Ture. Stokely Carmichael is part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

the student nonviolent coordinating committee is not nonviolent per se. I mean, they're kind of open to doing whatever, you know, and they become increasingly radical as the period goes on. And, you know, this whole thing of, I have a dream in blacks and whites living together equally with equal respect, you know, transitions into black power, where black people are saying, you know, we want to be seen. and respected, you know, in our own and on our own right. And that has a profound way in terms of how it asserts itself in the street.

You know, that's where Hoover's counterintelligence program comes from. I mean, the best example in my book is you got this artist from South Africa, Miriam McKeeba, who's just got this wonderful voice. She has a top hit with this song, Atapata. I hope you can put a link. to this. It's just a really wonderful, life-affirming song. She marries Stokely, 68, 69, and the FBI is all over her. You know, they've got to file hundreds of pages. They're sending people to her concerts. You know, she's, they're leaking stuff in the media. They're saying, well, her and Stokely are rich.

They're buying a house, which, you know, it's all very exaggerated. I mean, the two of them moved to I believe Guinea in Africa, you know, and kind of exit themselves. But they're like a huge target. I mean, you and I have talked in the past about, you know, the black, you know, Judas and the Black Messiah, you know, this notion that Fred Hampton was considered a Black Messiah. It's not something I agree with. Stokely Carmichael is a named Black Messiah.

You know, in the Cointel Pro memo, Hoover said, as people like King, if he becomes more radical, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad, have the potential to become black messias who could lead, you know, black people in very radical and dangerous directions for the U.S. So Miriam Akiba had the fortune, misfortune of falling in love and marrying Stokely, and her career took a major hit as a result. So that's where you see a, you know, direct FBI, you know, impacting because, you know, into the purview of black hate co-intel pro and stuff so i mean that that's one example sam cook i

asked for his uh you know the pop singer sam cook wrote these great songs like cupid and another saturday night he also writes this huge anthem a change is going to come he has an fbi file but they say they destroyed it so i i don't quite know what they had to say on him it could just be it was so short that, you know, they were legally enabled to get rid of it. But, you know, he was not somebody who, uh, who fit into the model. Um, so, you know, he's another one. Richie Havens, the folk singer who opens Woodstock singing Freedom. He has a file, too, another one that's been destroyed, so I don't quite know what the deal there was. But, you know, so that's some of the intersection of how the FBI took this on. And, you know,

In the larger society, there's huge contention. There's a lot of support for this. And then there's people like George Wallace who runs for president in 68, basically, you know, upholding the Jim Crow integration, separate but equal order and stuff. So it's all, it's, you know, a lot of back and forth in that period bringing us to where we are now, which is, you know, not a land of great peace and harmony. but still a lot of contention back and forth. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, the 2020 uprisings, Black Lives Matter uprisings, the biggest in American history. I mean, a lot of these problems, they never get solved. They erupt at certain times. L.A. riots was another example of this eruption when things come to a boiling point, but because America refuses to address its deep racial issues at the systemic level, these things are going to continue to occur. We're living in these loops over and over again,

because, you know, the society as a whole and the state in particular refuses to do anything to acknowledge and, you know, repair the damage done from, you know, hundreds of years of white supremacy. And so I think it's going to take a, it's going to take more struggles and a sort of overall radical change in society that opens up the possibility for us to try to address at the material level these historical injustices if we're ever going to, as a society, escape it. but that also might, it might actually not be able to be done within the confines of the society. It might, if it's really done in a real way, it might be akin to a sort of revolutionary rupture from the American society that is plagued by these problems, but that remains to be seen, just that these issues are a live issue. And just to throw in a little localism, I'm obviously born and raised here in Omaha, and I worked with an older white lady at one point who was alive during the Martin Luther King assassination shoes in high school. and Omaha had its own riot after the assassination of MLK and she remembers that the black students in her high school it got up when they heard the news left

and immediately went out to join the broader riots. We had a pretty active Black Panther Party chapter here in Omaha as well. Of course Malcolm X and Harry Haywood, they were born here in Omaha. Harry Haywood is just a few miles from where I grew up in South Omaha. So, you know, I just wanted to throw that in there. Omaha has its hand in this as well. well, and obviously Omaha also showed up for the Black Lives Matter protest pretty rigorously

as well. So this is something that, you know, occurs across the entire society and will continue to occur. That's fascinating. I just want to insert the, I mean, because one of the things I did come to in this book is, I mean, look, in the United States, the narrative of civil rights is, you know, you know, King, you know, King did the Montgomery bus boycott, you know, they They did the march on Washington in 1963, and then the Voting Rights Act was passed, and that was the end of the story. You know, and I think some of what I've talked about is, well, you know, that's actually not quite how it went. The quote that comes to mind is H. Rapp Brown. I mean, he has a, he's a Muslim now.

Unfortunately, I don't know his Muslim name off the top of my head, but he had this famous quote. you know, violence is as American as cherry pie, which, I mean, that's the real thing. I mean, you can name as many boulevards Martin Luther King Boulevard as you want, but if you're not, like you say, you know, unearthing the systemic oppression, you're still going to confront people not wanting to be treated, you know, is less than human, as less than fully realized as everyone else. me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest everybody knows about Mississippi God damn Alabama's got me so upset Lurlene Wallace has made me lose my rest everybody knows

about Mississippi goddamn can't you see it I know you can feel it it's all in the am. I can't stand the pressure much longer. Somebody say a prayer. Alabama has got me so upset and Memphis has made me lose my rest. Everybody knows about this. I said me go to prayer. I'm dogs on my trail little school children sitting in jail black cat crossed my path I think every day's going to be my last

Lord have mercy on this land of mine we all gonna get it in due time because I don't belong here, I don't belong there I've even stopped believing in prayer Don't tell me, I'll tell you, me and my people just about do.

I've been there so I know we keep on saying you go slow. Well, that's just the trouble. Who, go. Washing the windows. Who, go. Picking the cotton. No. Nothing but rotten

Too dumb lazy Thinking's crazy Where am I going What am I doing? I don't know I don't know Just try to do my very best Stand up, be counted with all the rest

Because everybody knows about this Now you heard him, he's one of you. If you have been moved at all, and you know my songs are tall, for God's sakes join me. Don't sit back there. The time is too late now. Good God, you know.

You know, the king is dead. The king of love is dead. I ain't about to be non-violent, honey. Oh, dude. Picket lines, school boycotts. They try to say it's a communist spot. But all I want is equality. for my sister, my brother, my mule, and me.

And I loved him because he believed it. He lived by it. But you lied to me. But you lied to me all the years. You told me to wash and clean my ears. Clean my ears and talk real fine just like a lady and you stop calling my mama and say it. Yeah, me now.

But my country is full of lives. We all gonna die and die like flies. I don't trust nobody anymore. anymore, he won't say and go slow. That's just the trouble. To slow. Desegregation. Too slow.

Mass participation. Too slow. Unification. Two things gradually. Too slow. We bring more tragedy. Too slow. Why don't you see it?

Why don't you see it? feel it i don't know i don't know you don't have to live next to me just give me my equality because everybody knows about me everybody knows about Alabama everybody knows about So we mentioned this a few times, and we have to go into it because it's crucial. The Cuban Revolution, and then all the stuff that came after, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs, et cetera, and the Vietnam War were rocking American life and consciousness at this time. And, of course, like everything else, this is filtered up through the artistic and cultural expressions of American society at that time and through music in particular. So can you kind of talk about the Cuban situation and the Vietnam situation and how that,

that manifested in the form of cultural products and musical products at that time? Yeah, so, you know, I got the FBI file of Susie Rodola or Rotolo. I think I'm mangling the pronunciation. Somebody had pointed this out. I would call her Susie Rotolo. She was Bob Dylan's first girlfriend when he came to New York in 63. She's like 17. Dylan's 19.

I mean, they're just kids. Her parents had been Communist Party activists. She had worked with the Communist Party youth group, and she had gone to Cuba with the Progressive Labor Party contingent. I don't think she was part of Progressive Labor Party, but to get into Cuba, you had to be attached to something. So she's got this whole file. You know, they're all over her, but then sure enough,

they mentioned that she's Bob Dylan's girlfriend and she can be seen on the cover of freewheeling, you know, Dylan and Susie arm and arm walking down the street in the West Village. And they talk about Dylan being a folk singer and stuff. So it's just all very trippy. So, I mean, the reason her file goes on and on is she comes back from Cuba and she's talking about the, you know, the Kennedy travel ban and, you know, opposing that and stuff. She's actually in the newspaper. Dylan, for his part, I mean, Dylan is, he's a character. He like, at this point, he's like, you know, he's hanging around with all these leftists. So there's Susie, Gordon Frieson, and Sis Cunningham do this

newsletter called Broadside where they're publishing, you know, songs by Phil Oaks and Bob Dylan. You know, they had been in the Communist Party, the Almanac singer folk group back in the day. You know, Dylan is sleeping on the couch of Terry Thal and Dave Van Runk, who were Trotskyist at the time. You know, Dave Van Runk says, oh, I was always trying to recruit Bob Dylan, you know, but I don't think he really gave a shit about the true nature of the Soviet Union. So all this is having a profound effect on Dylan, who's writing his most political work. I mean, he only stays with that for a year or two. before he transitions, you know, to more experimental stuff.

But it is, you see it kind of caught up in the swirl with what's going on in the Caribbean. You know, and then you got Phil Oaks, right, who kind of underappreciated, maybe even underrated. Phil Oaks, he writes this song in, what, 65 called Santo Domingo. So, you know, the U.S. loses Cuba. I mean, I don't know what all happened. I mean, one minute Castro is on Ed Sullivan, and next minute, you know, Castro is inviting the Soviets to do missiles. The U.S. loses Cuba, and they're not going to lose anything else. So when there is a coup in Santo Domingo, and it looks like, you know, the communists might be leveraging that to come to power, the U.S. sends the Marines in.

And then Phil Oaks writes this song called Santo Domingo, and he talks about the crabs are crawling on the beaches because the Marines have landed on the shores of Santo Domingo. So you see this intersection of what's going on in the Caribbean. You know, your question about Cuba, Santa, you know, the Dominican Republic and Cuba are very close, you know, in many ways. and the U.S. is not going to lose the Dominican Republic, and by extension, they're not going to lose Vietnam.

You know, the Indonesia, the CIA helps, you know, mastermind a bloody coup to eliminate the Communist Party as a force there. So you've got the U.S. globally throwing down, you know, we may have lost Cuba, but we're not losing any more ground. But it's impacting, you know, culturally, you know, you know, from Susie Rottola's connection to Dylan, which is kind of maybe more tangential to, you know, more overtly, you know, Phil Oaks. There has been a drastic change in American foreign policy in recent months

to take the Dominican Republic, which we did a little... A little while ago, killing a few people here and there, mostly there, Saving the day for freedom and democracy in the Western Hemisphere once again, folks. I was over there in the Dominican Republic, entertaining the troops. I won't say which troops. Over there with a U.S.O. group, including Walter Lippman and Supi Sells. I played there in a small coffee house called The Sniper. And this was my most unpopular.

song, with the poetic, symbolic title of The Marines have landed on the shores of Santo Domingo. And the crabs are crazy. They scuttle back and forth. The sand is burning. And the fish take flight and scatter from the side their chorus is turning.

As the seagulls rest on the cold cannon nest, the sea is churning. The Marines have landed on the shores of San Antonio, the fishermen sweat, they're pausing at their nets, the days of morning. As the warships sway and thunder in the bay, loud in the morning. But the boy on the shores throwing pebbles no more, he runs a warning that the marines have landed on the shores of Santa Domingo. The streets are still, there's silence in the hills, the town is sleeping, and the farmers yawning the gray silver dawn, the fields they're keeping. as the first troops land and step into the sand the flags are weeping the marines have landed on the shores of santa domingo the unsmining sunny is shining down upon the singing soldiers in the cloud dust world they whistle at the girls they're getting bolder

Are the old women's side Think of memories gone by They shrug their shoulders The Marines have landed on the shore The Santa Dominga Ready for the tricks Their bayonets are fixed Now they are rolling

And the tanks make tracks Past the trembling shacks where fears unfolding All the young wives afraid Turn their backs to the parade With babes they're holding

The Marines have landed on the shores of Santa Dominga A bullet cracks the sound The Army hits the ground The snipers fall in So they open up their

guns a thousand to one no sense installing He clutches at his head And totters on the edge Look now he's falling The Marines have landed on the shores of Santa Domingo In the red plaza square The crowds come to stare

The heat is leaning and the eyes of the dead are turning every head to the widow screaming but the soldiers make a bit giving candy to the kids their teeth are gleaming the Marines have landed on the shores of Santa Domingo up and down the coast the generals drink a toast the wheel is spinning and the cowards and the hordes are peeking through the doors to see who's winning but the traitors will pretend that it's getting near the end when it's peaking it the Marines have landed on the shores of Sandra Dominga

and the crabs are crazy They scuttle back and forth, the sand is burning And the fish take flight And scattered from the side their course is turning As the seagulls rest on the cold cannon nest, The sea is churning The marines have landed on the shores of Santa Domingo. And then Kennedy gets assassinated, and that creates all kinds of, well, yeah, so I got to tell the Kennedy's story, right?

Because Kennedy gets killed, and Dylan, two weeks later, he's getting the Tom Payne Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which is kind of associated with the Communist Party. So he's up there with James Baldwin and, you know, some of these old CP members. And Dylan's getting a little high on alcohol. So, you know, he gets up. He gives a whole rambling speech about, well, you know, I'm a young person and you guys aren't young and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And he talks about Cuba. And he says, I don't think there's anything wrong with going to Cuba, which you would think that would have been the most controversial thing. But then he says, you know, I can kind of understand Lee Harvey Oswald.

I wouldn't have done stuff like that. But, you know, I see a little bit of him in me. Something like that. I'm paraphrasing. But, you know, there's informants in the room. And like Dylan's whole schick ends up in a column by Fulton Lewis Jr., who is a friend of Jay Edgar Hoover's. So it's in a national column, you know.

And the FBI opens a file on Dylan based on this. I mean, in the public sphere, Dylan tries to walk it back a little bit. Look, it's just Dylan, like any other person, kind of processing stuff and thinking openly, probably saying the quiet part out loud. You know, I mean, who cares, you know, what Dylan thinks about Oswald? But, you know, in this country, you know, they talk about freedom of speech, except, you know, when you go there, you know. you know, then it's not free. But so this is a huge deal with Dylan, and it's part of, you know, what I talk about in the book of a number of things aimed at Dylan back, you know,

in this period, you know, Dylan was not somebody who was welcomed by a certain section of U.S. society, and this is a very stark example of that. But that's all tied up with the Cuba stuff, too. Cube is a huge problem in the U.S. and where you fall out on it is of extreme. consequence. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I'm going to be putting songs in that you mention in this episode as we go through

it to give people a sort of a taste of what you're talking about and how the music hits in regards to the issues that the songs are covering. But yeah, that's just incredibly important. And there's so much music that just comes out of the Vietnam conflict in and of itself. That is, you know, absolutely classic Americana music. And it was, you know, the impetus was the Vietnam War and the reaction. to it. But another critical component of the 60s in particular was the rise of drug use, especially psychedelics like mushrooms, LSD, peyote, etc. And this was inseparable from the artistic

and musical movements of the era as well. You know, as a teenager myself first experimenting with magic mushrooms in particular, I actually became pretty obsessed with the doors in my junior year high school. In large part, because of certain intense experience, I had tripping on mushrooms while listening to their music. I remember, at my junior year high school, I went to a high school where the football team and the guys at the high school did not like me from previous instances when I was at a different high school and some girls were involved. And they felt like they owned the girls at their school.

And when they would date guys and other schools, it was a whole problem, right? So that was kind of the thing. So I had to go to this school where I was hated by all the guys and I would, you know, often get in fights, but it would often also mean that I didn't have anywhere to sit at lunch. And I remember like wearing the doors t-shirts and going back to the back of the school where nobody could really see me in the hallways and like reading a biography of the doors. It's just very nostalgic for me in that period of my time because I was experimenting for the first time with these psychedelics, listening to the doors. And then I had all this other stuff going on in my life. And it was kind of a refuge for me in the heated moments of my junior year in high school in particular.

So that's just a little digression on my personal life experiences. but I'm somebody going to high school in the in the aughts right somebody very disconnected by decades from the from the actual doors and their run in the culture so with all of that in mind can you kind of talk about these drugs the fear and reaction to it the drug war and sort of its impact on culture and music yeah well just before I do that Ray Manzarek's book about the doors he really hates Oliver Stone's film and you read his book and you realize the door doors are really, most of these artists are really, you know, the matter of which side are you on is really key here. Look, the carpenters were on that side. You know, the lettermen were on that side. And if you were on that side, you weren't on this side. And the doors and the animals and Jefferson Airplane and your service, they were all on this side. Even the rascals are on, you know, the side of kind of the youthful, rebellious tumult. So things are, you know, very polarized that way,

and the better music is coming from, you know, for lack of a better word, the left side. So having said that, Brett, I feel like I just lost your question. Can you repeat that a little? Yeah, it was just an open-ended, big question about the impact of psychedelic drugs and the drug war. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so LSD is legal.

right but then people start doing it and by 66 they're you know they're making it illegal on the state level and eventually the feds get in that uh you know lenin did a lot of LSD and you know um the music transformed it was like uh you know you're you know suddenly you're kicking down all the walls you know and instead of standing in a room you're standing in a field with a huge sky above you And everything is limitless. You know, I'm not extolling this stuff in an untethered way. But to go from the kind of conformity of madmen's circus 61, 62, to, you know, everything is possible, question everything. I mean, I think some of these drugs had that impact for whatever social, psychological, biological reason.

It allowed people to look beyond, you know, to what's the word, to smash through the paradigm, you know, that revolution in science theory, you know, to be able to actually construct something else. A lot of the Beatles' best, most experimental stuff came out of Lenin's, you know, experimenting with LSD. Look, this stuff's got limits. You know, I did some of that stuff, too. it. Actually, I went and saw Leonard Skinnerd in the middle 70s. I was really looking forward to it. Ronnie Van Zant was still alive and I was tripping. And Ronnie Van Zant looked like a little pig. It was very disappointing. And they did Freebird, right? And the intro to Free Word just went on about, I think it was

about three and a half hours that intro went on before they did. So there was. There was. kind of my last time I did psychedelics. I think I need to be a little more grounded. But, you know, look, it had an effect of, you know, let's look at things, you know, qualitatively differently. I mean, I don't know you always need to do drugs to do that, but sometimes, you know, it helps to have a little push. And if you look at the music, you know, it's really a trip. I mean, Jefferson Airplane, right? A couple stories about Jefferson Airplane, who are one of my favorites, I think unappreciated, you know, in the period, circa 67 to 70, you know, they're really doing some really overtly radical music and very experimental. I mean, they're put forward as the quintessence

of psychedelia. You know, Paul Cantner, the leader of the group and was a huge fan of the weavers from the 1950s, you know, this folk group. And, you know, So, you know, they kind of come up with a kind of a folk sensibility. Somebody told me a story that Paul Cantner knew Ronnie Gilbert, who was the woman singer and the weavers. And Ronnie told him, you know, Paul, you want to have a good group. You need a woman in the group. And, you know, Jefferson Airplane, what set them apart is they have this powerful woman, great slick at the center.

I mean, without her, the group is just good, but with Grace Slick, they're just powerful. A very few groups having, you know, men and women. I mean, actually, I cringe a little when I think of all these aging classic rock stars. It's four or five, you know, swinging dicks, right? You know, they're good, but geez, come on, man. You know, there's more than that to humanity. Anyway, so But the airplane is psychedelic,

but they're grounded in folk music And there's this leap up, you know, and how did they do that? Well, I think the drugs maybe were a little bit of a catalyst. So, but, you know, kids, take it easy. Be responsible. You don't want to go to a concert and see your favorite person be a little pig man.

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small. And the ones that Mother gives you don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice when she's 10 feet tall. And if you go chasing rabbits and you know you're going to fall, Tell them a hookah smoking caterpillar has given you a call, called Alice when she was just small. When the men on the chessboard, get up and tell you where to go. And you just have some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving

Oh, oh, I starless, I think you'll know Logic and proportion Have fallen a sloppy dead And the white night is talking backward And the red queens Of with her head Remember

What the Dormo said Feed your head Beat your head Beat your head You know I totally agree with you that these things are interesting but they definitely have their limits and i've known some people personally and we've seen people historically who especially at that time would overdo it

and really basically in sort of lack for lack of a better term fry their fry their brains um it's like you you can get something out of it i remember a ramdas who was obviously very active in the 60s he used to be a harvard professor doing psychedelic research at harvard and was kicked out of Harvard because of it and then went to India and got involved in Hinduism and Buddhism and came back as Ram Dass and he talks about psychedelics and this is somebody who would do it every day for years of his life apparently and he's like with psychedelics when you get the message hang up the phone it's like you know it's limited in what it can show you it can show you amazing things the first few times you try it but to make it a thing where you're doing it all the time you know

you're not getting anything new you're degrading your capacity to actually be tethered to reality and people really kind of lose their minds by going too deep into these rabbit holes and I always like I always like that quote of when you get the message hang up the phone and I felt like it's uh it's true if anybody's going to experiment with this stuff to kind of take it easy understand the limitations of what these things can do and if you really want the spiritual revelations that things like psychedelics are lauded for for making possible I would I would much prefer people take the perhaps less intense road of spiritual practice and meditation, stuff like that, because, you know, you are kind of playing with fire when it comes to these

psychedelics. But culturally, having these things influx into society, what they do is they sort of break down the ego on an individual level and all the conventions that come with it, the defense mechanisms that are a part of it, that creates radical openings, re-werectual openings, rewiring of your neural connections such that new things become available for the first time. And so I could see why even just that the music and the psychedelics and their mix is threatening to a 50s and 60s American culture that in many areas and conservative areas is very conformist, very much not about doing any of these things. And you can see why it's sort of scared society to see the influx of these chemicals in particular, but also, so the cultural fallout that surrounded them.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's, well, it's like putting on x-ray goggles, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. All right, well, I wanted to do something fun here because we're talking about the, you know, underpinning social, political, economic issues and how they're translated in the music. And you cover so many amazing artists and bands.

I couldn't get to them all. So I wanted to set a little section aside where we could cover some of the major artists, in more or less a lightning round fashion. So I'll throw out a couple names that we haven't talked about so far, and you can kind of briefly riff on who they were, what their impact was, and how they fit into the story. Cool.

The first person I'll throw at you, and we've done a whole episode on her, if anybody's interested, she's really a fascinating figure, but Nina Simone. Yeah, angry woman, but she writes this song, Mississippi Goddamn, and it's genius. She does it as kind of a show tune. and it's just railing against the white supremacist order. And she has this line.

There's different versions, but the version I really embrace is the one where she's basically talking to these white supremacist and says, you're all going to die and die like flies. That's Nina. Yeah. She was an absolute badass. What was that one song? The Backlash Blues. I always love that song as well.

And that was very much in the ferment of the Vietnam War and the decolonization movements around the world, the black liberation struggles in and outside of the U.S. And that song just absolutely still hits today. All right. The next one I have for you, Aaron, is Johnny Cash, a personal favorite of mine. Yeah, funny guy, man. He's like one foot in America and one foot somewhere else. But he thinks he's Native American.

A lot of people do, you know, in this country. You know, I mean, there's a basis for that. He's actually not, but he does a whole album of, you know, homage to native people, including his famous song, The Ballot of Ira Hayes, and the record company says, okay, you can make it, we're not going to sell it. And Cash basically says, well, fuck you, I'm going to sell it. And he sends it out, takes it around personally to radio stations, and with a basic challenge, you know, do you have the guts to play this?

And, you know, he makes it a hit. So Johnny Cash, you want as a friend. Yeah. You know, if you're his friend, he's going to stand by you. And if you're his enemy, you know, watch out. Definitely. His song, Man in Black, always jumps out to me as like, you know, talking about the poor, the dispossessed, why he wears all black for the people

that are, you know, destroyed by this society. And Folsom Prison Blues, his forays into performing inside of prisons and having that sort of sympathy for those, you know, elements of American society that were utterly discarded. Yeah, that song, you know, my brother, he's passed on, but my brother introduced me to Johnny Cash, and he plays that. He played the song Folsom Prison, and he said, now listen to this when he said, I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, and the crowd goes nuts. All right, yeah. Yeah, you know, I think Johnny Cash has this really interesting place in American society, even to this day, where I live in a, you know, a deep red state here.

in Nebraska, and I've lived in Iowa and Montana as well, and he's loved universally by those on the political right, but he's also loved universally by, you know, my comrades and those on the political left as well. And he's one of the few figures that is like very well loved, in general from people all across the political spectrum. And I always found that a kind of interesting thing about him and his impact. All right. You want to go to the next one? The next one is interesting. The next one is Buffy St. Marie. Yeah, she's a native. woman, one of the very, very few, she does this song, Universal Soldier, which is an anti-war song that the Scottish artist Donovan has a hit with. She reports, you know, LBJ was all up

in her business, basically writing to radio stations saying, don't play this. You know, so she, you know, there's evidence that her career was suppressed as a result. She's still around. She, you know, I just put a thing up on, you know, I have a Facebook page if your listeners want to follow me. And I'm also on Twitter, but I just posted a picture of her singing at Alcatraz Island when it was occupied by the American Indian movement. I think it was around 69 or so. And it's just a beautiful picture. And she's just a wonderful artist. Yeah, that's interesting.

I didn't know about that part of it. But I do, I think I was introduced to her from her rendition of Barry. my heart at Wounded Knee, which was a very impactful and a sort of beautiful song. So she was basically a Native American activist and musician, correct? Exactly. Yeah, she comes up out of Canada.

Nice. The Canadians really embraced their artists, Buffy St. Marie and Gordon Lightfoot, and of course, Neil Young and Johnny Mitchell, you know, they've actually given us a lot. They've given us some really precious people. Yeah. All right. Last one I have for you,

and this is when I actually came into contact with only very recently, but he makes pretty intense songs, pretty funny ones. Dave Von Runk, you want to talk about him? Yeah, he's a folk singer, you know, coming out of the early 60s, and, you know, he was invited to be part of Peter, Paul, and Mary, but he turned it down, and so instead they took this guy, Noel Paul Stuckey, took his place, but had Van Runk joined that trio. It was a self-created thing by Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman. But, you know, Van Runk was a long-time Trotsky, a huge FBI file. I mean, they were all in his business all the time. I mean, there's a funny story that, so his FBI file says it has a report of him reporting for his physical to get inducted to Vietnam. And they basically said, oh, the guy was sweaty. was nervous. I think he's got mental problems, you know. So basically he was given a classification

as undesirable. His ex-wife, Terry Thal, told me that the deal was the night before the physical him and his buddy went out, got drunk and high and totally fucked up. So they would be in a wretched state for the physical. And then, you know, Van Runk was just really overplaying, oh, I'm nervous, I'm crazy, you know. It was kind of like. with the Arlo Guthrie Ellis' restaurant model writ large, but very successful, kind of fooled the FBI who considered him unstable, you know, afterwards. And he was not. I mean, I'm sure he had his own issues, but the issues they thought he had were not the issues he had.

But dude was a very important mentor of Bob Dylan. You know, people live in a community, and none of these artists are, you know, single bright stars on their own. so van ron canthal you know you got to give it to nurturing dylan at a point when he needed it when i came back from low hang pra bang i didn't have a thing where my balls used to hang but i had a wooden metal and a fine harangue now i'm a fucking hero mourn your dead land of the free you want to be a hero follow me mourn your dead land of the free you want to be a hero follow me mourn your dead land of the free You want to be a hero, follow me And now the boys all envy me

I fought for Christian democracy With nothing but air where my balls used to be Now I'm a fucking hero Morn your dead land of the free You want to be a hero, follow me Mourn your dead land of the free You want to be a hero, follow me And one in twenty, cannon thunder

into the bloody wild blue yonder for a patriotic ballless wonder now I'm a fucking hero mourn your dead land of the free if you want to be a hero follow me mourn your dead land of the free you want to be a hero follow me in the wang-pawang there is a spot where the corpses of your brother's rot and every corpse is a patriot every corpse is a patriot every corpse is a hero. Morning your dead land of the free if you want to be a hero, follow me. Morning your dead land of the free

you want to be a hero, follow me. Dylan's one of my favorites, so it's kind of part of where I'm coming from for all his ups and downs and craziness. Yeah, do you want to say anything else about Bob Dylan? I know we mentioned him throughout this episode, but since he's a big figure in your mind, you want to talk a little bit more about him?

Yeah, just that, so he does all this great political music that really stands up. But then he like 65, 66, he produces this genius work, bringing an all back home album, Highway 61 revisited, and blonde on blonde. And that's part of, you know, going back to the effects of drugs or just this whole kind of paradigm smashing outlook. these albums and this music is radical without being political politically radical it is just a whole it's a fusing of the beat aesthetic elements of jazz folk music rock all melded into one and you can still pick it up and listen to it today and almost every time you listen you can you can kind of derive a different pleasure so you know he was kind of castigated by more doctrinaire left forces at the time for leaving topical music.

But in those two or three years, I mean, he just produced lasting work. And, you know, part of why we still care about Dylan. And he's a funny guy who's, you know, later in life has been able to from time to produce, you know, really interesting stuff. But nothing, I'm sorry, on the level of what he was able to do in those years. I mean, the poetry was coming from almost a mystical place. and I'm not a mystical person, but it is kind of how it comes through. Yeah, I know Masters of War, you know, still absolutely bone-chilling to hear that song.

I can listen to it a million times and it's still incredibly moving, and just the anger and the righteousness that it can generate inside me, at least, is powerful. Yeah, and I would add to that. I've just been queuing up when the ship comes in, which he sang at the March on Washington. So Martin Luther King is talking about I have a dream And Dylan's going on Old Testament You know saying you know Pharaoh's tribe will be drowned in the tide

And like Goliath they'll be conquered I mean it was you know very stark imagery of Essentially black people getting free and in you know Doing away with their oppressors Yeah one more point Actually going back to it well it's Bob Dylan and Dave von Ronk I don't know if you know the movie by the Cohen brothers inside Lewin Davis, but it's a great movie. Yeah.

And I think isn't that character based off Dave on Rock? It is. It is. Terry Thal, his ex, actually wrote an interesting piece in the village. She actually took issue with it. But it's loosely based on him. I mean, I saw this interview with the Cohen brothers and it kind of disturbed me because somebody said, well, you know, did you? want to do a parody of folk music? And they said something like, oh, you can't parody folk music.

It already parodies itself. And I'm like, I don't think they quite get it, you know. There's bad folk music, sure is. But a lot of it was really pushing the boundaries at the time. And, you know, I guess I see the film a bit differently than you. I felt like it kind of, those times were much more uplifting if if you know they were still a bit disorienting but uh you know i i just kind of walked out of the film really a little rattled like what are they trying to say but you know maybe i missed something yeah or maybe i did i'm not as well informed and don't have the the personal experience of living through that period of time i just like the cohen brothers and i like that movie a lot um so i don't know if anybody's interested you can definitely check it out i mean i think

it has a 92 on rotten tomato so it's a it's a good film regardless of how you personally walk away from it feeling but yeah worth yeah and i do i have a story in the book because in the film he he can't find his merchant marine papers uh but in reality you know his merchant marine papers are stolen uh and he doesn't want to get him renewed because of his left wing ties he he's worried it's going to be a whole deal and sure enough in the book we doc i document how the fbi and naval intelligence were conspiring to make sure he did didn't get his papers replaced. So it's basically here's where reality is even more interesting than fiction. Yeah. Interesting. All right. Well, I have one more question for you, Aaron,

which is just kind of conclude this wonderful conversation on this wonderful book. How is American culture today shaped by what happened from 1955 through 1972, the events that you cover in your book? And kind of, what's the ultimate legacy of that period of time, in your opinion? Yeah. You know, I don't know that I can really answer that. I can say that it just amazes me that people are still discovering people like the Beatles and Dylan. And, you know, I'm kind of jealous. You know, I would love to just discover the Beatles today because there's just so much there. So I think that element, or Joni Mitchell, for that matter, there's a certain canon from back then that really does hold up.

And I think it's, you know, it's obviously it's impacted things in a multitude of way of which I can't really readily identify. But, I mean, one thing is, before then, you had to be a professional songwriter to write a song, and they basically changed that rule so people can write their own songs now, although in the pop mainstream, that's kind of reverted back to, you know, companies, you know, hire multiple people to write music and hits are generated almost, you know, scientifically and stuff, but I think it's a lot of it is, what's possible has become a lot more possible. You know, the boundaries are down and, you know, people can write and sing what they want. Some of the styles have morphed up, you know, and been passed along. But, you know,

I think it's a work in progress. There's contention still. You know, like I said, the pop mainstream is really reverted back and it's hard you know all the good stuff is there you just have to go looking for it more but to a degree you can find it i think you do owe a debt uh to those folks back there you know much in the way that when i was coming up i owed a debt to you know my forebearers as it were that it didn't quite acknowledge at the time you know yeah they gave us a lot of bad stuff too but you know you got to be dialectical about these things absolutely well said and a a perfect way to end the episode. So the book is called Whole World in an Uproar, Music, Rebellion and Repression, 1995 through 1972. Thank you so much, Aaron, for coming on.

It's always a pleasure to have you on. Always fun to talk with you. You're welcome back anytime. Before I let you go, though, is there anywhere that our listeners can find you online? I think you said your Twitter and your Facebook, which I'll link to, and also let people know where they can find the book. Yeah, so I'm a Twitter, L-E-O-N-A-0-1. That's at L-E-O-N-A-A-0-1. And you'll put my website, it's Aaronleonord.net. So those are the best ways to find me. All right, my friend.

Thank you so much for coming on. Let's do it again sometime. Okay, thanks for having me, Brett. You take care now. there's something happening here what it is ain't exactly clear there's a man with a gun over there telling me I've got to beware

I think it's time we stop children what's that sound everybody look what's going down There's battle lines being wrong Nobody's right If everybody's wrong Young people speak in their minds Are getting so much resistance From behind

Time we stop Hey, what's that sound Everybody look what's growing down What a field day for the heat A thousand people in the street Singing songs and a carry in sight Mostly say hooray for our side It's time we stop

Hey, what's that sound? Everybody looks, what's going now? Paranoia strikes deep Into your life it will creep It starts when you're always afraid Step out of line The man come and take you away We better stop

Hey, what's that sound Everybody look what's going Now to stop Hey, what's that sound Everybody look what's going We better stop now What's that sound Everybody look what's going

We better stop Children What's that sound Thank you.