Friday, 18 September 2009
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Music of the Counterculture Era: American History through Music
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the flourishing of an American counterculture that affected many walks of society. The movement's music provided the soundtrack for this bellwether time in American cultural history. Such performers as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Arlo Guthrie, The Doors, John Lennon, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and The Grateful Dead ushered in new sounds, as well as new attitudes and philosophies for an emerging generation. With vibrant narrative chapters on the role of music in the anti-war movement, the Black Power movement, the women's movement, political radicalism, drug use, and the counterculture lifestyle, this book details the emerging issues explored by performers in the Sixties and Seventies. A chapter of biographical sketches provides an easily accessible resource on significant performers, recordings, and terminology. Also included are chapter bibliographies, a timeline, and a subject index.
The American History through Music series examines the many different styles of music that have played a significant part in our nation's history. While volumes in this series show the multifaceted roles of music in culture, they also use music as a lens through which readers may study American social history. The authors present in-depth analyses of American musical genres, significant musicians, technological innovations, and the many connections between music and the realms of art, politics, and daily life.
* Chapters present accessible narratives on music and its cultural resonations
* Music theory and technique is broken down for the lay reader
* And each volume presents a chapter of alphabetically arranged entries on significant people and terms.
Excerpt
With Bob Dylan's retreat from the protest music scene, Phil Ochs became the most successful of the male protest singer-songwriters in the 1964-1965 era. Although Ochs wrote, frequently performed, published, and recorded numerous anti-war songs, his "Draft Dodger Rag" and "I Ain't Marching Anymore" were the most notable. Historian Ray Pratt describes the two songs as quickly having achieved "anthem status" in the peace movement. Pratt also writes that Och's albums All the News That's Fit to Sing, containing "One More Parade," and I Ain't Marching Anymore, containing both "Draft Dodger Rag" and the title song, became "essentials of the record libraries of activist students and early opponents of the war" (Pratt 1998, 176).
[...]
Ochs, Phil
One of the leading leftist folk revival singer-songwriters to take up the anti-war cause during the counterculture era, Phil Ochs (1941-1975 [sic]) never achieved the popular commercial success of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, or Bob Dylan. While he touched relatively few people through his recordings, Ochs performed at countless peace rallies and folk festivals, often rallying the crowds with his best-known anti-war songs, "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and "Draft Dodger Rag." He also wrote influential and effective songs protesting the mistreatment of Blacks ("The Ballad of Medgar Evers" and "Here's to the State of Mississippi") and in support of workers' rights. Apparently convinced that the movement had been all for naught and fighting depression, brought on in part by a mugging in Africa that left his voice permanently damaged, and by an addiction to alcohol, Ochs took his own life. Interestingly, Ochs's recordings from the 1960s and 1970s are virtually all available on compact disc reissues, as well as in elaborate boxed sets. Interest in Phil Ochs as a topical singer-songwriter is perhaps stronger today than it was during his lifetime.
The American History through Music series examines the many different styles of music that have played a significant part in our nation's history. While volumes in this series show the multifaceted roles of music in culture, they also use music as a lens through which readers may study American social history. The authors present in-depth analyses of American musical genres, significant musicians, technological innovations, and the many connections between music and the realms of art, politics, and daily life.
* Chapters present accessible narratives on music and its cultural resonations
* Music theory and technique is broken down for the lay reader
* And each volume presents a chapter of alphabetically arranged entries on significant people and terms.
Excerpt
With Bob Dylan's retreat from the protest music scene, Phil Ochs became the most successful of the male protest singer-songwriters in the 1964-1965 era. Although Ochs wrote, frequently performed, published, and recorded numerous anti-war songs, his "Draft Dodger Rag" and "I Ain't Marching Anymore" were the most notable. Historian Ray Pratt describes the two songs as quickly having achieved "anthem status" in the peace movement. Pratt also writes that Och's albums All the News That's Fit to Sing, containing "One More Parade," and I Ain't Marching Anymore, containing both "Draft Dodger Rag" and the title song, became "essentials of the record libraries of activist students and early opponents of the war" (Pratt 1998, 176).
[...]
Ochs, Phil
One of the leading leftist folk revival singer-songwriters to take up the anti-war cause during the counterculture era, Phil Ochs (1941-1975 [sic]) never achieved the popular commercial success of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, or Bob Dylan. While he touched relatively few people through his recordings, Ochs performed at countless peace rallies and folk festivals, often rallying the crowds with his best-known anti-war songs, "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and "Draft Dodger Rag." He also wrote influential and effective songs protesting the mistreatment of Blacks ("The Ballad of Medgar Evers" and "Here's to the State of Mississippi") and in support of workers' rights. Apparently convinced that the movement had been all for naught and fighting depression, brought on in part by a mugging in Africa that left his voice permanently damaged, and by an addiction to alcohol, Ochs took his own life. Interestingly, Ochs's recordings from the 1960s and 1970s are virtually all available on compact disc reissues, as well as in elaborate boxed sets. Interest in Phil Ochs as a topical singer-songwriter is perhaps stronger today than it was during his lifetime.
Friday, 11 September 2009
Thursday, 10 September 2009
The Movement and the Sixties
By Terry H. Anderson
It began in 1960 with the Greensboro sit-ins. By 1973, when a few Native Americans rebelled at Wounded Knee and the U.S. Army came home from Vietnam, it was over. In between came Freedom Rides, Port Huron, the Mississippi Summer, Berkeley, Selma, Vietnam, the Summer of Love, Black Power, the Chicago Convention, hippies, Brown Power, and Women's Liberation--The Movement--in an era that became known as The Sixties. Why did millions of Americans become activists; why did they take to the streets? These are questions Terry Anderson explores in The Movement and The Sixties, a searching history of the social activism that defined a generation of young Americans and that called into question the very nature of "America." Drawing on interviews, "underground" manuscripts collected at campuses and archives throughout the nation, and many popular accounts, Anderson begins with Greensboro and reveals how one event built upon another and exploded into the kaleidoscope of activism by the early 1970s. Civil rights, student power, and the crusade against the Vietnam War composed the first wave of the movement, and during and after the rip tides of 1968, the movement changed and expanded, flowing into new currents of counterculture, minority empowerment, and women's liberation. The parades of protesters, along with shocking events--from the Kennedy assassination to My Lai--encouraged other citizens to question their nation. Was America racist, imperialist, sexist? Unlike other books on this tumultuous decade, The Movement and The Sixties is neither a personal memoir, nor a treatise on New Left ideology, nor a chronicle of the so-called leaders of the movement. Instead, it is a national history, a compelling and fascinating account of a defining era that remains a significant part of our lives today.
It began in 1960 with the Greensboro sit-ins. By 1973, when a few Native Americans rebelled at Wounded Knee and the U.S. Army came home from Vietnam, it was over. In between came Freedom Rides, Port Huron, the Mississippi Summer, Berkeley, Selma, Vietnam, the Summer of Love, Black Power, the Chicago Convention, hippies, Brown Power, and Women's Liberation--The Movement--in an era that became known as The Sixties. Why did millions of Americans become activists; why did they take to the streets? These are questions Terry Anderson explores in The Movement and The Sixties, a searching history of the social activism that defined a generation of young Americans and that called into question the very nature of "America." Drawing on interviews, "underground" manuscripts collected at campuses and archives throughout the nation, and many popular accounts, Anderson begins with Greensboro and reveals how one event built upon another and exploded into the kaleidoscope of activism by the early 1970s. Civil rights, student power, and the crusade against the Vietnam War composed the first wave of the movement, and during and after the rip tides of 1968, the movement changed and expanded, flowing into new currents of counterculture, minority empowerment, and women's liberation. The parades of protesters, along with shocking events--from the Kennedy assassination to My Lai--encouraged other citizens to question their nation. Was America racist, imperialist, sexist? Unlike other books on this tumultuous decade, The Movement and The Sixties is neither a personal memoir, nor a treatise on New Left ideology, nor a chronicle of the so-called leaders of the movement. Instead, it is a national history, a compelling and fascinating account of a defining era that remains a significant part of our lives today.
Saturday, 5 September 2009
The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir
By Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald
My attitude is essentially that of a craftsman, and I thought a lot of times the politics got in the way of the craft. Also, there is a built-in flaw to topical songs, which is that if you live by the newspaper, you die by the newspaper. You may expend your greatest efforts and do some of your best writing about an incident that will be forgotten in six weeks. I mean, Phil Ochs was one of my best friends and I love a good many of his songs, but it always struck me as a tragedy that so much of Phil's material became dated so quickly. I remember when I heard him sing his song about William Worthy, I thought, "That's not one of Phil's best, but it doesn't matter, because two years down the line he won't be able to sing it anymore." And sure enough, he couldn't, because nobody remembered who William Worthy was. But unfortunately that was also true of some of his other material that I liked a lot more. Paxton dealt with that kind of planned obsolescence by disciplining himself to the point that if you give him a topic, he can give you a song, just like that. Len Chandler did the same thing; for a while he had a radio show in LA where he would improvise songs over the air from the daily newspaper. And if you have that kind of skill, I suppose you can keep going indefinitely as a topical songwriter. But nothing less than that will do, and very few people can do that or would want to, year in and year out. I think that was one of the things that destroyed Phil, in the end: he had painted himself into a corner, and he tried to work his way out of it by doing things like "Pleasures of the Harbor," but they never had the immediacy of his topical material, and he knew it.
When I first met Phil, he was working at a place on 3rd Street called the Third Side. It was the same story as with Dylan: Somebody was making the rounds of the clubs, happened to hear him, and came barging into the Kettle of Fish and said, "There's a guy over at the Third Side who's really fantastic. You've gotta check him out." I don't think he had been in town for more than a week or so, and as I remember, the owner of the club was letting him crash there as well, sleeping on the pool table.
Phil was very much his own man, right from the beginning. For one thing, although he was never going to be nominated to any best-dressed lists, he was one of the last of the jacket-and-tie holdouts. He used to wear this thing that had once been a blue suit, but he had worn it so long that, if you had got him to stand still, you could have shaved in your reflection in the back of the jacket. He had a way with neckties, though. I remember one that looked like it was made out of crepe paper, which he carried around in his back pocket to use for formal occasions.
Musically, what struck me first about Phil's work was that he was a very interesting extension of Bob Gibson. He had Bob's approach to chords and melodic lines, and also a lot of Bob's guitar style, but he had harnessed all of this for political commentary, which Bob was not all that interested in doing. Later on, when he and Bob were collaborating on some songs, it was perfect, because it was like Bob collaborating with his political self and Phil collaborating with his nonpolitical self.
Phil's chord sense was quite advanced, and he was the only person around aside from Gibson who used the relative minor and secondary keys. He was also one of the few songwriters on that scene who knew how to write a bridge. He was no Jerome Kern, but considering the limitations almost everybody else was struggling with, his work stood out. That may in part explain why he was not a very influential songwriter. There were a few Ochs clones, but not many, and that was probably because most of the people who wanted to sound like him couldn't do it. He was also a surprisingly effective guitarist - not a virtuoso by any means, but he filled in all the spaces and never lost the impetus. And man, he pounded the shit out of his instruments. He borrowed a guitar from me once at a festival, and you can still see where his flat-pick gouged into the top.
As a lyricist, there was nobody like Phil before and there has not been anybody since. That is not to say that I liked everything he wrote, but he had a touch that was so distinctive that it just could not be anybody else. He had been a journalism student before he became a singer, and he would never sacrifice what he felt to be the truth for a good line. In a way that was a shame, because he would have come up with more good lines if he had been willing to compromise now and then. But at its best, there was a deftness to his writing that went beyond straight journalism. He wrote a song about the conservatism of big labor in that period called "Links on the Chain," and its last line was, "It's only fair to ask you boys, now which side are you on?" That is goddamn good. There is a dialectic to that line; it has a history, and all of that is right there. A lot of people I knew on the working-class left were upset by that song - they felt he was using "Which Side Are You On?" to attack the people it was written for - but as far as I was concerned, he was laying it on the line to those guys, and that was just what the situation called for. And he not only called 'em the way he saw 'em but made the call a work of art. Phil was very prolific for a while, and he committed as much hackwork as almost any other songwriter of the period, but when that boy cooked, he really cooked.
Phil and I fought like cats and dogs, about politics and everything else. I was a socialist; he was a left liberal. I was a materialist and he was a mystic. So we could argue about everything from the meaning of life to yesterday's headlines. I thought a lot of his stances were too simplistic, which was typical of that whole crowd. His positions would make sense in a limited way, but he had not really thought them through. Like when he wrote "Here's to the State of Mississippi," I understood that he had just been down there and had been horrified by what he was seeing, but I thought that singling out Mississippi as a racist hellhole was unfair to the other forty-nine states. As Malcolm X used to say, "There's down south, and there's up south." Without all the activists who were from there, none of that movement would have happened, and having some northerner come down and shit all over Mississippi was unfair to the people who were living there and trying to fix up their state. And it was also too damn easy.
Like a lot of people on that scene, Phil was essentially a Jeffersonian democrat who had been pushed to the left by what was happening around him. Two consecutive Democratic presidents had turned out to be such disappointments that it forced a lot of liberals into a sort of artificial left-wing stance, and Phil was of that stripe. That may seem a surprising thing to say about the man who wrote "Love Me, I'm a Liberal," but I think it is accurate. He had believed in the liberal tradition, and it had betrayed him, and naturally he had a special contempt for the people who espoused lukewarm liberal views but were supporting the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, the crackdown on the student movement. Someone like John Wayne - an out-and-out conservative, prowar patriot - could earn Phil's admiration in a way. As a matter of fact, Wayne was one of his heroes, and he always believed that if he had somehow gotten a chance to talk with him, he could have won Wayne over to the revolution.
I must add that, along with our honest disagreements, Phil and I also had a lot of very good dishonest disagreements. We both loved to argue, and quite often he would take a position just to be ornery and annoy me. (Me, I was utterly sincere all the time, of course . . .) In an argument, Phil's weapon of choice was the rapier. He would lead you down a primrose path to the place where he had an ambush set, and then he would skewer you...
My attitude is essentially that of a craftsman, and I thought a lot of times the politics got in the way of the craft. Also, there is a built-in flaw to topical songs, which is that if you live by the newspaper, you die by the newspaper. You may expend your greatest efforts and do some of your best writing about an incident that will be forgotten in six weeks. I mean, Phil Ochs was one of my best friends and I love a good many of his songs, but it always struck me as a tragedy that so much of Phil's material became dated so quickly. I remember when I heard him sing his song about William Worthy, I thought, "That's not one of Phil's best, but it doesn't matter, because two years down the line he won't be able to sing it anymore." And sure enough, he couldn't, because nobody remembered who William Worthy was. But unfortunately that was also true of some of his other material that I liked a lot more. Paxton dealt with that kind of planned obsolescence by disciplining himself to the point that if you give him a topic, he can give you a song, just like that. Len Chandler did the same thing; for a while he had a radio show in LA where he would improvise songs over the air from the daily newspaper. And if you have that kind of skill, I suppose you can keep going indefinitely as a topical songwriter. But nothing less than that will do, and very few people can do that or would want to, year in and year out. I think that was one of the things that destroyed Phil, in the end: he had painted himself into a corner, and he tried to work his way out of it by doing things like "Pleasures of the Harbor," but they never had the immediacy of his topical material, and he knew it.
When I first met Phil, he was working at a place on 3rd Street called the Third Side. It was the same story as with Dylan: Somebody was making the rounds of the clubs, happened to hear him, and came barging into the Kettle of Fish and said, "There's a guy over at the Third Side who's really fantastic. You've gotta check him out." I don't think he had been in town for more than a week or so, and as I remember, the owner of the club was letting him crash there as well, sleeping on the pool table.
Phil was very much his own man, right from the beginning. For one thing, although he was never going to be nominated to any best-dressed lists, he was one of the last of the jacket-and-tie holdouts. He used to wear this thing that had once been a blue suit, but he had worn it so long that, if you had got him to stand still, you could have shaved in your reflection in the back of the jacket. He had a way with neckties, though. I remember one that looked like it was made out of crepe paper, which he carried around in his back pocket to use for formal occasions.
Musically, what struck me first about Phil's work was that he was a very interesting extension of Bob Gibson. He had Bob's approach to chords and melodic lines, and also a lot of Bob's guitar style, but he had harnessed all of this for political commentary, which Bob was not all that interested in doing. Later on, when he and Bob were collaborating on some songs, it was perfect, because it was like Bob collaborating with his political self and Phil collaborating with his nonpolitical self.
Phil's chord sense was quite advanced, and he was the only person around aside from Gibson who used the relative minor and secondary keys. He was also one of the few songwriters on that scene who knew how to write a bridge. He was no Jerome Kern, but considering the limitations almost everybody else was struggling with, his work stood out. That may in part explain why he was not a very influential songwriter. There were a few Ochs clones, but not many, and that was probably because most of the people who wanted to sound like him couldn't do it. He was also a surprisingly effective guitarist - not a virtuoso by any means, but he filled in all the spaces and never lost the impetus. And man, he pounded the shit out of his instruments. He borrowed a guitar from me once at a festival, and you can still see where his flat-pick gouged into the top.
As a lyricist, there was nobody like Phil before and there has not been anybody since. That is not to say that I liked everything he wrote, but he had a touch that was so distinctive that it just could not be anybody else. He had been a journalism student before he became a singer, and he would never sacrifice what he felt to be the truth for a good line. In a way that was a shame, because he would have come up with more good lines if he had been willing to compromise now and then. But at its best, there was a deftness to his writing that went beyond straight journalism. He wrote a song about the conservatism of big labor in that period called "Links on the Chain," and its last line was, "It's only fair to ask you boys, now which side are you on?" That is goddamn good. There is a dialectic to that line; it has a history, and all of that is right there. A lot of people I knew on the working-class left were upset by that song - they felt he was using "Which Side Are You On?" to attack the people it was written for - but as far as I was concerned, he was laying it on the line to those guys, and that was just what the situation called for. And he not only called 'em the way he saw 'em but made the call a work of art. Phil was very prolific for a while, and he committed as much hackwork as almost any other songwriter of the period, but when that boy cooked, he really cooked.
Phil and I fought like cats and dogs, about politics and everything else. I was a socialist; he was a left liberal. I was a materialist and he was a mystic. So we could argue about everything from the meaning of life to yesterday's headlines. I thought a lot of his stances were too simplistic, which was typical of that whole crowd. His positions would make sense in a limited way, but he had not really thought them through. Like when he wrote "Here's to the State of Mississippi," I understood that he had just been down there and had been horrified by what he was seeing, but I thought that singling out Mississippi as a racist hellhole was unfair to the other forty-nine states. As Malcolm X used to say, "There's down south, and there's up south." Without all the activists who were from there, none of that movement would have happened, and having some northerner come down and shit all over Mississippi was unfair to the people who were living there and trying to fix up their state. And it was also too damn easy.
Like a lot of people on that scene, Phil was essentially a Jeffersonian democrat who had been pushed to the left by what was happening around him. Two consecutive Democratic presidents had turned out to be such disappointments that it forced a lot of liberals into a sort of artificial left-wing stance, and Phil was of that stripe. That may seem a surprising thing to say about the man who wrote "Love Me, I'm a Liberal," but I think it is accurate. He had believed in the liberal tradition, and it had betrayed him, and naturally he had a special contempt for the people who espoused lukewarm liberal views but were supporting the Cold War, the war in Vietnam, the crackdown on the student movement. Someone like John Wayne - an out-and-out conservative, prowar patriot - could earn Phil's admiration in a way. As a matter of fact, Wayne was one of his heroes, and he always believed that if he had somehow gotten a chance to talk with him, he could have won Wayne over to the revolution.
I must add that, along with our honest disagreements, Phil and I also had a lot of very good dishonest disagreements. We both loved to argue, and quite often he would take a position just to be ornery and annoy me. (Me, I was utterly sincere all the time, of course . . .) In an argument, Phil's weapon of choice was the rapier. He would lead you down a primrose path to the place where he had an ambush set, and then he would skewer you...
Friday, 4 September 2009
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Rare Bob Dylan Recordings from 1963: A Collaboration with Gil Turner
Bob Dylan & Gil Turner – “Farewell”
Gil Turner – “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”
Broadside holds the honor of being the first magazine to publish Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1962. It was standard practice of Broadside for editors Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen to invite local songwriters to Broadside’s “office” (really their small apartment in New York City) and capture their songs on tape, so that Sis could transcribe them both lyrically and musically for the magazine.
Folk singer Gil Turner (M.C. of Gerde’s Folk City) was responsible for bringing Phil Ochs, among others, to the magazine. Ochs became, along with Malvina Reynolds (of “Little Boxes” fame), the most prolific contributor to Broadside. In a rarely heard Broadside tape, Turner provides backing harmony for Dylan’s “Farewell,” a song based on the traditional ballad “Leaving of Liverpool.”
Dylan sometimes shied away from recording his songs directly for Broadside (perhaps since he had already recorded most of them for Witmark, his music publisher at the time). Instead of singing them into a tape recorder, he would often get his girlfriend Suze Rotolo to hand in lyric transcription sheets. Gil Turner performed Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in January 1963 to give Sis and Gordon an idea of what the song sounded like. The track would not be released until that May on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Turner at one point sings the wrong lyrics, but quickly recovers by re-singing the second verse.
As good as these songs are, they would have meant little to the Broadside editors sitting across the room. Sis and Gordon were serious proponents of topical songs with social messages and using the magazine to promote exclusively this form of songwriting. When it came time to release songs on Broadside compilations, more topical selections from Dylan such as “Ballad of Donald White,” “Only a Hobo,” and “Talking Devil” were used. Rather than risk the ire from his record company, Dylan was listed under the pseudonym “Blind Boy Grunt.” As it stood, the songs “Farewell” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” were left on the cutting room floor. The latter was destined to become an American classic but at the time was simply another great song from the 22-year-old songwriter. Of Dylan’s songwriting, Turner said: “I feel about Bob Dylan's songs very often that Bob is actually a kind of folk mind that he represents to all the people around. And all the ideas current are just filtered down and come out in poetry.”
Gil Turner – “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”
Broadside holds the honor of being the first magazine to publish Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in 1962. It was standard practice of Broadside for editors Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen to invite local songwriters to Broadside’s “office” (really their small apartment in New York City) and capture their songs on tape, so that Sis could transcribe them both lyrically and musically for the magazine.
Folk singer Gil Turner (M.C. of Gerde’s Folk City) was responsible for bringing Phil Ochs, among others, to the magazine. Ochs became, along with Malvina Reynolds (of “Little Boxes” fame), the most prolific contributor to Broadside. In a rarely heard Broadside tape, Turner provides backing harmony for Dylan’s “Farewell,” a song based on the traditional ballad “Leaving of Liverpool.”
Dylan sometimes shied away from recording his songs directly for Broadside (perhaps since he had already recorded most of them for Witmark, his music publisher at the time). Instead of singing them into a tape recorder, he would often get his girlfriend Suze Rotolo to hand in lyric transcription sheets. Gil Turner performed Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in January 1963 to give Sis and Gordon an idea of what the song sounded like. The track would not be released until that May on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Turner at one point sings the wrong lyrics, but quickly recovers by re-singing the second verse.
As good as these songs are, they would have meant little to the Broadside editors sitting across the room. Sis and Gordon were serious proponents of topical songs with social messages and using the magazine to promote exclusively this form of songwriting. When it came time to release songs on Broadside compilations, more topical selections from Dylan such as “Ballad of Donald White,” “Only a Hobo,” and “Talking Devil” were used. Rather than risk the ire from his record company, Dylan was listed under the pseudonym “Blind Boy Grunt.” As it stood, the songs “Farewell” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” were left on the cutting room floor. The latter was destined to become an American classic but at the time was simply another great song from the 22-year-old songwriter. Of Dylan’s songwriting, Turner said: “I feel about Bob Dylan's songs very often that Bob is actually a kind of folk mind that he represents to all the people around. And all the ideas current are just filtered down and come out in poetry.”
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