Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Artemy Troitsky, the Soviet equivalent of Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed, promoted what, by Western standards, would be decidedly unhip concerts in the 1970s, including a flute/cello band called Aquarium, whose influences included Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. However, it wasn’t long before the guitarist at a 1979 Aquarium concert began rubbing his Fender Telecaster guitar against the microphone stand before lying on stage. An official watcher group, a “judging committee,” was dumbstruck, and left in protest. “We bear no responsibility for the performance of such hooligans,” snorted one of the judges.80 The lead guitarist, Boris Grebenshikov, later to emerge as the “Soviet Union’s premier rock star,” spent countless hours reading Tolkien and Western music magazines and was described by Troitsky as “a fairly self-indulgent but democratic guru.”81 He would later disavow much influence from groups such as the Beatles (although most Russian bands borrowed heavily from the Liverpudlians, adding a distinct Russian bard element). Grebenshikov was well familiar with darker bands such as R.E.M., and spoke in religious overtones about music, likening it to “a middle person between God and people . . . a musician should be . . . an intermediary between God and people.”82 Having already made an enemy of the Pope, communism was now aligned against both God and rock and roll.

  As if to confirm his prophecy, the most popular musical event of the early 1970s was Jesus Christ Superstar, the Tim Rice musical. In 1971, a complete English-language performance of the opera was staged in Vilnius, Lithuania’s major municipality—even before it opened in London. Subsequently, virtually every rock event in the USSR began to include some tip of the hat to the musical. By the end of the 1970s, the nightly news program Vremya used the theme song as its introduction! God and rock and roll had proved to be the combination that would ultimately destroy communism. But Troitsky and others gave it a push. Troitsky wrote a key 1975 story published for the Soviet youth journal about British rockers Deep Purple, fully aware that “Russian rock . . . was a power tool of subversion and resistance. . . .”83 Iron Curtain ears were more attuned to British rock, finding American black rhythms, up to that point, unappealing. But where American music had the black-white tension, Soviet rock and roll touched on equally dangerous (and rebellious) themes: betrayal, alienation, drugs, alcohol, and teen loneliness. The government repeatedly promoted Troitsky, whose ideas gained currency.

  At the same time—long before Mikhail Gorbachev’s celebrated glasnost—British and American country and rock groups were allowed inside the USSR, beginning with Roy Clark and Cliff Richard in 1976, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in 1977, and Elton John, who appeared in Leningrad in 1979, although each performer had to clear censors. (Ironically, the avantgarde rocker Frank Zappa refused to perform in the USSR when invited, out of protest against its oppression.)84 Others, more appropriately perhaps, simply rebelled. Elton John, told he could not play the Beatles’ “Back in the USSR,” did so anyway during his encore, and a previously polite, even quiet, auditorium erupted. After a series of highly publicized concerts failed to materialize, Soviet authorities returned again into the fog of distrust and suspicion among the youth. John Lennon’s death in 1980 produced both respect (Radio Sofia in Bulgaria dedicated two hours to Beatles music and a popular Estonian band wrote a song, “Requiem,” in his memory) and the predictable propaganda, with East German papers reminding readers of the thousands of people murdered every year in America.

  When Moscow hosted the Olympic Games in 1980, it opened the floodgates for Western sounds and influences, and the first true rock clubs opened in Leningrad and Moscow within a couple of years. Groups found they could tour within the Soviet Union, and the government discovered the commercial potential of allowing them to do so. The phenomenon came full circle in 1986 when a double LP called Red Wave: 4 Underground Bands from the USSR was released in the West. Soviet rockers actually went on tour, visiting France and Japan the following two years. The swell of rock and roll that took place in 1987 sparked a sudden and significant antirock music backlash (Bulgaria attempted one last time to shut down its rock clubs, and Czech police interrupted several concerts)—but even that fizzled quietly, and the Communists quickly started sponsoring rock festivals. The Bulgarian band Milena Rock Cooperative (named after the Cyndi Lauperish Milena Slavova) led the new heavy metal charge; and by 1988, Bulgarian party newspapers ran ads for concerts featuring the British band Uriah Heep.

  Spies such as Vasili Mitrokhin, whose smuggled notes revealed the anti-Soviet influence of rock music, warned that radio broadcasts from the West were producing “unhealthy signs of interest in . . . pop stars” and “almost surreal” levels of subversion in some Russian cities.85 Spy memos reported that 80 percent of Soviet youth listened to Western music broadcasts, which “gave young people a distorted idea of Soviet reality,” and repeatedly noted the “treasonable nature” of such music.86 No less than Jim Morrison, the iconic Doors revolutionary, summed it up when he said, “I’ve always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority, like ideas about breaking away or overthrowing the established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder and chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning.”87

  Romania sponsored sociologists to study the “youth problem,” and officials moaned that the young had embraced materialism and cosmopolitan-ism. 88 But the real development was, as always, “in the grooves,” as American Bandstand fixture Dick Clark used to say. By the mid-1980s, Soviet youths were importing less Western music and began making copies of Soviet rockers, who no longer needed to imitate the Americans or the British—in either style or rebellious lyrics. A final crackdown by Konstantin Chernenko proved the last, wheezing gasp of a totalitarian society seeking to control youth and music, a scene straight out of Footloose with the overprotective preacher trying to pull the plug on kids “dancin’ in the streets.”

  Gorbachev’s glasnost policies did not create anything new, but merely reflected what was already in progress. If anything, as Russian rock critic Artemy Troitsky argued, glasnost conceded rock and roll’s victory, while at the same time producing “the biggest anti-rock backlash [in the Soviet Union] of the past couple of years [i.e., 1986-1987]. It was initiated by some Russophile writers, supported by certain officials in the Ministry of Culture . . . under the banner of glasnost.”89 In 1987 piano-rocker Billy Joel became the first American star to tour the Soviet Union with a fully staged show. Joel even recorded a live album in Leningrad, and in 1988, the government sold airtime to Pepsi, which flashed commercials featuring pop superstar Michael Jackson with his metal-studded jacket. When the Berlin Wall came down a year later, rockers like Joel and Springsteen could, metaphorically, point with pride to small sections they helped crack open. Certainly the Iron Curtain rockers tipped their hat to the Americans: “The whole spirit of the 60s [in the USA], the rebellion against the establishment, affected significantly the spiritual life of my generation and of the younger people,” recalled Czech writer Václav Havel, “and in a very strange way, transcended into the present.” 90 And while rock music may have had limited impact in America and Britain when it came to fomenting a political revolution, pop music played a central role in ripping apart totalitarianism.

  Recently, some academics, realizing that they had been had by the mythology of anticapitalist, anti-American rock, have displayed amusing gymnastics in trying to backpedal their way out of their arguments. One asserted that “rock was not inherently anti-Communist” (and of course many conservative critics wrongly charged it with being overly pro-Communist).91 In fact, rock by its very nature was antiestablishment. When that same critic claimed the “rock ‘revolt’ was not against the dominant culture, but within it,” the circular logic approached Hendrix-level lyrical nonsense: all revolutions begin within the dominant culture—but against what? The same Stephen Stills who warned “There’s something happening here” would have had the same reaction to the Iron Curtain police (although the Soviets would have jailed him for such observations), an
d, like Wolf Biermann or the Plastic People of the Universe, would have no doubt written some East Bloc version of Neil Young’s “Ohio” to commemorate those killed by German riot police.

  Perhaps power chords emanating from stacks of Marshall amplifiers did not literally shatter the Berlin Wall, and perhaps the mythology of the influence of rock music in transforming any culture has seen its share of hyperbole, but even critics don’t question the fact that the music of liberation played some role in undermining totalitarian states. As Timothy Ryback wrote in Rock Around the Bloc, “Western rock culture has debunked Marxist-Leninist assumptions about the state’s ability to control citizens.”92 A fitting Stalinist-style monument, Ryback continued, to the heroes of socialist rock would depict a young man in blue jeans, “head thrust defiantly upward. In his hand, where the Stalinist war hero once gripped his Kalashnikov . . . this long-haired warrior would clutch the electric guitar.”93 And perhaps what was always assumed to be just Western rebelliousness in rock was deeper than once thought. John Kay, the vocalist whose version of “Born to Be Wild” became an American anthem of liberty used in the counterculture movie Easy Rider, was born Joachim Krauledat in Tilsit before escaping to the West to start Steppenwolf. Jan Hammer, famous for his synthesizer work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and later for the music in Miami Vice, grew up in Czechoslovakia.

  Little difference existed between the 1980s rockers’ visits to the Eastern bloc and Louis Armstrong’s jazz tours of the 1950s (denigrated as “mud music”), except that Armstrong’s were sponsored directly by the U.S. government, while the rockers’ were the equivalent of volunteer missions. If, however, the lyrics themselves didn’t send the youths to the barricades, the music form introduced them to individuality in a much different way. In both cases—the jazz of the 1950s and the rock of the 1980s—the essential, unique character of Western free societies was on display within the music: the very structure of most rock and jazz features a verse or two played/sung by the entire band, followed by solo breaks, before eventually (sometimes after tortuously long solo interregnums) the entire band reunites to finish the piece together. Western music, then, showed that individuals can and do work well together voluntarily, but unlike in “socialist” music, individuals had freedom to stand out, even if it meant baldly outshining the rest of the band. Or, as Timothy Ryback observed, “the triumph of rock and roll [behind the Iron Curtain] has been the realization of a democratic process.”94

  Rock and roll’s contribution to the collapse of communism provides one more piece of evidence that the human soul longs for freedom in all areas. It was a principle the Founders understood when they limited government’s ability to intrude on the arts, speech, and business. In later years, they would differ over the wisdom of founding a national university, for example, with George Washington calling for the establishment of such a college in his final address to Congress in 1796.95 But virtually all support for such a university—as well as for such “big government” projects as the large internal improvements measure that Thomas Jefferson supported (but which Congress failed to pass)—sprang from concerns about maintaining national defense. Alexander Hamilton, likewise, had based much of his advocacy of protective tariffs on the need to ensure the supply of muskets and uniforms for the American military, not as a sop to business.

  More than a few expressed misgivings about Congress involving itself in any way in the arts. Many objected to the government’s purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal book collection after the British burned much of Washington, D.C., in 1814; and four years later critics decried the government’s paying John Trumbull $32,000 for four paintings about the American Revolution (including his masterpiece, the Declaration of Independence).

  Overall, though, the Founders were cautious in their support for government aid to any kind of art or entertainment, aware that with money came strings, and with strings, political agendas. With a few exceptions, they favored keeping government out of human affairs whenever possible. They certainly understood that the arts (as well as business or education) could have its seamier side; people were not angels, but rather humans who would abuse liberty from time to time, and government’s purpose was to limit their ability to do this. But deciding when art was harming people always bordered on censorship, and with censorship came political control. Thus the Founders would have recoiled at Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ on several levels, most obviously its disgusting disrespect for Christianity, but also, more significantly, on the grounds that taxpayers were forced to fund such denigration of their fellow Americans’ religion.

  It is essential to recognize that, just as the Founders never imagined the government would interfere with its citizens’ diet, they never imagined it would try to control the arts. As a consequence, they never felt the need to comment on or expressly prohibit what they felt was much too ridiculous to consider. When John Adams wrote to Abigail in 1780, “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have the liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy . . . in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine,” he meant to establish a prioritized list of that which was necessary to enable that which was desirable. He did not intend that government fund “Tapestry and Porcelaine.” Washington, likewise, insisted, “The arts and sciences essential to the prosperity of the state and to the ornament and happiness of human life have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind,” but he meant individuals should “encourage,” not the state. Jefferson, who once said, “I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts,” never once attempted to make it the government’s job to support them or fund them.96

  The Founders’ vision of keeping speech and the arts free of government control and money has largely been abandoned. If Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda campaigns of World War I didn’t permanently link the two (though one can argue that, in wartime, propaganda and censorship are necessary), certainly Franklin Roosevelt’s public works programs did. During the Great Depression, the federal government paid artists and writers to engage in myriad projects—some admirable, most of them make-work, but none of which were judged by the private sector to be valuable prior to the New Deal. Rock music’s rebellion, therefore, in an ironic way, constituted a grand act of defiance against government control over the arts. After all, the BBC refused to even play the Beatles at first, which led them to American shores!

  Had the Founders been alive to see the Beatles’ arrival in 1964, they most likely would not have joined in singing choruses of “Yeah, yeah, yeah” or screamed in delight. (For that matter, I don’t think a record exists of George Washington ever even letting out a “Yahoo!”) But the Founders’ intuitive appreciation for liberty as a self-regulating force would have led them to smile benignly at Beatlemania and shake their heads at the marvel of youth and the genius of those lads from Britain. George Washington, James Madison, and even Thomas Jefferson likely would have grudgingly signed on to federal funding of Louis Armstrong’s Cold War tours as necessary for national defense. They certainly would have approved of Radio Free Europe. And while they would have been horrified by the “devil music” of rockers such as Ronnie James Dio, or the nihilistic death metal of Metallica, one can’t imagine them backing legislation—like the kind Tipper Gore championed in the 1980s—to stop it.

  Nor can one seriously entertain visions of James Madison or Alexander Hamilton (who always struck me as opera types, anyway) throwing stacks of Led Zeppelin records onto a bonfire. These same Founders danced jigs that originated in rebellious Irish glens, enjoyed Mozart and the Psalms put to music, sang songs of freedom that were handed down by recalcitrant Scots, and solemnly joined in fervent hymns from the English Puritan heritage. (It is worth noting that Mozart, in his day, embodied the term “revolutionary,” so here were revolutionaries listening to a revolutionary!)

  Washington was entertained by string quartets, when
popular songs of the day were “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” and “The President’s March” by Philip Phile. Both Jefferson and Washington enjoyed Haydn, but the Squire of Monticello could also be heard humming Scotch songs and Italian hymns, and Jefferson family sheet music included “Draw the Sword, Scotland,” “The Jolly British Tar,” and “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.”97 For the record, Washington could not carry a tune in a bucket, though his household was musical. Later, it’s been said, Abraham Lincoln particularly enjoyed the songs of Stephen Foster and, remarkably, his all-time favorite was “Dixie”!98 It was all the music of revolution, perhaps to a different beat, but revolution nonetheless. When a Christian rock group, the Elms, in 2006 sang “Who Puts Rock and Roll in Your Blood?” they clearly answered, “God.” The Founders would answer the question slightly differently. “Who puts rock and roll in your blood?” Not the State!

  6.

  RONALD REAGAN TRIES TO KEEP THE PEACE . . . AND MAKES HIS BIGGEST MISTAKE

  It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same.

  THOMAS PAINE, THE CRISIS, 1777

  Even if Ronald Reagan had done nothing but end the Cold War, his place in history still would have been assured. But by simultaneously rescuing the American economy from a decades-long death spiral, and by touching off a boom that spawned 14 million new jobs and almost twenty-five years of prosperity, Reagan ensured his place next to Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts as one of the most influential presidents in America’s history. His sunny optimism, unrelenting faith in America’s virtues and foundations, and relentless determination to make the American dream a reality for the citizens has elevated him to the highest echelons of our leaders. By liberating millions, Reagan’s place in the world aligns him with the greatest champions of human freedom who ever lived.