The B side, “There He Is (At My Door),” is almost a throwaway. It did not make much of an impression, since it was already two years old, and next to the sparkling new sound of “Dancing in the Street,” the B side seemed to emphasize how much the Motown sound had evolved since 1962. The song by Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Frank Gorman, predating the famous Holland-Dozier-Holland team, had first been recorded by the Vells, a group in which Gloria Jean Williamson sang lead and Reeves was one of the backup singers. For this B side, Reeves’s lead was dubbed in so that she is actually singing backup for herself. But the song, though no longer remembered, got a huge ride by being on the flip side of “Dancing in the Street.”
Slowly, “Dancing in the Street” started to have an enormous impact on the young people who heard it—the slamming backbeat, and the bell-like brightness of the sound. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny was not even a teenager when he first heard it. “I remember that song vividly, coming out that summer. I was nine years old. That spring my grandfather, my dad’s dad, gave me a transistor radio, which I kept tuned to WHB Top Forty radio in Kansas City.”
Later, as a jazz musician, he appreciated it even more. He was not an R&B musician, but this music had jazz in it. He especially noted the bridge, a musical term for a passage of different characteristics that moves a song from one verse to another. The bridge on “Dancing in the Street” slips to a minor key and has been singled out by many musicians, including Keith Richards. Mention “Dancing in the Street” to any musician and he or she will often reply, “That bridge!” When Pat Metheny recalled the song, he said, “Just that bridge in ‘Dancing.’ The bridge switches to minor. In the past thirty years there haven’t been a lot of tunes with that many chords.”
Jon Landau, then a leading critic of R&B music, was interviewed on tour with Bruce Springsteen whom he manages. He said, “There are some records that are so perfectly constructed, when I hear them, I can’t think of anything that would improve them—‘Johnny B. Goode,’ ‘Like a Rolling Stone’—‘Dancing’ is one of those records. The record is perfect.”
• • •
On August 2, two days after “Dancing in the Street” was released, America changed. At the time, according to polls, the leading issue in the United States was civil rights. Lyndon Johnson and Congress had earmarked a huge part of the federal budget for social spending on the programs that were to build Johnson’s “Great Society.” At the beginning of the year, Khrushchev had announced that he was reducing his military, and Johnson planned to do the same. “And I’m taking that money and putting it into poverty,” Johnson told California congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas on the first day of 1964. By the end of the year, Khrushchev would be replaced by the more aggressive Brezhnev, but Johnson’s plan had really fallen apart before that, on August 2. The United States had been avoiding war with North Vietnam but finding small ways to harass them. They trained and armed South Vietnamese, establishing a fleet of fast Norwegian-made patrol boats in Da Nang, a harbor in northern South Vietnam. From there, the American-trained units would raid the coast of North Vietnam, carrying out small acts of sabotage, blowing up bridges, radar stations, whatever they could find. To make these raids effective, the units needed logistical information, which was furnished by a long-standing Navy spy operation, known to the military as covert Operation 34A, destroyers that slipped into the territorial waters of the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam to gather information on coastal activities.
The North Vietnamese wanted to slap the little boats that were raiding their coast but these boats were too fast to be caught. And so the North Vietnamese sent three torpedo boats after one of the destroyers in North Vietnamese waters in the Gulf of Tonkin, the U.S.S. Maddox, which reported that the three exhibited the “apparent intention of torpedo attack.” It is not clear if they actually attacked. The Maddox suffered no damage, though a later Pentagon investigation claimed to find torpedo shell fragments. The Maddox counterattacked, damaging two of the enemy boats and destroying the third. She then retreated to the fleet in open waters, but was then ordered back to the Gulf of Tonkin with a second destroyer.
The mood was surprisingly light in the White House when President Johnson was briefed on the incident. There was a discussion with Secretary of State Dean Rusk about denouncing the incident as “an unprovoked attack,” but Johnson was reminded of the 34A operation that he had approved, and it wasn’t certain if they really could call it unprovoked. With one of his typical metaphors, Johnson compared the situation to going to the movies in Texas with “a pretty girl.” Johnson described it as a hand starting at a girl’s ankle and slowly moving up. “You move it up further,” said the president, “and you’re thinking of moving a bit more, and all of a sudden you get slapped. I think we got slapped.” He said that he would reprimand but not retaliate, despite the urging of the new ambassador to Saigon, General Maxwell Taylor, to take military action. And to the surprise of his advisers, he moved on to other subjects.
On August 4, the United States reported that the North Vietnamese had attacked the two destroyers. A later message said that there was no visual confirmation of an attack and that the radar may have misinterpreted weather conditions. It was not clear that there was any attack at all. In fact, twenty years after the war that was about to start had ended, the relevant North Vietnamese military authorities confirmed that they had ordered the first attack, but there had been no second attack.
On August 5, U.S. aircraft carriers, in retaliation for the fictitious second attack, struck North Vietnam and sank an estimated thirty North Vietnamese ships. On August 7, Congress authorized Johnson to use military force against North Vietnam however he saw fit. Not one member of the House opposed the resolution, and only two senators voted against it—Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, both Democrats. Morse called it “a historic mistake.” As the conflict expanded into full-scale war, the Senate was still holding hearings to determine if the second attack ever took place. Most historians who have examined the evidence have concluded that it didn’t. There was also little mention of the fact that the attacked vessels had been spying in North Vietnamese territorial waters or that they were engaged in sabotage against North Vietnam. And so began an eight-year war in which millions died, including fifty-eight thousand Americans.
• • •
Federal agents searched around Philadelphia, Mississippi, throughout June and July. They found the car belonging to the three, but no bodies. Finally they started offering $25,000 for vital information and, acting on an informant’s tip, they found the three bodies buried in an earthen dam on a farm. The two white men had each been dispatched with a quick bullet to the heart, but Chaney, the black man, had been severely beaten and then shot three times. And yet Freedom Summer went on. The murder of the three did not cause any volunteers to leave the South. The project that succeeded in registering only a few black voters did much to mobilize the consciences of whites and blacks in the North to support the movement and also to make SNCC more militant and distant from King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
History was made twice in the summer of 1964 in the same large stadium six miles outside of San Francisco called the Cow Palace. It had been built by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. On July 13 to 16, while Motown was putting together the perfect record in Detroit and while the people of Harlem were in combat with the police, the Republican Party was holding its national convention to nominate Barry Goldwater. Journalist Theodore White wrote, “No one can yet define accurately what happened to the Republican Party at San Francisco—whether the forces that seized it were ephemeral or were to become permanently a majority that would alter and perhaps end the Republican Party as known through a century of American history. This will become clear only as the years throw perspective.”
Now, with the hindsight of decades, we know that the Republican Party did survive but as a completely changed enti
ty. The liberal wing led by Nelson Rockefeller was shunted aside for archconservatives. No reforming liberal would ever get the Republican mantle again. The party became belligerently militarist, anti-union, and anti–civil rights. This was not a platform that the leading Republicans, men like Rockefeller, Javits, and Keating in New York; Lodge in Massachusetts; or Scranton in Pennsylvania would ever run on. But they were out. In San Francisco, the new western party had overthrown the eastern establishment and built a western/southern party.
Some of this platform was clearly on the losing side. Not one congressman who voted for the Civil Rights Bill was defeated in 1964. But eleven of the twenty-two northern congressmen who had opposed it were defeated that fall. Protests outside the Cow Palace were for civil rights but also against it, some cursing Earl Warren, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice who had led landmark integration decisions. There was also a Beatles fan carrying a “Ringo for President” placard.
The Beatles themselves kicked off their summer twenty-three-city one-month American tour with a concert at the Cow Palace on August 19 to a crowd of 17,130 people. Billboard had already announced in July, “Britain’s Beatlemania Has Spread to America!” On September 6 they performed at Detroit’s Olympia Stadium to thirty thousand screaming fans. In terms of the size and enthusiasm of the audiences, it is considered the biggest tour in rock ’n’ roll history. In the huge crowds, teenage girls fainted from hyperventilating, fans pressed so forcefully that people were bloodied. The four were hidden in an ambulance and rushed to the airports, their only way of escaping to the next town. It was sometimes terrifying. John Lennon said, “Can’t sing when you’re scared for your life.” Ringo, the oldest Beatle, had just turned twenty-four years old.
• • •
The Democratic Party’s nominating convention in Atlantic City from August 24 to 27, the coronation of President Johnson, which should have been uneventful, was as much of a watershed as the Republican convention at the Cow Palace. Present were 5,260 delegates and 5,500 people from the news media. The drama that Johnson didn’t want came from 68 delegates sent from Mississippi by an organization called the Freedom Democratic Party. Since black people were completely excluded from the delegate process in the state of Mississippi just as they were from the general election process, a group of activists led by SNCC formed their own party, which selected its own delegation and demanded to replace the regular Mississippi delegation. The delegates were blacks and whites, maids and schoolteachers. As one of their leaders, Charles Sherrod, of SNCC put it, “Ordinary people with an extraordinary story to tell.” America had come a long way since the March on Washington the year before. Thanks to the Summer Project, people in the North had some idea of the brutality that these people faced in Mississippi. They told their stories—horror stories of beatings and screams and prison torture and burnings—to the press, and it was hard to ignore them.
On the other hand, Johnson thought that a fight over this or even the refusal to seat the regular delegation would be a political disaster that would cost him the entire South in the upcoming election. For three days the credentials committee tried to find an acceptable compromise, but these scarred veterans of Mississippi were not interested in compromises. The final offer was that two delegates at large would be seated with voting rights, the regular white Mississippi delegation would be seated but had to swear loyalty to the ticket, and that in 1968 no delegation would be seated that deprived blacks of a vote.
The press hailed this as a great victory for the Freedom Party because they understood so little about these people of SNCC. They had faced beatings and jails and death, and getting seated at the convention was the only acceptable result. Their response, of course, was a sit-in. They illegally sat in the Mississippi chairs, locked arms, and refused to move. Many, including old-time civil rights leaders such as Bayard Rustin, said that it was a mistake not to accept the compromise.
In hindsight it was probably the Democratic Party that made the mistake. The South was already lost, and there were other supporters now at risk. Sherrod said, “In the South and the North, the black man is losing confidence in the intentions of the federal government. . . . The seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would have gone a long way toward restoring faith in the intentions of our government for the many who believe that the federal government is a white man.” Soon a large wing of the civil rights movement would break away from the program of nonviolence. A new organization, the Black Panthers, would be formed, and a new militancy would usher in harder, more violent times. Many black people felt attacked by the Republicans and betrayed by the Democrats. Soon the phrase “dancing in the street” would have another meaning for a different time.
H. Rap Brown, a SNCC activist who would soon lead the organization away from nonviolence, was at the convention and said of the compromise, “So all the liberals, ‘our friends,’ turned against us.” According to Brown, “The convention was a classic example of the lack of a vehicle for the redress of grievances for black people.”
• • •
In the fall Johnson defeated Goldwater by 43 million votes to 27 million, one of the great landslides of American presidential history, but it should have been sobering that 27 million people actually voted for a candidate who wanted to use nuclear weapons and opposed civil rights. Goldwater carried the entire South. In Mississippi, 87 percent of the people allowed to vote—an estimated 91 percent of blacks were denied the vote—cast their vote for Goldwater.
Also that fall, SNCC volunteers returned from Mississippi to their college campuses with new lessons learned. Berkeley became the first of many college campuses paralyzed by student protest led by SNCC veterans.
When “Dancing in the Street” was first released, the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” was number 1 on the Billboard chart. By August 15 Billboard listed “Dancing in the Street” as a “hot” up-and-coming record. On August 22 it entered the Top 100 chart at number 68. At the time the number 1 hit was “Where Did Our Love Go” by the Supremes. By September 19 “Dancing” had entered the Top 10 at number 10. The Supremes had dropped to number 3, and “The House of the Rising Sun,” by the Animals, was number 1. By October 3 “Dancing” had reached number 3, overtaking the Supremes, who had dropped to number 19. Indicative of the interests of Motown with Martha and the Vandellas on the rise, the studio ran a full-page ad for the descending Supremes on the page opposite the chart. On October 17 “Dancing in the Street” was number 2 on the chart. Number 1 was “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” the British Manfred Mann’s cover of an American song. “Dancing” never beat the British record to make number 1 but it was already a classic.
A bad year for many people, 1964 was a great year not only for Martha Reeves, who got through it in “the Motown bubble”—in a recent interview she said she had never heard of the organization SNCC—but for Motown, which released sixty single records, of which 70 percent hit the Top 100 chart and nineteen were number 1 hits.
By the end of the summer of 1964, the entire tone of the 1960s had changed: America was almost a different country, and “Dancing in the Street,” born on the cusp, one of the few Motown songs that was not about love and heartache, was going to make the transition to the new and much more harsh America.
On December 11, 1964, Sam Cooke died, shot by the night manager of a shady motel in south central Los Angeles after a dispute with a prostitute. A coroner’s jury ruled it justifiable homicide after a fifteen-minute inquiry. Angry young blacks picketed the motel. Conspiracy theories on who killed Cooke and why spread like theories on the Kennedy assassination, but no one turned up any evidence of such plots. Eleven days after Cooke’s death his most prophetic song was released, a fitting cap to the year, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”
The legal scholar Alexander Meiklejohn, who had been dancing in the street in August, died in December, a saddened man. He had been a close friend of Andrew Goodman and his family. The Gulf of Tonk
in resolution also filled him with despair. When depressed, he always tried to find quotations that would cheer him up. In the fall of 1964 he had quoted from Bertolt Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues: “There is an essential gaiety. If it is not lighthearted, it becomes absurd. You can achieve every shade of seriousness by means of ease, but none without it. No matter how fearful the problems plays handle, they should always be playful.”
Isn’t the same true for songs? In the next few years, the brightness of “Dancing in the Street,” the party song, would be used to arrive at darker things more appropriate to the times.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE TIME IS RIGHT FOR DANCING IN THE STREET
In 1965 one of the first signs of that change that was gonna come was on January 30, when Billboard announced that it was reinstating its rhythm & blues chart for black record sales because it saw that the difference between white and black tastes in records was once again significant.
This was not encouraging for Motown, which both artistically and commercially had gambled on the future of integration. But integration, the theme of a decade of civil rights struggle, was no longer the shared goal of Afro-America. The ideals of black nationalism, that blacks should look to each other and not depend on whites, were gaining popularity. Ten years earlier, novelist-anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston—always an iconoclast who called the literary scene in the Harlem Renaissance the “niggerati” and referred to W. E. B Du Bois, often suspected of middle-class values, as Dr. Dubious—went too far when she wrote an article criticizing Brown v. Board of Education. Her point that it was insulting to suggest that blacks could not have good schools on their own would have resonated with some by 1965, but in 1955 was unacceptable. She was denounced by fellow African Americans and, worse, cheered by southern racists. Her once-prominent career was over, and she ended her days in her native central Florida working as a maid. One client realized one afternoon that his cleaning woman was the writer profiled in the magazine he was reading. She died unforgiven, in obscurity.
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 16