How to close this first of the great open-air rock festivals of the 1960s? Adler had the concert end with the Mamas and the Papas singing “Dancing in the Street.” It was forever after said that “Dancing in the Street” was the great closing number. For Martha Reeves, it was the number they came to hear and the one the audience waited for, but for almost any artist it was the song that would leave the audience energized.
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In 1967, H. Rap Brown, born Hubert Brown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, became chairman of SNCC. He had acquired the nickname “Rap” from his fiery rhythmic speaking style, which made him one of the early rappers.
By then every summer was approached with dread or excitement, depending on the point of view. In the spring and summer of 1966 there had been forty-three violent uprisings in U.S. cities, almost all of which had begun over the treatment of a black person by the police. Brown said, “These rebellions are but a dress rehearsal for real revolution.” The summer of 1967 promised to be the longest, hottest one ever.
During the summer, H. Rap Brown often spoke in urban black neighborhoods from the roof of a parked car. Sometimes the car had music playing, and often that music was Martha and the Vandellas singing “Dancing in the Street.” He did this in Cambridge, Maryland, in Detroit, and in numerous other stops. The song would energize the crowd and give his rally a partylike atmosphere.
There were more than 120 violent uprisings in American cities that year, most of them in the summer. Some of the most violent were in Cambridge, Maryland, Minneapolis, New York, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Tampa. But two of the worst and most remembered were in Detroit and Newark. Unknown to Reeves, the theme song of these disruptions around the country, or “’cross the nation,” just like “Burn, baby, burn” in Watts, was “Dancing in the Street.” Strangely, the uprisings, too, often took on a party spirit. It can be seen in press photos of the incidents—people standing around, laughing, taunting the police. And this was the atmosphere this song helped create. The record would be played. People would sing it. They would refer to what they were doing as “dancing in the street.” Radical leader Tom Hayden, who was in Newark as an organizer at the time of that city’s explosion, said of “Dancing in the Street,” “It certainly was a beat in Newark during the years I was there.” Martha Reeves had been right when she insisted that this was a party song. But this was a different kind of party.
On July 12 the Newark police’s rough treatment of a black taxi driver led to six days of violence in which twenty-five people were killed, including a white police detective, a white fireman, and twenty-three black people, two of whom were children.
On July 23, 1967, Martha Reeves had a ten-day engagement at Detroit’s Fox Theater, where Elvis Presley had first appeared in Detroit in 1956 to fifteen thousand screaming fans in three nights. One night, while she was performing “Dancing in the Street,” a man in the wing started waving his arms furiously to get her attention. When she finished the song, she went to the wing and the stage manager told her that Detroit was literally in flames. A dispute with police, she was told, had erupted, and angry crowds were smashing storefronts, looting, and setting entire city blocks on fire. Reeves was told that rather than go into her next number, the hit “Jimmy Mack,” she needed to tell the audience what was happening and get them to leave calmly and go home. “It was very scary,” she later said, but she did talk the audience into leaving quietly.
The city’s Afro-American population seemed to have made good on H. Rap Brown’s threat when he had visited earlier in the month. If “Motown doesn’t come around,” he warned, “we are going to burn you down.”
By 1967 there was a great deal in Detroit that needed to come around. There were discriminatory housing practices that kept blacks in third-rate dwellings, an “urban renewal” project that bulldozed black neighborhoods to build highways, and a brutal, largely white police force.
The spark that set off the Detroit riots was on Twelfth Street, an almost entirely black neighborhood where the Funk Brothers often worked out passages for the next day’s track at the Chit Chat Lounge. Though no survivors can recall, it would be a great irony if the celebrated track for “Dancing in the Street” had been worked out at the Chit Chat, where the Detroit riot of 1967 that tied itself to the song began. The club was beloved in the neighborhood, and when Twelfth Street was leveled by violence, the Chit Chat was untouched.
As whites left for the suburbs, the neighborhood had gone from one third black in 1950 to 96 percent black in 1960. It was happening all over Detroit, which by 1967 was 40 percent black. But the police force was largely white and known for harassing young blacks, using words such as nigger. The vice squads were particularly infamous, and one such group raided a Twelfth Street club expecting to round up a handful of people. Instead there were eighty-two people inside celebrating the return of two Vietnam veterans. Hugely outnumbered, the police decided to attempt to arrest all eighty-two. The situation erupted so rapidly that the police lost control of the city and federal troops were brought in the next morning. After five days of fighting for control of the city’s black neighborhoods, 43 people were killed, 1,189 injured, and more than 7,000 people were arrested. Almost four out of five victims were blacks shot by police or National Guardsmen. In one of the most famous incidents, the subject of John Hersey’s The Algiers Motel Incident, the police shot three unarmed black teenagers in a hotel. The youngest victim of the violence was Tonya Blanding, a four-year-old girl shot in the chest with a .50-caliber bullet from a tank that opened fire on her housing complex when they mistook the lighting of a cigarette for sniper fire.
But there were also a few white victims, including the oldest person to be killed, Krikor Messerlian, a sixty-eight-year-old Armenian immigrant who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a gang of young blacks as he attempted to protect his shoe repair shop with a ceremonial sword late the first night. One twenty-year-old black, implicated in the beating, was one of the few people charged with a killing.
Amiri Baraka, who was arrested in the Newark uprising and charged with resisting arrest and possession of an illegal weapon—charges for which he was sentenced to three years in prison, although the conviction was reversed on appeal—wrote about the rationale for the summer violence, which he called “the magic dance in the street.” In a piece called “Black People!” he wrote about the sentiment that if you are black, the white man “owes you anything you want” and “you can get it, no money down.” Smash windows and take it, says the piece. “Dance up and down the street.” That was the street language of 1967.
Martha Reeves had been near the scene of riots in performance not only in Detroit but when she appeared in Newark, and in Myrtle Beach, when Cambridge erupted again. She was disturbed by the way she believed her song was being misused in this terrible violence. Nothing could have been further from who Martha Reeves was. She loved singing “Dancing in the Street,” because to her, “the song is something you want to say to people. It says, ‘Have fun.’”
Later that year, after black urban uprisings had swept the United States, Martha Reeves went to Britain on tour. She was glad to escape America and what to her seemed deplorable violence. To her complete shock, in London reporters followed her with questions about her involvement in the riots. At one London press conference she broke into tears as a reporter asked her if “Dancing in the Street” was a call to arms. “It is a party song,” she insisted. She was horrified that she would be associated “with people rioting and burning.”
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But clearly there was another way of looking at the song, and to many people it was much more than a party song. It is often said that radio stations banned the song, but no one has come up with a concrete example of a radio station outlawing it. In any event, at the time radio stations were not banning songs. Since the payola scandal, they had taken the decisions away from the deejays. The station had weekly music meetings, at whic
h a list of possible records was put together. The deejay had no say in this. Cousin Brucie said, “In 1963 we were told not to bring in records anymore. They were all supplied by the program director, and deejays voted on the ones they brought in. If I suggested something not on the list, they would say ‘That’s not here, Brucie.’”
“Dancing in the Street” may have been turning up less on urban radio lists in the summer of 1967, but no one had to give a reason. There were few attempts at an outright ban of a song by an American radio station anymore, and if there were any, they usually failed. In 1968 an El Paso, Texas, station banned all records by Bob Dylan because it was too difficult to understand the lyrics and there might be offensive hidden messages. So the station played covers of the songs by artists with clearer diction. The same year, during the violent National Democratic Convention in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley’s attempt to ban the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” famously backfired into a local hit.
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To those for whom “urban insurrection” and “dancing in the street” were synonymous, such as Amiri Baraka and H. Rap Brown and their followers, Martha Reeves’s party song was subversive and radio stations might have seen it the same way. But mostly they appeared not to because it could also be seen as just a “party song.” How can two such radically different interpretations of a song be explained?
To some, the song was clearly about revolution in the street. Certainly it was to H. Rap Brown, who used it almost as the battle song of urban uprisings and a way to stir the crowd. He even got them dancing to the song against his fiery rhetoric. He corresponded from his cell at ADX Florence super-maximum security prison in Colorado, where after a lifetime of arrests and convictions, some of them highly dubious—including a 1995 arrest for shooting a man who later recanted, saying he had been pressured by the authorities to lie—he was serving a life sentence for the 2000 killing of a policeman, which he denies having done. Brown, who converted to Islam and used the name Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, said, “About the significance of ‘Dancing in the Street’ as an anthem for movement in the sixties; when viewed in the context of the struggle, it is part of the catalogue of inspirational and iconic message music that defined an era.”
He went on to quote from the eighteenth-century English poet William Cowper’s “Human Frailty”: “But oars alone can ne’er prevail / To reach the distant coast; / The breath of Heaven must swell the sail, / Or all the toil is lost.” Brown understood that to lead he had to inspire, and that “Dancing in the Street” was an invaluable tool for this, that it could give that breath of heaven to fill the sails.
The song was using the language of the time, a street language both the songwriters and Brown knew well. At the time Brown was saying that the new fashion for unstraightened hair called the “natural” was meaningless. “It ain’t what’s on your head,” he said. “It’s what’s in it.” Or as Stevenson, Gaye, and Hunter put it, “It doesn’t matter what you wear. Just as long as you are there.”
Brown was forever using the word street. He spoke of the “brother who was taking care of business, the brother who is in the street.” Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, a retired professor who had known Brown well from their years together at SNCC, said, “‘Dancing in the Street’ was an obvious choice for the movement. I can see how this would happen from the title. The words ‘dancing in the street’ meant something.”
The Living Theatre’s benchmark of avant-garde theater, Paradise Now, ended every performance in New York and on tour in the late 1960s with the lines “Theater is in the street. The street belongs to the people. Free the theater, free the street. Begin.”
Martha Reeves argues that the politically charged word is streets, and that people who have the political interpretation often incorrectly call the song “Dancing in the Streets.” The song phrase is actually “Dancing in the Street”—singular—and street does not have the same connotation as streets. In the recording, Martha sings “street,” but the backup singers reply, “Dancing in the streets,” so that there appears to be a dialogue between these two ideas.
It is almost impossible to talk about these summer conflagrations without the words street and even dancing. The Kerner Report, the result of a presidential committee to study these summer occurrences, which they wisely labeled “disorders,” and named after its chairman, Illinois governor Otto Kerner, reported that in the Detroit disorder, “a spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold.” It quoted one witness observing that young people were “dancing amidst the flames.”
Rolland Snellings of SNCC wrote in 1965 of “the coming Black Revolution.” According to Snellings, “they are moving to the rhythms of a New Song, a New Sound: dancing in the streets to a Universal Dream that haunts their wretched nights: they dream of freedom!”
And then there is that telling phrase: “Summer’s here and the time is right.” And did not “calling out around the world” mean a call for revolution, and didn’t the song include a list of cities, each with important black communities that were likely to have “disorders”? What did it mean to be calling out to these cities for people to go dancing in the street now that summer’s here and the time is right?
Amiri Baraka, interviewed in 2012, recalled that the song was first released at the time of the Harlem disturbances. “The song comes out at the time of the rebellion in Harlem,” he said. “We just moved from the Village to Harlem. That whole idea of revolution. That is what that song was to us. That is what it seemed to be. ‘Calling out around the world, are you ready.’ That’s what we got from it.”
In fact, since the song came out just as these uprisings were beginning, it seemed not just to be calling for them but to be predicting them. Baraka said that the song “prophesied the rebellion.” After all, the lyrics are mostly in the future tense—“There’ll be . . .”
Snellings wrote in Liberator in October 1965 following that year’s riot season:
WE ARE COMING UP! WE ARE COMING UP! And it’s reflected in the Riot-song that symbolized Harlem, Philly, Brooklyn, Rochester, Paterson, Elizabeth; this song, of course, “Dancing in the Streets”—making Martha and the Vandellas legendary.
Notice that this quote dubbing the recording a “riot-song” makes the exact mistake Martha Reeves referred to—he erroneously wrote “streets” in the plural.
When it was pointed out to Amiri Baraka that Martha Reeves, Mickey Stevenson, and Ivy Jo Hunter all denied his interpretation of their song, he said, “No matter what she might think. At that particular time it coincides with people who were dancing in the street. They were the only people I knew who were dancing in the street. It doesn’t matter to me what they meant. If you take the words in the context they came in, that’s what it came to mean. It was used at rallies by Black Panthers and other groups.”
Many people in the music industry agree with this idea about the interpretation of songs. Jon Landau said, “When work goes out into the public the artist interpretation becomes just another interpretation. It’s not necessarily the deepest interpretation. It’s just one interpretation.”
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This idea that a song might have two meanings, the lighthearted one for the general public and a political one for the thinking few, was for young white people in the 1960s an intriguing new concept of counterculture introduced by radio stations, which got very uncomfortable about undecipherable rock ’n’ roll lyrics. Originally the fear was not so much political messages as the belief that black music held hidden sexual innuendos, which it sometimes did. The most memorable incident of this for white kids growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s was the 1955 hit “Louie Louie.” Written and performed by Richard Berry, a black doo-wop singer, the song was a classic example of the mambo craze influencing R&B. Berry took the idea for the song from Cuban bandleader Rosendo Ruíz’s “Amarren al Loco.” But the lyrics came from a ballad about a Jamaican sailor looking for his lover. Few people ever hear
d the original recording, but a West Coast group called the Kingsmen slapped together a cover in one take in a garage for fifty dollars in expenses. The recording is full of mistakes and cover-ups and badly used equipment, and as a result the words are completely indecipherable. The song tells of how the sailor searches Jamaica for this girl he cannot get over. What kids, and a lot of radio stations that refused to play it, heard was something like
Da nights and days I sail dad a
Think of girl do dada
What were they saying? Kids sat around with portable record players, which had three speeds, but they could not make it out. Finally a complaint reached Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and he put the FBI on it. What did the FBI do? Exactly what kids had been doing—sat around a record player running it at different speeds. But they dropped the case because they couldn’t decipher the words, either. Kids were now even more determined to find out what the FBI couldn’t. Different scatological versions circulated and “What are the words to ‘Louie Louie’?” remained a topic of young people’s conversations for years. This was how white kids learned to listen for hidden meanings in songs.
Ready For a Brand New Beat Page 19