Witness to the Revolution
Page 14
THELMA SCHOONMAKER
When we cut Country Joe singing his anti-Vietnam song, I chose the shots of these beautiful young men who were going to be cannon fodder if they ended up in Vietnam. We particularly wanted to illustrate that. We had so much rich material. We couldn’t even use it all, of course, but we knew something special had happened. We didn’t know it would never happen again, but we knew it was special. It was very much connected with Vietnam, very, very much.
COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD
I didn’t know Michael Wadleigh was there filming me. I didn’t see him. I was concentrating on the crowd. I was surprised they paid attention to me, because they weren’t paying any attention to me before that. Then they started standing up. It was exciting. I thought, This is amazing. Then they all stood up and they sang along. I didn’t know what the hell to do next. So I went back out and sang a little bit more of it.
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
The unique thing about “Fixin’-to-Die Rag” is that it is not anti-soldier. It’s just about a person who’s doing a job that he thinks is stupid and doesn’t want to do it, but is going to go ahead and do it anyway.
GREIL MARCUS
You’re talking about a time when life was politicized, when people are talking about and arguing about political issues all the time, whether it’s the war, whether it’s Nixon, whether it’s Humphrey, whether it’s Eldridge Cleaver, whether it’s the Black Panthers, whether it’s SDS, or Weathermen. All these things are being discussed all the time. Everybody is aware of these things. And people are living more politically than they had before and most likely than they have since. So politics just becomes a dimension of life. It isn’t something foreign. It isn’t something over there.
So you’ve got David Crosby writing “Almost Cut my Hair,” which in a way is a ludicrous kind of song, except it was about something real, which is all kinds of people had grown their hair long, and most people had done it because it looked good. Then they said, “Actually having long hair is kind of distracting, and it gets in the way of things, and do I really want this? But now if I cut my hair, I’m saying I’m disaffiliating with people who have long hair. Maybe I don’t want to do that.” In other words, it was a real dilemma. So he wrote a song, and it was this very heartfelt song, and maybe overdone, but it was about something that people were actually living through, so in that sense it was a good song.
Almost cut my hair, it happened just the other day.
It’s gettin’ kinda long, I coulda said it wasn’t in my way.
But I didn’t and I wonder why, I feel like letting my freak flag fly,
’Cause I feel like I owe it to someone.
Must be because I had the flu for Christmas and I’m not feeling up to par.
It increases my paranoia, like looking at my mirror and seeing a police car.
But I’m not giving in an inch to fear ’cause I missed myself this year.
I feel like I owe it to someone.
STEPHEN STILLS
We got there on the second day; we flew in and saw six hundred acres covered with wall-to-wall people. You have no idea what that looks like. It’s unbelievable. And as I said to a German reporter who was getting under my skin, I said, “Do you know the last time in history that this many people got together for anything? Normandy.” Actually, Normandy was less. But it was just a sea of humanity.
JOHN HARTMANN (music agent, manager)
Everyone knew CSN&Y even though they had never put out a record or played in a gig other than in Chicago the night before, because they all came from supergroups. Crosby came from the Byrds, probably the first big folk rock band; Stills and [Neil] Young came from Buffalo Springfield, hit act, well-known. [Graham] Nash came from the Hollies; he wrote most of the Hollies’ hits. They get up on this stage and Stephen Stills says, “This is only the second time we’ve performed in front of people. We’re scared shitless.” Then those three-part harmonies hit and it was all over. They owned that place and they became the star of the event—until Jimi.
COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD
One of the more political moments of Woodstock was when Jimi Hendrix shredded the national anthem, which the establishment still doesn’t know what to do about. Is it a dis? Is it not? He was a musical genius. When he played the national anthem, I knew that he changed playing the guitar forever. He just did stuff with the guitar that nobody had ever done before—made sounds and improvisations. There’s really no language to describe it. But you know when you hear it. No one had ever done that before—taking a traditional song and trashing it like that. Not trashed—it was just gorgeous. It was unbelievable—really unbelievable—creative, artistic, not intellectual, impulsive—all those things, without a word of language. Then a whole generation of kids grew up playing like that.
Credit 6.4
David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young (who is not in this photograph) take the stage at Woodstock at about 3 A.M. on the festival’s final day. It was their second live performance as a newly formed band.
THELMA SCHOONMAKER
I remember that at the very end we were so tired. I just cannot tell you how tired we were. We had rented motel rooms but there was no way we could get to them, so we had no place to sleep. We just laid down in the mud whenever there would be an hour we could sleep, which was about all we got, because we were shooting all night and all day, and there was nothing to eat. It was insane. I’ll never forget the smell of the mud. It must’ve been like it was in the trenches in World War I, you know, the mud mixed with garbage, and we were covered in mud ourselves. We had decided to go out in the field and film the remnant of the field as if it was Vietnam. We got beautiful footage, and we used that against Jimi Hendrix playing, massacring “The Star-Spangled Banner” with Vietnam sounds.*3
Credit 6.5
Guitar legend Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) plays “The Star-Spangled Banner” early in the morning on August 18, 1969, as the final act at Woodstock.
GREIL MARCUS
The most powerful political statement that was made musically—or for that matter verbally—was Jimi Hendrix on the last morning, Monday at eight in the morning. The show went way long and there was almost nobody there by the time he played. He was the last performer, playing his version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is a very complex, deep piece of music. I always think of it as the greatest protest song ever, but it’s not just a protest song, it’s an incredibly layered, ambiguous piece of music. To take the national anthem and distort it, when people saw it in the Woodstock movie, when they heard it on the soundtrack album, because, again, very few people were actually there to hear the performance—it was taken as an attack on the United States for its crimes in Vietnam, which is not an unreasonable way to hear it, but it’s also a great piece of music. No art that has its own integrity is ever going to be about one thing or be one thing.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL,
AUGUST 18, 1969
NIGHTMARE IN THE CATSKILLS
…What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess? One youth dead and at least three others in hospitals from overdoses of drugs….The adults who helped create the society against which these young people are so feverishly rebelling must bear a share of the responsibility for this outrageous episode….
RICHARD REEVES
When things started to break up, I went back with the bands, and their managers, and maintained contact with them, and wrote a New York Times Magazine piece about Woodstock. At that time, it was the most resold Times piece that had ever been written, because everybody in the world was interested in Woodstock.
GERALD LEFCOURT
Within one week of the concert, Abbie wrote a book called Woodstock Nation. He wrote it on the floor of Chris Cerf’s apartment in New York.*4 He slept in his living room for a week. The book comes out, and then they [the Chicago Eight] go to trial in September.
* * *
*1 Abbie
Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale were all charged with conspiracy to incite a riot during the protests outside the Democratic National Convention in August 1968.
*2 The four organizers, Michael Lang, John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, and Artie Kornfeld, planned to make a profit from the concert. Ultimately, so many people flooded the venue that fences were torn down and the concert automatically became free.
*3 The three-hour documentary Woodstock was edited in seven months and won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 1971. Thelma Schoonmaker earned a nomination for best documentary film editor. Woodstock was the sixth-largest-grossing film of 1970—it made $51 million and the production cost $600,000. After the film was released, Abbie Hoffman called Warner Bros. and complained that the film had left out the antiwar music.
*4 Chris Cerf’s father, Bennett Cerf, was the cofounder and publisher of Random House, which published Woodstock Nation: A Talk-Rock Album in 1969. The book became a must-read within the movement.
CHAPTER 7
WEATHERMEN
(August–October 1969)
Revolution: how had it come to that? It was a blend of many things: bitterness, hatred, and alienation, hope, confidence, and conviction, energy, passion, and need. It was the pattern woven by all the threads of the sixties, the inevitable product of the awakened generation as it probed deeper and deeper into the character of its nation.
—KIRKPATRICK SALE, SDS
A majority of Americans had always supported the U.S. efforts in Vietnam, until 1969, when a September Gallup poll showed that the tide had changed and 55 percent believed the United States had made a mistake sending troops to fight there. Troop strength in Vietnam peaked at 543,480 in April 1969, and an average of two hundred American soldiers were being killed every week. In April, Nixon announced his first troop withdrawal, promising that twenty-five thousand soldiers would be home by the end of August and initiating his Vietnamization strategy of training and arming South Vietnamese troops while beginning to withdraw American combat troops.
But frustration with American casualty rates and media images of napalm-burned Vietnamese civilians turned some antiwar activists to violence. The Weathermen adopted the slogan “Bring the war home,” and they worked to transform the student movement into a revolutionary force. Former SDS president Todd Gitlin expressed a commonly held view among older members of the New Left when he said, “I sat in horror watching the Weathermen run away with the student left.”
MICHAEL KAZIN (Harvard SDS)
I was in Berkeley in the summer of ’69, where I had a job ghostwriting papers for undergraduates, which paid pretty well. I wasn’t sure if I’d go back to Harvard or not. I was pretty disillusioned with being a good Harvard boy at the time. On my way back east in August, I met with Mark Rudd in Chicago, where the Weather people were still in charge of the SDS national office. I asked him, isn’t this Weatherman stuff kind of adventurist? That’s an old Leninist term for going far beyond what the people will stand for. He said, “When have we ever done too much to stop the war? When have we ever done too much to help black liberation?” He kind of gut-checked me. I said, “Well, I guess you’re right.” So I took the fall of ’69 off from Harvard to join the Weathermen, and I moved into the Cambridge collective when I got back in late August of ’69. We lived near Central Square, in a small apartment with too many of us.*1
DAVID FENTON (movement photographer)
I had dropped out of the Bronx High School of Science to join the revolution when I was sixteen. Tenth grade was the end of my formal education. Tim Leary said, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” so I decided to follow him faithfully and I did all three. But I was also very responsible—I was a photographer and I made a living. After the SDS convention in June, the Weathermen took an interest in me and some of my friends because we were high school students, so they kept trying to get me to join them. Not too long after that convention in Chicago, the Weathermen faction took over SDS’s staid, boring newspaper, which had been called New Left Notes, and they changed the name of it to Fire! and printed it in full color. It became a hippie, psychedelic underground paper, only it was filled with violent, crazy rhetoric—“Off the pigs,” “Overthrow the government.” They wanted me to move to Chicago and work with them on this newspaper.
Mark Rudd was pushing me to do it. I remember he’d call me up and say, “This is where you belong. We’re going to make a revolution. You should be part of it. We’re going to overthrow the state, and we’re going to have a good time.” I was on a cross-country national park camping trip, and Mark had given me these deadlines. “You need to let us know by this date.” This would have been that summer of ’69, and I remember I called him from a phone booth in South Dakota to say, “You know, I’m really not going to do this.” Because I just thought they were nuts. I admit I was a little attracted to it. It was exciting and vibrant and different and interesting, but politically crazy. Plus it was so clear to me, and a lot of other people, that they were playing right into Nixon’s hands. They were turning the public against the antiwar movement and they had no awareness of this. If you tried to talk to them about it, they’d say, “You’re a counterrevolutionary.”
MICHAEL KAZIN
It was exhilarating and a little scary, because we were taking karate classes, we were planning on taking weapons classes, but we never ended up doing that. We would do these actions, as we called them. In one of them we went to Boston Latin School and we’d go on the steps of the school and start giving speeches about how schools were jails and how you should break out. On this particular occasion the football team tried to beat us up, because they were really pissed. We went to a mixer at BU [Boston University] to denounce them for being sexist, because women’s liberation was beginning then, too.
Our big action, which I planned, was at the Center for International Affairs, a think tank to train grad students in international relations and government, that Kissinger helped start. Because Kissinger was involved, and Kissinger was of course Nixon’s national security advisor at the time, this was clearly a cornerstone of U.S. imperialism right on [the Harvard] campus. I thought it would be a good target for an action. So about twenty of us went into the Center for International Affairs. We pushed the people who worked there out of the building; some of them resisted, some did not, and we spray-painted all kinds of slogans on the walls like “Long live the victory of the people’s war,” and “Down with U.S. imperialism.” And then we fled through the Peabody Museum, through the glass flowers exhibit. I worked out the escape route very well. It was like being a little guerrilla fighter. Two of the people got arrested and served two to three years of jail time for assault. Luckily I did not. I didn’t beat anybody up.
I remember when Ho Chi Minh died in early September in ’69, and we went to Dorchester to get in a fight with white working-class kids to show them how tough we were. Completely absurd in retrospect, but this was a middle-class kid’s idea of revolution. A lot of my friends who didn’t join Weatherman thought we were nuts, and in retrospect, they were right. But at the time I thought we were at the cutting edge of the revolution. It taught me something about what it might be like to be a terrorist suicide bomber, even though I didn’t make any bombs. Well, actually, I did make a Molotov cocktail at one point, put it next to the ROTC building at Harvard, and it didn’t go off, luckily. I’ve never been very mechanical.
BERNARDINE DOHRN (Weathermen leader)
The Cleveland Conference in late September ’69 was our own internal conference. The culture had actually been developed in the collectives, but it got spread to everyone, and unified or homogenized. At Cleveland the idea of criticism, self-criticism, and “total commitment,” and “gut check,” and “are you strong enough to be a revolutionary,” and “smash monogamy,” came in. A collective was a group of as many as eight to twenty people who united in trying to organize together. And everyone threw everything they had
into it: time, money, goods. Everything was subordinated to this one idea of organizing together.
At the Cleveland Conference the collectives reported on their work, and there were all kinds of fantastical reports like “We’re chartering a train from Detroit to take hundreds of people to Chicago,” things like that. Or we did this action at a high school and this action at a suburban mall, and we broke windows, and we attracted support. It was all fantasy. It was all self-serving lies.
CATHY WILKERSON (Weathermen member)
I was coming from the civil rights movement, and from SDS at my college, Swarthmore, and being in the national office in Chicago, working on the newspaper and then starting a region in Washington, D.C.
For me, the Cleveland Conference was the beginning of the cult period during which people were humiliated and undermined—it’s embarrassing to think about it now. Many of us were required to stay up all night, leaving us sleep deprived. Then a further shift away from bringing people into the movement became apparent, replaced by even more emphasis on militancy and changing consciousness through demonstrations of our own rage. I think most women were not entirely sure how to interpret all that.