Another effective use of social bonding songs is in the political sphere. As I said above, music was used by some early humans to ease social tensions within the group—political schmoozing—and it was also used to allow subgroups, particularly the disenfranchised, to cohere. Protest songs use social bonding powerfully. Whether it’s Bob Marley singing “Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!” or Phil Ochs singing “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Moses Rabbeinu singing “Let My People Go,” or Pete Seeger singing “We Shall Overcome,” protest songs have an ability to inspire, motivate, bind, focus, and move people to action.
Countless musicians have sung protest songs, and if rock music has a single recurring theme, it is rebellion. One band, the Plastic People of the Universe (PPU), started with no political agenda but is widely regarded as having spurred a revolution in Czechoslovakia. The band started in 1968, the same year that Prague was invaded by Soviet tanks to shut down the liberalization known as the Prague Spring. The new Communist government suppressed free speech, imprisoning many musicians. The PPU were forbidden by the government on several occasions to play, not because of any inflammatory lyric content, but because of their long hair and emulation of capitalist bands like the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. (The band took their name from a Zappa song.) In 1970, the government revoked the PPU’s musician licenses, which made it impossible for them to get equipment or gigs; they had to play underground concerts to avoid government detection and arrest.
“We were workers,” Ivan Bierhanzl, their bassist, says. “For us it was important just to play and listen to our music, and absolutely not to be some heroes.” In 1974, the government raided one of their concerts; fans were chased by police with clubs, and some students were expelled, forever ending their academic careers. In 1976, twenty-seven people were arrested at a PPU concert simply for being there. The saxophonist and the lyricist were both imprisoned. Other band members were beaten. A Czech human rights movement emerged, culminating in the nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” ending Communist control of Czechoslovakia. (Tom Stoppard wrote a play about it, which premiered in 2007.)
The unusual thing about the PPU is that they themselves were apolitical and never considered themselves activists, protestors, or revolutionaries with respect to government policy—all they wanted to do was to play their music. But the Communists’ actions created a strong support group of activists around the band.
What has been far more common in our lifetime is that protest songs have directly, through their lyrics, addressed slavery, human rights, desegregation, economic injustice, legal injustice (“Hurricane,” Dylan’s ballad of Rubin Carter), and other social ills. In the past forty years, a particularly large number of protest songs have been antiwar songs, to such a degree that to many people, the phrase “protest song” is synonymous with antiwar songs. And for those of us who grew up in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, disagreements about war created a fissure that seemed sure to drive the country apart. For some people, the moral certainty of peace seemed innate, and protest music gave these people the courage to hold onto their convictions while others around them derided them.
I already had developed antiwar feelings when I was seven years old. I understood World War II—my grandfather had fought in that, and although the war was terrible, the reason for it was clear. A tyrant was trying to kill all the Jews; we were Jewish, and some countries came to our aid. That war made sense. But in 1965 the Vietnam War did not make sense. By October, the United States had sent nearly two hundred thousand marines to Vietnam. The leaves were starting to change color and we did a crafts project with them during art hour at school. Right after recess the teacher had shown us some news reports—young American boys dead on the battlefield. As soon as I got home, I told my mother that we needed to call the President of the United States on the phone and tell him to stop the war. “We can’t call the President,” my mother said, “he’s probably very busy. You know, like when your father is busy at work and we don’t call him there unless it is very, very important.”
“But this is important,” I insisted. “There is no reason that the killing should go on anymore, it can stop today!”
My mother picked up the receiver and called directory assistance to get the number, and then she called the White House. She spoke firmly but matter-of-factly to the receptionist, like calling the President was something she did every day. “My seven-year-old son wants to talk to the President,” my mother said, “about the war.” She was transferred several times. We got all the way up to the President’s chief of staff, W. Marvin Watson. My mother held the receiver against her shoulder. “He said that the President can’t talk to you now, he’s in a meeting. But he said that he’ll pass on the message if you tell it to him.” She handed me the phone. He introduced himself, then asked my name and where I lived, and what I knew about the war.
“That the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese are killing each other and we went over to help, and now they’re killing us. We heard in school about teenagers that went there with the army, and they came back dead. Please—tell the President that he has to talk to them. He has to tell them to stop killing each other. They’ll listen to him.”
He sighed and I remember hearing that eerie noise of long-distance connections in those days, the clicking and crackling static on the line. He took a deep breath. “We’ve tried that,” he said, his voice cracking. “They won’t listen to us. We don’t know what to do.”
“But tell them,” I said, “that we’re all just like brothers and sisters. We have to stop fighting!”
“I’ll tell the President,” he said. “I’ll tell him just what you said.”
That night I went to bed and heard my parents fighting after I had fallen asleep.
My father and his younger brother were spared both the Vietnam and the Korean wars. My grandfather had been drafted into the army medical corps at the age of thirty-nine, and was away from his sons during four years of World War II, part of that time in Okinawa, where he had engaged in hand-to-hand combat. As a doctor, he had seen the worst bodily destruction imaginable. When his own sons were old enough for military service, he confided to me when I was seven, he intervened—without their knowledge—to make sure that his physician colleagues on the selective Service Board were alerted to medical conditions that may otherwise have gone undetected, and they were classified as 4F, ineligible for service. My father had wanted to serve his country, and had even tried to enlist a year earlier, but my grandfather hadn’t let him. My father never expressed remorse or guilt over not having been able to serve, but his principal hobby as long as I’ve known him has been reading books and watching films about World War II.
During the 1960s, everyone over the age of seventeen was assigned a draft number, but most people who were in college got deferments. By the time I was eleven, though, the war had escalated. Nixon had just won the White House and the army was starting to take college students, graduate students, medical students, anyone they could get—men in their thirties were being called up. On the nightly news we saw hundreds of flag-covered caskets being unloaded from big transport planes on an airfield in Texas. Now boys in the neighborhood were coming home dead—the older brothers of people we knew. That same year we had to collect butterflies in science class, kill them, and mount them on cardboard. I couldn’t do it and my mother had to write a note asking for an alternate assignment. As Vietnam filled the TV news reports every day, my mother saw how worried I was, and at the dinner table one night she said, “Of course if you’re drafted, you can say you don’t want to go, as a conscientious objector. Or if they don’t accept that reason, you can go to Canada.”
My father threw his fork down. “He’ll do no such thing! If he’s drafted, he’ll fight in the war. It’s his duty as an American citizen—his obligation. No son of mine is going to be a draft dodger!”
I had always thought of my father as my protector, that if anything serious ever happened, he would be there to s
hield me. My mother countered with “He will not fight in that war.” My parents argued about this all night, long after my little sister and I were sent to bed. Unlike other nights, when we usually fought and called each other names from bedroom to bedroom, this night we spoke softly so that they wouldn’t hear us.
“What did Daddy mean? Why was he so upset?” she asked.
“You’ve seen the war on television,” I whispered.
“Yes, between North and South Vietnam,” she said. “A civil war.” She was now seven herself.
“Daddy said that I might have to go there.”
“Nooo!” she said. “You could get killed! He wouldn’t say that!”
During the war in Vietnam it seemed as though everybody who was in a position of power or authority in the United States was in favor of it, and those who were most against it were powerless to stop it. This was different from the Gulf War and the Iraq War, in which there was vocal opposition in Washington and very public disagreement from the beginning. To a child, and an antiwar one at that, it gave the Vietnam resistance a kind of David-versus-Goliath feel. There were so many of us against the war, millions by some estimates, but we weren’t rich, we weren’t in positions of control. The odds seemed overwhelmingly against us. Two of the most important antiwar spokespersons had been assassinated that year, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. I had seen the Kennedy assassination on live television. My grandfather also died that same year. “We” had tried to take control of the Democratic Convention in 1968, I knew, but we had been held back. Those men, outcasts, rebels at the perimeters of society had tried to get the antiwar agenda heard.
Music was there, songs, to bind together the resistance. I first learned “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” as a seven-year-old at a summer camp in the California mountains. A twenty-two-year-old camp counselor brought his guitar to campfire and taught all ninety of us these two protest songs, and we sang them every night for three weeks. As the war escalated, more songs appeared on the radio: “War (What Is It Good For?),” “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” “Universal Soldier,” “Eve of Destruction,” and “Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam).” Then there was “Give Peace a Chance,” written and performed by John Lennon without the other Beatles. It didn’t sound like a Beatles song, but there was that familiar voice, the familiar acoustic guitar rhythms, making the call for an end to the war. Lennon’s song was far from the first or even the most popular protest song, but it exploded with musical power and with the raw simplicity of its message. My friends and I memorized even the somewhat tricky lyrics of the verses and sang them in the backseats of station wagons as our parents drove us to Little League practice, Scouts, and to Sunday school. Lennon was on board—he’d step to the head of the line and help lead the antiwar effort. With his charisma and intelligence, maybe now people would listen. This might be the song to do it!
We saw college kids protesting, singing, everywhere. UC Berkeley was just over the hill from where we lived, and the free speech movement, the protests, women’s lib, and improved race relations were all bound up into one big cause, into us against them. The songs seemed to hold wisdom, encouragement, and motivation. They were something to play back in your head to remind you that the movement was more than just a thought in your own head, or in the heads of a small group of people you could see. Just knowing that there were other people like you throughout the country, hundreds of thousands or millions of protesters, singing the same songs, chanting the same slogans, all with the same goal: The songs provided a strong sense of solidarity.
Then came Kent State, the shooting of four student protesters. This was all we were talking about in my junior high school, going over and over the story in disbelief: The National Guard, the agency formed to protect American citizens in the event of a national emergency, had shot and killed four antiwar activists just like us. We had just held our own walk-out the week before, congregating on the football field of our California school, refusing to attend class. For an hour we stood in silence, as did hundreds of thousands of other students throughout the country at the appointed time and place. What if the National Guard shot us too?
I was infatuated with the Chicago Seven, whom I considered role models, especially after Graham Nash wrote a song about them, “Chicago.”
We all knew the music of Crosby, Stills & Nash. Stills (with his band Buffalo Springfield, which also included Neil Young) had sung his antiwar song, “For What It’s Worth,” a few years before:There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
We gotta stop hey watch that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Writing a review of a documentary about the sixties (broadcast in 2007), New York Times critic Neil Genzlinger said, “That astonishing song came to encapsulate ’60s turmoil so perfectly that resorting to it is a subconscious admission by a documentarian: ‘I have nothing to say that Stephen Stills didn’t say better in 2 minutes 41 seconds.’ Its instantly recognizable two-note opening rings like an alarm bell.”
Right after the Kent State murders in 1970, CS&N were in the recording studio with Neil Young. “Teach Your Children” was climbing up the charts and headed for number one. Neil had just written “Ohio” in reaction to the shooting of four student protesters. “Graham suggested that we release the song right away,” Neil Young recalled. “It was his call, because it was his song that was climbing the charts, and we knew that we might not be able to have two songs on the charts at the same time. But he felt it was important to get the song out, and so he sacrificed ‘Teach Your Children’ for ‘Ohio.’ That was really something.” Nash added, “I had left my group The Hollies over disagreements over which songs to release—I wasn’t going to do to Neil what they had done to me.” “Ohio” became one of the most moving antiwar anthems; David Crosby can be heard crying at the end of the recording. Many people who grew up in the fifties, sixties, and seventies regarded the leaders of the antiwar movement—whether political leaders or musical leaders—as heroes, taking a courageous stand with the minority, speaking their conscience.
My friends and I spent hours reading everything we could about the assassinations; about James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan; about Kent State. I came to realize that the disagreements about the war were splitting my own house—my own parents, who seemed synchronized on every other aspect of life. Over all this, and the death of my grandfather who had explained everything to me and kindled my young interest in science, I was devastated. But at eleven I could not find a tear for Grandpa Joe, for Dr. King or Senator Kennedy, for the sixty thousand U.S. boys killed, or the three hundred thousand wounded, or for those young college students in Ohio, Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder. I wanted to cry for them, for all of us. But I was not yet ready.
It eventually became politically untenable to fight the war. It was clear that the United States could not meet any of its objectives. How much of this was due to the music, the antiwar soundtrack to the protests? It is difficult to say, but music was present at almost every march and rally, in the background of nearly every organizational meeting. At the minimum, it’s clear that people at the time at least thought music was helping. But how can songs create such changes?
“The arts have power owing to their form and structures,” Pete Seeger says. “As I said earlier, good music can leap over language boundaries, over barriers of religion and politics and hit someone’s heartstrings somehow. That opens up their hearts to ideas that they might not have entertained if brought in through regular speech.”
“I believe in songs, of course,” Sting confided to me, “but it’s very difficult to imagine that a song would change anything overnight. What you can do is to plant a seed in someone’s brain, as seeds were planted in mine to make me the political animal I am. I think you can sing
an idea to a young mind and that young mind may become a political person or a person in power one day and that seed will have borne fruit. Seeger has planted a few seeds that may have borne fruit forty or fifty years later in a subsequent generation.”
After visiting Guatemalan refugee camps in the early 1980s, Bruce Cockburn wrote an antiwar song, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher.” “Aside from airing my own experience,” Cockburn explains, “which is where the songs always start, if we’re ever going to find a solution for this ongoing passion for wasting each other, we have to start with the rage that knows no impediments, an uncivilized rage that says it’s okay to go out and shoot someone. . . . The idea was to reach a different audience than the politicians by having us go and observe, using the relative visibility that we have to educate the Canadian public to what we had seen and to raise money for projects that OXFAM has in the region.”
Here comes the helicopter—second time today
Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away
How many kids they’ve murdered only God can say
If I had a rocket launcher . . . I’d make somebody pay
I don’t believe in guarded borders and I don’t believe in hate
I don’t believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher . . . I would retaliate
On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Page 7