The same tangled logic and righteous enthusiasm encouraged many American rock bands of the late 1960s to explore a vital but often overlooked strand of the nation’s musical web: country and western. There were political reasons why it had been ignored. Country was linked in many minds to the South, to racism,fn5 the taint of slavery, artistic and moral conservatism, the Klan, rednecks, Baptist preachers and demagogic politicians. Yet there was another, more attractive view of country, as the so-called white man’s blues, working class and proud, clinging tight to its traditions and its heroes. This was a music of bars and fields, hard drinking and long suffering – adult music, finally, for which one did not require a symphony orchestra or a studio of synthesised sound effects. It was the home of Merle Haggard, the heroes of whose songs grappled with poverty and a restless desire to escape the confines of working life; George Jones, adrift in his permanent struggle with the bottle; and Tammy Wynette, voice of those silent women desperate to maintain their marriages without sacrificing their souls.
After four years in which pop had expanded exponentially into forms that even their creators did not entirely comprehend, there was comfort to be found in a genre and a culture that seemed not to have budged an inch. The old virtues were still the true ones in country: there were mouths to feed, children to raise and relationships to preserve. The landscape might have widened, but whether the heroes of country songs were pushing ploughs, riding trucks or even taking dictation in a big-city office, their concerns and pleasures were as reliable as the twang of a hillbilly voice.
For those rock performers who’d been raised on country music, such as Michael Nesmith of the Monkees and Chris Hillman of the Byrds, reclaiming that heritage was like revisiting their childhood home. Meanwhile, lifelong country fan Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde, thick with the fug of narcotics, accompanied by Nashville’s top session players, who struggled to acclimatise to the metaphorical landscape of ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’. The country hierarchy had been bemused enough by the arrival of the British beat groups in 1964. Roy Acuff acknowledged ‘the Beatles … and the Animals17, bears and bugs … They must be alright, as millions think so. They sing country music, you know, in a different style … I believe their hairdos put them over, but I have to give them credit for being smart.’ The following year, country fan Ringo Starr spurred the Beatles into recording Buck Owens’s ‘Act Naturally’, which was accepted by their fans as a novelty. Returning the compliment, a bluegrass band named the Charles River Boys offered an entire album of Beatles Country.
Behind the extravagant distractions of 1967, a growing number of American musicians began to toy with the idea of mixing country instruments with rock ideology. After Bob Dylan delivered John Wesley Harding that December, its harsh biblical parables set to the leanest of Nashville accompaniments, the influx of rock tourists to the self-styled Music City became a stampede. The Byrds and Beau Brummels led the way, while several former Byrds alumni combined in 1969 as the Flying Burrito Brothers to make The Gilded Palace of Sin. This was arguably the most significant country-rock album of them all, a set of songs that confronted the jaded decadence of Hollywood with truth-telling eyes. Just as no respecting garage or beat band had been able to perform without a clutch of R&B covers, now the least likely country boys – the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, even Frank Zappa – were playing with the Southern white man’s tools, even if (like Zappa) they were twisting them for satirical purposes.
This was ambiguous ground: were the country rockers revisiting American roots or stealing the symbols of a culture without understanding them? If rock signified progress and modernism, how did it fit with a style perceived as epitomising conservatism? Most acts didn’t bother to confront those questions, briefly borrowing a steel guitar and a Southern accent and then quickly leaving town. Others plunged into the stew of history – English boys Elton John and lyricist Bernie Taupin reinventing themselves as veterans of the old South on Tumbleweed Connection, for example. Bob Dylan didn’t attempt anything that drastic; he merely made records that sounded as if he’d found his peace in Nashville, allowing his retreads of traditional folk tunes and country standards on the wryly named Self Portrait in 1970 to be wreathed in the deep-pile ‘countrypolitan’ strings and chorales that Chet Atkins had fashioned earlier in the decade.
It was Dylan’s one-time backing group, dubbing themselves simply the Band, who pulled the richest treasures out of the Southern earth. On Music From Big Pink (1968) and the utterly unimpeachable The Band (1969), they drew from a melting pot of – no other word for it, the tradition begins here – Americana.fn6 Although four of the quintet, including chief writer Robbie Robertson, were Canadian, they were able to use all the tools at their disposal – country, soul and blues, jazz and rock ’n’ roll, myth and legend from the Civil War and the Old West, and a unique insight into Dylan’s creative processes – to refine Southern soil into jewels of mysterious import. Artists such as Eric Clapton and George Harrison instantly recognised that the Band’s music offered them an escape route from the draining overload of psychedelic rock; allowed them, in fact, to dream of a rock band that might be a union of souls rather than a battleground of egos. Yet even the Band could not sustain that fantasy beyond their second album. And there was a more troubling issue to consider. Did this desperate borrowing of another genre’s values and truths signify that, like an army that has advanced too quickly, rock had lost connection with its line of supply? Was it going backwards to replenish its rations? Or simply conceding that the long march towards an idealised future was over?
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fn1 It takes a certain blind certainty to deliver time-sensitive protest songs such as ‘For What It’s Worth’ and ‘Chicago’ with the same fervour in the twenty-first century as in 1970: naïvety, too, one might say, were it not for the fact that these seemingly exhausted anthems can still unify their ageing audience, and remind them of the crusading zeal which they all once shared, for good or ill.
fn2 The song endured, though: at the time of writing, Nigerian parents have been marching through the streets pleading for the return of their kidnapped children, using Lennon’s melody as their voice.
fn3 The most shameless of these was arguably ‘The Return of Jerry Lee’, intended by Jerry Lee Lewis’s record company to overcome the fracas of his bigamous marriage to his underage cousin.
fn4 Rock historians argue to this day about whether Tommy was a concept album or an opera, and, in either case, whether it was beaten to either or both accolades by the Pretty Things’ psychedelic odyssey, S. F. Sorrow.
fn5 There was a tradition of ‘underground’ country releases by artists such as Johnny Rebel, and the Son of Mississippi, which expressed violently racist views. Rebel’s ‘Nigger Hatin’ Me’ demonstrated that a country single could be ethically contemptible and musically appealing, in the same awful moment.
fn6 Given a critic’s scissors and paste, and a dictator’s power, I would make alterations to almost all of my favourite albums – snipping a track here, sliding an out-take into the mix here. But I make an exception for The Band, the only record I’ve ever heard on which I would not wish to alter a single note.
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JOHN LENNON AND Yoko Ono proclaimed that the year commonly accepted as 1970 AD was actually Year One AP (After Peace). But the couple’s bed-ins for peace, and poster events for peace, and Live Peace concert in Toronto, hadn’t stopped the Vietnam War, any more than Sgt. Pepper had done. Caught between drug addiction and violent psychotherapy, Lennon began to question his purpose, and that of the Beatles. Unbeknown to the public, he had officially quit the band the previous autumn. ‘The Beatles pattern3 is one that has to be scrapped,’ he said soon afterwards, ‘because if it remains the same it’s a monument or a museum, and one thing this age is about is no museums. And the Beatles turned into a museum, so they have to be scrapped or deformed or changed.’
To
avoid becoming a museum piece, Lennon refashioned himself as a radical newspaper, chronicling the disturbances of the times. On 27 January 1970, he wrote and recorded ‘Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)’, in which he questioned the value of stardom, and the relationship between musician and audience, concluding that they were one and the same. In keeping with his new aesthetic, he rush-released ‘Instant Karma!’ as a single: it was in the shops within ten days.
On 4 May that year, four young people were shot dead by Ohio National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University, during a demonstration against US military action in Cambodia. Newspaperman’s son Neil Young wrote an anguished song of protest after his bandmate David Crosby showed him Life magazine’s coverage of the tragedy. Two weeks later, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s ‘Ohio’ was released, a month to the day after the murders.
Both singles were hits: ‘Ohio’ focused global attention on an event that might otherwise have been forgotten; ‘Instant Karma!’ remains one of the most compelling rock records of all time. Urgent and outspoken, they represented the culture at its most spontaneous. Rock, it seemed, might not just provide the soundtrack for a cultural revolution, but be able to carry the weight of leadership. Yet these dreams soon dematerialised, for the truth was that by 1970, after (or despite) Kent State, the counter-culture centred on the Vietnam anti-war movement, psychedelic drugs and hippie morality was in ruins. The decay could be measured in personal terms. Within weeks of ‘Ohio’, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young had sacrificed their partnership to the indulgence of their egos, while John Lennon was screaming out his mother’s name on the floor of a therapist’s office in Los Angeles. Ultimately, neither Lennon nor CSNY could sustain the hippie dream, or erect a viable alternative; their failure testified as much to the breadth of their ambition as to their human frailty. (It’s emblematic that Lennon, the composer of ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, should struggle to keep his marriage intact for the remainder of his life, while two members of CSNY fell out of harmony over their shared lust for singer Rita Coolidge.)
There was no official declaration of defeat, and for many the fantasy lived on. Indeed, the rhetoric of rebellion grew more heated as the embers cooled, thanks to the likes of Paul Kantner and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, who devoted several rousing albums to a social and political revolution that was by then a figment of their imagination. By 1972, John Lennon could build an entire album, Some Time in New York City, out of radical rhetoric, much of it already anachronistic by the time the album was released: not so much a news bulletin as yesterday’s papers.
What remained after the death of the counter-culture? A culture, certainly; a world in which rock was central to people’s lives; and, inevitably, a corporate global industry to ensure its survival. No sooner had hippie become a tag with a commercial value than these corporations – and quite shamelessly, their client-artists – began to market it. The example most often quoted, because it was the most blatant, was a late 1960s campaign by Columbia Records which resulted in such deathless advertising copy as this: ‘The Rock Machine4 never sleeps. Day or night you can hear it. With its happening sounds. Of today … of tomorrow … The Rock Machine. Its beat is relentless. Because those at work within it are … The Rock Machine is restive. Enter. It’s wild inside.’ They were speaking the truth: the Rock Machine was restive, and needed a ready supply of fresh blood to renew its grotesque soul.
The early 1970s was an era when rock stars profited from the Rock Machine and wrestled with their consciences as they banked their cheques. Some assuaged themselves with political or charitable campaigning, such as Joan Baez and Country Joe McDonald. George Harrison staged two 1971 charity concerts to raise funds for the starving refugees of Bangladesh, his selfless endeavours tarnished by the British government’s insistence on claiming tax from the resulting single, album and film. In more introspective mode, stars channelled their moral dilemmas into songs questioning the very nature of the system which had made them rich. Pete Townshend grappled with this quandary at such length that it eventually inspired two best-selling albums, Who’s Next and Quadrophenia. Joni Mitchell waxed cynical about the ‘star-maker machinery behind the popular song’. Ray Davies of the Kinks extract-flush-lefted more than one album, and a TV play, from his self-doubt. David Bowie, when still a virtual unknown, challenged the iconography of fame on his Hunky Dory album, and then invented his own superstar, Ziggy Stardust, to show how hollow and yet addictive the notion of rock celebrity could be.
These misgivings about the meaning of fame came from the stars themselves, rather than the public – at least until later in the decade. People wanted to believe in the majesty and transcendent power of rock ’n’ roll, because it still raised them up, took them away from the tedium of the everyday, provided the rhythm of their daily lives, and filled their minds with fantasies of rebellion and stardom. Everyone benefited from keeping the counter-culture dream alive, so it lived on. Rock festivals became a regular fixture in the calendar, their grim conditions (no shelter, no water, no toilets, no food) camouflaged by the potency of the collective myth. Bands who had once performed in cinemas, theatres or student common rooms now filled arenas or even, after CSNY’s ‘doom tour’ in 1974, vast American sports stadia. Record sales increased exponentially during the early years of the decade, and so did the proceeds from rock merchandising. No self-respecting adolescent or student bedroom was complete without posters of their stardom-wary icons on the wall.
There was an irony to this mass celebration of rock’s cultural importance. Once it had been possible to organise a Gathering of the Tribes in Golden Gate Park. Now, there were few tribes left who could stand each other’s company. You didn’t love rock, you loved progressive rock, or hippie rock, or glam rock, or hard rock, or country rock, or folk rock – only existing superstars from the 1960s bridged those divides. Holding an iconic album sleeve under your arm no longer marked you out as a member of a secret sect, but as an adherent of a subculture. Schoolboys decorated their satchels with the biro-ed names of their favourite bands: after you’d scrawled your allegiance to ‘SABBATH’, ‘ELP’ or ‘HEEP’, you carried it as a badge of pride.
Yet increasingly the preoccupations of rock’s aristocracy – the men (and a very occasional woman) who grew up with Elvis and launched their careers in the first half of the 1960s – were distant from those of the traditional rock ’n’ roll audience: the teenagers. The early 1970s saw those stars near or past the age of 30 using rock to explore the crises of privileged adulthood. If it was hard for kids in the slums or the suburbs to empathise with rich men complaining about the vicissitudes of life in Chelsea or Laurel Canyon, it was equally alienating to be sold anthems of political disillusionment, artistic self-doubt, marital strife, and existential concern about the state of the culture. These were not the crusades that would set a thousand biros to work on school exercise-books and bags. Adolescents wanted heroes who were rebellious and carefree; only adults could afford to sympathise with the decadent and jaded.
Between 1970 and 1976, the parameters of rock lyrics broadened to engage with these comparatively complex issues of adulthood. During those years, it became ever more obvious to even the vaguely intelligent observer that something had gone badly awry with the culture that those stars represented. But individually, even at their most fallow, the rock pantheon could still offer a sense of honesty and authenticity, regardless of how far removed their lifestyle was from that of their fans. The singer-songwriter tradition epitomised by James Taylor, Carole King, CSNY and Joni Mitchell allowed for extremes of self-indulgence (beautiful self-indulgence, some of it, as on David Crosby’s rich, therapeutic exhibition of vocal harmony, If I Could Only Remember My Name). It facilitated a style of songwriting that could easily be abused, but which could also offer a degree of humanity and insight previously only available from literature. Joni Mitchell transcended her fame via the acuity with which she examined her milieu and her psyche, stripped bare her own insecurities on Blue and t
hen widened her horizons to analyse her social surroundings. Yet these were necessarily removed from the experience of her audience, who weren’t accompanying Warren Beatty to A-list Hollywood parties or chopping lines of cocaine on antique tables beneath windows of stained glass. Fans had to choose which was the lesser evil: songwriters who lived in mansions but still wrote about life on the streets; or those who admitted the distance between their privilege and their listeners’ mundane existence.
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