The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  Baez entertained no delusions about the CIA. In San Francisco, she once promoted State of Seige, a film, she said later, that “exposed, among other things, the corrupt element in the AID program which funded the teaching of torture techniques in Latin America. We solicited signatures against the use of torture.” She informed these signatories, “Torture was more prevalent than it had been since the middle ages, thus the danger was its common use as government policy,” and, “though at one remove, the hands of the US government were far from clean.”3

  The psychological cost of ritual abuse/mind control experimentation as a child, and decades of civil rights activism, has been years of intensive therapy to confront her “inner demons,” her fears, insomnias, panic attacks, phobias, and anxieties. Therapists kept Baez “glued together, to get me to the next gig, or to the next march.”4

  Joan's father, a Quaker by religious conversion, “was invited to become Head of Operations Research at Cornell.” This position and a security pass would almost certainly bring him into contact with the CIA’s Human Ecology Fund, the contract base for all classified academic mind control studies sequestered behind the privet fences of Ivy League campuses across the country. “Exactly what the job entailed was classified information,” Baez recalls, but her father was “offered a three-week cruise on an aircraft carrier as an introduction to the project and promised a huge salary. As it turned out, he would be overseeing Project Portrex, a vast amphibious exercise which among other things involved testing fighter jets, then a relatively new phenomenon. Millions of dollars would be poured into the project, about which he was to know little and say less.”5 After high school, her father moved on to MIT, another fount of classified military research.”6 At the age of ten, she lived in Baghdad, Iraq with her family. Upon their return to the US, the Baez family moved to California.

  She was not buried by CHAOS, but she lived under its intolerant eye and it could silence her: “An American,” the New York Times reported on February 21, 1967, “identifying himself as Harold Cooper, a CIA man, had ordered the Japanese interpreter, Ichiro Takasaki, to substitute an innocuous translation in Japanese for Miss Baez’ remarks in English on Vietnam and Nagasaki’s atom bomb survivors.” Cooper asked Takasaki to revise political statements made by the folk singer, and warned, “If you don’t cooperate, you will have trouble in your work in the future.” The interpreter cooperated and mistranslated her statements.

  “It was a most strange case,” Takasaki told reporters. “I knew that Miss Baez was a marked person who was opposed to the Vietnam War and who had been tacitly boycotted by the broadcasting companies in the United States. American friends also repeatedly advised me not to take on the job, but I took it on as a business proposition, since the Japanese fans were coming not to hear her political statements, but her music. I met Mr. Cooper once in the presence of a Times reporter in Japan, but even in that meeting he openly demanded that I mistranslate. I tried to reject the absurd demands, but he knew the name of my child and the contents of my work very well. I became afraid and agreed.”7

  A year later the European Exchange System announced that the sale of Joan Baez records had been banned from all Army PXs. And in 1969, Baez denounced the draft on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. She was censored by CBS—her comments cut from the video tape when the program aired. Shortly thereafter, CBS canceled the troublesome Smothers Brothers for good. This was the same year that David Harris, her then-husband, was sentenced to a three-year prison term for draft evasion.

  Baez also fell under the baleful eye of Mississippi’s Sovereign Commission, a secret agency operating behind a pro-segregationist public relations facade, as revealed in 132,000 pages of documents declassified in 1998. The Commission spied on and smeared civil rights activists by falsely linking them to communist organizations. Among the estimated 80,000 names contained in the files: Baez, Sidney Poitier, Washington attorney Vernon Jordan, James Brown, Harry Belafonte, and jazz musician Dave Brubeck. “It’s more disappointing than angering,” Jordon told CNN on March 17, 1998. “It’s disgraceful to have been spied on for doing your duty and trying to become first-class citizens.” But Horace Harned of Starkville, a former state legislator and two-term member of the commission, defended the CIA-backed group. “We were under the threat of being overrun by an alien force led by the communists. . . . This was a time when the Freedom Riders were marching and burning things from New Jersey to California. They threatened to march through Mississippi,” Harned declaimed. “Whether it was legal or not . . . never bothered me. We needed to have those spies. . . . A lot of [civil rights activists] were misguided, not realizing who was leading them and putting up the money.”8

  In April 1961, Baez met Bob Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City, then opening for bluesman John Lee Hooker. Dylan, writes rock historian Wayne Hampton, would lead “the surge of folk protest into the popular mainstream of American culture. . . . Never before had songs of such stark political intensity reached into the realm of popular culture.”9 Dylan, of course, nearly died in 1966 after a motorcycle accident. Three months earlier, Joan’s brother-in-law, Richard Farina, a folksinger and novelist of Irish-Cuban descent, did die in a motor-cycle accident on his way home from a promotional party for his book, Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me. Farina died on April 30, 1966, his wife Mimi’s birthday. “He’d been riding on the back of a motorcycle on Carmel Valley Road,” his friend Thomas Pynchon—who dedicated the labyrinthian Gravity’s Rainbow to Farina—wrote in a memoir, “where a prudent speed would have been thirty-five. Police estimated that they must have been doing ninety, and failed to make a curve.” Farina was thrown and killed. Before his death he had been producing an album of contemporary songs performed by Joan Baez. The recording was shelved after Farina died.10

  Ninety miles per hour on a slow turn? How to account for the breakneck motorcycle ride? Was Farina in a reckless mood or had someone fiddled with the throttle? The government had no use for Richard Farina. The notorious HUAC Committee attempted to demonize him after a joyously rebellious trip to Cuba and his earthy political performances on college campuses. Farina’s dissident lyrics—“It was the red, white and blue making war on the poor/Lying mother justice on a pile of manure”—undoubtedly cost him fans in the District of Columbia.

  Dylan nearly followed Farina through the mists of American Pie oblivion but took a hard turn instead. He dropped the broadside lyrics grating on the nerves of the establishment. In 1963, Dylan was informed by censors that he would not be allowed to sing a ditty lampooning the distant-right John Birch Society on the Ed Sullivan Show.”11 Three years later, rock critic Ralph J. Gleason, writing in Ramparts, could argue that the most serious threat to the American Order came “not from the armed might of a foreign power but from a frail, slender, elusive lad, whose weapons are words and music, a burning imagination and an apocalyptic vision of the world.”12

  But after his motorcycle accident and a slow recovery from concussion and a number of broken vertebrae, Dylan underwent a political change. He retreated to Nashville and recorded John Wesley Harding, an allegoric collection of songs about his life situation, and in 1969 cut Nashville Skyline, a politically-innocuous country-and-western album. “He no longer wished to play radical politics with his music,” observes Hampton. Dylan was suddenly apolitical. “Perhaps it was the accident, or perhaps he had already lost his nerve and used the accident as a cover.” His sudden departure from radical politics outraged some critics and many of his fans. There were calls for a boycott.13 Only five years after the accident did he appease his detractors with “George Jackson,” a fiercely-driven ballad about the Black Panther leader viciously murdered by a prison guard. But by and large, he announced, “I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know, be a spokesman.”14

  Dylan shied away from communal politics in general, preferring to align himself with the individual tormented by the evils of American culture. He was a symbol of the ’60s. Mark Edmundson, in Civilization magazine,
writes:

  He wasn’t ruined by drugs or the lure of easy transcendence, though he never sneers at the prospect of happiness. Dylan’s work combines art and politics, the drive for pleasure with the urge to know the harshest truth about the world and then to try doing something about it. And ultimately this is the 1960s idea that has been lost from view. The accounts we have that are unsympathetic to the 1960s tell the story of people who have been addicted to power or pleasure and were ruined by those addictions. But there was, and is, a middle ground, where Dylan’s work unfolds. The Dylan who moved audiences in the 1960s and continues to do so is not a “protest singer,” nor is he just another episode in the disposable culture of American pop. He is, in the major phase of his work, a visionary skeptic. . . . Dylan, like the post-1865 Whitman, loves the promise of America and yet is disgusted by much of its reality.15

  Dylan and Baez became intimate in 1963, a time, critic Tom Smucker wrote in the October 31, 1969 issue of Fusion, when, “due to factors I do not understand, having something to do with post WWII America, the breakdown of the socializing forces of schooling, affluence, the Cold War, and the beginnings of the Black revolt as a vital semi-alternative, some white kids began: 1. listening to black music on the radio, or eventually their own derivative of that: Rock ‘n’ Roll; 2. participating in what was then called the Civil Rights movement.” They met at the Monterey Folk Festival and joined forces. Farina sketched one of their performances a year later: “They claimed to be there not as virtuosos in the field of concretized folk music but as purveyors of an enjoined social consciousness and responsibility. They felt the intolerability of bigoted opposition to Civil Rights. . . . When they left the stage to a whirlwind of enthusiastic cheers, it seemed that the previously unspoken word of protest, like the torch of President Kennedy’s inaugural address, had most certainly been passed.”16

  The stories that Dylan spun over his dangling harmonica were not traditional folk music, Farina—his first wife launched Dylan’s career—observed. The songs “had nothing to do with unrequited Appalachian love affairs or idealized whorehouses in New Orleans. They told about the cane murder of Negro servant Hattie Carroll, the death of boxer Davey Moore, the unbroken chains of injustice waiting for the hammers of a crusading era. They went right to the heart of his decade’s most recurring preoccupation: that in a time of irreversible technological progress, moral civilization has pathetically faltered; that no matter how much international attention is focused on macro-cosmic affairs, the plight of the individual must be considered.”17

  Phil Ochs, the “Outlaw” and his Brain

  U.S. AGENTS WERE ABLE TO DESTROY ANY PERSON’S REPUTATION BY INDUCING HYSTERIA OR EXCESSIVE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES. TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT INSANITY, SUGGEST OR ENCOURAGE SUICIDE, ERASE MEMORY, INVENT DOUBLE OR TRIPLE PERSONALITIES INSIDE ONE MIND. . . . MAE BRUSSELL, “OPERATION CHAOS”

  Yippie cherub Phil Ochs, for instance. Ochs was a close chum of Dylan’s, and the nearest competitor for the folk-rock mantle. Life in another’s shadow stung him. Yet he considered Dylan the “greatest poet ever” and often talked about his songs.

  Dylan, Ochs and Farina set out on the folk minstrel’s path in the Village of the early ’60s at The Bitter End, the Gaslight, and other Greenwich Village clubs with Tom Paxton, Eric Anderson, Buffy Saint-Marie, John Sebastian, Eric Anderson, Dave Van Ronk, and a clutch of other then unknowns dubbed by Seeger “Woody’s Children.” There was an invigorating charge in the air, a sense of social rage finding and redefining itself after the cultural stagnation of the Eisenhower decade. Dylan crooned “Masters of War,” Phil Ochs belted out an anguished “Too Many Martyrs.” Together, they dragged folk music away from the migrant camps and union halls into direct confrontation with the boardroom of Eisenhower’s looming “military-industrial complex.”

  Dylan, Baez, and Ochs strummed a path to the bill of the 1963 Newport Festival. Folksinging made an overnight comeback and immediately altered course to meet the path of extreme resistance. Ochs denounced American geopolitics in “Cops of the World.”

  And when we’ve butchered your sons, boys,

  Have a stick of our gum, boys!

  We own half the world, “Oh, say can you see.”

  And the name for our profits is democracy. . .

  He was the ultimate dissident . . .

  The comic and the beauty queen are dancing on the stage.

  The raw recruits are lining up like coffins in a cage.

  A prophet on the barricades . . .

  Oh, we’re fighting in a war we lost before the war began . . .

  Ochs was appalled by the corruption flourishing in the District of Columbia under Richard Nixon. One evening toward the end of his life, at a concert on West Third Street, Ochs knocked back a few tumblers of rum and drew down on CIA Director William Colby, formerly director of the murderous Phoenix program in Vietnam. “I put out a contract on Colby,” Ochs spat, “for a hundred thousand dollars. I told Colby he’s got a half year to get out or he’s dead. They can kill me but he’s dead. He’s a dead man now. William Colby is dead.”

  Before the concert was over, sobriety was a distant memory, but he ranted on about his distrust of Patty Hearst (“Tanya . . . it’s like a CIA code word”), the execution of Che Guevara, the media (“That awful cunt paper Ms., run by that CIA agent—what’s her name?— Steinem, CIA Steinem . . .”).18

  Ochs rose to prominence as a performer with Baez and Dylan after the killing of John Kennedy. He was a founder of the Yippie Party, sang for the embattled ranks of protesters at the nightmarish 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, appeared as a witness, guitar in tow, at the Chicago Seven Trial. His lyrics were considered so inflammatory that he was banned from the airwaves.

  Ochs despised Nixon and the war. Music conveyed his obsessions, and so “Here’s to the State of Richard Nixon”:

  Nixon’s gone and taught you lies

  A face that screams out for replies . . .

  If ever there was a crook, he’s it

  Perversion is the soul of wit

  Pack your shovel, he’s full of shit,

  The tides are risin.’

  The bursts of rage did not pass unnoticed by J. Edgar Hoover, who whipped off anxious memoranda to the executive branch implying that Ochs was gunning for Nixon. A recently declassified Justice Department memo, originating with the FBI office in Little Rock, Arkansas on October 22, 1969, reveals that “paranoia” was a two-way street:

  PHONOGRAPH RECORD ENTITLED “REHEARSALS FOR RETIREMENT” BY PHIL OCHS, THREAT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT [Name redacted] made available a phonograph record entitled, “Rehearsals for Retirement” by PHIL OCHS, distributed by A&M Records, 1416 North La Brea, Hollywood, California. The record was purchased by her 14-year-old son, Stanley Thomas, at Osco Drugs, Southwest Shopping Center, Little Rock, Arkansas.

  This record was monitored on October 20, 1969, and on side one the first song, entitled “Pretty Smart On My Part,” states in song what appears to be: “I can see them coming. They are training in the mountains. They talk Chinese and spread disease [the CIA]. They will hurt me, bring me down . . . Sometime later, when I feel a little better, we will assassinate the President and take over the government. We will fry them.”

  A disclaimer attached to the memo notes, “this document contains neither recommendations nor conclusions of the FBI, and in keeping with that we will refrain from drawing conclusions.” But the Bureau did not refrain from amassing a huge file on Ochs, and the feeling that he was never alone unnerved him. In “My Life,” he addressed the federal agents shadowing him:

  Take everything I own,

  Take your tap from my phone

  And leave my life alone,

  My life alone.

  But he wasn’t left alone. The name Phil Ochs was listed on Hoover’s Security Index, a catalogue of “subversives” considered a threat to national defense. He was tarred as a “Communist.”19 The fear, the “paranoia” that had gripped Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix,
and other ill-fated musicians before him took hold. His friend John Berendt recalls that Ochs was “convinced he would be assassinated, probably onstage. Once, while he was waiting in the wings in Baltimore, the performer ahead of him dropped his guitar on the floor with a bang. Ochs ducked, positive the shooting had begun.”

  After the Chicago police riot, his life underwent an erratic, tormented decline. He was cursed by lengthy spells of depression. The tombstone on the cover of Rehearsals for Retirement (1969) was one of the many intimations of his pending death scattered around.20 The album’s title track reflected the despair that sank in after Chicago, a nagging sense of doom:

  This then is the death of the American imprisoned by paranoia,

  And all his diseases of his innocent inventions.

  He plunges to the drugs of the devil to find his gods.

  So the poet swordsmen and their lost generation

  Must divorce themselves from their very motherland.

  While I stumble through this paradise, considering several suicides.

  My responsibilities are done, let them come, let them come,

  And I realize these last days these trials and tragedies

  Were after all only our rehearsals for retirement.

  He was driven to drink by the radio blackballing of his music, hounded by the authorities and a series of unexplained mishaps. His nerves gave out. He lived in a perpetual state of “paranoia.” In Hong Kong, tagging along on a lecture tour with underground cartoonist Ron Cobb in 1971, Ochs returned to his hotel room to find that it had been forcibly entered and all of his cash stolen. Ochs was convinced the CIA had robbed him to prevent his entry to Vietnam, the ultimate destination of Cobb’s tour, and had no choice but to catch the next flight back to the States on an American Express card.21