1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music

by Andrew Grant Jackson

  The group was laying down new vocals when Murry Wilson arrived, drunk, and started trying to direct the proceedings as he had done in the early days as their manager, before they fired him. The father had terrorized the boys when they were young. Brian said in 1999 that “[Murry] hit me with a two by four, right to the side of my head. He totally put my right ear out. He made me so deaf.”13 Murry would also take his glass eye out and make his kids look in the socket.

  But Brian wasn’t intimidated anymore, as revealed in the session tape that, years later, was circulated as a bootleg.

  “Brian, you’re coming in shrill,” Murry told him. “Al, loosen up a little more, say sexy ‘Rhonda’ more … Dennis, don’t flat anymore … you’re so tight fella, I can’t believe it … loosen up, sweetie.”

  “Oh shit! You’re driving me nuts, shut up!” Brian finally screamed. “That’s it; I’ve got one ear left, and your big loud voice is killing it.”

  “You’re an ingrate when you do this … When you guys get so big that you can’t sing from your hearts, you’re going downhill.”

  “We would like to record under an atmosphere of calmness, and you’re not … presenting that.”

  “The kid got a big success and he thinks he owns the business … Brian, I’m a genius, too.”14

  The contretemps would inspire the next album’s “I’m Bugged at My Ol’ Man,” in which Brian bemoans how his dad has sold his surfboard, cut off his hair in his sleep, locked him in his room, boarded up his windows, taken his phone, and given him breadcrumbs to eat. Still, despite Murry’s interruption of the recording session, the revamped “Help Me, Rhonda” hit No. 1 after its release on April 5.

  4

  Resolution: A Love Supreme, Malcolm X, and the March from Selma to Montgomery

  John Coltrane releases his magnum opus in February. Malcolm X plants the seeds of Black Power before his murder on February 21. Martin Luther King Jr. leads protestors on the Voting Rights Trail, March 21–25.

  When saxophonist John Coltrane became strung out on heroin again in 1957, Miles Davis fired him from the first Great Quintet, the American jazz band Davis had formed two years earlier. Coltrane played with pianist Thelonious Monk for a year, and then had a spiritual epiphany and got clean. He did not want to go down in flames like bebop sax pioneer Charlie Parker, dead at thirty-four in 1955 from advanced cirrhosis of the liver and a heart attack. It was with Monk that Coltrane invented his “sheets of sound” playing style (so named by Down Beat critic Ira Gitler in 1958). Coltrane would play arpeggios and patterns running from the lowest note to the highest ultrafast, play several chords at the same time, and then play each note in each chord. The style was so new that even the French booed Coltrane when he rejoined Davis on tour there in 1959.

  Coltrane practiced all day, playing scales endlessly in his room, and then played live for hours, attaining a state of ecstasy. With his own quartet he played up to forty-five weeks a year, six nights a week, three to four sets a night, crossing the country in a Chrysler station wagon.1 He began studying diverse forms of music from across the globe—classical composers such as Stravinsky and Debussy, Indian ragas, African rhythms—and elements from these found their way into his own compositions.

  After the birth of his son, Trane, as he was known, took a break from touring and meditated in his room for five days. There he wrote A Love Supreme, a suite broken into four movements that symbolized the path of achieving spiritual clarity: “Acknowledgement” (acknowledging the desire for enlightenment), “Resolution” (resolving to attain it), “Pursuance” (striving for it), and “Psalm” (attaining it).

  On December 9, with his band (McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on double bass, and Elvin Jones on drums), he recorded the album in one session, from 8:00 p.m. till midnight, in engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio.2 The studio looked a bit like a church, with its thirty-nine-foot ceiling comprised of two huge wooden arches and exposed brick walls. The album’s majesty owes much to Van Gelder’s spatial balance of sound: the musicians played close to one another, the drummer not separated by a baffle, the lights set low for mood.

  The band didn’t know what Coltrane planned for them to do, but they all had near-telepathic communication after years of playing together live. When the rare mistake was made, Coltrane would gently say, “Excuse me,” and they’d start again.3

  “Acknowledgement” opens with the benevolent crash of a gong and the gentle tap of cymbals, and then the bass kicks in with a four-note motif echoing the words “a love supreme.” Five minutes into the track, Coltrane picks up the motif and plays it thirty-seven times with his sax in all twelve keys, and then chants it vocally like a mantra, the first time his voice is heard on record.

  For the final piece, “Psalm,” Jones’s tympani and cymbals evoke the grandeur of ocean waves crashing against mountains as Trane’s sax blows out across the cosmos. Coltrane “plays” the words of a sixty-nine-line poem he wrote (and includes in the liner notes), an exhortation to seek God every day and ask God to help “resolve our fears and weaknesses.”4 (Fan-made videos on YouTube play the music while highlighting the lines of the poem; Coltrane follows the words almost exactly.) He gives thanks and praises the wonders of the universe. “One thought can produce millions of vibrations,” he writes/sings. “Thought waves, heat waves … and they all go back to God … and He cleanses all.” The movement climaxes with “Elation. Elegance. Exaltation. All from God. Thank you God. Amen.”

  As to what sort of God Coltrane believed in, on his liner notes for his album Meditations, he writes, “I believe in all religions.” Both his grandfathers were African Methodist Episcopal Zion ministers, and he studied the Bible. His first wife, Juanita, converted to Islam, and he studied the Koran. He also studied the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead, Zen, the Kabbalah, Greek philosophy, and astrology.

  Impulse! Records released the thirty-three-minute album in February and it became Coltrane’s most popular work. Usually his albums sold around thirty thousand copies, but this one would go on to sell half a million. Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead remembered that he would hear the album wafting out of windows constantly as he walked around Haight-Ashbury.5 Coltrane played A Love Supreme live only once, however, at the Festival Mondial du Jazz Antibes in France on July 26. His usual venue was nightclubs, where the audience was drunk and distracted—not the proper atmosphere for his hymn of devotion.6

  * * *

  Malcolm Little (born 1925) was the son of Earl Little, a leader in the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Whites killed three of Earl’s brothers, and then an offshoot of the Klan called the Black Legion burned down the Littles’ house. Finally, Earl was killed in a streetcar accident when Malcolm was six; his mother believed the Black Legion was responsible. She had a nervous breakdown six years later and was institutionalized, and Malcolm’s siblings were split up and sent to different foster homes.

  Malcolm became a pimp, drug dealer, gambler, thief, and sometimes a male hustler. It was his incarnation as a criminal that later gave him the street cred Martin Luther King Jr. lacked, as many blacks couldn’t relate to MLK’s upbringing as the college-educated son of a Baptist pastor. In 1946, Little was sentenced to ten years for burglary and joined the Nation of Islam in prison. Founded in 1930, the Nation forbade drugs and alcohol, rehabilitated convicts and addicts, and strove to achieve economic independence by supporting its own businesses and creating its own schools.

  In 1950, Malcolm Little took the name Malcolm X and, after his parole in 1952, became the Nation of Islam’s most powerful speaker. At six foot three, he had physical and intellectual swagger and captivated crowds with his fiery rhetoric. He pushed for the words black or African to replace Negro, denouncing Negro as a label from slave owners. He encouraged blacks to throw off the feelings of inferiority internalized since slavery and be proud of their African heritage.

  Yet, over time, tensions began to rise between the Nation’s star and its leader
Elijah Muhammad. Some speculate that Muhammad was envious that Malcolm received the bulk of the media attention. Malcolm was disillusioned that Muhammad had impregnated many of his teenage secretaries. After the FBI’s covert COINTELPRO program was revealed in the 1970s, many came to believe that the Nation’s national secretary, John Ali, was an undercover agent who had deliberately stoked discord between Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.

  On March 8, 1964, Malcolm announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam to start his own organization. His successor as Nation of Islam spokesman, Louis X (today Louis Farrakhan), branded Malcolm a traitor and said he was worthy of death.

  * * *

  The Nation of Islam discouraged black people from voting and getting involved with the white world’s politics. But Malcolm now wanted to work together with civil rights organizations such as Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to mobilize the black vote. A month after he left the Nation, he delivered his famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech in which he defined Black Nationalism as the black man controlling the politicians of his community. To do so, he advised putting one’s religion “in the closet,” because whether a black person was Christian, Muslim, or atheist, he had the same problem. The white man owned the stores in the neighborhood but took the money out of town at the end of the day. Malcolm insisted that the key to liberation was blacks owning and operating the businesses in their own neighborhoods, generating employment, and keeping the money in the community.

  Malcolm and King met only once, briefly, eighteen days after Malcolm left the Nation of Islam, when both traveled to Washington, DC, for the debate over the congressional Civil Rights Act. Outside the Senate Caucus Room, they smiled and shook hands.

  “Well, Malcolm, good to see you.”

  “Good to see you.”

  President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in July, but southern blacks were still subject to red tape designed to dissuade them from casting ballots, such as poll taxes and “literacy tests,” not to mention questions such as “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” Beyond the harassment at the registrar, blacks could also lose their jobs or bank credit for daring to vote. And the looming threat of the Klan was ever present. The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been working to register voters in Selma, Alabama, for two years, but by the beginning of 1965 it had managed to register only three hundred out of fifteen thousand local blacks. So other Selma residents reached out to King’s SCLC for help.

  Many different cities were competing for the SCLC’s attention, but Selma had a loose-cannon sheriff named Jim Clark, who the SCLC knew would generate outrageous press. Clark was the archetypal redneck cop with no anger management skills. He would stand in front of the courthouse to block blacks from registering, wearing a lapel pin that read “Never” (in reference to integration). Armed with pistol, club, and cattle prod, he menaced black student protestors, using the electric prod on them when marching them to holding areas. Author James Baldwin stated that Clark even put the prod against a woman’s breast.

  Clark formed an anti–civil rights force comprised of highway patrolmen and the KKK to drive the activists out of his jurisdiction, and was present for the momentous protest march of February 18 that set in motion the forces that would finally overcome voter repression. When state troopers started to club the mother and grandfather of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old church deacon, Jackson rose to their defense and was shot in the stomach by state trooper Corporal James Bonard Fowler.

  Malcolm had long spoken out in favor of self-defense, a stance that seemed incendiary to a large majority of whites at the time (though most whites believed in self-defense for themselves). “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us, but we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us … Any time you live in a society supposedly based upon law and it doesn’t enforce its own law because the color of a man’s skin happens to be wrong, then I say those people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice where the government can’t give them justice.”7

  Malcolm saw himself as the essential bad cop to King’s good cop, and warned, “I think that the people in this part of the world would do well to listen to Dr. Martin Luther King and give him what he’s asking for, and give it to him fast, before some other factions come along and try to do it another way. What he’s asking for is rights and that’s the ballot. And if he can’t get it the way [King’s] trying to get it, then it’s going to be gotten one way or the other.”8

  * * *

  The Nation of Islam maintained it owned Malcolm’s house in Queens and sued him for it. It lost the case, but it went back to trial. On February 14, the night before the next scheduled court date, the house burned down. Malcolm’s wife and kids got out safely, but the event deeply shook him.

  On February 21, four hundred people gathered at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom to hear Malcolm speak. Suddenly, men in the crowd shouted, threw a smoke bomb, and shot Malcolm twenty-one times with a shotgun and two handguns.

  The killers ran, though the crowd caught one, Nation of Islam’s Talmadge Hayer, and beat him until the police showed up. He said that four others were involved, but he wouldn’t name them; two other men were jailed.

  Elijah Muhammad said, “Malcolm X got just what he preached.”9

  King sent a condolence telegram to Malcolm’s wife, Betty, and told the press, “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem. He was an eloquent spokesman for his point of view, and no one can honestly doubt that Malcolm had a great concern for the problems that we face as a race.”

  Crowds of up to thirty thousand attended the public viewing in Harlem on February 23–26. Actor Ossie Davis, known to later generations by his many appearances in Spike Lee films, delivered the eulogy. Davis’ wife Ruby Dee (who would also later be a Lee alum) and Sidney Poitier’s wife Juanita raised money for Malcolm’s family. He had died at age thirty-nine with no savings for his survivors; he hadn’t wanted to profit from his organization.

  The New York Times obituary on February 22 labeled him “an extraordinary and twisted man, turning many true gifts to evil purpose.” On March 5, Time wrote that Malcolm was “an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred…” But theirs would hardly be the last word. Malcolm had been in the process of authoring his Autobiography with Alex Haley, who would later write Roots. Published in November, it went on to sell millions of copies over the ensuing decades.

  * * *

  In Alabama, on February 26, Jimmie Lee Jackson died in the hospital from his gunshot wounds. King railed at Jackson’s funeral on March 3, “He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam and cannot protect the rights of its own citizens seeking the right to vote.”

  In response to Jackson’s shooting, the SCLC planned a fifty-four-mile march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery. It was to be in the style of Gandhi’s marches, which lasted for days and provided lots of time for media coverage. Governor George Wallace quickly forbade the march, but 525 protestors embarked on March 7 anyway.

  Sheriff Clark ordered all white males over twenty-one in his county to report to the courthouse for deputation. Then Clark’s men watched as Governor Wallace ordered the state troopers to stop the march. When the demonstrators proceeded to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, 200 troopers, many on horseback, attacked them with tear gas, billy clubs, bullwhips, and rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire. When the marchers fled, the mounted troopers chased them and continued beating them while white crowds on the sidelines cheered.

  A local church was turned into a makeshift medical facility to help over fifty marchers suffering serious injuries, and at least sixteen were admitted to Selma’s Good Samaritan Hospital. Many enraged blacks wanted to return wi
th guns to exact vengeance and had to be talked down by the nonviolent organizers, who pointed out the troopers had more guns, and more powerful guns at that.10

  Contrary to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 rap “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” with the attack on the marchers, the nonviolent civil rights revolution would begin its televised climax. The ABC Sunday Night Movie that evening was Judgment at Nuremberg, in which Americans put white supremacist Nazis on trial in the weeks after World War II. ABC News interrupted the movie to show forty-eight million viewers footage of women, children, and clergy being assaulted in what was quickly named “Bloody Sunday.”

  The nationwide revulsion was immediate. King arrived in Selma and put out a call for all religious leaders and sympathetic citizens to come to Alabama for a new march, to take place on March 9. Hundreds came by bus, car, and plane.

  The SCLC requested a court order to prevent the police from obstructing the new demonstration. Instead, Federal District Court judge Frank Minis Johnson, though one of the only southern judges not hostile to the movement, issued a restraining order to delay the March 9 march until he could hold a hearing on the issue in a few days. Nevertheless, twenty-five hundred marchers set out again for the state capital. State troopers ordered them, again at the bridge, to turn back. King, at the front of the marchers, requested that they be allowed to pray, and he knelt in the street.

  Having not yet crossed the bridge, the marchers had not yet violated the restraining order. The SCLC believed that the sympathetic Judge Johnson would eventually lift the restraining order. So they decided to turn around and head back to Selma, avoiding bloodshed—though frustrating many of the marchers.

  That day, President Johnson called King. He asked him to wait until the court lifted the restraining order and vowed to get a Voting Rights Bill before Congress in a few days. As the marchers returned to Selma, King asked all the supporters who had come in from other states to stay a little longer.