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You Only Are What You Believe: 1967 Anti-War Protest and the Year’s Music

On October 21 in 1967, one of the most significant signs of public disgruntlement with the Vietnam conflict began. Nearly 100,000 people showed up in D.C. to protest the U.S. role in the war.

The March on the Pentagon to Confront the War Makers started near the Lincoln Memorial, and approximately 50,000 of the protesters then went to the Pentagon, where many remained until October 23 and where some participated in acts of civil disobedience. Author Norman Mailer captured many of the events of the protest in his novel, Armies of the Night.

That year there were other protests around the country, as polls showed that the support for the war had dropped below 50%. All of those factors led President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to respond with a public relations campaign in support of the war.

But the protest, and complaints after the Tet offensive in early 1968, illustrated that many Americans would continue to raise their voices to end the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Music Reflects the Protests Against the War

At the time, one might have noticed from the music that something was in the air. The year 1967 began with the Rolling Stones appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show in January. At the show’s request, the band famously changed the title lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to the less sexy “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.” But by September, the Doors appeared on the same show after also agreeing to alter the lyrics to their song, “Light My Fire.” But Jim Morrison captured the growing youth rebellion by going ahead and singing the offending line “Girl we couldn’t get much higher.”

In other 1967 music news, Buffalo Springfrield released “For What It’s Worth” in January. In February, Aretha Franklin recorded “Respect.” In March, the Who performed for the first time in the U.S. In June, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Also in June, the Monterey Pop Festival brought young people together to hear such artists as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Otis Redding. Redding soon would write and record “(Sitting on) the Dock of the Bay.”

John Lennon in How I Won the War

Then, on October 18, three days before the Washington protest, the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine came off the presses with a cover photo of John Lennon from the film How I Won the War. The film was a comedy where Lennon first appeared with his famous round glasses.

Phil Ochs Declares the War is Over

Of course, there was music at the protest in D.C. too. One of the performers at the protest was Phil Ochs. He performed his recent song that imagined a future without the war, “The War is Over.”

In the song at the protest, Ochs proclaimed “This country is too young to die,” so “I declare the war is over.” He concludes, “You only are what you believe.”

Below is a video of a different live performance of “The War is Over.”

The U.S. eventually withdrew its troops from Viet Nam, but it would be nearly six more years before the war was actually over for the U.S. soldiers and their loved ones at home.

Photo via public domain.

What is your favorite music or event from 1967? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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The Ambiguous Anti-War Underpinnings of “Galveston”

“All You Need Is Love” Worldwide Broadcast

New Beatles ‘A Day in the Life’ Video

My Lai and “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley”

Buck Owens: Don’t Judge a Man’s Music By His Overalls

Time Is On My Side

(Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)

The Strange Coincidence With the Ending of “Wrath of Khan”

Many commentators have noticed the parallels between Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Several parallels are intentional, but is one of the biggest similarities just a coincidence? Note that this post has spoilers for both Moby Dick and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The Wrath of Khan (“TWOK“) mirrors the overrding theme of vengeance from Moby Dick. Just as Ahab is driven by his desire for vengeance against the white whale, TWOK focuses on Khan’s obsessive quest for vengeance against Captain Kirk (William Shatner). The movie writers’ intent is reinforced with Herman Melville’s book appearing in one scene and Khan quoting or paraphrasing from Moby Dick at points (“to the last I grapple with thee; from Hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee”). Finally, the ending of TWOK is almost identical to the ending of Moby Dick. But what is interesting is that, despite all of the intentional similarities, it appears that this major similarity about the two endings is entirely coincidental.

In the end of TWOK, after Spock dies, his body is sent off in a photon torpedo as his coffin. In one of the final scenes, we see that this “coffin” has landed on the planet where Genesis is bringing the planet back to life.

The test version of the film, though, omitted the final coffin-on-the-rejuvinating-planet scene. Various sources, including Wikipedia, explain that Leonard Nimoy had initially agreed to reprise his role as Mr. Spock in TWOK only because his character would finally be killed. But, as the filming was coming to a close, Nimoy had enjoyed the making of the movie so much, he wanted to allow for Spock’s return if they so chose. So, the scene of Spock mind melding with Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) was added, but the initial cut of the movie still ended in a way that appeared to make Spock’s death final. Only after test audiences reacted poorly to seeing the icon’s death did producer Harve Bennett add the final scene showing Spock’s coffin on the rejuvenating planet with Nimoy’s voiceover of the traditional Star Trek series opening monologue.

The director, Nicholas Myer objected to the changes but allowed them. According to his director’s commentary on the video, he believed it was cheating to change the finality of the death scene (and having no interest in a resurrection story, he declined an offer to direct Star Trek III: The Search for Spock). In the commentary, he explains that as the movie was being finalized, producers realized that they might want to continue the series. And so the movie has the ending we all know:

Other sources confirm the story about the changes to the ending of TWOK. The book Star Trek and Sacred Ground, by Jennifer E. Porter and Darcee L. McLaren, reports that the first versions of the film did not include the scenes with Spock’s coffin landing on the Genesis planet. (p. 155.) A 2010 Los Angeles Times article noted Nimoy’s response to seeing the coffin scene: ”I was caught by surprise by the ending…. I was sitting there watching it and the camera goes across some foliage, some mist — a little magical kind of look — and guess what, there’s the black tube … whoa, I think I’m going to get a call from Paramount.”

So why is it interesting that the final scene was an afterthought and not planned from the start? Because so much of the rest of the movie echoes Moby Dick, and in the classic novel, a coffin plays an important role. Aboard the novel’s ship the Pequod, the character Queequeg at one point thought he was dying and had a coffin built for him. At the end of the novel, the obsessed Ahab is killed by his obsession just as the obsessed Khan is effectively killed by his obsession Kirk. Then, the book’s narrator Ishmael survives because after the Pequod is destroyed, he uses the coffin as a life buoy, just as Spock is left with a coffin after the Enterprise is almost destroyed. As Ishmael is adrift after the ship’s destruction, he describes his discovery of a “black bubble” in the ocean:

“[T]he black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin like-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.”

[Update February 2015: The final coffin scene from the Gregory Peck movie does not seem to be on YouTube any longer, but below is a trailer for the movie.]

When I first saw The Wrath of Khan in the movie theater, because of the Moby Dick references, I thought the director intended to invoke Moby Dick again at the end. Just as the classic novel ended with Ishmael surviving in a scene with a coffin, I thought the producers’ message with the final coffin scene was designed to evoke Ishmael’s survival, revealing that Spock would live again. While they did intend to imply Spock might live again, it seems it was a coincidence that the way they did it once again invoked Moby Dick.

Were the similar endings a coincidence? What do you think? Leave a comment.

Bonus Moby Dick References: There are a couple of other parallels between Moby Dick and Star Trek outside The Wrath of Khan. Captain Picard, i.e., Patrick Stewart, starred in a TV version of Moby Dick and like Khan he quoted the book in a Star Trek movie, Star Trek: First Contact (1996).

7 Things About “Star Trek: Into Darkness” (Short Review)

“This man’s dead, Captain”

Two Spocks and an Audi

“Star Trek Beyond” Gets Back to Basics

“Star Trek Beyond” Tribute to Leonard Nimoy

“First” Interracial Kiss on TV

(Some Related Chimesfreedom Posts)

Hey Jack Kerouac, Happy Birthday

On March 12, 1922, novelist and poet Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. After showing early promise as a scholar and football player, Kerouac attended Columbia University but then dropped out. He was later kicked out of the Navy on psychiatric grounds.

On the Road

By the late 1940s, Kerouac was finding some promise with his writing. But it would be the 1957 publication of his book based on his travels, On the Road, that would make him famous as an important figure of the Beat Generation.

Surprisingly, a year earlier in 1956, Kerouac threatened to never publish the book. But even after gaining fame from On the Road, Kerouac had trouble finding peace and happiness. He died from an abdominal hemorrhage in 1969 at the age of 47.

In this clip from The Steve Allen Plymouth Show, Allen interviews Kerouac in 1959. And Kerouac reads from his book while Allen and the band plays jazzy music in the background. Check it out.

On the Road was made into a 2012 film directed by Walter Salles and starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart in 2012. But one seems more likely to run into Kerouac in songs rather than in films.

“Hey Jack Kerouac”

There are several Kerouac-inspired songs, as listed by Raditaz. Probably the most famous creative work that is about Kerouac is the 10,000 Maniacs song, “Hey Jack Kerouac.” The song first appeared on the band’s 1987 album In My Tribe.

When the group appeared on MTV Unplugged on April 21, 1993, one of the songs they performed was “Hey Jack Kerouac.” Merchant introduced the song for the 10,000 Maniacs by reading about Kerouac. Her reading apparently was from the introduction in her copy of On the Road.

The song portrays Kerouac as a misunderstood artistic soul (“little boy lost in our little world that hated/ and that dared to drag him down”). And the song also mentions other of the Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg (“Allen baby, why so jaded?”) and William S. Burroughs (“Billy, what a saint they’ve made you”). Still, others have pointed out that the song complains about the effects of the over popularization of the Beats.

Lead singer Natalie Merchant wrote the song with the band’s guitarist Rob Buck who passed away in December 2000. You may easily tell they try to capture Kerouac’s writing style in the chorus:

You chose your words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood.
Cool junk booting madmen, street minded girls
In Harlem howling at night.
What a tear-stained shock of the world,
You’ve gone away without saying goodbye.

I do not know what Jack Kerouac would have thought of the song or if he would have agreed with the sentiments. But it would have been cool if he would have stuck around to tell us with his clever use of language. Happy birthday Jack.

What is your favorite work inspired by Jack Kerouac? Leave your two cents in the comments.

The Cowboy Philosopher Will Rogers

Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Short Review)

Richard III and Guy Clark: Out in the Parking Lot

The Search for Missing WWII Pilot Billie Harris

(Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)

Abraham and Thomas Lincoln: Sons and Fathers in History and Song

As in the excellent movie Lincoln (2012), we generally picture Abraham Lincoln full-grown as the great president. So it is easy to forget that he grew up as a child living in the wilderness dealing with normal family issues. One of the struggles of the young Abraham’s life was that he and his father Thomas Lincoln were very different.

Michael Burlingame’s detailed two-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008), noted that many contemporaries of the Lincolns reported that the father and son did not get along. The friction may have been partly created because Thomas lacked ambition and disdained the fact that his son sought to educate himself.

The young Abraham was not afraid to speak up around strangers to ask precocious questions, and his father would often whip the young boy for his assertiveness. One time, the young Abe received a beating for releasing a bear cub from one of his father’s traps.

As the young Abe grew into a man, he continued to dislike his father. When Lincoln became a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, he never invited his father to visit him.

And, when Thomas was dying in 1851 and asked his son to visit him, the son refused, telling his step-brother to tell Thomas, “if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would be more painful than pleasant.” Lincoln did not attend Thomas’s funeral or put a tombstone on the grave. Two years later in 1853, though, Lincoln named his fourth son after his father. The beloved child would soon be nicknamed “Tad.” (Burlingame, pp. 10-11.)

Fathers and Sons in Song

It is speculation to wonder how Lincoln’s relationship with his father affected his later life. But the father-son struggle helps us humanize a man we know as an icon etched in stone. His father-son dynamic is not unusual, as sons strive to find their places in the world. And this struggle occasionally appears in films like Field of Dreams (1989), as well as in popular songs such as Harry Chapin‘s “Cats in the Cradle.”

One of the best father-son songs is by Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam. The beautiful “Father and Son,” which appeared on Tea for the Tillerman (1970). Yusuf Islam originally wrote the song for a play that was never completed.

The song is a conversation between father and son where the son tries to explain to his father why he is leaving. When Yusuf Islam recorded the song, he had only experienced being a son. But by the time he did the following performance, which appears to be from 2015, he was a grandfather, giving the song new meaning.

Bruce Springsteen has spoke openly about his own difficulties with his father Douglas “Dutch” Springsteen. He has captured that complicated relationship in songs such as “Adam Raised a Cain,” from Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), “My Father’s House” from Nebraska (1982), and “Independence Day,” from The River (1980). The latter song, like “Father and Son,” is about a son leaving his father.

Springsteen’s “Independence Day” is slightly more bitter than “Father and Son.” The bitterness may come from the fact that Springsteen had a rockier relation with his father than Yusuf Islam did. But it is also a heavyhearted father-son conversation.

In the above video from 1980, Springsteen begins by telling the audience how the music he heard on the radio inspired him to seek a different life, just as Lincoln’s books inspired him. Similarly, as in Lincoln’s message to his dying father, the singer in “Independence Day” tells his father “Papa go to bed now, it’s late. / There’s nothing we can say can change anything now.”

As Springsteen learned as he got older, the sins of the father also makes the man that the son becomes. So, for this celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, remember the man’s first years with his father. One may look back on Thomas Lincoln for his faults in the way he treated our beloved Abraham Lincoln. But the father, struggling to carve out a place for his family in the wilderness, did something right because his son turned out pretty well.

Ultimately, the son Abraham, perhaps remembering Thomas’s lack of ambition or remembering his own beatings, carried his concerns for the suffering of others with him when he left on his own Independence Day and when he went to the White House. And although Abraham Lincoln had a long way to travel for his own education, maybe The Great Emancipator contained a little of the boy who saw a suffering bear cub and freed it, knowing he would face his father’s wrath but defying his father anyway.

{Photos via: me, taken around the 1990s. The statue is located at New Salem, Illinois. The farm is the place of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in Hodgenville, Kentucky.}

What is your favorite song about fathers and sons? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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The Children of “The Dust Bowl” (Short Review)

Several years ago, I read Timothy Egan‘s The Worst Hard Time, a National Book Award winner about the dust storms and drought that struck the High Plains in the 1930s during the Great Depression. The book is a fascinating immersion into another time describing the causes, government responses, and the people in an otherworldly land. So I was excited to see that filmmaker Ken Burns created a new two-part documentary about The Dust Bowl for PBS, and that Egan appears several times throughout the film.

The Dust Bowl is unable to go into the depths that Egan’s book did about the causes and the responses to the environmental disaster, but the documentary narrated by Peter Coyote gives viewers a decent understanding of a somewhat forgotten period of American history that is still relevant today. As today’s politicians debate the effects that human beings have on our environment (even if scientists agree), The Dust Bowl provides a clear example of how human activity destroyed an environment. The film explores how the farming practices ruined the landscape, how the government was eventually able to effectively respond, and how humans often fail to learn from experience.

What The Dust Bowl does best, however, is tell the personal stories of the people who lived on the High Plains during the 1930s. Through interviews with twenty-six survivors who were there, along with outstanding photos and video footage of the land and the dust storms, one gets a good sense of what it was like to live on the land at the time, as well as understanding why some stayed and why some left.

More precisely, The Dust Bowl captures what it was like to be a child growing up there at the time, as the most fascinating interviews in the film are of people who experienced the drought and dust storms. And, of course, those people still alive now were children during the Dust Bowl era. So, the most moving tales come from the eyes of children remembering details like the dust on the dishes and the joy of being reunited with a parent. Also, because they were children, we see that some of the stories that most affected the speakers were not about falling wheat prices or how the dirt affected the local economy but about seeing how the drought affected animals. So just as animals often play a large role in our memories of childhood, one person vividly remembers the death of a calf, another remembers the community’s brutal response to an influx of jackrabbits, and others are haunted by other similar childhood experiences.

Others who are no longer alive give us additional perspectives on the times, including footage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Another famous voice we get to hear is that of Woody Guthrie, both talking and singing about “the dusty old dust.”

The story moves along briskly and is engaging throughout. The episodes were written by Dayton Duncan, who has worked with director Ken Burns on other series like The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz. I have been a fan of Duncan’s since the late 1980’s when I discovered his book Out West: American Journey Along the Lewis and Clark Trail (1988), where Duncan recounted his own modern road trip tracing Lewis and Clark’s famous travels. When I saw that he was working with Director Ken Burns years ago, I was glad that Burns found such a good writer.

If you enjoy Ken Burns’s other work, such as The Civil War, you probably already know whether you want to see The Dust Bowl or have already seen it. I am a fan of all of his work. But even if you have not seen his other work, you might find The Dust Bowl engaging because its first-person accounts provide an entertaining living history and a living warning about our times. Check your local PBS stations for reruns of The Dust Bowl, which is also available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Another Review Because Why Should You Trust Me?: For a different view on The Dust Bowl, check out “Burns’ ‘Dust Bowl’ speaks to our times, but it’s dry” from David Wiegand.

What did you think of The Dust Bowl? Leave your two cents in the comments.