Ok, I'm over 60 and listen to some
music my loved ones call “moldy.” But I like to think that much
of the music of the 70s holds up well. Anyway, in addition to the
indie and alternative music my son and friends at ATG keep me
current with, I still play that moldy stuff.
Much of 70's music – and for my
purposes here that means the period from around 1968 to 78 – is
just music, meant to entertain, get you “up” or help you get
high. But two strains have had me thinking recently because they
seem to pinpoint something that changed early on in the decade,
something that maybe points to a broader dynamic we can see playing
out in the recent “Arab Spring” and on the streets of American cities.
The first of the 70's music broke over
the happy silliness of Beatlemania. It took rock and folk and added
drugs to produce the psychedelic movement with Jefferson Airplane and
then the Grateful Dead. The Beatles themselves started it with
"Magical Mystical Tour." But while this and much else of the time was
just escapism – not to denigrate such fun – the strain that I'm
focused on here was the music of protest and revolution. In the
aftermath of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and in the middle
of the Vietnam war movement, songs like “What About Me” by
Quicksilver Messenger Service (1970) addressed the issues of
pollution, war, repression, the 99% but also looked forward to change
through confronting the forces of authority challenging them –
“what you going to do about me?” Other songs of the period
looked forward to just jumping over the mess of this world in the
post-apocalyptic “Wooden Ships” (Jefferson Airplane &
CS&N, 1969) or by hijacking a starship (Jefferson
Starship's "Blows Against the Empire," 1970). Whether it was
confronting the man or escaping him, this music looked toward a
better future, a fundamental re-ordering of society.
But by 1972, disappointment, alienation
and a sense of loss had already begun to set in, despite the fact
that we would shortly be seeing the first seeming accomplishments of
the “attack” against the old order. Richard Nixon would be
forced to take us out of the Vietnam War (the Paris Peace Accords,
1973) and himself would be forced from office (1974). I was at a
CSN&Y concert in Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City on the night of
August 8, 1974. One of the group came out to explain a slight delay
by informing us all “it's over,” Nixon had resigned. Music and
fireworks celebrated this “victory.”
But The Who, sensing that maybe
it would not be so easy, announced in “Won't Get Fooled Again”
(1971) that after the “fighting in the streets” our team on the
left would now be our team on the right. Jackson Browne was asking
in “Doctor My Eyes” (1972) if perhaps we had already seen too
much without anything really getting any better? Pink Floyd was
suggesting that maybe it was all really about money and that anyone
who doubted it was living on the "Dark Side of the Moon" (1973).
Jethro Tull – Ian Anderson always seeming to be bitingly aware of how
real life disappoints our dreams – noted how each day was like
“Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day” (1974) and, in “OneWhite Duck” (1975), that something must be wrong in our brains if
we were “so patently unrewarding.”
By 1977, Jackson Browne was “Running on Empty” and the year later, Jefferson Starship began its
transformation into pop. Most of the supergroups fell apart in a
haze of booze and drugs. Everyone else went to work. And the Fall
of Nixon led to the two hapless president – Ford and Carter –
and then in 1980, the “return of the repressed” victory of Barry
Goldwater in the form of Ronald Reagan.
The hopes and dreams of the 70s were
real and so was the movement on the streets. We – and I am taking
some liberties here including myself in this – did remove a
president and end a war. But the hopes that any of this would really
change anything fundamental or in some way make our daily lives
“better” or “happier” were not realized.
We've seen in the past year new
movements in the streets, toppling governments and challenging the
economic order. The experience of the 70s reminds that the push for
real change leads to reaction; the harder the push, the greater the
reaction. Society is, by evolution, a essentially conservative
adaptation. The force of inertia fights against any change of
direction. But the movement of the Arab Spring is more powerful than
anything we experienced in the 70s because it is more necessary, more
mass based. The Occupy movement is more informed by history than we
were in the 70s. And it is so much clearer now, and in so many ways,
that the world we live in has serious problems that don't seem to be
getting better on their own, by business as usual.
Leaving the last word to Neil Young,
who remained sideways hopeful despite everything we've seen since the
70's, keep on rockin in the Free World.
