Monday 1 September 2008

THE TRACKS OF OUR YEARS

It’s often said that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there. So who was?
Bob Dylan, Sam Cooke, Nina Simone, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs certainly were because the events of that turbulent decade clearly resonate through the lyrics of their songs. And then there were the bands, the Byrds, the Doors, the Beatles and the Stones all picking up on the chaos around them to record the soundscape to the decade.
Therefore my story of sixties America is chronologically sequenced through 28 tracks on a jukebox, the tracks of our years. All these songs have become symbolic of the events and movements of that period, and the time frame used is the one covered by Don McLean’s song “American Pie.”
The narrator is a photojournalist sent to investigate the death of Buddy Holly in a plane crash in 1959. The sight of the wreckage evokes memories of the Korean War where he discovered something he shouldn’t during a friendly fire incident and ended up wounded in a MASH unit.
He’s visited by Military Intelligence who try to discredit his story but he refuses to accept their version and is flown home to a New York Military Hospital. Over several months he is supposedly being treated using hypnosis and electric shock therapy.
During his convalescence he falls in love with one of the nurses, a young black woman named Lavinia Beaux who is heavily into music and active in the Civil Rights Movement. They move in together and although supposedly blacklisted he manages to get assignments as a photojournalist using fake ID.
He and Lavinia attend many political events and demos throughout the decade which he records in words and pictures. When Kennedy comes to power and Martin Luther king assumes leadership of the civil rights movement they are confident positive change will follow. Sam Cooke is also convinced and writes the song “One day a change is gonna come.” But there are people in America determined to stop any such change and within a few years the two leaders are assassinated. Phil Ochs graphically describes this in his song “Crucifixion.”
America becomes increasingly drawn into what is basically a civil war in Vietnam and pays a very high price for intervening. As the body count on both sides climbs higher and higher the protests get ever louder and one of the rebel chants of the period becomes Country Joe’s song “Fixin to Die Rag.” The narrator covers these anti-war protests.
In 1967 there’s the summer of love with its emphasis on make love not war backed up by conspicuous consumption of the drug LSD, which, if nothing else spawns a great anthem, “Let’s go to San Francisco.” The love affair with this hippy idyll would continue for another two years culminating in the Woodstock Festival with its fantastic array of counter culture talent on display. But the honeymoon period comes to an abrupt end when a young man is allegedly stabbed and kicked to death by Hells Angels at Altamont, just as the Stones finish playing “Sympathy for the Devil.”
The realisation that America is never going to win in Vietnam dawns in 1968 when Charlie Company perpetrates one of the worst atrocities of the war at the village of Mai Lai. Men, women and children are bayoneted and shot to death in an orgy of violence as American soldiers, frustrated at their inability to locate the enemy, take their anger out on the villagers. The Door’s song “The End” seems to reflect the brutal futility of the conflict.
By the end of the decade the war has been brought home to the streets of America with groups like the Black Panthers and the “Weather Underground” using the atrocities perpetrated against civilians in Vietnam to excuse their own violent tactics in attempting to bring about radical change in America.
If the start of the decade belonged to the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the end of the decade belongs to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The idealism of youth has been replaced by the cynicism of old age as the two men conspire to destroy the radical elements in US society and get out of Vietnam. Don McLean in his song “American Pie” graphically illustrates this descent into anarchy and chaos at the end of the decade which is why it is the final track in my book.

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