Remembering The 1960s

The Daily Escape:

Corona Arch trail, UT – photo by Mark Shutt

Over the past few days, Wrongo and Ms. Right have taken a temporary deep dive back into the 1960s, the Vietnam War, activism and the folk music that accompanied those times. We did this by reading “The Women” a novel by Kristen Hannah, and watching a documentary “I Am A Noise” a truly stunning biopic about Joan Baez.

The scope of both go beyond the 1960s into the 1980s for “The Women” and up to the present for the Baez film, but the Sixties decade is the foundation for the book and the film.

Let’s talk about the book. “The Women” is about the early days of the Vietnam War, and is the story of an Army nurse, Frances McGrath (Frankie). She goes from being a newbie to a highly skilled surgical nurse on the frontlines of the Vietnam War only to return to a changed America that does not welcome home its veterans. Worse, the US government, including the VA, will not recognize that women were even in Vietnam, despite the fact that around 6,000 of them served in-country. How Frankie adapts to a world in which she feels totally out of place is the plot of the novel.

The book also charts Frankie’s PTSD, and estrangement from her upper class family after the war. It is filled with references to the music of the time, and if you are of that generation, all of the tunes will be familiar. While the historical fiction aspects of the novel are engaging, all of the characters are very thinly sketched. Frankie’s several romances propel the narrative, with all of them ending badly, contributing to her spiral into drug and alcohol dependence. It’s not giving too much away to say that she finds a healthy place in society, after many difficult years.

Wrongo has read much of the great literature that came out of the Vietnam War, including O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried“, as well as the extraordinary non-fiction Herr’s “Dispatches“; Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie” and Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest“.

“The Women” isn’t up to the standard of any of those books, but it took Wrongo and Ms. Right back to revisit the changes that the Vietnam War brought to America in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Joan Baez film is essentially two stories, first about her being dead-center of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and the second, a starkly frank and difficult look at her life-long struggle with the crippling anxiety attacks she suffered beginning in her teenage years. At one point in the film, she says:

“I’m not very good with one-on-one relationships, I’m good with one-on-two-thousand relationships,”

Her mental health struggles are handled with sensitivity and finesse, although there’s a big reveal near the end.

In the 1950s, Baez was a college dropout singing barefoot in coffeehouses around Boston. She was invited to perform at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival and was “discovered”. That led to her meteoric rise to fame. She sang at Carnegie Hall before she was 18 and was on the cover of Time magazine at 21. Baez says in the film:

“For whatever reason…..I think I was the right voice at the right time.”

Baez’s crystal-clear soprano was unforgettable. Wrongo started listening to her in 1963. Her pure young soprano on the first few albums still give him chills. And her activism placed her at the center of several political movements. She sparked a resurgence of American folk music, sang at both the 1963 March on Washington and at Woodstock. She helped raise Bob Dylan to prominence. She was on the fields with Cesar Chavez. And MLK Jr. visited her after she was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War.

Baez remained interesting if not relevant down through the decades, until today. In the early 1980s, she dated Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In 2015, Taylor Swift invited Baez to dance on stage with her at a concert. Baez also visited Ukraine with the Ukraine Children’s Action Project, helping raise awareness for the war’s youngest victims.

The film’s big reveal comes about 90 minutes in, when Baez gets therapy and begins to grapple with childhood trauma. Periods of seeming contentment would be followed by breakdowns. After she endured a decade-long addiction to quaaludes, Baez tried to prise out “the kernel” of her interior darkness. It turns out that in therapy, Joan and her younger sister Mimi both believed that they were abused by their father as young children.

Baez thinks that was the cause of her difficulties with intimacy and her long periods of anxiety and depression. Clearly the film shows Baez and her two sisters as having been damaged early in life and then trying to cope with it for the rest of their lives. Ultimately Baez is shown having successfully navigated the past six decades, if not always easily, with her talent, perseverance and courage. See it yourself.

Enough for this week, it’s time for our Saturday Soother where we try to sluff off the tiny particles of outrage that cling to us from another week of political and geopolitical trauma. Here on the Fields of Wrong, the hummingbirds and the bluebirds are back. But this week, we’ve gotten very few things on our to-do list crossed off.

To help you prepare for another week of RFK Jr.’s brain worms and Trump’s trial, grab a seat outdoors in the shade and listen to a few tunes that come from the 1960s. First, the Vietnam anthem “We Gotta Get Outta This Place” by Eric Burdon and the Animals:

There are films that show hundreds of GIs in Vietnam singing this. Next, Joan Baez got her start as a folk singer. Here are two deep cuts from when she was very young. First, the traditional “Will you go laddie go?” Recorded in Edinburgh 1965:

Second, “With God on our side” also recorded in 1965, where she covers Bob Dylan:

This Bob Dylan song was written 1965…. and in 2024 we still don’t get it.

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Monday Wake Up Call – Dixie Chicks Edition, June 29, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Delaware Water Gap, NJ – 2020 photo by Craig Conklin

OK, Wrongo was wrong, again. He said on Saturday that changing the name of the Dixie Chicks to the Chicks wasn’t going to do anything for them. Wrongo ignored the power of a great protest song, and what it can do for your career.

And the Chicks have such a protest song in the just-released “March March” which is featured below.

But first, a few words about the mostly-forgotten Dixie Chicks. They were country, but not the faux patriotic kind. Their name came from the song by Little Feat, “Dixie Chicken”. If you’ve never heard it, you’re in for a treat, so listen at the link above.

Despite the name, they were pretty progressive in their music and lyrics. And they got in trouble for it in the Bush II administration. From Wikipedia: (brackets by Wrongo)

“On March 10, 2003, nine days before the invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks performed…in London, England. It was the first concert of their Top of the World tour in support of their sixth album, Home. Introducing their song “Travelin’ Soldier”, [Natalie] Maines told the audience the band did not support the upcoming Allied invasion of Iraq and were “ashamed” that President George W. Bush was from Texas.

Many American country music listeners supported the war, and Maines’s remark triggered a backlash in the United States. The Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations, and the band members received death threats…”

This was a huge deal back then. The entire country music industry ostracized them. At roughly the same time as the Chicks were blacklisted, the House GOP pushed to rename french fries and french toast in their cafeteria to “freedom fries” and “freedom toast”. Freedumb!

But the Chicks were correct. It wasn’t simply the Iraq war, it was illegal torture, the rise of the unitary executive, the attacks on free speech, and the destruction of the Iraqi state, and how that destabilized the Middle East. The Dixie Chicks’ protest grew to include all of that.

Looking back, Nashville didn’t have a clue about how to respond after 9/11. In their simplistic view, we had WWII, a story about the good guys vs. the bad guys. We also had Vietnam’s multiple shades of gray. But from a marketing perspective, and based on their collective ideology, Nashville wanted Bush’s Iraq war to be perceived at the WWII end of the spectrum.

In retrospect, the Chicks were a lot closer to where most of America was on the Iraq war than their Nashville gatekeepers. If you have any doubts about their political bona fides, listen to their anti-Vietnam song, Travelin’ Soldier, written by Bruce Robison in 1996.

So onward to the Chicks’ new song. Watch it full screen, it’s worth it.

This is protest music at its best. There have been protest songs all along, but the last time they were truly relevant was in 1970, with the CSNY song “Ohio” memorializing the Kent State shootings.

In 2020, it’s taken a pandemic, a maliciously negligent government, and disgusting abuses of authority to maybe slap us wide awake. Time to wake up America! Listen to the Chicks do “March March”:

Full Lyrics:

 [Chorus]
March, march to my own drum
March, march to my own drum
Hey, hey, I’m an army of one
Oh, I’m an army of one
March, march to my own drum
March, march to my own drum
Hey, hey, I’m an army of one
Oh, I’m an army of one

[Verse 1]
Brenda’s packin’ heat ’cause she don’t like Mondays
Underpaid teacher policin’ the hallways
Print yourself a weapon and take it to the gun range
(Ah, cut the shit, you ain’t goin’ to the gun range)
Standin’ with Emma and our sons and daughters
Watchin’ our youth have to solve our problems
I’ll follow them, so who’s comin’ with me?
(Half of you love me, half already hate me)

[Chorus]

[Verse 2]
Tell the ol’ boys in the white bread lobby
What they can and can’t do with their bodies
Temperatures are risin’, cities are sinkin’
(Ah, cut the shit, you know your city is sinkin’)
Lies are truth and truth is fiction
Everybody’s talkin’, who’s gonna listen?
What the hell happened in Helsinki?

[Chorus]

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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