the Guns of August
[part 2 of the Death of Rock and Roll]
[Coming Next Part: Yellow Submarine]

by Stephen Deng

In conversation with guitarist Skip Lunch about the 40th anniversary of the Death of Rock and Roll, this reporter's curiosity was piqued. I got busy with google, wikipedia and answers.com in the hope of understanding the US youth culture / counter-culture that could allow this to happen. By the first month of 1966 David Jones, token Briton with the industry-concocted band The Monkees,* had become so famous in the US that another Briton with the same name, and with his own plans for Rock and Roll stardom, took the stage surname Bowie. Columbia River writer Ken Kesey and his band The Merry Pranksters brought their legendary “Acid test” show into the big Pacific port of sanFrancisco. With its lighting effects and unique self-expressive RNR it was pretty much a proto-rave.* In Mississippi Vernon Dahmer died defending his family from a KKK attack.

(Interviewee Skip Lunch)

The underground party had targeted him because he had enabled black citizens to vote. Dahmer’s killer, a KKK leader, was not convicted until 1998! [to die in prison, aged 82, only two Sundays ago--Nov 5th 2006]. US culture then as now ran the gamut* from artistic high adventure to thuggish low reaction.

February saw the cinema release of The Chase, which starred Marlon Brando and dealt with white racism against blacks, among other violence and hypocrisy. Set in Texas, the film subtly reminded the audience of the Kennedy Assassination.* In March mass demonstrations against Johnson’s war in VietNam occurred across the US homeland. Above it all, former fighter pilot Neil Armstrong manoeuvered silently in his Gemini VIII orbit vehicle.

monkees (davy jones centre)		LBJohnson

Jan Berry may not have died in April--along with his three passengers—in the crash of his Corvette, but he did leave RNR lovers with cause to mourn : his new album, covers of The Beatles, was poo; the previous one “Jan and Dean meet Batman” was worse. His core audience was not much bothered by a “patriotic” song of his which dissed draft-dodgers as cowards,* but social progressives were disgusted. Berry had just been drafted himself -- if not for the crash he would have been jet-planed over to VietNam and may well have wound up dead or in hospital anyway.
“His cheesy material’s not the worst of it, either,” says Skip Lunch, legendary New York punk guitarist, gazing from his balcony over at the RNR practice-and-party spaces of Xiamen’s old port. “Berry’s practice of using non-band (= studio) musicians on recordings was becoming industry standard. The album Pet Sounds, composed by Berry’s good friend Brian Wilson, [and released in May] is credited to The Beach Boys, right? But by ’66 Wilson was basically an ex-Beach Boy—the band was performing only live [= on stage], and probably couldn’t have squeezed into Wilson’s studio even if they wanted to—which they didnt. His use of their name was a brazen marketing ploy, or else an in-joke of appalling snideness.”** The songs contained on Pet Sounds were further from RNR than anything the band had recorded, quite lovely in fact but weird--and so elaborate that they were never performed live until the end of the century. Cf www.brianwilson.com
Back in the big world as Berry and RNR lay in critical condition, Life magazine began a series of articles looking into the Kennedy Assassination & Warren Commission; in June the series was yanked* for lack of evidence withheld by Texas media figures with business ties to the CIA. The #1 song was “Paint it, Black” by the UK band The Rolling Stones. Three soldiers from a Texas army base publicly refused to be jet-planed over; they faced a court martial (=military) but escaped its secrecy by holding a press conference. Cf www.sirnosir.com


(the #174th greatest song of all time.)

Late that month and into July, The Beatles performed the first Rock and Roll shows ever staged in Tokyo’s hallowed Wudao-guan. Even The Ventures, a Columbia River guitar band, had been forbidden the national martial arts venue, perhaps because their tours of Japan had stirred such unseemly hysteria and hullabaloo. Why did Japan now bend over backwards for Invasion-style RNR? “Search me,” says Lunch.* “The Beatles had been a great cover band but their original songs can’t hold a candle to the some of the other UK bands, e.g. The Kinks and The Stones.* Even The Ventures weren’t that good anymore. Their cover of Telstar was even better than the [UK] original but they were less convincing after they moved into LA Surf stuff. Not that you can blame them for liking it. But if there had been any RNR background here, any critical awareness in all that frenzy, fewer Japanese would have lost their heads over mediocre bands like that.”*

(Gemini orbit craft)

Hullabaloo and Frenzy

The Beatles were to face a different sort of hysteria in the US, where a teen magazine had unfairly (=out of context) reported their singer-guitarist’s opinion that the band was now “more popular than Jesus.” Beginning in August, christian fundamentalists were rallied by radio to stomp and burn Beatles records and memorabilia (= dolls, posters, magazines, even books). The KKK went further, burning the band in effigy.* For good measure they tossed other RNR records, such as the latest Invasion hit “Wild Thing” by The Troggs--calling it all black “race music” for its 1940s origins. Even draft-happy Jan Berry’s album of Beatles covers was consigned to the flames. “Good riddance,” says Lunch. “Too bad it was for the wrong reason. I suppose the fundamentalist youth would have been allowed to hang on to his album of Batman songs.”

On the 11th of August, The Beatles held a press conference in the big Great Lakes port of Chicago, where a white mob had recently attacked the civil rights leader King. With a cut version of the new album “Revolver” just out in the shops,* and a tour of shows looming, the band’s singer-guitarist rendered an apology for his “more popular than Jesus” remark. The Vatican accepted his explanation, conceding the truth of the remark. Unimpressed, a radio station in Texas organised another bonfire; lightning struck the station the next morning.* In Europe two countries banned Beatles songs from radio; so did white-run South Africa.

The New York Herald-Tribune newspaper, whose long-ago correspondent Karl Marx had related the UK national congress debates over Opium war II and systematic torture, among other matters,* ended a long labour strike by disappearing into a merger. The Democrat-controlled national congress debates illegalizing any form of aid to its VietNamese enemies : progressive Christians for example were over there supplying the medical treatment of skin burns (caused by napalm) and leg loss (dud cluster bombs).* The debates were disrupted by youth who meant to protect their big freedoms : Speech, Meeting, Printing, and Disagreement.

In Ontario province, The Beatles' singer-guitarist made things worse by saying it was good that drafted young men could flee to Canada. Death threats dogged the tour. In Memphis, the home of RNR, the show was surrounded by the KKK and for a sick moment it seemed one of that party had shot the singer-guitarist (it was a firecracker). Controversy pushed the sales of revolver past 1 000 000. In LA the band traveled in an armoured car. They finished the harrowing tour in sanFrancisco. The last song of their last show was a cover of the RNR standard Long Tall Sally.



Vocabulary :

* token = representative, usually included to make a false impression.
The Monkees didnt really have anything to do with British Invasion,
but wanted to be associated with it.
Briton = a citizen of the UK, or "Britain"
industry = music companies. Also, from 1967, “corporate”
* proto = earliest or original, a hypothetical ancestor.
rave = a boisterous party, esp. a dance
* gamut = the entire scale or range, from one extreme to the other
* subtly = without obvious meaning
* Kennedy Assassination = the first one, 1963
* diss X = to speak of X or speak to X rudely.
* draft = involuntary military service
* dodge = to escape
* coward = a timid person
* brazen = shameless
* ploy = trick
* snide = nasty, arrogant
* in-joke = irony, humour intended for a limited audience
* yank = to extract or remove abruptly, confusingly
* search me = how should i know?
* can't hold a candle to X = to suffer by comparison with X
* e.g. = for example
* lose one’s head = to become uncontrolled or wildly excited. Also “go ape”
* rally = to call together a subordinate mass, as at a rally
* effigy = a crude representaion of someone disliked, used for public ridicule and worse.
* cut = shortened, edited, diluted, censored. Cf the 89 meanings at answers.com
* lightning = electrical discharge from cloud to cloud, or from cloud to ground, where it is a symbol of God's displeasure.
* www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/newspapers/new-york-tribune.htm
* dud = inferior in quality, as of a device that does not work predictably.