Ho Chi Minh + LBJ = Sgt Pepper?

Here’s a radical idea: add Ho Chi Minh and Lyndon Johnson and you get: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

 Think about it: would the massive upheaval, the social revolution, the counterculture, have happened if (A) North Vietnam hadn’t invaded South Vietnam, and (B) LBJ hadn’t sent US troops into Vietnam in 1965? 

 Back in the early 60s, we were like the late 50s: crew cuts, rock’n’roll, Elvis, anti-communist, obey authority, no drugs, etc.  We trusted the government just as we trusted our parents, to tell us the truth and look out for our best interests.  LSD was in the hands of the CIA and a few knowledgeable souls such as Ken Kesey, but otherwise unknown.  There was a very small fringe - beatniks and communists – but they were a very small minority and off the radar of mainstream America.  The Beatles didn’t even put out an album until 1962, and even then it was Please Please Me. 

 By 1970 everything was different.  Woodstock, Altamont, LSD, Kent State, you name it.  Even if the counterculture represented a minority – as distinguished from Nixon’s “Silent Majority” – it was still thrust in America’s face, impossible to ignore.  The war itself was on the news, as were the protests.  A threshold was reached where ordinary people were capable of doing anything.  The Beatles had put away their matching outfits, grown their hair long – or even beards – and Lennon and Yoko posed naked on their album cover.  Even the Beach Boys (???) were singing about marijuana, meditation, all that New Age crap.

 Clearly something happened.  But what?  What did the WAR have to do with it?  The war stretched the government’s credibility gap beyond the breaking point for all but the most diehard right wing reactionary.  During WWI and WWII it was expected that the government may have been fudging a little on its propaganda, what Churchill called “terminological inexactitude”, but so long as the war was being won and the results didn’t stray too far from what we were being told, it didn’t matter too much – we assumed we were being told this for our own good and that our own government was looking out for our own best interests, like parents telling their children about Santa Claus, a harmless story for the benefit of the child’s happiness and well being.

 But Vietnam was different.  Ordinary people could tell that what they were being told didn’t match what was really going on.  Body bags + violence + an unconventional war against an unconventional opponent; it didn’t help that the war was being fought with one hand behind our back.  Instead of invading North Vietnam on the ground, we bombed it from the air; and we know from experience that you although you can’t win a war without air superiority, air power alone won’t win the war without “boots on the ground” – it’s a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for victory.  We could see the napalm, the arc lights, the destruction, but not the victory.

 Tet January 1968 was probably the last straw.  Up until that point the White House, Pentagon and General Westmoreland had been telling America that the war was being won, that the enemy was on its last legs.  Then POW!  The VC and NVA attacked everywhere at once, overrunning much of Hue and breaking into the US Embassy compound in Saigon.  Although the NVA and VC eventually lost all the territory they had gained – suffering horrible casualties and wiping out the VC as a military force – the political damage was done.  The irony was that NOW the war was winnable, but no one – not even the military – believed it anymore.

 It was this destruction of government integrity, how they betrayed our trust (“Born on the Fourth of July”, Daniel Ellsberg, etc.) which ripped our social fabric apart at the seams.  We were a democracy, but we could no longer trust the government, as if our parents, who we loved and respected, turned out to be selfish, lying bastards.  The world was turned upside down.  Now anything was possible.  Black was white.  Night was day.  Drugs were OK.  Promiscuous sex was OK.  And Revolver and Sgt Pepper (as well as the Grateful Dead and Piper at the Gates of Dawn) stepped in to fill the void.  These albums, this music, fit our mood, our spirit.  They described exactly how fucked up, how confused, how crazy we felt.  If America hadn’t been corrupted and weakened from within, if the bond between government and people hadn’t been ruptured, all this counterculture would have remained a small, weak, insignificant margin outside the mainstream, out of sight, out of mind.  The music might still have been made, but it would not have had the impact and the success it did, instead remaining obscure like Bloodrock, Hawkwind, and Blue Cheer.

 In each place, the US and London, a social revolution was going on.  The youth of the counterculture had come to the conclusion that: (A) the establishment looked out for its own interests, not those of the public at large, and not for the younger generation – who it sent to Vietnam to fight its wars; (B) it established arbitrary rules which restricted the freedom of young people to express themselves; (C) it was possible, nevertheless, for youth to rebel against this corrupt authority and take control of their lives, and (D) there was no shortage of outlets for this rebellion.  The music – especially Pink Floyd & the Beatles, and the San Francisco bands, reflected this change, casting away the old restrictions and going off into new, uncharted territory where anything was possible.  Sgt Pepper is the finest example of this: 4 guys going into the studio without having to worry about satisfying mobs of screaming teenage girls or whether they could reproduce the music onstage. 

 LSD.  Undoubtedly, the catalyst for channeling the severe social distortion of the Vietnam War into the creative and productive outlet of music was the drugs, and none more important than lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, or acid.  The drug is too important to fully address here, and deserves a full blog entry in its own right.  But for here it’s enough to argue that the drug was responsible for no less than Sgt Pepper, Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Pink Floyd), Blue Cheer, the Grateful Dead, Hawkwind, and countless other bands.  Lennon has always denied that “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was about LSD, but the song title and lyrics, plus Lennon’s own extremely irreverent and cynical personality, convince me that his denial was really an elaborate put down, an inside joke, a slap in the face, and an insult to the intelligence of anyone who ever listened to the song closely.  By expanding our consciousness, by smashing outside the box of conventional thinking, the drug opened new horizons.  Not all the music was good, but the best of it was some of the best ever made, and could never have been made without the LSD.  Sure, these same bands had made quality material in the early 60s, but alcohol, cigarettes, even marijuana, were no substitute for what Jimi Hendrix called “the experience”.  LSD was the only game in town.

 The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and others in London’s Underground movement were watching America, particularly San Francisco, and the shock waves rippling through America from the Vietnam War – including Woodstock, which was an anti-war protest festival – flew across the sea into the streets of London, and channeled through the artists and musicians by LSD, were engrooved into vinyl for the rest of us to experience and enjoy even to this day.  Thanks to Uncle Ho for invading South Vietnam, and President Lyndon Johnson for sending US troops to defend it.