Age of Aquarius: Rock in the late 1960s

1
Age of AquariusRock in the late 1960s

• Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In The 5th
  Dimension (1969)
• Featured in the musical Hair

2
Counter-Culture in the Age of Aquarius

• Kennedys America on the edge of a New Frontier
• Age of Aquarius (Dawning)
• Dominated by astrological sign of Aquarius
• Airy, scientific, and intellectual
• Associated with intuition (knowledge above
  reason) and direct perceptions of the heart
• Represents rejection of Judeo-Christian beliefs
  and values
• Represents an optimism (even as hippies drop
  out.
• Californias unique atmosphere created by
• Influence of East Asian belief systems (Buddhism,
  Hinduism)
• Individualism fostered by Rock and Surf music

3
Hippy Culture

• Hippy and New Age movements of 1960s and 1970s
• Era of universal brotherhood rooted in reason
• Equality
• Intellectual and spiritual improvement
• Youth seek cultural revolution, rejecting
  everything to do with mainstream society
• Love for nature
• Experimentation with mind-altering drugs
• Students often became politically active
• Encouraged alternate living styles
• Free mixing of races, socially and sexually
• Complete sexual liberation and experimentation
• Beginning of movements for womens and minority
  rights

4

• Q What is the Source of the Hippy Counterculture
  of the 60s?
• A The Beat Counter Culture of the 50 mixed with
  a Folk Music Revival.

5
Counter-Culture Folk Rock

• The Beats (1940s 50s) The original
  counter-culture
• They consisted of writers, travelers, and
  philosophers.
• Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
• Neal Cassady Traveled with Kerouac in 1951.
• Allen Ginsberg
• Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (1962)
• William Bouroughs
• Paul Bowles
• Term Beats comes from
• (Beatitude from Zen Buddhism) or (Bebop or Bop
  Jazz)
• Bop Jazz provide a lot of their inspiration
• Thelonious Monks Four in One.

6
Beats (continued)

• They idolized their favorite Jazz Players
  including Parker, Gillespie, Monk, and Davis and
  many were regulars at the famous New York jazz
  clubs like Mintons, Red Drum, and The Open Door.
• The beat writers were intrigued by the mysticism
  and nonconformist attitude of the lonesome,
  introspective jazz player.
• They talked the jazz slang, using words like cat,
  dig, blow, and square and they did the jazz drugs
  including weed, heroin, and Benzedrine.

7
Jack Kerouac

• Wrote On the Road in a 3 day Benzedrine binge
  one long sheet of manuscript paper. There were no
  paragraph indentations.
• Believed in trance writing without
  consciousness
• but he began each work with a rough outline of
  what he was trying to write about like a chord
  progression or riff in a jazz piece.
• Stylistic elements are basically the same as
  those of jazz improvisation.
• NPR Website with audio and visual demonstration

8
Poets / Writers

• William S Burroughs (1959)
• Smell of chili houses and dank overcoats and
  atrophied testicles .A heaving sea of air
  hammers in the purple brown dusk tainted with
  rotten metal smell of sewer gas
• Allen Ginsberg (1956)
• America Ive given you all
• and now Im nothing.
• Im sick of your demands.
• Liner notes of Fugs 2nd album (Kill for Peace,
  1966)
• Vision of beats (143)

CIA Man (1965)
9
Velvet Underground

• Lou Reed (lyrics), John Cale, Sterling Morison,
  Angus MacLise, Nico
• Managed by Andy Warhol
• The sexual and drug-related themes of the Velvet
  Underground were only taboo on records.Movies,
  plays, books, its all there. pg. 145
• Heroine (1967) lyrics

10
Folk Music Revival

• Love for nature and simplicity, along with
  British innovation threat, rekindled interest in
  folk music
• Songs composed in style of folk music
• Melodic lines similar to country western and
  pop styles
• Use of acoustic instruments, especially early on
• Usually duo or trio harmonies
• Usually take the form of a protest song
• Lyrics usually clearly enunciated to deliver
  social or political message
• Scene especially strong at first in NYCs
  Greenwich Village

11
Folk Music Revival
Kingston Trio 1957 Three Jolly Coachmen Merry
Minuet
If I had a Hammer Lyrics Pete Seeger

• Peter, Paul and Mary
• (website)
• Puff the Magic Dragon
• Blowin in the Wind (vid)
• Leaving on a Jet Plane
• Dont Laugh at Me

Bio
12
Folk Music Revival

• Joan Baez
• Born in 1941
• Her father was a physicist who refused to work
  for the war industries
• His influence led to Joans political activism
• In the 1950s, she lived in Boston where there
  was an up-and coming folk music scene
• Began folk career at the 1959 Newport Folk
  Festival
• Introduced Bob Dylan to the folk scene.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in 1963
Baezs cover of Dylans Blowin in the Wind
13
Woody Guthrie (1912-1967) bio

• Documented in 1940 by Alan Lomax
• Born in Indian Territory, Oklahoma
• Traveled as hobo during 1930s depression
  witnessing pressures and troubles of ordinary
  people Talkin Dust Bowl
• Style known as talkin Blues, developed by Led
  Belly but popularized by Woody
• Do Re Mi (treatment of Migrants from Texas)
• Ani DiFranco version
• This Land is Your Land (1940)
• Bruce Springsteen Version
• Response to Irving Berlins God Bless America
• Grand Coulee Dam (lyrics)
• The Bonneville Power Authority placed Woody on
  the Federal payroll for a month

14
Bob Dylan (b. Robert Zimmerman, 1941)

• Influenced by Guthrie (met in 1961)
• Distinctive voice
• Poetic and provocative lyrics
• Transformed musical and political worlds of 1960s
• First album (1962) contains
• Song to Woody, based on melody of Guthries song
  1913 Massacre
• Talkin New York, rooted in the Talkin Blues
• Talkin John Burch Paranoid Blues

15
Bob Dylan (cont)

• FreeWheelin Bob Dylan(1963)
• A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall
• Example of early Dylan
• Acoustic guitar
• Similar musically and lyrically to folk ballad
• What social commentary is Dylan making?
• Lyrics
• The Times They Are a-Changin (1964)
• The Times They Are a-Changin
• Video (Folk Career)

16
Dylan and Folk Rock

• Moves from Folk Revival style to integrate other
  genres
• Abandons protest songs and goes electric
• Many fans angry at him for selling out
• Forges Electric Folk Rock (Plugged-In
  Folk-Rock)
• 1965 Newport Folk Festival (Video)
• "Subterranean Home Sick Blues (1965)
• Like a Rolling Stone
• Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)
• Written by Dylan
• Recorded by The Byrds (Video)
• Legitimized folk-rock commercially
• Released before Dylans performance
• Dylan bridges gap between love-obsessed rockers
  and protest-focused folk singers

17
Where does folk rock music go from here?

• Several Directions
• Working Class Folk Rock
• Country Music (Dylan, Cash) Blue Collar Rock
  (Springsteen)
• Counter-Culture Folk Rock
• San Francisco Scene Acid Rock, Psychedelic
  Rock
• Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, Grateful
  Dead, CSNY, etc

18
Where does folk music go from here?

• Country Music Blue Collar
• Dylan Next Big Switch
• Bob Dylan pulls another switch and brings
  popular folk music back to the country in 1969
• Does not attend Woodstock
• Puts out the mainstream country album Nashville
  Skyline in 1969 it features a duet with Johnnie
  Cash and the song Lay Lady Lay

19
Bruce Springsteen?

• Lets look again at the roots of Folk Music
  Follow its trajectory

20
Walt Whitmans vision

• 1855 Leaves of Grass
• Book of songs representing ideal social order.
• Implies the connection of the individual to the
  social good, the dehumanizing of the
  working-class man in an industrialized era, and
  the destruction of the their individuality.
• Anti-capitalist works, calling for the
  working-class hero.

21
Whitmans succesors

• Alan Lomax helped preserve the attitude through
  his compilation of multi-cultural music

• Woody Guthrie 1920s and 30s
  
  Dust Bowl Ballads
• Hurt songs that reflected the pain of the
  under-class individual

• Pete Seeger Spread radicalism throughout the
  50s and 60s in Folk music.

• Bob Dylan Emulated Guthrie in image and style.
  Dylan had a well informed political view and
  during the 60s was at the forefront for
  political protest music.
• Songs commented on social and political issues
  very deeply and poetically.

• Bruce Springsteen Began to fit the mold of the
  working-class hero, and began to express his
  socio-political radicalism in a more
  impressionistic, cinematic style through his
  song.

22
Bruce Springsteen

• Born in Freehold NJ
• 1972 Signs with Columbia
• The next Dylan, the future of rock n roll
• Influences
• Woody Guthrie, Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams,
  Johnny Cash, John Steinbecks novel the Grapes
  of Wrath, and readings of political and cultural
  history.
• January, 1973 Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ
  and September, 1973 The Wild, the innocent and
  the E Street Shuffle
• Very impressionistic interpretation of the urban
  social setting, and reflections of the optimism
  of the youth in the 70s.
• Blinded By the Light, Lyrics (1973) Steelers
  Wheel

23
Born to Run

• August 1975 Springsteen becomes a national rock
  sensation.
• Popular culture desired sound is fulfilled
• Escapism is a prominent theme, and the
  non-acceptance of the future for these working
  class characters.
• Born To Run and Lyrics
• Other tracks expressing similar themes include
  Jungle Land and Thunder Road

24
Late 70s Early 80s

• Baby boomer generation grows older and are
  confronted with the harsh reality of the economic
  forces of this country.
• Expanded his historical awareness and hence his
  cultural contemporaneous awareness. Adds This
  Land is Your Land into his repertory and plays
  at fund raising concerts and protest concerts.

25
A turning point in his music

• Nebraska 1982
• Takes on Reagans America (Antilabor policies, 11
  percent unemployment, union membership 29,
  homelessness becomes a national problem)
• Prevalent themes Isolation, Dissolution of
  communal relationships, sheer meanness,
  directionless anger, violence, social
  consciousness
• Julius Daniels Ninety Nine Year Blues(1927),
  The Carter Familys John Hardy(1930) and Woody
  Guthries John Hardy
• Johnny 99, Lyrics

26
Born in the USA (1984)

• Misconstrued notion of optimism and patriotism
• Lyrics
• Born down in a dead man's town The first kick I
  took was when I hit the ground You end up like a
  dog that's been beat too much 'Til you spend half
  your life just covering up
• I had a buddy at Khe Sahn Fighting off the Viet
  Cong They're still there, he's all gone He had a
  little girl in Saigon I got a picture of him in
  her arms

27
Born in the USA (1984)

• George Will - 1984
• have not got a clue about Springsteen's
  politics, if any, but flags get waved at his
  concerts while he sings songs about hard times.
  He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed
  factories and other problems always seems
  punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation
  'Born in the U.S.A.!'"

2003 During the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, many
counter-demonstrators played the song opposite
anti-war protesters, which demonstrates continued
misinterpretation of the song years after its
initial recording.