by Peter Cole
Beyond Chron
January 31st, 2017
As
the fiftieth anniversary of San Francisco’s “Summer of Love” begins,
Mat Callahan wants us to question its myths. Young denizens of the city
weren’t wearing “flowers in their hair,” weren’t that “gentle,” and
didn’t all live in Haight-Ashbury. In fact, he contends, “there was no
‘Summer of Love’.” Rather, as Callahan quips, it “was a media creation
that passed into popular usage the same way Tampax became the generic
name for a sanitary napkin.”
Instead, Callahan seeks to return
the revolutionary ethos of music and SF, joined by legions of young
people also desirous of radical change. They fought on multiple fronts
in social movements—most obviously, in support of the civil rights
movement and against the US war in Vietnam. Indeed, social movements of a
shocking variety, populated mostly if not exclusively by young people,
emerged to challenge “the system,” and they were led by and danced to
the music. They sought to remake race relations, culture and society,
really their entire world.
Written well before the election of
Donald Trump, Brexit vote, growing authoritarianism in Turkey, and the
rise of fascist parties from Austria to Denmark to France, this book
sure seems prescient. Its publication was timed for release in 2017 to
take advantage of what, no doubt, will be immense heat if not light
during this year’s commemorations of the Human Be-In, Monterey Pop
Festival, and “Summer of Love,” all connected to San Francisco.
Yet
as annoying as the author finds stereotypes of 1960s counterculture, he
agrees with Scott McKenzie (writer of the eponymous song) that they saw
themselves as revolutionaries. The conglomeration of activists,
artists, and allies in San Francisco made it one of the most important
cities in the nation, even world, in the Sixties. They launched
themselves against cultural, economic, musical, political, and social
barricades. Callahan—a native son, musician, and activist—wants people
to think deeply about the revolutionary impact of music on the politics
of the Sixties. Callahan celebrates this artistic and political spirit
that raised consciousness and promoted human liberation. Understanding
what happened then and there just might allow us to win the revolution
the next time conditions are ripe.
Readers beware: this book is
not for those wishing for another day-glo daydream of the Merry
Pranksters, Grateful Dead, and LSD. Instead, it is a deep,
philosophical-historical meditation about the revolutionary potential of
music in San Francisco. Parts of the book feel like a slog and it could
have been cut by a quarter. Those who stay the course will be rewarded
for Callahan knows of what he speaks.
…
Callahan was a
SF-born “red-diaper baby.” His father participated in the peace movement
and ran with Paul Robeson. His mother, inspired by the revolutionary
dance theoretician Isadora Duncan, joined the Communist Party and danced
professionally. His stepfather worked on the SF waterfront and belonged
to Local 10, the Bay Area branch of the International Longshoremen’s
& Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), one of the most powerful, leftwing
unions in 20th century America.
In 1964, Callahan came of age.
Before dawn, one day that year, his stepfather awoke Callahan and his
brother to drive across the Bay Bridge to the University of California
in Berkeley. His dad wanted his boys to see hundreds of student
activists in the Free Speech Movement be hauled off to jail.
Even
more impactful, that same year a revolution occurred in rock ‘n’ roll
music. The Beatles’ appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show launched
Callahan onto a new trajectory—as a guitarist. Though not discussed, he
later became a professional musician in several popular Bay Area bands.
One that he fronted, the Looters, opened for the Grateful Dead at its
New Year’s Eve show, in 1987, in Oakland. Given his radical upbringing
and music resume, Callahan’s bonafides are undeniable.
…
Callahan’s
book thoughtfully, at times brilliantly, weaves together three
threads—music, politics, and San Francisco—that served as harbingers of
global revolution between 1965 and 1975.
While art is a crucial
aspect of humanity, Callahan convincingly argues that music became the
premier art form of the generation that came of age in The Sixties. The
creating, listening, and performing of music (not just the lyrics that
too many fixate upon), inspired millions of young people to reject
American-style capitalism and politics.
The new music that
emerged in San Francisco in the mid 1960s offered liberation from the
gerbil’s treadmill of suburban materialism as well as the authoritarian
nature of Soviet-style communism.
The best parts of the book
focus upon the incredible flowering of music in this particular time and
place and why this was, indeed, revolutionary. The Jefferson Airplane,
Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Sly and the Family Stone,
Big Brother & The Holding Company (Janis Jopin’s band), Tower of
Power, Santana, Taj Mahal, and Credence Clearwater Revival all receive
quite thoughtful analysis. So do lesser-known but important local bands
including the Charlatans, Sons of Champlin, Malo, and Great! Society.
These
artists directly challenged the industry that controlled music. For
millennia, peoples around the world have created music. However in the
early 20th century, Callahan contends, for-profit corporations hijacked
music and turned it into homogeneous, commercialized, apolitical pop. In
SF in the Sixties, though, a new generation refused to let producers
and engineers dictate their sound. They refused to accept orders from
corporate executives that their songs be no more than three minutes
long. They played for the liberatory joy of creating and sharing art
rather than to get rich.
SF musicians and those who danced to
this music saw themselves building a new society. Bands like the
Airplane and the Dead regularly played in public parks for free.
Importantly, they played countless benefit concerts in allegiance with
the incredible range of social movements exploding in the Bay Area and
across the land: The Southern civil rights movement and Bay Area
variants, opposition to the war in Vietnam and draft, solidarity with
the United Farmworkers of America (UFW), and dozens of other social
justice causes all received mighty support from Bay Area musicians and
listeners.
Though the author fixates on the Bay Area, he
appreciates that many other artists, such as the Chambers Brothers in
their epic “Time Has Come Today,” embodied the new spirit and values. He
has a historian’s grasp and musician’s appreciation for many of the
antecedents of Sixties rock so discusses everyone from Sister Rosetta
Tharpe to Pete Seeger. He understands that young people in New York,
Paris, Mexico City, Prague, and countless other communities also built
this struggle.
…
His knowledge of San Francisco is deep
and wide, earned from many decades of a life lived there. Thus, he can
wax eloquently upon: the Beats and longshoremen of North Beach; the
Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asians who fought to prevent
gentrification in the International Hotel struggle; Carlos and brother
Jorge Santana who formed bands in the Mission District, as well as; the
influence of China Books, the only official bookstore of communist China
in the United States.
He discusses the centrality of the civil
rights movement and Black Panther Party in Oakland and various SF
neighborhoods including the Fillmore and Hunters Point. He fully
appreciates that race is the central paradox of US History, a nation
committed to equality that systematically denies millions equal
treatment.
So, too, the SF Mime Troupe, which pioneered much of
the spirit of this new politics. Teatro Campesino, which applied the
Troupe’s radical politics and methods to aiding Chicano farmworkers, and
the Diggers (creator of the Free Stores) with their anti-capitalist
ethic and use of spectacle all receive attention.
He writes of
the emerging radicalism of young people in SF high schools and at San
Francisco State, which non-locals might be less familiar with (compared
to Berkeley and nearby Stanford). SFS students planned and carried out
not one but two occupations of Alcatraz Island, populated the Haight and
other neighborhoods, and pulled off the longest student strike in US
history.
These revolutionaries were working class and of every
color and creed. African Americans taking their centuries-long protest
of racism to new heights. American Indians invoking the resistance of
their 19th century ancestors. Asian Americans in what was then, at
least, their unofficial American capital. Chicanos, Cubanos, and Central
Americans. Working class whites. Women. Homosexuals and sex radicals.
Environmentalists. It can be easy to forget the breadth and depth of the
social movements that erupted in the 1960s and carried well into the
1970s.
And he repeatedly and convincingly hammers home how much local
people drove the musical and political innovations, later picked up by
those who moved to SF or built their own scenes in their own places.
Thus,
despite his dislike of the 1967 hit “San Francisco,” Callahan cannot
deny the song got a few things right. After all: “There’s a whole
generation/With a new explanation
People in motion.” Yet Callahan takes
exception that it was a “love-in.” Instead, young people in this city,
nation, and world tossed their agendas into a seething cauldron with the
desire to overthrow “the system” and “change the world.” They believed
themselves revolutionaries and helped lead a struggle that
exploded—globally—in 1968.
…
This book is periodically
fascinating, sometimes fun, and often educational but hardly “light.”
How could it be when the catalog of philosophers discussed includes:
W.E.B. Du Bois, Kenneth Rexroth, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Marx, Herbert
Marcuse, Michael Denning, Mao Zedong, and Ngugi wa Thiongo’o. Callahan
deserves a commendation for thinking deeply about the philosophy of
music and revolutions though some readers may get lost trying to follow
him down his long and winding philosophical roads.
In this
endeavor, he builds upon his last book The Trouble With Music (AK Press,
2005), a scathing look at the “music industry.” The industry, of
course, is profit-driven and Callahan believes that capitalism destroys
music, the people who make music, and the people who listen to it.
Callahan’s
dislike of Bill Graham, in particular, bleeds through the pages. A man
with great business and marketing skills enriched himself while
co-opting the revolutionary potential of the music. By contrast,
Callahan celebrates those who make music, emerging organically in
communities like his home city. He showcases the Family Dog—the
anti-commercial, anti-Graham, music producers of legendary Bay Area
shows, including the 3-day Trips Festival at the ILWU Longshoremen’s
Hall in 1966.
At times, Callahan’s diatribes can become
tiresome even if one shares his views. He apparently has an entire
shedful of axes to grind. He devotes two pages, for instance, to
explaining why the “Summer of Love” did not exist despite timing his
book for its fiftieth anniversary. The book’s first appendix devotes
itself to an “Inventory of Falsehoods.”
…
Nevertheless, this essay
shall close, as does the book, hopefully. Callahan writes, “Humanity’s
liberation is the not yet explored so deeply by philosopher Ernest
Bloch. The not yet is the wellspring of art.”
Local musicians
like Callahan helped turned San Francisco into a seething hotbed of
revolutionary potential that rocked the world. They sought to destroy
hidebound traditions and replace them with radical, egalitarian values.
Although “the system” managed to reassert control, obviously the
struggle continues. People in every city and country retain the
potential to break our collective chains. The music and musicians of San
Francisco, Callahan asserts, show us the way forward.
Peter Cole is a professor of history at Western Illinois University. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia and at work on Dockworker Power: Race, Technology, and Unions in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes on the history of labor unions, port cities, race matters, radicalism, and politics. He tweets from @ProfPeterCole
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