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The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture
In his 1967 megahit "San Francisco," Scott McKenzie sang of "people in motion" coming from all across the country to San Francisco, the white-hot center of rock music and anti-war protests. At the same time, another large group of young Americans was also in motion, less eagerly, heading for the jungles of Vietnam.
Now, in The Republic of Rock, Michael Kramer draws on new archival sources and interviews to explore sixties music and politics through the lens of these two generation-changing places--San Francisco and Vietnam. From the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to hippie disc jockeys on strike, the military's use of rock music to "boost morale" in Vietnam, and the forgotten tale of a South Vietnamese rock band, The Republic of Rock shows how the musical connections between the City of the Summer of Love and war-torn Southeast Asia were crucial to the making of the sixties counterculture. The book also illustrates how and why the legacy of rock music in the sixties continues to matter to the meaning of citizenship in a global society today. Going beyond cliched narratives about sixties music, Kramer argues that rock became a way for participants in the counterculture to think about what it meant to be an American citizen, a world citizen, a citizen-consumer, or a citizen-soldier. The music became a resource for grappling with the nature of democracy in larger systems of American power both domestically and globally.
For anyone interested in the 1960s, popular music, and American culture and counterculture, The Republic of Rock offers new insight into the many ways rock music has shaped our ideas of individual freedom and collective belonging.
Now, in The Republic of Rock, Michael Kramer draws on new archival sources and interviews to explore sixties music and politics through the lens of these two generation-changing places--San Francisco and Vietnam. From the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to hippie disc jockeys on strike, the military's use of rock music to "boost morale" in Vietnam, and the forgotten tale of a South Vietnamese rock band, The Republic of Rock shows how the musical connections between the City of the Summer of Love and war-torn Southeast Asia were crucial to the making of the sixties counterculture. The book also illustrates how and why the legacy of rock music in the sixties continues to matter to the meaning of citizenship in a global society today. Going beyond cliched narratives about sixties music, Kramer argues that rock became a way for participants in the counterculture to think about what it meant to be an American citizen, a world citizen, a citizen-consumer, or a citizen-soldier. The music became a resource for grappling with the nature of democracy in larger systems of American power both domestically and globally.
For anyone interested in the 1960s, popular music, and American culture and counterculture, The Republic of Rock offers new insight into the many ways rock music has shaped our ideas of individual freedom and collective belonging.
- GenresNonfictionMusicHistory
304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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February 7, 2017
Kramer argues that a symbiotic relationship existed between the counterculture in the United States and the U.S. military intervention in southeast Asia. The war in Vietnam became a metaphor suffusing various aspects of the counterculture—for example, concert venues were labeled "induction centers" because it was at those sites where youth were "inducted" into the counterculture. On the other hand, Kramer acknowledges that "the commodification of phenomena such as hippies . . . allowed the US military and its personnel to transport the energies of the Fillmore and the Haigh-Ashbury to Southeast Asia: troops brought rock on records and cassettes; family and friends sent countercultural materials such as posters, magazines, books, clothes, instruments, and hippie bric-a-brac to GIs." The U.S. Army also took advantage of the counterculture and appropriated its values and material manifestations "in the hopes of raising morale among young troops. For example, a poster for a touring soldier rock band in Vietnam "featured a Haight-Ashbury-like neighborhood of head shops, music stores, and street art transposed to the confusing space of military struggle as if to suggest that American GI's could become hippies in their downtime even if they were still warriors at work." (p. 5)
Kramer divides his work into two parts. The first explores the counterculture of rock in San Francisco, more specifically in the Haight-Ashbury. He includes a chapter that explores LSD and rock culture among the many "induction centers" where rock bands like The Grateful Dead performed psychedelic shows. Another chapter describes how the workers of KMPX, a rock station in San Francisco, struck for better pay and more importantly artistic license. A third chapter describes how the "Wild West Festival" in San Francisco, the equivalent of a Woodstock for the Bay area, ultimately failed because potential attendees and performers chafed at the co-optation of the counterculture by capitalism. The second part, and more interesting my purposes, describes how rock played an outsized role in the lives of American soldiers in Vietnam.
Chapter Four, "A Soundtrack for the Entire Process," details the varied ways that rock music entered Vietnam—official channels, such as the AFVN, "bullshit bands" and underground music stations, through the PXs and mail services. Kramer argues that rock music suffused the experience of GIs in Vietnam and actually helped inform their interpretation of the conflict and citizenship back home. On one hand, Kramer's argument is appealing for understanding soldiers' culture during the latter years of the Vietnam conflict, especially after 1968, but less helpful for knowing the relationship between music and soldiers before rock music became popular and salient. Kramer also blurs distinctions between line and support units in Vietnam, preferring to discuss how rock music became a staple on support bases in Vietnam (and perhaps the occasional fire base) while only hinting at the power for rock music to influence the lives of combatants (infantrymen). It's probable that infantrymen in sustained combat operations rarely listened to rock music in the ways that support soldiers stationed in Da Nang listened to music (a particular focus of Kramer's analysis). Kramer makes broader points about how "hip militarism" functioned like "hip capitalism" to provide access to rock music while simultaneously drawing on "rock" as a genre to market a message to soldiers.
Chapter Five is an exploration of the Military Command Touring Shows (MCTS), the Entertainment Branch's official sponsoring of soldier bands to perform rock music to GI audiences throughout Vietnam. The institutional effort to address morale through music occurred approximately in late-1969 and especially between 1970 and 1972. This meant that the Entertainment Branch was escalating its efforts to assuage morale through music at precisely the same time demobilization was proceeding at full pace. Kramer rightly interprets the MCTS as a pat of the army's last-ditch efforts to buoy morale, but Kramer does not emphasize the contextual reality that the army's mission was no longer "winning the war" but instead training and developing the ARVN forces to take over. Therefore, Kramer mistakenly associates the presence of rock music with the exacerbation of morale problems among American soldiers because rock undermined the army's "mission" in Vietnam by bringing into tension the army's official stance and the counterculture's rebuff of authority and especially the war. To what extent did those who were doing the fighting actually hear the sets performed by the MCTS program? This is a crucial question not addressed in Kramer's analysis and its likely that much of Kramer's evidence hails from the support services in Vietnam that already had more access to mass culture and other amenities. That seems to me a glaring omission considering that Kramer advances an argument (or correlation) between the presence of rock music and the depletion of morale and/or mission failure in Vietnam. If anything, soldier dissent in Vietnam predated the Entertainment Branch's efforts to inject rock into Vietnam and was worsened partly by the presence of the counterculture in Vietnam, but even more so by demobilization. Soldiers simply did not want to be the last man to die in Vietnam—or for that matter, no soldier in Vietnam wanted to be the first, last, fifth, or thousandth man to die. Rock also was not the only type of music available to soldiers in Vietnam and other works have provided a more holistic assessment of how different musical genres hit soldiers on an emotional and psychological level throughout the war. It is important to note that Kramer's book deals mostly with the period 1968-1972 in Vietnam.
Chapter six describes how the importation of American mass culture (and counterculture) into Vietnam affected Vietnamese youth who came of age in the midst of war. I would argue this is the most interesting chapter in the book, and well-written. Kramer focuses on a Vietnamese band known by the acronym CBC. CBC performed in Saigon and other venues (including Fillmore Far East) for both American GIs and Vietnamese audiences. The CBC specialized in acid-rock and psychedelic rock of the late-sixties and performed songs as wide ranging as John Lennon's "Imagine" and Santana's "Soul Sacrifice." However, Kramer illustrates how the CBC, by adopting the style and cultural presentation of the American counterculture, had placed themselves in a dangerously liminal space between the American war and an extremely conservative Vietnamese tradition that rebuked the liberal strands of American culture. During the war, the CBC faced potential recriminations from Vietnamese military police who perceived the band-mates as subversives, American military police who believed the long-haired hippie Vietnamese men and women were "dirty gooks," and a future communist regime that despised Vietnamese who closely affiliated themselves with American culture and practice. Hence, as the war concluded and communist forces consolidated their hold on "South Vietnam" the band-mates of CBC fled to Thailand to escape persecution at the hands of the communist government. The CBC then moved throughout the Far East before finally arriving in the United States through the generous support of veterans and a refugee resettlement program.
I would recommend this book to scholars of the sixties, the Vietnam War, or music history. Enthusiasts of rock might find parts of this book accessible and interesting. Beware, though, Kramer is an academic and thus the book is riddled with neologisms and obscure jargon.
Kramer divides his work into two parts. The first explores the counterculture of rock in San Francisco, more specifically in the Haight-Ashbury. He includes a chapter that explores LSD and rock culture among the many "induction centers" where rock bands like The Grateful Dead performed psychedelic shows. Another chapter describes how the workers of KMPX, a rock station in San Francisco, struck for better pay and more importantly artistic license. A third chapter describes how the "Wild West Festival" in San Francisco, the equivalent of a Woodstock for the Bay area, ultimately failed because potential attendees and performers chafed at the co-optation of the counterculture by capitalism. The second part, and more interesting my purposes, describes how rock played an outsized role in the lives of American soldiers in Vietnam.
Chapter Four, "A Soundtrack for the Entire Process," details the varied ways that rock music entered Vietnam—official channels, such as the AFVN, "bullshit bands" and underground music stations, through the PXs and mail services. Kramer argues that rock music suffused the experience of GIs in Vietnam and actually helped inform their interpretation of the conflict and citizenship back home. On one hand, Kramer's argument is appealing for understanding soldiers' culture during the latter years of the Vietnam conflict, especially after 1968, but less helpful for knowing the relationship between music and soldiers before rock music became popular and salient. Kramer also blurs distinctions between line and support units in Vietnam, preferring to discuss how rock music became a staple on support bases in Vietnam (and perhaps the occasional fire base) while only hinting at the power for rock music to influence the lives of combatants (infantrymen). It's probable that infantrymen in sustained combat operations rarely listened to rock music in the ways that support soldiers stationed in Da Nang listened to music (a particular focus of Kramer's analysis). Kramer makes broader points about how "hip militarism" functioned like "hip capitalism" to provide access to rock music while simultaneously drawing on "rock" as a genre to market a message to soldiers.
Chapter Five is an exploration of the Military Command Touring Shows (MCTS), the Entertainment Branch's official sponsoring of soldier bands to perform rock music to GI audiences throughout Vietnam. The institutional effort to address morale through music occurred approximately in late-1969 and especially between 1970 and 1972. This meant that the Entertainment Branch was escalating its efforts to assuage morale through music at precisely the same time demobilization was proceeding at full pace. Kramer rightly interprets the MCTS as a pat of the army's last-ditch efforts to buoy morale, but Kramer does not emphasize the contextual reality that the army's mission was no longer "winning the war" but instead training and developing the ARVN forces to take over. Therefore, Kramer mistakenly associates the presence of rock music with the exacerbation of morale problems among American soldiers because rock undermined the army's "mission" in Vietnam by bringing into tension the army's official stance and the counterculture's rebuff of authority and especially the war. To what extent did those who were doing the fighting actually hear the sets performed by the MCTS program? This is a crucial question not addressed in Kramer's analysis and its likely that much of Kramer's evidence hails from the support services in Vietnam that already had more access to mass culture and other amenities. That seems to me a glaring omission considering that Kramer advances an argument (or correlation) between the presence of rock music and the depletion of morale and/or mission failure in Vietnam. If anything, soldier dissent in Vietnam predated the Entertainment Branch's efforts to inject rock into Vietnam and was worsened partly by the presence of the counterculture in Vietnam, but even more so by demobilization. Soldiers simply did not want to be the last man to die in Vietnam—or for that matter, no soldier in Vietnam wanted to be the first, last, fifth, or thousandth man to die. Rock also was not the only type of music available to soldiers in Vietnam and other works have provided a more holistic assessment of how different musical genres hit soldiers on an emotional and psychological level throughout the war. It is important to note that Kramer's book deals mostly with the period 1968-1972 in Vietnam.
Chapter six describes how the importation of American mass culture (and counterculture) into Vietnam affected Vietnamese youth who came of age in the midst of war. I would argue this is the most interesting chapter in the book, and well-written. Kramer focuses on a Vietnamese band known by the acronym CBC. CBC performed in Saigon and other venues (including Fillmore Far East) for both American GIs and Vietnamese audiences. The CBC specialized in acid-rock and psychedelic rock of the late-sixties and performed songs as wide ranging as John Lennon's "Imagine" and Santana's "Soul Sacrifice." However, Kramer illustrates how the CBC, by adopting the style and cultural presentation of the American counterculture, had placed themselves in a dangerously liminal space between the American war and an extremely conservative Vietnamese tradition that rebuked the liberal strands of American culture. During the war, the CBC faced potential recriminations from Vietnamese military police who perceived the band-mates as subversives, American military police who believed the long-haired hippie Vietnamese men and women were "dirty gooks," and a future communist regime that despised Vietnamese who closely affiliated themselves with American culture and practice. Hence, as the war concluded and communist forces consolidated their hold on "South Vietnam" the band-mates of CBC fled to Thailand to escape persecution at the hands of the communist government. The CBC then moved throughout the Far East before finally arriving in the United States through the generous support of veterans and a refugee resettlement program.
I would recommend this book to scholars of the sixties, the Vietnam War, or music history. Enthusiasts of rock might find parts of this book accessible and interesting. Beware, though, Kramer is an academic and thus the book is riddled with neologisms and obscure jargon.
June 10, 2013
Very interesting new study of the roll of rock in forging community and new paradigms of citizenship in San Francisco and Vietnam. Not your typical 1960s rock tome, this one has an academic/historical slant, coming at the music through the a fascinating variety of point-of-view. including hip capitalism and hip militarism. I knew nothing about the KMPX strike, the aborted Wild West Festival, Vietnam pirate "bullshit band" underground radio, the CBC band and the drive toward a "transnational" Woodstock Nation. This isn't a lengthy book, but I can pretty much guarantee you'll learn a great deal from it.
June 10, 2018
I picked up The Republic of Rock mainly because of my interest in the Vietnam War, but as it turned out, it offered new insights on my own, post-Vietnam War generation.
Kramer's thesis is that, during those years, rock music became the platform for a profound inquiry into the nature of American citizenship. Being both a product of the American Cold War military-industrial capitalist culture and a site of rebellion against it, rock posed contradictions that necessitated constant consideration. Kramer asserts that rock's roles in two milieux in particular - the San Francisco counterculture and the Vietnam War - not only exemplified its paradox, but also were linked closely to one another. And this isn't some pasted-on, after-the-fact, academic gimmick. In the book's introduction Kramer quotes a 1967 letter in the underground paper The Berkeley Barb: "There probably would be no Haight-Ashbury without the war."
"Hip capitalism" is the term Kramer uses for the way in which commercial interests jumped onto the counterculture bandwagon, sowing both discord and discourse in the City of Love; "hip militarism" the term for the way the military followed suit, bringing rock music and its acoutrements (from radio and reel-to-reels to psychedelia and drugs) to the troops. Both hip "isms" were calculated, but the military's use of rock in an attempt to lift morale was especially cynical and cruel. It was also, ultimately, a failure, for though it undoubtedly offered soldiers escape from the war's horrors, as Kramer writes, "partying to rock music often...led to a deepening consciousness of the war's absurdities and fundamental injustices" and "undermined morale in the long run by importing countercultural dissonance, engagement, and civic questioning."
For my purposes the section on the San Francisco underground went a bit too far into the weeds at times, but I learned a lot and came away with a new understanding of the messy but (seemingly, largely) sincere scene and its role in laying the groundwork for my culture as a middle class white teen in the '70s. By then, we were fully aware that rock music was basically a party bus hired to deliver us to the altar of consumerism for sacrifice. And even though, as Kramer writes, "consumer experiences that traded on heightened critical awareness could not be vacuum-sealed from actual critical awareness," it's been shown time and time again that awareness is no substitute for action. And thus is the human race doomed to repeat history.
But I digress. The Republic of Rock is an extensive, in-depth study of the uses and roles of rock music in the San Francisco counter culture of the late '60s to early '70s, and in military culture in Vietnam in the same era. I gained considerable insight from it. Well worth reading!
Kramer's thesis is that, during those years, rock music became the platform for a profound inquiry into the nature of American citizenship. Being both a product of the American Cold War military-industrial capitalist culture and a site of rebellion against it, rock posed contradictions that necessitated constant consideration. Kramer asserts that rock's roles in two milieux in particular - the San Francisco counterculture and the Vietnam War - not only exemplified its paradox, but also were linked closely to one another. And this isn't some pasted-on, after-the-fact, academic gimmick. In the book's introduction Kramer quotes a 1967 letter in the underground paper The Berkeley Barb: "There probably would be no Haight-Ashbury without the war."
"Hip capitalism" is the term Kramer uses for the way in which commercial interests jumped onto the counterculture bandwagon, sowing both discord and discourse in the City of Love; "hip militarism" the term for the way the military followed suit, bringing rock music and its acoutrements (from radio and reel-to-reels to psychedelia and drugs) to the troops. Both hip "isms" were calculated, but the military's use of rock in an attempt to lift morale was especially cynical and cruel. It was also, ultimately, a failure, for though it undoubtedly offered soldiers escape from the war's horrors, as Kramer writes, "partying to rock music often...led to a deepening consciousness of the war's absurdities and fundamental injustices" and "undermined morale in the long run by importing countercultural dissonance, engagement, and civic questioning."
For my purposes the section on the San Francisco underground went a bit too far into the weeds at times, but I learned a lot and came away with a new understanding of the messy but (seemingly, largely) sincere scene and its role in laying the groundwork for my culture as a middle class white teen in the '70s. By then, we were fully aware that rock music was basically a party bus hired to deliver us to the altar of consumerism for sacrifice. And even though, as Kramer writes, "consumer experiences that traded on heightened critical awareness could not be vacuum-sealed from actual critical awareness," it's been shown time and time again that awareness is no substitute for action. And thus is the human race doomed to repeat history.
But I digress. The Republic of Rock is an extensive, in-depth study of the uses and roles of rock music in the San Francisco counter culture of the late '60s to early '70s, and in military culture in Vietnam in the same era. I gained considerable insight from it. Well worth reading!
April 1, 2018
Very interesting study of how rock music impacted society and the counterculture in San Francisco as well as Vietnam. Kramer dives deep into events and people that not many know about such as the KMPX strike and abortion of the Wild West Festival. The book is a bit repetitive and is written like a text book making for a long and sometimes boring read. Interesting a book about a very interesting time, but it didn’t blow me away.
September 27, 2014
Focusing on San Francisco in the late 60s and Vietnam in the late 60s and early 70s, Kramer builds an argument concerning the relationship of "hip capitalism" and "hip militarism" to the democratic aspirations of rock music (by which he mostly means psychedelic/acid rock). Attentive to the tensions and contradictions, he's sympathetic to the aspirations of many of the musicians and audiences, but presents a clear-eyed analysis of the way the scenes were implicated in the very systems they set themselves up in opposition to. I learned a lot about the San Francisco scene, especially the labor unrest at pioneering FM radio station KMPX and the political/economic conflicts that led to the cancellation of the Wild West Music Festival (which could easily have taken the slot in sixties mythology now occupied by Woodstock). I know more about Ken Kesey and the Acid Trips, but picked up some cool detail. I've been working on a book about music and Vietnam vets for a decade--with any luck the book I've written with my vet friend Doug Bradley will be out next year--and I had some of the inevitable specialist's quibbles (Kramer misidentifies the songwriters responsible for "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" and he missed an opportunity to place Sly and the Family Stone closer to the center of his argument. But none of them undercut the book's value. I did learn quite a bit of detail about relatively obscure GI bands and Vietnam bands that I hadn't known previously.
Kramer's deeply grounded in cultural theory and at times there's an "academic" feel to the prose, but he never succumbs to jargon or abstraction. One of, if not the, best academic book about rock in the late 60s.
Kramer's deeply grounded in cultural theory and at times there's an "academic" feel to the prose, but he never succumbs to jargon or abstraction. One of, if not the, best academic book about rock in the late 60s.
July 31, 2014
Certainly not easy reading, this is an academic book, with all the stuff this entails. Basically it's about hip, how hip music was incorporated in hip capitalism and hip militarism. It speaks of delusions of an era, the late 60s, when love and flowers would produce something different. It speaks about the capacity of capitalism to absorb everything, even counterculture. And it speaks of this wonderland upon Mekong which was the 'Nam. The author searches for similarities between Saigon and the Haight-Ashbury district of SF. Fillmore West and Fillmore Far East. A culture of drugs to escape the crude reality. The military, who listened to country and western, popularising acid rock in the Republic of Vietnam.
Good book, but far too long. Also, the political analysis is not clear enough, further from this hip capitalism and hip militarism idea. Just for your general enlightenment, a couple of quotations:
The music most of all encapsulated the operations of hip capitalism, in which people purchased the feeling of not being sold a bill of goods and thus were sold a bill of goods; they were incorporated into capitalism by buying the very experience of feeling outside capitalism.
This one is not from the author: the history of the sixties strongly suggests that the impulse to buy a new car and tool down the freeway with the radio blasting rock-and-roll is not unconnected to the impulse to fuck outside marriage, get high, stand up to men or white people or bosses, join dissident movements.
Good book, but far too long. Also, the political analysis is not clear enough, further from this hip capitalism and hip militarism idea. Just for your general enlightenment, a couple of quotations:
The music most of all encapsulated the operations of hip capitalism, in which people purchased the feeling of not being sold a bill of goods and thus were sold a bill of goods; they were incorporated into capitalism by buying the very experience of feeling outside capitalism.
This one is not from the author: the history of the sixties strongly suggests that the impulse to buy a new car and tool down the freeway with the radio blasting rock-and-roll is not unconnected to the impulse to fuck outside marriage, get high, stand up to men or white people or bosses, join dissident movements.
August 6, 2014
Here is my DigBoston.com review of The Republic of Rock:
http://digboston.com/boston-arts-thea...
http://digboston.com/boston-arts-thea...
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