| Late 60s/Early 70s: Racial Apocalypses and the Turn Away From Optimism
The first sign that the hippie's dream might not be as it seemed was provided by The Doors in 1967. Their singer, Jim Morrison, was a strange figure, a popular public personality who was many things to many people: a poet, a drunk, a rebel, a renegade, an artist and a pervert. Unlike his hippie peers he seemed to embody violence and existential confusion. That a character so at odds with the ethos of both the counterculture and the mainstream became a popular figure attests to how deeply popular the idea of the violent destruction of the world had become. Morrison was marketable in the late-60s because he himself was the embodiment of the personal apocalypse, living a violent, careless life and finally self-destructing in a Paris bathtub from a heroine overdose at the age of 27. 43
While their peers where espousing the optimism of utopian politics, the Doors were promoting a vision of a violent, destructive apocalypse. The band closed their 1967 debut album with the aptly titled "The End", a 12-minute dirge that presaged the epic-length apocalyptic tales of Funkadelic and Black Sabbath. The song is a slow-burning mess built out of dark organ licks and lead singer Jim Morrison's deep and hypnotic voice. His convoluted and dense lyrics paint a hazy, drugged-out image of incest and murder at the end of the world with the repeated phrase, "This is the end." 44 The lyrics also reference Satan as the snake that tricked Adam and Eve and engineered their expulsion from Eden. Traces of the generational and familial conflict brewing at the time are also found in the song, "'Father?'/ 'Yes, son?' / 'I want to kill you.' / 'Mother, I want to.....'," Morrison then breaks into a wordless howl as the song reaches its crescendo. Although "The End" didn't get any airplay because of it's length and controversial content, the Doors' debut album reached number one in 1967, ensuring that plenty of people were indeed listening. 45 The song was later used in the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's disturbing 1979 Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, one of the most effective pairings of sound and image in the history of moviemaking.
The debut of the Doors song also coincided with an event of vast apocalyptic implications: The Six-Day War in Israel. Jewish apocalyptic ideas had always revolved around the land of Israel, even in the time of Jesus Christ. After the Diaspora, in which the Jews were scattered throughout Europe, the focus of their redemption became the rebirth of Israel and their return to the holy land. After hundreds of years that goal finally became reality in 1948 when the United Nations voted to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Coming on the heels of the holocaust, it seemed as though the millennium might finally be hand: the holocaust being the great tribulation and destruction and the creation of Israel being the promised heavenly kingdom.
The return of the Jews to Israel was also an integral part of many Christian interpretations of Revelation, as was the belief that Armageddon would begin in the Middle East. Tensions in the region were high from the beginning, the Muslims living in Palestine considered the Jews to be occupiers of the holy land. Arab nations refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel and in 1967 they dramatically raised tensions by blockading the country. Although the war was over in only six days, the conflict had great significance for the apocalyptic frame of mind of the 1960s. Especially potent was the symbolism involved: Israel had won a war in six days and now they could rest on their sabbath, just as God had done while creating the world. Israel soundly defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan and greatly expanded its borders, gaining the Golan Heights, Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and most significantly, Jerusalem. 46 In Revelation, the holy city of New Jerusalem is promised to drop down from heaven at the beginning of the millennial kingdom, after the final judgment of the dead. 47 For the next forty years, any confrontation or flare-up in the region would bring all the possibilities of Armageddon, but in 1967 the possibility seemed especially keen. 48
The next year took on an ever more apocalyptic tone, it seemed as if America's old political systems could no longer deal with the problems of society. Chaos was everywhere in 1968-kids protesting, politicians dying, cities burning-and it really did seem as though the world was on the verge of some great change or destruction, reinforcing the millennial rhetoric of the counterculture.
Robert Kennedy had captured the hearts and minds of many young people with his promise to end the war in Vietnam and restore America to the glory years of his brother's administration. His assassination after the California primary in June, "further smashed the already beleaguered forces of American liberalism." 49 It left his young supporters feeling jaded and defeated. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April had a similar but much more intense and violent reaction amongst African-Americans. Race riots broke out in 110 cities across the country and left the nonviolent utopian dreams of the civil rights movement in shambles. 50 The Tet Offensive occurred in January and February in Vietnam. The Vietcong attacked five major cities, sixty-four district capitals, thirty-three provincial capitals, fifty towns and the American embassy in Saigon. 51 For months President Johnson and Pentagon officials had been claiming that America was winning the war in Vietnam but Tet exposed the truth. 52 The Americans were not wearing down the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, in fact they retained enough strength to launch a major offensive that caught the American military by surprise. Average Americans lost faith in the war and the statements coming from the White House.
Violence seemed ubiquitous in 1968, not just in America but across the world. Students and workers in Paris went on a general strike to protest nothing much at all except the entirety of modern society, and almost managed to topple the government of World War II hero Charles de Gaulle. Rebels in Czechoslovakia revolted against their communist government only to be crushed by Soviet tanks. Violent confrontations between students and police also erupted in West Berlin, Tokyo, Bologna, Milan and Mexico City. 53 But the capstone of the entire year was the 'police riot' at the Democratic Nation Convention (DNC) in Chicago.
President Johnson had dropped out of the race and, following the assassination of Robert Kennedy, it was announced that the Democratic Party would choose Vice-president Hubert Humphrey as its presidential candidate, despite his not having won a single primary. Student radicals and war protestors converged on Chicago to disrupt the DNC and shame the Party in the eyes of America, largely because Humphrey pledged to continue the war in Vietnam. SDS and the Yippies, led by Tom Hayden and Abbie Hoffman respectively, set up camp in Lincoln Park along with several other political organizations despite the denial of permits from city hall. They claimed the park as 'liberated territory' and insisted on their right to camp there because it was public property, and they were the public after all. Only about a 10,000 protestors showed up to Chicago, if that, but they were outnumbered by a force of 12,000 police with National Guardsmen and federal troops waiting in the wings. The police beat hundreds of protestors over the course of the convention, despite the peaceful intent of the protests. 54 Violence and bloodshed was broadcast to the entire nation on television. The America people saw for themselves the apocalyptic forces arrayed against each other, battling amidst civil strife and determined to bring about a change in the world. As a result of the violence at the DNC, Republican Richard Nixon won the presidential race of 1968. His campaign promised America law and order and an end to the Vietnam War.
But Vietnam continued to rage despite widespread opposition, so minority groups and student organizations became increasingly radical. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had ended legal segregation but the utopian integrationist dreams of those working for civil rights organizations did not survive. Race riots spread across the country. Black Panther groups preached Black Power and engaged in shootouts with police. Many of America's other minority groups began spouting radical rhetoric and demanded their rights as well. Once a bastion of integrationist practices and ideologies, SNCC expelled any and every white member from its organization, renounced nonviolence and took on a new radical leader in the form of Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael himself had actually created the term 'black power' during the Meredith March in June 1966, much to Martin Luther King Jr.'s horror. 55 King's death two years later only intensified the racial violence and toughened the aggressive ideologies that were emerging. The country was splitting apart as racial tensions escalated. Much of the millennial rhetoric died and the country began imagining more violent apocalyptic scenarios that were free from any type of redemption, secular or otherwise. With black nationalists and separatists calling for independence, it began to look more like an actual race war might break out at any moment.
Charles Manson imagined the rising racial tension as the key factor in the imminent apocalypse. Coming from the hippy movement, Manson had already absorbed the millennial beliefs and end-of-the-world rhetoric of the era, but he also drew subtly on sources like the Nation of Islam, which had long preached a racial apocalypse in which the 'white devils' would be killed and blacks would inherent the earth. Manson believed himself to be both Jesus Christ and the fifth angel in Revelation. He wove together an interesting interpretation of the Christian apocalypse that included the Beatles as the other four angels of God's wraith. 56 He believed that their self-titled 1968 LP (known to fans as The White Album) was riddled with clues about the coming racial apocalypse, which he termed "Helter Skelter" after the fiercest song on the album. A long, dense sonic collage called "Revolution 9" he equated with Revelation, chapter nine, which dealt with the fifth angel (himself) and the plague of locusts (which he interpreted as 'beetles'). 57
Manson formed an apocalyptic hippie cult called "The Family" that believed in his Beatles-inspired visions of racial destruction. Many young, disaffected members of the Family even took on names like "Sexy Sadie" that referenced songs on The White Album. On August 9, 1969 members of the Family murdered five people, including actress Sharon Tate, in the hopes of sparking Helter Skelter. The next night they killed two more. At both murder scenes they left messages scrawled in blood to encourage African-Americans to rise up and revolt. 58 The Family also left clues incriminating black America, hoping to spark another race riot that would blossom into a full-blown apocalypse. Manson believed that the black population of America would rise to kill one-third of the population after which they would descend into leaderless chaos, unable to govern themselves.
He and his follows believed they could hide in a cave in Death Valley and escape the slaughter of Helter Skelter, emerging to lead the black masses and establish a new civilization. He based this on several lines from the song "Helter Skelter", "When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide … I'm coming down fast but I'm miles above you." 59 He interpreted these directions to be both instructions on whether to hide (Death Valley, the lowest spot in America) and his future rule over the blacks. In reality, "Helter Skelter" was a term for a child's spiral slide in England, and the lyrics make perfect light-hearted sense in that context. 60
Another musical group that explored the idea of a racial apocalypse was George Clinton's Funkadelic, with their nine-and-a-half minute instrumental funk jam "Wars of Armageddon." The song is constructed of a complex polyrhythm, reminiscent of African roots music, using drums, bongos and cowbells. Overtop of all this are placed the sounds of urban chaos and domestic strife: crying babies, civil rights protest chants, television sounds, clocks counting down, explosions, and a chaotic organ and violent guitar line. The sounds meld together to form a foreboding, doom-soaked atmosphere that ends with a nuclear explosion and the sound of a heart beat. The positioning of sounds within the song suggests that the modern society of violence and black radicalism would result in total destruction and chaos. 61 The song grinds on and on, the beat warping the sounds of urban chaos into a hypnotic promise of destruction and fear. Although similar in theme, their song is free of the twisted pseudo-religious musings that characterized Manson's vision. However, Funkadelic dedicated Maggot Brain, the album that contained "Wars of Armageddon", to the Process Church, also known as the Church of the Final Judgment, which held beliefs reminiscent of Noah's flood, "the tide will not ebb until all is destroyed." 62 To members of the Church, "'The Process' means change - specifically, the changes necessary to avoid the end of the world with its associated judgment." Much like the hippies they taught that love conquers evil. "Christ's teachings to 'love your enemies' became their prime rule of behavior. They love the individual, but not his/her evil deeds. These beliefs led to a love for Satan - not to his acts but to Satan, the Being," who was a servant of God. 63
A book about Manson, titled The Family, even tried to falsely link him to the Process Church, though the publishers later apologized and retracted the claim. 64 Manson and his family, as well as the growing racial tension they hoped to exploit, were very visible symbols that the peace-and-love millennialism of the hippies was souring. Drugs and self-inflicted social experiments were also taking their toll on people and their ideals. Optimism faded in the counterculture, again following the lead of the civil rights movement. Problem after problem weighed down on people: racial tensions, the continuation of Vietnam, the lies about the war coming from Presidents Johnson and Nixon, the violent deaths of students at a Kent State demonstration in 1970, a conservative backlash, the beginning stages of rampant inflation, and the gradual collapse of the New Left. The profound mood of cynicism that would come to characterize much of the 70s was beginning to develop, and one of the key events was the Altamont Festival.
The Rolling Stones had missed Woodstock, the defining moment of the counterculture in which 400,000 hippies joined together peacefully in a temporary tent city in 1969 for a three-day music festival. It seemed like a utopia, the millennial aspirations of the hippies come true. Later that year, the Stones attempted to recreate it by throwing a free festival at the Altamont Speedway in California. It was a disaster though, the antithesis of Woodstock and a clear dividing line between the idealism of the earlier era and the cynicism to come. 65
The history of rock and roll is filled with bonehead moves, but hiring The Hell's Angels biker gang to work security at Altamont is truly one of the stupidest. The festival was full of violence. The Hell's Angels beat the audience with pool cues and stabbed and killed a black man named Meredith Hunter as the Stones played "Sympathy for the Devil". In total four people died at the festival, which occurred in the same month as the release of the Stones' ominously titled Let It Bleed, which contained their most apocalyptic song, "Gimme Shelter". The coincidence was striking and unavoidable. Never before had the Rolling Stones lived up to their evil and troublemaking image so well. Even the concert film of the disastrous Altamont festival was titled Gimme Shelter.
By this point the Stones had returned to their R&B roots and "Gimme Shelter" places a very distinctive, shimmering guitar and harmonica over dense percussion. Lead singer Mick Jagger and African-American session singer Merry Clayton breathlessly wail, "The floods is threatening / My very life today / If I don't get some shelter / Oh yeah, I'm gonna fade away … Rape, murder / It's just a shot away," once again referencing Noah's flood. 66 As the violence against protestors increased and the backlash against the counterculture began, many of the hippies obviously felt the same way, they just wanted a safe place to help them weather the coming disaster.
Since Dylan had forsaken folk music and gone electric in 1965, the politics and the music grew louder, harsher and more violent. It all came to head at the end of the decade, with a roots revival and the deaths of several countercultural heroes and leader. The Beatles, who had told the hippies that "all you need is love", got petty and nasty with each other, finally breaking up in 1970. 67 George Harrison even admitted in 1971, "It was the business that broke us up." 68 Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin both died of drug overdoses and a year later so did Jim Morrison. SDS fractured into several pieces in '69, breaking along racial and ideological lines with several of the splinter groups practicing violent revolution. 69 The radicals grew harder and lost their utopian hope, as Gitlin explains, "The only affirmative position was negation … it was not the mood to generate ideas about a reconstruction of politics. The best that could be claimed for it was the purity of a scourging-the aesthetics of the apocalypse, not a political vision." 70 Even former Beatle John Lennon would air his new negativity and deny the legacy of the 60s in his song "God", "I don't believe in Beatles / I just believe in me … the Dream is over / what can I say?" 71
Lennon was right, the hippie dream was fading. The younger kids and new bands forming at the turn of the decade didn't care about politics or the atomic bomb; they lost the urgency and freedom of apocalyptic time. However, they did continue to take drugs and the counterculture moved drastically from using drugs to help usher in their new world to a state of total decadence. According to Iggy Pop, leader of the nihilistic, primitivist Stooges at the time, "[They] would say, 'We are going to politicize the Youth!' But the kids were like, 'WHAT? Just gimme some dope.' They didn't care. That's how it really was." 72
This world of violence, cynicism and decadence is exactly where David Bowie struck gold with the brilliant apocalyptic fantasy The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The hopeful millennial mood of 1960s music had all but evaporated in Bowie's paranoid, choppy and debauched lyrics. Ziggy Stardust is the tale of an androgynous alien who descends to a decaying Earth during its final days. Ziggy rises to the heights of rock star fame but later commits suicide (before the end of the world even) amidst a whirlwind of drugs and wounded egos.
The album kicks off in grand style with one of Bowie's best songs, "Five Years", which sets the apocalyptic stage for the rest of the album. Although the source of the impending destruction is never discussed, it is clearly regarded as a horrible, devastating event, "News guy wept and told us, earth was really dying / Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying." The song rolls slowly on a simple, meandering beat and gradually builds up to an emotional break with Bowie's lyrics focusing almost exclusively on the ordinary people involved and their hysterical reactions, "A girl my age went off her head, hit some tiny children / If the black hadn't a-pulled her off, I think she would have killed them / A soldier with a broken arm, fixed his stare to the wheels of a Cadillac / A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that." These descriptions are uncannily similar to the ones that Abbie Hoffman gave of the reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis a decade earlier. Bowie finally exclaims in grand dramatic fashion, "I never thought there'd be so many people." 73
The world of Ziggy Stardust has only five years left before total destruction, quite a far cry from the boundless millennial sentiments of "Shape of Things to Come". In 1974, Bowie would go even further and produce Diamond Dogs, an album originally inspired by George Orwell's 1984 that presented a frightful, dystopian view of a totalitarian future society completely at odds with the millennial sentiment of the 1960s.
The 'peace and love' optimism of the hippies was irrelevant, and psychedelic music was considered passé. It was in this atmosphere, as well as a return to traditional rock and roll sounds, that heavy metal was born. Black Sabbath, the defining band of the genre, was so completely disconnected from the millennial dreams of the hippies that most of their imagery (and even their name) came from satanic sources. Unlike almost everyone else in rock, their songs weren't about girls, they were, "like grim foreboding premonitions of the future," which made them perfect purveyors of apocalypticism. 74
"War Pigs", the first track of their second LP, Paranoid, presented an apocalyptic fantasy of human war masterminded by the devil with absolutely no hope of any redemption or heavenly saviors. "Death and hatred to mankind / poisoning their brainwashed minds" is the general sentiment of the song, full of raging, distorted guitars and tumultuous drum fills. Like "The End" and "Wars of Armageddon" before it, "War Pigs" is an epic song that repeats its refrains into infinity, the beat drones forever onward until the very End. Black Sabbath's apocalypse, although it has a place for both God and Satan, is the product of human action, "Politicians hide themselves away / They only started the war … making war just for fun / Treating people just like pawns in chess / wait till their judgement day comes." 75 The song ends with a vision of Satan laughing down on the ruins of mankind. Heavy metal would become one of the defining musical styles of the 1970s and come to even greater prominence in the 1980s. Satanic imagery was all the rage, proving just how dead the millennial dream was and how long post-psychedelic cynicism would last.
________________ 43 Anonymous. "Heroin page in Fuller Up, Dead Musician Directory", <link>, March 23, 2003. 44 The Doors. "The End", The Doors, 1967. 45 Anonymous, "The Doors Discography", <link>, 2003. 46 Bard, Michell. "The 1967 Six Day War". Jewish Virtual Library. <link>, 2004. 47 Revelation, 21. 48 O'Leary, 141. 49 Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974. (NY: Oxford University Press, 1996.), 693. 50 Anonymous, "Martin Luther King, Jr.: Historical Resource Study". <link>, March 1, 2003. 51 Patterson, 678-679 52 Patterson, 680. 53 Patterson, 686. 54Patterson, 694-697. 55Patterson, 655-656. 56Anonymous. "The Book of Revelation (Chapter 9) and the Ideology of Charles Manson". <link>, December 11, 2003. 57Conley, Rauk. "The Link Between Charles Manson and the Beatles". <link>, December 11, 2003. 58Ross, Rick. "The Tate-LaBianca Murders and The Manson Family". <link>, September, 1999. 59The Beatles. "Helter Skelter", The Beatles, 1968. 60Unterberger, Richie. "Helter Skelter", All Music Guide. |