America, Where Are
You Now...."- Steppenwolf’s The Monster-Take Four
A
YouTube Film Clip Of Steppenwolf Performing Monster- Ah, Those
Were The Days
From The Pen Of Bart
Webber
America where are you
now?
Don't you care about
your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we
need you now
We can't fight alone
against the monster
Chorus Line From The
Monster
Back in 2011 Frank Jackman’s friend
from back in the old growing up hometown days in the late 1960s in Carver about
thirty miles south of Boston toward the ocean, Sam Lowell, had written, under
the influence of a rage he was feeling about the never-ending war in
Afghanistan (still never-ending as of this 2015 writing), a review of an album
of heavy-duty rock band they both loved to listen to back in the day,
Steppenwolf. Sam’s impetus for writing that review had been a recent listening
to the group’s song Monster on YouTube where he heard the words quoted above,
the words that sent him reeling back to another never-ending war time in
Vietnam. But here is the rub, back then Sam was probably the least political of
the guys who hung out around Jimmy Jack’s Diner holding up the wall, checking
the passing girls out, and occasionally putting a few quarters in the jukebox
inside at the counter or in one the red vinyl-covered seats at a booth if they
had eating money as well to hear what was what just then.
Back then those Steppenwolf lyrics
about parents “abandoning” their kids leaving them alone and untutored in the
ways of the harsh world to fight the monster machine that would devour them in
a fit of consumer-culture death if not fought hit home not because of the
raging war but because of his own difficulties with his parents, his own having
to go it alone to find his own path, a path that took many wrong turns. Frank a little more attuned to the swirl of
the political maelstrom around him “got” the less personal aspect of fighting
against the imperial government machine at all costs in the song and tried
unsuccessfully to convey that understanding to Sam even though he too had had
his own running battles mainly with his mother over what the hell he was to do
in the world, about why he did not want to do the things his parents craved for
him to do.
Frank got “religion” earlier than Sam
in another way since shortly after the unsuccessful attempts to “hip” Sam to
the need to fight the monsters who were devouring their humanity he got a
letter in late 1968, a very official letter, from his friends and neighbors (that
is how they put the greeting in any case) at the Carver draft board telling him
his number was up, that assuming that he was physically fit enough, he was
subject to being called up (when he later went up to Boston to take his
physical at the Army Base down near the harbor he found that if a guy was still
breathing basically and did not fall over to the touch he was fit despite the
slew of medical excuses other guys had tried to fake the doctors out with so he
was found fit ). He freaked that letter-opening day, freaked the day he took
his physical knowing he had passed and knowing too that the way Charley
(although he would not know the significance of that name until later) was
chewing up the American Army despite the beating he took during his Tet
offensive that he would be called, no question, and he freaked the day the very
early one morning he headed to the Boston Army Base to be inducted. That
despite Frank’s immense hesitations about going, although stuck down in Carver
he was unaware as he would later become aware of that there were ways to fight his
induction. But see every other thing in his blessed life went the other way,
there was nothing to guide him in his hesitations. Certainly not the
super-patriotism of his parents, Christ, they would wind supporting the war
effort until the very end and even wrote a letter to their Congressman telling
him to tell President Ford to send troops to Vietnam in 1975 as all hell was
breaking around Saigon and the North Vietnamese were rolling to cut off that
town. Of course by that time he was in one of his frequent periods of not
talking to them for years at a time. Nor did it help unlike in some places
where middle class families fearful for their sons were at least listening to
the options, that all the guys, all the guys he knew in old time working-class
Carver, who had not jumped at the chance of enlisting but waited until they were
given notice went, maybe kicking and screaming like Frank but went, and that
while he had certain defined views about politics they were as he would figure
out later pretty simple and not reason enough to go to jail or flee to Canada
over, the choices that he had heard about but kind of dismissed out of
hand.
So Frank went to Boston and took the
oath, went in and while not being the best of soldiers he was not the worse and
guys in his unit would wind up saying of him that when he arrived in Vietnam and
he settled in he got them out a few messes that did not look like they would
get out of alive or in one piece when Charley came a-calling. Later, say late
1971 after he was discharged, early 1972 talking to a Quaker girl he was
interested in over in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out after the
few days that he spent in Carver convinced him that he had to flee that town,
about what had happened to him in Vietnam he realized just how much he hated
the monster government for doing what it did to him, about the slaughter of the
innocence and about how he had to wash himself clean to get back his humanity.
And so he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and after that died
down after a few years he joined that Quaker girl in her forthright efforts to
bring a little peace in the world.
Sam, and here is the funny way paths
divert, had had a serious injury when he was a kid, a serious injury to his
left arm which despite many severe and long-drawn-out procedures was about
ninety percent useless and so was declared early on 4-F, not fit for military
service, by those same friends and neighbors who had left Frank to hang out and
dry. Thus while Sam tepidly held some of the same opinions that his fellow
students who were causing holy hell on the campus at Boston University where it
seemed every other day they were protesting or striking against something,
sometimes to do with the war, other times about some grievance local or
societal, he was rather outside of all of that.
Even when Frank had fruitlessly argued
with him about what their parents were leaving them to fight against he had fluffed
it off. Later after Frank got back for Vietnam he was a bit more thoughtful for
a while, tried to listen when Frank talked about stuff, about the bloody
madness going on in his name but Sam was too busy trying to survive law school
and start a practice in Carver to listen much. So of course they drifted apart
something that if either of them had been asked let’s say as they graduated
from high school in 1967 they would have scoffed at. Frank headed west, went to
California after that thing with the Quaker girl had run out, after he had let
his “wanting habits” addictions get the best of him and that thread of the
story is still murky (mostly drug-related and some small felonies from what Sam
had heard from somebody who had run into Frank in San Francisco at a peace event
in the late 1980s). Sam went on to thrive in his small town law practice,
eventually taking on a partner, having a family including two sons, and
generally having a good life.
But then Sam got “religion,” got it not
through anything he did, or did not do, but through the times, through another
act of governmental hubris. After 9/11 (and like Pearl Harbor and a few other
events in American history just saying the words stand by themselves, no explanation
necessary) the bulk of the population in America was beside itself with unfocused
rage, was out for some kind of vengeance, any target would do, convenient,
distant, the bigger the better, but some kind of Moslem/ Arab payback was best.
Like in a lot of time of emergency situations, military emergencies, some of
the young get caught up in the crush of the action. Want to play the patriot game
for keeps. The long and short of it was that Bradley Lowell, Sam’s older son,
enlisted in Army, went to Officer Candidate School and came out a second
lieutenant, came out just as all hell was breaking loose in Washington about
Iraqi Saddem weapons of mass destruction and that the only way to make things
right was to invade that benighted country, destroy it out of hand. Puff. Sam,
beside himself when he heard that Bradley would be deployed, would be in the
thick of it as an officer in an infantry unit, tried like hell to talk him out
of going, talked to him about refusing to go, about going to jail, tried to
talk to him about what had happened during war to guys like his old friend
Frank Jackman. No soap, Brad Lowell was gung-ho. And as the fates would have it
one Bradley Lowell was felled by an IED and laid his head down in Iraq on his
second tour of duty in 2005.
For a while Sam was inconsolable, as
was his wife, Laura, and it took a lot of thinking to figure out what he was to
do to keep Brad’s memory alive. As the situation in Iraq got more unstable and
as the American casualties kept piling up Sam decided to go to an anti-war
rally in Boston at the Commons one spring afternoon in 2006. (Laura taking the
loss of Bradley hard in that way refused to go in public to such an event.) The
crowd of a few hundred was not big like in the times of his youth during Vietnam
when one day the whole Commons had been filled (he had not attended that rally since
he was studying for an exam but he had heard about it from his roommate who had
attended and believed that the war would be over shortly-in the event it lasted
almost five years more) but he was fine with the idea of just protesting as
best he could. As fate would have it Frank Jackman, back a few months before from
the West Coast to attend to his wife’s mother care for a while up in Lynnfield,
also was in attendance that day. That day he was wearing his dark blue embossed
with the white dove of peace Veterans for Peace tee-shirt, an organization that
Frank had joined just before the Iraq invasion in 2002 after many years of ad hoc work with a myriad of peace and
social justice groups, and Sam thinking back to Frank’s VVAW days sort of
recognized his old school boy friend, as he approached him (both men both
thicker than in their slender youths, showing lots less hair, now grey-white,
and lots more wrinkles and Frank sporting a longish beard and thus not unlike
about half the male section of their generation so neither man could be blamed
if they did not immediately recognize each other). Once the light of
recognition hit they gathered to each other like in old times. Sam told Frank
about his son Bradley and they both shed a tear for Brad, for their lost youth,
and for the endless wars that have plagued their world.
They agreed to meet at the Sunnyvale
Grille in downtown Boston a few days later and go over how they were going to
continue the anti-war struggle in the face of a great deal of indifference (not
of the soldiers deaths, like Brad’s, but of the unchecked damn war policies of
two consecutive governments) from the general public who opposed the war before
it started but had gone along with it once the deal went down. That meeting was
the first time that they both discussed the commonly remembered Steppenwolf
song Monster which a few years later
prompted Sam to write that album review, trying to sum up the hard fact that
the now oldsters Frank Jackman and Sam Lowell had to lend the kids a helping
hand, or pass the torch on to them. Here is what Sam had to say:
The heavy rock band Steppenwolf (maybe
acid rock is better signifying that the band started in the American dream gone
awry 1960s night when the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, The Byrds
and groups like the transformed from muppet Beatles and Stones held forth,
rather than in the ebb-tide 1970s when the harder sounds of groups like
Aerosmith and Black Sabbath were needed to drown out the fact that
we were in decisive retreat), one of many that was thrown up by the musical
counter-culture of the mid to late 1960's was a cut above and apart from some
of the others due to their scorching lyrics provided mainly, but not solely, by
gravelly-voiced lead singer John Kay. That musical counter-culture not only put
a premium on band-written materials, as against the old Tin Pan Alley somebody
wrote the lyrics, somebody else sang the song division before Bob Dylan and the
Beatles made singer-songwriters fashionable but also was a serious reaction to
the vanilla-ization of rock and popular music in the earlier part of the decade
that drove many of us from the AM radio dials and into “exotic” stuff like
electric blues (country too, come to think of it) and the various strands of
folk music.
Some bands played, consciously played,
to the “drop out” notion popular at the times. “Drop out” of rat-race bourgeois
society and its money imperative, its “white picket fence with little white
house attached” visions. (Those my own visions which I pursued as it turned
out.) That is the place where many of the young, the post-World War II
baby-boomer young, now sadly older, had grown up and were in the process of
repudiating for a grander vision of the world, the “world turned upside down”
as an old time British folk tune had it. Drop out and create a niche somewhere
(a commune maybe out away from the rat-race places some of which did spring up
in the likes of Taos, Oregon, Big Sur and the hills of old Vermont which if you
care to see what hellish thing happened to that old vision once the seers got
older you can go to and witness first hand these days), so some physical
somewhere perhaps but certainly some other mental somewhere and the music
reflected that disenchantment.
That mental somewhere involved liberal
use of drugs to induce, well, who knows what it induced but it felt like a new
state of consciousness so make of that what you will. The drugs used, in
retrospect, to make you less “uptight” not a bad thing then, or today. The
whole underlying premise though whether well thought out or not was that music,
the music of the shamans of the youth tribe, was the revolution. (An idea, as a
man who abhorred politics then and am only a little more enamored of now but
have a greater purpose to be out in the streets than then when it was a pose if
I showed up at all, I held to lightly for a while) An idea that for a short
while before all hell broke loose with the criminal antics of Lyndon Johnson
and one Richard M. Nixon, all hell broke loose with Tet, with May 1968, with
Chicago 1968, with the “days of rage,” with Altamont and with a hundred other
lesser downers I subscribed to. Those events, a draft notice, some hard time in
Vietnam, made my old time school boy friend Frank Jackman get “religion” on the
need for “in-their-face” political struggle. Me, though it took longer, took a
generation longer to lose my innocence about American war policy.
Musically much of that stuff was
ephemeral, merely background music, and has not survived (except in lonely
YouTube cyberspace). Yeah, Neal Young, the Airplane, the Doors, the Byrds still
sound good but a lot of it is wha-wha music now you know Ten Years After, a lot
of Rod Stewart, even the acid-etched albums by the Beatles and Stones, it is no
wonder that the latter do not have any tunes from Their Satanic Majesties on
their playlists out on the concert tours these days). Others, flash
pan “music is the revolution,” period exclamation point, end of conversation
bands assumed a few pithy lyrics would carry the day and dirty old bourgeois
society would run and hide in horror leaving the field open, open for, uh, us.
That music too, except for gems like The Ballad Of Easy Rider, is safely
ensconced in vast cyberspace.
Steppenwolf was different, was
political from the get-go taking on the deadliness of bourgeois culture, worse
the chewing up of their young in unwinnable wars with no apologies or second
thoughts, the pusher man, the draft resister and lots of other subjects (and a
few traditional songs too about the love that got away, things like that).
Not all the lyrics worked, then or now. (See below for some that do). Not
all the words are now some forty plus years later memorable. After all every
song is written with some current audience in mind, and notions of immortality
as the fate of most songs are displaced. Certainly some of the less political
lyrics seem entirely forgettable. As does some of the heavy decibel rock sound
that seems to wander at times like, as was the case more often than not, and
more often that we, deep in some a then hermetic drug thrall, would have
acknowledged, or worried about. But know this- when you think today about
trying to escape from the rat-race of daily living then you have an enduring
anthem Born To Be Wild that still stirs the young (and not so young). If
Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone was one musical pillar of the youth
revolt of the 1960's then Born To Be Wild was the other.
And if you needed (or need) a quick
history lesson about the nature of American society in the 1960's, what it was
doing to its young, where it had been and where it was heading (and seemingly
still is as we finish up the Afghan wars and the war signals for deep
intervention into the Syria civil war or another war in Iraq get louder, or
both are beating the war drums fiercely) then the trilogy under the title
"The Monster" said it all.
Then there were songs like The
Pusher Man a song that could be usefully used as an argument in favor of
decriminalization of drugs today and get our people the hell out of jail and
moving on with their lives and others then more topical songs like Draft
Resister to fill out their playlist. The group did not have the staying
power of others like The Rolling Stones but if you want to know, approximately,
what it was like for rock groups to seriously put rock and roll and a hard
political edge together give a listen to the group sometime. And listen to how
right my old friend Frank Jackman had been about their political messages
Words and music by
John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom
(Monster)
(Monster)
Once the religious, the hunted and
weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new
vision
Far from the reaches of kingdom and
pope
Like good Christians, some would burn
the witches
Later some got slaves to gather riches
But still from near and far to seek
America
They came by thousands to court the
wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore
a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
And once the ties with the crown had
been broken
Westward in saddle and wagon it went
And 'til the railroad linked ocean to
ocean
Many the lives which had come to an end
While we bullied, stole and bought our
a homeland
We began the slaughter of the red man
But still from near and far to seek
America
They came by thousands to court the
wild
And she just patiently smiled and bore
a child
To be their spirit and guiding light
The blue and grey they stomped it
They kicked it just like a dog
And when the war over
They stuffed it just like a hog
And though the past has it's share of
injustice
Kind was the spirit in many a way
But it's protectors and friends have
been sleeping
Now it's a monster and will not obey
(Suicide)
The spirit was freedom and justice
And it's keepers seem generous and kind
It's leaders were supposed to serve the
country
But now they won't pay it no mind
'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
And now their vote is a meaningless
joke
They babble about law and order
But it's all just an echo of what
they've been told
Yeah, there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watchin'
Our cities have turned into jungles
And corruption is stranglin' the land
The police force is watching the people
And the people just can't understand
We don't know how to mind our own
business
'Cause the whole worlds got to be just
like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who's the winner
We can't pay the cost
'Cause there's a monster on the loose
It's got our heads into a noose
And it just sits there watching
(America)
America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and
daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the
monster
© Copyright MCA Music
(BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC
--Used with permission--
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC
--Used with permission--
Born To Be Wild
Words and music by Mars Bonfire
Words and music by Mars Bonfire
Get your motor runnin'
Head out on the highway
Lookin' for adventure
And whatever comes our way
Yeah Darlin' go make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
I like smoke and lightning
Heavy metal thunder
Racin' with the wind
And the feelin' that I'm under
Yeah Darlin' go make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space
Like a true nature's child
We were born, born to be wild
We can climb so high
I never wanna die
Born to be wild
Born to be wild
© MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC
--Used with permission--
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by
MCA Corporation of America, INC
--Used with permission--
THE PUSHER
From the 1968 release
"Steppenwolf"
Words and music by Hoyt Axton
You know I've smoked a lot of grass
O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills
But I never touched nothin'
That my spirit could kill
You know, I've seen a lot of people
walkin' 'round
With tombstones in their eyes
But the pusher don't care
Ah, if you live or if you die
God damn, The Pusher
God damn, I say The Pusher
I said God damn, God damn The Pusher
man
You know the dealer, the dealer is a
man
With the love grass in his hand
Oh but the pusher is a monster
Good God, he's not a natural man
The dealer for a nickel
Lord, will sell you lots of sweet
dreams
Ah, but the pusher ruin your body
Lord, he'll leave your, he'll leave
your mind to scream
God damn, The Pusher
God damn, God damn the Pusher
I said God damn, God, God damn The
Pusher man
Well, now if I were the president of
this land
You know, I'd declare total war on The
Pusher man
I'd cut him if he stands, and I'd shoot
him if he'd run
Yes I'd kill him with my Bible and my
razor and my gun
God damn The Pusher
Gad damn The Pusher
I said God damn, God damn The Pusher
man\
© Irving Music Inc. (BMI)
--Used with permission--
