1969: the best year ever for music.
Regular readers know that I feel strongly that the best music of the modern era was from 1969, from the six months preceding, to the six months following that year.
A Song For Everyone: The Story of Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Lingan, c. 2022.
I can't recommend this book for those looking to great literature. By page 196, at the end of Chapter 22, I was ready to not only quit reading this book but actually throwing it away. I "knew" what I wanted to know about Creedence Clearwater Revival. The writing had become boring, repetitive.
Then, the first line of the next chapter:
Stu Steinberg arrived in Vietnam in September, 1968, as a volunteer, not a draftee.
It brought back a lot of memories. The chapter begins in 1968, but it's pretty much a chapter on/of/about "1969."
I graduated from high school in 1969. That was not the most important year of my life; that would be 1972. But 1969 was momentous. Had I graduated in from college in 1969 and not 1973 my life would have been completely different.
The following is a full transcript of chapter 23 of Lingan's Creedence Clearwater Revival. Typographical errors are mine. I'm having a huge problem with an old keyboard: vowels generally duplicate every time I type "e," "o," or "i." Also "c."
Chapter 23: The Acceptance of Death
Stu Steinberg arrived in Vietnam in September, 1968, as a volunteer, not a draftee. He'd been in the Army for two years and spent the previous six months at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, a major testing site for chemical weapons and nerve agents. Right before Steinberg left for the war, this unholy place was the site of the infamous "Dugway sheep incident," in which thousands of animals died from chemical exposure on farmland well outside the base. He was among the first on the scene, taking stock of an endless expanse of rotting animals. After a week on the cleanup team, picking through the remnants of a mass chemical livestock die-off,Steinberg was ready for a change. Any change. Even Nam.
He was aware it would be terrible. Khe Sanh was in the news, and Tet was still a scar in the nation's psyche. Soldiers reported to Dugway after serving in country, and even if they didn't share much about the experience, the numbers were staggering. By the time Steinberg got hs orders, thirty-three thousand US troops were dead. But Dugway was a kind of living death, so after saying goodbye to his family in Virginia, he left on a military plane from San Francisco and landed in Quy Nhon, where US forces had installed a giant naval base on the South China Sea.
When he arrived in Vietnam, Steinberg didn't think it was possible that he could be killed. He was young and invincible, for one, and since he was familiar with chemical and biological materials, he was placed on the bomb squad, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or as that prideful, death-defying community referred to themselves, "E-O-fucking-D!" They performed one oof the most dangerous and respected jobs in the entire military: detecting, defusing, and detonating enemy bombs. Obviously some of them died, but to perform that task you nevertheless had to bet on your fearlessness and education against your own common sense, every time. They exposed their skin to poisons just to know what the reactions looked like. And this was only their lab training. In the field, EODs worked without flak jackets. Those only made it harder to move. And if you messed up, there wasn't a jacket in the world that could save you anyway.
Steinberg was a rocker. He arrived with the debt LPs by Savoy Brown and Cream in his bag and quickly discovered that every other guy brought their own records as well. EOD crews were tight bands of ten, and you build intimacy in a hurry when your work involves the constant possibility of instant death. When they weren't out in enemy territory, they were back on base, listening to the R&B and soul that the Black guys brought. The soldiers in Vietnam were the first fully desegregated military force in US history, and notably younger than those in previous years. Music was a shared language, essential to everyone, and a way to fill the frequent long waiting periods between missions. And the musical scene had changd significantly since the first US troops in Vietnam blared Pat Boone in 1965.
At first Steinberg's group didn't have stereo equipment. They listened to the radio. But the post exchange, the PX, had a huge record and electronics section. Soon he had an enviable hi-fi, all Pioneer gear, including a reel-to-reel, great big speakers, receiver, and a new-model record player. He went regularly to the PX with his closest friend Roger and never left without buying. One trip in early 1969, he got a typical haul: another Savoy Brown album, one by Hendrix, one from the Stones, and the tree-lined debut record from Creedence so he could have "Suzie Q," which he recently heard on Armed Forces Radio. Only a few months later, Creedence was everywhere on that station, as they were stateside.
In 1969 and 1970, US troops purchased half a million radios, 178,000 reel-to-reel tape decks and 220,000 cassette records. By 1969, about a third of troops -- and half of those who were still teen-agers -- listened to music more than five hours a day. The military stocked LPs and stereo goods in every PX to keep troops from growing depressed or even mutinous. As in California motorcycle chop shops, some soldiers even made a sport out of building sound systems piecemeal from elements purchased or swapped on base. Music was thee primary driving force of social life for everyone.
Creedence's musical and production styles, even their lyrics and song titles, were perfectly suited to all the typical musical settings in Vietnam. The radios often sounded small and tinny. Usually you'd hear one blaring from someone's bag as you entered a tent, or from above a bar in the PX. Creedence sounded great on those things. Their melodies cut straight through any conversation, and the rhythm was distinct enough that it didn't get lost either. On nicer equipment you could pick up the delicate mixing or John's guitar tones. Or maybe in the bush at night, alone with only nine other guys and your tape deck, maybe with an enemy afoot, those songs could make you feel strong. At least one tank crew christened their vehicle "Proud Mary." Other squadrons had theme songs, like one who called themselves the Buffalo Soldiers and blasted "Bad Moon Rising" into the dark jungle before their attacks. Plenty of the fan mail that showed up at the Creedence headquarters, the Factory, came from military addresses in Asia.
Creedence joined the highest pantheon of Vietnam music. Like Jimi, Aretha, and Marvin, they defined the aesthetic of the war. Like those others, John Fogerty's voice was pure honesty. He took no shortcuts. His songs were made from simple parts, but that only made the final product more incredible. He made music worthy of those moments in the jungle with just a joint and a tape, pretending Creedence or Hendrix was with you, waiting for a possible explosion or ambush, unsure if you'd ever see another sunrise.
In the cities, in less perilous moments, you might see an incredible cover band, all women, playing American and British songs. The famous Seoul Sisters, in Long Binh, were one such group, and played the Ventures, the Supremes, Johnny Cash, and Creedence, whose major hit made their accents unavoidably indelible: "Lollin' on a liver." Other bands came from the Philippines or Korea just to entertain the Americans. Often they spoke no English and learned songs phonetically. But the bands were phenomenal. GIs rarely performed for each other in clubs; they couldn't do better. For most of them, music was a soundtrack and an escape, no a pursuit. Every day, men in Vietnam heard bands or snogs, sometimes unconsciously, in a field or a tent or a bar or a chopper, and anointed them with the emotional intensity of their ongoing reckonings with mortality and broken trust. Music colored the whole demonic world.
These men were already in a state of escalating faithlessness about the war by the time Creedence's music appeared in PX record bins. Polls showed collective idealism about the US presence collapsing simultaneous with Creedence's rise in 1969, and the band's music even reflected the soldiers' attitude. It was direct, unromantic, brotherly, and haunted by visions of a world in decay. In other surveys, soldiers increasingly equated maturity and pose with an "acceptance of death." Creedence met that challenge directly: Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Stateside, many people were having similar epiphanies. A Gallup poll in 1969 found that, for the first time, most respondents felt it had been a mistake to send troops into Vietnam. Here too, Creedence captured the era's sense of betrayal and disappointment, the anger of recognizing a world gone wrong. And nothing embodied that feeling more than the war.
The draft was still in effect, and thanks to bootstrap-government initiatives, was still pulling more Black and poor white boys than ever out of their towns and families, into a war that was not getting less deadly. After so many years there was no longer any kidding about the lopsidedness of it all. Across the United States, local draft boards of "upstanding citizens" decided which boys effectively lived or died. Barely a handful of these upstanding souls were nonwhite. The southern boards were known for special cruelty, as when civil rights activists Bennie Tucker and Hubert Davis filed to run for city offices in Mississippi and got their draft notices shortly after. When another leader in similar circumstances reported for his physical a few minutes latee, he was given a five-year prison sentence.
Boards arbitrarily granted deferments for only some fathers and hardship cases, but for all who were rich enough to attend college. Even jobs with Lockheed and Dow Chemical -- even Honeywell, making ovens -- were considered exempt out of 'national interest." It was no secret where those companies got their workforce, either. Throughout the 1960s, about three thousand men graduated every year from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. And through the whole decade, fewer than twenty died in Vietnam. It was all so glaringly unfair. That was the feeling that tightened people's skin. New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that the Selective Service was "a system whereby poor boys are selected to go to Vietnam and rich boys are selected to go to college."
In the summer and early fall, the band practiced and recorded an instrumental that John was calling "Fortunate Son." John had them hammering the music down for more than a month before his lyrics came. He wanted the bass too pound and the guitar to snarl. Creedence worked at the Factory and played the odd sport complex during the earliest months of growth and planning for the Vietnam Moratorium Day movement, which inspired protest events in thousands of communities, including Muskogee, the small town that Merle Haggard had just made synonymous wiht hippie bashing. More than two million people participated in these marches altogether October 15, 1969, the largest antiwar protest to that point.
John wrote words to "Fortunate Son" quickly, even by his standards. Twenty minutes, he said. The entire band read the fan mail they received from Vietnam. The letters weren't written by private school boys from Sacramento. They weren't even by El Cerrito Highlanders. Being who he was, having experienced an actual training camp and known the kind of guys who ended up in those caskets on TV, John didn't need a spur to write about these feelings, though the television images of Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower, two dynasts in love, left him enraged. That made the words flow.
"Fortunate Son" went to number 14, an underperfomance for John, but that only made it a relatively countercultural commodity. The civilian antiwar movement adopted it as a standard anthem, of course, though it wasn't technically an antiwar song. Not a word of it concerned anti-violence, or even Vietnam. Ultimately it was a working-class song. It was about rich boys getting away with things and poor boys getting punished. Just like "Born on the Bayou" or "Porterville."
But the song made perfect sense for Vietnam. Anyone in country could sign "Fortunate Son" and mean every word. To sing "It ain't me" in the jungle was to tell the war to fuck off while still doing your duty. The narrator of "Fortunate Son" doesn't contemplate draft-dodging, not that the listener knows of. He'd probably fight if asked. He would learn the same lesson that Stu Steinberg and hiis E-O-fucking-D crew learned. The same lesson taught by the "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" in Country Joe's mordantly sarcastic manner, and by "2+2=?," the terrifying antiwar track on the Bob Seger System's 1969 debut, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man. He would learn the acceptance of death.
Stu lived. He was in Vietnam just under two years. Things did not improve. Not in general morale, not in Stu's own mental health. Not in the American goals for war, either. He was sent into enemy territory and bomb-filled caves. His close friends died. In December, 1969, he watched from two hundred yards as a group of soldiers followed VS straight into a bomb he's been hunting in thee forest. When he left Vietnam, Stu still liked the music he bought and he was happy to hear it. But by that time there was a sound that delivered thee gut punch that he now needed. After Vietnam, Stu was a metalhead.
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