August 23, 2024: I posted the original note on September 16, 2022.
This book on CCR provides an excellent discussion of the "inequality" in the East Bay / Oakland. That was the first time I had heard of the flatlands / hillsides of Oakland. The higher up the hillside one lived, the wealthier one was. The poorest lived at the bottom of the hills, in the "Flatlands." The University of Richmond, Oakland, CA, provides an interactive map: "Mappping Inequality" (link here). This all became a "thing" again when Kamala Harris mentioned that she and her family grew up in the "Flatflands" when they lived in the East Bay / Oakland.
August 23, 2024: from "Mapping Inequality" --
In the city of Oakland, California, real estate interests by the 1920s had carved neighborhoods into long narrow strips marked by income and elevation. They thereby embedded a class and racial regime literally into the physical terrain.
Located directly east of San Francisco, across the waters of San Francisco Bay, Oakland rises from tidal flats into ridgelines of successively higher hills. In the era of HOLC and FHA redlining, native-born white, European immigrant, Black, Latino/a, and Asian American working-class communities characterized the "flatlands," where blue-collar neighborhoods abutted the port, railroads, and factories.
Middle-class and elite white neighborhoods developed further east, in higher and often hilly terrain that ascended dramatically into what locals called the "Oakland hills." One 1930s booster publication indelibly captured this geography.
"High above the turmoil of traffic and hustle of business," it rhapsodized, "are homes tucked away among the tree-covered slopes." This contrast between the multi-racial, industrial flatland neighborhoods and the verdant, garden-like, and largely white hillside districts defined Oakland in the twentieth century. On the 1937 HOLC map—which includes the adjacent, smaller East Bay cities of Berkeley, Albany, Alameda, Piedmont, Emeryville, and San Leandro—one can immediately identify this class and racial geography.
Every flatland neighborhood, running from Berkeley south into Oakland and from Oakland southeast toward San Leandro, was marked with the "hazardous" red.
Adjacent neighborhoods just to the east were identified as "declining."
In all, the 1937 HOLC survey concluded that nearly two-thirds of the residential neighborhoods of the East Bay were in some state of "decline." Notably, this included West Oakland and North Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, as well as South Berkeley, the home of Byron Rumford, one of only two Black State legislators in the immediate postwar decades and sponsor of the "Rumford Act," California's 1963 fair housing law.
East Bay flatland neighborhoods had long served as a "port of entry" for migrating workers, the first place of settlement where rents were reasonable and jobs nearby.
Working-class refugees from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake settled here. So did successive waves of railroad, dock, and factory workers, as Oakland by the 1920s had become a bustling port and warehouse city and an important regional railroad shipping hub. By the 1940s, Oakland was not exactly the "Detroit of the West," as a local booster bragged (although at least six automobile or tractor factories called the East Bay home), but it was nevertheless a thriving industrial city with a multi-racial working class. West Oakland, in particular, was a "marvelous mixture of people," one resident who went on to serve in the California Assembly recalled. "We had every nationality that we knew of in that neighborhood. We had Chinese. We had Mexican, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Yugoslav. Our immediate neighbor was a Black family."
With a few exceptions, the 1937 HOLC appraisers characterized the East Bay flatlands in derogatory terms. Race was central to those calculations. West Oakland neighborhoods south of San Pablo Avenue were summed up this way: "Old type houses and cottages, tenement tendencies. Heterogeneous mixture of all races." In a flatland neighborhood southeast of Lake Merritt, appraisers insisted that "infiltration of Negroes necessitates hazardous rating." One flatland neighborhood with a significant Black residential population, South Berkeley, was characterized as a "high grade Negro area," where "good loans can be made [...] if care is exercised," but was still "redlined" with the hazardous rating. In all, the language of the HOLC appraisers was a racial grammar, an idiom, that communicated to mortgage lenders, banks, and government agencies which neighborhoods were deemed unfit for investment.
Much further east, in the Oakland and Berkeley hills, FHA financing by 1937 was already leading to new construction for middle- and upper-class white home buyers. These neighborhoods were perched high above the bay with gorgeous views of San Francisco. "Most of the new construction has been financed with FHA loans," the HOLC reported of the hillside district known as Wilshire Heights near Joaquin Miller Park. In a nearby neighborhood, known as Oakmore, new homes were also "largely financed by FHA loans." Even in the Great Depression years of the late 1930s, these "tree-covered slopes" were attractive for developers, who built speculative homes on the assumption that buyers would eventually materialize.
Original Post
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 of 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 debut 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 changed 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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